Authors: Nancy Thayer
But when she drove into the driveway of her house and saw it lit up by the headlights of her car, and saw the kitchen window shining with light—Madeline had a key to the house, Madeline would be there now, worrying about Suzanna’s disappearance—Suzanna’s heart expanded with joy; she felt as buoyant inside as a helium balloon. She had done it! They could do it! What a way to start the new year!
After the first rush of exhilaration, Madeline and Suzanna had settled down to the serious business of working out a life together, and much of it was not fun. They looked at houses which had the luxury of large adjoining bedrooms, and they looked at houses which had small adjoining bedrooms, but they very quickly realized that even with their two incomes combined, they could not afford a very big house. The interest rates were too high, so high that they would end up paying more for a small house than Suzanna was paying now for the house she and Tom had bought in 1970 when the interest rates were relatively low. This was a pedestrian bit of knowledge, not in keeping with the dreams of love, but one they had to deal with.
They ended up having a small wing built onto Suzanna’s house. This provided a downstairs bedroom and study for Madeline, with a tiny circular wrought-iron staircase leading up into a corner of Suzanna’s bedroom. It was an attractive addition, but an expensive one, costing almost as much as the equity on the main house itself. The builders began in early spring as soon as the weather was good, and Suzanna often came home from school and sat with her children drinking lemonade, watching the walls go up. She wished that Ron Bennett were still alive, because she thought that if he had done the work, this addition would have been much nicer. And she didn’t care for the builder she hired; he was taciturn, abrupt, and condescending, a gruff chauvinist. Still, when the work was done and the builders were gone, Suzanna and Madeline painted and wallpapered the rooms, and made this new addition
theirs
, part of their life together. Suzanna would tuck the children in bed on the second floor, then go into her bedroom, which with the addition of the spiral staircase was now expansive with happy possibilities: Madeline coming up
the stairs, Suzanna going down.
Before the construction of the new addition, Suzanna had sat Priscilla and Seth down in the living room, planning to have a long and serious discussion with them. She was ready for any questions. She explained gently, precisely, that Madeline was going to be living with them permanently, that the new parts of the house would be Madeline’s rooms. Madeline was her best friend, Suzanna told them, and she would help Suzanna do the housework and cooking and even help drive the children here and there or read them books if they wanted. Madeline would help pay the bills, which would be a big help to Mommy. In short, Madeline would make Mommy happier. Suzanna hoped they could all live together happily.
“Okay, Mom,” Priscilla said. “Can we go play now?”
Suzanna smiled. Children, their minds! “Don’t you have any questions?”
The children both looked puzzled and bored. “Nope,” Seth said, and wriggled.
So she let them run off. She stayed on guard, apprehensive, the next few weeks, for any sign from the children that they were disturbed by the new arrangements. She waited for them to come home from school with tears in their eyes and stories of nasty comments made by schoolmates. She prepared herself for a crisis, but none occurred. It seemed very strange.
It was May when the moving van bringing Madeline’s furniture and boxes of books and possessions pulled up in front of Suzanna’s house. The weather was springlike and mild, and neighbors were jogging or strolling around. Suzanna waited until some of the older ones came by, looking with frank curiosity at the van. Then, unable to bear the suspense any longer, she charged out of the house and into the street to confront one of the couples, a pleasant older married man and wife who took their constitutionals every evening when the weather permitted.
“Hello!” Suzanna called.
“Hello, dear,” they said, “are you moving?”
“No, no. I’m having a friend move in. Madeline Meade. She teaches psychology at Southmark College. That’s why I had the addition built on. We’re good friends, and it will be so much easier having another adult in the house.”
“How nice for you, dear,” they said. “We worry about you sometimes, you know, living all alone like that without a husband for protection.”
They all talked a bit more about the weather, the children, the news, and then
Madeline came out of the house, wiping her hands on her jeans, and walked out to the road to shake hands with the old couple and say hello. When everyone parted, Suzanna said to Madeline, “Why, it’s amazing. They seem to think this is perfectly fine. They didn’t raise an eyebrow. Do you suppose they wonder about our sex life?”
“I don’t know why they should,” Madeline said. “We don’t wonder about theirs.”
After Madeline moved in, there was a period of about two weeks when both women felt the town buzz slightly, as if a low-voltage electric shock had been passed around. When Suzanna pushed her shopping cart down the aisles of the Price Chopper, acquaintances who had formerly only said hello now stopped her for a long sociable chat, and Suzanna felt that they were looking her over, bright-eyed, searching her out for some sign. Once she had come upon Pam Moyer in the hardware store and Pam had smiled hello, then blushed scarlet. Ursula Aranguren reported that several people at the college who knew Suzanna slightly had bothered to ask if she supposed that Suzanna was a homosexual.
“I just told them that if you were anything, you were bisexual, since you have children,” Ursula said.
This conversation had occurred over drinks at a local restaurant; Ursula, Madeline, and Suzanna were having dinner together.
“But I don’t understand,” Suzanna said. “I thought there would be so much more of a to-do about it all.”
“Your timing’s all off for a to-do,” said Ursula. “Madeline should have moved in in January when we were all so bored we would have chewed any bit of gossip we could find to the rind. Last fall was taken up with Ron’s death and Johnny’s disappearance, and now Johnny’s come home and taken your limelight.”
“Oh, don’t talk that way, Ursula,” Suzanna said. “The last thing we want is limelight. I’ve been sick with worry about what might happen.”
“Well, I think you can stop worrying,” Ursula said, looking around the restaurant. “I can assure you I’m much more interested in finding someone to liven up
my
sex life than I am in hearing about anyone else’s.”
But Suzanna still worried. When June came and she walked down the hall from her classroom to her daughter’s classroom for the final parent-teacher conference of the year, her stomach cramped so she could hardly stand. She had mentioned her new living arrangements casually over the past few months to the other teachers as they sat sipping
their Tabs in the teachers’ lounge, and no one had said, “My God, Suzanna, does this mean you’re a lesbian, unfit to teach children?” She thought that now and then when she entered the lounge, conversation among the other teachers stopped for a moment—but that always happened, because there were factions in the school, some teachers for certain school policies, some against; there was always some small squabble going on. She had not felt personally snubbed by the other teachers. But what if Priscilla’s teacher had been noticing some personality change, or felt that Priscilla was unhappy, becoming maladjusted? But Priscilla’s teacher gave Suzanna a glowing report: she was fine, cheerful, learning easily and well.
“I was afraid that she might be exhibiting some signs of—oh, I’m not sure what—unhappiness, I suppose,” Suzanna said to the teacher. “I mean, since Madeline’s moved in.”
Martha Martin was in her fifties, and today she looked tired. “I don’t see why she should,” she said. “I think the important thing when someone new enters a household—man, woman, or child—is to discuss this change with the child and to be sure to continue to give the child the affection and attention he or she is used to. And clearly you’ve done that.”
“Well, then,” Suzanna said, “thank you.” She rose and went to the door.
“Suzanna,” Martha called, so that Suzanna turned back. “Priscilla is really all right. It’s
all
all right.” She smiled.
Perhaps it really was
all
all right, Suzanna thought now, for here she was, in her church, at a wedding, with her children on one side of her and her lover on the other. The summer had been a quiet one. She and Madeline had started a huge vegetable garden. Tom and Tracy had taken the children on a camping trip to Canada for a month. Without the usual contact of fellow teachers at the school or other parents to arrange activities for the children, Suzanna had become slightly lonely, as if a void were expanding around them. And she had thought: Ah, this is what it’s going to be. Not a noisy reaction of angry people, but a simple falling away. We’ll be snubbed. Even Madeline agreed that it did seem the town was drawing back a bit, studying the situation in its conservative way. But at the end of the summer the Vandersons had their annual all-day swimming and barbecue party, and the invitation that arrived in the mailbox was addressed to “Suzanna, Priscilla, and Seth Blair and Madeline Meade.” They had all gone to the party and had a good time, talking easily with everyone.
And now they had received a similar invitation, addressed to them as a pair, from Leigh Findly, for Mandy’s wedding, and here they sat. We’ll never have this, Suzanna thought, this public affirmation of our love, a wedding. But we are living together happily, accepted by the town. We will live out our lives here, the children will grow up, we’ll go to parties, weddings, funerals, concerts, and plays here. We will, we
do
belong. It seemed to her that people were kinder than she had ever supposed, and now as the sanctuary glowed with flowers and music, Suzanna’s emotions expanded accordingly.
The family provides the world for children, but the town provides the world for grown-ups. We are all living here like a group of relatives, second cousins twice removed, stepsisters, would-be spouses, misplaced aunts and uncles; we’re incestuous, marrying and divorcing one another, meddling in one another’s affairs, counting on one another when our cars or marriages break down, turning to one another for a good game of tennis, bridge, or sex. We pass the gossip around as greedily as children whispering the game at a birthday party, but we mean one another no harm.
Why, consider Johnny Bennett, she thought, for just then he entered the sanctuary, following his mother and sister to a pew on the groom’s side. He ran off last year with Liza Howard, Suzanna thought, and jilted poor Sarah Stafford, and created a big scandal. Perhaps we all did talk about it a lot, for the truth is, it cheered us up considerably: the fact that Liza and Johnny, who live among us, who are part of us, could do such a thing made us feel capable of exciting things, too. Exciting sexual things. Lust and drama. Escape. We thrilled with it for days, imagining how it must have been. Of course we all felt sorry for Sarah, but not too sorry, after all. She just went off to Paris for the year, and the newspapers have been full of little tidbits about her social life, the parties she goes to, the gowns she wears. She’s probably delighted she didn’t marry Johnny, she’ll probably come home married to a count.
Suzanna studied Johnny as he settled his mother into the pew and seated himself next to her. He certainly was handsome. Too handsome for his own good, probably; she was grateful her daughter was too young for his charms. She wondered who he would marry now. He seemed to have given his complete attention over to his mother since he returned home, but surely that couldn’t last.
“You know,” Madeline had said this evening as they lay in each other’s arms, “probably half the people in this town—the female half—are delighted that you and I have each other. That takes two women off the market.”
“What a way to put it!” Suzanna had laughed.
“Well, it’s true, you know,” Madeline had said. “There are more single eligible women in this town than there are men. Especially now that Judy Bennett’s widowed. And I heard that the Moyers are getting divorced.”
“I heard that, too,” Suzanna said. “I wonder why. They always seemed to be the perfect family.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with the Bennetts,” Madeline had said. “The Moyers were their closest friends, and tragedies have a way of reverberating among friends.”
“That was such a sad time,” Suzanna said, thinking of those bleak fall days after the police had found Ron Bennett’s Mercedes in the river.
“I know,” Madeline replied. “That’s probably another reason why no one made a fuss about us. This town was so hard hit by Ron’s death. I think it made us all feel mortal. In the face of that, any kind of love seems a blessing.”
So there they sat, together at a wedding, a couple fairly much like any other. They would never hold hands in public or even kiss a quick good-bye if anyone else was around, but in a way this necessary restraint provided an elegance to their relationship, and an awareness of pleasures they might have otherwise missed. Just now Madeline leaned over to Suzanna and whispered, “Look at that hat.” Suzanna looked at the hat—it was a turquoise affair with a plume, very ostentatious for Londonton—and Suzanna smiled, but she was smiling not so much at the hat as at the rush of pleasure she got when Madeline’s breath and perfume drifted up against her skin.
Gary Moyer was one of the last guests to arrive at the wedding. The usher who greeted him at the door was a seventeen-year-old hulk named Carter Doullet, who was a friend of Michael Taylor’s and a friend of Gary’s own eighteen-year-old son Matthew.
“Hi, Mr. Moyer.” Carter grinned. “Your wife’s already here. I think I can squeeze you in next to her.”
“That won’t be necessary, Carter,” Gary said. “I’ll just sit at the back by myself, thank you.”
Carter looked surprised. Gary realized that meant that Matthew wasn’t telling his friends that his parents had separated. Gary settled himself into his pew, wondering if he should now worry about the implications of his son’s secrecy. Of course the boy did not
want his parents to separate, so he probably thought the less he talked about it, the less real it would be.