Daughters of the Revolution (15 page)

This time, lunch was disappointing. I ordered a Manhattan and my favorite chicken dish with green peppers and maraschino cherries. EV had a glass of beer. She wouldn’t eat anything, and worried that the sweet-and-sour sauce was all sugar that might put me into a coma on top of the vermouth and rye. She was right, of course, and I had to ask the waitress to box it all up. I asked some question about Pilgrim Cornblum—was he attentive, something like that—and she glared at me in such a way that my sweater, a hand-knit one I’ve always loved, suddenly sprouted legs that crawled over my skin. The sweater’s no longer flattering—my neck is ropes and toggles—and I had on a white dickey, which had become constricting and hot. (We’d left Maidenhead in a fog, which burned off as we drove.) Just as I felt the betrayal of my favorite clothes, two gray-haired women came by our table. One of them said, “Excuse me, but all through lunch we wondered—are you an Episcopal priest?”

The Episcopal Church had just ordained four women in our county. I wondered myself where such women (pious, serious, perhaps sexually adventurous) had come from.

EV barked out a laugh.

“No?” said the woman who’d spoken first. “My friend thought not. I thought maybe. You know, a woman in a dickey.”

“I am a French teacher at the public high school,” I told them, noticing how the word
French
slightly brightened the leaden effect of the word
teacher
. I was used to that.

“You’re French?”

“No.” I was used to that, too.

“Well,” said the friend, “sorry to interrupt your lunch.”

“Not at all!” EV said, glad.

I’d allowed too much time, and we were early to the airport. EV drifted restlessly around the terminal in her awful acid green minidress, which exaggerated the boniness of her shoulders and knees. Her hair, dyed unrealistically, drew attention. I sat in a molded chair with my bag in my lap and waited for an hour, hating myself for not having brought a book to read. A board above the ticket counter said the plane was scheduled to arrive at 3:02. (The arrogant precision of the airline industry is one reason I don’t fly.) Still, if all went well, we might be home by 4:30, not too early to get out the ice, the gin and the tonic water.

The plane touched down at 3:15. Somebody in an orange vest rolled a stair to the door, and I recognized Pilgrim from EV’s description: “He’s twenty-nine; he went to Yale.” I wondered what this boy wanted with my daughter. He was perfect, short and round and pink—but perfect for what? He looked like a young God; I mean like Goddard Byrd might have looked in youth—fully formed, the clay still damp. I enjoyed him immediately. He was badly dressed in old, expensive clothes; he clearly felt no responsibility to be attractive. We see this often around Cape Wilde and Maidenhead—idle money wasted on the dowdy rich. Pilgrim looked down at the steps beneath him, completely unconscious of being met—of our eyes upon him. He looked forty, a pose. I recognized him at once as the kind of man who marries at thirty to relieve sexual strain (but does not marry a
girl like EV), produces three children, loses hair, never pauses. An empire builder. Already he’d published a book on the history of systems. I wondered what they talked about, my daughter and this Pilgrim.

The barrier between us was made of sawhorses and plastic tape. If Pilgrim had looked up, he would have seen that EV’s face expressed no particular joy or tenderness at the sight of him; she wanted more. At least I hoped she did. (I’d tried to raise a greedy, lusty girl—which EV so defiantly
was
, especially as a child.) In any case, for some men, a woman’s esteem is not a factor, and Pilgrim’s eyes remained on the sharp decline of the stair.

He kissed her on the mouth, which she allowed, and when that was done, EV wiped her lips and said, “Mei-Mei, this is Pilgrim. Pilgrim, this is Mei-Mei.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Pilgrim said, and held out his hand to be shaken.

“Enchantée,”
I said. I took the hand to my lips—a joke—and kissed it.

Pilgrim carried his luggage, one leather bag, and stowed it in back on the passenger side. EV opened the other rear door to sit in back. But then Pilgrim began to climb in back, too—to sit beside EV, as if I were a taxi driver! I thought it was a queer thing to do, worse than queer.

“Pilgrim, come sit shotgun with me,” I said. “We’ll give you the ride of your life.”

Pilgrim looked alarmed.

“Her new car,” EV explained.

“Oh, fine,” he said.

I took charge, pointed out the beaver dams, the islands in the bay. “Smell the flats!” I told him as we crossed the bridge to town. I buzzed down all the windows and let in the phosphorescent
odor of clams. Pilgrim was blind to the marvels of Cape Wilde—though he did seem drawn to EV, turning halfway around in his seat several times to make sure she was there, reaching a hand around to paw at her.

EV was so removed, I thought at first she might be reading. Since she’d come home from New York, we’d been on a Patricia Highsmith jag—long afternoons at the beach in our swim-suits, taking turns with
Ripley Under Water
or
Ripley Under Ground
, passing a bottle of baby oil and iodine between us, occasionally reading some choice bit out loud. I’d gotten out of her that Pilgrim was her downstairs neighbor in Greenwich Village. Amid the little intimacies and pressures of urban living, they’d become close.

“Are you reading something good, kitten?” I called to the rear, but before she could answer, Pilgrim said, “Nothing, actually, that I could recommend.”

At home, he made no polite remarks about my treasures—the French clock, the life-size silver suit of armor I’d bought at an estate sale, wonderfully cheap. All of which I minded a little. He produced a bunch of spotty Dole bananas. “For the house,” he said grandly, and put them in my hands.

“You’ll have to bunk with EV,” I told him. “There’s no spare room.”

“We’ll manage,” he said, and managed her down the hall. I heard beds being pushed together—those punishing twin beds with the ancient mattresses redolent of sour horsehair and EV’s childhood emissions. I cracked ice into the bucket and watched through the back window as the starlings made their beeline into the birdhouse hole. I promised myself I wouldn’t drink too much, would work for an hour before bed. I’d been meaning all summer to prepare some new exercises in
futur antérieur
and
plus-que-parfait
. At a certain level, my students feel a false sense of fluency. They live in the past and the present. It’s important—not too soon and not too late—to introduce a subtler sense of
time: what might be or should be, what will have been, what’s over and done.

They came back for cocktails holding hands. EV still wore her funny green dress; she made gin and tonics for everybody. Pilgrim drank two and gobbled cheese and crackers. EV drank her gin quickly for a person who had eaten no lunch; she even scoffed up her lime.

EV’s eating habits—if eating is still habitual for her—are a secret. I’m a lunch person; when EV visits, we usually “transcend supper,” as she puts it, and make do with drinks and carrot sticks. I’d meant to defrost a lasagna in Pilgrim’s honor but had forgotten. After an hour, it was still a hopeless brick. EV might have helped, suggested something—I can’t imagine what.

“I have a lovely lasagna,” I told them. “But it’s cold.”

Nevertheless, I drew Pilgrim out, over our drinks, about systems and history. We spoke of busing in Boston; he was, it turned out, all for it. “That’s because, of course, you went to private schools,” I ventured, and Pilgrim laughed. I’d asked EV about it earlier, just to be sure. He’d gone to Loomis before Yale.

By 7:30, Pilgrim had begun to suffer and starve. Crackers and cheese don’t quell the appetites of men like him, who expect to be well fed, who see regular meals as a form of discipline.

He and EV sat together on the cat-clawed love seat in the living room. Pilgrim’s khaki leg touched EV’s naked one and his hand rode high above her knee. His eyes were hard to read through his muddy glasses, though they
looked
bold—challenging me. But to what?

Finally he said, “Let me take you both out for dinner.” EV contracted at the mention of food.

“You two go,” I said. “Take him to the fish fry, kitten.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” EV said. But I knew exactly what he wanted.

“You get good fish—from the ocean—here,” he said.

“That’s exactly right,” I told him.

Pilgrim grabbed EV’s hand and said, “I’m hungry.”

I’d forgotten the claim a man’s needs have over a woman. I stood up and said, “I’m feeling peckish, too.”

First, EV wanted to change. She went off; then I heard her calling, and went to see. She came out of her closet with a pair of blue jeans and unfurled them over the bed. “What are these?” she said.

“Your blue jeans, darling,” I told her. “You wore them every day in high school.”

“I never wore these! These aren’t those,” she said.

“They do look big for you,” I said carefully.

She poked at the legs. “These were never mine.”

“Darling, I think you should go look at yourself. I think you should step on the scale and weigh yourself.”

“Look at
myself
!” EV was beside herself. “I can’t stand this.”

“You mean Pilgrim, darling?”

“I don’t want him here. There’s something wrong with him,” she said, her eyes wild.

“There is nothing
wrong
with him,” I said. “Now go find some clothes you don’t mind getting fishy, and wash your face. We will meet you outside.”

I walked out of the room, turned the corner and found Pilgrim lurking. “EV’s just changing,” I told him. “Why don’t we wait on the porch?”

We watched a bat circling the yard. “Do you have the time?” I asked, and he showed me the platinum face of his watch.

“I can’t see anything that small,” I said.

“Seven-thirty-eight,” said Pilgrim.

When EV emerged, still wearing her terrible green dress, she said we should go without her, that she had a headache. Something
defiant radiated around her, something shrill. Pilgrim had seen it before; I could tell.

“We could all just stay here,” I said. “I could boil you an egg, Pilgrim.”

“I don’t want an egg,” said Pilgrim. “I want real food.”

“Of course you do,” I told him.

“So you two go,” EV said.

The idea sounded reasonable and civilized. We’d go, Pilgrim and I—without EV—to the Friday fish fry and eat together. We’d feed.

“Will you be our driver?” I asked him.

“Pilgrim doesn’t drive,” EV said.

“I
can
drive,” Pilgrim said.

“Mei-Mei never lets anybody drive her precious car,” EV said.

“That’s not true,” I said, and handed him the keys.

Friday night at the fish fry is packed and steamy. We sat in a booth in back, across from each other on the red leatherette.

“We’ll drink wine?” Pilgrim asked.

“That would be fun,” I said.

He looked over the list—I’d never seen a wine list at the fish fry—and ordered a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. I perked up at the French. Debbie O’Greefe brought the wine and two wineglasses, which gleamed in the greasy light.

I barely recognized Debbie at first. She’d run to fat a little bit, which was too bad. Debbie was a student of mine once, a classmate of EV’s. Her mother was our landlady, my husband’s and mine, years and years ago—a tragic figure. Remarkably, she once had her own nipple sewn onto her forehead after her awful husband severed it in a so-called act of love. I used to use her as a local example when I taught English and we read
The Scarlet Letter
.

“Ça va bien, Debbie?”
I asked her.

Debbie blew out an embarrassed little laugh.
“Oui?”
she said, as if it were a question. (How could it not be? Twenty-two, just EV’s age, and the poor girl had three children.) She struggled with the cork for a minute, then poured out wine. Pilgrim’s glass touched mine.
“Cin-cin,”
he said.

“Choo-choo,”
I said. The wine was very good, dry and almost puckery. It had an old-world heaviness I liked. Pilgrim sniffed away at his glass.

“Lovely wine, Debbie,” I said.
“Un bon vin blanc.”
We used that phrase in French classes to practice vowels, and I thought Debbie would recognize it. But she only looked uncomfortable, as if I were speaking in tongues. She smiled tightly and pocketed her corkscrew.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

“So you’re a French teacher,” Pilgrim said. “Done that long?”

“A thousand years,” I told him.

“Do you go to France and so on?”

“I’ve never been. I don’t fly. EV went last year. With a man.”

“Shouldn’t you go,” he said, “for your work?”

“I have no desire—no need,” I said. “There’s no professional pressure, and I don’t push myself too hard. You’d probably say this is a two-bit kind of town.”

“Why teach French if you don’t care about the culture, the people?”

“I don’t teach French because of the culture or the people,” I said. “Fourteen years ago, the school needed someone and I came forward. I never pretended to be French. I do love the language—the grammar, the literature—and I like my job. I think travel is overrated. People are the same everywhere, don’t you think?” Discreetly, I pressed two fingers to my heart to sop up a drizzle of moisture.

Debbie returned with her pad, and I ordered steamed clams
to start, a salad to share, and two fish frys. Pilgrim tied a plastic bib around his neck. We talked of his research in Boston, where he’d studied “systems and history.” He was at work on a book about integration and busing in the early 1970s. I raveled out my stories about Goode and God, the early days of coeducation there, as well as my own narrow escape from that doll’s house. He seemed politely interested, maybe more; in the moment, I felt I had something concrete to offer him. I told him that I always thought of Boston as my city, too, since some of my life had happened there. Pilgrim made one generous remark. He said, “I think that to know a city, you can’t just live there; you have to visit it.”

It was a beautiful thing to say—and so true. I thought of one time when EV was at Smith (a scholarship girl) and I drove across the state in my old car, my beloved unheatable Escort, to visit. I wore two pairs of long underwear and socks and kept a hot-water bottle in my lap the whole way. I got a room—quite seedy, but cheap and in town. Every day I walked for miles. EV was busy and I barely saw her, except one afternoon when I sat for some portraits she did for her photography class. It was more than enough just to know she was there. But then I came down with a cold and decided to leave early. I drove to Boston and took a room at the Parker House—an outrageous extravagance. The next day, I walked around the city, sneezing and feverish, into the State House, where the sacred cod still hangs on the wall, and into the new outdoor market, where I saw an old man plunge the blue numbers on his forearm into a barrel of brine and pull up an enormous, reeking pickle. I walked by the address of the first apartment I shared with my husband, Heck, though the neighborhood had long since been swallowed up by the university’s hospital. Revisiting it all, I felt like a stranger, an outsider, seeing the place in its strangeness, reliving moments that felt like nothing twenty years ago, when I’d thought there would be more.