Chaper 1 Part I

She turned the knob all the way left, quickly to keep the pipes from shaking, and huddled under the hot water that trickled out of the shower head. “Just a minute,” she thought. “Just a minute under the water until the room warms up.” The goose bumps on her arms and legs began to disappear as she inhaled the warm steam.
First in the shower most mornings, Beth had the benefit of a nice dry bathroom, the near certainty of an unused and clean towel, almost unlimited hot water, and no wait. The drawback? The bathroom was stone cold on dark Maine winter mornings. When she hopped into the shower at 5:15 a.m. she curled her toes to minimize the pain in her feet precipitated by the chilly bathtub. The dry dull ache of cold Beth enjoyed on her limbs during the brief summer months when they swam in the frigid Atlantic was not so different from the feel of the porcelain beneath her feet December through March.
“Damn it.” Beth cursed under her breath as the water suddenly ran cold. Someone’s running the warm downstairs. As she finished rinsing her hair, the goose bumps reappearing on her skin, Beth repeated the pledge she took almost religiously. “When I am grown up, I will live in a brand new house. Everything will work and everything will be new. There won’t be any leaks or drafts. The fuses will never be blown and there will always be enough water pressure and hot water to go around.”
This fantasy was just one of the many the Beth entertained. She imagined that she would be adopted by one of her teachers, that she would become deathly ill so everyone paid attention to her, visiting her at the hospital to hold her hand and tell her how much she meant to them. She hoped she would become a famous actress whose renown was attributable to her sensitive emotional portrayals of tragic characters.
She dried herself off and pulled on her clothes: jeans, a t-shirt, a sweater, a pair of cotton socks and converse all-stars, and exited the bathroom hanging her wet towel on the hall banister for use by her brothers and sister once all the clean towels were gone. The dim morning light was beginning to penetrate the house, silent except for someone’s snores.
“Who’s next for the shower?” She called into the twilight.
“In a minute.” replied one of her brothers. She walked into her bedroom. Sensing instead of seeing in the dark room, Beth collected yesterday’s dirty clothes and her schoolbag. She heard her sister sigh and turn over in bed. She left the room, pulling the door closed behind her.

“Good morning, Miss Tish!” Beth was more like her mother, who preferred to spend her early morning sitting quietly at the eastward kitchen window with a cup of coffee and a cigarette.
“Quiet down, Dad!” She glared, coming down the stairs and heading for the downstairs bathroom to place her clothers in the hamper, brush her teeth and comb her hair. “It’s too early for that kind of noise.”
“Beautiful morning!” he bellowed in reply with an enormous grin. “Clear as a bell.”
“Are you ready for your coffee, Fred?” Beth’s mother asked from the kitchen.
“Thank you, Mrs. F!” came the enthusiastic reply.
Pepper was the only member of the family who had ever proved susceptible to Fred’s excessive morning enthusiasm. Pepper and Fred enjoyed breaking the early morning silence on Greenwood Lane by expressing their mutual love for the dawn of a new day. Fred would often break into song and his choruses of “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” and “Climb Every Mountain” were usually accompanied by Pepper’s loud purring. As Beth listened to her father’s impressive baritone and her cat’s equally impressive show of support, she wondered how it was that the joy of this day had not yet managed to infect her.
“Six o’clock. Have a good day.” Her mother called softly as she stepped away from the window framing the sun rising over the Atlantic, put out her cigarette, and placed her coffee cup in the sink. As she headed up the stairs in her quilted bathrobe and slippers, her early morning demeanor was replaced by the no-nonsense air of the master of ceremonies, the conductor responsible for having the remainder of the household up, washed, dressed, fed and out the door. “C.J. your next for the shower. It’s after 6 o’clock. Let’s get MOVING up there!”
“I have a headache. Let me sleep a little longer. Mike can go next!”
“I don’t want to go next. It’s CJ’s turn.”
“You’ll feel better once you get into the shower C.J. Get moving now.”
“FUCK!”
Beth stopped to give Pepper a quick scratch. She took quick note of her cat’s tattered and bloody ears and what looked like an infected scratch on his cheek. “You’re not as tough as you think, you know. Your wild life is going to catch up with you.” Beth ducked into the mudroom for her coat and shivered as she pulled the icy parka over her sweater. She slung her bag over her shoulder. “Are you coming dad?”
“On my way.”
She felt the parka warming slowly and pulled on her hat and mittens. The house shook as C.J. stomped from his bedroom to the upstairs bath. Fred wrapped a scarf around his neck, pulled on his coat, (name of hat) with earflaps down to protect against the cold and donned the enormous fleece lined leather gloves he pulled from the pocket. “Let’s go Miss Tish.”

They turned their backs to the blood red sunrise and trudged over a footpath through the trees without speaking, the snow and fallen leaves crunching and rustling under their feet. The tops of the trees were shivering in the wind, a sure sign that, once they left the shelter of Greenwood lane, they would be molested by a fierce north wind.
“Did I ever tell you about my cousin Perry?”
Beth looked up in surprise at her father who, for all his boisterousness getting ready to leave the house, usually maintained a strict silence on the pilgrimage to the ferry. “I don’t think so.” She rejoined tentatively. “Does he live around here?”
“No. Salem.” he paused uncertainly, also out of character. “Well, Perry, see, he was a really good student. Smart and successful in school. He ended up getting a scholarship to study engineering at M.I.T.” The look that Beth shot her father showed evidence of both doubt and surprise. She didn’t know that her dad was close to someone that went to M.I.T. She didn’t know that he had any real friendships with people who had attended college at all. Her father caught her eye briefly and then they both looked down at their feet as they continued to labor through the leaves and snow.
“Yeah, we all thought that Perry really had it made. But, the thing was, he had this girlfriend and they were pretty serious. He didn’t want to leave her behind after high school so he decided not to go to M.I.T. after all. Instead he took a factory job – worked at the Parker Brothers factory making board game pieces. Making toys” he spat disgustedly “when he could have been at M.I.T. And you know what happened in the end? In the end, she left him after only a couple of years. And there he was, divorced and uneducated.”
He stopped speaking as abruptly as he started and they walked on in silence for a few minutes.
They were coming out of the woods, out of the hollow, onto to the windward face of the island. Beth could already hear the wind howling in the trees. She buried her face in the neck of her parka and her pulled her mittened hands up into her coat sleeves. “What do you think we can learn from Perry?” Her father interjected suddenly.
Beth lifted her face long enough to send him a scowl and reply, with a certain air of superiority, confident that her parenting advice was eminently reasonable and that, when she had children of her own she would not subject them to such ineffective didactic attempts,” I think that if you want to know whether or not I am thinking about giving up on college to be with Ben you should just ask me.” She ducked her face pack into her parka just in time to avoid getting the first blast of icy air full in the face. Her cheeks blistered instantly. Fred bowed his head quickly against the wind and they made the rest of the journey in silence.