“I’ll go,” I said.
“Oh, that’s wonderful, Lucy!” she said.
I got along fine with my mother, despite my lifestyle choices. I’d never been married, but had lived with three different men, eight years apiece. Eight years seemed to be my limit, for some reason.
Julie’s relationship with Mom had always been a little strained, though, in spite of the fact that my sister tried to do everything right. She’d stayed Catholic, gotten married, produced a beautiful grandchild and had an enormously successful career. She was conservative and reliable, the levelheaded daughter who took Mom to her doctor’s appointments and helped her with all her paperwork. Still, there was an undeniable awkwardness between my mother and Julie that I doubted would ever go away. Julie thought she still blamed her for Isabel’s death. I didn’t believe that for a minute, but it was impossible to know if that might be the case, because my mother wasn’t the type to talk about her feelings. The topic of Isabel was always off-limits, anyway. Even
“Listen,” my mother said, “I was thinking we need to have a big party before Shannon goes off to college. She’ll be away for her birthday on September tenth, so it could be a combination birthday and going-away party.”
“That’s not for a couple of months, Mom,” I said.
“But you know how time slips by,” she said. “If we don’t start planning it now, it might never happen.”
“All right.” Sometimes it was better to let my mother run with an idea than to try to stop her. “What are your thoughts?”
“We could have it here.”
“At McDonald’s?” I tried not to sound too horrified. “Shannon’s nearly eighteen. I don’t think she’d want to have a party here.”
“All right, all right.” My mother brushed away my comment as though she’d known it was coming. “How about at home, then?” She meant her house, the house Julie and I had grown up in.
“Good idea,” I said.
She started talking about her plans for the party—who we should invite, a theme for the decorations, what sort of food we’d have—and my mind slipped back to the eel.
“Do you remember that huge eel Julie caught?” I asked suddenly.
My mother looked confused, my question so completely out of context. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “What eel? When?”
I realized I’d made a mistake starting the conversation, because I was certain the year of the eel had been 1962.
“Just…when we were kids,” I answered. “She caught it in the canal. When you put it in the frying pan, it still moved.”
“Oh, they always did,” my mother said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Some autonomic nerve thing,” she said. “They were dead as doornails. What on earth made you think of that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I lied. “It just popped into my head.”
My mother looked dreamily into space. “What I wouldn’t give for some eel right now,” she said.
I leaned back and sipped my soda, feeling pleased all out of proportion to the conversation: I’d said something about the bungalow and survived.
CHAPTER 4
Until my sister’s death the summer I was twelve years old, I’d had a nearly idyllic childhood. The school year was spent in Westfield, a town that offered everything I could possibly need and was an easy bus ride to New York, where my parents often took my sisters and me to the zoo or the history museum or a Broadway play. My parents were smart, well educated and loving, and my overindulgent maternal grandparents, Grandma and Grandpop Foley, lived nearby. Their house was as open to us as our own.
I was a creative child—too creative, some of my teachers said—and loved making up adventures for myself and my friends. I made up stories about things going on in the neighborhood: the old lady on the corner was a witch, I had a boyfriend in another town, I was found abandoned on my parents’ doorstep as an infant. I told the kids in my class that wolves had been spotted in Mindowaskin Park, close to our homes. I loved to write plays to put on in our garage and poetry to read to my classmates.
My mother was popular among my friends, because she always took our endeavors very seriously. She’d paint scenery and sew curtains for the “stage” when we put on a play, and she’d go along with the tall tales I told the neighborhood kids, as long as I wasn’t scaring any of them too much.
My father was a physician with a busy schedule, but he made time for my sisters and me. Even though he walked with a limp from a World War II injury, he still managed to take us tobogganing or ice-skating or bowling. My world was safe and fun and easy.
Things started getting rocky around the time Isabel turned fifteen. She wanted to hang out with her friends instead of with the family, and she wanted to go to parties my parents didn’t approve of. She was nasty to me, suddenly viewing me as a liability rather than an asset. She no longer wanted me around and barely spoke to me if she was with her friends. It was a fairly tame rebellion, in retrospect. My father still seemed to think his eldest daughter could walk on water, while my mother bore the brunt of her defiant behavior. The worst part was that, by the summer Isabel was seventeen, my parents had begun arguing about how to handle her. I had never heard a cross word pass between the two of them before, and their disagreements worried me.
All during the school year, I’d hunger for my grandparents’ summer bungalow down the shore on the Point Pleasant Canal. It was in a little beach community called Bay Head Shores, only an hour from Westfield, but it seemed a world away. In 1962, we arrived at the bungalow a few days after school ended, caravanning with my grandparents, who towed our boat behind their black Studebaker. Lucy, my mother and I followed in the Chrysler, and Dad and Isabel brought up the rear in our father’s flashy yellow Lark convertible. Everyone pretended that
