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1

August 23, 2003. I was sitting in my office at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., where I have worked in the Civil Rights Division since 1978, when my new assistant, Jack, rapped on the door. He stuck his head in the crack, holding a pink memo slip, but when he saw that I was on the phone, he began to shut the door and creep away. I waved him in.

“Hang on a sec, will you?” I said to the young attorney on the other end. I was just finishing up a case that had dragged on for years, a suit against a police department in the Midwest. Mostly, I could delegate these days. But there were still some details—the finer print of the contracts—that I wanted to nail down myself.

“Sorry, Jamie. I thought you’d want this,” Jack whispered, pointing to the pink slip.

I gave Jack the go-ahead to call me Jamie a few weeks ago, but he had only just begun to get used to it. Casual is not the ethos around Justice, and I stand out because I never wear skirts and usually walk the halls in my stocking feet, as if I am in a college dorm and not a major seat of the United States government. 

Jack is a good-looking, twenty-three-year old Georgetown graduate with blonde-highlighted, spiky hair. He’s saving money to put himself through law school, even though I keep telling him that this is no life for a normal person. 

“Define normal,” he always retorts, to which I answer, shooting a forefinger at him, “Good reply, good reply.”

I looked down at the memo slip.

Your mother called. Cousin Stevie died. Funeral this Friday. Invite brother.

I nodded to Jack, and he slipped out as I got back to the phone.

“Sorry, Richard,” I said to the attorney. “Something’s come up here. Can I call you back?”

I hung up, rolled my chair over to the window, and looked down, onto the concrete courtyard. There, some people were already eating their lunches, packed in cheap brown bags, along with bad coffee from the cafeteria. 

So Stevie was dead. Poor Stevie. Sixty-two, never left home—apart from a few stays in a mental ward and the one time my mother dragged him to New York City, to meet an art agent.

I remembered him as he looked forty years earlier: pencil-thin black pants, black jacket, thin, craggy face always tucked warily into his collar, a cigarette forever burning between yellowed fingers. Stevie never looked at you, but if he accidentally caught your eye he would always do a sort of quick, horrified double-take, as if to say, Whoa! Hang on! Who the hell are you?! 

I looked back down at the people having lunch in the square, and imagined the heat out there, the intense heat of a late summer day in the Capitol. Inside, the air was refrigerator-cold. So cold I wore a sweater. I remembered that I hadn’t eaten, but I didn’t feel like going anywhere. I had to call Harry, but I didn’t feel like doing that, either.

I imagined Grief Hill, where Stevie lived, as it must have been at that moment. That is its real name. It stands roughly midway between Liberty and Monticello, New York, a beautiful area of lakes, ponds, and thriving resort hotels. Or used to be. I wouldn’t know, having not been there since the summer of 1963. My mother once told me that Grief Hill got its name back in the horse and buggy days, when carts had a terrible time getting up the hill in the winter.

My mother’s parents bought a farm there back in 1928, before she was born. Land was cheap then, even for an immigrant. The Jews of New York craved nature, land, a healthy place to raise children. My grandfather got some, only to die of heart disease a few years later, leaving three young daughters with pretty American names and a wife who spoke no English.

Now, on top of Grief Hill, sat the Sullivan County International Airport. And, across from the airport, my aunt Delia’s house, where my cousin Jane still lived and where Stevie lived until yesterday. On the eastern flank of the property stretched a vast cemetery. It used to be hidden behind a beautiful, old woods, but now you could probably see it from out the front window of Aunt Delia’s house.

I have gone so far as to look the airport up online, and checked out the roads on Mapquest.com. I have tried to imagine it, at least.

Suddenly, I felt sleepy. It’s what I do when I feel trapped but can’t run. Running is my preferred method of avoidance; sleep is a strong second. I put my feet up on the thin metal edge of the window. The edge dug into my ankles but I leaned back and shut my eyes anyway; I must have fallen into a doze, because I was awakened some time later by the buzz of my intercom. It was Jack.

“Jamie,” he said sotto voce, “it’s 4:40, and I really, really hate to disturb you, but you’ve got a shit-load of calls here. Also, I feel it’s my job as your assistant to remind you that your mother said, “tell her to call Harry’, but I haven’t seen your phone light go on. Do you want me to get him on the phone before I go home?”

I laughed at Jack’s fastidiousness. He’d make an excellent lawyer someday, though secretly I wished he’d chuck it all for First Mate on a sailing ship. That’s what Mal, my husband, fantasized about: get out of the crime and punishment business and hitch a 32-footer to nowhere.

“Oh, yes. That would be great. Thanks for reminding me.” I was woozy and speaking carefully, the way a drunk does when trying not to sound drunk. I added, “Could you bring the messages in?”

Jack brought the messages around as I hurried to take my feet down off the windowsill and look like I was doing something besides daydreaming. My ankles had straight red welts cutting across them. As the blood began to re-circulate, the welts began to throb. I reached down and rubbed them.

There were a dozen phone messages. Normally I would stay until seven or eight to deal with them. But today wasn’t a normal day. I wanted to go home, hug my men, and have a drink. But before I left I needed to make that one phone call to my brother.

Jack left the room and in a minute he had me patched into Harry’s phone. The connection sounded crackly.

“Jamie? That you?” Harry’s loud, deep voice.

Wobble, crackle, a drone-like whine surrounding everything.

In the air, I noted.

Harry lived in Crested Butte, Colorado, and owned his own plane. He flew it everywhere. It was probably compensation for the clubfoot that once gave him so much trouble. All his young life he had been slowed down, left behind, chosen last for every sports team. Now he got everywhere first. Now he was a pretty famous writer, too, and nobody looked at his foot.

“Who else would it be?” I asked.

“Oh, shut up,” he said.

I laughed. “Shut up” was not a term of endearment I allowed anyone else in the world to use. Had my colleagues overheard Harry cursing me out, they’d never have believed how meekly I took it. I had the reputation around Justice for being a bit of a ball-buster. Payback, I would have told them.

“Listen, sad news,” I got to the point, “Stevie died. Mom called to invite us to the funeral. I’m not going, but you should. I mean, one of us definitely should.”

“When?” he asked, and I knew he was looking at his Rolex watch at 30,000 feet above the earth. Harry didn’t ask me how Stevie died. The truth was, we had all expected him to die a long time ago. Die, kill someone, or both. That he finally succumbed to something as soft and normal as liver disease at the age of sixty-two was frankly a bit of a miracle.

“Friday.”

“This Friday? That’s in two days.”

“Yeah, I know. Please, Harry?”

More static. I heard him speak to someone with his hand over the cell. Probably Michael, his eldest son. Mike often flew with him. The boy was only seventeen, but he had already logged something like five hundred hours in the sky.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll call you en route. Kind of odd to think I’ll essentially be landing on the farm.”

“Yeah, it is.”

We said our goodbyes, but I felt depressed.  Harry hadn’t even tried to get me to go. Not even one little nudge. I buzzed Jack to tell him he could go home, and I went back to staring out the window.

My conscience did not let me go home as I wanted to; I got through half the return phone calls, of those, getting through to live human beings about half the time. By seven o’clock I was faint and my bladder was about to burst. I was done. I ran down the hall to the bathroom in my stocking feet. The workaholics were all still there, skulking around the building in their rumpled suits and sagging stockings and faded makeup.

I returned to my office, set the untouched messages on my chair, got into my dirty old sneakers, grabbed my bag, and headed gratefully down towards the garage.

It was still light out, but just this past week the days had begun to grow visibly shorter. The city was still broiling during the day, but at this hour you could feel fall coming on.

Driving home, south on Pennsylvania to Georgetown, I was thinking back to my grandmother’s farm, amazed at the specificity of the detail I could remember. It was as if every moment of that final summer had been photographically etched in my brain, replete not only with its shades of light but of its sounds and smells as well. Once more, I had that crushing, depressed feeling come over me, some nameless feeling of despair and failure, and I did what I always do when such feelings threaten to overtake me:  I congratulated myself. My career had been a feminist success story. I was the highest-ranking attorney in my division. I had won some of the highest-profile cases in the history of our department. And, along the way, I had earned the undying hatred of some of the most virulent racists and criminals alive. I have the Christmas cards to prove it.

Every Christmas, I receive cards from prisons all over the country. Vampirists, satanic cultists, white supremacists, former police chiefs, Klansmen, all wishing me joy on the holidays. Some of them read, “Ms. Vendler, you’re dead.” (I like the “Ms.”) Others come with sweet little gifts such as fingers, ears, and tongues. Luckily, our security down in the mailroom rivals that of the CIA. Actually, I think it is CIA. Most of the time, I am only told after the fact about these thank-you tokens. But there have been a few incidents at my private residence as well. Oh, I’m a brave woman, I congratulate myself. But one thing I have never been brave enough to do is to return to Grief Hill.

2

“You’re home late,” Mel kissed me at the door. It was now dark, but Mel could read my moods even without his eyes. “Whassup?”

I kicked off my sneakers, peeled off my nylon knee-highs, and let my bare feet sink gratefully into the soft carpet of our Georgetown townhouse. Mel is also an attorney, the kind who makes real money: partner in a private law firm. He is used to us both working late.

“How’d you get home so early?” I asked jealously.

“It’s not early. It’s nearly eight.”

“David get dinner?” I asked, flopping into an armchair by the fireplace.

“I guess. He was at the table with me for about thirty-five seconds. I might have dreamed it.” Mel laughed his gentle, baffled laugh. At seventeen, David wanted to spend as little time with us as humanly possible. I would have thought it was odd had things been different. But I missed him, and after I had rested a few moments I got up and stood by the foot of the stairs and shouted:

“Yo, David! It’s Ma!”

I heard a shuffle and the loud, thumping music above my head suddenly click off.

“Hi, Mom.”

That was his disembodied voice from above, then saw pieces of his large body emerge in the upstairs landing.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“How was school?”

“Okay.”

“Got a lot of work?”

“Sort of.”

It was the usual conversation with a teenager. No eye contact, a full flight of stairs buffering our differences. Then, because we had brought him up right, he thought to ask,

“How was your day, Mom?”

“My cousin Stevie died,” I said.

Silence.

“The schizo?”

I didn’t know what to say. He never knew Stevie. Scolding would be pointless, and probably hypocritical.

“Yeah, the schizo,” I said.

At this piece of news, our conversation became something worth his leaving his computer for. He made an appearance on the staircase, like a rare bird on a tree limb.  Even disheveled, in his blue bathrobe, David was beautiful. He had his father’s long, lanky legs, and my blue eyes. He had kinky blond-brown hair, the envy of his sister, Amanda, who somehow got stuck with curly red hair. It was a very good thing, I thought, that David didn’t yet know how beautiful he was.

“You goin’ back there? To Grief Hill?” he asked, looking me straight in the eye as if somehow my answer were important to his private worldview.

My children, while they didn’t fully know what happened, knew that it was bad enough for me to never go back. We’d spoken about it in hyperbole: the forces that drove me to study law, my reasons for applying for an internship at the Southern Poverty Law Center after college, the ironic twist of fate that had me meeting and falling in love with their dad in Alabama, and the kismet of ending up at Justice. Always putting that summer of 1963 in mythic terms, as if tragedy had a pre-ordained, higher purpose.

“No,” I said.

According to my son, that was the wrong answer.

“Come on, Ma.”

David moved down the stairs, cocked his head at me. “You should go.” He flung an arm casually around my shoulders and actually kissed me on the cheek.

“Harry’s going,” I said, as if that got me off the hook.

At the mention of Harry, David broke into a grin.

“Oh, Uncle Harry. I love him. He’s so cool.” He withdrew his arm from my shoulders; five seconds of physical contact is probably the maximum a mother can expect from a straight male teenager. Still, I felt bereft.

“Yeah, he is,” I said.

Suddenly, I realized that Mel was observing me in silence from across the room. He has a very quiet way of watching me, as if he is looking to catch me in a lie. But if he catches me, he never says so.

David had already moved back up the stairs, having gleaned the essential facts. I went to have a drink out on the patio with Mel, to ask him about his day, to tell him about Stevie and the funeral.

“David’s right, you should go,” he said, sipping his glass of red wine. He was holding my hand loosely under the table.

“Ugh,” I made a face. “Mom and Bill? Emily and Jane? Ugh,” I said again, and might actually have shivered.

“You’re a big girl. They can’t harm you.”

“I might harm them.”

“Well, if you want I’ll go with you. If that would help.”

“Thanks,” I smiled. “I think Harry’s got it covered.”

Mel dropped the subject then. We talked about his day and some associate the partners decided to fire for something he’d done that was less than ethical, and how bad Mel felt because the guy had two kids and another on the way. I talked about Jack and how I couldn’t wait to write him a rave recommendation for law school. We’d nearly run out of talking about our days when Mel suddenly remembered,

“Oh, yeah, Amanda called.”

“She did? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I forgot.”

“It’s too late now. She’s probably in the library.”

Amanda was our eldest. She was a junior at Duke, studying international government.

“She said it was nothing urgent, you could call her tomorrow. She just wanted to say hi.”

I missed Amanda so much; the older I grew, and the older she grew, the more I regretted how driven I had been while she was growing up. I felt guilty that I had missed all her soccer games and school plays. I had never car-pooled with the stay-at-home Moms. She said none of that mattered to her now, but I still felt guilty that being a parent had never been remotely enough for me. I thought: maybe by the time Amanda had kids, I’d be the kind of Grandma who baked cookies and spent the afternoon at F.A.O. Schwartz or had ice cream sodas at the local diner. Probably not, though.

“What are you smiling at?” Mel glanced at me. “You do realize you’re smiling. Lunatic.”

I laughed. “I was thinking about what kind of grandmother I’d be. You know, whether I’ll be domesticated by then.”

“God I hope not,” Mel said, reaching out and kissing me. “I have plans for you, Matey.”

In Mel’s retirement fantasy captaining a sailboat around the world, I was slotted to play a crucial role: pirate-watcher and piña colada maker. Unfortunately, I sort of hated sailing. Not enough to do. Nowhere to run. I just smiled.

At that moment it was not the future that interested me; the past had awakened in me as if my adulthood had been a dream. A few hours later, after we had watched the news together and read in bed side by side until Mel, exhausted from his long day at work, fell asleep, his large body curled against me, I got up quietly and went to my study. There, upon my bookshelf, was a small black notebook. Its leather was creased and flaking. Inside, lines of a child’s neophyte script wavered across the page. Some pages had been torn out; others held childish drawings and doodles. And still others, in the very back, in a different boy’s hand, held obscene and no longer childish drawings disgusting enough to have made the owner of the notebook close it forever. 

I felt chilly and went back into my darkened bedroom to fetch my robe.

“Why are you up?” Mel mumbled.

“It’s nothing. I’m reading. Go back to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep without you.”

“Yes you can.”

I kissed him, tucked him in. He held on to me as if he wouldn’t let go. But I pulled away and returned to my study. There, bundled in my robe, feet on my desk, I began to read the notebook. Slowly, from the beginning.

3

June 19, 1963. We were heading up to my grandmother’s house in the Catskills, like we did every summer.  The radio was turned up high; the four-o’clock news was on. My brother Harry and I were in the middle of a fight, and I had just dug my nails into his arm when I caught the end of a story about the world’s first woman in space. Valentina Tereshkova was back on earth after three days in orbit. Premier Khrushchev was pinning a medal of honor on her. The Yankees, far ahead in the Eastern Division, were warming up to play the Washington Senators at Yankee Stadium.  That was the only news I cared about.

“Reporting the local news…”

“Ow!” cried Harry, rubbing his arm.

Our mother, dressed in a blue sweater set and white Capri pants, twisted her spine around and caught me as I was about to pierce my brother’s skin. Undaunted, Harry grabbed for his notebook, which lay on the seat next to him. He took that notebook everywhere. It drove me crazy.

“June 19. 4:05 p.m. Older sister abuses me.”

Older sister, I snorted. It’s not like he had a younger sister.

I lunged for him.

“Jamie! My mother snarled. “You’re too old for this nonsense.  Anyway, we’re nearly there. I would prefer it if Grandma didn’t see what a lousy job I’ve done raising you.”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

“Older sister lies,” said Harry, still writing.

That’s when our father suddenly swerved the car onto the edge of Route 17, by a bunch of trees. His sudden brake made us all lurch forward, as if we were on a bad amusement park ride.

My father opened the passenger door. His large form cast a shadow over us.

“You go on in the back, Molly. I’m not listening to any more of this crap.”

I looked up at the clock on the dashboard. Its hands read:  4:07.

"Wong has escaped from the Sullivan County courthouse.  Police are searching for—”

"What?"  I asked, sitting down in the front, excited that finally something interesting was happening at the farm. Nothing very interesting ever happened on the farm.

"Shhh!” my parents hissed in stereo.

“…considered dangerous.  When last seen, the suspect was wearing a pair of Levi blue jeans and a white T-shirt. Local residents are urged to lock their windows and doors—“

My mother leaned forward, sucked in her breath, and rested a protective hand on my shoulder.

“Did he say Wong? Isn’t that the Superette people?”

The Superette was just down the road from my grandmother’s farm. That’s where she got her provisions. The Grossmans, a rich family who had a summerhouse up the road from us, owned it. But it was run by a Chinese family, recent immigrants. They lived in an apartment right behind the store.

“It’s a common name,” observed Dad.

“I don’t like it. It makes me nervous,” said Mom.

“You were born nervous,” he said, waving his chapped fingers at her. Then he pulled back onto the road.

We were used to his chapped fingers, Harry and I. That’s what happened when you spent your life with your fingers in other people’s mouths. My father had a successful business as a dentist. His office was attached to our rambling Tudor home in Scarsdale, New York.  At that very moment, in fact, we were riding in one of the fruits of his labors: a red Cadillac so bright and spanking new it looked like a giant Corgi toy fresh from the cellophane wrapper.

“He’s not a convict,” I piped up.  “Maybe he didn’t do it.  Maybe he’s innocent.”

“Maybe,” my father agreed. Dad stared resolutely through thick, black plastic frames. Some people found him handsome. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but in his white dentist jacket and one bushy eyebrow, he always looked to me like a mad scientist.

“Those Orientals are sly,” hissed my mother.

That got my father going on a whole other track.

“What on God’s green earth do you know about Chinese people, Molly? Have you ever even known a person from China?”

“Of course I’ve known a person—people—from China,” she sniffed, looking straight ahead.  But I didn’t think she could name a single one.

I said, angered now, “Like no Jew ever committed a crime?”

She caught my hair from behind, forcing me to turn around and face her.

“Why, no.  To be honest, I don’t know of any Jewish people who have committed crimes.”

At this, my father let out an amazed guffaw.

“How about Bugsy Segal?” I retorted, working off my father’s alliance, “or Zwill Longman?”

“How about King David?” my father chimed in.

“All right, all right,” said Mom. “That’s enough. I’m sick of all of you!”

I slouched back in my seat, crossed my arms over my chest, and peered hatefully out the window from a mass of curly, unwashed hair.

Harry was still writing in his notebook in the back, probably reporting on all of us.

“Give it up, Harry!” I reached back and pulled the notebook out of his hands, forcing him to make a big long mark across the page with his pen.

“Hey!” he cried out.

“Jamie, really,” said my mother. “You can be so mean. I don’t know how I produced such a mean daughter.”

“That’s genetics for you,” I said. But before anyone could smack me, the Swan Lake Superette loomed up beside our window. 

As we drove past the Superette, my heart leapt at the memory of the beautiful Chinese girl I had met there. Her name was Rose, and for several summers I had observed her from a distance. I loved the slow, unhurried way she moved. I found grace even in the way she took cash from customers, placed groceries in bags. She wore her straight hair in a braid that came to the tiny small of her back. Usually, she kept her eyes down, or spoke in whispers to the boys who helped her in the store. But whenever I came in she would look up and smile at me.  Oh, that smile—it had no malice for anyone in the world. There were no smiles like that back in Scarsdale.

It took me two summers to work up the courage to ask the girl her name.  One afternoon, I was paying for some groceries for my grandmother, and when our eyes met, she reached out her hand as if to touch my curly hair. I leaned my head closer to her, giving permission, and she touched it lightly.

“So pretty hair,” she sighed.

I laughed, because I had always disliked my own hair. It was a dark red-brown, quite curly, and it got horribly tangled.

That’s when I worked up the courage to ask her name.

“Li Wei,” she offered right away. “They call me Rose at school.”

“Mine’s Jamie.”

“I know your name already,” she said, smiling shyly.  “Will you come to my house? When I not work?”

But I never had.  I would come down on errands and our eyes would meet and she would smile at me expectantly.  And although we hadn’t exchanged more than a few words, I felt like Rose was my secret treasure, my gentle soul mate in the harsh world. She was altogether different from the cliques of girls I went to school with, the ones who mocked me in the lunchroom, always asking me how the Yankees were doing, in an insinuating tone I never quite understood. I imagine that real girls weren’t supposed to like sports, but I loved the Yankees, and it was a good year to love them. They were a shoe-in for the pennant.

As our car moved up the hill past the Superette, I vowed that this summer I would cross that invisible barrier between my world and Rose’s.  I rolled the window down, stuck my head out as if to catch her scent. I felt the warm air smack my face, smelled hay and honeysuckle, but no Rose.  The Superette looked oddly dark, closed for business.

The Cadillac finally rounded the top of Grief Hill and my cousins came into view.  They were kneeling on the front lawn, digging for lost treasure.  Aunt Delia rocked back and forth in Grandma’s old rocking chair on the farmhouse porch, smiling at some private joke.  Mom always told us Delia had been brain damaged after a diphtheria epidemic nearly killed all of them when they were little.  As a young woman, the damage hadn’t shown: she was sweet and beautiful, if not highly intelligent. But I suppose that for a woman of her generation, intelligence wasn’t absolutely necessary. Over time, though, my aunt Delia had grown more vague, more forgetful. Now, she sometimes wandered off in the middle of the night, and Mom would have to tromp into the fields in her pink feather slippers, yelling, “Dee-lia! Dee-lia!” 

Delia’s husband, my uncle Meyer, had died when I was about eleven. I had loved him more than anyone else. He was quite tall and handsome, nearly six-two, with a thick head of white hair. Although dirt poor, his manners were highly refined, almost 19th century. He always delighted me by pretending to have a mouse in his pocket. He had a funny way of talking, too, saying everything in a high and mighty manner, like, “in my humble opinion,” or, ‘as the prophets were wont to say.” Sometimes, instead of speaking, he recited poetry, and it was only later, when I was nearly an adult, that I understood the beautiful words he spoke were not his own but those of Shakespeare, or Emily Dickinson.  If only Uncle Meyer were still alive, I brooded.

Delia’s eldest, Cousin Stevie, was nowhere in sight. But then, he rarely made an appearance. Sometimes we saw his cigarette smoke wafting from his bedroom window and knew he was watching us in the dark. My family’s public position on Stevie was that he was harmless, but I wasn’t so sure.  He had his mother’s lovely sweetness and gentleness, combined with something loose, irrational, and dangerous.  These two qualities—sweetness and violence—swirled about inside him like oil and water, never mixing, one never toning down the other.  Stevie had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic when he was still a teenager.

I saw Grandma walking toward us but not seeing us. She leaned heavily to the left, and in one brown-spotted hand she clutched a huge black purse, like a doctor’s bag, big enough to hold a stethoscope and forceps.

When they heard the car, my cousins’ necks stretched up like bobble-heads. They dropped their spades and came flying toward us.

Dad stopped short and Grandma peered into the car through her pale blue wing-tip glasses. She looked startled, then strangely overjoyed, as if she had had no idea we were coming.

Emily and Jane flapped their arms up and down in excitement.

“Did you hear? Did you hear? We’ve got an escaped Oriental. Right here in Swan Lake!!”

I had only been at the farm for two seconds, but right away I remembered why I disliked my cousins: naïve country rubes, the pair of them.

We all got out of the car and began unloading our bags. I kissed Grandma hello. She smelled of crushed almonds and yeast, and I got excited that she might have made one of her delicious almond tarts. I loved food and never thought about my weight or whether it was unfeminine to have a big appetite, something my cousins teased me about.

The twins were wearing bright red Bermuda shorts with creases down the front and white socks and Keds sneakers with holes in their toes, the same holes where genetically identical big toes had worn out the canvas. My cousins’ ears were pierced, too, and they both wore pink lipstick that clashed with their shorts. The snooty girls in my hometown would have thought they were trashy and possibly even hookers. Here, in the sticks, though, many of the girls looked just like my cousins.

My grandmother continued on her way down the hill when I remembered what I’d seen:

“It’s closed, Grandma,” I said.

She cocked her head and looked at me inquisitively, the way a canary in a cage looks at you.

“’Cause of the murderer!” said Jane gleefully.

“He could come and murder us, right in our beds.”

“What would he want with us?” I asked, sensibly, watching Grandma walk back toward the house, her big purse knocking at her knees.

“We’re pretty,” giggled Emily.

“He’s probably a hundred miles away,” I said. “Anyway, Monticello isn’t all that close.”

“He’s not from Monticello!” cried Emily, thrilled to be telling me something I didn’t know. “He’s from right here! Shing Wong! We know him from school!”

That the boy was actually was from Swan Lake—from right down the street, in fact, was chilling. I tried to remember him, but I could recall no one clearly except for Rose. There had been boys in the store, but to me they were a blur of dark-skinned Chinese maleness.

“They said he has a chain around his ankles,” offered Jane.

“Well,” I replied reasonably, trying not to show my discomfiture, “if he’s got a chain around his ankles, then he’s not making it up Grief Hill to kill us, is he.”

On that note, the twins, easily distracted, dropped the subject of Shing Wong and reached for my tangled hair. They tsked in unison.

“Jamie, Jamie. You’ll never get a boyfriend looking like this.”

“I don’t want a boyfriend,” I sighed, remembering yet another thing I detested about the farm: the annual makeover. Every summer my cousins tried to turn me into a girly girl. They set up a “beauty salon” in my grandmother’s parlor, where they painted my nails bright red, straightened my hair with a hair iron that burned my scalp, applied blue eye shadow to my eyelids. It was, I had learned, easier to submit than to resist their constant harping. But, after a few days, I always scratched off the nail polish and my curly hair would return to its wild, untamed state.

I looked up at the old farmhouse: it was practically falling down from neglect. Paint the color of pumpkin flesh had peeled off the elaborate gingerbread porch, exposing earlier red and green layers. One step leading up to the porch was completely rotted through, and nobody ever bothered to fix it. We called it the “trick step,” because you had to know about it and stay to the left of it if you didn’t want to find your foot going straight through to the ground. I don’t know why we neglected to fix it; it’s not like we couldn’t afford to. It was almost as if my parents left it because they felt that the farm should have a rotten trick step—that it belonged there, somehow.

It might have had to do with everyone feeling that the upkeep of the farm was still my grandfather’s job. “Grandpa” had been in the theatre, a traveling vaudevillian who bought the farm and then left Grandma to run it while he was gone. Everyone resented that, and maybe still did. The problem was, Grandpa had been dead for thirty years. He wasn’t coming back to fix anything.

We walked up the porch and my aunt Delia turned to us.  I kissed her on the cheek.

“Oh!” she said, putting a hand to her hair and ignoring Harry, “So many girls!  So, so many!”

It was true, in fact. Since Uncle Meyer’s death, there were no men on the farm apart from Stevie and a few unreliable hired hands, and only my father’s regular checks—a distant rich man’s income—kept them all alive.

Suddenly, Mom halted all conversation by turning to us and barking, “Hey, stop dawdling and give us a hand!”

It was nearly five o’clock, and my parents were tired and grouchy.  They bickered as they began to hoist two months’ worth of clothing, pillows, sheets, and toiletries up the farmhouse’s narrow steps. 

My room was at the top of the stairs on the right. Harry stayed on the first floor, in a converted pantry behind the kitchen, so he wouldn’t have to go up and down the stairs.  Harry was born with a clubfoot and had already undergone several surgeries for it.  But I never saw any real improvement from these operations.  Harry liked being in the back of the house because he could fling open the back door and run into the pastures beyond.  He loved being able to run right outside without anyone seeing him.  Sometimes, I watched him from the bathroom window and was touched by how freely he moved his body when he thought no one was looking. He would raise his arms in the air and shake his fingers and kick up his heels, like the women in a Baptist prayer meeting, to music only he could hear.

4

The next morning, I woke to the sound of my mother and grandmother having an argument in Yiddish. I always hated it when my mother spoke Yiddish, because I couldn’t understand what she was saying. That was why she was speaking it, of course.  Our grandmother knew English, though not well.  

I looked out my window, yanked it up with an effort, and stuck my head out. It was a fine morning. The sun cast long, golden red shadows over the hills.  Everything was soaking wet, as if it had rained.  But I knew it was only the air’s moisture that had been squeezed out during the night.  I breathed in the thin, cool air.  It smelled good, of hay and leaves and the faintly acrid odor of the cows.  I got dressed and went down to see what was going on.

My mother was sitting at the old table in the parlor, having dry toast with jam.  She was dressed in raw silk pink Capri pants with a matching zipper jacket and a pale pink sleeveless shirt.  Her short, wavy hair was neatly set, and her nails were pink half-moons of glossy enamel.  

“You slept late,” said Mom. I couldn’t tell if it was a reproach or an observation. I never could with her.

“Yeah, I guess the drive tired me out. Where’s Dad?” I looked around.

“Shaving,” she said.

My grandmother was in the kitchen. It was a small kitchen for such a large house, a galley kitchen, big enough for two to fit side by side. Probably, the original kitchen had been in a separate building, long-since torn down.  I recall when I was very little my mother taking it upon herself to get the kitchen renovated. Now, everything in there was 1950s “modern”:  stainless steel counter and sink, big celery green enamel stove. I liked it in there.

Grandma turned, surprised to see me. She looked like an old waitress in a shabby diner: in one strong, flat palm she held a large almond tart. In the other, she held a plate of steaming scrambled onion and eggs. She set them down and cast us flinty looks as I began to slice the tart. Harry arrived and, satisfied we were all eating, Grandma resumed the argument she’d been having with our mother.

Harry, oddly, understood Yiddish.  He could probably have spoken it fluently had he been stupid enough to let on that he understood. 

I kicked him under the table. 

“Finish your breakfast,” he whispered, “and meet me in my room.  I’ll tell you what’s up.”

I finished my eggs and Harry and I ran to his room, where we plopped onto his narrow, creaky bed.  

“So?” I said, sinking onto my elbows.

“I don’t understand every word, but they’re definitely fighting about the Grossmans. The Grossmans are having a Fourth of July party. They were fighting about whether to go.”

I was disappointed. 

“That’s a boring fight.”

“No, I haven’t finished.  See, Grandma wasn’t invited, even though all the other neighbors were, and Mom thinks it was on purpose and that Grandma shouldn’t let it slide.  She’s known Adele Grossman forever. She knew Mrs. Grossman’s grandparents.”

“Maybe Grandma doesn’t like Adele Grossman,” I offered rationally.

“She doesn’t like Adele Grossman.  But that’s not the point.  Mom said, and I quote—” Harry reached for his notebook, “‘That isn’t the point.  The point is, the whole neighborhood has been invited, even the Marshalls.’ Or I should have written, ‘even the Marshalls exclamation point’.” 

I laughed at Harry’s serious face, and at his obsessive attention to detail. The Marshalls lived just down the road toward Liberty. They had more money than Grandma, but our mother always told us they were crass, low people. Two sons had moved away, but apparently their youngest, Gary Marshall, had taken a job with the Swan Lake Police Department.

Harry continued: “Then Grandma said she was too old to fight.  The whole argument was giving her a pain in her liver.”  Harry turned to me: “Why didn’t they invite Grandma, do you think?”

“They probably think she’s a kike,” I shrugged.  I had heard that word around Scarsdale High. Girls used it to denigrate Jewish boys—“the little kike,” they’d say, laughing. “He asked me to the pictures. Imagine that!” But some Jews used it, too, trying to “pass” by putting down poorer Jews.

It was an ugly word and Harry, sensitive to the sound words made, became alarmed.

“A kike?  Grandma’s not a kike!—what’s a kike?” 

“Never mind.” I was sorry I’d said it. “It’s just that some of the people up here don’t like Jews. Including other Jews.”

We heard Mom and Grandma’s loud voices beneath us, and suddenly I knew what had gotten under my mother’s skin: she felt herself every bit the equal of Adele Grossman, who thought she was above everyone in Swan Lake because she lived on Park Avenue and owned a local store.  Rumors were the Grossmans were planning to sell the business and move their summer home elsewhere—the Hamptons, maybe.

My mother felt slighted. She had married a professional, educated man and lived in Scarsdale. But up here, by virtue of her family, her status fell back to what it had been twenty-years earlier: a fatherless daughter of a poor, rough peasant woman.

“What’s she saying now?” I asked Harry.

We crept into the hall.

“She’s saying she’s gonna call and make a fuss, and that we’re going whether or not we’re invited.”

“Why does Mom want to go to such a low-life party anyway?” I asked. 

“They’re not lowlifes.  They’re crème de la crème.  Besides, you know Mom,” he said.  “She wants to be wherever she isn’t invited.”

I laughed.  Where on earth did Harry get “crème de la crème”?  It was true that our mother would not be kept out of anything.  It would not occur to her not to fight for her right to attend simply because she in fact didn’t like those people.  She would go to make a point, and to teach something to her mother about upward mobility that I didn’t think Grandma would ever learn. 

That afternoon, as I was reading quietly on my bed, engrossed in The Lou Gehrig Story, my cousins burst into my room without even knocking.

“Jamie, Jamie, we’ve got kittens!”

I have never been a big animal person. Once, Harry and I had pestered our mother to get us a canary. She finally did, and we named it Mr. D. But it died only a few weeks later, and I didn’t like seeing its stiff, yellow body lying on the cage floor. It made me feel guilty that we had kept it locked up like that.  Then there was the incident with a baby frog, in which Mom insisted on cleaning out his foul tank only to have the frog slip down the drain. She said it went to animal Heaven, but I didn’t believe her for a minute, and neither did Harry.

No, animals spelled heartache. But my cousins practically dragged me out of bed. As we banged through the front door I heard my mother shout at us,

“Don’t you kids even think of going to the tree house.”

“We’re not, we’re not!” my cousins shouted back.  “We’re going to the barn.”

I hadn’t even remembered the tree house until my mother told me not to think of it. It got built the summer I turned ten and cost almost a thousand dollars—a vast sum at the time. Enough to buy a car. We didn’t go there that often now, anyway, had nearly outgrown it. But my mother’s telling me I couldn’t go made me resolve to go at the earliest opportunity.

The ground became moist and squishy as we approached the barn.  It was an old, dilapidated wood building that leaned back like a person avoiding confrontation.  It was no longer used, except to store hay and a few rusted rakes.  There was a second story you could get to by climbing a flight of wobbly steps.  The whole staircase swayed as you climbed it.  I always thought it would come crashing down, and for several years we’d been forbidden to go up there, although we always did.  One year there were baby skunks, and we all got sprayed. My grandmother made us soak in a bath of fresh cow’s milk. I remember we squeezed a whole bottle of chocolate syrup in and tried to drink the milk we were sitting in and got badly scolded for it. Another year, we found bat babies, their wings thin and papery as butterflies, yet remarkably warm.

“Over there!” Jane pointed. I caught the quick blip of hay, and we crawled on hands and knees toward that spot.  A huge, fluffy, orange cat the size of a raccoon lay on her side, teats exposed. She was suckling nearly a dozen kittens.

Although their fur had not yet grown, you could see the kittens’ coloration stained into their pink skin. There were two orange ones, a white one, one calico, and a mess of black ones, all squashed together. Jane reached down and pulled a suckling kitten off a teat.

"Jane, you’re not supposed to do that.  Put it back,” I said.

"Why not?" She stared at me with a blank, freckled face.  "I'm not hurting it."

"The mother won't like your smell.  She may reject the baby."

"That's silly," she said with the authority of a real farm girl.  "I've never seen a mama cat reject her baby.  Want to hold it?"

"All right," I said.  It was so tiny, it felt like a mouse in my hands.  I stuck my nose down and smelled it.  It smelled of hay, and warmth, and milky-sour wetness.  I put the baby back where it had been suckling, and in less than a second it found the free teat once more.

"See," said Jane.

I lay back in the hay, propping my head up on one elbow. 

“Hey, Jamie, you wanna try the milk?”

“What milk?” I asked drowsily. My eyes were closed, and the hay all around me gave me a soft, wonderful sense of safety.

“The cat’s milk. It’s good—we’ve had it before.”

“Are you crazy? She’ll bite your head off.”

My eyes were open now. I sat up.

“No she won’t.”

“You touch that cat, I’m leaving,” I said.

“Oh, all right, party-pooper,” said Jane.

I lay back in the hay and sighed.  Sometimes my cousins seemed not just naive but demented.  I knew they weren’t, though—not entirely, anyway.   For one thing, they both had photographic memories.  One summer, my mother gave them a guide to wildflowers, and by the end of that summer they knew all the Latin names for every single plant that grew in their fields.  It always shocked Harry and me when they stopped mid-stride to stare down at a tiny flower and say something like, “Oh, wow, Chamaemelum nobilis.  We can make tea like the Queen of England!” 

When we first heard them uttering these strange Latin words we thought they sounded like Devil-children. We pressed them anxiously about what these words were. But they just shrugged their shoulders, as if everyone knew them.

Suddenly, we heard rustling. It was Harry, coming up the steps.

"Go away," I hissed.

"I don't have to," he hissed back.  "I want to see the kittens, too."  Harry loved animals, maybe because death didn’t entirely make sense to him yet.

He was peering up eagerly from the steps, and I had to admire how my brother wasn’t afraid of me, even though I pushed him around.  Getting up those stairs was a struggle for him, and part of me felt bad and cruel. But he finally made it up the last rickety stair, then scrambled toward us through the hay.  The smell was intoxicating: a tang of peat and birth. I lifted up the rank hay lid, under which the mother cat lay with her kittens. 

“Look,” I said.  Harry drew in his breath through sweetly puckered lips. I gently handed him the fat calico kitten.

“Oh, let’s take this one home,” he whispered. “D’you think Mom and Dad will let us?”

“You can ask,” I said. “But don’t ask me to take care of it.”

He put the kitten down and it went instantly back to sucking. “You know, you guys had better scram.  If Mom catches us up here we’ll be grounded.”

Grounded, I snorted. As if anyone could ground me anymore.

Harry crept back down the rickety stairs. Emily, Jane and I left soon after him, brushing the hay from our shorts and shoes.  When we emerged, blinking, the world seemed bright and clean, but also oddly dark around the edges, like looking the wrong way through a telescope.  I shivered, and when my eyes adjusted to the brightness I noticed Cousin Stevie standing about ten feet away. 

He was dressed all in black. Black skinny pants, black T-shirt, black hair.  Only his skin and fingernails were not black.  They were stained yellow from tobacco.  Between thumb and forefinger he held a lit cigarette, its inch-long ash ready to drop. In another twenty seconds the cigarette would burn his fingertips.  I wondered if he would notice, and I just stood there watching, curious.  He was staring at me in a not-very-friendly way.  Then I did something very childish: I stuck my tongue out at him and we all giggled and ran like mad.  

Stevie’s world was filled with demons, and it was very odd for him to be outside just standing about. Enemies were everywhere, and he always thought we were crazy for not seeing them.

Cousin Stevie was right, of course. We were the crazy ones, for not seeing them.

5

I have given my soul to the dark side since I was sixteen years old, and my hatred has made me hated. One time, when my daughter, Amanda, was still in middle-school, I almost got us all killed. I had been working on a case for several months, in which a police officer in a rural town of Mississippi was suspected of having Klan connections. In particular, he was suspected of involvement in the bombing of a church, and the subsequent deaths of three black parishioners. We had been gathering evidence on this officer but I didn’t think my name was out there anywhere.

It was.

Back in those days, we didn’t have a two-car garage. We had a narrow driveway, and only a one-car garage, and we didn’t like to keep our cars parked tandem, so Mel usually parked his car on the street. I parked mine in the driveway, for quick starts in the morning.

It was a fine spring morning. Mel had just walked down the path to his car, David following not far behind. Pink cherry blossoms fell on their shoulders. Mel usually dropped David off at the local public elementary school. I dropped Amanda off at Sidwell Friends before heading back in the other direction, towards town.

Amanda is athletic, like me, although she looks very feminine, with her flying red curls and pink nail polish. She insists that everything match, and wouldn’t dream of wearing even a ponytail elastic that clashed with her outfit.  David, tall and lanky like his father, looks like he should be a basketball player, but he actually hates sports and loves gentle pursuits like playing the guitar.  Nowadays you can live with these discrepancies; your friends accept you and sometimes even think you’re cool.

Anyway, I was running a bit late and Amanda strode out of the house ahead of me, heading for my car. Just before she opened the passenger door she noticed the basketball lying a few feet off. And then she made a lucky decision: she set her backpack down, took up the ball, and shot a few hoops. But my car was in the way and on her last shot the ball bounced on the hood, then rolled forward, then back under the car.

When Amanda leaned down to peer under the car, she saw something that didn’t belong there, something involving a coke can and duct tape. Slowly, she backed away.

“Ma?” she called.

I had just finally come out of the house. Mel and David waved as they drove away, cherry blossoms still on their shoulders.

“Call you later!” Mel blew a kiss from the front window.

“Love you, Mom!” called David from the back window.

I turned to Amanda.

“What is it, honey?”

“Ma, there’s a Coke can taped under your car. You want me to pull it off?”

My eyes widened but I did not raise my voice when I said,

“Come here, Amanda. Leave your backpack and walk straight towards me. Now.”

When she’d come close enough I grabbed her and moved into the house, locking the door behind me.

I didn’t bother with the police. I called the FBI. When they arrived fifteen minutes later, they found a ten-pound homemade explosive devise attached to the chasse. It would have ripped us and the car and anything within twenty feet of the car to bits the moment I turned the key in the ignition.

I almost quit then. My family begged me to quit. Amanda wouldn’t talk to me for two weeks.

“Ask Mom to pass the salt,” she said at the dinner table.  Or, “Tell Mom I have soccer practice tomorrow.”

I tried to speak with her, but she would not see reason. Or, not mine, anyway.

“I saw a bomb,” was all she could say.

And it’s true: one shouldn’t have to say more. But I wasn’t ready to quit. According to my calculations I had a good twenty years of active hate in me. It was Mel who finally said,

“Look, I’ll back you if you want to quit. The trouble is, we can take Jamie out of the Justice Department, but will Justice still be in you when you leave? You know that will make us all miserable, too.”

“I could bake pies,” I said, leaning my head on his shoulder. I was smiling, but sort of crying, too.  I had never been very interested in cooking or housekeeping or any of those domestic arts. What would I do if I left?

But then they caught the perpetrators and we nailed the police officer and my family calmed down. Amanda eventually began talking to me again; but I don’t think she ever quite forgave me.

6

The Grossmans’ party was the highlight of my cousins’ life that June.  As it turned out, my grandmother had been invited. At least, that’s what Adele told my mother upon running into her at the Superette when it opened again a few days later. The two women commiserated on the Wong tragedy. Then, as narrated by my mother later, Adele put on a surprised face and said, Surely Pauline had received her invitation by now! My mother assured her that she had not.

No one will ever know if the story of the “lost invitation” had been made up, but my mother chose not to question it. Over the next two weeks, my cousins could talk about little else. What they would wear, which boys would be there. How they would be able to sneak a few alcoholic beverages without their mother noticing.  Then somehow they got to teasing me about Rodney Grossman. He was about seventeen, and would be coming up from the city for the rest of the summer. Rodney was an Andover boy, the ultimate in “class,” from my cousins’ point of view.

“You’re going to fall in love, Jamie,” said Jane.  “I know it.”

“Yeah, maybe he’ll keep in touch after the summer and you’ll end up getting married.”

“You guys are stupid,” I said.

At that, the twins pulled in their chins.

“We don’t use words like ‘stupid’,” said Emily quietly.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I didn’t mean stupid, stupid.”  But that didn’t come out right, either.  They frowned, and I realized that I could not tease my cousins the way I teased Harry.  They had no sense of irony.  Maybe irony was a city thing.

I tried to remember Rodney Grossman but could not remember much about him. I remembered him only as reserved and somewhat high-minded, with a habit of pushing his straight, sandy-colored hair off his forehead.  His skin was very fair. He never played with us and would have nothing to do with my cousin Drew, whom he called a “psychopath,” a word I didn’t know until Harry looked it up in the dictionary.  Unfortunately, the psychopath himself would be at the party because Aunt Caroline had already called and told my mother she was bringing him up the following weekend.  I would have to move in with Harry so they could use my room. Mom told us it would just be for a few days.

Having Drew at the farm was not something I looked forward to.

Caroline, the middle of the three sisters, lived in the city and brought Drew up to the farm every summer, leaving him there “to take the good country air.” But we all knew the real reason was that she couldn’t be bothered with him. She had a lot of boyfriends, and he got in the way. Usually, we missed Drew’s visit, coming in July when he came in August, or vice versa. But for some reason, this summer my parents decided to spend both months at the farm.

As a child, Drew had been the kind of boy who liked to pull wings off butterflies or fry bugs in a skillet of fat to watch them die.  I actually saw him kill an animal once, a few years earlier.  I was walking by myself down to the Superette to buy candy.  I liked those candy necklaces made of colored sugar wheels on an elastic string. Anyway, there was Cousin Drew and his local friends. Drew always wore nice city clothes over his too-soft body, but the other boys were dirty, scraggly, and mean, like the feral cats that ran across the fields.

The boys were huddled around a puddle in the margin of the roadway, butts sticking out, Levi cuffs muddied. I stuck my nose above their hunched shoulders.

"Gross!  He's moving!" they cried.

When Drew noticed me he said, "Bug off, Jamie!” He was holding the sorry, wet beast by the chest and dunking it headfirst into the puddle.  He brought it up for air just so he could watch it gasp.  The muskrat's brown paws were pedaling furiously, as if it might swim away from his strong fingers. 

It was a genuine family secret that Drew didn’t have a father.  He must have had one, but nobody could ever pry out of Aunt Caroline who it was. She had made up some fiction for Drew about a wonderful dead husband, a Purple Heart World War II hero who died of his wounds or something. But we all knew it must have been a one-night stand in a sleazy motel. Maybe Aunt Caroline herself didn’t know who the father was.

Anyway, as expected, my mother buried her unease by taking full control of what everyone was going to wear.  She barked at Bernie that he had to get new pants because all of his pants smelled of his dentist’s office. She told Harry he’d have to wear a tie. She told me I’d have to buy a “nice dress.”

Watching my mother prepare for the party, you would think that she was shallow.  But she wasn’t. My mother noticed everything and felt even more than she noticed. But she could also will herself not to see things that were right in front of her face. That was her specialty. It still is.

In the end, we settled on a very nice dress for me, as dresses went.  It was a pale blue linen dress with a Peter Pan collar and it had blue cloth buttons going all the way down the front.  The dress had little cap sleeves, and the skirt on the dress was cut on the bias so it swung loosely around my calves.

My mother made me model it.  As I came down the stairs, Harry, who had been heading out the front door, looked up.

“Hey, wow,” he said.  “I didn’t recognize you.”

“Oh shut up,” I said, pushing him out of my way to go outside, where Dad was sitting with his newspaper.

Harry had meant it nicely, but I was a strong girl and had pushed him so hard he fell onto the floor. He rubbed his bruised chin, tears springing to his eyes.  I hadn’t meant to push him that hard.

“Harry—” I began, but he just reached for his notebook and wrote, saying loud enough for everyone to hear, “Sister becomes violent.”

“Jamie,” my mother said sharply, “don’t push your brother.”

“He was taunting me,” I said lamely.

“Sister uses big words,” Harry recited.

“And you there!” she waved at Harry, “don’t be obnoxious.  There’s simply no excuse,” Mom muttered as she turned to go upstairs. Harry and I looked at each other hatefully, each certain that our mother was speaking about the other. 

“Anyway, Jamie,” she turned back to look at me, “it’s time you got used to the niceties of being a young lady in society.”

I looked up at her as she ascended the stairs.

“Niceties of being a young lady?” I parroted.  “Are you nuts? This is Swan Lake we’re talking about!  This is hicksville!” I shouted up the stairs at her.

But my mother just shot me down a menacing look before disappearing into her bedroom. 

At the time, nothing could make me understand why it was so important to impress the Grossmans, whom my parents never saw during the year and didn’t even socialize with during the summer.

Suddenly, I heard a horror-movie-like scream from upstairs: apparently, I had no shoes to go with my dress.  My mother came racing back down the stairs and her face had this horrified expression on it. She grabbed me by a piece of my curly hair, which she sometimes used like a leash, and dragged me to the car. Off we went together, to Monticello, in search of blue shoes.

7

Aunt Caroline arrived in a beam of cool, bright light, like a goddesses bringing the weather with her. The taxi gleamed in the early morning sunlight.

When I came out, my aunt was standing by the side of the cab, receiving leather boxes, cardboard boxes, and gift-wrapped boxes, all being pushed by unseen hands from inside the taxi. She lifted them, then gave them to the cabbie.  He was an old black man, used to doing as he was told by beautiful white women. He brought the boxes up the front steps.

“Watch that step,” my mother called. “There’s a hole.”

But he had already seen the hole and stepped around it.

“Upstairs, upstairs! All the way up!” Aunt Caroline ordered him just as he had set some of the boxes on the porch. I saw the old man’s eyes roll up white as he lifted a few of the boxes in his wiry arms and continued on into the house.

“Leonard, Drew, go help him!”

That’s when my new uncle emerged from the car.

I have always distrusted men who dressed too well, and Uncle Lenny dressed very well. He was wearing a broad pinstripe blue suit, double-breasted, of wool so smooth and light it felt like felt. He was a big fellow and was sweating profusely, wiping away his sweat on his forehead with a monogrammed linen handkerchief.

Uncle Lenny wore more jewelry than I’d ever seen on anyone, including my mother. He had a ruby pinkie ring and a heavy gold necklace. He was bald on top and had a pretentious little goatee over a receding chin that he kept nervously touching.

Aunt Caroline looked out of place as well, standing there on the front lawn. Her platinum blonde hair was pulled back against her head, then twisted into a French bun. Her slender figure seemed to be all legs and bosom, the whole package sensually wrapped in a beautiful Robin’s egg blue suit.

The burly figure of Uncle Lenny suddenly spotted me and Harry standing by the screen door, and he bolted toward us.

“Hey!” he called affably, “let’s see who we’ve got there!”

His smile displayed a solid gold incisor. Harry and I took a yard-sized step back, nearly tripping over each other’s legs.

“Jamie, Harry, you haven’t met your uncle Lenny, have you?”

Uncle Lenny extended his moist, plump hand for me to shake. I stared at the unsavory appendage until I felt the lump of my mother’s knee in the back of my leg.

That’s when Cousin Drew made his appearance from the back seat. He had grown taller since I’d last seen him at his bar mitzvah four years earlier. He shut the door and waved the driver on. Then he walked slowly toward me. He had tight, close-cropped curls, nearly black.

“If he tries to kiss me, I’m going to punch him,” I whispered to Harry.

“You’re going to have to, Jamie,” said Harry. “It’s the custom.”

“So what if it is,” I said.

But in the end, Harry was right. Ten seconds later he was upon us, grinning smarmily.

“Hiya, Jamie,” he said. Then he planted a big, wet kiss on my cheek.

As Drew walked by with his bag Harry shrugged his shoulders.

He whispered to me, “I can’t really do anything, you know. I’m only eleven.”

Uncle Lenny and Aunt Caroline moved into my room; Drew disappeared into the basement. I had never been down there: too creepy. But I had heard there was a little cell-like room that used to be for storing canned food. Now it had a cot and electricity. I shivered at the very thought of Drew down there.

That evening, Uncle Lenny went into the kitchen to chat with Grandma as she made dinner. He didn’t know any better, I suppose, and was trying to be affable: no one spoke to Grandma while she was cooking, except for Mom. When Grandma cooked, she had the focus of a chef on a cruise liner cooking for hundreds. You didn’t disturb her.

But there was Uncle Lenny, chatting away. He even took a few plates out to the table in his bear paws. Harry and I had to drag in one of the rickety tables from the porch and set it next to the regular one to make enough places. Mom and Caroline were sitting at the table chatting about this year’s fashions, just as if they didn’t hate each other’s guts.

Sometime during that dinner, Drew said he wanted to work on his photographs that summer.

Work on his photographs that summer. Every piece of that sentence poked my liver. “Work,” like it was a job or something. “His photographs”: so pretentious, as if he were a famous photographer.  But the “this summer” really sent me over the edge. How long did he plan to stay?

My mother did not look disturbed, which meant that she had known all along Drew was going to stick around.

“Do you have a camera, Drew?” my mother asked. “If not, I’m sure Bernie will let you use his.”

I glared at my mother.

“Dad uses that camera a lot,” I said.

“Oh, nonsense, that’s fine,” replied my father affably. “I can share it.”

“You’ll need a darkroom, Drew,” Aunt Caroline mused. “Well, I guess a basement is as good a place as any to set one up, isn’t it?”

I could take it no longer.

“I thought you were only staying a few days,” I said.

“Jamie!” my mother frowned.

“Yes,” Aunt Caroline replied, “we are. But Drew’s staying the summer.” She looked at me then with her cool blue wolf eyes.

“Lucky us,” I smirked.

Harry just shrugged.

8

The next morning was the morning of the party. The house was cool and still, everyone sleeping very deeply the way you do in the country. Harry and I awoke to clomping feet in the kitchen next door, then scattershot shouts: 

“It’s mine!”

“Is not!”

“Give it here!”

I got up from my floor-bed and peered into the parlor. Beyond the window, I could see a beautiful summer day begin to rise over Grief Hill.

Emily and Jane were grabbing and poking each other like normal siblings, something I almost never saw them do.

“Girls!  Come here!” Suddenly my mother emerged from the kitchen in her silk Pucci bathrobe, blotches of bright color surrounded by dark black random lines, like a page from a child’s coloring book.  The girls stopped fighting, surprised by my mother’s harsh tone. 

“What on earth could you be fighting about this early in the morning?”

Emily approached my mother and stuck out her hand.  Resting in her sweaty palm was a tortoise-shell barrette.

“We had two,” she said plaintively, “but we can’t find the other.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, girls.  Fighting over such a thing.”  But I could tell my mother secretly appreciated my cousins’ girly interest in hair barrettes.  I would have held my hair back with a stick, if it had worked. “Come on up, and we’ll see if one of mine won’t do.”

I quickly locked Harry’s door, and in another moment I heard their feet upstairs in my parents’ bedroom.

“Stay under the covers for a minute and don’t look,” I ordered Harry.

“Okay, okay. It’s not like I want to see your gross body, anyway.”

Five minutes later I was up and dressed. Just as I opened my door I nearly collided with my cousins, who now both proudly sported nearly identical barrettes in their pretty, wheat-blonde hair. 

They went downstairs and out onto the porch to enjoy the warming air while I had breakfast.  Harry soon joined me.  He had brought a huge book to the table.  It covered his small face. 

“Don’t read at the table, Harry.  That’s rude.”

“Sorry,” he said, putting the book down hastily.  “It’s just very interesting.  It’s about the life of Ludwig von Beethoven—”

“Children!” our mother called from the stairs.  “Get on with your breakfast and stop blathering.”

The inevitable moment had come where I would have to put on that dress and new shoes. I would have to suffer my cousins’ merciless teasing about Rodney Grossman, who I didn’t care about. Once more, I would have to feel how inadequate I was to the daunting, unpleasant chore of becoming a woman.

Once we had finished breakfast, my cousins asked me if I wanted to go to the Hinkley’s swing. I said sure. There was nothing else to do. Harry stayed behind to read his book and we took off for the field where the old swing stood.

Neither my grandmother nor my mother spoke to the Hinkleys.  According to my mother, she and her sisters once had a pet dog named Al Jolson.  He was a crazy mutt with big white spots that used to run in circles all over the property, chasing birds, leaping into the air.  My mother and her sisters loved that dog.  But one day, they found him dead.  Poisoned.  My grandmother blamed the Hinkleys, said they did it because they were annoyed at the dog always coming into their fields and chasing their chickens. 

For the next several hours, I forgot about the Grossman party and swung back and forth on the double swing, whose seats yawned and came together in a consoling rhythm.  My cousins and I commiserated about how boring it was that my parents weren’t letting me use my tree house that summer, because of the escaped murderer.

“Yeah, and we still have our stuff there.  Magazines and makeup and stuff,” Jane complained. 

Suddenly, out of nowhere, we saw Harry limping across the field towards us. He looked worried.

“Hey, the kittens are gone,” he called once he was close enough for us to hear him.

“What do you mean, gone?” I asked.

“Gone. All of them.”

“Oh,” said Jane, “they’re around. Don’t worry. Cats can take care of themselves.”

Suddenly, from a great distance, we heard Grandma’s old cowbell calling us home. It felt like we had just eaten breakfast, but Grandma had already set lunch on the table.  Obviously, she had no faith that the Grossmans would serve food a body could actually eat.

We ate with surprising relish, and at the end of the meal my father pushed his plate away and announced that he was going to read the paper, then take a nap.  He always announced his plans, as if letting us know ahead of time would prevent interruptions, which it never did.  Then he got up and moved to the porch, and in a few minutes he called to us:

“Hey, listen to this.  They’ve indicted the man who killed Medgar Evers.”

Nobody said anything.  I didn’t know who Medgar Evers was.  I didn’t know what “indicted” meant, either.  We walked out to the porch to see what was going on.

Receiving no reply, our father said with consternation, “Doesn’t anybody care about that?  About Medgar Evers?  Shot in the back in his own goddamned driveway?”

“Sure we care,” said Harry, and I elbowed him because I knew he didn’t know Medgar Evers or indicted, either.

“Hey,” I said suddenly, remembering, “How’d the Yanks do last night?”

There was a defeated pause. 

“Where do I find that?”

“Sports page. In the Sports section, Dad.” 

“Okay, okay, I get it,” he said, huffily.  Except for the times we ganged up on Mom, it felt like my father and I had absolutely nothing in common. 

Our mother, who had in the meantime come outside and taken a seat across from Dad, changed the subject again: 

“Jack comes home from his trip tomorrow.” 

By Jack she meant the President, of course. 

“I’ll be glad when he’s back.  When he travels, it makes me so nervous.  These are actually very hard times, you know,” she added. “You kids don’t realize it because you’re just kids.”

I was willing to agree with that, but not Harry.

“I know,” he said.

Dad looked up bemusedly from his paper. “What do you know, exactly, Harry?”

“We’re in a Cold War,” he said. “We almost got blown up by the Russians last year. And then there’s Castro and the Bay Full of Pigs.”

Dad guffawed. It was a rare occurrence. Although he was a dentist, I realized that I didn’t even know what my own father’s teeth looked like.

“Well, that about sums it up, all right.”

I hissed at Harry, “You don’t know what the Bay of Pigs is, you little moron.”

“Yeah,” he hissed back, “well, neither do you.”

Suddenly our mother called out in a light voice, “Jamie, I put your party clothes out on your bed. Go have a look.”

Up in my room, I stared at my bed with the clothing spread out upon it.  It looked so demure, so pretty—just like the girl my mother wanted me to be.  The prim little blue dress, stockings and new garter belt, the new blue shoes, toes pointed in the same direction on the floor, even a pair of white gloves at the end of where my arms might have been. It was as if my mother hoped that I could just pour myself into that outfit and turn myself into a beautiful princess, like Cinderella.

In the afternoon, my family, refreshed from naps, began to dress. Then they gradually collected on the farmhouse porch.  Stevie, in a black suit and bow tie, sat smoking in a rocking chair and staring out over the hills.  He nodded at me and looked away every time we made eye contact.  His hands were filthy, and if you got too close to him, he smelled.

Harry looked uncomfortable in the new button-down shirt and tie our mother bought him.  He kept sticking his finger inside the collar and making choking noises.  As for my father, Mom was not satisfied until he had come downstairs in three different outfits. She finally gave up, saying, “Oh, wear whatever you want!” She herself floated onto the porch in a cloud of expensive perfume.  Her hair had been set so that it flipped up at the ends, just brushing against a double strand of genuine pearls.  She was beautiful and she knew it, but it was a sterile, untouchable beauty—at least, our father did not seem moved to touch her. 

Aunt Delia looked pretty in her pink ruffles and her black hair braided and pulled into a bun.  She stood out on the lawn, pacing back and forth.  I’d never seen Aunt Delia nervous before.  Finally, Stevie said, “Ma, stop pacing.  You’re driving me nuts.”  She just stopped and stood there, eyes blinking.  Harry and I glanced at each other and then fled inside, where we choked on ceaseless peals of laughter.

“Hey, folks,” our dad said, once we had returned, “lemme get this picture.”

I heard the click, then the film advance as he cried, “Don’t move!  One more!”

It was color film, expensive. I still have that photograph: in the picture, the twins have glittery wings of peacock blue eye shadow and pink lipstick.  My mother’s got her hands on either side of my head like she’s about to lift it clear off my shoulders.  I look like Alice in Wonderland after her neck has grown too tall for the rest of her.  She is probably trying to get me to stand straight, to pay attention.  But my eyes are glancing off to the side, beyond the picture frame.

Then, as if my father’s act of freezing us all in time had merely wound me up to spring away, I suddenly bolted.

“I’ll meet up with you! Don’t wait for me!” I called.

Emily, Jane, and Harry looked at me in shock.  Then Dad’s photograph came to life as they all flew after me. 

“Wait, wait for us!” they cried, long skinny legs flying across the field. Harry began to run, too, not wanting to be left out.  But he wasn’t able to keep up.

“Harry, get back here this instant!” our mother shouted.  Harry stopped running.  I looked back and caught the frustration on his face.

We ran. To the barn, up the rickety steps.  I was breathless as I finally crawled my way over to the spot where the kittens should have been.  I lifted up the hay, expecting that the kittens would be back, nursing. They were not.  There was no sign of them.

“They’re still not here!” I called down to my cousins, who refused to risk ruining their party outfits by climbing the stairs into the loft.

“The party! We’ll be late!” they called, stomping their feet.

“Go on,” I repeated firmly. “It would be a waste for you to miss the party, too.”

Emily and Jane turned and I saw their backs emerge into the light as they made their way back to the farm.  I saw them join the rest of the party.  Then, once more, I ran.  I ran through every field in search of those cats.  I ran into the tool shed behind the house, which stank of turpentine and linseed oil and cat urine.  But there were no cats. I ran across the strawberry fields, not stopping to listen to the shouts of my family as they saw me running in my good clothes, calling out “Psst psst psst, here kitty!  Here, kitty kitty!” all the while cursing myself that I had let myself grow attached to one of them.

I grazed a rose bush, and in an instant my new blue dress ripped across the shoulder.  But I kept running.  A bad feeling grew inside me. Instinctively, I felt that something had happened to those kittens. 

At the very back end of the last field before the woods, there was a stream, forbidden that summer along with the tree house, which neatly roped off the farmed land from the wilderness beyond.  We always went there to wash our feet or search for snails that liked to stick against the slimy, algae-covered rocks.  When we were very young, Harry and I even brought kitchen strainers out there to search for gold.  

Now, as I approached the bank of the stream, swollen up thigh-deep from the heavy winter snows, I saw something out of place.  It was not snails or rocks and it certainly wasn’t gold.  It was the rippled top of a tied bag.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe.

Someone had wedged the bag partly under a heavy rock.  It took me a minute to pull it loose.  I walked right into the stream, not thinking of my clothing, not bothering to take my shoes off.  I pulled the heavy bag up from under the stone.  It was a shopping bag, the kind you got at a department store. 

There was water in the bag and it was tied with a piece of dirty old rope.  I bent down, and it took me another minute to get it loose.  As I worked, I could feel the bodies of the kittens knocking against each other in a bloated, horrible way, stiff with rigor mortis. 

On one side, the bag said, “May’s.  Where Great Sales are Everyday.”  I was thinking that “Everyday” should be two words.  They had printed up thousands of those bags, and they were all wrong.  As I lifted the bag it came apart with a terrible, soft rip, and four of the bodies—including Harry’s kitten, the one who had loved to lick the salt off my hands—fell into the stream.  Their eyes were shut, their mouths open.  Foam, horrible pinkish foam, frothed from their mouths.  They had drowned.  They had suffered.

I stood rooted to the spot, breathing heavily, driven to absorb the horror.  I wasn’t then, and am not now, one to run from horror. I stood there, but not for long.  Just long enough for my breathing to slow a bit and for the fury to rise up through my body, all the way to my eyes. I had no doubt whatsoever about who was to blame. Then, grasping what was left of the bag, two of the kittens still inside, I began to run.

9

When I got back to the farm, out of breath, it was hauntingly quiet.  I paused there for a moment and looked around. It was the first time I had ever seen it empty. Without my family, it looked barren and shabby, like a place people had left in a hurry. A ghost town. 

I kept running.  All around me buzzed the noises of a perfect summer day. Tall Queen Anne’s lace grew by the side of the road.  Cows grazed in the distance.  The air smelled of a distant brush fire, and honeysuckle. After running nonstop for fifteen minutes, I finally reached the Grossmans. I paused just long enough to catch my breath. 

With its big, white urns and professionally-manicured lawn, the Grossman’s house looked like something a tornado had picked up in Scarsdale and set down intact.  On the left side of the property, leading to the backyard, two waiters, college boys on summer break, were passing around hors d’oeuvres.  There must have been more than fifty people on the lawn—nearly every family in a five-mile radius, dressed in their summer finery. 

I did not at first see my family, so I marched across the lawn and kept going.  The Grossman’s backyard had a huge pool with white metal tables set on a rectangular flagstone patio.   A girl that looked amazingly like Rose offered champagne on a silver tray. Then I realized that it was Rose.

I spotted my father. He was awkwardly holding a tall glass, yawning at the sky, looking bored. His camera was slung over a shoulder.  When he saw me, he smiled and waved, then reached for his camera.  Stevie paced back and forth in a far corner of the yard, holding a drink and a cigarette, lips moving in constant conversation with himself.  He looked deranged. At any other time, I would have been mortified by him.

My aunt Caroline and Uncle Lenny had gathered a small entourage around them, and Caroline was laughing and regaling everyone with some convincing fabrication. Emily and Jane were flirting with a group of tall, clean-cut boys, all dressed in blue blazers and thin maroon ties and khaki pants.  One of them must have been Rodney Grossman. 

My father took my picture before he understood what he was seeing:

I am standing in a torn dress, wet to the thighs, holding two dead kittens in half a soggy bag.  Behind me, Harry is playing a game of Frisbee with some boys.  He has good aim, but the other boys can’t catch and are running after the pin-wheeling Frisbee.  In the background, my mother is holding a glass of champagne. Her silk skirt flutters in the gentle summer breeze. 

My mother had not wanted Dad to bring his camera; she said it was unforgivably tacky.  But it was my father’s condition for going, his defense against boredom and shyness. My head turned, and I saw Drew just a few yards away. He was in a huddle with some other boys, by the edge of the pool. 

“Drew!” I called out. 

He stood up, a puzzled look on his soft, round face. “Hey, Cousin Jamie.”

With my left arm I offered the bag, and he backed away from me, frowning.  I continued to walk toward him and when his heels touched the rim of the pool, I saw my opportunity and pushed him hard in the chest with both hands.  With a cry of surprise he fell straight backward into the pool.

I heard my mother say something and knew she was heading my way.

“You crazy bitch!” he said furiously, splashing his arms frantically as he bobbed up to the surface, his blue suit ballooning around him.  “I can’t swim!”

“That’s for killing my brother’s kitten.  You can drown like it did for all I care.”

Aunt Caroline put her glass of champagne down on a small table and came running towards us just as Mr. Grossman removed his thick eyeglasses and tuxedo jacket and jumped feet-first into the pool.   He went under the water, and for a fraction of a second everything stood still.  Adult bodies were poised like wax statues around the yard.  Then Mr. Grossman shot back up.  Drew coughed and spluttered as Mr. Grossman led him in a Red Cross grip toward the shallow end.

I followed them like a hyena stalking wounded prey.

“And you can say hello to your REAL father for me.  You know, the one that stuck it in but didn’t bother to stick around?”

“Jamie!” cried my mother, now nearly upon me along with Aunt Caroline.

“I didn’t kill your stupid cats!” Drew shouted at me. He was lying on the flagstone, his navy suit shrink-wrapped around him. All the eyes of the party had rotated towards me and Drew.  Mr. Grossman was on hands and knees in his dripping tuxedo, sucking air.

I felt Aunt Caroline’s long fingernails dig through my dress as she grabbed hold of my shoulder. That’s when I dropped the bag and ran.  I ran past everyone, drinks still in their hands, mouths still filled with canapés, cigarettes poised in mid-air.

I didn’t go back to the house.  Instead, I stumbled through the fields and back toward the stream.  I leapt across it and scrambled up the other side.  My new dress was now completely mud-spattered and torn.  In another moment, I was in the woods, and I relaxed a little as the farm disappeared from view and the trees closed around me protectively. As I stopped to catch my breath, I could feel my heart banging away against my ribs. 

Finding myself suddenly alone, I thought I heard a rustling noise.  But there was nothing there.  Lots of things lived in these woods.  Raccoons, muskrats, and a hundred species of birds.  Once, my father told me, he’d seen a bald eagle on top of one of the tall firs.  When my heart stopped hammering, I walked in the direction of the tree house.

Crying had turned to sniffling.  A calm settled into me as the reality of my situation became clearer.  My plan had been to hang out for a while until everyone got control of their tempers.  I dreamed of Aunt Caroline and Uncle Lenny and Drew being gone by the time I returned. I knew that my mother would lecture me on how I’d ruined an event that many people had been looking forward to all summer.  My father, on the other hand, would probably give me the Silent Treatment, which was far worse.  It was reserved for those times I’d done something so despicable that he felt it beneath his dignity to even speak to me.  I always knew my father’s outrage was sincere, too, which is what made it so unbearable.  I don’t think Harry ever did anything bad enough to deserve our father’s silence the way I did.

In a moment, the tree house came into view.  At first, it looked much as I’d left it the summer before. Still standing was the staircase that wound around the big trunk of the oak tree, steel supports hidden behind wide wood planks, and the house itself, poised in the crotch of two giant branches. 

I approached the stairs but stopped when I saw a trail of fresh footprints on them. 

“Hello?”

There was no answer.  It didn’t feel as if anyone was there, but clearly someone had been there.  Working my way slowly up the stairs, I found myself inside the house.  Inside my tree house there was a sleeping bag, a plate with the remains of a meal on it, a bright red bandana and, snaking along the sleeping bag, a big fat hunk of metal chain.