Chapter Fifteen

The Great Swamp Fight

Chapter 15

Intervention

The patient reader must bear in mind that none of us realized what Conrad had done to Abby on Block Island. She may have been slightly thinner when they came back, but none of us remarked on it at the time. Guy and I thought she looked her splendid, zaftig self. So when Conrad approached us, alone, soon after their return, to enlist our aid, we were credulous, indeed eager to do as he asked, convinced as we were of the sincerity of his concern.

Had we but known! Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these…

“YOU’RE DANGEROUSLY OVERWEIGHT.”

What Conrad enlisted the DeVilbisses’ aid in doing was an early form of what was just then coming to be legitimized, in psychopop circles, as an “intervention”: luring an unsuspecting citizen into the company of those very humans he has every right to trust in order to confront him with his most obvious frailties. Those who consider this kind of thing acceptable are able, somehow, to distinguish it in their own minds from “sandbagging,” “ambushing,” and “being unforgivably rude,” and it’s gotten so popular even in the exurbs that the prudent alcoholic avoids friendly gatherings of more than two, and even then leaves his motor running.

I wasn’t prepared for Abigail’s Intervention, and this was no accident. Guy and Hilda knew better than to attempt to enlist my services for their little surprise party. In fact they knew better than to do such a stupid thing in the first place. But they did. They allowed Conrad to convince them that he was

 

WORRIED ABOUT HER HEALTH.

 

So it was that on a clambake-steamy August morning the Friends of Abigail and Conrad massed like blackbirds at the entrance to the Great Swamp Nature Trail in West Kingston.

Anna and I had come bird-watching here countless times: it was for me, until this particular Sunday, a place of great peace and beauty. Here is where I taught four-year-old Anna how to talk to chickadees, and get them to talk back to you. Here we saw our first osprey. Here she tasted her first wild strawberry. Abigail never came along with us, as the walk, though not arduous, is over five miles long, and Abigail always hated what she called pointless exercise. In order for anything natural to acquire a “point” for Abigail it has to be flashy and vulgar: Niagara Falls. The Grand Canyon.

Abigail was as surprised as I, then, when, after I mentioned the trail at a recent DeVilbiss gathering, Conrad, Guy, and Hilda, as one, suddenly voiced an irresistible urge to go there. I should have smelled a rat, especially when Guy, who had spent his whole life insulated from firsthand experience, insisted that he pay his respects to the noble Massasoits, at the spot where they made their last stand against the imperialist English colonists. I should have smelled the Giant Rat of Sumatra, but I was too eager to set him straight—it was the Narragansetts, you dolt, Massasoit was a Wampanoag chieftain—and, I must confess, all too eager to show off the swamp itself. Instead of sniffing the strange air while the rest twittered about picnic baskets and insect repellent and who was going to drive, I was already planning our route, and wondering if there were enough binoculars to go around.

So I went for a walk, and on that walk I brought an Audubon bird guide, my Bushnells, a small flask of Courvoisier, a duck call…. Not a duck call, actually, but an ingenious device that makes squeaky chittering sounds which fool an odd variety of songbirds into briefly coming out of hiding, searching for baby birds in trouble, before they get a grip on themselves and remember that their own babies are grown and flown. I also brought Anna, and Tim Paine, sans dolorous wife, and Tansy Wasserman, a recent addition to the DeVilbiss group. Abigail and Conrad came with the DeVilbisses.

We must have looked a bizarre gaggle, as we milled around the gateway to the trail, divvying up provisions. This was before backpacks were popular, and we contended with straw baskets and shopping bags from the Outlet Company. Only three of us looked anything like nature-lovers: Anna and I, of course, and the dreaded Tansy, an old nature-girl, a wrinkled Ophelia who, in addition to penning whale sonnets, grows her own dyes, colors her own homespun wool, and weaves it into what Perelman called, in 1930, “horrid super-dirndls with home-cooked hems.” Apparently the type existed way before the sixties, as did Tansy herself, as well as Perelman’s Mibs (“usually engaged in reading a book written by two unfrocked chemists which tells women how to make their own cold cream by mixing a little potash with a dram of glycerine and a few cloves”).

Guy looked paler than ever against the glorious backdrop of the dog-days swamp. He was wearing something like lederhosen, only knee-length and made of shiny corduroy, some weird European outdoor garment. He looked like an old Hitler youth who’d fallen asleep under a rock in 1942. Rip von Ribbentrop. Hilda, swathed in something like a burlap caftan, slathered Guy’s exposed whiteness with Off. I don’t remember what Conrad wore, but he looked jaunty and cool, especially compared to Abigail, who emerged from the DeVilbisses’ Karmann Ghia as from a Turkish bath, complaining bitterly about the group’s choice of venue. Conrad, parceling out the burdens, stuck her with shopping bags full of potato salad and condiments.

“Hey,” she said, “these weigh a ton.”

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s why I gave them to you. Would you rather carry the watermelon?”

My sister hung her head like a shamed child, and, as if a bell had tolled, off we started. Anna and I, lightly burdened with bread and deviled eggs, forged ahead, locating, in record time, an American redstart, a scarlet tanager, and a pair of goldfinches. The tanager was particularly exciting; they’re common enough, but so shy that despite their brilliant plumage you hardly ever spot them. We announced each find to the group, but they were already preoccupied with their burgeoning discomfort and, no doubt, the mechanics of the impending “intervention.” At this time of year mosquitoes hovered in the shade and deer flies in the sunlight. The flies were worse: their stings hurt, and they were spectacularly impervious to Off. Neither flies nor mosquitoes have ever bothered me, nor Anna. Abigail suffered mightily, unable to swat them away, shackled, as she was, by potato salad.

The Great Swamp is nothing like the better known swamps of the southern U.S. The trail is dry, flanked by bogs and stands of dead maple and occasional flashes of living holly. Alligators and water moccasins could never survive here. You have to walk for an hour before you reach real water. The heart of the swamp is a largish stand, more pond than swamp, perhaps three feet deep, ringed by a dike. A footbridge bisects it, running directly beneath a march of power lines, and at the top of the poles are osprey nests, to which the great birds return every year.

By the time we neared the water everyone but us was out of sorts. Anna and I had stayed far enough ahead so that their complaints did not interfere with our pleasure, but all along we could hear Abigail swearing, and Conrad needling her, and Hilda soothing her miserable husband, whose close encounter with nature was proving intolerable. I don’t think he had ever been bitten before. Certainly not by Hilda. Tim and Tansy kept up with us for a while and made an effort to enthuse, but then Tansy, spotting a small field of her wild-flower namesakes, stupidly waded in for a harvest—tansies are apparently great dye plants—and emerged covered with ticks. Most ticks fall off by themselves, and the ones that remain are easily tweezed, and they were just deer ticks, for God’s sake, but Tansy got hysterical and reenacted the leech scene from The African Queen, with poor agreeable Tim playing Katharine Hepburn, pinching the little nippers off Tansy’s quivering midsection, a sight so depressing that Anna and I tiptoed off and returned to the birds.

 

Anna. By my reckoning she was fourteen years old then, as this must have been 1976, the year after the wedding. The bicentennial year! Yes, and we had gone, just the two of us, to the big bash on the Charles River, Fiedler’s Last Stand, and the most gorgeous fireworks display I have ever seen. I don’t remember why Abigail didn’t go. It would have been her sort of thing.

Anna is our child, Abigail’s and mine. We have always shared custody, and Anna, who looks like neither of us, has never, to my knowledge, suffered as a result. The three of us lived together until Conrad, upon whose arrival Anna chose to stay with me, with no hard feelings on anyone’s part. I had never discussed Conrad with Anna. I had no idea what she thought of him.

Between us, Abigail and me, we have been a good mother. Abigail nursed and diapered, I manned the cloth books and refrigerator magnets, and we were both there to hold her, though almost from the beginning she was a cool and independent child, not a cuddler. She walked early and talked late, waiting, I think, until her vocabulary was sufficient to her needs. Even before she walked she would make me carry her around the house and yard, pointing at various objects and inquiring, with respect to each, “Iss ta?” And I would name the object, which was clearly her aim, and I would only have to say it once. Mantel. Dahlia. Ottoman. Snapshot. Dictionary. Afterward I could refer to any of these objects in conversation, and she would know what I meant. She was wonderfully bright and sunny.

She took us both in, Abigail and me, her eyes sharp and amused. She listened to us quarreling, and sometimes, when one of us got in a particularly good dig, she would clap hands with delight. “The kid gives me the creeps,” Abigail said more than once. Which sounds harsh, but isn’t. Abigail was a serene and careless mother, and she needed me to complete her, to be the prudent worrier, but with her child, as with all her men except one, she was free of sentimentality and generous with her love, and did not require reciprocity. I suppose if Anna had hated her it would have stung; but Anna liked her mother, likes her still, likes us both. We called her “I Spy with my Little Eye,” and then just “The Spy.”

Abigail took the post office job when Anna was three, and from then on I took Anna with me to the library every weekday. She grew up in the library, and not just in the children’s section. Her favorite spot, when she was little, was behind the check-in desk. She would position herself beside the return slot and goggle at the fall of books. She seemed interested at first in the haphazard mess they made, but soon she was stacking them neatly. By the time she was four she was alphabetizing them, and at six she had a basic understanding of the Dewey decimal system, and kept the F’s separate from the B’s, and all the numbers in perfect order. She even understood the Mc/Mac principle. Of course she was an early, voracious reader.

I was intoxicated, in Anna’s early years, by the belief that somehow she had taken after me. The belief was silly—how could she “take after” her aunt?—and the intoxication sillier still. So what if she did? She was, and is, her own creature. Then, when she hit high school, her body, which had always been slim like mine, began to take on more opulent curves, and boys started coming around, and I thought that somehow she was both of us, Abigail and I, made sensibly whole. Really, I was quite romantic about Anna.

Abigail never was. “There was,” she would remind me, cruelly, “another family involved, you know. She looks more like the Essers than like any of us. She’s got the German coloring, the cleft chin. She’s going to be tall, like Ev.” I wouldn’t even consider this possibility until, three years ago, Anna came back home for Thanksgiving break, her freshman year at Middlebury, and there she was at the front door, Everett Esser’s daughter, of course. But still ours, our girl.

 

And on this day she was fourteen, and still, in my foolish eyes, my heir and soul mate. Until we reached the Great Swamp’s heart, and allowed the rest to catch up with us, we enjoyed ourselves immensely. I still have the bird list from that day. We spotted fifty-six separate species, our prize the gorgeous pileated woodpecker, a discreet red-crested creature the size of a hawk. We heard him first, of course, rattling on a dead sugar maple like the crack of doom, and then Anna spotted him, and, holding her breath, pointed him out to me. And just as I got him square in my sights, Conrad Lowe burst through the bushes behind us, vanishing the marvelous bird as though at the flick of a wand. What a terrible man.

“What the hell was that?” he asked. “Some kind of mutant crow?”

“Dryocopus pileatus,” I said. “The pileated woodpecker, or logcock. I only saw one before in my life, and that was thirty years ago. I’ll never see another. And if you hadn’t come crashing through the underbrush like that—”

“Hey, everybody,” Conrad yelled over his shoulder, “Dorcas just spotted a postulated wallbanger!”

Anna giggled. I couldn’t blame her. He was funny; this was one of his worst traits.

“Or ‘logcock,’” he repeated, waggling his eyebrows at me. “I’ll have to tell the little woman.”

“How much farther?” whined Guy, at the head of the sweaty, deeply unhappy pack of stragglers.

They were all petulant, except for Conrad; martyred, as though I had forced them to do something onerous. For God’s sake, this hadn’t been my idea. “Stop where you are,” I said, to all of them. “Just turn around and go back. Leave one car for Anna and me. Throw away your goddamn potato salad. Beat it.” They didn’t deserve to be here.

Abigail set down her load and flexed both hands. From ten yards away I could see cruel shopping-bag grooves worn across each palm. She waved at Conrad, that tentative, hopeful wave she used with him, like a shy child who has no real hope of being noticed. She wasn’t. “Yoo hoo!” she called, blushing. Still he ignored her, ducking by Anna and taking the lead away from us. “Honey!”

Abigail never used his name. Conrad was, in reference, He, Him, in address, You, in supplication, Honey. Use of his actual given name was to her an affront to their great intimacy. I never used his name either. Using it was like summoning him up, acknowledging his importance, an affront to our great enmity. He was to me, in reference, he, him, it, in address, excuse me, I beg your pardon, hey you, look you. See here. (I use his name now that he’s dead, joyfully, waving it about like a war trophy, a severed ear.) “Hey!” I cried, and then, lunging forward, grabbed the back of his shirt. It was white, I remember it now, a frayed Oxford cloth shirt with buttoned-down collar, the sleeves rolled up. I grabbed it and it pulled loose of his pants. Chinos. “Hey, you!” He looked around at me, raising his eyebrows. “Your wife,” I said.

“Yes?” He tucked in his shirttail with exaggerated languor.

“Are you deaf? You’re not deaf. Pay attention to her.”

Abigail caught up with us. “Race ya,” she said softly, smiling up at him, trying so very hard. My sister never lost her pride, not really. That was one of the awfulest things. He never broke her. She bent and bent and bent.

“How much farther to the famous dike?” he inquired, of me, of course.

“Not to the dike,” said Abigail. “Back to the lot. Seriously, honey, I’ve had it. Guy’s covered with welts. Wasserman’s having a nervous breakdown. Even Tim isn’t happy.” She tugged on his wrist. “Come on.”

“We’re almost there, right?” Still to me.

“Your wife,” I said, “would like to go home, and so would everybody else, except us.”

“How about it?” He addressed everybody but me, and Abigail. “Are we giving up?”

Guy, who looked like a lacquered chicken pox victim—Hilda had gone insane with Off—stood gazing at Conrad with what had to be simple hatred, suffering having burned away his pretensions, and said nothing, and Hilda opened her mouth, clearly about to say, “Of course we’re giving up, I’ve got to get him home, he’s in agony,” and then closed it again.

“Hell, no,” said Tim, without conviction, and a muted grumble of assent arose from the rest, even the DeVilbisses.

“He’s right,” said Anna. “We’re almost there. Look!” She pointed up and over the trees to the south, where an osprey appeared, briefly, and glided out of sight. She ran ahead of Conrad, followed by everybody else, leaving Abigail and me standing dumbstruck with astonishment and chagrin.

“What the hell?!?” we said.

I picked up one of the shopping bags, and, together, we brought up the rear.

 

Anna and I walked across the footbridge to the far side of the swamp, where Conrad had suggested we have our picnic. Everyone else took the long way, the dike path, rather than chance the bridge, which, while not rickety, consisted only of two-by-ten boards laid across the water on simple posts, with a single thick wire railing. It isn’t the least bit dangerous—even if you fall off, the water is only up to your hips—but they seemed determined not to risk even the slightest chance of enjoying the occasion.

There were three pairs of ospreys nesting in the poles above the bridge, and we stopped and studied all three nests, and listened to the warning cries of the males, out hunting for baby food, but not letting us out of their sight for a moment. The male osprey is much smaller than his mate. Their cries are heartbreaking, like the cries of hawks and eagles, lonely and hopeful. And like the other large predators, they do not flock together. Luckily for us.

We stopped and stood, wordless, and waited out a changing of the guard, the male returning to nestle, the female soaring out to hunt. We stopped long enough for the day’s mischief to get underway. Anna glanced across the water. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Something’s up.”

From our perspective the group was smaller than the osprey nest, but we could clearly see that they had formed a circle, with the largest of their number captive at its center, like children playing Little Sally Saucer. I saw a large group of domestic ducks do this once, by Johnson’s Pond when Anna was little, and then another duck came into the circle, grabbed the duck that was It by the back of the neck, and proceeded, apparently, to strangle it. Anna screamed and I ran into the quacking circle, stomping and yelling “Stop it! Stop it!” And only when I got up close to the grappling pair did I realize they were mating. Wild ducks, I explained to Anna (Abigail laughing uproariously all the while), do not behave like this. Although prenuptial rituals can be quite lovely, the act itself is never gorgeous, at least not with the higher orders—Cecropia moths being another story—but the ugliness of those white ducks had, I was sure, something to do with their domestication, their centuries of familiarity with us.

We hurried toward the ominous circle of humans. I think now of Frank Calef and the night of the ice circle, and I wonder if even on this humiliating day she didn’t, at some level, enjoy all the attention. She certainly didn’t act as though she did. When we got close enough to hear snatches of conversation Abigail was cursing out Tansy Wasserman, repeatedly calling her a name that sounded weirdly like “prune-eater.” “You prune-eater!” she cried, sticking her face right in Tansy’s. “You ugly silly dried-up prune-eater!” This was, in fact, what she was saying. Even more strangely, Tansy, having made peace with her ticks, was not taking umbrage, was instead stroking my sister’s shoulder and nodding in rhythm with Abigail’s imprecations, as though in utter accord.

Across the circle from Tansy, behind Abigail’s back, the DeVilbisses quivered, white with terror, having more sense than Tansy Wasserman, but still they stood fast, even as Abigail whirled to attack. “Fuck your concern. Fuck your friendship. Fuck you!”

“What’s going on?” I asked. No one heard me.

“It’s no use,” said Conrad Lowe.

“We will care for you,” said Tansy, “no matter what you say, no matter what you do.”

Tim Paine stared at Tansy and said nothing. He seemed to be wondering how he got involved in the whole mess. He’s the real thing, I think, a genuine alcoholic.

“Just hear us out,” ventured Guy.

“I’ve heard enough,” said Abigail, “you pompous asshole.”

Hilda waved me over. “It’s an intervention,” she whispered, and when I failed to respond to her news flash, “We’re confronting Abigail.”

“With what?”

“Her, um, body.”

Abigail was crying with rage. I gave up on Hilda and demanded a coherent explanation from her husband.

“Her weight, Dorcas,” Guy said, his mouth even prissier than usual. “We’re all worried about her heart. I’m sure you are too.”

I stepped into the circle and stood by my sister’s shaking body. I still didn’t understand. Of course I tried at first to take their meaning literally, but rejected out of hand the possibility that any civilized group, even this one, was capable of such behavior. The only thing I could figure was that everyone was uncomfortable and out of sorts and spontaneously took it out on Abigail. “You are all,” I said, “acting like children. Go home. There”—I pointed at the westward path—“is the way back to the lot. Take it. You don’t belong here.”

Tim raised his hand. “It wasn’t our idea, Dorcas. It was Conrad’s idea.”

I could readily believe this, even without knowing what he was talking about, the atmosphere being so foul, my lovely day in shambles.

“Shut up, Tim,” said Conrad.

“And what idea,” I asked him, “was that?”

Tim paused. “Diabetes?”

“What?”

“Heart trouble,” said Tansy.

Guy cleared his throat. “Not to mention circulatory difficulties.”

“Your sister is at risk.” Conrad regarded me mildly, as though we were chatting about the weather. “And I don’t want to lose her. I’ve tried gentle persuasion, but it hasn’t worked.”

Your sister is at risk. This, from him, was as obviously true as the rest of his speech, whatever it was about, was obviously false. I turned to look at Abigail, and she was staring at him, her face pale and wet. She was suffering, betrayed, and her look of naked hurt blocked out the rest of us. She was alone with him, trying to understand what he wanted from her. And what he wanted, I saw then for the first time, was to destroy her utterly. She was indeed at risk.

“Jeez,” said Tim, “I didn’t know it was going to be this bad.”

“It seems cruel,” said Hilda, “because—”

“—because it is,” said Tim. “We don’t have any right to do this.”

“We have,” said Tansy, “the duty to do it.”

“Because we love her,” said Hilda.

“Well, I hope nobody ever loves me that much,” Anna muttered. She seemed to understand the scene.

I was still confused. Clearly they’d all been doing something bad to Abigail—if it was Conrad’s idea, it had to be bad—and yet the only thing I could imagine “confronting” her with was the awfulness of her married state. Anna stepped into the circle and attempted to comfort her mother, who paid her no attention. Abigail had stopped crying, and color was coming back to her face, but she didn’t take her eyes from Conrad.

Conrad stared back, the two of them perfectly intimate, the rest of us not there. “I told you,” he said. “We had a deal.”

“Have,” said Abigail.

“Had. I found your little stash.”

Abigail caught her breath, blinked, rallied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“That makes two of us,” I said. “Stash?”

“You had enough stowed away to gag Judy fucking Garland.”

Abigail raised her head and attempted an imperious tone. “I see. Well, for your information, that ‘little stash’ was for Halloween.”

Now I was truly confounded, for it seemed, from the few clues I was allowed, that my sister was supposed to be some sort of dope fiend. This made absolutely no sense. Abigail could drink any man—any woman, except me—under the table, and we were both too old for marijuana.

“Planning ahead, were you? For the kiddies?”

“Abigail! What is he talking about?” Were they selling dope to children?

“Believe what you want to. And I’ll thank you to stay out of my underwear drawer. I don’t fumble around in your—”

“Gotcha!” Conrad grinned evilly.

“Will someone please answer me.”

“I never went near your underwear drawer, sweetmeat. I wouldn’t be likely to, would I, unless I were going into the parachute business.”

Abigail swore, vilely, and stamped her foot, and hung her great wretched head.

Conrad now addressed me, with his usual gross intimacy. “Stashed behind the bathroom bowl,” he whispered. “Like The Godfather.”

I gaped at the man, who had obviously gone insane, along with everyone else, me included. I don’t know what upset me more, my sister at bay or myself ignored. Which is more humiliating? To twist in a baleful spotlight? To flail and wail, invisible? In despair I turned to Anna. “Please tell me what this means,” I said.

But even Anna ignored me. She stepped in front of her mother and stared Conrad in the face. “Why don’t you leave her alone,” she said, in an even voice, with a hint of genuine curiosity in it.

Conrad blinked at the upstart, momentarily confused by her unscripted entrance. I think he had always dealt with Anna by not dealing with her, by pretending she didn’t exist (which was easy, as she lived with me, and Abigail, not being any sort of worrier, probably didn’t mention her much). Anna didn’t fit into his schemes. Which was odd, really, given his own mythological childhood. He saw her as neither ally nor enemy. Even now she just blocked his way, like a spring sapling on a narrow path, and I watched him debate whether to go around her or cut her down. He chose prudence. Luckily for him.

He turned away from Anna and Abigail, and addressed his merry band. “Heath bars!” he proclaimed, spreading his arms like an evangelist on a roll. This was rather like his performance at the Rational Tap, except that now he wasn’t drunk. “A ten-pack of Charleston Chews! Giant slabs of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut!”

The crowd gasped. Wasserman shook her head in exaggerated disbelief, her face a billboard of pity and disgust.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

“Stuck on the back of the toilet tank!”

“How?” asked Tim.

“Duct tape!”

“Hold it just a minute. See here. Do you mean this whole thing is about—”

From Abigail came a low growl that threatened to rise up into a shriek, which it did. “I hope you all fuck yourselves blind and die!”

“We know you don’t mean that,” said Hilda.

“—food???”

Hilda looked at me as though I was crazy. “Of course it’s about food, Dorcas. Weren’t you listening?”

I took a long breath. “And he put you up to this. Didn’t he?”

“It’s not a question of putting up to,” said the articulate Tansy. “We were all of us concerned about Abby.”

“No we weren’t,” said Tim, softly.

“And why,” I asked them all, “did you imagine you had the right to do this thing?”

“It’s not a question of right,” said Guy. “It’s a question of duty.”

“No it’s not,” said Tim. “I’m sorry, ladies. I’m really and truly sorry.”

Conrad said nothing. He regarded me with exaggerated insouciance. Perhaps, I thought, I had him worried.

“Guy,” I said, “do you know what’s wrong with you?”

“Now, Dorcas,” said Hilda.

“Hilda. Do you know what’s the matter with you?”

Tansy actually reached for me, to touch me.

“Tansy! Do you know what your problem is?”

“I know,” she said, “that you’re having certain feelings right now.”

“Would you all like to know what’s wrong with each and every one of you?” Silence. “Well, answer me.”

Guy cleared his throat. “Dorcas—”

“Answer my question.”

“Well,” he said, “I guess you could say I’m—”

“I could say a lot of things. The point is, I won’t. The point is that I would never, ever, even in the shadow of the gallows, look another adult in the eye and tell him what’s wrong with him.” I was breathing hard now, and advancing on Guy. “This is what we do to children. We are not children. We are grown people. We are fully formed. We are each of us responsible for and to ourselves. We have a social contract. We treat one another with the respect owed to equals. We see one another’s faults and we keep our own counsel.” Hilda put a protective arm around her terrorized husband and opened her mouth to speak. “We do not presume,” I spat, “to improve our friends. Decent people do not take such burdens upon themselves. We are supposed to be decent people. We are all, against the evidence of this sorry day”—and now I was shouting, my voice as deep as I could make it—“mature adults!”

The right side of Guy’s openmouthed face disappeared behind a great magical glob of what I first took to be osprey shit, so that I immediately looked up, searching for the great soaring deus ex machina, and I missed seeing the same excellent thing happen to Hilda’s caftanned bosom. “Look out!” yelled Tim. I continued scanning the skies (again, everybody but me caught on immediately; it seems that on this day I was doomed to be colossally obtuse), until Hilda shrieked, “No, Abigail, no!” and I looked down just in time to see a milk-white comet streak past my shoulder, as though fired from behind, and strike Guy’s face again, this time square on his open mouth.

It had of course been fired from behind, by my sister, who now yelled at me to “duck!” Amazingly, instead of stupidly seeking out pintails and mergansers, I took her meaning right away, and I dropped and turned, and there was Abigail rising up with two fistfuls of potato salad, both of which she zinged with great accuracy at Tansy Wasserman’s crotch.

“All right.” This from Anna, who was, though not jumping up and down and clapping her hands, smiling at her mother with measured pride.

“Dorcas,” Hilda pleaded now, “do something.” She was troweling glop off her husband’s blushing face. Intellectual Guy, the a priori king, was having quite a day for himself. He had somehow opened the wrong door and stumbled into real experience, and now, as nature, human and otherwise, howled about him he fumbled visibly for an appropriate reaction, but could do no better than social unease. He tried on a bemused smile, as though his thoughts were elsewhere, a ruse so inept that it was almost heroic. Picture Christ, crucified, trying to recall whether he’d turned the oven off. Potato salad splatted on his forehead and his wife squealed, but genial Guy, at that very moment, apparently remembered something terrifically funny, and just had to laugh.

A lot of things happened in no particular order. Wasserman announced that it was “good” that Abigail was dealing so honestly with her anger, and Abigail chased her down and squished the rest of the potato salad down her bodice, and Conrad, who had been extremely quiet, told everybody to calm down, she was out of ammo now, said this in a bored drawl as if half wakened from a Sunday nap, and then someone handed her the cold roast chicken, which she ripped apart and fired, again with great accuracy, at people’s heads, bloodying Wasserman’s nose with a drumstick. Food flew everywhere, carrot curls, pickles, strawberry cheesecake, mostly toward Wasserman and the DeVilbisses, but Tim Paine got it too, tomato slices and hot pastrami, and then there was an oval of silence, like the center of a hurricane, and Abigail stood before her husband with a Tupperware bowl of peach compote in her hand and murder in her eye.

I could see plainly, and so could he, that he had lost control, that he was in the open, naked, unarmed, and she hissed at him, “I’m going to kill you, you sick son of a whore.”

Slowly, slowly, with exquisite care, he raised his hand to her, index finger extended, pointing at her nose, the fingertip coming to rest an inch from her face, and holding steady. His breathing was shallow, his body taut, he focused, expressionless, upon her eyes, as if trying to hypnotize a cobra. Abigail froze. Taking heart, he began to speak to her, softly, seducing her, perhaps, or promising retaliation, promising something anyway, it was probably all the same to those two. His deep intent fascinated me: I had never seen him work hard at anything, and now he behaved as though everything of value hung in the balance, and for him I guess it did. He was the dominant male, status was all, and if she managed to make him look foolish—if, say, she dumped the compote over his head—he would lose his crown for all time. And just when I saw that this was true, tears sprang to my sister’s eyes, washing the fight right out of them, and Anna, standing next to me, sighed and slumped.

“Oh, well,” Anna said.

Do it! I wanted to shout, Let him have it! Now! Do it now!

But I am not a screamer. I am a civilized woman, not a creature of impulse, nope, not me. I willed her to be strong, that’s all, I wished it with all my heart, and so I got to watch my sister crumple up into a sodden heap. And that was that.

After this defining moment other things happened, in no particular order and to no good end. Tim Paine, still wishing to make amends, bless his heart, lobbed a deviled egg at Conrad Lowe, which of course struck him white first and bounced away harmlessly, unacknowledged by anybody. Tansy embraced Abigail and was not disemboweled. We picked up after ourselves and trudged back to the parking lot, and on that dreary march, dear Anna, resilient as the child she still was, spotted chickadees, nuthatches, a pair of yellowthroat warblers, and an American redstart, and a swarm of yellow-jackets discovered poor mayonnaised Guy, whose whimpers still echo in my brain on hot sleepless summer nights, and Conrad made Abigail apologize, formally, to everybody, one by one.

The phrase “window of opportunity,” not then in currency, is all too apt, and today, with dark rain lashing the roof and storm winds punching at the north wall, I recognize that one instant, when she faced him in fury, poised to annihilate but not to kill, as a tiny blue window on a sunlit world: not paradise perhaps, but lost forever anyway. I let my sister down that day. I did hand her the cold roast chicken. Surprised hell out of myself, too, when I did it. Thought it was a big deal. It wasn’t. It wasn’t nearly enough.