There were still books. Elizabeth would read them for hours, forgetting the time. Dinner came and went like in children’s stories, plates gone cold as the blue dusk fell or the sun rose. Beggar girls—Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese—sought answers from the Man in the Moon. They followed their golden dragons, believing in golden stairways that led straight up. The girls were driven by desperation: their parents starving in the Forgotten Village, existing on two or three grains of rice after their days’ labor. The girls would speak to the golden dragons, who would go along, protecting them from the various obstacles they encountered along the way, ferocious animals or unscrupulous merchants. They were innocent girls who believed in the dreams of the night before or week, sleeping on pine needles in the Forgotten Forest. All they had to do was get out of the Forest. They believed in that, though their parents, convinced of their deaths, had gone gray as sheets as they poked holes in the muddy swamps, planting another meager rice crop. Sometimes one had a lucky copper bowl. Sometimes one had a premonition, or an encounter with a magical goldfish.
The bird in its tiny cage, hopping on one scrawny claw as the other reached to pluck the scroll: the fortune.
Tell us what it means, the destitute parent asked of the copper bowl, the magical goldfish. Tell us when it will end, or begin.
She yawned and rose, hungry or not at all. She read and read and the years passed as if nothing had ever happened, as if no one had been lost to the world, taken into the water. Her sixteenth birthday at the summer place in that great, high-ceilinged room in the White Mountains, a fire in the fireplace, alone. She had lied to be here, where she worked in the dining room clearing tables and washing dishes: seventeen years of age, minimum. Yes, yes, she had said to the employer, a Mrs. Something who wasn’t born yesterday, who knew which end was up. And now, day off and raining, Elizabeth read the book she had brought from home, from the box marked FREE. She yawned: Happy Birthday to me, she said under her breath.
Out the window the lake stretched and steamed toward forever, its borders edged with cattails, clogged with the felled, waterlogged stumps of beaver dams. There were loon and warm-blooded mammals, nocturnal, hiding. On the long graceful roots of the water lilies egg sacs that would hatch in days: tadpoles. Just last night she had heard an owl and the boy in her bed had said, Is that an owl?
She thought how that sounded, the boy in her bed. She thought how that would feel to say it: more than wanting to do it, she had wanted to say it, to name it, to say she had. But the doing: she could still feel his hands in certain places and she wished them back, wished him back though this was not his day off. Tomorrow’s my birthday, she had told him, and he, the coolest in the pack, the long-banged boy, had said, Let’s celebrate, and someone had something from home, illegal and sweet. It made her feel old and reckless and she had let the boy unbutton her jeans and put his hand there, and she had twisted around so he would put his hand into her, and she had felt as if all of her might puddle into butter like Sambo, one of the stories she remembers though mostly the look of its cover and illustrations, the black boy and the ferocious tiger.
“You are a tiger,” the boy had said, as if he were reading her mind. He has taken off all her clothes and his, and he pushes into her in the place his hand kneaded and warmed though now it feels too small for him and he is no longer here anyway. He’s somewhere else, jerking on top of her.
The boy smells delicious and feels soft as she feels. A summer night though cool. The lights are out and they are in her bed and the room is the maid’s room, chamber pot on the bureau as if for flowers but there are no flowers here, only stiff green pine and dried brown needles and stones to stub your toe if you skinny-dip and they will, they do—she wants to wash the boy out of her, there had been so much of him—but it is cold, cold in the shadows of the overhanging spruce, her feet sunk in the mud, a mire of decomposing leaves that had once composed the autumn and the spring, that had once composed Molly; now only the green of summer, these woods, the children, the teenagers—a beautiful boy and a beautiful girl asleep in the narrow bed meant for one, their hair still wet with lake, a fishy smell, the dusty, mothballed blanket pulled to their chins, their eyes sweet with sleep.
The beautiful boy has been here before but she has never been and doesn’t want to wake up, doesn’t want to stir in case the boy decides to leave too early. He has work to do. He must deliver the ice to the iceboxes and new guests want sailing lessons. There will be another pretty girl in their company and he will flirt, forgetting her for the afternoon or at least until dinner, when the other staff wink as he sets down his tray beside hers.
What’s up, he’ll say, and she’ll know, just by that, which way the wind blows. (East-west, he told the family, smiling at the new pretty girl, a blonde in a string bikini, pancake flat but amazing turquoise eyes. She loved him immediately, the coolest boy, long-banged, dull.)
I read a great book today, she’ll say.
Yeah? he says, forgetting her birthday, but then the bell rings as the guest who caught the big fish steps from the kitchen holding it high above his head and the other guests in the dining room and the staff and even the cook come out from the kitchen to applaud.
The boy’s name Teddy, she remembers. She wrote him letters and he wrote her one.I
It’s usually smooth as glass! Elizabeth shouts to her father, there to see her, a surprise, the two now in the motorboat, a whaler, thirty-horsepower, a putt-putt to take him to Grizzly Cove, where he might catch a big fish everyone will applaud at dinner. The lake whips around them as he drives the boat, as the boat smacks the rough, the whitecaps, then slams down hard again on the black water, slams down again and again, the waves rising up to take her under, she knows, to take her down.
I. Last year she looked him up online and found photographs: the boy all grown with his family. They stood six in a row near a lake and she wondered if it were the same lake, if Teddy had returned to the camp as a guest, caught a fish or two, sailed with his daughters, hiked the mountain that rose up to shadow the whole or to pierce the storm clouds that always came in so quickly, roughing the lake water that usually, in the early evening, was smooth as glass.