Authors: Beth Gutcheon
The morning had ended with an equally upsetting peer review of a colleague who had been letting interns perform his surgeries unsupervised, yet listing himself as the surgeon of record and billing accordingly. What were people thinking of? Sometimes it seemed to him that people in his field just took a dose too much of being treated like gods and lost their minds.
In that mood, the last thing he expected or wanted to find when he walked into Consulting Room #2 to meet his first patient of the afternoon was his wife, stark naked except for her stockings and garter belt, fetchingly arrayed beneath a sheet on the examination table.
Amy managed to stop crying before they got to the Plaza. “What makes me so mad is, you were so damn late the chocolate was melting all down my legs!” she said. “I don’t know how you keep patients if you treat them like that!” Then he wouldn’t take her word for it that he truly had no more appointments for the afternoon, but insisted on cross-examining both his receptionist and his nurse before he allowed himself to be taken hostage, blindfolded, and led down in the freight elevator to a limousine waiting by the service exit in the basement.
The Veuve Cliquot in the car and the basin of chilled caviar waiting in the suite had improved his mood, but Amy was still so annoyed that instead of proceeding with Afternoon Delight, she decided to tie his wrists to the headboard with her garter belt and pace around threatening to whip him with a hanger. Neither one of them found it very sexy, but she was finally mollified enough to proceed with the program, which included lovemaking (during which they accidentally broke the arm off the desk chair), a nap, a bubble bath, dinner from room service, and a visit from a pair of masseuses.
“You are the most incredible woman,” Noah whispered when they were finally on the way to sleep. “I can’t imagine what you’ll do for a sixtieth.”
“Put a lump of coal in your stocking,” she said. But she was happy again.
L
aurie flew from Phoenix to Salt Lake City, where her brother Billy was waiting for her with the family plane.
“Hello, Fats,” he said. “How was it?” He gave her a kiss.
“Can’t you tell by looking?”
“I wasn’t sure what four thousand dollars was supposed to look like.”
“It was good. I stopped losing weight, at least.”
“And you slept?”
“I did. After the first night or two.”
“You look better.”
She nodded. “How’s everything at home?”
“Everyone’s fine. The twins and Melanie have taken over the tree house, and now they feel like really
big
kids.”
“Did Cara and Tessie kill each other?”
“They tried. Then they fell in love again. They’re out riding together now.”
“That’s good news.”
They were walking out to the airstrip where the Cessna was waiting.
Billy was the same height as Laurie, compact and muscular. He looked like what he was, a man who spent most of his life outdoors.
Billy and Laurie had the same blue eyes and were going slightly gray in about the same way; they had always looked as if they came from the same genetic stock, while their older brother, Bliss, was larger and softer and beginning to run to fat.
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120 / Beth Gutcheon
Billy moved more fluidly than his sister although he was two years older. Outdoor work had kept him supple. They had both been downhill ski racers in their teens. She was good, but Billy had been Olympic class. He would have gone to Grenoble if he hadn’t been in Vietnam.
“You want to drive?” Billy asked her. Laurie shook her head. She hoisted herself into the copilot’s seat and studied a high system of cirrus clouds as Billy went through his preflight routine. They wheeled out onto the runway to await clearance for takeoff.
“Anna missed you a lot. She spent a lot of time with Cinder.”
Cinder was Billy’s wife, who was to Laurie the first sister she’d ever had. Anna, at fifteen, was Laurie’s worry child, the odd one out in her little fatherless family. Carlos, the oldest, would never question his position in the universe. The twins were the babies and had each other, and thirteen-year-old Cara had an all-absorbing love-hate bond with her cousin Tessie. But Anna was a loose marble. She wasn’t athletic, like the rest of them. She was musical, unlike the rest of them. Her father’s death had hit her especially hard.
“Did Carlos get his history paper done?” Laurie asked as they moved into position for takeoff.
“Yes. With only one all-nighter.”
“Typical.” She made a face.
Carlos seemed to regard planning ahead not as an aid to efficiency or a guard against disaster, but as the death of possibilities. Laurie and Roberto had laughed about it. Laurie didn’t laugh easily anymore. Instead she tended to weary herself fretting over qualities in her children that might bring them unhappiness or failure. She wanted to
make
them see things as she did.
Cinder would say gently, “We could do so much better at living their lives than they do,” and they would smile. But Laurie knew that this will to make the children do things her way was becoming a monster that was hard to cage. If she could be in five places at once, she’d follow every one of them around all day, nagging. She knew what Cinder thought. Cinder thought she ought to get a life.
Billy throttled up, and the little plane scooted down the runway
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and into the sky. Billy loved flying. Laurie didn’t, though she kept her license up in case of emergency. Of all the family, only Roberto had never learned.
The weather was crisp and cool, but snow was still a long way off. The sky was huge. After some time, she’d lost track of how much, Laurie saw they were flying over one of the national forests.
“Is that Wasatch?”
“Caribou,” said Billy. “We’re in Idaho.”
Caribou. About seventy miles from home, then.
“You know what they said at The Cloisters?”
“What?”
“They decided to run me for the Senate against Jimbo Turnbull.
It was kind of a goof we all got into.”
Billy frowned slightly and adjusted something on the dashboard.
He looked intently into the middle distance.
“One woman whose friend works for the President said I’m even on some list at the White House.”
“What kind of list?”
“Longshot list, I think.”
Billy smiled.
“Some list of people who might by some stretch of the imagination be able to beat Big Jim.”
Billy nodded slightly. There was silence for a little.
“Well, since you bring it up.”
Laurie looked at him.
“Since I bring it up, what?”
“I’ve had the same thought myself. So has Cinder.”
“I hope you’re kidding. I
had
my fifteen minutes of humiliation, remember?”
“It was eighteen years ago. Get over it.”
“Why?” She was stung, but Billy took the question literally.
“First, everyone wanted Bliss in seventy-six. Everyone thought Bliss was the next JFK. Second, Idaho wasn’t ready to send a woman to Washington. Now they’ll elect Maryellen Beckwith, for god’s sake.”
They hit a patch of turbulence and Laurie noticed, as she had 122 / Beth Gutcheon
often before, that not only was Billy not troubled, he rather liked it when unseen currents batted the plane around. She scooped up a pair of sunglasses that had hit the floor and pushed them into the overstuffed cargo hammock where they should have been stowed in the first place.
When the plane stopped lurching, Billy said, “Look. You need a new dream. So do the kids. You had a happy family dream, and you lost it. You need something to put in its place, and you need it right now.”
“It wasn’t a dream.”
“All right, but it’s gone. You need something to fight for.”
“I feel as if I’ve wandered into a tough love seminar.”
Billy flew his plane.
“It seemed insane to me,” Laurie said after a while.
“Well, let’s look at the plus column. There’s Dad and Bliss and Roberto, the Famous Political Family factor. There’s the sympathy vote. And the Moral Outrage vote, all the people who are sick of seeing insiders and celebrities get a different deal from the rest of us. You’d be a hero to a lot of people if you fought back. Including your children. And including me.”
Laurie stared out the window. “But you like underdogs,” she said.
“I do.” He smiled suddenly. “I can’t help it…I’m from Idaho.”
“This is nuts. A woman? A Democrat from Blaine County? Against an entrenched incumbent? A widow leaving her children to eat worms and fall out of windows while she runs for office?”
“The kids are the most important reason to do it.”
“Well, that’s a novel approach.” There was a pause. “You don’t know what it feels like to stand around your headquarters on election night watching those numbers coming in, saying, ‘Nah, no thanks, we pass.’”
“Laurie, it isn’t personal.”
“It’s the most personal thing in the world.”
“Fine, you’re right. Does it feel worse than sitting around in your house feeling the way you do now? If your kids all grow up to be alcoholic John Birchers, don’t blame me.”
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“If I don’t strap on my chamber pot and gallop off to get throttled, I’m a bad mother?”
“If you teach your kids that the only fights worth taking on are the ones you know you can win, yes.”
Laurie felt tears start. If she could have spoken without crying, she’d have said “Dirty pool.” It was one of the things Roberto always said. He’d had so much to overcome, he’d tilted against so many windmills, winning and losing, while she who always had the odds in her favor hated the smallest failure so much.
“Look, the kids can speak for themselves. And if they wanted you to run, they would tell people so. Meanwhile, you know everyone in the party, and they know you. You’ve served on the school board, you’ve run for judge. You’ve won everything you ever tried for except the congressional race.”
“You don’t know how much I hated that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“What would Bliss say?”
“No idea. No, I take it back. He’ll say, ‘Laurie? Why not me?’”
They both laughed. Bliss was a lawyer in Boise. He’d been in and out of state politics, but was never willing to drop everything and go for it; he was making too much money. Yet he always talked as if any day now he was going to.
“What about Dad?”
“You can ask him yourself in half an hour,” said Billy.
There was a silence.
“What do you
think
he’d say?”
Billy said, “I don’t know what he’d
say
. I know it would be the best thing that could happen to him.”
They landed at Friedman Field and walked to the farm truck Billy had left there. To the north, suddenly jutting from a wide plain, were the stark and beautiful Sawtooth Range. They drove southeast in the bright afternoon. The aspens were almost bare; the streams were low compared to their rushing spring levels. Laurie rarely traveled this road without thinking about the day Billy had brought home Roberto
124 / Beth Gutcheon
Lopez, the famous tennis star. She had loved to think of what this magnificence had looked like to Roberto, seeing it for the first time.
It had made her see it with his eyes ever after, instead of her own, as if time had stopped and their first meeting were just about to happen.
The twins were outside with their cousin Melanie playing mumblety-peg when the truck pulled into the yard. Hunter and Xavier, too young to be cool, dropped their jackknives and ran to her, crowing. Laurie wrapped them in her arms, and was suddenly overjoyed to be home. The boys had a million things to tell her. She gave her niece a kiss and went toward the kitchen door with the boys dancing around her.
In the kitchen, she found Cinder with Anna. Cinder was tall and rail slim, with huge brown eyes and her hair pulled out of the way and held with whatever came to hand. Sometimes it was a rubber band, sometimes one of the children’s scrunchies, sometimes a bandanna or a pair of sunglasses on top of her head. She was utterly natural, never wearing makeup or taking any care with her appearance except to be shiny clean. She was the most naturally beautiful woman Laurie had ever seen. Cinder had absolutely no idea that it was true and would have been supremely uninterested if she had been told.
Cinder wasn’t a touch person. She greeted Laurie by smiling at her, and the warmth in her eyes said all that needed to be said. Anna came to her mother to be hugged. Soon Cara and Tessie came flying in from the barn where they’d been building a clubhouse in the hayloft. Carlos was at home “doing homework,” said Cinder, in a voice that let Laurie hear the quotation marks. She meant that she was sure he had the boom box up to top volume playing Pearl Jam, and was wandering around the house in his boxers, eating cold cereal and reading the funnies.
Laurie sent the littles upstairs to pack up their stuff. Anna was already ready. Carlos had taken Laurie’s car when he’d gone home, so the bags and small children were put in the back of the pickup, and Cinder drove them to Laurie’s house, with Anna between them in the cab.
“Can you stay for a cup of tea?”
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“How about a walk?” Cinder said. “I haven’t been out of the house all day.”
“Great.”
“Can I come?” Anna asked.
“Of course, Puddleduck.”
“Anna.”
“Sorry. Anna.” She added, “I’d like to stop and see Dad. Have you seen him today?”
“No, not since Friday,” said Cinder.
“I have,” said Anna.
“Really?”
“Yesterday. I helped him put straw on his garden.”
“Did you indeed. You good person.”
“We ate his last tomato.” Eating the last of Hunt’s summer tomatoes was a great honor.
When Laurie had changed into blue jeans, they set off for Hunt’s cottage. They found him reading the
New York Times
, for which he drove all the way into Hailey every Sunday.
“Well, here’s the world traveler,” he said, giving Laurie a kiss.
“How are things?”
“Things are better,” she said.
“You look like you’ve had a rest, anyway.”