Wilde Lake: A Novel Read online

  “Make the numbers live,” she says to Penelope, “and they’ll make more sense.”

  “Do they have to be people? Because three makes me think of a bear and eight is a snowman.”

  “They can be whatever you want them to be,” she says, savoring the moment.

  Her children asleep, her father shut up in his study, Lu goes to AJ’s room on the third floor. The linens have been updated, but it is otherwise as he left it, even as the rest of the house has been transformed around it. The transformation continues, in fact, with no end in sight. Her father seems to have become compulsive about renovation the way some women become addicted to plastic surgery. Since Lu’s return, he has remade almost every square foot of this old house and built an addition, essentially a new wing, which includes rooms for the twins and Lu. (Her childhood bedroom, which adjoins her father’s suite, is now the study to which he retreats at night, sequestering himself from all the noise that accompanies bathtime and bedtime.) But their father wants AJ to decide how his room should be redone, and AJ keeps putting him off. Lu wonders if it’s the very fervency of her father’s redecorating that keeps AJ from making any decisions. AJ has sworn off material things. Sort of, kind of. But this time capsule of a room is to Lu’s advantage tonight. She quickly finds AJ’s high school yearbook, the Glass Hour, on the shelf above his desk, a modular unit that Lu envied terribly as a kid. She envies it now—this kind of midcentury modern design is back in style and she yearns for a more modern-looking house, but her father continues to decorate in the traditional style that her mother preferred. Stout, dark wood, rich, soft fabrics that run to hunter green and burgundy.

  Lu flips through the yearbook. As a ten-year-old left behind after her brother’s high school graduation, she used to study this book as if it were a sacred text, wondering if she would have as glorious a high school career as her brother. (She did not, although she finally cracked the code of social life and enjoyed the last two years.) There must be at least a dozen photographs of AJ throughout the yearbook. and it is filled with affectionate scrawls of inside jokes from dozens of his classmates. “Ach du lieber, Mrs. Bitterman!” “Still bummed we never made RP room.” “AJ Brant for President 2000.” How typical that one of AJ’s friends would calculate the first year that he could legally run for president.

  But the only place she can find Rudy Drysdale is on the masthead, one of four staff photographers. And in the yearbook staff’s group photo, he is listed as absent. He was at least a year behind AJ, maybe two. Still, he almost certainly took some of these photos of AJ—in his soccer uniform, his leg bent at a seemingly impossible angle; as Sancho Panza, looking up worshipfully at Davey’s Don Quixote; surrounded by his group in a candid photo in the cafeteria. Were they a clique? Was that word even used at the time?

  Penelope and Justin are only eight, and Lu already has seen so many dynamics she thought wouldn’t happen for years—mean girls, bullies, this terrible anxiety about fitting in. And there is so much concern about autism these days. Until the twins turned five or so, the pediatrician was forever asking Lu about laughter and eye contact and whether the twins would tolerate being touched. “Their father died when they were three,” Lu said time and again. “They come by their seriousness and anxiety pretty honestly.”

  She bet her father was never asked these same questions about Lu, although her circumstances were similar. Adele Brant had died in childbirth. Well, not in. She gave birth. She died a week later. As a child, Lu clung to the lie—insisted on the lie—that her mother’s heart condition had not been affected by this clearly unplanned pregnancy. Lu was born, a week later her mother died. No connection, no cause and effect, just a series of discrete events. Yep, sure, that makes sense. Even as all the other myths of childhood—Santa, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny—fell away, the Brant family maintained this well-intentioned fiction. Her father even insisted that he was the one to blame for his wife’s death. Not because Adele Brant got pregnant against her doctor’s advice, but because her husband made her move to Columbia, a place to which she could not be reconciled, no matter how hard her husband tried.

  And he tried so hard, starting with this very house. If Lu says nothing as the bills come in—Italian tiles, bathtubs that cost as much as small cars, custom rugs, top-of-the-line appliances for the kitchen where Teensy continues to make most of their meals—it’s because she realizes her father is trying to make good on a forty-five-year-old promise. He lured his young wife to Columbia, saying he would do anything to make her happy here. He failed. With Lu and the twins, he has a second chance to make someone happy in this house.

  But is he happy? Was he ever happy? she wonders. Then she feels guilty, as grown children often do, for how seldom they have bothered to consider a parent’s happiness.

  THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

  My January second birthdate seemed tragic when I was young, the cornerstone of all my social failures. If my birthday fell on a school day, it was always the first day back from the holiday, the least happy day of the year. And if it were a Saturday or Sunday, it was still an awkward time. People have no energy for celebrations after January first. Besides, my father didn’t know how to throw a party for a girl. With AJ, who had an April birthday, he told him to invite all the boys in his class, and that was that. They played in the yard for three hours, Teensy served a cake, then threw everyone out.

  When my father told me I should invite all the girls in my class over for an indoor party for my seventh birthday, I saw the pitfalls. There would be no theme, no organization. If there were games, they would be too babyish. The favors would be found wanting. No, there were just too many ways to fail.

  “I don’t like all the girls,” I said. “Some of them are mean to me.” That wasn’t exactly true. All the girls were mean to me. And most of the boys.

  “The Brants don’t believe in leaving people out. All or nothing.”

  “You’re leaving the boys out,” I said.

  “There are twenty-six children in your class,” he said. “That is simply too much. But if you don’t want to include all the girls, you can have a celebration with AJ and me. You’ll have your favorite cake. You can choose an activity. Movie, bowling, ice-skating. And then you can invite your best friend. But if you want to have a party, you must include everyone.”

  I wondered if my father had noticed that I was seldom invited to parties, that other parents did not observe the Brant standard. He certainly should have been aware that I had no best friend, but then—he did not arrive home until suppertime and I was too proud to speak of my troubles to Teensy or AJ. It made me feel better in a way that my father had no inkling I was friendless. I told him I could not choose just one friend—true enough—and selected ice-skating as my activity. There was a rink on the east side of Columbia and I was good at ice-skating, thanks to AJ’s tutelage, and I had my own skates, which provided a tiny bit of cachet. And at a rink, if one moved quickly enough, it was possible to disguise the fact that one was going around and around in circles all alone.

  Better still, my father accompanied us and even laced himself into a pair of rental skates, the best gift he could have given me. Our father was not one for playing with us unless it was something brainy. He did not throw a football with AJ or swim with us at the community pool. Other fathers were rare there, too, but when they showed up, they picked up their children and launched them through the air, happy squealing rockets. We sometimes wondered if our father avoided activities because he was klutzy or inept. But when he did do something, he did it well. Still, I doubt he would have put on rented ice skates if it were not for the influence of our new neighbor, Miss Maude.

  We had thought she was old when she moved into the house closest to ours, just a few weeks before Halloween. Really old, older-than-our-father old. She had silver hair, a lot of it, amplified by a wild curly perm. She never seemed to smile. But she wasn’t quite thirty and she came by her sad expression honestly. She was a widow. Her husband had been in Viet
nam. “That’s probably why her hair turned white,” Noel said to AJ. “A bad shock really can do that.”

  “Oh, that’s just nonsense,” AJ said.

  They were in AJ’s room, watching Miss Maude through one of the little dormer windows that ringed the top floor, two to a side. I was in the adjoining room, the one that Teensy used when she slept over, eavesdropping. Two sets of spies. I didn’t understand the attraction of watching Maude Lennox preparing her yard and garden for the coming winter. The day was Indian summer hot, but a freeze was forecast for the next week. I glanced out the dormer window in Teensy’s room—from the outside, these windows looked like two eyebrows, arched in surprise. Miss Maude was crouching over a rosebush. She wore cherry-red shorts and a gingham halter, her snaky silver hair tamed by a triangle of red bandanna.

  Music floated in the air, from AJ’s record player. It was a song he liked a lot, something about two people sitting on a hill. The girl apparently had moonlight in her eyes, which sounded interesting to me, like maybe she had moonbeams that shot out like lasers. Everything was ours, everything was ours. I imagined a king and a queen, surveying their kingdom, subduing miscreants with lasers.

  “I can see her bending over a hot stove,” Noel said. “Trouble is, I can’t see the stove. Groucho Marx, Duck Soup.”

  “Shut up,” AJ hissed.

  “She can’t hear us, not with the music blasting. And from this angle, she can’t see us. Although it’s not her angles that interest you, I guess.”

  “Noel.” A slamming sound. The window shutting? The volume on the record player was lowered, because if it were too loud, Teensy might storm upstairs. Whatever they were doing, they didn’t want anyone in there. Not Teensy, not me. A smell of smoke, sweet and strange. The sound of the window creaking open.

  “Do you think they do it?” That was Noel.

  “Who?”

  “Kim and Carson.”

  “Probably. I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  “He says they do.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Didn’t you ask Kim to homecoming?”

  “No.”

  “You said you were going to.”

  “I said that if I wanted to go to a dance, she’d be okay. Obviously, she’s going with Carson.”

  “I don’t think they do it. They’re all over each other at school. Between classes—it’s like he was going off to war instead of French II. Heh, French II. Based on what I’ve seen, Kim could teach AP French. She goes for it. Right there in the hall.”

  “Noel, I don’t want to talk about Kim and Carson.”

  The window closed again.

  “What does your dad think?”

  Why, I wondered, would my father care about these people named Kim and Carson, and whether they’re going to the dance together?

  “I told you—he doesn’t want me to smoke, but he all but said that if I do smoke, do it at home when he’s not here. I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s what he was saying, between the lines. Can you imagine if Andrew Brant’s son got busted for grass?”

  I sat there, trying to figure out how one smoked grass. I assumed that Noel and AJ were making fake cigarettes out of grass clippings. Maybe they were watching Miss Maude in hopes of stealing some grass from her yard. Smoking was bad. Smoking killed you. I had nagged my father until he gave up his pipe and now it sounded as if I was going to have to start in on my brother.

  “We’re not stoners,” Noel said. “We can take it or leave it.”

  My six-year-old brain turned that over, too. Did Noel mean they wouldn’t throw rocks at someone? Were they going to throw rocks at Miss Maude? Or was he talking about stonemen, like the ones in the B.C. comic?

  “We’re not really anything,” Noel continued. “We’re sort of a group unto ourselves. We do the theater stuff and singing, we dominate the productions, but we’re not the theater group. That’s, you know, Sarah and that boy Mark, the ones who are always drawing attention to themselves, breaking into musical numbers in the hall. We’re athletes, but we’re not jocks, not even Bash or Lynne. I play tennis and you’ll probably make JV for both basketball and baseball this year. You might even be varsity for baseball, as a freshman. We get good grades.”

  “You have to be pretty lame not to get good grades at a school where there’s no failure and they let you retake tests.”

  “Less and less,” Noel said. “Some of the classes are like normal classes anywhere now. Anyway, we’re, like, I don’t know—the Bloomsbury Group of Wilde Lake High School. I’m going to start calling you Leonard.”

  “Does that make you Virginia?”

  They laughed very hard at this. I guessed Leonard and Virginia were really weird. Then, Noel again: “Come away from the window, you pervert, Lawdy, Miss Maude-y. If I were your dad, I’d be over there with, I don’t know, what does the Welcome Wagon actually bring? Is there still a Welcome Wagon?”

  “I think that’s in The Music Man,” AJ said. “I hope they put that on when we’re juniors or seniors. I want to play Harold Hill.”

  “No, that’s the Wells Fargo wagon, you doofus.”

  The music stopped and it was evident that AJ was changing records. He put the Music Man soundtrack on his stereo, and the two of them sang along to the train rhythms of the opening song. As the record continued, they laughed hysterically at things that didn’t seem that funny to me. I could tell from the timbre of their voices that they were lying on the wooden floor, singing to the ceiling. I lay down on the floor in the spare room, wondering what made the ceiling so hilarious. It was plaster, in need of repair, and if you squinted hard enough, you could find shapes in the stains and cracks. But unlike clouds, they were always the same shapes, and I had identified them long ago. A rabbit. A rose. A cow head. Trouble, AJ sang, Trouble. And Noel sang back: Right here in Wilde Lake. The kids in their—what? For years I thought it was their “double backers,” not that I knew what a double backer was, but it made as much sense as knickerbockers would have. Then again, it was only this year, listening to Sirius radio in my car, that I found out that I had gone my entire life thinking that the nice man who sang “More I Cannot Wish You,” was not, in fact, hoping that the young woman found a man with the “licorice tooth.”

  A week or two later, our father paid his respects to our new neighbor, taking her a bottle of wine, the kind that had straw on the bottom and, once empty, could be used as a candleholder. He was the one who reported back that she was only thirty, despite the shock of white hair, and really quite friendly, if particular about her lawn and plantings. She was originally from South Carolina, but her husband had been assigned to Fort Meade before he was sent to Vietnam and she came to like Maryland. She wasn’t sure why she had bought a three-bedroom house in a suburb. Maybe, she told my father, it was because she still kept thinking she was going to have a family.

  My father thought it a kindness to Miss Maude to send me over there on Fridays to keep her company, but he insisted to her that she was doing him a favor, that if she looked after me for a couple of hours, Teensy could leave early and avoid the rush-hour traffic. (“My husband wants me home by five on Fridays” was one of her pronouncements.”) Miss Maude began stocking her refrigerator and pantry with my favorite treats. She introduced me to the world of soap operas. I seldom got to her house before The Edge of Night and I saw only the Friday episodes, but it wasn’t that hard to follow. Soap operas moved slowly then, and a lot of the best stuff happened on Fridays. She would walk me home when she saw my father’s car in the drive and, often as not, he invited her to share our standing Friday night dinner of Colombo’s pizza, which he picked up on the way home. But they never spent any time alone and they certainly never had dates. When we all went ice-skating for my birthday, Miss Maude sat in the stands, stamping her feet and breathing smoke. “I grew up in the South,” she said when I asked her to join us. “I never learned to skate. It’s a hard thing to pick up when you’re older, although your father did, at college. He was on the hoc
key team.”

  “He never was,” I said, sure that I knew everything about him. But when I asked my father, he agreed that he had played hockey in college, although on an intramural team, not the official one. And he had learned to skate in boarding school, Deerfield. Miss Maude had gotten that part of the story wrong. That made me feel better for some reason.

  I remember the winter that followed my seventh birthday as a particularly bitter one. (When it comes to weather, I have not bothered to check if my memory is right. I can’t check everything.) Single-digit temperatures, icicles like daggers, yet relatively little snow. For just the second time in my life, Wilde Lake was almost solid enough to walk across, although only the boldest boys risked that. The cold air leaked into our house from every window and faultily hung door. We burned fires in all the fireplaces, even at night, violating our father’s long-standing rule about not leaving fires untended.

  Yet it wasn’t our old house, with fireplaces going around the clock, that went up in flames. It was Miss Maude’s.