Five Tuesdays in Winter(8)

“Her parents recently—you know.” Mrs. Pike never used the word “divorced.” She always left it blank. She didn’t realize how well her voice carried over the grass. It wasn’t true, though. There had been no lawyers, no papers.

Hugh asked something and she said, “I have no idea.” Sharply.

Kay snorted.

“When on Friday will Dan arrive?” Mrs. Pike asked Kay, to change the subject.

The fountain in the center of the little pool was a birdbath that produced a small orb of water that looked frozen in place. The only way you knew it was moving was from the dribbling off the sides. The oval basin was painted a pale turquoise, nearly the shade of Hugh’s eyes.

I told the children they could put their feet in. I helped them take off their shoes and socks. The water was warmer here than in the big pool and soon feet were not enough.

Stevie pulled down his pants.

“Stephen Pike Martin!” Mrs. Pike called.

I pulled his pants back up.

“Can’t they, Mom?”

“In the fountain? No.”

“Take it all off, Stevie!”

“Hugh!”

“God, Mother,” he said. “Let them be children, for pity’s sake.”

“You and your pity’s sake. Oh, all right. Cara, let them go. No one’s watching.”

The side of the basin was steeper than it appeared and Stevie slid underwater as soon as he stepped in. I leapt in with my shoes still on and I scooped him up by his armpits. Water sluiced off his thin hair and he blinked madly and I waited for him to howl but he burst out laughing, which made Elsie scream for me to bring her in, too. I was already wet from the rescue, so I tossed off my shoes and put both kids on my lap and we slid down the little slope. Raised up like that they didn’t go under, but their chins got close enough to make it feel dangerous and there was much yelling and splashing, their naked bodies rubbery under the water, gripping onto mine and howling in pleasure. We slid a few yards until my feet touched the base of the fountain and we stood up and waded up the slope to do it again.

“You’re a polar bear,” Stevie said. “And we’re your little cubs sliding down an iceberg.” We went down again and on the way back up he said, “You should be nudie, too.” He tugged on my shirt.

“No, I can’t be nudie,” I said. We slid down many more times. I forgot about the Pikes, about Hugh and Raven and my notebook, until the light shifted and I saw Kay at the edge of the fountain, her face strange, stripped of all kindness.

“Okay, that’s enough. Pass me the children and go put some dry clothes on, Carol.”

When I walked past the seating area Hugh’s head was bent and he was pinching the insides of his eyes with his thumb and index finger. He was laughing, not crying.

“Don’t you say a word,” his mother said to him.

Margaret was coming out with towels as I was going in. She gave me one and said something that I didn’t understand until I’d gotten to the front stairs. “Cover yourself now” is what she’d said.

In front of the standing mirror in the corner of my room, I understood. My wet clothes, a pink tank top and white shorts, were transparent. I had been nudie, just like Stevie wanted. But the body in the mirror didn’t entirely seem mine. The breasts were fuller, risen suddenly like an ad for biscuits. And through the shorts and underwear my crotch was a dark triangle. I recognized nothing about this body. It felt to me that the mirror itself, more like a looking glass, really, in its old-fashioned frame, had conjured it up, that I hadn’t had this body before I’d moved into this room.

I went down to eat dinner in the pantry with Thomas and Margaret in the darkest, baggiest clothes I’d brought. I sat with my back to the dining room, so the Pikes didn’t have to see me when Thomas pushed open the swinging door. Kay did not call for me that night to take the kids upstairs, even though I could hear them fussing throughout the meal.

I thought perhaps Mrs. Pike would send me home before breakfast, but the next morning she was particularly attentive and kind. She asked me how I’d slept and showed me how to use the little egg cutter to lop off the top of my soft-boiled egg. She proposed that she take me and the kids to the beach club for lunch, and Kay could have some time to herself. She could make an appointment for her at the hairdresser’s if she liked.

But Kay said she wanted to take the kids to a place called David’s Animal Farm, just over the New Hampshire border. I’d never heard of it before.

“Why on earth would you go all that way on such a beautiful day?” Mrs. Pike said.

“It sounds fun.”

“I hired Cara so you could get a break.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean, so you can have some grown-up time.”

“I know what you meant. But I want to be with my children on our vacation.”

We ate our soft-boiled eggs in the silence that followed, everyone except Elsie who had Cheerios on her tray.

Hugh pushed through the swinging door and laughed at us.

“The egg cups!” We were eating from little figure eight–shaped porcelain cups that matched the plates, pink flowers, gold rims. “Ah, isn’t it good to be alive in 1905?” He reached for the silver egg cutter and pretended to go after Stevie’s nose.

I smelled him and remembered how I’d put myself to sleep the night before with a story about him taking me out into the woods where there was this old tennis court no one used anymore and him teaching me to play and afterward kissing me, a tender, delicate kiss, not the gross kind you saw on TV when it looked like the two people were trying to eat the same piece of candy, and remembering that story—even more than Hugh himself—gave me a nervous stomach and I couldn’t take another bite of egg.