Love Anthony (9 page)

“That’s what we’re going to find out tonight.”

“Yeah, but you’ve seen her. What do you think?”

“I think she doesn’t hold a candle to you.”

Beth smiles, but then her eyes return to her closet. “How about after Figawi?”

“How about tonight?”

“Petra, I don’t have to go at all.”

“True.”

“But I can’t stand not knowing who she is.”

“Well then.”

Beth chews her thumbnail. “Can I borrow your turquoise necklace?”

“You got it. I’ll be over a little before seven. You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not even noon. You should get out of the house. Step away from the closet.”

“I will. Once I figure out what I’m wearing.”

“Black top, skirt, turquoise necklace. You’ll look great. See you tonight.”

Black top and a skirt. She pulls out her white peasant skirt and considers it. She walks into the hallway and stops in front of their most recent family photo hung on the wall, the one taken last summer on Miacomet Beach. She wore this skirt. She, Sophie, and Gracie wore white skirts and black tops; Jimmy and Jessica, who won’t wear anything but pants, wore white shorts and black tops. It’s a beautiful photograph. They’re all sitting in the sand, beach grass, wispy white clouds, and soft-blue sky behind them. Jimmy has his hand on her knee, touching her skirt, this skirt now in her hands, touching her so easily, so naturally.

She remembers those days early on, when they were dating and first married, when he touched her, even in passing, and she felt it. Really felt it. That magnetic, electric heat of his hand on her. That invisible, magical, chemical connection. Where did that go?

He was cheating on her when this picture was taken. Beth pinches her eyes shut and swallows, trying to keep it together. What does Jimmy feel when he touches Angela? Does he feel an invisible, magical, chemical connection? What doesn’t he feel when he touches Beth? When he used to touch her. She opens her eyes and steps back, taking in the whole wall—seven years of family portraits and a black-and-white photo of her and Jimmy from their wedding day. She looks at everyone’s smiles, her happy family. Her life. She clenches her teeth and blinks back tears. Her life is a fraud.

She straightens two of the frames that were tipped just slightly to the right of level, returns to her bedroom, and crawls back into bed. The bed feels good. The bed feels safe.

And she knows how to dress for bed. She’s wearing her old, pink flannel pajamas, covered in nubs, the most colorful things she owns. She should go to Salt in her pajamas. Then she’d really make an impression. Not the kind of impression she wants to make though.

But what kind of impression does she want to make? She wishes she didn’t have to make one at all, that she could go in disguise, sporting a wig and dark glasses, so she could see and not be seen. But she also fantasizes about going and being noticed by everyone. She’d strut into Salt, looking confident and sexy (tastefully sexy, not trashy sexy), and shy of that, at least better than Angela, a difficult goal to set since she has no idea what Angela looks like. She’s terrified of giving this woman any reason to feel any more superior to Beth than she probably already feels. Unfortunately, realistically, there’s an awful good chance of this. Beth’s not feeling confident or sexy. And she never struts. She looks into her pathetic closet, rolls over, closes her eyes, and tucks the blankets up to her chin.

Behind her closed lids, she envisions Jimmy shaking a martini, then stopping midpour, struck by the sight of her as she
struts
into the restaurant with her friends. She imagines him pulling her aside, telling her that he feels like an idiot for leaving her. She imagines him begging her to take him back right there at the bar, right in front of Angela.

She directs the entire Salt scene, smiling as it plays out in her head. She’s even cast a fictitious Angela, devastated and defeated, with sleek black hair, thick eyebrows, severe makeup, and a spandex dress (trashy sexy). The only person she can’t see in this little fantasy is herself.

Damn it, what am I going to wear?

It occurs to her that she’s on the other end of this ridiculous question at least once a week with Sophie, her thirteen-going-on-eighteen-year-old. The other two girls will be dressed and ready and waiting at the front door, and Sophie will still be
in her room, half-dressed, crazed and crying, clothes tossed everywhere.
I can’t go to school! I have
nothing
to wear!

Worried more about the girls’ being late for school than Sophie’s fashion crisis, Beth typically offers something quick and admittedly too glib.

You look beautiful. Just be yourself and it won’t matter what you wear. C’mon, let’s go!

Now Beth gets why Sophie rolls her eyes and cries harder. She owes her daughter an apology and a trip to the Hyannis mall.

She tries for a moment to take her own advice.
Be yourself
. But who is she? She’s Jimmy’s wife, and she’s a mother. And if she gets divorced, if she’s no longer Mrs. James Ellis, and she’s only a mother, then is there less of her? She fears this and feels it already, physically, as if a surgeon has taken a scalpel to her abdomen and removed a whole and necessary part of her. Without Jimmy, she doesn’t recognize herself. How can that be? Who has she become?

She rolls over and looks into her closet. It’s organized. That’s her. But otherwise, she’s not in there. She sits up and looks at herself in the mirror on the back of the bedroom door, her blond, chin-length hair a matted mess, her blue eyes deeply set and dull, her pajamas pink and nubby.
That’s not who I am
.

She gets out of bed and returns to face the pictures on the wall in the hallway. The most recent portraits offer her nothing more than wife and mother. She’d always approved of how she looks in these pictures, her hair not too frizzy from the humidity, her makeup subtle, her nails polished, her clothes pressed. But as she studies herself now, her smile appears forced, unnatural, her posture stiff, like she’s a cardboard cutout of herself. Like she’s posing. She moves back in time and visits the oldest family photo and the portrait from her wedding. Here she sees more of the woman she thinks of as herself. Her smile
contains an unself-conscious abandon, her eyes are bright and happy. Where did that woman go?

For some reason, she looks up at the ceiling, and there it is, as if the answer were delivered to her from above. The attic!

She stands on her tiptoes, pulls the dangling white string, unfolds the wooden stairs, and climbs up. A wall of dense, stagnant heat greets her in a hurry at the top. Nearing the end of May, the days have been sunny, but it’s remained cool, only in the sixties, yet the trapped heat up here feels like summer against her skin.

She pauses before fully committing to going in. The roof is pitched and low, and the wooden ceiling is riddled with protruding nails, making it both impossible and dangerous to stand up straight. And the floor is unfinished, with only a few planks of wood running the length through the center, like a bridge crossing a sea of pink insulation.

Beth doesn’t like coming up here for fear of either forgetting about the low ceiling and impaling her head with a nail or accidentally stepping off the planks and falling through the fluffy fiberglass floor into the living room. Because of this, she normally visits the attic only twice a year—the day after Thanksgiving to take the Christmas decorations down and New Year’s Day to put the Christmas decorations back. Up and in, out and down, she’s never dallied in here.

Jimmy’s got a bunch of his stuff strewn all over the far end—fishing rods leaning against the angled ceiling, two of them fallen over, tangled nets, tackle boxes, one of them open, a collection of golf clubs crisscrossed and loose on the floor like a pile of pick-up sticks, the empty golf bag, a single golf shoe, a surfboard, a clamming rake and bucket.

“Jimmy.”

With her hands on her hips, she scolds him in her head and has to resist the urge to tidy it up. That’s not why she’s here.

Separate from his mess are three standing fans and two
window-box air conditioners. Six plastic storage tubs, all labeled in her printing with a black Sharpie on masking tape, sit in a neat row, two each:
CHRISTMAS, HALLOWEEN, WINTER.

The winter boxes are both empty. She and the girls have still been wearing their winter coats in the morning and at night, and they’ve also been getting good use out of their winter boots, the ground finally fully thawed, the height of mud season. Each year, about a week or two from now and under Beth’s directive, Jimmy carries all of the winter gear up to the attic and comes back down with the fans and air conditioners. She sighs, recognizing that this will be her job from now on.

One last tub, apart from the others, way at the back, is labeled
BETH.
The lid is coated with dust. She hasn’t opened this bin in at least a decade. Feeling both excited and scared of what she might discover inside, she sits cross-legged next to it and opens the lid.

First, she pulls out a red Frisbee signed by everyone on her ultimate Frisbee team, turning it over in her hands as she studies each note and signature. Johnny C! Her four-year, unrequited crush from Reed College. She hasn’t thought about him in years. He was such a sweet guy. He was premed. She wonders where he is now. He’s probably a successful doctor somewhere, not cheating on his wife.

She finds a stack of ticket stubs held together by an elastic band. Rolling Stones,
Stomp, Rent,
Cirque du Soleil, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an airline ticket from Portland to New York, another to New Mexico, even movie stubs, each labeled with the names of the friends or boyfriend who went with her. She can’t remember the last concert she’s been to (it might’ve been the Stones), and her last plane trip was from New York to Nantucket, one way. She misses vacations to new places, Broadway shows, and museums (and the trips with each daughter’s third-grade class to the whaling museum don’t count).

She shuffles through her college ID cards, photos from parties and summer vacations. She laughs at her huge hair and aqua-blue eyeliner. The nineties!

Then she finds a stack of birthday cards, and she hesitates, gathering emotional courage. Eight birthday cards from her mother. She reads through them all, starting with sweet sixteen, treasuring each handwritten word, each
Love you, Mom,
wiping her eyes with her pajama sleeve every time the words get too blurry to read through her tears.

Her mother had a lumpectomy the summer before Beth moved to Nantucket. Her doctor said they got it all. She had radiation and chemotherapy after the surgery. Everything was standard procedure. Everything looked good.

Her hair was gone when Beth moved to New York in September. It was her first job out of college, an editorial assistant for
Self
magazine. Her mother insisted she go and start her life and assured her that she would be fine.

But she wasn’t fine. They didn’t get it all. In November, she went back into surgery, this time to remove the whole breast and some lymph tissue. Beth’s heart tightens. If only they’d done this in the first place. Again, the doctors said they got everything. She and Beth celebrated over Thanksgiving weekend, relieved and grateful.

But they shouldn’t have celebrated anything because some microscopic flecks of cancer had already broken free of her breast before the doctors removed it, and they floated off into her mother’s body, looking for a new residence. They found her liver first. And then her lungs. She died in January.

Beth holds the last birthday card, the last
Love you, Mom
. It was her twenty-third birthday, and she never imagined her mother wouldn’t be here to see her turn twenty-four, thirty, thirty-eight.

She’s often wondered if she’d be married to Jimmy if her mother hadn’t died. She found getting out of bed and going
to work nearly impossible after her mother’s funeral. She remembers feeling utterly unable to do her job, even though it only consisted of fairly mindless office duties such as answering the phones, checking faxes, and scheduling meetings. She remembers trying to hide a torrent of tears at so many unprofessional moments. She needed some time off. She clawed her way through each week until June, then she quit and left New York City. She quit and went to Nantucket.

She had inherited a little money from her mother, enough for her to rent a cottage with three friends for the summer and attend graduate school in the fall. She’d been accepted into Boston University’s MFA program in creative writing. Other than that, there was no plan. She didn’t plan on meeting Jimmy and falling in love with him. And she certainly didn’t plan on marrying him and starting a family instead of going back to school.

But this is exactly what she did. On Labor Day, when her friends got on a plane and flew back to the real world, Beth stayed. A year later, she and Jimmy got married, and a year after that, Sophie was born.

She’s often wondered what her mother would’ve thought of Jimmy. She probably wouldn’t have liked him. She certainly wouldn’t be a fan of his right now. Her mother never had a high opinion of men. She and her father divorced when Beth was three, and they never saw him again after Beth turned four. She doesn’t remember her mother ever dating. She was entirely devoted to making a living and raising her daughter, her only child.

Beth digs through the tub, now looking for a specific picture. She knows it’s in here. She finds it at the bottom of everything, the only picture she has of her father. He’s wearing a men’s white undershirt and black-rimmed glasses. His light brown hair is receding. He’s smiling. His arms look strong. He’s holding Beth in his lap. Her blond hair is in
pigtails, and she’s wearing a pink party dress. It’s her second birthday. She’s also smiling. They look happy together. She has no memory of this man or of herself as this little girl, but she believes that it’s them. The writing on the back of the picture, her mother’s writing, reads
Denny & Beth, 10–2–73
. She breathes a dense sigh and discards the photograph back to the bottom of the bin.