And then I was lifted up, coughing, by Reverend Filo and my counselor, Sandy. “Dear girl!” exclaimed the Reverend, who was also coughing, his hair sopping. “You just lifted off like a rocket!”
I sat on the shore in my wet cape, and let the sand cake on it. I coughed some more and spit onto the beach. Monica Hyde placed towels around me, and Sandy went to get me a can of soda. Hayden Filo sat next to me, looking disappointed, looking as if that were the most graceless, foolish baptism he’d ever seen.
“Perhaps I can try it again sometime,” I croaked.
“Perhaps,” he said distantly.
“Let’s sing a song, shall we?” said Reverend Filo. And we joined hands in a circle and sang “Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley.” When we got to the last “He had to walk it by himself,” Sandy arrived with the soda, and I stepped out of the circle and drank.
At the end of August, before I was sent to the Mount Brookfield School, my mother picked me up at camp to take me home. Getting ready to sit beside her in the car, I had a great desire to be good, a nice girl, like Monica Hyde. But it was when functioning from this desire that I felt most anxious and odd, for what I had was only a desire, not a knack. My mother did not hug me. She asked me if I had everything, and then we got in and stopped first at the nearest gas station, a Sinclair station, its bright green brontosaurus like some reptilian Baby Huey; a puffy, inverted dollar sign. She signaled to the attendant, who was on my side of the car, and as she did I noticed the swaying flesh beneath her bicep and the greenish, black-stubbled oval of her half-shaved underarm — like the prickly, peppery seeds of a tropical fruit. I had to try not to feel repelled by her. I had to remember not her frosty, scolding self, or all the sad, injured love between us, but her niceness, the bursts of energy and originality which she had sometimes bestowed upon me when I was little: sewing new, striped clothes for all my dolls, then arranging them around the room before I woke on Easter; the cakes and breads and frosting bowls she’d leave out for snacks; a dance she once did in my room one night, all by herself, when I was sick in bed and bored. The dance had ended with one of her feet propped on a chair, arms thrust skyward and held like that, her hands clutching two aluminum pie pans. She did have a sense of theater, of costume and set design, and she could make things out of nothing: hats out of rags, doormats out of bottle caps. There were times she fascinated me. But we had never been close, and it was hard for me, ever, to feel I knew her. To know something you had to be able to go inside and feel, then step outside and look, and then do that again: go inside, feel, then outside and look. You had to do it twice. That was knowledge. Two in a row. But with my mother I could only do it once. I’d do it once, the first time, then run.
“Do you feel you learned things at camp?” my mother asked suddenly, after she’d paid the station attendant and pulled away, down the road. She seemed anxious to exude something, some affection; she seemed possessed of some inarticulate goodwill — I could see it surging and flickering in her face, in a kind of confusion.
“Yes,” I said.
“Really? That’s good. What did you learn?”
What I’d learned at camp, from all the vesper readings, mostly, was that you didn’t give back to the same people who gave to you. “Let’s see,” I said, stalling. You didn’t give back to the same people at all. You gave to different people. And they, in turn, gave to someone else entirely. Not you. That was the sloppy economy of gift and love. But that was living as a Christian — a practical Christian, but a Christian nonetheless. This, I realized, my parents already understood. Though it was probably not what they’d hoped I’d learn. “I learned that God is eternal benevolence,” I said finally, a little breathlessly.
My mother looked at me with alarm, then became quiet, watching the road. For about forty miles she said nothing, and then suddenly she started in. “Your grandmother’s looking forward to seeing you,” she said.
“I’ll visit her,” I promised.
“Silsby called to find out when you were coming home. I didn’t tell her exactly.”
“You didn’t?”
“She’s not a good influence on you, Berie. She never has been.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s too much strain in her family, the situation with her parents and all. I always felt you spent too much time over there. You should have other friends. Her family has enough to worry about.”
“There’s strain in every family. Besides, they’re not worried about me. I’m not getting in the way.”
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t see her too much right away. Take a break from the friendship.”
“I’ve had a break.”
“Silsby and I spoke for a little bit, and I told her the same thing.”
“You did what?”
“She said she wasn’t going to be around for a week anyway. She was going camping with her boyfriend, Mike, so she wanted me to tell you that and to wish you all the best at school, since it looked like she wouldn’t be able to see you.”
“Wouldn’t be able to see me?” Something stung and ached before my eyes: a picture of Sils, peeling along the lake roads on the back of the new bike Mike would surely by now have bought with the insurance money. “The crowd goes crazy!” he would shout and laugh, whipping dangerously around the curves. They’d go to the State Park campground, and in a blue pup tent lie listening to “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl” on Mike’s transistor, slapping the beat on Mike’s thighs. I felt bludgeoned and bleak and abandoned. “Mom, why did you have to say all that?” I bleated mournfully. “You didn’t have to say all that!”
“Berie,” she said, trying to sound gentle, “you needn’t make a tragic caricature of every small emotion.” And then we said nothing else, staring straight ahead at the road, or off to the side, where miles of trees had burned in a recent fire — stanch and starch the mush! — and where now toadstools were sprouting through the charred ground.
Back in Horsehearts I went over by myself, on my bicycle, to visit my Grandmother Carr. I had phoned beforehand, and she had suggested the time: two-fifteen.
The weather was cool for August, but I was warm from my bike ride. I climbed wearily up the stairs of her front porch. The door was open, and so I called through the screen. She appeared, wearing a light summer suit, her gray hair curled up in back in a twist. She showed me into her book-lined sitting room, where I had two davenports and a chesterfield to choose from. All her furniture was shadowy and hulking, like an indentured household staff. I chose the chesterfield. She brought me a cup of tea. Then she sat down across from me and sipped from her own cup. I looked down at the floor, pretending to study the busy patterns of the Persian rug. I had seldom visited her — I could have counted the times on one hand: the time when I was five and had stood in her kitchen and asked, “Grandma Carr, who is older, you or Daddy?” And she had scowled. Idiot child! Or the time when I was seven, and Claude and I brought her a gift — an old jack-in-the-box we didn’t want anymore. Or the time when I was ten and brought Sils along, and we sat at the dining table and asked for cookies. My grandmother had fetched us some graham crackers, a little mechanically. “Can we have some juice, too?” I’d asked, and after we departed, full of snacks, she phoned my mother to tell her of our rudeness and demands. When I got home, as punishment, my mother took out all the guest towels and made me iron them.