Authors: Renee Manfredi
But enough today. She reboxed the slides. It was her birthday, after all, and what she wanted suddenly was to get a little drunk—a good sign, she thought, since that meant she wasn’t too old to enjoy the finer pleasures of a good Scotch with a good friend. She picked up the phone to call Greta.
“What are you doing?” she said when Greta picked up.
“Well, I was about to make dinner, but Mike called and said he’s working till nine, so not to bother.”
Anna could sense her friend’s mood immediately. Six months ago Greta had quit her job as vice-president of a software firm to devote herself full-time to the business of trying to get pregnant. Her tripartite obsession these days was conception, making elaborate dinners with ingredients she drove all over Boston to find, and coordinating a music and dance group for deaf children. Greta called the ensemble The No-Tones, and had already been written up twice in the Boston papers. Both of Greta’s parents, German immigrants, were deaf. Anna was awed by Greta’s childhood stories, the way, without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, she described leaving the silence every morning and moving slowly into sound, “like I was the light on water, and had to reach one shore in the morning, and the opposite every evening.”
Greta’s moods these days, Anna knew, were a rope bridge, swaying this way and that with emotion of even the slightest weight. She spoke softly. “So, anyway, since my wayward husband is missing dinner yet again, why don’t you let me cook for you?”
“Better yet, meet me in the city. Let’s go get drunk.”
Greta laughed. “You paranoid thing, you. You don’t believe me when I said I called off the surprise party?”
“Yes, I do. Mostly. But I just don’t want to go home right now.” Greta’s townhouse was right next to Anna’s.
Greta agreed to meet her at a working-class bar in Back Bay, a place she’d never been but had noticed on one of her drives. “It’s across the street from a Korean Deli,” Anna said. “I’ll meet you there in an hour.”
By the time Anna was on her second martini, Greta still hadn’t shown up. She got out her cell phone to call Greta’s house, but the battery was dead. Anna ordered a San Pellegrino, to sip along with the drink, though she was less afraid of drunkenness than she was of maudlin emotion.
A little more than a decade ago, she turned forty at the summer home in Maine. Hugh had arranged for a surprise dinner party—the one and only time Anna didn’t mind, since he’d invited only people she truly loved. He had taken her for a two-hour walk on the beach and when they returned, there on the front porch were their friends at tables set with snowy linens and pink roses. There was a string quartet on the lawn, and hired servers to fill champagne flutes. Sometime during that evening Anna wondered where she would be for future birthdays and vaguely imagined that it would be right in the same place, with Hugh beside her, maybe just the two of them drinking wine on the beach after a quiet dinner in town. This, this sticky-floored bar with its torn vinyl booths and damaged-looking characters—of which she supposed she was one—was the last place she would have guessed.
Greta walked in finally, grabbing two pool cues on her way over to Anna’s booth. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Is everything all right?” Anna said, noticing Greta’s bloodshot eyes.
“No, but I’m not talking about my problems right now. This is your night.” She gave Anna a pool cue. “Follow me, Fifty-three.”
Anna laughed and walked with her friend over to the pool table, then watched as Greta racked the balls. The look on Greta’s face was precisely the reason Anna was done with relationships.
Other than Greta, she didn’t even especially want friendships. The older she got, the more any successful human relationship seemed impossible. There were men around when she needed or wanted them—Anna thought of them as white cells; whenever she felt a little low, the monocycles and leukocytes attacked the virus of loneliness until she felt better.
She’d had a few dalliances in the years since losing her husband, but no one had truly held her interest.
“Your turn,” Greta said. “You’re stripes, and we’re playing slop.”
“Naturally,” Anna said, and her shot sent two balls thumping off the table. “Oops.”
Greta gave her an exasperated look, then signaled to the waiter for another round.
“I shouldn’t,” Anna said. “I teach tomorrow and I still have quizzes to grade.”
“Oh, bull. It’s your birthday. You need to be self-indulgent. If you were a man in mid-life you’d be buying supersized SUVs with equipment racks for sports you don’t even play.”
Anna studied the table for a decent shot. “I need to do something out of character. I think I’m in a rut.” The third martini was a mistake: Alcohol never had the mellowing effect on her that it seemed to on others. She didn’t need to be stirred up, didn’t want to think about regrets or mistakes. She didn’t get the career she’d wanted, but she got an unexpected bonus in her husband who made her life just as fulfilling—more, probably—than if her plan to become a surgeon had worked out. She had things in her life now that satisfied her—her music, her teaching—and if her world was smaller and more lightly made than it had once been, it was also easier to let things go and let small pleasures step in for any epic striving after happiness, whatever that was.
Anyway, what satisfied her these days were quiet, low-key things—hanging out with Greta, rehearsals for the community chamber orchestra, helping out with an occasional charitable event.
“Earth to Anna,” Greta said. “It’s your turn.”
Anna lined up a sure shot, but it went wide of the pocket.
Greta laughed. “What’s the matter, granny, got the shakes?”
“Give me a break. I’m almost a senior citizen. In some states, I’m old enough for a retirement community.”
“Sure. Any minute now you’ll be breaking a hip and taking in stray cats. Watch my youthful dexterity now: six, corner pocket.”
Anna watched Greta concentrating on the game, along with, she saw now, most of the men in the bar. Greta was in her late thirties, though she looked much younger. She commanded attention wherever she was. It was
her hair, partly, the shimmering length of gold, but there was something else, too, something intangible, as though she carried her own weather with her, changing the air from cool to warm, from low pressure to high, whenever she walked into the room. Greta was a big woman, not heavy or especially tall, but outsized somehow, awkwardly postured, as though she were constantly bumping her head against the ceiling of her life and coming away wounded. It was this air of bruised vulnerability that made her more beautiful.
Anna was grateful that she didn’t worry about losing her looks as she got older. Men were attracted to her for reasons other than physicality, she knew. Hugh once said it was her aura of aloneness the first time he saw her at the freshmen mixer, her cool blue dress and watery drape of dark hair, the proud tilt of her chin, as though dancing or standing alone made no difference to her at all. Anna believed that the ideal world would consist of two physical types of women: those powered by estrogen and maternity, and those who functioned on the rational hormone of progesterone, cut with a little testosterone, for a competitive edge. She’d have chosen the latter, hands down.
Greta sank the eight ball and ended the game. “Another?” she asked.
Anna said no, but agreed to a nightcap at Greta’s when it became clear that her friend didn’t want to be alone. “I’ll see you at home then,” Anna said, and ducked into the ladies’ room to wash her face. She felt a little sick, light-headed with a sudden dread. She put her hands under the cold water. A man was speaking Spanish on the pay phone just outside the door. He was angry, whoever he was. He looked her up and down when she came out.
“Señora,” he called.
She turned. He held out something to her. One of the hairpin brooches. She took it from him. “Gracias,” she said, and saw that he was breathtaking. Beautiful dark eyes and lovely hands, lean and elegantly dressed in closely cut trousers and a yellow shirt that looked like raw silk. She turned the pin over in her hand. The one with the silver forget-me-nots. She put it back in her pocket. She might keep this one.
Back at Greta’s, Anna put on a pot of decaf while Greta checked her phone messages. Anna ran her hands over the smooth blue and white tile on the butcher-block island. Greta’s things were nice, of the highest
quality. Beautiful copper-bottomed pots hanging on a rack above the sink, wonderful smells in every part of the house—cinnamon and dill in the kitchen, eucalyptus and lavender in the living room. Greta usually had a vase or two of daises or baby tulips, but wandering now through the rooms, Anna counted no fewer than ten vases of exotic flowers. “Who died, anyway?” Anna said, nodding toward a huge arrangement of pink orchids and Asian lilies.
“I know. Isn’t that something? Mike’s been bringing them home. Every other day. I suppose I should be suspicious.”
Anna raised an eyebrow.
“Birthdays, anniversaries, or forgiveness. Is there any other reason a man brings a woman flowers?” Greta opened the linen drawer, pulled out a pack of cigarettes from beneath the dishtowels. “Wanna do something wicked?”
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Anna said.
“I don’t. Only when I’m feeling rebellious. Mike hates it.”
“Sure, I’ll have one.” She’d been a regular smoker in college, but hadn’t had a cigarette in at least twenty years.
Anna followed Greta to the deck in back. A small fence here separated Greta’s yard from Anna’s. “I have to ask, Greta.”
“Yeah?”
“Is everything all right? Between you and Mike?”
Greta didn’t answer at first. “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s staying away longer and longer. He sometimes leaves the house at six in the morning and doesn’t get back till nine or ten. Yesterday he didn’t get home until midnight.”
“Well,” Anna said, “well, what do you think?”
Greta exhaled, shook her head. “I don’t know. I doubt he’d be that brazen if it were another woman. He’d at least have the decency to lie to me.”
“Where does he say he’s been?”
“Driving. Just driving around.”
“He might be. I mean, that might be the truth.” There had been a time in Anna’s own life, as a new mother, when she felt at peace only in the car. Though she never came close to leaving her family, the possibility that each exit off the freeway held, knowing that with one turn she could take the off-ramp and head into Canada, was beguiling and thrilling. Those early years, especially, when Hugh was working a twenty-four-hour shift at
the hospital, Anna sometimes felt as if her life were as precarious and flimsy as a rotten floorboard.
She’d been a scholarship student at Smith, double-majoring in chemistry and physics when she met Hugh at the freshmen mixer. Her plans were to go on to medical school—by her junior year she had been accepted early decision at Tufts—but the romance with Hugh was so intoxicating and so perfect that Anna couldn’t imagine anything going awry. They married the month after graduation. Their plan was for Hugh to get through medical school and into a residency before Anna started her studies.
She completed a med tech program in nine months and worked in a lab to pay the bills. It was easy, pleasant work, a temporary stopgap while she waited for her turn to go to school. Even in her long hours alone while Hugh worked, her boredom with the repetitive lab work, she was satisfied with their life, glad to come home at the end of the day to their shabby rooms with the threadbare furniture and the smells of bad cooking from the neighboring apartments. It was the kind of marriage she’d always wanted but dared not hope for. Everything was exactly on track the first two years. Then Anna discovered she was pregnant. She and Hugh had been so careful, and Anna knew her cycle so exactly—down to the hour she ovulated—that they never worried about accidental pregnancy.
She knew when she had conceived. Hugh had gotten a rare four days in a row off and they drove up country to stay at Hugh’s family summer home in Maine. Anna was the happiest she’d ever been, riding bikes and walking along the beach every afternoon, the two of them eating lobster in the burnished gold of evening light, lulled by the hiss and roil of the water and the waves.
Anna had never thought of herself as a mother and was content with a childless marriage. The idea of an infant infuriated her, made her feel panicked and trapped.
She wanted Hugh to at least consider aborting, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Hugh tried to reassure her. “Nothing will change, darling. We’ll simply switch jobs. I’ll get into a residency program, and then you’ll go to medical school. We’ll get a nanny for the baby.”
Except that it didn’t quite work out that way. Hugh joined the orthopedic surgical staff at Boston General. Anna had Poppy—named after Hugh’s grandmother—and prepared to begin her studies. But the baby left
her exhausted, and there were dinner parties for Hugh’s new colleagues, social events for doctors and their wives, and clubs Hugh suggested she join, including one called The Medical Wives’ Society. She laughed at him. But he pleaded with her, said he knew it was a bunch of bored women, but it didn’t entail much more than afternoon teas, a charitable activity or two.
“How can you possibly ask me to join something like this?” she’d said to him. “It shows so little respect for who I am that I have to wonder if you know me at all.”
“Anna,” he said quietly, “darling Anna.”
In the end he won—though she didn’t think of it that way; she loved him, and she made the concession. She dressed up and lunched at the club once a month, sat through the endless chatter about shopping and decorating and suspicions about pretty, predatory nurses. Twenty-five years later, Anna still occasionally attended some of the Medical Wives’ events. There was nothing like the consistency of disliking someone for nearly three decades to make one feel ageless.
Anna shook out another cigarette from Greta’s pack and lit it. “I’m fifty-three, what a drag,” she said. “Anyway, my insomnia is back these days, so you can call me later tonight if you want.”
“What are you going to do now?”
Anna stubbed out her cigarette in the potted geranium. “Grade papers. Then practice, if I’m still cogent. I’ve joined the community orchestra again, and Rachmaninoff’s on the program, which would have put me behind even if I hadn’t missed the first two rehearsals.”