Perfect Family (2 page)

“I'll go change,” he said.

While he was up in his room, pulling on his trunks, he saw Pony down on the beach, toeing the sand, her head bowed. She'd stuffed
her hair into her shirt, and it gave her back a kind of hump. She paced. She chewed a fingernail. She walked up the lawn, stepped into the baby's playpen, and sat down cross-legged in front of him. William heard the baby laugh. They were alike that way, Pony and Andrew. Their first reaction to each other was always laughter, no matter what. She kissed him, and he giggled again. She put a little yellow jacket on him and a hat because of the breeze.

“I need to tell you something,” she had said over the telephone two years earlier. They'd met in Elizabeth Park in Hartford and taken a walk. It had been a mild November day. They'd walked through the dormant rose garden and sat on a bench. “I'm pregnant,” Pony had said. He'd accepted the news quietly and waited for her to say more. “It's perfect, actually,” she'd said. “The father won't ever know. He's long gone. A one-night stand, if memory serves.” She'd smiled almost radiantly. “You're the only one I'm telling who the father is. Let them go crazy guessing. Tinker especially.”

“People will think it was Seth,” William said, referring to Pony's on-again-off-again boyfriend.

“Let them. He got married last year and moved to Canada.”

When the family found out, things had fallen apart. Their father sank into one of his weekend-in-the-chair depressions. Tinker set up conference calls with Mira and William. Pony needed to be married to whomever the father was, she said. Or someone needed to approach Pony on the subject of an abortion, and she thought William was the one; Pony might listen to him. William had stopped taking Tinker's calls until Pony was safely into her second trimester. And then Andrew was born and the family laid down arms for a period. He was the first grandson, and what could anybody do? But Andrew was a year old now, and Pony had a job in an art supply store that paid nothing. They'd all have to pitch in, which raised yet another problem, in Tinker's view—how Pony would handle any money they gave her. She wasn't exactly a financial genius, and if the family ponied up—excuse the expression—some money for Andrew's care,
how could they be sure Pony wouldn't spend it on art supplies or give it away to charity? Mira didn't see what was the matter with Pony buying art supplies. “She
is
an artist, Tinker,” she said.

There had been some more e-mails about that lately, which William hadn't answered. He gave Pony money whenever he had it, but he didn't want to be part of the organized charity that Tinker was trying to set up. He didn't want to be bound to Tinker, didn't want to be ordered around. What was more, the others still believed the baby had a regular father someplace, a real guy who'd come out of hiding and take responsibility or, worst-case scenario, Pony would have somebody to sue for child support if things got bad. Nobody in the family but William knew how on her own Pony was with this one.

She stepped back over Andrew's playpen and went down to the water's edge, where she pulled off her shirt and stepped out of her shorts and then her underwear. William watched her, feeling lousy about it but watching anyway. She stood on the shore, hands on her hips, looking out at the water. Instinctively, he went to the other window to see if anybody was watching over at the Bells', but no. Nobody was outside over there now, as far as he could see.

He was annoyed that she would skinny-dip in the daytime. They didn't do that. Only at night. But then a lot had changed. Their mother's death had been the opening salvo, and ever since, the family had been caving in. Pony would not have had Andrew if their mother were still alive. William was sure of it. She would not have come up here without asking, and neither would he. Mira would have gone to graduate school. Their father would have had Fond du Lac painted. He would have contracted out the new roof. And William would still be working a nine-to-five at Aetna, a job he hated, because it was one thing to disappoint his mother but another to disappoint his father, who had, when you came down to it, pulled the rug out from under William in the first place.

Ever since childhood, William had assumed he would follow in his father's footsteps. He'd had the summer jobs at Carteret Ball
Bearings—working the mail room, the advertising department, and—his best summer because it had kept him out-of-doors—working with the grounds crew. He'd gone to Trinity College in Hartford, the alma mater of all the Carterets, and studied history and economics, as they had. Unlike them, however, William had been a disappointing C student in everything but English.

But when William was in his junior year, his father sold the company. It had happened without warning, only an explanation after the fact. Advancement in manufacture and technology had made labor almost obsolete. Ball bearings could be produced by machine twenty-four hours a day: manufactured, assembled, packaged, shipped, and distributed without ever being touched by a human hand. The competition was revving up; upgrades needed to be made. The sale had gone quickly. The whole plant was knocked down and shipped to Finland, where it was reconstructed and producing within the month. The buildings were sold to a community college.

And so just out of college, William had gone to work at Aetna in a public relations job. It involved sitting in a cubicle most days and making incremental steps up the corporate ladder every year at performance-review time. When his mother died, he'd quit and started his own freelance business. The work suited him brilliantly, and he was good at it. When he worked, he earned money. When he didn't, he could go hiking. He would never be the chief executive officer of anything.

He caught sight of his reflection in the full-length mirror and leaned in to see his dark eyes and the long black lashes he'd cut down to the root in eighth grade after Amber Alexander had said she envied him. He turned sideways to see the musculature of his chest. Leonine, his girlfriend, Ruth, called him. He moved like a lion, she said; it was in his build, long in the torso and narrow through the hips and with the smooth gait of a cat. And his skin was olive, unlike that of his sisters, who all had fair, easily freckled skin and fine pale hairs on their arms and cheeks. William ran a hand over his hair, which was dark and cut very short. He had a high forehead and
wide-set eyes, and he had the same strong nose as Pony.

She was in the water when he came back outside, swimming out toward the raft, doing the six-beat crawl he'd taught her, three kicks to each arm for power and endurance. She still liked to swim across the lake in midsummer, and if he was around, he'd row the safety boat for her, synchronizing his oars to the rhythm of her stroke. Now she paused and did a surface dive, her bare ass rising white and glistening before disappearing.

He and Pony often skinny-dipped during long family parties. The game was to make sure Tinker knew—a dropped shoe, a slammed door, something to alert their uptight sister that they were headed outside to the lake, to make her charge down to the water and stand there waving her flashlight and calling in a stage whisper to them:
This is so inappropriate.
Pony said that if Tinker were happy with her body, she'd be in there with them every time.

William entered the lake quickly, feeling the cold against his shins and thighs, the sudden shock to his groin. He did a quick immersion. He swam underwater, his eyes open to the black haze, and took a few strokes to get warm, then surfaced. He looked about for Pony. The choppy water everywhere made it difficult to see. He listened over the wind for a splash.

Something brushed his feet, coming up from a deeper place. He tucked on instinct, but her hands clamped fast around his ankles and pulled him down. He tried to buck, to kick her away, but she had him tight. She gripped his lower legs with both arms from behind. She shinnied up his body, arm over arm, to his knees and his thighs, pulling him down as she moved deeper underwater. He thrashed and tried to pry himself free, but of all the holds, this was the surest, the safest, for the rescuer. She was solidly behind, out of his reach and in control.

But he was ripped. Worse than ripped. He was scared. There hadn't been time to take in a breath.
Use your head,
he told himself. There was no breaking that hold. The only option was to stop fighting. He forced himself to let go, to surrender and feel immediately
the soft warmth of her body along the length of him. On instinct, he tried to twist away again, but she was too strong.
Jesus, Pony.
They broke the surface, and he hauled in a deep breath, then another. “What the fuck!” he shouted.

She kept him in her grip. “Like riding a bicycle,” she said, and laughed. “You said so yourself. I've still got it.”

“Let go.” He could hardly breathe. He was hyperventilating, forcing himself to slow down, take in the breaths deep and slow. Nausea was setting in.

“Not on your life,” she said. “You'll get me back. I know you will.”

“God Almighty, I'm not going to do anything. Cut this out!”

But she kept sidestroking, her upper leg pulling up, thrusting away, lurching the two of them toward shore. “I didn't forget any of this stuff,” she said. “We have the drowning game coming up in class. I plan to win. If I can take you, I can take anybody.”

He couldn't speak. He had to think about breathing. The warmth of her body against his back unnerved him. He made a vain attempt to twist away again. They were in shallow water, and she loosened her grip. He crouched, swam away from her. She plopped down on the sand at the water's edge, totally at ease with her nakedness. Behind her, Andrew shook his pen with his fists.

“Put some clothes on,” William said.

“Nobody's even up here now,” she said. “Except a couple of Bells, and they don't count.” Her skin was a weave of gooseflesh.

“
I'm
up here.” He felt too shaky to stand. He dove underwater and swam the distance to the raft, as if it were possible to cleanse himself. He pulled himself up on the raft. The wind chilled him quickly, a new discomfort. He focused on the water and on the opposite shore. He forced himself to resist shivering. He'd panicked. She'd taken him by surprise, and he'd panicked.

He lay down to get out of the wind, pressing his chest against the warmer boards of the raft. She was at the water's edge, playing peek-aboo with Andrew as if nothing had happened. William stared down
through the slats below, a thin-line glimpse at the dark water under the raft, aware of exactly what had happened physiologically in his body. In the instant Pony had attacked him, his nervous system had kicked his heart into overdrive and sent blood to his limbs, where it was needed. Now came the aftermath. He felt dizzy and light-headed. His hands trembled. He pressed his cheek against the raft. He was furious at himself. He felt nauseated. He felt ashamed.

There was a trip on the Yucatan Peninsula he'd heard about. A week in a jungle so dense a person could advance only a mile a day toward Mayan ruins that might be there and might not. The ruins had never been found. The point of the expedition was the journey. Every step had to be taken slowly, calculated. A snake in that jungle had a bite that disintegrated the vascular system and caused a person to bleed to death from his pores. There were venomous spiders and no way out. Sometimes William thought about that: what it would be like to be so trapped, forced to overcome panic or surely die.

That was the whole thing about panic. You had to use your head, not your instinct. As soon as the body got its way, you were in trouble. He sat up and watched Pony. She waved and smiled at him. She was still buck-naked. He lowered himself into the water and swam to shore. She was lying on her back on the sand, resting on her elbows, her breasts sloping to either side.

“What the fuck was that about?” he asked her. Without waiting for an answer, he headed up the lawn toward the house. Andrew stared as if William were an alien creature. William stared back. Andrew was the alien creature. Cute, but hey. William went upstairs, toweled off, and, as he changed into his clothes, watched Pony from the window. She stood at water's edge, stretching, arms over her head, leaning one way, then the other. He couldn't take his eyes off her, and she probably knew it. He felt the flutter of fear, the residual fear of a near-miss, a dangerous swerve on the highway, a stumble while hiking a knife-edge. It was lousy, the heavy sensation and feeling ashamed. She was his sister.

Years earlier, when Pony was about nine or ten, William had been in the bathroom of the West Hartford house, shaving. It was afternoon, and it was winter. The mirror on the medicine cabinet was spotted where the tin had eaten through, so shaving was a pain. Pony had banged on the door, demanding to be let in. William wrapped a towel around himself and opened the door a crack, but his little sister barged in and sat down on the commode, crossing her arms over her chest in fury. He went back to shaving. “So what's the problem?” he said.

“Mom,” she said. “I'm coming out of my room, and she says, ‘Pony, dear, I need to tell you about the birds and the bees.'” She looked at William and crossed her eyes. “Birds and bees? What planet is she on, anyway?”

“I'll bet she showed you that book,” he said. “The one she keeps in the closet.”

“It is so lame. She said that I am not allowed ever ever ever to let a boy put his hands below my waist.” Pony grinned up at William. “I said, ‘Maybe no boy will ever ever ever try.' She said, ‘Oh, yes, they will.' She said it happens to every single girl in every city and every country and that it will happen to me, and the minute it does, I need to remember what she said.”

William went on shaving.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Is it true?”

William nodded. “Yup,” he said. “It's true.”

“You think it'll even happen to Tinker?”