Teddy Sets a Sailboat on Fire

The day Teddy set a sailboat on fire started out like any normal day on the Vineyard. My father was drinking his coffee and reading the New Yorker. Eventually he moved onto the sports section of the New York Times. You could tell because he started grumbling about another loss. His teams were never doing well. My mother was making scrambled eggs for breakfast while humming a Talking Heads song under her breath. My brother Alex and I were drinking orange juice out of wine glasses at the kitchen table, the way they did at restaurants in Edgartown. We liked to pretend we were this particular rich old couple who insisted on drinking orange out of fancy wine glasses at breakfast and who we spied on incessantly.

My father began drinking his steaming coffee in big gulps and his glasses began to fog up. This happened often. He glowered at us and said he was going to the bakery ten minutes away because he didn’t eat eggs, due to horrible memories of scrambled eggs in Belgrade, and Alex and I suppressed our laughter as he grumbled at us, scoured the room for his car keys, which were always lost, and left in his bathrobe and pajamas.

We had stayed on the island of Martha’s Vineyard all summer long as far back as I could remember. Every year, we stayed with our friends the Crowes, who were from Los Angeles, but this year my mother and father’s friends, the Friedmans, had offered us their cottage. Our parents were always a bit desperate to impress the Friedmans, who were distinguished British writers and professors of philosophy at Harvard. Some old friend of our mother’s from New York City had introduced us to them a few summers back. There was Mrs. Friedman, with her clear British accent, and Mr. Friedman, with his thick glasses and huge grin. The Friedmans had two sons who we’d never met before—they were always out boating or turtle-tagging or sailing. One of the sons was supposedly a genius—though a lot of people are supposedly a genius—while the other had been kicked out of every school he’d ever attended.

My mother rolled her eyes as my father slammed the door shut, the coattails of his long bathrobe blowing in the breeze. His salt-and-pepper hair was unkempt and his glasses were still foggy as he turned his head to scowl at us before ducking into his Saab. Alex and I finally released our laughter, howling.

My mother glared at me. I’d been on the receiving end of this look many times. Her blue eyes were steely and instantly my smile faded. “Don’t laugh, Katie; it’s rude and ungrateful,” she said. “By the way, the Friedmans are coming over for dinner tonight with their sons and I’m expecting good behavior.” I never understood why my mother was so keen on impressing the Friedmans.

Alex half-smiled at me. I shook my head. I was pretty sure a friend of mine had mentioned Kalen Friedman, the younger son. They knew each other somehow. Who had that been? I racked my brain, but I couldn’t remember. Maybe I was imagining it.

The phone started to ring. I looked at it and Mom looked at it too. “Pick it up,” she instructed me. I sat. “Pick it up,” she said. I stared at her for a moment and then, without adjusting my gaze, I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Oh, hello there,” came the voice on the other end. It was all I could do not to laugh. 

“Are you from Harry Potter?” I heard myself say, before I felt my face go tomato-red.

A low and silvery chuckle came through. “Oh boy, I wish. As matter of fact I like to think that maybe I am,” the voice said. It was definitely a she, kind of older. 

“Are you Mrs. Friedman?” I blurted.

“That would be me,” she said, and I could hear her smile. I was at once embarrassed and happy with myself. “The one and only. Actually I imagine there are other Mathilda Friedmans. . . .”

I laughed, forcefully, politely.

“Well, I imagine you are the daughter,” Mathilda Friedman said. I nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see me.

“I—yes. I’m the daughter.”

“Well, it’s lovely to hear your voice,” Mathilda Friedman said. I shiftly in my seat. “I met you when you were smaller,” Mathila Friedman pointed out in her delicate, polite way.

“I don’t remember,” I blurted. I looked up from the phone and saw my mother glaring at me. “Sorry, that was rude. Actually I kind of do remember, you know, very vaguely. We were in a garden, I think?”

Mathilda Friedman laughed loudly. “Oh darling, that’s alright, you don’t have to pretend to remember me. I just wanted to confirm dinner tonight. You lot are welcome to our house. And Kalen’s friend from boarding school is home; I hope you don’t mind the company.”

“Not at all,” I said quickly.

“Well, we’ll see you at 7,” Mathilda Friedman said. “Give your parents my best. I can’t wait to see you all!”

I smiled, looking into space. The sun cast a funny light on a cloud of dust mounting the kitchen table, spinning in a vacuum towards the window. “Thank you,” I said finally. “We look forward to it.”

I hung up, clenching the phone. Alex was having his third pancake. Usually I ate five or six, but I found myself no longer hungry. I had remembered Kalen’s friend: Jack Sparrow.

Jack was originally from South Africa, and I remember him being both proud of and embarrassed by this. In fact, that seemed to be the case with most everything about Jack: he was elusive, aloof, brooding. He always seemed to be thinking a lot more than he was saying, and enjoyed arguing and debating as a hobby, desperate to both prove his sharpness and to hide it. Jack had lived in London for five years, so maybe that was how he knew Kalen. Just like that, a memory surfaced: I sat on the small sandy beach of the lake. It was the first real summer day, the end of May, a cloudless infinity of blue sky and blue lake. As usual, my thoughts consumed me as I sat alone, comfortable in the hot sand, curls in my eyes. I felt a hand on my shoulder, down my back. I felt myself smile, then turned around. Jack looked at me with his downward-smiling, bemused expression. He didn’t say anything.

Then: “Katie, don’t you have a race now?” 

I stared at him. I looked at my watch. “I didn’t think so,” I said, immediately starting to panic. “Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“I don’t know, did they change it? Did they change the times?”

Jack shrugged, his broad shoulders stiffening and relaxing. “I don’t know; I’m so out of it,” he said, smirking, as if he was proud of this fact: I’m so out of it.

“I know,” I hissed.

“What?” Hurt, waiting. Then: “Katie, I’m just messing with you.”

I glared at him. “Okay.” I started walking away, aware of his gaze following me, my cheeks turning hot. My clothes were sweaty, my hair a mess and my shoes mud-splattered. I was walking in a strange way; every step was unbearably light. The sand beneath my feet felt like clouds, or air. Jack was strange, like a one-way magnet: you were always pulled to him, but he wasn’t pulled to anything but himself. On that day I felt especially pulled to him. I turned and looked at him. He was already looking at me. We locked eyes. I remember exactly what he was wearing that day: his blue T-shirt and a pair of Yale sweatpants. They were gray. Part of his face was shadowed, his expression locked in its usual straddle between stony and sarcastic, sad and amused. 

I worried for Jack, suddenly, at this moment. He was lonely, but never alone, always walking alongside one of his friends. He was separate, in the wrong place, different; I felt that way too sometimes, in one place when I should have been in another. 

“My friend Kalen rows crew,” Jack said then.

“I know a Kalen,” I said vaguely. “At least, I think I do.”

“How can you think you know someone?” Jack frowned. I looked at my shoes. “Actually don’t you feel that way sometimes?”

I laughed. “Yeah, kind of all the same.” 

Jack pursed his lips, a habit. “You think you know Kalen? Kalen Friedman?”

I nodded. Friedman. I did know that name. “I remember him, from somewhere; I don’t know,” I said finally, letting out a breath. Jack stepped towards me. The sun was hot, way too hot, burning my pale arms and my pale legs. Jack narrowed his eyes. “Kalen’s a cool guy.” Then he disappeared and walked away and I saw his tufts of hair mounting the pavilion and he was laughing and talking and joking with the guys and I wondered why I knew such a different Jack than everybody else did and if there was something wrong with me.

“Hellooo?” Alex was waving his hands in front of my face. I stirred. “Whatcha thinkin’ about?” Alex asked me, his eyes bugging out. “You get into these trances, Katie. . . .”

“Just thinking,” I said. “I want another pancake,” I said finally. I was hungry again. I felt lighter.

“We’re going to the beach,” Mom announced, leaping up from the table. “I have to find—let me just find—where’s my sunhat? Has anyone seen it?”

“No,” Alex and I said at the same time.

“Has anyone my wallet? Or my sunblock?”

“No.”

“No.”

In the end we went to the beach without any of her stuff, since it was all missing.

We pulled up to the parking lot of the beach. We’d been going to Lucy Vincent since before I could remember, but it felt today it felt different, colder. There was a nip in the air, unusual for this time of year. Our golden retriever, Teddy, who was in the back, started barking loudly as we approached the path to the beach. Lucy Vincent was the only beach that allowed dogs, so we took Teddy here to swim and run around in the sand nearly every day. He sniffed the air cautiously. My mother was hauling along four beach chairs even though my father wasn’t with us. She did things like this often—forgot who was who or what was what and then complained people had told her otherwise. We had packed up the station wagon with a million towels and bathing suits and pairs of goggles and sunscreen and extra clothes. My mother liked to be, well, prepared. Overprepared, you could say. 

Alex and I set out our towels on a stretch of sand near the cliffs. A seagull swooped down and snatched Alex’s bagel right out of his hands. Our mother yelled at us for swimming too deep. She fussed Alex about wearing sunscreen, and when he declined, she moved on to me, emphatically smearing chunks of the white, creamy, every-possible-toxin free cream she’d specially bought all over my face and neck and limbs.

“Enough!” I finally said tiredly.

“Don’t talk like that,” she warned me.

Mom sat with a shirt wrapped around her head and another draped in front of her face because she was afraid of getting sun poisoning. Alex and I chased Teddy in the waves, and I lay on my towel, hoping to tan. I was unsuccessful. Finally Mom looked at her watch: “Well, it’s three o’clock. I say we go home now. The Friedmans are coming at 5.”

“I thought we were going to their house at 7?”

“No, no, I’m positive it was the cottage at 5.”

Alex and I looked at each other. There was no point in correcting her or indicating in any way that she might have been wrong.

“Mh-hm,” I said. “I guess it was.”

A figure with fuzzy chest hair, expensive-looking sunglasses, and frazzled-looking grayish hair walked toward us, a towel slung over their shoulder and a canvas bag over the other. The winding, teetering walk of the figure could only belong to one person.

“There’s Dad,” I said, as our father came closer.

“Hello!” he said. “I bought some nice things at the bakery. Spent a while there. Then I found the bookstore. It moved again.”

My mother and I exchanged a look. “That’s why you took so long,” I said. “There was a bookstore.”

“Well, yeah, and it moved. But once I found it I guess I was there for a few hours,” Dad said.

“Hours?” Alex laughed. “Jeez.”

Our father glared at us from behind his sunglasses and produced a paperback with a bland cover.

Teddy ran up to a little girl building a sandcastle and promptly knocked it over. My mother had leashed Teddy after the lifeguard yelled at us for letting him do this. But now I watched my father look at Teddy with sympathy, still on his leash and gazing wistfully, if a dog can gaze wistfully, out at the water. Then I watched as my father discreetly let Teddy off his leash. Teddy slipped it off and bounded into the water. I sat in the surf to watch him experience the joy of a simple summer day at the ocean.

But soon enough . . .  Teddy, to my horror, started swimming out to the closest sailboat, and I noticed that they were having a barbeque. I wasn’t sure if that was allowed on a 420, but it seemed kind of dangerous to be grilling burgers on a boat. Then Teddy clawed at the side of the 420. He managed to crawl onto the gunwales and he kicked at the coals of their fire. The family in the boat started screaming at him and tried to push poor Teddy back in the sea, but he howled. The coals were alight and spreading. I watched as one the sails caught on fire as the coals spread even more. The family in the boat jumped off the boat and into the water, screaming. I couldn’t help wondering if there were sharks out where they were, but there must have been. That gave me the chills.

In the corner of my eye I noticed my father laughing and my mother screaming. My two little sisters next to me were speechless with shock.

Then Teddy accidentally knocked one of the clubs you use to knock fish you catch unconscious. But the thing was, he didn’t just knock it off the side of the boat; he knocked it all the way to a wooden dock down the shore from where we were. At a private beach. I gulped. Teddy had hit the club towards Mrs. Cummington’s mansion, where she herself was sitting out on the dock in a fancy lawn chair.

The club knocked a drink out of her hands and it spilled all over the fancy floral shirt she was wearing. “Oh, no!” I heard her yell out. “Now I have tonic all over my great-great-grandmother’s Lilly Pulitzer blouse!”

“Ew,” Alex whispered beside me. “I’ll never be a clothing designer,” he told me, and I laughed. 

“Alex,” I told him, “don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll be a great sharkologist.”

Alex smiled at me. “That’s what I was planning to do all along, Katie,” he said. “I’ll be specializing in the Ninja Lantern—”

“Okay, okay,” I said, giggling. Jeez, Alex could be annoying sometimes, but he sure was funny. I wasn’t sure if “sharkologist” was a real word, but on Martha’s Vineyard, stuff like that didn’t even matter.

“Oh, great,” my father said behind us, not laughing anymore.

“Oh, Jimmy!” my mother said to my father, whose real name was James. Everyone just called him Jimmy, though. “What just happened?”

My father covered his eyes. “Please tell me none of that just happened,” he whispered. “Please, please, please.”

“It did, Dad,” Alex said.

My dad put his head in his hands. 

“Teddy, bad boy!” Alex yelled.

“Julia, shh!” my mother said. “We need to be calm, Jimmy. Calm, alright?”

It turned out my mother’s spur of calmness made the first step of the lawsuit turn out okay. 

We were ordered by the Menemsha Police, including an extremely odd woman named Dolly Fuse, who called herself the Shellfish Constable, to leave the island by next Saturday, if we lost the lawsuit, which was next Friday. If we won, we would get to stay for the rest of the summer. That was why all my whole family wanted to win it so desperately. We loved the island. It was a terrible emergency, and my parents were in complete distress that week.

We hired a perfectly good lawyer. His name was Henry Brickwall, which was strange name, but he was a perfectly normal guy. He was extremely smart, too, and had gone to Harvard Law School, which I actually liked about him. He wasn’t a nerd at all. He said if my sisters and I were looking for a possible career, we should become defense lawyers, because that’s what he was. As far as I could tell, he obviously liked his job. He was handsome the way a brave protagonist is. He had close-cropped blond hair, pure blue eyes, and was tall, maybe six feet or even six foot two. 

Henry Brickwall had little green environmentally-friendly notebooks that he always carried around with him, for writing down notes, which was one of the many aspects about him my father liked. Henry and my father would scribbled down notes in the green books, which were the size of my palm, no bigger. While he talked to my parents, I tried guessing exactly how tall he was (I had come to the conclusion that he was six one) or how he managed to press his suits so well. I also tried guessing how somebody could have eyes that blue. Soaring blue, I called them, like the blue summer sky on Martha’s Vineyard with seagulls soaring above the sea. 

Two days before the court case, Henry Brickwall had a family emergency in Slovakia, which meant we had to hire a new lawyer.

My mother decided that any luck she’d thought we had was gone, if it had ever existed.

So we hired Albilio Mancana, a man six inches shorter and six million times uglier than Henry Brickwall. He was a Portuguese man who had immigrated to pursue his dreams of becoming a lawyer. The only problem was, he was pretty awful at his job. Henry Brickwall had pointed out a million reasons why we were correct, and that it wasn’t Teddy’s fault that the sailboat had caught on fire. First of all, the sailboat wasn’t licensed to have a barbeque on board! Henry had come up with plenty of other reasons, but the sailors, who were called the Mayers, Mrs. Cummington, and Dolly Fuse, the Shellfish Constable, along with the rest of the Menemsha Police had better reasons than Albilio Mancana. With Henry, we would have won, but now we were stuck with rotten, ugly Albilio Mancana.

Albilio had greasy black hair and was several inches shorter than Henry. And quite a lot fatter, even though I would never say that with my mother around. Anyway, Albilio was a lot dumber than Henry, but I guess it’s mean to say that, because Henry was one of the smartest people I had ever met. Albilio had messy, pizza-stained suits with wrinkled shirts and ties that looked like they’d been tied in the dark. He played poker and smoked outside our house. He carried a silver laptop instead of green environmentally-friendly notebooks, and his laptop had a bit too many stickers on it that my father said weren’t environmentally-friendly in the least. Instead of scribbling down notes, he typed them rapidly and with an intense furor belonging to a warrior whose battleground was the keyboard.

I thought Henry’s family emergency in Slovakia was a bit of a strange business, but as my mother always says, it is what is, and my father knew we had more important matters to deal with even though he was especially skeptical and angry. 

My parents hadn’t said this, but I knew they thought we would lose. They also hadn’t mentioned that they wouldn’t leave the island for anything, but that I knew for certain. My father was not interested in giving up, and he thought leaving would be giving up. I thought it would be more like giving in.

But I also didn’t want to give in to someone like Dolly Fuse.