The tension was present between Michael and Nick. They sniped at each other all through dinner. Nick called Michael a corporate ass kisser and Michael called Nick a ne’er-do-well nitwit sponge. Cy and Evelyn didn’t seem to notice, or maybe they did notice and were just used to it. As Evelyn was clearing the plates, she let it slip that the reason Nick’s nose was crooked was that Michael had punched him in the face, back when they were in high school.
I gasped. “Why?” I said.
Michael and Nick didn’t answer. They were glowering at each other.
Evelyn answered from the kitchen, “They were fighting over some girl.”
Before dessert, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and I wandered down the long hallway looking at pictures of Michael and Nick and Dora as children. I loved the eighties hair and clothes, Michael in his lacrosse uniform, Nick in his corduroy suit, his nose straight and perfect. I found the powder room. It was elegant and refined, much like the powder room in Birdie’s house. There was a bowl of soap meant to look like river rocks.
When I opened the powder room door, Nick was standing there. I was startled. He kissed me. His lips were warm, salty, tangy. Then he pulled away. He said, “You taste just like I dreamed you would.” And he disappeared into some nether part of the house. He didn’t reappear for the chocolate mousse. I didn’t see him again that night.
Chess threw the notebook across the attic. It skidded under the dresser, disturbing who knew how many spiders. The confession was hurting, not helping. Robin was a quack.
A few seconds later, Chess lifted herself out of bed to retrieve the notebook and put it back between the mattress and box spring. She didn’t want Tate to find it.
Robin and her medical degree had told Chess that the most important thing to do upon her arrival on Tuckernuck was to establish a routine. The routine should not be complicated or stressful. This made Chess laugh. Nothing on Tuckernuck was complicated or stressful; it was simple and boring.
Still, she tried. Chess woke up between nine and ten in the morning, at which point Tate had already been awake for three hours, run around the island and done six hundred sit-ups hanging by her knees from the tree branch, taken a shower, eaten a robust breakfast prepared by their mother, changed into her bikini, put on lotion, and made her way to the beach. Tate urged Chess to join her.
“I’ll be down in a little while,” Chess said. She brushed her teeth and oozed down the stairs like a slug, still in her nightgown. Sleeping in didn’t make a person feel good; it made a person feel slovenly. Birdie always lingered in the kitchen long after everyone else had finished breakfast so that she could make Chess’s breakfast fresh and it would be hot. And what did Chess do by way of thanks? She picked at her food and let some drop to the ground on purpose, where the ants would get it. After not eating breakfast, Chess returned to the sweltering attic, where she wrote her confession in the notebook.
She then put on her bathing suit, trying to ignore the fact that her body was changing in the most unfair way. She was skeletal in the rib cage, and her breasts were shrinking. The skin at the sides of her breasts, which used to be taut, was slack; she could pull at it. And yet, Chess’s ass didn’t fit in her bikini bottom properly; she had to pull at it to keep the suit secure. The Tuckernuck house had no full-length mirror-in fact, the house had no mirrors at all except for the badly tarnished mirror above the bathroom sink-which was a good thing because Chess was, for the first time in her life, ugly. Her hair was gone. Each morning, she woke up thinking she had long, silken hair, the envy of every woman she had ever met, only to discover that her head was as scruffy as a vacant lot. Her scalp itched. This led to further thoughts: It didn’t matter if she was ugly. She loved only one man and that was Nick, and Nick was gone. And Michael was dead. Dead? No. But yes. She hated thinking. She needed to stanch her mental bleeding.
Her routine included rising late, picking at breakfast, writing down the pain, and indulging in some negative self-image.
To the beach, Chess wore her ill-fitting bikini, her stretched-out Diplomatic Immunity T-shirt, her army-surplus shorts, and her blue crocheted cap. She carried a towel, a book, and a bottle of water. She had decided she would read only the classics while on Tuckernuck, and so the two books she had brought were War and Peace and Vanity Fair. She had thought that because the books were set in olden times, the characters would have quaint, outdated problems. She started with War and Peace. She slogged through the war scenes, and she identified way too closely with the affairs of the heart suffered by Natasha. Reading War and Peace was alternately dull and painful. She should have brought something light and funny, but Chess didn’t like light and funny books; she liked deep and meaningful books, which, now, her psyche couldn’t handle.
As it turned out, this hardly mattered because after five or possibly ten minutes of reading, Tate interrupted her. “Jesus, Chess, all you do is read.” And Chess put her book down because Tate needed lotion rubbed into her back or Tate wanted to swim or Tate wanted to throw the Frisbee or Tate wanted to take a walk to see if she could identify any of the shorebirds from the book she was “reading,” which was the same flora and fauna guide she’d picked off the shelf the minute they arrived at the house. Being at the beach with Tate was like being at the beach with a five-year-old boy. She couldn’t sit still, she couldn’t be quiet. She wanted conversation, movement, activity. Chess was grateful when Birdie and India made their way down the steps with their upright chairs, carrying a small cooler with lunch, and a thermos of iced tea. Birdie and India wore one-piece suits and they both looked better than Chess looked in her bikini. Birdie and India now smoked like flappers, a discovery that had initially shocked Chess, then comforted her, because it was a self-destructive behavior that she had not indulged in (yet). Between cigarettes and smearing chunks of baguette with camembert, Birdie and India took turns entertaining Tate. They walked with her, they swam with her, and Aunt India even played Frisbee with her, throwing and catching quite adeptly with one hand while holding a cigarette in the other. This allowed Chess to stand at the water’s edge and throw rocks in the water, a symbolic exercise meant to lighten her load. Get rid of the heavy stuff, Robin had told her. At first, Chess assigned the rocks names: grief, guilt, eulogy, harness. And then she would throw the rock as far as she could. The act of throwing was therapeutic in and of itself; three dozen rocks left her exhausted. Aunt India started referring to this as Chess’s “shot-put practice,” but Chess was pretty sure India understood. Afterward, Chess would fall asleep in the sun.
Routine included five or ten minutes of tortured reading of classics, reluctant beach activity forced upon her by sister suffering from ADD, picking at prosciutto and butter sandwich wrapped in wax paper, “shot-put practice,” and nap.
They left the beach at three thirty, at which point they all took “showers.” Chess couldn’t abide the freezing cold water, and the soap didn’t adequately lather in it anyway, so all she got was a cursory rinse. Thankfully, she didn’t have to worry about her hair. After showering, Tate convinced Chess to take a “nature walk,” which ended up being a three-mile tramp across Tuckernuck on the dirt-and-gravel road. It was hot, there were mosquitoes and horseflies, and if she took one step off the path into the brush, she was standing in poison ivy, to which she was grossly allergic. Why did Tate insist on this hike when she had already run five miles that morning? There was no nature to be seen other than seagulls, which were as prevalent as rats in the Bastille sewer, and red-tailed hawks, one of which dive-bombed into the scrub a few yards in front of them and came up with a wriggling field mouse. Tate found this display thrilling, whereas Chess found it sad and disturbing. They walked past all the houses they recalled from childhood, including the “scary house,” which had been owned, in their grandparents’ day and maybe before, by Adeliza Coffin. Adeliza, the girls had been told, used to stand in front of her house with a shotgun, to scare off interlopers. She and her husband, Albert, were buried right there in the front yard; their gravestones jutted crookedly out of the ground like buckteeth. Out of habit, Tate and Chess hurried past the scary house with just a quick glance.