I was the martini baby, conceived, I’m sure, after one too many in late July of 1971. My parents already had their family: two girls in boarding school, a boy about to enter the seventh grade. My father was fifty-one, my mother forty-seven. It must have seemed slightly obscene back then, a woman of her age getting pregnant. I was such a deep inconvenience to them. That much was clear already, although not something I could have put in words. It was purely visceral, a confused shame lodged inside my gut, a sense that I had been terribly, terribly bad but not being able to recall what I’d done wrong.
My mother had walked Ed and Grant through the house during their interview, showing them the circuit breakers and the hot-water heater and the fire extinguishers. She took them out to the pool house and explained about the toilet latch, told them a man named Chuck would come by every Wednesday to clean and chlorinate the pool. She brought them back in the house and gave them each a glass of iced tea with a sprig of fresh mint, which grew beside the back door stoop, and asked them if they had any questions.
It was Grant who asked about me. “Could you give us the rundown on your son?” I don’t think he knew my name yet. “When he should be in bed, what he likes to eat, where he’s allowed to go on his bike.”
“Oh, he takes care of himself quite well, really.” She gave me a small smile. “The club’s schedule is right there on the fridge if there’s any question of where he should be.”
They were just two boys, young men, I suppose. Nothing particularly special about either of them. Ed came from New England, a small town in northern Maine, and Grant from Pennsylvania. Ed spoke little about his family except in tight, funny vignettes, like his father buying his mother-in-law a cow for Christmas because whenever she came over to the house she complained the milk was off. But Grant told me long stories about his sisters’ love affairs, his mother’s battle with polio, his father’s ashes scattered in their garden and how scared he’d been as a boy to touch the flowers that grew there.
That first night we had chicken noodle casserole and peas and crinkled french fries, all from the freezer in the basement.
“It’s better than a supermarket down there,” Grant said when he came up with an armful of boxes. They had carte blanche at the market—just had to sign their names—but Grant loved foraging down in the basement much more.
He made the dinner while Ed sat at the kitchen table drinking a Schlitz. But he didn’t sit there morbidly like my father sometimes did in the evenings, forcing himself—or perhaps forced by my mother—to be present. Ed set his chair at an angle and put his feet up on another one and chatted. He was a great chatterer. Chatting wasn’t something I was used to.
“How long you been out of school?” He had an accent I’d never heard before. “School” sounded like scoal. It sounded Scottish or something.
“Three weeks tomorrow.” They had been boring, lonely weeks. I hated tennis lessons and trying to hit the tin can for a Coke when you served and sailing classes with all the instruction about winches and halyards and the folding and unfolding of the sails and never enough time on the water.
“Three weeks? My little sister just got out yesterday.”
“Private school,” Grant said over his shoulder.
“That right? You pay for longer vacations?” he said to Grant. And then to me: “You like scoal?”
“Not really.”
“You like anything?”
I thought. I wanted to like something. I liked them, Ed and Grant, though I wasn’t about to say that.
“Guess not,” he said. “Trying to think what I liked when I was your age. How old are you? No, wait, let me guess.” He pretended to tie a kerchief to his head then pressed his fingers on his temples. “You are fourteen years, four months, and one day.”
I did the math. He was exactly right.
He started laughing as my eyes widened at him. “Your father keeps your passports in his top desk drawer.”
His words struck me like a slap.
“So, let’s see,” Ed said. “At fourteen years, three months, and a day, I loved Celia Washburn. I loved her so much my jaw ached and—”
“You can’t go in that study. Ever. You have to promise.”
I felt Grant turning around behind me. Saw Ed glance at him. They were trying not to laugh at the weird possessed voice that had come out of me.
“Okay. It’s a promise,” Ed said. He shifted his legs and took a swig of beer. “So my mother took me to the doctor because of this jaw ache, and he said I had to stop clenching it so much and when did I clench it, and I said whenever I think about a certain girl and he and the nurse laughed. My mother was out in the waiting room. Then we got to talking about other things and I told him my mother wouldn’t let me play baseball that year because my cousin had gotten clonked on the head in the outfield, the dolt. So when he called my mother in, he told her that I was a little stressed and that she should let me play baseball to unwind.”