Eva had risen wordlessly with the sun and started to pack her bags. I watched her from the bed as she folded her clothes and put them into the suitcase, the lid open like a mouth. She didn’t speak as she tidied and packed; then she disappeared downstairs. When I finally came down from the loft she was standing at the stove with an apron on, Rose nestled against her hip. She was making eggs and bacon in a cast iron skillet. There were gutted oranges littering the counter and a pitcher of fresh-squeezed juice.
“There’s coffee in the percolator,” she said, motioning to the pot.
We had stayed up late, as though morning wouldn’t come if we were waiting for it.
I don’t want you to leave,
I had said.
I love you,
I’d whispered, fearful that my words were lost in the dark expanse of her hair. But then she had embraced me, pressing every inch of her skin against mine, and my words, like the children’s voices bouncing back to them at the lake, echoed back to me.
I love you
.
And, despite the thrill of those three words, the way they repeated endlessly in my head, in my chest, in every muscle of my body, I was still able to fall asleep just as the sun was starting to illuminate the pale curtains in the loft window. But now, my sadness, coupled with fatigue, made me wonder how I could possibly get through this day. Coffee, I suspected, would be an ineffectual elixir.
Somehow, I had managed to put Frankie out of my mind for the last two weeks, or at least into a small, quiet corner of it. I had to. The idea of him appearing, in the flesh, after all that had transpired between Eva and me seemed somehow ludicrous. And terrifying. I worried that he would see what had happened in my face. That the places she had touched somehow still bore the imprint of her lips, her fingers, her tongue.
“What time will Frankie be here?” she asked as though reading my mind as she set a plate of eggs and bacon down in front of me.
“No idea,” I said. “If he sees any tag sales, he’ll stop. He also usually grabs a bite at the Miss Quimby Diner.”
“Okay.” She nodded.
We sent the kids outside to play, but Johnny complained that he wasn’t feeling well.
“What’s the matter, sweetie?” Eva asked, her voice strained.
“I have a headache and a stomachache, and my legs feel itchy,” he said.
Eva sighed heavily. These were our last hours together before we had to return to that other life, the one we’d shrugged off two weeks ago. “Well, it sounds to me like a good old-fashioned case of the gollywobbles,” she said, lifting him up onto her lap. “And do you know the treatment for the gollywobbles?”
“Pepto-Bismol?” Johnny asked, clutching his stomach. His cowlick was sticking straight up, as usual, giving him an impish look.
“No.” Eva shook her head. “Guess again.”
“Aspirin?” he tried, bouncing back and forth in anticipation.
“Uh-uh,” she said. “Something much more potent. Something very powerful.”
“Tell me!” he said, clutching his hair with both hands, his wide blue eyes imploring.
She stood up and motioned for him to follow her to the kitchen. “This way,” she said.
I followed them, lingering in the doorway, and watched as she opened the cupboard door and peered inside. “Now, where did it go?” she asked, browsing the shelves, running her fingers across the canned vegetables and soup. A bag of marshmallows, a dusty box of Cream of Wheat. “Aha,” she said finally, reaching behind everything and grabbing a can of Hershey’s Syrup. “Did you know that the cocoa bean has healing powers?” she asked, crouching down to Johnny’s level. “It is the only known cure for the gollywobbles.”
“Really?” he asked, eyes widening joyfully. “Chocolate?”
“The mighty cocoa bean,” she said seriously, nodding her head.
“There’s a church key in the drawer,” I said.
And with that, she punctured the lid and poured the syrup into a shot glass she found in the top of one of the cupboards.
“Now drink up,” she said, and handed him the glass.
Gleefully he swallowed the syrup, wiping the chocolate from his lip with his sleeve. “Better?” she asked.
He nodded, amazed. She winked at me and swatted his bottom. “Now go play!”
Frankie called from Quimby at six o’clock, and said he was just sitting down to supper at the diner, that he’d be at least another hour. We were down to our final hour, the last minutes of this strange haven, this stolen piece of heaven. And as the sun slipped quietly behind Franklin Mountain, I felt all of this slipping away too.
“You’re a good mother,” I said, as we sat on the front lawn side by side, not touching, watching our children dart about like fireflies in the waning light. “I wish I were as patient as you are.”
“Stop,” she said, shaking her head, blushing.
But it was true. I was too selfish to be a good mother. All day I had wished the children away so that these last few minutes could be spent together. It made me feel terrible.
“Look, Mama!” Mouse said, running up to me with her small, dirty hands clenched together, her eyes wide and excited.
“What is it?” I asked, suddenly feeling such tenderness toward her, and such an overwhelming sense of inadequacy.“Let me see,” I said, and leaned forward to peer into her hands.
But when she opened them to show me what was inside, her face fell. In her excitement, in her eager hands, the firefly had been crushed. The luminescence smeared across her palms. My heart ached. Because I understood this clumsiness, this dangerous greed.
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said, and kissed her hand. “You didn’t mean to.”
J
uan insists on parking in the garage and walking me inside the airport, though I keep telling him that I’ll be fine getting dropped off at the curb. He carries my suitcase (which is so old it doesn’t even have wheels) and holds the elevator door open for me, ushering me in first.
There is a lot of noisy construction at the airport. A new parking lot, Juan says. It looks like rubble to me, as though we are in a war zone instead of America’s Finest City. It is overcast today, and the air has a chill to it. I have a sweater for the flight, and I packed some snacks. My boarding pass is in my pocket, and my license is in my wallet.
“I used to love to fly,” I say to Juan to fill the empty quiet between us. It is early, and the ride from my cottage to the airport was a silent one.
“Not anymore?” he asks.
I shake my head. The last flight I can remember enjoying was when I left the East Coast, bound for California. Perhaps it was because that flight had indeed been one of flight, of
fleeing
. It had purpose, intent. It signified the end of one life and the beginning of another. I remember I had felt like my heart was soaring as the engines roared and the plane taxied down the runway. All the others since then have been imbued with portent: the flight home for my mother’s funeral, for Frankie’s funeral, and later when Gussy’s Frank got sick. Even Francesca’s wedding had my stomach in knots as I soared back to Boston. I had never met her fiancé, Michael, and I spent the entire trip imagining the worst. And now Johnny.
I can’t remember the last time I flew for pleasure. When you live at the edge of the world, inside a postcard picture, there seems little need for vacation. I’ve become happily sedentary in my old age. But now, here I am once again, flying home, feeling queasy already, even before I have checked my bags.
“You don’t need to stay,” I say. “I can find my gate.”
“You sure?” Juan asks. His eyes look tired, and I realize that despite what he’s said, he must have risen early especially for me.
“I’m fine.” I smile and give him a little hug.
“Okay,” he says. “Call me when you get back. I can be here in a few minutes to pick you up. We’ll miss you at the bar.” I watch him disappear up the escalator and through the glass doors to the walkway. I get in line to check my bag and take a deep breath. The girl in front of me has a giant backpack on her shoulders. It looks like it might weigh more than she does. She smells strongly of patchouli oil, and her hair runs down to her waist in thick, dreaded ropes. When she turns, looking for something or someone beyond me, I see she is pretty, her eyes a sparkly green. She looks a little like Mouse actually, at that age. Wild and unruly. Mouse and Francesca have always been opposites: Chessy in her tidy skirts, never a hair out of place; her clothes never got grass-stained or torn. And Mouse, who never cared how she looked, favoring fun and freedom over fashion.
When I told Francesca I was going back to the lake to speak with Johnny, she said she didn’t think it was a good idea.“Why go digging up those old bones?” she said, her father’s expression. I hadn’t expected her to understand. “And Mom, that’s a really big trip to make by yourself,” as if her concern were truly only about my health and welfare.
“I’m healthy as a horse,” I said. And it was true. My last doctor’s visit had confirmed that, besides my blood pressure, I am in good shape. So far I’ve eluded all those other harbingers of old age: diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis. I am much more like a sixty-year-old than an eighty-year-old, except for my heart. I even have my hearing, my memory, and most of my marbles, though I’m sure Francesca would argue that.
“I can’t wait to see you,” I said.
“You too, Mom. Have a safe flight.”
I called Mouse right after I spoke with Francesca. She is living in Taos now; she’s been there for nearly a year, if I am remembering correctly. She met a man, a fellow artist, and they are living together in some sort of teepee, though when she described it, it sounded relatively palatial (as far as teepees go anyway). I’ve learned to let go of Mouse over the years, to understand that she will always surprise me with her choices. Because despite financial instability, her decision not to get married or have a family, her meanderings all over the globe, she is the happiest person I know. And something about that makes me proud.
The girl in front of me turns and says, “Excuse me? Do you have the time?”
“I do,” I say, gently tugging my cuff upward to reveal my watch. “It’s six o’clock.”
“Thank you,” she says, smiling. “I’m going home to see my parents,” she says, continuing the conversation. “It’s been a whole year.”
I nod and smile at her. “They must be excited.”
“They don’t exactly know yet. It’s kind of a surprise,” she says, and twists her mouth a little, a nervous tic, I gather. “Or ambush.”
This makes me laugh. I hope we get seated next to each other on this flight.
Suddenly, I feel someone moving behind me, hear a voice saying, “Excuse me. So sorry. I’m with her up there.”
It’s another girl loaded down with a heavy backpack. This one has short dark hair and freckles across her face. “I’m so sorry,” she says to me as she moves to meet the girl in front of me, whom she kisses quickly on the lips.
The other girl punches her gently in the arm. “I thought you’d ditched me.”
“Never,” the dark-haired girl says, cooing dreamily at my new friend.
I feel my heart swell up, tears coming to my eyes. I look away, ashamed as they kiss again. I grimace as the old man behind me clears his throat. So much has changed, I think. And so much has stayed exactly the same.
“Have a nice flight,” the girl says to me after she and her girlfriend have checked their bags and, liberated of their luggage, turn to go to their gate.
“You too,” I say, and then I am alone again, overwhelmed by the smell of cinnamon buns and coffee and too much perfume.
There are few undeniable perks to being an old lady. One, I learn now, is that you get to pre-board most flights. I am quickly ushered by a helpful attendant to the line where families with small children and all those needing special assistance (the man in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank at his side, the blind woman with the service dog, and another old lady like me who seems to have lost the battle with her bones and is bent at the waist, her spine at a forty-five degree angle) are all congregating. I sit down on one of these restricted seats and study my boarding pass. My driver’s license. In the photo, I am only seventy-five years old. But other than a few more wrinkles across my brow, little else has changed. I still wear my hair in two braids pinned on top of my head. I still weigh a hundred and twenty pounds. I’m still five foot eight inches tall when I make the effort.
The loudspeaker announces that we’re boarding, me and the other infirm, and I rise from my seat, thinking,
This is it, lady. Your last chance to back out
. To simply backtrack through the airport, maybe grab one of those cinnamon buns on the way out. Get a taxi, go back to the cottage, and just take a nap. But as I start to plan my route through the crowd of early-morning travelers, my eyes catch sight of the two girls who had been in front of me in the check-in line. They are at the gate across the way. They are sitting side by side, one resting her head on the other’s shoulder. Their flight is headed to New York. And I think about how much more courage they need than I.
R
eturning to our normal lives after that first summer at Lake Gormlaith meant returning to a lie. Frankie told me once that when he was little, his parents didn’t have enough money for Christmas presents for all the children, and so his mother had sat down and wrapped up a dozen empty boxes and put them under the tree so that when company came over it would look as though there were gifts for everyone. It was like this, and it seemed impossible to comprehend how we had lived for so long inside these pretty, empty boxes. Our days were spent simultaneously keeping up this illusion and finding ways to be together. We lived in fear of being found out but could not stomach the alternative.
We lived in a state of constant hunger; that gnawing, futile desperation of the starved. Fearful, clawing, scheming. We learned that desire, true desire, is both raw and complex. The entire world seemed to be conspiring against us, which only made us hungrier.
The children were all in school now, at least, with only little Rose at home. And Ted, with some new, odd sense of trust (perhaps that my friendship would keep Eva from straying into another man’s arms—God, how little did he know), had started riding to work with Frankie each morning, leaving his car behind. The sudden mobility that Eva had was a blessing, but it also felt like a trap. I second-guessed every good thing, every blessing, waiting, always, for the other shoe to drop.
We drove. Some days, we’d get in the car and just go. No direction, no destination, just simply moving, as though momentum alone could protect us. We’d roll the windows down to the Indian summer heat and let our hair fly. We cranked the radio up as loud as it would go, and little Rose would cover her ears with two pudgy hands in the backseat as we sang. Eva drove fast, the car almost flying in her control (or
out
of it, rather). She, and Rose, particularly liked one hilly road that dipped up and down like a roller coaster. She’d accelerate on the incline so that the car was nearly airborne when we reached the summit. Those were breathless, reckless times. Hearts pounding, we knew we should be more careful but somehow could not resist.
We clung to the moments when we could be together, though Rose’s naps were the only time when we were truly alone. Each morning after everyone had left, I would finish cleaning up the kitchen and put a load of wash in, and then hurry across the street, knocking softly at the door. Rose still took her morning nap (though we knew the end of these was coming soon), which gave us a blessed hour (and sometimes two) together. We disappeared into Eva and Ted’s bedroom until we heard Rose’s cries on the other side of the wall, and then we would spend the rest of the day together, sharing the domestic duties at each of our houses to ensure that the floors were clean and the tubs and toilets sparkling before we got in the car and flew.
It was 1961, and in other parts of the country young black students were demanding their civil rights, sitting down at “whites only” lunch counters. Their courage and audacity to demand equal rights was something I admired but did not connect, not then, with my own life. It would be a long, long time before I felt that I had a
right
to this life, to these dreams and needs. Eva, on the other hand, saw us as somehow allied with these kids, these people who only wanted to be treated fairly by the rest of the world.
“I wish,” she said once as Rose napped and we lay together in her bed, “we could go somewhere.”
I was touching her hair, marveling at how it was so soft, I could barely feel it in my fingers. It reminded me of the girls’ skin when they were infants.
“There are places,” she said, dreamily staring at the ceiling above us. “Where girls,
women
like us, don’t have to pretend.”
“Where?” I scoffed more loudly than I had intended. Certainly not in Hollyville, Massachusetts.
“I knew someone at school in San Francisco,” she said.
I felt my throat grow thick. The idea of Eva and Ted was somehow tolerable, because I knew it wasn’t real, that it was just another empty box under the tree. But the notion of her with another woman, with someone besides me, was intolerable. I felt sick. “Who?” I managed to choke out.
“Just a girl I knew. A student. She took me once to a bar where everyone was, you know . . .”
“Why did she take
you?
” I asked. And it was like a dark shadow had crossed this sunlit bed where we lay naked while the world spun endlessly, obliviously, without us.
She ignored me, the way I knew she probably dismissed Ted’s jealousy, his invidious delusions. Still, I needed to know.
“Have you . . .” I started, feeling blood rushing to my ears. “Been with other girls?”
Eva tilted her head and looked at me as though gauging whether she should answer me. I hated her hesitancy. This quiet distrust.
“I mean, it doesn’t matter, I’m just curious. . . .” I said, backpedaling, wishing I hadn’t asked. Not really wanting to know.
“I’ve felt things, before,” she said softly. “But I’ve never done anything about it. I thought the feelings would go away. With Liam. And then Ted.”
“Did they?” I asked. “Go away?”
She cocked her head again. “I suppose. Until you came along.”
“Do you think it’s a sin?” I asked, thinking about my mother and father. About the way they thought that God could fix me. That I was somehow broken and in need of repair. I knew that Eva made weekly treks to church, that they had a family Bible on display in their living room.
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Adultery is a sin. But is it adultery when you never loved the person you married?”
“You
never
loved Ted?” I asked, feeling my heart swell. “Not even before?”
She shook her head. “I made a mistake.”
I thought about Frankie then. I tried not to when Eva and I were together; I felt terrible imagining how Frankie would feel if he knew what happened after he pulled out of the driveway every morning. He would
absolutely
see this, the tender morning hours Eva and I spent clinging to each other, as sinful. It would kill him. Like Ted, Frankie could be a mean drunk, but he was generally a good man, a good father. I did love him for that. But that wasn’t the kind of love I meant. Not the kind of love I felt for Eva.
“We could go somewhere,” she said earnestly, tracing her finger across my bare stomach. My skin trembled under her touch. “Where we wouldn’t have to hide.” My entire body grew feverish as I thought about this possibility. About running away.
“Where?” I asked.
“I have an idea,” she said, and sat up, clapping her hands together like a child. “Let’s take a trip.”
I still don’t know how she talked Ted into it, though convincing Frankie was easy. I simply told him that Eva and I were going to New York City to a Girl Scout leaders’ convention, a national conference being held over a weekend in January. In my mind, the convention existed. I pictured a hundred other mothers in their Scout leader uniforms, learning better ways to start campfires, braid lanyards, and peddle cookies. He said that he’d keep Ted company while we were gone.
It was the aunts, ultimately, who unwittingly made it possible. Frankie’s sister Theresa agreed to come help Frankie watch the girls for the long weekend. And Ted’s sister, Mary, offered her babysitting services again as well. The aunts arrived on the same train in from Boston, and Ted picked them both up. Then, after we’d given our various instructions, Frankie took Eva and me to the train station and dropped us off, the changing of the guards nearly seamless. It was almost too easy.
Eva and I got on the train, carrying our Girl Scout handbooks and luggage, waved good-bye to Frankie, and then collapsed into our seats with such tremendous relief and excitement we could barely contain ourselves.
Eva’s friend Dorothy (Dot), from school, lived in New York now, had since she finished school in San Francisco. She told Eva we could stay with her. Eva said she wanted to take me to the Museum of Modern Art, to Rockefeller Plaza, to Times Square. As we hurled through the frosty morning, I felt like the farm girl I was, had always been, having never traveled farther south than Massachusetts and never farther west than Niagara Falls. I had never been to New York.
Dot, a pale wisp of a woman (a painter, Eva had said), met us at Grand Central Station. I was dizzy with the traffic noise and smells and sounds of the city, feeling like a real country mouse, as we navigated our way to the subway and then six blocks to her apartment in the Village.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” she said, smirking, as she unlocked the heavy iron gate leading to the basement apartment. The steps were steep and cracked, with a thin layer of treacherous ice. The windows were smudgy and small, but inside the apartment was warm and clean.
Dot made us scrambled eggs and toast for dinner that night at a tiny stove with only two burners, gave us herbal tea, and showed us where the clean towels and washcloths were.
There were canvases propped against every inch of every wall, mostly gloomy-looking portraits of women. A lot of them were nudes, only instead of women in repose, the women appeared to be in agony, grimacing, with writhing bodies curled like fists.
Dot struck me right away as one of those women who has something to prove. She asked a lot of questions about how Eva and I met, and then went into a lengthy anecdote about the first time she’d met Eva. “Well, you know she had on that blue dress,” she said, reaching for Eva’s arm and then looking at me, as if challenging me to remember that blue dress. Eva had a lot of blue dresses. I didn’t know which one she was talking about or why it mattered.
“And of course, Liam couldn’t keep his eyes off her,
none
of us could in that dress, but she just sat right down at one of the free easels and started to sketch, and it was a drawing of him. Liam O’Leary.
Nude
.”
Eva blushed and swatted at Dot’s arm, giggling.
I felt my skin growing hot. I tried to imagine this Eva, this other Eva in her blue dress, this brazen Eva undressing her professor with her pencil. I also wondered if she’d ever “felt things” for Dot. If she had ever fawned over her the way I had over Miss Mars.
“We all knew then that Eva was one ballsy lady,” she said, throwing her head back, laughing.
They reminisced for another fifteen minutes or so until finally Dot seemed to grow bored with us (with me anyway) and took off to meet some friends for a drink. She gave us the address of the bar where she planned to be later, and we told her we’d meet her there after we took a little rest.
Grateful to be alone again, I sat down on the edge of the Murphy bed, which Dot had pulled out of the wall like magic. The sheets were threadbare but soft. Through the basement window, I could see Dot’s feet as she walked away.
“She’s something else, huh?” Eva asked. I could tell she wanted me to like her, and I didn’t want to seem ungrateful or judgmental of her old friend.
“She’s funny,” I said.
Eva nodded. “She was the only one I had to talk to when I found out I was pregnant. . . .” Again, I felt this nagging stab of jealousy. I hated myself for it.
“Come here,” I said, and motioned for her to join me.
She sat down next to me on the bed, and I stroked her hair. It was as soft as corn silk in my fingers. This was what surprised me the most, I think, the contrast between Frankie and Eva. Frankie with his hard stubble of a beard at night, his callused hands and tough skin. Eva was silk, while Frankie was metal. A corrugated tin man.
Together we lay on the bed, completely alone for the first time ever. And I remember watching people’s feet move across the sidewalk through the high windows in that apartment, feeling safe in this underground place: this makeshift subterranean haven.
At about eight o’clock we took a shower together, and then got ready to meet Dot. I would have been content to spend the rest of the weekend in the apartment alone with Eva, but she was excited to show me the city, and her enthusiasm was infectious.
She wore the red dress that I loved, the one that made her look like a magazine model. She painted her lips red as well, and instead of her usual White Shoulders, she wore a perfume that smelled like cinnamon. She was like one of those fireball candies that Johnny and Mouse loved. Feeling dull in comparison, I put on my best dress, the one with raglan sleeves and a pleated skirt, a dress I’d made myself from a remnant of emerald green shantung I got on sale, and a pair of heels I’d dyed to match. The last time I’d worn it was for one of Frankie’s sister’s weddings.
“You look so pretty,” Eva said, squeezing my hand, as the taxi moved in fits and starts through the city.
The bar’s entrance was in an alleyway, and it was snowing lightly as we got out of the taxi, clutching the address Dorothy had given us. Eva leaned over and handed the driver the fare, and we stood peering down the dark alley. She reached for my hand and squeezed it again. “Ready?” she asked.
I nodded.
We made our way through the dark and found the entrance, where a couple, embracing, was blocking the doorway.
“Excuse me,” Eva said, and the couple pulled apart, startled. I felt my face grow hot as I realized it was two women.
Relieved to see that we were going into the bar, they resumed their groping against the brick wall next to the entrance.
Inside, the bar was smoky and loud. There was a band playing a song from Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue,
an album Eva loved, though the last time we’d listened to that record, we’d been sitting at her kitchen table, sewing Girl Scout badges onto sashes.
My heart pounded in time with the snare drum as we walked briskly across the dirty floor to Dot, who was motioning to us from the bar. The room was packed, and all of the patrons were women, though at first glance you wouldn’t have known that. While half of the women were dressed like Eva and me, in dresses and stockings and heels, the other half were dressed like men: short hair slicked back into ducktails, high-waisted pleated pants and collared dress shirts. Suspenders and jackets and ties. It was only the softness of their faces and eyes that gave them away, only their hands, their long, thin fingers and manicured nails, that held on gently to bottles of beer or cocktail glasses. It was confusing, and frightening. I didn’t know where we fit into this crowd,
how
we fit into this crowd. Who these people were, who we were. Who
I
was. The apprehension must have shown on my face, because Eva squeezed my hand again and leaned toward me, whispering, “It’s okay. Just relax.”