The Headmaster's Wife(28)
Sometimes she thinks of her life as a series of halting changes, as if she were a train that was suddenly moved to another set of tracks. She has this idea that other people—Arthur, for instance—live lives that follow more or less a straight narrative, as straight as a walk across a field. Hers, instead, plods along. Then something dramatic happens, a monumental decision, and everything changes until the plates shift underneath her again. It is not until the next rerouting occurs that she realizes she has been bracing for it the whole time.
Craftsbury, Vermont, where her family moved when she was five, is, even now to Elizabeth, a place of both singular beauty and stifling insularity. The decision her parents made—well, her father, to be precise—to leave the security of the family business in New York to make life anew among these highlands of sloping hills and grassy valleys in Northern Vermont is the first of these changes.
Her grandfather had started an air-conditioning company on Long Island that soon grew to the point that he was the go-to guy for air-conditioning systems in the city. The company even installed one for the Empire State Building. Her grandfather became quite wealthy, and it was always assumed that her father would eventually take over the family business. He, however, was as stubborn as her grandfather. He was stubborn and brilliant, and he went to Harvard with the bright-eyed idea that he would come back to Long Island and live the comfortable life of a corporate executive. This was in the placid fifties, but things, at least in the underground of America, were beginning to change. Her parents met in Boston. Her mother was at a small finishing school called Pine Manor, in Chestnut Hill. They fell in love. Her mother got pregnant with her that first year, and they decided to have the child. Her grandfather implored her father to get it taken care of, and to get rid of this girl who clearly had no morals. In the end he threatened to cut him off, and her father said to go ahead.
Her parents got married at City Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and with no means of support, they dropped out of school and her father taught himself to be a carpenter, and five years later, with her younger sister now in tow, they moved on a whim to Northern Vermont, where a thousand dollars got you an old farmhouse and a piece of green earth with views of mountains. They had romantic ideas of growing their own food and living off the land. He would build and repair houses. She might get a pottery wheel and learn how to throw pots.
As with all romantic ideas, theirs was short-lived. That first winter, they ordered five cords of wood for the stove that was the old house’s only heat and failed to stack it right away. When the frost came, the wood froze solid in the pile where it sat in the yard. Her father would chip away at it piece by piece, removing the blanket of snow to get at it, but no matter what they did, the wind whistled through the old windows and, on some nights, when the mercury dropped below zero, they huddled in blankets in the main room and were lucky if it got above fifty degrees inside. There was no work for carpenters in Northern Vermont. For a time her proud father, who had spent a year at Harvard, cleaned toilets at a local hotel so they could eat. The cars they owned, an old Saab and a Peugeot that refused to run in the rain, more often than not sat idle in the driveway covered with snow or, in the summer, up on cinderblocks with the hoods propped open.
But the second year, her father got a job teaching woodworking at the small private college in town, and things began to look up. In hindsight, it was a happy country childhood for Elizabeth. There were some neighborhood friends and fields to run and play in, and long, sloping hills to sled down in the winter.
There were also books. Books were her great escape, and Elizabeth had her father’s mind. Early on, her father made a house rule that as long as you were reading you could stay up as late as you wanted, provided you were in your own bed. She read everything she could get her hands on. Her parents traveled to used-book stores just to feed her growing appetite. The public school in town, where she and her sister both went, had only forty-six students, from kindergarten through grade twelve. School could not keep up with her. She was bored and got little out of it. Instead, she learned from the books that gradually filled her house, and the math and science her father taught her at the kitchen table on cold winter nights, when outside the wind swept across the highlands and buffeted the windows.
The summer she turned fifteen, she listened late at night in her bed while her parents argued. They did not know their words carried so easily from the kitchen to where she lay with her knees up, her head on the pillow, a novel rested, as always, on her thighs. They fought about her. Her dad said she was dying here, that there was nothing for her, and her mother took the position that anything she needed she could get from him.
“She’s already outgrown me,” her father said. “She runs f*cking circles around me. Do you get what kind of mind she has? It’s time for her to move on.”
It was an argument her father won, as he won all important arguments in their family, and the following morning, for the first time, the subject of boarding school was presented to her.
She imagined it. She thought about being away from here, this place she both loved and loathed. She thought about her friends—in truth there were not many. A few that mattered to her, but this was a town impervious to change, and they would be here. This much she knew. She had lived long enough to know that some would leave Craftsbury and some would not, and it was pretty much predetermined which camp you were in. She knew she belonged to the former and while she did not think she would leave so soon, she had to admit it held an attraction for her. The new. A chance to begin again. To be something else than what she had always been.