Cassie Binegar

For Ann, Dale, and Shulamith

—
companions throughout the process
—

One is beginning to learn

What the other is forgetting
,

One preparing to go

Where the other has been
,

And they feed each other

From kitchen chairs
,

The space between

As clear as a sky beyond

Two branches, one tapering out
,

The second, a nub of everything possible. . . 
.

Brendan Galvin

“Old Old Woman, Little Girl”

Atlantic Flyway

Dedication

Epigraph

  
1
   
  
Infinity

  
2
   
  
Day Dreams, Night Dreams

  
3
   
  
Inside, Outside

  
4
   
  
Gran

  
5
   
  
Wishes

  
6
   
  
Kaleidoscope

  
7
   
  
Feathers and Rhymes

  
8
   
  
Feet

  
9
   
  
Conversations

10
   
  
Questions and Answers

11
   
  
Cocoons

12
   
  
Catching Snow

13
   
  
Eyeglasses

14
   
  
The Lavender Dress

15
   
  
The Storm

16
   
  
Birds Across the Moon

About the Author

Back Ads

Other Books by Patricia MacLachlan

Credits

Copyright

About The Publisher

C
ASSIE
B
INEGAR
(whose name rhymes with vinegar) sat on a sand dune by the sea, being angry.
I AM ANGRY,
she wrote in big letters in the sand. “What's written becomes truth,” her fourth-grade teacher had once said, and Cassie believed him. She carried a lined-white-paper list of complaints and angers, now numbering twenty-two and ranging from too many relatives to dry skin to this lonely place where she now lived. Cassie sighed and smoothed over the letters with a sweep of her hand and wrote
I AM INFINITELY ANGRY.
Cassie liked the word infinity. It was a big word with a big meaning. It was an i-n-f-i-n-i-t-e word.

A sea wind came up, and a tiny land crab walked sideways through the tail of the
Y
in
INFINITELY.
Cassie frowned and watched the sea. The sand and water stretched out as far as she could see. The spring sky, the color blue of her mother's garden irises, was huge and cloudless. There were no neat fenced-in yards or sidewalks or boundaries in this new place. After one sand dune, there was another. After one wave, another came behind. Even the birds moved endlessly, the gulls wheeling above, the sanderlings darting before the waves below, always running just out of the way of the white curls of water. Cassie had tried running from the waves herself, but she was almost always caught by the water, sometimes in her good shoes.

The thought of shoes made Cassie frown again, for shoes had been one of the reasons they had moved to this lonely place.

“Can't afford to shoe the family,” she had heard her father complain. “Boots for James, growing like sourweed. Boots and foul-weather gear for John Thomas. School shoes for Cassie.” And her parents had moved here to Snow Shore from their house inland. It was closer to her father and brothers' fishing boat, and her mother could tend and rent the cottages that spread about the house like seeds sown from an apron.

Cassie turned her back on the sea and looked up at the new house.
New
house! It was old and gray and weathered, with only one scrub pine in the side yard—a tree so wind-wild and stunted that it didn't even reach the roof. The garden was scattered, a clump of irises here, a nest of nasturtiums there, and beach plums and sea roses everywhere.

Cassie thought longingly of the order and pattern in her mother's old garden inland. And her old tree house, built on the low limbs of a huge maple tree. It had been her space. Here there was no space for her. Even her own room was not hers. There was faded wallpaper—cabbage roses, her mother said—hung there by those who had lived there before. And there were worn places on the wooden floors that someone else had patterned.

In the beginning, when they had first come, the old attic had been Cassie's space. There was a small round window there, and if Cassie lay on her stomach she could see the water, the sand, and the winding sea roads. She had arranged her books there—her dictionary, her thesaurus, and her notebooks—hidden from the rest of her family. She began her poem “Spaces” there.

She had searched through her dictionary for words to describe the new house. She had found three so far, all D words: dreary, depressing, decadent. She had become strangely content in her attic space. But soon, piece by piece, furniture and trunks and old suitcases tied with string took over the attic, moving her out.

Then Cassie found a door hidden under the back stairway, with a bare hanging light inside. She spent hours there, reading and writing.

But before Cassie could make this space her own, her older brothers and her father began to use it for their boots and fishing gear. Then the smell of the sea invaded and swept her away.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” called her laughing brothers, allowing her no privacy. And they pulled her into the kitchen, where they would spin another tale of a fish lost.

“Good!” Cassie would cry adamantly, her heart with the escaped fish.

“Another one for Cass,” her father would say, reaching over to take her hand. “Another Big Jim”—his name for every big fish that got away.

Cassie moved into each cottage then, one by one, taking her pen and notebook and books. The cottages were private and scattered, some hidden between grassy dunes, one high on a bluff so that Cassie could watch for the intruders that were her family. But slowly, her mother came behind her to scrape and paint and put up new curtains. “To get ready for the summer people next year,” she said.

“But I need a space!” cried Cassie. “A space of my own.”

Her mother, tall and lean and out of sorts, took her outside and waved her arm. “Cass, there's space here. Space for everyone!”

But Cassie shook her head. It's not
my
space, she thought.

Her new friend Margaret Mary lived in a shiny house that had lots of spaces for Margaret Mary. Cassie had visited her and seen that at least
she
fit in her family. She had neat braids and matching dresses and socks. She had a very neat dollhouse, neatly arranged, with matching sets of furniture. Even the doll's toilet was in the doll's bathroom. Cassie thought about her own secondhand dollhouse, passed down to her from now-old cousins, with its tumble of new and used furniture, just like Cassie's house.

Margaret Mary's mother was a proper mother, too. She did not wear her husband's work shirts as Cassie's mother did, or knit too-big sweaters and laugh at the mistakes and leave them in the sweater! Margaret Mary's mother wore high-heeled shoes that made sharp clicking noises when she walked. You could always tell where she was and where she was going just by listening. She even had her canned goods in alphabetical order: artichoke hearts, broccoli, corn.

Margaret Mary's father wore a neat suit and carried a black briefcase and came home at five-thirty every evening to give whoever stood by the front door a tidy kiss. Cassie's father and brothers came home with the tides, smelling of fish, and they'd whirl her up in their arms and touch her hello with rough, rope-worn hands.

“Am I adopted?” asked Cassie after visiting Margaret Mary's house for the first time.

“Adopted!” Her mother laughed, pushing her long curly hair back with both hands. “We would have adopted you if we had known you. We've told you where you were born.”

“We never made it to the hospital with you,” her father said, his voice soft. “You were born in a taxi.”

“A taxi!” exclaimed Cassie. She told them about Margaret Mary, born in a city hospital with soft lights, hushed voices, and her father swooping (“swooping” was Margaret Mary's word) into the room with an armful of roses.

“No roses,” said Cassie's mother, putting her hand on her husband's arm. “But your father raced through the crowd and bought a bunch of violets from a lady on the street corner.”

“Why didn't he send the taxi driver?” grumped Cassie.

“Because the taxi driver was helping,” said her mother.

“Helping!” shrieked Cassie. “A stranger?”

“He's not a stranger,” said her mother firmly. “We hear from him every year at Christmas.”

“If it's swooping you want,” said her oldest brother John Thomas, “then swooping is what you'll get.” And he whirled Cassie up in his arms, swinging her up and down and around. “Swoop!” he called. “Swoop, swoop, we are swooping your new baby to you, Madam.”