Chapter 23
That night, we eat leftovers warmed up on the stove, and after we’ve washed and dried the dishes, Henry tells me to put on a coat. The day stayed hot, but now the windows are pebbled with rain. When I ask him where we’re going, he pretends not to hear.
We get into the boat, and instead of following the backbend curve of the lake’s shores, Henry steers us diagonally across.
We used to do this drive with Henry’s parents on Friday nights.
I would be entrusted with the shopping bag containing bottles of Merlot and disks of soft cheese, Henry’s mother repeatedly reminding me to keep it in my lap so that the bottom did not get wet and tear.
The first time I carried that intact shopping bag down the dock and up the stairs to the front door where PT was waiting for us with a warm smile and an immediate offer to take the bag from me, I did not understand why the other residents spoke of PT’s place in such breathless tones.
His cabin looked like all the other cabins on Lake Wanika: cozy and unassuming with a dash of intentional kitsch.
It was only after Henry took me to see the tree that Dorothy Parker engraved, a winding but mostly flat mile from PT’s back door, that I understood.
In the distance Henry pointed out peaks of open rock to five thousand feet and said that from up there you could look down and feel like you were king of an entire continent.
That’s how vast PT’s property was, how wildly the terrain varied, from sandy hills with conifer cover to private ponds of screaming frogs to stretches of boulder and, in the spring, pockets of what everyone referred to as “lovely black goo,” actually some kind of fungus that can almost act as quicksand.
And all of it belonged to PT, an unpatrolled hunk of private, howling real estate.
It’s been years since I’ve been in this house, but Henry opens the doors and twists the switches of the gas sconces, and I reacquaint myself with the tatty tribal rugs, the art on the walls that is not fish, and I remember the relief I used to feel when PT opened the door and invited me inside.
Here, it didn’t matter that I didn’t know how to check a boat’s engine oil or bushwhack a trail.
There were old films to watch and discuss, meaty pours of Italian reds, PT asking me what I thought about Jaws—the book, not the movie, told from the perspective of the shark.
PT never had a television. No one on Wanika Lake does. He would use a battery-operated projector, which Henry removes now from the low wood console pushed into a white wall, the only painted wall in the cabin, on which I watched Casablanca for the first time.
“What are we watching?”
“Pick out a bottle,” Henry answers without answering. “You’ll see in a minute.”
I go through the kitchen and into the pantry, find a white Burgundy with a scrawly old label. I hear a few chords of a theme song that freezes me in my tracks, and just as quickly it cuts out. I come back into the kitchen area and stare at Henry.
“I’ve never seen it,” he admits. “Other than that episode, I mean.”
I’m flooded with my favorite kind of feeling.
It is a full-body rush to get to watch something you’ve made with someone who has never seen it before.
Though I’ve seen my show dozens of times between writing it, shooting it, editing it, screening it, and editing it again, the thing always feels brand-new again when I am with someone who does not know what happens next.
“Why start now?” I say. I’m trying to play it cool but I am profusely happy.
“Because it won’t be painful to watch you when you’re sitting here next to me,” Henry says.
We start with season three, the season I finally raised my hand and ended up writing and directing four of the nine episodes. Henry laughs at the parts that I intended to be funny. He claps when my name comes on the screen. It’s so good, Faye, he keeps saying to my utter delight, I get it.
“I have to know,” he says, when we take a break to use the bathroom and scrounge around in the kitchen cabinets for snacks. “What do your parents think?”
“Oh,” I say, my hand in a box of stale Cheez-Its. “They stopped watching after the second episode.”
“I’m shocked they got that far.”
“Yeah, well. I used to get links to the episodes early. And they begged me to send them. And I did and then I just never heard anything, and after a while I checked in and my mother said, and I quote, she was worried I was making a mistake that would hurt my future prospects in life. Also that there was no way she could recommend the show to her friends in good faith because some of the things we spoke about, some of the things we did, were private things, things between a husband and a wife, that should not ever be discussed out in the open and especially not by people who were not married to each other.”
Henry holds out a hand. I pass him the box of Cheez-Its. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Your parents always struck me as a little repressed.”
“A little?” I laugh. Hook my finger through the heart charm on my new-old necklace, saw it back and forth obsessively.
“You know, part of me could respect it. If those were their values, and they just stuck to them. But when the show came out, it was immediately this zeitgeisty, awardsy thing. And then I started writing for it. And directing it. And then I won a very prestigious award. And they wanted to be invited to everything. And I did. I invited them. To all the premieres and the parties. Because I wanted them to be proud of me. And they are, so proud. But it’s like…
they’re proud of my success but ashamed of what I do. Does that make sense?”
Henry offers me the box of Cheez-Its as a consolation. We nibble and crunch for a moment, not talking.
“Do you think,” Henry says, “you are the way you are because of them?”
“I don’t think there’s one thing that happened to make me the way I am. I think it’s a bunch of things and whatever sneaky internal damage occurred when everything collided.”
“Like?”
“Well, I think I have a thing about being taken care of.” When I was a child, my parents did nearly everything for me.
I hated the mornings, and so they laid out my clothes at the foot of the bed.
In the bathroom, a slug of toothpaste coated my toothbrush.
When math and science made me want to lie down and never wake up, my mother took on algebra, my father acid-base definitions, and let me return the A’s in English.
This was a precarious deal, I’d come to find, because any time I did anything to displease them, which was often, they threw it back in my face.
They did everything for me. Did I have any idea how good I had it, how ungrateful and selfish I must be at my innermost core to not see that on my own?
“And you have a thing with taking care of people,” I say. “So we plug in there.”
Quietly, Henry says, “Hurting you is the opposite of taking care of you.”
“Oh,” I muse, offering him the box again, but he waves it away. I set it down on the counter and dust salt from my palms. “The daycare thing is definitely tied up with that.”
Henry frowns. “The daycare thing?”
“I told you about that.”
“Uh,” Henry says. “No, you did not. A daycare thing? I would remember a daycare thing.”
Henry would. Henry would remember this. “I really thought I told you this.” I uncross my arms, cross my feet. I suddenly cannot find a position that feels comfortable.
“What the fuck happened?”
I clasp my hands at my pelvis. That still feels wrong. I jam my hands into my pockets. Better. “I went to this daycare where they spanked you.” I laugh a little; Henry does not.
“What would you get spanked for?”
“Like, if you did something wrong.”
“What would you do wrong?”
“The first time. The main time. I got lost.”
“You got lost? How is that a three-year-old’s fault?”
“I wandered off,” I say. “Or I didn’t wander off, exactly, but I didn’t keep up.
” I’m falling all over my words, struggling to explain.
I take a deep breath. Center myself. Start from the beginning.
“There was a stable not too far from the school. You could get there through a path in the woods. They would take us there to visit a horse named Nickles. It was my turn to pet him or feed him a carrot or whatever, and I was doing that, and all of a sudden I realized it had gotten very quiet. I looked over my shoulder, and everyone was gone. I was all alone in the middle of the woods. I stumbled around until I found a house and knocked on the door. They brought me back to the daycare center, and the owner dragged me into the middle of the room, pulled down my pants, and told all the kids to gather around.”
Henry stares at me in horror. “She made the other kids watch.”
“She always did. Sometimes she would just put a kid in her lap and cross their arms over their chest and hold them by their wrists and, like, turn them, in a circle, telling all the other kids, like, ‘Look at so-and-so, he’s been very bad. He did something wrong. Stare at him.’ She owned the daycare, this woman.
Her name was Mrs. Worther. She could be so mean, but then after she would punish you like that, she’d, like, dote on you.
Cuddle you. Stroke your hair. It was all extremely fucked up, and so yeah, that’s probably at play here. ”
Henry is staring at me, appalled. “Uh, ya think?”
Something about the way he says this is funny to me. Uh, ya think? Extremely funny, actually. I start to laugh.
“Jesus,” Henry says, shaking his head in disgust. “That’s almost as fucked up as the fact that I didn’t talk for, like, a year.”
“What?” I stop laughing. “Henry, wait. What? You didn’t talk for a year?”
“Faye,” Henry says, in the same admonishing tone I used when I insisted I’d told him about what happened to me at daycare. “I told you this.”
“No,” I say firmly, and then I burst into laughter again. This conversation is absurd. “No. Henry. Come on. I would remember if you told me you did not say a word for an entire year. What the fuck? What the fuck happened?”
“Oh,” he says, his eyebrows raised, realizing maybe he hadn’t told me about this either.
“I told my mom I had to use the bathroom. We were running errands or something, and the store we were in wouldn’t let us use the bathroom, and she was like, ‘Can you just hold it? We can be home in ten minutes.’ And I probably could have, but I told her I couldn’t.
So she took me across the street to the McDonald’s, and she got hit by a car. ”
“Henry! No. Stop. Stop.” I’m wiping tears from my eyes with my knuckles.
“Yeah. I mean. She was fine, in the end. But she was in the hospital for like a week.” Henry stares off into space, shell-shocked all over again. “And I was like, I almost killed my mom because I told her I needed the bathroom, so I should probably just never speak again.”
We stare at each other with stricken faces. “Why didn’t we ever tell each other this stuff before?” Henry asks.
“I guess we just didn’t think it was important then, but now we realize it’s so important we thought, of course we told the other about this.”
We stand there in the kitchen a moment, not saying anything else, not looking at each other.
Henry notices some crumbs on the counter and sweeps them into his palm, deposits them in the sink.
He looks up. Fixates on something over my shoulder.
I turn to see my face, frozen on the white-painted wall.
I’m twenty-seven, pouty, positively lethal.
“Remember the time we stayed here?” Henry poses the question to my old face, though the memory is so vivid it feels new.
PT had a wedding in Europe and asked us to housesit for the week.
I told Henry I wanted to fall asleep alone.
I wanted him to enter the room in the middle of the night.
I wanted to be surprised and scared. I wanted him to be a stranger who felt nothing for me at first, but began to feel bad when I started to cry, who dried my tears with the corners of the sheets and kissed me on the mouth until I gave in and stopped fighting him.
This is rape you’re asking for, he said, impressively neutral.
It was like a waiter repeating your order back to you to make sure he’d written it down correctly.
Henry wanted to make sure I would get what I was asking for.
We had been strolling back from breakfast and he had come around in front of me to say this, to stop me and make me stand still and take in what I was asking for.
I had given him a light shove in the chest, and he had grabbed my wrist, pulled me close. Should I care if you come?
I thought about my answer as though he were again my waiter, asking me how I’d like my steak cooked.
I don’t think I should, I said after a moment, not if I want this to feel real.
Henry nodded, his face serious and already frightening.
Wear your hair in a ponytail, he said. That was that. My steak was as I asked.
I used to think that the things we did together were possible because of me.
I was taught all the tired clichés, that men were pigs, that they only had one thing on their minds.
I assumed most would kill for a woman with an appetite like mine, that there were a million Henrys out there and only one of me. But now I know.
There is only one of him too.