In the early days, there was herself, in a garden. There were people she called father and mother (only recently identified), on a nubbly blanket there. They were collecting catalpa pods around themselves into piles. In the middle, quite near them, was a sundial. The sun struck the metal pointer and threw a slice of shadow down. As she looked at it, her father and mother became interested too. They moved the blanket over and she sat with them watching the sundial, tucked into her father’s crossed legs. Her parents murmured about whether or not they could see the shadow move, but mostly they were quiet in love. She was in love alongside them, inside their circle, part of them. But she was not trapped like them. She came to know that more and more later. Around the sundial she fit in with them just like a card into a deck. In order to do it she had to be an innocuous card, like the five of clubs. Certainly not the Queen or King, oh no. In order to stay in the circle she could not be more than thirteen, and they couldn’t be more than thirty-three or thirty-four.
East Hampton Town was about two hours from New York city, if the traffic wasn’t bad. If one traveled through to the end of it, to Montauk Point, they’d be on the Easternmost tip of a large, long island that was actually called Long Island. If they were determined, they could climb up to the Widow’s Walk of the lighthouse, and from there they’d see dark blue chop on all sides: Gardiners Bay to the north, Block Island Sound to the East, and further out, the unfathomable Atlantic—foreboding in winters, seductive and glittering in summers. East Hampton town had only one land border—the rest of Long Island. The eastern half of the peninsula had once, long ago, been inhabited solely by the Montaukett and Shinnecock tribes, and covered with verdant forests, except for large plains that existed in what is now called Hempstead, and all along the south shore. Now crisscrossed with Robert Moses’ vision of the future, it was pinged with dismal strip malls, and towns with no centers, churches, or parks. Instead, cars were the dominant beasts, and big box stores were so enormous that many workers required a personal vehicle to navigate their unforgiving concrete floors.
Looking through the window of her bus, Olivia Everly wasn’t interested in the configuration of the island or the town, she noticed only that everything was much uglier than she had expected. (She wasn’t aware of it, but the village of East Hampton was her goal, not sprawling East Hampton town). She had no interest in demographics, Robert Moses or the lack of old churches. She only wondered why everything looked like a suburb of the Maryland she had just left, and reasoned that East Hampton proper had to be a long way off still. Flicking her phone onto maps, she saw that, yes, there was over an hour to go. Maybe it would get better. It had to get better; she’d risked the few connections she had in this world to get here.
Her new employer, Leslie Gaget, had been the first and only one to answer her ad—Light Cooking, Light Housekeeping/Housewatching and Pet Care—Live In only. Eastern Seaboard preferred/New York City Adjacent. Available Now. Leslie had called and they had had a brief chat. Then she had asked for Olivia’s picture, which Olivia sent, after taking ten selfies and picking what might be the right one. She had wondered why her appearance mattered. It was a menial job, just like every other job she had had. Though in this glamorous place, there might be reasons she didn’t yet understand. Through her intense study of the rich and famous, she knew that these society types sometimes had their callous husbands stolen away by the help. No problem there. If there had been an example of “nondescript” floating around on the internet, it would surely be the picture that she forwarded to Leslie Gaget last week. Leslie would see that Olivia was hardly a seductress. She’d slept with only one person, though a lot with that one person—another thing she was happy to leave behind in Maryland. Him. Him living with someone else, him lurking around for her to run into anytime. It was like waiting for a bomb to drop every time she went to the grocery store.
Mrs. Gaget responded immediately, with, not a picture of herself or the family, but the house, as if it were the main selling point. Olivia looked at it again on her phone. It was amazing. An old-fashioned place with a bizarre kind of tower, deep shadowed porches, and bands of the Atlantic on either side. A worn, genteel beauty, its windows gleamed with secrets, like something out of an old black & white movie. A circular drive gave onto a wide lawn, with borders of unkempt plants. As if waiting for a breeze, an American Flag drooped over the whole proceedings. It wasn’t an organized garden, like her aunt Kay’s. Kay would have had workmen over immediately to move the flag to the front, where it could proudly fly in the sea breeze. Olivia imagined that the Gagets were the more relaxed type of rich, probably voted for Kamala, and probably, like everyone in Hollywood, hated Trump. They certainly were artistic. The Dad, Phillip Gaget, was a writer. He worked at home in a small studio on the property of the house, Leslie had informed her. Olivia heard in her voice an intonation of gratitude that he was in the studio, “most of the time.” Hearing things in people’s voices was one of Olivia’s gifts. In that brief conversation she was sure that Leslie was weary of her husband, weary of his children, probably had no children with him, and wanted to get onto other aspects of living. Olivia looked him up, but had never heard of his books. She found that he had two kids, twins, by his first wife, who had died a long time ago. His books sounded very grown up. Olivia’s thing was Romantasy, children’s books, fairytales and Harry Potter. Right now she was reading A Court of Thorns and Roses.
The note from Mrs. Gaget also said that Olivia would have her own charming room off of the kitchen, a few steps from the beach, and that she was hired if she wanted the job. Olivia was firm that she wanted the job, but she would have to be paid in cash only. Mrs. Gaget didn’t seem to have a problem with it. She didn’t ask for references, which was a relief, and also odd.
Olivia felt bad about her aunt Kay, about leaving her. But a disturbing trend had been developing, a subtext that began poking into their conversations for the last year or so. Olivia had begun to realize that she was always being pushed and prodded, not very subtly, in a certain direction, which would fit in handily with Kay’s life plan. Kay seemed to have the idea that Olivia was going to stay in Maryland forever, and that this was a real, actual possibility. Kay, who knew her well, seemed to think her incapable of anything more. According to Kay, she should grab a hold of the most practical option, and hang onto it for dear life. To be under estimated infuriated Olivia, and goaded her into action.
“I’m almost twenty-six,” Olivia had said to her last week, over glasses of wine. Kay always had wine on Saturday night, and she didn’t like to drink alone.
“You are not almost twenty-six. You are twenty-three.”
“I’ll be twenty-four in June, which puts me on the other side of twenty-five. Next thing you know—”
“I don’t like the sound of the Indeed website. Is that like Craig’s list? I can’t just let you go off to some people you met through the internet. If something happened I couldn’t live with myself.”
“It can be reliable, a good place to find a job—the kind I’m looking for. What if I can talk to the family, and you can check them out?” Olivia said, not telling Kay about the job she had already found.
“Family, what family?”
“Well, I would likely work for a family, for the summer to start, as an au pair or cook slash assistant—”
A few days after that, after Kay had left for the hardware store, Olivia went into her room and snooped for the last time. Despite Kay’s efforts to fill it, the room had a quality of emptiness. It was jammed with heavy arts and crafts furniture that Kay had refinished herself, hook rugs, and a shabby chic love seat. Next to that, a bookcase full of serious literature, like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that made Olivia feel terrible about this world she had stumbled into. Any part of this world. Portrait of the Artist was too tender, too true, and too sad, which made it too much for Olivia.
As if the house knew how badly she wanted to get away from it, Kay’s room was quiet and somber. Its plaintive emptiness collected in the reading nook of bright cushions, and swirled in tumbleweeds across the floor. Emptiness crept up the legs of the arts & crafts mirror like a sweet pea vine, and flowed from the sun squares vibrating on the bookcase. Olivia glanced at the framed photo of her parents on the bureau, coaching herself to leave those no-longer-living subjects behind too. In the mirror she scrutinized herself, turning this way and that, and back to the pictures. She didn’t get her father’s height, or her mother’s pale, fragile beauty. Olivia was curvy, clumsier on land than in the water, with a long waist, heavy bones and feet that were large for her size. She was most comfortable in a T-shirt, and boy’s jeans several sizes too big, cinched at the waist. “You’ll never get married that way,” Kay had said, followed by another bit of advice, “mascara and a tight sweater. That gets the guys. And mystery. Don’t say too much. Don’t be too available.” Conversation had never been a strong point for her anyway. Right now she worked at the local business center. They had no more than about five customers each day, so what did it matter what she wore? She reached over to Kay’s bureau and tried one of her frosted lipsticks, rubbing it smooth with her pinky. The chances that one of those customers was to be the husband-acquisition were very small. They didn’t know yet that she wasn’t coming in, so she had a few moments yet.
Pulling her hair back she posed this way and that, wondering if the picture she sent was right, and if she looked better with lipstick on. She wasn’t fat, but she was padded all over with a layer of fat, like a seal. She had shiny long brown hair that was the color of a seal, that she never had to tame, it just fell into place. It already had a few grey strands. It was the prettiest thing about her, said Kay, as if giving her something to hope for—one pretty thing. But you’ll probably get a lot of grey by your thirties, Kay added, like your mother did. Olivia’s eyes were a milky jade green, inward looking and slightly glassy. Her features were unremarkable in a face that was too round. If she could have been pulled lengthwise like taffy, she’d have been beautiful. Beeyootiful… she mouthed into the mirror. On land she was slightly oafish. In the bay, she was a silver minnow, gleaming and darting under the surface. On land she was solid and utilitarian, unable to inspire admiration or even notice. She thought of herself as built for work and possibly babies, though she didn’t have a strong pull towards either of those things.
Maryland had been a strange and monotonous land of mists, moisture hovering in the air, and sky-wide damp clouds that masked the sun for days, not raining. Little patches of woods demarcated ponds and one wide, sweeping farm from another. Crops, mainly tended by machines, revolved according to the season, corn, soybeans, and wheat. Kay’s house sat on a fragment of one of those farms, the major acreage having been sold after her husband died. Kay and Olivia’s mother Lily weren’t close. After that horrifying day ten years ago, it was a surprise to Olivia to discover that her young parents (not very much older than she was now), had a will, and left everything to a mysterious aunt. Lily’s sister Kay had been given guardianship of their one child and a fund for that child, should anything ever happen to them. On reflection, Olivia thought that her father Matt hadn’t seemed the type that would have had this kind of forethought. They had owned a café in Duchess County, and weren’t very organized, as the café was constantly running out of offerings on the menu. After he died, she realized that there was a lot she didn’t know, and much more she never would know. He had set up the will when she was an infant, and the worst thing he and her mother could ever have imagined had actually happened, unleashing the shrapnel of their poorly thought out intentions into her life.
Olivia had wiped the lipstick off because it looked stupid. She walked past the shabby chic love seat, and over the hooked rug, to where Kay kept her cash in a bedside table. There was usually a pretty good stack on a Monday from the cash register at the store. She found two piles, one of twenties, one of tens. She took two thirds of each, not intending to pay her back one day, because Kay had all of her sister’s money now, and was extremely tight with it. She took a wooden penguin off her own set of house keys, and decided to leave the keys and the note downstairs.
As she tucked the cash in her jacket, she remembered Kay’s reaction to her plans the other night.
“You couldn’t cook your way out of a paper bag,” Kay had said.
Kay had been at that fragile moment in between her usual low-grade depression and getting seriously puffed up about her ability to cook muffins or a brisket. Olivia had felt stung. It was true, she wasn’t much of a cook. But she was a fast learner. Her father had always said so. And he had always said that she could do anything she wanted to do, which she remembered.
“I am not a master chef, if that’s what you are saying,” Olivia had replied.
“You have a good job at the business center, why not give it some more time. All you need is to meet someone,” said Kay, and, with delicate reverence, poured more wine from the new cooler sleeve she had bought this morning at Williams Sonoma.
“I’m pretty sure the man of my dreams is not going to walk into the business center,” said Olivia. “Anyway, that isn’t what I’m looking for. Necessarily.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. I just want to try some new things, a new place.” That was only part of it. What she wanted most of all were experiences, new experiences. She was not old yet, yet sometimes felt so old. She wanted something to happen to let her know that she was alive. She wanted to get away from her ex-boyfriend Chris, and Kay, two stagnant end points in her life.
“That’s a little vague,” Kay had said with a smirk, as if the idea was some sort of far flung joke.
“Well when you were my age, did you have an iron clad plan?”
“When I was your age I had a two year old and Corey on the way. I wanted to be a professional cook. But we needed money so we bought the hardware store. And then I gave those cooking classes, as you know.” Kay had said.
Faced with this bulwark of practicalities, Olivia had gone silent. If she continued to engage, she would never, ever get out of this place. As the contents of the bottle descended, Kay had gotten sadder, loopier and meaner, which was another thing that always happened. Unfortunately, Kay had not caught on that Olivia was serious, which made Olivia a little sorry for her. But she hadn’t really listened, had she? Maybe she was blind to Olivia’s ideas because she thought of Olivia as helpless, and wrongly believed that Olivia, because of the terrible thing that had happened, would be nailed to her house, or at least into dull Chestertown forever, which would provide Kay the company that she craved. And also, control of the money. Probably not a lot of money, but enough for Kay to assume the role of concerned guard dog whenever the subject of the trust had come up. She tried to hide it, but Olivia could almost smell it. No, not a lot. But enough to care. Olivia had never seen the will, and out of misplaced guilt, had not asked. All of it made her feel sick. Olivia never wanted to go up against Kay, because Kay had her own problems, which happened to include the very fact of Olivia. Yet oddly, Olivia was somehow also the solution.