Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

I haven’t heard about a cure for that yet, she said.

I know, but it will come in the future.

If you say so, Felix. You seem to know a lot.

Where in Russia are you from?

The mountains. I’m named after a river near where I was born.

Felix looked at her for an extra beat, as if he could see the vibrant blue River Neva flowing in the sky behind her head.

Poppy is coming today, he said.

Who is Poppy?

My sister. Actually she’s my cousin who was adopted by my dad when her mother died. She was six. She’s seventeen now. Her mom was my dad’s sister. It’ll be better when she gets here. She’s interesting.

Like you?

For the first time since she’d met him he blushed a little and didn’t seem to know whether to laugh or to hide.

No, he said. Not like me. She’s cool.

I can’t imagine anyone cooler than you.

She has totally white hair. Well, the last time I saw her she did. And her eyes are kind of far apart.

I look forward to meeting her.

Are there any more potatoes?

—

For a long time Neva has had no friends. Not since she was very small. But Felix, this child, seems like a friend. She is twenty-six and yet this nine-year-old boy makes sense to her. He does not seem to need anything, just like her. Except this girl Poppy, he seems to need this girl Poppy. Neva feels a curiosity about the girl and a pull toward the boy. This is new and different. She is not usually taken in by these families. She doesn’t despise them, but she usually feels a great distance, a divide having to do with more than money, more than education, more than privilege. She usually sees them as people with no similarity to her whatsoever, as if they were an entirely different species, even when she likes them, even when they seem to be decent, thoughtful people. But now she feels an unfamiliar kinship, a powerful loneliness that she can comprehend in this family. She could misunderstand it, could think that she and they are very much alike, and that she is one of them. But she is realistic and practical and she understands at least this much: what connects her to this particular family is their loneliness and in the case of Felix his awareness that he is lonely. He accepts it, accepts himself. Jonathan is like many of the other families she has worked for. Jonathan does not even know that he is in pain, inflicting pain, always in the vicinity of pain. Steve is something else. Steve is another matter. Steve is an ocean.

—

For dessert they ate ice-cream sandwiches made in innovative combinations such as gingersnap with lavender gelato or mint-chocolate-chip cookie with Earl Grey custard. Neva took the boys back to their room and got them changed into their tennis clothes and then accompanied them to the tennis courts where an instructor was waiting. Roman catapulted the ball at the Australian pro, and Felix hobbled around the court like he had someplace else to be.

Neva sat on the sidelines watching them, Roman lunging and Felix flitting, two awkward, unnaturally cultivated birds.

POPPY DID NOT let the men who appeared with headsets and strong arms to take her belongings take her belongings, at least not one suitcase in particular, a beat-up purple T. Anthony, which she lugged by herself up some stone steps into a vast foyer with checkerboard marble flooring and, following that, up a green-carpeted staircase. She came upon her room by herself and looked around at the quiet chandelier, the Persian rug, the intricately patterned wallpaper, and huge bed. She took in that this house belonged to real people from another family who were once very rich, perhaps as rich as her family was today, and who now rented out their stately home for lavish events. A slight feeling of discomfort, something like pity, stirred the foliage around the gate of her inner mansion, that world usually cut off from too much feeling. However, here — in the orbit of her family and especially Ian — feelings could not be entirely held at bay. They were blowing in, first signs of a storm.

A rumble of the mattress as she hoisted her purple valise onto it, inciting ripples of dark pink velvet bedspread. A rosy reflected light colored her face as she unzipped the bag and rummaged around for a change of clothes. A slight breeze from the drafty house brushed the bangs of her now-brown hair, her new short cut showing off the line of her long clean neck. Her eyes lay wide and searching in her gently mocking, pretty face. Out the window the sun was just slanting sideways through the tall trees, out of which rose little birds like flying thoughts distracting the world from some great mystery behind the greenery. She pulled on a striped and slouchy dress and slipped her toes into low suede boots and strode coolly out of the room.

—

Before all of this, shortly before the wedding, Poppy had accepted the persistent attentions of a rich young musician who had been slavishly pursuing her for months. They got together at a party Patrizia and Steve threw for Poppy at that semi-new hotel in Williamsburg. Soon after the party Poppy had announced to Steve that she wouldn’t be applying to college in the fall. Steve was in the middle of a complicated multinational negotiation at the time and decided to humor her until her idiotic idea went away and that boy with the ridiculous beard finally bored her. Steve had no awareness that she would take his evasive “we’ll see” attitude as an affirmation of her plans. And so it continued with the musician whose privileged life was nothing compared with Poppy’s advantageous perch atop the universal elite. He — his name was something offbeat his parents had come up with that was meant to make him extraordinary — looked on in lust and admiration and studied everything about Poppy: her angled face, her knowing naïveté, her sarcastic smile and adorable wit. Her careless, fearless, superbly plain sense of style and ravishing big eyes. In the month of June of the year 20—, the boyfriend looked on as she boarded a plane bound for the wedding of her half brother Jonathan, flying away from him, the boyfriend, and away from the sweltering diseased heat of a soot-smeared summer in New York, into the seductive, self-annihilating beauty of time captured in the endlessly rolling, eternally mythic English countryside.

—

Poppy thinks that she is the heroine of her own life but knows, deeply, that she is not. She feels the calm air around her and senses that nature has some wisdom she does not yet understand, some equanimity, while she herself is all impulse and wonder and fury and bottomless hope. Her hopefulness is so deep that it is almost shallow. It is her desire to understand that keeps it from being shallow. She desperately wants to understand who she is, how she got here, what to do with her life. Her life seems all at once too fragile and insubstantial and the only thing she has, and so this leaves her both willing to destroy it and afraid to risk her entire universe, this not-girl-anymore but not-yet-adult life. Some days she would like to risk everything.

—

Would she be different if she hadn’t lost her mother at so young an age? Would she be different if she had known her father? Would she be different if she hadn’t had so many resources? (The fancy school, the low suede boots.) These questions swim absentmindedly around in her consciousness, but she never notices them. If she did they would reveal themselves as impossible to answer, but she might learn something from contemplating them, not the answers but the fact that the questions bother her, worry her, distract her like small invisible insects in the air.

She doesn’t know yet that the questions themselves are her biggest problem, that they are keeping her from deciding what to become. Instead she throws all of her love at the world, swatting at the insects, smacking them with love, without knowing that this is what she is doing. This makes her brave but not strong, intense but not knowing. This makes her heartbreaking to anyone who can see her for who she is.