Family of Liars(33)

I think about our half-finished conversation. Poor little rich boy, Lawrence the third, you think it makes you special that you don’t want to go to college and you liked your summer job? You think feeling that way makes you one of the people? You imagine you’re unique because you want to travel and bum around drinking beer? Everyone wants to travel. No one wants to go to college.

But then—people do want to go to college. At least, the people I know. My friends at school do. Major and Yardley and George do. And I am sure lots of people want to go who cannot.

But I don’t.

I want what Pfeff wants. To make things. To work. To see more of the world.

And unlike him, I’ve never done it. I haven’t had any job, ever. I haven’t left my family for the summer like he is doing now. I certainly haven’t worked long hours in a burrito bar or fallen off a cliff in the Canyonlands while in the middle of a torrid love affair.

We arrive at the family dock. Tie up. Penny and Major race each other up to Clairmont, where no doubt people are gathered now, eating breakfast on the front porch.

I am last to climb out of the boat, because I’m collecting the empty cake pan that no one thought to take. When I look up, Pfeff is waiting for me.

“Carrie.” The wind whips through his T-shirt. His hair is in his eyes.

“What?” I try to sound neutral, uninterested.

“You can tell I’m a fake, right? I feel like a fake all the time,” he says. “You can see through me.”

“Because I called you a dick?”

“Maybe.” He looks at his feet. “I just—I’d like someone else to know the truth. Besides my parents. And I feel like you kind of already know. You look at me like you can tell what a liar I am.”

I wait.

“I didn’t get into Amherst,” he says finally.

“But you’re going,” I say. “Right? With Major?”

“Yeah. But I didn’t get in, because it’s really hard to get in, and my grades suck, and mostly I partied my way through high school. Actually, I didn’t get in anywhere.”

He is looking down, kicking the old board with the nails sticking out of it that Harris still hasn’t replaced. He pokes his sneaker into the gap in the dock where the board used to be.

“So my dad made a phone call,” he goes on. “Or something. I don’t know. He made a couple calls and maybe made a big donation to the school, and suddenly, I had a letter saying I was in off the wait list.”

“Wow.”

“But I was never on the wait list,” says Pfeff. “And I was ashamed, you know? Ashamed of having messed up so badly that nobody wanted me. And I didn’t want to take the spot they were offering. But my dad had done whatever he did, and it had been months and months of my parents being—well, really pretty angry at how I messed up the college process.”

“So you’re going.”

“Yeah. I’ll show up at Amherst, and I’ll be just like everybody else. There’s no stamp on my forehead saying ‘Loser.’ I’ll just go.”

“It’ll be like it never happened,” I say.

“Just an ugly thing in my past that nobody knows about,” Pfeff says, looking up and smiling devilishly. “Except you. You know, now, what a terrible person I am.” Suddenly he seems delighted with himself, instead of ashamed. “Okay, Carrie? You’re the keeper of my secret.”





35.


“WHO’S THE MAN in the picture?” I finally ask Tipper, late that day. Penny’s theory about it being our father, outrageous as it is, makes the asking seem more urgent.

I have come to my mother’s room when it is nearly the six-o’clock cocktail hour. She likes to change her clothes after cooking, to put on something fresh for the evening.

I have been meaning to ask her about the picture, but I have hardly seen her alone. She is always with Luda in the kitchen or with Harris on the beach, or else with Gerrard discussing plantings and repairs to the houses. She is also off-island more than anyone, shopping for food.

“What picture?” she asks now. She is inside her walk-in closet.

“The one of you and the man with no face,” I say, sitting down on the bed beside Wharton.

Tipper comes to the door of her closet. She is wearing a black cotton shirtdress and looks severe. “When did you see that?” she asks sharply.

“When I put your pearls away. It was sticking out,” I add, though that is untrue. “I thought it might be of Rosemary.”

A spasm crosses her face. “Well, it’s not.”

“I know that, now.”

I have given it some thought, and I doubt the man is Uncle Chris. Or Harris. I’m guessing instead that he is Albert Holland, Tipper’s first-year college sweetheart. I’ve been told how he took her to dances and football games, and how he once got his a cappella group to sing “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” outside her dormitory window.

I want to know why the face is scratched out, and why she hides it in her jewelry drawer.

My mother goes back into her closet. I hear her rustling clothes and moving hangers. “Did you ask your father about it?”

“No.”

“Is that the truth?”

“I didn’t ask him.”