Chapter 10 Lindy
Lindy
Lindy’s father insisted they have David over for dinner, though her mother complained that imbued a mere summer romance with
a significance it didn’t deserve. “They’re going to forget all about each other the minute summer’s over,” Lindy’s mother
said, ignoring the reality of last winter’s letters, plus the fact that the Kauffman family appeared to be taking Lindy’s
presence in David’s life seriously, at least. But Tom said nobody could predict the future, and he wanted to get to know this
boy that his daughter was spending so much time with.
“Have you thought about academia, son?” he said, swirling the ice in his whiskey sour, as Greta circled the table serving
up the beef stroganoff. She was wearing an apron printed with cartoonish lemons over a starched red cotton dress, plus full
makeup and pearl earrings. Lindy was pretty sure the entire get-up could only be an ironic gesture of protest against putting
on this dinner for David.
“Dad!” Lindy said. She worried that her father’s question was insensitive, that it only pointed out how little choice David had in the matter.
David’s father owned a giant machine shop back in Chicago, which David didn’t like to talk about because he was dreading having to work there next summer, after he finished high school.
Mr. Kauffman had told him that it would be time to “join the real world for good” then.
No more summers at The Cove. (Hearing this had been a knife twist in Lindy’s gut; she tried not to let on.) Salt in the wound, David said, was how unfair it was that he’d be starting out “learning the ropes” in management, when men who’d worked there twenty years would never get such a chance.
“Nepotism,” he scoffed. “I’m sure I have less talent for this than any one of them.
” But even less than he wanted to work in management did he want to work on the shop floor.
Now David smiled at Lindy a little to let her know the question was fine. “Can’t say that I have, sir.”
“Best job in the world, in my view.”
“Though not the most lucrative,” teased Greta, and Tom laughed and gave her a wink. They were so embarrassing, flirting with
each other like teenagers. Probably, to embarrass Lindy even further, they’d end up putting on Rumours after dinner and try to get David up dancing. She shook her head and rolled her eyes at David to convey her mortification,
but he just gave her one of his cute half smiles, which made her heart give a little flip, and for a second, her parents might
not have even been in the room.
The period room at the Met that always figuratively grabbed Lindy by the lapels and shook her in a way that was almost entirely
unpleasant—yet she couldn’t look away, either—was the one from 1680s Massachusetts, with its low ceilings and canopy bed and
brick fireplace, diamond-paned yellow glass windows, scarlet coverlet and bed curtains, the cradle at the foot of the bed.
It gave her a feeling of cold mornings, crowdedness, the threat of death. Of not wanting to get out of bed.
Her favorite, the Powel Room, from 1760s Philadelphia, had high plaster ceilings with intricate molded designs, a dazzling cut-glass chandelier holding eight tapers, and elaborate hand-painted green-gold Chinese wallpaper featuring stately birds posing among the branches of flowering trees.
This room felt made for teatime and good manners, women in corseted gowns making plans for revolution they would never tell their husbands about.
Lindy would spend an hour or two in the Powel Room at a time.
She’d attempt to sketch the chandelier if she was feeling up to a challenge, or the tilt-top tea table if she was not.
It was a room full of hope and beauty, ideals and optimism.
“But wouldn’t the first room be more representative of regular people’s lives?” David said, when she told him about the contrast.
“Of how regular people feel, most of the time?” It was dusk, and they were sitting on a log beside the campfire up in the
spot in the woods that he and Toby and Mike had set up. Toby and Mike had gone home for dinner, but David and Lindy had roasted
hot dogs and now were cuddled together, holding hands, as the night grew cool.
“That’s what I love about you,” she blurted, without thinking of the implications. “Your optimism,” she joked.
Usually, he would laugh at her jokes. But now there was a silence, as if she’d dropped a boulder into the center of a pond
and they were just watching the ripples fan out. “Do you love me, Lindy?” he said then.
The question and the answer both surprised her, though maybe they shouldn’t have. “Well. Yes. I think I do!”
He sighed like this was disappointing, but then he kissed her harder than he ever had, twining his fingers through her hair.
She let herself get swept up, dissolving under the sweet-tasting pressure of his mouth, forcing herself not to think of how
he hadn’t said “I love you” back, and when he slid his hand underneath her T-shirt, she didn’t object. Soon, he laid out the
sleeping bag on the ground beside the flickering fire, and she lay down and let him unbutton and half unzip her jeans. He
kissed her belly right down to the waistband of her cotton panties. She lifted her hips, wanting him to take off her jeans,
but he groaned and shook his head before moving up to kiss her mouth again. “I really don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I’m
sorry.”
“You’re not going to hurt me, David.” Under his weight, her whole body was humming now, not just her knees, and she didn’t
know what would happen next, but whatever it was, she wanted it.
“Listen, Lindy, there are things about me you don’t know, okay?” He sat up, raked a hand through his hair. “I shouldn’t have—”
She sat up, too, aggravated now. “Well, then, tell me! We’ve been talking all this time! What is it you think I should know?”
But he shook his head, stood up and held out his hand. She took it and let him pull her up so she was standing close beside
him. “David?” she said, looking up at the square of his chin in the near-darkness, as if divining its exact shape would help
divine the answers she needed, too.
He withdrew his hand. “Come on, I’ll walk you home,” he said, averting his gaze, kicking dirt on the fire. She wished she
knew what had gone wrong. That she could say something to rewind.
But from the slump of his shoulders, it was obvious he’d turned some corner, one that led away from her, and that he wasn’t
going to turn back. She buttoned her jeans. She thought, Well, if he doesn’t love me, then . . .
She couldn’t finish the thought, couldn’t even try to convince herself that any small consequence of him not loving her would
be okay, not the whole trek home through the woods, with him walking silently beside her, his sneakers quiet on the pine needles
of the forest floor.
Three days passed, and he didn’t stop by Innisfree, and she didn’t go to the yellow cottage. It rained almost nonstop the
first day, which was an easy excuse to give her parents, but days two and three were gorgeous, and she sat out on the deck
and sketched for hours, skirting their questions about why she wasn’t seeing David. It wasn’t as if she understood it herself!
What she did know for sure: She didn’t want to leave Innisfree, in case he’d gone to the beach or the clubhouse or out sailing
without her. That would be just too humiliating, to see him moving on with his life, after what had happened.
When she woke up on the fourth morning, it was raining again, and she suddenly felt certain that he did love her. She tallied
the evidence in her mind: Their conversations; the way he touched and held her; even the way he’d stopped himself the other
night before taking off her jeans, instead of plowing ahead the way an opportunistic boy with an uninvested heart might’ve.
She thought of the way he looked at her. The way he sometimes kissed her gently on the forehead, seeming most times to surprise even himself with this, as if it was an impulse not quite under his control.
She remembered the way he pointed out every cormorant because he knew how much she loved to watch them dive.
Yes! He loved her. Right?
So what was wrong? What was he afraid of? What was it that he thought she didn’t know about him that would get in their way?
She washed her hair, dried it, and ironed it flat. She put on jeans, a T-shirt, sneakers, and her yellow raincoat and walked
over to the yellow cottage, swallowing back her nerves.
Kate answered the door. “He’s up at the campsite. We thought he’d be home by now, with this rain, but I guess they’re sticking
it out.” Oddly, she seemed a little worried. Preoccupied, anyway. But, knowing Kate, she was probably just in the part of
a Sweet Valley High book where it seemed like nothing was going to work out the way you wanted it to.
Lindy was too embarrassed to go up to the campsite when she knew Toby and Mike would be there. Now she wasn’t feeling so certain
that David loved her, and he might have told them how she’d said she loved him, and they’d probably all laughed about it and
called her a little fool, or worse. She walked down across the road to the beach and sat on a wet rock at the edge of it.
The rain had stopped, and she watched the tiny gray waves lapping the shore. She traced lines with her fingernails in the
damp sand nearby, wishing she had her sketchbook. After a few minutes, she heard some boys talking back and forth, bike tires
crunching on the wet gravel road above. She craned her neck to look and saw Toby and Mike riding by. Which meant David was
by himself in the woods. Avoiding her, clearly.
Well, she wasn’t going to stand for it.
She marched through the woods at a good clip, motivated at first by anger and then by what began to feel, strangely, like fear.
Setting out, she’d been sure she could find the place again without much trouble, but it took her longer than she thought it would to get there, and soon she was almost running, though why she was in such a hurry, why her heart was in her throat and she couldn’t catch her breath, she didn’t know.
And then she got there, and the campsite looked empty. She paused in the quiet to take in the scene as her own heavy breathing
echoed in her ears. Charred, damp embers smoldered inside the rock fire ring. The green canvas tent was soaked and drooping.
Old rain dropped from leaves on the surrounding trees. “David?” she ventured. Then, through the half-open entry flap, she
saw a slight movement—a flash of white fabric, maybe. “David?” she said again, more loudly, moving closer.
She leaned down to peer inside, and he was sitting cross-legged in there, his face pale. He looked back out at her with wide,
dark, frightened eyes. And then she saw the hunting knife in his right hand, the blood pouring from a slice in his left wrist.
“David!” she screamed. She lunged for him, grabbed the knife handle without thinking. He didn’t fight for it, just let his
hand fall open, and she flung the knife outside, backward toward the fire ring. She snatched up a hunk of sleeping bag and
pressed it hard to where his wrist bled, watching as the fabric began to stain.
“I don’t know why I did it,” he said, in a strained, odd tone of voice.
“Stop, stop, stop, stop!” she screamed at the blood.