perceptible difference between an aging hippie and a transient.
So they were frightened at first, but I held up my hands as I walked up to the porch. The cottage had a wide wraparound porch, stone-floored, with swings, chairs, rugs, and potted plants. The girls retreated partway up the stairs and stood there uncertainly on the steps in their simple cotton frocks, clutching a Frisbee and a skipping rope. I held up my hands like a man who was surrendering.
I was lucky the help wasn’t around and the mother, as usual, had gone to bed early. If anyone else had been there — the cook, for one, who was a domineering type — they probably would have run me off.
I’d had too much to drink, of course. It was my pastime then — the summer before my divorce, a strange and isolated time. I was camped out in an old airplane hangar on one of the smaller lakes and now and then I hitchhiked into town, bought booze and groceries, and prayed not to run into my estranged wife. We’d had our own more modest summer place nearby.
What I’d done was, I’d disappeared. I didn’t want my wife to know where I had gone. It was the only trick I had left: hiding and vanishing. I got some meager satisfaction from an idea I had of her not knowing whether I lived or died — her wondering if maybe, defying all her expectations, I’d left my dull old self behind and flown off to a distant and unknown country.
Those girls were good. Plenty of rich girls aren’t, we all know that. But those two girls were innocent. I don’t know how they turned out that way, with the mother who wasn’t all there and the father who wasn’t there at all. That goodness came from them like milk from a rock.
Snow, as I came to call her because I couldn’t be bothered to pronounce her real name, mostly liked books, and sat in the shade of the porch on afternoons, reading. Her sister was more social and spent her time talking to everyone. She rode her bicycle to an old folks’ home most days and helped the people there.
As I stood on the lawn looking up at them, I noticed something I hadn’t seen from a distance: the girls’ skin glowed. Both of them had this luminous kind of skin.
That clear, young skin is part of what makes girls look so edible.
I asked them not to be afraid. I told them my name, and after a few moments they seemed to relax and told me theirs. They had a dog, an old Irish setter who lay around and barely raised his tail even for flies. I sat down on the steps and petted the dog, after a while.
So we were friends. Of course, I wouldn’t have had a chance if the girls hadn’t been left on their own so much. Now and then a friend their own age came up from the city to visit and I didn’t intrude upon them then.
But those visits were rare. Often at dawn or dusk, when the deer and the girls were out, I was the only company they had. I kept a low profile and did not throw the Frisbee back and forth with them, in case someone could see us from the house. Usually we stood together and we talked, a little out of sight. Once or twice they sat on the end of the dock and trailed their feet through the water, and I swam, only my head above the darkening surface.
From the high bedroom windows of the cottage’s second floor, that wouldn’t have looked like anything.
The girls were kind to me. They let me use the canoes in the boathouse, even encouraged me, and some mornings I would row out into a hidden bay and sit and drift, trying idly to fish in the shade of a red pine. There were some old rods in the boathouse, and since I had none of my own I used to borrow them.
Snow would leave me sandwiches or sometimes bring a bowl of ice cream onto the porch. Rose offered small hotel bottles of shampoo and told me to use them.
These girls were both honest. Once Snow said to me, “You smell not too good. Did you know?”
I told her that I washed my clothes whenever I could, in the coin laundry in town or the lake. I also tried to swim and use soap on myself, but now and then I lost track and missed a day or two.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Snow wistfully.
My back hurt from sleeping on the cement floor of the hangar and I ended up asking the sisters for aspirin. For several days my back and neck had been sore, and the pills took the worst edge off the pain but that was all. Then Rose said I should sleep in the cottage, which had more bedrooms than could easily be counted. There was a certain servants’ part of the house, they said, which had its own entrance, and none of the help used it. I could sneak in at night and sleep in the comfortable bed, which had down pillows and high-thread-count sheets.
I protested at first; I had some fear I’d run into one of the other members of the household. But it was silent when I snuck in there at night, after the girls had gone to bed. It was so quiet that it almost seemed to me they lived there by themselves, and food and water were furnished to them by invisible hands.
The bed was a nice change from concrete floors, so nice I almost questioned my recent course in life — hunkering down in the hangar, unshaved and unwashed, hiding from my soon-to-be-ex-wife. But then I came full circle; the hiding couldn’t be so wrong for it had brought me here, to this great mansion with its soft sheets and gentle girls.
After that I often slipped in by the servants’ narrow stairs and slept in my private room, tucked up under the roof. I set my wristwatch alarm and crept out at the crack of dawn. The cottage doors were never locked during the summer months; the family was always there, the family or the staff. I watched them from the shadows whenever I could. The Mexican groundskeeper rode around on his lawn tractor uselessly, mowing nothing, happy to sit aloft. The live-in maid smoked cigarettes near the garden shed and sometimes slipped away to have sex with him in the bushes.
One day the mother had a brief flash of life and donned her sparkling tennis whites. She ran outside and hit a few balls feebly with Rose on the clay tennis court. Meanwhile Snow, on the sidelines, took snapshots for the family album.
It was a rare occasion, to see the mother outside in the sun, acting alive like that.
But only fifteen minutes passed before the mother went inside again, apparently angry or depressed. She threw her racket down and blurted something that I couldn’t quite make out. I saw the girls’ faces as they watched her go. Their faces were both sad and calm; the girls were resigned to this beautiful, semiretarded mother with her spidery limbs and odd tantrums.
Perhaps she was never a ballerina, I thought to myself. There aren’t too many retarded ballerinas in this world, is my perception of the thing, although there certainly are a few who, like the mother, starve themselves.
That evening, around dusk, the girls came swimming with me in the lake; Rose lathered my hair up with shampoo. It was one of the only times I felt the sisters’ touch. They weren’t too prone to physical contact. They hadn’t grown up with affection, and also, I was an older, often bad-smelling man, quite unattractive to them. No doubt they were afraid that any touching would be mistaken for an invitation.
But on this occasion, beyond the end of the dock, Rose ducked my head under, laughing, and when I came up spluttering and trying to catch my breath Snow pushed my head under again, and both of them were playfully drowning me.
We were happy.
Then Rose said, “What would he look like with no beard?”
Snow looked at me, too, considering, and then climbed up onto the dock, toweled off, and ran into the house. She came back in a minute with shaving equipment. She even had scissors — clearly no razor, by itself, would be up to the task — and an old hand mirror of heavy silver.
Snow cut off the part of the beard that hung. Then they watched while I sat in the shallows and, with Rose holding up the mirror, shaved off the stubble that was left.
“He’s not that bad,” she said, when I was done.
I dipped my face under and came up again, wiping the water away from my eyes, the flecks of girl-scented shaving foam floating.
“He looks like that actor,” said Snow, cocking her head. “You know, that big French one with the crooked nose.”
“You look like that actor,” concurred Rose, nodding.
“He’s sort of ugly,” said Snow. “And you have to like him.”
“Exactly,” said Rose. “Ugly, like you.”
“But also likable,” said her older sister.
“Girls,” I said ruefully, “you’re going to have to find a way to tell the truth a little less often.”
“Why?” asked Snow.
“Well, for one thing, it hurts people’s feelings.”
