“I am not!”
“Girls!” said Clover. “Girls, you’re normally very well-behaved, but I don’t have the strength for this tonight. Anyway, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do: we’ll make a lemon soufflé.”
“Lemon soufflé?” said Val, pouting. “But I want chocolate.”
“One of these days, you’re going to have to cultivate your palate beyond chocolate, and lemon soufflé is an excellent place to start. And anyway, I think we have all the ingredients in the apartment already.”
“What do we need?” I asked; lemon soufflé sounded just lovely to me.
“Oh, let’s see. Lemons, eggs, sugar, cream, a bit of salt…”
With a little bit of rummaging around, I found all of these things. Then Clover took out a cutting board and started on the lemons, and put Val on egg-breaking duty. Val sighed first, but got to it.
“I used to make this in Sag Harbor,” said Clover, in a dreamy tone of voice, grating the lemon skins.
“Sag Harbor?” I said.
“That’s where I used to go every August, with Theo. She had a house there.”
“Oh.”
”Franny, why don’t you break the eggs? And I know, Valentine, why don’t you mix?” We switched places. Meanwhile, Clover sighed and poured some heavy cream into the bowl of egg yolks and lemon. Then she poured the mixture into a baking pan and put it in the oven. Then she mixed herself a gin and tonic and we all went and sat down in the living room. By now it was dark out, and Clover turned on Aunt Theo’s rickety old table lamps. They shed rosy light on the room and on all the paintings of the nudes, looming over the three of us.
“What was the house like?” I asked Clover.
“A big brown Victorian,” said Clover, remembering. “With blue shutters.”
“Blue and brown together,” sniffed Valentine. “That doesn’t sound very pretty.”
“Oh, no, it was, Valentine, it was. A kind of a rich, fudge brown with Tiffany blue shutters.”
“What shade’s Tiffany blue again?” asked Val, still unconvinced.
I rolled my eyes.
“Like the store, Val. The color of the boxes the jewelry comes in.”
“Oh, right. That shade.”
Clover continued: “It was one of those old houses that always smelled of the sea and the marshes. And also it smelled like ashes that were left over from last year’s fires in the fireplace. Theo just loved having fires. She used to sit by the fireplace with these Polish scarves wound around her hair…”
“Why Polish?”
“Because she had all these friends in Krakow and Budapest. She was always going over there and coming back with scarves. I can show you some of them later if you’re interested. Some of them are quite gorgeous, really.”
“Were they from admirers?” I asked.
“Everybody’s always talking about admirers this summer,” Valentine groaned. “Admirers, admirers! You’re just using that word because you heard the grownups use it, Franny. You’re always imitating the grownups.”
“Am not,” I said, though, in fact, Valentine had a point about that; I just didn’t want to admit it in front of her.
“Anyway, what I want to know is—” Val tossed her red curls and paused.
“What, Valentine? What is it that you want to know?”
“No, no, I can’t ask it. Never mind.”
“Oh, don’t say that. You girls should feel free this summer to ask me anything, anything at all.”
“Well—” she was still hesitating. “What I want to know is how old were you when—”
“Oh,” said Clover, understanding immediately.
She’s asking about boys, I thought to myself.
“Seventeen,” I heard Clover say. “I was seventeen when I fell in love for the first time. It happened in Sag Harbor too.”
“You were my age!” exclaimed Valentine.
“Yes, I suppose I was, come to think of it. It happened on a rainy night, I remember, you could hear the wind howling through the pine trees outside. I have always loved being by the ocean when it rains…”
“What happened? Keep going,” prodded Val. “I want to hear about the guy.”
“Oh, him,” said Clover, smiling. “Well, I was trying to set the scene before I got to the man.”
The use of the word man caught my attention, even though it appeared that she was telling the story for Valentine more than for me.
“Man?” I repeated. “Man, or boy, do you mean? You said you were only seventeen at the time.”
“Man, then, if you insist. He was older—much older than me…”
“How old?” I asked.
“Not old-old, I hope,” said Valentine. “Right?
“Older,” said Clover sternly, and I knew from that tone of voice that this was as much as she was ever going to tell us.
“Was it fun, though?” said Val.
“First love, fun? Of course it was!”