I met Rachel at a party, alongside the buffet, the two of us bumping hands as we both tried to snatch up the last gougère. (I don’t always see rapidly moving objects coming from my left. Close one of your eyes for several minutes and you might be surprised at the constant and obtrusive presence of your nose.) After the clash, the two of us shared a joke about how many of the devilish little cheese bombs we’d devoured already, while a furtive, hirsute gentleman brushed past us and popped the final prize whole in his mouth.
Probably for the best, my buffet neighbor whispered to me. Although the thing is, she added, I’ve been trying really hard to convince myself they’re 70 percent air and that makes them diet food.
Cheesy puffs, I said. I tell myself the same lie about cheesy puffs, I confessed, and we both watched as Mr. Hirsute pushed several miniature cupcakes in his mouth, before piling his plate high with undipped crudités and heading back to his wife.
I’m Rachel, said the woman, offering me her hand, and then we started to chat—how we knew the hostess, who else at the party we were friends with, the location of our partners, Rachel’s being the most attractive woman in the room, before landing eventually on the topic of what we both did for a living.
Rachel went first, telling me she worked as a literary agent, that she had both fiction and nonfiction clients writing in several different genres, but her main area of interest and great passion was true crime. Seeing my reaction, Rachel added quickly, Oh, please don’t judge me. I mean, sure, I take an unhealthy interest in the most gruesome details of the lives of serial killers and the murders they commit, but …
Wait, I said, that’s amazing.
It is? said Rachel. Oh, good, I was hoping you were one of the dark ones.
I’m a crime reporter, I said. For the New York Mail.
Get out of town, said Rachel.
We chatted away for an hour or more, quickly realizing that one of my former colleagues was a client of Rachel’s—Mike Tucker, who wrote a New York Times bestseller about the Gotham Ripper, in which I stake out a spot in the acknowledgments—and then discovering that we both loved the same authors, the TV series The Wire, had both read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood as teenagers (under the bedcovers with a flashlight, in my case), and both came from small towns that no one has ever heard of. Eventually Rachel uttered the fateful words, So, have you ever thought about writing a book, Hannah?
We went over several of the stories I’d covered and Rachel said she’d love me to get something to her, just a couple of sample chapters and an outline would do for the time being, it shouldn’t take ever so long.
That was four years ago.
I’m sorry about all those missed deadlines, Rachel. Also, I’m sorry if this tale didn’t end up being quite the thing you had in mind.
For the next several weeks after meeting Rachel, I went back over my notes and stories concerning several of the murders I’d worked on in depth for the New York Mail. There were at least two or three I thought might warrant a lengthier telling, but every time I tried to get down the first page, my spirit crumpled before I hit the second paragraph.
For some time I tried to ignore the issue, but it soon became clear what the problem was. Evidently there was only one story that could be my first, the only true crime with which I was intimately familiar, an incident that took place up in the Swangum Mountains in the year 1982.
Once I accepted this, I knew I had to write it all down—the story of a girl and a boy and a BB gun—and then, upon finishing, I would lock all of the pages in a drawer, never letting anyone see what I’d written. After that I hoped I might be able to move on to something less personal.
At some point toward the end of 2007 (around the same time my husband, Patch, lost his job), I began. Which means that when I started writing this, I had no idea of the great secret our marriage was harboring. (For a short while I would have said that our marriage was based on a lie, but my opinion has softened a hell of a lot since then.) And of course I knew nothing of what was coming in 2008, had no idea how everything would end later that year. This also means that, when I started working on Grist Mill Road, the story existed within the bounds of only a single year. All I wanted to do was explain, as best I could, everything that led up to Matthew Weaver shooting my eye out in August 1982.
My favorite book, one that I’ve read more than a dozen times, is the greatest true crime book ever written, the same one I’d discussed with Rachel at the party—In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Capote’s In Cold Blood tells the story of the murder of four members of the Clutter family in 1959, each one of them bound and gagged and shot in the head, the quadruple homicide taking place in their home, a farmhouse on the high wheat plains of Kansas.
When most people write about crime, they write thrillers. But Truman Capote didn’t write a thriller—Capote wrote his story as a tragedy. (He gives the reader a little wink at the end of his very first paragraph, comparing the image of distant grain elevators in Kansas to the appearance of temples in ancient Greece.) One of the most pathos-invoking elements of Capote’s tragedy is that he makes the crime seem both brutally unique and yet, at the same time, disturbingly everyday. The opening of the book feels eerily familiar, scenes from small-town America, quaint details that might describe ten thousand different places across the land. Reading about the ordinary day-to-day lives of the residents of Holcomb, Kansas, feels a little like flicking through hundreds of postcards, small illustrations depicting the wholesomeness of daily American life at the geographical and spiritual heart of the nation. There’s the farmer, Herb Clutter, clanging his milk pails. Oh look, do you see the postmistress in denim and cowboy boots? Now here comes the farmer’s daughter, Nancy, arriving home late from her date with the school basketball star, Bobby. (Herb will have a few things to say to young Nancy.) And yet, while you’re reading this, you understand that at some point as you flick through these pretty snapshots, you’re going to get to the blood and that, when you do, this will be the worst thing you’ve ever had to read in your life.
It all makes tragedy feel both horribly average and terribly inevitable—and I think that’s something I certainly believe myself.
When I started writing my own story, I suppose somewhere back in my mind I must have been thinking about In Cold Blood. I too was writing a small-town tragedy, a story that began very small, its ingredients the familiar details of American life. In my case those everyday ingredients were school hallways and lockers, sleepovers, boy crushes, and mean girls. All I was trying to do in my opening chapters was tell the story of a twelve-year-old girl, a few months shy of thirteen, who was just as selfish as children that age tend to be and just as myopic (I shudder to use that word now), but also just as innocent and naive and keen to learn about life, a bright-eyed girl wondering what the world would look like in adulthood, how she would turn out, what she would do and who she might love and settle down with one day.
So that’s where I began, writing the opening lines a few weeks before Christmas 2007, obviously unable to see the story for what it was truly, the seed of a tragedy far greater than mine alone, the beginning of everything that’s happened since the day when I first sat down and typed out the words, I grew up ninety miles north and half a decade away from New York City. Because just as with my favorite book, In Cold Blood, this story you’re reading once started out as a perfectly ordinary, everyday tale. Until, very suddenly, it wasn’t.
This is how it went.
* * *
I GREW UP NINETY MILES north and half a decade away from New York City in a big parchment-colored home standing right at the bend on Grist Mill Road, just before the junction with Earhart Place. Three miles east of our family abode, Grist Mill Road reaches its romantic end at a parking lot, having swept back and forth up into the Swangum Mountains, a legendary area for rock climbers, so I’ve heard, but famous also for their ice caves, a day-trip I’d recommend highly to anyone who finds regular caves just a little too cozy and dry.
From the front windows of our house we could gaze up at the Swangum Ridge, a rock face presenting itself majestically across the horizon like a vast lower jaw, a set of uneven teeth in a yellowish shade I believe to be known as British White.
While I was growing up on Grist Mill Road, my father’s favorite joke while greeting any new visitor out front was to point up at the ridge and then the street sign beyond the bend, before announcing to his guest, with a jovial clap on the shoulder, We live between a rock and Earhart Place. OK, so you had to fudge the pronunciation of Earhart and, strictly speaking, the Swangum Ridge isn’t a single rock, of course, it’s actually an intricate layer cake of various mineral strata, but still, my dad knocked it out of the park every time.
My mother, meanwhile, liked to say we were blessed to be living in the shadow of God’s beauty.
I have a feeling I got my sense of humor from my dad.
Roseborn is not a large town and certainly not in any way famous. However, you might be familiar with its name if, like me, you happen to be an aficionado of cement. (Perhaps you heard mention of it at a cheese and cement party, or in one of the better cement boutiques of Fifth Avenue.) Otherwise, you may have heard of Roseborn if … let me think …
No, Roseborn is pretty much famous only for its excellent once-famous cement.
You might eventually conclude that any lack of romantic feelings I hold toward the town in which I was born and raised has something to do with a little incident that took place nearby in the Swangum Mountains one Wednesday in August 1982, when a fourteen-year-old boy, Matthew Weaver, tied me to a tree and shot me thirty-seven times with a Red Ryder BB gun, the final shot piercing my eye—and there may be some truth to this, my hometown certainly looked different to me after I lost my left eye. And yes, I do like to say that I lost it, even if this doesn’t adequately convey the horror of having one’s eye irreparably damaged by a steel pellet and surgically removed by Dr. David P. Schwab. (For all you word lovers out there, the technical name of this hospital procedure is enucleation, so I guess you could say my eye got nuked.)
Incidentally, I have visions, half-visions in my case, of Dr. Schwab talking about the enucleation procedure to his shocked plaid-sporting buddies, maybe as they awaited their tee shots on the tenth, and using the golf ball in his hand and the tip of his red plastic tee to illustrate the tale.
This was big news in Roseborn.
Anyway, certainly in one sense of the word I did lose my eye, because two days after its removal, I asked where it was and no one could tell me.
What follows is one of the conversations I had on Friday, Thursday having been consumed by tears and whys and police, more tears and finally a platter of jelly beans that preceded a wildly psychedelic sixteen-hour sleep. (Although thinking about this twenty-five years on, perhaps those weren’t actually jelly beans.)
But where is it? I asked my bedside parents.
My mom decided to take the lead on this topic. It’s nowhere, honey, she said.
It’s not nowhere, I said. It has to be somewhere. It didn’t vanish into thin air. (In fact it probably did vanish into thin air. Most likely it would have been burned with a whole pile of other medical waste.)
Oh, Hannah. I don’t know, the things you come out with.
Can I keep it? I want to keep it.
What? Are you serious?
It’s my eye, Mom.
Next there followed a short silence as my mom covered her face and pretended to cry, one of the many child-rearing methods at which she excelled.
I can ask the doctor, Hanny Bee, said my dad.
My mom threw her shocked hands from her streakless face.
We are not asking the doctor, she gasped. What sort of people would ask a doctor a thing like that?
So that was that, we didn’t ask. Which to my mind means that somewhere along the line, my eye was in fact lost.
* * *
IS IT JUST ME OR do Hannah’s eyes look double-psycho today?
This is Christie Laing and you may have detected in her words just the faintest whiff of animosity toward me. It’s January 1982, our first day back after Christmas break, and I have seven more months of blissfully biocular life ahead of me.
Yet things could have been so different between us. I was a pretty brunette girl, Christie was a pretty blond girl, if only I’d been prepared to play along, taunting the less attractive girls and mocking the quieter boys, we could have formed a great-hair superpower in Roseborn Middle School, strutting the hallways together like ABBA, me brunette Anni-Frid, Christie as platinum Agnetha.
I wish I could say it was a sense of decency that prevented me from joining forces with Christie, but really I think it was a kind of uncomprehending indifference. What would have been the point? As early as the age of eleven, I knew I wanted to stride out into the wide world to explore everything that existed beyond Roseborn. (For years I was obsessed with Japan because I considered it the strangest place I could visit that didn’t require space travel. Then again, I had not, until my early twenties, experienced New Jersey.) But knowing this didn’t make me immune to Christie’s torture campaign and so, as a child and then teenager, I fretted constantly about my too bright eyes, my too full lips, my impossibly thin legs, my excessively skinny ass … Oh yes, there was no doubt about it, I was cursed.
Christie wasn’t done with me yet. My what big eyes you have, Hannah, she said in a singsongy fairy-tale voice, before adding, with a generous pinch of wicked witch—All the better to bite me with.
Christie’s grasp of the dialogue of Little Red Riding Hood may have been seriously sub-kindergarten, but I didn’t interrupt because I could see that Sandy Delillo was brewing up a zinger, and when Sandy Delillo switched to zinger mode, the world stopped to listen.
Hey everyone, her eyes look exactly like toilet cleaner.
Excellent work, Sandy. (Sandy would go on to own Roseborn’s only hair salon, Curl Up & Dye. Because what better way to attract customers to your business than with a pun referencing the crippling effects of Parkinson’s disease?)
Now Tammy Frankowski was ready to jump in, but it was too late because Christie was ready with the kicker.
That’s why she sucks so much shit!
Pow! What a fine start to the first school day of 1982. Yes, Christie had been short of opportunities to mock me for nearly two whole weeks, not having noticed my presence at Jonny Spinoza’s birthday party on New Year’s Day.
That night, all of the boys had brought sleeping bags with them, the plan being for Jonny the Spin’s party to end with a guys-only sleepover. I’d been keeping a lookout for Christie all night, trying to avoid another one of her verbal assaults, so when she wriggled down into the bag of Jonny the Spin’s older brother, Benny Spinoza, a sophisticated sixteen-year-old, I observed everything that followed.
First of all Benny’s shoulder started to move, as if he were trying to retrieve something from the lower reaches of his bag, and next Christie’s face went all funny—first a blink, then a flash, and finally a quick shudder. While Jonny the Spin’s brother resumed his conversation with Ted Benson about Phil Simms being the reason why the Giants hadn’t made the playoffs, Christie turned her head away and started nibbling her nails.
Now, I was no expert in the chivalrous world of teenage boys and their gallant wooing techniques, but I was pretty certain I knew what Benny was up to, two feet under, in his red nylon sleeping pouch, and I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass, now that Christie had kicked off ’82’s hallway banter with such an elegant display of her wit.
I crossed my arms, paused a beat, and said, You know, Christie, Jonny the Spin’s brother was letting every boy at the party smell his fingers after you left. I heard Ted Benson reckons you stink like dead skunk.
Christie’s crew didn’t dare react to my barb, but two boys nearby started to snicker like drunken trolls.
Now, as far as I knew, Benny Spinoza had said nothing about his between-the-zipper activities on that first night of 1982, but the look on Christie’s face when I called her out in the hallway suggested my suspicion was correct and, pretty soon, the quality of Christie’s comeback confirmed this.
Nobody likes you, bitch. (This happened not to be true, I just didn’t have my own posse of gum-blowing joke machines.)
We were on our way to math, my class walking down the hallway, Matthew and Patch’s class heading the other way, and there they were, hip-by-hip as always, Matthew looking like he was five years older than anyone else in middle school, Patch looking nearly the same number of years younger. Meanwhile, the trolls were still snickering, so Matthew stopped and asked them what was so funny.
Hannah says Benny Spinoza fingered Christie at his party.
Christie was already fading away down the corridor. She turned to scowl and flip the bird at the trolls.
A split second later, Matthew called out to her, Hey, Christabel, we don’t actually need to know which finger he used.
The laughter everywhere was of the violent body-creasing kind, but Matthew stood tall as the hallway doubled up all around him. He couldn’t have played it straighter if you’d frozen all the blood in his veins.
I believe that was the exact moment, right there in the hallway, when I decided I liked him.
* * *
WHEN I CAST MY EYE back over my twelve-year-old self, I can see that I wasn’t exactly mature for a girl on the brink of becoming a teenager—and I was certainly no Christie Laing, who seemed ten shades of adolescence older than any other girl in seventh grade.
In the early stages, I honestly believed my feelings toward Matthew Weaver were nothing more than curiosity. I had always been fascinated by anything that felt different from my life in Roseborn, hence my obsession with Japan. Matthew had grown up in New York City. What was that like? Also, not only did Matthew possess Big Apple glam, but he was also older than most of us in seventh grade, having been held back a year sometime before he moved to Roseborn, and everyone in school knew that the left-back kids were the serious badasses of the world.
Yes, there was definitely something pulling me toward Matthew, but I suppose that, to begin with, Matthew must have seemed something like the concept of eating raw fish—an idea that intrigued me, but an activity I probably wouldn’t be able to enjoy until my mid-twenties.
But then, after two days of quiet reflection upon Matthew’s otherness, I felt everything start to speed up. I remember lying in bed trying to imagine what Matthew’s mom was like (everyone knew about his dad, the town drunk), wondering what posters Matthew had on his walls and what TV shows Matthew watched before going to bed. Wait, was Matthew even in bed? Maybe Matthew’s mom was cooler than mine and he could stay up past ten o’clock at night. Damn that lucky son of a bitch.
Even after several days of obsessing over Matthew, it didn’t occur to me that this might be a crush, because although I understood the mechanics of what had been going on in Benny Spinoza’s sleeping bag, I really didn’t understand the impulse. Around that time, Olivia Newton-John’s Physical had gone to number one in the charts and although in her hit single the Neutron Bomb panted away about getting animal and bodies talking horizontally, it wasn’t until I heard the song again in college that I realized the lyrics were about something other than dance aerobics. So whenever the track came on the radio in my childhood bedroom, I would bounce along to the beat in front of the mirror wearing a sweatband on my head, which lent me a certain John McEnroe chic. I’m guessing now that this must have been the reason why I incorporated both the serve and two-handed backhand into my carefully self-choreographed dance routine.
This wasn’t exactly the behavior of a femme fatale in the making.
No, instead of fantasies of getting animal with Matthew, I dreamed about the fascinating conversations we would have, drew up a list of places that he and I would enjoy going together (the movies, the mall, Tokyo), and practiced my signature over and over with his surname in place of my own—Hannah Weaver Hannah Weaver Hannah Weaver—only I didn’t like the way it flowed and decided he would have to take my name. Matthew Jensen. Nonnegotiable.
Obviously I didn’t actually do anything to make any of this happen. What was I supposed to do, just walk up to Matthew and start talking to him? Impossible! I mean, it’s not as if I were some sort of creature with two functioning legs and a fully operational voice box.
However, ten days or so after Matthew’s already legendary finger joke, he strode straight up to me after I got off the school bus one morning.
Hey Hannah, stop a moment. You do know Christie’s just jealous of you, right?
Why?
Come on, Hannah, you know why.
What?
Maybe there should be a club. I don’t understand why everyone lets the Christies of the world take charge when there are so many of us.
Who?
The non-Christies. The anti-Christies. I just don’t get it. Anyway, maybe we should hang out. You wanna hang out sometime?
Well …
Me and Tricky—I mean Patch—we don’t do anything interesting, so…?
When? (Thus far, you may have observed that my side of this conversation has proceeded as follows—Why? What? Who? Well. When? Was I actually an episode of Sesame Street brought to you by the letter W?)
No idea, said Matthew. How about tonight?
Where? (You see, this illustrates why I love my work in newspapers. From a very young age I clearly had an innate feel for the five W’s of journalism—who, what, when, where, why.)
You have a bike? I ride over to Tricky’s most days after school. Oh, but I’m the only one calls him Tricky by the way, just so you know. Anyway, you only live a few streets from him, right? But maybe it would be good if we all had bikes.
Sure, I have a bike, but …
How about you, Jen, you have a bike?
(Sorry, I haven’t until now mentioned the presence of my very best friend, Jen Snell, in this scene because, ever since Matthew strode up to us, she hasn’t said anything, hasn’t moved, hasn’t taken even one solitary sip of the world’s readily available oxygen.)
Jen’s words came out in one rapid spew. Ihavetoaskmymom.
You have to ask your mom if you have a bike?
Ihaveabike.
Great, then everything’s arranged. Tell your moms you’re going over to Joe McConnell’s. But don’t mention me, just say Patrick needs some help stapling leaflets or making ticker tape or something else mind-blowing. They’ll dig that. See you tonight, then, Hannah.
Matthew turned and headed toward the school doors, taking the first few steps at walking pace and then broke into a run.
I stared wide-eyed at Jen. Jen stared wide-eyed at me.
Wow!
* * *
WHY DO YOU THINK HE runs everywhere? said Jen.
It was a good question. Now that I thought about it, I realized that whenever Matthew wasn’t with Patrick, he was running—down the hallway, off the school bus, or fast up the school steps, taking them two and three at a time.
I don’t know, I said. Maybe going to some place or another is just the stuff that happens in between, I don’t know … better … stuff?
You mean like a sandwich?
Sure. But the other way round.
You mean cheese on the outside and bread for the filling? I made that for lunch one time.
Was it good?
No, it was seriously gross.
Yes, it was with witty conversations like this that were going to captivate the most dangerously thrilling seventh grader in Roseborn.
We started walking again, making our way toward school, a squat redbrick building that looked like it might have been designed using a Lego starter kit to achieve its wildly inspiring look.
So do you think we should go? said Jen.
I wanted to scream at her—Should we go? Of course we should go. If we don’t we’ll regret it for the rest of our lives. We will die old and lonely in a house stinking of washcloth and cat feces.
Maybe, I said.
Yeah, maybe, said Jen.
So that was a yes from us both.
* * *
I SPENT THE WHOLE DAY thinking about our postschool rendezvous, rehearsing conversations with Matthew in my head, being admonished by teachers for inattentiveness, talking to Jen between lessons about how weird Matthew was—majorly weird, we agreed, the word thrilling me each time we used it—and absently doodling on pages torn out of my schoolbooks. I scrawled various things on those scraps of paper, different configurations of the letters HJWA (Hannah Jensen Matthew Weaver), pictures of a stick boy and stick girl in stick Tokyo (some of those doodles including stick chopsticks), and bunches of flowers that may or may not have been wedding bouquets. However, at no point while I was doing any of this did I think of myself as being pressed down on by the all-consuming millstone of my life’s first ever crush.
No, Matthew was a weird but interesting boy, that was all. The letters HJWA were no more romantic than a chemical formula. Those flowers I’d drawn in huge bunches were simply the blooms of intellectual curiosity.
Meanwhile, the feeling of having to wait for my dangerous liaison caused schooltime to virtually freeze, the day’s lessons moving forward at a crawl. When finally the bell rang for the end of the day, I felt as if I’d been imprisoned for a lifetime, but now I was free, the light beyond the school doors beckoning me and the gray air clumping around our sputtering school buses a heady perfume.
Sitting next to each other on the ride home, as we always did, the bus inching its way through Roseborn, Jen and I made our plans (meet at Jen’s, ride our bikes over to Patch’s house, talk about The Dukes of Hazzard only if backed into a corner), and when finally the odyssey to the end of Grist Mill Road was complete, I exploded out of the bus doors onto my driveway as if a trigger had been pulled somewhere inside me—although, had anyone asked me, I still would have denied, vigorously and perfectly innocently, that my behavior bore all the hallmarks of a crush.
But Matthew Weaver, oh Matthew Weaver. I can admit it now, I was in love.
* * *
THINKING OF NOTHING BUT MATTHEW, my kindred spirit to be, I skipped up the short stretch of drive toward our gates, which were always open, passing through the stone gateposts topped with twin models of the Brooklyn Bridge arches. Erected by an earlier Jensen, the model arches were a nod to the nature of our family business, Roseborn’s once-famous export, the powder behind the power—cement. OK, I’ll grant you that it’s not the most glamorous product in the world, but I can assure you that cement was once gray gold in them thar hills.
Yes, I was born into a rich family, there’s no point in hiding it, and while it didn’t seem to be a factor in my life when I was twelve, I wasn’t thinking ever so deeply about such things back then. In fact, rather than being kindred spirits, there were actually many differences between myself and Matthew Weaver, differences that my twelve-year-old self never stopped to consider. I suppose I was aware that Matthew was a rough kid, an older kid, and an out-of-towner, but I probably never stopped to think how different my life was from his. The Jensens had been resident in Roseborn for more than a century and a half, and after I passed through those gateposts, the view that greeted me was of a large parchment-colored home, a three-car garage, a set of stables, and the vast acreage of our expertly landscaped grounds. And while the grounds were currently covered in snow, in a few months time we would have the greenest lawn, the wildest flowerbeds, and the trimmest hedges in town. Matthew, meanwhile, lived under very different circumstances, as I would find out for myself later on.
The upturn in our family’s fortunes—which was also the upturn in sleepy Roseborn’s fortunes—had come early in the nineteenth century when workers blasting out the bed of the Delaware and Hudson Canal discovered the snout end of a thirty-square-mile belt of high-grade limestone near Roseborn, New York, a large portion of which turned out to be buried beneath land owned by a farmer and recent immigrant from Denmark named Jens Henrik Jensen.
Every time we ate dinner in my childhood home, I got spooked by the oil painting of Jens Henrik that hung at the end of our dining table, the great Dane leering at me, pale faced and sharp boned, a dark mop of hair falling over his brow, almost all the way down to his lurid blue eyes. Noticing the eyes of this long-dead forebear as they followed me around the dining room—eyes that were clearly my eyes as well—I was filled every time with a dread sense of doom.
Prior to the discovery of Roseborn’s powdered gold, Jens Henrik Jensen had owned and operated a grist mill (hence the name of our road), but shrewdly converted this to a cement grinding mill soon after the limestone’s unearthing. Thereafter, production of Roseborn cement would quickly become the bedrock of our family business, a company known to this day by anyone who works in the construction industry, The Jensen Royal Cement Company. (Jens Henrik inserted the Royal both for the sake of gravitas and to honor Denmark’s King Frederik VI.)
Apparently this ultra-high-grade limestone was some seriously good blow, good enough that our humble town rapidly gave birth to fifteen cement companies and lent its name to a whole new breed of cement … drumroll … Roseborn cement! And who in the world does not know that Roseborn cement was used for the Grand Central Terminal, the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge, New York’s earliest skyscrapers, and the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty?
Shame on you.
From its discovery to present day, Roseborn cement experienced many ups and downs—our natural cement is formidably strong once it sets, but frustratingly it takes an incredibly long time to do so. Yes, tough but stupidly slow, Roseborn cement is the Sylvester Stallone of the construction world.
OK, let’s pause there for a moment while I admit to employing humor to hide the fact that I am, truth be told, an enormous cement nerd. I find all this stuff fascinating, and even as a young girl, cement intrigued me. The Society for the Preservation of Historical Cements (a real thing, I kid you not) would hold its meetings at our house, and I would sit at the back of the room trying to take it all in—my father was a high-ranking official in the society and anything my father did fascinated me. The gatherings were hosted by a man named Pete whose face must have been carved from a rock, with a beard that looked like it was dusted with cement powder. Pete worked for the Conservancy and seemed to be the local expert on anything and everything, coming to our school sometimes to give talks on glaciers or the flora and fauna of the Swangums, but while glaciers left me cold and pine needles didn’t spike my interest, there was something about the topic of cement that lit me up like gunpowder.
Anyway, by the end of the nineteenth century, Roseborn’s fifteen competing cement plants were producing 42 percent of the nation’s cement. However, there was trouble in store for our heroic local product because a foreign interloper had entered the market as well, a vile and inferior slurry known as Portland cement.
An early-nineteenth-century concoction, Portland cement was a man-made product cooked up by a bricklayer in Leeds, England. Yes, that’s right, Lady Liberty’s patriotic foundation, Roseborn cement, was being threatened by nothing other than limey limestone.
King Kong v. Godzilla, pah! You ain’t seen nothing until you’ve seen two cements facing off. The war was hard fought, but there could be only one winner. Unfortunately, the long curing time of Roseborn cement made it unpopular in the hurried post–World War One construction boom with its vast road- and bridge-building programs, and so the winner was, alas, Portland cement.
However, as it happened, this egregious injustice turned out to be hugely advantageous to our family, the reason for which we will come to mercifully soon.
So, thanks to Portland cement, Roseborn cement fell on hard times, and I’m afraid it ain’t pretty when a strain of natural cement lets itself go. Crapulent plants lay in disarray on the outskirts of Roseborn like broken men, their glory days behind them, until finally only one was left standing—Jensen Royal Cement. But although our family’s business survived, it now ran unprofitably, staying open only because the cement business was so beloved by my grandfather, William Jensen, a shrewd operator who’d made money from investments in the 1920s and then, according to family legend, having been warned of the Wall Street crash in a dream by Jens Henrik Jensen, shifted all his profits away from shares and into movies and property just before the lower-rear hole was ripped from the stock market.
The Jensen Royal Cement Company returned slowly to profitability watched over by William Jensen and then, despite more hard times ahead, under the stewardship of my father, Walt Jensen.
Finally our family business flourished anew, and soon we did more than flourish—beginning with an inspirational act of diversification, we grew rich. A fact of which my mother was supremely proud.
Laura Jensen, née Snedecker, was a most august concrete baroness, and as a wife and mother she was much devoted to her husband, my father Walt Jensen, and her two sons, Bobby and Pauly. She was well known in Roseborn for her conspicuous wealth, her huge financial support of the Republican Party, and her jaw-dropping, eye-shutting bluntness. My mom had a mysterious ability to identify a person’s weak points and proceed to ask the question that least wanted asking in any given social situation. For example—
My daughter says you’re good with the boys. Not so much with the girls. Is there a reason for that, Mr. Bocelli? This question was asked right in front of me, to my teacher in tenth grade. Now, firstly, I had said no such thing, my mom had simply intuited it from several completely innocent statements. Secondly, and even worse, it was absolutely true. And finally, God help us all, Mr. Bocelli was secretly, but quite obviously, gay—or a fag, as he would have been termed back then. Please don’t judge me for my use of this word, or at the very least, hold fire for now, because we’ll return to this later on. It’s just a fact that, in the early 1980s, and in the place I grew up, for reasons I suppose I never thought about at the time, a faggot was one of the worst things you could be. Look, I’m a reporter, I am only reporting the facts.
Anyway, then there was the time after church when we were saying our goodbyes to the Snells, my best friend Jen’s dad having just told us how his mother had recently died in a car accident resulting from a failure to stop at a set of rail crossing lights, at which point my mother said, Oh, that’s too terrible for words, and not at all a nice way to go. (Always, immediately before one of my mom’s gaffes, there came a pause, at which point my stomach would drop to my pelvic floor.) Sooo, she continued, a genuine note of curiosity in her voice, do they think it might have been because of the drinking?
As you might imagine, it was tact and sensitivity such as this that would turn the forthcoming monocular portion of my childhood into one never-ending party.
Only here’s the thing about my mother’s forensic ability to sniff out the awkward question and then go ahead and ask it. While in social situations such behavior is generally considered, at the very least, gauche, in the world of news reporting, awkward question–asking is something that’s actually considered a skill. In fact, you might even say that awkward question–asking is the chief requirement of the job, which means that the very quality that made me squirm so often as a child, the quality in my mother that upset me the most as an adolescent, would in fact turn out to be her gift to me when, years later, I would discover that although my eyes and sense of humor had been passed down to me from the Jensen side of the family, my ability to perform in my job was 100 percent Snedecker. But despite my visible discomfort, my mother would continue until the day that she died to float through life blissfully unaware she was considered by the local populace to be the foot-in-mouth queen of Roseborn.
Besides, my mother occupied another position, and this was one of which she was both proud and very much aware, because according to family legend, Laura Snedecker had once saved the life of Jensen Royal Cement, and therefore was absolutely entitled to sit every day on the luxurious upholstery of the family throne. And how did my mother earn her crown? Well, despite the fact that Jensen Royal Cement had emerged as Roseborn’s only survivor in its battle with Portland cement, the keeping of the business afloat remained a daily struggle. Roseborn cement was very much a niche product, and the prospect of financial ruin still loomed large. It’s true that the business needed the kiss of life, and legend has it that one day, while they were courting, my mother heard that her beau Walter had come down with a bad case of the flu. Pulling on her boots double-quick, she then sped around to his house with a can of soup to find my father sweaty and delirious, but nursed him back to health with hand-fed spoonfuls of Campbell’s Condensed Cream of Mushroom. As my father emerged from his fevered dreams, he saw the empty soup can and the word mushroom glowing as if lit up like a neon sign, and that’s when the idea struck him.
You see, the extraction of vast quantities of limestone from the ground leaves behind dirty great holes, which means that on our land, a short trot behind the stables, we had ourselves a fine thirty-acre cave. (That’s almost twenty-three football fields.)
Delirium, delirium, Laura, can, soup, mushroom, cave … wait … mushroom cave …
Bingo!
Within a year my parents had wed and the thirty-acre cave beneath the Jensen estate was producing five tons of mushrooms every day. From 1955 to 1969, Jensen Royal Cement’s cave was the almost sole supplier of mushrooms to the Campbell Soup Company, which means that, in 1962, when Andy Warhol exhibited his thirty-two cans of Campbell’s soup, one of those cans would theoretically have been full of Jensen-cave-grown mushrooms. Which is why my mother hung a copy of the Warhol painting right next to the oil of the great Dane, Jens Henrik Jensen.
Meanwhile my dad, an intensely quiet man, never spoke up about his role in keeping the business afloat, and no one in our family ever publicly questioned the details of the story, although personally I have always wondered about the likelihood of my mother’s choice of condensed cream of mushroom as medicine—because isn’t there a reason why chicken noodle soup is known as Jewish penicillin? Who on earth would take a flu patient condensed cream of mushroom soup as opposed to chicken noodle? But enough of my awkward questions. However it came about, Jensen Royal Cement’s slim profits were now being fattened up on sweet fungo-dollars, and although the Campbell Soup Company would eventually find itself an even cheaper source of mushrooms, our family business had had a good run and my father had never been one to tread water. In fact, it was time to further diversify. At the beginning of 1969, the Jensen Royal Cement Company started to produce … I can hardly bear to say it, but here it comes, the vile twist in the tale … Portland cement.
Back in the 1930s, it had been noticed that if you added just a little sip of Roseborn cement to its Portland nemesis, the result was a considerably stronger cement, and by the end of the 1960s, thanks to advancing technology, it became possible to create this construction dream team without having to manually combine the two products.
All of which means that, while it was mushrooms that had kept our family business afloat, it was the enemy cement that led to Jensen’s 1970s boom, a dramatic rise in profits led by sales of a new miracle product, a mixture of Roseborn and Portland cements, King Kong and Godzilla, sold under the proprietary name, Roseport Cement.
The money was about to start rolling in. A new cement had been born to the world, and, some three months later, so was I.
* * *
AND NOW HERE I WAS, teetering on the brink of adolescence, walking up our expensively paved driveway, between low walls of plowed snow, toward our large ancestral home, thinking about Matthew Weaver (and yet not really thinking about the real Matthew Weaver), slowing down slightly when I noticed my dad’s truck hurriedly parked close to the front door, two of its wheels buried in the snow just off the driveway, a half-grassed job.
Which meant that clearly something was wrong, because my father performed even the smallest of life’s tasks with pinpoint precision. Right away I felt sick, my first thought being that maybe something terrible had happened to one of my brothers (who both lived out their lives neck-deep in dangerous vices), and I started to run to the front door.
In fact the worst thing in the world hadn’t yet happened. The worst thing in the world was actually about to happen, and it was going to happen to me—or so it foolishly felt at the time.
Twelve years old, what did I know about anything? The world has taught me a lot since then.
* * *
OPENING THE FRONT DOOR AND seeing my brothers in the front room, very much alive, I felt a surge of relief. There was Bobby feet-up in the recliner, TV remote in one hand, fresh vodka-tonic in the other (if you ever asked what he was drinking, his response was 7UP), and there was Pauly, the younger of my two brothers, who preferred hash to hooch, stretched out on the sofa with a forearm draped over his forehead, looking like a Victorian lady recovering from a bout of the vapors.
Hey, little sis, said Bobby.
What’s going on? I said.
You’d better go see for yourself, said Bobby, making an upward gesture with his drink.
Pauly dragged his eyes over to me. Yo, Hannah Solo, he said. You know, I think it might actually have been my fault. I kinda thought it through and I think, yeah, so don’t worry, I’ll tell her later some time.
I had no idea what Pauly was talking about, which wasn’t unusual.
And then I heard Mom call out my name from the floor above, loud at first and then whiny. Han-aaah! Haaa-nah!
Now I wanted to run outside, jump on my bike, and pedal as fast as I could away from that place.
Coming, Mom, I called out, moving without any obvious haste.
* * *
MY BROTHERS WERE TEN AND twelve years old when I was born (something of an unplanned blip), and by the time I entered the world, bawling and bright-eyed, my mom had been sitting on the family throne for years. She spent her days enjoying a regal portion of Jensen Royal Cement’s profits (she had a wardrobe straight out of Charlie’s Angels and an eye for antiques), employing and firing a succession of housemaids and gardeners, and doting on her sons.
My mom had successfully constructed for herself the world in which she wished to live—the large house, the hired help, the stoic and protective husband, all of these things earned, to her mind, by her womanly wiles, and now she was free to sit back and enjoy a lifetime of restful days. But unfortunately in her idlesse she became a role model to Bobby and Pauly, my two sweet brothers, who to me seemed as innocent as a pair of toy bears, all goofy smiles and plump bellies, stuffed to the seams every day with the fillings of their choice.
Bobby, the eldest, had been drinking for as long as I could remember. Not that he was an angry or violent drunk, just more like an overgrown kid who had discovered an endless supply of his favorite candy and spent his days constantly on the edge of a sugar coma. Meanwhile Pauly, who was two years younger, was the mellowest dude in the county, popular at school, even more popular at parties, and much in demand among the sort of girls who hated sunlight and loved listening to obscure British bands. But really I think there was, hidden deep down inside, a little of my father in both of my brothers, a faint voice fighting hard to be heard, a longing to strive for something more in their lives.
Unfortunately, the tragedy of Bobby and Pauly was that they had both found the remote control that could turn down life’s noise. The remote control was free and it was good and the more often you pressed the button, the better the haze and the dimmer the voice nagging at you to do things you didn’t want to do, or rather didn’t need to do, which ended up amounting to the very same thing.
My brothers both had immensely sad eyes, which flipped over to kindness whenever they looked at me, even when they teased me, which they loved to do and did so lovingly, and I loved them back very much. However, in truth, I wanted to be nothing like them at all, neither my brothers nor my mother. Not that this impulse to be something different was intended as an act of rebellion—it was just the way I was built, I was my father’s little girl all the way through, my father the feminist, who wanted me to be an engineer, an astronaut, or even president of the United States. My father was a hero who toiled without complaint in powdery monochrome, his cement plant an airless moonscape, and even when he wasn’t working, he was busy, helping out fixing the church roof, painting a fence with a buddy, or picking up groceries for elderly members of the parish, and I was my father’s more-than-willing little helper whenever I was allowed.
So if I reacted badly to my mother sometimes, it wasn’t that I simply wanted to defy her. No, what I wanted was the chance to be me (or my father, perhaps). Not my brothers. And not her, I’m afraid.
If I was less than loving toward my mother sometimes, then I’m sorry now. It seems to me that if we’d ever had the chance, we might have become the kind of mother-daughter who share friendly hugs at Thanksgiving and leave each other thoughtful presents under the Christmas tree. However, throughout my childhood my mother took my desire to go in the direction of my own personality as criticism of her character, her sedentary ways, and I suppose there might have been a little of that, but what good had it done my brothers, trying to be like her? So if I mouthed off to her sometimes, then let’s not forget that I was a girl on the verge of that awkward transition to womanhood, and after the shooting, when things were at their worst between us, I was a self-conscious, hormonal teenager with only one eye. What chance did we stand?
* * *
HANNAH, WHERE ARE YOU, WHAT’S taking so long? yelled my mom from upstairs.
Mom was an epic summoner. Throughout the day she liked to bellow my name from some part of the house, most often her bedroom, and I would be expected to come running. Upon my arrival, she would then tell me she was exhausted (she was always exhausted), and I needed to go find something for her—a cup of coffee, her Good Housekeeping magazine, a small bowl of fancy mixed nuts.
Coming, Mom, I called out again, wearily this time.
Reaching the top of the stairs, I was greeted by the familiar smell of death, which was ever present in the top story of our home, an old house with a roof always in need of repair (even my industrious dad couldn’t keep up), and with numerous chimneys and crooked attics. Somehow squirrels or chipmunks or bats would find their way into our home, wedge themselves into an unfindable space, and then promptly lose the will to live.
(Han-aaaaah! Walt, what is wrong with that girl?)
I knew how they felt.
There was always a bag of lavender hanging from a hook at the top of the stairs. I held it to my face and took a deep breath before turning right toward my parents’ bedroom, and when I reached the open door, the first thing I saw was my father sitting on the corner of the bed, motioning me to hurry up. Moving into the room, I saw my mom lying on top of the bedcovers, her leg swathed in a thick protective cast and raised up on a stack of several pillows. It made me think right away of The Princess and the Pea.
Look, honey, I broke my leg, said Mom, sounding perfectly tranquil. And then she performed her sad-face pout, but I could tell that what she really wanted to do was burst into song—
I broke my leg
I broke my leg
Everyone has to do what I say
Everyone has to answer my call
For six weeks at least
Or maybe eight
With any luck
I broke my leg
Mom patted at a spot beside her on the bed. I went and sat down while my dad put his hands on my shoulders.
Oh, Hannah, it’s not your fault, said my mother.
My father squeezed me tenderly while I made a confused face.
It was your tea-party table, she said, you left it out in the den and I tripped and fell. But don’t blame yourself, honey.
Now I remembered what Pauly had said about something being his fault, and I knew for a fact that I hadn’t left any miniature tables in the den. I might not have been in the full flush of puberty, but I was a long way from make-believe tea parties. Pauly often used that table as a convenient joint-rolling surface, it being just the right height, like one of those trays with legs for eating breakfast in bed.
We’re all going to have to help your mom around the house a little more for a while, said my dad.
Which made me think instantly, Not all of us, Dad. You and I.
Mom gave me a look suggesting she was hurt on my behalf and then said, You don’t blame yourself too much, do you, Hannah?
I responded with a series of hard blinks and then a hard No!
My mom look horribly aggrieved. But you did leave that table right where I could trip over it, Hannah, she said.
What was I supposed to say? I wasn’t about to throw my brother under the bus, and anyway, there wouldn’t have been any point, my brothers’ vices were something completely ignored in our household, as if my mother had been hypnotized into not seeing the signs right in front of her—Bobby’s slurred speech and stumbles, the smell of weed that leached from Pauly’s room when he forgot to blow his smoke out the window.
Sorry, Mom, I said, without much enthusiasm.
My father squeezed my shoulders some more. It’s not your fault, Hanny Bee, but let’s be a little more careful in future. And for a while, your mom’s going to need a lot more help around the house. Can you do that for me?
Yes, Dad, I said, half-turning to look up at him beaming at me like he’d never been prouder, the same look I got from my father a dozen times every day.
Good girl, Hanny Bee. Wanna help me make dinner tonight?
Sure, I said, but I promised Jen that I’d go over to her house. It’s only an hour. Can I help when I come back?
At which point my father’s smile started turning to a wince as I heard my mom say, Oh, that is absolutely not happening, Hannah.
I turned back to face her, my mother looking breathless with irritation. How could I think to suggest such a thing at a time like this?
And not just today, she continued. While I’m in this cast, I need you to come straight home from school every day. No more going around to Jen Snell’s for a while.
No, I cried out, you have to let me go to Jen’s today, you have to, it’s all arranged.
It’s out of the question, Hannah.
Please, Mom, pleeease, I pleaded.
Jeesh, said my mom, you and that vapid little girl sit on the school bus together every single day. You have classes together. What more is there to talk about? No, I can’t spare you, Hannah, it’s settled.
But Cathy can help. (Cathy was our latest maid.)
Cathy finishes at three, she has her own family to worry about.
No, it’s not fair, I said, my voice getting louder. It’s like I’m being grounded and I didn’t even do anything wrong.
Nothing wrong? said my mom, her voice rising as she peered meaningfully down at her leg. This is ridiculous, Hannah, don’t act like you’re being punished. Puh-leeze.
That’s exactly what’s happening, I shouted, close to tears, I am being punished.
Then my mom shouted back, her voice a bitter rasp at the back of her throat. If helping around the house is such a punishment, then I get punished every single damn day of my life, Hannah.
There was nowhere else for my rage to escape, I had to spit it out and I yelled furiously back at her—I wish you’d broken your stupid damn neck!
There was a shocked pause, a moment of silence as if a clock had just stopped, and then my mom reached out and slapped me hard in the face.
In some sense the slap came as a relief because now I could cry, everything that had been building up could have its release, and my tears burst forth with a furious speed, my body stiffening with the sting of unfairness.
I got up from the bed and ran from the room, my father shouting after me, Hannah, you come back right now and apologize.
No, let her go, I heard my mom call out. Ungrateful wretch.
By the time I threw myself, wailing, onto my bed, I was certain that my life was absolutely over, that nothing in the world could be more painful than this and that now, thanks to my mother, I would never get close to Matthew Weaver.
And yet, on all three counts, I was wrong.
* * *
MIGHT EVERYTHING HAVE TURNED OUT differently if my mother hadn’t broken her leg that day? My guess is that, had I gone with Jen to Patch’s house that afternoon, had I got to know Matthew much earlier in 1982, the four of us would have become friends and surely then, however naive I was, I would have discovered at a much more leisurely pace that the Matthew I had invented in my head was not the Matthew that existed in real life.
Instead of this I would be kept at arm’s length from my fantasy for another eight weeks while my mother’s leg gradually healed. Eight more weeks in which I could paint an even more intricate Matthew inside my head, eight weeks of an intense burning at the unfairness of life as my brothers remained free to sink into their evening fogs after their days hard at work learning the family business, to use my mom’s frequently whipped-out phrase.
Really? However much I loved them, Bobby and Pauly were learning the family business about as much as I was learning the secret ways of the ninja. Only very rarely did either of them spend more than a couple of hours at the cement plant, although Pauly sometimes put in a longer shift if he was having trouble locating a new pot dealer, my dad having a long-held policy of quietly ushering out a steady string of his suppliers.
So instead of getting to know Matthew and Patrick, I had to endure eight weeks in the role of Cinderella, performing household chores each day while pining for my prince, making and carrying drinks for my mom and cooking dinner each night with my dad, a series of Mom’s classics, such as French onion soup meat loaf (the soup coming in dehydrated form from a packet), tuna noodle casserole (sprinkled with crushed cheddar Goldfish crackers), and my brothers’ all-time favorite, chili con wieners.
For the next eight weeks, I talked it through obsessively with Jen every day at school. Had Matthew just made eye contact with me when we passed in the hallway? What did his look mean? Did he run his fingers through his hair a lot when I was around or did he just run his fingers through his hair a lot? Was his decision to wear denim that day some kind of secret sign?
Yes, for eight weeks everything built and built inside me until finally the cast came off my mother’s leg and that same day, Jen sauntered over to Matthew and Patrick between lessons, while I hung back in awe of my best friend’s astonishing possession of two functioning legs and a fully operational voice box while she fixed up a new liaison at the McConnell household for the following evening. Once the arrangements were made, Matthew waved at me and let out a kindly chuckle when I waved back with all the vigor of a fainting damsel.
The next morning I could barely contain the feeling gushing through my body as I stepped off the school bus with Jen, my eyes scooting around for a glimpse of him, oh Matthew, my gaze running fast up the school steps, taking them two and three at a time, and yes, there he was.
Only wait, because there she was, there they were.
Matthew, Matthew and Christie, Matthew and Christie kissing.
I remember that was the moment, for the first time in my life (although certainly not the last), I felt the very physical sense of my heart being broken.