VILLAGE GIRL by Patricia Page

“Don’t let them put you to housework. They will surely try.”
My mother knew what she was talking about. She had been overworked and mistreated while employed as a live‑in nanny during the Depression. She’d had no choice then; her family needed the money. Both parents had lost their jobs in the textile mill, and she was the oldest of four children. Later, she became a nurse and able to set her own course, but the Depression days were never far below the surface for her.
I was about to be a nanny myself, the occasion for my mother’s advice, although the word “nanny” was usually reserved for college girls and immigrants, while we younger girls were called babysitters. I had been hired by the Reverend and Mrs. Isaac Eliot, one of the wealthy families from Boston who summered on Stowe Hill about five miles from town, to care for their two grandchildren so that their daughter‑in‑law, Bootsie (real name Anne), could have a relaxing summer. My friend Lorraine had been their babysitter the previous year, but this year Lorraine had turned sixteen and landed a job as a waitress at Howard Johnson’s out on Highway 5, so she recommended me. The Eliots were somewhat concerned that I was only fourteen, but my mother informed them that I had been babysitting for neighbors and friends since I was in fifth grade.
I would not live in. My mother, negotiating the terms over the phone with the senior Mrs. Eliot as I eavesdropped, had insisted on that. “Her father will deliver her to you at eight o’clock every weekday morning and pick her up at four-thirty.” She listened intensely for a moment, then looked at me with a smile and raised eyebrows. “Yes, I think eighty cents an hour would be fair.” (I usually earned fifty cents an hour.) “Perhaps extra on weekends should you need her, say ninety cents? Good. When would you like her to start?”
Immediately was the answer, and the next day my father and I set out, passing through town, up Firehouse Hill, and out into the surrounding countryside to Stowe Hill, a real hill, not one of those deceptively named suburbs common today. The enclave included the Stowe descendants themselves, as well as the Eliots, and the two families shared remote blood ties, but I have forgotten the nature of the connection. Despite my mother’s anxious expectations regarding the rich, the Eliots treated me well enough. I hardly ever saw the Reverend Isaac Eliot. He joined the family only on weekends, when I was rarely there. Occasionally he came up from Boston on Fridays, and then he always had an absent-minded but kindly word or two for me, although I don’t think he ever learned my name. I also didn’t have much to do with the senior Mrs. Eliot, who was confined by her crowded social calendar, but her impeccable manners never faltered in the exchanges we did have. She referred to me as “dear,” as in Dear, do you think you could entertain the children outside this afternoon, while we ladies are having tea?
Other than the children, the Eliot I had most to do with was Bootsie, young and pretty and modern. She embarrassed me and amused her mother‑in‑law by talking openly about sex, or rather the lack of it. “What’s missing here is a roll in the hay,” she would say with an exaggerated sigh after a long afternoon in the hammock with a book. Or on the phone with her husband, she’d cry in mock despair, “It’s use it or lose it, Franklin. Help!” Her husband, also a minister, was engaged in outreach efforts in Baltimore most of that summer and traveled to Stowe Hill only a couple of times.
The children – three-year-old Paul and four-year-old Amy – turned out to be easy to care for. They were a bit spoiled; they liked to get their way and were accustomed to success, but they were also smart and curious. We spent sunny mornings outside going for walks, playing in the sandbox, collecting bugs, that sort of thing, and rainy mornings in the playroom, which was well stocked with toys. After lunch, the children took a nap, time I used to study French and work through How to Increase Your Vocabulary in Thirty Days. I had somehow acquired the notion that possession of a robust vocabulary and a foreign language would help me win the scholarship I would need to go to college, which I desperately wanted to do.
My first trial with the Eliots took place early on. I was sitting in one of the playroom’s tiny chairs with my knees pressed up against the tiny table, writing out vocabulary definitions, when Bootsie came in. Barefoot and wearing shorts, she was not an especially imposing woman, but the way she looked around the playroom prompted me to put down my pencil and look around myself. Blocks and dolls and stuffed animals and miniature farm figures and a couple of board games and puzzles littered the floor. Scarcely a bare spot allowed for a footstep. An easel stood in one corner, paint pots open, brushes unwashed.
“I think, Maureen, that while the children are sleeping you might put the toys away and run the carpet sweeper.”
Don’t let them put you to housework. I could just see the grim set of my mother’s lips. Ignoring her advice could be hazardous. I’d more than once tasted crow. Yet Bootsie’s request seemed fair enough to me. I was being paid while the children slept, after all, and these tasks were not onerous. “I guess I could do that, if you really want me to.”
Bootsie smiled. “I really do.”
Her smile troubled me a little. I didn’t know how to interpret it. Had I overstepped some invisible line? Ordinarily this was the kind of question I would have asked my mother, but in this circumstance, of course, I couldn’t.
That weekend I asked Lorraine if she had been asked to keep the playroom in order. She said she hadn’t had to be asked, that she had just done it. So I figured I had made the right decision. But I was on my guard now, and when, a few days later, Bootsie asked me if I thought I might be able to sweep the porch, words were out of my mouth before I took time to consider. “I don’t think that’s my responsibility.”
Bootsie looked at me for a moment, surprised. “You don’t? Hmmm. I’ll have to think about that.”
The question of whether or not I had acted correctly dogged me all day long. I tried to reassure myself that I had. I was, after all, keeping the playroom in good order, and agreeing to sweep the porch, as well, might be the inch that would become a mile. I might soon be making the beds and dusting the antiques.
But with the onset of darkness, the potential consequences of my decision, namely losing my job, kept me awake that night. Imagined scenarios of humiliation (begging for a second chance) vacillated with those of defiance (marching from the Eliot home, head high, back straight).
I considered confiding in my father on the way to Stowe Hill the next morning but decided against it. He had an aversion to problems of this sort. He was a glass-half-full man, and maintaining unflagging optimism while providing for his family on the slim profits of his auto repair shop was challenge enough. Any disturbance of his sunny but shaky world view was likely to provoke a wounded response too guilt‑inspiring for me to handle just then, and we spent the drive to Stowe Hill in silence, devoted to our separate thoughts.
As it happened, I did not lose my job. Bootsie seemed as glad as ever to see me that morning, eager to hand off Paul and Amy, still in their pajamas and eating their breakfast in the kitchen. The notion of firing me did not seem to have occurred to her, and the rest of the day passed without incident. A day or two later, I noticed Mrs. Baldwin, the Eliots’ twice-a-week housecleaner, sweeping the porch.
That rich people talk about their help surprised me. Granted, I talked about them – to Lorraine mostly – but I hadn’t thought myself visible enough to inspire discussion. It was Jane Ross who corrected my misconception. She told me that Bootsie had told her mother about my refusal to sweep the porch. “She said you were spunky.”
“I guess that’s a compliment.”
“Usually,” said Jane, which left me feeling somewhat unsure.
Uncertainty had been the norm, actually, in the short time I had known Jane. I didn’t know quite what to make of her. I had met her the very first week of my employment. I was sitting outside on the edge of Amy and Paul’s sandbox, waiting for my father to pick me up, when I saw a brown-haired, freckle-faced girl about my age march up the driveway. On reaching me, she extended a hand and sat down beside me on the edge of the sandbox. “Jane Ross. I’m the girl next door.”
On Stowe Hill, “next door” meant a good quarter mile or more away, depending on the acreage demanded by the enclave’s stately, sprawling residences, and I wondered, even then, how she had known to stop by. Jane couldn’t have seen the Eliots’ from where she was staying, so she must have had some intelligence that the Eliots had hired a new girl. I didn’t fully realize that at the time, too dazzled by the fact of her handshake. No one under the age of my parents had ever offered to shake my hand, and I registered the gesture as a sophisticated one.
That impression solidified with her revelation that as a baby, she had been taken by her parents to meet FDR and Eleanor. Awestruck, I could not put a responsive sentence together. FDR was a superhero in our family. My father had told me many times over how FDR had rescued us from the “pit of poverty.” I noted that Jane had referred to the former First Lady as “Eleanor,” and I sensed I would not be able to talk to Jane the way I could talk to Lorraine and my other friends. I had little to contribute. I would have to listen to her, listen and learn.
Although her nominal home was in Boston, she attended some girls’ academy, I forget the name, in Virginia during the school year. I knew nothing of boarding schools then, and I felt sorry for her. It sounded lonely to me. She described it as a “finishing school.” I wanted to ask her what, exactly, was being “finished,” but cautious about exposing my ignorance, I instead pretended to know. In any case, what she said next gave the word enough context for me to figure it out.
“I’m being groomed to marry Carleton.”
Groomed? This was the first I’d heard “groomed” refer to a person, not a horse. But I knew who Carleton was: Carleton Avery Stowe III. I had never met nor seen him, but like most people in town, I knew of his existence.
“My mother is renting here so that we can be close to the Stowes this summer. She’s a widow. We are not rich, so it’s up to me.”
Like in Pride and Prejudice! Jane Austen’s novel was a favorite of mine (and Jane’s, I learned), and somehow I managed to transform this freckle-faced teenager in dungarees and sneakers, sitting on the edge of the sandbox with me, into one of Mrs. Bennet’s daughters.

* * *

That summer, I learned how elastic time could be. Some days were so boring, the minutes ticked by, one by one, stretching a day the length of a week. Other days flew by, shrinking a week into a day. As time went on, though, stretched days became more the norm, and I was overwhelmingly grateful when Bootsie came up with a surprising offer.
“I’ve been thinking, Maureen, that you might like to browse my father‑in‑law’s library.”
Would I! This was an unexpected perk, and that afternoon, once I had straightened the playroom, I skipped my French and vocabulary studies and made my tentative way along the hall to the library. To my delight, it matched the one in my imagination, cobbled together from British novels and the game of Clue: three walls of floor‑to‑ceiling books, one wall with a window that let in soft, filtered light, and a floor carpeted with what I didn’t know then was a Bohkara rug. A massive, polished hardwood desk and a leather high-backed chair; two comfortable wing chairs on either side of a reading lamp with a frosted glass shade; and a small side table made up the furniture. Four ancestor portraits hung from the book shelves, hiding the books behind. I had to fight the urge to take them down. Although this was my first time in a house-bound library, I felt at home and a little bit proprietary.
I discovered the Perry Mason mysteries right away, well-thumbed paperbacks that took up an entire shelf and a half. I couldn’t get enough of these books, where justice eventually reigned, served by the sober application of the law, even in the most hopeless of cases, against unbeatable odds. Justice done, over and over, in book after book, never ceased to gratify me. I finished each one with a pleased and secure sense of an unpredictable world brought to order.
Bootsie, however, did not approve of these books, and one day she handed me Lust for Life, the Van Gogh biography by Irving Stone. “I thought you might like to read something more enlightening, Maureen. I think this will broaden your mind.”
If Perry Mason is good enough for the reverend, he’s good enough for me, I wanted to say, but, of course, I didn’t. Instead I thanked her for the book, feeling mildly chastised but, at the same time, aware that my mind did, in fact, need broadening.
Lust for Life turned out to be just as absorbing as the mysteries I’d been reading. Van Gogh’s many hardships and humiliations stirred my sympathies and admiration. “He was treated so unjustly,” I reported to Jane. “It makes you want to cry. I think his life might have turned out differently if only he’d had someone to defend him with more . . . more force than his brother Theo. Someone more like Perry Mason.”
“Who’s Perry Mason?”
“He’s a lawyer, and he wins cases for people unjustly treated.”
“Oh.”
Her indifferent response prodded me to further explain. “Poor people sometimes. Or sometimes people who act a little bit differently from everyone else. You should read one of these books. Bootsie would probably let you borrow one.”
“No, I don’t think I’m interested. Speaking of Bootsie, did I tell you what she told Carleton’s mother?”
“No.”
“She said you had goats.”
“We do. So what?”
“I don’t know. It’s just interesting.”

* * *

It was toward the end of the summer that I finally met Carleton Avery Stowe III. Twice a week, Bootsie, Paul, Amy, and I headed for nearby Silver Lake and “the club.” The children and I would swim in the lake and build sand castles on the beach (with sand regularly trucked in, Silver Lake’s natural shore being stony), while Bootsie played tennis. One day, we pulled into the parking lot, and as we spilled out of our Volvo, a conspicuously overweight boy edged out of what the British novels pressed on me by our town librarian would have called a roadster, and that Jane would later identify for me as a Ferrari Spyder. What struck me was its color: red, a daring color in New England at this time, when cars were still mostly black or dark blue or forest green.
“Maureen, Carleton,” said Bootsie.
Carleton Avery Stowe III? It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be, because this Carleton was fat and pimpled and not very tall. His hair was cut short, revealing large ears, and he wore Bermuda shorts, which I thought unmanly. Where was Mr. Darcy? In a flash, I saw a bleak future ahead for Jane. Carleton couldn’t hold a candle to my own heartthrob of the moment, Chick Sanderson, starting pitcher for the Suffolk Bulldogs. (Chick would be senior that year, had a girlfriend, and was unaware of my devotion, but that did not dampen my ardor.) “Carleton Avery Stowe III is a drip,” I told Lorraine later.
Carleton mumbled a glad‑to‑meet-you without quite looking at me, and Bootsie explained that Carleton had just arrived on Stowe Hill after six weeks as a camp counselor at Lake Winnipesaukee. “Is this your new car?” she asked him.
For an answer he grinned, nodded, and patted the hood, as if the car were a pet.
“Carleton turned sixteen last week,” said Bootsie. “This was his birthday present.”
“Gosh.” I was impressed that a car could be a gift instead of, say, a sweater or an Elvis Presley LP.
“I haven’t run it full throttle yet,” he said, sounding apologetic.
Bootsie gave him a stern look. “Yet? I don’t think you should be running it full throttle at all, Carleton.”
He shrugged and gave me a sideways, embarrassed smile.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m late for tennis. Are you coming with your parents to dinner Friday night? Mrs. Baldwin will be making her lemon meringue pie.”
“I think so.”
“Good.”
With that, Bootsie headed for the courts, leaving Carleton and me to mutely regard the conversational hole she had left. Paul and Amy, who had been tugging impatiently on my hands throughout this encounter, grew insistent. “Come on, Maurie. Let’s go!”
“I have to get these kids down to the lake,” I said.
“Oh. Okay.” He bent down, picked up our beach bag, and stood there, again not looking directly at me but in my general direction. It took me a minute to realize he was waiting for me to lead the way.
“You don’t have to.” I nodded at the beach bag.
He shrugged. “I know.”
He kept hold of the bag, so I set off, hyper-conscious of him walking slightly behind me, but at least Paul and Amy’s jabber eliminated the need for conversation. To my relief, he left us on the sand. “See you around,” he said and started back toward the parking lot.
Poor Jane, I thought, wading into the water, Paul and Amy hanging onto my hands.
Both children were at home in the water. They were too young for Marco Polo, but we played tag and tossed a ball around. I had them practice their dog paddles. Amy did a creditable job without my help, but Paul still needed me to hold him from below while he stroked and kicked. Eventually, they tired of the water, so we splashed our way to the shore to sit on our towels and eat the peanut butter crackers I’d brought for a snack. We had just started a sand castle when Bootsie appeared on the club lawn and called to us that it was time to go.
On the way home, she asked the children if they’d had fun, which she always did, and they said, yes, as they always did. Amy told her how Paul had tried to rub off the wrinkles on his finger pads, and of course the wrinkles didn’t come off, she’d known they wouldn’t. Paul didn’t dispute this; he was eager to tell his mother that he could do the dog “puddle” by himself now, which was almost true; he had paddled a few feet without my support. They fell silent after a few miles; they were tired.
After that day, I often saw the red roadster drive back and forth along the road past the Eliots’, but Carleton never stopped. I asked Jane if she saw much of him.
“Oh, yes. All the time. Our mothers, you know, are both on the symphony board.”
“And . . . ?” I was expecting to hear more, but Jane changed the subject. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. My cousin is coming to visit at the end of the summer. Would you like to meet him?”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s fourteen like you, good-looking. He likes to build model airplanes. He’s good at it and has quite a collection. The Smithsonian might be interested someday.”
I couldn’t have been less impressed.
A few days later, Bootsie came into the library one afternoon, where I was working on the next to last chapter of How to Improve Your Vocabulary in Thirty Days, and asked what seemed to me an odd question.
“Maureen, do you like to dance?”
I answered carefully, unsure where this was going. “I suppose so.”
“The club is having an end‑of‑the-summer dance for the young people this Saturday night. I thought you might want to go with Carleton.”
Carleton! No! I did not want to go anywhere with Carleton. I did not want my first date alone with a boy to be with a fat, pimply-faced one!
“He is too shy to ask you himself. I’ve talked to your father, and he has given his permission.”
My father! My mild-mannered, hospitable father would agree to anything. She should have asked my mother. My father was accommodating to a fault.
“It’s not a formal dance, a nice summer dress will do,” said Bootsie. “I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time, Maureen. Carleton is a fine young man.”
Blindsided, I watched her leave the library. I had not managed to edge in a single word, too taken aback to muster a response. I crumpled up the vocabulary list I’d been writing out. I no longer had the will for it.
Another dimension to the problem had to do with Jane. To tell her or not to tell her? I didn’t want to, but she was likely to find out, and then what? In the end, I waited too long. We were sitting at the picnic table complaining about our hair – hers straight, mine curly – when out of the blue she brought up the subject herself. “I hear you’re going to the club dance with Carleton.”
Guilt descended. “Bootsie – ”
” – is a busybody. Not that I care.”
“No, I don’t really care either. Carleton probably didn’t know who to ask, and Bootsie just took over. He’s back from some camp, I guess. Have you seen his car?”
“The Ferrari? Yes. Boys think cars like that help them get dates,” she said, her gaze drilling right through me.
I stood up. “Oh, I don’t care about cars. Speaking of cars, I think I hear my dad’s.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“You have to know what to listen for. Our car ran over a rock yesterday and put a hole in the muffler. It makes a loud sound.”
My father did not appear immediately in response to my silent summons, but when he did, minutes later, our damaged muffler’s rumble reverberated, deep and heavy. “Hear that?”
Jane didn’t say anything.

* * *

Despite my wishes to the contrary, Saturday night arrived and so did Carleton. Here I need to set the scene. My family lived on ten acres at the very edge of town in a farmhouse built in the 1800s. Our two goats were staked outside, moved from place to place to keep the weeds down; a half dozen Rhode Island Reds ran around, clucking and harassing one another; and two mean-spirited geese strutted the perimeter, keeping an eye out for intruders. Into this setting drove Carleton that Saturday night, and as he stepped out of his red roadster, both geese bore down on him with surprising speed, and Jack managed to bite him on one leg, while Jill attempted the other. I watched, appalled, from my second-story bedroom window, as my father came loping out into the yard to shoo away the geese.
I left the window and hurried out to the stairs, descending to unwelcome witnesses: my two younger siblings. They trailed after me, as I rushed through the house. Mother was nowhere in evidence, probably unwilling to be party to what was about to happen, whatever it was. She had opposed this turn of events, saving her most vehement objections to the fact that I would be going out with a boy in a car, as if Carleton’s Ferrari would prove the chariot to hell (or worse and more likely in her mind, pregnancy).
“You kids stay here, okay?” I walked out, the screen door banging behind me. A second or two later, it banged again. The little monsters were following me. “Here she comes!” trumpeted my father, as though announcing royalty. Heavy with the burden of my father’s pride, I walked over to Carleton and tried to smile. “Hi.”
“Hi.” He held the passenger door open for me, looking as ill at ease as I was feeling. “I put the top down,” he said, unnecessarily, because I could see that for myself. The door clicked neatly into place, a sound that seemed to make whatever happened next inevitable.
“Have fun now,” said my father.
“We will.” I had my doubts but didn’t want to deflate his expectations. Carleton nodded in what I assumed was agreement.
Glancing at him as he got into the car, I watched a subtle change in the way he moved, an avid readiness not unlike the way Chick Sanderson approached the mound. He started the engine, which roared, startling me, then backed up to turn around (somewhat inexpertly), and pulled out onto the road. He drove at a reassuringly moderate speed through town, but the minute we hit the outskirts, he sped up. And so did my heart, as the wind lifted my hair, combing it out behind me. “This is like in the movies!” I exulted over the road noise, and Carleton grinned.
At first, we took the narrow, up-and-down lanes familiar to me, but it wasn’t long before we were passing fields and barns that seemed out of place. But I wasn’t afraid. I figured Carleton was simply taking a route to the club unfamiliar to me.
“We could go faster if we were on a straightaway!” he shouted.
“You’re in New Hampshire!” I shouted back. “You’re not going to find any straightaways around here!” This corner of New Hampshire was a maze of back roads. He took a curve, and I nearly tumbled sideways into his lap. It occurred to me that at sixteen he was not exactly an expert driver. Who cared? I was having fun.
“I like the way she handles!” he yelled, as we shot forward.
Neither of us tried to talk much after that, and as dusk deepened into darkness, the silence, speed, and the singing, stinging wind took over. The world and all its contents, including the dance, fell away. We could have been sailing through space, high above the spinning earth. Left on earth was Maureen Mahoney, and shooting forward – weightless, thoughtless – streaked an unnamed, exciting me. A line from a song my father liked to sing sounded in my head, I’ve got the world on a string . . . . Beside me, Carleton was inconsequential./“Do you still want to go to the dance?” he hollered at one point.
I laughed, the wind cold on my teeth. “Why?”
So we kept going, Carleton sometimes driving too fast, maybe a little recklessly, taking the curves without slowing down much, the gravel crunching when the right-hand wheels hit the verge.
We agreed that night not to tell anyone we had not gone to the dance. For Carleton, this did not pose much of a problem. His parents were with friends on Martha’s Vineyard that weekend, and he was alone in the house with the cook and the housekeeper, who were unlikely to question him. But I had parents to whom I was immediately accountable.
My mother had gone to bed, but my father had waited up for me. He had dozed off in the recliner, but woke up easily when I walked into the room. “Welcome home,” he said, blinking and fumbling for the chair handle to bring himself upright. He yawned. “Did the belle of the ball have a good time?”
“I wasn’t really the belle of the ball. But I did have a good time,” I answered truthfully.
“Carleton seemed like a nice boy.”
“Nicer than I thought, actually.”
“Did you dance the fox trot?”
“Dad. No one dances the fox trot anymore.”
“You remember how I taught you, though.”
“Sure.” I demonstrated. “Step, step, slide-together-step. I was what, ten? I don’t think anyone was dancing the fox trot back then either.”
“The fox trot, the jitterbug, the lindy hop – I knew them all. I had itchy feet. Your mother liked to dance, too. She was good.”
Hearing a hint of nostalgia in his tone, I seized the opportunity. “Those were the days.”
“They were indeed. Sit down for a minute. Did I ever tell you about the time we caught Artie Shaw at the Crystal Ballroom in Boston?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I lied, a mere white lie, prompting only a slight flutter of guilt, as I sat down on the couch.
“This was before we were married, and your mother . . .”
He was off. I didn’t have to listen, but I did, and by the time he’d finished, I’d had a full rehash of the time my mother had had her shoes stolen, after leaving them under the table, so she could dance in her stockinged feet.
“Those were the days,” I repeated. “You know, I think I’ll head for bed.”
“Me, too,” he said, hauling himself out of the recliner. “It’s been a long day. Goodnight, sweetheart.”
‘“Night.” The sweet feeling of escape buoyed my step as I walked up the stairs to my bedroom, untouched, so far, by any repercussions from Carleton’s and my adventure.

* * *

“Mrs. Eliot will be picking you up today,” my mother told me when I came down for breakfast Monday morning. “Your father had a call.” This meant my father had been summoned to tow a disabled car, part of his duties as a Triple A contractor.
“Which Mrs. Eliot? Bootsie?”
My mother made a swift pivot from the stove, tea kettle in hand. “Is that what you call her?”
“She told me to!” I protested.
“I don’t know what to think of that woman.”
“She’s okay,” I said, coming to Bootsie’s defense. “She’s taken an interest in me,” I added, repeating what Jane had told me.
It was the wrong thing to say. My mother slammed the tea kettle back on the burner. “You’d better be careful. I don’t want you – ”
A beeping horn – shave-and-a-haircut-two bits – cut off her words.
“That’s for me.” I got up from the table so quickly, I jarred the table, rattling the dishes.
“You don’t know what you don’t know, Maureen!” Mother called after me, adding something about regret, but I was already out the door.
“Did you have a good time with Carleton?” Bootsie asked, as I got into the Volvo. I knew this would be her first question.
“Yes, I did.” I could say this with one hundred percent veracity.
“I thought you would,” she said with a triumphant smile. “I’m sure Carleton did, too. That was his first date. Did he kiss you goodnight?”
“No!”
She laughed and accelerated up Firehouse Hill.
The day passed without further reference to Carleton and myself. Bootsie was busy with a college friend who had come for a visit, and Mrs. Eliot left for one of her luncheons, so I was mostly alone with Amy and Paul. By the end of the day, I sat out on the edge of the sandbox waiting for my father, feeling blessed by the gods. I took off my sneakers and buried my feet in the warm afternoon sand. Saturday night was still vivid in my mind, and I closed my eyes to see again the strobed blur of tree trunks, the yellow line rushing beneath us. Hearing a car drive by, I looked up, but it was not a red roadster but Jane’s mother’s station wagon. It stopped, and Jane got out. Anxiety began to nibble at my recollections of Saturday night, as her mother drove off and Jane walked toward me, frowning.
“Where were you Saturday night?” she asked, sitting down.
Taken back by her question, I didn’t answer.
“I didn’t see you and Carleton at the dance.”
“You were there?”
“My cousin and I decided to go.”
Her cousin. I’d forgotten about him. I hesitated, then plunged. “Carleton and I never went to the dance. We just rode around.”
My confession did not seem to surprise her. She nodded. “Because you’re a village girl. He was afraid to be seen with you at a club dance.”
Shock vibrated through my body, rendering me mute for a moment. But only a moment. I jumped up. “What do you know? You should have seen us racing the back roads in his Ferrari! Have you ridden in his Ferrari yet? I’ll bet not.” I could tell from her collapsed expression I had guessed correctly. “And by the way. I don’t live in a village. I live in a town.”
I stepped from the sandbox, picked up my sneakers, and, displaying the perfect posture I’d practiced carrying a book on my head, walked back into the house and to the library, where I slumped into the high-backed leather chair. Village girl. This was a view of myself that had never occurred to me.
I don’t know how long I sat at the massive desk, furious and feeling something else, too, the sense I had – and fought, not quite successfully – of having been weakened somehow. I had never considered that Jane and I were not equals. Or Carleton and I. I knew they were different, which I found interesting and worth paying attention to, but I had not translated difference into inferiority. And didn’t now, although I was confused about how to go about dealing with this new awareness. I put on my sneakers and picked up my books from the desk but made no move to return to the sandbox to wait for my father. Gazing out the window, I watched a squirrel gather a few acorns from beneath an oak tree, stuff them in his mouth, and scamper off to his secret cache. School would be starting soon. Lorraine and I would be seeing one another daily again.
“Here she is.”
I turned to see Bootsie and my father. He looked bewildered. He had never been inside the Eliots’ home before. His hands were in his pockets, and I knew why: to hide the grime under his fingernails that he was never able to entirely eradicate, despite the gray, grainy, paste-like soap he used. A feeling I would be hard put to name, even now, rose like a hot blush in my chest. I wanted to protect him, uphold him, and somehow temper the wrongness of what caused him to keep his hands in his pockets. I wanted him to not care.
Bootsie escorted us out to the driveway, chatting to my father. I looked apprehensively toward the sandbox, but Jane was gone. Bootsie put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and I wondered if she had witnessed what had passed between Jane and me. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Maureen.”
My father and I got into the car, which rumbled loudly to life; he had not yet replaced the damaged muffler. As my mother often said, “The cobbler’s children go barefoot.”
Neither of us said anything at first. I watched the familiar landscape flow by – the low, stone walls from another century, the maple trees with darkening leaves – and thought about Jane. So what if her parents knew the Franklin Roosevelts? What a stupid thing to be proud of.
“Is anything wrong, Maureen?”
I wanted to tell my father what Jane had said but hesitated, partly because my feelings were so disorderly, but also because I understood that his knowing something hurtful had been flung my way would upset him. “No.” He may have suspected otherwise, but he did not pursue it.
The remaining two weeks of my nanny days were uneventful. I saw the red roadster drive by several times before, finally, on my next to last day on Stowe Hill, Carleton stopped and joined me at the picnic table, where I had been memorizing irregular French verbs while Paul and Amy napped. He would be returning to Exeter after Labor Day, he said, and wanted to say goodbye. “Will you write to me?”
“I’m not much of a writer,” I hedged. Part of me wanted to leave Stowe Hill behind forever. Another part sensed a nascent power in myself to use, if I chose to.
“Neither am I,” he assured me.
“Okay.” I tore a sheet of paper from my notebook, and he wrote down his address, his hand unsteady.
We did exchange a couple of letters, but our correspondence soon tapered off to nothing. I don’t remember which of us stopped first. Jane I never saw again, but every once in a while, I will be sitting at my desk at Bates, Cameron, and Mahoney, (a desk that is not, it occurs to me, unlike the desk in Reverend Eliot’s library) and wonder: where she is now? what sort of life is she living? Looking back, I don’t think she meant to hurt me. I think from her perspective, her place in the world, she simply was stating what she saw as a fact.
I know she never married Carleton Avery Stowe III, though, because I ran into him recently at a wedding in Vermont. He was talking to a friend of mine, and, not surprisingly, we did not recognize one another until she introduced us. “You!” we exclaimed in unison, laughing. Carleton had not gained much height, but he was no longer fat and pimpled. In fact, he had become adequately handsome in that white-haired, tan-faced, navy-jacketed way. After a few minutes of talk about the lovely garden wedding we had just witnessed (Carleton up close, as a groomsman), our mutual friend excused herself, leaving Carleton and me to ourselves.
“I think they will be happy together, don’t you?” said Carleton, referring to the bride and groom. “They’re no longer young and foolish.”
“No, they’re not.” This had been a mid-life marriage, the second for both of them.
“As we were once. I, at least.”
“I was once young,” I admitted. “I don’t know about foolish.” I couldn’t afford foolish.
“No, you were not foolish. I remember Bootsie telling my mother how mature you were for your age. You surprised me, though. That night. When I got to your house – ”
“The goose!”
“The goose? Oh, the goose! I’d forgotten the goose. No, it’s just that when you stepped into the car in that blue dress, I realized I didn’t want to go to the dance. I wanted to drive around in my new car with a pretty girl.”
“Which we did.”
“Yes. That was sporting of you. To give up going to the dance.”
“Oh, I didn’t want to go.”
“You didn’t?”
“No.”
“So there we were? Just a dashing, young man and a pretty girl out for a spin?”
“In a red roadster,” I reminded him.
“Yes, a red roadster.”
“Do you still have it?”
“No. The red roadster belongs to more innocent times. Days long gone.”
“Not entirely. They’re not entirely gone if we remember them.”
He tilted his head and looked at me as if I had said something unexpected. “We do, don’t we. Remember them.”
For a moment, we hung suspended in the shimmering space of possibility. Then it faded, and we eased into less freighted territory, catching one another up on our current lives and our children’s lives (his two and my one) amid the clink of glasses and babble of talk. After a bit, an auburn-haired woman in a filmy green dress approached, and Carleton introduced her. “My wife, Alethea.” I was glad to see she was pretty. She explained that dinner was about to be served, and guests were taking their seats. “The toasts are up next, Carleton, and you’re on. I’m sorry,” she said, turning to me, “but I must spirit him away.”
“If you must, you must.” We all made promises unlikely to be kept to meet for dinner in the city sometime, they left, and I turned to scan the crowd for my husband.

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Patricia Page is the author of the novel Hope’s Cadillac (W.W. Norton, 1996). Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Epoch, Glimmer Train, and American Fiction.