Hooked (5 page)

By the time I untangled the last bunch of knots, I had a nice ball of yarn the size of a tennis ball. I squeezed it, letting little images from the amazing, perfect weekend with Will drift by. The way he slept in a fetal position with his leg curled up around my waist reminded me of the framed
Rolling Stone
cover on the wall in Mom’s bathroom where John Lennon is lying curled up around Yoko Ono. I took the crochet hook and stabbed it into the ball. It looked like a piece of sculpture or artwork, full of weight and purpose. When I pulled the hook out, it brought a couple of strands of yarn with it and I thought, That’s my heart right now—stabbed by a blunt object, with little bits of heart mush oozing out. That’s my heart. My heart is hooked.

All spring, I expected Will to graduate and that would be that. He would realize how silly this thing with me was, given the sea of women about to become available to him in September. So June took on a Lifetime-television-for-women quality, like soon Will would … die tragically of leukemia.

But we didn’t break up. When school ended, we got summer jobs, me at Mom’s friend Ella’s shop on Lexington Avenue, he at a law firm, and we’d meet every day for hot dogs in Central Park, sweaty and irritable.

We drove to Charter Island one weekend in July and made it to the station by 8:05 to pick up Dad, who’d caught a train at Grand Central after work. I saw the train pull up and there he was, his head in the window, looking down at some “important documents.” I thought of Mom and her fits of rage as they were splitting up. “Tosser marches off to rehab the second Bill Mindorff raises a red flag, but we don’t count for rubbish.”

Was it true? If it was true, why didn’t he try to change? To shift his priorities around a little bit? It seemed stubborn and selfish of him not to try, and look where it got him: facing backward on a train on a Friday night, his shoes stuck to old newspapers, another summer closing in on him.

“I can’t understand why anyone would want to endure I-95 when there’s that perfectly nice Metro-North,” Dad said as he got into the car, carrying stale train air with him. “You must be Will.” They shook hands and I saw it right away in his eyes: this was the reason his daughter wouldn’t be going to Wesleyan.

“Nice to meet you, Ted,” said Will. Dad glared at Will.
I knew he was put out by the first name. I wished he would relax and not sit so straight in his seat, his wide head like a cement block in front of me.

“We had decent luck on the way up, not much traffic, thank God,” Will said as we pulled out of the parking lot.

“I have a car, but it sits in the garage by my apartment most of the time,” Dad responded.

“What kind of car do you drive?” Will asked in an overly chummy way.

“An eighty-four Aston Martin.”

“Oh man, I would love to see that.”

“A fellow at work sold it to me when he took a job in capital markets in London,” Dad said placidly.

“So I hear you’re a banker,” Will said, stopping a little too short at a red light. “What area are you in?”

“It has to do with risk,” Dad said vaguely, as if Will couldn’t handle a complete definition.

“Is that why you’re in it?” Will asked.

I squirmed in the backseat. The question was sassy and Dad ignored it.

“Did you two have dinner?” Dad asked.

“We did,” I said. We’d stopped at McDonald’s on the way up, and the car still smelled like heat-blasted strawberry milk shakes. “We were starving. Sorry.”

There were whitecaps on the water that glowed under the moon as we drove toward the house. We parked on the gravel and I led Will to the guest room, where he dropped his bag and swung old tennis racquets and picked up books from the stacks on the table. I was glad Dad was still upstairs when Will went to the kitchen and opened cabinets. The snack cabinet was packed with family-sized bags of chips and Goldfish
that Dad kept around in case people came over for a sandwich or drinks. I wondered if Will thought it was weird that a grown man who lived in a house by himself had giant bags of junk food in his closet. I was always wondering what Will thought. He took an old metal pinwheel off a shelf in the library and went out to the porch to watch it spin. I sat down next to him on the damp wicker couch and before long, Dad came out in jeans and a brand-new Harvard Business School sweatshirt.

“So, nice to have you up here.” He nodded and raised his Coke to us ceremoniously before he placed it deliberately onto a coaster, then pulled the legs of his jeans up and lowered himself to his chair.

Will leaned forward on the couch next to me. “This is a beautiful spot, Ted. It must have been wonderful to grow up here.” I looked around. It was what you would call a casual house. Sailing trophies were strewn around on shelves, and a rack of croquet mallets jutted out into the living room. But that was my grandmother. Not Dad. Dad was so uptight, so stiff and ill at ease, I wondered how he could have any friends. I could tell that Dad thought Will was out of line, calling him Ted again. I could almost see him squirming and seething in his chair. He sat with his knees together, as though he were holding in pee, gripping his glass on the table next to him.

“Thea doesn’t come up as much as she used to,” he said. “This is a treat.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I was here last weekend.”

“We’ve got to get you up on skis,” he said, turning to Will. “We took her out last weekend and it’s the damnedest thing. She just can’t stand up.”

“You rev the engine too much,” I said, making a fist and turning it. “You’ve got to go lighter. You jerk me around. Literally.”

“She’s never gotten up,” he said to Will, ignoring me. “I can’t figure it out. Her feet are exactly where they should be, her legs—”

“Dad, hello? What did I just say? It’s too much of a jolt.”

“No one else … the Hendricksons didn’t seem to have any problem with it. I think it has more to do with your stance. You lean over too far.”

“Well, how about I lean back next time and you pull the throttle to half where you were pulling it.” I remembered floating sickly in the water, hanging on and wanting to let go, anticipating the smack down. Everyone on the boat turned to the water, watching me, except Dad, his head turned away, hand gripping the throttle.

“We’ll get you up one of these days,” he said. “By golly, we’re going to make it happen!”

Why had he brought this up out of nowhere? I heard Jim, the caretaker, come in through the kitchen door and start to get Dad’s dinner ready. Jim had looked after the house for my grandmother, and after she died, Dad kept him on and the job somehow evolved into shopping and cooking for him on the weekends. The house looked more formal, fancier, than it actually was. Dad sighed and closed his eyes in forced relaxation, then glanced at Will.

“How’d you like to go fishing tomorrow morning?”

“I’d love it,” Will answered, overly enthused. “What time?”

Dad got up and walked over to the tide chart hanging on a pillar.

“The optimum is three hours or so before dead high,” he said. “So, five or six.”

“Ouch,” said Will.

Dad looked at Will like he’d said a word he didn’t understand.

“What the hell.” Will slapped his legs. “I’m game. Morning air. Good for the brain.” He broke into a wide, jovial grin. He looked slightly ignited, a little too hungry, next to me in the dim light.

“All right, then,” Dad said. “We have a taker.”

Dad had never once asked me to go fishing. Sailing, yes, but fishing was a man’s thing. This infuriated me—how he could complain that I didn’t spend enough time with him, then spend the day devising new ways to get away from me when I was actually there.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I said to Will.

“Sure,” he said.

Dad stood up. “I’ll tap on your door at around quarter of tomorrow,” he said.

“Would that be quarter of five or quarter of six?” Will asked.

“Six,” Dad said. “Let’s sleep in a little.” He winked as if he’d just said something very sly. I cringed. What a nerd. “You two have a nice walk,” he said, and started for the dining room. Will and I went out and found his sandals on the front porch. We headed down the street, and through a crack in the hedges I could see Jim lighting two tall, white candles and pouring water into a crystal glass. Dad tucked his napkin into his sweatshirt collar, lord of the manor, commencing his meal.

My bare heels banged against the pavement, and our shadows grew taller and thinner under a lone streetlamp.

“How glad are you that you’re not a fifty-year-old divorced investment banker with no life?” I said.

“
So
glad,” Will said, looking back toward the dining room window. “Who’s that guy waiting on him?

“It’s just Jim,” I said. “He’s been around forever. He helps Dad out on the weekends.”

“Nice,” Will said, his expression hard to read underneath the dim yellow streetlamp.

They went fishing the next morning for three hours while I sat on the porch eating Grape Nuts, worrying Will would catch something and show Dad up, or not catch anything at all and feel like a failure. He ended up catching one lonely snapper, which he threw back.

I watched Jim go into the kitchen that night with moving brown-paper bags, remembering how Mom would run screaming from the kitchen when she saw those bags. Eventually she would boycott lobster night altogether.

I pulled out some old green-glass salad plates shaped like crescents.

“I’d wash them,” Jim said sheepishly. He filled the big black pot with water.

When the water was boiling, Jim squeezed the tops of the lobsters’ heads, which he said deadened the pain, then threw them in. Will came downstairs and smiled, his back to the pot, when he heard the lobsters hissing.

The wind had died down, so we ate outside on the porch while Jim cleaned up the kitchen. Dad focused on his food, and we would have eaten in complete silence if Will hadn’t started talking.

“Did you spend a lot of time here when you were a kid, Thea?” Will asked me, his lips glistening with butter and salad dressing.

“We would come up for a week or two in the summer,” I said, “but most of the time I went to day camp in the Bronx. Mom didn’t like it here.”

“Fiona was not one for island life,” Dad said as the claw he was cracking fell into the butter. “This island, anyway.”

“That’s hard to imagine,” Will said. “It’s beautiful here. It’s one of the most beautiful spots I’ve ever seen.”

Dad stared at his plate, chewing, avoiding Will’s eyes. I begged him in my head to at least acknowledge the compliment.

“When Thea was little, she used to think lobsters were monsters,” he said. “She’d see the bags and run outside, all the way out to the end of the bluff. Remember, you wouldn’t come in until they turned red?”

“Well, it was hard to watch Mom freak out and not think something terrible was happening.”

“Thea was also afraid of rain.” Dad rose suddenly, scraping his chair, and went to the pillar in the corner. “See what I did here? I haven’t shown you, have I? I moved them.”

“Moved what?” I asked.

“Your height measurements.”

I got up and went over, followed by Will.

He turned on a lamp. “I marked it all up on a tape, so I think it’s still pretty accurate.” I looked at the markings, immediately
remembering the sensation of a pencil being leveled on top of my head: the first when I was around a year old, then every few months after that, the gaps ranging from incremental to gaping, depending how much time passed in between. The original markings had been done in different-colored pens, and Mom had done some of the early ones, so the handwriting looked different from year to year, depending on which one of them wrote it. But now the markings were uniformly etched in black graphite, Dad’s script as neat and tight as a calligrapher’s.

“Why did you move them over here?” I asked.

“The chairs kept smacking against the pillar by the table, so when the porch was finally painted last fall, I transferred them over here, out of harm’s way,” Dad said. “It’s a wonder you ever grew at all, given how much you hated vegetables. Do you remember how crazy we used to get?”

I nodded, remembering the nauseating stench of corn-on-the-cob steam escaping from a jiggling lid. Nana, of course, blamed my mother and her lack of discipline in raising me.

“But now look at you,” he said. “A broccoli fanatic. And salad. Salad was the first thing you started to come around on, if I remember correctly. Salad with little cherry tomatoes.”

He looked me up and down, arms stiffly at his sides, and it was like I could read his mind: she needs to lose a few pounds. After the divorce I’d become Mom’s property and therefore vaguely distasteful to him.

“Let’s eat,” he said, steering us back to the table.

“So where do you get the lobsters?” Will asked. “Do you guys have a trap out there?” He elbowed toward the water.

“No, it’s illegal now, you need a license. Thea, why are we eating salad off ashtrays?”

“What?” I asked. “I thought they were salad plates.”

“These were Nana’s and they’re actually ashtrays,” Dad said, picking up his plate and holding it at his chest. “This gives you an indication of how much they used to smoke. They would lay these out all over the house during cocktail parties.”

“They really do look like plates,” Will mused. “Were you ever a smoker, Ted?”

Dad nodded, mashing his napkin across his mouth. “Two packs a day at one point. I’d somehow resisted temptation all through college. I raced crew and played lacrosse, so I took that very seriously. But when I met Thea’s mother, actually, that’s when I took it up.”

“Right, all her fault,” I chimed in.

“I’m not saying that, Thea,” he said, looking at me pointedly. “No one to blame but myself on that front.” He pushed his bowl of empty lobster shells away from him, toward the glass-enclosed candle in the middle of the table. “I think I got caught up in all the headiness of it, you know, the parties, the scene, all that. They all smoked.”

“What brand?” I asked. I pictured him slouched in his chair in the living room, drunk.

“Camel Lights, whatever was around. Anyway, needless to say, I hope you don’t fall down that little rabbit hole,” he said, rattling his glass of ice and draining it of water. “Nicotine addiction is no prize. It’s been, what … almost a decade? And still, I’d kill for a cigarette.”