Read A Piece of the World Page 21


  I watch as he sets up his easel in the same patch of grass as the day before. He unfolds the quilt and lays it on the ground, pulling the scalloped edges to smooth it. Then he comes back inside to get me, standing very close, and puts his shoulder under mine as he pulls me up from my chair. I haven’t been this close to a man I’m not related to since I was with Walton. I am acutely aware of my body next to Andy’s, my fragile bones and papery skin against his warm solid chest, his muscular arm clasping my gaunt one. My senses suddenly sharpen; I possess the eye of an eagle, the ear of a cat, the nose of a dog. His breath on my face is sickly sweet. I hear a faint click between his teeth. My stomach lurches as my brain registers the smell. “Is that . . . butterscotch?”

  “Sure is.”

  He doesn’t notice that I turn my head away.

  With his arms wrapped around me, under my elbows, to support my weight, he half walks, half carries me outside. My heart is beating so loudly I almost wonder if he can hear it. Gently he sets me on the quilt—adjusting my legs, smoothing my dress, tucking my hair behind my ear—before rooting around in his jacket pocket. He pulls out a cellophane bag filled with the wrapped amber candies. “I warn you, they’re addictive.”

  “No, no—I don’t want one,” I say, putting up my hand. “I can’t abide the smell. Much less the taste.”

  “How can that be? Everybody likes butterscotch.”

  “Well, not me.” The memory is so painful I have to catch my breath: Walton’s scratchy cheek against mine, one hand on the small of my back, his breath on my neck as we dance at the Grange Hall . . . “Someone I knew was always . . . sucking on them.”

  “There’s a story,” he says, tucking the cellophane bag back into his pocket. “Let me guess. The boy you alluded to yesterday?”

  I look away. “I didn’t allude to any boy.”

  He spits the butterscotch into his hand and flicks it into Al’s rosebush. Adjusts the easel, props his pad on it, opens the tackle box. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” he says, pulling out his pens and brushes, “but I suspect we’ll be here for more than an hour today as well. In case, you know, you’re concerned you won’t have time to tell me about him.”

  For a while I am silent. I listen to Andy’s pen scratching the paper. Then I take a deep breath. “It was . . . a summer visitor.”

  “One summer?”

  “Four. Four summers.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twenty, the first year.”

  “Around the age I was when I met Betsy,” he says, holding his hand out in an L shape and squinting at me through it. “Was it serious?”

  “I don’t know.” I swallow hard. “He promised me that . . . that we would be together.”

  “You mean that you’d get married?”

  I nod. Is that what he promised? I’m not quite sure.

  “Oh, Christina.” Andy sighs. “What happened?”

  Something in his manner makes me want to confide things to him I’ve never told anyone. Even painful things, shameful things.

  I didn’t know how badly I wanted to share them.

  “HONESTLY, CHRISTINA,” ANDY says, shaking his head, when I finish telling him the story. “That man sounds very dull. Very conventional. What in the world did you see in him?”

  “I don’t know.” I think, again, of my mother opening her front door to a Swedish sailor, the stuff of fairy tales: Rapunzel letting down her hair, Cinderella sliding her foot into the glass slipper, Sleeping Beauty awaiting a kiss. All were given one chance to step into a happily ever after—or at least it must’ve seemed that way. But was it the prince who attracted them, or merely the opportunity for escape?

  How much of my love for, obsession with, Walton was about my fantasy of rescue—a fantasy I didn’t even know I harbored until he came along?

  “I suppose I just wanted . . .” To be loved, I almost blurt. But I’m ashamed to say it. “A normal life, I guess.”

  Andy sighs. “Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but you could never have a normal life, even if that’s what you thought you wanted. You and me, we’re not ‘normal.’ We don’t fit into conventional boxes.” Shaking his head again, he says, “You dodged a bullet, if you ask me. If that man lives to be a hundred, he’ll never know the strength of his convictions.”

  I swallow the lump in my throat. “He knew he didn’t want me.”

  “Pah. He was weak. Easily swayed. Believe me, you avoided a lifetime of misery. That man would’ve chipped away at your heart bit by bit until there was nothing left. It may have been bruised, but at least it’s whole.”

  He may be right; my heart might be whole. But I think about the people I’ve kept at arm’s length, even those I love. I think about how I treated Al and Estelle. What I said, and meant, to Gertrude, who had come only to help that morning during my nephew’s birth: I swear I will never speak to you again. Maybe she was right when she told me I had a cold heart. “I feel as if . . . as if it’s been encased in ice.”

  “Ever since?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it always was.”

  He caps the pen in his hand. “I can see why it might feel that way. But I don’t believe it. You’re guarded, perhaps, but that’s understandable. Jesus, Christina, you’ve been dealt a rough hand. Taking care of your family your whole life. Your goddamn legs that don’t work the way they’re supposed to.” He looks at me intently, and again I have the uncanny sense that he can see straight through me. “It’s obvious to me—it’s always been obvious—that you have a big heart. Just watching you with Betsy, for one thing. The affection between you. And your love for your nephew—there’s no mistaking that. But most of all, you and Al, in this house. Your kindnesses to each other. This guy—this guy Walton,” he says, mocking his name, “has no consequence here. You scared the poor bugger off.” He laughs drily. “What did Al think of him?”

  “Not much.”

  “Didn’t think so.” Closing the sketchbook, he says, “Al knows what’s what.”

  My heart—bruised, battered; who knows, possibly thawing—constricts. Your kindnesses to each other. Andy doesn’t know the whole story.

  He’s right about one thing, though: Al does know what’s what. Has always known. And I rewarded his empathy, his loyalty, by taking him for granted, by ruining his relationship with a woman who probably would have been good for him. Who would’ve changed his life. I can picture the small, neat cottage that the two of them might’ve lived in. His pale pink roses on another trellis. Al up before dawn and out on the water in his lobster boat, checking traps, calculating the yield with a tug. Home in mid-afternoon to a cozy kitchen, wingbacks by the fire, a child to play a game with, a wife to ask about his day . . .

  In my own grief and panic, I denied him the respect he has always given me. What right did I have to deny him his one chance for love?

  “I NEED TO say something, Alvaro,” I tell him in the kitchen at dusk, when we are drinking tea by the range. “Not that it will make any difference now. But . . . I had no right to force you to stay.”

  I can barely make out his features, but I see him flinch.

  “I am sorry.”

  He sighs.

  “You could have been happy with her.”

  “I’m not unhappy.” His voice is so quiet I can barely hear it.

  “You loved her, didn’t you.” I choke out the words. “I kept you here.”

  “Christie—”

  “Will you ever forgive me?”

  Al rocks back and forth in his creaky chair. Reaches into his pocket and pulls out his pipe, tamps down the tobacco, swipes a match against the oven door and lights it. Mumbles something under his breath.

  “What?”

  He sucks in the smoke and blows it out. “I said, I let myself be kept.”

  I think about this for a moment. “You felt sorry for me.”

  “It wasn’t that. I made a choice.”

  I shake my head. “What choice did you
have? I made you feel like you were abandoning me, when you were just trying to live your life.”

  “Well.” He swipes at the air with his hand. “How could I leave all this?”

  It isn’t until he gives me a wry grin that I realize he’s making a joke.

  “Nobody else knows how I like my oatmeal,” he says. “And anyway. You would’ve done the same for me.”

  I wouldn’t have, of course. Al is being kind, or maybe it’s easier for him to believe this. Either way, it doesn’t excuse what I did. Here we are, the two of us, not partners but siblings, destined to live out our lives together in the house we grew up in, surrounded by the phantoms of our ancestors, haunted by the phantom lives we might’ve lived. A stack of letters hidden in a closet. A dory in the rafters of the shed. No one will ever know, when we’re gone to dust, the life we’ve shared here, our desires and our doubts, our intimacy and our solitude.

  Al and I have never hugged, that I can remember. I don’t know the last time we’ve touched, except when he is helping me get around. But here in the murky darkness I put my hand over his, and he lays his other hand over mine. I feel the way I do when I lose something—a spool of thread, say—and search for it everywhere, only to discover it in an obvious place, like on the sideboard under the cloth.

  I think of what Mamey told me long ago: there are many ways to love and be loved. Too bad it’s taken most of a lifetime for me to understand what that means.

  A FEW DAYS after Andy started sketching me in the pink dress in the grass, he takes his drawings upstairs. I work in the kitchen all morning, scraping my chair around the floor. I leave biscuits cooling on the counter, a pot of chicken soup on the range. At noontime he comes downstairs and helps himself, scooping a biscuit through his bowl of soup, gulping water from the pump in the pantry, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Heads back upstairs. In the afternoon I bake a blueberry pie, cut a warm slice, push it ahead of me on a plate to the stairs, and call for him to come and get it. It’s worth the effort for the grin on his face.

  He rows home at dusk. Comes back the next day and troops upstairs, his heavy thudding footsteps the only sound in the quiet house. I hear him pacing around up there, opening doors, shutting doors, walking into different rooms.

  This goes on for weeks.

  One month, then two.

  There are traces of Andy everywhere, even when he’s gone. The smell of eggs, splatters of tempera. A dry, splayed paintbrush. A wooden board pocked with color.

  The weather cools. He’s still working. He doesn’t leave for Pennsylvania as usual at the end of August. I don’t ask why, half afraid that if I speak the words aloud, they’ll remind him that it is past time for him to return home.

  While he’s upstairs I go through the motions of my routine. Heat water for tea. Knead the bread. Stroke the cat on my lap. Watch the grasses sway out the window. Chat with Al about the weather. Settle in to enjoy the sunset, as vivid as a Technicolor movie. But all the time I’m thinking of Andy, tucked away in a distant room like a character in a fairy tale, spinning straw into gold.

  One October morning Andy doesn’t show up. I haven’t seen Betsy in weeks, but the next day, when I’m darning socks, she pops her head in the kitchen door. “Christina! Will you and Al come to dinner?”

  “To your house?” I ask with surprise. They’ve never invited us before.

  She nods. “Andy talked to Al, and they agreed Al can bring you in the car. Please tell me you’ll come! Just a simple meal, nothing fancy. We’d adore it. A nice send-off before we head back to Chadds Ford.”

  “Andy’s finished for the season, then?”

  “Finally,” she says. “It’ll be nice to have some peace and quiet, I’ll bet.”

  “We don’t mind. We have a lot of peace and quiet.”

  IT’S LATE IN the afternoon a few days later when Al—wearing a light-blue collared shirt I made for him years ago that I rarely see him in—lifts me out of my chair in the kitchen and carries me down the steps and into the back of the old Ford Runabout. It’s been a long time since I’ve been anywhere in a car—since I’ve been anywhere except Sadie’s, in fact. I’m dressed in a long navy cotton skirt with forgiving panels and a white blouse—an old uniform, but at least it isn’t torn or stained. Hair smoothed back and tied with a ribbon.

  The backseat of the car is dark and cool. As we bump down the drive I lean back and close my eyes, feeling the vibrating thrum of the motor against my legs and a flutter of nervousness in my stomach. I’ve never seen Andy anywhere except in our house, with his paint-spattered boots and pockets bulging with eggs. Will he be a different person in his own home?

  Al turns right at a stop sign, then drives mile after mile on a smooth road. I hear the loud blinker; we make a slow right turn. Then the crackle of gravel. “We’re here, Christie,” he says.

  I open my eyes. White clapboard cottage, trellis of white clematis, dark windows, neat green arborvitae. I knew they’d moved out of the horse stalls, but seeing the cottage reminds me anew: Betsy got her house after all.

  And here she is, standing on the porch in slim black pants, a mint-green blouse, a red-lipped smile, waving. “Welcome!” Behind her, Andy waves too. It is strange seeing him here, out of context, wearing a crisp white shirt and clean, unsullied trousers and shoes, his hair neatly combed. He looks like a nice, ordinary man in a nice, ordinary house. The only hint of the Andy I know is his hands stained with paint.

  Al gets out and opens my door. He and Andy cradle me up the steps and into the house. Betsy holds the door open; two young boys dart back and forth like minnows.

  “Nicholas! Jamie!” Betsy scolds. “You two go play upstairs. I’ll bring you some cake if you’re good.”

  Al and Andy carry me into a sparsely furnished room with a long red couch, a low oblong wooden table in front of it, and two striped wingback chairs. They settle me onto the couch while Betsy disappears through a swinging door and emerges with a tray of radishes in a small bowl, a platter of deviled eggs, and a little jar of green olives with red tongues. (I’ve seen olives like this before, but never tried one.) She sits beside me and directs Andy and Al to sit across from us in the wingbacks.

  Andy seems a little jittery. He shifts in his chair and gives me a funny smile. Al glances above my head and then looks at Andy. He seems jittery too.

  “Toothpick?” Betsy offers.

  I take one and spear an olive into my mouth. Briny. Texture like flesh. Where to put the toothpick? I see a small woodpile on Andy’s plate and balance the toothpick on my own. Looking around the room, I see Andy’s familiar pictures in frames all over the walls: a watercolor of Al raking blueberries, his pipe and cap in profile. A charcoal sketch of Al sitting on the front doorstep. The large egg tempera of Mamey’s lace curtains in a third-floor room billowing in the wind.

  “They look nice in frames,” I tell Andy.

  “That’s Betsy’s domain,” he says. “She names them and frames them.”

  “We divide and conquer,” Betsy says. “A glass of sherry, Christina?”

  “No, thank you. I only drink at the holidays.” I don’t want to say it, but I’m afraid I might spill on my blouse.

  “All right. Al?” Betsy asks.

  “A drink would be nice,” he says.

  Al and I, not used to being served, are stiff and formal. Betsy’s doing her best to put us at ease. “It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, I hear,” she says as she hands Al a tiny glass of sherry.

  “Good thing, we can use it,” Al says and takes a sip. He winces. I don’t think he’s ever tasted sherry before. He sets the glass on the table.

  I glance at Betsy, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Laughing lightly, she says, “I know rain is good for the farm, but it’s no fun to be stuck inside with the children on a rainy day, let me tell you.”

  Al gives Andy a droll look. “You should get them painting,” he says.

  Andy shakes his head. “Finger painting is more like it. Actually, Nicholas s
eems to have no aptitude for it whatsoever, but Jamie—I think he might actually have some talent.”

  “For heaven’s sake, he’s two years old,” Betsy says. “And Nicky’s only five. You can’t know that already.”

  “I think maybe you can. My father said he saw that spark in me when I was eight months old.”

  “Your father . . .” Betsy rolls her eyes.

  Spearing another olive, I ask, “So you’re headed back to Pennsylvania in a few days?”

  Betsy nods. “Starting to pack up. It’s always hard to leave. Though we stayed longer than usual this year.”

  “It feels like you just got here,” I say.

  “Goodness, Christina, you can’t mean that! With Andy bothering you day in and day out?”

  “It wasn’t a bother.”

  “Except when I made her pose.” Andy catches my gaze. “Then it was a big bother.”

  I shrug. “I didn’t mind it so much this time.”

  “Glad he didn’t ask me again,” Al says.

  Andy laughs, shaking his head. “I learned my lesson.”

  “Well,” Betsy says, standing up, “I need to go up and check on the boys. Andy, can you clear these plates?”

  I see a look pass between them.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says. When Betsy leaves the room, he gathers the bowls and puts them back on the tray. “You two will have to entertain each other. I’m just the hired help.” We watch him shuffle backward through the swinging door, holding the tray aloft.

  “Nice house, isn’t it,” Al says when it’s just us.

  “Very nice.” We’re artificial with each other, unaccustomed to small talk. “I could get used to those olives.”

  He grimaces. “I don’t care for them. Too—rubbery.”

  This makes me laugh. “They are kind of rubbery.”

  As we sit in strained silence I see Al’s gaze rise up the wall above my head again. He looks at me for a moment, then back at the wall.

  “What?” I ask.

  He lifts his chin.

  I shift on my seat, craning my neck to see what he’s looking at. It’s a painting, a large painting, and it fills almost the entire wall above my head. A girl in a yellow field wearing a light pink dress with a thin black belt. Her dark hair blows in the wind. Her face is hidden. She’s leaning toward a shadowy silver house and barn balanced on the horizon line, beneath a pale ribbon of sky.