Black & White (18 page)

Chapter Six

I
T WAS
J
ONATHAN
who had come up with the idea of Mount Desert Island. Jonathan who studied the map with her, their fingers tracing routes from New Haven to—well, they didn’t know exactly where to. They were giddy, in love, stunned to have found each other. Reveling in their freedom to go absolutely anywhere. Arizona? New Mexico? Too vast and dusty. California? Expensive—and besides, they shared a disdain for chronically good weather. Europe? Clara spoke good Brearley French, and Jonathan spoke passable Italian. But how would he start his business in a foreign country? They considered the possibilities—over long afternoons at the Middle Eastern café they tried on their future lives for size—but nothing felt quite right.

“I’ve been thinking,” Jonathan began. Clara was naked, lying on top of Jonathan’s old quilt, the midday sunlight pouring in through the skylight of his room in graduate student housing. “My aunt has a house in Southwest Harbor. She’s old now and she never uses it. Maybe she’d let us rent it for a while.”

“Southwest Harbor? Where’s that?”

She had never even heard of it.

“Maine,” Jonathan said.

“You’re distracting me.” Clara felt his hands traveling over her. Exploring her body for its lakes and valleys, ridges and disparate climates, as if she herself were a map. She closed her eyes, tried to allow the good feelings in. Tried to allow her nakedness to be the most natural thing in the world. The warmth of the sun, lighting her—the gentle hands moving her this way and that—

“Relax,” Jonathan whispered. Parting her legs. His tongue moving in a straight line down from her belly button. Clara willed her muscles to let go, her limbs to soften. This was Jonathan—Jonathan!—and she trusted him. He was not like those boys from Trinity or Collegiate, boys who wanted to fuck her because they’d seen her naked. They had seen her go from little girl to adolescent before their very eyes.

“I can’t.” She squirmed and rolled away from him.
I can’t.
The first of so many times Jonathan would be the recipient of that tiny, nearly invisible wound.

He climbed back up to her, his lower face wet. She resisted the urge to wipe him with the sheet. To remove all traces of herself from him.

“So,” he went on, as if nothing had just happened, “let’s talk about Maine.”

“Isn’t it full of—I don’t know—lumberjacks?” she asked. “Who would buy your jewelry?”

“Well, Southwest Harbor is sort of unique,” Jonathan answered. “It’s on an island. There’s a wealthy summer community, and—”

He went on, but Clara had stopped listening.
Island.
He had said the magic word.
Island.
A place disconnected from the mainland. A place floating on its own, separate, apart.

“Yes,” she said, interrupting him.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Yes?”

“Let’s do it,” she said. She, who had vetoed every idea from Rome to Albuquerque. “Let’s move to Mount Desert Island.” Even the name itself was perfect: round and American and comforting—but also somehow strange and new.

The house—the first time she saw it—was like a figment from a dream she had forgotten but now remembered with all the power of a déjà vu. White, crumbling, Victorian—like an abandoned, melting wedding cake perched a block from the harbor—it possessed a lopsided charm, as if the house understood its own improbability.
Don’t take me seriously!
it seemed to shout from its high perch. When had Clara dreamt of it? And in what kind of dream? She had no reference point for a place like this. It was nothing like the old farmhouses in Hillsdale, which were simple clapboard affairs.

“Well, here we are.” Jonathan’s voice is tense, excited. He’s nervous, Clara realizes. He wants her to like this place.

She slowly makes her way up the steep, painted front stairs, holding on to the rickety banister. Is she seven months pregnant? Eight? The preparations to come here have taken longer than either of them had thought. Jonathan had to finish his fellowship, and Clara got a job making cappuccinos and lattes for the New Haven crowd: Yale students, professors, actors and stagehands who worked at Yale Rep, the crew from the public radio station. At first, Clara could hardly tell them apart, but by the time she left her job she was able to match the drink to the face: The girl with the Mohawk always got the hot chai. The older man in the blue sweater—a famous historian, she had been told—got the double espresso. And the skinny lady who carried a brown paper shopping bag at all times, she got the half-caff cappuccino.

Jonathan pulls the house keys from an envelope addressed in a spidery old-woman’s hand. He fumbles for a moment, dropping the keys—they fall to the weathered porch in a clatter—and then finally fits one into the lock and pushes the door open.

“Hold on. I should carry you over the threshold.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Clara says. Thirty pounds heavier than she usually is.

She makes her way slowly through the front foyer. No one’s been in the house in many months. The shades are drawn; she can just begin to make out the shapes of furniture in the dim light. A sofa. Two club chairs. The dull gleam of silver frames lining the fireplace mantel.

“I haven’t been here since I was a kid,” Jonathan says. “I spent every summer—”

“What’s that smell?” Clara asks.

Jonathan sniffs the air.

“Something dead,” he says. “Mouse, probably.”

She nods. Keeps walking into the kitchen, which is cheery in that old-fashioned way of kitchens that have never been updated. Yellow-and-green tile floor. Old enamel double oven. A pot rack hanging in a corner, copper pots dangling over abandoned plants. She imagines the kitchen with a paint job. New leafy plants to replace the old ones. A bright tablecloth covering the speckled linoleum table.

Behind her, she hears Jonathan opening the curtains. Cracking windows. Letting the ocean air inside.

“I guess the caretaker hasn’t been doing his job,” Jonathan says.

They don’t stop moving, passing through the warren of small ornate rooms: library, a double parlor where a grand piano is coated with a thick film of dust.

“So, what do you think?” Jonathan asks.

It’s scary,
she wants to say.
It’s so far away from anything I understand.
But she doesn’t want to hurt him. And honestly she has no idea what she really thinks.

“Let’s go upstairs.”

She runs her hand along the carved banister—mahogany? a dark-stained cherry?—as she makes her way slowly up the stairs. Patterns of colored shapes dance on the wooden steps like jewels. She looks up—three floors up the winding staircase—at the stained-glass window set into the roof. Ruby red, emerald green, a deep sapphire blue, citrine yellow: a jeweler’s house.

“I want you to be happy here,” Jonathan says. His arms wrap around her as they reach the second floor. “It may take some time—it isn’t what you’re used to.”

She leans against his chest. She can’t tell him what she’s thinking—even if she had the words, she doesn’t have the heart to tell him that happiness is more than she expects. Contentment, perhaps. A semblance of peace. Fleeting moments of joy such as this one. What she longs for: the absence of pain.

“I will be happy here—I know it.”

A white lie, one of thousands of white lies she has already woven so thickly around herself that she sees the world this way: shining, blinding, blanched.

I don’t miss New York.

I never think about my mother.

All that is behind me now.

Does she think she’s fooling Jonathan? Does she think she’s fooling herself? This much she knows is true: She loves her husband. She trusts him as much as she can trust anyone. Look at him! His eyes gazing down at her,
seeing
her. Taking her in. Has anyone ever done that before? Certainly not Ruth. Ruth’s attention was predatory, stalking Clara from the other side of a lens. Even now—even as Clara stands at the threshold of her new life—she is being consumed by her mother.
You’re mine!
Laying claim to her.
Mine!
Drowning out all that is good.

Jonathan is saying something—he sounds so far away. She struggles mightily to push back into the present.

“What?” She turns to him. Foggy, lost.

“Come. Let me show you our bedroom.”

Jonathan holds her hand, leading her down the hall.

T
HE MOMS ARE SITTING
in a wooden booth at Tapley’s, killing time, waiting for the five o’clock jujitsu class to let out. Killing time is something the moms have turned into an art form over the years. Crocheting, needlepointing, the lugging around of quality paperbacks—sneaking in a few quick pages here and there—they have learned that a lot can be accomplished in the hours of waiting. Even the dozens of daily miles they clock in their pickup trucks and Jeeps are not wasted. They have discovered motivational tapes and the educational value of radio. And then—on afternoons like this—there’s always a quick coffee with the girls.

If only Clara felt like one of the girls. She has never—not from the very first day of Sammy’s preschool—felt like she belonged in this group. Before Sammy started school, Clara existed in her own little universe. Taking care of a toddler, helping Jonathan as he started his jewelry shop. But then school opened up a whole world of play dates—and play dates meant hanging out with the moms on carpeted playroom floors while the kids built towers out of blocks or engaged in imaginative dialogue with their Barbies.
Good sharing, honey!
they’d call encouragingly from the sidelines.
Nice work!

And Clara—Clara always felt she was posing. Did these mothers come from childhoods that had prepared them for this? They were nice enough—Susanna Haber, Tess Martin, Ali Mulvey, the whole gang. But invariably Clara walked away from them feeling that there was a secret club of motherhood, complete with a password no one had ever given her. Why did this all seem so satisfying to them—the cupcake baking, the constant scheduling, the endless games of Candy Land? And what was wrong with Clara, what psychic disease caused her constant yearning for something more? It wasn’t that she didn’t adore Sammy. She did—with all her heart.

“So what do you gals think,” Mary Ann Rowe is saying, “about this new sailing camp opening up? It’s supposed to be—”

“Expensive,” says Susanna Haber.

“You said it,” says Laurel. “Going after the summer people.”

“You bet they are.”

“Have you heard anything about it?”

It takes a moment for Clara to realize this question is being directed at her. She’s distracted, off floating. Usually this is fine. She has existed for so many years among these women, they have stopped expecting her full participation.

“Sorry?”

“The sailing camp. Has Jonathan heard anything about it—maybe from some of his customers?”

“I don’t think so.”

She’s trying to stay focused. Sammy’s going to be here any minute, with the rest of the girls from the orange-belt class. Some of them are going out to dinner after—but Clara has declined. She needs to focus. All her energy has been spent on figuring out the next right step in a series of impossibly wrong ones.

“Hey, guys!”

The girls troop in, made smaller by their stiff white uniforms, bright orange belts wound two or three times around their tiny waists.

Clara steels herself. She has been home three days—three days, and Sammy has pulled even farther away from her. Sad, anxious, withdrawn. And so terribly thin. Clara has chosen not to talk to Sammy about the lies, even now that she knows their full extent. A weak heart! Requiring open-heart surgery! Where had Sammy even come up with such a thing? Clara is treading carefully, afraid of anything that will upset Sam more than she already is. Each day, Clara has left messages for the local child psychiatrist—a woman in Bar Harbor—but apparently there’s a waiting list.

“Hi.” Sam sidles up to her.

Clara’s heart leaps. Pathetic—that she is hungry for a simple hello from her daughter. Sam has grown mute these past days. Fading into a mere shadow of herself.