Bittersweet

I wanted them to go on. But Ev didn’t ask any more questions, and we crossed the causeway in silence.

On the other side of the glistening water, we were once again plunged into darkness. A sudden forest swallowed what became a gravel road. Birch trunks glowed ghostly in the moonlight. John’s headlights gave us glimpses of barns and farmhouses. He took each turn with the reckless speed of someone who has driven it a thousand times. Ev unrolled her window again to let the sweet night in, and we were embraced by the soft chirping of crickets, their pulse growing louder as we drove into a vast meadow. The moon greeted us again, a milky lantern.

We slowed after a particularly skidding turn – I could feel the rocks kicking out from under our tires. ‘We’re here,’ Ev sang. Outside stood dense forest. Nailed to one of the trunks was a small sign with hand-painted letters spelling out WINLOCH and PRIVATE PROPERTY. Our headlights pointed onto a precarious-looking road hung with warnings: NO TRESPASSING! NO HUNTING – VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED! NO DUMPING. This bore no resemblance to the grand estate which Ev had described. The skittering sound of the leaves brought to mind a movie I’d once seen about vampires. I felt a prickling up my spine.

It occurred to me then that my mother was probably right: Ev had brought me all the way here only to leave me on the side of the road, an elaborate trick not unlike the one Sarah Templeton had played on me in sixth grade, asking me to her birthday party only to disinvite me – with a roomful of classmates looking on – the moment I materialized on her doorstep, because I was ‘too fat to fit in any of the roller coaster seats.’ The doubt my mother had been planting began to spread through me – I was a fool to think Ev had actually brought me to her family’s estate for a summer of fun.

But Ev laughed dismissively, as though she could read my thoughts. ‘Thank god you’re here,’ she said, and the warmth of her cheer, and the softness of the azure cashmere, brought me back to my senses.

John flipped on the radio again. Country. We plunged into the forest as a man mourned his breaking heart.

We braked once, abruptly. A raccoon blocked our way, his eyes glowing in the glare of our headlights as he waited, front paw lifted, for us to hit him. But John flipped the lights and radio off, and we sat with the engine purring low as the animal’s strange, uneven body scurried into the scrub lining the road.

We cut our way past a smattering of unlit cottages, then tennis courts and a great, grand building glowing white in the moonlight. We turned right onto a side road – although it could hardly have been called more than a path – which we stayed on for another quarter mile before sighting a small house set at the dead end.

‘No dogs allowed, but I’ll make an exception for Abby,’ Ev offered as John pulled up in front of the cottage.

‘Don’t do her any favors.’

‘It’s not a favor,’ she replied, eyes skimming John.

He took Abby toward the woods to piddle. The night came rushing in: the rhythmic cricket clamor, the lapping of water I couldn’t see. The moon was behind a cloud. Beyond us, I could sense an expanse which I took to be the lake.

‘What do we have to do before the inspection?’ I asked Ev quietly.

‘Make it livable. Now we only have six days until my parents arrive, and I don’t even know what state it’s in.’

‘What if we can’t do it that fast?’ I asked.

Ev cocked her head to the side. ‘Are you worrying again, Miss Mabel?’ She looked back at me. ‘All we have to do is clean it up. Make it good as new.’

The moon reemerged. I examined the old house before us – an indecipherable sign nailed to it began with the letter B. The building looked rickety and weatherworn in the moonlight. I had a feeling six days wasn’t going to cut it. ‘What happens if we can’t?’

‘Then I move in with my witch of a mother and you spend the summer in Oregon.’

My lungs filled with the chemical memory of perc. My feet began to ache from a phantom day of standing behind the counter. I couldn’t go home – I couldn’t. How could I explain my desperation to her? But then I stepped into the night, and there Ev was, in the flesh, smelling of tea roses. She threw her arms wide to envelop me.

‘Welcome home,’ she murmured. ‘Welcome to Bittersweet.’

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_c3a5e9f5-6bcd-5dd8-9330-356dffd8cbd3)

The Window (#ulink_c3a5e9f5-6bcd-5dd8-9330-356dffd8cbd3)

WHEN MY EYES OPENED that first morning in the cottage they called Bittersweet, shadows of tree branches danced across the bead board ceiling in time with the glug of water in the cove below. Out the window, I could see a nuthatch hopping up and down the trunk of a red pine, chirping in celebration of his grubby breakfast. The Vermont air was cool and I was alone.

Arriving under cover of darkness had given a disappointing first impression, made worse by the threat of Birch’s inspection and my fate in the face of our failure. The house had seemed all dingy fixtures and shabby, unmatched furniture, touched everywhere with the scent of mildew; all I saw was work.

But I understood now, as I took in the shining brass beds in the morning, the crisp cotton duvet covers, and the faint scent of coffee wafting in from the kitchen, that this was a quiet place, a country place, a place of baguettes and pink grapefruit and spreadable honeycomb, idyllic and sun-drenched in a way I had never known, but of which I had long been dreaming.

Ev’s bed, the twin of my own, lay empty under the opposite window, rumpled sheets cast aside. From the light and birdsong, I could guess it was no later than eight. In the nine months I had lived with Ev, I had never once seen her up before ten. I called her name twice, but there was no reply. I puzzled for a few moments over her whereabouts, before lying back and closing my eyes, willing more delicious sleep. It refused me.

I felt a hint of desire. I listened long and hard. I was truly alone. And so I (shyly, bravely) put my hand down between my legs and felt myself grow wet. I knew there was a risk Ev might barge through the door any second, so I told myself to hold still, to move only one finger, to feign sleep. It is strange how such restrictions heighten one’s desire, but there it is. Soon my fingers were buried deep and I was in another world.

I tried to remember to listen. But there were always a few moments in which even I could not be cautious enough to subdivide my mind. I threw off the covers and felt that private wildness inside me rise up and carry me over a great, shivering chasm of joy, the only unbridled pleasure I knew.

It took time to recover myself. Afterward, I lay there, legs splayed, eyes closed, grateful for the warmth inside of me, until I felt the particular sensation of being watched. I lifted my eyes to the window just above Ev’s bed.

There, framed by wood and glass, was the face of a man.

His eyes were glazed over.

His mouth was agape.

I screamed. He ducked. I covered my whole self with the quilt. I laughed, horrified, nearly suffocating under the duvet. Almost burst into tears. Peeked out from beneath the quilt again. The window was empty. Had there really been someone there? Oh god. A new level of humiliation. I would never forget the look on his face – a mix of lust (I hoped) and horror (more likely). He’d been freckled. Dirty blond hair. I could feel myself blushing from head to toe. When I got up the nerve, I strode to the window, wrapped in the comforter, and wrestled the resistant, dusty blind down into submission before dressing myself with nunlike modesty. Maybe they’d kick me out of Winloch before we even got to the inspection.

Ev returned an hour later, moss tangling her locks. She smelled like a child who’d been playing in the forest, and her face bloomed with a smile she was doing her best to hide. Eager for distraction, I offered to cook, but she insisted I sit at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table and let her do the work for once, a dubious allowance, since I knew that she could hardly boil water without setting the kettle on fire. As she bustled about the white metal cabinets, art deco refrigerator with a heavy, ka-thunking door pull, and dirty seafoam-green linoleum curling up at the edges, my fingers traced the repeating, once-vibrant pattern of blackberries and gingham that had protected the table during someone else’s breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.

The kitchen had once been the short part of the L that made up the porch, and it retained the casement windows from its earlier life as a sunroom. Because the waist-to-ceiling panes overlooked the Bittersweet cove, what might have been a gloomy room glittered, making it the most beautiful spot in the cottage. But I resisted the view, keeping my back to the woods and water, remembering, with fresh embarrassment, the feeling of that man’s eyes upon me. He was out there, somewhere. What was to keep him from telling? The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

‘Galway said he met you this morning,’ Ev mentioned, casually clicking on the stove’s pilot light to heat the green enamel percolator set on the back burner. My pulse began to race. That man in the window was the only person I’d seen all day. Did she know? Had he told her? Had she read my mind?

‘He’s pretty awkward,’ she said apologetically. She glanced at me for a moment, catching the expression on my face. ‘Was he awful to you?’

‘What’d he say?’ I managed to squeak.

Ev rolled her eyes. ‘Galway doesn’t say anything unless it serves his own political gains.’ I breathed a sigh of relief as she babbled on. ‘Don’t worry, he’s only coming up weekends.’ She rolled her eyes conspiratorially, as if I had any idea what she was talking about. ‘Now you know firsthand why he’s terrible with women,’ she chirped, as I resolved simply never to see Galway again, whoever he was, while Ev went on to tell me how ill-equipped her brothers were for any kind of love, even though two of the three of them had managed to find wives. But Galway would be a bachelor forever, although she was almost positive he wasn’t gay, he seemed extremely hetero to her, mostly because he was an asshole, and if she was going to pick one of them to be gay she would have picked fussy Athol, although Banning was such a pleasure seeker (this is how I gathered, with horror, that Galway was her brother) – and then she served me a burned scrambled egg and lukewarm, bitter coffee, rendered drinkable only after I added a healthy slug from a dented can of condensed milk found on the shelf above the sink, and gave dictation on the provisions and products we would need John to pick up in town for the coming days of cleaning.

Even then, I was glad I’d come.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_c2550b68-562a-5715-8560-8cedf2d50be6)

The Cleanup (#ulink_c2550b68-562a-5715-8560-8cedf2d50be6)

THE COTTAGE EV STOOD to inherit had been inhabited, until her demise the previous summer, by Ev’s great-aunt Antonia Winslow. Although Ev insisted the ancient woman hadn’t actually died in the house, it was easy to imagine that the yellowed piles of papers that lined every room, or the permeating combination of animal urine and mildew that radiated from the furniture, or the sulfuric smell bubbling from the pipes every time we turned on the water, might well have conspired to bring about her end.

I expected Ev to be overwhelmed in the face of such disrepair, but she seemed energized by the challenge of it. I thought I’d be the one to teach her that newspapers and a touch of vinegar were best for windows, or that you diluted the Pine-Sol in a bucket of warm water, but her years spent getting into trouble at boarding school had taught her plenty about deep and thorough cleaning. Covered in dust after spending three hours sorting and binding the papers from the living room, I asked her, ‘Why do you have to clean this place?’ After all, the Winslows could afford the help; this backbreaking labor seemed to contradict everything that photograph above my desk had appeared to promise.

‘We believe in hard work,’ she said, tucking a piece of hair back into the bandanna she’d tied over her head. ‘It’s tradition: when we turn eighteen, we’re each offered a cottage – usually the oldest, dirtiest one available. And then it’s up to us to make it livable. To prove ourselves.’ She frowned. ‘It’s been the big joke that when it’s my turn I won’t be able to hack it.’ And then she met my eyes. ‘But they’re wrong, aren’t they?’

Her vulnerability hit me in the gut. I knew what it was to be doubted. To need to prove yourself. ‘Of course they’re wrong.’ And so, for the next six days, we both went to town on that cottage and its five little rooms – bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen, sunporch – as though our lives, and not merely our summers, depended on it.

Once we’d cleared away the superficial mess (even if the backbreaking labor didn’t feel superficial), it became apparent that Bittersweet was a tidy cottage, good-boned after a hundred years, even if its musculature showed its age. On blustery nights, the wind sang through invisible gaps between the casements and their frames. The off-white bead board walls had been slapped with paint dozens of times, rendering the grooves between some of the slats all but nonexistent. What furniture we were able to salvage was mismatched: in one corner of the living room, a wooden chair with a fraying straw seat waited humbly before a nicked mahogany desk that had once been part of a grander household, while in the other corner, a sagging red chair with cotton spilling from its split corduroy upholstery held the distinguished position as most coveted reading spot in the house.

On our second afternoon, John returned with the groceries we’d ordered. He had delivered our box of cleaning products the previous day with what I took to be silent grudgingness, but when I’d asked Ev about it she’d replied, ‘It’s his job,’ which was how I’d found out he was a servant.

Lest Ev confuse me with the help, I let her and John unload while I sank into the red chair with a glass of lemonade. I watched Abby drop a browned, balding tennis ball onto Bittersweet’s uneven floorboards, painted a flaking Portuguese blue. The ball rolled in a straight line toward the crumbling brick fireplace, with its tarnished brass andirons, before inexplicably turning around the curve of a faded rag rug and heading north, toward the dimly lit wooden bathroom, with its stained sink and pull-chain toilet.

Abby’s ears twitched with excitement as she traced the ball’s trajectory. She panted as though it were alive, but I held her back, fascinated to see where it would end up if we left it alone. Sure enough, it hit upon a burl, cascading east again and nearly into the cottage’s bedroom before plunging, along the line of a sunken floorboard, straight south toward the cove, back across my path, through the close living room, and into the jewel of the kitchen. I jumped up and followed. The old ball pinged against the metal cabinet that housed the deep porcelain sink, then through the doorway that separated kitchen from living room. On this new, northwest course, it headed into the screened-in porch, with its worn wicker couch, half-patched screens that allowed in the whistling breeze, and private view of the watery cove below.