Dr. and Mrs. Cone continued talking, their mouths breathing the same thin slice of air, while Izzy explained the buzzer in Operation. The twins had Operation and I considered myself an expert. Izzy held the tweezers against the metal rim, purposefully setting off the electric hum. She laughed. Then she looked up at her parents and said, “Mom, you have to see what I made!” Dr. and Mrs. Cone snapped their heads toward Izzy at the exact same moment. Their bodies were still touching all the way up and down so that they were like a single two-headed being.
Izzy led the charge down the stairs, almost tripping over a cactus in a ceramic pot. Mrs. Cone was behind her, I followed Mrs. Cone, and Dr. Cone was behind me, talking the whole way. They had to get going on the third floor. They needed a better mattress on the bed, and they’d need better lighting, too. It could be a very comfortable guest suite.
As we entered the living room, Mrs. Cone picked up the inflated raft and sailed it into the dining room. It hit the long junk-covered table and then fell silently to the floor. The four of us assembled in front of the coffee table, which was covered with books, magazines, and a package of Fig Newton cookies that looked like it had been ripped open by a wolf. Beside the Fig Newtons, on top of a teetering pile of paperbacks, stood a lumpy papier-maché lighthouse. It rose about three feet high and curved to the right.
“That’s beautiful,” I said.
“Is it a lighthouse?” Mrs. Cone leaned to one side to get a better look.
“Yes! On the Chesapeake Bay!” Izzy had been at a sailing-and-craft camp down at the Inner Harbor. Today was her last day. Mrs. Cone had mentioned the camp in our introductory phone call. She described it as “a bunch of bratty private school kids who think nothing of excluding Izzy from every game.”
“It’s magnificent,” Mrs. Cone finally said. She picked up the lighthouse and went to the fireplace. On the mantel were more books, wineglasses, bongos that appeared to be made of ceramic and animal hide, and what I thought was a ukulele but was maybe some other kind of stringed instrument. She set the lighthouse on top of the books.
“Perfect,” Dr. Cone said.
“Sort of looks like a giant dildo.” Mrs. Cone said this quietly, maybe so Izzy couldn’t hear. I had no idea what a dildo was. I glanced at Dr. Cone. He seemed to be holding in a laugh.
“I love it!” Izzy took my hand and pulled me back upstairs. Maybe her instinct was right and I was like a visitor from Siberia. I had never met anyone like Dr. and Mrs. Cone. And I’d never been in a house where every space was crammed with things to look at or think about （could it be that all messes weren’t evil and didn’t need to be banished with such efficiency?）。 I’d felt instantaneous affection for Izzy and was happy that I was to be her nanny. But I was happy for other things too: that I’d be doing something I’d never done before, that my days would be spent in a world that was so different to me that I could feel a sheen of anticipation on my skin. Already, I didn’t want the summer to end.
2
On my first full day at the Cones’， I dressed in my red terry-cloth shorts and the rainbow-striped top I’d picked out as part of my new summer wardrobe. My mother thought the shorts were too short, but we couldn’t find anything longer at Hutzler’s downtown, at least not in the juniors section. Mom told me to put my dirty-blond hair in a ponytail. “You need to be professional. It’s a doctor’s home,” she said.
I pulled my hair back, put on my flip-flops, and walked through the neighborhood toward the Cones’ house. It was sunny and quiet out. I saw a few men in suits walking to their cars, about to drive to work. I only saw one woman: our new neighbor. My mother and I had driven by as the movers had been unloading the furniture, and my mother slowed the car to catch a glimpse of a chintz sofa being carried off the truck. “A bit too blue,” she had said, once the couch was out of sight.
The new neighbor was in her gardening capris and a checked shirt. In her blond hair was the thin triangle of a blue scarf. She was on her knees, leaning over a hole she’d just dug in the dirt outline of the lawn. Beside her was a wooden crate full of flowers.
She sat up straight and shielded her eyes as I approached. “Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning.” I slowed but didn’t stop, even though I really wanted to. This woman had a face out of a Hitchcock film. She was pretty. Clean-looking. Did she have kids? Was she married? Had she grown up in town? Had she attended the all-girls Roland Park Country School, where I was a student?