Off Season (11 page)
“Where is everybody?” I asked. I looked around the kitchen to see if more food lurked about but none did, so I sat down opposite Cecie and took a piece of limp, cold toast. A glass of orange juice sat at my place, but it was stale and tasted of its cardboard carton, and I pushed it and the toast aside. I was vaguely affronted. No one had ever failed to provide me with a hot breakfast before.
“Out doing whatever you do in the middle of the morning,” Cecie said snappishly. “It’s almost ten-thirty. Your mother’s painting and said she’d kill anyone who disturbed her, and Clara’s gone to Ellsworth to take Seth to the foot doctor, and all the others left after you hadn’t come down by nine-thirty and went over to the Davenports’. Peaches is having a little luncheon party at Jordan Pond.”
“What did they do that for?” I said stupidly. I could not imagine my summertime coterie not there and ready for adventure, much less gone all the way over to Mount Desert to eat popovers in their good clothes. This was the morning in the summers when we always planned our courses of action for the next three months, laid out our goals and itineraries: the serious harassment of the yacht club steward, finally being allowed to ride our bicycles across the Deer Isle Bridge to Little Deer Isle, or whether or not this would be the summer we rebelled against the parent-mandated participation in the Saturday Beetle Cat regattas over at Middle Harbor. The theory was that we would acquire sportsmanship and new friends and priceless future contacts along with sailing acumen, but we hated the regattas. It was not that we were poor sailors; most of us could outsail the colony young of our ages, largely because of the proximity of the Shellbacks and Beetle Cats tied up at our dock. We just wanted our own regatta. There were almost enough of us for that.
It was the full flowering of Camelot, the New Frontier, and the glamour and rigor of the young Kennedy administration brought with it strong feelings. The Republicans among us in the summers loathed the Kennedys. The fewer Democrats loved them. It never struck me as worthy of note until later that most of the Carter’s Cove crowd, with the exception of Canon Davenport and old Brooks Burns, were Democrats. I’m still not sure what that signified, but I had heard my father say he was damned if he was going to the yacht club teas and listening to all those fat-necked old Captains of Industry bellow about shanty Irish and Not Our Kind and looming welfare states. The fact that they all summered in one of the latter, he said, hadn’t occurred to a single one of them. After that I vocally castigated Republicans, although I could not have told you why.
It was, too, a time of exploration and flaming new cultural concepts, and the sound of tumbling mores was loud in the land. I am sure that most of our parents worried about our going baying after the rock music and the burgeoning hair and the beginning-to-be-whispered-about emergence of a terrifying substance called marijuana. They might as well not have worried, at least not there or then. We were as innocent of worldly knowledge and ambitions as a school of sprats. If we yearned after rebellion, it was against sailing regattas and good clothes.
“Well,” said Cecie now, rather prissily, “you weren’t here and Mrs. Doo-doo Davenport came in the minute everybody got here saying she had hot pancakes and real maple syrup, and I guess everybody figured if they were going to eat at all, they’d have to do it over there. Besides, Clara never makes anything but toast anyway. And from pancakes to popovers isn’t such a big jump if you don’t have anything else to do. We all thought we were going to sail over to Sunderson’s and see the baby ospreys, but I guess you already did that yesterday with that new kid. He’s out getting a sailing lesson from your dad. That left me. I’d starve before I ate anything of Peaches Davenport’s.”
Guilt smote me, for I had indeed suggested that we all take our Beetle Cats over to the island this morning. And there was another feeling, too, somewhere in my chest. Jon. I felt a sudden absolute need to hear someone speak his name. “You mean that Jon guy?” I said, striving for nonchalance and missing.
“Yeah,” Cecie said. “That Jon guy. The one you spent all afternoon and last night with. Nobody else has met him or even seen him. What is he, spastic or something? They don’t let him out?”
Anger rose in my throat, hot and bitter. I swallowed it. “He’s not spastic. He’s nice. They just got here, Cecie. Mother asked them for drinks, them and the Davenports and that goon Peaches, and we just talked and stuff. He’s keeping Wilma over at their place in the daytime because they’ve got two big dogs and a fenced yard, and Peaches goes crazy when she sees Wilma. You’ll like him when you meet him. His mother, too. She’s neat. I don’t think anybody much likes his dad. He’s really uptight.”
She was silent for a while, and then she said, “Don’t tell me he likes Peaches. Just don’t tell me that.”
“I’d like to read her
The Hound of the Baskervilles
out loud. In a dark room,” I heard Jon saying again, his voice full of laughter.
“No. He can’t stand her. That’s one reason I like him.”
“One?” Cecie said, and I knew I had not yet been forgiven for my abandonment of her yesterday afternoon. I was suddenly weary of innuendo and quivering feelings. I did not reply.
We sat in silence a while longer, and I looked over at her. She was staring out the kitchen window at the reach, and in the dim, aqueous light I saw what I had not seen the morning before when we’d met on the cliff top: Cecie had passed the going-to-be-pretty stage and was there. Sometime over the past winter she had grown taller and even slimmer, and there was the definite beginning of breasts under her T-shirt. Her profile, in the underwater light, was defined and clean; she had lost the little wrappings of childhood fat under her chin and on her neck, and her hair shone mahogany. Her soft mouth was pinker than I remembered; could it be she was wearing lip gloss? Her skin was winter pale, just flushed with the first of summer, her bare legs porcelain. I stared, and then looked down at my own legs. They were scabby and bruised, and glistened with tiny bronze hairs. Why had I never noticed?
“Cecie,” I said idiotically, “do you think I’m hairy?”
“Hairy?”
“Yeah. You know, hair all over me.”
“I think you’re nuts. But I don’t think you’re any hairier than you’ve ever been. What, did somebody say you were?”
“No. I was just looking at my legs. And yours. You don’t have any hair on yours, and I do.”
“Well,” Cecie said a little uncomfortably, “I shave them. Mother said it was time.”
Time. Time to shave your legs, time to wear lip gloss. Cecie was only two months older than I was, but the gulf between shaved legs and unshaved ones seemed unbreachable. I wondered if my mother was ever going to tell me when it was time to begin to let childhood slough off. Somehow I did not think so.
“Is it hard?” I said.
“No. You just have to be real careful. I’ll show you, if you want me to.”
“Yeah, I do.”
We made an appointment for the ritual virgin shaving the next morning. I could think of nothing to say. I had always been the leader of the pack, the instigator. But I sensed that now we were moving into an uncharted country whose map I did not have. I hated the feeling.
Then Cecie said, “Here comes your dad and the famous Jon, just tying up at the dock. Let’s go down so I can meet him and see what’s making you act so silly.”
“I am
not
silly,” I said indignantly, but thought to myself that I probably was. All of a sudden I did not like anybody in my world. But then . . . Jon. Jon would be there, standing on the end of my dock in the wind and new sun just sliding out from behind the scudding clouds. I rose and followed Cecie out of the kitchen.
They had tied up and were climbing onto the end of the dock when Cecie and I got there. My father, in a battered parka and frayed old Top-Siders, waved. He was grinning widely, and I thought again how distinguished he was, and how glad I was that I had his rangy build and quick smile. Or did I alone see his beauty, and the goodness and sweetness of his face? I was beginning to distrust my own perceptions this shifting, sliding summer.
“He did wonderfully,” he called. “He’s a natural. I let him bring us home by himself, and in this chop, too.”
Behind him, Jon grinned hugely. His golden face was already darker, with wind and light, if not sun, and his streaked-gilt hair fell over his eyes. I thought it would be sun bleached to vermeil by the time the summer was over. Again I was grateful for the chipped front tooth. Without it he would be, simply, unbelievable.
I turned to look at Cecie, to see her face as she saw him for the first time. It was calm and pleasant, Cecie’s meeting-new-people face, but that was all. No awe. No widening of her sherry-brown eyes. What was the
matter
with everybody?
“Well,” my father said, “a gathering of young Olympians. A tennis star who sails like Odysseus. A horsewoman who is half-centaur. And my daughter, who is—”
“The star of the flying trapezes,” Jon finished. I was absurdly pleased that he had remembered my telling him about my father’s and my gymnasium in our basement at home.
I introduced Jon and Cecie, and we all walked up the dock toward the seawall. It was a sweet, calm morning, and I am sure I was the only one who felt the inklings and oddments in the air. The other three talked pleasantly of Jon’s sailing prowess and Cecie’s family’s winter. My father said that my mother would call her parents soon and arrange for drinks or dinner. Cecie said she knew they’d like that. Jon said he hoped his family would get to know hers, too. I said nothing. I was afraid my voice would rend the taut skin of this strange world.
When we got to the seawall Jon’s father was standing under the big pine looking down at us. He wore perfectly creased khakis and a beautiful oatmeal cashmere sweater over a blue oxford-cloth shirt, and gleaming loafers. In comparison, we four looked like scurvy-ridden survivors of a shipwreck.
Jon’s father smiled. It did not reach his dark, opaque eyes. “You’re more than an hour late, Jon,” he said in a neutral voice. “Your mother has had lunch waiting for quite a while. We were getting worried.”
“My fault entirely,” my father said. “He was doing so well that I wanted to try him out a bit longer. He’s a natural sailor. We’ll be more attentive next time.”
“Jon is a tennis player first and foremost,” Arthur Lowell said. “His training routine is very strict, and much as I’d like to let it slide a bit this summer, we simply can’t afford to. Next year will be a very big competition year for him. So we’ll need to be a bit more careful about schedules. Jon, go on up and have your lunch, so you can get in at least two hours’ rest before our match. I’ll be right along.”
Jon’s face tightened. The joy of the morning drained out of it. He looked at my father, and then at me, helplessly.
“I thought maybe we could still ride up Caterpillar Hill,” he said to me. “It shouldn’t take too long, should it?”
“Definitely
not
before tennis practice,” his father said. “Another time, perhaps.”
Jon opened his mouth to say something else, and then shut it.
“Yes sir,” he said finally. Both of the Lowells turned and walked up the hill toward the road and their cottage. Neither looked back.
On the dock we were all silent, and then Cecie said, “Well. You want to go cycling with me, Lilly? I hear there’s a really big boat up at the boatyard, being worked on. We could go see it.”
All of a sudden exhaustion swamped me.
“Tomorrow, okay? I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but I’m so sleepy I can’t hold my head up.”
After a moment Cecie said, “Sure.”
My father said nothing at all.
L
ook,” Jon said. “Is that the moon? I never saw it so clear in the daytime before.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking up into the sky, going milky blue now with the coming evening and with a huge shrouded white moon hanging low. “Seth and Clara call it a Ghost Moon. Sometimes you can see moons in the daytime, but I don’t remember why. That’s the Strawberry Moon. The moon of June. I guess because the strawberries are ripe. It’s full, too, or almost. And the tide will be full in when it rises, so it will be a really, really high tide. They happen once or twice a year, around the summer and winter solstices. Clara says mariners call them moon tides. Tonight’s the solstice; well, you know. Mother’s having a party for it. She said y’all are coming.”
“Yeah. My mother’s really excited about it. She says she never knew anyone who gave parties for the summer solstice before and from now on she’s going to give them, too. She really likes your mother.”
“Mom likes her, too,” I said. “I don’t think I ever met anybody she likes in the same way.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh . . . well, your mom’s somebody who would understand a party for the solstice, I guess. Somebody who doesn’t get snarky when Mom talks about magic. Tonight is powerful magic, she says. The solstice, the full moon,
and
the moon tide. Earth magic. It’s very old. Dad says people have always believed in it.”
“Does your mother believe in it?” Jon said.
“Oh, not really. It’s just that it’s nature and all, you know, and she cares a lot about that stuff. And she likes celebrations. Dad says she’s half witch, and sometimes I think she agrees with him. Her ancestors were Scots from the Highlands, and sometimes she laughs and says she has the sight. She says magic is just as necessary for human beings as food and shelter, but most of us have forgotten it.”
“I like that,” Jon said. “Sometimes I almost feel it—you know, like the ospreys and all. And people flying . . .” He grinned at me. “That would be magic, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said, raising my arm to lie across my eyes so that the sun and drowning glitter from the water would not blind me. We were lying on our backs in a tangle of blueberry bushes a little way down the slope of Caterpillar Hill, and from there the entire panorama of earth and sky and water wheeled before us in almost a 360-degree circle. From here you could see over to Blue Hill and Blue Hill Bay, to the mountains of Mount Desert, to Deer Isle and all the inner and outer islands, to the great swell of the peninsula that rose to meet the sky above the Camden Hills. It was a very popular scenic spot for tourists, and there were almost always cars drawn up on the little overlook and people with cameras and artist’s easels on its brow. But there were none now, and there had been very few since midmorning. Just at this moment, at the huge and mystical turning of the year, we had the great hill to ourselves.
