“You’ve enervated yourself; you need B vitamins, calcium, and magnesium.” My mother hands me a glass of celery juice. “Celery juice feeds the nervous system.”
Summer’s over. I don’t want to be here, back in our Plandome kitchen with its dark wood paneling and cold, dark brown, penny-tile floor, in our house of too many rooms with too many walls between me and the outside, surrounded by large, silent estates and endless, winding tree-lined streets. I want to be back walking the streets of tiny, knowable Point Lookout, with the sun overhead and the ocean over my shoulder, where anything can happen.
“Your nerves are shot. You overextended yourself this summer. You’re feeling the effects.” I can hear the scold in her tone, the message that I was reckless in my choice to unspool myself in the pure joy of summer, to let abandonment and feeling overtake the priority of feeding my nervous system.
I sip the celery juice. It’s dark green. I’m guessing my mother chose these stalks purposely; the darker the green, the more minerals.
“Drink it slowly. Digest it in your mouth first.” She hands me three calcium-magnesium tablets with another message: now it’s time to reel myself back. I swallow the tablets, waiting for the feeling of loss to lift.
* * *
It’s my sophomore year at Dalton and Greg is a freshman.
“Have you seen The Exorcist?” our classmates ask, when they see our blended salads.
In the recently released horror movie, blended salad–like vomit is sprayed on the walls. Though we hide in the hallway by our lockers to drink the blended salads—soured, despite the tinfoil my mother wraps them in, from their morning sitting in our lockers—and celery juice, it’s impossible to avoid detection in the small school. Greg is easy in his body and funny; he and his best friend, Andrew Zimmern, who will go on to write and host a Travel Channel program called Bizarre Foods, draw small crowds in the hallway as they riff off each other in impromptu stand-up. But, despite having friends, I’m still feeling awkward and shy, and the stigma of our weird diet feels less easy for me to shake off.
I like classmate David Cremin, but when he passes a note in math asking if I want to go to a movie on Friday, I am flooded with the familiar hot embarrassment I felt at camp when counselor Randy visited me to say good night. I stuff the note inside my backpack and am first out the door when the bell rings. I avoid him at lunch and for the next few days until I feel sure he got the message. But what’s the message? Can I like someone who likes me? Maybe, now that our lives are about deprivation, I only know how to want what I can’t have.
* * *
“It’s blond. Hardly noticeable,” my mother says. I’ve asked her for a razor.
It’s summer again. We are standing in our Point Lookout kitchen, looking at my lower legs, which are covered in hair that has seemed to appear overnight. I want her to be right, but as I look this way and that, the light hits an amount of hair that, blond or not, no other girl I know allows on her legs.
“It’s noticeable enough,” I say.
“It’s lovely,” my mother says. “Once you shave it, it will grow in dark.” Her voice drops in warning: “You can never go back to blond.”
This sounds dire; I don’t want dark hair on my legs. I also don’t want hair on my legs, period.
“Sexuality is our basest drive,” my mother says. I’ve also mentioned I want to pluck my eyebrows. I will turn sixteen in July. “If you pluck them, the hairs just grow in thicker. Look at my eyebrows. Ruined. The girl at the end of the road sat me down in a chair and promised she’d make them beautiful.” She shows me the long, wiry strands that came from that day, tells me about the girls growing up around her on other farms in Illinois. “They were bored. Girls who dress sexy and go looking for that kind of thing aren’t using their minds.”
The good news is that I put myself on an eight-day juice fast when we first got to Point Lookout, and it worked. I didn’t mind being hungry. I fed off the high of knowing I’d see Gilly again. Each morning I woke up, walked upstairs to stand in front of my parents’ mirror to find more and more of my winter chub seemingly rinsing away. My thighs are streamlined again.
“You can wax your legs,” my mother says brightly. I have never heard of waxing. I’m certain no one I know has ever heard of it either. “Waxing pulls the hair up at the roots. It preserves the blond.”
That afternoon in my bedroom, Francesca does a double take at my legs.
“I’m going to wax them,” I say quickly.
“What’s that?”
“It pulls the hair up at the roots so the hair grows back blond.” I suddenly want waxing to sound like the cooler method of hair removal. “With shaving it grows back dark.”
“Oh.” Francesca sounds completely unconcerned that she has crossed an irrevocable line into battling dark hair growth.
The problem with waxing, I will find out, is the fact that in between appointments, in order for the waxing to work, I have to allow all my leg hair to grow back, which means for half the month, for a once-a-month appointment, I walk around with hairy legs. I don’t get to fit in with what everyone else is doing, which somehow feels like exactly what my mother was after in the first place.
Francesca sets down the tape recorder and punches rewind. The tape slides in a high-pitched whine. She punches stop then start. Karen Carpenter’s chocolaty silky voice begins crooning:
Why do birds suddenly appear
every time, you are ne-ee-ear?
We both chime in. We’re making an audition tape of ourselves singing “Close to You” by the Carpenters and “This Guy’s in Love with You” by Burt Bacharach to give to my father. It’s Francesca’s idea.
“Once he hears how good we are, he’ll put us in movies.”
I have the sense that if he were going to put us in a movie, he would have done so already, but I hold my fist like a microphone and pretend Gilly’s standing right in front of me and I’m singing only to him.
* * *
I open the jar. Crouch down on the other side of the low brick wall that follows the sidewalk toward Point Lookout’s beach then stops at the dead end. The late-morning July sun warms the brick. If I stand, I can see our beach house kitchen window, and through it, my mother at the sink. I crouch lower, then dip my finger into the oily marinade. This is the one thing I crave above all else. I have given in to it this morning, purchasing this jar at the deli on an errand with Francesca. One jar costs less than two dollars, so I don’t feel guilty taking change from the basket on the table. Hot cherry peppers. I slide a pepper slice onto my tongue. And another. In my mouth, the papery skin peels from the soft flesh of the orange and green and red slices. Pepper by pepper, I eat slowly to the bottom then drink the juice, the pulpy, meaty, vinegary droplets inside the oily preserve. I turn the jar upside down and shake every last bit of salty liquid, then I wipe the glass inside clean with my finger.
* * *
It’s the first week of July 1976. The Tall Ships have sailed to celebrate the bicentennial, and my father is upstairs on the phone.
In the small house we can hear everything. His voice is loud, high-pitched, urgent; almost, but not quite, the decibel he reaches when he rages. But today his focus is not on us. The air feels electric, as it always does for me around anything to do with his movies. From the couch in our living room I hear him say he knows exactly who to get to write a damn good script in two days. He’ll write it himself if he has to. We’re not entering this to produce schlock, his voice rings through the house.
He is racing against all other competing productions to make Raid on Entebbe, a made-for-television movie that dramatizes Israel’s daring rescue of hostages held by Idi Amin Dada in Uganda, which happened last week. It’s the first time one of his productions has this much urgency; there is no way to secure rights, so many companies are racing to be the first to produce a story of the saga.
* * *
Outside our upstairs picture window, I do a double take. Gilly is walking Freddie along the boardwalk just past our sand lot. He lives on the other side of town. I have never seen him over on this part of the beach. I watch him make his way down the path. After I lose sight of him behind the big sand dune, Braddy comes upstairs and flops down on the daybed tucked under the picture window, which takes up most of the wall.
“Gilly Callaghan gave me a message to give to you.”
“What????”
“Gilly Callaghan gave me a message.”
“How does he even know we’re related?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Tell your sister to come out tonight.’”
Oh. My. God.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“What else did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“Did he say where he’d be?”
“No.”
“What else did you say?”
“I told you. I didn’t say anything.”
He stands. He’s had enough of my grilling, especially when he’s doing me a favor. He sidesteps around me and jumps onto the first linoleum step leading downstairs. Thump. Then he jumps to the next. And the next. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. When he hits the first floor, he runs off.
Outside the window, the beach and boardwalk are deserted. Tell your sister to come out tonight. Why would he take the time to pass that message to my brother? Why would he walk Freddie on our side of town, so obviously out of his way? There can be only one explanation. He likes me. Gilly Callaghan likes me.
“He didn’t say where he’d meet you?” I have run next door to tell Francesca what just happened. Francesca, bless her heart, is making it sound like a date. “How are we supposed to find him?” We. We’re in this together. I am not alone.
* * *
I have been allowed out after dinner. My curfew is 9:30 P.M. Francesca and I cross the sand, our well-worn walk in the daytime, but after dark the gate to the beach is otherworldly, the bathrooms locked, the rows of shining bike racks empty. The night air, wet and thick and lit dark yellow from the streetlamp above our heads, presses down. My hair is curling, starting to drip moisture at the tips. My sneakers crunch, sand on cement. I can make out figures on bikes by the wall. I look for the tilt of a head, the stooped shoulders, the slight knock-knees.
For an instant, anything is possible.
But these are younger boys. Their voices, in conversation, jab out into the soupy cadmium night, then retreat. Then they re-grip their handlebars, pull their bikes upright under them, step onto their pedals, and push off, swooping single file like swallows through the main gate.
Across the sand, I hear voices in the pavilion by the bathrooms.
We head over.
Away from the corral of lamplight, the sky extends to every horizon, a vast black suspended tent.
As we climb the pavilion steps, I feel the drama in the black waves crashing onto the beach only a few yards away. The dome of sky overhead is our theater, the raised cement a stage, our audience light-years away and silent pinpricks of light, but interested nevertheless.
But there are only three friends in cutoff jeans and striped T-shirts skateboarding up and down the stairs. Whatever we are looking for, this isn’t it.
Off the beach, street corners are lit under streetlights. Mid-block, the weed-cracked narrow sidewalks and wide, carless streets sit deep in shadow. Passing into the light, I feel obvious. Don’t we have better things to do? Left to my own devices, I spend day and night with my horse books, reading about Pony Penning Day and wild horses swimming over razor-sharp shoals from the wrecks of Spanish galleons. Now I am trawling the streets, both fisherman and bait.
Two blocks ahead, in the spill of streetlight, we see a small gathering. Gilly and Pat on Steven Viola’s corner. We can turn around still and not be seen; one more block and it will be too late. We hit the corner before Steven’s. If we turn around now, it will look like we saw them, like we turned around because of them.
“Cross the street,” Francesca says, panicking at the last minute. I’m already crossing.
We pass the corner across the wide expanse of Beech Street. I feel like there’s a spotlight on us. I stare straight ahead, hot with embarrassment.
Francesca is looking out of the corner of her eye. “There’s Gilly. There’s Pat.”
I can’t believe we’re doing this.
“What are you girls doing?” Pat calls across the street.
“Heading home,” Francesca calls back, dimpling.
“Have a good night, then!”
Once we’re far enough away, Francesca grabs my arm.
“Have a good night! Pat O’Keefe said have a good night! Can you believe it? He likes us. He definitely likes us.”
* * *
The house is dark when I enter. It feels strange to be the only one awake.
I pass the small couch, pad over the living room rug, taken from my grandmother’s farm, round and cozy and farmhouse old-fashioned. Hanging on the walls, gathering dust, are cotton nets, dyed blue, evidence of an attempt, long-neglected now, at nautical design. Some of the tacks have come loose and the nets have been left to droop where they’ve fallen. In places where the tacks still hold, thin blown-glass balls the size of volleyballs protrude from the thread latticework, fishing floats from the old days, my mother once explained, before Styrofoam. In the midst of nets and floats, a five-foot-long taxidermy barracuda holds center stage over the upright piano. We all know the story. How my mother, who grew up landlocked in her father’s alfalfa fields and is terrified of the ocean, who still shudders at the feel of seawater on her shoulders, her neck, her face, somehow reeled in this fish on their honeymoon. I try never to look at it. The cheap shine of its shellacked silver scales, the black spots and forced arch of its body as if still in the mid-sweep of a graceful underwater turn, the stare of its glassy yellow eye, have always seemed to me to be the preservation of a mistake. The mistake of this fish arching across our wall when it belongs in the sea. The mistake of my mother in a fishing boat, the last place I know she would ever want to be, the hot sun beating down, my father’s slowly stiffening day’s catch dying at her feet. The mistake, though I will not formulate this thought until many years later: this trophy as symbol of their future life together, clearly foretold.
* * *
Gilly is in the pavilion. I see him before we are even across the sand. Pat O’Keefe is with him, plus Robert Manning and Marty, smaller Beech Street Gang players.
In the past week, we have seen Gilly here and there. Three days before, he rode up behind us on his bike—“Who are you? Oh, I know who you are”—then continued on. Now we climb the pavilion steps, where Gilly sits off a bit from the others, his face tilted up, toward the sky. The sun has just set; the sky is still white. “What are you looking at?” I ask, my heart pounding so hard, I wonder if he can see it.
“The star,” he says.
Only four stars are out, but one shines down, the brightest of all of them. I don’t tell him that ten minutes before, leaving my house, I had wished, star light, star bright, on this same star, as I do every night. Please let Gilly Callaghan love me.
But I do say, “That’s my star.”
He looks at me now. “No, it’s not. It’s mine.”
“I saw it first,” I say.
His eyes are transparent. “I’ll give it to you,” he says.
Nearby, talking to Francesca, Pat laughs at something, throwing his head back.
Gilly looks over at Pat, then back at me. He smiles, then looks down at his knees. His hair falls across his face.
“I gotta go,” he says suddenly. He stands and brushes off the back of his jeans with the palms of his hands. “Hey, O’Keefe?” Pat nods at Gilly as Gilly heads down the pavilion steps. I watch him walking away on the beach.
“Gilly has to get some things straight in his head,” Pat says, as if apologizing.
Francesca pulls me aside. “Pat says Robert Manning likes you. He thinks you have a great body.”
“Are you sure he meant me?”
“Yes. He meant you.”
I feel my image of myself shift slightly, though I wonder what it is he likes.
“Pat told me about Gilly.”
My legs feel suddenly weak. “What about Gilly?”
“There’s this guy, Roddy, who Wren likes back home. She’s trying to decide between him and Gilly.”
“Who’s Wren?”
“Gilly’s girlfriend.”
Gilly has a girlfriend?
“They’ve known each other their whole lives. Everyone knows they’re more brother-sister than anything else.”
“Oh,” I say.
“But he likes you, too.”
“Gilly likes me?”
“Pat said that’s why he left. He’s trying to figure it out.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Pat said you have to ride it out. You can’t get too caught up in it. But Gilly is confused because of you. That’s good, right?”
* * *
My father and mother are in California. We have a babysitter, who is asleep when I get home at night. I’m beginning to lose the urgency I feel to be home at 9:30 P.M. sharp. Point Lookout teems with teenage life after dark, and Francesca and I are caught up in the swirl of it all.
Every night I look for Gilly. It’s been three days since he gave me a star. He is nowhere to be found.
In the cove, Stevie Sabelli—blond crew cut, white T-shirt, pale skin—and Peter Bekker, fringe Beech Street Gangers, share a six-pack of Budweiser with Francesca and me in the circle of black jetty rocks, then ride us through town on the handlebars of their Stingrays. My arms and legs feel heavy and warm; house lights and sidewalks and street corners swim past. I assuage my prickling of guilt by remembering my mother, at the beginning of the summer, telling my father that beer is healthier than soda. I tell myself that pot, which we tried two nights ago with Joe and Dean, members of the Bay Rat Gang who live on the bay side of town, comes from a plant.
I think I am rebelling, I write in my journal. Against Gilly.
Clearly, he can’t like me that much, or he’d be around.
When my parents return from California, my mother finds Milky Way and Snickers wrappers filling the bottom two drawers of Braddy’s dresser. He has emptied out his clothes to make room. There are at least a hundred. Maybe more.
“What’s been going on around here?” my father asks.
I don’t have an answer.
I am not allowed out of the house that night. Or the next. Or the night after that. They see something that I cannot. “I don’t like your attitude,” my father says.
“You girls pushed too hard,” my mother tells me when I am finally let out and a week goes by and I don’t see Gilly. “Boys like girls who play hard to get.”
* * *
At the bike racks, under the yellow streetlight, Gilly says he’s glad we’re having this talk; he wanted to before the summer was over. He says it’s hard to talk about his feelings for someone else to anyone else. He says I probably can’t really understand someone else’s feelings and that maybe one day he’ll understand. He says he loves Wren. He says he has felt so strongly toward her for so long that nothing could overpower that. He says he loves her and she loves him and they’re finally happy.
In my journal, I write, I’m so proud of myself. I didn’t feel anything for him tonight.
I don’t mention that for the first time in my life I have lost my appetite. I swallow warm spoonfuls of blended salad, chew my eleven almonds, but it’s all the same, before I eat, after I eat. The gnawing hunger, the brief fullness of a stomach heavy with liquid vegetables, the craving that quickly follows this false fullness, the body’s sharp message that it needs more than egg yolk and nuts, have redlined to a constant, heavy, unwavering ache.
“If you look at a beautiful lake, the feeling you get is inside you, not inside the lake. You don’t need anyone to make you feel a certain way. The ability to feel is inside you,” my mother says, trying to cheer me up. I clearly don’t have what it takes to be that enlightened.
A few afternoons later a skinny silver-and-black-striped alley cat follows me down our street, up our steps, and onto the porch. I open our front door and it walks boldly into the living room, trails after my ankles, into my bedroom.
“Its stomach is swollen. It’s malnourished,” my mother says.
It jumps into my open dresser drawer and turns around several times, like a dog.
“It’s so tired,” I say. “Look, it’s already asleep.”
“It must have fleas,” my mother says. “If you feed it, you won’t be able to get rid of it.”
In the morning, six wet newborn kittens squirm and scratch amid my now blood-and fluid-soaked T-shirts and shorts.
I think how maybe there’s something to this. How, out of everyone it could have followed home, out of everyone in the whole town, this cat chose me.
* * *
When the fog rolls in, the day turns monotone steel, shades of gray and blue. My parents have been arguing. This fight is more physical than most: things are being thrown, objects that sound like baseballs slam against the kitchen wall. I can hear feet scuffling, my mother’s voice, muffled, angry. Then her frightened, guttural animal moan.
I slip out of my bed and head for the kitchen. They are facing each other, close. My father seems to loom over my mother. His back is to me.
My mother sees me from over his shoulder. “Go on now, Christine,” Her voice is impatient, You’re going to make it worse tense.
Waiting in my room, it takes several moments for me to realize the house has gone completely silent.
I listen at my door.
Nothing.
I creep down the hall.
The kitchen is empty. I see a spatula on the floor. The seedy pulp of broken tomatoes bleeds and mixes with dripping, fist-size clumps of my father’s non-Program cottage cheese on the wall beside the fridge. An open cottage cheese carton lies in one corner of the room, the lid in another.
I stand, feeling for them more than listening. A moment ago all hell was breaking loose and now the house is utterly still. Where is my mother? I push open the kitchen side door and descend the three steps into the driveway and our yard. The yard, like the house, is dead silent.
“Mom?” I half whisper. My mother never goes outside. She spends morning, noon, and night in the kitchen. We always know where to find her.
No answer.
“Mom!” I call.
I tug on the garage door, but it is heavy. It lifts knee-high and I crawl under. Maybe this was a bad idea. The light has been broken all summer. I can see almost nothing. If she were in here, if she needed my help, how would I know? I’m afraid to call out. Afraid to announce my own presence in the darkness. I should look carefully, under the beach umbrellas, the stacked outdoor furniture cushions, but instead I duck under the door and back into daylight. The yard is as still as before. Suddenly I feel completely calm. I don’t feel surprised at all by the warm tranquility that has replaced my panic as I pull open the sliding door of our Volkswagen bus. The calm way I expect to see her feet, her legs and arms sprawled, lifeless, behind the driver and passenger seats, on the black rubber car mats. He has killed her. But the car is empty.
“Mooooom!” It feels purely practical now that I scream as loudly as I can.
I walk out into the middle of the street.
“Help!” I scream, standing completely still.
I feel like I’m looking down on myself, standing in my striped Danskin shorts and matching T-shirt, barefoot, my toes buried in the warm tar, my hair unbrushed and childishly tangled. I know this appears crazy, this choice I am making to stand here and scream at the top of my lungs, but inside I feel in complete control.
I want to do this. I want someone else to know.
“Please-help-me.”
A screen door bangs and I see Francesca’s mother step onto her porch and spot me. She takes quick steps down the stairs, crosses her driveway, the tiny sidewalk, and reaches me in the street. She puts her arm across my shoulders.
“I don’t know where my mother is,” I say.
“Go back inside, Christine.” Her voice is uncharacteristically gentle. “She’s probably on a walk. Sometimes mothers need to go off by themselves. Okay? Go inside.”
An hour later my mother opens the side door and steps into the kitchen, where I am standing at the sink.
My legs turn to water in relief. Her hair is frizzed from the fog. Her eyes are calm. She is barefoot, like a little girl. She is never without her clogs.
“I’m sorry if you were worried,” she says without looking at me.
Still barefoot, she picks up the carton of cottage cheese, retrieves the lid, and puts both into the garbage can. Takes a rag and begins wiping off the walls.
“Ask the boys if they’re ready for their celery juice.”
* * *
It’s the end of August, and Pat O’Keefe and I are standing knee-deep in the waves. Pat says he wants to see the kittens. He wants to try the blended salads everyone knows I drink.
Our living room is open and breezy. The late-afternoon sun slants through the open wood-framed windows. A thin layer of not-yet-swept-up sand feels gritty under my bare feet on the hardwood floor. Pat sits cross-legged on our comfortably worn couch, watching me with his Pat O’Keefe wide-toothed grin. I feel like a celebrity has dropped by.
I slice the peel from the lemon and skin the cucumber, cut the tomato in quarters, wash three leaves of romaine. Now, Pat has asked to be let in, to my house, to our diet—a blended salad, the emblem of all the ways my family isn’t normal. This feels too big, but I don’t know how to play hard to get. This is my house and I have nowhere else to go.
The vegetables have been in the refrigerator and, as I push everything down with a stalk of celery, the liquid salad blends to a cool, foamy light green.
Pat takes a sip.
“Hmmm,” he says. He takes another. “Not bad.”
His grin is wide, happy, his eyes still on me. I have the feeling that I always have with him, that he is seeing right to the heart of me, where no one else has bothered to look. The living room suddenly feels cozier, friendlier than usual.
“It’s like gazpacho,” Pat says. “Cold soup. Have you ever had that?”
He’s making the blended salad look good, and suddenly I want some. He hands me his glass. I take a sip. I can taste the sour of the lemon, the coolness of the cucumber, the sweetness of the tomato.
“Do you ever put spices in it?”
We’re not even allowed salt or pepper. “No…”
“It doesn’t need them really, does it?”
I consider the truth of this as he downs the rest of his glass.
My bedroom smells of milk and kitten urine. Dust particles float in the solitary beam of light from the doorway.
Inside the open drawer, the cat curls around her kittens. I reach into the moist warmth of silky, newly licked fur and slip my fingers under the biggest kitten. He’s black, the size of my fist. I put the kitten in Pat’s cupped hands. Its newly opened eyes are milky blue. We watch as it paws the air with claws so thin and clear, they look like curled hairs.
Francesca says Pat likes me. She can tell. He always wants to talk to me. We find out that Gilly left for college a few days ago. He didn’t even say good-bye.
“He’s changed,” Francesca says. “He’s not the Gilly we knew.”
* * *
Pat rides me to his house on the handlebars of his bike. I sit on his bed while he throws T-shirts and jeans, hats, socks, sneakers, into several duffel bags, packing for Fordham. I wait for Maria or Jeanine, Beech Street Girls, to show up, to do what I’m doing, to keep him company as he prepares for the next stage of his life. But no one else arrives.
“You’d better write,” Pat says. “Maybe next summer you can save your walks on the beach for me.”
My room feels darker and colder after Pat drops me off.
I write in my journal, I don’t want to get hurt again, but I think I’m falling in love.
I don’t know yet that there will be no next summer. At the end of the school year we will move to California. It will be almost three decades before I set foot, accompanied by my own son and daughter, in Point Lookout again.