Though her parents were eventually happy together, she had the inexplicable feeling that living with someone, being married to them, was essentially a terrible mistake. She remembered her early childhood. Before Danny was born her parents were, as she now understood, simply living out the drama of a teenage relationship with an audience of their own making. Those scenes should’ve been set behind bleachers and in detention halls, the tears, the bitter fights, the overacted violence.
She understood them as ridiculous, in part, because of Gwen. Gwen had always, when their parents wept amid the ashes of broken china, made fun of them and whisked her away to a game or a secret place or some other protected zone. Gwen’s catalog of hidden spots was inexhaustible, in part because their parents let them go, wanting only each other, only to bask in another perfectly tragic moment between themselves.
Libby did not want to live out her own No?l Coward play. She wanted what they had later, but since it seemed to take a new baby to achieve that, it was beyond her, a distant and dreamlike place, a place where you could breathe underwater. But hadn’t she tried that once, breathing underwater? It hadn’t worked.
She didn’t want babies. She had her students, her fifteen little children who changed each year. With them she had all the attachment, she imagined, of a parent. But at the end of a day she could zip them into jackets, tie them into shoes, send them home to their parents, and have a deep, heavy, sloshing glass of wine. This was plenty of parenthood for her. She’d much rather have a dog. And so that was her plan, to have the lesbian fantasy of a wife who lived in the house just next door with the dog they shared, a Newfoundland, preferably, named Roscoe.
Danny stood up and stretched.
“Want a beer? It’s four thirty.” Meaning that it was a perfectly acceptable time for her to start drinking. Though when they were there, on vacation, really it was acceptable to drink anytime, as long as the drink was appropriate: Bloody Marys with breakfast, beers with lunch, beers as pre-cocktails, cocktails with hors d’oeuvres, wine with dinner, and port or whiskey after dinner. Not that you availed yourself of all these options, but the ingredients were on hand just in case.
“No, I’m gonna clean up for cocktails and have a real drink. Thanks, though.”
He walked out of the sun and into the shadow of the porch roof, and from the open screened door he turned. “Nice hat,” he called back. She knew he meant it.
PART III
SEVENTEEN
ANOTHER SUMMER
Their mother knows. She already knows, or thinks she does. Or she doesn’t want to. What she knows is this: there is someone. But having never seen this someone or even evidence of them, it is an internal certainty. It is a certainty best dismissed, tossed out alongside the remnants of a broken wineglass, along with the spent mothballs. There is no purpose to it, to the speculation. When sweeping the stairs under the moose head, she pauses and sits on the landing, the dustpan hanging from her hand; she thinks of the broken glass, of the family trips of which he opted out. She thinks of their girls, too young, and the boy, maybe not.
She wonders what she must look like, this other woman who loves her husband. It’s not jealousy but a morbid curiosity. She walks down the long dim back hall, the side door a hopeful bright spot at its end. Past Tom’s room, the hallway smells of soil, camphor, the slick sharpness of kerosene, the metallic tang of oil on tools. This woman is her reflection or opposite. This woman is her in another space. The place where she didn’t marry the first man she loved, preserving herself like an Egyptian queen in gauzy dressings. Their wedding night came and went, she entombed in crisp white sheets in an epic bed at the Ritz-Carlton, while he stayed at the bar. Neither of them knew where to begin; it took time to find the starting line. Having protected her virginity like a gem hidden in the center of a temple, having been told again and again of its value, her only value, it seemed strange just to toss it away.
The side screen door, only used for firewood trips and her own flinging of dust from a pan, creaks on hinges prickled with rust. She steps out into a patch of sun that seems to shine perpetually on that slim step.
The two of them didn’t stay that way. He woke his queen, poured oil upon her forehead, and fed her grape leaves and thick liquor flecked with gold. And in the dingy top floor of a triple-decker they found, she thought, the appetite of gods, a divine devouring. Even here at this house, most especially here, with their first asleep alone in the nursery, they made the second on the front porch at sunset, made the wicker divan weep softly. An errant heel kicked a tumbler from the rail; it smashed on a rock that was covered at one end by lichen. She thinks of that other glass, shards found long ago, tossed along the edge of the wood at the side of the house. He doesn’t drink wine.
Three days later she has come back early from a trip to the mainland for supplies. She managed to catch a ride on the mail boat. Ned, their postman, thought her too pathetic standing in the parking lot at the ferry depot in her dirt-smeared gardening hat, a flat of tomato seedlings wilting next to a deflated paper bag from the pharmacy. With her seedlings tucked carefully in the hold, they flew past the ferry, lumbering out to open ocean like a tired dog to the food dish. From there Remy met her at the landing and drove her back in his truck.
She pulls the flat from the bed of Remy’s truck. She worries that the blazing-hot black ribs of the truck bed have cooked her little seedlings, which are looking sorrier than ever. He doesn’t get out, simply holds a hand out the driver-side window before reversing up to the pump house and turning around in a chorus of thumps and scratching branches. She wonders how many decades must pass before he calls her Scarlet.
Neither of them mentioned the car parked up the road. A little thing, Japanese, that shouldn’t even be allowed on a road like theirs, all hardscrabble and gullies. It is another wineglass, she thinks. The same, she hopes. She leaves the seedlings under the oak that dapples the meadow with its shadow and tosses her hat beside them. She wishes she were not a windblown mess. The sweat of a day on the mainland makes her shirt cling to her, her hair sticky with salt from the spray of the crossing; she had to sit on her hat to keep it from blowing away. Normally in this state she would drop everything on the back porch and walk through the house, leaving a trail of clothes, and head down to the dock naked, a treat for the lobstermen. Or this is something she did once, and she likes to think that is who she is, who she is when no one is home.