HOPEWOOD, VIRGINIA, 2006
LUCY SAT IN her backyard with the thick smell of
newly cut grass in her head. It was nearly seven o’clock in the
evening but still so hot she was sitting with her feet in a pot
filled with cold water.
Now that she was grown up and fresh off the wonders
of Jefferson’s gardens on campus, she could see that this yard was
nothing special. But when she was small it had been her pleasure
dome. From her earliest memory she’d loved digging in the grass and
making puddles with the hose. As with clay, she yearned to get her
hands dirty. It was a tactile pleasure and another of her
small-bore rebellions.
She’d made a vegetable garden in fifth grade and
produced her own cucumbers, but the rabbits and deer got to it
after seventh grade, when she’d spent a July in Virginia Beach with
Marnie’s family.
She’d planted her raspberries in ninth grade. Her
mom complained about the rotten compost Lucy amassed and the fact
that the canes took over the entire back of the yard. It was true
that Lucy was generous to fertilize and slow to prune. But they had
fresh sweet raspberries all through the late summer and fall, not
to mention raspberry jam and raspberry sauce and frozen raspberries
the rest of the year. “You pay four dollars for a stinky little
half-pint of them in the supermarket, and compared to ours they
have no taste at all,” her mother acknowledged with a certain
amount of pride.
Lucy’s first act of landscape design had been their
swimming pool when she was sixteen. The neighbors on both sides and
in back of them had built pools, and her father had proclaimed they
would build one, too. She’d made hundreds of drawings of it in her
sketchbook. She didn’t want a big bright turquoise rectangle like
the neighbors had. She designed a small pool in the shape and color
of a pond with a natural bank of grass and flowers that went right
up to the water. You wouldn’t even see any concrete unless you
peered over the edge. She’d tried to figure out the kinds of
materials they would need, investigated the drainage issues, priced
it all to the best of her ability, and written out her order for
the nursery.
But the time for the pool was never now. She’d
pestered her dad year after year, presenting him with new and
refined drawings until one night she saw him writing checks at the
dining-room table and realized he was still paying off Dana’s
hospital bills. She didn’t say anything more about it after that.
And anyway, she told herself, a built pool would never have turned
out as good as the one she’d imagined.
This summer Lucy had been eager to get home from
school to her room and her raspberries and her nothing-special
yard. She’d been feeling anxious since the end of the semester,
sleeping little and badly, and waking up from terrible dreams.
She’d told her mom it was the stress of exams. She had chasing
dreams, burning dreams, beating dreams, and the wracking and crying
dreams, which often featured the absurd Madame Esme trading off
with Dana. And Daniel was a presence, seen or felt, in nearly every
one. Lucy’s body ached from the strain of them.
She’d hoped that being home would soothe her and
bore her, as it usually did. She thought if she just changed the
rhythm of her nights and days, the dreams would stop. And here she
was at home, and exams were over and Madame Esme was far away, but
the dreams persisted. She couldn’t leave her brain at school. That
was the problem. If she could have, she might have enjoyed a
perfectly happy summer vacation.
She heard the screen door open and turned to see
her mom. She had her pink suit on.
“Did you show a house?” Lucy asked.
“I had that open house on Meadow.”
Lucy could see the sweat seeping into circles under
the arms of her mother’s pink linen jacket. “How’d it go?”
“I laid out food and flowers and cleaned that dump
up myself. Four brokers showed up, not a buyer in sight, and those
vultures had the nerve to eat my snacks.” Her tone was so dramatic
Lucy wanted to laugh, but she didn’t.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
Her mother hated being a realtor. She said she’d
prefer to sell underwear at Victoria’s Secret, but her father
thought that was unseemly for a graduate of Sweet Briar College.
Lucy always had the feeling her mother couldn’t rebel against her
native prissiness, so her daughters did it for her.
“Well.” She surveyed Lucy’s sundress. “Are you
going out?”
“Kyle Farmer is having a party.”
“Kyle from chorus?”
“Yep. That one.”
“Fun. I’m glad you are going to see your old
friends.”
Her mother took so much heart from simple social
interactions that Lucy felt bad she didn’t have more of them, or at
least make it seem like she did. She wondered if she should have
stayed in Charlottesville for the summer with Marnie and spared her
mother her true mood. She mostly avoided parties of old high school
people. They had a depressing air of unearned nostalgia. Kind of
like reunions but premature, where no one had gone out and done
anything yet. But tonight she had a motive. Brandon Crist was going
to be there, and he was the closest thing to a friend Daniel ever
had at that school.
“Can I use your car?” she asked.
Her mother nodded, but her face showed reluctance.
“You need to help pay for gas this summer, okay?”
“I know. I’ll fill it up. I put in two applications
today.”
“Good girl.” Her mom always wanted to be pleased.
She didn’t want to give Lucy a hard time. Dana had broken her so
hard that Lucy’s shortcomings were almost like gifts.