Neverland Read Free Page A

simply moving my bed closer to the door and the light switch.
    But in the station wagon, on the way to the Retreat, such petty assaults as bed-wetting reminders were common. Most brothers and sisters say they love each other even if they fight, but when I turned back around to face forward again, I remember thinking that I hated the twins more than I hated school and more than I hated farts.
    When the Retreat came into view, its jutting geometry pushing at the luminescent drifting clouds behind it, I reached over and pressed my hand into the horn and Dad swore, and I heard Mama whisper tensely, “Starting in already.” I didn’t take offense when my mother began scolding us—there was some magnetic field around Gull Island, at its strongest at the Retreat, with its epicenter dwelling in Grammy Weenie herself. The closer Mama got to her mother, the more wound up she became.

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    Rowena Wandigaux Lee, no relation to Robert E. or Harper, although she claimed to be kin of anyone of note, had inherited the house and the land from her parents. After a few decades of renting the property out, the place was completely unrentable, and now Grammy Weenie lived there most of each year. She was a dethroned princess, riddled through like a Swiss cheese with the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. “My daddy invented a most curious elixir,” she’d say, her powder-white, liver-spotted fingers picking lint off our Sunday-school clothes, “and we would be doing quite well now, if that pharmacist hadn’t stolen it.” And we all knew she was referring to Coca-Cola, a drink that would never touch her lips; or, “Your great-great granddaddy was a wealthy man before the war”—and needless to say, the war she meant had ended in the
1860s. When Grammy Weenie kissed us, we smelled a mixture of bourbon, Isis of the Nile perfume, and something sour and yeasty; all of us children agreed that it was like having to kiss a toad, and my cousin Sumter tried to prove us wrong by kissing an actual toad, but our opinion could not be swayed.
    So the big house on Gull Island was yet another albatross for Grammy Weenie, and none of us was surprised when we learned that Great-Grammy Wandigaux used Confederate dollars to purchase it back in the long ago—and it looked like it. The house sagged as if it were beginning to sink into the ground. It was always sweltering in August, and the Retreat, which was the name of the place, had warped steadily year by year since early in the century, until it was bowed like a grounded ship. A poorly conceived Victorian mess, the Retreat had lost its color through tropical storms and lack of care: It was a muddy khaki hue, like the oversized shorts Sumter’s mother forced him to wear around the house rather than the cutoffs the rest of us ran around in. Aunt Cricket would sniff, “In a classless society there’s always going to be folks without class,” and my father would do his best to belch at such moments. The house was sturdy, however: It had survived four tropical storms, two hurricanes, and three fires set by locals at various times in its long history.
    Most of the islanders were black and considered by my Grammy Weenie to be quite backward and filthy. To her, they were always going to be lower-caste victims of their own lack of civilization and cultural advancement, stemming back from their origins in the Dark Continent. Coloreds , which Grammy Weenie called any race other than her own, were very much like children themselves and needed watching over. Grammy Weenie was what you might call—if you felt charitable—an unrepentant racist who believed it was a white woman’s duty to uphold such bigotry in the face of the modern world’s loss of values. She would be equally vocal in her denunciation of groups such as the Klan, and if you were ever to point out how similar her prejudices were to theirs—as Daddy often did—she
would tell you point-blank that you were just too young to understand