Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

Laundry —as always, I remind you: the water must be scalding, especially for the last rinse.

Christmas supplies —By the end of the day all seasonal decorations, inside and out, should be up and attractively arranged; all meals should be served on the Christmas linens; bud vases for the trays should be in combinations of green, red, and white.

“Your mother,” Eudora said, less amused than Naomi had expected. “Yesterday…”

She paused, looking uncomfortable. Then she continued, “She said the oddest thing to me before I left. She asked me to stop riding home with you on Wednesday evenings — because of Miles, she said. Because she wants you and Miles to have time alone together. She seems to think he’s interested in you.”

Naomi groaned. “Miles,” she said. “If she had just let me get a real job I never would have asked him for work.”

“Your mother’s not the one who’s been flirting with him,” Eudora pointed out.

“I haven’t been flirting, ” Naomi said. “Not really.”

Eudora scuffed her feet through the damp leaves as if they deserved her full attention. In the silence Naomi almost believed her own words. The idea that her mother, characteristically alert to anything that might advance their lives, was pushing her and Miles together made her wince. “Whatever he’s thinking,” she said, “I’m certainly not interested in him.”

“He’s not so bad,” Eudora said. “At least he’s trying to do something .”

Naomi made a face and changed the subject, baffled that Eudora hadn’t grasped her dismay. Not a single person understood — she didn’t understand herself — how she could want and want and want. She wanted not to keep living in Tamarack Lake, under her mother’s thumb. Not to end up with some local boy, because no one else was around. And not to choose someone like Miles, just because she could make him tremble by flashing her stockings when she crossed her legs. Both she and Eudora had let the boys they’d known in school take them out to moving-picture shows, skating parties, hayrides. Some they’d kissed, but Eudora never liked to talk about that, and when Naomi tried to tell her about the time she and Liam O’Connor had done a little more than that in the woods last summer, Eudora wouldn’t listen.

But that had just been Liam, sweet and as dumb as a big yellow dog; Naomi had wanted to see what he’d do. Liam, the Dalton brothers, Mrs. Flaherty’s husband, Miles: what a waste, Naomi thought. What she really wanted was to know what being with someone felt like. What it was like to be in love, and with someone who didn’t act like a dog at the end of her leash.

Into her head flashed a picture of Leo Marburg, so intriguingly different from her despite his similar hair and eyes. His life before Tamarack State was a blank; no one visited him and he never mentioned brothers or sisters or parents or a girlfriend. Did he have a family? He had to be poor, or he wouldn’t be here. And smart — beyond the questions he asked Miles, he seemed to read a great deal and Eudora had shown her the toy he’d made from the Erector set. He’d been in this country for six years; he came from someplace overseas. When she was close to him she felt the way she used to feel in Chester, early in the morning, when she couldn’t imagine what the day would bring but was thrilled to get up and meet it.

He was lonely, she thought, and he had no idea how attractive he was. He seemed mystified by the way people moved toward him, often resting their hands on his arms as they talked. Sometimes she’d caught him looking her way, seeming to study her as she studied him, and she’d imagined rising, while whoever was speaking droned on, and slipping out into the garden as he followed her. There was a nook outside the solarium door, near the chimney and across from that fountain, and he pressed her into it, not clumsily like Liam but tenderly, moving his hands along her back as if he was investigating…

“…and Eugene said he’d ask you,” Eudora said. “What do you think?”

Naomi stopped. “About what?” She’d missed half a conversation, and the huge boulder, perched as casually as if a giant had dropped a pebble on the thumb of land protruding into the lake, loomed before her as if some other set of feet had carried her there.

“I’ve been talking for five minutes — what were you thinking about?”

“Just…” Naomi gestured toward the lake, the stars dimly reflected in the water but the distant shore invisible and the mountains lost as well. “Don’t you get tired of this?”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Work. Our families, everything. How empty it is here.”

“It’s home,” Eudora said.

“Not for me,” Naomi said. “Not really.” She struggled to explain herself more clearly. “When I was tiny and we lived in Chester,” she began, “I used to wake up in my room almost wild with excitement, so anxious to run out into the garden, down to the river, everywhere, so thrilled to talk to the fishermen or the neighbors. If I found a flower that had fallen from one of the tulip trees, that was enough to make the whole day. A pinecone. The sight of the neighbor’s gray horse. Why is it different now?”

“Is it different?” Eudora asked.

“Mostly — you don’t feel that? I can see the world around me, I can draw everything in it. But now I’m outside it, on the edge somehow. It’s like being trapped on the wrong side of a window. If I could scratch through it, maybe I’d know what everyone else wants and feels.”

“You know what I feel,” Eudora said, stopping to look directly at Naomi, her expression wounded. “I tell you everything.”

Naomi shook her head. “You don’t,” she said. “No one really does, do they? That’s what I mean. You tell me lots of things but not what’s most important to you, what’s hidden inside. Everyone else I know does the same thing. We’re all like that and some days I can’t stand it, I just can’t stand it.”

Her eyes were wet, her voice was loud, she was flinging her arms about and Eudora was looking at her as though she’d hit a dog with the Model T — why was she saying this, why would she even want what she’d just said? Suppose Eudora knew what she really thought about Miles, about Leo, about Ernest or the men she passed on the street. Suppose Eudora, so helpful to the patients at Tamarack State, knew what she did to some of her mother’s boarders? The young women, especially — how she turned her back when they wanted to confide something sad, how she dawdled over their fretful requests. It was unbearable the way that, despite all their money, they acted like their lives were over and they had nothing to look forward to. Unbearable that they confused her with the hired help and spoke to her in the same tone.

Eudora didn’t know that she sometimes stole from them. Little things, something small and part of a set, so that for months they’d go on searching for a cuff link, an earring, a lone calfskin glove. A single turquoise stocking, which wouldn’t be missed for weeks. Or letters, which she took just often enough to baffle them. The boarders left their mail in the basket on the sideboard, trusting her to deliver it to the post office. Once in a while she took a letter for herself, which was how she kept track of what they thought. Or she’d slip an incoming letter from the pile she brought home and then listen, her face blank, while they fretted about how their families never wrote.

Eudora reached for her hand, her face concerned. “What is it?” she said. “What am I missing?”

They’d reached the boulder and were heading back now, to the village and their families and their jobs and their lives that would never, Naomi thought, ever change except to grow still more confining. She drew the cool air into her lungs and tried to focus on the bare trees lining the path, so common that they’d given the village its name. Each limb lined with twigs, each twig dotted with tiny stubs from which the smallest, softest, pale green needles would sprout in the spring, darkening throughout the summer and then lightening again once the weather changed until they’d turn a beautiful yellow and, before Thanksgiving, shower to the ground. On the ground they looked like a golden veil. A hundred times she’d drawn tamaracks, which were pleasing in every season. Not once had she told Eudora or anyone else how she loved them.