While we are waiting in line for our ice cream, my mother brings up the subject of Sam. “So,” she says to me. “What do you think? Really.”
I have to say, I have been expecting this. They haven’t argued all day. In fact, most of the times I have seen my mother this morning, she has been in the company of Sam, strolling through the south corner of the orchard, or snapping beans with him on the porch as the sun beats down, or just talking. I’ve wondered what they are saying-Sam having no experience in speech disorders, and my mother knowing next to nothing about agriculture. I figure they talk about Uncle Joley, their common ground. Once or twice, I’ve pretended they are talking about me.
“I don’t know him really well,” I say. “He seems nice enough.”
My mother steps in front of my line of vision so that all I can see is her. “Nice enough for what?”
What does she expect me to say? She stares so hard that I know she demands a better answer, a right answer, and I haven’t any idea what that could be. “If you mean, Should I screw him, then, if you want to, yes.”
“Rebecca!” My mother says it so loudly that the woman in front of us, Hadley, Joley and Sam himself all turn around. She smiles, and waves them all away. Then she says more quietly, “I don’t know what has gotten into you here. Sometimes I think you aren’t the same kid I brought out East.”
I’m not, I want to say, I’m crazy in love. But you don’t tell your mother that, especially when she’s all of a sudden best friends with a different guy who happens to be the same age as the guy you love. My mother turns to Uncle Joley. “She wants a small chocolate. I’ll have a javaberry. Can you order, we’re going to walk a ways.”
I pull my arm away from her grasp. “I don’t want chocolate,” I tell my uncle, although that was what I had planned to order. “She doesn’t know what I want.” I shook a look at my mother. “ Creamsicle sherbert.”
“Creamsicle? You hate creamsicle. You told me last year it reminds you of St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin.”
“Creamsicle,” I repeat. “That’s what I want.” To avoid a scene, I walk with my mother. When we leave, Hadley and Sam are pointing at an all-terrain bicycle.
“What is it?” I say, figuring if I get it out into the open then this will all be over. I know it is about Hadley, and how much time I have been spending with him. For all I know, maybe she found out about us in the barn.
I have worked this all out in my mind, the product of several nights that I have lain awake missing the sounds of California. You don’t hear passing cars, or Big Wheels on the sidewalk, or the surf from miles away. Instead there are cicadas (peepers, Hadley says), and the wind in the branches and blossoms and the bleating of sheep. I swear you can hear headlights here. I cannot see the drive from my bedroom; at least three times I have run to the window at the end of the upper hall to survey the cars below-count them, and make sure my father hasn’t come yet. The only thing I can imagine worse than confronting my mother about Hadley is confronting my father about this entire trip.
This is what I am going to say to my mother: I know you think that I am young. But I was old enough to come here with you. And I was old enough to know what was going on between you and Daddy, and what was better for us in the long run. So don’t tell me I don’t know what I am doing. After all, you weren’t any older than I am when you began to date Daddy.
What my mother says is: “I know you think I’m betraying your father.”
I stare up at her in amazement. This isn’t about me at all. She hasn’t even noticed me and Hadley.
“I know that I am still married to him. Don’t you think every time I see you in the morning I think about what I’ve left behind in California? A whole life, Rebecca, I left my whole life. I left a man who, at least in some ways, depends on me. And that’s why sometimes I wonder what I’m doing out here, in this godforsaken farm zone-”She waves her arm in the air, “-with this-”
When her voice falls off, I interrupt her. “This what?”
“This absolutely incredible man,” she says.
An absolutely incredible man?
My mother stops walking. “You’re pissed off at me.”
“No I’m not.”
“I can tell.”
“I’m not. Really.”
“You don’t have to lie . . .”
“Mom,” I say, louder. “I’m not lying.” Am I? I face her and put my hands on my hips. I think, who is the child here? “So what’s been going on between you and Sam, anyway?”
My mother turns beet red. Beet red, on my own mother! “Nothing,” she admits. “But I’ve been having some crazy thoughts. It’s nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
My own mother. Who would have thought. “I didn’t think you two got along.”
“Well, neither did I,” she says. “But I guess compatibility isn’t the issue.” She stares in the direction of Hadley and Sam, who are waiting with Uncle Joley at the front of the ice cream line. This place is different from the one we went to yesterday, back when my mother and Sam didn’t like each other. This place makes its own ice cream. It has only seven flavors and Sam says it’s always busy. “We should head back,” my mother says, without any real determination.
When we first got here, Sam wanted nothing to do with my mother. After the whole sheep-shearing fiasco, which was a lousy first impression, he’d told Hadley my mother was some uptown bitch with a lot to learn about real life. And when Hadley told me, and I’d told my mother, she’d snorted and said that an apple farm in East Jesus wasn’t real life.
And then last night they just started hanging around together. When I first saw it I couldn’t believe it; I thought that my mother found Sam to be such a hick, she had to see it for herself. In truth, I didn’t pay much attention. I had been spending time with Hadley- we’d hit it off immediately, and then after last night, well, who knew what would come of this. Hadley, who was so fascinating. He could do things that I had never seen anyone do: make seedlings grow, plane a rough tree into a board, build things that would last forever. He was absolutely incredible.
Absolutely incredible. All this time, whether she knows it or not, my mother has been falling in love.
“I think you’ve got the hots for Sam,” I say, testing the idea out loud.
“Oh, please. I’m a married lady, remember?”
I stare at her. “ Do you remember?” I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. I could barely conjure a picture of my father’s face, and I had less of a reason to want to be away from him. When I thought about him really hard, I could see his eyes-wide, blue, unbelievably tired. His eyes, and the lines around his mouth (although not his mouth itself) and the bend of his knuckles holding a pen. That’s it, the memory of fifteen years.
“Of course I remember,” my mother says, annoyed. “I’ve been married to your father for fifteen years. Aren’t you supposed to love the person you marry?”
“You tell me.”
This stops my mother dead in her tracks. “Yes, you are supposed to.” She says the words slowly. She seems to be trying to convince herself. “Sam is just a friend.” She waves her hand in front of us, as if she’s clearing away everything else she’s said. “My friend,” she repeats. Then she looks at me with such confusion I think she’s forgotten that she has been speaking to me all along. “I just wanted you to know that’s where things stand.”
“Well, I appreciate that,” I say, and I try not to laugh. I don’t imagine that’s what she wants to hear. “Our ice cream is going to melt.” She grabs my hand to take me back to the counter. I shake her away, because Hadley is watching. “Please, Mom. I’m not three.”
I walk over to Hadley and offer him some of my cone. He smiles and pulls me to sit on his lap while he winds his tongue along the ridges made by the soft ice cream machine. We end up trading our cones, because after all I do not like creamsicle.
My mother is standing almost diagonally across from us. She is feeding Sam her cone while Sam is feeding her his cone. Sam misjudges the distance and dots a little vanilla on my mother’s nose. She giggles and mashes her cone onto Sam’s chin. Watching them, you have to smile. She’s acting like a kid, I think. She’s acting like me.
Uncle Joley, Hadley and I ride in the back of the red pickup on our way to Pickerel Pond. It’s the place where Sam learned how to swim when he was a kid, a few miles away from the orchard. In the fifties, Sam yells from the cab of the truck, there was only this one pond. It’s the one we’ll see with lily pads that’s still stocked with fish. But then the residents in the area chipped in and they dug a huge hole beside it, added sand for the bottom, and built swimming docks. For a summer fee, your whole family could come and swim whenever.
It is a perfect Sunday. The sun has scalded the metal of the flatbed and all three of us are sitting on our T-shirts. There isn’t much of a wind, but there seems to be a breeze when you find yourself thinking about it. The air smells like luck. “I think you’ll like this place,” Hadley says over the roar of tires. “No undertow.”
Maybe my mother will even swim. I’ve always assumed that it’s the current of the ocean that keeps her from venturing into the water. In fact, she has been very optimistic about coming here for a picnic. She packed the lunch herself and keeps talking about how nice it will be to cool off.
The sun beats on the crown of my head. I hold my palm up against it for a minute of shade. “It’s like fire,” I tell Hadley, and I make him touch it too.
Uncle Joley, who has brought a ukulele, is trying to play the beginning bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” He has almost got the notes right, but it sounds like sick luau music. To me it is not soothing, but it lulls Hadley to sleep. His head rests in my lap. The entire trip, Uncle Joley strums unlikely songs: “Happy Birthday,” the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, “Blue Velvet,” “Twist and Shout.”
Sam pulls into what looks like a thicket, but it opens up to a dirt path and then becomes a road. At the end is a parking lot with a metal gate and rusted hinges. “They tried to lock up here at night for a few years,” Sam yells to us. “But kids kept jumping the fence to party on the beach. When they left the gates open at night, all the kids stopped coming here.”
Hadley, who has woken up, says, “That’s ‘cause it wasn’t fun anymore. You only want to make trouble at a place that’s off limits.”
Sam leans his head out his window and tries to look at Hadley. “You used to come here?” He laughs. “Figures.”
Sam and my mother carry the cooler to the pond, and I take the towels, the paddle games and the yellow kickball. Uncle Joley brings his ukulele. At a green post, Sam signs his name on a clipboard.
The pond is much larger than I had envisioned. It is almost perfectly square, but then again it was man-made. Adjacent to the swimming pond is the real pond, Pickerel Pond, and it is so large that I cannot see one of its edges. There are two Sunfishes, a muddy paddle-boat and a metal rowboat on the shore of the big pond, all labeled PPA, Pickerel Pond Association.
Sam comes up behind me. “You can take out the boats if no one else is using them.” He turns to my mother, pointing out the sights that are missing at this swimming pond, twenty years after its creation. “There used to be a diving board off that dock. And over here? Second Dock here didn’t always connect to the shore. If you wanted to get to it you had to swim to it. And when you’re a little kid, you have to take a swimming test each summer to be allowed to swim beyond the buoys.”
Hadley and Uncle Joley, who apparently have this all planned, take the towels and the ball from my arms. The grab me, kicking and screaming, and toss me on the count of three off First Dock. Somewhere, a fat lifeguard yells at us. No throwing. Not off that dock.
Hadley jumps in after me and grabs my ankle. He pulls me under. The water is murky, colored with some blue dye, and colder in some spots than others. I tread water, trying to find a warm place where Hadley will not try to drown me again.
Uncle Joley, who has been speaking with the lifeguard, does a swan-dive into the pond. He surfaces, already talking. “The reason this place looks like a giant Tid-E-Bowl is because of chemicals. They put the blue in to cloud the water so algae doesn’t grow as easily.”
“Algae,” I say, “yuck.” I am sure there is algae or something worse at the beaches of San Diego, but there you rest assured it keeps going out with the tide.
My mother keeps herself busy by spreading our towels on the small stretch of beach. It’s funny, it isn’t a beach at all. It’s more like a couple of bulldozer dumps of sand, raked nicely. These people, I think. We could teach them a thing or two.
My mother creates a colony of towels. She borders the striped with the pink one, the Les Miserables promo towel with the Ralph Lauren. At the edge of all four of these she lays a big plaid blanket. I wonder who will get to lie there. She pays no attention at all to the position of the sun. “Hey,” she calls to Sam, but he is out of her range.
In fact, at the exact moment she calls, Sam’s body hits the water in a double somersault. For someone without the aid of a diving board he has an awfully good amount of height and spring. All the rest of us, already in the water, clap. Sam pulls himself onto Second Dock and takes a bow.
His body, unlike Hadley’s, is compact. He has dark hair on his chest that grows in the shape of a heart. The hair on his legs, surprisingly, isn’t as coarse. Sam has broad shoulders and a small waist, strong arms (all that lifting) and muscular thighs. I remember hearing something at the dinner table about him having trouble buying jeans-the legs always too tight, the waist too big, or something like that.
“Come on,” Hadley says, swimming up behind me. “Let’s race.” He begins to do a vigorous crawl across the pond. He almost collides with Uncle Joley, who is swimming a lazy backstroke and chanting something in another language. Swimming, I remember, is a sort of religious thing for Uncle Joley. My mother says she has no idea where he got that from.
Hadley and I tie on the other side of the pond. “It’s because you’ve got ten years on me.”
“Give me a break,” I laugh. “You just want an excuse.”
“Oh, do I?” he says, pulling my hair and holding me under the water. I open my eyes, and massage his legs. When he lets me go, I swim between them, running my fingers along the inside. “That’s cheating,” he says.
We move to the shallow end, where a bunch of kids are on the shore, spooning sloppy sand into pails. Hadley and I sit on the bottom of the pond, letting the water play at our wrists. “I used to do that all the time. Sand castles.”
“You grew up on a beach. You must have gotten pretty good,” he says.
“I hated it. One minute you’ve got the pride of two hours’ work; the next minute a wave knocks it all down.”
“So you decided not to go to the beach. Toddler boycott?”
I turn to him, shocked. “How’d you know? I refused to go. I’d throw tantrums every weekend as my parents loaded up the car with floats and towels and coolers.”
Hadley laughs. “Lucky guess. You must have been a ballsy little-kid.”
“Must have been? Everyone tells me I still am.”
“You’re ballsy all right,” Hadley says. “But you’re no kid. You’ve got more sense in your head than almost anyone I know, and you sure as hell don’t act like I did when I was fifteen.”
“Back when there were dinosaurs.”
“Yeah,” Hadley grins. “Back when there were dinosaurs.”
I would have loved to see Hadley when he was my age. I pretend to bury a pebble. “How did you act?” I ask.
“I cursed a lot and took up smoking. Sam and me were peepingtoms in the girls’ locker room in gym,” Hadley says. “I wasn’t quite as focused as you.”
Focused. In Hadley’s eyes there is a perfect, round reflection of the sun. “I guess I’m pretty focused.”
Hadley and I play with the paddle game in the shallow end of the pond and try to catch bullfrogs in our hands. We dig flat stones from the sandy bottom with our toes and see who can skim them further. Sometimes, we just stretch out on the slick wet wood of First Dock, and, holding hands, we sleep. From time to time I catch my mother’s eye. I do not know if she is looking at us in particular, or if it is just chance. She speaks to Sam at one point when he comes out of the pond to rest. Sam looks in our direction, and shrugs.
At lunch my mother completely forgets to serve Hadley and pretends that it is an accident. Then, she makes a big deal about giving him a beer, and not giving one to me. “Some of us,” she says, staring at me, “are still too young to drink.”
Hadley gives me half of his anyway when my mother gets up to go to the bathroom. Uncle Joley tells me to ignore her when she gets like this.
After lunch, my mother insists on cleaning up the picnic. She double-bags the garbage and rearranges the leftovers. She refolds used napkins. She shakes the towels off to get rid of crumbs. Sam, who has been waiting for her, jumps into the pond and swims the perimeter twice while she is doing all this. Apparently she said she would go in after lunch.
Finally Sam comes over to the oasis she’s created. She is standingin front of it trying to find something else to do. Uncle Joley, Hadley and I kneel in the shallow end, waiting to see what will happen. Hadley has his hands spread across my rib cage, pressing me back against the floating pockets of his bathing suit.
Sam picks my mother up in his arms and begins to carry her towards the shallow end. She is still wearing her shorts.
“No,” she says, laughing at first. She kicks her heels, and people-around the pond smile, thinking this is some kind of joke. I lean against Hadley and wonder when she is going to snap.
“Sam,” she says, more insistent. They have passed the edge of Second Dock; they are almost at the edge of the water. “I can’t.”
Sam stops for a moment, serious. “Can you swim?”
“Well, no,” my mother says. Big mistake.
Sam’s feet hit the water and my mother begins to shout. “No, Sam! No!”
“Good for him,” Uncle Joley says, to no one in particular.
Sam begins to wade deeper. The water hits my mother’s shorts, spreading like a stain. She stops kicking when she realizes it only makes her more wet. At one point I think she has almost resigned herself to what is going to happen. Sam, a man with a mission, continues to walk into the water.
“Don’t do this to me,” she whispers to Sam, but we can all make out the words.
“Don’t worry,” Sam says, and my mother clutches her arms tighter around him. He stares directly at her, like he has blocked out the rest of the watching world. “If you don’t want to go- really don’t want to go-then I’ll take you back. Now. Just say the word.”
My mother looks terrified. I am starting to feel sorry for her.
“I’ll be with you,” Sam says. “I’m not going to let anything happen.”
She closes her eyes. “Go ahead. Maybe this is what I need after all.”
With measured steps, Sam inches farther into the water until it reaches my mother’s chin. Then, telling her to focus on his eyes, right here -he says- my eyes -he ducks under the surface.
It seems like a very long time. Everyone on the shore of the pond is watching. Several industrious kids with scuba masks swim out closer and peek underwater to see what is going on. Then my mother and Sam burst out of the water in unison, gasping for air. “Oh!” my mother cries. “It’s so wonderful!” Her eyelashes blink back water, and her arms make wide circles in front of her, with ripples that reach us. Sam is triumphant. He winks at Uncle Joley and stays beside her, a personal lifeguard, fulfilling his promise to my mother. Nothing is going to happen, after all, as long as he is there. Well it’s about time, I think. Hadley and I, bored by all the theatrics, check into taking a canoe out onto the larger pond. As we go, my mother is doing the crawl.
At one point my mother and I are the only two awake. We lie on the towels on our backs and try to find pictures in the clouds. I see a llama and a paper clip. She sees a kerosene lamp and a kangaroo. We both look for a chameleon, but there is none to be found.
“About Hadley,” my mother says, “I’ve been thinking.”
I feel my shoulders tense. “We have a lot of fun together.”
“I’ve noticed. Sam says Hadley likes you a lot.”
I lean on one elbow. “He said that?”
“In not so many words. He said he’s a very responsible person.” She picks grass absentmindedly with her left hand.
“Well he is. He takes care of just about everything on the farm that Sam doesn’t. He’s his right-hand man.”
“Man,” my mother says. “Exactly. You’re a kid.”
“I’m fifteen,” I remind her. “I’m not a kid.”
“You’re a kid.”
“How old were you when you started to go out with Daddy?”
My mother rolls onto her stomach and pushes her chin into the sand. I can barely understand her. I think she says, “It was different then.”
“It’s not different. You can’t just keep yourself from falling for a person. You can’t turn off your emotions like a faucet.”
“Oh, you’re an expert?”
I think about saying, Neither are you, but decide against it.
“You can’t keep yourself from falling in love,” she says, “but you can steer yourself away from the wrong people. That’s all I’m trying to say. I’m just warning you before it’s too late.”
I roll away from her. Doesn’t she know it’s too late already?
Sam, awake, sits up between us. To keep up a conversation we’d have to talk across him. My mother, probably against her better judgment, gives me a look. We’ll continue this later, she is saying.
They decide to go fishing in the metal rowboat, and leave me to watch over Uncle Joley, Hadley and the cooler. I take out a nectarine and eat it slowly. The juice drips down my neck and dries sticky.
My mother doesn’t know what she is talking about. I don’t believe I have a thing for “older men.” I think I have a thing for Hadley. I reach down and swat a fly from his ear. He has three birthmarks on his lobe, three I hadn’t noticed before. I count them, twice, fascinated. When I am with him, I don’t know who I am. I don’t know and I don’t care; it must be someone wonderful because he seems to be having such a good time. And he holds me the way I used to hold china dolls as a child. They were so beautiful, their painted faces, that I only let myself take them off the shelves in my bedroom for minutes at a time.
Uncle Joley doesn’t snore, but he breathes heavily when he sleeps. It drives me crazy. It’s a raspy noise that comes in currents. You get into a rhythm listening to him, and then all of a sudden he alters the pattern, and you find yourself hanging, waiting for him to complete what he’s started. After about three minutes of listening to this I stand and stretch. I walk around the pond, dipping my toes in the water and writing my initials in the sand. H.S. + R.J. I realize there won’t be any tide to wash this away.
On the far end of the pond are a thatch of reeds and cattails. They are wheat-yellow and as high as I am. The area is off-limits, a swamp. When the lifeguard isn’t looking I step behind the first row. Once I do this, I am hidden. I take a last look at Hadley; I sift through the reeds with my arms.
The ground is a sponge that closes up around my ankles. I keep walking. I want to know where I will end up. Somewhere, there must be water.
The cry of a cormorant tells me I have reached the edge. I can’t actually see a shore; I have to part the thickest growth here with my hands. I have come to a part of Pickerel Pond that I couldn’t see from the swimming area. It is an inlet shaded by willow trees. In the middle is a rowboat, my mother and Sam.
My mother has just caught a fish, I have no idea what kind it is. Its spine is a series of spikes that grow shorter and shorter; the hook seems to be caught in its cheek. My mother holds the fishing line while Sam smoothes the spikes of the fish and gently removes the hook. As he does this I hear a faint pluck. He holds the fish into the water and they both watch it swim away at an amazing pace. I myself did not know fish could move that quickly. When I look up at my mother and Sam, they seem quite pleased with themselves.
Sam has propped the oars on my mother’s seat. She has her hands on the gunwale of the rowboat and is leaning back slightly. Sam, balancing, comes forward and catches his arms around her waist. When she sits up she doesn’t look startled. She leans forward and kisses him.
I feel my heart beating faster and I think about leaving, but they will hear me then. I consciously try to think of my father, expecting him to jump to mind. But all I can remember is my own reaction, last Mother’s Day, when my father cooked breakfast in bed for her. He woke me up to ask about my mother’s favorite type of eggs and I looked at him as if he were crazy. He was married to her, after all. Didn’t he know she doesn’t eat eggs?
Sam cups his hand around my mother’s right breast and kisses her neck. He says something to her I cannot hear. His thumb keeps rubbing and like magic I see her nipple appear. My mother tightens her grip on the edge of the boat. She opens her eyes to look at him. As the boat turns in the wind I see Sam. His eyes-well, they look like they are growing deeper. I can’t describe it any better than that. He kisses her again, and from this new angle I see her mouth meet his, her tongue meet his.
They move so slowly. I do not know if this is something that has to do with the balance of the rowboat, or with what is happening. My head is pounding now and I don’t know why. I cannot decide if I should be angry at her. I cannot decide if I should try to leave. All I know for sure is that I have never seen my mother like this. It crosses my mind: maybe this is not my mother; check again.
I turn around and run as fast as I can through the swamp. I trip across the chained “KEEP OUT” sign and cut my thigh. Ignoring the lifeguard’s whistle I dive into that cool, anonymous pond. I open my eyes as wide as I can. I imagine water rushing into the back of my head. When I reach the other side I hide under the dock until I am ready. Then I throw myself down on my towel, beside Hadley, as if I really do not care at all.