The Paper Palace(13)

“Tell them eleven thirty.”

Jack walks into the living room and picks my purse up from the table. I watch as he digs around, pulls out my car keys.

“What exactly are you doing?” I ask.

“I’ll bring it back with a full tank. I promise.”

“Give me those,” I hold out my hand for the keys. “Either you come to the beach with us or you bike to the Racing Club. Basta.”

“Why are you doing this? You are literally going out of your way to make problems for me.” Jack throws my car keys on the floor and slams out the porch door. “How can you stand being married to such a bitch,” he shouts over his shoulder as he storms off to his cabin.

“You make a great point,” Peter calls back, laughing.

“Are you kidding me, Pete?”

“Relax. He’s a teenager. He’s supposed to be rude to his mother. It’s all part of the separation process.”

My entire being bristles. There is nothing that makes me more tense than being told to relax. “Rude? He called me a bitch. And your laughing only encourages him.”

“So, this is my fault?” Peter raises an eyebrow.

“Of course not,” I say, exasperated. “But he takes his cues from you.”

Peter stands up. “I’m going into town to get cigarettes.”

“We’re in the middle of a conversation.”

“Is there anything else we need?” His voice is cold as stones.

“For fuck’s sake, Pete.”

Maddy and Finn have gone completely still, like small animals at a watering hole watching as a Komodo dragon slithers toward a water buffalo. It is unusual for them to see their father angry. Peter rarely loses his cool. He much prefers to laugh things off. But he is looking at me now narrow-eyed, as if he can feel the molecules around me vibrating at a different wavelength—as if he has caught me in the act, but doesn’t know the act of what.

“Can you pick up some half-and-half?” Mum calls from the kitchen, where she’s pretending to reheat coffee, listening in. I can hear her voice inside my head saying, Think Botticelli. The sane part of me knows she’s right: I need to back down. I fucked my oldest friend in the bushes last night. All Peter did was laugh when our teenage son disrespected me, which is a daily occurrence. But it’s the tone of warning in Peter’s voice that makes me rise to the bait.

“Don’t make this about you, Pete.”

“About me? Are you sure you want to go there, Eleanor?”

Breakfast rises in my throat. A sudden panic. I glance over at Maddy and Finn on the sofa, their small nervous expressions. Their sweetness. Their worry. What I did last night. A terrible mistake I can never take back.

“I’m sorry,” I say. Then I hold my breath and wait for whatever happens next.





5


   1972. August, Connecticut.


Rural Connecticut is an oppressive place in late summer. By eight in the morning the air is already thick with landlocked humidity and the suffocating greenness of everything. After lunch, I like to hide in the shade of my grandfather’s cornfield, run from one end to the other, the lazy husks pattering against me; lie on a dark stripe of plowed earth between the rows, secret and safe, listen to the quiet rustle; watch soldier ants carrying their heavy loads across the ruts and furrows. In the late afternoon, clouds of gnats appear from nowhere and swarm us, forcing us to run inside for cover until they disappear back into the shadows of the sour plum tree.

Every evening at our grandparents’ farm, we wait for the air to cool before taking our after-dinner walk. In the heat of the day, the road’s blacktop oozes and blisters. But later, it is lovely to walk on, the tar still soft but not sticky, like walking on marshmallows, the sweet smell of lava rising. Granddaddy William, my father’s father, carries his hickory walking stick, pipe and packet of tobacco shoved in his trouser pocket. We walk together past the cornfield, past the old cemetery across the street from their farmhouse, past the little white church with its darkened windows, the minister’s small clapboard house, reading lights on, his lace curtains drawn. We walk up the hill, where sheep bells tinkle in the dusky hollows of the neighbor’s farm.

Anna and I carry sugar cubes in our pockets and run ahead to feed the Straights’ piebald horse from the palms of our hands. He waits for us at the edge of the field, waist-high in stinging nettles, his warm, snuffling nostrils picking up our scent. Anna scratches him between the eyes and he harrumphs and stomps his foot. When we get home, Granny Myrtle always has cider and homemade sugar cookies waiting. She says she wishes we could stay here with her all the time—divorce is never good for the children. “I’ve always admired your mother,” she says. “Wallace is a very handsome woman.”

The church has a small playground for Sunday school—swings and a jungle gym—but Anna and I prefer to play in the cemetery, with its big shade trees and clipped green lawns. The rows and rows of gravestones are perfect for hide-and-seek. Our favorite place is the suicide grave. It is all by itself, halfway up the hill. People who kill themselves aren’t allowed near the other graves because they have sinned, Granny Myrtle tells us. The suicide grave has a tall stone marker, much taller than me, with a cyprus tree on either side. His widow planted them, Granny says. “At first they were only shrubs. But that was long ago now. Your grandfather helped her dig the holes. She moved to New Haven after that.” When Anna asks her how the man died, Granny Myrtle replies, “Your grandfather cut him down.”