Running a Pound
“Beer break?” Mat lifts the lid of the cooler. “You’ve been working hard all day, and it’s a hot one.”
I smile but shake my head. “It’s two, and a beer’ll make me so sleepy I won’t get anything else done today, but thanks.” I’m on the front porch, labeling the boxes of kitchenware I’ve filled for tomorrow’s Goodwill pickup. My doily head kerchief has become a sweat mop, wadded in my back pocket.
Mat’s relentless: “It’s five, East Coast time. C’mon, Jackie.” Mat has taken charge of the cooler, an ancient green metal Coleman from the pool equipment shed. He’s the only one who can lift it. “Okay, if you don’t want beer, there’s also a local pear cider I picked up. Oregon pears. Only six proof, pure fruity refreshment, excellent work fuel.”
Shane, who’s marking up some sheet music in the porch hammock, says, “Leave her alone, Mat. Not everyone has your tolerance.”
“You’re just jealous, Cuzzy Bro,” Mat says good-naturedly. To me: “’Cause I’m pure muscle.”
“I’ll take one of those ciders,” I say, figuring I’ll have a few polite sips before returning inside to work.
Mat sends Shane a triumphant look, cracks the cider open barehanded on the porch rail, and offers it to me.
I take a sip, then a long swallow. “That’s really good,” I say, surprised.
Mat toasts me with his beer and Shane laughs. “You’re a corrupting influence, Mat.”
“Who, me? I’m a force for pure good, Chook.”
“Then give me one of those.”
I’m laughing at the two of them, pressing the cold neck of the beer against my own damp neck and surveying the busy field. We all fixed up the Doughboy pool together yesterday during their break, scrubbing and cleaning it. I personally taped the rusty ladder. It’s an eyesore, but it’s a pool again.
Piper and her wife, April, and their friends who’ve come up from LA for a few days are in the water doing a synchronized swim routine to the Radiohead blaring from the speakers. Mat always drags them out on Sunday afternoons, transforming the bowl into a giant stereo.
Fiona and Kauri and some other kids someone brought are at the picnic table, working on the old Farrah Fawcett Glamour Center head I found in a closet. They’re striping Farrah’s hair green and purple with homemade dye—Jell-O powder and water made into paste.
Three bare-chested guys and a bikinied woman are playing a whooping game of Frisbee around the campfire circle. Another woman is sunbathing, facedown, lazily throwing a tennis ball for her yellow Lab.
Other visitors, farther off, are engaged in their own Sunday afternoon diversions. Sketching, reading. It’s like a picture in one of those Richard Scarry books I loved as a child: happy activity everywhere. With more skin.
That’s when I see him.
He’s walking up the center of the field, in a navy sweater vest and navy button-down and black pants, a suitcase in his hand. The sun glints off his light hair and beard. He’s squinting. Of course he forgot sunglasses. Does he own sunglasses?
I take in the scene through his eyes. The shirtless Frisbee players, the barebacked sunbathers, the raucous swimmers, the kids with their rainbow Farrah bust.
And me. Standing on the porch barefoot, in a short yellow sundress I found in the sauna changing room this morning. Drinking at two in the afternoon and laughing with two strange men.
“Who’s that, a traveling salesman?” Mat asks. “Census taker? Unnnndertaker?”
Shane turns to see who he’s talking about.
“No,” I say. “That’s Paul.”
“So you just forgot to mention that you’re managing some sort of...what? Commune here this summer? Boy, when I asked if you were running away with the Moonies, I had no idea how close I was to the truth.”
“Paul. It’s hardly a commune.”
We’re alone in the parlor after an awkward group dinner, the door and windows shut. It’s stuffy, but though everyone moved tactfully away from the house hours ago, I don’t want to take a chance on them hearing us.
Mat and Shane may look shaggy, but they showed better manners than me. They offered Paul a beer and a seat on the porch swing, asked about his flight, tried to make warm conversation. At dinner, everyone tried to include him, tried to keep the shop talk to a minimum. Compensating for my halting explanations and obvious shock, my fumbling hostess job.
Paul got the address from the school office; I’d given it to them so they could mail my lesson plan forms and fall class lists here. Instead he’d brought them personally, as a surprise. He took a red-eye with two hideous layovers. The cheapest possible flight, but a splurge on his teacher’s salary.
“Not a commune,” Paul says. “Compound, then. On your dead aunt’s property. Which you now own, if I understand what your friends were saying out there?”
“Yes.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
“Yes, of course. It all just happened. I didn’t plan it, Paul. Like I said. There’s an old analog studio down in the basement. It’s a big deal to some people.”
“And that’s who all of these people are, your houseguests. Musicians.”
“Not all of them. Some are friends of the musicians, and, I don’t know, sometimes people just show up.”
“Strays. So, not a compound. A pound.” He laughs bitterly.
“That’s not nice.”
“I know it isn’t. I’m sorry. And they’re making a record out of your uncle’s music.”
“Yes.” And mine.
Paul sighs and reaches down to scratch Toby’s chin. “Hey, buddy. Toby missed me, at least.” He’s trying to joke, to lighten things up, but it comes out childish. Paul is the most mature person I know. I hate seeing him like this, knowing it’s my fault.
“I’m sorry, Paul. I should have told you.” I squeeze his arm. “And I’m really glad you’re here.”
He pulls away and turns his back on me, touching the pattern of nudes on the stamped velvet wallpaper. “The house is quite something. It’s not what I pictured.”
“You pictured a small house. An old-lady house.”
“Yes.”
“And you pictured me alone.”
He nods and turns to face me, rubbing his beard thoughtfully the way he does.
“Tell me about summer school,” I say. “How’s Rae Simmons, have you seen her?”
“She’s been coming to the Bridge program.”
“Good. Good! I’ve been thinking about her.”
A pause. “Should I tell her you’ll be back by September?”
“Paul. Come on. Of course I will. That’s why I asked Frances to send my papers. I’ve already got my ticket.”
“So much for the Cape, huh.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
His silence is long and heavy with accusation. He clears his throat and says quietly, “Well. You just tell me your flight number in August, then. I’ll pick you up at Logan. If you still want me to.”
“Of course I do!” I come to him and wrap my arms around his neck, squeeze him. After a minute, he kisses the top of my head.
“So, where are we sleeping? Upstairs?”
“No. I don’t sleep up—It’s a mess up there.” Though of course I have no idea if this is true or not.
I still haven’t gone up there, to the main bedroom. Or Willa’s.
I’m behind schedule. Every day, I wake up freshly determined to go upstairs and get it over with. I tell myself I’ll work fast, be ruthless and decisive. But then I don’t. I can run up and down the beach path all day, clamber around the bowl and the hilly grounds with my visitors. But I can’t seem to climb those fourteen carpeted stairs.
“You’ve been sleeping in here? On a sofa?” Paul says. “Not even on a real bed?”
“It’s been fine, see? It’s really comfortable.”
But there’s no way the two of us can both fit on the daybed, so I drag some orange velour cushions in from the Rec Room to make myself a floor pallet. Paul, selfless Paul, insists on taking it, of course.
I don’t even try to sleep. Paul tosses for an hour and then gathers his pillows and blankets.
“You can still sleep in here, Paul. Even if you’re mad at me. Which you have every right to be.”
“That’s not it. The floor’s shaking too much in here. I think you have plumbing problems. I’ll sleep on that porch hammock.”
“No, I will.”
“I’ll be fine. One of your new friends told me we should all be sleeping in hammocks, they’re good for the spine. Apparently the American mattress industry is one giant conspiracy against the spine. Anyway, I want to get the flavor of the place.”
“You’re a good sport, Paul. I’ll make it up to you tomorrow. I’ll cook you a big breakfast. Your runny fried eggs and everything. The works. Even if we can’t go to the Cape, we can go on a little road trip around here somewhere. Mendocino, or Fort Bragg? Would you like that?”
“That sounds heavenly.” He kisses the tips of his fingers and presses them to my shoulder before he heads to the porch.
I watch him out the window. A long, agitated lump in the hammock—a restless chrysalis. He’s in a jangly mood. But finally his body stills.
He came all this way to get treated like a party crasher. I will make it up to him tomorrow. Show him the grounds, take him on a romantic beach picnic. My real life is in Boston. Not in the netherworld I’ve created out of twenty-year-old memories. Paul has flown three thousand miles to remind me of that.
But I pause on the rug to feel for Shane. The sweet, secret shaking has stopped; he’s finished.
What am I doing? I kick the leg of the daybed, the wooden lion’s paw, in frustration.
The little jar with the key inside rolls out.
I cross the garden, the damp soil cold under my bare feet. I’m in only my nightshirt, but I’ll be warm soon enough, after climbing the hill.
Creeeeaaak.
The studio door.
I duck behind the stone well. It’s Shane. Not asleep, then.
He’s come out for air. To puzzle over the grace notes of whatever track he plans to record tomorrow morning.
He enters the garden, no more than twenty feet from me. In the orange circle of the garden lamp, he looks around, rubs his hair. He touches a tomato stalk so neglected I can hear its rustle from here.
He pulls a flashlight from his shorts pocket and heads uphill, behind the garden. Purposeful; he has a destination in mind. Ten feet. Twenty, thirty.
I follow.
I have no flashlight, but it’s a full moon and I can see well enough. I track his bobbing light, just like Willa once tracked me. And though I’ve avoided these fir thickets behind the house until now, they’re still familiar.
But he doesn’t slow as we pass the treehouse. I stop and glance up—it was always well-hidden, and there’s not enough moonlight in this spot to see if anything’s left of its base. I trail my fingers along the bark. How many pink-and-white scrapes did it leave on my clumsy legs and hands that summer? By July I could climb up the rope ladder without worry, but I was never as swift or graceful as Willa.
Shane’s clambering faster now and I press on, trying to keep my panting under control so he won’t hear me. We continue straight uphill, to the ridge that marks the eastern edge of the Kingston land. There he stops, his back to me, looking down over the neighboring property. He rubs his left side, under his T-shirt; he has a stitch from hiking so fast.
As I watch from behind a trunk, he picks up a rock or branch—it’s hard to tell—and throws it over the ridge. He throws another. And another.
Then he turns and walks slowly downhill.
When it’s safe I creep up to the ridge and look for what might have incited his rage. But it’s only rolling hills and trees sloping down, down, down for acres. Toward a few distant roofs, silvery in the moonlight.
I follow Shane’s flashlight downhill.
This time he stops at the treehouse. Right under it.
Against its thick trunk, he sits. Rests the back of his head on its bark, his neck stretched long. He’s looking up at the dear old hideout—or, if its simple plywood frame has been battered to nothing in a storm, where it used to be. He reaches up with both hands and strums his fingers along the bark. A little washboard-music song.
What is this? Why here, of all the square feet on these 416 acres?
My head’s pounding—I was too tense to eat today, nothing but that gulp of cider on the porch. I should go back for a glass of milk, bed, forget this madness. Shane has an artist’s temperament and keeps artist’s hours. The live oak’s trunk is an inviting place to sit. That’s all.
Crack.
The glass jar, slick with my sweat, has shot from my fingers and smashed on a rock.
“Hey!”
I duck behind a tree and freeze, hold my breath.
“Hey. Who’s there?” Shane’s up, walking in my direction. Any second his flashlight will reveal me.
I could creep away. I still know these woods. But the broken jar—I can see it from here. Big, broken pieces like cups of moonlight, waiting to give me away.
“Jackie?” His voice is softer than before. Surprised, but not angry.
I move toward him. For a minute, I stand in my white nightshirt in the beam of his flashlight.
How did we get to this point? The day started so relaxed. Me and Mat and Shane on the porch joking around, enjoying cider. And now I’m out here in the dead of night like a ghost, sneaking around...
He lowers the beam to the glass between our feet, bends to pick up the miniature key. He hands it to me, then goes for the glass, carefully wrapping the shards in a Kleenex from his pocket and setting them on a stump.
I wait for him to ask what the key opens, what the hell I’m doing out here in the middle of the night spying on him, throwing jam jars.
“Can’t sleep?” he asks.
“Didn’t even try.”
“Jangly night.”
“Yes.”
“Been out here long?”
“Awhile.”
“Oh.” He nods.
“You can tell me if you want to be alone,” I say.
“Actually, I’d very much prefer not to be alone. If you’re not needed elsewhere.”
“I’m not.”
“Then sit with me a little while?”
We sit at the base of the giant live oak tree on Shane’s spread-out sweatshirt, our backs against its massive trunk. I try not to look up. Try not to show how hard it is for me not to look up.
“So, how’s your packing going?” he asks.
“I haven’t been upstairs yet,” I confess.
“It’s hard, letting go of stuff.”
“Yes.” It’s a relief to say it. “If I don’t pick up the pace, I’ll be ready to sell by next Labor Day.”
“Terrible shame.”
“Oh, right. I’m sure you’re devastated by my lack of progress.”
He smiles a little, and I smile back.
“I could help you if you want, on breaks. That’s the least I could do. Since you’re our belatedly credited songwriter and all.”
“Thank you. I may take you up on that.”
“So. Your guy’s here. Been together a long time?”
Paul. Alone, dangling on the porch.
“I’m not... Paul is... We have a lot in common. Both teachers, same age.”
“He seems like a really good guy.”
“He is! He is. And he played in a garage band when he was in high school. They were called the Bananas Foster. Because his last name is Foster.”
We let that hang there for a minute, let it congeal and harden into full absurdity.
“I didn’t know he was coming,” I admit. “It’s a little awkward.”
“So I gathered.”
“Thanks for being so welcoming to him. That was nice of you.”
He looks me in the eyes. “Not really.”
I glance down at the key in my hand. Then—I can’t help myself—I look up.
“It’s still there,” Shane says softly. “If you were wondering.”
I stare at him. “You know. You know what’s up there?”
He nods.
He hands me the flashlight and I shine it straight up. There. Plywood floor. The pale rope ladder looped on a high branch.
So it is still there. I wonder what it’s like inside, if any of the homey touches Willa and I worked on together so happily remain.
“When did you notice it?” I ask. “You were on a hike and happened to look up right here, or what?”
Nothing.
“Shane?”
He touches my knee. His hand is warm. “Jackie, I need to tell you something.”