Valley of the Moon (9 page)

I would ask Joseph if I could stay a few more days.

I woke at midnight. Unable to fall back asleep, I went out on the porch. Joseph was there. We'd barely spoken at dinner, although I'd caught him looking at me a few times.

The red tip of his cigarette glowed in the dark.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” I said.

He didn't answer.

“Can I have a puff?” I asked.

He handed the cigarette to me. I took a drag and tried to give it back to him. “Keep it,” he said. “How did it go today?”

I didn't realize until he asked me the question how I'd been longing for him to inquire about my day.

“Good. I like the garden crew.”

“Do you?”

“You sound surprised.”

“You didn't mind laboring in the heat for eight hours?”

“I loved it.”

“You
loved
it?”

“You don't believe me?”

“I doubt you're used to this kind of life.”

What kind of life was he referring to? The kind of life where you spent the day outside, playing and working alongside people who knew you, really knew you?

“When I was a kid, my father would take me to Lapis Lake in New Hampshire,” I said. “Greengage reminds me of there.”

Joseph held his hand out for the cigarette.

I gave it back to him, surprised that he didn't mind sharing with me.

“Were you happy at Lapis Lake?” he asked.

“I was. For a long time.”

“Until you weren't.”

Right.

“When were you there last?”

I had to think. “Nineteen sixty-four,” I said finally.

“Absolutely not,” said my mother. “It would break your father's heart. You're going.” She handed me a jar of Pond's. “By the way, just because you'll be swimming every day doesn't mean you shouldn't cleanse your face properly every night.”

I tucked the Pond's into my suitcase. “I'm only talking about going up a couple of days late. This weekend is Meg's birthday party. Her parents are renting out the entire rec center. We'll have the pool all to ourselves. After that I can go join Dad at the lake.”

I didn't tell her the party was co-ed and that Meg had invited a bunch of sophomore boys.

“I can take the bus to Portsmouth on Monday and Dad can meet me there.”

“He needs your help opening up the cabin.”

“He can open it himself.”

My mother sighed.

“Please. It's only two days. Nobody will miss me.”

“Everybody will miss you. The McKinleys. The Babbitts. They'll be terribly disappointed if you don't show up with your dad for Saturday night dinner. And what about that new family that bought the cabin next to the Hineses last year?”

“The Harrises,” I said.

“Yes, don't they have a girl your age?”

Beth Harris. We'd bonded last summer. We were as opposite from each other as could be, but our differences fell away at Lapis Lake.

My mother folded a blouse. “You'll have great fun once you get there, you always do.” She eyed my blue jean shorts. “You're not wearing those today, are you?”

My father and I were leaving for the lake tomorrow, but today the three of us were attending the New Parents' Reception at St. Paul's School.

“It's just a bunch of parents.”

“A bunch of very excited parents who are thrilled and grateful their children will be attending St. Paul's in September, thanks to your father.” She rifled through my closet and pulled out a blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar. “This will do nicely.”

“No,” I groaned.

“I'm sorry, darling, but you're going to have to get used to dressing conservatively. If you think you're under a spotlight now being the dean's daughter, wait until you're the headmaster's daughter.”

The headmaster of St. Paul's was retiring and my father was the obvious choice to replace him; the board had been considering the appointment for months. He had the seniority and he was deeply committed to his job. He was popular as well. Kids adored him; they always hung out in his office. Grateful mothers sent him plates of cookies; grateful fathers, bottles of scotch at Christmas. He left the house at seven-thirty each morning and often didn't return until seven o'clock at night. He loved his work.

“Can I bring a book?” I asked.

“That would be rude.”

“If I sit in the very back?”

“What book?”

“House of Mirth,”
I lied. I was in the middle of Updike's
Rabbit, Run
and couldn't wait to get back to it.

“Fine,” she capitulated.

There were benefits to being my father's daughter, and the moment we stepped onto campus they accrued to me. We were like celebrities. Parents called out their hellos. Many times, on our way to the chapel, people stopped us.

“Is this your daughter?”

“Yes, this is Lux,” said my father.

“Oh, she's just lovely,” they said. “A junior, senior?”

My father looked appalled.

My mother said, “Oh, no, Lux is just entering her freshman year.”

I was breathless, thrilled they thought I was older than fourteen.

I didn't end up reading
Rabbit, Run
at the New Parents' Reception. My father, preaching the gospel of St. Paul's School from the pulpit of the chapel, was too riveting. Like everybody else in the audience, I was swept away by the force of his charisma. I prayed for his eyes to fall on me, to choose me, to mark me as special. But foolishly I'd chosen to sit in the back row. It was impossible for him to pick me out in the sea of blue dresses.

At least that's what I told myself; I wasn't ready to admit the truth—I was afraid my shine had worn off for him. Things had become awkward and forced between us over the past year. Most of my friends already had that distance with their fathers, it was built into their relationships; they'd always been much closer with their mothers. But in my house, it was the opposite. It was my father and I that were inseparable. His darling girl; that's what he called me. He understood me—his bright, easily bored, passionate, underdog-defending, in-need-of-large-doses-of-physical-activity-and-changes-of-scenery daughter. And more important than understanding me, he liked me. He was most proud when I took the road less traveled by.

It wouldn't be exaggerating to say I lived for the look of delight and surprise in his eyes when I accomplished something out of the ordinary. Beating him at chess. Reading the unabridged version of
Anna Karenina
when I was ten. Starting a campfire with nothing but a flint and a knife.

But now it seemed our father and daughter skins were growing too small. I still craved his attention and approval, but he gave it more sparingly. Our long, rambling conversations about everything and anything—the speed of light, the Cuban missile crisis, how many minutes on each side to grill a perfect medium-rare steak—had petered out, replaced with the most quotidian of inquiries:
Is
Gunsmoke
on tonight? Is it supposed to snow tomorrow? When's the last time the grass was cut?

It was mostly my fault. I'd created the distance. Or puberty had done it for me. Along with my new body (Breasts! Hair! Hips! Pimples!) came disorientation. What was charming behavior when I was a girl wasn't always so charming at fourteen. Also, my adventurous nature didn't set me apart anymore. The rest of my friends had finally caught up with me. Not only were they doing the daredevil things I'd always done, but they were doing those things on a grander, if more subversive, scale. They lied, they sneaked around, they hid their real lives away from their parents. They said they were going to the beach; instead they took the bus to Providence. They said they were sleeping over at a friend's house; instead they spent the night on the beach with a boy. I was a good girl, I still asked permission to do practically everything, but for the first time in my life my father had started to question my judgment. He'd loved my precociousness when I was young. He'd let me roam free my entire life, in fact he'd encouraged it. Now, just when I was on the cusp of truly being able to handle the independence, he wanted to shut me in.

More and more we stood on opposite shores, or, worse than that, he wasn't on the shore at all. Instead it was my mother who'd taken his place, waving at me from across the sea that separated parent from child, imploring me to wash my face and moisturize every night.

“I'm going to miss you two,” my mother said the next morning, watching me zip up my suitcase.

Jeans. Shorts. Shirts. Bathing suit. Underwear. Sneakers. What was I forgetting?

The phone rang downstairs.

“I've got it!” shouted my father.

“Why don't you come with us?” I asked.

She plumped up the pillows on my bed. “Me, sleeping on that mildewed mattress? All those bugs? Rats running around in the eaves at night and God knows what else?”

Lapis Lake was no Lake Winnipesaukee. It was a dozen or so uninsulated fishing cabins clustered around a small lake. It was at the base of Mount Fort, a tiny mountain, more of a hill, really. My grandfather Harry, who worked as a pulper at the paper mill in Rumford, Maine (until he died of lung cancer at forty-eight), had made the exodus to the lake every summer, as had a group of other mill families. When my grandfather's generation passed, the cabins had been handed down to my father's generation, who in turn brought their sons and daughters every August. Or
daughter,
in my case.

My mother had gone with my father to Lapis Lake a few times, but after I was born she'd stopped. She wasn't a snob (she sent Christmas cards to all the other lake families every year), she just wasn't outdoorsy. She much preferred to stay home in Newport. When Dad and I were gone, she met her friends for drinks and dinner. She waded through thick books, ate at odd hours, and went to the movies. She had no problem keeping herself busy.

“I've never seen a rat,” I said. There were, however, plenty of mice.

There was a loud thud from the kitchen and my father yelled, “Jesus!”

We ran down the stairs and found him in his jeans and undershirt, barefoot, coffee and broken pieces of mug all over the floor.

My father's left leg was almost two inches shorter than his right; he usually wore his lift from the moment he got out of bed to the moment he climbed back in at night. This structural defect (he referred to it that way, as if he were a building) had prevented him from participating in any kind of athletics when he was a boy, and when he was a man it had kept him out of the war. It hadn't barred him from academia, though. He'd gotten his undergraduate degree in English at the University of Maine and his graduate degree in public policy at URI. Education was everything to him. It was the only path up and out.

Now thirty-nine (with lifts for every kind of footwear imaginable, including his slippers), my father was confident and handsome, his dark hair Brylcreemed, his face smelling of Pinaud-Clubman aftershave. He didn't have a belly like lots of the other fathers. He boxed at McGillicutty's gym in Middletown three times a week to stay in shape.

“What a mess,” my father said.

“I'll get it.” I grabbed a dish towel and wiped up the spill.

“Who was that on the phone?” asked my mother.

“Manny. He'll be here to cut the grass on Thursday.”

“You already told me that,” said my mother.

“Did I?”

My father smoothed the hair back from my mother's face, tipped up her chin with his finger, and looked into her eyes. When my father turned the spotlight of his gaze on you, it was like you were the only person alive.

It was a quiet ride north. My father and I often didn't speak when driving to the camp; it was a transitional time and we honored it. But this silence felt oppressively heavy. Had my mother told him I wanted to come late?