I pulled into the center parking lot at Miss Porter’s School to pick up my fourteen-year-old niece Sara for the annual family ski weekend at Killington, Vermont. I’d heard of Miss Porter’s School, and read about it. Jackie O. went there. It was supposed to be a wonderful place. But I‘d lost touch with Sara over the years, so I wasn’t expecting an outpouring of insight from her.
I saw well kept Victorians built close to tree-lined streets, and natural stone buildings surrounding clay tennis courts, a hockey field, and an outdoor amphitheater. There were plenty of other girls being picked up for the weekend, throwing themselves into the backseat of foreign SUVs, looking very sleek and polished. They were miniatures version of their mama’s upfront. Everyone looked healthy, robust, and so, so confident.
I‘d moved around the country with my first and second husbands for most of Sara’s life, and when I’d moved to Connecticut a few years ago I’d hoped Sara and I would somehow drift together, and I’d have a built-in part-time daughter. So far, it hadn’t happened.
After a few attempts at conversation on my part, we fell into silence. I didn’t know if Sara was sad, mad, depressed, or if this is just the way teenage girls are. When we crossed into Vermont, and still hadn’t exchanged more than a few words, I acted on an impulse and dove off the first exit into Rutland that led to the fast-food row, just outside of town.
Sara asked, “Why are we stopping? Are you hungry?”
“No, I used to live here around here. I wanted to check it out. See how it’s changed.”
I was surprised I remembered the way to the gut off the highway. The highway was slightly built up, a few more signs, a few more businesses, mostly chain stores, but not as built up as you’d expect after 30 years. I followed my nose over the tracks, behind a new strip mall, and pulled up in front of what I thought was my old three-flat.
“They called this part of town the gut. They called it the gut because it was hidden back off Main Street in the belly of the town and there were all these two and three-flats for the quarry workers, and workers from the ski resorts.” I pointed to the corner. “That was my building.”
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“Don’t get caught on the tree stump!” I shouted out the bathroom window from the tub to Roy.
“You have to be at the Old Mill Inn by nine! The roads to Middlebury won’t be plowed yet!” I listened to Toyota’s gears grind. “I don’t have time to push you off. I have a 9:30 at the Yankee Peddler in town. It’s a gift box deal!”
It was Valentine’s Day, 1978, the coldest winter in Vermont on record since 1912. Roy and I were twenty-three and married about a year. We’d lived in the gut, for about 6 months. Next to our building, in the middle of our parking area, there was a two-foot-wide, eighteen-inch tall tree stump. In the winter, after a fresh snow, one of us would always get the undercarriage of our car hung up in it. That morning it was Roy’s 1968 red Toyota Wagon. Sometimes it was my pea-green AMC Hornet. Whenever fresh snow fell, the stump was a torment, and fresh snow fell almost every day.
We’d come to Vermont to stake out a future together. Neither of us had a college degree. I had 2 years of college credits in this and that from various community colleges and undergrad programs in the Northeast. Roy had almost completed and paid for a Bell and Howell correspondence school program in something that had to do with restaurant management. We‘d dated for two years before we got married.
Continued in Chapter 2
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