I was just deciding whether I wanted to cut back into the woods beyond the Dining Hall when three dachshunds, yapping sharply, appeared from the undergrowth on the other side of the road. They surrounded me, their assault ridiculous. At first. But every time I tried to step away, they growled and shifted to form a new circle of containment. They were small, and I wasn’t afraid, but there was nowhere to go.
‘Come back, assholes!’ Soon, from out of the forest, burst a tall, sharp woman, Ev in another life. A good fifty years older, the woman was not as striking as Ev, and she wore a god-awful hand-crocheted poncho that Ev wouldn’t have been caught dead in, but they were unmistakably related.
‘Oh dear god,’ she barked, marching toward me full steam, bending down and yanking the ringleader by the collar. ‘Fritz, leave the goddamn girl alone,’ she commanded, and Fritz ceased yapping at once, which quieted the other two dogs. Soon they were snuffling through the newly mown grass as though I didn’t exist at all.
She started laughing, big and raucous. ‘That must’ve scared the shit out of you.’
‘I didn’t think anyone else was here.’
‘Drove up last night,’ she confided, taking my arm in hers. ‘Come to tea.’
EV’S AUNT LINDEN – WHO introduced herself as Indo – lived to the right and over a hill, in a part of Winloch I didn’t know existed, a long, well-trimmed meadow where the oldest cottages sat, four in a row. At the farthest end of the meadow was the largest house I’d seen at Winloch; white, with multiple stories and a porch that stretched around its four ample sides. I recognized it from the picture that had hung in our dorm room. The other three cottages were siblings of Bittersweet, each small and block-like, one story high. Transplanted white pines tastefully disguised the poles carrying electricity to each home.
It wasn’t hard to guess which house was Indo’s. Cherry red, with a moss-covered roof, the first little cottage leaned to the left upon its foundation. A bathtub planted with impatiens occupied its small front lawn, mowed from the meadow. According to the faded, hand-painted sign pasted in the window of the door, it was called Clover.
‘Leave your shoes,’ Indo indicated as she let me into a kitchen smelling of sandalwood and cayenne. Fritz and his compatriots trotted right past me, faithful in their owner’s assessment of my trustworthiness. I pulled Ev’s boots off, balancing them upon a tangle of clogs in the corner.
From the peaked roof above me hung a dozen baskets covered in thick dust. A glass-fronted cabinet, propped up on one side with a stack of shims, overflowed with china. Clipped atop it was the room’s sole light, a bulb set inside an aluminum funnel, with which a construction crew might have illumined a work site. The kitchen itself seemed haphazardly collected, as though Indo had gone into a handful of homes with a hacksaw and helped herself to an Edwardian porcelain sink here, a particleboard shelving unit there. And where the impulse, under someone else’s directive, would have been to use the cutout above the sink to pass food between the kitchen and living room, in Clover, it served as a repository for more stuff – two dozen wooden spoons, a precariously stacked collection of teal earthenware, and a great green tin of Bag Balm.
I followed the older woman into the living room, watching her long gray braid snake across her back. ‘It’s not much,’ she prattled, ‘but it’s all I have. Must sound melodramatic to a pretty young thing like you. But I’m afraid it’s true, this eyesore is everything to me. And who knows how long it’ll be before it’s taken from me too. What’s that saying? “It’s not whether you get screwed but if you have fun while it’s happening.” Something like that, but pithier.’
She spoke as though we had known each other forever, and I hid my discomfort with such unearned intimacies by taking in the rest of her home. Clover’s walls, like Bittersweet’s, were made of bead board, but whereas Ev’s cottage was painted a silty white, Indo had embraced color: scarlet paint on the walls; an indigo, batiked cloth tossed over a sofa whose fourth leg was a stack of water-rippled paperbacks; a chair upholstered in seventies tangerine floral. Through two sets of French doors along the second and third of the living room’s adjoining walls, the screen porch looked out over the lake.
‘But listen to me, going on about myself. It’s you I want to hear about. You look sparky. I like that about you. Do you need to pee? No, that’s fine. Right through that door on the left.’
I followed her directions into a short hallway that led to two small bedrooms. I peeked into both of them in search of the toilet, and was surprised to discover that whereas the rest of Indo’s home seemed funky and youthful, her pastel bedroom looked like it had been decorated by the old woman she seemed to have avoided becoming. Mosquito netting modestly shielded the bed, which was draped with a chenille spread. Framed lithographs of local flowers hung on the pink walls.
I found the cottage’s only bathroom, painted a glossy magenta, and learned quickly it was a primitive affair, with a cracked, too-high mirror and two sinks – the working one of which was turned on by a permanently affixed set of pliers – and a decoupaged toilet that swayed dismayingly whenever weight was set upon it.
Throughout Clover, the wooden walls – no matter their color – were decorated with black-and-white pictures, either framed and askew or curled up toward the tacks that pinned them. A few of the photographs depicted landscapes (some of which I could recognize right out the window), but, for the most part, the subjects were children: blond, sinewy, strong. I scrutinized the faces, recognizing Indo herself as a young girl, and a tall, proud boy who had Birch’s eyes.
‘You like my pictures?’ Indo chuckled through the kitchen cutout as she busied herself over the stove.
‘You took these?’ My eyes ran over the taut bodies sunning themselves in old-fashioned bathing suits.
‘My mother bought me a camera for my tenth birthday. I was a hobbyist.’
‘And now?’ I asked, discovering a newer photograph, of a beaming toddler who might have been Ev.
‘Art is for the young,’ Indo declared, and a long silence fell upon us for the first time.
Every nook and cranny of Indo’s living room was filled: books, masks, and little carved boxes from all over the world. A collection of birds’ nests was displayed on what she called a whatnot shelf of driftwood and wind-felled pine. The sheer quantity of accumulated goods was no far cry from my mother’s Hummel figurines and salt and pepper shaker collection. Whereas breezy Bittersweet felt like a foreign country, Clover, with its alarmingly creaky floors, damp smell, and myriad collections, made me feel homesick for the first time.
Indo emerged from the kitchen with a clinking tea tray. She ordered the dogs down to their ancient pillow on the living room floor, in front of the cold woodstove, then led me onto the side porch, where a long table and moldy wicker chairs awaited us. It was brighter out there, and I squinted as my eyes adjusted to the glare of the sun upon the lake. She served a strong pot of smoky Lapsang souchong beside rye toast dripping margarine; if I’d known her well, I would have teased her that it had taken her so long to make such a simple snack.
She seemed to read my mind. ‘I’ll be pleased as punch when they open the goddamn Dining Hall – I am not a cook. And the Dining Hall’s free. Only good part about the Winloch Constitution – all you can eat. Oh, but look at you, poor thing, I’ve made you glum. Well, I won’t be the one to tell you Winloch is anything but heaven on earth.’
‘You should eat with us,’ I proposed.
‘Might want to ask Ev first,’ she warned, but when I blushed as I remembered my place,