The sun beats down, the heat comes wavering up off the sand. I wear a cotton kerchief on my head, folded into a triangle and tied behind my ears, the front of it damp with sweat. Around us is the drone of flies. I try to listen through it, behind it, for the sound of bears. I’m not sure what they would sound like, but I know that bears like blueberries, and they’re unpredictable. They may run away. Or they may come after you. If they come you should lie down and pretend to be dead. This is what my brother says. Then they might go away, he says; or they might scoop out your innards. I’ve seen fish guts, I can picture this. My brother finds a bear turd, blue and speckled and human-looking, and pokes a stick into it to see how fresh it is.
In the afternoons, when it’s too hot to pick berries, we swim in the lake, in the same water the fish come out of. I’m not supposed to go over my depth. The water is gelid, murky; down there, past where the sand drops away and it’s deep, there are old rocks covered with slime, sunken logs, crayfish, leeches, huge pike with undershot jaws. Stephen tells me fish can smell. He says they’ll smell us, and keep out of the way.
We sit on the shore, on rocks that poke up from the narrow beach, and toss bits of bread into the water, seeing what we can entice: minnows, a few perch. We search for flat stones and skip them, or we practice burping at will, or we put our mouths against the insides of our arms and blow to make farting noises, or we fill our mouths with water and see how far we can spit. In these contests I am not the winner, I am more like an audience; though my brother does not brag, and would probably do the same things, by himself, if I weren’t there.
Sometimes he writes in pee, on the thin edge of sand or on the surface of the water. He does this methodically, as if it’s important to do it well, the pee arching delicately out from the front of his swim trunks, from his hand and its extra finger, the writing angular, like his real writing, and ending always with a period. He doesn’t write his name, or dirty words, as other boys do, as I know from snowbanks. Instead he writes: MARS. Or, if he’s feeling up to it, something longer: JUPITER. By the end of the summer he has done the whole solar system, three times over, in pee.
It’s the middle of September; the leaves are already turning, dark red, bright yellow. At night when I walk to the outhouse, in the dark with no flashlight because I can see better that way, the stars are sharp and crystalline and my breath goes before me. I see my parents, in through the window, sitting beside the kerosene lamp, and they are like a faraway picture with a frame of blackness. It’s disquieting to look at them, in through the window, and know that they don’t know I can see them. It’s as if I don’t exist; or as if they don’t.
When we come back down from the north it’s like coming down from a mountain. We descend through layers of clarity, of coolness and uncluttered light, down past the last granite outcrop, the last small raggedy-edged lake, into the thicker air, the dampness and warm heaviness, the cricket noises and weedy meadow smells of the south.
We reach our house in the afternoon. It looks strange, different, as if enchanted. Thistles and goldenrod have grown up around it, like a thorny hedge, out of the mud. The huge hole and the mountain of earth next door have vanished, and in their place is a new house. How has this happened? I wasn’t expecting such changes.
Grace and Carol are standing among the apple trees, just where I left them. But they don’t look the same. They don’t look at all like the pictures of them I’ve carried around in my head for the past four months, shifting pictures in which only a few features stand out. For one thing they’re bigger; and they have on different clothes.
They don’t come running over, but stop what they’re doing and stare, as if we’re new people, as if I’ve never lived here. A third girl is with them. I look at her, empty of premonition. I’ve never seen her before.
Chapter 14
Grace waves. After a moment Carol waves too. The third girl doesn’t wave. They stand among the asters and goldenrod, waiting as I go toward them. The apple trees are covered with scabby apples, red ones and yellow ones; some of the apples have fallen off and are rotting on the ground. There’s a sweet, cidery smell, and the buzz of drunken yellowjackets. The apples mush under my feet. Grace and Carol are browner, less pasty; their features are farther apart, their hair lighter. The third girl is the tallest. Unlike Grace and Carol, who are in summer skirts, she wears corduroys and a pullover. Both Carol and Grace are stubby-shaped, but this girl is thin without being fragile: lanky, sinewy. She has dark-blond hair cut in a long pageboy, with bangs falling half into her greenish eyes. Her face is long, her mouth slightly lopsided; something about the top lip is a little skewed, as if it’s been cut open and sewn up crooked.
But her mouth evens out when she smiles. She has a smile like a grown-up’s, as if she’s learned it and is doing it out of politeness. She holds out her hand. “Hi, I’m Cordelia. And you must be…”
I stare at her. If she were an adult, I would take the hand, shake it, I would know what to say. But children do not shake hands like this.
“Elaine,” Grace says.
I feel shy with Cordelia. I’ve been riding in the back of the car for two days, sleeping in a tent; I’m conscious of my grubbiness, my unbrushed hair. Cordelia is looking past me to where my parents are unloading the car. Her eyes are measuring, amused. I can see, without turning around, my father’s old felt hat, his boots, the stubble on his face, my brother’s uncut hair and seedy sweater and baggy knees, my mother’s gray slacks, her manlike plaid shirt, her face blank of makeup.
“There’s dog poop on your shoe,” Cordelia says.
I look down. “It’s only a rotten apple.”
“It’s the same color though, isn’t it?” Cordelia says. “Not the hard kind, the soft squooshy kind, like peanut butter.” This time her voice is confiding, as if she’s talking about something intimate that only she and I know about and agree on. She creates a circle of two, takes me in. Cordelia lives farther east than I do, in a region of houses even newer than ours, with the same surrounding mud. But her house is not a bungalow, it has two stories. It has a dining room separated by a curtain which you can pull back to make the living room and the dining room into one big room, and a bathroom on the ground floor with no bathtub in it which is called the powder room. The colors in Cordelia’s house are not dark, like those in other houses. They’re light grays and light greens and whites. The sofa, for instance, is apple-green. There’s nothing flowered or maroon or velvet. There’s a picture, framed in light gray, of Cordelia’s two older sisters, done in pastels when they were younger, both wearing smocked dresses, their hair feathery, their eyes like mist. There are real flowers, several different kinds at once, in chunky, flowing vases of Swedish glass. It’s Cordelia who tells us the glass is Swedish. Swedish glass is the best kind, she says.
Cordelia’s mother arranges the flowers herself, wearing gardening gloves. My own mother doesn’t arrange flowers. Sometimes she sticks a few into a pot and puts them on the dinner table, but these are flowers she picks herself, during her exercise walks, in her slacks, along the road or in the ravine. Really they are weeds. She would never think of spending money on flowers. It occurs to me for the first time that we are not rich.
Cordelia’s mother has a cleaning lady. She is the only one of our mothers who has one. The cleaning lady is not called the cleaning lady, however. She is called the woman. On the days when the woman comes, we have to stay out of her way.