She regrouped again. “Did you know her well back then?”
“For a time.” He was strangely peaceful.
She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. “We have some pictures. With you. From then.”
He didn’t look skittish or scared, like her mother did. “I have a few too,” he said.
He’d been in love with her mom. That seemed almost certain to her now.
He walked a little way up the beach to where the sand perched over the surf and sat down. He gestured for her to join him. They were quiet for a while. “Have you asked your mother about this?”
“I tried.”
“She didn’t want to talk.”
Mattie snorted a little. “At the sound of your name she shut down. I think she’s pretty much been avoiding me since.”
He looked wistful, but he didn’t look hurt. “It was a complicated time. You probably know that.”
“The divorce, you mean?” This was territory where she got reckless.
For the first time a look of trouble passed over his face. He sighed again. “I respectfully defer to your mom in this case.”
Was he the reason for the divorce? Was it that obvious? Her mom cheated and her dad threw her out? Was it as simple and tawdry as that?
He pushed the sand around with his hands. “I am delighted to see you here, Mattie. I really would enjoy getting to know you again. If you ever want to take up surfing, please look no further. I am available almost any time and my rates are quite reasonable.” He smiled at her. She figured he was probably joking about the rates part.
“But if your mom doesn’t want to talk to you about this, then I don’t feel comfortable talking to you about it.”
About it. So there was an “it.” He wasn’t denying that. “About you and my mom?” she asked, wanting to eke out a little more.
His voice was less certain, more measured when he spoke again. “About me and her. And you.”
“And me?” she fired back indignantly without even thinking. “What does it have to do with me?”
She wished she’d stopped herself from saying this, especially thinking on it so many times afterward. She would probably feel this memory like a kick in the neck for the rest of her life.
She’d fired back without listening or understanding because of the old child-of-divorce catechism: It has nothing to do with you. Never blame yourself for what happened. She’d heard that from every adult in the land—even virtual strangers—and recited it to herself on a thousand different occasions. It was a reflex in her child-brain. It flared in her eyes and blinded her from seeing what he was really getting at.
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t, it seemed, and that gave her a dizzying and painful stretch of time to think.
And you. She couldn’t let it in. But it came in anyway, in sharp little jabs, each one injuring and disorienting.
She was just a baby back then. The jabs got, slower, duller, more bruising. What could a baby have done? Thud. Except the notorious thing a baby can do to wreck a marriage.
But that couldn’t be her. She couldn’t be that. She found herself looking down at his feet.
When she looked back at his face she saw deep discomfort. He thought she knew. Or at least suspected. He thought that was what she had come here to investigate, maybe something she was open to. Now she felt bad for him. She felt worse for herself.
He pressed sand down under both hands, hard. He looked up at her and dusted them together. “I’m sorry, Mattie.” He looked genuinely sorry. “You need to talk to your mom.”
—
Half the time, when Evie went to Wainscott early for the weekend, Robert arranged for the firm’s car service to drive him out so he could get work done. Usually Sasha went with her mom, but now and then she went with her dad.
Here was a conversation Sasha had heard before: Back of a spotless black car, maybe a Mercedes or a Town Car. Today it was a Suburban. Her dad tapping on his phone. And then the driver, usually polite and well-meaning: “If I may ask, where are you from, sir?”
Her dad looks up, already impatient. “Canada. Outside Toronto.” Back to his phone.
“Before that? Your family?”
When this happens, they all know what the driver means. The driver himself is Indian or Pakistani or Southeast Asian. He sees potential kinship here. You’re not one of them, the driver is thinking, maybe with some pride. You are one of us, aren’t you? Who are you really?
Her dad will have none of it. “All Southern Ontario. That’s it.” Nothing to see here, folks. Keep moving.
The driver invariably looks skeptical, maybe even hurt. Maybe he looks to Sasha’s Bengali eyes for help. If so, she gives a fleeting look of compassion mixed with warning.
She’s always tempted to say more: My dad is Bangladeshi. You can tell, can’t you? His biological mother was, in any case. He never talks about it, but something terrible happened to her in the war in ’71. He’s a war baby, but he’ll never say that. He was sent to Canada at two years old to be raised by white parents. He’s tall now. They fed him milk.
Her dad grew up skating on homemade ice rinks in backyards, just like all the other kids in Ontario. From what she could understand, he wasn’t particularly sensitive about the fact that he looked different from the other kids—that he was visibly a different race. He wasn’t defiant about it. He wasn’t very interested in it. “I like to stay busy with the things I can do something about,” he’d told her once.
To hear her dad tell it, he’s Canadian through and through. He had the best parents in the world. He’d sing you all four verses of “O Canada” and a dozen Anglican hymns before he’d tell you he was the unwanted baby of a teenage rape victim born in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. He played ice hockey at Princeton. He’s the founder of Califax Capital. He has four beautiful daughters. That’s all you or anyone needs to know.
Her dad was back giving orders on his phone. Nobody, not even strangers, could tell anything about him on the phone.
—
Quinn had passed the Body Arts tattoo and piercing store in Hampton Bays dozens of times and never thought of going in. A few of those times she’d noticed the middle-aged woman with the black-red hair and the many tattoos smoking out front. Impulsively Quinn pulled her bike into the parking lot.
The woman was inside. She introduced herself as Raven.
“Do you pierce noses?” Quinn asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you pierce my nose?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
Raven made a face. “Are you really? I would have guessed sixteen. Who rides their bike along Montauk Highway? You have ID?”
“Yes.”
“Sure thing. You want to do it now?”
“Can you?”
Raven looked around. “I don’t see any other customers, do you?”
Quinn shook her head. The place was darkly lit and the walls were covered with potential tattoo designs. There were a lot of serpents and dragons on first glance.
“You’ll need to fill out a form and pick your jewelry, and we’re good to go.”
“Okay.” It seemed that Raven favored tattoos involving wings. Butterflies, angels, dark birds of prey, an owl, a winged lion, a dragon, a bat or two.
Quinn filled out the paper, gave her ID, and picked a tiny titanium half circle to start with.
“Is your name really Quinn?” Raven led her to the room in the back, where the atmosphere was less mystical but the light was better for piercing holes in people.
“Yes. It was my father’s mother’s maiden name.” Raven pointed to a reclining chair like at the dentist’s. “Is your name really Raven?”
“No. My mother named me Barbara.”
“Oh.”
Raven had a leather corset kind of thing strapped tightly across her wide bosom, stretchy pants, and high-heeled black boots. Under all the wings, her skin looked crepey and tired. She had many rings jammed onto her short fingers. It was hard
to tell if any one of them meant she was married. She had a scar on her neck and another on her forearm. Quinn’s mind floated over, beginning to imagine her as the girl her mother named Barbara.
Everyone had a mother. That was the thing. The week before, Emma had dragged her to a movie set during World War I. Quinn sat balled up in her seat as soldiers fell in droves, and for every one, Quinn thought of his mother. Mr. Reese had a mother once. It was one of nature’s many mercies that people didn’t usually get old enough to watch their kids get old.
Quinn sat back in the piercing chair.
Was Raven someone’s mother? Quinn floated out a bit further. For some reason she didn’t think so.
“Which was your first tattoo?” Quinn asked.
Pop went the piercing gun, and for that moment Quinn was entirely in her own body.
An hour and a half later, the redness had gone down, and Quinn had a jot of titanium in her left nostril. She also knew the story of every one of Raven’s thirty-one tattoos, and thus had a nearly complete story of her life, from the first at fourteen to the most recent (“not the last”) for her sixtieth birthday in April. Her first boyfriend chose the first, a lamb sitting nestled in her cleavage, and she’d chosen herself wings for every one after.
Quinn hugged Raven after she’d given her fifty-eight dollars, including tip, and also a bag of sweet yellow Shiro plums she’d retrieved from her bike basket. Raven squeezed her for a few extra seconds. “You’re a soul gazer, you know that?”
“What does that mean?” Quinn asked into her shoulder.
“You’ve got those eyes—you take in a person’s soul.”
Quinn thought this was only partly true. She did take people in, but it was her own soul that did most of the traveling.
—
Riding home on her bike in the dark, Quinn wondered why she didn’t stick in her own body more. It was a perfectly fine body; she had no complaints about it. It actually worked quite well—people used to say she was the most gifted athlete in the family, but that unlike Emma, she had no feeling for hierarchy or competition. So why did she slip out of it so easily? Why wasn’t her obligation to it more binding?
What if she slipped out of her body one time and forgot to come back? Like Ping the duckling, when the door of the wise-eyed boat closed, and he was left to bob down the Yangtze River. Would that be a tragedy, really, or some kind of apotheosis?
Quinn pedaled past the Reeses’ farm and got the itchy feeling of the lettuces being dry, so she stopped and leaned her bike quietly against the side of the barn. The moon rose as she tended to the greens.
Quinn knew time passed differently for her. That was another thing. She didn’t orient herself to hours of the day or days of the week. She’d tried to for a long time to honor the units, but they didn’t hold for her, didn’t feel consistent or sequential as they did for most other people. Time tightened or bagged, ambled forward or doubled back, depending on the light and the season and her mood.
Sometimes she imagined the days of the calendar were a series of doorframes leading from one chamber to the next. Quinn wasn’t walking through the doorframes. She wasn’t even in the building.
In the care of plants, the work was her clock. The plants set the time.
So she realized when she got home that dinner was well under way, and she was meant to be there at the beginning of it.
Her father stood up to greet her. She’d forgotten about her nose, but he noticed it instantly.
“What in the world have you done to your beautiful nose?”
He wasn’t kidding around. He was pained, she could see.
She touched it, remembering. “I think it makes my ordinary nose look more beautiful,” she answered honestly.
“Let me see,” Mattie called, getting up. “Wow.”
Sasha came over too.
“Why would you do that, Quinn?” her father demanded. “You know how I feel about piercing. If you take the thing out, will it close over?” His voice went unusually high and turned brittle.
“I think it’s cool,” Mattie pronounced. “When did Quinn ever try to be cool before?”
“Most Indian women pierce their noses when they come of age,” Quinn said.
“You are not an Indian woman,” he shot back.
Quinn was sorry now. She was sorry that her father was troubled by it. She was sorry that Sasha had to see her get scolded, because she knew Sasha minded it and was her staunchest defender.
“By blood I am partly a Bengali woman,” she said carefully. She felt Sasha’s warmth and distress at her elbow.
Evie came over, knowing she couldn’t hold the table or the evening together at this point. She put a hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “Promise your father you won’t get anything else pierced,” she said lightly, champion of neatening.
Quinn turned to him. “I promise,” she said solemnly. “Not even my ears.”
“Your ears would be fine,” he muttered.
—
Quinn’s mother arrived at changeover on Sunday, but it was half a day before Lila stopped Quinn in the kitchen. “Hey, wait. Stop. Something’s different.”
Quinn nodded.
Lila held Quinn’s face between her two hands.
Quinn pointed to her nose.
Her mother squinted at it, dotted it lightly with the tip of her finger. “It looks nice. I like it.”
Little Ray,
Did Quinn ever tell you stories about the Indians of Eel Cove? I had a dream about them last night.
Big Sasha
BS,
Oh my God, yes. I loved the mother/chief/witch doctor with the sea-glass beads. I still think about her potions. (To forget your name, to share your mind, to hear things people say on the other side of the world.) Do you remember how the kids in the white family would go to the regular doctor and they’d just get more twisted up and needy, and then one of them would sneak off to the chief for a real cure?
LR
LR,
That was when Quinn was sick. I never put it together back then. We were only six or seven, I guess. I remember visiting her in the hospital. I remember the night she got home, she got out of bed and walked into the pond in her pajamas.
My memory of her in the hospital is so dark and strange I wasn’t sure it actually happened. But if you remember it too, I guess it did. I snuck into her bed with her. She said, “I’ve got to get out of here, because there’s no way to get better in this place.”
BS
“Just tell me he didn’t go to Princeton.”
“He went to Princeton,” Emma said flatly.
A trip to the farmers’ market on her morning off had sounded like a good idea when her mom suggested it. Now Emma was trailing her mother with a net shopping bag full of weird root vegetables and wanting to cry. One minute her mother was examining heirloom tomatoes and the next she turned on her.
“I just don’t understand what the rush is. Why barrel into this? You’re twenty-two years old! You just met him.”
“You got married at twenty-two.”
“Exactly, and look what that got me!”
Emma shook her head in disbelief. “Thanks a lot, Mom. It got you me and Quinn and Mattie.”
Lila dropped the tomatoes into the bin and put her arm around Emma. She kissed the side of Emma’s head. “Darling, of course. I would never ever change that. But you know what I mean.”
Emma pushed her fingers against the spiny husk of a pineapple. What kind of farmers’ market sold pineapples? “I seriously doubt any farmer around here grew this.”
“And this party Mattie and Quinn keep talking about,” Lila muttered. “My God! This August? Is that really necessary?”
“I think it’s sweet,” Emma said tersely.
Lila huffed out a breath and turned to a bin of tangled string beans. “The thing I don’t understand is, what do you gain by getting married? You can do all the things you want without getting married.”
“You got married. Twice.”
>
“Because I had children. Don’t tell me you’re ready to have children.”
Perversely, Emma wished she could produce a few children right then and there. “I want to get married because I love him. We want to live together.”
“Emma, you have your whole life for that. Now is when you’re free. You can travel. You can experience how you feel with lots of different people.”
“I don’t want to experience lots of different people. I like how I feel with him.”
Her mother put down her bag. “Now you do. But how do you know what you’ll want in five years? Or ten? Or twenty?”
Emma didn’t like where they were and she didn’t like where they were going. She didn’t like the dark judgment stirring in her chest. “Well, maybe the idea is that you commit to somebody you love and you stick with them, regardless of what happens in five or ten or twenty or a hundred years, because they’re your family and that’s what marriage is and because you made a vow.”
Lila turned away. She picked up her shopping bag and moved along to the berries. They paid for their groceries in silence and walked to the car in silence.
Emma hated the way her mother’s car smelled after baking on the hot street. She hated how much crap there always was in it: the pottery wheel and bags of clay—or whatever other crafty thing she was into at the moment—weird health bars half unwrapped in the door pocket or stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Midwifery paraphernalia so puzzling and gross you did not even want to ask. Jackets, shoes, old junk mail. You always had to move stuff to sit down.
Lila waited until they pulled into their driveway to break the silence. “Just don’t tell me you’re going to change your name.”
Emma got out of the car and shut the door hard behind her. If she hadn’t wanted to change her name before, she sure did now.
—
Of all the lies he’d ever told, the one Ray probably regretted most was the one about losing his virginity. It wasn’t necessarily the worst one. It didn’t really do anyone harm. But unlike most lies that slipped into the past and let you forget about them, this one kept coming back.
For example, every time he considered that he hadn’t actually lost his virginity, the lie tapped on his shoulder. Every time he considered how he might actually lose his virginity, it sort of coughed skeptically. This amounted to a lot of times.