books! Everybody in her family loved to read. They’d sit, engrossed by stories in the living room with its wicker chairs and tongue-and-groove paneled walls and the black-and-white drawings of yachts in harbor, while the rain pattered on the roof and the fire crackled and the wind rattled the shutters.
Their mother had found the drawings in a flea market. Their father would have preferred brand-new pictures to grace the walls of the cottage, but their mother never got used to having whatever she wanted, let alone this capacious, gray-shingled “cottage,” part of Martha’s Vineyard enclave of affluent African Americans. Now their father treasured those pictures. They caught him looking at them again and again, as if he’d never seen them before.
It didn’t rain a drop that weekend, all three days as perfect as the first. No Parcheesi, no Monopoly, they didn’t read a line. They spent the mornings playing doubles on a neighbor’s clay court, four at a time until each had served a game, while the fifth took turns on the sidelines holding Bags’s leash so he wouldn’t chase the balls. The afternoons they spent on the beach. Evenings gin and tonic, dinner, then long talks over too much wine. Rachel and her husband were always the first to go upstairs to bed.
On their last night, already nostalgic, Rachel took a long hot shower to wash the ocean salt away while her naked husband waited for her in bed. Then she put perfume on in the places he liked her to, opened the medicine cabinet above the sink, and took down the little striped purse in which she kept her diaphragm. Last winter, after six years of marriage, they had decided to have a child, but in June she still wasn’t pregnant and then she was suddenly appointed head of school. They made the common-sense decision that she wouldn’t get pregnant until she’d been in office long enough to feel comfortable about taking a maternity leave. But she was thirty-five. Her time was running short. Or was it her mother’s empty chair that made her want to make a child right this minute for herself and a grandchild for her dad?
She opened the purse and took out the case. In her hands its round smoothness felt like some kind of shellfish made in a lab. Inside, the diaphragm looked altogether too much like the rubber dam her dentist used for her root canals. She thought of all the ardent little swimmers that had raced each other toward it, only to crash into it and die like thwarted salmon. She opened the bathroom door and stepped naked into the bedroom. Her husband’s eyes lighted up. She lifted her hand, the round rubber thing held between thumb and forefinger as if it were maybe just a little bit poisonous. “Let’s just see what happens instead,” she said.
He sat bolt upright. “What?”
“Just this once.” She let her hand drop down to her side. His eyes followed. She stood still so he would see her instead, naked, facing him. His eyes moved down from her face and over her body, lingering; his Adam’s apple jumped, his face softened, seeming to melt, as it did when he was aroused. “I’m sick of planning,” she murmured, fervent now, as aroused as he, and turned around to go into the bathroom and put the thing back in the cabinet. She gave a little booty shake to try to make him laugh, and with the door still open so he could see, she put the diaphragm back in its shell, the shell into the striped purse, the purse back into the cabinet. They were going to make love her way, or not at all.
Then she crossed the room to him, lifted the sheet, slid in, and pressing herself against his side, she threw her arm across his chest. “You are too,” she said. “Admit it.”
“I am what?”
“Never mind,” she said, raising herself above him. She lay down on top of him, and aimed her lips for his, but he turned his face. She missed, kissing him on his cheek. He was even more aroused now. That was obvious. She put her tongue in his ear, but he kept his head sideways on the pillow. She was suddenly as furious as she was horny, and she rolled off him onto her side, facing away.
“Oh, Rach!” he said. “A baby right now is the last—”
“Don’t say a word!” she hissed. “Just don’t.”
He was very still. She waited for him to beg her to get up, go back into the bathroom, put the damn thing in, and start all over, but he said nothing and they lay in the dark on their backs not touching, watching a glimmer of moonlight that played on the ceiling, and listening to the distant surf.
THE HONEYSUCKLE SMELL at the front door of the Head’s House, to which she returned on Monday, made Rachel want to cry. The vines ran up a trellis on the front of the Island cottage too, and yesterday all the windows were open and the same sweet, heavy summertime smell was rushing in when she saw her father straightening the pictures of yachts in harbor on the wall for the second time that day, and she touched him on the shoulder, just the end of her fingers lightly there.
She shook her head to clear the memory away. She had work to do. She’d go in, change into running clothes, take a run, then come back and shower and get to her office. She pushed the door open. It was dark inside, all the shades down, and cool after the humid air outside. And big. Too big for her right then—commodious enough for a head with a spouse and several kids. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be alone in it, even for the few minutes it would take to change to running clothes. She put down her suitcase in the foyer, turned around, and headed for her office.
The campus was empty. All afternoon, working in her office, Rachel waited for the phone to ring. Twice she reached for it to make the call to Bob. Each time, she stopped before she picked up the receiver. You’re being dumb, she told herself. What difference does it make who calls first? Still she didn’t call, and when she was hungry at dinnertime, she went to a restaurant in the nearby village of Fieldington to eat. She still didn’t want to be alone in her house. The hostess seated her at a table next to a middle-aged couple. Rachel took comfort in the fact that they hardly said a word to one other.
Back on campus, the lights were on in Eudora Easter’s apartment. Eudora was the chair of the Art Department, twenty years older than Rachel, and the only other black woman on the staff. Rachel stopped the car by the side of the drive and crossed the lawn in the twilight, hungry for her company. Their friendship had blossomed at the end of last year when Eudora had gone out of her way to thank Rachel for daring to break precedent by allowing Claire Nelson to stay another year. Eudora had been on the faculty forever—only one year fewer than the Plummers. During all that time, no girl had ever stayed on after her senior year. “But you gave me the chance to do what needs to be done to make sure that enormous talent of hers gets a foundation,” she told Rachel. “I don’t trust anybody more than I trust myself to make that happen.” Eudora dressed in costumes that, no matter how outlandish, always seemed just right for her. She was a large woman with a round, soft body and a beautiful face whom Marjorie Boyd had hired when Eudora was still thin—right after her husband drowned absurdly in a swamp during a Reserve Marine Corps exercise two weeks after their honeymoon—and since then she had given up dieting.
But before Rachel was halfway across the lawn, the lights went out in Eudora’s living room in the front and, an instant later, came on in the backroom Eudora had converted into her private studio. Rachel turned around and walked back to her car. She knew better than to intrude on Eudora’s painting time.
On the other side of the lawn, the lights in Francis and Peggy Plummer’s apartment were out. The Plummers and Eudora had lived just across a small lawn from each other all those years. It warmed Rachel to think about the deep Plummer-Easter friendship. She figured the Plummers were still driving home from the Cape and wondered what they were saying to each other after living apart for almost half a year.
Home at last, she went straight upstairs, turned on all the lights in her bedroom, got in bed to watch the Red Sox game, and promptly fell asleep. She woke up long after the game was over, switched off the TV and the lights, and lay back down in the dark, wondering what it had been like for her dad getting in bed alone the first time after her mother
