Transformations

Illustration by Arthur Rackham

Our mother, Ruth, went on a diet. She drank Tab from plastic cups that she covered with lipstick marks; she ate cottage cheese on wheat toast. She ordered a box of powdered milkshakes by calling the number on a late-night infomercial in which aging movie stars claimed to have been transformed. The box arrived on a Friday in spring, and my sister, Beth, and I helped her fill the pantry with the dainty packets of powder. At breakfast and lunch she was supposed to combine the packets with a thin, anemic milk she kept in the fridge. Then, according to the advertisement, she could eat a sensible dinner and lose weight. The powders came in flavors with bright, surreal colors: hot-pink strawberry, red cherry, yellow pineapple.

Ruth bought a stationary bike that our father, Henry, put together over a weekend, its pieces in piles on the front porch, where he wrestled with instructions and drawings. Henry wasn’t a mechanical man, and sometimes he tried to fit two pieces together by sheer force because he was tired of reading about the relationship between part F and part C. In the end, the bike was a delicate thing that lived in front of our television set in the living room. If you held on too tightly, the handlebars fell off, and if you pedaled too fast, one of the pedals flung itself across the room.

Our parents, Beth and I noticed, were unhappy with themselves. They wanted to look better and feel better, to use their time more efficiently. Our father bought a series of tapes designed to make him smarter while he slept at night. Beth and I could hear the voice on those tapes in our bedroom upstairs: a man lecturing on history and art, on philosophy and physics, on the exact architecture of an atom.

On Saturdays, we began looking at real estate. Beth and I liked our house, a cedar cottage with porches beside a lagoon, but our parents said it was outdated and didn’t give the right impression.

“What kind of impression are we trying to give?” Beth wanted to know.

Our parents didn’t seem to know the answer to this question, since what followed was a silence as heavy as a cloud.

We looked at houses all over the island: on tall legs by the ocean, with swimming pools and brightly colored exteriors, with huge fake lawns grown over the sand. My mother had a manicured, stylish friend named Joyce who never minded giving us the keys to something. She let my parents lean over books of photographs, then reached into a cabinet behind her desk where keys lived in airless neighborhoods, hung from nails. Sometimes there was a secret code to a box that was draped over a doorknob. It turned out I liked looking at real estate, that for the rest of my life I would see an interesting house for sale and pull into the driveway, stand on the porch, press my nose to the dark windows.

Beth and I belonged to a writing group that met in the home of a woman named Sylvia, who had just graduated from college. Her dirty-blonde hair fell in ringlets to her waist, and she lived in a beach box: a cheap, wooden structure, up a flight of stairs, by the sea.

We took the bus after school on Wednesdays and sat on pillows in Sylvia’s living room with five other kids we did not know well. Sylvia burned candles that smelled like flowers and fruits, and she served us cups of tea. Beth and I loved everything about Sylvia: her surfboard and guitars, propped against a wall, her bathing suits and gauzy clothing that seemed full of wind and balance.

The writing lessons from this season were based on local folklore. Sylvia had been reading aloud to us from a booklet written by a midwife in one of our fishing villages one hundred years before, and in it was a story of a woman...