Off Course (27 page)

Cress went to the extension in Tillie's bedroom. She sat on the unmade king-sized bed. “It's me,” Quinn said, and his voice bore only the faintest hint of the bass she knew. He was not drunk—the opposite: distant, businesslike. A stranger's voice, the voice of a servant sent to deliver an edict.

“Oh, Quinn.” She spoke in a gush, urgent to delay. She'd just been thinking about him! How was he? What was he doing?

For eight months they'd loved each other. She had agreed to marry him. Would he really drop her in a phone call?

“Cress,” he said. “I'm calling so you know. I moved back home today.”

Of course. Of course he moved home. Theirs was too wispy a love, when weighed against children, houses, vehicles, decades.

“It's best,” he said. “You may not think so now, but you'll see.”

“What happened?” She fought to keep her voice neutral, reasonable, even kind.

“Sylvia and I have been talking more than we ever have. She thought I wanted to live in town. I thought she did. She thought I wanted to be left alone after my father died. I thought she wasn't reaching out to me.”

Tillie's bedclothes were a rumpled mess of white sheets and a gray blanket edged in green silk. Cress, shivering, pulled the blanket to her chest. The closet door gaped open. Inside, the clothes were sloppily hung; even the five-hundred-dollar brown power jacket sagged unevenly on a wire hanger.

“Cress?” he said. “Are you there?”

“Donna always said you were just using me to shake up your marriage. Well. Glad to be of service.”

“That's not how it was, and you know it.”

“I don't know anything,” Cress said. “Except that you asked me to marry you and I said yes.” She stood abruptly and went to the windows and looked down at the court with its curving walkways. “You've already moved back? You're in the house? With her?” She shivered, and her teeth chattered softly.

“I really care about you, Cress,” he said. “I will always care about you.”

Care.
What an ugly compensatory little word.
Care
, the downgrade from love. “Gee,” she said. All down Braithway Court, she noted, every unit had its own flower bed and small, closely mowed patch of lawn.

“What will you do now?” he said. “Go to London?”

“That's hardly your business.”

“This isn't easy for me, either,” he said.

About halfway down the court, two tuxedoed cats sat on the grass by red geraniums. Pets were forbidden at Braithway, but cats abounded. Farther down, a fat white one slithered on its belly across another tiny lawn.

“If you're not going to talk to me, Cress, I'm going to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” she said.

“I wish you the best, Cress. I hope you do everything you dreamed of. I would of held you back. I'm too set in my ways. I couldn't change as much as you need me to. Your friends would never really like me.”

“You've worked it all out, haven't you.”

“Cress,” he said.

Another silence. She said, “Goodbye,” and set the phone in its cradle.

The large round planter in the heart of the courtyard had been a fishpond in Braithway's heyday as a tourist home. One tuxedoed brother leaped onto the concrete lip, followed by the other. The white cat had disappeared under a bush.

Of course Quinn would go back to his wife; he'd never mustered a convincing argument against her.

The kitchen smelled cool and green: Tillie was spooning yogurt into a bowl of sliced cucumbers.

“That was Quinn,” Cress said. “He moved back home with his wife.”

Tillie gave the bowl three sharp raps with the spoon. “The shit,” she said.

*   *   *

She drank most of a bottle of red wine that night and woke up a few hours later aflame with thirst. In the morning, Tillie and Edgar said Cress could stay with them as long as she liked.

After they left the house, she took Tillie's dull old kitchen scissors and calmly cut—and partly tore—up the blouse he'd liked, the sleeveless white cotton shell with eyelet. She'd kept it unwashed because it smelled of him, that spicy musk with the chemical taint—and it still did, as a snarl of scraps and buttons and hairy threads; twice she pulled it from the wastebasket to inhale it. She emptied her flask in the sink and threw it down Tillie's back stairs, into the parking lot. Following, she kicked it, slid her foot on it, scratching and denting the silver before tossing it in a trash can. She retrieved it an hour later, filled it with water: no leaks. She wished she had the little donkey (she'd stored it at the A-frame, in her box of dissertation notes) so she could hammer it into dust.

The second day, there was a blare in the air and a weird edge around objects, as if the world were off-register. She didn't get out of bed or open the red curtains. She slept with the snarl of shredded blouse under her pillow.

On the third day, thinking that a vast body of water would clear her head and allow her some perspective, she drove to the ocean. The beach was socked in with fog, but the sand was warm. Her mother always said that this was when you could get badly sunburned without knowing it. In her pedal pushers and T-shirt, Cress lay down on the old chenille spread Tillie had lent her and rolled up in it, covering even her head. She looked like any other homeless person sleeping in the sand. She wept until the warmth of the sun bled through and the thudding of the waves calmed her. She slept hard for an hour and woke up sweating. She stood, shook out the spread, and folded it.

A small crafts fair had set up along the boardwalk, and at a jeweler's table Cress chose a ring, a silver band with a green stone, to symbolize her own new beginning, one hundred dollars. Only after she got it home to the sun porch did she see the small peridot was the exact pale green of his eyes and that a thin bezel encircling the stone was made of yellow gold. Worse, at night, the stone seemed darker, greener, and the gold more pronounced, which frightened her, made her feel unhinged. The next day she drove back, thirty-seven miles, to return or exchange the ring, but the little fair was gone. Afraid now even to look at the stone, she waded into the surf, holding her skirt. The water was cold and prickling, churning with sand and fine pebbles; only children scampered in and out without wetsuits. When the receding tide tugged hard at her shins, she slid the ring off her finger and flung it into a gathering wave.

*   *   *

Back at Braithway, there was a note from her mother, who'd stopped by and dropped off a letter from Sharon.

13 June 1982

Dear Cress,

I hope Mom and Dad deliver this letter intact! Did you check the seals?

How are you? Still enjoying wedding season? (Loved your last letter! So funny!) I hope all is well with the Dark and Handsome Woodsman. (Mom says you're somewhat engaged!!! Is that true??? Details, please!)

I know that I've been nagging you to come to London, and Mom wrote that you're waiting for your passport. If you haven't already bought your ticket (and even if you have), I'm afraid I have to withdraw my invitation. For the last few months, my rebirthing process has been very intense, and this week I made it back to the moment of my birth, and before, as well. I recalled in perfect detail the darkness (or really a kind of gray-blue dimness) of the womb, and how it split open (remember—you and I were both C-sections!) as if the night sky had been slit and peeled back. Light poured in, along with enormous fuzzy shapes that bobbed and loomed over me. What a shock! No surprise I carried that trauma all my life. You go from the dark lull of the womb straight to blinding light … and MONSTERS! You can't imagine how much better I feel having gone back with adult eyes and seen that those fuzzy giants were just nurses and a doctor and dumb old Dad in surgical caps and masks!!!

The whole basis of rebirthing is not only that you get to reenact the entire traumatic birth process, but you also get to go through a brand-new one, this time trauma-free! That's what I did this week, and it was so amazing and mind-clearing. Unfortunately, according to my rebirthing counselor, for the transformation to really take hold, I need to stay away from my original toxic family, which—I regret that I have to say, and no offense—includes you. (Not that you yourself are toxic [although my life did take a huge turn for the worse the day you were born and knocked me off center stage] [!!!]) But that's hardly your fault. Still, the old inherited family patterns are so strong and so deep, and the new ones are so fresh and fragile, that they really need time to get established. Please understand that it's nothing personal. For years now, I've been desperate to find a way out from under Dad's extreme narcissism and pathological stinginess, and Mom's hysteria and control, so much of which I seem to have absorbed into my own personality. Hopefully, that will change now.

I wish you would consider rebirthing for yourself. I'm sure there are rebirthing clinics and therapists in L.A.—it's a worldwide phenomenon. I can ask my counselor for referrals, if you'd like. It'll free you up, make you much more your own person and much less a product of Mom and Dad, who are bloody neurotic, you know.

In the meantime, best of luck with the dark handsome affianced. I'll let you know when I'm ready for a visit, but it might not be for a year—or longer, even!! (Though I'd never miss your wedding!) If you've already bought your ticket here, and you don't want to visit England without seeing me, and you can't get a refund, or can't get the ticket credited toward some future adventure, let me know, and I'll reimburse you whatever amount you're out. This brings

Love,

Sharon

P.S. Don't be mad at me!!!

P.P.S. Although I'm happy to hear about your life, I must ask you not to share any opinions you might have about mine. If you need a ticket refund, just say how much and I'll send an international money order.

Cress hadn't bought her ticket. She'd only shelled out thirty-five dollars for the passport fee, and she thought of making Sharon pay that—for slamming the door, blocking her exit at the worst possible moment.

*   *   *

“I might go to Tucson to visit my old drawing teacher,” Cress told Tillie and Edgar. “Then maybe on to Minneapolis to check out the road not taken.” She meant John Bird with his finished diss, his job at the Fed.

On the seventh day after Quinn's call, twenty days since the last time she'd seen him, Cress kissed Tillie and Edgar as they left for work. She drank tea and read the newspaper at their dining room table until noon, and for an hour or so, she sat in a chair and watched cats gambol up and down Braithway Court. She rose and pulled the sheets off her bed and stuffed them into the washer. She packed the plaid suitcase, carried that and another box of her things to the Saab's backseat—the trunk was still filled with the bearskin rug—and drove north.

She had to see him one more time. She had things to say, face-to-face, words formed from ashes and fury, from which there was no going back.

*   *   *

Although she had been there only once, she had no trouble finding the bleak subdivision or his uncharming tract home. His truck sat in the driveway. The lawn was dead. The lemon tree, a shaggy, asymmetrical hump, was overloaded with undersized fruit. The living room's picture window reflected a metallic twilight sky, but she saw the television flicker within and shadowy human movements. He was in there with his wife, her teacups.

Cress drove down the block and turned into a cul-de-sac. Pulling to the curb, for want of a paper bag, she cupped her hands over her mouth to capture carbon dioxide.

He's home
, Sylvia has surely told her friends—she must have friends she talks to, at least one, someone she works with, possibly Mrs. Harvey herself.

Quinn's back.
Cress can hear her childlike tones
. And he seems relieved.

Just a midlife crisis, after all. It started with his dad. Then, for the first time ever, he couldn't find work. I went out and got a job, but it went against his masculine pride. Then Annette graduated and was going away to college—so much change, it really knocked him for a loop. He did some dumb things. But he's back now.

Cress pictures a small smile tugging at the corners of Sylvia's pretty lips, a smile that means they are having sex. Always something he enjoyed. They enjoyed.

Sylvia will have to be careful, and not let her triumph show, especially around him. He won't tolerate smugness. She'll have to act as if nothing has happened, as if she bears no grudge. He won't tolerate reproach, either. He certainly won't like Sylvia to ever mention Cress.

What's done is done, he'd say.

Sylvia will have to be more loving and attentive, and a little smarter, if possible, and more intellectually alive now, since that is what he gave up when he moved back home.

Cress imagined Sylvia leaving work, stopping in at Longs drugstore for toothpaste and mascara. She lingers, reading
Redbook
. Then, maybe, she picks up
Harper's Magazine
. If the girl reads such brainy publications, Sylvia no doubt thinks, she should, too. But she is quickly bored. The Afghan War, Tanzania, the Bauhaus—must she really be conversant on these topics? Even he probably can't locate Dar es Salaam on a map.

In one arena, there was no competition. Sylvia was not plain. She did not have stringy hair or a flat face and thin lips. It was not hard to imagine Quinn stroking Sylvia's cheek.
I missed your beautiful face.

Cress shook her head and twisted the key in the ignition, making a terrible grating noise: the engine was already running. She pulled away from the curb, turned around, and, passing his house again, drove out of the subdivision.

*   *   *

Don Darrington stood outside his little back house in Sawyer watching Shim paw at something in the grass. “You're back,” he said.