The Lace Reader (30 page)

from our place. I stayed up on the widow’s walk until the winds got really bad, and Eva made me come in. She told me she expected May to come in any day now. She was sure of it. But it never happened. I kept to myself at school. November first came and went. By then even most of the fishing boats had stopped going out, but my mother never showed up. To distract me Eva gave me a job in the tearoom. And the dancing school. In November, I got an invitation to a cotillion at Hamilton Hall. In the past I’d always thrown the invitations away, and I did the same this time, but Eva fished it out of the garbage and sent an RSVP. When I hadn’t seen May’s light for two days and wouldn’t come down from the widow’s walk for most of the weekend, Eva decided she’d had enough. She got a lobsterman to take her out to the island to fetch May, the same way she had with Lyndley, but again she came back alone. I could tell that Eva was upset, and also that she didn’t want to worry me. It was Veterans Day, I remember, because we had the day off from school.

“She never had any intention of coming,” I said, seeing the truth, knowing that May would rather give us up than leave her island, ever.

“It’s not that simple,” Eva said, reading me, but I wasn’t having any of it.

“It is too that simple.”

“For God’s sake, Sophya, have some compassion.”

“It’s the same thing all over again.” I was unable to sit, I was so agitated.

“What do you mean?”

“Like with Lyndley.”

“What about Lyndley?” She said the words slowly, as if she were trying to find out how much I knew.

“She gave away Lyndley, and now she’s giving away Beezer and me.”

“What are you talking about?” Eva stared at me.

“What’s happening to Lyndley, what he’s doing to her.” My skin 268 Brunonia

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crawled when I thought of that night in Lyndley’s room. “None of it would be happening if May hadn’t given Lyndley away in the first place. Everyone knows what he does to her!” I was crying uncontrollably as I said the words. I couldn’t breathe. Eva held me for a long time. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. I didn’t see how.

She took me to a therapist in Boston. The doctor put me on a mild antidepressant. Eva had hoped I would talk to him. I couldn’t seem to do it.

“Tell me about your sister,” he would say. But I couldn’t do it. I could tell Eva, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell to a stranger. After six sessions I refused to go back. She gave me a job helping with the dancing lessons instead. She was trying to keep me busy. The fact that she was expecting me to go to Hamilton Hall and behave like a lady was part of that plan as well. I learned to follow the leads of the most tentative dancing partners. Eva bought me long gloves that extended up past my elbows, and she taught me to tuck the hands of my gloves up when I ate dinner, leaving just the sleeves, and to eat chicken à la king while sitting at a crammed banquet table without moving my elbows and without dropping any peas on my formal dress. When I asked what I should do if they served something besides chicken à la king, Eva just laughed and told me that would never happen, “not in a million years,” she said
.
A few weeks before the cotillion, I got an invitation from a girl at Pingree to ride to the dance in a small bus her parents had rented for the occasion. I hardly knew the girl; the only thing I remembered about her was that she was really preppy-looking and liked to say

“fuck” a lot, just for the shock value. I told Eva I thought it was ridicu-The Lace Reader 269

lous, since the bus was leaving from Beverly Farms and I could walk to Hamilton Hall from our house, but Eva said I was missing the point. She made me accept the girl’s “kind invitation” in writing and had her driver chauffeur me all the way to Beverly Farms and drop me off so that I could take a crowded, smelly bus all the way back to Salem. The dance wasn’t terrible, even if it was from another century. Each girl had two partners going in, one on each arm, and one of my escorts was a kid I knew from the Pleon Yacht Club in Marblehead. Each time the orchestra took a break, they threw felt hats into the audience with the band’s name embroidered across the brim, and boys tried to catch them to give to the girls they liked. And even though the kids hated the music, they liked the hats. They fought one another for them, jumping into the air to catch them as if they were at a baseball game or something.

During one of the breaks, someone hid the conductor’s stick, and the dance stopped while the chaperones searched for it and interrogated the kids. The guys went outside to smoke, including both of my escorts, and I decided it was a good idea considering the Spanish Inquisition that was going on inside. We stood in the park across the street, and a kid with a madras cummerbund lit up a Marlboro and started his own inquisition about Cal and how he was doing in San Diego. Up to that point, no one had gotten the connection. To the sailing boys who knew about him, Cal was a local hero, the kind of man they could hope to become if they were lucky and everything went their way. “He’s probably the best sailor in the world,” the kid said in closing. “And he’s rich. He owns that whole island, for God’s sake.”

“He doesn’t own the island. My mother’s family owns the island,”

I said with a little too much edge.

“Same difference.”

“I saw his picture in the paper,” one of the girls said dreamily.

“He looks like Paul fucking Newman,” the Rental Bus Girl said. I could feel my muscles tense.

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One of the girls was shivering. “How long are they going to make us stay out here?”

“Until they find the perpetrator.” The Cummerbund winked at me.

“Which gives us some time,” the Yacht Club Kid said, with a side glance at the Cummerbund, who pulled a silver flask out of his jacket pocket and stood there passing it around.

“I’m going home,” I said.

“What?”

“No way.”

“You can’t go home. The bus won’t be here until eleven.”

“I’m not waiting until eleven o’clock for a bus to drive me when I only live six blocks away.”

“Party at Towner’s house,” one of the boys said.

“I live with my Great-Aunt Eva.”

The Rental Bus Girl shot me a look.

“Party at Towner’s great-aunt’s house,” the boy declared.

“Eva will be asleep.”

“Trust me, you don’t want to party there,” said one of the other girls.

“Yeah,” said the Rental Bus Girl, “Eva Whitney is fucking Emily Post.”

“Excuse me?!” The Cummerbund raised an eyebrow. “Did you say her great-aunt is
fucking
Emily Post? I didn’t even know that Emily Post was still alive.”

The girl started to giggle as if she thought it was the funniest joke she’d ever heard. “You know what I mean.”

I left before anyone could concoct an alternate plan that included me. I realized halfway down the block that my coat was still inside, but I didn’t want to go back for it because I was afraid I wouldn’t get away so easily the next time. Instead I tucked the hands up inside the The Lace Reader 271

gloves and worked the long sleeves up as high as I could get them to cover my arms. As I turned the corner, I could hear the orchestra tuning up, and I saw the kids file back inside. I walked by the house, but Eva was still awake, and I didn’t want to go in yet, so I just kept going. As I walked along, I started to get really angry with May for letting this happen: for putting me in this situation and making me live in Eva’s house and go to cotillions. And angry because Beezer was gone for good, wasn’t he? Because after boarding school was . . . what? Prep school, then college? Going, going, gone. I was starting to realize how much things had changed and how quickly. We’d probably never all live on the island together again. In the blink of an eye, our whole world had changed, and none of us could make it go back to the way it was. Lyndley was gone, my brother was gone. And my mother, May, was depressed or crazy or just plain didn’t care.

And then I started getting this really crazy idea. I started thinking that maybe I
could
change it, if I acted quickly, that maybe it wasn’t too late if I went home right now, tonight. If I called Beezer and told him to come home, he would. I still had that much power over him, although it was fading quickly. I went to the pay phone on the dock and tried Beezer at school, but it was lights-out already, and they wouldn’t answer the call. I figured it didn’t matter. He’d be home for Thanksgiving in a few days, and when he got to Eva’s and found out I was on the island, he’d get himself over there, and everything would be all right again. I knew him. He’d get there somehow. Even if he had to take a helicopter, my brother would do it. And so I found myself at the boathouse where the Whaler was put up for the winter, and I checked the tank, and it actually had some gas left, and it was a pretty calm night, so I shoved the boat into the water and got into it, ruining my dress in the process, but who cared? If I was ever going to go home again, tonight was the night. It couldn’t wait. I pushed the boat off, and it drifted into the harbor. The tide was 272 Brunonia

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dead low, the moon almost full, but there wasn’t another boat anywhere around, so at least no one was going to ask me any questions or try to stop me.

I figured I’d waste some gas starting her up, but it was easier than I’d thought. I picked up the gas can. It was about half full. There were no swells, and with the moon so bright it was easy to spot the rocks. I knew I’d be fine if I didn’t do anything stupid, if I didn’t fall in. I remember Eva telling Lyndley once that a fifty-year-old had a 50

percent chance of surviving a fifty-yard swim in fifty-degree water. It was one of the reasons you weren’t supposed to swim if you fell in. You were supposed to just stay there, using as little energy as possible, and wait until someone rescued you. If you started to swim, you’d force all your blood to your extremities and away from your vital organs. You’d die a hell of a lot faster that way, and that was in fifty-degree water. This water hadn’t seen fifty degrees since early October. When I got out of the harbor and away from the shelter of land, a cold wind rippled the water, and I noticed that there were some swells, too, although they weren’t very bad and it wasn’t very far to the island, so I wasn’t worried about them. Still, the whole thing seemed sort of strange and out of place to me. The stars had the brightness of winter to them, and I remember thinking that even though I’d stayed out on the island in previous winters and seen these same skies, I’d never actually been
on
the water this late in the year. We took our boats out early, right after Columbus Day. Even if it stayed warm, the float had to come out by Veterans Day, because that’s when the boatyard closed down for the season, and the boatyard workers are the ones who did all the work. The only boats running this late in the year were the big boats out of Gloucester. And a few of the lobster boats. I was almost to the island when I got the joke. It was a great cosmic kind of joke, and I got it in a flash. And then I started to laugh. I laughed so hard I had to cut the engine, because I was afraid I’d fall out of the boat if I didn’t sit down until it passed. The Lace Reader 273

What was it Eva said?
You can’t go home again.
That was the joke. It wasn’t figurative, though, or metaphorical. It was literal. When I got close to the island, I realized that the float was gone. The ramp was there, hanging high above the water, just the way it was every night I could remember, when May pulled it up. But the float it connected to was gone. It was pulled out of the water for the winter as it was every year by Veterans Day, but for some reason I hadn’t remembered that. It’s what Eva had been worried about when she went to fetch May and why she went out there when she did, because once the float was pulled out, May couldn’t get off the island until spring except by helicopter, which she would never do. I knew it; we’d been talking about it just last weekend. But what I’d forgotten was that if May couldn’t get off the island, I couldn’t get onto it either. The only way on was Back Beach, but not in winter waters. It would tear a boat apart this time of year. Here I was making this grand gesture, trying to go home again, but my Aunt Eva was right when she said you can’t go home again. And for some reason, now I found it really funny. I sat in the boat, the engine turned off, looking at the island, which was just a few hundred feet away but might just as well have been a million miles away for all the good it did me. I knew I should start the engine and head back to town, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t go forward and I couldn’t go backward. I just sat in the boat in my party dress, laughing my ass off.

Jack thought the boat had broken down or something. He was coming from the back side of the island, where his father still kept a few traps. He’d been hauling them out for the winter, and the boat was full of them, a maze of little boxes. He hadn’t wanted to come out that night—he told me that later—but his father had been nagging him for weeks, and he was tired of hearing his father’s voice. He just wanted to get it over with, so he could get some peace. Because 274 Brunonia

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the moon was so bright, Jack saw the Whaler right away. I don’t think he realized it was me until he pulled up alongside. I saw him take in the dress, the gloves. He didn’t ask what I was doing out there, didn’t even ask about the engine. Instead he grabbed an arm and pulled me aboard, tying up the Whaler to the back of his boat, shoving his jacket at me. He didn’t greet me. I could tell he was pissed off. In fact, he didn’t speak to me at all for a long time, and when he finally did, it was to ask me, “Are you just stupid, or do you have a real problem?”

I wasn’t sure which was the correct answer, so I didn’t say anything. The Lace Reader 275

Summer again . . .

The following summer I did go back to the island. It was a decision I made with Eva and with my shrink. May was doing better, and so was I. She sent me a letter saying she hoped I’d be out for the summer, that she was looking forward to it. Beezer didn’t come back. He got the opportunity to attend a science camp at Caltech. Everyone, including May, agreed he should go. Things weren’t the same between May and me. But they were tolerable. And she was all right. The depression that had hit her so hard was gone now, and I started to wonder if maybe she really did know what was best for her. That maybe, unlike the rest of us, May knew her own limitations and worked within them. In early August, Lyndley arrived. She wasn’t scheduled to come. She just showed up out of the blue, saying she missed me and wanted to spend our birthday together. She seemed happy. She’d been accepted at two art schools, RISD and CalArts. Lyndley told me that Cal and Auntie Emma were insisting on CalArts. They wanted her to stay close to home.