In Sakonnet Bay, people aged and looked it. I had auburn hair and there was no way I was going to let nature take its course. At this time of my life, age thirty-seven, the only thing I had to do about gray hair was extract one strand at a time, but I already had plans to eradicate one irritating vertical crease between my eyebrows. I’d read in Elle about this magical remedy, Botox. A little shot of botulism. No beau of mine would ever boast, Lily doesn’t wear a lick of makeup. But many women here didn’t wear a lick, and I found it cozy. Sam and I were moving into a village of grandmas.
After we walked the business district, Jane took me on a ride through the pricey area. “The ocean-side of Maine,” she called it. An elegant landscape of groomed gardens and sprawling houses, but deserted, lifeless. It was late April, a month before the weekenders and summer residents from Manhattan would begin their occupation. Then we went north into my future neighborhood.
Here locals lived on tree-lined streets in two-story shingled dwellings on identical quarter-acre lots. The houses appeared to have been built at the same time, because they resembled one another like members of a large extended family. Jane said they dated from between 1875 and 1920. Each had a bit of personality—a path bordered in whitewashed rocks, dormer windows edged with gingerbread—but only personality, not eccentricity, and that was further confirmation of solidity, of a world that fads passed by.
I wrote about our move for Ladies’ Home Journal, in a cheerful upbeat piece, which was what the magazine always wanted. I described my going-away party at a SoHo bar, claiming that my friends had sworn to visit. They did promise—that was true—and we all kissed and cried; but they were like me, diehard Manhattanites. To leave the city, unless it was to go someplace thrilling like Paris, they would have to be towed. I said that the traffic, crowds, and noise were driving Sam and me away. In fact, I thrived on chaos. It was unlikely we’d be back, I insisted, neglecting to mention that we’d sublet our rent-stabilized apartment month to month, to a writer friend who needed an office. I also enthused about how glorious it would be to see stars at night, when actually a grand sparkling night sky would turn out to be intimidating. Fodder for my overactive fearful imagination. Until I moved to a quiet place, I didn’t understand how fears and fantasies could expand to take up all available space. So in this article, I was as inaccurate in projecting my tranquil future as in describing my troubled present. I omitted that my fifteen-year-old son was sneaking out to Manhattan clubs. Several times I’d caught him returning at four in the morning. And I certainly didn’t mention the incident that had triggered my panic and subsequent break with the city: I had found a knife in Sam’s underwear drawer. A steak knife, imitation-wood handle and blade with serrated edge. I’d been hunting for drugs, been prepared to uncover a baggie full of grass, when I discovered the knife instead.
I removed it and mentioned it to neither Sam nor his father, whom Sam visited in Massachusetts every fourth weekend. I couldn’t imagine waving and yelling, What was this doing there? Besides, I thought I knew. Its presence was consistent with a crayon drawing Sam had made as a six-year-old, after the divorce: a stick figure of a boy under a sky filled with long narrow triangles.
“What are these?” I had asked.
“Missiles,” he told me.
I showed the picture to his pediatrician, who announced, “Sam doesn’t feel safe.”
Nine years later, he evidently still felt unsafe. Perhaps his club-hopping was a way of seeking danger. He was going after an experience that would confirm an existing feeling. Mulling the situation, that’s what I concluded. The knife was not a weapon but protection. I didn’t think that anyone else would necessarily accept this interpretation of the facts, but I didn’t care. I knew Sam. What I couldn’t determine was whether his late-night expeditions to clubs where alcohol and drugs were readily available marked the beginning of a downhill slide.
I continued to obsess until I made the decision to leave Manhattan. Until Sam was out of high school, when his fragile teen years were over, we would live in a missile-free town.
“We’re moving to Sakonnet Bay because I think you’ll be better off there,” was all I told him. I came armed with a map so I could point out our coastal town.
He didn’t bother to look.
I started to fill in the details, to describe a place he’d never been able to visualize in his childhood drawings, but I choked up. He hadn’t stomped away in anger. There was no one he wanted to phone, no friend to bitch and moan to.
Four months and no questions later, that August, we moved. Ladies’ Home Journal wanted to accompany my peppy article with a photo of Sam and me attempting to install a hammock in our first backyard. I remember this day fondly, my pounding a nail into a tree while Sam held the hammock aloft as if it were a giant fish he’d landed. Sam, my baby, was now six feet tall, his flesh as pale as mole rats I’d seen on the Discovery Channel, animals that never once encountered the sun. He wasn’t fat, more soft and squishy from a disinclination to move except when absolutely necessary. Still he was sweet-looking. Impish blue eyes, and brows that curved comically over them like quarter-moons. Nose straight and fine, a strong chin with a dimple. As the photographer snapped, Sam squinted into the sun, his head cocked back as usual. He led with his chin, walked with it tilted up and out.
I had stuck a copy of the photo in a frame, a reminder of the last time I could look at my son without wincing. The morning after that lovely afternoon, when he had, incredibly, swung in the hammock, and Jane had arrived with housewarming presents—candles and a transistor radio for the inevitable power outages—Sam shaved the sides and back of his head and pulled his remaining dirty-blond hair into a rubber band so it looked as if he had a spout on top of his head.
In Manhattan, Sam had gone through a phase in which he wore a set of plastic werewolf fangs to school—they fit neatly over his upper teeth—and that was fine. That was, in my opinion, in the normal range of teenage behavior. But one evening he had confessed to forgetting his algebra homework. This was well into his freshman year, and when I suggested he call someone in class, he said, “I don’t know their names.”
“Any of them?”
“No.”
Not in the normal range.
I tormented myself with this code of measurement. No friends. Not in the normal range. Hair spout: NNR. I longed for normal range, lusted after it. When I signed the lease for our new home, I envisioned Sam strolling down Main Street, laughing and talking to other kids, munching a doughnut, powdered sugar misting his neatly-tucked-in alligator shirt. Within months, he would be as pretty inside and out as Sakonnet Bay. I caught myself, wanted to bang my head against the real estate office wall, dislodge a few pictures of ocean-front houses to knock some sense in. I must keep my expectations reasonable. Still, in the recesses of my heart, where reason did not dwell, a boy was talking and laughing, walking with friends, munching doughnuts. Having a wonderful time.
Our transition was initially easy. I worried that Sakonnet High might reject Sam because of his hair spout, but the registrar handed over the forms and he enrolled. This surprised me so pleasantly that I stopped at a nursery and purchased tulip bulbs. That evening I planted, measuring an exact six inches from one bulb to the next. The following day I started work at the weekly paper, The Sakonnet Times. A piece of good fortune, landing this job—the editor, Art Lindsay, happened to be the uncle of one of my city friends. Each week I would write a column on a subject of my own choosing, as well as several articles on assignment. I was thrilled to give up freelancing. It’s an outsider’s existence. With this work, I could set an example for my son. I would join the community, be part of the life.
On October 4, the day events took an unexpected turn, Sam sat at the kitchen table ignoring his bowl of cereal, which he had saturated with so much milk that the Cheerios floated around like pool toys. NR—normal range. One leg was pulled against his chest, permitting a crusty size-twelve foot to rest on the chair seat. He picked at the cuticles on his toes. NR, but disgusting.
“Isn’t it beautiful out today?” I was reduced to weather