"Keen," he said, kneeling in the sand above the platform where Julie and my mother were doing their dirty work. "That is the most gigantic eel I"ve ever seen." Ethan was very skinny, his knees the widest part of his legs. He was entirely covered with freckles, and his hair looked brown one minute and red the next, depending on how the sun hit it. His gla.s.ses were thick. he said, kneeling in the sand above the platform where Julie and my mother were doing their dirty work. "That is the most gigantic eel I"ve ever seen." Ethan was very skinny, his knees the widest part of his legs. He was entirely covered with freckles, and his hair looked brown one minute and red the next, depending on how the sun hit it. His gla.s.ses were thick.
"Why don"t you come over tonight and have some?" my mother said. Then she tossed her head back with laughter at the face Ethan made. She knew the eel she cooked was safe from anyone besides my grandmother and herself.
"I don"t want to eat that thing," Ethan said. "Could I have the skin, though?"
Julie had been about to throw the skin into the water, but she looked up at him, the whites of her eyes in sharp contrast to her nut-brown summer tan.
"What for?" she asked.
"It"s beautiful," he said, pointing. "Look how shiny it is on the inside. Look at all the colors."
We stared down at the inside-out eel skin. I could see what he meant. The skin had a shimmery mother-of-pearl look to it.
"It"s yours," Julie said, tossing the skin up to him.
Ethan reached out with one of his toothpick arms and managed to catch the slithery mess. "And can I have the guts when you clean him?" he asked.
I could see Julie wrinkle her nose. "You"re gross," she said.
"Julie," my mother reprimanded her quietly. Then she looked up at Ethan. "Sure you can have them, Ethan," she said. "What will you do with them?"
"Study them," Ethan said, and I understood why Julie was no longer friends with him that summer.
Later, when my mother threw the skinned, gutted and beheaded eel into the frying pan, it still wriggled. I had nightmares about that for several nights in a row. I"d been an extraordinarily fearful child back then. After Isabel died that August, my fears gradually began to slip away. It was illogical; I should have become more fearful once my world had been shattered. But it was as though the worst had happened and I"d survived, and I knew I would be okay no matter what happened after that.
Mom finally came over to my table in the corner and sat down across from me.
"Whew!" She smiled. "Busy place today."
"All the summer-school kids," I said.
Mom was not really with me. Her eyes darted around the small restaurant, looking for customers she knew and tables in need of cleaning. She"d worked there for five years and it was her home away from home.
"That girl," she said, nodding toward the young woman she"d introduced me to earlier, "is pregnant again. Can you believe it? She"s going to have three little ones under the age of four." She clucked her tongue. "The choices people make," she said.
"It"s her choice, though," I said.
"Well, I"m certain her husband had something to do with it," my mother said. She pulled a napkin from her pocket and wiped at a spot on the table. "I wish you"d go to church with me Sunday," she said. "It"s a special occasion."
"What"s special about it?" I tried to remember when the holy days were, but drew a blank.
"It"s Father Terrell"s birthday."
"Ah," I said. That wasn"t special enough to get me inside a Catholic church. I"d explored just about every religion possible over the course of my adult life and was probably best described as a Buddhist Quaker. I wanted peace, both inside and outside. But I watched my mother carefully fold up the napkin and put it back in her pocket. She was so cute. So devoted to her job. How could I resist her?
"I"ll go," I said.
"Oh, that"s wonderful, Lucy!" she said.
I got along fine with my mother, despite my lifestyle choices. I"d never been married, but had lived with three different men, eight years apiece. Eight years seemed to be my limit, for some reason.
Julie"s relationship with Mom had always been a little strained, though, in spite of the fact that my sister tried to do everything right. She"d stayed Catholic, gotten married, produced a beautiful grandchild and had an enormously successful career. She was conservative and reliable, the levelheaded daughter who took Mom to her doctor"s appointments and helped her with all her paperwork. Still, there was an undeniable awkwardness between my mother and Julie that I doubted would ever go away. Julie thought she still blamed her for Isabel"s death. I didn"t believe that for a minute, but it was impossible to know if that might be the case, because my mother wasn"t the type to talk about her feelings. The topic of Isabel was always off-limits, anyway. Even I I would have been uncomfortable bringing it up with her. Feelings kept under wraps, though, could be far more destructive than those brought out in the open. I knew that, and I was a brave woman, but I would never have been able to form the right words to speak to my mother about Isabel. would have been uncomfortable bringing it up with her. Feelings kept under wraps, though, could be far more destructive than those brought out in the open. I knew that, and I was a brave woman, but I would never have been able to form the right words to speak to my mother about Isabel.
"Listen," my mother said, "I was thinking we need to have a big party before Shannon goes off to college. She"ll be away for her birthday on September tenth, so it could be a combination birthday and going-away party."
"That"s not for a couple of months, Mom," I said.
"But you know how time slips by," she said. "If we don"t start planning it now, it might never happen."
"All right." Sometimes it was better to let my mother run with an idea than to try to stop her. "What are your thoughts?"
"We could have it here."
"At McDonald"s?" I tried not to sound too horrified. "Shannon"s nearly eighteen. I don"t think she"d want to have a party here."
"All right, all right." My mother brushed away my comment as though she"d known it was coming. "How about at home, then?" She meant her house, the house Julie and I had grown up in.
"Good idea," I said.
She started talking about her plans for the party-who we should invite, a theme for the decorations, what sort of food we"d have-and my mind slipped back to the eel.
"Do you remember that huge eel Julie caught?" I asked suddenly.
My mother looked confused, my question so completely out of context. "What are you talking about?" she asked. "What eel? When?"
I realized I"d made a mistake starting the conversation, because I was certain the year of the eel had been 1962.
"Just...when we were kids," I answered. "She caught it in the ca.n.a.l. When you put it in the frying pan, it still moved."
"Oh, they always did," my mother said.
"Why?" I asked.
"Some autonomic nerve thing," she said. "They were dead as doornails. What on earth made you think of that?"
I shrugged. "I don"t know," I lied. "It just popped into my head."
My mother looked dreamily into s.p.a.ce. "What I wouldn"t give for some eel right now," she said.
I leaned back and sipped my soda, feeling pleased all out of proportion to the conversation: I"d said something about the bungalow and survived.
CHAPTER 4.
Julie.
1962.
Until my sister"s death the summer I was twelve years old, I"d had a nearly idyllic childhood. The school year was spent in Westfield, a town that offered everything I could possibly need and was an easy bus ride to New York, where my parents often took my sisters and me to the zoo or the history museum or a Broadway play. My parents were smart, well educated and loving, and my overindulgent maternal grandparents, Grandma and Grandpop Foley, lived nearby. Their house was as open to us as our own.
I was a creative child-too creative, some of my teachers said-and loved making up adventures for myself and my friends. I made up stories about things going on in the neighborhood: the old lady on the corner was a witch, I had a boyfriend in another town, I was found abandoned on my parents" doorstep as an infant. I told the kids in my cla.s.s that wolves had been spotted in Mindowaskin Park, close to our homes. I loved to write plays to put on in our garage and poetry to read to my cla.s.smates.
My mother was popular among my friends, because she always took our endeavors very seriously. She"d paint scenery and sew curtains for the "stage" when we put on a play, and she"d go along with the tall tales I told the neighborhood kids, as long as I wasn"t scaring any of them too much.
My father was a physician with a busy schedule, but he made time for my sisters and me. Even though he walked with a limp from a World War II injury, he still managed to take us tobogganing or ice-skating or bowling. My world was safe and fun and easy.
Things started getting rocky around the time Isabel turned fifteen. She wanted to hang out with her friends instead of with the family, and she wanted to go to parties my parents didn"t approve of. She was nasty to me, suddenly viewing me as a liability rather than an a.s.set. She no longer wanted me around and barely spoke to me if she was with her friends. It was a fairly tame rebellion, in retrospect. My father still seemed to think his eldest daughter could walk on water, while my mother bore the brunt of her defiant behavior. The worst part was that, by the summer Isabel was seventeen, my parents had begun arguing about how to handle her. I had never heard a cross word pa.s.s between the two of them before, and their disagreements worried me.
All during the school year, I"d hunger for my grandparents" summer bungalow down the sh.o.r.e on the Point Pleasant Ca.n.a.l. It was in a little beach community called Bay Head Sh.o.r.es, only an hour from Westfield, but it seemed a world away. In 1962, we arrived at the bungalow a few days after school ended, caravanning with my grandparents, who towed our boat behind their black Studebaker. Lucy, my mother and I followed in the Chrysler, and Dad and Isabel brought up the rear in our father"s flashy yellow Lark convertible. Everyone pretended that Isabel was riding with Dad in order to get a head start on her tan in the open car, but I knew it was really that she and my mother were in the middle of one of their battles and that having her ride with Dad would be more peaceful for all concerned.
Like me, Lucy, who was eight at the time, was a book lover, but she couldn"t read in the car without throwing up, and her propensity to motion sickness also meant she had to sit in the front seat of the Chrysler next to Mom, which was fine with me. I lounged between suitcases and pillows in the back seat, reading Nancy Drew"s The Secret of Red Gate Farm The Secret of Red Gate Farm, which I"d read before. I"d read all the Nancy Drew books and was systematically working my way through them once again. I liked to pretend that I was Nancy Drew myself. A few months earlier, I"d started collecting things I found around my yard or my neighborhood. I"d found a glove in the gutter, a money clip on the sidewalk and-much to my mother"s horror-someone"s bra, discovered in the woods behind a friend"s house. These items I squirreled beneath my bed in case a mystery occurred in the neighborhood and one of my finds might prove to be valuable evidence. I planned to do the same down the sh.o.r.e.
The small bluish-gray, black-shuttered Cape Cod was one of two bungalows at the end of a short, dead-end dirt road. My sisters and I had our shoes off before we"d even stepped out of the cars. Grandpop unlocked the front door, pretending to fumble with the key, chuckling at our impatience. The musty smell of a house closed up for ten months washed over us as we walked into the hallway, and Lucy and I raced from room to room to see that everything was exactly as we"d left it the year before.
The two bedrooms downstairs were used by the adults, while the three of us girls slept in the attic. Izzy and I loved the attic, but it terrified Lucy, who seemed to have gotten all the fear genes in the family. She and Mom had been in a car accident when Lucy was little, and she"d been pulled screaming from my mother"s arms in the emergency room and taken away somewhere for the treatment of several broken ribs and a broken leg. Since that day, she"d been afraid of everything. The attic could only be reached by rickety, pull-down steps, and Lucy was always afraid those steps might somehow snap closed while she was up there and she would be trapped. The attic itself was a source of endless fascination for me. It was wide-open, its ceiling the bare wooden underbelly of the roof, and it was filled with enough beds to sleep eight people. The beds were divided by curtains strung on wires across the room, so everyone had a little bit of privacy if they wanted it. During the day, we usually drew the curtains back, though, to allow a breeze through the small windows. The attic could suffocate us with its heat.
Everyone"s favorite part of the bungalow-and the reason for its very existence-was the ca.n.a.l that ran behind the house. Our backyard was a broad rectangle of sand shared with the Chapman family next door and sandwiched between their boat dock and ours. Our boat was just a runabout, a tiny, open thing with an outboard motor, but the Chapmans owned a big Boston Whaler fast enough to pull two skiers at once.
Anyone wanting to take the inland route from Barnegat Bay to the Manasquan River and the ocean had to pa.s.s through our ca.n.a.l, and some of the boaters were celebrities. My father boasted to everyone that he"d received a wave from Richard Nixon one time, as the then-vice-president"s boat cruised past our house. On weekends, the water could be frightening to navigate as the ca.n.a.l filled with boats of all shapes and sizes. The water beneath the little Lovelandtown Bridge, well within sight of our house, grew as choppy as the ocean during a storm, and accidents were not infrequent. We all loved to watch the boats dodge the pilings on a busy weekend afternoon.
When we arrived at the bungalow that summer, though, my father did not care about going into the backyard to watch the boats or climbing down the ladder in our dock to touch the water with his toes, as my mother and I did. Instead, he went directly to the phone. He"d made sure it was already turned on for the summer, because he was on a vendetta. He was outraged by the recent Supreme Court decision forbidding school prayer, and he wanted to call every Catholic person he knew to organize a protest against the court ruling. My father was a recipient of the Purple Heart, a civic leader in our community and a well-respected member of our church, since he wrote a regular column for a Catholic magazine. Still too young to think for myself and having adopted the mores of my parents, I was as outraged as he was about the school prayer ruling. I couldn"t imagine starting the school day without the Lord"s Prayer. So we all gave my father the time he needed to sit near the wall phone in the living room with his pad of names, making his calls, his voice at times loud with his anger.
All four of the Chapmans were in their backyard when we arrived. My mother and sisters went over to greet them, but I walked outside the chain-link fence and sat down on the bulkhead, my book in my lap and my feet dangling a foot or so above the water. Even though I wasn"t looking in his direction, I knew Ethan was probably watching me. I imagined him sitting on one of the chairs, swinging his legs, his flip-flops hanging halfway off his feet. Ethan and I had once been great summertime buddies. We"d ride our bikes to the little Bay Head Sh.o.r.es beach or fish together or climb trees. We"d even sleep over at each other"s houses. We"d been born on the same day-March 10, 1950-and we thought that gave us a lifelong bond. But we"d started drifting apart the previous summer, as opposite-s.e.x friends sometimes did as they grew older. It seemed mutual to me, as if we"d both received word at the same time that we should avoid each other. As far as I was concerned, he"d gotten weird. He"d developed a fascination with marine life, dissecting everything he could find-crabs, blowfish, eels, starfish and the tiny shrimp that clung to the bulkhead just below the water"s surface. I was glad my mother didn"t insist I go over to say h.e.l.lo to him.
We ate dinner-my grandmother"s spaghetti and meatb.a.l.l.s-on the screened porch that night, as we always did. There was a huge table at one end of the porch which was the hub of all activity in the house-the place for meals, card games and puzzles. After dinner, my sisters and I helped Mom clean up in the kitchen. I felt happy, two months of freedom stretching out in front of me. Lucy didn"t feel that freedom, though; she felt fear.
"You"ll go up to bed with me at night, won"t you, Julie?" she asked as she dried the silverware. I always had to go to bed at the same time she did, some compromise hour between the two of our bedtimes, so that she wouldn"t have to be in the attic alone.
I looked at my mother. "I want to stay up later this summer, Mom," I pleaded. "I"m twelve twelve now." now."
"You"ll go at the same time Lucy does," my mother said, but she drew me aside and whispered in my ear. "Go up when she does and wait until she falls asleep," she said. "Then you can come downstairs again."
"Lucy needs to grow up," Isabel said as she dried a plate. "She"s never going to get over her fears if you keep coddling her."
"What would be more helpful than your criticism," our mother said, "is for you to offer to go up with Lucy sometimes so Julie doesn"t always need to be the one to do it."
"Be happy to," Isabel said. "I"ll tell her ghost stories."
Mom was sponging off the counter, but stopped to look at Isabel. "When did you get so mean?" she asked, and turned away. I saw the look of remorse on Isabel"s face before she covered it with a smirk. My sister was not as hard as she pretended to be.
I was coming to realize that Isabel was very beautiful-and that she knew it. She could get her way with just about anyone, especially our father, using a pout of her lips or the sheen of tears in her eyes. Her dark eyes were amazing, the lashes so long and lush they looked as though they must be false. She complained about her hair all the time. It was too wavy. Too thick. Too dark. But her complaints were empty; she knew her hair was the envy of every other girl in her high-school cla.s.s. She had large b.r.e.a.s.t.s and a tiny waist. Boys stared at her when we"d walk down the street and girls were cautious around her, afraid that their boyfriends might compare them to Isabel and decide they could do better. There was no use denying that she"d gotten the looks in the family. Lucy and I had dark hair, as well, but I had to set mine on rollers to make it wavy, and Mom had given Lucy"s short hair a perm that made her look like a poodle.
The kitchen had grown very quiet. I poured the remaining tomato sauce into a Tupperware container and burped the lid, which made Lucy giggle.
Isabel lifted the colander from the dish drainer and began to dry it. "Ned asked me to a party tonight," she said. "I can go, can"t I?"
My mother continued cleaning the countertop with the sponge. "Not tonight," she said. "You need to unpack and-"
"I"ve already unpacked and I helped Julie and Lucy unpack, too," Izzy said. "And the beds are made upstairs and I swept the floor up there and cleaned the toilet and sink and everything."
I honestly wasn"t sure if all she was saying was true or not. I knew I had unpacked my things quite capably on my own, but I said nothing.
"And we"re practically done in here, aren"t we?" Isabel asked.
"Yes, we are." My mother turned on the faucet to rinse the sponge. "But I don"t want you gone our first night here."
Isabel smacked her dish towel down on the counter. "That makes absolutely no sense," she said.
My mother looked up from the sink, wringing the sponge between her hands. "I said no," she said.
Isabel rolled her eyes and picked up the towel again. I could hear the aggravation in her breathing as she dried one of the saucepans. She didn"t say another word, and neither did my mother. There was tension in the room, and I grew quiet myself. I didn"t know the appropriate rules of behavior when the ice suddenly grew that thin.
Later, my mother and I were cleaning the deep drawers beneath the kitchen cabinets. Lucy stood nearby, brushing ancient crumbs from the old toaster. She"d refused to help us with the drawers because we had found mouse droppings in one of them and a spider in another. Daddy came into the room and poured himself a gla.s.s of ginger ale from the bottle in the refrigerator. He was wearing his summer uniform: baggy shorts that showed off his pale, scarred legs and one of his short-sleeved plaid shirts.
"Charles." My mother looked up from the task. "Would you find Isabel and ask her to sweep and organize the hall closet, please?"
"She"s gone out,"he said. He"d taken the ice tray from the freezer and although the ice had barely had time to form yet, he cracked the tray open and dropped a couple of delicate cubes into his gla.s.s.
My mother straightened up. "Gone where?" she said.
"To a party with Ned Chapman."
My mother put her hands on her hips. "I told her she couldn"t go," she said.
My father looked surprised, his eyes, the same light brown as his hair, wide-open. "She didn"t tell me she asked you," he said.
I watched a blotch of red form on my mother"s throat. "I"m going to ground her for the rest of the week," she said.
"That"s a little harsh, Maria, don"t you think?"my father asked, swirling the ice and liquid around in his gla.s.s. "It"s her first night down the sh.o.r.e and she"s known Ned all her life. His father may be one of the biggest fools on earth, but you can"t hold that against Ned. I don"t see the harm in her going to a party with him."
"Yes, she"s known him all her life, but she"s seventeen seventeen this summer," she said, as if that explained everything. "And it"s her first night here. I think she should have stayed in. Help clean up a little. Get acclimated." this summer," she said, as if that explained everything. "And it"s her first night here. I think she should have stayed in. Help clean up a little. Get acclimated."
Daddy laughed. "Acclimated?" he asked. I was not sure what the word meant, and I realized I had left my dictionary in Westfield. I didn"t like to hear my parents argue, and I buried my head deeper in the drawer I was cleaning, brushing mouse droppings into a dustpan with a small broom. I glanced at Lucy, who looked as uncomfortable as I felt. She was concentrating hard on every crevice of the old toaster.
Daddy put his arm around my mother and kissed her cheek. "We raised her right," he said. "She"s got a good head on her shoulders."
My mother looked wounded. "How can you say that when she just lied to you about-"
"She didn"t lie to me," Daddy said, letting go of her and heading for the door to the hallway. "She omitted a small fact."
"She has you wrapped around her little finger," my mother said. "She"ll be fine," Daddy said. He walked out of the room, turning in the direction of the front door. I knew he was working in the garage with Grandpop this evening, organizing the fishing gear and slapping a fresh coat of blue paint on the Adirondack chairs.
My mother returned to her cleaning with a vengeance, and I could see the tight line of her lips. I knew my sister lied often to our parents. When we would go to confession on Sat.u.r.day evenings, I was always amazed at how short her sessions in the confessional were. I knew she couldn"t possibly be owning up to every lie she"d told. I learned from watching her. Instead of enumerating everything I did wrong, I now gave the priest the abbreviated version. "I lied five times," I"d say. I refused to count "pretending" as "lying." If I counted pretending, I would be in the confessional all night. "I disobeyed my mother once," I"d continue, "and I was mean to my little sister twice." It was a relief to do it that way, instead of spilling all the details of my sins, and the priest didn"t seem to care.