“Hey,” she said, leaning toward me. “Billie, are you crying?”
I could smell the dried chlorine on her body, as well as that citrus smell of her that reminded me of summertime. Her eyes were wide and concerned. She reached her hand out and touched my shoulder, and it felt like I’d run into our electric fence in the pasture.
Crying, I leaned into her touch, and before I could stop myself, I was reaching for her mouth with my mouth. When our lips touched, I let out a small gasp at my own audacity, but Miss Mars simply shook her head and pulled back.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay, Billie,” she said. Her face was red, and she looked like she might cry. But her voice was calm, even as always. “You’re having a rough time. You probably just need a good night’s sleep.”
I left her office that day feeling trampled, as though a stampede of horses had run across my back. I didn’t know how I would face her again. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to return to the pool. The horror of what I had done was so enormous, I didn’t know how I could ever look her in the eye; I could barely confront my own reflection.
The call from Principal Hilton came that evening. I watched my mother hand my father the phone and collapse into one of the hard-backed kitchen chairs. I watched her put her face in her hands and her whole body tremble. I heard my father’s words. “What do you mean, an
unnatural attachment
to Miss Mars?”
I was sent to a therapist to help me process this
unnatural attachment
. And after ten meetings, meetings where I nodded and said what it was I knew he wanted me to say, denied all the awful things I knew to be true, he declared me
cured
and sent me on my way. My parents, still not convinced, sent me to church. My mother made me sit with her each night, forgoing homework for Bible studies, the passages proving her point underlined angrily in pencil.
The principal, who despite my troubles was reluctant to give up a star athlete, paired me with Coach Norman for my early morning lessons. But Coach Norman was a football coach and didn’t know the first thing about the backstroke, the butterfly. And because I had no choice, I got up each morning that winter, walked through the freezing cold to the school with Biblical admonishments echoing in my head, peered longingly at the pale yellow light in Miss Mars’s house, and then disappeared into the depths of the pool.
I have always been a swimmer. But while I had been treading water for the last twelve years with Frankie, just bobbing and floating along, now I felt the familiar terrifying but irresistible pull: the soaring, sinking, stupefying feeling I’d disallowed for the last decade. The siren’s song, beckoning me. But this time, the voice calling me into the water belonged not to Miss Mars but to Eva.
I
expected to lose Eva too. I waited for her to retreat, to disappear. To turn into a pale yellow light behind the closed door of her house. But oddly enough, after the camping trip, our lives simply resumed. As though what had happened between us was perfectly normal. As though I hadn’t stepped through Alice’s looking glass into an upside-down world. We didn’t speak about what happened, but there was something else between us now: a shared secret, one that belonged to
both
of us. And somehow, despite our respective silence regarding what had transpired inside that tent, I knew that things had changed.
Every afternoon, we walked together to get the girls from the bus stop, little Johnny tagging along behind, pulling Rose in her wagon. While the children played, we listened to music and folded laundry or baked cookies for bake sales or planned our Girl Scout meetings for the following year. But all those old habits and routines and chores were suddenly imbued with an added layer; the very air had a new texture to it. My senses were heightened. I clung to the scent of Eva’s laundry detergent, to the husky sound of her voice, to the beautiful ghosts our cigarettes made, the separate specters merging together between us over the kitchen table. I was aware of the heat of her hand on my back as she showed me how to get a blood stain from cotton sheets. It was a time of anticipation, a time of portent. Like the electric feeling of the air before a storm. Like the smell of rain before it falls.
We didn’t even need to touch.
When the first heat wave of summer came early, in June, Eva, sitting with her feet soaking in the baby pool, leaned toward me and whispered conspiratorially, “I want to go with you to the lake.” And these nine words, this simple sentence, was like the first crack of thunder in my chest. A promise so big, so dangerous and thrilling, I felt my entire body pulse.
And so, like someone battening down the hatches for a coming storm, I moved quickly into action. First I called Gussy to see if it would be okay to have Eva and her children join me for two weeks of our visit. Though I knew she wouldn’t say no, I was ready to argue my case, to plead if I needed to. Frankie too was easy (so easy it made me feel an articulate and vivid flash of guilt).
I’ll certainly worry about you less,
he had said,
if you’ve got a friend there with you
. And for a brief moment, I felt overwhelmed by remorse. But like a bolt of lightning, my shame disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. I needed to focus. We still had one more person to convince.
Eva came to the house distraught one morning after Ted had gone to work.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“He doesn’t think we should be alone at the lake without a car. He’s worried about what will happen if Johnny falls out of a tree or something.”
“He leaves you without a car here every day!” I said, feeling desperate. Frantic. “Besides, my sister and her husband live only twenty minutes away. We have a telephone now. We have neighbors.”
But Eva kept trembling, even after I handed her a cup of coffee, loaded with milk and sugar like she liked.
“What’s going on, Eva?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Teddy’s been saying things. He worries.”
I felt my skin go cold and clammy, the blood draining from my head and pooling in my stomach and hips. “About what?” I could barely get my words out.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, dismissively, brushing her hand in front of her face.
“Eva,” I said sternly. I needed to know what he was saying.
“About
other men,
” she said, rolling her eyes and grimacing. “That’s why he drives to work. Why he won’t leave me with a car. He’d rather pay twenty dollars a month to park his car than take a chance that I might drive off and find some other man.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “What does he think you do with Johnny and Rose while you’re off having these affairs?”
She looked at me and laughed. “You know that’s what every man is looking for. A woman with two little kids in tow. Very sexy,” she said, giggling.
“Nothing says romance like Cheerios in your brassiere,” I said, starting to howl with both relief and laughter. “What does he think you’re going to do in Vermont? Find some handsome farmer to run off with?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her smile fading. She shook her head. “I need you and Frankie to talk to him, Billie. Convince him this will be good for the children. For me. Tell him he doesn’t have anything to worry about.” When she touched my hand, it was as though I’d been struck by lightning.
I had never spoken alone to Ted Wilson. I avoided Ted like I avoided most things that frightened me, especially after the camping trip. But Frankie wasn’t afraid of Ted Wilson, and I would have done anything to get him to let Eva come to Vermont. And so the plan was hatched.
“You ought to take Ted to a game,” I said to Frankie. “Maybe if he felt like he had a friend in the neighborhood, he wouldn’t feel so alone when Eva comes to Vermont. And you know how much happier we’d be up there. The girls would have playmates. I’d have someone to keep me company.” I felt my skin growing hot as I said this and had to look away.
Frankie worked with a guy who had season Sox tickets, and when he couldn’t make it to a home game would offer them to us. I figured this would be a good place to start.
“I’ll give it a shot,” said Frankie, shrugging. And surprisingly, he came home that very afternoon with a pair of tickets for that weekend’s game against the Cleveland Indians.
On Saturday morning, I watched them drive off in Ted’s car, Frankie looking a little like he’d been kidnapped, and I hoped for the best.
They didn’t get home until almost midnight. I was dead asleep when I heard their voices outside the window. It became clear as soon as I came out of the heavy fog of slumber that they were both thoroughly inebriated. I knew this could be either a good thing or a terrible thing. Frankie’s voice echoed loudly through the neighborhood, and then I heard our garage door opening. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” I thought, knowing this could only mean trouble.
I got out of bed and peered out the window at the street below, illuminated only dimly by the gas lamp streetlights. Frankie had a baseball bat in one hand, and for a moment, as he marched back across the street to the Wilsons’ house, I thought he was about to beat the sense out of Ted. But then I saw Ted coming out of his own garage with a leather mitt on one hand and a baseball in the other. They met in the street, and the next thing I knew they were playing ball. At midnight, in the middle of the street.
The lights on the Bouchers’ porch went on. The lights at the Bakers’ lit up. And then Old Man Castillo was out on his porch and screaming bloody murder. “Take it somewhere else, you goddamned drunks!”
Frankie and Ted roared with laughter and disappeared into the field behind our house. From upstairs, I watched them play a crazy, drunken version of baseball, using some flagstones as bases, until, as expected, I heard the crack of the ball against the bat and then the crack of the ball against my dining room window. The sound of glass shattering was followed by silence and then one big “Oh shit!”
And then they were tromping through my azalea bushes and plucking the broken pieces of glass out of the grass. I would have been livid, but it seemed like our harebrained plan had actually worked. Because then they were walking back toward the front of the house together, and Frankie was patting Ted on the back.
I don’t know what Frankie said to Ted that night, and I didn’t care. I only cared that one week after the girls and I arrived in Vermont that August, Ted’s red Caddie pulled up into the grass driveway by the camp and he presented Eva, Donna, Sally, Johnny, and Rose on the doorstep of the camp like a gift.
That first night at the lake, the kids were all exhausted. Johnny was so tired he fell asleep in the kitchen nook, nodding off into his plate of spaghetti. Ted carried him out to the living room and laid him on the couch. The girls curled up together on cots, and I helped Eva set up the playpen for Rose. I was too afraid to even look at Eva as I bustled about. I knew that if I did, my face would give away every emotion, all that wild longing and aching and happiness that I was feeling. I was terrified that Ted would see through me.
“Time to hit the hay!” he said finally. I had given them the big bed upstairs where I usually slept and made my own bed on the porch. He motioned for Eva, who led the way up the stairs, goosing her and she giggling and slapping at his hands, as they disappeared up into the loft.
I couldn’t listen. It would have killed me if I’d heard even a sigh from Eva. And so I went out to the lake and swam until I was certain that they had fallen asleep. And later in the quiet camp, I lay awake for hours, listening to the sounds of their slumber, the old iron bed creaking every time Ted rolled over. He snored, and his snores were voluminous, like an animal’s. I didn’t know how Eva got any sleep at all at home. Morning couldn’t come quickly enough. Ted wouldn’t be staying; he had to get back to Boston for work and then we’d have the place to ourselves until Frankie came two weeks later to visit, and then he would bring them back home with him.
I was the last one up the next morning, having finally been consumed by sleep in the final hours before dawn.
Eva had made blueberry pancakes for breakfast, and the kitchen smelled heavenly. She stood at the stove, flipping the next batch of pancakes on the griddle. Ted came up behind her, as if I weren’t there, as if the kids weren’t all piled into the kitchen nook. He stood behind her, meaty hands wrapped around her waist, thick chin resting on her shoulder. He whispered something in her ear, and I felt my skin flush. Eva shook her head, and I longed to know what he’d said to her. I felt my knees go liquid with jealousy. With fear. For one awful moment, I wondered if I’d only been entertaining some wild dream.
“You sure you’ll be all right out here in the sticks?” Ted asked then, addressing the question to both of us.
“We’ll be
fine,
” she said, looking at me and rolling her eyes, as if she sensed that I was feeling left out. I was so grateful for this acknowledgment I could have cried.
Rose crawled across the floor and pulled herself up, clinging to Ted’s pant legs, though her presence didn’t seem to register with Ted, who was still holding on to Eva. Rose was almost a year old now and just starting to walk. I’d moved everything at her eye level that might hurt her up to higher ground. I’d put tape across the outlets and made sure all of the cleaning supplies were out of her reach.
Finally noticing Rose, Ted released Eva and reached down to scoop her up. “Well, if it isn’t Rosie O’Grady,” he said, gently lifting her up and tossing her in the air. She squealed with delight and then he set her down, patting her diapered bottom as if to send her on her way.
Ted turned to Johnny then, who was running a Matchbox car across a mountain of pancakes and along a maple syrup road. “Johnny, you going to take care of my girls?” he asked, and Johnny nodded.
“Well, all-righty then. I’ll be off,” he said, to no one in particular.
“You’ve got the number here, right?” I asked him.
“Sure do. And maybe I’ll try to pop on by for another visit. Sure is pretty here. Slept like a baby last night.”
Now it was my turn to roll my eyes.
There really wasn’t enough room for all of us. I knew this would be the case, but hadn’t really come up with a good plan for how we would accommodate all of these bodies for two whole weeks. Finally, we decided to give the sleeping porch over to the girls, two on the daybed and two on cots. Johnny would sleep on the couch in the living room. And Eva and I would share the large bed in the loft, with Rose in a playpen.
My heart trilled like a plucked guitar string, vibrating endlessly at the thought of being so close to Eva each night, of waking up to the smell of her instead of the stink of Frankie’s wine-soaked skin. I was excited and terrified, and that entire first day I felt like I was living inside of a dream. A dream inside of a dream. A dream from which I couldn’t bear to wake up.
The children, of course, were in heaven as well. After a week at the lake with only each other for company, my girls were thrilled to have someone else to play with. And I was so grateful not to have to listen to their bickering anymore. Johnny, as expected, was captivated by the tree house and quickly claimed it as his own. There was also a little boy staying at a camp down the road about Johnny’s age who, like a dog, sniffed out his playmate only minutes after we shooed them outside to play. That first afternoon after we sent Ted off with sandwiches and a cold beer for the ride home, Eva and I set up the lawn chairs on the front lawn, laid down a blanket covered in toys for Rosie, and collectively sighed.
“I love it here,” she said, as if speaking to the lake. “I don’t think I’m ever going home.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. I meant it as a joke, but it came out sounding serious and strange. “I mean, not for a couple of weeks anyway.”
“Thank you for having us,” Eva said, and reached for my hand.
Every moment of the day felt somehow fraught with import. Time slowed. Every minute was imbued with the distinct possibility of something enormous. But somehow, the anticipation of whatever it was I hoped for, longed for, was almost enough. The suspense was exquisite. I could have lingered in these charged moments forever.
That night, we built a fire in the stone fire pit that Frankie had helped Gussy’s Frank make a few summers before. The kids cooked hot dogs on long sticks they found in the woods behind the camp, and then toasted marshmallows. Ted and Eva had picked up some sweet corn from a farm stand on their way up, and we ate all ten ears dripping in butter and crunchy with salt. Eva and I drank cold beers we kept in a bucket of ice, and the children played. There was something so delicious about all of this. Even the air tasted sweet.