Five Tuesdays in Winter

by Lily King

wasn’t in a hurry to become an employee.

was aware of the age difference between us—I was fourteen and she was twenty-nine—but to her, because she spent her days with a two- and a four-year-old, I must have seemed older than I was.

They never resisted the naps. After the morning activity and the hot sun and the swim, they were ready to crawl into their cool beds in the dim house and fall into a heavy sleep.

I read Jane Eyre. I suddenly felt so much closer to Jane, now that I, too, lived in a huge house and had charge of two children.

But I was trying things out, life as That Girl, life as Jane Eyre, life as a writer alone in her own room, which eventually, after a lot of other things, is what I became.

and their departure in my arms from the dining room was loud and trailed behind me like the tail of a kite all the way up the wide front staircase, across the landing with the two sofas beneath the windows, and up to their rooms on the second floor.

He climbed the steps with his arm around his mother and they looked like a pair in a movie, the rich old lady befriending the hobo.

Kay watched her mother through a window. “Well, we chased her away in less than a minute. Might be a record.”

I sensed Hugh didn’t want to be alone. Something within him was crying out for something.

“They’re not weird. They’re happy, Stevie. Will you promise me you’ll remember that?” “‘Member what?” “Your mom and dad laughing. Will you promise? Even when you’re old as Grammy you’ll remember?”

It was over fifteen pages now, the longest thing I’d ever written. I liked to run my fingers over the words pressed into both sides of the pages with my blue ballpoint pen.

It was a skill of mine, splitting myself in half, pretending to be childish and oblivious while sifting through adult exchanges with the focus and discrimination of a forensic detective.

I liked the smell of Desitin. I sniffed my fingers. It brought on something from the earliest part of my childhood. I sucked in another long deep breath of it. I tried to remember a specific moment, a place, but it was only a feeling. A good feeling. A warm, safe feeling I no longer had.

“I hired Cara so you could get a break.” “Thank you.” “I mean, so you can have some grown-up time.” “I know what you meant. But I want to be with my children on our vacation.”

smelled him and remembered how I’d put myself to sleep the night before with a story about him taking me out into the woods where there was this old tennis court no one used anymore and him teaching me to play and afterward kissing me, a tender, delicate kiss, not the gross kind you saw on TV when it looked like the two people were trying to eat the same piece of candy, and remembering that story—even more than Hugh himself—gave me a nervous stomach and I couldn’t take another bite of egg.

Mitchell’s daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them or lead them to very clearly marked sections—if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books?—while they complained that nothing was arranged by title.

He would have liked to have a bouncer at the door, a man with a rippled neck who would turn people away or quietly remove them when they revealed too much ignorance. His daughter loved the customers.

He hadn’t been devastated when his wife walked out. People vanished. It had been happening all his life.

Paula glowered. She was trying to train him to be more forgiving of his patrons. That was her campaign, ever since she’d grown tall, learned words like reticent, and found him flawed.

He felt abstracted and disjointed, and it occurred to him that the sensation was only a slight magnification of what he felt all the time.

Paula waited for Mitchell’s version of the events, but what he remembered most now about Watergate was the feeling of being nineteen in a one-room apartment and the sound—though it had been silent for so many years now—of Aaron’s hyena laugh.

Last week a man had been looking for War and Peace, and when Mitchell explained that he was temporarily out of anything by Tolstoy, the man asked if he had it by anyone else. It was a terrible time for books.

Mitchell, remembering the hours Paula had spent with her rock polisher, lamented the loss of the driveway as a primary source of entertainment and gifts. He knew he’d have to drive Paula to the mall.

His wife had left because, she claimed, he was locked shut. She said the most emotion he’d ever shown her had been during a heated debate about her use of a comma in a note she’d left him about grocery shopping.

Nervous as a school-girl. He wondered where that expression came from, for he had never seen Paula ever behave this way. Nervous as a forty-two-year-old bookseller was how the saying should go.

It was a quilt his mother had made and he had slept beneath as a child. The stains and streaks seemed like warnings. Soon Paula would begin complaining that he didn’t understand her, didn’t appreciate her, didn’t love her enough, when in fact he loved her so much his heart often felt shredded by it. But people always wanted words for all that roiled inside you.

All I really remember is her walking me to school and holding my hand and giving me big hugs at the door. But I always knew the minute she turned her back I was out of her mind completely. She wasn’t like you. I knew you were thinking about me always.”

“Maybe he saw something similar in them.” “Like what?” “Fear.” She looked away. He’d forgotten how disappointing these conversations could be. “Desire,” she added quietly. Love, he thought. It would come out soon enough. Words and feelings were all churned up together inside him, finding each other like lost parts of an atom. He didn’t try to push them apart or away. He let them float in the new fullness in his chest.

That much was clear already, although not something I could have put in words. It was purely visceral, a confused shame lodged inside my gut, a sense that I had been terribly, terribly bad but not being able to recall what I’d done wrong.

But he didn’t sit there morbidly like my father sometimes did in the evenings, forcing himself—or perhaps forced by my mother—to be present. Ed set his chair at an angle and put his feet up on another one and chatted. He was a great chatterer. Chatting wasn’t something I was used to.

I had never been naked in front of anyone since I was a baby and even then I wasn’t sure. All my life my mother had been handing me things through a closed door, just her arm reaching in with a towel or soap or whatever I needed.

I was too ashamed to speak. They chatted away to each other, as if they weren’t angry with me, as if they weren’t embarrassed for me and humiliated by me. As if I were not, as my mother used to say as she whisked me up to my room, a little beast who needed to change back to a boy.

forgiving when I didn’t. Ed got them all laughing because he really couldn’t do anything in this life without talking.

I can look back on that time now as if rereading a book I was too young for the first time around.

Becca, though, I married. I don’t know how other people do it, not stay with the girl whose ankle socks made your stomach flip at age fourteen, whose wet hair smells like your past—the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to happiness.

Kindnesses like that could strip her naked and she scrambled to cover herself up.

Hanne smiled. “Dot Dot. I thought you were the most beautiful singer in the whole world.” Oda felt pitched up onto the crest of a wave, like one of those boats far out at sea.

Oda felt a racing in her body, an urgency that had no reason to exist now. She didn’t have to get up for work or make Hanne’s lunch or get her to her Saturday lessons or to church. She wondered how other people adjusted to vacations. It was such an unpleasant feeling, like gunning a car in neutral.

Oda would have liked to ask the innkeeper what other sullen, ungrateful twelve-year-olds did on the island to amuse themselves,

She wasn’t going to share any part of it. A few years ago she would have told Oda everything, wide-eyed and shrill, spinning around in what she and Fritz used to call her happy dance, unable to contain her joy.

Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss.

“I don’t want you to say anything in particular. I just don’t think the silence is healthy. I grew up with parents who never talked about the things that mattered, the things that pained them.” “The war?” “Yes, the war was one of those things.” “So Papi’s death is like the war and I’m like a Nazi who won’t talk about it?”

Hanne would have children someday. She would have her own family and these future people were the ones she would give her heart and her affection to. Oda would be the old lady they were forced to see on holidays then laugh about in the car on the way home. This right now was probably the closest they would ever be.

Don’t touch me, Hanne said when Oda tried to stroke her hair. So Oda had sat in a chair beside the bed like a visitor in a hospital room. She’d ached to hold her. To be held. Let me hold you, she’d asked again and again.

That fresh start, clean slate, anything’s possible feeling. I didn’t have that. I knew I was going to write a lot of stupid things that made me cry before I wrote anything good on that table.

Sweet was not a word we used in our family. Sweet was for suckers.

Honesty, generosity, tenderness were not valued either. We had been raised to sharpen our tongues and defend ourselves to the death with them. We loved each other, we amused each other, but we were never unguarded, and we were never surprised by a sudden plunge of the knife.

I remember feeling happy among strangers, people I’d only known for a few weeks, which made me feel like things would be okay in my life after all.

On the way back to Vermont I thought about words and how, if you put a few of them in the right order, a three-minute story about a girl and her dog can get people to forget all the ways you’ve disappointed them.

We were best friends because we were roommates. I never deluded myself that he would have chosen me otherwise. Socially we balanced each other out. He was the guy who came into the room and everyone was relieved. I made people deeply uneasy, myself most of all.