Mr. Dancy stares into a small square tub in the maid’s-room bath off the sunless kitchen of our apartment. Mrs. Dancy has moved out of the building. Mr. Dancy visits us often, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to reveal his muscular arms. The enamel faucets he closes now have letters on them, H and C. The old brass drain shines from underneath the cool water. A tiny alligator is swimming around the tub. Mr. Dancy bought it in Chinatown for his children as a pet. He was told it was a species of alligator that would never grow more than a foot long. Now he has learned he was conned. The alligator is just a baby alligator. Soon it will grow to be dangerous. Even here in this little tub it has a menacing light in its eyes. I lower a wooden chopstick into the water and watch it snap angrily in frightened, futile little grabs.
“Give me the stick,” Anna says, leaning perilously close to the water. “Give it!” Her long black braid trails the top of the water like a lure.
I hand it over to her and she jabs at the creature. Mr. Dancy watches, strokes his thick butterscotch mustache. After a while, he lifts the baby alligator from the water by its nubbly tail and holds it over the toilet bowl. It writhes in the air, snapping at his wrist. I watch in fascination as he drops it in the toilet and flushes it down.
“We couldn’t keep it,” he says. “It would have grown into a monster.”
“Carl,” my mother calls from somewhere in the apartment, “do you want a drink? Supper is almost ready.”
Anna’s and my first week in our father’s new apartment. It is a grubby walk-up on Astor Place, but he makes it seem exotic and adventurous. The air is heavy, hot, no air conditioning—the wiring is too old for that—but he has gotten us our own rotating fan. And he promises, as soon as he gets his next paycheck, he will buy us each an International Doll. I want Holland. He promises us many wonderful things that we will eventually learn not to expect. “From here on out, it’s just me and my girls.” We jump up and down on our new trundle bed, dance to the Monkees, and eat Dannon blueberry yogurts. If you keep stirring the fruit up from the bottom the yogurt becomes darker and darker, he tells us when he turns on the evening news.
On Monday morning, our father dresses himself with precision in a blue pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit and brown wing tips that he shines to a high gloss with a chamois. He smells of Old Spice and shaving foam. He looks at himself in the hall mirror, parts his hair with a small tortoiseshell comb, adjusts his tie so it sits exactly right between his starched collars, pulls his cuffs, centers his gold cuff links. “Your father was famously handsome when he was young,” our mother tells us. “They called him the Belle of the Ball when he played football at Yale. That silly game ruined his knees.”
I hold on to the edge of his suit jacket as we go down the dark creaking staircase. My hair is a tangled mess. No one has reminded me to brush it. I have a nervous feeling in my stomach. Today is our first day at Triumph Day Camp. Anna and I are taking the bus alone. We are both wearing our camp uniforms: navy blue shorts and white T-shirts that say TRIUMPH on the front. On the back, they say All Girls Are Champions.
“There are very few girls in the world who are lucky enough to wear a shirt like that,” our father tells us. On the way to the bus, he stops at Chock full o’Nuts and buys us cream cheese and date-nut bread sandwiches for our lunch. I don’t want him to be mad at me, but the tears come on their own, betraying me. I hate cream cheese, I say, when he asks me what’s wrong. He tells me he’s sure I will like it, and hands me the paper bag. I can see he’s annoyed and it worries me. When he loads us onto the camp bus, I beg him not to make me go. He can’t be in two places at once, he says. He has to earn a living. Book reviews to write. Time-Life is waiting. But he’ll be right here waiting for us when the bus comes back. And I will love camp, he promises.
As the bus pulls into Sixth Avenue traffic, I watch him getting smaller and smaller. I tear a piece of paper off the edge of my lunch bag and chew it into a ball. What will I do if I need to pee? How will I know where to go? I want a swim badge, but I’m not allowed in over my head. Anna chats to the little girl next to her, ignoring me, and eats half her sandwich before the bus reaches Westchester.
Triumph Day Camp is on a lake. We drive in past baseball diamonds, a field covered in big dart boards, a giant teepee. The driver pulls in behind a long line of yellow buses. The parking lot is a sea of girls. All of them wearing the same Triumph T-shirts.
My counselors introduce themselves as June and Pia. They both wear Triumph shirts, but theirs are bright red.
“Welcome, five-to-sevens! For those of you who are new: if you need to find us, look for our red shirts,” June says. “Raise your hand if you were at Triumph last year.”
Most of the girls in my group raise their hands.
“Then you are already champions!! First things first. Let’s head over to your cubbies to put away our lunches. We’re in Little Arrow.” She lines us up behind her, leads us to a big brown building. Pia walks at the back of the line. “To make sure there are no stragglers. Rule number one: Never, ever leave your group. But if you ever do get separated, don’t move. Sit down right where you are and wait. One of us will come back for you,” Pia tells us.
On the edge of each cubby is a piece of masking tape with our names and birthday written in marker. Eleanor Bishop, September 17, 1966. I bite my finger. Now they will all know I haven’t even turned five yet and they won’t want to play with me. Barbara Duffy has the cubby next to mine. She is seven and has a Beatles lunch box.
“Grab your knapsacks!” June calls out. We’ll have a potty break and then change into our bathing suits. Who here knows how to tread water? That’s the art studio.” She points as we pass a room that smells of construction paper and paste.
The changing room is lined with little curtained stalls. I go into a stall and pull the curtain shut. I’m in my underpants before I realize my father has forgotten to pack me a bathing suit. By the time I get dressed again, everyone has already gone to the lake. I sit down on a wooden bench.
June and Pia don’t notice I’m missing until snack time, when they do the after-swim head count. From the changing room, I hear them calling my name again and again. A whistle blows, shrill and panicky. “Everyone out of the water,” I hear a lifeguard scream. “Now!”
I sit quietly, waiting for someone to come back for me.
9:22 A.M.
The cabin steps—three old pine planks attached by struts that have been on the verge of rusting-through since before I was born—bow under my weight. I bang on the kids’ door. It is one of those metal-framed doors with screens and glass windows that can be raised or lowered and, with a satisfying click, slot into place. My three children are tucked safely into their beds, the brightly painted yellow floor covered in wet towels and bathing suits. My mother is right. They really are pigs.
“Oi! Breakfast!” I pound on the door. “Up and out.”
Jack, my eldest, turns in his bed, gives me a look of cold disdain, and pulls his scratchy wool blanket over his head. He is being forced to bunk in with the little kids for a few nights while my mother fumigates his cabin for carpenter ants. Seventeen is a vile age.
The younger two emerge, bleary-eyed, from their cocoons, blinking in the morning light.
“Five more minutes,” Maddy groans. “I’m not even hungry.” Madeline is ten years old. Astonishingly beautiful, like my mother. But unlike most of the women in our family, she is small-boned and delicate, with pale English rose skin, Peter’s gray eyes, and Anna’s thick, dark hair. Every time I look at her I wonder how this creature came out of me.
Finn climbs out of bed in his sweet saggy underpants, rubs the sand out of his eyes. God, I love him. His cheeks have tiny sleep wrinkles on them from the pillowcase. He’s only nine—still on the verge of being a small boy. But soon he, too, will come to treat me with utter contempt. When Jack was born, I looked at the tiny baby in my arms, suckling, pig-perfect, kissed his eyelids and said, “I love you so much, and someday, no matter what I do, you will hate me. At least for a little while.” It’s a fact of life.
“Okay, my lovelies. Come, don’t come. But your father is making eggs, and you know what that means.”
“A total nightmare and a huge fucking mess,” Jack says.
“Correct.” I bang down the stairs. “Language,” I call over my shoulder as I head down the pine-needled path.
I wait until my cabin door slams shut behind me before allowing myself to take the breath I’ve been holding since Peter startled me on the porch. The normalcy of everything in our room seems impossible: clothes hung on ancient metal hangers along a makeshift wooden pole. Our oak dresser with a bottom drawer that sticks when it rains. The bed where Peter and I have slept for so many years, curled together like fiddleheads, entwined in sweat and sex and kisses, his sweet-sour smell. He has left the bed unmade.
I hang my bathrobe on a rusty nail that serves as a hook. Next to it is a cloudy full-length mirror aged by half a century of moisture and frost. I have always been grateful for its dim reflection, its pockmarks. I can look at myself through a mottled scrim of silver that hides my bumps and imperfections: the jagged scar on my chin that has been there since the night Peter and I were burglarized; the long thin scar that splits me across my belly, still visible after fifty years; the small white scar beneath it.
Jack came right away. But after Jack, nothing. No matter how hard we tried, what position, legs up, legs down, relaxed or tense, bottom or top. Nothing. At first I thought it was Jack. Maybe something had torn during my labor. Or maybe I loved him too much to allow myself to share him. In the end, the doctor made a small cut above my pubic bone and put a camera inside me, plumbing for answers.
“Well, young lady,” he said when I came out of anesthesia, “someone made quite a mess in there when you were a baby. It’s like a Spaghetti Western with all that scar tissue. What’s worse, the surgeon managed to chop off your left ovary in the process. But there’s some good news,” he said as I started to cry. “Your healthy tube had a kink—got tacked to a bit of scar tissue. Eggs were piling up behind it. I’ve cut it free.”
Maddy was born a year later. And Finn eleven months after that.
“Congratulations,” the doctor said to me and Peter as I lay on the exam table. “You’re having Irish twins.”
“Irish twins?” Peter said. “That’s not possible.”
“Of course it is,” the doctor said.
“Well,” Peter said. “If you’re right, I’m going to find the drunken Irishman who fucked my wife and throw him off the highest cliff in Kilkenny straight into the sea.”
“Kilkenny is landlocked,” the doctor said. “I was there for a golf tournament a few years back.”
I position myself in the largest remaining patch of mirror and stare at my naked body, assessing it, looking for something on the outside that might give away the truth, the panic inside me, the hunger, the regret, the breathless desire for more. But all I can see is the lie.
“Breakfast!” Peter shouts from the Big House. “Chop-chop.”
I pull on my bathing suit, grab a sarong, and sprint down the path, banging on the kid’s door. As I near the Big House I check myself, slow to a walk. It’s unlike me to snap to attention, as Peter well knows. I push through a thicket of bushes onto the damp shoreline, dig my toes into the wet sand. Out on the pond, my mother’s steady scissors kicks leave a white trail behind her. The water is blue-ing up. Soon even the transparent brown-greens of the shallows will be mirrored over. For those few hours at least, the minnows and largemouth bass hovering over their sandy crop-circle nests will be invisible. What lies beneath will be hidden from us.
I am running through the woods in my cotton nightgown along the narrow path that connects our camp to my grandfather Amory’s house. The path follows the shape of the land uphill and down around the pond’s ragged shoreline. My father cut it between our two properties when he and my mother were first together. Granddaddy Amory calls it the “Intellectual’s Path” because, he says, it wanders around and around without ever getting to the point. Where the path approaches my grandfather’s house there is a steep downhill run. I race along it, careful not to stub my bare toes on the stumps of the bushes my father cut down. Those nasty little stumps are my father’s only other legacy to this place.
I tiptoe past my grandfather’s bedroom window, careful not to disturb him, then sprint to the end of his wooden dock. I sit down, dangle my feet in the water, scratch my itchy stomach, try my best to sit perfectly still. Microscopic bubbles cover my feet in a carbonated sheath. Soon they will come. Hold still. Don’t move. Let your feet be lures. Then the swift dart from the shadows. Their courage gets the best of their fear, and at last I feel a little sucking feeling. One by one the sunfish are kissing my feet, sucking off little bits of dead skin and the crumbs of forest floor that have attached themselves to me. I love the sunfish. They are the color of pond water, with dappled backs and sweet, pursed lips. Every morning I bring them this breakfast of fresh feet.
My mother and Mr. Dancy are still in bed when I get home. Their cabin has a plate-glass window overlooking the pond. I run into their room without knocking, jump up and down on their bouncy mattress with my wet, sandy feet. My nightgown rises into the air every time I come back to earth.
“Out,” Mr. Dancy growls in a half sleep. “Wallace, Jesus Christ.”
Through the window I see Anna and her best summer-friend Peggy in the water, splashing each other. Peggy has orange hair and freckles.
“What are those?” My mother points at my belly. “Hold still!”
I stop jumping, pull up my nightgown, and let her examine my stomach. It is covered in red spots.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” she says. “Chicken pox. How did this happen? I’d better go check Anna.”
“They itch,” I say and flip off the bed.
“Stay here,” my mother orders. “I’ll get the calamine lotion.”
“I want to go swimming.”
“Stay in this room. I don’t need you infecting Peggy.”
I push past her and make a run for the door.
Mr. Dancy snatches my arm, hard. “You heard your mother.”
I try to pull away, but his grip tightens.
“Carl, stop. You’re hurting her,” my mother says.
“She needs to be controlled.”
“Please,” Mum says. “She’s five.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job.”
“Of course not,” Mum says, placating.
He throws off the covers and starts pulling on his clothes. “If I want to deal with spoiled brats, I’ll go spend time with my own kids.”
“What are you doing?” My mother’s voice sounds tight, high-pitched.
“I’ll see you back in the city. This place makes me antsy.”
“Please, Carl.”
The door slams behind him.
“Do. Not. Move,” Mum says. “If I find you out of this room there will be hell to pay.” And races out to stop him.
I sit down on the bed, watch Anna putting on a mask and snorkel. She squats down at the water’s edge, her back to the pond, dips her mask in the pond, empties it, spits in it. Behind her, Peggy wades out into deeper water. With every step, a few more inches of her disappear. A car engine starts up. I hear my mother shouting, her voice getting fainter and fainter as she runs up the driveway, chasing Mr. Dancy’s car. I watch as the bottom of Peggy’s red pigtail disappears. Now only her head is above water, floating, disembodied. Now only the top of her head, like a turtle’s back. Now Peggy is a trail of bubbles. I imagine the suckerfish, giving her their soft kisses. The bubbles stop. I wait for her to reappear. I bang on the glass, trying to get Anna’s attention. I know she can hear me, but she doesn’t bother to look up. I bang again, harder now. Anna sticks her tongue out at me, sits down on the beach to pull on her yellow flippers.