Page 51 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

Aggie followed Betsy to the back door as she readied to brave the winds outside. “What’s wrong with you, anyway? You haven’t stopped cleaning the house for days. I mean, I appreciate you washing the spittle rags and towels, but it’s starting to get weird.”

Softly closing the screen behind her, Betsy forced a smile as a gust of wind blew her ponytail off her neck. “I get accused of not helping enough. Then I get accused of doing too much. I can’t win in this house.”

She felt her sister’s eyes on her as she traveled down the concrete steps, the cool air of the cellar making her shiver. As she pulled the damp sheets out of the washer, she heard Aggie yell out to her: “I’m in for the book club.”

The wind howled, blowing against the cellar door, and for a moment Betsy worried it would slam the metal door shut, sealing her into the darkness. But a square of light remained at the cellar stairs. The person she needed to talk to was Andy. He needed to know that there was a lima bean growing inside her, and a part of her wondered—her rib cage feeling tender at the very thought—if the news might nudge him in a different direction. On a walk in the Ramble of Central Park, hehadtold her that he wanted children.

Betsy finished stuffing the sheets in the dryer, adjusting the temperature to high heat, the drum of the dryer thrumming. Maybe he would see this surprising development as his one chance.

A second unexpected squall blew in from the Cape on Friday morning, this time with sideways rain and fog that made Betsy dig out a hooded spring jacket from the closet. She was free again, with sailing canceled a second day. Breakfast made, Betsy padded into the dining room and sat at the formal mahogany dining table with a piece of notebook paper in front of her. She twirled her pen once, and began to write. By noon, she had a finished version.

Mom, do you remember the summer you and I had a book club and we read all those rah-rah women books, likeThe Yellow WallpaperandA Room of One’s Own?What’s funny to me now is that I realized in a psychology class last year that I wasn’t honest with you about what I thought of those books. I was never honest with you about what I thought about anything, because I never felt there was room for anyone’s opinion but yours. I kind of want to read those booksagain, all of us, and we can reexamine our ideas about womanhood. Because I’ve decided that what interests me most about you and Louisa and Aggie is not what we tell each other. It’s the things we don’t.

Setting the pen on top of the letter, Betsy went to the coat hooks in the kitchen and pulled on her windbreaker. She set out for the village, trudging along the cobblestones in the rain. She’d slept terribly the night before, waking up at three in the morning with a deep ache in her chest, deciding that today was the day she would tell Andy. She felt in her pocket for the roll of dimes she’d taken from the kitchen drawer, the sole of her sneaker finding grip on the slippery edges of the cobblestone sidewalk. Her body was damp with weather and nerves. There was a phone in the lobby of the Edgartown Town Hall, and she’d remembered as she’d pressed her cheek into her freshly washed pillowcase last night that it was one of those telephone booths with a door for privacy. Hurrying into the white clapboard building now, Betsy took a second to shake the rain off her jacket, closing her umbrella and gathering her wits. The silver booth stood in one corner of the red-carpeted lobby, and as she walked toward it, every soggy step took the energy of a hundred. Betsy tried to predict how the exchange would go, deciding that when Andy heard her voice, she’d know in an instant how he felt.

The folding door jammed as she tried to close the aluminum and glass panels, and she jimmied the handle to seal the booth shut, the smell of the musty New England Telephone phone book overtaking the stuffy air inside. Betsy heaved her hobo-style purse onto the aluminum shelf, pulling out her pocket-sized green address book. “Long distance, please,” she told the operator. She relayed the phone number, and the woman instructed her to insert two dollars and ten cents. “Thank you,” Betsy said, her body quivering as she stuffed the twenty-one dimes into the phone. She wouldn’t have long, maybe a few minutes, before the operator returned to the line to tell her to insert additional dimes per minute.

She heard the click and pop of phone lines crossing. As she waited, she thought of her psychology professor, Dr. Birnbaum, with his yellow hair and rosacea-prone cheeks, telling the class, “People hurt themselves continually by believing in false hope, by believing these false narratives about people in their lives.” It nearly made her hang up, but then she heard the perky voice of a Dartmouth College switchboard operator come on the line, and Betsy, clearing her throat, pressed her feet into the linoleum flooring of the three-by-three booth. She asked to be connected to Dr. Andy Pines in the Department of Psychology. Quiet static crackled along the lines, her mouth going dry as soon as a second phone trilled. She inserted three additional dimes.

Twisting at the metal phone cord, Betsy heard an elderly voice answer with a friendly greeting. “Dartmouth Psychology. May I help you?”

Betsy tasted the strawberry ChapStick on her lips, hesitating, and the woman barked into the receiver, “Hello?”

“Hi,” Betsy said. She launched into a long-winded explanation of how she was an old friend of Dr. Andy Pines from Columbia, and did he have a moment to speak with her? There was the shuffle of papers, the thud of the mouthpiece being set down on a desk. Voices chatting in the background. Then, finally, footsteps.

“Hello?” The baritone of his voice, the friendly tone. Did Andy not have a phone in his office? She thought this conversation would be more private, but now she imagined him receiving the information while standing under the fluorescent lights of a department office, the ubiquitous filing cabinets and photocopy machine nearby, the rhythmic click of a stapler irritating him more than it needed to.

“Hello, Andy,” she said, trying to sound friendly, worming her finger into the change dispenser. “It’s me. Betsy.”

Andy was the quiet type, a man that squinted when he listened closely, that pressed his thin lips closed as he hunted for a thoughtful response. This time, though, he responded like a game show host. “Betsy? Betsy from Columbia?”

She curled her toes in her swampy sneakers.I’ll give up sailing. I’ll give up this island. This house of my family’s. Just let this go all right.

“Yes, it’s Betsy from Columbia. I saw you a few weeks ago. In your office.”You failed me. In more ways than you know.

“Ha, just checking to make sure,” he said. It was his public voice, the voice he used when he stood at the front of the class and tried to win his students over with his sparkling personality. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

So soon.The words were like an anchor tossed overboard, the heavy weight sinking to the sea floor, slamming with a thud in the sand.

Betsy wiped her nose with the back of her wrist and sucked in one solid breath while feeding the phone with two more dimes. “Yes, well, I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

They made a few seconds of small talk about how beautiful the campus was, how he was working on a research project until classes began at the end of August. The rain picked up outside and the front door of the Town Hall opened. A middle-aged man in a cap entered and shook out an umbrella. Betsy turned her back to the stranger and pressed her forehead against the cool glass wall of the booth.

“I’m in the middle of something though, Betsy, so…”

“I’m pregnant.”

The line went quiet. They would be forced to have an adult conversation, to work out the details. It would be the first in a series of phone calls as they figured out what to do.

Andy cleared his throat. “Sorry, but that’s not possible.”

The muscles in her abdomen contracted. Her mind recalled how he’d unbuttoned her wool dress in her bedroom on that first night, how he’d kissed up her back like he couldn’t get enough of her. How they’d repeated the scene on several occasions. Yes, it was certainly possible.

The operator came on the line, reminding Betsy that every minute cost two dimes. She hurried in two more and hoped to God the operator wasn’t listening. “There’s been no one else, Andy.”

I thought maybe I could move up to New Hampshire and we could get an apartment and have this baby together. A baby, not a lima bean. A baby.

His voice was so formal it was pressed flat, steamrolling right over her. “I’m sorry, but I can’t be of much help. I don’t have a student by that name.”

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