Barefoot: A Novel

AUGUST

There was a lot to be learned from children’s games, Brenda thought. Take Chutes and Ladders, which she and Blaine had played umpteen times this summer and which they were playing again now on the coffee table. The board, with its 100 spaces, was a person’s life, and a random spinner dictated which space a person would land on . This little girl did her chores so she earned money to go to the movies: short ladder. This boy stood on a wobbly chair to reach the cookie jar, but he fell and broke his arm: steep chute. As Blaine assiduously practiced counting out spaces, he looked to Brenda for nods of affirmation, but she was musing about al the things that had happened to her in the past year. Brenda had sailed up a tal ladder with her doctorate and the job at Champion and the highest teaching rating in the department, but al this seemed to do was to elevate her to a place where there were more perilous chutes. A professor has an affair with her student. . . . A woman throws a book in anger. . . .

Blaine won the game. This always made him happy.

“Want to play again?” he asked.

It was August, everybody’s summer, though for Brenda the month heralded the beginning of the end. They would be leaving the island in three and a half weeks. It made Brenda physical y sick to think of leaving Nantucket and returning to the city, to the apartment she could no longer afford and the pervasive back-to-school atmosphere that now meant nothing to her. For the first time in her memory, Brenda would not be going back to school.

She had been banned from school. You will never work in academia again. It was almost too much to bear. And so, Brenda did her best to ignore the fact that it was August.

Brian Delaney, Esquire, however, would not let her forget. His cal s came so frequently that Brenda’s life felt like a video game in which Brian Delaney, Esquire, popped up in her path to thwart her.

She final y cal ed him back from a bench in the smal park next to the ’Sconset Market. Even ’Sconset, quaint vil age that it was, was bursting at the seams with people now that it was August. There was a line out the door of the market for coffee and the paper, and there were no fewer than five people on cel phones in the smal park, but none of them, certainly, were conducting business more unpleasant than Brenda’s.

Trudi, Brian Delaney, Esquire’s secretary, sounded relieved to hear it was Brenda cal ing. “He wants to get this settled,” Trudi confided to Brenda, “before he goes to the Hamptons!”

“So now we’re working around your vacation?” Brenda said when Himself came on the line. She meant to sound snappy-funny-sarcastic, but for once, Brian Delaney, Esquire, wasn’t biting.

“Listen,” he said. “The university is wil ing to settle at a hundred and twenty-five. Are you jumping for joy? One twenty-five. And they’l waive the ten grand you owe them to work on the painting. I guess the guy Len, or whomever, is going to write a paper about the restoration. So that’s a clean and clear one twenty-five. That is as good as it’s going to get, Dr. Lyndon. I strongly advise you to take it.”

“I don’t have a hundred and twenty-five thousand dol ars,” Brenda said. “And I don’t have a job. How can I settle when I don’t have the money?”

“We have to settle,” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “How’s the screenplay coming?”

“Fine,” Brenda said. Which was true—the screenplay, which had started out as a wing and a prayer, was now nearly done. But the problem with finishing the screenplay was the incipient worry about sel ing the damn thing.

“Good, good,” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “There’s your mil ion dol ars right there.”

“Yeah,” Brenda said. “In my dreams.”

“And there’s that pretty piece of real estate you’re sitting on. You could sel out to your sister.”

“No,” Brenda said. The cottage was the only thing Brenda owned. If things didn’t work out in the city, she would have to live on Nantucket year-round. She would have to get a job as a landscaper, or as a salesperson at one of the shops in town. She would have to make friends with other year-rounders who had failed to make lives in the real world. “I’ve told you I don’t know how many times, my sister is sick. She has cancer. I can’t bother her or her husband with a real estate thing now, just because I need money.”

“But you do need money,” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “We can’t leave this hanging. Everything doesn’t stop just because it’s summer and you’re on Nantucket. The university wil take us to trial, where, I assure you, we wil lose—to the tune of three hundred grand, plus al the money you’l have to pay me to prepare. I don’t know what you did to that woman Atela, but she is pissed. She wants justice, the university counsel tel s me.

Justice! ” Brian Delaney, Esquire, huffed impatiently. “Do you want me to settle this thing or not?”

There was no justice, Brenda thought. There were only chutes and ladders.

“Settle,” she said.

The beginning of the end with Walsh had arrived when Brenda handed back the midterm papers to her class. She knew students compared notes and shared grades, but she never expected that Walsh would do so. Then again, she never told him (as perhaps she should have): Don’t tell anyone what grade I gave you. The fact of the matter was, Brenda and Walsh didn’t discuss the paper, or his grade, at al . It wasn’t relevant to their relationship; it might have been someone else who gave Walsh the grade.

On the first day of April, no one showed up for class. At five past eleven, not a single student. This struck Brenda as odd, but she relished the quiet. She was tired. She had spent the night before at her parents’ house in Philadelphia; she and Vicki had gone to their father’s law office and signed the papers that made them the official owners of Number Eleven Shel Street. El en Lyndon had persuaded Brenda to stay for a dinner that featured roast chicken and several bottles of celebratory wine. Brenda missed the last train back to New York and had spent the night in her childhood bed. She’d awoken at six that morning to get to 30th Street Station. Her day had been a blur of Metroliner, subway, crosstown bus.

So as she waited for her class to arrive, she rested her head on the Queen Anne table. It smel ed like lemon Pledge. She closed her eyes.

And jolted awake! A minute later, two minutes? No, it was eleven-fifteen and stil no one had come. She checked her syl abus; spring break wasn’t for two weeks. But then she thought, April first, April Fool’s. The class was playing a trick on her. Ha, ha. But where were they?