Fly Away Home (16 page)

Mel was tall, and painfully thin, bent like a string bean someone had tried to snap. “Hello, missus,” he said, sneaking a quick look at her face before dropping his eyes. Sylvie turned away. She’d have to get used to this: people looking at her, and then turning their heads. They had television in Connecticut, the same channels featuring the same rogue’s gallery of pundits pulling back the covers of her marital bed and speculating about what was, or was not, happening beneath them.

She put on a pleasant half-smile. After her plane had landed at LaGuardia, she’d driven up to Connecticut, and spent the drive flipping through the talk-radio stations, where the hosts and callers blathered on about biblical judgment and the sanctity of marriage and whether a senator sleeping with another woman really mattered in this day and age. By far the number one topic, the one they came back to over and over again, was why his wife would choose to stand up on a stage beside a man who had disgraced her. Sylvie would force herself to listen calmly for a minute or two. Then she’d start arguing in her head with the callers. Soon she’d be arguing out loud. “For your information, Suzanne from Falls Church, I have children. Better I was the one standing up there on that podium than my daughters, don’t you think?” she demanded. “Well, Fred from Dallas,” she said, after a man had called in to read Bible verses in a thick Southern accent, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone. You ever heard that one?” She flipped until she recognized the voice of the brittle redhead, the one who laughed at her own jokes and salted her Sunday columns with the boldfaced names of politicians and Washington insiders she inevitably identified as “my close friend.” (Richard had once been one of them.) “If I were Sylvie Woodruff, I’d just be grateful that it wasn’t a live boy or a dead girl,” she said. “Plagiarist!” Sylvie hollered, thumping the leather-wrapped wheel with her hand. “That’s Edwin Edwards’s line!”

She’d made it to Fairview at just after five o’clock on a bright blue afternoon. Downtown was as pretty as she’d remembered it: neatly kept buildings of clapboard and brick lining sidewalks so pristine it looked as if they’d been swept. There were boutiques and bakeries and coffee shops to go along with the places she remembered, the library and town hall and the emerald square of the town green behind it. The corner store, Simmons Grocery, was now a yarn shop, but Violet’s ice cream parlor was there, its painted sign advertising sixteen flavors faded, but otherwise the same as Sylvie remembered it. A brisk wind rattled the leaves. It had been hot and humid when she’d left the airport, but there was always a breeze by the ocean, and fall had made some inroads here. She was north, away from home, feeling hollow and empty, sick with sorrow, and utterly unlike herself.

“I see you got things in shape,” Mel said, looking around. Sylvie nodded. As miserable and furious as she’d been on the drive up from the city, her heart had lifted a bit as she’d steered the car up the long driveway and parked in front of the rambling white Colonial that hunkered on top of the bluff. She’d always been happy to come here, as a child and as a bride and a young mother, excited for the promise of summer, and all the things she’d loved: the swims in the bracing ocean water, the barbecues and the picnics they’d pack to watch the Little League games on the town green, riding her bicycle, or napping on the daybed on the porch with a novel and a glass of iced tea waiting on the coffee table.

The house had looked good, the porch freshly painted and the lawn newly mowed. Jan had told her that the house had been empty all summer. None of the cousins had wanted or, Sylvie guessed, been able to afford to come. When Sylvie had wiped her feet on the you
ARE WELCOME HERE
mat and turned the key in the weathered oak door, a puff of warm, stale air hit her face, a smell of mold and mouse. Breathing through her mouth, she dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and walked toward the windows, drawn by the view—the crescent of dark-gold sand, the gently churning gray-green water. She stood, entranced, listening to the sound of the waves until she realized that she’d left the front door wide open, and that she needed to unpack.

She walked back through the big room that ran the length of the first floor. In the living room section there was a pair of overstuffed couches, their upholstery clawed by long-dead cats, and another table for playing cards or board games. The bookshelves were full of law journals and stained, water-bloated paperbacks—the romances and Agatha Christie books her grandmother had favored, the westerns and mysteries her grandfather had loved—and a mounted deer’s head hung over the fireplace in the middle. Past the great room was a porch that stood under a deep awning and was lined with lounge chairs, a glider for two, and little wicker tables. Out past the porch was the sea, with white-curdled waves rolling gently over the sand.

Selma and Dave, together with Selma’s sister, Ruth, and her husband, Freddie, had bought the place forty years ago, with the idea that they’d spend summers there, and that Sylvie and her daughters would visit, along with Selma’s parents, Freddie and Ruth’s children, kooky cousin Jan and her brother, George, now a dentist in Reno. With its mismatched furniture, hodgepodge of castoff coffee tables and plates and dishes purchased at tag sales or donated from the cousins’ homes, the house was far from fancy, but there were five bedrooms: room enough, Sylvie remembered her mother saying, for everyone to be together, to have a place at the table and a bed to sleep in.

Sylvie closed the front door. It was so quiet here. No cabs zipping down the street, no buses belching toxic clouds, no businesspeople chattering into their earpieces; just the sound of the water, and the occasional seagull squawking into the waves. She could smell dust and mildew and decaying paper and the bracing scent of the salt water, and found herself unexpectedly filled with a buoyant sensation that it took her a minute to recognize as excitement. She’d gotten through the press conference, and the terrible weeks that followed. She had driven herself here (and how long had it been since she’d driven herself anywhere, since it wasn’t Richard or Derek behind the wheel? She thought it was the long weekend three or four years ago when she and Ceil had gone to Canyon Ranch in Lenox and, in spite of the GPS that came with the rental car, gotten themselves hopelessly lost). Standing in the house, which needed her love and attention in a way that nothing had in years, she felt, on top of her sadness, a bit of that old first-day-of-school lightness, when the world was brighter than normal, and filled with possibilities. Never mind that all she’d done during her stay so far was sleep, drink whiskey from an old bottle she’d found in the kitchen, eat peanut-butter-on-Wonder-bread sandwiches (she’d bought the peanut butter and the Wonder bread at the gas station where she’d stopped to fill the car), take long, aimless walks on the beach, and sleep some more.

Mel led her through the living room, telling her that the oil tank had been filled, the plumbing lines flushed, and the gas bill paid, that if she planned on staying through the winter (here, he chanced a quick look at her face), she had only to let him know.

“You seen any critters?” he asked.

“Not live ones,” Sylvie said. Ten minutes after she’d brought her luggage—what there was of it—into the kitchen, she’d gone looking for the source of the bad smell and found a desiccated mouse corpse, caught in a snap trap in a corner of the pantry. She’d stared at it for a moment, wondering what to do. They’d had mice in Brooklyn. Sylvie had vivid memories of being home with baby Diana and spying a furry little visitor scurrying along the floorboards of the kitchen. She’d screamed an extremely clichéd “eek!” and jumped up on one of the kitchen chairs with the telephone in her hand and the baby in her arms, and stayed there, terrified, until Richard came running up the stairs to their third-floor apartment. He’d gone to the hardware store and paved their floor with snap traps, and convinced Sylvie that he would keep her safe, that mice didn’t bite or carry diseases, and that they did not need, nor could they afford, to decamp to a hotel. Every morning he’d bring the baby into bed, and she’d sit up, nursing, while he went to check the traps to see if they’d caught anything. “Home is the hunter, home from the sea,” he’d proclaim, thumping his bare chest and dropping the dead mouse into one of the paper bags they’d started collecting just for that purpose. “Don’t show me,” she’d begged, with her eyes squeezed shut, and Richard never had.

Sylvie had lifted the trap by its edges, and then, feeling queasy and sick with the memory of a younger Richard who’d once loved and cared for her and kept her and their baby safe, she dropped it into a trash bag, tied the top shut and set it on the porch, where, presumably, it still was. She hoped Mel hadn’t noticed it. She hoped it didn’t smell.

Mel hitched up his pants and led her back to the kitchen. “You haven’t been in here in a while.”

“Twelve years,” said Sylvie. She could hardly believe it had been so long. From the time she was a baby until she’d left for college, she’d spent three weeks every August at this house, along with her Aunt Ruth and Uncle Freddie and their children, her cousins Jan and George. They were the happiest times: building sandcastles, roasting hot dogs over the fire in the sandy pit that her Uncle Freddie would dig, complaining bitterly with each turn of the shovel; braving the icy water in her one-piece Jantzens and, later, as a teenager, wearing bikinis, basting her body with baby oil and dousing her hair with lemon juice and barely touching a toe to the surf. There had been bikes in the garage, and one was always just the right size for her every summer she came. Best of all, she’d gotten to be part of a tribe. They’d play tricks on the grown-ups: telling Aunt Ruth that Jan was missing was a perennial hit; hiding Uncle Freddie’s Budweiser was another, and moving her mother’s legal pads had been Sylvie’s favorite of all. “Goddamnit, I’ve got work to do!” Selma would holler. With a streak of white zinc on her nose, in her flowered, skirted bathing suit, she looked like a cross between an alien and an angry couch. Dave, with a mesh fisherman’s hat over his bald head and his cigar clamped between his teeth, would pat her shoulder. “Selma, relax! You’re on vacation!” “I’ve got a deadline!” she’d yell. The cousins would stay up late scaring one another with ghost stories, and wake up to the smell of French toast. Once every summer, on the last Friday before school, she and Jan and George would take sleeping bags and blankets down the rickety wooden steps that led to the water and spend the night camped out on the beach.

She and Richard had come up with the girls every summer, but when Richard started commuting to Washington, it was clear that he couldn’t afford to spend two or three prime summer weeks cloistered in an out-of-the-way town in Connecticut. Although trophy homes had blossomed along the coastline, Fairview was too far away to become fashionable with New York’s smart set. The people with summer homes here were from Connecticut and Massachusetts; a lot of the money was still old money, Republican money that did Richard no good. The last time up, twelve years ago, Richard had gotten in a fight with Uncle Freddie about gay marriage that had almost come to blows. Uncle Freddie and his family had left two days early. Richard spent the remainder of the visit in their bedroom on the telephone, sneezing and complaining about the mold, while Sylvie stayed downstairs, sitting at the dining room table, pounding out press releases on the Mac Classic she’d brought up from New York.

Mel was still talking, demonstrating the improvements: the electric baseboard heating on the second floor; the powder room that had been added onto the kitchen five years ago—“shipshape,” said Mel, through a pair of bright white dentures, except that the toilet handle needed a jiggle in order to flush.

Following his plaid-shirted back up the staircase, Sylvie remembered what a wonder this house had been when she was a bookish girl with a vivid imagination. It had been her enchanted castle, her Narnia, her attic garret and her secret garden. When she was a girl here she’d slept next to her cousin Jan, beneath faded cotton comforters, whispering secrets until one parent or another would make the trip to the third floor and tell them to quiet down and go to sleep, that tomorrow would be another beautiful day at the beach.

“You gonna be all right?” Mel asked, after he’d shown her the thermometers and the closet where the extra lightbulbs were stored.

She nodded. Mel looked down, shuffling his feet. “I’m sorry for your troubles,” he finally said, and Sylvie, surprised, said, “Thank you,” before walking him out to the porch.

The plastic bag with the dead mouse was still next to the door, where she’d left it, and she was, she knew, out of food. She’d scraped the last bit of peanut butter out of the jar the night before.

Time to deal with it. Time to deal with all of it.

She walked through the living room, past the television set, which she’d refused to turn on since she’d arrived. She could imagine what they were saying. She’d heard it all before, about every other politician’s wife (and there were so many of them, such an unhappy sorority to have joined). Better to try to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t happening, to hope that, in the intervening days and weeks, some public figure, some politician or professional athlete had made a bigger fool of himself than her Richard. She swallowed hard, letting the familiar mix of sorrow and rage and shame fill her as she imagined herself like an ostrich, its big behind waving in the air and its head stuck firmly in the sand.
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are gone
. Even though she could try to ignore it, to stick her head in the sand or jam her fingers in her ears and not listen, it didn’t stop what was happening out there, the things they were saying about Richard, the names they were calling him, and her, and their daughters.

Never mind. She’d faced Mel, and it had gone all right. She’d get some food, diversify her diet. Then, eventually, she’d worry about the rest of it.

Simmons Grocery had once been a glorified convenience store with sandy wooden floors and a single cash register and a smell of sour milk, a place where vacationers would stop on their way back from the beach to pick up a package of hot dogs, canned soup, or disposable diapers. There’d been a cooler full of ice cream sandwiches and popsicles by the door, and dirty magazines high on a shelf that the boys would dare one another to look at.