Off Season (14 page)

I was scrubbed and dressed in a sleeveless white blouse and the long, sheer paisley skirt my mother had brought me back from India a few years before, telling me that it would make a lovely summer party skirt. I had finally capitulated and put it on this evening for the first time, and was surprised how nice it felt brushing against my bare legs and billowing in the little tidal breeze. I had piled my hair on top of my head while it was still damp, because I could not subdue the curls that summer humidity by the sea had spawned, and stabbed it with a few of Mother’s hairpins. It was already springing loose and wisping around my face, but I did not care. I had put on no lip gloss nor stolen any blush, and I smelled simply of soap and mineral-infused water. I had not even looked at myself after I had dressed. This evening did not feel like a party to me. There was a dullness in my heart and a weariness in my limbs. It had been so since Jon told me his father was coming home, this afternoon on Caterpillar Hill. Whatever we had, Jon and I, would soon be lost to strictures and schedules and sternness. Suddenly I wanted to cry.

I wish we’d never had it,
I thought, sniffling. Presently I saw Claire Lowell walking across our lawn from the lane, dressed in something long and blue and carrying a huge bouquet of white daisies and some kind of shiny green leaves. I leaned forward to see if Jon had accompanied her. He was not there. My whole body shuddered suddenly with hatred for Arthur Lowell. What sort of man was it whose mere presence blighted an entire summer?

I sat back, realizing that Jon’s mother was talking and I could hear her. I sat very still.

“. . . stole them out of that pasture we pass on the way to Blue Hill,” she was saying, laughter in her voice. “It was covered with them and I’ve never seen a living soul around there . . . Yes, Arthur’s home now, but he’s pretty tired from the trip, and he and Jon have been playing tennis for over two hours. I don’t mind telling you he was furious that Jon hadn’t played all week.”

“. . . partly our fault,” I heard my mother say. “George had research to do and I think he thought Jon needed a little downtime from sailing anyway. I knew Jon was off with Lilly on their bikes most every day, but they were . . . having such a good time.”

“I’m delighted he had that time,” Claire Lowell said, putting her bouquet into Clara’s waiting arms and smiling at her. “Something smells wonderful in the kitchen, Clara,” she said.

“Crab quiche.” Clara smiled in return. “My own recipe. Those folks up at the inn want me to make it for them, but I didn’t want to be tied down every night.”

“I will eat a dozen slices,” Claire Lowell said. And then, to my mother, “I told Jon it was okay to skip the tennis for a while,” she said. “It’s almost all he ever does. I know he’s awfully good and he needs to practice, but this is . . . obsessive and excessive on Arthur’s part. I never saw him quite so rigid about it before this summer. We had a pretty unpleasant scene about it, to tell you the truth. He said he didn’t want Jon spending so much time with any girls, including Lilly, and I said I was delighted that he had Lilly for a friend. Jon’s never made many friends because he’s never had much free time, and Lilly’s just the sort of friend I’d always hoped he’d have. Arthur said he hoped friend was all it was—oh, God. I shouldn’t be babbling to you about this, Liz. But it was just such an ugly thing to say. I hope Jon didn’t hear it, but I think he may have. He didn’t say a word on the way over here, and he usually talks a lot, to me.”

Jon was here, then. My fury blew away as suddenly as it had come, and I got up and crawled back through the window to go and find him.

“We all love Jon,” I heard my mother say. “Not just Lilly, though I know she adores him. Do you think people are talking about the time they spend together, or anything like that? I never even thought about it.”

“Oh, of course not! It’s not as though they were seventeen or eighteen yet. When I was Lilly’s age my best friend was literally the boy next door, and we spent every waking minute together, and nobody minded at all. I still keep up with him,” Mrs. Lowell said. “I think Arthur is terrified that something or someone will take Jon away from tennis, and I’d give a good deal if something would. He needs a real life. He’s never said, but there are times I think Jon is just plain tired of tennis.”

That’s all you know,
I thought smugly.

“Well, you can tell Arthur he’s got nothing to worry about,” my mother said, laughter in her voice. “Lilly hasn’t even gotten her period yet. Is Arthur coming tonight, by the way?”

“No. He said he was damned if he’d go to some kind of magic witch party, and I told him our house could use a little of both, and he went upstairs to his office and closed the door. I’m hoping he’ll be asleep by the time we get back.”

I hardly heard the rest of the sentence. My entire body flamed with embarrassment and violation, and I swung into the room and ran down the hall to my bathroom and scrubbed my face with cold water. Then I sat down on the end of my bed, my heart rocketing in my chest. I sat waiting for it to find the rhythm of the sea so I could breathe again, but it was a long time before it did.

I knew about periods, of course; everybody in my crowd did, and talked of them endlessly in bored voices, but in truth I did not think anyone had gotten hers yet. We would have known. There would have been no end of ersatz agony and preening. I had always thought about my first period as something that would mean I was nearly grown up, waiting far ahead in some golden-mist–shrouded future along with getting my driver’s license and being able to vote. It was nothing I had to deal with now, nothing I had to think about yet.

But suddenly the gilded mist turned dull red and roiled. Small tadpole shapes swam in it, and it smelled somehow of low tide. It terrified me. I wanted with all my heart to go back to the first day at Edgewater, before I had met Jon coming out of the sun at the top of the cliff. I wanted cold green water and sunlight tingling on my shoulders and dew pricking my bare feet and Wilma larruping around my ankles and nothing on my mind or in my world but seeing Cecie for the first time and what we might have for dessert that night. I wanted simplicity. I wanted only childhood.

But then there would be no Jon.

I laid my hot face down on my folded arms. Red darkness danced behind my eyelids. Was this what it was, then: love? Was this what love meant? Having to give up so much self that you did not even recognize who was left in order to have this stabbing, sweet, wild new joy? How did people ever choose?

But then, how could they not?

I was overwhelmed with complexity and choice and joy and pain and fear, and suddenly I wanted not Jon, but my father. I ran out of the room and out of the house and down onto the lawn, still barefoot, and looked around for him. I did not see him. I did not see Jon.

“How pretty you look.” Jon’s mother smiled at me. “I like your hair up, and that long skirt . . . a proper solstice princess.”

“You do look nice, sweetie,” my mother said, looking at me long and closely. “But do you feel all right? You’re flushed.”

“Too much sun,” I said, hoping my voice would not wobble. “Where’s Daddy?”

My mother gestured.

“Down at the dock with Jon,” she said.

I looked. They stood at the end of the dock, their backs to us, silhouetted against the mothy, luminous darkness that came just before summer moonrise. Jon’s head was bowed, and my father’s arm was around his shoulder. He was saying something to Jon, but of course I could not hear what.

“Just getting a little pep talk, I think,” Claire Lowell said. “His father wasn’t too pleased that he missed tennis this week.”

Just then Jon turned and looked up the long dock at me. In the dusk I could see that his yellow head lifted and his teeth flashed white. I could see the chipped tooth in my mind without seeing it at all. He lifted his hand in salute. I felt my mouth curve up in an answering smile. My arm lifted and waved back.

Jon. Of course. Jon.

No choice.

I started across the lawn toward him. By the time I reached the edge of the dock I was trotting. He walked quickly up the dock, his long legs cutting the distance. When we met, I turned suddenly shy and dropped my eyes. We did not speak for a long moment, and then I said, still looking down, “Hey.”

“Hey,” he said.

Whatever we might have had at this meeting exploded softly into the air, shards of it tinkling to the ground.

Finally I looked at him. His face was shadowed in the failing light, but I could see that his eyes were red.

“Are you crying?” I blurted.

“No,” he said. “Come on. Here comes Clara with a plate of something. Whatever it is, I want some. I’m starved. I haven’t eaten since those sandwiches at noon.”

We turned and walked together over the lawn to the buffet table, already spread with hors d’oeuvres and hot bread and a great platter of cheeses with crackers. There seemed to be no one about yet but our mothers. My father had gone in to change, I supposed, and Clara had disappeared back into the house.

The two women smiled at us. That was how they seemed to me tonight. Two women; powerfully and totally whole, archetypal in the flickering light of the candles and the strengthening radiance of the moon. Below the seawall the sea murmured and slapped, almost reaching the top. I had never seen it this full, and remembered what I had told Jon that afternoon.

“Moon tide,” I said.

“Yes,” my mother said, smiling at me. “Prettiest one I’ve seen since I started coming here. Fix yourselves a plate before the ravening horde gets here. The chowder isn’t out yet, but this will hold you.”

“Fill your plate, Jon. You haven’t eaten,” Claire Lowell said, looking keenly at her son. He turned away to the table.

“Where is everybody?” I asked, my mouth full of hot crab dip.

“They’ll be along,” my mother said. “I told everybody except Claire seven, so we could admire our handiwork and commune with the old spirits. If we did that in front of this bunch they’d shove us in Saint Elizabeth’s before you could say Aphrodite. I think the only old spirits this crowd communes with are single malt. Listen—I think I hear the outriders now.”

It was the custom in the colony and its environs for every family to give one large party a summer, inviting literally everyone. My mother dutifully followed the custom, but this was not her large party. This party was just for the families in Carter’s Cove. She had given it on this night for years, and so far as I knew no one had ever suspected they were paying homage to pagan deities, even though it was done in fun. Well, half-fun, anyway. As my father said, Canon Davenport would attempt to exorcise us if he suspected.

At this party the children of all the cove’s families were included, something my mother never did except on this night.

“The only children I want to see at a party are the ones passing trays,” she had said once, when we were leaving a large dinner party that had been completely hijacked by racing, shrieking children.

I listened and heard them too: the children of Carter’s Cove, my summer cadre, pounding down our driveway en masse, laughing and yelling at everything and nothing. My heart lifted suddenly and flew out to meet them. Childhood was coming back to me in one drowning rush. I ran to meet them at the edge of the lawn. Jon was close behind me. Before the first of their parents arrived, we had fallen into linked-arm lines opposite each other on our lawn. Red Rover was about to begin.

There is something magical about playing outdoors by moonlight so bright that you need nothing else. It is as if you have drunk the moonlight; you are giddy with it. Since early childhood on this night, the children of this cove had played games of childhood: Kick the Can, Red Rover, Statues, Giant Step. Back at our winter homes and schools we would not have been caught dead playing them, but in this place, and certainly on this night, childhood claimed us once more, perhaps all the sweeter because deep down we knew that we were leaving it, that we all had one foot on the farther shore. I thought about this a good deal much later, but this was not a night for reflection. This night was for young bodies and new grass and the great sphere of the Strawberry Moon, fully emerged now and ruling all the earth. It was immense, luminous, so close you could see the pits and shadows, the great lunar seas and valleys and mountains where, before any of us were fully grown, men of earth would walk. It was hardly possible to look away from it for any length of time. My father said later that he could never remember a moon that seemed so near the earth. The adults, all of whom had arrived in the middle of our games, sat quietly, drinking cocktails and nibbling quiche and smoked salmon, looking up at the moon. It was obvious that this party was not only for my mother’s friends, but also for the great moon of the strawberries.

When at last we were limp and panting from our exertions, we went in a pack to the buffet table to fill our plates. As bidden by my mother, I said hello to all the parents there, all except Jon’s known to me since childhood. When I came to Cecie’s mother and father, I stopped still.

“Where’s Cecie?” I said. It was only then that I realized that she had not been in the pack on the lawn.

“She’s at a new equestrian camp in Virginia,” Mrs. Wentworth said. “She left a couple of days ago; a spot opened up and her instructor called us. She really wanted Cecie to go. Cecie said to tell you good-bye if she didn’t see you.”

“I . . . but . . .” I stammered, shame nearly choking me. I had not thought of Cecie since the beginning of the week, when Jon had been liberated.

“It was very sudden,” Mrs. Wentworth said, smiling. “We hardly had time to get her packed and on the plane. She knows you’ll understand. She’s going to write you.”

The borrowed childhood sluiced off me like water. I had totally forgotten my best friend for Jon. That other thing, that thing that was stealing my soul like aborigines believe a camera will steal theirs, was back. I mumbled something and went to sit on the seawall with my plate. Jon followed me.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I didn’t do anything with Cecie all this week, and now she’s gone to camp, and she didn’t say good-bye.”