Round Robin (5 page)

“We'll see.” Carol's voice was flat, and Sarah realized Carol was determined to despise him and wouldn't give him any opportunity to change her mind.

Sarah hung up the phone with a sigh. She couldn't really blame Carol for not seeing through Dave; after all, it had taken Sarah fourteen months to figure him out. But now she could see that he was all style, no substance. As a freshman she had been dazzled by his popularity, his expensive car, the luxurious lifestyle his parents had provided him—but in the weeks preceding the breakup, she had grown restless. Dave was charming and witty, handsome and athletic, but something was missing.
He wouldn't allow anyone to bring him down with bad news or serious conversation, not even Sarah. With him she had to feign perpetual cheerfulness or lose his interest. Once when she needed to talk about a frustrating argument with her mother, she watched as his face went blank and he began to look over her shoulder for someone more pleasant to talk to. That was when Sarah understood that Dave kept her around not because he loved her—although perhaps he thought he did—but because she worked so hard to amuse him. She had learned early in their relationship that there were plenty of other women on campus who would pretend anything, hide anything, if it meant having his warm smile directed at them. But Sarah was tired of acting, of being onstage every moment they were together. She wanted someone who could love the real Sarah, with all her bad moods and faults.

After knowing Matt only a short while, she realized she had found that someone in him. He was kind and sensible, and though he didn't have Dave's charisma, he was handsome in a strong, unpolished kind of way, and he made Sarah feel valued. The first time they kissed, she learned that what she thought was love with Dave had not been love at all, or even a close approximation. Infatuation, yes; admiration, definitely. But not until Matt came into her life did Sarah truly know what it meant to love someone and be loved in return.

It would have been pointless to explain this to her mother. She was convinced that Sarah had traded in a pre-med student from a good family for a man whose ambition in life was to mow lawns and prune bushes. Even after she met him, Carol never saw Matt's solid core of strength and kindness, and never sensed how much he truly cared for Sarah. Those qualities made Matt worth two of Dave, with his roving eye and his refusal to plan anything more than a week in advance. Sarah saw this, but Carol couldn't, or refused to.

Carol evidently never gave up hoping that Sarah would change her mind, not even when Sarah told her she and Matt were getting married. Then Carol grew frantic. She warned Sarah that she would never be happy if she settled for a man like Matt. She begged Sarah to wait, to date other men, if only to be certain that she wasn't making a hasty decision.
She offered Sarah a check—enough for a more lavish wedding than Sarah could afford or even wanted—if only Sarah would cancel the ceremony.

Sarah managed to hold her fury in check long enough to point out that Carol herself had chosen a man much like Matt. “Did you settle for Dad?” Sarah demanded. “Would you have let your parents buy your affection?”

“I didn't have your choices,” Carol said.

“I've made my choice,” Sarah said, and as far as she was concerned the matter was settled. But Carol wasn't willing to give up, and her appeals continued throughout the engagement.

Sarah had torn up and discarded the letters long ago, but she could still see them in her mind, page after page of her mother's small, neat handwriting on the Susquehanna Presbyterian Hospital letterhead she'd probably stolen from the receptionist's desk. “Marriage will change your life, and not for the better,” Carol had written. “Twenty-three is too young. You should have a life of your own first. You could go anywhere, do anything, and you ought to do it now, while you're young. If you marry that gardener, you'll be stuck in some little town forever, and everything you ever wanted for yourself will be swallowed up in what you do for him.” Marriage was expensive, she argued in letter after letter. Sarah could forget about the little luxuries that made life bearable. If she took a job in an exciting city, she would come into contact with all sorts of eligible men, lawyers and doctors rather than overgrown boys who liked to dig around in the dirt. After a few years, while she was still young enough to look pretty in a wedding gown and bear children, she should consider marriage. But not now, and not to that gardener.

“I understand why you find him attractive,” her mother had written. “But young people today don't have to be married to have sex. You can do that, if you must, and get it out of your system without ruining your chances with someone better. Besides, if you marry him, the sexual attraction will fade once the novelty wears off, and then where will you be?”

Carol's signature followed, as if anyone else could have written such a hateful letter. There was a postscript, but Sarah's hands trembled, rattling
the paper so that the words blurred and she could barely make them out: “Please know that my feelings are specifically about you and your friend. They are not a reflection of my relationship with your father. We had a happy, loving marriage that ended too soon.”

At once, Sarah snatched up the phone and dialed her mother's number. When she answered, Sarah didn't return her greeting. “Don't you ever, ever spew such filth about Matt again,” she snapped. “Do you hear me? Do you understand?”

She slammed down the phone without waiting for a reply.

The letters halted, and despite her earlier threats, a few months later Carol came to the small wedding in Eisenhower Chapel on the Penn State campus. She spoke politely with Matt's father, posed for pictures as the photographer instructed, and wept no more than was appropriate. Sarah could hardly look at her, could hardly bear to be in the presence of someone so spiteful to the man she loved. She knew Matt sensed the tension that sparkled and crackled between them, and hoped he attributed it to the inherent stress of the occasion.

The memory of those letters stung as sharply as if she had received them only yesterday.

“What do you think, Sarah?” Sylvia asked, startling her out of her reverie.

“Oh.” Sarah carried a bunch of carrots to the sink to wash them. “Whatever you want to do is fine with me.”

“You haven't heard a word I've said, have you?”

Sarah shook the water from the carrots. “No. I'm sorry.” She avoided meeting Sylvia's eyes as she returned to the counter. “I've been thinking about our newest camper.” She picked up a knife, lined up a carrot on the cutting board, and chopped off its top with a sharp whack.

Sylvia's eyebrows rose as she watched the cutting board. “I see.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Tell me. What brought about this estrangement? Did your mother abuse you? Neglect you?”

Sarah dispatched another carrot with a few strong chops of the knife. “No.” As angry as she was at her mother, it wouldn't be fair to accuse her of that.

“What was it, then? It must have been something truly horrible, the way you two act around each other.”

“It's hard to explain.” Sarah divided the carrot slices among four large salad bowls and began cutting up the rest of the bunch. “Sometimes I wish she had done something bad enough to justify cutting her out of my life altogether. As a mother, I'm afraid she was all too typical. Lots of mothers constantly criticize their daughters, right?”

Sylvia shrugged.

“That's what my mother did. Does. Nothing I do is ever good enough for her. For most of my life I've been knocking myself out trying to please her, but it's useless. It's like she thinks I'm not living up to my potential just to spite her.”

“I'm sure your mother is proud of you, even if she doesn't always show it.”

“I wish I could be so sure.”

Sylvia opened the oven door to check on the chickens. “You do love her, though, don't you?”

“Of course I love her.” Sarah hesitated, then forced herself to say the rest. “I just don't like her very much. Believe me, the feeling is mutual.”

“Sylvia, Sarah, would you two like some help?”

Quickly, Sarah looked up to find Carol standing in the kitchen doorway. Two other quilters stood behind her, smiling eagerly. Sarah's heart sank. How much had her mother overheard?

“We're fine, thank you,” Sylvia said, as she always did. Quilters were generous people who knew that many hands could make even a dull, slow job pleasant and quick. Sylvia often had to remind her guests to enjoy their vacations and let others wait on them for a change, but there were always a few who brushed off her protests.

This time was no different. “Preparing a meal for twelve is too much work for only the two of you,” Carol said, motioning for her companions to follow her into the kitchen. She had changed into a dark blue warm-up suit but somehow still managed to look dressed up.

“We can handle it,” Sarah said. Her voice came out sharper than she intended. “And there's fifteen, including me and Sylvia and Matt.”

Carol pursed her lips in a semblance of a smile. “Fifteen. I stand corrected.” She went to the sink, tucked a dish towel into her waistband, and began washing a bundle of celery while Sylvia found tasks for the others.

Sarah forced herself to breathe deeply and evenly until the edge of her annoyance softened. “I see you've made some new friends,” she said as her mother joined her at the cutting board.

“They're my nearest neighbors upstairs.” Carol pulled open drawers until she found a knife. “Linda's a physician's assistant in Erie and Renée is a cardiac specialist at Hershey Medical Center. We have a lot in common.”

“That's nice.” Sarah watched as a puddle collected beneath the bundle of celery on her mother's side of the cutting board. Carol had neglected to shake the water off, as usual, and now the salad would be soaked. Sarah held back a complaint and concentrated on the carrots.

They worked without speaking. Sarah tried to concentrate on Sylvia's conversation with Renée and Linda, but she was conscious of how Carol kept glancing from her celery to Sarah's carrots. Finally her mother's scrutiny became too much. “All right. What is it?” Sarah asked, setting down the knife.

Her mother feigned innocence. “What?”

“What's the problem?”

“Nothing.” Carol's brow furrowed in concentration as she chopped away at the celery. Water droplets flew.

“You might as well tell me.”

Carol paused. “I was just wondering why you were cutting the carrots like that.”

“Like what?” Sarah fought to keep her voice even. “You mean, with a knife?”

“No, I mean cutting straight down like that. Your slices are round and chunky. If you cut at an angle, the slices will be tapered and have a more attractive oval shape.” Carol took a carrot and demonstrated. “See? Isn't that pretty?”

“Lovely.” Sarah snatched the carrot and resumed cutting straight, round slices. First the hair, now this—artistic differences over carrot slices. It was going to be a long week.

When the meal was ready, Sarah, Sylvia, and their helpers carried plates, glasses, and silverware across the hallway through the servants' entrance to the banquet hall. The other guests soon joined them, entering through the main entrance off the front foyer. Sarah steeled herself and took a seat at Carol's table just as Matt hurried in from the kitchen, where he had scrubbed his hands and face. He smiled at Sarah as he pulled up a chair beside her, smelling of soap and fresh air.

“How's everything going with your mom?” he murmured.

Sarah shrugged, not sure how to answer. They hadn't fought, but that same old tension was still there. She swallowed a bite of chicken and forced herself to smile across the table at her mother. One week. Surely she could manage to be civil for one week.

After supper, everyone helped clear the tables and clean up the kitchen, so the work was finished in no time at all. The quilters went their separate ways for a time, outside to stroll through the gardens, to the library to read or write in journals, to new friends' rooms to chat. As evening fell, Sarah and Sylvia returned to the kitchen to prepare a snack of tea and cookies, which they carried outside to the place Sylvia's mother had named the cornerstone patio.

Sarah summoned their guests. It was time for her favorite part of quilt camp, when the week still lay before them, promising friendship and fun, and their eventual parting could be forgotten for a while.

The quilters who had remained indoors followed Sarah across the foyer toward the west wing of the manor. Past the formal parlor, one room after another lay behind closed doors, and the quilters buzzed with excitement at the mystery of it all. At the end of the hallway, Sarah held open one last door, allowing the guests to precede her outside to the gray stone patio surrounded by evergreens and lilacs just beginning to bloom. After gathering the other guests there, Sylvia had arranged the wooden furniture into a circle and had placed the tea and cookies on a table to the right, where she waited, hands clasped and smiling.

Sarah caught Sylvia's eye and smiled as she closed the door behind her. Soon, she knew, one of the quilters was bound to ask why this place was called the cornerstone patio. Sylvia or Sarah, whoever was nearer,
would hold back the tree branches where the patio touched the northeast corner of the manor. The quilter who had asked the question would read aloud the engraving on a large stone at the base of the structure:
BERGSTROM
1858. Sylvia would tell them about her great-grandfather, Hans Bergstrom, who had placed that cornerstone with the help of his wife, Anneke, and sister Gerda, and built the west wing of the manor upon it.

When everyone had helped themselves to refreshments, Sylvia asked them to take seats in the circle. “If you'll indulge us, we'd like to end this first evening with a simple ceremony we call a Candlelight.” The quilters' voices hushed as Sylvia lit a candle, placed it in a crystal votive holder, and went to the center of the circle. The dancing flame in her hands cast light and shadow on her features, making her seem at once young and old, wise and joyful.