When in the Dordogne

The summer of 1986, the summer before I entered high school, my parents went to the Dordogne for eight weeks. My father had been sick, and it was thought that France, where he had studied as a young man, would enable his recovery. Through the university’s employment office, my mother hired two sophomores to house-sit for the time they would be out of the country. As I came with the house, these two college boys were obliged to take care of me, too.

We lived at the end of a short street in a quiet neighborhood. Our house was big and gray, exceptionally large for three people, though I didn’t realize that until Ed and Grant arrived in a maroon Pontiac that first afternoon. The two boys stood responsibly beside me as we waved my parents off. Grant might have murmured something consoling as they disappeared around the corner, about how they’d be back before I knew it.

And then, after a respectful pause, they let loose.

Ed ran into the house and circled the rooms like a dog just let off its leash, climbed up the front staircase and came down the tight back stairs and then went back up the front set again, whooping and whooping again, all the way to the third-floor balcony where he called down to Grant and me still standing in the front hall. Just as we looked up, he released a pale-green globule that landed right on Grant’s cheek. Grant barely flinched, wiped it off with the bottom of his T-shirt, and tore up the stairs. I could hear them on one floor and then another, down across the back hallway to my father’s study—I didn’t tell them not to go in, though I was screaming it in my head

—and around to my sisters’ old rooms, my brother’s old room, all of them having left before I could remember them ever having lived there, their rooms still stuck in the seventies: the girls’ closet doors covered with

McGovern-Muskie bumper stickers, my brother’s with Nixon-Agnew and Ford-Rockefeller. I stood there frozen in the downstairs hallway, not with fear but with amazement, with revelation. I had only seen people behave one way in this house, prudently, laconically, in codes I could not understand but had learned to imitate. And now here was another way.

I was the martini baby, conceived, I’m sure, after one too many in late July of 1971. My parents already had their family: two girls in boarding school, a boy about to enter the seventh grade. My father was fifty-one, my mother forty-seven. It must have seemed slightly obscene back then, a woman of her age getting pregnant. I was such a deep inconvenience to them. That much was clear already, although not something I could have put in words. It was purely visceral, a confused shame lodged inside my gut, a sense that I had been terribly, terribly bad but not being able to recall what I’d done wrong.

My mother had walked Ed and Grant through the house during their interview, showing them the circuit breakers and the hot-water heater and the fire extinguishers. She took them out to the pool house and explained about the toilet latch, told them a man named Chuck would come by every Wednesday to clean and chlorinate the pool. She brought them back in the house and gave them each a glass of iced tea with a sprig of fresh mint, which grew beside the back door stoop, and asked them if they had any questions.

It was Grant who asked about me. “Could you give us the rundown on your son?” I don’t think he knew my name yet. “When he should be in bed, what he likes to eat, where he’s allowed to go on his bike.”

“Oh, he takes care of himself quite well, really.” She gave me a small smile. “The club’s schedule is right there on the fridge if there’s any question of where he should be.”

They were just two boys, young men, I suppose. Nothing particularly special about either of them. Ed came from New England, a small town in northern Maine, and Grant from Pennsylvania. Ed spoke little about his family except in tight, funny vignettes, like his father buying his mother-in-law a cow for Christmas because whenever she came over to the house she complained the milk was off. But Grant told me long stories about his sisters’ love affairs, his mother’s battle with polio, his father’s ashes scattered in their garden and how scared he’d been as a boy to touch the flowers that grew there.

That first night we had chicken noodle casserole and peas and crinkled french fries, all from the freezer in the basement.

“It’s better than a supermarket down there,” Grant said when he came up with an armful of boxes. They had carte blanche at the market—just had to sign their names—but Grant loved foraging down in the basement much more.

He made the dinner while Ed sat at the kitchen table drinking a Schlitz.

But he didn’t sit there morbidly like my father sometimes did in the evenings, forcing himself—or perhaps forced by my mother—to be present.

Ed set his chair at an angle and put his feet up on another one and chatted.

He was a great chatterer. Chatting wasn’t something I was used to.

“How long you been out of school?” He had an accent I’d never heard before. “School” sounded like scoal. It sounded Scottish or something.

“Three weeks tomorrow.” They had been boring, lonely weeks. I hated tennis lessons and trying to hit the tin can for a Coke when you served and sailing classes with all the instruction about winches and halyards and the folding and unfolding of the sails and never enough time on the water.

“Three weeks? My little sister just got out yesterday.”

“Private school,” Grant said over his shoulder.

“That right? You pay for longer vacations?” he said to Grant. And then to me: “You like scoal?”

“Not really.”

“You like anything?”

I thought. I wanted to like something. I liked them, Ed and Grant, though I wasn’t about to say that.

“Guess not,” he said. “Trying to think what I liked when I was your age.

How old are you? No, wait, let me guess.” He pretended to tie a kerchief to his head then pressed his fingers on his temples. “You are fourteen years, four months, and one day.”

I did the math. He was exactly right.

He started laughing as my eyes widened at him. “Your father keeps your passports in his top desk drawer.”

His words struck me like a slap.

“So, let’s see,” Ed said. “At fourteen years, three months, and a day, I loved Celia Washburn. I loved her so much my jaw ached and—”

“You can’t go in that study. Ever. You have to promise.”

I felt Grant turning around behind me. Saw Ed glance at him. They were trying not to laugh at the weird possessed voice that had come out of me.

“Okay. It’s a promise,” Ed said. He shifted his legs and took a swig of beer. “So my mother took me to the doctor because of this jaw ache, and he said I had to stop clenching it so much and when did I clench it, and I said whenever I think about a certain girl and he and the nurse laughed. My mother was out in the waiting room. Then we got to talking about other things and I told him my mother wouldn’t let me play baseball that year because my cousin had gotten clonked on the head in the outfield, the dolt.

So when he called my mother in, he told her that I was a little stressed and that she should let me play baseball to unwind.”

Grant was chuckling.

“Oh, the shiny knees and long ponytail of Celia Washburn,” Ed said.

“You enamored with anyone?”

I was, of course. Hopelessly. But I shook my head no.

Ed hooted. “Oh my God, you are a terrible liar! Le pire! Never mind. I’ll get it out of you in due time, my pretty.” He raised his beer to his lips, then put it down again. “So apart from her, who shall remain nameless for now, what do you think about? What, as Professor Marcus would say—

remember this, Grant?—makes your heart sing?”

I felt so uneasy with all this interrogation, but I liked it, too. And yet I had no answer. Nothing made my heart sing. Even Becca Salinero didn’t make my heart sing. She made it hurt.

“Nothing? Nothing makes your heart sing?” Ed swung his head to Grant at the stove. “What makes your heart sing?”

“Chicken noodle casserole. The full moon and the really thin moon.

Sunday mornings if the New York Times isn’t sold out. My nieces and nephews. My blue bicycle. Yeats. And Hermann Hesse sometimes.”

“Hermann Hesse. Le pire!”

“Narcissus and Goldmund,” Grant said.

“Oh, c’mon. If you have to read a German, read Mann, not that lightweight.”

“Four hundred pages about a guy wrapped in a camel hair blanket? No thanks.”

“What makes your heart sing, Ed?” I ventured.

“The venerable state of Maine.”

“So why aren’t you there now?”

“Oh, God,” said Grant.

“It’s Disneyland in the summer. Unrecognizable. Hollywood. Hate it.”

“Well, that was impressively concise.” Grant handed me the peas and said sotto voce and yet for Ed’s benefit, “Sometimes that topic can go on into the night.”

“Well, I didn’t want to scare our boy here right out of the gate.”

We ate. The food, though familiar, tasted better than when my mother made it. I listened to them talk about the part-time jobs they had just started.

Grant worked the lunch shift at a diner out on the highway, and Ed paved people’s driveways. Grant said he dreaded going to sleep because he was always dreaming about gravy, pouring it into people’s coffee cups, serving it in shoes. Ed said his lungs would be paved by the end of the summer.

Grant had heated up a Sara Lee pie, blueberry. We gathered round it when he pulled it out. He started to cut into it and Ed said, “I know how you’re going to do this, a miserly wedge at a time when you know for a fact we’re going to eat the whole thing. Gimme that.”

Ed took the knife from him and cut the pie into thirds and put a mound of ice cream on each of the enormous pieces. We ate on the porch. It was a warm, humid night and the hot pie and the cold ice cream were perfect together. Our lawn looked blue in the near dark. We could hear the sounds of a cocktail party down the street, the rumble of male conversation and a woman’s laughing voice cutting through, saying, “No, no, don’t tell them!”

“No, no, don’t tell them,” Ed said in falsetto. “Don’t tell them, Harold, about our large animal fetish!”

Everything he said felt like the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

Ed finished his pie way before Grant or me. He set his plate on the porch boards next to him and put the fork carefully at four o’clock. “It’s very civilized, being rich,” he said. “Very mellow.”

I’d always been told we were middle class. Rich was something else.

Yachts and private jets. I remembered my parents and their plane flight.

They would be over the ocean by now. I didn’t know what a nervous breakdown was, though I knew that’s what kept happening to my father.

From far off there was a splash. Then Ed started to laugh. “I heard that person dive into a pool and I thought, lucky bastard, and then I remembered we have a fucking pool.” He lifted off his T-shirt. “Fancy a swim?”

I never swam in the pool at night. It was too scary to be the only one in there, my limbs white as an octopus. Even with Grant and Ed that first night

I was a little scared, and embarrassed. They took off all their clothes but I couldn’t. I changed into the suit that was hanging in the pool house. I thought they’d make fun of me for this but they didn’t. They didn’t say a word. I had never been naked in front of anyone since I was a baby and even then I wasn’t sure. All my life my mother had been handing me things through a closed door, just her arm reaching in with a towel or soap or whatever I needed. One time when I was eight or nine I slipped getting out of the tub and she had to call my father to come get me. I remember how rough his wool jacket felt against my wet skin.

With the big underwater bulb on in the deep end, everything was lime green. Our splashes looked phosphorescent. I was aware of their bodies, fascinated by their bodies. Ed was smaller and more compact than Grant, with taut bulbs at the backs of his calves and a stomach with small bands of muscle. He had a thick head of hair but his chest was hairless, smooth as rubber. Grant was tall and lean but loose, strangely fleshy for a person who in clothes appeared so thin. Two small pools of skin hung at his narrow hips, as if used to drooping there above an elastic band. He had thin brown hair on his head, a sparse coating of it on his chest, and yet around his penis the hair was quite red.

Ed found me in the shallow end, staring at Grant hanging from the diving board. “Do you think he dyes it?”

“I heard that,” Grant called to us.

“Well, do you?” Ed called back.

Grant dropped down into the water and skimmed the bottom toward us, his long legs doing all the work, his ass tight then loose, tight then loose, square and soft.

Grant crashed through the surface and took Ed in a half nelson and they struggled and threw each other down into the water and I swear I could hear my mother at the side of the pool saying, No roughhousing in the pool you could drown each other. Though when she ever said that I didn’t know.

Perhaps when my brother was a young boy and I was watching from her lap. I had a hard time thinking of my brother—Frank was his name—as my brother. He was thirteen years older than I was, more like a friend of my parents’ who stopped in occasionally for a drink. It seemed to me he was always wearing a tie, even on Saturdays. He lived in the city and my mother lamented how little he came to visit, how much he worked. He likes it, my father often said. Worse things than working too hard. Frank rarely spoke to

me directly, though I think he spoke a lot about me, for I was aware of a hum of talk, like crickets at night, that when I came closer receded and when I left the room resumed. I thought it was about me, though perhaps it was about something else.

At one point, Grant held Ed underwater for a long time, too long, I thought, and just as I opened my mouth to tell him so, Ed elbowed him hard in his soft stomach. Grant released him with a long whimper and Ed’s head pushed up through the water screaming, “What the fuck?” and Grant seemed to be crying, though it was hard to tell with the weird green shadows and all the water already on his face.

Grant got out, wrapped a towel around his waist, and went inside to do the dishes. Ed swam laps back and forth. I was afraid their argument would be like the ones my parents had, a few sharp words followed by days of silence. But after Grant finished up in the kitchen, he came back outside with a beer and placed it at the edge of the pool. Ed glided toward it and drank it standing in the shallow end. He made a joke in French and Grant laughed and things were tranquil between them again.

Later we sat on the porch. Their clothes were back on and that was more comfortable for me, though still I was not entirely at ease around them and found myself shaking with nerves despite the heat. They drank beers and Ed suggested I have one but Grant said no.

“I cannot believe it’s not Friday yet,” Ed said.

“It’s not even Tuesday yet.”

“The smell of that stuff.” He meant the liquid asphalt. “Le pire.”

“Why do you always say ‘le pire’?” I asked.

He gave a very French frown, a thinking, eyebrows-raised frown of consideration. He lifted his palms up to me. “When in the Dordogne.”

I woke up in the middle of the night. Someone was coughing below my window. I looked down and saw Ed on the back porch rattling cookies out of a package. He ate five in a row then lit a cigarette. “Fuck,” I heard him say. “Fuck that.”

I went into my father’s study. It was a big room, meant to be a bedroom.

Bookcases lined the walls. They were crammed with books and papers and journals in no particular order. The cleaning lady had done that in the spring, taken everything that had been scattered around for years and shoved it on the shelves. His desk was in the far corner, a chair on either

side, its surface clean and empty now. It was an old desk, with green leather inlaid on the top and fat brass handles on the drawers. I sat down and opened each one, checking for the gun that was no longer there. Then I turned around to the wall, stuck my finger in the hole between his diploma from the Sorbonne and an old painting of the sea.

I heard a cough in the hallway and then a tap at the door.

I spun around in the swivel chair, wiping the plaster off my finger.

“Can I come in?” Ed said, already in and coming toward me.

He sat in the chair on the other side of the desk. I tried to block his view, but he saw it anyway, the hole and the fissures in the plaster around it.

“Wasn’t exactly a crack shot, was he?”

“I think maybe he took a bit of skin off his cheek. He wore a Band-Aid for a few days.”

Ed smirked. He was wearing boxer shorts. It was a hot night and we were both stuck to the leather chairs.

“It’s not here anymore,” he said.

“What?”

“What happened.”

“Then where is it?”

“It’s gone. It’s over. You can’t find it, stroke it, coo over it. Time has stolen it away like it fucking steals everything. In rare instances, like yours, that can be a good thing.”

During the interview my mother had asked Ed and Grant if they played either tennis or golf and they had lied and said they did, thinking that that was the kind of person she was looking for. In fact she had wanted to know solely for practical reasons, because if they did she would put their names down in the guest book at the club and they could come and go as they liked. That first weekend I took them to play tennis. On weekends you had to wear all whites and so they put on my father’s clothes. It was only as we were walking there that I noticed Ed had forgotten to put on my father’s white socks. I didn’t say anything but Grant did, and Ed said he was going to move so fast on the court that no one would arrest him for his black socks.

I made sure we got court 8, the farthest one from the clubhouse. Ed picked up on it right away.

“You don’t want to be seen with a couple of slouches, do you?”

He was right. I could tell by the swings they’d taken in the yard that neither of them had any form. I probably told myself I was protecting them from ridicule, but I was protecting myself. I could already hear my tennis teacher telling me how bad it was for my game to play people like that.

Fortunately the court next to us was empty and the wild lobs they hit at first did not bother anyone else’s game. I was disappointed by their lack of skill.

After living with them for five days I had convinced myself they could do anything. They looked like buffoons, especially Ed in his black socks, who was clearly athletic and could reach everything, but once he got there he flung his body along with his racket at the ball with very little success. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t easily imitate my stroke, which I showed them again and again. After rallying for a while, Ed moved over to Grant’s side and they challenged me to a set. I suggested a little more practice was in order but they insisted. I spun my racket, they called up, it was down, and I served.

I decided to crush them. I lifted that first toss and decided to shred them to pieces. I had never had that feeling on the tennis court before, the raw desire to win. I was a competent player, but I had more runner-up trophies than anything else. I determined that I would not let them win one point off me. Because suddenly I found I resented my awe of them, my infatuation with them both, and the dread that had already lodged itself in my chest of their leaving in the middle of August. I wanted somehow to even the scales a bit, to show them that I was worth something, too, that I had something to teach them, something for them to be in awe of.

My first serve was low and fast. Ed returned it with a punch, as if it were a volley, and I expected it to die in the net but it went over and I couldn’t reach it in time. That was the only point, I coached myself, they were ever going to get off me.

I served to Grant. He spun around and whiffed it. Tossed a high one to Ed who backed up then rushed forward but reached it and knocked it over nicely, right to me. I smashed it back but Grant stuck his racket out, it came back at me, and I hit it crosscourt to Ed’s alley, but he was there and gave me a lob, which I smacked at his toes and watched it sail far up as he scrambled back, not backward as I had been taught, with little steps, but sprinting to the back of the court and reaching it and slicing it at just the right angle to my back corner. I hadn’t been ready to run and it flashed past me, ticking the tape. Ed let out a victorious bellow. I could feel the heads

down the row of courts swivel toward us. We had all taken to grunts and groans and hollers. They got better and I got worse and I slowly relinquished all hopes of a shutout and just tried to scratch out a humble win.

In the end they beat me 6–4. I threw my racquet at the fence and stalked off. I knew what this looked like; it was the kind of behavior that was abhorrent to my parents. Any anger was dealt with swiftly and severely, quarantined immediately, allowed no audience. I expected Grant and Ed to react similarly, to urge me home that instant, remove me from this public place because people were watching. People on the clubhouse veranda, people walking to their cars, people on the courts, and even people on the putting green could hear me swearing and kicking tires in the parking lot. I was surprised by it myself, the anger that came pouring out all because a couple of hacks had beaten me at tennis. But they just sat on the little strip of grass beyond the court with the three racquets zipped back up in the cases and the balls back in the can. After a while I had nothing left in me and they came to where I was by a maple tree near the entrance to the club and we started walking home.

I was too ashamed to speak. They chatted away to each other, as if they weren’t angry with me, as if they weren’t embarrassed for me and humiliated by me. As if I were not, as my mother used to say as she whisked me up to my room, a little beast who needed to change back to a boy.

“Your family belong to a club like that?”

Grant laughed. “No.”

“Look at that guy burrowing into those bushes. What do you think he’s doing?”

“Look at the dog on the porch.”

“He’s waiting for him to fetch the ball!” Ed joked.

And when the man backed out of the bushes with the dog’s filthy ball, they burst into hysterics. They thought everything in our neighborhood was funny.

“Layton with the sheep,” Grant said.

Ed cracked up. “Sometimes I’m lying in bed and I think of that story and I can’t stop laughing.”

“I know. It might be the funniest thing I ever heard.”

“What do you think he’s up to right now? Do you think he made it to Alaska?”

“Yeah. Knowing him.”

“With the girl?”

“That I don’t know. I was never sure about that part of the story.”

“Me neither.”

After a pause, Ed said, “I hope he didn’t take that girl. God, they only fuck you up so bad.” Ed’s face was red and he was staring hard at a stoplight ahead of us while Grant was staring at him just as intently. “Still fucking kills,” Ed said.

I saw Grant’s arm lift slightly then fall back down at his side.

Then Ed nudged me. I thought they’d forgotten all about me. “Ground Round for dinner tonight?”

“Sure,” I said lightly, all the anger gone somehow.

We reached Elm Street, the main street of our town, with all its green canvas awnings and the store names written in white on their scalloped hems.

“Let’s get a Snickers at Healey’s,” Ed said, and we turned down Elm instead of going straight on Winthrop to the house.

Becca Salinero and her little brother were choosing sodas from the cooler, their backs to us. I spun around and tried to leave but Ed grabbed me and whispered, “It’s her, isn’t it?”

I didn’t answer but it didn’t matter. He went directly to the cooler. I meant to leave the store but my legs were stuck in place.

“Don’t worry,” Grant said. “He’s good at this.”

“Good at what?”

“Good at making friends.”

He waited for them to choose their drinks. Becca’s little brother had taken off his shirt and stuffed the collar and sleeves down the back of his shorts so the rest of it flapped behind him. He was so skinny you could see every rib in 3D.

Ed pointed to the soda her brother had chosen and said, “What, no diet drink for you, Fatty?” And Becca laughed her deep laugh.

I hid in the back aisle while they talked. Becca and her brother paid and left.

Ed had found out that she was a counselor at the summer camp at the community center. When we got home, he said, we’d call up the center for

the camp’s hours. And then, he explained as we stepped back into the sun and the heat pouring up from the sidewalk cement, we’d make our plan of attack.

If I hadn’t glimpsed her in the store, hadn’t been physically reminded of her, I might have protested. But I was putty and he knew it.

“Interesting choice,” Grant said, and they both cracked up.

It was true that Becca was going through an awkward stage. She had recently shot up, but only in the legs, so that, especially in shorts, her squat torso looked like it was supported by stilts. She had gotten her braces off in the spring, though now she wore some sort of thick retainer whose fake kitten-tongue pink made her real gums look gray and sickly.

“A diamond in the rough, perhaps,” Ed said, forcing a straight face.

“Seriously, it shows good taste. She’s not hiding anything. She’s like a clear stream. That’s exactly what you want. I went for the other kind and it’s ruined my life.”

“Ruined your spring,” Grant said.

“Ruined my spring, summer, winter. What did I miss? Fall. God, I can’t even think about fall. Anyway, not quite as adorable as Celia Washburn maybe, a little Animal Kingdom.” Ed stretched his neck and pretended to rip leaves off a tree. Grant snorted and Ed’s voice quavered then righted itself as he finished: “But very sweet.”

On the way home we passed the park. There was a pickup game out on the basketball court. Ed made a bee-line for it. I cringed. When the ball went through the net, he stepped onto the court and talked to the tallest guy, pointing to me and Grant who had trailed behind.

“Get your asses over here,” he said. “It’s our ball.”

Basketball wasn’t my game. But after a frustrating set of tennis it felt good to hold a big ball in my hands. I had never played on this court. No one I knew had. It was for the public school kids. Between points, I looked around at my town: the gazebo, the swings and jungle gym, the baseball diamond, the stone library and its parking lot beyond. I’d never seen it from right here. I’d had my own swing set in the backyard, gone to the club for my summer sports. One kid on the court gave me a hard time, called me Richie Rich under his breath. But the others just played, slapped me on the back when I managed to do the right thing, were forgiving when I didn’t.

Ed got them all laughing because he really couldn’t do anything in this life without talking. He tried to derail the other team with his narration:

“Okay, now Big Red’s got the ball. Big Red’s coming down. Does Big Red have boobs or pecs? We’re not sure but boy are they distracting. They draw your eye away from the ball.” He went on and on. Even as he was intercepting and fleeing in the other direction you could hear his voice trailing after him. Every now and then I’d remember we’d seen Becca and were going to call the community center when we got back and I’d get a fresh rush of energy.

Once we got her schedule, we arranged to run into her. Ed had an uncanny knack of being able to predict her movements so that each time, she appeared to be stumbling upon us and not vice versa. Ed did not let me hide in the aisles again. The first time was in the sub shop. We were already in line when she walked in. We had it all planned out. Grant, very naturally though completely scripted, asked me what time it was and I turned around to look at the clock on the back wall. I caught her spitting her retainer into her hand and shoving it into her shorts pocket.

She said hey and I said hey. Her hair was in a ponytail and she had on her light-blue camp T-shirt that was crusty with some kind of freshly dried paint or clay. She had the clearest eyes. I had no idea what the word was for the color they were. She asked me if I was having a good summer and I asked her the same. We told each other which books we’d chosen from the summer reading list. She promised me that The Brothers Karamazov got better sixty pages in. And then we placed our orders, which came quickly, wrapped up tight, and she left, saying she had to bring one back to the house for her brother.

“Only one sub for Fatty?” Ed said.

When she was gone he said, “She likes our boy.”

“What’s not to like?” Grant said.

The next time we saw her I was supposed to ask her out. But I chickened out. The time after that Ed did it for me.

“We’re going to the movies tonight. Want to come?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Um, yeah it is. We’ll pick you up at six forty-five sharp.”

“But you don’t know where I live.”

“You’re in the blue book, right?” I said, as if I didn’t know 67 Vine Road and the big beech tree out front and her mother’s Volkswagen Rabbit

(LL3783) and her father’s Audi (KN9722) that sat in the garage they built last year.

“Oh, you’re in the blue blood book, right?” Ed mocked afterward, exactly in my accent, which had never seemed an accent to me before then.

At first, of course, I feared Becca would fall for Ed. “Une femme qui rit est une femme au lit,” he’d said once, and he was so much funnier than anyone I knew.

The third time she came out with us, we went miniature golfing and got through five holes before it started pouring and we went back to the house.

Grant pulled out the big pot for popcorn and Ed went into the living room and flopped on the sofa. I said I needed to go upstairs and change my shirt, but I lingered on the stairs to see what she and Ed would do together alone.

“You’re kind of a ringer at the mini links,” he said. “You go there a lot?”

“My brother likes it.”

“But you not so much.”

“I just beat him so easily.”

Ed laughed and said, “Have a seat.” But Becca said she was going to go find me.

I made it to the top of the stairs before she saw me. She came up and we looked down over the railing into the empty hallway. It was warm on the second floor. We were damp from the rain and the heat felt good. For once my house felt cozy. I pretended to be looking all the way down but I was really looking at her sneakers and the little peds she had on with fuzzy balls sticking out the back. I looked up to tell her one was hanging on by a thread and she kissed me. Or maybe I kissed her, which is what she always said when we relived that moment afterward. I had always dreaded my first kiss, knew it was long overdue but had no idea how it would ever come about.

I’d had intensely sexual dreams by then, but they never gave me any indication of how such things would begin, how I was to make even kissing happen. Although I had never said it in so many words to myself, I would have preferred to be a girl in those situations. But there was something about having Grant and Ed below—hearing their noises, the popcorn starting to bounce in the pan, Ed yelping to Grant about something—that gave me courage. You know what you’re doing, the noises below seemed to be saying. We know you’re up there with her and we’re hoping for the best for you. I felt my tongue go into her mouth, felt her tongue hesitate then

meet mine, felt she had no more experience than I did, felt her neck and her hair, felt for the first time that I was feeling what I should be feeling, as if for once all the sharp awkward fragments of my life suddenly fell into their proper slots.

The TV went on. Ed and Grant started laughing, which made us laugh. A navy blue light was coming through the small high windows in the hallways. I’m not sure I was ever so happy.

“You smell like a wet dog,” she said.

“You smell like a wet mongoose.” And we laughed and kissed, feeling like we were doing something dirty by talking while we were kissing, talking of wet things.

And then we went downstairs and ate popcorn and her cheeks were flushed and her lips bright red and it was raining hard now outside and I knew Ed and Grant knew everything, and everything— everything—made me happy.

I imagined—more than once, more than a few times that summer—my parents killed in a car crash in France. I imagined Grant and Ed moving in permanently; I wondered if my parents had a will and in whose care they’d planned to leave me. I imagined long courtroom scenes with my mother’s brother or my father’s aunt, both of whom seemed likely candidates for guardian, versus me and Ed and Grant. I imagined us winning the lawsuit, taking a big road trip like the ones we were always talking about: to Louisiana, to Acapulco.

To wish your parents ill, to wish that they would never return, seems heavy from an adult perspective but it sat lightly on me that summer. A frivolous, whimsical wish that I knew would never come true.

And it didn’t. My parents returned on August 16 as they had said they would, at six in the evening as they had also predicted. My father seemed stronger, full of a loud bluster I remembered from years earlier. My mother hugged me several times, each time telling me, like a grandmother, how tall I’d gotten. And then she looked me directly in the eye—I saw it was true that I had grown; I had to look down at an even steeper angle to meet her eye—and told me she was so surprised by how terribly she had missed me.

On the word “terribly,” her lips crumpled out of their usual fixed position and she could not seem to right them. I held her gaze and said I was

surprised by how little I missed her. And then we laughed. What else could we do?

“Let’s get you boys settled up,” said my father, and he led Ed and Grant up the stairs swiftly, without the torpor of the past few years. He opened the door to his study and I followed them in. From the bottom drawer of the desk he pulled out a three-ring binder that held his checks. He wrote slowly, one check for Ed, another for Grant. Behind him the hole was gone. I raked my eyes over the white surface until I detected a small, slightly darker area where it had been patched up and painted. I tried to catch Ed’s eye, but my father was asking them which professors they’d had, to see if he knew any of them.

“How was the Dordogne?” Grant asked.

They were awkward and stiff, strangers in a house that was once their own.

My father slid the binder back inside his desk and shut the drawer. “The Dordogne was the Dordogne.”

I knew it was a line Ed would savor, that it would become part of his lexicon with Grant. My father shook both their hands firmly and thanked them for taking good care of the house.

I walked with Ed and Grant down the porch steps, across the lawn to the Pontiac.

“We never drove to Mexico,” Ed said.

“Or to New Orleans,” Grant said.

“Maybe they’ll go back to Europe next summer,” I said.

“Start leaving brochures around the house.” Ed spread out his palms, marquee-style. “Capri in July!”

Grant dropped his bag beside the car and hugged me hard.

“I love you.”

It was as if his big arms had squeezed the words out of me. I was embarrassed and I was also surprised, because I’d always thought I’d loved Ed more.

“Aw, we don’t like to leave our boy,” Ed said and came in on the hug. I breathed in his smell of cigarettes and hot asphalt.

I think we all felt certain we would see each other again, that this was not a real goodbye. In a week, after they’d gone home to see their families, they’d be back in their dorm a few miles from this road. They had pointed it out to me from the car, a big high-rise in the midst of squat brick buildings,

and I imagined our life together would resume there in a few weeks. I could see the beanbag chairs, the box of pizza, the newspaper spread out with the movie listings. But when the school year began, I could never summon the confidence to step on campus, let alone go into a dorm and up to the eighth floor. Becca urged me to at least call or drop them a line but the summer closed up and there seemed no way back in.

I can look back on that time now as if rereading a book I was too young for the first time around. I see now how in love Grant was with Ed, how Ed knew it and needed it even if he couldn’t return it, how Ed was nursing a badly broken heart, and how well they understood what had gone on in my house before they arrived. I will carry that summer with me until I am, as Ed used to say, “passé composé.” I have never seen either of them since, though I have read all three of Ed’s novels and liked each one. I confess that I have hoped for some reference to that summer in them, a large gray house, a college town, a lonely boy whose parents have left the country, but there has been no sign of me yet, nor of Grant. It is strange to think that they both still walk this earth somewhere, that they have also had several decades more of life, that right now they are each lying down or standing up or reading a book or on an airplane or in a hospital room or a taxi or sitting in an office.

Becca, though, I married. I don’t know how other people do it, not stay with the girl whose ankle socks made your stomach flip at age fourteen, whose wet hair smells like your past—the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to happiness.