Most evenings, she saw Paul. He was working at a construction job, earning money that would help him through Yale. At night he would stop by, exhausted, and they sat on her porch, sipped iced tea, and talked. Sometimes she felt, sadly, that they had already entered two different worlds. His was the world of sunburn and sweat, and of men. When she asked him what he had done that day, he told her of the men he worked with—people she didn't know. Their talk, on the job, was of TV shows and women, Paul said, amused. They had asked him to join a bowling team and to drive with them to Boston some weekend for a Red Sox game.
High school seemed in the distant past, through it was only three weeks before that they had stood in the gym at graduation and whispered familiar jokes to their classmates, about teachers and shared pranks. Paul felt it too, the quickness of the transition. Two of their classmates had already joined the Navy; one other was married. The local newspaper had carried a picture of her on Sunday, wearing a white veil and smiling shyly over a bouquet of carnations. Four weeks before the same girl had been called into the principal's office for a lecture when she had been caught smoking in the girls' bathroom. Now she would be settling down in an apartment full of furniture sold in matched sets at Sears, joining the other housewives in their morning trips to the supermarket, carefully sorting the coupons from last night's paper, and waiting idly at the Laundromat while the week's wash floated like a collage in the dryer.
Another boy, someone they knew only slightly, had been killed two days after graduation, when he drove his car into a tree at midnight after a party. The Class of '77, which had stood in a proud group arranged according to height and wearing rented maroon graduation gowns, was already history. "What happened to———" people would ask before long, and the answers would come, in many cases, as surprises. The Class Clown would be working in his father's company, selling radial tires. The Class Flirts, photographed for the yearbook in a silly, amorous pose, had gone separate ways, the girl to beauticians' school in Portland, and the boy studying aeronautics in New Hampshire. The Class Intellectual, Gretchen, was working in a summer camp in Vermont; Natalie had had a brief letter from her, filled with funny remarks about the crafts—basket-making and what Gretchen called "wavery weaving"—that she taught to rich people's children, and the news that Solzhenitsyn, in exile from Russia, was living only twelve miles away. On her day off she had passed the long fence that surrounded his house, and wanted, she wrote whimsically, to call over it "I love you."
"Here we are," said Natalie, laughing to Paul, "the 'Best All-Around Girl' and the 'Most Likely to Succeed Boy,' and we're too lazy to do anything except push this swing back and forth with our feet."
"And hold hands," added Paul, squeezing her hand. "Nobody ever said I was most likely to succeed immediately. And you're definitely the best all-around hand-holder I know."
"Oh, well. We'll set the world on fire someday. Right now it's nice to be lazy."
"You want to go to the movies Friday night?"
Natalie shook her head. "I'm leaving Thursday, and going to Simmons' Mills."
Paul sighed. "I really think you're crazy, Nat. You're going to go up there and talk to that lawyer—what was his name?"
"Foster H. Goodwin."
"You're going to go talk Foster H. Goodwin into telling you who your parents are, and then what? You're going to go knock on their door. I can see it now. They'll be living very peacefully in a split-level house, with five kids and a dachshund and a couple of Snowmobiles. Up comes Natalie Armstrong, up the front walk. Knock knock knock. 'Hello,' you'll say. 'Remember me?' What happens then?"
Natalie made a face at him. "Paul, give me credit for a little good sense. I don't know exactly what I'll do, but I'm certainly not going to march up to their front door. Maybe I'll write them a letter."
"Which they won't answer."
"Of course they'll answer. Probably they'll be really nice people. We'll have dinner together, or something. They'll tell me a little bit about what happened seventeen years ago. We'll talk. I'll get to find out what they're like. They'll see what I'm like. We'll become friends. It won't be a big embarrassing deal, or anything."
"Then you'll exchange Christmas cards for the next thirty years."
Natalie laughed. "I told you. We'll become friends. And we won't have to wonder anymore whatever became of each other."
"It hasn't occurred to you that maybe they've never wondered at all?"
"Impossible," said Natalie firmly.
"Bullshit," said Paul. "I hope you're right, Natalie, for your sake. But I think you're the 'Best All-Around Crazy Person.'"
He gave the swing a strong push, and they moved suddenly back and forth, the way they had as children, trying to scare themselves into thinking they might fall. She held tightly to his hand.
14
LATER THAT EVENING, after Paul had gone, Natalie opened the small box that Tallie had given her.
If I were Nancy, she thought, peeling away the Scotch tape at the edges, I would have opened this up as soon as I got off the boat from Ox Island. Nancy is the one who leaps in the ocean all at once. And I'm the one who goes in inch by excruciating inch.
For me, she thought, the waiting and the wondering are sometimes the best part of things. Maybe that's why I've kind of cooled it with Paul, when some of my friends have become so heavily involved. I like having things to look forward to.
She removed the lid from the box, and saw the letters that were written in her own mother's handwriting. She smiled. The small, vertical strokes of Kay Armstrong's script hadn't changed, though these letters had been saved for years. There were only a few; Tallie had sorted them, she had told Natalie, and given her just the ones that would add the necessary dimension. Natalie envisioned her grandmother looking through the stack, reading through each letter quickly, with her head cocked sideways like a bird, and making the selection, in the same way that Natalie had watched her paint with bold, carefully considered definitive strokes.
The first letter was dated March, 1960.
Dearest Tallie;
Aren't you ever going to cut loose from Boston just for a weekend and come to see us in Maine? The house is so spacious, and we have reserved a room for you; I painted it white, and there are plants hanging in the windows and a wonderful patchwork quilt on the bed, in all the shades of blue and green that are your favorites.