Chapter 8 Lindy
Lindy
They wrote back and forth throughout the winter and into the spring. At the bottom of one of her letters in February, she
drew a cartoonish sketch of herself bundled up and leaning into a howling wind. He raved about it, so she began illustrating
each letter. She usually never shared her sketches with anyone, but when she remembered the way his brown eyes looked hazel
in the sun and how it had felt when her knee brushed his in the Sunfish, she wanted to make him smile.
In May, he wrote that he’d had a dream about sailing with her again, and when summer came, the first time she stopped by the
yellow cottage, on a foggy, cool, early June day, he answered the door. She saw Kate standing behind him in the living room,
and Kate, surprisingly, grinned and gave Lindy two thumbs up, which Lindy guessed amounted to her giving her blessing. This
seemed an odd change of heart from last year, but maybe they’d all grown up over the winter. (Kate, Lindy knew from a letter,
had lost her virginity to a boy she’d met in her biology class. Seems fitting, I guess, even though we were just learning how to dissect frogs, she’d written.)
David stepped out onto the front porch and shut the door behind him.
Lindy was barefoot, wearing a navy-blue sweater and cutoff jeans.
Her legs were freezing, covered in goose bumps, and her hair was frizzing unavoidably in the dampness.
She tilted her chin to look up at him. She had written to him about things no one knew—her hatred of her leering piano teacher; her fascination with wandering the period rooms in the American Wing at the Met; her dream of going to art school.
It was strange to think, looking at him now, that he knew all those things about her.
And the sketches! She might as well have let him see her naked.
He would be turning eighteen soon, and he was broader in the shoulders, and taller, too.
“Did you grow another two inches over the winter?” she said, and he smiled, reached out, and casually looped two of his fingers
around two of hers.
“I’ve been looking forward to seeing you,” he said.
Lindy’d had a casual boyfriend named Kent in New York for the last three months, because who even knew what David meant by
writing her things like, Sometimes when you look at the stars don’t you just feel so small?
Half the time, she didn’t know how to respond to what he wrote.
What’s the use in having big dreams when you’re just going to turn into a cog in the machine?
Or, Did you know the average human spends five years of their life waiting in line?
She asked him questions that were more prosaic—Are you going to prom?
What are you most looking forward to about summer?
—and though she really wanted to know his answers, he rarely responded directly.
He seemed to like to tease her with his mysteriousness,
and he would sidestep and write something slightly philosophical instead. (Dating is just a ritual to give the bored something to pretend to look forward to, did not tell her whether he’d had a date to prom!) Sometimes Lindy even thought her mother—it had turned out to be impossible
to keep the exchange of letters a secret—had been right when she said that, once they spent more time together, David would
quickly see that Lindy was too young for him. “You can pretend all kinds of things at a distance,” Greta would say.
Now, though, Lindy gave both Kent and her mother’s opinions the old heave-ho in her mind.
She would write to Kent later today; she would ride her bike to the post office to make sure the letter went out immediately.
“You have?” she said. David nodded. Smiled.
He squeezed her fingers slightly, and she felt warmth flooding her as she gazed up into his dark eyes, unable to keep from smiling.
She was fifteen and a half years old, and suddenly she knew two things for sure.
One: Her mother was wrong about David. (Just as, it lately seemed, Greta was wrong about most things.)
And two: If he was a mystery, he was one that Lindy wanted to solve.
She still had to practice the piano for an hour a day, and David ran for two or three. At least, in Summerland Cove, Greta
let Lindy have the piano first, early in the morning, so Lindy could have the rest of the day free. “It’s summer. I’m not
heartless,” Greta would say. (Lindy suspected Greta just wanted to be sure the piano room, which was the big room on the other
side of the stairs from the living and dining rooms, would be available in the evenings. Greta and Tom liked to listen to
their LPs—David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan—on the stereo in there, drinking their martinis and dancing
when they got “loosened up” enough.)
David got up early to run first thing in the morning, too.
But it wasn’t straightforward, at first, how the days would go, or when or how often Lindy would see him. In the past, she
could go knock on the door of the yellow cottage any time for Kate. Now it seemed crucial to ensure she didn’t seem too eager
to see David. Everyone over there knew now that, if she knocked, it wouldn’t be to see Kate.
The first week, the weather was cool, damp, and cloudy. There were chores to do at Innisfree, helping her mother get the cottage
ready for the season. Greta liked to have everything “shipshape and in Bristol fashion” before Lindy’s father arrived, so
that he could “just relax and not worry about a thing.” And Lindy got engrossed in a novel she found on the shelf, Windswept by Mary Ellen Chase.
The book, an old family saga set in Maine, had her mother’s name written in pencil on the flyleaf, though Lindy found it hard to believe that Greta had ever sat still long enough to read it, or that, if she had, she’d have liked it enough to keep it all these years.
Lindy couldn’t ask, though, because she’d found it up in Greta’s old room—now Lindy’s father’s office—in the attic, where Lindy wasn’t supposed to go.
For years now, Lindy had been begging to be allowed to have the attic be her room, but Greta refused to consider it. Even when Tom said he wouldn’t mind switching, Greta simply said, “I won’t hear of
it,” using her and-that’s-final tone. Tom could only give his daughter a rueful shrug, and Lindy had to stay in the room next to her parents, which had belonged
to her mother’s brothers when they all were young. Greta said it was the far superior room, but Lindy, snooping around and
checking out the view from the attic this week, with her father absent and her mother not paying attention, didn’t agree.
Finally, the sun came out, and Lindy took her sketchbook out to the porch. The warmth of the sun on her skin as she sat in
one of the Adirondack chairs was a relief after the chill and fog of the last few days. From the piano room came the sound
of her mother playing a Chopin nocturne, one of the complicated ones that was beyond Lindy (“For now,” according to Greta).
Lindy sighed at the thought of all the years she’d have to practice before she’d ever be as good as her mother and looked
out at the blue of the ocean, the frame of pine trees, the rock ledge below that was visible only at low tide. As much as
Lindy loved Manhattan, she loved this place just as much. Even playing the piano here wasn’t so bad, because here you got
to look at the ocean while you did it, instead of being stuck in a tiny square room in a small apartment. That she could love
such disparate places equally was a fact about herself that didn’t seem to make much sense, but her father said you couldn’t
always expect things to make sense. (Her mother said you could try.)
A squirrel leaped onto the porch railing and sat looking at her.
She smiled. “Oh, you want to be my subject, do you?” It didn’t answer, just sat there working its little mouth and blinking.
She began sketching it, enjoying the feel of her pencil gliding over paper, making lines.
After a moment, she thought she heard a knock on the door.
As she got up, the squirrel scampered away and clambered up a nearby tree.
She peered around the corner of the porch, and, to her surprise, there on the steps stood David, tall and handsome in a white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, sunlight glinting on his dark curls.
When he saw her, he smiled. “I thought about writing a letter,” he joked.
“The post office is way down at the end of the road,” Lindy observed coolly, hiding the way her knees had started to hum at
the sight of him.
David’s smile deepened. “That’s why I thought I’d just come over.”
They were the talk of The Cove, after that. They were seen walking together at all hours. Arriving at the season-opening potluck
at the clubhouse together. (Leaving together, too.) They played tennis at the SCPA court. Went out sailing in the neighbor’s
Sunfish. They went to the beach, where he rubbed Coppertone on her back and they talked about their families and the transcendentalists
and urban crime rates and Louis Comfort Tiffany’s theories of light, all of which made her feel that they’d already gotten
to a deeper level than a typical teenage romance. This was a satisfying feeling, even if the level of romance in their romance
was not yet satisfying.
Lindy knew all the adults were talking to her parents about her being seen with David so often, and she overheard Greta at
the wine and cheese party at the clubhouse the following week saying, with her typical flair, “It will burn itself out, the
way these things do.”
Lindy disagreed, but of course she didn’t say so.
On the other hand, what was there to burn out, when he hadn’t even kissed her yet?
She wished she could ask Kate’s opinion on what on earth he might be thinking, the way she would’ve if he were any other boy,
but obviously, she couldn’t.