The tension was present between Michael and Nick. They sniped at each other all through dinner. Nick called Michael a corporate ass kisser and Michael called Nick a ne’er-do-well nitwit sponge. Cy and Evelyn didn’t seem to notice, or maybe they did notice and were just used to it. As Evelyn was clearing the plates, she let it slip that the reason Nick’s nose was crooked was that Michael had punched him in the face, back when they were in high school.
I gasped. “Why?” I said.
Michael and Nick didn’t answer. They were glowering at each other.
Evelyn answered from the kitchen, “They were fighting over some girl.”
Before dessert, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and I wandered down the long hallway looking at pictures of Michael and Nick and Dora as children. I loved the eighties hair and clothes, Michael in his lacrosse uniform, Nick in his corduroy suit, his nose straight and perfect. I found the powder room. It was elegant and refined, much like the powder room in Birdie’s house. There was a bowl of soap meant to look like river rocks.
When I opened the powder room door, Nick was standing there. I was startled. He kissed me. His lips were warm, salty, tangy. Then he pulled away. He said, “You taste just like I dreamed you would.” And he disappeared into some nether part of the house. He didn’t reappear for the chocolate mousse. I didn’t see him again that night.
Chess threw the notebook across the attic. It skidded under the dresser, disturbing who knew how many spiders. The confession was hurting, not helping. Robin was a quack.
A few seconds later, Chess lifted herself out of bed to retrieve the notebook and put it back between the mattress and box spring. She didn’t want Tate to find it.
Robin and her medical degree had told Chess that the most important thing to do upon her arrival on Tuckernuck was to establish a routine. The routine should not be complicated or stressful. This made Chess laugh. Nothing on Tuckernuck was complicated or stressful; it was simple and boring.
Still, she tried. Chess woke up between nine and ten in the morning, at which point Tate had already been awake for three hours, run around the island and done six hundred sit-ups hanging by her knees from the tree branch, taken a shower, eaten a robust breakfast prepared by their mother, changed into her bikini, put on lotion, and made her way to the beach. Tate urged Chess to join her.
“I’ll be down in a little while,” Chess said. She brushed her teeth and oozed down the stairs like a slug, still in her nightgown. Sleeping in didn’t make a person feel good; it made a person feel slovenly. Birdie always lingered in the kitchen long after everyone else had finished breakfast so that she could make Chess’s breakfast fresh and it would be hot. And what did Chess do by way of thanks? She picked at her food and let some drop to the ground on purpose, where the ants would get it. After not eating breakfast, Chess returned to the sweltering attic, where she wrote her confession in the notebook.
She then put on her bathing suit, trying to ignore the fact that her body was changing in the most unfair way. She was skeletal in the rib cage, and her breasts were shrinking. The skin at the sides of her breasts, which used to be taut, was slack; she could pull at it. And yet, Chess’s ass didn’t fit in her bikini bottom properly; she had to pull at it to keep the suit secure. The Tuckernuck house had no full-length mirror—in fact, the house had no mirrors at all except for the badly tarnished mirror above the bathroom sink—which was a good thing because Chess was, for the first time in her life, ugly. Her hair was gone. Each morning, she woke up thinking she had long, silken hair, the envy of every woman she had ever met, only to discover that her head was as scruffy as a vacant lot. Her scalp itched. This led to further thoughts: It didn’t matter if she was ugly. She loved only one man and that was Nick, and Nick was gone. And Michael was dead. Dead? No. But yes. She hated thinking. She needed to stanch her mental bleeding.
Her routine included rising late, picking at breakfast, writing down the pain, and indulging in some negative self-image.
To the beach, Chess wore her ill-fitting bikini, her stretched-out Diplomatic Immunity T-shirt, her army-surplus shorts, and her blue crocheted cap. She carried a towel, a book, and a bottle of water. She had decided she would read only the classics while on Tuckernuck, and so the two books she had brought were
War and Peace
and
Vanity Fair.
She had thought that because the books were set in olden times, the characters would have quaint, outdated problems. She started with
War and Peace.
She slogged through the war scenes, and she identified way too closely with the affairs of the heart suffered by Natasha. Reading
War and Peace
was alternately dull and painful. She should have brought something light and funny, but Chess didn’t like light and funny books; she liked deep and meaningful books, which, now, her psyche couldn’t handle.
As it turned out, this hardly mattered because after five or possibly ten minutes of reading, Tate interrupted her. “Jesus, Chess, all you do is read.” And Chess put her book down because Tate needed lotion rubbed into her back or Tate wanted to swim or Tate wanted to throw the Frisbee or Tate wanted to take a walk to see if she could identify any of the shorebirds from the book she was “reading,” which was the same flora and fauna guide she’d picked off the shelf the minute they arrived at the house. Being at the beach with Tate was like being at the beach with a five-year-old boy. She couldn’t sit still, she couldn’t be quiet. She wanted conversation, movement, activity. Chess was grateful when Birdie and India made their way down the steps with their upright chairs, carrying a small cooler with lunch, and a thermos of iced tea. Birdie and India wore one-piece suits and they both looked better than Chess looked in her bikini. Birdie and India now smoked like flappers, a discovery that had initially shocked Chess, then comforted her, because it was a self-destructive behavior that she had not indulged in (yet). Between cigarettes and smearing chunks of baguette with camembert, Birdie and India took turns entertaining Tate. They walked with her, they swam with her, and Aunt India even played Frisbee with her, throwing and catching quite adeptly with one hand while holding a cigarette in the other. This allowed Chess to stand at the water’s edge and throw rocks in the water, a symbolic exercise meant to lighten her load.
Get rid of the heavy stuff,
Robin had told her. At first, Chess assigned the rocks names:
grief, guilt, eulogy, harness.
And then she would throw the rock as far as she could. The act of throwing was therapeutic in and of itself; three dozen rocks left her exhausted. Aunt India started referring to this as Chess’s “shot-put practice,” but Chess was pretty sure India understood. Afterward, Chess would fall asleep in the sun.
Routine included five or ten minutes of tortured reading of classics, reluctant beach activity forced upon her by sister suffering from ADD, picking at prosciutto and butter sandwich wrapped in wax paper, “shot-put practice,” and nap.
They left the beach at three thirty, at which point they all took “showers.” Chess couldn’t abide the freezing cold water, and the soap didn’t adequately lather in it anyway, so all she got was a cursory rinse. Thankfully, she didn’t have to worry about her hair. After showering, Tate convinced Chess to take a “nature walk,” which ended up being a three-mile tramp across Tuckernuck on the dirt-and-gravel road. It was hot, there were mosquitoes and horseflies, and if she took one step off the path into the brush, she was standing in poison ivy, to which she was grossly allergic. Why did Tate insist on this hike when she had already run five miles that morning? There was no nature to be seen other than seagulls, which were as prevalent as rats in the Bastille sewer, and red-tailed hawks, one of which dive-bombed into the scrub a few yards in front of them and came up with a wriggling field mouse. Tate found this display thrilling, whereas Chess found it sad and disturbing. They walked past all the houses they recalled from childhood, including the “scary house,” which had been owned, in their grandparents’ day and maybe before, by Adeliza Coffin. Adeliza, the girls had been told, used to stand in front of her house with a shotgun, to scare off interlopers. She and her husband, Albert, were buried right there in the front yard; their gravestones jutted crookedly out of the ground like buckteeth. Out of habit, Tate and Chess hurried past the scary house with just a quick glance.
For the most part, the citizens of Tuckernuck were hearty, salty, happy-looking people, whose families had all owned their houses for two hundred years and who were all somehow distantly related.
“Life is good!” a gentleman wearing a tattered fishing hat called out to them.
And Tate, the ambassador, eagerly called back, “Life is good!”
“Life is good” was the accepted Tuckernuck greeting. It was a password. By calling out, “Life is good!” Tate was announcing that they belonged there, despite their thirteen-year absence.
The best part of Chess’s day was arriving home from the nature walk feeling sweaty and spent and sitting down at the picnic table with Birdie and Aunt India for a glass of wine. It was, officially, happy hour, Chess’s favorite time of day. This had always been the case, but it was especially true now. What did this say about her? Tate preferred the morning, as did their mother, when the day was new and filled with possibility. Chess, however, liked it when the day was done, morning and afternoon survived, and as her reward, she could sit down and have a glass of wine—which, because she’d eaten next to nothing, went straight to her head. Birdie set out dishes of Marcona almonds and smoked bluefish pâté with rosemary crackers, and although Chess had not had an appetite all day, she ate these snacks. This “happy hour” was only compromised when Barrett Lee joined them.
Barrett Lee made Chess uncomfortable, and not only because he was a member of the male species and as such was someone she should stay away from. She was uneasy around him because of their past, which included one ill-fated date here on Tuckernuck and one even more ill-fated road trip that Barrett Lee had taken the following autumn. Chess had treated him as badly as she had treated anyone in her life, Michael Morgan included. And even though Barrett had been nothing but friendly and kind since she arrived, she suspected it was an act. She had hurt him, and men didn’t forget things like that. Or maybe they did. Maybe Barrett had forgiven her; his life had certainly held bigger challenges than rejection by a recalcitrant college girl.
Chess had been surprised to hear that Barrett had lost his wife. In everyone else’s eyes, this made Barrett Lee a hero and a saint. Birdie and India treated him with kid gloves. And Tate, well, Tate wore her heart on her sleeve; it was easy to see how Tate felt. Chess wasn’t sure that losing someone you loved made you a hero or a saint. It turned you into a figure of pity; rising above the pity was what made you admirable. Barrett had risen above the pity. He had kids; he had to get on with it.
Chess had always known that Barrett was a worthy person. She knew his compass pointed true north; she knew he was made of finer stuff than she was. And that, perhaps, was what made Chess uncomfortable in Barrett’s presence.
Barrett only stayed for one beer. Tate and Birdie and India leaned toward him and asked the appropriate questions to keep Barrett talking. As six o’clock approached, the sun achieved a mellow slant and Barrett said, “Well, I should shove off. I have little mouths to feed.”
He left, hauling two bags of trash and their laundry and the list for the next day, and the others watched him go. Aunt India, as part of her own routine, gave a wolf whistle, which made Tate swear under her breath and Birdie shake her head with a delighted smile. “Honestly, India.”
And India said, “He’d better get used to it.”
As happy hour waned, Birdie started on dinner. If Birdie had said it once, she’d said it a hundred times: “Chess is the real cook in the family. Are you sure you don’t want to cook, Chess?” Chess declined. Cooking, just like everything else, had lost its allure. She remembered the hours of planning and preparation she used to put into dinner parties—she had made her own pasta from scratch, her own sauces, her own bread. For herself and Michael on a weeknight, she’d whipped up chicken piccata, a Thai
laksa,
an elaborate Indian curry with eight garnishes. Why had she gone to all that trouble? She couldn’t imagine.
Birdie was a good cook, and the meals were simple. She grilled steaks or chicken or fish, she boiled corn on the camp stove, she prepared a lettuce salad or cucumbers marinated in tarragon vinegar, and she served the rolls that Barrett brought from the bakery each morning. India usually pitched in to help, and sometimes Tate, too, while Chess sat and drank her wine.
I am a parasite,
she thought. But she didn’t lift a finger.
Between dinner and dessert, Tate and Chess got into the Scout and drove out to North Pond to watch the sun set. They took their plastic cups filled with more wine—really, by this time, Chess was too drunk to drive and Tate probably, too. But that was the beauty of Tuckernuck: there was no one else on the road. They only had to watch out for deer. The car radio picked up an alternative station out of Brown University, so they were able to listen to music. The sunset itself was an otherworldly event. In New York the sun came up and went down, and between all the people and the cabs and the Korean delis and the stock market, no one seemed to notice. Which was too bad. Of course, it was far superior to watch the sun sink into the ocean than it was to watch it set over Fort Lee, New Jersey. It gave Chess peace, perhaps her only real peace of the day, once the sun was gone, extinguished like a candle. She had survived another day.
When they got back to the house, Birdie served them blueberry pie, which Barrett had bought at Bartlett Farm, topped with whipped cream from a can. After dessert, they all retreated to the screened-in porch, which allowed them to feel like they were outside, while at the same time keeping them safe from bugs. There was a card table on the porch, and some new wicker furniture with comfy cushions that Birdie had purchased—the old wicker furniture had disintegrated and the old cushions had been as inviting as stale slices of bread. Tate wanted to play gin rummy, but Chess couldn’t focus. (She closed her eyes and saw Nick bathed in the green light of the poker table, cards fanned in his hand.) Birdie was working on a needlepoint Christmas stocking for India’s soon-to-be grandson, William Burroughs Bishop III, who would be called Tripp. India indulged Tate in rummy for half an hour, and then she took what she called “me-myself time,” which she spent smoking one last cigarette and reading in her bedroom. Chess tried to read on the porch, though it was difficult to concentrate with Tate swearing over the lie of the cards (after India retired, she played solitaire). Chess would not go up to the attic without Tate because she was afraid of the bats. Chess hadn’t seen any bats yet and Birdie had made a point of mentioning that Barrett had somehow gotten rid of the bats in the attic. But Chess was afraid nonetheless.