Depot were serene occasions-fresh air and girl-talk with Aunt Martha, and some doubtless needed relief from what must have been the claustrophobia of her life with Grandmother and Lydia and the maids at Front Street. Mother must have been dying to leave home. Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to. But, for me, Sawyer Depot was a training camp; yet the athleticism was not-all by itself -what was most thrilling to me about the time spent with my cousins. What made these contests thrilling was the presexual tension that I always associated with the competition-that I always associated with Hester in particular. To this day, I still engage in debate with Noah and Simon regarding whether Hester was 'created' by her environment, which was almost entirely created by Noah and Simon-which is my opinion-or whether she was born with an overdose of sexual aggression and family animosity-which is what Noah and Simon say. We all agree that my Aunt Martha, as a model of womanhood, was no match for the superior impression my Uncle Alfred made-as a man. Felling trees, clearing the land,
milling lumber-what a male business was the Eastman Lumber Company! The house in Sawyer Depot was spacious and pretty; for my Aunt Martha had acquired my grandmother's good taste, and she'd brought money of her own to the marriage. But Uncle Alfred made more money than we Wheelwrights were simply sitting on. Uncle Alfred was a paragon of maleness, too, in that he was rich and he dressed like a lumberjack; that he spent most of the day behind a desk did not influence his appearance. Even if he only briefly visited the sawmill-and not more than twice a week did he actually venture into the forests where they were logging-he looked the part. Although he was fiercely strong, I never saw him do an ounce of physical labor. He radiated a burly good health, and despite how little time he spent 'in the field,' there was always sawdust in his bushy hair, wood chips wedged between the laces of his boots, and a few fragrant pine needles ground into the knees of his blue jeans. Possibly he kept the pine needles, the wood chips, and the sawdust in his office desk drawer. What does it matter? While wrestling with my cousins and me, Uncle Alfred was an ever-friendly bruiser; and the cologne of his rough-and-ready business, the veritable scent of the woods, was always upon him. I don't know how my Aunt Martha tolerated it, but Firewater often slept in the king-size bed in my uncle and aunt's room-and that was an even further manifestation of Uncle Alfred's manliness: that when he wasn't snuggling up to my lovely Aunt Martha, he was lolling in bed with a big dog. I thought Uncle Alfred was terrific-a wonderful father; and, for boys, he was what today's idiots would call a superior 'role model.' He must have been a difficult 'role model' for Hester, however, because I think her worshipful love of him-in addition to her constant losses in the daily competitions with her older brothers-simply overwhelmed her, and gave her an unwarranted contempt of my Aunt Martha. But I know what Noah would say to that; he would say 'bullshit,' that his mother was a model of sweetness and caring-and she was I I don't argue with that!-and that Hester was born to her antagonism toward her mother, that she was born to challenge her parents' love with hostility toward both of them, and that the only way she could repay her brothers for outskiing her (on water and on snow), and for hurting her off sawdust piles, and for cramming her cousin into a basket with her old underwear, was to intimidate every girlfriend either of them ever had and to fuck the brains out of every boy they ever knew. Which she appeared to do. It's a no-win argument-that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth. Privately, I continue to be more forgiving of Hester than her own family is. I think she was up against a stacked deck from the start, and that everything she would become began for her when Noah and Simon made me kiss her-because they made it clear that kissing Hester was punishment, the penalty part of the game; to have to kiss Hester meant you had lost. I don't remember exactly how old we were when we were first forced to kiss, Hester and I, but it was sometime after my mother had met Dan Needham-because Dan was spending Christmas vacation with us at the Eastmans' in Sawyer Depot-and it was sometime before my mother and Dan Needham were married, because Mother and I were still living at Front Street. Whenever it was, Hester and I were still in our preadolescent years-our presexual years, if that's safe to say; perhaps that is never safe to say in regard to Hester, but I promise it is safe to say of me. Anyway, there'd been a thaw in the north country, and some rain, and then an ice storm, which froze the slush in deep-grooved rats. The snow was the texture of jagged glass, which made skiing all the more exciting for Noah and Simon but made it entirely out of the question for me. So Noah and Simon went up north to brave the elements, and I stayed in the Eastmans' extremely comfortable house; I don't remember why Hester stayed home, too. Perhaps she was in a cranky temper, or else she just wanted to sleep in. For whatever reason, we were there together, and by the end of the day, when Noah and Simon returned, Hester and I were in her room, playing Monopoly. I hate Monopoly, but even a capitalist board game was welcome relief from the more strenuous activities my cousins subjected me to-and Hester was either in a rare mood to be calm, or else I rarely saw her without the company of Noah and Simon, around whom it was impossible to remain calm. We were lounging on the thick, soft rug in Hester's room, with some of her old stuffed animals for pillows, when the boys-then- hands and faces bitter cold from skiing-attacked
us. They trod across the Monopoly game so effectively that there was no hope of re-creating where our houses and hotels and tokens might have been.
' 'Whoa!'' Noah yelled. ' 'Look at this hanky-panky going on here!'
'There's no hanky-panky going on!' Hester said angrily.
'Whoa!' Simon yelled. 'Watch out for Hester the Mo/ester!'
'Get out of my room!' Hester shouted.
'Last one through the house has to kiss Hester the
