A Summer to Die (2 page)

But I was talking about the age of houses. As my mother had said, this house was built in 1840. That makes it almost one hundred and forty years old. Our house in town was fifty years old. The difference is that the house in town was big, with a million closets and stairways and windows and an attic, all sorts of places for privacy and escape: places where you could curl up with a book and no one would know you were there for hours. Places that were just mine, like the little alcove at the top of the attic stairs, where I tacked my photographs and watercolors on the wall to make my own private gallery, and no one bugged me about the thumbtack holes in the wall.

It's important, I think, to have places like that in your life, secrets that you share only by choice. I said that to Molly once, and she didn't understand; she said she would like to share everything. It's why she likes cheerleading, she said: because she can throw out her arms and a whole crowd of people responds to her.

Here, in the country, the house is very small. Dad
explained that it was built this way because it was so hard to keep it warm way back then. The ceilings are low; the windows are small; the staircase is like a tiny tunnel. Nothing seems to fit right. The floors slant, and there are wide spaces between the pine boards. If you close a door, it falls open again all on its own, when you're not looking. It doesn't matter much, the doors not closing, because there's no place for privacy anyway. Why bother to close the door to your room when it's not even your own room?

When we got here, I ran inside the empty house while the others were all still standing in the yard, trying to help the moving van get turned around in the snowy driveway. I went up the little flight of stairs, looked around, and saw the three bedrooms: two big ones, and the tiny one in the middle, just off the narrow hall. In that room the ceiling was slanted almost down to the floor, and there was one window that looked out over the woods behind the house, and the wallpaper was yellow, very faded and old but still yellow, with a tiny green leaf here and there in the pattern. There was just room for my bed and my desk and my bookcase and the few other things that would make it really mine. I stood for a long time by that one window, looking out at the woods. Across a field to the left of the house, I could see another house far away; it was empty, the
outside unpainted, and the windows, some of them broken, black like dark eyes. The rectangle of the window in the little room was like the frame of a painting, and I stood there thinking how I would wake up each morning there, looking out, and each day it would change to a new kind of picture. The snow would get deeper; the wind would blow those last few leaves from the trees; there would be icicles hanging from the edge of the roof; and then, in spring, things would melt, and change, and turn green. There would be rabbits in the field in the early morning. Wild flowers. Maybe someone would come to live in that abandoned house, and light would come from those dark windows at night, across the meadow.

Finally I went downstairs. My mother was in the empty living room, figuring out how to fit in the big couch from the other house. Dad and Molly were still outside, sprinkling salt on the driveway so that the moving men wouldn't slip on the snow.

"Mom," I said, "the little room is mine, isn't it?"

She stopped to think for a minute, remembering the upstairs of the new house. Then she put her arm around me and said, "Meg, the little room is for Dad's study. That's where he'll finish the book. You and Molly will share the big bedroom at the end of the hall, the one with the pretty blue-flowered wallpaper."

Mom always tries to make things right with gestures: hugs, quick kisses blown across a room, waves, winks, smiles. Sometimes it helps.

I went back upstairs, to the big room that wasn't going to be all mine. From the windows I could still see the woods, and part of the empty house across the field, but the view was partly blocked by the big gray falling-down barn that was attached to our house on the side. It wasn't the same. I'm pretty good at making the best of things, but it wasn't the same.

Now, just a month later, just two days before Christmas, the house looks lived in. It's warm, and full of the sound of fires in the fireplaces, the sound of Dad's typewriter upstairs, and full of winter smells like wet boots drying, and cinnamon, because my mother is making pumpkin pies and gingerbread. But now Molly, who wants more than anything to throw out her arms and share, has drawn that line, because I can't be like those crowds who smile at her, and share back.

Good things are happening here. That surprises me a little. When we came, I thought it would be a place where I would just have to stick it out, where I would be lonely for a year. Where nothing would ever happen at all.

Now good things are happening to all of us. Well, it's hard to tell with my mother; she's the kind of person who always enjoys everything anyway. Molly and Mom are a lot alike. They get so enthusiastic and excited that you think something
wonderful has happened; then, when you stop to think about it, nothing has really happened at all. Every morning, for example, Mom puts fresh birdseed in the bird feeder outside the kitchen window. Two minutes later the first bird stops by for breakfast, and Mom jumps up, says "Shhh" and goes to look, and you forget that 400 birds were there the day before. Or a plant in the kitchen gets a new leaf and she almost sends out birth announcements. So it always seems as if good things are happening to Mom.

Dad is more like me; he waits for the truly good things, as if getting excited about the little ones might keep the big ones from coming. But the book is going well for Dad, and he says it was coming here that did it.

He goes into the little room each morning, closes the door, and sets a brick against it so that it won't fall open while he's working. He's still there when Molly and I get home from school at four, and Mom says he doesn't come out all day, except every now and then when he appears in the kitchen and pours himself a cup of coffee without saying a word, and goes back upstairs. Like a sleepwalker, Mom says. We can hear the typewriter going full speed; every now and then we hear him rip up or crumple a piece of paper, and then roll a fresh one into the typewriter and start clattering away again. He talks
to himself, too—we can hear him muttering behind the door—but talking to himself is a good sign. When he's silent, it means things aren't going well, but he's been talking to himself behind the door to the little room ever since we came here.

Last night he came to dinner looking very preoccupied, but smiling to himself now and then. Molly and I were talking about school, and Mom was telling us how she had decided to make a patchwork quilt while we're living in the country, using scraps of material from all the clothes Molly and I wore when we were little. We started remembering our old dresses—we don't even
wear
dresses anymore; I don't think I've worn anything but jeans for two years. Molly said, "Remember that yucky dress I used to have that had butterflies on it? The one I wore at my sixth birthday party?" I didn't remember it, but Mom did; she laughed, and said, "Molly, that was a
beautiful
dress. Those butterflies were hand-embroidered! It's going into a special place on the quilt!"

Dad hadn't heard a word, but he'd been sitting there with a half-smile on his face. All of a sudden he said, "Lydia, I really have a grip on Coleridge!" and he jumped up from his chair, leaving half a piece of apple pie, and went back to the study, taking the stairs two at a time. We could hear the typewriter start up again.

Mom looked after him with that special fond look she gives to things that are slightly foolish and very lovable. She smiles, and her eyes look as if they can see back into her memory, into all the things that have gone into making a person what they are. With Dad, I think she looks back to when she knew him as a student, when he must have been serious and forgetful and very kind, the way he still is, but young, which he isn't anymore. With me, I know her memories go back to all sorts of frustrations and confusions, because I was never an "easy" child; 1 remember that I questioned and argued and raged. But her look, for me, is still that same caring look that goes beyond all that. As for Molly? I've seen her look at Molly that way, too, and it's a more complicated thing; I think when Mom looks at Molly, her memories go back farther, to her own self as a girl, because they are so alike, and it must be a puzzling thing to see yourself growing up again. It must be like looking through the wrong end of a telescope—seeing yourself young, far away, on your own; the distance is too great for the watcher, really, to do anything more than watch, and remember, and smile.

Molly has a boyfriend. Boys have
always
liked Molly. When she was little, boys in the neighborhood used to come to repair her bike; they loaned her their skate keys, brought her home when she 18
skinned her knees and waited, anxious, while she got a Band-Aid; they shared their trick-or-treat candy with Molly at Halloween. When I was down to the dregs in my paper bag, two weeks later, down to eating the wrinkled apples in the bottom, Molly always had Mounds bars left, gifts from the boys on the block.

How could boys
not
like a girl who looks the way she does? I've gotten used to Molly's looks because I've lived with her for thirteen years. But every now and then I glance at her and see her as if she were a stranger. One night recently she was sitting in front of the fire doing her homework, and I looked over because I wanted to ask her a question about negative numbers. The light from the fire was on her face, all gold, and her blond hair was falling down across her forehead and in waves around her cheeks and onto her shoulders. For a second she looked just like a picture on a Christmas card we had gotten from friends in Boston; it was almost eerie. I held my breath when I looked at her for that moment, because she looked so beautiful. Then she saw me watching her, and stuck her tongue out, so that she was just Molly again, and familiar.

Boys, I think, probably see that part of her all the time, the beautiful part. And now suddenly this one boy, Tierney McGoldrick, who plays on the basketball team and is also president of the junior class, is
hanging around her every minute in school. They're always together, and he lets her wear his school jacket with a big MV for Macwahoc Valley on the back. Of course, because we live out here in the middle of the woods, so far from everything, they can't actually date. Tierney's not old enough to drive, even if he wanted to drive all the way from where he lives; half the distance is a dirt road that's usually covered with snow. But he calls her up every single night. Molly takes the phone into the pantry, so that the long cord is stretched all across the kitchen, and my mother and I have to step over it while we're putting the dinner dishes away. Mom thinks it's quite funny. But then Mom has curly hair too, and was probably just as beautiful as Molly once. Maybe it's because I have straight stringy hair and glasses that the whole thing makes me feel a little sad.

So Dad has a grip on Coleridge, whatever that means, and Molly has a grip on Tierney McGoldrick. Me, I can't actually say I have a grip on anything, but good things have been happening to me here, too.

I have a new friend.

Just after New Year's, before school vacation ended, I went out for a walk. It was a walk I'd been meaning to take ever since we moved to the house, but things had been so busy, first with school and
fixing up the house, then Christmas, then settling down after Christmas—I don't know, the time just never seemed right for it. I guess I like to think that it was fate that sent me out for this particular walk on this particular day. Fate, and the fact that the sun finally came out after weeks of grayness and snow.

I took my camera—the first time I'd taken my camera out since we came to the country—and went, all bundled up in my down jacket and wearing heavy boots, down the dirt road beyond our house. I walked toward the abandoned house that I could see across the fields from the upstairs window.

The snow kept me from getting close to it. The house is a long distance back from the road and of course the driveway, really a narrow road in its own right, hadn't been plowed. But I stood, stamping my feet to keep warm, and looked at it for a long time. It reminds me of a very honest and kind blind man. That sounds silly. But it looks honest to me because it's so square and straight. It's a very old house—I know that because of the way it's built, with a center chimney and all the other things I've learned about from living in
our old
house—but its corners are all square like a man holding his shoulders straight. Nothing sags on it at all. It's a shabby house, though, with no paint, so that the old boards are all weathered to gray. I guess that's why it seems
kind, because it doesn't mind being poor and paintless; it even seems to be proud of it. Blind because it doesn't look back at me. The windows are empty and dark. Not scary. Just waiting, and thinking about something.

I took a couple of photographs of the house from the road and walked on. I know the dirt road ends a mile beyond our house, but I had never gone to the end. The school bus turns around in our driveway, and no other cars ever come down this road except for one beat-up truck now and then.