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Authors: Chris Bohjalian
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Massachusetts. During my sophomore year I became friends with a proud belle from a town on Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, who did in fact strive to look as pale as paste, so I am confident I know the difference.)
But she didn’t behave as though she was sickly, and that would obviously become an important issue at the trial. My mother believed there was a critical difference between fragile and sickly. She discouraged many women with histories of medical illness from having their babies at home, but those sorts of women who simply strike us all as frail when we see them in shopping malls or drugstores but do not in reality have a diagnosed, physiological problem—those sorts of women my mother was happy to help when they became pregnant. My mother believed a home birth was an extremely empowering and invigorating experience, and gave fragile women energy, confidence, and strength: They learned just what their bodies could do, and it gave them comfort.
And I know my mother figured out pretty quickly that Charlotte was not prepared for the short days, numbing cold, and endless snow of a Vermont winter. Especially a Vermont winter not far from the northern border of the state. As early as October, when Charlotte was in her second trimester and visiting my mother at the office in our home in Reddington for her monthly prenatal exam, she became frightened and morose when she talked of the weather.
“I just don’t know what we’re going to do up here, I just don’t know how we’re going to get by,” I heard her telling my mother. “Asa hasn’t even had time to get himself a snow shovel, and I just don’t know where to begin finding proper boots. And it’s all so expensive, just so frightfully expensive.”
They had arrived in Vermont at the best possible time of the year to become lulled into the mistaken belief that the state has a hospitable, welcoming, and moderate climate. I can imagine her thoughts when they arrived in mid-April, just after that year’s awful mud season, when the rocky hills of Vermont—hills thick with maple and pine and ash—explode overnight in color, and the days grow long and warm. She probably imagined the mythic winters were indeed just that: myths. Sure, it snowed, but the state had plows. Maybe the rain sometimes froze, maybe the driveway would get a little muddy in March … but nothing a minister and his family couldn’t handle.
But her introduction to fall in Vermont was nasty and winter harsher still. There was a killing frost that year in late August, and she lost the flowers she’d planted by the bluestone walk the previous spring; there was a light snow during the second week in September, and almost nine inches were dumped on the state the Friday and Saturday of Columbus Day weekend.
Charlotte had eyes as gray as moonstone, and thin hair the color of straw. She was pretty if you didn’t mind the subtle but unmistakable atmosphere of bad luck that seemed to pulse from that pale, pale skin.
Rollie and I spent the Fourth of July at the Bedfords’, baby-sitting Foogie. We spent the afternoon in T-shirts and shorts, watching Foogie run back and forth under the sprinkler in his bathing suit, and then spraying the boy with the hose. He loved it. Like his mother, he had white, almost translucent skin, but he had Asa’s red hair and round head. He was a sweet boy, but as ugly as they come.
Rollie was menstruating by then, but I wasn’t. She was in the midst of her fourth period that weekend, a fact she shared with me with no small amount of pride: the agony of the cramps she was stoically enduring, the flow that she claimed was so strong she’d have to leave me alone with Foogie almost every hour, while she raced inside to insert a fresh tampon.
Once when Foogie wasn’t within earshot, I teased Rollie by suggesting she was fabricating her period for my benefit.
“How can you say that?” she asked.
“Your white shorts,” I answered. “When I get a period, there’s
But she didn’t behave as though she was sickly, and that would obviously become an important issue at the trial. My mother believed there was a critical difference between fragile and sickly. She discouraged many women with histories of medical illness from having their babies at home, but those sorts of women who simply strike us all as frail when we see them in shopping malls or drugstores but do not in reality have a diagnosed, physiological problem—those sorts of women my mother was happy to help when they became pregnant. My mother believed a home birth was an extremely empowering and invigorating experience, and gave fragile women energy, confidence, and strength: They learned just what their bodies could do, and it gave them comfort.
And I know my mother figured out pretty quickly that Charlotte was not prepared for the short days, numbing cold, and endless snow of a Vermont winter. Especially a Vermont winter not far from the northern border of the state. As early as October, when Charlotte was in her second trimester and visiting my mother at the office in our home in Reddington for her monthly prenatal exam, she became frightened and morose when she talked of the weather.
“I just don’t know what we’re going to do up here, I just don’t know how we’re going to get by,” I heard her telling my mother. “Asa hasn’t even had time to get himself a snow shovel, and I just don’t know where to begin finding proper boots. And it’s all so expensive, just so frightfully expensive.”
They had arrived in Vermont at the best possible time of the year to become lulled into the mistaken belief that the state has a hospitable, welcoming, and moderate climate. I can imagine her thoughts when they arrived in mid-April, just after that year’s awful mud season, when the rocky hills of Vermont—hills thick with maple and pine and ash—explode overnight in color, and the days grow long and warm. She probably imagined the mythic winters were indeed just that: myths. Sure, it snowed, but the state had plows. Maybe the rain sometimes froze, maybe the driveway would get a little muddy in March … but nothing a minister and his family couldn’t handle.
But her introduction to fall in Vermont was nasty and winter harsher still. There was a killing frost that year in late August, and she lost the flowers she’d planted by the bluestone walk the previous spring; there was a light snow during the second week in September, and almost nine inches were dumped on the state the Friday and Saturday of Columbus Day weekend.
Charlotte had eyes as gray as moonstone, and thin hair the color of straw. She was pretty if you didn’t mind the subtle but unmistakable atmosphere of bad luck that seemed to pulse from that pale, pale skin.
Rollie and I spent the Fourth of July at the Bedfords’, baby-sitting Foogie. We spent the afternoon in T-shirts and shorts, watching Foogie run back and forth under the sprinkler in his bathing suit, and then spraying the boy with the hose. He loved it. Like his mother, he had white, almost translucent skin, but he had Asa’s red hair and round head. He was a sweet boy, but as ugly as they come.
Rollie was menstruating by then, but I wasn’t. She was in the midst of her fourth period that weekend, a fact she shared with me with no small amount of pride: the agony of the cramps she was stoically enduring, the flow that she claimed was so strong she’d have to leave me alone with Foogie almost every hour, while she raced inside to insert a fresh tampon.
Once when Foogie wasn’t within earshot, I teased Rollie by suggesting she was fabricating her period for my benefit.
“How can you say that?” she asked.
“Your white shorts,” I answered. “When I get a period, there’s
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