French Braid(9)

They left the cabin and set off down the path that Robin and David had taken earlier. It was hot but not unbearably so—a good ten degrees cooler than Baltimore, Alice would guess. Tiny insects buzzed around their heads whenever they passed through shade, and squirrels scrabbled up the trees.

The lake was bigger than Alice had expected. You could see the opposite shore, but it looked very far away, and the near shore curved to the left and disappeared behind a clump of bushes, so she knew there must be more lake in the distance. A heavyset woman lay tanning on a towel, and an old man, fully dressed, sat facing outward on a canvas chair at the end of a rickety dock. The only one in the water was Robin, swimming a determined breaststroke parallel to the shore with his expression grim and set. David stood watching from the water’s edge. He had taken off his robe but he was bone-dry; clearly he had not so much as dipped a toe in. “What do you think of the lake?” Mercy asked, coming up behind him, and he turned and asked, “Is Daddy going to drown?”

“No, no, no,” she assured him, “Daddy’s a good swimmer.” David turned away again and resumed watching his father.

“You planning to get wet?” Alice asked him.

He said, “Pretty soon I am.”

“Want me to take you?”

“No, that’s okay.”

Alice removed her shirt and tossed it onto the sand next to her camera. “Well, here goes,” she said, and she began wading in. The water was lukewarm but turned cooler the farther she waded, and when she finally ducked under it was cold enough to make her gasp.

Viewed from here, the shoreline had the quaint, static look of a scene in her mother’s book of French paintings—the old man on the dock shaded by a giant straw hat, the woman just a flattened strip of color against the sand. David was squatting now to fill his bucket. Mercy was taking dainty steps deeper and deeper until finally she launched herself forward in a breaststroke considerably more graceful than Robin’s. She had spent her girlhood vacationing in Ocean City, was why. She was no stranger to water. But after a few yards or so, she stopped swimming and stood up. “Come on out!” Robin called to her, but she said, “I don’t want to get my hair wet.” She had the kind of hair that took forever to dry, thick and wavy, with ringlets spilling from a chignon piled high on top of her head. She said, “I was thinking I might fetch my sketch pad and take a little walk in the woods. Can you keep an eye on David?”

“Sure thing,” Robin said. “I’ll teach him how to swim; how’s that?”

“Oh, good,” Mercy said. She turned and started wading back, her arms held straight out at her sides and her hands lifted like little birds, while far beyond her, up at the edge of the woods, a small version of Lily could be seen shading her eyes to observe them. She didn’t come any closer, though. She didn’t even have her swimsuit on, and after a moment she turned away and disappeared again.

The difference between this scene and the ones in the French paintings, Alice thought, was that the paintings all showed people interacting—picnickers and boating parties. But here everybody was separate. Even her father, a few yards away from her, was swimming now toward shore. A passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, and so lonesome.



* * *



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All three of the children, even David, knew that their mother hated to cook. She claimed she loved to cook, but what she meant was, she loved to make desserts. And her desserts were the fancy kind: not cookies or chocolate pudding but delicate pastry cornucopias filled with sweetened whipped cream, and towering structures of meringue studded with candied violets. Things she’d served in her youth to her gentleman callers, Alice surmised. Beautiful to look at, but not what her children wanted to eat.

Or Robin, either, although he never admitted it. He would say, of some lacy concoction, “Why, honey! How did you do that?” But he wouldn’t have more than a sample spoonful of it.

This meant that Alice took on more of a role in the kitchen than most girls her age. She opened a can of Dinty Moore or boiled some frankfurters, to begin with, but gradually she moved on to simple casseroles and then to recipes from Woman’s Day or the food page of the newspaper—dishes with “Espagnol” in their names or “à la Fran?aise.” “Oh, why, sweetheart!” her father would say, poor man. “Did you fix this?” He was a meat-and-potatoes guy himself. But she knew he was grateful to her for pitching in.

For their first supper at the lake—Mercy not back from sketching yet, David cranky with hunger—Alice heated some tinned corned beef hash and topped it with grated cheddar and a sprinkle of chives from a bottle she’d found in the cupboard. (Previous renters had left all manner of odds and ends behind—jams and dried beans and barbecue sauces and various mysterious cans that she looked forward to exploring.) She sliced up several farm-stand cucumbers and doused them in a mixture of Mazola and cider vinegar. David, meanwhile, begged for something to hold him over. Crackers, cookies—“Anything!” he said dramatically, but then turned down the slice of cucumber she offered.

“Where’s your mother?” her father asked her. It was a constant refrain of his: “Where could she be?”

Alice said, “Still out sketching. Let’s start without her.” Then she slapped plates on the table, and counted out silverware, and raced around hunting napkins till she realized they’d forgotten to bring any and started tearing off sections of paper toweling instead.