Five Tuesdays in Winter(2)

“The littles have gone to the beach with their mum but should be back for naptime. They’ll come find you then, I’m sure.” Her accent wasn’t like the man’s. Foreign, but different. I realized they might not be married at all.

When she’d gone, I shut the door and looked around my room. It was the first room I’d ever had that had nothing to do with my parents, their tastes, or their rules. I felt like Marlo Thomas on That Girl, a girl with her own apartment. It was a chaste room, with two twin beds covered in the same white knitted bedspreads, their fluted oak posts rising to eye level and tapering to pinecones. The bedside table between them was small, covered with a piece of calico, and had just enough space for a glass lamp with a pull chain and an ashtray, also glass, with a bull in the center and four notches along the edge for cigarettes. I’d smoked a bit when I was younger, with my friend Gina in the woods, but I’d grown out of it. Even though the ashtray was clean, I could smell old ash and I slid it into the rickety drawer below.

I had a window seat! I rushed over to it as if it might disappear and stretched out on my stomach on the long, curved cushion. There were three huge windows that bent to form a half circle—this whole half of my room was curved—and it was only then that I realized I was inside one of the turrets I’d seen from the road.

I pressed my nose to the old glass and breathed in its dusty metallic smell and looked down at the gravel driveway and the shaved lawn that gave way to an un groomed field of tall grasses and a few wildflowers and ended abruptly with a drop to the ocean. I thought of my parents and their fights over money, of my father living in what my mother and I thought of as a big house now that we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, which wasn’t at all like That Girl to me. Though maybe to my mother—who was still in her thirties and had a pretty smile and, as she often said, a lot of things going for her—it was. I wanted to show each of them my room in this mansion, but then again I didn’t. I wanted it to be all mine.

The ground suddenly seemed a long way down and escape far away. I pushed out thoughts of Rapunzel, a story that had always scared me, and of Charles Manson, whom Gina’s older brother had told us about that spring. I opened my suitcase and took out Jane Eyre and the new notebook I’d bought. But I didn’t feel like reading or taking notes, so I started a letter to Gina. I told her about the bike ride to the Pikes’. I told her about going past my father’s and seeing the neglected flower beds, all the death and new life tangled together, I wrote, and surprised myself and kept writing.

Over an hour later a navy blue station wagon came down the driveway and stopped in front of the garage. My windows were closed but I could see the little boy was crying when he got out of the car and the little girl was asleep as her mother pulled her out of the back and draped her on her shoulder. I supposed I should go down and help them unload the car of towels and beach toys or scoop up the sleeping girl and put her down on a bed somewhere, but I didn’t. I wasn’t in a hurry to become an employee. I stayed in my turret sprawled on my window seat until, a half hour later, there was a knock on my door and the job began for real.

It wasn’t difficult, at least not before Hugh arrived. Margaret made all the meals and Thomas, the man with the ice-cream cone head, did all the serving and the washing up. A lady named Mrs. Bay came for the laundry, including the disgusting cloth diapers that Kay, the children’s mother, insisted on using. When I met Kay the first day, she attached Elsie to one of my hands and Stevie to the other and said, “I’ve got to pee like a racehorse, Carol,” and dashed off. She came right back and gave me a hug and thanked me for coming, as if we were old friends and I’d stopped by to visit. I was aware of the age difference between us—I was fourteen and she was twenty-nine—but to her, because she spent her days with a two-and a four-year-old, I must have seemed older than I was. Kay was different around her mother, stiff and nearly silent. Mrs. Pike told us each morning in the breakfast room how the day would unfold. Kay nodded at her mother’s ideas—Mrs. Pike wanted her to see old friends, play tennis at the club, visit her old German tutor who had said she had so much promise—but as soon as her mother left the room to go to her desk after breakfast, Kay turned to me and hatched another plan.

We took the kids to several different beaches, a whaling museum, an aquarium, often stopping after lunch at an ice-cream parlor where we made our own sundaes. In the early afternoon I played with the kids in the pool while Kay read her book on a lounge chair in the grass, then I took them up and put them down for their naps. They never resisted the naps. After the morning activity and the hot sun and the swim, they were ready to crawl into their cool beds in the dim house and fall into a heavy sleep. While I read and sang to them, I imagined going to my room and sleeping, too, but when I got up to my third-floor turret I always had a new surge of energy. I continued the letter I’d started to Gina all about my life in the Pike mansion. I read Jane Eyre. I suddenly felt so much closer to Jane, now that I, too, lived in a huge house and had charge of two children. Soon my long letter took on the tone and vocabulary of Charlotte Bront?, which Gina mocked me mercilessly for later. But I was trying things out, life as That Girl, life as Jane Eyre, life as a writer alone in her own room, which eventually, after a lot of other things, is what I became.

When the children woke up from their naps, I played with them outside on the lawn until hunger made them cranky and we went and visited Margaret in the kitchen for a snack. Dinner wasn’t served until eight, when I’d wrestle Elsie into her highchair (she much preferred a lap, especially at that hour) then retreat to the kitchen where I was given my dinner at the oilcloth table. Sometimes Thomas or Margaret would sit with me for a minute or two, but they were always popping up to plate and serve a new course. Stevie and Elsie rarely made it to dessert. Kay often poked her head in the kitchen, signaling that I should evac them upstairs. Of course they put up a fight. Dessert had been held out to them as a reward for good behavior at dinner, but they had “fussed,” as Mrs. Pike called it, and their departure in my arms from the dining room was loud and trailed behind me like the tail of a kite all the way up the wide front staircase, across the landing with the two sofas beneath the windows, and up to their rooms on the second floor.