Sara Paretsky - A Woman’s Eye

She surveyed the dancers on the floor. “She’s probably down at the boathouse,” she said.

“What’s she doing down there?” I asked. Innocence. Too young. For a beat Katty and her friends just looked at me. And Linda started laughing. Katty joined in. The boys were politely inexpressive. They were sophisticates.

After she’d stopped laughing, Linda said, as if everyone knew that, “It’s where couples go.”

Katty added, “When they want to be alone.”

“Smooching,” Linda said.

I caught on. I wasn’t that innocent. Necking, they called it at my school.

“She’ll be here after the music stops,” Katty said. “She wouldn’t dare not,” she explained to her friends. “She knows Aunt Priscilla is waiting up.”

Truly true. Aunt Priscilla wasn’t as sharp-tongued as Aunt George. But you could bully Aunt George by a temper tantrum. Katty explained it to me early in the summer. Aunt Priscilla was immovable.

When Mr. Gruen dimmed the colored lights and set the juke box for the last dance, always “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” I saw them. Elektra and Voss. Dancing. Two become one. I watched through the whole record. Daydreaming. Why call it “day” when it’s at night? Someday I’d grow up and have a boyfriend who danced like Voss.

Voss and Claude said good night and walked off. Elektra rowed us home. Aunt Pris glanced at her watch. “It will be midnight before you get to sleep.” This was a nudge to go to bed, not stay up talking. “And we have to start packing up tomorrow. Aunt George and Fred will be here Monday morning.”

Katty and I didn’t talk much. Too tired. Too much, each of us, to remember. From the beginning of summer through this our final night of the boys’ farewell across the water. “Good Night, Ladies…”

We had to miss Sunday morning church when at the lake. The nearest was in Clarksvale, too far to walk. Aunt Priscilla read her Bible. The children were kept quiet, and Katty and I usually slept until noon. In the afternoon we were allowed to swim and splash by our dock.

This Sunday was different. I woke-it wasn’t eight o’clock-to the children gabbling in loud voices. Loud voices. Like on a weekday. My mother and Aunt Pris were ahead of me to the kitchen. Mother with her hair still in kid curlers, Aunt Pris with her gray hair in a plait down her back. Both in their nightgowns and robes. Aunt Pris was asking, “Whatever is the matter?” and my mother saying to her two, “Quiet. Quiet now. What’s wrong?”

The children all talked at once. Emerged, one question. “Where’s Elektra?”

Aunt Pris was dubious. “She isn’t here?”

“No, She isn’t here,” all talking again at once. Almost shouting. “She’s not here. There’s no breakfast.”

“Perhaps she overslept,” Aunt Pris said. She hesitated. Then made her way to the back of the house, past my room, sleepy-eyed Katty just emerging, saying, “What’s wrong?”

On to Elektra’s bedroom beyond. Aunt Priscilla proper. Knocking on the door. Calling gently, careful not to startle a sleeper. “Elektra… Elektra… it’s Miss Priscilla.”

No response. She tried it again, a bit louder. Again no response. Aunt Priscilla took hold of the doorknob. Reluctantly. It was against all the principles of good manners. To open another’s bedroom door. Even a servant’s. But with no sound within, she did open the door, one small slant. Enough to peep inside. Then wider. And she said, “She isn’t here.”

“She must be around someplace.” Katty and I had followed into the room. Katty said, “She can’t have left. She hasn’t taken her things.” The hairbrush was on the bureau. The box of powder and the puff also there. Her nightdress still folded neatly over the back of a chair. The bed already made up. Or was it used last night?

“She’ll be back,” Aunt Priscilla decided. “I’ll dress and then I’ll cook breakfast.”

Mother said, “I’ll give the children some cornflakes and milk to tide them over.” She had already put the kettle on for Aunt Priscilla’s morning tea.

Aunt George came up in the afternoon. She said the same as Aunt Priscilla. “She’ll be back.” Her reasoning was different’ “I owe her five dollars. For last week. She won’t leave without her pay.”

But she didn’t come back. Not that day.

Not the next day. My small suitcase was packed. All else was confusion. Katty trying to curl her hair before closing her suitcase. Aunt Priscilla had packed all of Elektra’s belongings into her own trunk. There wasn’t much. The skirt and shirt she wore to work in, the few cosmetics, even her toothbrush and toothpaste had been left behind, and her undergarments (one to wear, one to wash, one to dry), her bedroom slippers, and an old night-robe that Aunt Pris had given her. Of course she’d taken her purse with her; the one she carried last night wasn’t in the room. There’d be a comb and lipstick and powder compact in it.

Aunt Priscilla was trying to get everything shipshape, as it had been when we arrived. Mother was trying to get her children ready to leave. Aunt George arrival and added to the confusion while insisting, “Of course Elektra’s gone back to Clarksvale. For reasons of her own.” She finally took the Tompkin boys out to Fred, let him keep them busy out by the truck.

I managed to slip out the side door at a propitious moment when all the others were in the house or in front by the cars. I skulked rapidly through the trees until I was on the path that led to High Peak. It wasn’t a real path. Just bumpy earth, pebbles and rocks, bits of green that wasn’t weeds or wild grass, just green stuff. I zigzagged up the path to the promontory at the top. High above the shore. Elektra’s special place. One afternoon when Katty and Linda were being exceptionally boy-crazies, Elektra had let me go with her to the peak. This was her time off from children and chores-why would she take me with her? Maybe because Voss danced with me once in the Paul Jones.

She didn’t talk about him. She didn’t talk when we were there. She just stood on the promontory and looked at the sky or down at the water. Under the promontory but still high on the slope there was a shelf. Not far below the peak. No way to get to it except by zigzagging down the slope and stooping your way under the protruding upper slope. She didn’t take me there. She didn’t go there either. Just pointed it out to me as we leaned over the tip. Scary.

I didn’t want to go there now. She wasn’t there. But she had been here last night. With Voss? A farewell? In each other’s arms. Two into one. “Stop dreaming,” Katty would say. Or my mother. Or anyone if I spoke of it. But I knew. Before I saw the bead, the red glass bead on the green stuff scattered on the earth. She wore those beads to the dance last night. She always wore them with her summer dress, her white dress with the little roses sprinkled across the pattern. The beads almost looked like crystals. Not really. They were pretend, cut like crystals, but made of glass. They were a little handful of beauty to her. She must have searched for them when the strand was broken. Caught on a tree branch, or the button on a man’s jacket. Too dark to find all of them. I looked. There was one out on the tip, but I didn’t go there. I scruffed through the green and found another. And another, with leaf mold patterning it. No more. I hadn’t time to search for more. I ran until the cottage was in sight. Then I just hurried, the beads tight in my left fist. Fred was loading the last of the suitcases.

My mother came to me with, “Emmy, where have you been?” and as she looked into my face, softly, “Saying goodbye?”

She understood the need to say good-bye. To the woods and the water. To some of summer memories. In some secret place you had marked as your own.