I let out a little cry, my feet scrabbling along the floor. The frog roars. The mesh is chinking and clanging and groaning with its weight.
“You’re making it happen,” Rie says. “My brother’s making it happen.” But she lets me hold her hand, so I know we’re safe. I look up the tier; Laurie gives me a quick nod.
We’re in a helicopter out of Martin State. There’s an after-party in Talbot County. I am completely smashed, nearly falling asleep, head bouncing against a window. Over the roar of the engine, I can hear Rie behind me, slurring, giggling. “All I could think of was reproduction,” she’s saying. “I kept looking, against my will, at those hips moving like a piston, spewing that filthy clotted cream. Wasn’t it so terrible? Wasn’t it? That was so disgusting. Every time I close my eyes, I just see it-and I think it should be outlawed. Oh, but maybe I want to see it just one more time.”
For a while, no one speaks. I’m kind of staring out at the purple night clouds and the sparkle of the shoreline in the distance.
Rie makes a little purring noise. I can hear her lips. I guess she’s kissing the guy in the seat next to hers.
“My God, honey,” she says all throat, “my brother made that happen.”
GOODWOOD GARDENS BY SUJATA MASSEY
Roland Park
Jeannie always made it a point to say that the house on Goodwood Gardens had never been her choice. Charlie, however, clung to his belief that their first home in
Baltimore had been a marital compromise. It was an argument without an ending-like their family, and like the house itself.
Goodwood Gardens was not actually a park, as the name suggested, but a short residential road in Plat Four, the fourth portion of land developed in the early twentieth century in Roland Park, a magical neighborhood of curving, tree-shaded streets that boasted grand, century-old houses of stone, stucco, and shingle.
The omission of a word such as “street” or “road” or “avenue” in the Gardens’ address was something Jeannie found maddeningly pretentious, but Goodwood Gardens had been established as the city’s millionaire’s row back at the dawning of the twentieth century, and its identity had held. It didn’t seem like a place that anyone, least of all a girl who’d grown up in a ranch house in San Mateo, should have disliked so heartily.
Jeannie and Charlie’s house had been built in the 1920s, making it one of the newer houses on the street. The residence was huge-ten bedrooms, ten baths, and two powder rooms-more than enough room for a family of three. The place reminded one of an embassy, perhaps located in Salzburg or some other romantic Teutonic locale. The exterior was beautifully half-timbered white stucco, and was ornamented with two battlements from which hung, respectively, the flags of the United States and Maryland.
Jeannie had wanted to remove the flags-the previous owners had left in a hurry, not bothering to take them along-but Charlie thought the neighbors would wonder why. So the flags remained, respectfully illuminated through the night by the klieg-like spotlights that nestled around the house: an excellent security feature, but also another way of showing off the structure, making it look more like a State Department residence than the home of a computer game designer, his three-year-old heir, and the heir’s out-of work, out-of-sorts mother. The only solace, Jeannie thought, was that the house had experienced a succession of seven active owners during the last ten years, so it was completely updated and there were almost no home improvements to be done.
“Just needs a little Restylane,” Hodder Reeves, the real estate broker, had said with an airy wave of his hand the first time he’d walked them through. The house was for sale, but without a sign in front. The house had never needed any signage; the real estate agents knew when it was on the market, and brought select clients registered with their own firm who’d been pre-authorized as having sufficient buying power, and who clearly understood that only offers in the range of two million would be considered.
“A little patch-up on the plaster, here and there, to make things perfect. You’re from California. You know how that stuff’s done,” Hodder had said, winking at Jeannie, who was lingering on the first floor while Charlie was leading their son, Ivanhoe, through the second floor’s maze of interconnecting bedrooms and baths.
Charlie and Jeannie had offered that day, and six months later, as Jeannie weeded the grass underneath the ancient boxwood hedges that now belonged to her, she thought more about Hodder Reeves. He knew the house well, having managed, for the last five go-rounds, to be both the listing and selling agent for it. Six percent of a house like theirs-that appreciated between twenty or thirty percent each time it sold-was practically enough to live on, although Hodder had plenty of other listings in the charmed North Baltimore trifecta of Roland Park, Guilford, and Homeland. Having grown up on Ridgewood Road in a handsome eight-bedroom Greek revival house that backed up to the one next door to Charlie and Jeannie’s, Hodder was a Roland Park boy through and through. His father had founded the region’s largest party services company, which Hodder’s older brother, Stuart, had taken over; Hodder had also mentioned that all the Reeves men had graduated from Gilman, which would be the perfect school for Ivanhoe.
Jeannie couldn’t imagine what a school full of boys would make of a new student called Ivanhoe. Charlie had wanted his firstborn to have a unique name with a historic pedigree. He had suggested Ivanhoe right after birth, when Jeannie was still delirious from mood-altering drugs. When she came to full consciousness and saw the name Charlie had ordered inscribed on the baby’s crib chart, she was upset at first, but once again her husband got what he wanted.
Jeannie had gotten over the name brouhaha, but what continued to bother her, she thought as she yanked at some stubborn clover, was that Ivanhoe was one of the heroic personalities in the educational computer game that Charlie had made his fortune designing. Although Charlie would point out that the game’s success was Jeannie’s doing because of how she, an English major temping at Charlie’s fledgling games company, had suggested Charlie read Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley for ideas-after all, these were stories old enough not to be copyrighted.
The game was a language-building tool, packed with sharp swords and SAT vocabulary. The American Library Association had called Charlie a hero; and once public libraries and elementary schools started buying the program-well, Charlie could either let himself be bought out, which he thought he was too young to do, or do something creative, like take a wrecked old factory in inner-city Baltimore and remake it into a manufacturing plant for the game.
It was like Goodwood Gardens’ past come to life, Jeannie mused, as she continued pulling up weeds from between the bricks. Charlie was the lord of an old factory in East Baltimore; he even went to work in a three-piece suit, wanting to seem like anything but an ordinary computer game programmer. He lunched with people like the mayor, and the lawyer who owned the Baltimore Orioles.
“You know, you could hire someone to do that-but aren’t you cute doing it yourself.” Hodder Reeves’s private-school drawl cut through Jeannie’s gardening trance.
The real estate agent was standing a few feet away from her, hands splayed on the hips of his creaseless khakis, which broke crisply on the tops of his cordovan Gucci loafers. He had no socks on, as usual, and was wearing a turquoise Lacoste shirt that made his eyes look even bluer, and the longish hair that curled around the shirt’s upturned collar seem youthfully thick and blond, though Jeannie knew for a fact he was over forty and got his highlights at the same salon that she frequented.