I moseyed back into the house, where Angus was licking icing from a cake Annette had baked. There's something about a summer house that entices you into the kitchen. The night before, we had been up for hours making corn tassel dolls because I had read about them in an ancient Lois Lenski book. Maybe Vermont hours are slower than New York hours, or perhaps Vermont kitchens are roomier and sunnier.
Angus ran a finger around the cake rim and scooped up a dollop for me. I licked it off his finger. Yummy. “You know what Joanna said to me the other day, Angus?” I said. I took my own icing scoop. There were now sled tracks where our fingers had plowed and the chocolate-cake earth showed through.
“What?” Angus got milk out of the refrigerator.
“She said she's always wondered if Daddy has a son by his first marriage, and she would meet the son and have a crush on her own brother.” I poured us each a glass of milk. “Isn't that silly, Angus? The whole idea of Daddy having another son?”
Angus gave me a funny look. “But Shelley,” he said, “Dad does have another son. His name is Toby.”
Vermont was quiet, the sun hot, the lake shining. Down by the water Annette turned a page in her book.
“What are you talking about?” I whispered.
“Toby,” my brother repeated unhelpfully.
“Toby who?” I demanded.
“I don't know. I just know he is.”
“Is what?” I was shrieking now, but still whispering. Annette was aware of nothing. For that matter, Angus was aware of nothing. He began gathering supplies for one of his endless projects. I followed him. He rounded up two pairs of sunglasses, one to wear and one to perch in his hair. The pair he was wearing had miniature green venetian blinds, so I had to look through slots to see his eyes. “Dad does have another son” I quoted. “His name is Toby. What kind of sentences are those?”
Angus pawed through the rainy-day box of broken crayons, dry Magic Markers, tracing paper and construction paper. It had been abandoned by the previous summer-home owner, and we hadn't discarded it, because you never knew when you might need a coloring book. Angus extracted some relatively clean paper and fished around for pencils.
“Angus! Exactly how did you learn about Toby? Give me all the details. Now.”
Angus shrugged. “Don't know the details.” He checked the pencils to see how sharp their tips were.
“You do too know. If you don't give me a real answer, I'll stab you with your pencils. Information as important as that would stick with you. Especially with you. I bet you have a whole separate file in your computer for family secrets.”
Angus looked thoughtful. He's always ready for a new project. But he shrugged a second time. “I have to get downtown,” he informed me, although downtown is a rather strong word for this village. “I can't waste more time on this.” From the stack of folded aluminum outdoor chairs, he chose a low folding beach chair, the kind where your bottom practically touches the sand. He gathered his necessities, slinging the flimsy beach chair over his shoulder like a huge purple-and-green-striped handbag. I wondered why he was not using his leg, but if I mentioned it, he'd remember the leg, and I could always hope that he was on the downside of leg-carrying.
I gripped his arm, but Angus threw me off. Last year he was a scrawny, thin, weak eleven-year-old. This year he's still thin, but he can pin me to the wall or the floor or, I suppose, the lake bottom should he choose. I'm against it. Little brothers should stay little.
“Nobody can have a son and not mention him!” I cried. “How about Christmas presents? Birthdays? And there's money! You have to pay for new shoes and braces and band instruments. And wouldn't Grandma and Grandpa have noticed and said something? And Mother—during the divorce, our divorce—wouldn't Mother have mentioned that? She mentioned everything else on earth. She would have thrown in a son named Toby. I think you're making it up, Angus, and I think it's mean and cruel and horrible, and I want the truth.”
Angus hates to repeat himself. He always wants a conversation to be brand-new. “So ask Dad. He'll be home Friday night. I'll get Annette out of the way.”
Angus was truly not interested. He was interested in the money in little Vermont pockets, and he was interested in cockroaches, but he was not interested in his own incredible remark. “But Shelley, Dad does have another son. His name is Toby”
Angus ran upstairs, and I could tell he was rooting around in Daddy and Annette's room. He came down with a pair of binoculars.
He was now burdened with the sort of collection that makes an older sister nervous, because who could guess what this latest project might be and where he was planning to put that beach chair? Experience told me not to go along. I tried to see into his eyes, but the sunglasses kept his secrets. I resent sunglasses when other people wear them. They could be laughing at you or ignoring you and you can't ever know. Black lids or silver reflections replace their eyes, as if they are part robot. When people wearing sunglasses speak to you, you want to wrench the things off their faces.
But if you wear them, you live in another world, safe in your own dark.
You should always be able to wear your sunglasses, but other people should never be allowed to wear theirs.
In the kitchen, Angus looked around for a nice portable snack. I tried to think of a threat that would force him to talk, but Annette walked in. Angus stood in front of the cake so she wouldn't spot our ski trails in the snow icing. “I'm going to walk down to the village and go to the library,” she told us. We just nodded. She hesitated, hoping one of us would want to go with her, I suppose, or at least say something nice, but I was frozen by the specter of Toby, and Angus was too busy with his own plans.
Annette left the house, pausing at the clump of orange tiger lilies at the edge of the yard. She loved them and had tried putting them in bouquets, but they didn't last.
I thought she would never be out of sight and hearing range. I turned to interrogate Angus, but he was gone, having taken the other door, and was marching off by himself. He never cares what he looks like and never cares whether anybody goes with him. I like to have a friend along. In fact, if I don't have a friend along, I probably won't go.
I cut myself a piece of cake. I drank my milk. I walked outside.
The hedge was woven with honeysuckle and bees. Perfume and humming crossed in the soft air. Waves made by a passing motorboat lapped over smooth stones. I lay on my back in the high grass and planned my conversation with Daddy. So, Dad. How was work? Spoken to Toby lately?
I wasn't lonely out there in the grass. How can you be lonely when the sun is beating down on you? But I was alone and afraid of what Angus had said. Fear isn't like sunglasses. Fear brings darkness, but a dark full of menace instead of safety.
I tried to think of safe things. If only my friends from New York were here—Marley or Kelsey or Bev. We would talk about clothes. What to pack for this family reunion halfway across the nation with four people named Perfect.Summer linen jackets or stained T-shirts? Graceful sundresses or torn jeans?
The day crept on, slow and hot.
I thought of Barrington, of barbecues and cornfields. Brett was sixteen and would have interesting friends who might think I was cute. Grandma always had great presents. Aunt Maggie fixed breathtaking amounts of food, as if she thought you couldn't eat well in New York.
The sun faded and the sky became pale and flat, a sheet hung out to dry. My world felt emptied, as if Angus had punctured it. Toby—whoever and whatever and if ever he was—was under all my thoughts, like water under a boat. From your boat you can stare at the sky or lean into your oars, but the water is always there, deep and cold and dark. Because I had no one with whom to share my thoughts, they were less—but at the same time, more, because they weren't diluted by being hashed over.
I went inside and telephoned Joanna. I didn't care about the time difference, and neither did she. When the phone rings, answer it; who cares what time it is?
She had just been to Monet's garden and strolled
among the very flowers he had planted and painted, and she was eager to tell me all about it.
“I don't care about anything French,” I told her. “Angus says there really is a brother we don't know about, and his name is Toby.”
“Oh, please. Angus is just one tall tale after another. Less loving sisters than we are would call him an out-and-out liar.”
“But you guessed the same thing, Joanna. It must have been based on something. What did you hear once?”
“I don't know,” she said uneasily. “I'm sure I made it up, Shell.”
“Go ask Mother what she knows.”
But Joanna didn't want to start anything.
“If Toby doesn't exist, you won't be starting anything.”
“If he does exist and Mother never heard of him and she gets mad at Dad for never telling her, it'll be awful, Shelley. But stop worrying about it. It's a typical Angus rumor.” She changed the subject. She wanted to talk about boys. Joanna always has lots of admirers. She and Daddy argued solidly the year she was fifteen because he wouldn't let her go out except in a group until she was sixteen. To celebrate turning sixteen, she telephoned every boy she'd been forced to refuse and assigned one night to each boy.
Joanna and Angus are never shy. I can't imagine asking a boy out. I can't imagine asking my father if he has another boy of his own. One he somehow forgot to mention.
“So,” said Joanna. “Any boys on the scene?” She had already dismissed the Toby story. But then, she is never taken in by Angus, and I always am. “There's a kid named DeWitt,” I told her. “He paddles around now and then.”
Sure that I was in the throes of first love, Joanna demanded a physical description. I had not really bothered to look at DeWitt. “He's—well—he's this—you know—I don't know; I think he has a tan.”
“Oh, well,” said Joanna. “I suppose you're going to be a late bloomer.”
I would be the quiet bud amidst the splendor of flowers. Just as early-bloomer blossoms fade, petals wilting, stems dropping, I would come out—beautiful and strong in the setting sun: the Late Bloomer. All the boy flowers would look up, startled, and move toward me in the evening.
Joanna admitted that even she was not blooming well in Paris, where there were tons of boys, but they didn't gather around, and she had no friends her age. I felt better about Paris. Joanna wouldn't stay very long where the boys didn't gather around. I told her how my thoughts had been less when I had nobody to share them with, and yet more, because they weren't diluted.
“Like concentrated juice,” agreed Joanna, “all your thoughts jammed into one frozen cylinder. But if you have friends to talk it over with, then it's the whole gallon. You could pour off glasses and glasses without even noticing. So your thoughts are more important when you keep them to yourself.”
“Oh, Joanna, you have to come to the reunion! I don't want to be all concentrated and lonely. I want to pour off my thoughts on you.”
“No.”
So we ended our phone call with a nice screaming fight just like old times, and I went back out into the yard feeling good again.
Annette and Angus came home together. They were both crying. I had never seen Annette break down, and Angus probably hasn't cried since preschool. The dust from the road had swirled up around their faces and caked in the tear tracks. They looked like relatives by blood instead of by marriage.
“How dare you spy on me?” said Annette, sobbing. “You are horrible, Angus!”
“I wasn't spying on you!” he said, weeping. “I really wasn't. I was taking notes and making lists. I had a list of feet. I'm thinking of manufacturing a new type of sneaker, and I had to get a good count of what people are wearing. Then, since we're eating so much up here, I figured I might as well keep track of weight while I was at it. What proportion of people in Vermont eat too much? Of course I always carry my license plate list with me, like there's a dentist and his plate reads GUM DZZZ and you never know when you might find another really good plate like that, so—”
“You were not!” screamed Annette. “You were spying on me. I came out of the psychiatrist's office and you had your binoculars trained on me.”
“It was a coincidence,” whispered Angus. “It really was. I didn't know where you were. Don't tell Dad, Annette.”
Luckily I hadn't devoured all of Annette's cake. Quickly I passed out slices, adding scoops of chocolate ice cream and glasses of milk all around, and told Annette that Angus and I loved her cake, that we had sneaked half the cake already because it was so unbelievably scrumptious. Then I ruined it. “Why are you going to this shrink?” I asked.
“You think it's going to be easy for me to face all those people in Barrington? You don't call them Perfect for a joke. They are Perfect. And they all think that your father's first… well—”
“Two wives,” I supplied.
“Were so terrific,” she finished. “And I'll have to show up with you two, and Angus will probably take his leg and—”
“They won't hold you responsible for my leg!” cried Angus. “They'll say it's just another sign of our unstable life.”
“They'll say I'm another sign of your unstable life,” said Annette, reaching for a tissue.
We all dipped into the Kleenex box and mopped up. We finished the cake crumbs. Annette said were there any onion bagels left? and Angus said no, and I said, “Anyway we're out of cream cheese.” Annette checked the discarded Zabar's bag in the garbage that had held the onion bagels, and I said Boston was only two hours away, as opposed to New York, which was five, and they probably had a decent deli in Boston, and Annette said, “Let's go.”
So we all got in the car and drove to Boston to find a delicatessen.
“You know,” said Angus, “you're not bad, Annette.”
“I know my delis,” she agreed. “There are those like you, Angus, who can scent a profit.” (Angus's chest expanded, like Dad's.) “And those like you, Shelley, for whom adorable teenage boys row across lakes.” (I tried again to remember anything about DeWitt except his tan.) “But I myself am a delicatessen-finder of the very highest order.” Taking a pen from her handbag, Annette drew a first-prize blue ribbon on her napkin and draped it over her shoulder.
“Then I think Dad was wise to marry you,” said Angus. “Because that is a valuable skill.”
Angus opened a roadside stand to sell scarlet and orange zinnias he cut in the back garden. For hours he sat surrounded by iced tea bottles, soup cans and pickle jars filled with water and flowers, holding a pink-striped beach umbrella over himself to keep off the sun. When cars did not stop at the rate he wanted, Angus changed tactics. He threw his umbrella down and rushed out into the road, arms waving frantically.
Of course they braked now. This adorable redheaded son of America probably needed either an ambulance or adoption. (Annette voted for adoption.)
The people in one car (New York plates) thought Angus's zinnias were a free Welcome to Vermont gift and drove off without paying, telling each other how sweet it was up here in the country.
The people in the next car (New York plates) thought two dollars was an awful lot to ask for half-wilted zinnias and drove off without paying, telling each other what a shame it was that even here in Vermont children would try to rip you off.
Annette spent the day pretending she didn't know what Angus was doing. She had a scrap of yellow-and-blue fabric, which she held up to the kitchen windows and walls to see if she could live with it.
I spent the day being jealous of Angus for having the kind of personality that could get away with anything, and make up anything, and fear nothing.
“Angus!” yelled Annette. “It's getting late. Come on in to help with supper.”
Angus's idea of helping with supper was to put so much lighter fluid on the briquettes that the flames reached the roof. I was not surprised that Annette had stopped serving hamburgers and moved on to safer food items. “We'll have spaghetti and pesto sauce with fresh basil,” she said.
In
New York you can get fresh basil any day of the year, twenty-four hours a day, but somehow in New York our hours would be more precious, and we'd just buy it made.
If we lived in Barrington, I thought, we'd have dinner at Aunt Maggie's a lot, and Uncle Todd would cook on one of those huge outdoor grills, and we'd be assigned to bring the salad, because Aunt Maggie would figure that even an unstable family such as ours could throw lettuce into a bowl. After supper all the cousins would play a long, slow board game like Monopoly, which we cannot play even in Vermont because we get so determined to win that we turn into rabid beasts and Annette quits.
Angus stomped into the kitchen. “How can I get rich selling zinnias?” he shouted. “Dad ruined all the real chances of earning real money. I hate Vermont.” He slammed the door and kicked the table leg. “I don't want spaghetti, either! I want a tuna fish, peanut butter and Fluff sandwich.”
“That's disgusting,” said Annette.
“You're disgusting,” said Angus.
I wondered if the Perfects had conversations like this. I got the spaghetti box out of the pantry. Italian food is so comforting. That little slurp of spaghetti trailing into your mouth, the little flecks of sauce zinging across the table if you are Angus, who is a high-speed slurper—these can always be counted upon.
Angus yelled at Annette for marrying Daddy. Annette yelled at Angus for never cooperating, never trying, never even being human like normal twelve-year-old boys.
I put large handfuls of stiff spaghetti into the boiling water, poking it down with a wooden spoon. I questioned whether twelve-year-old boys were ever human or normal.
Angus yanked the peanut butter off the shelf and began slathering it an inch thick on bread as he told Annette what he thought of her.
“How about a knuckle sandwich?” I said to my brother, forgetting how strong he had gotten. I slugged him and he slugged me back, and then I was afraid for my life. I screamed for Annette to protect me, but of course she didn't feel this was her responsibility. I put the table between myself and Angus, who tried to flip the table and crush me with it. Glasses of Queen Anne's lace hit the floor.