SHE MUST HAVE TAKEN THE TRAIN, the Harlem Line, probably drove from Litchfield and parked at the Wassaic station and bought a New York Post, which she finished before the train even arrived: the 8:30 A.M. to Grand Central, a trip of two hours, give or take a few minutes. I myself did the ride a week ago. Despite what you might think, I am trying to be accurate here. I forgot how much I enjoyed trains, their whistles and chugs, their storybook rhythms. When I was very young my mother would take us to Florida by Amtrak, longdistance train travel the lingering nostalgia of an earlier generation, and we would stay in sleeper cars with their slick use of space, and she would make the trip go faster by giving us a bagful of presents, just small things, with specific details written on the wrapping paper, like Four Yellow Schoolbuses, or A Herd of Cows, or Children Playing Baseball, and when our window-pressed eyes caught sight of one of these things we could finally rip open the present. It was as if my mother had gifted the world into being. A Red Volkswagen Bug. The Word SMILE. Any Kind of Dinosaur. While I rode along the Harlem Line I searched the landscape in hopes of finding a sign of her, unwrapping Lovely Green Hills and Small Dying Towns and Seventy-six-Year-Old Isabel, Born Isles, Once Dyer, Now Platt.
She sat by the window, reading. The car was a third full. Isabel recognized the people by type—the suburban subspecies—every stop adding a different variety. Most conversations cycled through cellphones, and she imagined “I’m running late …” swinging like Tarzan from those ugly towers disguised as evergreens, swinging all the way to wherever in Manhattan, throat full of yell. Me inconsiderate asshole. Isabel was halfway through a new collection by Alice Munro. She had just started a story called “The Beauty Abishag”—started it again and again, a series of restarts, reliving Janice Killgard’s fall from grace in the first paragraph. Something about age and crow’s feet and plastic surgery gone wrong. Lipstick. A car wreck. An older half sister in Ottawa. The writing was typical Alice Munro clear-as-a-bell prose, though Isabel found herself skimming the surface, striding the gaps between words. What were those insects called again, the ones who glided over their pond? Skaters? Skeeters? Whatever their name, those are my eyes, she thought, as she read again about that red light in Rosedale and the visor drawn down, not for the setting sun but for the evening mirror:
Had she imagined the light turning, the car behind her nearing its horn? She swore something flashed green beyond the mirror and windshield, something told her she needed to go. Of this she was certain. The crash came without impact. Life was lost elsewhere. Downstairs her nephew screamed and Janice checked her face a final time, her finger tracing the unnatural smoothness around her eyes and forehead. Do I look younger?
“A clone?”
“That’s what he told us,” said Jamie via speakerphone.
“He’s not well, Mom,” said Richard, no doubt jostling for position.
“Obviously,” from Jamie.
“It’s really sad,” from Richard.
“More ridiculous than sad,” from Jamie.
“Have some sympathy,” Richard to Jamie.
Isabel had been in the kitchen putting together her famous boring salad when the boys called. Roger was outside throwing a tennis ball for the springers, Glass and Steagall, his little joke, which, in his defense, he regretted. Isabel watched him through the window as he fired the ball as far as he could and took delight in the dogs’ competitive nature (Steagall was faster but Glass was smarter) and in his still-decent throwing arm (though he would rub his shoulder for the rest of the day until she finally succumbed and asked what was wrong). Roger was uncomplicated math, best suited to hearty hellos and fond farewells rather than the difficult middle, where he might drag. Baseball handsome is what Isabel’s mother would have called him. Goodness, the beautiful girls he dated in his youth. Avedon models. Society girls. But he was twice divorced and in both cases he had no idea why except a vague sympathy that they wanted more from life. But more of what? Andrew would have hated the man with a passion incommensurate with the facts on the ground. A grilled-cheese sandwich could make Roger’s day and sports on TV was his idea of heaven. But Isabel embraced this prosaic enthusiasm, crawled within this space and discovered she was happy watching the dogs sprint across the lawn, and cutting up tomatoes and peppers for lunch, and maybe tonight rubbing his shoulder by the fire, which he constantly poked as though its flame were personal.
Where was she? Something about a mistaken change? Back to the beginning:
Had she imagined the light turning, the car behind her nearing its horn? She swore something flashed green beyond the mirror and windshield, something told her …
“He had this whole story concocted,” said Jamie.
“A Swedish thing,” said Richard.
“Try Norwegian, a crazy Nobel cloning-conspiracy thing,” from Jamie.
“Whatever,” from Richard. “He’s had some kind of psychotic break, that’s obvious. And he talked nonstop about missing you and all the mistakes he’s made and how he wished he’d never written a single book.”
“It was medium-grade insanity, nearing full-blown,” from Jamie.
“It was plain sad,” from Richard.
“And what,” she finally asked the boys, “do you want me to do about it?”
Brewster into Croton Falls into Katonah, where she once knew many people, thanks to her brother Jonathan, who lived in Pound Ridge, and her other brother, Peter, who lived the next stop down in Bedford Hills, plus the many New York friends who had fled the city for the sake of safer streets and sporty children and three-acre grabs of the great outdoors, all of whom developed a passion for ice hockey and drunk driving. That’s not her line. That’s Larry Macawber from Tiro’s Corruption. Isabel remembered reading an early draft and telling Andrew he should go easy on Westchester and his fictional town of Cicero. “It’s getting a bit mean, don’t you think?” she said.
“How do you mean mean?”
“Don’t be cute.”
“I don’t think I could be cute if I tried.”
“Not true. When we first met you dabbled in cute.”
“Really? That was cute? Must have been reflected off of you.”
Isabel smiled more for effect. “Look,” she said, “I don’t care that we have a lot of friends there, some quite good friends, and family, nieces and nephews—”
“I’ve changed names. They’ll all think it’s the town next door, trust me.”
“Like I was saying, write what you want to write, but you should know that it’s coming across as angry and bitter, with easy targets everywhere. Instead of shooting fish in a barrel, you’re using the barrel as a toilet.”
“Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do.”
“But who wants to read a book like that?”
“I have no idea,” Andrew said, sounding like a teacher who has taught the same course for too long. “But what if you forget the characters and their struggles, forget all the clever phrases? What if you sweep the fiction from the page? What do you have? An exposé of this A. N. Dyer character. And maybe that’s the point.”
Isabel went quiet. At the time Andrew was fifty-eight and she was fifty-five and they had been married for thirty-one years and had known each other ten more and over those years she had noticed him change from easy to hard, an unfocused irritation that began with the publication of Ampersand and after the birth of the boys grew into a general annoyance with loud noises and broad behavior, a defensiveness against possible attack, particularly when the subject was fatherhood, a growing incapacity toward anything involving joy, an aversion to live performance, a distaste for New York yet an inability to leave the city, a cheapness of the soul, a solitariness disguised as solitude that pushed the limits and if even gently confronted was denied with extreme prejudice. These men, as she often muttered to her friend Eleanor Topping, the two of them pressed together like sisters, their friendship filling in for the matrimonial gaps. These men, romantically isolated, secretly tortured, became like lighthouses flashing their treacherous shallows. Stay away! Stay away! Isabel was sure she had changed as well—of course—but mostly she thought she just looked older. Why did she stay with him? That was the question, sort of. Why did she let her life get so constrained by his company? Well, maybe she blamed herself. Maybe she gave him leeway because he was such a wonderful writer. Maybe after all this time together she was certain he was a decent man, particularly when measured against others in his line of work, even outside his line of work. If there had been affairs, at least he had been discreet. Until he wasn’t. But really, when she thought about those maybes, when she was alone in bed and he was downstairs working, and she was debating the life you expect versus the life you get, she knew that leaving him would be like abandoning a helpless creature, and that seemed too cruel, especially after all their years together. Whatever his own feelings about the author of Tiro’s Corruption, Isabel touched his hand and said, “I’ve always cared more about the man, who is much better than he thinks.” Andrew ended up taking her advice and in the next draft humanized the characters and moved Cicero into Connecticut, probably not far from where she currently lived. It was the last book he wrote as her husband, Isabel going through the manuscript and flagging the sofas and the drapes and deciding to add carpet to the list of forbidden words.
Had she imagined the light turning, the car behind her nearing its horn? She swore something flashed green beyond the mirror.…
“He claims there was no affair,” said Jamie.
“It’s really bad,” said Richard.
“He said the affair was just a story behind the story,” from Jamie.
“A cover story,” from Richard.
“Whatever,” Jamie to Richard.
“And what do you want me to do?” Isabel asked again, exasperated.
These boys, these difficult boys. When do they become men? Early on Isabel was relieved at having only sons, frightened of the mother-daughter dynamic, of replaying her own mother, the famous swimmer, or so universally claimed since the fame was never documented in trophies or ribbons, never witnessed firsthand by any of her children. “Your mother could fly through the water,” Isabel would hear whenever she found herself near a pool with a grown-up. You could glimpse some of that truth in those big, bony feet and broad shoulders, features inherited by Isabel and mostly awkward on land. “We called her the Eel,” they would go on, as if eels embodied liquid speed rather than slipperiness. But then the Eel was better suited to men. She was the dinner companion who could keep up with the dirty jokes and the drinking and the smoking, who seemed to channel every role ever played by Katharine Hepburn. “Give me a straw and maybe I’ll drink the goddamn pool,” she once cracked during a Fourth of July party in Southampton, and the men laughed and Isabel, swimming with the other children but mostly staring up at her mother, laughed as well, which made the men laugh harder but embarrassed her mother. “Go swim between someone else’s legs,” she said, tossing an ice cube at her. Maybe Isabel assumed sons would be easier because of her own brothers, beloved by mother and sister alike: smart and charming, they tripped into every bad habit their generation had to offer yet rolled into their mid-fifties respected, admired even, for their recklessness. Those Isles brothers. They did have fun. Jamie inherited their smile, but he was too conscious of the resemblance and leaned on his uncles for maternal goodwill, his voice often dipping into straight-up impersonation, as if Isabel could be so easily snowed. Then there was Richard with his almost cannibalistic self-esteem issues. Did Isabel try hard enough with him? Had she let him go too quickly all those years ago?
“If he wants to be a junkie, let him be a junkie,” Andrew had told her. “But he’s on his own.”
“I don’t think he’s a junkie. He’s not shooting up.”
“For God’s sake, Isabel.”
“Just to be clear. It’s not heroin.”
“To be clear, it’s crack, and that still qualifies him as a goddamn junkie.”
“I don’t think that’s technically true. I think a syringe needs to be involved.”
“Is this really what we’re going to argue about?”
“I’m just saying he’s not a junkie.”
“Whatever he is, there’s nothing more we can do except step away.”
Maybe Andrew was right, but he sounded so cold and dismissive, relieved even, washing his hands before they were dirty enough. But they had tried, tried hard and for so long. There were Phoenix House and Hazelden, there were the interventions, the experts, but Richard never budged from his desire and denied them even the chance to be proper enablers. Isabel would ask, “What did we do to you?” mostly to herself, even when Richard was drug-free and thriving in California, but the mystery of his descent and her possible role remained this other person shamefully locked within her, and she would imagine pushing that woman aside and kicking in doors and grabbing her son and dragging him to safety, flying him to an island, nursing him back to health. Richard once told her, “You did the right thing, letting me hit bottom like that,” but she didn’t believe him. That’s not quite true. She didn’t believe herself.
“You need to talk to him,” Richard said.
“Yeah, maybe it will do him some good,” Jamie said.
“Confirm that he’s gone off the deep end,” Richard said.
“We’re just trying to figure out what we should do next,” Jamie said.
In the backyard Roger tossed the ball one last time, then turned and waved at her, the dogs coming up behind, Glass with the ball, Steagall pushing for the inside track. Isabel wondered how she looked framed in that kitchen window.
“It’s starting to rain,” Roger told her, once she was inside.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Really? Where?” He noticed the phone. “Oh, sorry.”
“I’ll come into the city tomorrow, in the morning,” she said.
Roger went to the fridge and poured himself a glass of water, every movement slow and deliberate, like he followed a secret scoring system. The boys soon hung up, but Isabel remained on the line, even uttered a few listening noises. Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Roger gave her a pat. They had been together for two years and had no plans of getting married, but then he needed a triple bypass and Mr. & Mrs. Platt seemed easier. That was three years ago. Roger washed his hands, dried them through his hair, which was always perfectly composed. “Maybe we could have lunch as well,” Isabel said to the dial tone. Why was she continuing with this pretense? She gripped the phone harder. A clone? How could he bring back up all of this heartbreak, and rewritten as science fiction, no less? Nearby Roger thumbed through the already thumbed-through newspaper, as if the headlines might change. At movies he ate popcorn one kernel at a time. He considered himself a passionate gardener when in fact he enjoyed bossing the real gardener around. “Melon’s?” Isabel said. “That sounds great. I haven’t been there in a long time.” Roger grabbed two plates though what they really needed were bowls. “Okay, yeah, bye.” What are you doing, you madwoman? It was as if A. N. Dyer were back in her head. “Love you too.” Finally she hung up. Roger asked the inevitable question, and the truth was no big deal, or most of the truth, the going-into-the-city-to-see-her-sons part, but Isabel wondered if this might splinter into her first betrayal, if the buzzing in her head would infect the rest of her, because Roger didn’t deserve this sort of brutal scrutiny, even as he went to the fridge and started the almost painful process of hard-boiling an egg.
Had she imagined the light turning …
Past Chappaqua, past Valhalla, Tuckahoe, Bronxville, Fleetwood, the train growing more crowded the closer Grand Central came and now a young black woman sat beside Isabel, two shopping bags crowding her feet, either recent purchases or soon-to-be returns. Isabel spotted a toaster oven. Before she could prove herself nosy she went back to “The Beauty Abishag.” The title seemed familiar to Isabel, though her thoughts tripped from beauty to the hard edge of old age and how she was quite proud of her untouched face, a true face, she thought, her friends blaming her luck on genetics, having never seen her mother’s post-op smile. The young black woman was full of argument on her phone. “You Tell Keesha I Do Not Appreciate Her Efforts On My Behalf As I Can Take Care Of Myself Especially In Circumstances Regarding Ronnie And His Love Life With Or Without Me Thank You Very Much.” Isabel wished she didn’t notice the voice, didn’t hear the stereotype that was tinged with almost unavoidable racism. Maybe this girl was a lawyer. But probably not. From the window towns gave way to more concrete, the city glimpsed in the curve of the track, like a feudal past rising. “But Now You Are Making Just About As Much Sense As Keesha Who As I Have Said Has No Fucking Sense.” Isabel turned to the photo of Alice Munro on the back flap. How old was she now? Roughly her age? They sported the same short haircut, though Alice had more of a shag while Isabel edged closer to pixie, a style she denied herself when she was younger, thinking it might be too mannish on her build. But she liked it. Anything to avoid the matron class. Perhaps that was why these new Alice Munro stories were more violent and lurid, like Hitchcock pushing Chekhov down the stairs. When she saw the book at Barnidge & McEnroe, Isabel muttered, Christ, another Alice Munro collection I should probably read, but these stories had nothing to do with dust and everything to do with blood. Browsing the bookstore Isabel drifted past the D’s—DeLillo, Dickens, Dreiser—and noticed the snazzy edition of Andrew’s books, a strange red slash on every spine. She tipped down Ampersand. For the new cover they used an early Diane Arbus photograph of a young man in a plaid overcoat, perhaps in Grand Central, and while the image was striking and it seemed a nice marriage of artist, writer, and era, she wondered why they would ever change the original with its Rothkoesque door. She opened the book to the dedication page:
In photographs Andrew was a dead ringer for his dad. They had the same dark eyes, repentant yet powerless to change, the smile, or lack of smile, a matter of contention. Isabel’s mother called Andrew “the WASP,” as in What A Smug Prick, though sometimes she amended it to What A Spectacular Prince, depending on her mood. At their wedding she gave a toast that began Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, figuring if you had to give a speech you might as well make it a great speech. Isabel’s father cried, but he was a Lincoln buff. What a disaster the whole thing was. Her brothers left a trail of broken bridesmaids, and Charlie Topping, oh so soused, sang them a song, tottering forward and gripping the microphone like it was the only piece of balance in the entire Waldorf, a couple of whoops from old classmates, hardly in support but in praise of humiliation, as Charlie sweated, positively defrosted back to his adolescence, his voice breaking against his choirboy training. If I ruled the night, stars and moon so bright, still I’d turn for light to you.… Thirty seconds in and people had to look away. Andrew dedicated Tiro’s Corruption to him.
For Charles Henry Topping
Amicus est tanquam alter idem.
—CICERO
Isabel turned Ampersand over. Despite everything, she was glad her photograph remained, right there on the upper left corner, no longer the entire back cover but the size of a postage stamp: Andrew posing in the middle of Sheep Meadow in Central Park.
“Now try smiling,” Isabel remembered telling him.
“This is smiling.”
“Very funny. Move your chin up a little.”
“I don’t want to come across as a buffoon.”
“By smiling?”
“I want to look serious. A serious author.”
Isabel lowered the camera. “Maybe you should get a professional to do this.”
“No, I want you to do this. Plus you’ll get paid.”
“Keep it in the family, huh.”
“The WASP thing to do, as your mother might say.”
“What A Stingy Peter. Make your mouth less stern.”
“Peter?”
“I couldn’t come up with a good P word. Just smile.”
“Pantywaist, Prig, Pissant.”
“Please.”
“Not even close,” he said.
“Pretty please.”
“This is what you get, Writer AS Peevish.”
“Want A Sucked Penis?”
The shutter clicked, and Isabel had her picture, dissected by readers for the next half century, nobody ever guessing what had just passed through those ears. Andrew dedicated three books to her, starting with his second, Pink Eye:
For Isabel
The girl in the ocean
And then his sixth, The Bend of Light:
Isabel
Where the Meanings are—
And finally his eighth, Eastern Time:
I.D.
My only clock
By then she had accepted his faults, understood where his weaknesses lay, focused on the flow rather than the specific debris that came to the surface, and if she was often unsatisfied, sometimes downright depressed, she did this for the sake of the backward view, of seeing her younger self all those years married to the same man.
The train tunneled for the final stretch into Grand Central. Cellphones lost their hold and a dozen conversations ended in B-movie dialogue—“Are you there?” “Can you hear me?” “Hello, hello, hello?” Passengers collected themselves around the newfound dark. Isabel closed her book. Suddenly she was interested in the world outside, which was black except for the reflection of her face. Her mother once told her she was too handsome to be beautiful. “But I’m not worried,” she added. “You’ve got a sharpness that will outlast the beauties in your grade. Trust me, doll, nobody cares how you slayed them at fourteen.” It took almost twenty years for this slight to redshift into a compliment, for Isabel to stare into the distancing past and see her mother’s drawn eyebrows as anything but desperate.
When did my life become a series of failed men? This thought came to her without specific ownership, and not terribly true, either, since she was more than her collective male parts, having done extensive volunteer work for various nonprofits and charities and sat on a handful of boards, including the ICP, and for close to fifteen years in her forties and fifties pulled down a mostly symbolic salary in the planning and development office of the NRDC. If this didn’t add up to a career, it was good enough for Isabel and allowed her time to read and go to the movies—true passions—and to take long walks, whether in the city or in the woods, and let her mind wander its corners. The train doors opened and from platform into station toward the subway Isabel moved with the precision of a former urban athlete, eyes gauging the best path, chin balanced between no-nonsense and courteous, as though somewhere in the bowels of Manhattan a stopwatch ticked and a voice whispered “faster,” and she continued to turn this thought in her head about men, her men, fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, how they all disappointed her even if she loved them with all her heart and suffered a deeper version of their own failure, right down to the roots of her teeth. The sleeplessness from last night came back into view. How would Andrew look? She hoped clean and well fed. But she had fears of long yellow fingernails. Thin white hair. Eyes so shrunken a blink might tear the skin. Later during that night he had transformed into a creature feeding on scraps of the past, reaching for her hand, famished. Toward dawn he became the last time she saw him seventeen years ago.
“I have a room at the Wales,” he said, peeking in from the hall.
“Just until I find a rental,” she answered from the living room couch.
“I should be the one moving out.”
“I have no desire to stay here,” she said. “In your mother’s crypt.”
“I didn’t think this would happen.”
“Really?”
“I’ve already told you how sorry I am.”
“Yes you have.”
“Ten thousand times sorry. I did a stupid thing. I made a terrible mistake. But it was just once, Isabel, after all these years just once. A single moment of weakness repeated only a few times. Just once.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“It must matter a little.”
“Your single moment of weakness wears diapers.”
“I know, I know.”
“And I’m not going to raise this child, not going to be reminded of it every day. I’ve put up with a lot but I won’t put up with that.”
“What can I do?”
“The gossip is already thick.”
“I know.”
“In the newspapers of all things. With pictures too.”
“I have no idea why they care. There must be something I can do, something that’ll bring you back to me, something I can say.”
“And I’m left playing the fool,” she said. “There goes Isabel Dyer, the fool.”
“I don’t think that’s what people are saying.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“If anything they’re talking about me. I’m the fool, the old fool.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said again.
“I should have known better, me in particular. I got caught in the trap of youth, the desire for change without thinking about what’s being changed. And now this absurd trope is a father again, ill-equipped, that’s for sure. But”—and he tried to smile here—“the boy has a nice face. He’s rather sweet and quiet, hardly cries, just stares and takes things in. For some reason I see you in his face. You have been nothing but an angel, Isabel Isles. I always loved your name, like a paradise somewhere between the Marshalls and the Gilberts, out in the tranquil Pacific. A shame to have ever mucked it up with Dyer.”
Listening to this, Isabel wondered if actual sentiment was involved or if this was another extension of his fiction, something she would read a few years later and cringe, knowing what was real and guessing what was possible and being unnerved by the rest. She hoped he would remember that his zipper was down (though that memory broke her heart a little). But was she so blameless in this sense, feet propped on the couch, reading a fashion magazine? She played brittle cool to perfection, hardly a wet eye in the house. The injured wife of a writer. The hidden neurotic rage. Talk about cliché. And while she hoped this masked her sadness—and she was sad and hurt and humiliated and scared—beneath those core emotions present since childhood was an unexpected reaction: she was free to escape with her good manners intact, the wounded instead of the wielder of the axe.
“You should go,” she said.
His last words to her: “You look lovely on that sofa.”
Isabel surfaced from the subway at 68th and Lexington. She still had plenty of friends in the city and visited almost once a week, Roger and her going to dinner with other couples, the movies, the theater, spending the night at the Cosmopolitan Club. There was nothing wistful about crossing Park, crossing Madison. The number of strollers and limousines was always a surprise. And the construction. The city seemed to be pushing up a new set of teeth. The sly, enigmatic grin of New York with its cross section of stylishness, its promise of every stranger being something special, something unexpected, their passing light tempting your shadow, now simply mumbled math. Isabel realized she was being a crank—Manhattan from the beginning had been about money—but it seemed less fun nowadays, less sexy. Isabel had a peculiar relationship with money anyway. Her father was on the Havemeyer tree but on a far less leafy branch, and he boomed but mostly busted throughout her childhood before hitting on the Acorn Press in the late fifties and publishing the I Can Draw That series, the Skedaddle books, the ever-popular Conrad Janus Mysteries, after which he divorced her mother and became spiteful of every cent, to the point where he actively ran the business into the ground. But it was during one of those early lean periods that Isabel was shipped to Southampton for July to stay with her cousin Polly. Isabel was fourteen.
“Fifteen in October,” she told the boy swimming with her in the ocean. Polly was already back on the beach, complaining about the water being too cold, and the waves too choppy, and really they should go up soon and have lunch at the Little Place because she was starving and she had tennis at two-thirty and she needed her stomach to settle before running after a stupid ball all because her father was the constant runner-up to the ten-time club champ. Two days in and Isabel was already sick of Polly. “How old are you?” she asked the boy, glad for the new company.
“Seven-um, seventeen,” he said.
“Oh.” An older boy. He seemed younger except for the acne, which was well established, like a drought in its third year. She tried to glimpse his armpits for evidence of full-born puberty and perhaps as revenge against the obviousness of her breasts, which were small yet persistent in that sixty-five-degree water. But the boy was not a confident swimmer and Isabel felt bad for even looking.
“Can you, um, ah, touch?” he asked.
“Barely.”
“Yeah, me neither, but you’re a good-um, you’re a good swim-swimmer.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m obviously not,” he said.
“Well you’re not sinking.”
“Give me time. Trying to get used to-ah, to-ah rough water.”
“It’s not that rough.” Isabel regretted the possible jab.
“Hence the trying-to-get-used-to part,” he said.
She smiled and he smiled in return.
“Crazy thing is, I come from-ah, a family of fish,” he said.
“Me too. But my mother’s a shark.”
They both floated in a congenial radius, half on tiptoes, facing the beach and the club in the distance with its brick terrace and gathering lunch crowd. Polly, arms crossed, posed for a statue called Impatience, annoyed yet incapable of leaving Isabel alone. She would make a fabulous stepmother someday.
“I should go,” Isabel said to the boy.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Where-ah, um, where you going?” he asked.
“Lunch with my cousin.”
“Polly Lash is your cousin?”
“Yep. Cut me and she bleeds.” Isabel had no idea what this meant, but the boy again smiled and she thought he seemed nice, a safe introduction to the world of seventeen-year-old boys and what they might think of a fourteen-year-old girl with big feet. For the sake of curiosity and the two cats warring within her stomach, she asked if he wanted to join them.
“For lunch?”
“Only if you want.”
“Um, okay.”
Isabel thought of asking his name, but at this stage it seemed weirdly intimate, plus the moment had passed, and wasn’t it the boy’s job anyway? Instead she rode a small wave in, arms pressed back, shoulders arched, chin cutting through the foam.
Isabel missed swimming in the ocean.
At 2 East 70th Street the day-shift doorman recognized her—“That you, Mrs. Dyer?”—and with a certain amount of pride Isabel remembered his name—“Hello, Felix”—and chatted about family, his four children now all grown, the older two with children themselves, though time unarticulated was the truer subject, Felix following the doorman code and refraining from asking personal questions, but seeing Mrs. Dyer of the sixth floor gave him a passing awareness of the gap between when he was young and when she was old and how it had narrowed to a crack. In the elevator Isabel counted the floors like beads on the rosary—please God don’t let him be pitiful; deranged; irredeemably senile; muttering some nonsense; incontinent—until the sixth floor lit up and she found herself asking, Why am I even here?
Polly Lash had heard the same question years ago. “Why what?”
“Nothing,” Isabel said with a weary shake of her head.
They were sitting at a table while the boy waited inside for his bacon burger. The Little Place crowd was nearing its peak though most of the adults were heading toward the Big Place with its finer selection of roast turkey and shrimp scampi and other dinner-like meals designed as an excuse for dinner-like drinks.
“Lunch with Charlie Topping of all people,” Polly went on again.
“He seems nice,” Isabel said.
“He’s a lemon. Now his brothers—”
“Just because of his pimples? Have you looked at your forehead lately?”
“That’s a sun rash.”
“Well you have sun rash on your back as well.”
“Are you his ah, um, ah, girl-um-friend, aah, all of a sudden?”
“That’s just mean,” Isabel said.
“All the older boys around here and you pick Charlie Lump.”
“What do you call those blackheads on your nose, a moon rash?”
Polly’s eyes sprouted fangs. “Why don’t you go back home, oh yeah, you can’t.”
Isabel went quiet.
“I didn’t ask you here,” Polly said. “It’s not my fault that your parents are in a state.”
That was the winning blow. Even worse, Isabel wanted to ask Polly what kind of state she meant since the exact nature of her parents’ situation was a mystery, like a magic trick without the magic, but things were definitely disappearing, starting with her brothers, who were spending the summer with relatives on a farm in Washington State. The dog was gone too. Even pieces of the furniture, that small painting by Greuze, were missing. But then Charlie Topping showed up with his bacon burger and a plate of extra bacon, and before sitting down he said an uncertain hello to Polly just in case she had overturned her cousin’s earlier ruling on lunch.
“Hello, Charlie.” Polly relented.
Charlie sat down. “I’m Charlie-um, Charlie Topping,” he said to Isabel.
“Yeah, I know. I’m Isabel Isles.”
Charlie got up again for the introduction, his knees knocking into the table.
“Christ,” Polly said.
“Sorry.”
“Just do us a favor and sit back down slowly.”
The three of them started to eat, glad for the excuse to avoid conversation. Every once in a while Charlie flicked a french fry to one of the sportier seagulls that scrounged the perimeter for food.
“Must you feed the flying rats?” Polly said.
“Gulls are useful birds and he’s-um, he’s caught three in a row.”
“Wow, what a bird.”
“The record is eleven.”
“Boys and their games.”
Charlie returned to his lunch. Isabel found something heartbreaking about the two dessert plates on his tray, the blueberry pie and the éclair, like this was where he grabbed his daily parcel of joy. Between that and his hair, which as it dried rose up like some earsplitting mushroom cloud, she wasn’t sure if she could watch this boy finish his meal.
“Where do you go to school, Isabel?” he asked.
“Brearley,” she said.
“Like in the, um, like in the city?”
“No,” Polly jumped in, “the Brearley in North Dakota.”
“Yeah, dumb question,” Charlie said. “And you’re here for the, for the summer?”
“Just for July, I think.”
“Yes, just July,” Polly confirmed.
“I’m leaving in a week for England,” Charlie informed the two girls, “London, the Lake District, kind of a tour with my-aah, my-aah, um, grandfather.” Charlie picked another french fry and chucked it extra hard and just out of reach for the seagull.
Polly almost laughed. “Summer with um Grandfather. What a treat.”
“He’s a bit of a, of a, a Renaissance man, unlike my dad. I tried camp”—Charlie made a face—“and sports, well, I only like sports that are, um, barely even sports. If we were at a carnival, I could win a dozen, a dozen of those giant stuffed animals, I’ve done it before, the stupider the game the better I am.”
“Yeah?” Isabel asked.
Charlie nodded, and then reconsidered. “Still can’t swim worth a damn though.”
“Fascinating conversation, you two,” Polly said, her eyes picking up a bigger stick. “You know I just realized something: if you two got married, let’s just say, that would make me related to you, Charlie. Imagine that. I mean we’ve known each other for so long. So many laughs together. Like remember the time you had that accident in the pool. An obvious kind of accident. Feels long ago but really wasn’t. They had to drain the whole pool. No swimming for two days. And Isabel, your parents would have to pay for the wedding. Eek. That might be difficult. Don’t worry, I’m sure something can be worked out. Maybe everyone could share a really substantial sandwich. Either way we should honor this moment, this spot right here where Charlie Topping and Isabel Isles first met and—”
That’s when food went flying, two hot dogs with mustard and ketchup, an order of fries, grape juice, chocolate cake, the majority of which crash-landed on Polly’s chest and lap. There was a moment of silence as all immediate oxygen rushed into Polly’s gasping mouth, her lungs a kiln stoked by the tables around her, the heads tilting and straining, everybody feeding the silence until the silence was fashioned into something easily broken: Polly Lash, mortified.
In retrospect, poor Polly. Her life was far from easy.
Isabel stood in front of her old apartment door, its fire-code steel painted to resemble wood. Twenty years ago when the painter had done the faux finish—graining, he called it—she had watched him and thought she might enjoy this as one of those hobbies that could double as a casual occupation—a faux finisher—and she went so far as to try to marbleize the downstairs bathroom in Southampton, a look Andrew dubbed Cartoon Carrara. Isabel waited a second before ringing, like an actor between “To be” and everything else.
She could still clearly see that other boy in grass-stained whites, hands holding his now-empty tray as he presented his defense to Polly, that he had tripped, it was an accident, sorry, sorry, sorry, but Polly detected nothing but ugly intent in his apology, that he had done it on purpose. Charlie, ever helpful, tried handing her his napkin but Polly knocked it away in favor of yelling at the offending boy. “You really are a snake in the grass!” She stood up. Her beach dress was flavored with condiment, french fries tumbling to the ground, as well as a hot dog that rolled free of its bun and was quickly snatched up by the seagull. For a moment Polly, arms spread, was a canvas hung for all to see, but then she curled into herself and rushed away, turning back near the steps and beckoning for relative support. But Isabel didn’t see her, or she chose not to see her, which was an unfortunate skill she had. Rather, Isabel remained at the table with Charlie and this other curious boy, who plopped down in Polly’s seat and jammed a loose chunk of cake into his mouth, mostly to keep a safe distance from smiling. Who was he? The boy wiped his lips. His attention moved from sheepish Charlie and settled on Isabel with what seemed a purity of purpose, like whatever he had done, he had done for her. “So,” he said through a mouthful of chocolate cake.
After a few more rings Isabel heard movement behind the door.