Before You Know Kindness (10 page)

Charlotte, Willow observed, didn’t seem to mind her father’s butter substitute, or even the fact that although Uncle Spencer’s waffle looked perfect, it had a strangely bitter aftertaste that Willow presumed had something to do with the soy milk. Her cousin sat in her skimpy white shorts with her bare legs underneath her in one of the antique ladder-back chairs around the dining room table, happily cutting the waffle apart with her fork, occasionally reaching down to peel a bit of burned skin off her thigh.

Abruptly she looked up at Willow and said, “Some teenagers are going to have a bonfire and their own party tonight at the club.” That evening they were all going to the annual midsummer blowout at the Contour Club, which was one of the reasons why Grandmother wanted everyone here this particular weekend: She liked to show off her family.

“Are you going to go?”

“I might. Connor told me about it,” she said. Connor, Willow knew, was a fifteen-year-old who came to the club under duress, but when he was there Charlotte didn’t take her eyes off him. He never went near the pool, had no interest in golf, but twice in the last week the two girls had watched him play tennis. It was clear he was one of the few members of the Contour Club who might have been able to give Aunt Catherine a little competition. He had green eyes—though the girls had only seen them one time, because he almost always wore sunglasses—a little dark fuzz above his lip, and hair as black as Charlotte’s string bikini.

“When were you talking to Connor?”

“He called.”

“Really?”

“Well, he called across the grass.”

“To you?”

Charlotte shrugged, and Willow guessed that small shoulder spasm meant that Connor had yelled across the grass by the Contour Club’s terrace to some other teenager about the bonfire on Saturday night, and Charlotte had overheard him.

“Anyway, I think I might go,” Charlotte murmured.

“You can’t have a bonfire until it’s dark out, and Grandmother will want us to go home by eight or eight thirty.”

“My dad will pick me up in that case,” she said, and then she called into the kitchen where her father was still at work beside the waffle iron, “Right, Dad?”

“Right what, honey?”

“Some of the kids are having a bonfire tonight. Can I go?”

“You mean at the club?”

“Uh-huh.”

He strolled into the dining room with a dishtowel slung over his shoulder. “I think a bonfire sounds nice. Can grown-ups go, too?”

“Nope. Just kids.”

“Too bad. How old will the kids be?”

“Oh, my age—and some older kids, too, of course, so the adults don’t need to worry.”

He smiled. “The presence of teenagers is supposed to make me worry less?”

“Well, you know, in terms of the fire. There will be older kids there so you don’t need to fear we’ll, like, burn down the woods.”

“Gotcha.”

“So we can go?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“The thing is, it might go on a little later than the cocktail party you and Mom will be at,” she said.

“I understand. We’ll obviously have a couple of cars. I don’t mind hanging around so I can drive you girls home.”

“Thank you, Dad.”

Willow watched her uncle, and she thought that he might have been about to lean over and kiss his daughter on her forehead, but then he seemed to think better of the idea. Maybe he thought he’d embarrass her. Instead he bent down and kissed his nephew on the boy’s cheek, oblivious to the long tendrils of drool that were hanging off the infant’s chin or that linked his mouth and his hand like filaments from a spider’s web. Then Uncle Spencer returned to the kitchen, where Willow heard the waffle iron scrape along the counter as he lifted the metal lid.

“See how easy that was?” Charlotte said. “My dad usually says yes to the things that don’t involve any work, so he can say no to the things that do. We can go.”

“You can go. I’m not sure I want to hang around with a bunch of teenagers.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Won’t you be nervous?”

“I’m sure there will be thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds there, too.”

“And sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.”

“Doubt it. Anyone around here old enough to drive has better places to go on a Saturday night than the Contour Club.”

Willow heard her mother pad lightly down the steps from the second floor. She had been upstairs showering and getting dressed.

“Ask your mom if you can go,” Charlotte said to her now. “Tell her my dad said it was okay with him, and he’d drive us home.”

Reminding herself that she could change her mind that afternoon if she didn’t want to tag along with Charlotte while her cousin lied about her age to a bunch of tenth- and eleventh-graders, she nodded, and when her mother wandered into the dining room—her hair in a towel because it was wet, but her eyes more refreshed than they’d been before she had climbed into the shower—she asked if she, too, could go to the bonfire.

Eight

C
atherine stood at the baseline of the northernmost of the four courts at the Contour Club Saturday morning, a wire basket of yellow tennis balls at her feet. The sun was behind her, and she allowed herself a hearty grunt with each serve into the ether on the other side of the net, the exhalations conjuring like a faint breeze across her tongue the dim but pleasurable memory of that single slice of her mother’s bologna she’d eaten surreptitiously before leaving with Sara and the girls for the club. She could feel sweat trickling down her shoulder blades and puddling in the small of her back. The grunts, she knew, were making the older men on the court beside her uncomfortable. At the Contour Club, people did not grunt—especially when they were practicing their serve all alone. Even those few members who actually lived in New Hampshire year-round knew enough not to grunt. Grunting, as her mother would say with a sniff, was awfully animalistic. And though Nan was preternaturally athletic for someone her age, she also believed it was inappropriate—unseemly, she would have said—to be
too
competitive. Grunters, it was clear, were people who tried way too hard.

The first time her mother had watched her play in a tournament in college—just after Catherine had discovered the power grunting added to her game—she had pulled her aside after the match and asked her what sort of unladylike gremlin had taken over her mouth. Catherine knew instantly what her mother was referring to, but she had won that morning against a high-seeded girl who was two years older than she was, and so she wasn’t about to stop grunting.

“UNNHH!” she cried out now, as she felt the wind from her swing on her legs.

She wasn’t exactly sure why she was taking such pleasure this morning in her grunts—each sharp, abbreviated syllable sounded downright melodious in her ear, and she loved the feel of her teeth against her tongue as she finished—but she understood that on some level this was (as her sister-in-law the therapist would say) a hostile gesture. Still, why she should be feeling hostile here and now was not entirely clear to her. After all, Charlotte and her niece seemed happy enough at the pool, her brother was holding up their generation’s honor at old Walter Durnip’s funeral, Sara was dozing on a blanket in the shade with Patrick, and Spencer was off at some garden nursery, seeing if there was anything at all the experts there could suggest to buffer the sad remains of the garden from the deer.

The deer. She paused with the tennis ball in her hand and rolled her thumb over the fuzz. She wondered if she was actually angry right now at the deer for devouring the garden. Her husband’s garden. It was possible, she decided. But it wasn’t likely: She viewed the garden with the same benign distance that she tolerated Charlotte’s glitter cosmetics. It demanded a tad more of her attention than she cared to invest, but it was essentially harmless.

And despite the ruination brought about by the deer, Spencer had seemed happy enough this morning when he’d made the girls all those waffles. (She had been relieved to see that for all her daughter’s neuroses and burgeoning adolescent angst, it was highly unlikely the kid was ever going to have an eating disorder. She’d wolfed down three of her dad’s waffles before leaving for the club.) On the other hand, those waffles had annoyed her. The last thing her mother needed this morning was more commotion in the kitchen. Sara, of course, would probably remind her that her anger had nothing to do with the way Spencer’s cooking had added to the Saturday morning confusion; rather, her sister-in-law would speculate—gently—that perhaps she was jealous because the waffles had allowed Spencer to further endear himself to the girls. There she was trying to appease her mother and organize the children, while her husband was (uncharacteristically) the anarchist who was reaping the children’s approval.

She tossed the ball high over her head, and with the loudest, most atavistic grunt yet sent the orb in a clothesline-straight stripe into the far court. “UNNHH!”

No, she decided firmly, as the ball bounced against the chain-link fence in the corner, whatever pebble was wedged inside her soul right now had nothing at all to do with either those waffles or the deer in the garden. It was something else: her frustration with Spencer throughout the spring and summer, perhaps, or the way they hadn’t found time for each other while Charlotte had been here in the country. That’s what it was.

Maybe this afternoon they would have some time alone together to talk and she would tell him.
Something’s wrong between us,
she heard herself murmuring to the man in her head.
We can’t go on as we are.
They’d go for a long walk like they did when they were younger, when they were in college, and she would tell him,
We’ve grown apart. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. We’ve grown apart.
If not today, then maybe tomorrow. Maybe she’d tell him on Sunday.

Or, perhaps, the week after next. When they were home in Manhattan.

And maybe she needed to begin with something softer in any case:
Something is troubling you. Something is troubling us. We need counseling.
Counseling was a reasonable step, wasn’t it? They had almost seventeen years of marriage and a daughter who would turn thirteen in a month.

Maybe they’d simply married too young. Certainly everyone had said so at the time. They’d married a mere seven months after finishing college, convinced there was no reason to wait because they’d been dating since they were freshmen. And less than four years after that she’d gotten pregnant, and she had been thrilled because she loved children—it was why she became a teacher—and he was thrilled because he seemed to love everything. Monkeys. Cats. Babies.

But they never did have another child, did they? They talked about it. And they thought they would. They
assumed
they would, especially when they were planning their brief, failed foray into Connecticut. But that experiment had left them all miserable, and so they’d moved back to the city and, somehow, the idea of another child was left behind in the suburbs. The timing, they told themselves, just hadn’t been right.

Same with the dog that Charlotte had wanted. It just didn’t seem to make sense to get one—at least not to Spencer—once they returned to Manhattan. He worried that the apartment wasn’t big enough for the kind of dog their young daughter desired (one, naturally enough, like Grandmother’s), and, besides, they already had a pair of cats.

“You have one hell of a serve.”

She turned and wiped her brow. There on the grass stood a young man in sneakers and baggy khaki shorts—one of the lifeguards, she believed—with a tennis racket and a can of balls in his hand. Something was sparkling on his left earlobe, and she couldn’t tell from this distance whether it was a stud or a legitimate rock of some sort.

“It’s not what it was fifteen years ago,” she said.

“It looks mighty fine to me.” She had the sense that he was making a leap from her serve to . . . to her.

“Trust me: It isn’t what it once was. Nothing is.”

“Can I join you? I was looking for a game.”

She gazed at the nearly empty basket at her feet. She’d planned on heading back to the pool soon, and diving into the water and splashing around with her daughter and her niece. Moreover, if this young man was a lifeguard, then the old guard on the courts to her left—the conservative codgers who disapproved of her grunts—would be miffed that she was playing tennis with him on a Saturday morning. He was, in their opinion . . .  the help.

That, of course, was reason enough to play with him in her mind. Not unlike her own daughter, she took great satisfaction from the torments she inflicted on the older generation. Besides, he was awfully cute.

“You don’t honestly think you can keep up with me, do you?” she asked, raising a single eyebrow.

He smiled. “I think I can try.”

There didn’t seem to be anybody else waiting, and so she nodded. “Okay. A couple games,” she agreed. “What’s your name?”

“Gary. Gary Winslow. My grandfather is—”

“Your grandfather is Kelsey Winslow, of course,” she said, and she understood instantly why this lifeguard was so comfortable wandering around the courts right now looking for a game. Gary was working here for the summer, yes, but he was also a member. His parents had died in the attack on the World Trade Center, when the two of them had had the misfortune of being on one of the early-morning planes out of Boston that were plunged into the towers like missiles. Gary’s father was an anesthesiologist and he was on his way to a symposium in San Francisco. Gary’s mother was accompanying him for no other reason than the fact that the conference was in northern California and she’d never been there. Ever since then Gary and his sister (whose name, at the moment, escaped Catherine) had been raised by Kelsey and Irene Winslow.

“And you’re Nan Seton’s daughter, right?” he said, vaguely mimicking the sudden recognition that had marked her own voice. “Charlotte McCullough’s mom?”

“I am.”

“Charlotte’s a terrific kid. Wants to be nineteen, but she’s a sweet girl. Good little swimmer, too. I keep a close eye on her, of course—on both her and her cousin. But I can assure you: She’s a real water rat.”

Catherine found herself nodding, and two unattractive thoughts simultaneously filled her head: The first was incredulity that anyone would ever refer to Charlotte McCullough as “a sweet girl”; the second was the realization that before she had understood that Gary was a Winslow—no, before she had understood that he was that
orphan
Winslow—she had seen him only as a cheeky young lifeguard with very nice arms, more hair than her husband, and an apparent interest in her despite the fact she was the mother of one of the girls he was watching that summer. He was, she guessed, not quite half her age. She was acting like Mrs. Robinson, for God’s sake! Usually the men with whom she flirted at least had finished college.

Still, he had been the one to approach her, hadn’t he? What the hell?

A sweet girl.

That orphan.

Mrs. Robinson.

Quickly she grabbed a ball, hurled it into the air, and then slammed it as hard as she could into the far court. The ball passed so close to the white ridge along the crest of the net that the plastic fluttered just the tiniest bit, and in her head she heard the echo of her grunt:
Unnhh!

“Let’s go,” she said to Gary, and the young man smiled and jogged to the other side of the court.

YOU CAN’T SHOOT
a buck out of season, and you can’t shoot a doe ever. Not in Vermont, not here.

That was what John had said to Sara in the small hours of the night—no more than eight or nine hours ago, now—after he had changed Patrick’s small diaper and she was nursing the baby back to sleep. It had come up because their bedroom window was open, and once Patrick had settled down they could listen to the wind in the lupine and John thought he might have heard animals rustling just outside the house. In the garden, perhaps. He wasn’t exactly talking to himself as he stood before the screen, but she knew that he didn’t expect an answer, either.

Still, with her son lolling against her breast she had felt compelled to remind him that she couldn’t imagine him shooting a deer over Spencer’s kohlrabi or green beans, anyway.

No,
he’d said.
Of course not.

She sat now in the cool shade in the grass near the swimming pool with Patrick in his baby seat beside her and wondered why her husband would even be thinking of such things in the middle of the night. She watched the two girls dive, and it made her forget the deer and the garden for a moment. She was impressed with their grace and their courage. How Charlotte had learned to stand on the board with her back to the water, throw her hips high into the air, curl her body back toward the fiberglass, and then dive into the water—the rear of her skull so close to the board that Sara flinched the first time her niece demonstrated an inward—was beyond her. The fact that her own daughter, still two years younger than Charlotte, had learned to do a somersault over the past two weeks was equally as amazing. She knew they had been taught by the young woman who was the lifeguard this morning, a plump girl between her junior and senior years at the high school in Littleton. She never expected overweight teens—boys as well as girls—to be sufficiently comfortable with their bodies to thrive in any activity that involved limited amounts of clothing. This girl, however, was an apparent exception. She seemed to wear a towel around her waist like a skirt when she wasn’t actually in the water, but otherwise she seemed completely at ease with the bulk she had wedged into her spandex. And she dove, Sara thought, like the small kestrels and falcons she’d seen darting through the air from the cliffs off Snake Mountain.

She politely clapped when Willow showed her a forward dive in the pike position. Her baby’s eyes followed her hands and then he cooed.

“Yes,” she murmured to him, leaning over to press her nose against his, “someday I will clap for you, too. Yes, I will.”

Her daughter emerged from the water and raced across the grass to her, wrapping herself quickly in a towel. “At the bonfire tonight,” Willow began, her sentence choppy because she was bouncing on one foot with her head angled to the side, “Charlotte said I can borrow her eye shadow. May I?”

“The stuff she was wearing last night at dinner?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why would you want to? It’s purple, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s lavender.”

“Oh.”

“So it’s okay?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Is it that you think ten is too young or you think I shouldn’t wear eye shadow to a bonfire?” She had stopped hopping, but her teeth were chattering now.

“It’s probably a little of both,” she answered, and then said—her change of mood so abrupt that Patrick looked at her and clucked—“Oh, of course it’s fine. Of course you may.”

Willow smiled and then made Sara’s morning more perfect than she had supposed it could be: The girl leaned over and kissed her warmly on her cheek, despite the nearby presence of Cousin Charlotte and the teenage lifeguard who had taught them to dive.