I listened avidly to our mother’s lectures, tonight and every night. We nodded and used words like patriarchy and privilege and gender. Shortly after the end of the Pause, Renee had announced that she would become a doctor, and now all her efforts pointed to this goal. AP chemistry, biology, and calculus; her part-time job at the lab in New Haven; her dominance on the Bexley High cross-country team.
Only Caroline, at sixteen, yawned or examined her fingernails or tried, occasionally, to dispute Noni’s lessons.
“But what if we want to be married?” Caroline asked tonight. “What if we want other people?” Caroline’s hair fell long across her back and was streaked a whitish blond from the Sun In she used every morning with the blow dryer. We knew that she was thinking of Nathan Duffy and the Goats, who now called Caroline an honorary Duffy. In the afternoons Nathan would ride his bike slowly past our house and leave on the front steps odd little gifts: one silver stick of dusty Juicy Fruit, a silky brown horse chestnut big as a child’s fist, a lone pink carnation frilly as a tutu.
Noni answered Caroline’s question in the abstract. Even if she knew that the front-door gifts were for Caroline, she believed them irrelevant.
“Fine. Have other people,” Noni said. “But remember that they can be gone—poof! In an instant. Gone. So be prepared.”
This answer did not satisfy Caroline, who shifted and fidgeted on her chair. She blinked rapidly, her entire face reddened. She looked ready to weep.
“Oh, Caroline,” Noni said, and her voice softened. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scare you, really, I don’t. I just want to prepare you. So you won’t have to suffer. So you’ll have an easier, better time than I did.” She took hold of Caroline’s hand. We had finished eating our pork chops; on each of our plates lay a ragged, moon-shaped bone.
I wanted to believe that Noni’s suffering would not be our own, but her lessons seemed difficult to place within the context of our actual lives. Noni herself had sworn off dating and all men. For her, easier and better meant being alone. We watched The Love Boat every Saturday night with a mixture of delight and unease as the new cadre of attractive passengers flirted and kissed and paired off in the few short days of their tropical cruise. Was this supposed to happen? Caroline seemed to me the purest example of true love: worshipped by Nathan in a factual, fateful way. But even their relationship was dependent on parental whims and the absence of snow, which in the winters made the roof too precarious for Caroline to shimmy across and down to Nathan’s waiting car.
Caroline, still sniffling, turned to Noni. “Can I ask you a question?” she said gently.
“Of course,” Noni answered.
“I was wondering if I could have a slightly later curfew. Just on Saturdays. Or Fridays. One day.” Caroline’s eyes glistened, still wet from her tears. “Please,” she said.
I almost considered Nathan to be one of us, the Skinners. He loved the secret, rushing green of the pond; he knew about the Pause. I’d watched him grow just as I’d watched Joe, with his sudden height and the rough spots of beard that appeared in patches across his cheeks and neck like camouflage. But Noni knew nothing about that. To her, Nathan presented the same risks and liabilities as a stray dog brought home from the park. Would it bite? How long would it stay? She looked at him askance no matter how strenuously he tried to impress her.
“I’m going to study biology,” he had told Noni earlier that year, “be a university professor. I’m particularly interested in amphibians, frogs mostly. They’re disappearing. We need to save the frogs.”
It was the pond that had started this for Nathan. The baritone bullfrogs and the smaller ones, green as a new leaf. The plunk-splash sound as they leaped into the water. The bulging, lidless eyes, jellied, glistening.
But Noni had no use for frogs, or for Nathan. She had imposed a strict 11:00 p.m. curfew on Caroline, Renee, and me, although it was clear that only Caroline truly needed it. I was in sixth grade, twelve years old, and had nowhere to go, nothing outrageous to do. My most scandalous behavior involved sneaking into movies I hadn’t paid for at the cineplex with my friend Violet and eating far too much buttered popcorn.
At night Renee studied organic chemistry and compared medical schools. After one