“Be a saint, will you? Just half a cup.”
Her nightgown has ridden up, and from here, I can see everything. My mother believes that wearing underpants to bed is bad for your health. “You need to let yourself air out at night,” she told us when we were little. Anna and I, of course, ignored her. The whole idea seemed embarrassing, dirty. The very thought that she had a vagina repulsed us, and, even worse, that it was out there in the open at night.
“He should leave her,” my mother says.
“Who?”
“Gina. She’s a bore. I almost fell asleep at the table listening to her blather on. She ‘makes’ art. Really? Why would we care?” She yawns before saying, “They don’t have any kids yet—it’s not like it’s even a real marriage. He might as well get out when he can.”
“That’s ridiculous. They’re completely married,” I snap. But even as I’m speaking, I’m thinking: Is she reading my mind?
“I don’t know why you’re getting so defensive, Elle. He’s not your husband.”
“It’s just an idiotic thing to say.” I open the icebox door and slam it, slosh milk into my coffee. ‘No kids make it not a marriage?’ Who are you?”
“I’m entitled to my opinion,” she says in a calm voice designed to wind me up.
“Lots of married couples never have children.”
“Mmhmm.”
“Jesus. Your sister-in-law had a radical mastectomy. Does that make her not a woman?”
My mother gives me a blank stare. “Have you gone mad?” She heaves herself off the sofa. “I’m going to take my swim. You should go back to bed and start your day over.”
I feel like smacking her, but instead I say, “They wanted kids.”
“God knows why.” She lets the screen door slam behind her.
1970. October, New York.
My mother has sent us next door to her lover’s apartment to play with his children while his wife babysits us. They are trying to decide whether or not he should leave his wife. I am older now—not old enough to understand any of this, but old enough to think it odd when I look across the interior courtyard from his apartment into ours and see Mr. Dancy holding my mother in his arms.
In the railroad kitchen, the Dancys’ two-year-old son is in his high chair, playing with Tupperware. Mrs. Dancy stares at a pregnant water bug that has rolled onto its back on the doorjamb between the galley kitchen and the dining room. Tiny little roaches are pouring out of it, quickly disappearing into the cracks of the parquet floor. Anna emerges from a back bedroom with Blythe, the Dancys’ daughter. Anna is crying. Blythe has cut off all of her bangs with a pair of craft scissors. The top of Anna’s forehead is now fringed by a high, uneven crescent of dark brown hair. Blythe’s smug, triumphant smile makes me think of mayonnaise sandwiches. Her mother doesn’t seem to notice anything. She stares at the exploding bug, a tear rolling down her cheek.
8:50 A.M.
I sit down on the sofa, settle into the warm spot my mother has left in her wake. Already I can see a few figures gathering on the little beach at the far side of the pond. Usually they are renters—tourists who have somehow found their way deep into the woods, and love that they have discovered a secret idyll. Trespassers, I think, annoyed.
When we were young, everyone in the Back Woods knew each other. The cocktail party moved from house to house: barefoot women in muumuus, handsome men in white duck trousers rolled up at the ankle, gin and tonics, cheap crackers, Kraft cheddar, mosquitoes swarming, and Cutter—finally, a bug spray that worked. The sandy dirt roads that ran through the woods were stippled with sun filtered through scrub pine and hemlock. As we walked to the beach, fine red-clay dust kicked up, filled with the smell of summer: dry, baked, everlasting, sweet. In the middle of the road, tall beach grasses and poison ivy grew. But we knew what to avoid. When cars passed, they slowed, offered us a ride on the running board or the front hood. It never occurred to anyone that we might fall off, fall under the car. No one worried their children might be sucked into the ocean’s rough undertow. We ran around unleashed, swimming in the freshwater kettle ponds that dotted the Back Woods. We called them ponds, but they were actually lakes—some deep and wide, others shallow and clear-bottomed—ancient relics formed at the end of the Ice Age when the glaciers retreated, leaving behind them massive blocks of melting ice heavy enough to dent the earth’s crust—hollow deep bowls into the landscape, kettles filled with the purest water. There were nine ponds in our woods. We swam in all of them, crossing other people’s property lines to reach small sandy coves, clamber out over the water on the trunks of fallen trees. Cannonball in. No one minded us. Everyone believed in the ancient rights of way: small shaded paths that led to the back doors of old Cape houses, built when the first dirt roads were carved, still standing in sober clearings preserved by snow and sea air and hot summers. And watercress pulled from a stream—someone else’s stream, someone else’s watercress.