You Lost Me There (19 page)

I laughed. “Are you still wearing your PETA button?”

“Dude, whatever. But who wants to buy antlers anyway? It’s, like, so fucking arrogant. Whoever is paying for that doesn’t have the balls to hunt, they just get to hand over fifty bucks.”

I drove slowly down the road past my neighbors: couples outside, gardening at twilight or grilling dinner, waving as we rolled past. At a neighborhood meeting the previous winter, we’d decided on a maximum speed limit of ten miles per hour. The breeze smelled of wood and charcoal smoke.

“Do you remember,” I said, chuckling, “when you tried to set our neighbor’s dog free?”

“It was chained to a tree!”

Cornelia pulled herself up and sat on her knees, facing me with an elbow propped on the headrest. She was smiling. “Okay, this from someone who actually tortures animals for a living?”

“Hold on. That’s not true.”

“I mean, maybe I could respect a hunter. But you breed mice just to kill them,” she said, staring screws through my head. “You want to talk about man’s arrogance?”

In high school, Cornelia had been a suffragist for lab rats. One of thousands, she participated in a letter-writing campaign that targeted prominent research scientists, including me. It ended up making headlines after one wacko, admittedly operating on his own, sent a letter bomb to a colleague of mine at Oregon State. Fortunately, the bomb didn’t explode, but Cornelia and I didn’t speak much that year.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said a moment later. “You’re being so generous, I’m totally grateful. But you know me, if you’re asking me to forsake my convictions—”

“Cornelia, let’s get this straight.” I paused to reinforce my authority. I couldn’t let this go on all summer. “I don’t torture animals. I never have. As an institution, in fact, we take extraordinary measures not to harm them.”

“Like not setting them free?”

“We didn’t trap them on the savannah, Cornelia. These are mice that were bred for this purpose. Simply by living, they save lives.”

“Save human lives, you mean, which are more important than mice lives. A value we’re entitled to impose?”

“Listen, Cornelia,” I said, my voice rising, “this issue is a lot more complicated than we have time for right now.”

“Yeah, complicated, deeper than I’d understand, okay, fine,” she said, and that was that. She stared out the window. I sighed and parked in the driveway.

Back when Sara was having a bad day, and I’d ask how she was, she’d always say, “Fine. I’m fine. How are things? Oh, things are nice, they’re fine, oh, thank you for asking.”

Surely the Comfort Inn would be cheaper than the Asticou, I thought.

“Look, Cornelia, for the sake of the summer, why don’t we just agree there are certain issues where we don’t see eye-to-eye—”

“Okay, just stop. I’m totally low blood sugar, I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I just need to snack on something, I promise, and I’ll stop being a bitch.”

Then I remembered my plan to grill steaks to celebrate her arrival. I’d neglected to remember Cornelia was a vegan. I didn’t even have salad supplies.

There had to be a vegetarian restaurant open somewhere. This was Mount Desert Island, after all. The food would probably turn out to be made from hemp.

To get us back on easier ground, backing out of the driveway, I asked if I could touch her dreadlocks. Apparently this was a hilarious question.

 

 

 

To prepare for Cornelia’s visit, I’d taken in Sara’s old BMW for a checkup. It came out with new oil and a clean bill of health. The car hadn’t been used in several years, though I drove it once a month around the neighborhood and it still ran fine, despite the accident. At the time, I’d felt compelled to have it repaired.

Before bed, I handed Cornelia the keys and gave her a Chamber of Commerce map of the island, showing her how to find Blue Sea. As I was leaving, I heard, “Victor, come back” in a little-girl voice. She pulled me down in a hug. Her sleep clothes consisted of black underwear, a flimsy wife-beater, and no bra. I avoided looking too closely. For the right boys her age she was probably intensely desired. The right boys being ones she could control, I thought, who’d relish being charged around.

There seemed to be a lot I hadn’t considered to my big idea: soy milk, boyfriends. Would I be repelling hippie Romeos through August?

Normally I wore only underwear to bed, but that night I added an old T-shirt, a freebie from
The Hook-Up
’sopening night.

 

 

 

It always amazed me how sharp some memories remained, whittled to their most significant points. The literature was filled with Alzheimer’s patients progressively losing grip on their address, their phone number, the names of their children, but they still could recall a girl from elementary school, as though they’d known her better than anyone.

In seventh grade, Claire Shore trapped me on the playground after I scored the highest math grade too many times in a row. Flanked by cohorts, she teased, “Victor, do you think you’re perfect? Do your parents call you Mr. Perfect?” Claire Shore with the pale gray eyes, later to be the first in our class fully at ease with sex, the bored queen of us all, the hit maker who shot “Mr. Perfect” up the charts and made the other children believe I desired so badly to be ostracized that I’d written the tune myself, as though I didn’t have enough trouble as Vicky, or Vicky Dicky, or plain Dick. So I flunked the next three tests deliberately, semi-passively: I added extra numbers to the correct answers, or left fields blank. Not that it helped my social status. “Hey, Perfect, what’s happening?” survived until we transferred to high school. But too many forties and fifties, instead of my normal ninety-eights, caused my teacher to request a parent meeting, a fallout I hadn’t anticipated.

Sitting next to my mother after school, I told the truth, just not all of it. Yes, I’d failed, I said, yes deliberately. But I refused to explain why. They’ll never get it out of me, I thought, and I stared out the window to where a team of boys were running around in gray sweats. First my mother thought it was a practical joke being played upon her perfect little man, someone’s idea of a prank. She drew her finger across the teacher’s grade book: indeed, her son had not been forging his report cards, he did otherwise have perfect grades, so from the pride of his father’s and mother’s hearts to this, without reason? No, the disappointment would be too great. It was impossible her son could conceive of such a thing, much less see it through. Where’s the motive? she wanted to know, playing homicide cop.

Like I don’t have the balls to pull it off, I remembered thinking.

My teacher informed my mother that I was going through a stage. There were hormones to consider. Boys will be boys. Then she half stood from behind her desk to let us know there were other students who didn’t have the luxury of failing on purpose. My mother left school clutching her purse below her stomach. Three F’s meant the path she had conscientiously, sacrificially prepared for her only child now was condemned.

Woman as mourner, I thought. Women who grieve as men don’t know how, who are the ones left behind, like we’d learned about in our Civil War lessons. I followed with my head up, trying to feel proud, like the Union generals, but underneath my sweater I was sick. I was on the verge of willing it out of me, the idea was almost tingling, picturing myself upchucking on the school lawn.
Then she’ll see what she’s done
.

When my mother refused to speak to me, the uncertainty was torment. A few days later, after a loud fight with my father downstairs, my mother walked into my bedroom crying, dressed in high heels to go out, smelling of some overwhelming perfume, like burst-open hydrangeas. I was wretched. The last person I could imagine hurting was my mother, but I knew that I had, and also that I’d enjoyed this new power. The perfume crept up through my sinuses as a pressure inside my head. Did I know, my mother asked, kneeling by my bedside, that she’d once dreamed of becoming a doctor? When she was a girl, she told me, she’d wanted to be like the men her father worked with, her father who had also been a pharmacist, as my father was. But in those days, she said, women didn’t become doctors. She’d learned this when she was about my age: that she could become a teacher or a nurse or a housewife, but never could she become one of the doctors who visited in their shiny black cars, the big men with the soft-hard voices. She said, “Did you fail those tests because you want to be a pharmacist? Nothing would hurt me worse, you becoming like your father.” Her eyes were dry. Both our heads were inside the perfume. I stared at her earrings, blue drops on gold wires. I’d always thought it was exactly what she wanted, me to become a pharmacist like my dad, but now the man was faceless in the dark, dreamless, a nobody. At school the next week, I scored a ninety-nine on a quiz and received stars again by my name: a straight line of red and gold adhesive stars punctured by a three-star gap.

While Cornelia slept, I unlocked Sara’s office and opened her filing cabinet. Read as many cards as I could stand, ran upstairs, and stuck the rest in the drawer of my bedside table.

I called information and asked for Dr. Sylvia Carrellas, Bar Harbor. I got her answering machine. I left a message. I swallowed two Ambien and chased them with a scotch, which knocked me out cold before I’d gotten more than a few pages deeper into the Admiral’s genealogy, into the history of one George “Starky” Gardner, Betsy’s great-great-grandfather, the family black sheep by way of cowardice, but forgiven because he’d paid for it. Apparently Starky had tried to flee Gettysburg, the battle of Little Round Top, but was shot on his way off the battlefield.

Whether it was enemy or friendly fire that killed him wasn’t noted. Either it was unknown or it didn’t matter.

 

 

 

Saturday night, the sky was a scratched plum, purple over gold flesh. I got home around eight and found the outdoor lights on, making the woods in relief seem darker. I didn’t remember leaving the lights on. Getting out of the car, I smelled smoke.

Behind the garage, there by the grill, was a faerie of the woods dancing, flicking a pair of tongs like castanets. Her siren song was playing from one of my three-thousand-dollar Reynaud speakers, terrifyingly jimmied halfway out an open window.

“Aren’t the Grateful Dead dead already?” I said.

“I think Andy Rooney wants his joke back,” Cornelia retorted, looking up, and then went back to nodding her head, her dreadlocks in a beehive bobbing up and down. She was wearing the same camisole as the day before, otherwise barefoot in jeans that were falling off her hips, with a kitchen towel tucked into the waistband. She lifted the top off the grill to show me two thick steaks, my uneaten tenderloins from the fridge, lying side by side.

“You’re making me two?”

“Actually, one is for me.”

“You have got to be kidding.”

“In about seven minutes, give or take,” she said, “I’ll be off the wagon.”

I stood there with my hands on my hips while Cornelia disappeared inside the house. She came skipping back with a bottle of champagne I’d kept for years in the vegetable crisper. Foam spilled over her arm after the pop. “See, apparently there’s no point,” she said excitedly, “working in a kitchen that serves everything if you can’t taste half the menu. At least that’s what Chef says—”

“You mean Joel?”

“And since it’s local, you know, the ducks are from his friend’s farm, the pigs are from a woman somewhere nearby, then at least it’s the best possible scenario, you know, morally I just need to accept that the majority of people eat this way, and if I’m truly to understand as a cook all the varieties of flavors, I mean, Victor, I got the job!”

Cornelia’s hug spilled my wine. I probably had bruises from all the hugs I’d received in the last two days. I wondered what would happen if Betsy and her cane met my new houseguest. One of them could end up with a broken arm.

“And it’s such a beautiful restaurant. Chef is like
amazing
, they cooked this big staff lunch, and I swear he’s doing exactly what I want to do someday, just very Alice Waters, totally in sync seasonally. I mean, you should have seen his baby greens, I’m not joking, I could have died.”

“With baby greens.”

“Actually? They’re called mâche.”

Stars appeared in a few small clusters, but it was too early to pick out constellations. Cornelia lit citronella torches and spiked them in the grass. Eating dinner at the picnic table while she jabbered on about “Chef’s” charms as a teacher and sage, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I sank into myself, staring up at the heavens and nodding at appropriate moments, but I was gone in the star patch, to remote bodies whipped through the universe. To Regina, La Loulou.

My stomach became a bowl of microbes. A soup of bitter baby greens.

What I could have taught Cornelia was that people are plastic mysteries. Unknowable and in flux, our cells constantly dying and being replaced. Samsara on the molecular plane. What Newton knew: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

We the people, we the results of handed-down mistakes and chance, we the equationless, bristling organisms, ignorant of time aside from when’s lunch.

Not palimpsests, but coal.

Most likely, I thought, Regina read my belated congratulations about her book as the final straw, a kiss-off “let’s be friends, shall we?” And wasn’t that what I’d wanted? Wasn’t it what I wanted still?

Cornelia wouldn’t stop moving: tapping her fingers, pulling on her bottom lip. She tucked her bare feet underneath her ass on the bench and hunched forward, craning over her elbows, her camisole falling off her left shoulder as she operated the wine bottle like a derrick and told me about organic farming.