She mashed the clay against the stone. ‘My father won’t let me. He says I’m too young. He says he’ll be too worried about me. My mother says I can’t upset Daddy; no one can ever upset Daddy. She says I should make other friends.’ Oh, the thunderous little frown she lifted to me. ‘I’ll bet you’re going to camp too.’
‘Well … not until all the way in August.’ But I didn’t want to think about that. I sat down next to her at the stream’s edge and began plucking up my pebbles. ‘Aren’t you going to go to day camp or anything?’
‘I hate day camp! I’m not going to go. I’m going to lie in a coffin all summer, all alone, under the ground. Then I’m going to come out at night and fly to Jessica’s camp and stand by Michelle’s window and sing a horrifying song.’
‘Well, yeah, I guess you could do that,’ I said. I looped a stone into the rushing middle depths with a satisfying plink. ‘Or you could just go to day camp and make some new friends like your mother says. It might be easier.’
‘I don’t want to meet new friends.’ It was really determined talk now through hardened jaws. She worked at her clay steadily. ‘I want to meet old people. I’m going to meet people so old that they’re in the past. They’ll be ghosts, like me. I’m going to go with my sister into her garden.’
I aimed for a fiery ball of reflected sunlight in a shallow eddy on the far side. Bullseye – shattered it into sparkles. ‘What do you mean? What garden?’
She was so long in answering, I looked over. The streaked Play-Doh was beginning to take shape into a figure now. Not limbs and head stuck onto a trunk either; a thing entire just sort of oozing out between her fingers. I’d never seen her actually do it before and it caught my attention. It gave me a thrill.
‘I had a dream one time,’ she said, ‘where Lena came.’
‘Your ghost sister. Yeah?’ I rolled my pebbles in my palm. I watched her work the clay.
‘She came and met me in a ghost place – a big, kind of – I don’t know – a big, kind of brown place where everything was broken. There were all these broken, old things lying around in the mud and some of them had arms and heads reaching out of the mud like monsters trying to crawl out, you know? And there were all these …’ She straightened a second to describe them in the sunlit air with her hand. ‘… scary trees, like, all around, that looked like monsters with giant fingers and scary faces staring down at us. And the sky was scary too with, like, clouds. And it was all cold.’ She returned to her figure, the little girl figure she had formed, Lena’s figure. ‘And Lena came there – wearing a white dress – she came there and met me and she said, “This isn’t where I really live. This is just where I have to come so I can meet you. Where I live it’s like a big garden with beautiful flowers all over everywhere like a carpet, and all the mothers are with their children and all the fathers are playing with them and everyone’s laughing.” And she said I could come there with her.’ She looked up, caught me gaping at her hands. ‘She said I could come with her to the garden where she lived.’ She took her figure from the rock and sat back in the dirt with it, bracing it against her scraped knee, shaping the details. ‘I wanted to go, too. I was going to. Only I didn’t know if she was telling the truth or not. Once you went to the garden, see, you couldn’t come back and what if it was all like this place, I mean the scary place we were in, you know, with the trees and things and I could never get back – never.’
She stopped and I figured she was finished with her story and I couldn’t help saying something about this incredible figure she’d made and I blurted out, ‘God, Agnes! God, that is so neat! How do you do that?’
She hiked one shoulder, made a grimace of disdain. ‘I just make what I see,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but, I mean, could you, like, make … like a monster or something, like a Frankenstein, something really cool like that?’
She rolled up off her backside back onto her knees, back to the edge of the burbling stream. She held Lena’s figure close to her in one hand. Braced with the other hand on the bank, she gazed down into a quiet pool sheltered from the current by stones.
‘Oh, come on, Agnes,’ I said behind her, ‘don’t drown it. Make a Frankenstein or something, make something cool.’ She hesitated. ‘Come on, Agnes.’
After another moment, she sat back. She was still gazing away sort of dreamily – or maybe sort of insanely, I don’t know – into the shadow-pocked slope on the far side. But she wagged her head. ‘I could make a Frankenstein.’
‘Yeah!’ I dusted the last pebbles off my palms and went over to her on my knees. ‘Only not a Frankenstein.’ I already had the Aurora Frankenstein monster model on the shelf in my room. ‘Something else cool,’ I said. ‘Like a skeleton or something.’
Dreamily, Agnes folded Lena in two between her palms. She mashed the figure back into the muddy ball whence it had come. ‘You can’t do a good skeleton with Play-Doh,’ she said, gazing off. ‘Because of the ribs. Play-Doh’s too soft to make good ribs. I could do a skull though.’
‘Yeah! Great! Okay! Make a skull!’
Slowly, reflectively, Agnes seemed to come back to herself. She heaved a deep sigh and set about the task. I knelt beside her on the sunlit bank, by the dribbling stream, under the trees heavy with leaves on the ridge above us. I watched her as she worked. I was mesmerized by those delicate little fingers in the clay.
And she made a skull, all right, a great one. She let me keep it too. It would be worth – what? – about two million dollars by now. Unfortunately, that autumn —just around the same time I was flipping my baseball card collection into piles of burning leaves – I accidentally knocked the skull from my shelf and it was dented by the fall. Somehow, when I picked it up, when I saw how lopped it was, I became fascinated. My thumb, as if of its own volition, slowly burrowed into the skull’s side, making it crumble, the clay having dried. Then, in a trance, I crushed the thing, and rolled the hardened bits into a clump. After that, I played with it for a few minutes distractedly, and finally threw it into the trash.
But not that afternoon. I carried it home carefully that afternoon. I held it balanced on my palm. Going over and over its ghostly eyes with my own, admiring the detail of its evil grin. No one had one like it, no one – on Long Island, in the whole world – it was a oner. God, if she weren’t a girl, and such a spooky girl, and so mysterious and so hard to approach for things, she could have made a million cool things – we could’ve set up a stand outside my house, like a lemonade stand – we’d have made enough money to buy a car or something … But that was just a thought. I was content enough. Absorbed in contemplation of the thing and with wisps of Agnes’s creepy dream drifting across my imagination and with that incandescent, floaty Walk-Home-From-Agnes’s feeling permeating the periphery of verdant foliage and scrabbling squirrels and summer sky. Raising my eyes as I came home to Old Colony Lane was like being interrupted from a TV show or a good book. There was my house suddenly barging in on my meditations. A big, homey colonial – white clapboards, green shutters – it seemed strangely unfamiliar to me for half a second. And, as I came around the hedges, there was something else – something really unfamiliar that brought me out of my revery the rest of the way. Another car was in the driveway. A family-style Ford of some kind, a Thunderbird I think, shiny and blue but stodgy in a way – and anyhow a foreigner, an intruder in the house, which made me grimace when I saw it.
I remembered who it was, though. My mother had mentioned it to me a week or so before: my Aunt May had finally come for her visit. She was going to be staying with us for quite some time.
‘I cannot, cannot tell you how happy I am – how happy I am now that this is over. This is the thing I dreaded above all else, above everything, being alone like this, and now that it’s finally here I feel so – so free! I just can’t tell you.’
Even I knew she was beautiful, even then. And glamor came off her in waves like perfume. The magazine-cover makeup that preserved her flushed-ivory complexion, the low fr
ont of her navy summer dress and her ensorcelling cleavage through a fringe of lace, her bare arms and the movement of her arms and the dramatic phrases she used and the smell of her, even a little too much fragrance in an aggressively feminine cloud around her: it all made her seem spotlit to me. The grand sideboard behind her, ranged with display plates and pewterware, became a sort of dim backdrop. My mother and father, at either end of the dining-room table, seemed to fade into the shadowy wings. And I, sitting across from her in the elegant and windowless alcove we used for company, could only finger my crystal of Seven-up and occasionally chew the lump of pot roast lying on my lower jaw like lead, and try and fail and try again not to stare at her.
‘Well, I never should have gone back to him. Oh God, it was the mistake of a lifetime. But, I mean, picture the scene: with me all alone and no money and nowhere to go, poor thing. You can’t imagine it, Claire: you’re so lucky, with Michael and Harry and a house and a life like this. Well, I wanted some of those things too, that’s not so terrible. And, you know, he’d set his picture up at Fox, and there was money again, and he said everything would be different. I was absolutely, completely, totally convinced that he wanted to have the baby.’
‘You know, I don’t think we really have to go through all this right now,’ my mother said. She wore an expression of stony disapproval – and a shapeless green muu-muu meant to hide her fat.
May pulled up at the rebuke. ‘Oh … I’m just saying, Claire … you don’t know how lucky you are, that’s all. Here with your family …’
My mother’s baggy face contorted once, and she pushed her last string bean through its butter with her fork. We all looked down, in fact, and our plates were strewn with only bones and wisps of mashed potatoes and streaks and puddles of butter. The carving board was down to a few gristly strips and there were just crumbs on the napkin in the bread basket. May’s plate alone was nearly untouched, but then she’d taken so little to begin with. And though she lifted her fork now, she only sat poised with it. Her head bowed, her black hair pouring forward.
‘You just don’t know, Claire,’ she said in a high, squeaking voice. All at once, the disaster of her tears was upon us. We repressed Bernards – who knows? – we might’ve died of the embarrassment. But luckily, May lifted her head quickly, and knuckled the damp cautiously from her underlids. ‘I don’t know why I should be crying. I’m so, so happy now – now that it’s over. But I mean you don’t know … every day he would come home, night after night, creeping into bed at eight-thirty, nine o’clock, hardly saying a word to me.’ She gave a juicy snuffle.
‘Are you done?’ my mother said to me. ‘Why don’t you go upstairs and I’ll call you when dessert is ready.’
I would’ve gone, I wasn’t all that riveted by this grownup stuff. It was the sight of her more than anything that held me. But May, turning to Dad now, just carried on, hoarsely: ‘I finally confronted him, Michael. That’s how it finally happened. He was leaving for work, he was going down the stairs. We had this beautiful curving staircase going down to this marble foyer with an absolutely magnificent chandelier hanging above it. And Ben was going down the stairs, and I was still in my nightgown. And I thought: “No. Just: No.” And I got out of bed – and this was with the worst, the most awful morning sickness anyone anywhere can imagine, just crippling, utterly crippling nausea – and I just didn’t care, I just ran – I ran – to the top of the stairs. I said, “Ben, you have to tell me what is going on. You have to tell me right now.” And, Claire …’ Because Mom and I were watching her again. ‘Claire, I just wish I could describe, I wish I could paint for you the lofty, sanctimonious expression on his face. If I could paint some sort of … patron of Renaissance art being shown flying up into heaven, that was Ben, that was the look on his face. He says, “May …” That was his lofty voice: “May, I’ve joined Alcoholics Anonymous. I’ve found a higher power to help me deal with all my problems from now on.” I mean, he was that self-satisfied. And so I said, “Well, what is that supposed to mean? You’re just going to go to bed every night and leave every morning from now on? You have your higher power, so you don’t need me anymore? Is that it?” And I can’t, I can’t convey the holier-than-thou expression on his face. “Oh, May,” he says, “Oh, May, stand with me now, this is the crisis point of my life.” And I just said, well, you know, “What about my crisis? Ben. I’m the one who’s pregnant. Everyone says, oh that’s so wonderful and everything – and then everything you do is a big, important crisis?” And he was just going to walk away from me! He was just going to turn his back and walk away. That was his answer to everything. And I just couldn’t take it anymore. I just couldn’t. I said to him, “You’re not walking away from me this time. You’re not. Absolutely.’”
‘May. I mean it. That’s enough,’ my mother said. ‘For God’s sake. Go on, Harry, go upstairs.’
‘Oh God! Of course, of course,’ said May, lifting her fork again. ‘I don’t have any children so I forget. I’m so, so sorry, Claire.’
‘Go on, Harry,’ my mother said. Her face was the color of concrete, with the cracks in it too. There was no getting out of this.
‘But what happened?’ I said. I was wrapped up in it now. ‘What did Aunt May do?’
‘Michael,’ she said, ‘would you tell your son to go upstairs?’
‘Go on, Harry,’ my father said heavily. ‘Do what your mother says.’
‘But what did Aunt May do?’ I insisted.
‘Harry, do you want there to be dessert?’ said my mother.
‘She lost the baby,’ my father went on in the same heavy tone. ‘She was going to have the baby but she lost it, it died. Now, go ahead, go upstairs or no dessert.’
I looked back at them once as I retreated toward the stairs and still – hell, more than before if anything – she was luminous. Aunt May. Eyes glistening with tears, cleavage heaving in the dull glow from the brasswork toplight. My parents flanked her in low relief, drab of aspect, drab of expression. My mother giving Dad her Damn-It-Michael look, my father shrugging at her for answer.
As I started upstairs, I was already wondering what I could find to watch on the TV in my parents’ bedroom, but I did hear my father say softly behind me, ‘Well, these things happen, Claire. You can’t protect him from everything. It’s only life.’
She moved into the guest room, down the hall from me, right across from Mom and Dad. I didn’t like it much; she was a stranger among us. That room – and the bathroom too – she made them alien territory. Scented atmosphere, stockings and frilly brassieres in plain sight, blouses bright as gardens – thrilling, you know, but foreign, invasive. She would come out of the bathroom some mornings in a cloud of steam with her hair in a towel and her leg flashing from her bathrobe and the white V beneath her throat showing. She would sit at breakfast and say, ‘Oh, it’s so peaceful here,’ and stretch with her hands intertwisted high above her head. She would talk about Hollywood, which bored me, but the whispery flute of her voice was so light it made everything else around her seem heavy and harsh. My parents’ very jowls sagged as they listened to her. They seemed to sit around her like those Bronze Age monoliths, those squat boulders plumped upright.
I heard the hiss of her shower in the morning sometimes and lay in my bed an extra few minutes, dreaming of dominion, stretching, arching, playing my dick like a trombone – not masturbating yet, just tugging at it. And once, when May asked me to run upstairs to her room to fetch a book, I left the lights off and just stood there; just breathed the alien air, the perfume. Then I crept to her closet; I reached inside; I rubbed a slip of hers between my finger and thumb. It was so sheer it seemed to catch on the ridges of my fingerprints. My little heart played rock ’n’ roll.
With no camp till August, I had a free July. Breakfast in front of the TV. Reruns by daylight – My Little Margie, Topper, all the mindless greats. The humid torpor of it, the rancid PJs, the mental drone; ah, whither are such summers fled! Most of my friends were gone during th
e day in one kind of camp or another, and I was prince of all their territories, running free from backyard to backyard, full of fantasy, alive with summertime and basically, yeah, bored out of my head. Luckily, stumbling through a hedge one morning, scratched nearly blind, I managed to discover an enclave of younger kids, some seven – and eight-year-olds, playing pirates in a lawn sprinkler. They were wary of me at first, but when I showed peaceable, they were sort of honored to let me tromp and splash around with them a while. I went back there most days to be with them. We played soldiers together and I taught them everything I knew – which was that Pickett charged with his hat on his sword, Civil War guys had to have their legs cut off without being unconscious, and Japs shot you in the back just when you thought you’d cleared the island of them. Slowly, indignant at the injustice of the world and the oppression of the weak everywhere, I organized these young scallywags into a band of right-seeking outlaws known forevermore as Harry’s Raiders. Our hideout was a teepee of old lumber in one of their backyards. Our exploits were trumpeted far and wide. We once stole an entire box of toybox cookies right out of Mrs Zimmerman’s kitchen while she was on the phone in the next room. Then, descending like the wind on the Allenwood Park playground, we distributed these, and mothers be damned, to a group of five-year-olds playing there in the sandboxes. One of these tots actually hugged me for it. ‘That’s all right, son,’ I said, squinting into the middle distance, ‘just thank … Harry’s Raiders.’ Whereupon I vanished, followed by my merry band, into the woods, and legend.
In the afternoons, after four o’clock, when I knew she’d be home from camp, I’d usually wander up to Piccadilly Road and climb down to the stream to see Agnes. Sometimes, I would get there first and wait for her, skimming stones, floating sticks. Other times, as I sauntered down the bank from the culvert, I would hear her there already through the low overhang of summer leaves, chattering girlishly to her figures or, better yet, gutturalizing hellish incantations echoed by the softer gutturals of the water.