Love in Mid Air (5 page)

When the Brothers Pressley would go to the snack bar to get my popcorn and her Twizzlers, I would climb into the front seat,
loose-limbed and giggly, and Kelly and I would watch the movie until they returned. The owner of the drive-in showed a lot
of oldies; I guess he figured the kids weren’t paying attention at all and it was a good way to save money. But Kelly and
I watched, and we loved Katharine and Bette and Lana and Ingrid. We watched them storming in and out of elegant rooms, crying
and throwing martini glasses, taking the stand to testify, going beautifully mad, sobering up, checking their lipstick, and
setting sail for Europe. We watched their flawless faces fading into the shadows of sex while their eyelids fluttered closed
and the music swelled. The drive-in was where we first got our passion for Elizabeth Taylor, an obsession we share to this
day.

“Frank’s better-looking,” Kelly would say, poking me, and this always made us laugh harder.

“He is not,” I’d say, “Kevin is the prince and Frank is the frog.”

But Kelly would only shake her head, sighing in that mock-tragic way of hers. “Face it, baby. You got the better-looking twin.”

W
hat’d you think of the book?” Kelly asks, coming back into the kitchen. She hasn’t just changed her shirt but her pants as
well, and she’s used a flatiron on her hair. She makes me look like shit.

“Next month, I want to do
David Copperfield
,” I say. “We need to get back to the classics. He’s got this great line, he says, ‘There is only one question, whether or
not a man is to be the hero of his own life.’ Isn’t that great?”

“Huh,” says Kelly. “Is it in paperback?”

“Yeah, it’s old, it’s Dickens. Charles Dickens. Of course it’s in paperback. You don’t think that’s a great line?”

“It’s a great line.”

“Because that’s what I want. I want to be the hero of my own life.”

“Just exactly what happened in Phoenix?”

At that moment there’s the pop of an opening door and Nancy and Belinda come in, Belinda already apologizing because she hasn’t
read the whole book. “Good God, you look terrible, what happened to you?” says Kelly, who frequently greets Belinda this way,
never seeming to notice how tactless she sounds. Belinda does give the impression of someone who has just rolled out of bed,
no matter what time of day you see her, and she launches into a long story about how her youngest busted a tooth out on the
coffee table just as she was leaving the house and Michael didn’t want to be left with a hurt and whimpering kid and she felt
bad about it herself, but this was her one night out and she had read most of the book, or at least about a hundred pages.

Nancy rolls her eyes at me and Kelly. Belinda is the youngest of us by nearly ten years and we’re all accustomed to the way
she lurches from crisis to crisis.

Belinda says all the time that she’s getting fat, and she pulls up her shirt as she says this, in case somebody doesn’t believe
her. She says that she’s stupid, although she doesn’t bother showing any concrete proof of this, and—perhaps most telling
of all—she refuses to do anything by herself. Her list of phobias is long and bizarre, ranging from cake batter to suspension
bridges. She’s afraid to drive at night, which is one reason Nancy always picks her up and takes her places. And Belinda constantly
points out, especially when she’s inside the guarded gates of Kelly’s neighborhood, that she doesn’t really fit in here.

Which is true enough, but what Belinda doesn’t understand is that nobody fits in here. We’re all transplants in a way—come
from up north or out west—and even me and Kelly, who grew up just a few miles from these very wrought-iron gates, are perhaps
the most aware that this isn’t the world we came from. These suburbs didn’t exist twenty years ago but now the farmland where
we used to ride our bikes seems to grow red brick. There are no longer open fields, just streets lined with enormous Georgian
houses. “They spring out of the ground,” my mother says darkly, and it’s true that if you go six months without driving a
particular country road, the odds are that the next time you take that route you won’t recognize it. My mother exists in a
permanent state of disorientation, something I believe is common in southerners of her generation. She often calls me crying
on her cell phone, reporting that she was just trying to take a shortcut and all of a sudden nothing looks familiar. “I’m
lost in my own hometown,” she will say, and I will assure her that she’s not, even though the truth is, I get lost sometimes
too.

This would surprise Belinda, who is convinced that all of her self-esteem issues spring from the fact that she was born in
Alabama. She came up poor and Michael had been poor too when she met him at the university. Poor but brilliant, one of those
lanky stooped-over idiot savant country boys—and who could have foreseen he’d write some sort of computer program when he
was still a sophomore, that he’d sell it to the Bank of America before he even graduated? Not her, that’s for sure. Everybody
said she really knew how to pick them, but she hated it when people talked like that. It made her sound so calculating, and
the truth is, girls never know what boys are going to become. It’s just that once, early in the morning, when they were walking
to class, Michael told her she was pretty. She’d met some guy at a kegger the night before, a guy who’d spent six blessed
hours humping her and then left without saying goodbye. Belinda had been walking to class hungover with her pajama top on
and Michael—sweet, shy Michael—had fallen into step with her and told her she was pretty.

They got married, she got pregnant, or maybe it happened the other way around, and they lived for two years in that awful
student housing, and then, bingo-bango, he signs with the bank for six figures. Six figures and five babies in five years
and now her mother keeps a picture of Belinda’s house on her refrigerator, held with a magnet. “She doesn’t have a picture
of my kids anywhere in her whole trailer,” Belinda has told me, several times, her voice rising in indignation. “But Mama
sure is proud of my house.”

So it’s hardly surprising she feels a bit like an imposter, but the truth of the matter is, she belongs here as much as anyone—just
one more fact to go into that bulging file labeled Things Belinda Has Not Yet Realized. She’s always trying to catch up. She
goes to those expensive old-lady stores and buys sweaters with pictures on them. Not just for holidays. She wears them all
the time. Sailboats and dogwoods and animals. Most of the sweaters are stretched in the front from being worn throughout Belinda’s
poorly spaced pregnancies and it makes the pictures a little surrealistic. Tonight she is wearing a dog whose legs look much
too long. The sweaters, along with ankle-length jean skirts and bright-colored suede flats, are what Belinda imagines the
sophisticated suburbanite should wear and she refuses to be deterred from this vision, even though God knows none of the rest
of us dress like that. I’ve wondered why Nancy hasn’t tried to set her straight, about the sweaters and other things too.
Belinda does everything Nancy tells her to do.

But Nancy, I guess, is uneasy in her own way. She moved down three years ago from New Jersey and she still seems overwhelmed
by the sheer size of her house. A lot of people moving in from the Northeast are like that—they had a $400,000 ranch house
in some commuter town and then they come down here and it boggles their minds what $400,000 will buy. It’s the way of the
world. The Realtor punches some buttons and tells you what you can afford, and it’s more than you think you can afford. But
if she says you can qualify, who are you to argue? You move in and then one morning you wake up and wander around and ask
yourself how the hell you ended up in this mausoleum of granite and marble. This obscene square footage, it makes us all nervous
in a way—me because I retain a little bit of the bohemian artist thing, Kelly because she misses her single-girl condo, Belinda
because she’s afraid we can still smell her trailer-park past, and Nancy because she’s not from the South.

Nancy has red hair and very white skin and it’s a great source of pride to her that, despite her vulnerable coloring, she
does not freckle. She has a nearly pathological fear of the sun. She dresses as if she’s in the middle of some never-ending
safari and she keeps a tube of sunscreen in the compartment between the front seats of her car. Every time she hits a stoplight
she dabs some on herself and her kids. The whole family smells like tropical fruit. Nancy keeps the Weather Channel on all
day long and surrounds herself with thermometers. At any given time she can tell you what the temperature is. “It’s 94,” she
will say, “and it isn’t even noon. Can you believe it? No, wait, wait, look at that. It’s 95.”

She tries, I mean she really tries, but I remember the first time we had book club at Nancy’s house. We came in, we sat down,
and then she just started talking about the book. Back then there were seven of us in book club and we all kept glancing around,
not quite sure what to do. I was uncomfortable, but then I was a little uncomfortable with how uncomfortable I was, because
exactly what did it say about me that I’d let something like that make me so upset? And Nancy just kept talking about the
symbolism and the point of view until finally Lynn said, “Excuse me,” as if she was going to the bathroom. But she went into
the kitchen and emerged a few minutes later with glasses of iced tea on a tray.

“I think you forgot to set these out,” Lynn said softly, and Nancy stared at the glasses as if she’d never seen them before
in her life. She probably hadn’t seen them in years. They looked like her good crystal. God knows how Lynn had managed to
find them and drag them out and dust them so fast.

“Oh,” said Nancy, still confused but trying to rise to the occasion as best she could. “Does anybody want anything to drink?”

I think of the Yankee woman in the barbecue scene in
Gone With the Wind
and how she referred to the southerners as “puzzling, stiff-necked strangers.” I suspect that is how Nancy sees us, as puzzling
and stiff-necked, as people who splash around a kind of surface friendliness but who are easily offended when she breaks rules
she didn’t know existed. Perhaps she views her time in North Carolina as some sort of extended anthropological study. She
does look a bit like Margaret Mead, peering out from her oversized hats and gauzy scarves, taking mental notes about the incomprehensible
rituals of the aboriginal people. Because there are a lot of rules and even though Kelly and I may not always follow them,
it’s a bit shocking to come up against someone who doesn’t even seem to know what they are. You don’t put dark meat in your
chicken salad. You write a thank-you note and send it through the U.S. Postal Service instead of relying on an Ecard. You
don’t correct anyone’s pronunciation of anything. You call anyone over seventy “ma’am” and you call your friends “ma’am” if
you’re mad at them. You don’t brag about how cheap you got something, or, even worse, how much you paid for it. Especially
not real estate. Now, on the flip side, it’s perfectly okay to drink like a fish, or curse, or flirt with someone else’s husband.
In fact it’s a little insulting if you don’t. To refuse to flirt with her husband implies your friend chose badly, and if
you and she both damn well know she chose badly, you need to flirt a little bit more just to help her cover up the fact.

And when people come to your house, you immediately offer them something to drink. I mean, Jesus, girl, don’t you know it’s
95 degrees out there?

So Jeff took the job down here and Nancy followed—I think that may have been one of the worst days of her life, but she’d
never say that. She does what’s expected of her. She joins every club and she chairs every committee. And she has tried to
make her house, uncomfortably large and scantily furnished as it is, into a home. Kelly and I have always laughed at her,
just a little bit, with all her crafts and rehabbing and cheap-chic decorating. The fact that she’s painted her master bedroom
with some sort of technique that she calls Bellagio faux glazing so that it looks like her bed is floating in a mottled pastel
cloud. How she drives around with the back of her old Volvo station wagon full of fabric books and half-filled paint cans
and some broken endtable she’s rescued from a yard sale. They greet her by name at the Home Depot. But it makes me sad too.
All the hours she sinks into that house, I know she’s just trying to put her mark on something. She’s trying to make it hers,
the same way a dog pees on a tree, and it’s not her fault she doesn’t quite get it.

“Elyse didn’t like the book,” Kelly says.

“Ah,” says Nancy. “And exactly what should we be reading, Elyse? Why don’t you just make up the list for the rest of the year?
It would save everybody else so much time.”

“I think we should get back to the classics,” I say.

“Well of course you do,” says Nancy.

“It wouldn’t kill us to read something serious once in a while. I was thinking
David Copper—
”

“Where’s Lynn?” Belinda suddenly asks, and Kelly shrugs. Lynn hasn’t been to book club in months. The official story is that
she is too busy with her new job, but we all know something else is afoot.

Maybe it’s not true that none of us was really born to this place. When I first moved into my neighborhood, Lynn was the one
I wanted to be like, the one I most admired. She’s the one who started book club and I always tried to be her partner when
we had whist night at church. She had—still has—that blue-blooded quality certain women have where they give their children
last names as first names and a natural, easy athleticism that reminds me of Kelly. Lynn did a half-marathon and then a marathon
and then a triathalon and finally when she dislocated her knee—stepping off a curb, ironically—she switched to walking. Within
a couple of months, she had the rest of us walking with her. Yeah, come to think of it, Lynn has always fit in better than
anyone, which is what makes it so mind-numbingly ironic that she’s the one who seems to be pulling away. Lynn is subtle, and
gracious, and feminine, and kind. The sort of woman who can serve iced tea out of someone else’s kitchen and make it seem
okay.