T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish.”

And here’s the canoe, scraping at the sand that will have to be replaced again this spring or they’ll all be hip-deep in mud, and Susan’s there now, trading places with the girl in back, the power position, raising her paddle high as if it were the honed glistening spear of a warrior out for conquest.

A puff of smoke. A long mournful inhalation and Marsha won’t look her in the eye. “They’re going to get a place in the Village, she says. Live free. Do their thing.” The canoe, Miriam sees, is stuck there under the weight of the girls, stuck in the mud, and she has to restrain herself from interfering until finally Susan digs her paddle into the bottom to push them off and the canoe rides free in a shimmer of light. “Or some such crap,” Marsha says.

[I was already gone by then, trying to redeem myself in grad school, and Les was in San Francisco, managing the first Cajun-style restaurant to appear there, but I knew Richie Spano from the time Les and I rented a house in the Colony three years earlier. There was a lot of traffic in that house — friends, musicians, druggies, friends of friends, friends of druggies — and Richie drifted in from time to time. He was quick on his feet, cocky, borderline obnoxious, with a mean streak that was something sick. One night, apropos of nothing, he plucked the darts out of the board on the kitchen wall and nailed my girlfriend’s cat with one of them — which stuck there in the stripe of fur along its spine, quivering like a bandillera, until the cat vanished and bled all over the carpet in the back room and cost thirty-five dollars at the vet’s to repair, money I paid out of my own pocket because Richie Spano wasn’t about to pay anybody anything.]

Miriam is there at the window one soft mist-hung morning in the spring of a year when the canoe has been all but forgotten, chained to a rail on a grassy strand off to the far side of the beach in a mismatched tumble of upended boats, the girls on to other pursuits now, most of them boy-related. Susan is seventeen, too nervous by half over her college applications, her AP courses, the way Mr. Honer presses her to practice though she’s only third violin and Mr. Davies rides roughshod over the Thespian Club, but her room is decorated with posters of shirtless, long-haired boys posing with guitars in their hands. And there was junior prom last year when Miriam had to pull strings behind the scenes till the boy her daughter liked finally asked her, though thank god nothing more came of it beyond the gown, the flowers and home by one.

She’s sipping a cup of tea while her cigarette levitates smoke at her elbow, caught in a recollection of her own seventeen-year-old self when she first came up from Stelton for the summer to stay with her cousins in a bungalow not three city blocks from where she’s sitting now. No one would have described her as shy back then, and when she went to the beach with her cousin Molly that first afternoon and saw a group of boys sweating over a little black ball on the paddleball court, she went right up to them, not five feet away, and watched as they leapt and grimaced and slammed at the ball with all the raw frustrated adolescent power boiling up out of them until they began to falter, to hit out, to lose the rhythm of the game — and it was no secret why. It was because she was there, with her pretty dark features that everyone said were just like Rita Hayworth’s, with her nails freshly done and a white towel slung insouciantly over one shoulder, dressed in the swimsuit she’d spent the better part of an hour admiring in the full-length mirror at Genung’s before she said yes and counted out the money at the cash register. There were four boys playing and half a dozen others sprawled on the grass at the edge of the court, but the one who caught her eye — the tall one, with his slicked-back dirty blond hair, his shrinking T-shirt and the black high-top basketball shoes he wore without socks — was Sid.

She shifts in her seat, lifts the cigarette to her lips to consolidate the recollection, but the cigarette is dead. And the tea — the tea’s gone cold. She’s about to push herself up and light the gas under the kettle when a movement on the ball field catches her eye. There’s someone out there — two people, a boy and a girl — and that strikes her as odd because it’s a school day and though it’s officially spring the leaves of the trees are wound tight in the grip of their buds and it’s cold still, especially with the way the mist is pushing in off the lake. Hardly beach weather.

She’s already put up dinner — a pot roast simmering in the crock pot Les gave her for her birthday last year — and she’s been through the newspaper twice and blackened the crossword puzzle till she can’t make a thing of it. Is she bored? Lonely? In need of stimulation? She supposes so. She’s been spending an awful lot of time sitting at the window lately, talking on the telephone or just dreaming, and she’s been putting on weight too. But what are they doing out there?

In the next moment she’s in the front hall, shrugging into her faded blue parka with the mismatched mittens stuffed deep in the pockets amidst various wads of Kleenex and expired notes to herself, and then she’s out in the air, the day brisk and smelling faintly of something left too long in the refrigerator, heading down the path to where her property ends and the single-lane gravel road loops through the high chain-link gates and peters out in the beach area. She veers left, onto the grass of the outfield, and feels it wet on the worn suede moccasins she slipped on at the door. When she gets closer — when she’s halfway to the two figures bent over what looks to be a big gray-green stone protruding from the grass — she recognizes Seldy. Seldy, in bell-bottom jeans and a serape and some sort of leather cowboy hat pulled down so far it masks her eyes. And who’s that with her? Richie. Richie, looking as if he’s dressed for Halloween with his long hair, his tie-dyed shirt and the ragged cloth overcoat he might have dug out of the pile at the Salvation Army.

She’s not thinking, really — and the way she’s dressed and with her hair uncombed and no makeup on she’s not especially in the mood to see anybody at the moment — but she’s here now and that thing on the ground, she realizes, is no rock. It’s moving. And the boy— Richie —is stabbing at it with a fallen branch. In the very instant she opens her mouth to say “Hi,” startling them both, she sees what it is: a turtle. One of the big ridge-backed things that come up out of the lake to lay their eggs on the apron of sand at the edge of the ball field.

Seldy tries for a smile and only partly succeeds. Richie ignores her. “Hi,” Seldy murmurs.

“Are you up visiting?” she hears herself say, even as Richie forces the stick into the animal’s mouth and the jaws clamp down with an audible crack.

“See that?” he says. “One of these things can take your hand off if you’re not careful.”

Very softly, as if she’s afraid to raise her voice, Seldy says, “Yes,” but that’s puzzling, because Marsha didn’t breathe a word and it takes a moment for her to realize they must be staying with Richie’s parents on the other side of the lake — or not even on the lake, really, but in a development off Amazon Road. And then a scenario from a year ago presents itself, a dinner party she was giving for a new couple, the Abramsons — he’s a doctor in the city — and how Seldy, up for the weekend, had sat rigidly between her parents and barely said a word all night. Except to be negative. At one point, early on, before the Abramsons and the others arrived, Miriam had been rearranging the flowers in the big cut-glass vase she’d inherited from her mother, soliciting Marsha’s opinion, just chattering, that was all, when Seldy, her face sour and her lips drawn down, snapped at her out of nowhere. “Jesus, Miriam, it’s only the Colony, only the sticks, ” she said, and her voice was like a saw cutting the house in two. “You’d think you were Mrs. Dalloway or something.”