possessions to me. I did not care what happened to any of it. But sorting and packing and storing it all seemed destined to be much wider and cumbersome work than could be done in just two or three days.
I hadn’t remembered, for instance, that the room I shared for years with Anne every summer, the one at the end of the hall, under the eaves, was filled with books. Mine, mostly as it turned out. Anne didn’t really care to spend the summer months reading, she was more interested in the beach and movie magazines and, eventually, boys. She used to yell at me to turn the light off at night when she wanted to sleep. I took to keeping a flashlight next to the bed so I could continue reading with the lamp that sat between our two beds turned off. That was secondary to wanting her to shut up and leave me alone though.
The bedroom was still the same bright yellow and white trim that it had always been. The bedspreads were of a floral pattern that changed from time to time but never by much. I didn’t recognize the spreads now but then I hadn’t been here in years so of course they would be different. I knew that Kathy shared this room with her sister Rachel until Mike’s daughter Sharon started spending summers here. Then Rachel got relegated to the sun porch and its metal spring cot and lumpy mattress. Kathy and Sharon, who were the same age and held the same interests (Barbies then boys) could stay up late giggling and pouring over Teen Beat, gossiping about their parents, speculating about which boy was more likely to respond to their not-so-subtle attempts at flirtation.
Those summers that seemed so far away before came right up and took center stage in my thoughts. I suddenly remembered the summer Anne got poison ivy so bad she had to be treated at the hospital. She told my mother (and anyone who would listen) that I pushed her into it and she fell, which is why she had it between her legs and on her backside. The truth was that she and one of the other summer kids, Bruce I think his name was, were rolling around in the stuff making out and fondling each other without realizing what they were doing. Bruce had a worse case of it than Anne and actually had to stay in the hospital for two days while they treated him. It wasn’t true that I pushed her though. I told her that I had seen the two of them the night before when she let him put his hand in the bottom of her bikini while they were kissing on the beach and that I thought he looked like a frog. She got her revenge and my mother grounded me for the rest of the summer though I don’t think she really believed Anne’s story. It didn’t matter. I was glad to stay confined to our section of the beach and to our house for a month. It got me out of going on the endless outings to town on which Anne and her friend’s and her friend’s little sisters were always dragging me.
Repeatedly, in order to make peace, I implored you to try and understand my position and reconcile yourself to the truth, the real truth Sarah, about your father. I don’t think you ever realized how much you hurt all of us with your vile lies and your indecent lack of empathy for us after what you put us through.
My mother, like most women of a certain age, refused to see the cracks in their own family’s delicate construction. My mother liked to hide behind a mixed fiction of devotion and familial perfection. She was not exactly delusional as everyone around her, including myself for the better part of my childhood, fulfilled her expectations and did not stray from the carefully constructed paths she laid before us. It was only when I announced my intention, in my sophomore year in high school, to go to college that my mother sensed a break in her world, a break from her in a very real sense because what she had in mind for me, the mousy, bookish daughter with no social life and few friends, was interminable spinsterhood; a life of devoted care of the family matriarch. My sister, three years older, had graduated from high school and taken a job as a receptionist at my father’s law firm. She was there three weeks before she met Thomas Levy, a promising junior in the firm. They started dating and got engaged six months later. Anne would be a wife and mother, join the country club and play golf. She would then proceed to instill in her children the same contempt for nonconformity and intellect (intellect beyond that which was needed to make money or find a husband) that my mother instilled in her. Anne’s life would be one filled with constant noise and obligation. She would, like our mother, show only bemused condescension for anyone ‘not like us’ and barely disguised contempt for those people, like me, who could have chosen the same kind of life for themselves as she had but found it lacking and chose differently.
After putting the books into boxes and the bedspreads into large trash bags and taping everything up, I moved to Mike’s room. It was still Mike’s room. None of the kids had taken it over and it still had the same dumb football player wallpaper, the same nautical knick-knacks from the year he took up sailing and the same twin bed with the same tattered red and blue comforter. The room was neat as a pin. No books. It would be short work. Mike’s room always smelled like a combination of bad cologne, sweat, seaweed and sun. It wasn’t at all unpleasant and while I was packing up the few things left in his room I remembered that when we were little we used to hide from Anne under his bed and try not to giggle as she looked for us all over the house. We were not playing Hide-and-Seek when this happened, we were just tormenting her. I found it exhilarating.
Mike is the oldest and when I was small, before he took to going off with his friends all the time, he took me with him on all his adventures. He taught me how swim, how to find tadpoles and the best places to hide when you needed to. He taught me how to climb a tree and, to my mother’s great horror, did not teach me how to climb down. Instead I had to figure it out for myself, which I did eventually. I was halfway down the massive oak tree on the edge of our property, having negotiated my way through the various options when it came to which branches to use, when my mother caught me. When I jumped from the last branch, about five feet off the ground she grabbed me, dragged me by the arm back to the house and made me stay in my room for the rest of the day. This was after a lecture on how little girls were supposed to behave.
I wish Sarah that you would see things as they really are instead of continually pretending that you are some sort of victim. If there are any victims here it is your father and me. Mike and Anne, peripherally I suppose but what you did to your father had a direct effect on me. You hurt him deeply with your scandal and your malicious actions against us.
While it was perfectly acceptable to swim, play tennis (or any sport really) even work up a sweat running around with friends in the yard, it was not acceptable to behave like a little boy by climbing trees or getting dirty. My mother had very definite ideas about the roles her children were to be bred to and I was not going to be a tomboy if she had anything to do with it. I think that afternoon I realized, even though I was very young, I could gravely disappoint my mother with very little effort if I wanted to. The knowledge that I could do that at will, that I could have that kind of control was thrilling.
When you said those awful things about you father I thought at first that you’d had some sort of mental break. You were never a very stable person, not even as a child. Imagine my horror at that thought; that you had slipped, that your diseased state of mind had finally taken over. I was terrified for you and for us, for what it would mean. But within a few days it became obvious that you were in complete control of your faculties when you unleashed that string of vial lies and that made you even more horrifying to me. To think I’d given birth to and loved and raised someone who was capable of such cruelty.
Once I’d tackled the linen closet and the drawers filled with pillow cases, washcloths, bath towels and various worn out quilts, duvets and coverlets I moved down the hall with large kitchen trash bags and stuffed into them as many ugly knick knacks, nautical object d’art and bad paintings from each of the other two bedrooms as I could. When I had completely finished with the upstairs, save for my mother’s bedroom, I had a total of eleven large boxes and thirteen trash bags filled with summer house crap and when the storage pod was delivered after lunch I loaded it all in. I decided to wait to go through the things in my mother??
?s room. I wasn’t sure exactly when I’d deal with it, just not now. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d just leave it for Anne to discover when she came up next month to meet with the realtor. I decided to get it over with after dinner.
The room my parents shared at the lake house was noticeably larger than all the other bedrooms. It had five large windows, three in the front of the room in over a window seat that was used for the storage of extra bed linen and beach towels. Later that evening, as I opened the door I was transported back in time to the summers I spent sitting on that window seat reading a book or just looking out at the lake during a storm. The bright yellow paint had faded and the curtains, once the bright white of new lace, were now greyish looking and sort of just drooped, reminding me of old women in clothing that no longer fit living in a world that no longer fit them. They no longer held the form and shape that they once had. They no longer seemed regal to me, just sad. The bed was already stripped, the sheets and comforter folded neatly at the foot, laundered the last time someone was up here