It was no big surprise to me that Regina had not come down from the house for the arrival of the guests. Even for the new, friendlier Regina, this would have been too much. Forrest was the life of the party naturally, admiring the women’s outfits, serving drinks, making jokes about his abysmal failure to complete the long-awaited triathlon, and slapping the backs of those who had.
“Ahoy, me hearties,” he said as he greeted his guests.
The father of one of the girls who’d participated in the tournament came over to me.
“That was some match you played today,” he said. “You’re quite the dark horse, aren’t you? That last set was a shocker.”
I didn’t know what that meant. Was he referring to my final killer approach shot at the net or the blood on my skirt? He moved on to talk with someone else before I had time to come up with a response.
As usual at gatherings like this one, I stood off by myself watching everyone—the husbands talking about sports, the wives talking about their children, the children running in circles on the vast lawn of Wonderland, wearing glow-in-the-dark bracelets, tossing Barbies in the air, blowing bubbles, tumbling and laughing on the soft grass as fireflies danced around them.
Out in front of the firepit, some friend of Forrest’s—one of his golf foursome, most likely—had set up a boom box. Now Bruce Springsteen blasted out over the water, “Glory Days.” On the dock, a group of women started dancing. They were mostly moms, and they danced like moms, except for the ones—and there were a couple of these—who danced like moms who wanted Forrest Emerson to notice them.File this away for next summer,maybe.
I could smell hamburgers on the grill. I caught sight of Prudence circulating with a tray of appetizers. A quarter moon hung over the water now. It was a perfect late-summer evening. But not really.
I looked over to the boathouse, thinking about the terrifying and wonderful book inside. The pictures in that book had alarmed me, but they had also provided so much excitement and stimulation over the course of the summer. That book had served as a part of my Wonderland education (that, along with tennis lessons—an unlikely combination).
The thought came to me that I could tuckThe Joy of Sexunder my sweatshirt and bring it up to the house, place it in my suitcase under the new Gap wardrobe Regina had purchased for me. If I brought it home with me, I could study that book whenever I wanted.
This brought me back to Hayward’s unwanted gift to me of the collage. I hated that he had ripped out that drawing from the book that had come to matter so much to me. To Hayward,The Joy of Sexwas nothing more than a dirty book, whose illustrations might offer a moment’s titillation and inspire an obscene note. For me it represented something entirely different. It was a guidebook to a country I’d never been to, and might never find. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go there. But I wanted to know about it.
It was clear, from the fact thatThe Joy of Sexhad been relegated to the boathouse, that nobody in the Emerson family valued it. The book had likely been sitting under spiderwebs on the shelf for years—ever since Forrest started sleeping in his solitary bedroom probably, with only the occasional visit from his wife.The Joy of Sexwould probably sit on the shelf, unopened, for many more summers. This seemed like a waste.
Watching the Emersons’ friends arranged around the picnic tables, laughing and scarfing down appetizers as their pirate host refilled their drinks, Hayward and his friend Jasper shooting off rubber bands at random guests, Jilly serving deviled eggs to her dolls, I concluded that the person who should have this book was me. Taking ownership might be a fitting way to mark my entry into womanhood that day. Back home in New Jersey, the book could serve as a reminder of my strange and complicated summer. One good part.
It was dark in the boathouse. If I’d fallen, climbing up on the step stool to bring down the treasured volume, I’d be caught red-handed with a book no fourteen-year-old was supposed to be reading. Though to me, the book was—along with all those Stephen King novels—the best reading experience a person could have asked for that summer.
Once I retrieved the book, I headed up to the house to stash it in my room. The sun was low over the lake now. The regatta hadn’t started yet. Billy had lit the tiki torches.
I found Regina in the kitchen. As expected, she had not put on the wench outfit. She had no intention of riding in the Chris-Craft with Forrest.
The sight of her took me by surprise. She was standing over the counter, where Prudence had lined up the desserts she’d be bringing down to the lake: A carrot cake, a sponge cake, a Boston cream pie.
Regina had a spoon in her hand. Not a teaspoon. A soup spoon. When I saw what she was doing I froze.
Regina was digging into the Boston cream pie. She wasn’t taking some delicate taste from one small corner. She had plunged her spoon right in the center of the pie. She was stuffing in giant mouthfuls. Even as she worked on swallowing the cream pie already in her mouth, she was digging her spoon in for more. Chocolate oozed from her mouth. Whipped cream dripped down her neck, onto her clothes.
The sight of her brought to mind that day she’d writhed on her thousand-thread-count sheets in green face masque goop. Only this was even stranger. Green goop was messy, but it wasn’t fattening. Now the same woman who refused a single butter cookie her husband brought her from the bakery, out of concern for her figure, was ingesting great, gasping gulps of the richest dessert Prudence ever made. She could have been a dog who hadn’t been fed in a week. Or a coyote come upon fresh carrion.
When she looked up from the pie and saw me watching, a look of shame came over her. I might have just stashed a book that didn’t belong to me under my sweatshirt, but the crime Regina was committing was—for Regina at least—ten times more heinous. She wasn’t just ruining a dessert intended for her guests; she was consuming calories in triple-digit numbers.
No words came out of her. No way they could. Her mouth was full; Boston cream pie and whipped cream were oozing down onto her chin.
There seemed only one thing to do then. I reached for a spoon myself. I stepped closer to the counter. I dug into the pie and took a bite. I licked my lips. I tried to act like this was normal behavior. I, the girl who struggled, herself, trying to figure out what normal was. The two of us stood there at the counter for several minutes until the last of the pie was gone. Finally Regina spoke, though her speech was slurred.
“This will be our secret,” she said.
I ran up to my room and put the precious book in my drawer. Then I headed back to the waterfront. I knew Forrest would be needing me to help get the children loaded into the canoe. More than this, I wanted to get out of there.
It took longer than we bargained for, getting the boats lined up. Over an hour, at least. As much of a charmer as Forrest was, he possessed none of Regina’s skill at getting a job done efficiently. Every time a few boats got in line, someone else would need to come in between them, requiring a lot of jockeying for positions. One family’s Boston Whaler got tangled up in someone else’s anchor. Another couple had trouble getting the engine started on their Grady-White. It turned out they needed fuel, which took another half hour.
The guests were getting restless. Children were cranky. A few people were drunk now. Prudence brought down the desserts—remarking, as she did, that her Boston cream pie seemed to have disappeared.
86
Birchbark
The regatta was supposed to get underway right at sunset, but it got to be eight thirty and Forrest still hadn’t managed to get the boats in line and out on the lake. By nine o’clock quite a few of the families gave up and went home.
