11
Since there is no space for groceries in my car, I take my father’s to the market. Going down the hill into town, I get behind a Volvo whose bumper declares they’d rather be windsurfing. A Saab at the fish market says it would rather be skiing. I laugh as if Jonathan were beside me and had made a joke. Yeah, he’d say, where I grew up we put stickers on our asses that said I’D RATHER BE DRIVING A CAR. At the sight of my father’s beige sedan, hands rise from steering wheels to wave and then surprised eyes peer in. They do not know me, but I know them: Mrs. Utley, chain-smoking in a green station wagon; Mrs. Braeburn, pursing her stiff lips in a navy Jeep; small Mrs. Wentworth leaning forward in a van, only her forehead visible; Mr. Timmons, who inexplicably retired in his early forties, parking his powder blue convertible outside the post office with the concentration of a leader of a small military operation.
After my mother died, I came to Ashing seldom and briefly. Two nights a year with my father and Catherine was enough. On the way, I’d think of all the people I wanted to see, old friends who might by chance be back visiting at the same time, friends of my mother’s who’d written kind letters to me after she died. I’d plan to go to all the shops, poke my head in at the Mug and the penny candy store. I wanted to visit people because I missed them and because I knew it would be healthy to break up the intensity of seeing my father. But my father’s house was not one you could flit in and out of. It sucked you in until it spat you out. It was seductively familiar, my father greeting me in the driveway, his scratchy voice animated, full of stories he’d seemed to save just for me. I rarely managed to time my visits with Patrick’s. After college he moved to Miami with a woman named Hill and her three children, and they didn’t come north much. Frank ended up in New York City and Elyse in Wyoming, and I never saw them, either. So I’d sit with my father and Catherine the first night and wonder why I didn’t come home more often. My father would get drunk, but he seemed happy, playful. That first night I never thought to go downtown to the bars like other people my age did when they came home to visit. I went to bed when he and Catherine did, and fell into a heavy sleep. But the show would always be over by the next afternoon. My father’s good mood never lasted long. Catherine would have said something that pissed him off, or a neighbor would have come over uninvited, or someone from work would have called. His anger would ramp up, and by nighttime he was seething and muttering, while I just tried to dodge as many insults as I could. I never ended up seeing anyone else in Ashing. He made me forget my attachments to others; he made me reptilian. To go see other people meant they would see my scales.
But the circumstances are different now. The last time I was here my dissertation was over two thousand pages of notes in a milk crate in the back of my car and I’d just had a bad breakup. But I am beyond all that uncertainty now. Almost miraculously, I think as I walk up the slight incline of Goodale’s parking lot to the glass doors, I have come back to Ashing whole.
It’s been at least a decade since I’ve entered this store and seen Mrs. Goodale glance up in irritation, as if she needed another customer like she needed a hole in her head. I don’t bear much resemblance to my child self: my hair has grown down my back, my skinny frame has filled out a bit, and the defensive grimace I wear in all the old photos is gone. I planned to be a spy in the aisles, listening for any talk of my father and Catherine, for where she might be and if there is any hope of her coming back. But Mrs. Goodale lifts her head and says, without a moment’s pause, “Daley Amory, back from beyond the beyond.”
It’s a bit like being announced by a footman at the entryway of a ball. Her proclamation carries straight back to meats then ricochets across to frozen foods and dairy. Fortunately the store is nearly empty. There’s only my sixth-grade teacher perusing the tomatoes, awful hard pale balls grouped in threes on green Styrofoam trays and wrapped in thick cellophane. Her scowl has deepened, though I think she’s trying to smile at me now. I see she isn’t as old as I once thought. She doesn’t look more than sixty now. She didn’t like me much. I had her the first year we lived on Water Street, the first year of my parents’ divorce. She called me a sullen little girl in the report card that came home at Christmastime. Garvey taunted me about it. He even called me Sully for a while. When, at the end of that year, I got a perfect score on my math exam, she called it a fluke.
I slip into the narrow vegetable aisle and stand beside her, closer than I normally get to people, especially people I don’t like. “Hello, Miss Perth.” I’m not much taller than she is but I have on my favorite shoes, black lace-ups with a chunky heel, and feel like I’m towering over her.
She startles like a cat and steps back. “Oh, it’s you,” she says, not remembering my name. “Gardiner’s sister.”
That reminds me of another thing she said, a few weeks after school had started in the falclass="underline" “Well, you’re nothing like your delightful brother, are you?”
“And what are you doing with yourself these days?” She says these days as if she doesn’t approve of the expression but has forgotten how to better articulate the time frame.
I pause. I want to brag, prove to her that I was no fluke in the end, but I want to do it with humility.
“A bit at loose ends, it seems,” she says.
“Not really.” I laugh, but an explanation is frozen in my throat. Defending myself has never been one of my strengths.
“Daley?” A large woman in a navy dress hurries up to me from the back of the store. “God, it is you! You hot shit. Look at you in your shiny shoes!” She envelops me sideways, my shoulder disappearing between her enormous breasts. “I can’t wait to tell Neal you’re home.” This is Mrs. Caffrey. Since I’ve been back I’ve forgotten to remember Neal Caffrey. Please don’t, I think. Please don’t mention my name to Neal.
“He’s here, you know. I mean he lives here. He has a shop.” She points back toward the middle of town. Neal Caffrey runs a shop in Ashing? He won all those subject prizes at graduation in eighth grade, and the big silver cup for excellence in scholarship, athletics, and citizenship. The Renaissance Cup. “He’d love to see you.” She glances at my left ring finger, finds it bare, and gushes on. “I think the two of you would really hit it off.”
“I’m only here for another day. I’m leaving for California on Sunday morning. I’m a professor at Berkeley.” It’s the first time I’ve ever said it like that, in the present tense. I speak loudly, but Miss Perth has turned the corner.
“Oh.” Mrs. Caffrey looks gravely disappointed. She kicks an unpacked box of leeks on the floor. “He’ll never meet anyone in this town. Everyone interesting leaves. Only the screwups hang around.”
This is as much as I’ve ever spoken to Neal’s mother. I remember her in the carpool line. She’d always be out of the car, leaning into someone else’s window, then leaning back out, howling. She had that large person’s jolliness and warmth. Neal didn’t inherit that. By eighth grade he’d become more of a brooder. A popular brooder, though. He had his pick of girls. I never did speak to him after that summer. He didn’t notice. He thought I was concave. That’s what he told Stacy Miller in seventh grade, that I was so flat-chested I was concave. After eighth grade he went on to Exeter while I stayed at the academy.