8:45 A.M.
When the table is empty, dishes piled by the sink, I wait for my mother to take her cue to get up and go for her morning swim—leave me alone for ten minutes. I need to sort things out. I need clarity. Peter will be awake soon. The kids will be awake. I am greedy for time. But she holds out her coffee cup.
“Be a saint, will you? Just half a cup.”
Her nightgown has ridden up, and from here, I can see everything. My mother believes that wearing underpants to bed is bad for your health. “You need to let yourself air out at night,” she told us when we were little. Anna and I, of course, ignored her. The whole idea seemed embarrassing, dirty. The very thought that she had a vagina repulsed us, and, even worse, that it was out there in the open at night.
“He should leave her,” my mother says.
“Who?”
“Gina. She’s a bore. I almost fell asleep at the table listening to her blather on. She ‘makes’ art. Really? Why would we care?” She yawns before saying, “They don’t have any kids yet—it’s not like it’s even a real marriage. He might as well get out when he can.”
“That’s ridiculous. They’re completely married,” I snap. But even as I’m speaking, I’m thinking: Is she reading my mind?
“I don’t know why you’re getting so defensive, Elle. He’s not your husband.”
“It’s just an idiotic thing to say.” I open the icebox door and slam it, slosh milk into my coffee. ‘No kids make it not a marriage?’ Who are you?”
“I’m entitled to my opinion,” she says in a calm voice designed to wind me up.
“Lots of married couples never have children.”
“Mmhmm.”
“Jesus. Your sister-in-law had a radical mastectomy. Does that make her not a woman?”
My mother gives me a blank stare. “Have you gone mad?” She heaves herself off the sofa. “I’m going to take my swim. You should go back to bed and start your day over.”
I feel like smacking her, but instead I say, “They wanted kids.”
“God knows why.” She lets the screen door slam behind her.
My mother has sent us next door to her lover’s apartment to play with his children while his wife babysits us. They are trying to decide whether or not he should leave his wife. I am older now—not old enough to understand any of this, but old enough to think it odd when I look across the interior courtyard from his apartment into ours and see Mr. Dancy holding my mother in his arms.
In the railroad kitchen, the Dancys’ two-year-old son is in his high chair, playing with Tupperware. Mrs. Dancy stares at a pregnant water bug that has rolled onto its back on the doorjamb between the galley kitchen and the dining room. Tiny little roaches are pouring out of it, quickly disappearing into the cracks of the parquet floor. Anna emerges from a back bedroom with Blythe, the Dancys’ daughter. Anna is crying. Blythe has cut off all of her bangs with a pair of craft scissors. The top of Anna’s forehead is now fringed by a high, uneven crescent of dark brown hair. Blythe’s smug, triumphant smile makes me think of mayonnaise sandwiches. Her mother doesn’t seem to notice anything. She stares at the exploding bug, a tear rolling down her cheek.
8:50 A.M.
I sit down on the sofa, settle into the warm spot my mother has left in her wake. Already I can see a few figures gathering on the little beach at the far side of the pond. Usually they are renters—tourists who have somehow found their way deep into the woods, and love that they have discovered a secret idyll. Trespassers, I think, annoyed.
When we were young, everyone in the Back Woods knew each other. The cocktail party moved from house to house: barefoot women in muumuus, handsome men in white duck trousers rolled up at the ankle, gin and tonics, cheap crackers, Kraft cheddar, mosquitoes swarming, and Cutter—finally, a bug spray that worked. The sandy dirt roads that ran through the woods were stippled with sun filtered through scrub pine and hemlock. As we walked to the beach, fine red-clay dust kicked up, filled with the smell of summer: dry, baked, everlasting, sweet. In the middle of the road, tall beach grasses and poison ivy grew. But we knew what to avoid. When cars passed, they slowed, offered us a ride on the running board or the front hood. It never occurred to anyone that we might fall off, fall under the car. No one worried their children might be sucked into the ocean’s rough undertow. We ran around unleashed, swimming in the freshwater kettle ponds that dotted the Back Woods. We called them ponds, but they were actually lakes—some deep and wide, others shallow and clear-bottomed—ancient relics formed at the end of the Ice Age when the glaciers retreated, leaving behind them massive blocks of melting ice heavy enough to dent the earth’s crust—hollow deep bowls into the landscape, kettles filled with the purest water. There were nine ponds in our woods. We swam in all of them, crossing other people’s property lines to reach small sandy coves, clamber out over the water on the trunks of fallen trees. Cannonball in. No one minded us. Everyone believed in the ancient rights of way: small shaded paths that led to the back doors of old Cape houses, built when the first dirt roads were carved, still standing in sober clearings preserved by snow and sea air and hot summers. And watercress pulled from a stream—someone else’s stream, someone else’s watercress.
On the bay side, the Cape was pastoral, more civilized. Cranberry bushes, beach plums, and laurels rolled out on the low-lying hills. But here, on the ocean side, it was wild. Violent with crashing surf, and dunes so tall you could run down from a great height, see the ground racing to meet you before you threw yourself into the warm sand. Back then, none of my mother’s friends carped, as they do now, accusing children of eroding the dunes just by playing on them—as if their small footprints could possibly compete with the rough winter storms that eat away the land in greedy bites.
Sitting around a beach bonfire at night, grown-ups and children ate sand-crunchy hamburgers covered in ketchup and relish, set up on driftwood tables. Our parents drank gin from jelly jars and disappeared into the darkness beyond the fire’s glow to kiss their lovers in the tall beach grass.
Over time, doors began to close. private property signs came out. The children of the original settlers—the artists and architects and intellectuals who had colonized this place—began to fight each other for time on the Cape. Feuds began over noise on the ponds, over who had more right than whom to love this place. Dogs awoke in the manger. These days even the beaches have been taken over with keep out signs: huge areas cordoned off to protect nesting shorebirds. Piping plovers are the only creatures left with a right of way. But it is still my woods, my pond. The place I have come to for fifty years—every summer of my life. The place where Jonas and I first met.
From the porch sofa, I watch my mother swimming the mile-long stretch across the pond. Her even strokes, arms slicing the water, an almost mechanical perfection. My mother never looks up when she swims. It’s as if she has a sixth sense for where she is going, a migrating whale following an ancient tread. I wonder now, as I often have, whether her sonar picks up more than whale songs. He should leave her. Is that what I want? Gina and Jonas are our oldest friends. We have spent almost every summer of our adult lives together: shucked oysters and drank them live from their shells; watched the full moon rising over the sea, while listening to Gina complain that the moon was making her period cramps worse; prayed the local fishermen would start culling the harbor seals; overcooked Thanksgiving turkeys; argued about Woody Allen. Gina is my daughter Maddy’s godmother, for fuck’s sake. What if Jonas did leave Gina? Could I betray her that way? And yet I already have. I fucked her husband last night. And the thought makes me want to do it again. The mercury-shimmer of it shudders through me.
“Hey, wife.” Peter kisses the back of my neck.
“Hey, yourself.” I start, struggle for normal.
“You looked deep in thought,” he says.
“There’s coffee.”
“Excellent.” He roots around in his shirt pocket and pulls out his cigarettes. Lights one. Sits down on the sofa beside me. I love the way his long legs look poking out from his faded surf shorts. Boyish. “I can’t believe you let me fall asleep on the sofa last night.”
“You were exhausted.”
“It must have been the jet lag.”
“I totally get it,” I say, rolling my eyes at him. That one-hour time difference between here and Memphis nearly killed me.”
“It’s true. I could barely wake up this morning. The clock said nine a.m., but I swear it felt like eight.”
“Funny.”
“I drank too much.”
“Understatement.”
“Did I do anything stupid?”
“Other than refuse to read the Shelley poem for Anna and pick a fight about Quakers?”
“Well, everyone agrees they’re basically fascists,” he says. “Such a violent people.”
“You’re an ass.” I kiss him on his lovely scruffy cheek. “You need to shave.”
He shoves his glasses up his nose, runs his hand through his curly dark blond hair, now graying at the temples, trying to make some order out of it. My husband is a handsome man. Not beautiful, but handsome in an old-fashioned movie star way. Tall. Elegant. British. A respected journalist. The kind of man who looks sexy in a suit. An Atticus. Patient, but formidable when angered. He can keep a secret. He rarely misses a beat. He’s looking at me now as if he can smell the sex on me.
“Where are the kids?” Peter grabs one of the large white sea-clam shells that line the screen-window ledge, turns it bowl side up, crushes out his cigarette.
“I let them sleep in. My mother hates it when you do that.” I take the shell from him, carry it into the kitchen, dump the butt into the trash, rinse it. My mother has almost reached the far shore.
“Jesus, that woman can swim,” Peter says.
The only person I’ve ever known who could beat my mother in a race was Anna. Anna didn’t swim across the pond—she flew. Left everyone behind her. I follow an osprey as it wings its way through the sky, chased by a small black bird. Wind ruffles the lily pads on the pond’s surface. They sigh, exhale.
9:15 A.M.
Peter is in the kitchen scrambling eggs. From the porch, I smell onions frying. A pile of thick applewood-smoked bacon drains its grease into a fold of paper towels on the counter. There’s nothing better than bacon and eggs for a hangover. Actually, there’s nothing better than bacon. Food of the gods. Like arugula and unfiltered olive oil and Patak’s Brinjal pickle. My desert-island-disc foods. That, and pasta. I’ve often fantasized about surviving alone on a desert island. How I would live on fish; build a tree house high off the ground, so that no wild animals could get to me; become really fit. In my fantasy, there’s always a Complete Works of Shakespeare that has somehow washed up on the beach, and with nothing else to do to pass the days, I read (and care about) every single line. I am forced by circumstance to at last become my best self—that supposed potential self. My other fantasies were prison or the army: someplace where I had no choice, where every second of my day was proscribed, where I was too afraid to fail. Self-education and a hundred push-ups and nibbled portions of dry biscuits with fresh water—these were my childhood dreams. Jonas didn’t come into the picture until later.
I wander into the kitchen and reach for a piece of bacon. Peter slaps my hand away.
“No picking.” He stirs shredded cheese into the eggs, grinds fresh pepper.
“Why are you using the deep saucepan?” I hate the way British people cook eggs. It’s obvious: a nonstick frying pan and lots of butter. This stupid, soupy, slow-cooking method leaves me a pan that is completely impossible to wash. I’ll have to soak it for two days. “Grr.” I poke him with a spatula.
Peter’s shirt is covered in splatters of grease. “Fuck off, gorgeous. I’m making the eggs.” He walks over to the breadbox, grabs a loaf of sliced bread. “Toast this, please.”
I feel my face redden, the sudden flush of heat as I picture my underpants crumpled behind the breadbox, a heap of black lace, the nakedness under my skirt, the way his finger traced a line up my thigh.
“Hello? Earth to Elle.”
My mother’s toaster holds two slices at a time. It burns the bread on one side, leaves it raw on the other. I turn the oven on to Broil and start lining up bread on a cookie sheet. I pick up a stick of butter, not quite sure whether to butter first or later.
“What’s our timing?”
“Eight minutes,” Peter says. “Twelve most. Go get the kids up.”
“We should wait for Mum.”
“The eggs will get tough.”
I look out at the pond. “She’s halfway back.”
“You swim, you lose.”
“K. You deal with the fallout.” When my mother feels slighted, she makes very sure everyone else in the vicinity feels equally afflicted. But Peter doesn’t give a shit about her shit. He just laughs at her, tells her to stop being such a loon, and for whatever reason, she takes it.
My mother was eight years old when her mother, Nanette Saltonstall, married for the second time. Nanette was a New York socialite—selfish and beautiful, famous for her lush, cruel lips. As a child, my grandmother Nanette had been wealthy—pampered by her banker father. But the Crash changed everything. Her family moved from their Fifth Avenue townhouse into a dark railroad apartment in Yorkville, where the one luxury my great-grandfather George Saltonstall still indulged in was his six p.m. vodka martini stirred with a long sterling silver spoon in a crystal shaker. Their eldest daughter’s beauty was the only currency they had left: Nanette would marry a rich man and save the family. That was the plan. Instead she went to a fashion design school in Paris and fell in love with my grandfather, Amory Cushing, a Boston Brahmin but penniless sculptor, whose sole collateral was a rambling old Cape house on the shores of a remote freshwater kettle pond in the Massachusetts woods. He had inherited the house and the pond from a distant uncle.
Grandfather Amory built our camp during the short time he and my grandmother were in love. He chose a long narrow stretch of shoreline, hidden from his own house by a sharp curve in the land. He had an idea to rent the cabins out in summer for extra money to support his glamorous young wife and two small children. On the outside, the cabins are solid—watertight saltboxes that have withstood endless harsh winters, nor’easters, and generations of squabbling families. But my grandfather was running low on funds, so he built the interior walls and ceilings out of pressed paperboard, Homasote, cheap and utilitarian, and nicknamed the camp the Paper Palace. What he didn’t count on was that my grandmother would leave him before he had finished building it. Or that Homasote is delicious to mice, who chew holes through the walls each winter and feed the regurgitated paper, like a breakfast of muesli, to the minuscule babies they birth inside the bureau drawers. Every summer, the person who opens the camp has the job of emptying mouse nests into the woods. You can’t really begrudge the mice: Cape winters are hard, as the Pilgrims discovered. But mouse piss has a warm stink, and I have always hated the terrified squeaks of dismay as they fall from the wooden drawers into the scrub.
After she divorced my grandfather, Granny Nanette spent a few months swanning around Europe, sunning herself topless in Cadaqués, drinking cold sherry with married men, while Mum and her little brother Austin waited in hotel lobbies. When her money ran out, Nanette decided it was time to go home and do what her parents had wanted her to do in the first place. So she married a banker. Jim. He was a decent sort of fellow. Andover and Princeton. He bought Nanette an apartment overlooking Central Park and a long-haired Siamese cat. Mum and Austin were sent to fancy Manhattan private schools where first-grade boys were required to wear a jacket and tie, and Mum learned to speak French and make Baked Alaska.
The week before her ninth birthday, my mother performed her first blow job. First, she watched as little Austin, his tiny six-year-old hands shaking, held their stepfather’s penis until it got hard. Jim told them it was all very natural, and didn’t they want to make him happy? The worst part, my mother said, when she finally told me this story, was the sticky white ejaculate. The rest she could, perhaps, have dealt with. That, and she hated the warmth of his penis, the slight urine smell of it. Jim threatened them with violence if they ever told their mother. They told her anyway, but she accused them of lying. Nanette had nowhere else to go, no money of her own. When she found her husband in the maid’s room off the kitchen screwing the nanny, she told him not to be vulgar and shut the door.
One Saturday, Nanette came home early from lunch at the Club. Her friend Maude had a headache and my grandmother didn’t feel like going to the Frick on her own. The apartment was empty—just the cat, who curled around her ankles at the front door, arching his back seductively. She dumped her fur coat on the bench, took off her high heels, and headed down the hallway to her bedroom. Jim was sitting in a wingback chair, pants around his ankles. My mother was on her knees in front of him. My grandmother strode over to them and slapped my mother hard across the face.
My mother told me this story when I was seventeen. I was in a rage because she had given Anna money to buy a new lip gloss at Gimbels, while I stayed home and did chores. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Elle,” she said as I stood at the kitchen sink, fuming over a pile of dishes. “You have to wash a plate . . . you don’t get a lipstick. I had to give my stepfather blow jobs. All Austin had to do was masturbate him. What can I tell you? Life’s not fair.”
9:20 A.M.
The odd thing is, I think now as I walk down the path toward the kids’ cabin, my mother lost her respect for women but not for men. Her stepfather’s perversion was a hard truth, but it was her mother’s weak-willed betrayal that made her go cold. In my mother’s world, the men are given the respect. She believes in the glass ceiling. Peter can do no wrong. “If you want to make Peter happy when he comes home from work,” Mum advised me years ago, “put on a fresh blouse, put in your diaphragm, and smile.”
Think Botticelli.