“What is the worst thing, then?” I asked tentatively. “If not disappointing your family?”
“Disappointing yourself,” he said quickly. “Disappointing yourself,” he repeated. “And it’s such an easy thing to do.”
I turned this phrase over and over—the thought had never occurred to me. Why should my disappointment matter? My parents were disappointed in me. And my brother, and my aunt and uncle. The word seemed to come unhinged, the way that words always did when you lingered on them too long—
disappoint
. What did it really mean? How was it even possible to disappoint myself? I was just myself. I was Thea, I was a girl, I was a daughter and a cousin and a sister and now a friend.
“Did you disappoint yourself?” I asked.
He laughed. “In too many ways to count.”
I watched the back of his head, he was silent for a second. He was so strong, Mr. Holmes; we were climbing a steep incline and his breath remained even, his footing sure.
I thought he was done with the subject, but he continued. “If I could do it all over again, relive my youth, as they say, I would do things differently. But so would everyone, I think. The trick is not to get mired in the muck.” It was an expression Father used. He turned, and I watched his profile as he spoke. “The past is the past, Thea. I hope somebody’s already told you that. But if they haven’t, well—it’s something to remember.”
Mr. Holmes stopped at a stand of trees and went through an opening I hadn’t seen. A secret opening, I thought as I followed, for our secret affair. The idea thrilled me. The trees opened and I could see straight through to the sky. I think half the transgressions here were committed because of weather like this. And the other half—in the memory of the weather. I touched his jacket, soft against my fingertips.
“Where does Emmy think we are?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Thea.” He shook his head. “You should be at the Hall, with all the other girls. You should not be here with me.”
“But I want to be here.”
We were quiet for a moment, and I knew that when he spoke again he might very well end this, send me back to be with all the other girls.
But instead he bent down and delicately picked up a transparent snake skin. “Snakes are coming out again.”
I reached for the skin, a long tube, dirty and translucent. “This is old.”
He looked at me, surprised.
“There are snakes all over in Florida.”
“You’re not scared of them?”
“Not particularly. Leave them alone, they leave you alone.”
I turned my face up and kissed him. I kissed him hard, directed his tongue; drew him closer to me.
“We can pretend we’re all alone out here,” I said.
“Because we are.”
Mr. Holmes kissed my neck, and suddenly we were on the ground, he was on top of me. My skirt was unbuttoned, and his jacket was off. I reached for his pants. Mr. Holmes above me, framed by the bluest sky I thought I’d ever seen, and I felt so lucky, that he was here with me, that I was getting again what I knew I shouldn’t have.
“No,” he whispered, and instead he licked my breasts, then my stomach, and continued down. His mouth was over my panties, and I started to sit up. He raised his head and pressed his hand into my shoulder and pushed, hard, until I relaxed. What are you doing, I thought of asking, but I felt if I spoke I might end this. My thighs quivered, and his tongue felt like it was inside me. Which was impossible, wasn’t it, but it felt so large and it moved and I put my hands on his head as if in a blessing.
S
issy caught up with me on the way back from the barn. I usually waited for her, but lately I had been scurrying out of the cabin after rest hour before the bell had even rung; and then, when I was done with riding, rushing through cooling out Naari. It was easy to evade Sissy, who was always late. I had started to do whatever I wanted to. Sometimes I didn’t even bow my head during prayer, but watched Mr. Holmes. He made small motions with his hands, even though he kept his eyes closed while he was speaking. I tried it once in the woods, closed my eyes and spoke to the trees. But it felt as strange as walking blindfolded.
“You’re always hurrying,” Sissy said. “I can never catch you.” She sounded irritated, her raspy voice high.
I shrugged. There were girls all around us. I opened my mouth to speak but closed it again; I didn’t really have anything to say.
Sissy shrugged, and I realized with a shock that she was imitating me. I stared at her.
“What?” She shrugged again. “I never see you, and you don’t seem to care. You haven’t asked about Boone in weeks.”
So this was what this was about. I was relieved, and, strangely, disappointed.
“I know he still comes,” I reminded her. “I’m the one who helps you. Takes your place in bed.”
She drew me to the side of the path, into the woods. “Stop, Thea.” Her voice cracked. “You’ve been walking around with your head in the clouds. You never come to the Hall anymore.”
“Nobody studies, anyway.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I started to defend myself, but Sissy continued. “You’re in Masters too much. Girls are talking.”
I waited for her to go on. But she didn’t. “What are they saying?” I asked.
“They’re saying you’re obsessed with Mr. Holmes, that you’re lovesick.”
I laughed, but the sound was strange in my throat. “Sissy,” I said, trying to sound incredulous, “I go there for Decca. She asked for me, you know.” I offered this as if it were proof of something. And then there was also a feeling of relief, that what Leona had said in the Square was gossip, nothing more.
“Thea, don’t!” Her voice was high. “I’m your best friend. Don’t.”
I was touched, even in that moment, that she considered herself my best friend. Sissy stood so rigidly; I took her hand, drew it from her side. “I just like being there. With Decca. With Mr. Holmes, too. We talk. He understands me.”
“What does he understand about you?” She gripped my hand tightly, now, and looked at me plaintively. “You were sent away because of a boy.”
I nodded. I had told her this, so long ago it seemed like another life, when I was settling in at Yonahlossee and wanted so badly to have a friend.
“Mr. Holmes isn’t a boy.”
I took my hand away. “I know that.” I paused for a moment. If I had been brave enough to trust Sissy I might have asked her what she meant, exactly, what she had guessed.
“What about David?” Sissy asked.
“David,” I repeated, confused. I’d nearly forgotten about him.
Sissy watched me. Eva walked by, with Gates, and I smiled at them over Sissy’s shoulder. “He’s not . . . I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t apologize. It’s just, it would be so easy, to like him. So fun. Just come around more,” she said, and her voice had returned to normal. “Please?” I’d seen Sissy do this before, decide that a quarrel was over and end it just like this, snuffing a candle. It was one of her gifts, never deigning to fight with anyone. But she had never acted like that with me. She had never needed to.
I thought about David the rest of the day, as I walked from place to place and nodded at various girls and knew that I was not like them, did not want the same things, had made my life unnecessarily hard, and would continue to do so. And why? Why, Thea, why, Mother’s voice ringing, ringing.
I knew why, though. I was a smart girl. David was a boy, and he reminded me of Georgie, as any boy would. I was done with boys.
—
S
uddenly Yonahlossee was a haze of color: candytuft carpeted the fields beyond the riding rings in all manner of pink; grape hyacinth lined the Square; and finally daffodils, my favorite, circled our riding rings in carefully planted beds. Mrs. Holmes had supervised their planting before she left. She has a genius for flowers, Henny said one night, and I had to agree.
There’s no future in this.
I kept waiting for Mr. Holmes to speak these words, but he never did. I knew this would end. I knew the date. I knew how. Mrs. Holmes would come back, and we would simply stop.
There’s no future in this, Mr. Holmes might have said, might have prepared me for the inevitable. But I wasn’t naive. I could have been called many things—shameful, cowardly, cunning—but not naive. Why did I act this way, first at home, then at Yonahlossee? I risked everything when I was old enough to know better. But there was always this: the hard kernel of want in my throat. I could not push it away. I did not want to.
Mother would be so disappointed in me. She would hate me, if she learned what I was doing. Yet if my family could cast me out so easily—out of their home, out of their hearts—shouldn’t I be able to act in the same way? I wasn’t weak. There was so much want inside me, there was so much desire. I felt it exploding when Mr. Holmes touched me, I felt it multiplying.
With Georgie I had felt desire, yes, but a fraction of what I felt with Mr. Holmes. He taught me that desire is divisible, that it changes in relation to its object. I wondered if Mother knew that. I wondered if Father did. Because you couldn’t know, if you had only ever desired a single person, if you had been kept away from everyone else.
I thought about what Mr. Holmes had told me, that my parents had made an exchange. He didn’t know them, he didn’t know my father’s tenderness, my mother’s lovely home. He didn’t know how we had loved each other.
G
eorgie was in Missouri, with his mother and father. Mother had said that we might see him next week, but I couldn’t confirm the date without calling attention to myself.
I’d woken and gasped for breath, the air was so thick and soupy. The clock on my bedside table read three thirty; in another hour or so it would be light enough to ride.
In the summers you had a second skin, a layer of moisture and sweat that was always with you. And this was only the beginning of it.
Outside, the world looked dead and disinterested; there was no breeze to rustle the grass, no crickets rubbing their legs together to interrupt the stillness. I sat on the steps and unbuttoned the first button of my nightgown, which made no difference. I closed my eyes and thought of my cousin, the way he had touched me last time, the way I had touched him, how we were learning.
“Thea,” Sam called, from behind me. I knew without looking that he was sitting in a rocking chair.
“Sam.”
“You weren’t scared?” he asked. He sounded like he had been up for a while. He had always liked to startle others, to jump out from behind doors, to wait in a bush and spring up, suddenly, a surprise.
“Who else would it be?” The question hung in the air for a moment, two. I spoke again. “Can’t sleep?”
“Who can? It must be a record, this heat. It feels like it.”
“It never is. A record.”
“No,” he agreed, “it never is.”
We were silent for a few moments. Sam sighed.
“You’ll be tired tomorrow,” I said.
“I’ll just sleep tomorrow. I won’t miss anything.”
“I guess not.”
“I want to go away, Thea. I want to travel.” His voice was strange. I turned and looked at him. He was barefoot, sprawled in the rocking chair in his normal day clothes. His head was turned, in profile, and I saw how handsome my brother was becoming. He was going to be more handsome than I was beautiful, our features more suited to a man’s face; but I pushed the thought from my mind. I was fifteen years old; I wanted to be beautiful. I did not want anyone else to be more beautiful, even my twin—or especially my twin. “Don’t you?” he asked again, and turned to me. Mother said some twins looked less and less alike as they grew older, but that didn’t seem to be the case for me and Sam.
“Where would you go?” I asked. My brother had never spoken to me of leaving before. Not ever.
“I think I’d like to go somewhere on a ship,” he said, and I couldn’t help it, I laughed.
Sam wouldn’t look at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “it’s just the picture of you on a ship. Would you be a sailor?”
He said nothing.
“Sam,” I began, “I’m sorry—”
“No you’re not. Anyway, wouldn’t you be glad if I left?” His voice was high, and I understood that Sam did not really want to go anywhere, that he wanted nothing about our lives to change.
“Why would I be glad, Sam?” I spoke quietly. “I need you.”
“Need me?” It was his turn to laugh. “Need me for what? You spend all day on Sasi. You don’t need anyone.”
“That isn’t true,” I said. But, strangely, my feelings weren’t hurt. I felt they should be, I expected them to be, but they weren’t.
“No,” Sam said, “I suppose it isn’t true. You need our cousin.”
I lay back against the hard brick, suddenly exhausted. I could feel Sam stand behind me; I thought he would go inside now, but instead he sat down next to me. I watched his back: he was growing broader as I was growing narrower.
“No moon tonight.” His voice was dull.
I shook my head, even though he wasn’t looking at me.
“Do you remember when you thought an Indian lived out there?” I asked.
“You believed it, too.”
He lay down next to me, and I knew the coolness of the brick was a relief to him also.
“Thea?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever wonder what it feels like to be dead?”
I considered the question. Sam passed his hand lightly over my eyes. “Close them.” I did. “It feels like this,” he said.
“No it doesn’t.”
“Try and fall asleep. You might as well be dead, when you’re sleeping.”
I tried to push all my thoughts away and make my mind go blank. I tried not to think about Georgie, I tried to lull my mind into stillness. I wanted to please my brother.
“I don’t think this is working.” Sam didn’t respond, but I could tell he wasn’t sleeping, only trying. “I wonder which one of us will die first.”
“Me,” he said, “it will be me.”
I said nothing. To be alive without Sam—would that be any life at all, I wondered. I knew Mother and Father would die first, though I didn’t know in which order; this made sense. They had lives before me, and I would have a life after them. But Sam and I had never existed alone, and now this existence seemed as much a burden as a pleasure. Or perhaps it was neither. It was merely a fact.
“Thea. Try again.”
I listened to Sam. I closed my eyes. And what did I see? Mother’s old carriage blanket, weighing down her arm like a stone. I tried to think of other things, put them on top of the blanket: Sasi, Georgie, the usual things. But they all led back to the blanket. Usually I was so good at plucking from my brain what I did not want to consider.
I almost fell asleep. The sun rose very slowly, by increments, and I kept my eyes shut against it, tried to make myself drift into oblivion. Then suddenly I could taste what it would be like to become nothing. And it was an absence so large I couldn’t quite conceive of it, except to be terrified.
I opened my eyes and sat up, turned to Sam, who slept peacefully. My hand hovered above his shoulder. I needed to wake him, I needed to tell him I was scared. He would help me understand it. But then I let my hand drop, onto the brick. I wanted to be separate from Sam. I wanted to experience something he did not. And so I stayed on the porch for another hour, the sun turning us hotter and hotter as it rose.
I should have woken Sam to prevent the burn that we would sport for the next week, our forearms and faces bright red, then pink, then peeling. But I did not. My face was redder on my left cheek, almost like I had painted it with rouge; it had been turned to the sun while I had watched my brother. He had wanted me to follow him there, to wherever he was, and I hadn’t. I could not. I watched him and saw very clearly that there were places I would not follow Sam, where he would not follow me.
—
W
hat Sam said rang over and over—You need our cousin. We love him differently. Georgie, his thick waist, his broad chest—what Sam could see. What Sam couldn’t see: the trail of hair that split his navel, the taut surface of his stomach.
We love him differently, but what was the difference? My mother and father loved each other, shared a bed; I loved my mother, my father loved me, they both loved Sam. Marriage meant you included someone, permanently, in your family. That kind of marriage made sense. In the Bible, Jacob married two first cousins, Rachel and Leah, and it was a joyful occasion. Occasions. I didn’t want as much as that—I only wanted a single person, a solitary being.
But that was so long ago. At the beginning of time, everyone must have been a cousin. Cousin-marriage, then, was a modern term, applied to pairs like Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgwood, their marriage an anecdote, woven into Father’s lecture in order to entertain, trick us into caring. I’d wondered if Emma was related to the porcelain manufacturer. Neither Father nor Mother had known, and there was no way for me to find out at that time in my life, no matter how badly I wanted to.
And so the story of Emma and Charles lodged itself somewhere in my young brain. Mr. Darwin had carefully considered both the benefits and detriments of marriage, committing himself to Miss Wedgwood for as long as they both would live. Marriage meant less money for his work, less time to catalogue all the unknown species of flora and fauna in the great beyond. Miss Emma Wedgwood was already catalogued, already
known
, and Mr. Darwin couldn’t have been less interested in what he already understood. In his huge, unrelenting brain, Mr. Darwin’s capacity for love had already been filled by the vast inhabitants of God’s earth.
If Mother found out what I was doing, she might want me to marry Georgie. And I did not want to marry my cousin. I did not want to live in Gainesville. I did not—and this thought shamed me—want to be poor. But still I wanted my cousin. I wanted him very badly. I tried to separate the two things in my mind. I could not make sense of it all, how I could want one part but not the other.
It was the longest Georgie and I had been apart. I didn’t think of it this way then, but that night in the stall must have worked on my conscience, because suddenly I saw what I was doing clearly, and I was terrified that someone would know. I was still hungry for my cousin—I wanted him to touch me, I craved his touch—but my hunger was tempered by caution. Perhaps it was as simple as this: I was older. I saw my mother unfurling her precious carriage blanket, pulling it from beneath the table, and it unlocked the possibilities in my brain. If I had allowed things to go further I would no longer be a virgin. That was the first thing, and then the second was that if anyone knew, I wouldn’t be marriageable. I could have conceived a child,
we
could have conceived a child. It was a possibility. I shudder to think of my life had that happened.
My mother held up the blanket, and in Georgie’s absence it had revealed itself to me like a flare in the night sky that had come into view suddenly and terrifyingly.
Then Georgie was back, and we went to Gainesville for tea, just me and Mother, Sam was busy with something. His absence would have seemed like a blessing a month ago. But now I wished he was here. Georgie had tea with us, stared at me in a way that was obvious, but Mother and Aunt Carrie didn’t seem to notice. I ate a scone and it was dust in my mouth.
I followed him upstairs later. He patted the space next to him on his unmade bed; I went reluctantly. I’d never liked his room.
“Did you miss me?”
“Yes.”
“My cousins there aren’t like the ones here,” he said, and I looked at him. Georgie leaned in to kiss me, his eyes already closed, and I turned my cheek.
“You left the blanket in the stall last time.”
“I did?”
“Mother found it. We could have been caught.”
He smoothed the sheet between us, and though he came close to touching me, he didn’t. I could hear my own heart. He kept drawing his hand in a pattern that brought it close and then away again.
“Georgie,” I said, my voice nearly a whisper.
“My cousins in Kansas City aren’t doing very well. Everyone’s moved into my grandmother’s house.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “It was good that she died.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What? It’s the truth. They’re all farmers, they don’t have professions they can depend on, like our fathers. Well, like your father. People are always sick, aren’t they? But it hasn’t rained in months there. They’re desperate.”
I stilled his hand and held it between both of mine. This was the Georgie who was mine, who no one else saw.
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you know how poor everyone is now? Father says it’s just starting, that it’ll be worse before it’s better. The cows in the pastures are starving. You can see their spines.”
I shivered. “They should shoot them, put them out of their misery.”
“They can’t. Then that would be the end of things. Think, Thea—they need their cows.”
“It will rain again. It always does.”
“Only God can say that.”
“Or the ocean. The ocean decides when it rains.”
“Tell my uncles. Tell them to ask the ocean.”
I hadn’t meant to be flip. “I’m sure it’s awful.”
“It is.” He rested his head on my shoulder, which he’d never done before. It was usually I who leaned against him. I stroked his forearm, watched how the fine hairs stood at my touch.
“All I thought about was you, when I was gone. How much I wanted you to be with me.”
“Well, here I am.”
“I mean be with you differently.” He drew his finger across my lap. “Do you want to be with me like that?”
I looked around the room—the ratty bedspread, flung on the floor; the uneven floorboards; the secondhand desk; the framed photograph of a man I did not recognize, someone from Aunt Carrie’s family. There was a small lockbox beneath the bed, which held his treasures: a silver dollar, a smooth stone from Ormond Beach, a postcard from Toronto.
These were all his things in the world. And now me, he had me, too.
“You don’t need to answer,” he said, into my neck. “Just stay here with me.”
—
I
came to Yonahlossee in late July, the summer nearly over. In Florida this was always the worst month, the heat so vicious it claimed lives, a dozen every July. The bugs were unbearable, biting, buzzing, trying to get at you any way they could. When I undressed, I found mosquitoes in my undergarments, nestled between my thighs.
Georgie was visiting, for the Fourth. I looked forward to seeing my cousin with a distinct combination of dread and exhilaration.
My uncle bought fireworks from a stand in Gainesville, a boxful of them, on a whim. We’d never lit fireworks before. I saw my father’s expression as Uncle George revealed his surprise, and he was not pleased, anyone could see that.
“A gift,” Uncle George said, “a gift,” and my father said nothing, and I pitied Uncle George, and I was so angry at Father for his meanness.
“A fine one,” my mother said, splitting the silence, “a fine one.” But it was too late.
Sometimes when I think of that weekend—and I have thought of it often, wound and rewound the scenes—I am not impressed. What happened seems, if not normal, inevitable, unsurprising. My family emerged a different family, but that would have happened anyway. Sam and I would have gone to college, Georgie would have married. The children would have left.
And other times I think of that weekend and I am a young stranger, that weekend is impossible.
—
I
did have the sense that someone was watching us. I was very careful, I diligently ignored Georgie when we were in front of anyone else, including Sam. Sam looked at me as if we had an understanding when I didn’t laugh at a joke Georgie made, when I refused to even smile; it was so simple to please him.