Through the large plate-glass window in my grandparents’ dining room, where I’m setting the table for dinner, I can see all the way across the low hills to the neighboring farm. Up against a barbed-wire fence, their cows chew the cud. The last bronzing light of the summer day flashes the tops of the trees beyond. My father and Joanne are getting divorced. He tells us it’s because he missed his girls too much and Joanne refused to move back to the States. He chose us. We are spending June together.
In the living room, where they are watching the six o’clock evening news, my father and Granny Myrtle are arguing in low voices. I tiptoe around the dining table, placing a silver fork on each napkin, silver knife to the right, trying to listen-in, careful not to make a sound.
“What hogwash,” I hear Granny Myrtle saying to him. “That insufferable woman cuckolded you. And I’d call it a blessing in disguise.” She turns the volume on the television up a notch. “I must be going deaf in my old age.”
“You’re wrong, Mother,” my father says. “I missed the girls.” But there’s a limpness in his voice that makes me think of empty rooms.
“Those two girls are the only good thing you’ve managed to accomplish,” she says.
I hear my father get up and go to the bar, hear the sound of ice cubes landing in his bourbon glass.
Anna lies on her twin bed in our room off the kitchen, staring at the ceiling. “I have to get out of here,” she says when I come in.
We’ve only been here two days, but already she wants to leave. Her boarding school roommate Lily has invited Anna to spend three weeks at the family’s summer “cottage” in Newport. “They belong to the country club. Her brother Leander is a pro in the tennis shop.”
“You don’t even know how to play tennis,” I say.
“God, you’re annoying.”
“If you leave, I’ll have nothing to do.”
“I have no interest in being stuck here for a month, just because Dad decided to come home.” She stands up and fishes a magazine out of her bag, flops back down.
I watch her read.
“Stop looking at me,” she says.
“Do you want to go swimming tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Do you want to go for a bike ride?”
She ignores me.
I sit on the edge of my bed, looking around the room. “If you had to choose between Tab and Fresca for the rest of your life—if you could only have one—which would you choose?”
“I don’t have to choose.”
“I know, but hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically, I may hit you if you don’t shut up.”
“Dad will be sad if you leave.”
“Please,” she says. “He has zero right to put us on some big guilt trip. He deserted us. And now that he’s back, we’re supposed to be grateful?”
There’s a soft knock on the door. Dad pokes his head in. “There’re my girls,” he says brightly. “Dinner’s almost ready. Mother made a pot roast.”
“I’m not hungry,” Anna says.
He sits down on the bed next to her. “What are you reading, kiddo?”
“A magazine.” She doesn’t bother to look up.
“You girls must have grown a head taller since I saw you at Easter. How was spring term?” he asks Anna. “Your mother tells me you got an A in French. Mademoiselle, tu es vraiment magnifique!”
His terrible accent hangs in the air.
Anna looks at him with contempt.
“Well,” he says. “Both of you wash your hands and come help Mother set the table.”
“Shut the door behind you,” Anna says.
It must be early. Thin rulers of gray light stripe my bedspread through the slats of the Venetian blinds. A mourning dove is calling for its mate. I lie in bed listening to its sad, hollow song. Anna is asleep. Low voices are coming from the kitchen. I climb out of bed and walk quietly across the linoleum floor. Our door is ajar. My father is at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. Granny Myrtle stands at the kitchen counter making a piecrust, her back to him. I watch her cutting butter into flour, trickling ice water in.
“There’s an eleven twenty bus on Friday morning. I looked up the schedule. It connects in New Haven.” She opens a cupboard and takes out a bag of sugar.
“Anna’s so angry with me.”
“Well, what on earth do you expect, Henry? She’s a fifteen-year-old girl who barely knows her own father. She’ll need a tennis skirt. We can drive into Danbury tomorrow.”
“Mother, tell me how to fix this.”
“There’s nothing to tell. You made your bed. Now you’ll just have to figure out how to un-make it.”
Through my bedroom window I watch my grandfather, already down the hill in the vegetable patch, kneeling in the moist earth. He is weeding the rhubarb, a full basket of sugar peas next to him. A screen door slams shut. My father walks across the lawn toward him. Granny Myrtle pulls a wooden rolling pin out of a lower drawer.
I pull on my jean shorts and a T-shirt and go in to breakfast. There’s half a grapefruit laid out for me on the table, its pink triangles carefully cut away from the skin, a sprinkling of brown sugar forming a sweet crust. Next to it is a silver spoon on a linen napkin. I kiss my grandmother on her soft duck-fuzz cheek, sit down at the table.
“I thought I would take you and Anna for a swim in the Wesselmans’ pool later.” She kisses the top of my head. “You need to wear a hat, Eleanor. Your hair is so bleached by the sun, it’s almost as white as mine.”
“Hats make my forehead itch.”
“Afterward we can take out some new books at the library. I’m making lamb chops for dinner. And you can help me pick asparagus from the patch.”
“I don’t want Anna to leave,” I say.
“Asparagus isn’t easy to grow, you know. Your grandfather was worried the deer and the rabbits would eat all the shoots this spring.”
“I won’t have anyone to be with.”
“There’s no reason your sister should have her summer ruined simply because your father chose to marry that god-awful woman.” My grandmother hands me a pile of buttered white toast and a mason jar of homemade crabapple jam. “Your father is a good man, but he lacks backbone.” She sits down beside me. “Now you, Eleanor, you have backbone. Anna is tough as a bull’s hide, heaven knows, but you are a stoic.” She pours herself a glass of buttermilk. “I blame myself for your father’s weakness. I pampered him.”
Behind us a floorboard creaks. My father stands there. Above the stove, a wall clock ticks the seconds. I stare down at my toast, mortified for him, wishing I could disappear, save him from his embarrassment.
“Elle and I were just talking about a swim,” my grandmother says to him, as if nothing has happened. “I’ve put in a call to the Wesselmans. Joy tells me their blueberry bushes are positively groaning.”
“I’d like to take the girls for a swim at the quarry today,” my father says.
“I’ve already made a pie crust.” She gets up, opens and closes a few cupboard doors. “I know I put those plastic berry buckets in here somewhere.”
I wait for my father to push back, but he stares out the kitchen window, hands in his pockets. “The black walnut Father and I planted last year has really taken off,” he says.
“Actually, Gran, I’d rather go to the quarry with Dad. We can pick blueberries for you after.”
My father stands up straighter, turns to me, his face smiling so broadly I feel stricken.
“Well, of course, dear,” my grandmother says to me. “If that’s what you would like, then I think it’s a perfect plan.”
The quarry is hidden in the fold of two hills that rise up behind the Straights’ farm. I’ve convinced Anna to come with us. Now that she knows she’s leaving on Friday, her mood has lifted. The three of us climb the slope, towels in hand, following a cow path toward a wide swath of pasture. At the flat top of the hill, black-and-white cows graze, tails flicking flies from their hinds, udders drooping with grassy milk. Everywhere the field is dotted with cow pies—some dry enough to burn, others steaming wet. Across the field, shaded in a copse of trees, is the quarry: a deep, clear watering hole, its granite sides slippery with moss and drip, its roughhewn ledges perfect for leaps into the bracing cold. But first we have to make it past the cow-pies.
My father takes off his loafers and lines them up side by side in military formation. “Race you across,” he says, grinning at us, and starts hopscotching his way expertly across the field. He’s been coming here since he was a kid. “Last one in is a rotten egg,” he shouts over his shoulder. He looks so happy, carefree, and it makes me happy. Anna kicks off her sneakers and races out into the field behind him, competing for the far side. I follow behind her, laughing, wind in my face, towel streaming out behind me like a banner. The cows move and munch around us, their swayed backs gently rocking, oblivious to the young girls rocketing past.
2:00 P.M.
The road to Black Pond is almost invisible, the center strip overgrown with wild grasses so high that as we drive, they brush the underbelly of our car, a sound like wind across a prairie. Ahead of us the road turns, forks, forks again, and again, before dead-ending at a broken split rail fence. Beyond the fence is a faint trail. I climb out of the car and follow behind Peter sharply downhill, dodging piles of coyote scat, gray with rabbit fur and thistle, to a little sand beach. Black Pond is the smallest kettle pond in the woods—a place only “Woods People” know about. Our pond is wide and clear. Its beauty is in its size, its mile-long expanse of pristine blue, the sweep of sky. This pond is older, wiser, wizened, as if it holds too many secrets. A bottomless watering hole surrounded by dense forest, that lives half of its day in shadow.
The beach is undisturbed, thick with pine needles. No one has been here in a while. When I was a child, this was a place to bring picnics. A place for a special outing. And each time we came, we had to remind ourselves which branch of the road to take, which fork. It was easy to get lost on the way. Once when I came here with Anna, there was a naked couple on the beach having sex. The woman was lying on her back, enormous thighs spread wide, the man rutting on top of her. There was something obscene about it. Not the sex, which frightened and fascinated me, but the way her body squished out on the hard ground like uncooked dough, and the way she didn’t seem to care if we saw them. We had backed away, racing for home, giggling in shame and delight.
Peter and I sit down on the bank. He fishes a cigarette out of his pocket. Lights it. “Do you remember the first time you brought me here?”
“Our very first summer.”
“I still think it may have been the most romantic moment of my life.”
“Well, that doesn’t say much for the rest of our life together.”
Peter laughs, but what I’m saying is true. I had brought him here for a late-afternoon swim. Later, when we made love on the beach, I suddenly remembered the naked couple, the woman’s legs wide open, the fleshiness of it all, and I’d moaned loud enough to make the pond echo. Peter had come then. I have always known there was something bad in me, a secret perversion I have tried to hide from Peter. That I hope he will never see.
“Look,” he says, taking my hand, “I owe you an apology.”
“For what?”
“For this morning. For last night. I know you were upset that I didn’t read Anna’s poem.”
“I was upset in the moment. But Jonas read it beautifully. And reading it for her every year is all that really matters.”
“Still, I’m sorry. I acted like a boor, and I regret it.”
“We’d all had too much to drink. You have nothing to apologize for. I promise.” Nothing.
“Just now in the car when I put my hand on your thigh, you flinched.”
“I didn’t flinch,” I say, hating myself for the lie. “In fact, I wish you would do that more often.”
He stubs his cigarette out in the sand, looks at me with skepticism, as if making sure I’m telling him the truth. “Well then, good.” He leans in, kisses me. His lips taste of smoke and salt. A few feet away from us, a box turtle slides off a log into the shallows.
I stand up, start stripping off my bathing suit. “What about that swim?” I cannot have sex with him now. Not after what I have just done with Jonas. I cannot wrong him this way, too, humiliate him. He grabs at me, but I dash away—dash for the water that I hope will purify me. Peter chases me, naked, flapping. I swim, breathless, toward the shadowy side of the pond, trying to stay ten strokes ahead. But he is faster, stronger, catches me from behind, pleased.
“Got you.” He presses his erection against my rubbery back.
“Rain check,” I say, wriggling out of his hold. “We really do need to get home.”
“Five minutes won’t make a difference,” Peter says.
“Exactly.” I laugh. “I need at least ten.” Then I dive away from him, swim for the beach, for my clothes, for what feels like my soul.
Row upon row. A sea of quivering green. I have never seen so much corn. William Whitman’s cornfields are endless, formidable. They move up and over the hills toward his farm like an enemy battalion. Whitman is Leo’s oldest friend. They’ve been best friends since elementary school. Sunday is Whitman’s birthday, and we’ve been invited to spend the weekend on his three-hundred-acre farm in northern Vermont.
“Whit moved up here from Philadelphia a few years back, after his wife died,” Leo says now as we drive the long dirt road that will, Leo promises my mother, eventually arrive at the farmhouse. She is certain we have made a wrong turn. “Left everything behind him in the rearview mirror—fancy law firm, beautiful home in Chestnut Hill.”
“I think we were meant to take that last left fork,” Mum says.
“What did she die of?” I ask. Conrad and I are squashed up against opposing windows in the back seat to make room for a large, dinged-up guitar case in the middle seat.
“Well now, that’s a terrible story,” Leo says. “Whit and his son Tyson were away on a father-and-son bonding weekend. Ty must’ve been around ten at the time.”
“Bonding weekend?” Mum says, trying to read a road map in the fading light. “That sounds unpleasant. Possibly a bit profane.”
Leo laughs. “Hardly. Indian Guides. Big Owl, Little Owl . . . Mighty Wolf, Mighty Cub. Sit around the campfire. Bead. Whittle arrowheads.”
My mother looks at him blankly, as if she can’t even absorb the concept.
“Like Cub Scouts,” Leo explains. “At any rate. They got home from their camping trip on Sunday night. Louisa was lying in the foyer, stabbed so many times her dress had turned red. Whit said young Tyson stood there, silent. Not a sound. Not a tear. Then he lay down on the marble floor, curled up close against his mother’s body, nose to nose, searching her dead, open eyes. Like he was trying to find her soul, Whit said.”
“That’s so sad,” I say.
“Boy never recovered. Barely speaks.”
“He’s a retard,” Conrad says without looking up from his Mad magazine.
“Conrad.” Leo keeps his voice controlled, but the warning is unmistakable.
“He’s totally retarded,” Conrad says to me in a stage whisper. “I met him.”
Leo’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. Since Conrad moved in with us last year, Leo has been making an effort to avoid any conflict. It’s important to him that Conrad isn’t unhappy living with us. But no matter how nice Leo is, it’s pretty obvious Conrad wishes he were back home in Memphis and that, like Anna, he wishes his mother had chosen him. Most of the time, he stays in his room—Anna’s old room—with the door shut, listening to ABBA and Meat Loaf, lifting weights or watching M*A*S*H on his rabbit-eared TV. His room stinks of feet: nauseating, moist, and sour.
We reach the farmhouse at dusk. Whitman and Tyson are waiting for us in the driveway, three dogs jumping at their heels.
“We heard that old clunker of yours coming down the road from a mile away. Could have walked out to meet it.” Whitman gives Leo a bear hug. “And you, Wallace. Still looking good enough to eat.”
“Been too long, man,” Leo says, slapping him on the back.
Tyson is surprisingly handsome. Tall, in worn overalls, with a gentle face.
“I’m Elle,” I say, putting out my hand.
But he looks away, bone-shy. Kicks at the ground.
“Tyson must be about your age, Conrad.” Whitman picks up our bags, and we follow him inside. “Grab those other bags, Ty. Put them up in the loft.”
Whitman is the polar opposite of his son. Small, jaunty, talking nonstop—so fast I don’t know how he manages to take a breath. He reminds me of a cartoon rooster, his bantam-crackly laugh, southern accent, the swift, jilty way he moves. I like him.
Inside the old farmhouse he has laid out dinner. “Fresh rabbit stew and succotash. I’ve become quite the homesteader since we left Philly,” he says proudly. “Baked the bread myself this morning. All the food on this table comes from our garden. Even the rabbits.”
“You grow rabbits?” Conrad says, poking at his stew.
Whitman laughs. “We catch rabbits. They’re a menace. Pests. We have to put traps out if we want a single vegetable to survive. But around here, we eat what we kill. Though we don’t get to eat rabbit as often as I’d like. Ty goes around tripping the traps when I’m not looking. He can’t stand the screaming.”
His son sits at the end of the long oak table, eyes down, eating his rabbit stew.
Whitman turns to me. “Ever hear a rabbit scream?”
I shake my head no.
“Not pretty. Can’t blame my boy.” Whitman tips back in his chair. “Talking of pests, the deer are worse this year than ever.” He turns to Conrad. “You know what that means, don’t you, young man?”
Conrad shakes his head.
“Tomorrow night, venison.”
Conrad looks horrified. Whitman bellows.
“Conrad’s not exactly the adventurous-food type,” Leo says, tearing off another piece of bread. His beard is a nest of crumbs. “If it was up to him, he would live on fish sticks and Whoppers.”
I take a big bite of my stew. “You should try it, Conrad.”
“I did,” Conrad says. “It’s really good.”
“No, you didn’t. You’ve just been pushing it around on your plate.”
“Tattletale,” Conrad spits.
“Liar,” I spit back.
“Jerk-off.”
Tyson has gone completely still, as if he is trying to hide in plain sight.
“Not to worry.” Whitman breaks the tension. “I ate nothing but baked eggs in cream until I was twelve. I’m making spaghetti and meatballs tomorrow. And no, young man, I didn’t go out and shoot a cow. Which reminds me, if any of you want to take a walk in the woods, be sure to wear something bright red. I’ve been having a problem with deer hunters trespassing on my land off-season.”
“I hate hunters,” I say.
“Well now, I don’t have a problem with them if they’re trying to put dinner on the table,” Whitman says. “But these hunters are shooting for sport. No moral compass. Leave the damn animals lying there to bleed out. Not even a shot to the head. Shameful. My dogs find them in the woods. Come home with their mouths all crusted in blood.”
“I think I’m gonna puke,” Conrad says.
“Conrad.” Leo looks as if he’s about to boil over.
“We had a dog when I lived in Guatemala as a girl,” Mum says. “It would get into the henhouse and bite the heads off the chickens. The gardener shot it.”
“Guatemala?” Whitman raises an eyebrow, refills her glass.
“My mother moved us there when I was twelve.”
“Why Guatemala?”
“An unfortunate divorce. And the help was cheap. In those days, you could have a private cook for eight cents an hour. Nanette was used to the finer things. But she hated Guatemala with a passion. She was convinced she was going to be attacked by a villager with a machete.”
“Does she still live there?”
“She died a few years back. Not a machete. My brother Austin never left. Married a local girl. Hates the States. Thinks we’re all a bunch of savages.” She laughs, downs her glass. “He’s an ornithologist. A parrot specialist, of all pointless things.”
“I love parrots,” Tyson says quietly.
After dinner, Whitman leads us up an almost vertical staircase to a loftlike attic, high ceilings open all the way to the rafters. Three mattresses are made up on the floor.
“I’ll leave the bathroom light on downstairs,” he says. “Don’t want any of you tripping in the dark. Hope no one has a problem with bats.”
“What the heck, Dad,” Conrad says after Whitman has gone. “We’re all sleeping in the same room?”
“It’ll be fun. Like camping,” Mum says, though she, too, looks doubtful.
Sometime in the night I am woken by whispers in the dark. Low raspy voices. It takes a moment for my ears to adjust. Mum and Leo are arguing. My mother sounds unhappy.
“Stop it, Wallace. Enough.” I hear the rustled pull of sheets as Leo moves away from her.
“We haven’t made love in weeks.”
“Goddammit!” Leo hisses. “Not in front of the kids.”
“I’ll be quiet. I promise.”
I have to pee, but if I get up now, she’ll know I’ve heard them. She’ll be mortified. And I can’t bear that for her.
“You’re drunk.” Leo’s voice is cold.
“Please, Leo,” she begs.
I cover my ears, pull my blanket over my head so I won’t hear her pleading. She sounds so pitiful—panicked, desperate. Maybe this is what it sounds like when a rabbit screams.
It must be early when I wake again. The whole house is asleep. The ashen light of dawn seeps in through a small dormered window. Conrad is on top of his covers, fully dressed. He hasn’t even taken off his shoes. Leo and my mother lie with their backs to each other. I hope that, when they wake, Leo will tell her how much he loves her.
I tiptoe down the stairs, anxious for fresh air. Outside, the morning still holds its chill. I haven’t seen the farm in daylight, and it is beautiful. Brambles of wild roses climb up and over split rail fences. In the kitchen garden, rows and rows of zucchini blossoms, sugar snap peas on stilts, a tangle of orange nasturtiums licking at their ankles. Three rabbits are feeding in the lettuces.
Past the garden, the cornfields stretch all the way to the base of the hills, where dark forests pitch toward a pinking sky. I pull my sweater on and head out through a potato field that borders the corn—its musky-sweet smell rises, hovers a few feet above the ground.
I follow a wide tractor path that slices through the center of the fields, parting the sea of corn. Cornstalks like hedgerows flank me on either side. I listen to their swish, their whispers. I wish I could unhear my mother.
I’ve been walking for almost an hour when I come around a sharp bend and stop short. Ten yards ahead of me, an enormous buck stands in the middle of the track. A Bambi’s-father buck, his proud, towering antlers like bare trees in winter. He looks directly at me and I look back, willing him not to spring away. And then the crack of a gunshot. His eyes open wide in surprise, and he falls. Blood pours from a hole in his neck. He lies there in soft, sad silence. There’s a movement in the corn, the barrel of a gun. I step back into the thick green, hidden from the hunters. Tyson emerges onto the track. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes are blank, dull, the eyes of a sleepwalker. He lowers himself to the ground and lies down beside the dying animal. He looks so small next it, childlike. He stares into the buck’s eyes, watches, unblinking, until its life slips away to nothingness. He gets to his knees and in a gesture somehow both beautiful and sickening, he leans down and kisses the dead deer gently on its mouth. Tyson hears my sharp intake of breath. He leaps to his feet, gun cocked.
“Tyson, wait!” I step out onto the track.
He looks at me for a moment and then, before I can say another word, he is gone. I watch the tops of the corn snaking behind him in his path.
When I get back to the farm, Conrad is in the vegetable garden with Whitman. He stirs a water bucket as Whitman pours dark brown powder into it. Tyson stands nearby, a small bloodstain on the tip of his boot.
“Morning, Elle,” Whitman calls out when he sees me. “We wondered where you’d gotten to.”
“I walked out through the cornfields.”
Tyson watches me intently. The entire walk home, I’ve tried to process what I witnessed, to understand why he would do such a cruel thing. I imagine the kind of agony he must still feel, the rage at his mother’s killer still out there, unpunished. And yet what I saw seemed more an act of love than of misplaced revenge.
Whitman hands me a bucket. “Come on and give us a hand spreading this.”
“It stinks,” I say. “What is it?”
“Dried cow blood. Keeps the deer and the rabbits away. They can’t stand the smell, either. Just a trickle around each plant. It doesn’t take much. Hope you kids are hungry. There’s a whole load of bacon in the oven. Eggs from the henhouse were still warm to the touch when I collected them.”
Conrad and I help Whitman pour blood on his crops while Tyson watches us from the sidelines of baby lettuces and cucumbers. By the time we have finished, all the life in Whitman’s garden smells like death to me.