Cool's Ridge Page 3

  I said, “Look gang, what I need to know is, can I stay or what?”

  “We have to vote,” Len said. He sat slouched on my right. He, too, looked past me when he talked, out of the windows, down at the table, up at the old porch ceiling. “I’ll vote ‘yes’,” he said.

  There were boos and catcalls. “Out of order, Leonard!” some of the others said. “Call for a vote first!”

  Wayne said, “Look, Liz, you seem like a nice girl …” Alice and Shauna hissed and Wayne corrected himself—“woman, and we do have a spare room right now, since Hilda left …”

  “Who’s Hilda?” I asked.

  “She was here until last week,” Wayne said. “But she’s gone, so if you’d like to use her room, it’s possible. We don’t have rent here, you see, we have shares. Did Skip tell you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Skip, tell her about the shares,” Wayne said.

  “I’m eating, Wayne,” Skip said, with his mouth full. “Why don’t you do it?”

  “I’ll do it,” May said, “even though I hate telling rules, it spoils my image of myself.” She looked at me and smiled.

  “Then I’ll do it,” Wayne said. “I don’t mind at all because it improves my image of myself.” Wayne was very short, with a pink rubbery, shiny face, gold-rimmed glasses, and a fuzzy halo of blonde curls. It seemed to me he never stopped smiling. He had small uneven teeth. “First of all, Liz, we have two kinds of shares, money shares and work shares.”

  “Wayne was an economics major at Dartmouth,” May said. Wayne went on, calmly telling the different rules, which seemed to boil down to whether you paid, or worked on the newspaper or in the garden. Everybody did housework and everybody cooked, which suited me fine because I didn’t like either. Wayne picked up his mandolin at the end of this recital and plucked a couple of strings. He looked at me and said, “Perchance, dost thou type?”

  I said, “Not professionally.”

  “Let’s see,” Wayne said, looking up at the ceiling. “Where have I heard that before? Why is it women no longer type?”

  “I didn’t say I couldn’t type,” I said.

  Skip laughed. “You picked the wrong woman,” he said to Wayne.

  “I’m a poor judge of character,” Wayne said, beaming at me. There was something so angelic about his smile that you always felt conned into smiling back. “You see, Liz, if you weren’t so dead set against typing, I could get you a job on our newspaper.”

  “No business at dinner,” Alice said. “We have two desserts.” Everybody groaned. “Rhubarb cobbler or strawberries.”

  “Strawberries how?” Wayne asked, leaning back in his chair and screwing his neck around to look up at Alice. “Romanoff, perhaps?”

  “Plain,” Alice snapped. “Romanoff! The idea.”

  “Well …” Wayne said slowly, “I suppose … in that case … I’ll have both.”

  “Both,” Skip said, and shoved his dinner plate away.

  “Both,” Len said.

  “I’m stuffed,” Sal said, “but I’ll have both, too, because I’m competitive as hell.”

  I smiled and looked out through the windows. The sunset was almost gone; outside everything was washed in inky shades of blue, but there was one last pink streak on the pond. They were clearing the table. I didn’t get up to help. I felt too tired, and besides, I was still a guest. I hoped they would let me stay. Of course I could always go home. No. I couldn’t go home. I wondered if Skip had said anything about me. I wondered if something had gone on between him and Alice. I wondered who Hilda was. Someone pulled my dinner plate away and replaced it with a blue and white speckled plate heaped with strawberries. Someone lifted the glass hurricanes and lit the candles. The wicks flared up and outside everything turned black and the faces around the table shone up out of the darkness. For a moment, a childish moment, I felt sleepy and secure and happy and forgot that I had come here tracking Skip. I liked all these people and I wanted them to like me.

  “Try the strawberries,” May said in her earnest voice. “They’re local, you know.” I picked one up. It was sweet and so ripe the juice ran down my chin. I looked across the table at Skip but he wasn’t there, and then I noticed that Alice was gone, too. I felt uneasy and half-turned in my chair, but there was Alice in the doorway carrying a glass bowl full of whipped cream.

  “For heroes,” she said, putting it down in front of Len.

  “Or martyrs,” he said gloomily.

  Skip came back onto the porch and sat down at the table. He looked at his plate. “Hey wait a minute,” he said. “When I left not five minutes ago, I had four strawberries, and now there are only three.” The telephone rang. Alice’s voice came toward me from the kitchen.

  “Liz?” she said. “It’s for you. It’s your mother.”

  4.

  My mother appeared the next day in a car I did not recognize. I had gone for a walk out to the main road and coming back I was overtaken by a dusty maroon Chevrolet.

  “’lo,” she said out of the window while the car continued to amble along. From under black sunglasses shaped like cat’s eyes she gave me a wry, hopeful grin. I wasn’t feeling receptive. I’d just gotten to the Farm myself and hadn’t had time to deal with my own problems let alone hers.

  “Oh, listen,” she said quickly, doing a rapid take on my face, “I’m not staying long, you know. I just thought I’d pop up and maybe we could chat. I thought you’d be coming home, but your father called and gave me this address.” The car stopped with a noise halfway between a wheeze and a sigh.

  “Uh huh. Where’d you get the car?”

  “Avis.”

  “Where’s the Plymouth?”

  She shrugged and stuck out her lower lip the way she does when she’s irritated. “It’s got yet another problem and I didn’t want to take a chance driving it up here. I’ve only been using it around town. Your father thinks it’s a bearing, there’s this grinding noise in the front. Want a lift?”

  “As long as you’re right here.”

  I got into the car and she started driving again. “What a road!” she said. “Do these people live here all winter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She peered ahead through the sun-striped gloom. “You don’t know?”

  “I just got here myself, Mom. I don’t have everything doped out yet.”

  “Ah. How’s Skip?”

  “He’s okay. He’s good.”

  There was a long scraping noise. She looked alarmed. “Uh-oh, I didn’t see that, whatever it was. My God, you need a Land Rover to navigate this terrain, or an elephant. They ought to call this Lost Exhaust Boulevard.”

  I laughed.

  “What’s he doing here, anyway?”

  “He’s helping them start a newspaper.”

  “It’s great to be rich, isn’t it? You get to have all these little hobbies.”

  “Mom.”

  “Is he ever going to practice law, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know, not right now. They seem like a nice bunch of people.”

  “Odd, though, living out here this way. Are they dropouts, or what?”

  “What’s odd about it, it’s nice here. No, they are not dropouts. Not exactly.”

  “That’s not what Dan said.”

  “Who’s Dan?”

  “A young man I talked to at a gas station. He said they were all atheists and draft dodgers. Oh!” She turned her head to the left. “Well, isn’t this pretty? What’s that, a barn?”

  “Used to be. Now it’s the house.”

  “Huh. And here I thought you’d be going to summer school this summer, working on your law degree.”

  “I changed my mind. Just pull around the house … yeah, around to the right, now pull it up next to that Volkswagen.”

  “Does one swim in the pond?”

  “Sure. Did you bring your suit?”

  “Unfortunately not, although I’ll bet that wouldn’t stop anyone up here.” She took off her black sunglasses wit
h a pinch of her fingers, and gave me her strict blue-eyed look. Her thin nostrils dilated, as if she smelled sex. I said nothing. I’d learned some time ago never to confirm or deny. Patient stoical silence was what usually got me through with my mother; you carefully fixed your face so she couldn’t infer too much and then you fed her selected facts. It had taken me my entire childhood to learn this protective technique. The thing about my mother was this: she was stunningly liberal on all sorts of issues, but sex turned her into a little miniature of Queen Victoria: “We are not amused.” It was unbelievable to me that she and my father had had any sort of sex life; on the other hand, look at Victoria and Albert: saying is not doing.

  She sighed and sat back and looked out of the dust-smeared windshield. “It certainly is pretty. Let’s get out of the car, I’m suffocating.”

  She had on a golfing costume—knee-length apple green shorts and a white cotton polo shirt that had crossed golf clubs embroidered on the pocket. She said that she’d bought the outfit to help out her friend Peggy Naylor who, since she’d gotten divorced, sold sports clothes out of her home to support herself. My mother despised golf: “A silly expensive game played on chemically force-fed grass.” A jaunty green bow rode the waves of her graying hair but she looked tired to me. Her blue eyes were too intense, her face was white and strained-looking.

  She opened the car door, groaned and got out.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I fell on my knee last winter and ever since it’s been giving me the devil.” She sighed and looked up. “A veritable paradise,” she said, “Who knows? Maybe you’ll stay here forever.”

  She was kidding, of course. She thought the commune craze was nuts and scoffed at the people who were going off to live at peace in the woods. Her approach to life was different. You stood up at bat and you got your licks and gave them and by God, you had better be in there swinging every second.

  Just to tease her I smiled and looked up at the treetops. “Who knows?” I said. “Maybe I will.”

  My mother was a lawyer who worked more or less full time with a small-town New Jersey law firm named Heinlein, Berger, Carson, and Stillwell. The Stillwell had only been added in 1970. She had worked for those guys for twenty years and it wasn’t until 1970 that they’d made her a partner. She’d been defensive about it. “Well, heck,” she said, “I don’t bring in the money they do.”

  “Still, Mom,” I’d said, “you do bring in clients. A lot of people use the firm because of you, so it’s not fair.”

  “I know, honey, but that’s not the way law firms work. I’ve always thought of it as a trade-off. They let me do my pro bono stuff, so I get a smaller piece of pie.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you see? They’re not just being nice. All that work you do for nothing adds a little luster to the firm’s name. And that brings in the clients, too.”

  “Ty doesn’t think that way, Liz. He needs to see it all spelled out in dollars and cents. Anyway, he gets the clients with the big bucks.”

  This argument went on until I’d goaded her into deciding she was going to leave the firm. She tendered her resignation and immediately they offered to make her a partner. The truth was that even though she’d done a lot of pro bono work she was a good lawyer—she’d argued cases in front of the state’s Supreme Court, and won.

  My father also did a lot of work for free. He was a physician, an internist with a small medical group in Comstock, the suburban New Jersey town I’d grown up in. He regularly spent one morning a week at the medical school in Newark seeing patients and teaching interns there, and some of his patients he carried for little or nothing. Both my parents had the attitude that the job came first, not the money you got for it.

  Still, there had always been enough money. If a new car was needed, well, it was bought, and not on time, either. We had a big white comfortable house on a shady side-street; there were ski vacations and camps in the summer, there were lessons of all kinds—skating, swimming, riding and tennis. After drugs came to Comstock Junior High School, John and I went to a private school in a neighboring town. It turned out that drugs were even more of a problem at Country Day, but we liked it there so we kept that quiet.

  It wasn’t that we were rich, but we lived in a certain way. My parents never did believe in spending a lot for clothes or cars, and most of the furniture had come from Grandpa and Grandma Stillwell’s big house in Bernardsville, the house they had before they moved to the farmhouse in Oldfields. Another thing my parents did not spend money on was country-club fees. They didn’t like the local club’s exclusionary policies, so instead we played tennis and swam at a neighborhood swim club that welcomed everyone. The year I was in ninth grade we built a swimming pool at the back of our house and that was great, too, because we could ask anyone we wanted over to swim.

  But after my brother John got sick everything changed. The money just went. After the medical insurance was used up (and it was used up fast), my parents sold the big white house to help pay John’s medical bills. They moved into, well, just a little green ranch house; and even though my mother had never been what you might call an exquisite decorator, and my father may not have been the gardener of all time, they sat there, in this little pasteboard house they had bought for too much money, that was right next to the back side of a tall brick apartment building, and a year later they still hadn’t unpacked their books, hung up the pictures, or planted tulip bulbs.

  The ranch house had a short concrete driveway and a cement block patio. If you sat out there in the summer, you sat in the dank shade of The Kensington Arms, and wafting over the fence you heard a constant irritating hum, like the menacing drone of angry bees, that came from the building’s air conditioners. The last owners of the house had left on the patio a rusted-out barbecue grill and such was my parents’ indifference to the place that they never removed it. The grill sat there for a whole year until one day when I was visiting, I got up early and took it to the town dump in my car.

  “Notice anything?” I said to my father when I got back.

  He looked all around the yard. “Can’t say that I do.” He had always gardened and now I couldn’t get him to go outside. Aside from the patio, the yard had a dead dogwood tree and some scraggly bushes next to a green chain-link fence.

  “Dad?” I said. “This is an awful house.”

  “It’s just for a couple of years,” he said, “until we die.”

  “Oh, please,” I said and rolled my eyes.

  “My sentiments exactly,” he said.

  Despite this house or maybe because of it there was a flatness now between my parents that I thought of as The Dead Sea. They seemed to be hopelessly floating side by side in a place where you wouldn’t sink and you couldn’t swim. I’d grown up listening to them banter. My father was a quiet man, but he somehow came up with outrageous one-liners—and my mother was verbal and quick. They used to go at it like two champions sparring; there was a lightness, a dexterity, the footwork was a joy to see and you understood that underneath the insults they were ferociously proud of each other.

  But in that house, their “new” house, there was an ominous lethargy, as if the air in that little compressed space was heavier, and there were no inspired feints, only a dull silence that erupted now and then into fights so bitter and nearly violent that once I ran from the house with my hands over my ears. And yet the fights were never “about” anything—not really. They fought over dates in history: “Correct me if I’m wrong,” my father would begin and my mother, of course, would. They fought over who had said what to whom when my father was home on leave from the army in December, 1942. They fought about money: who paid for the electric, who paid for the gas. They’d given up household help and now they fought about housework, shopping, errands—all the mundane tasks of domestic existence they’d been cordial and vague about when there was money for the A-1 Cleaning Service and Ed Zappa’s Gardeners to cut and rake the grass. Most of all, of course, they fought about Johnny—what to do
with him, where and how he ought to live. Whenever John did come home they fought all the time and I learned pretty quickly that when John was home I couldn’t be there. I used to get so depressed and then my mother would get angry with me, angry because she wanted me to be happy, only she couldn’t make me or anyone happy anymore, and her frustration and subsequent sense of helplessness made her rail at my father and this would engender a whole new round of arguments.

  So I decided not to go home, at least not too often, or not for more than hours at a time. I wrote and called instead. I missed my parents, but more than anything else I missed the way we all used to be, before my brother got sick.

  “So you’ve heard the good news,” my mother said. She was standing up straight with her arms folded Indian style looking at a hole in the leafy green circle of treetops, a patch of sky so deeply blue your eyes swam looking at it until it began to go around and round, darkening like a whirlpool.

  “Dad called night before last.”

  “Ah!” Her face pulled to one side and she said, “I’m sorry, Liz.”

  “Mom! What is it with you two? I mean, why are you both apologizing to me?”

  “Oh, these last years have been so …”—she shrugged, looked down at the ground and kicked at a spruce cone—“bad.”

  “I know.”

  “Your father and I … we both feel like failures, I guess.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “Is it?” She frowned and glanced around, restlessly. “Funny, now that I’m all the way up here I have nothing to say. I rest my case, counsellor. We’re getting divorced. Period. Could I have a glass of water?”

  “Sure.”

  We went inside. There was no one in the house. Everyone was out working but me. It felt sinful and good … let the peasants work. Actually, I would shortly need to rejoin the labor force, but I had enough money saved up to get through at least two more weeks of abysmal sloth. I got my mother a glass of water and we sat on the dining porch on some old rockers.

  “The what porch?” She said.