“Well, good for you.”
Say it like you mean it.
“Would you like to stay for dinner?”
“I have to call and ask.”
“Go ahead, honey.”
No wonder he's not into you.
Mrs. Heath's bones were sticking out. You could see the bones in her back, the knobby knot at the base of her neck. Her cheekbones seemed distorted, too big for the rest of her face. How had things become so messed up? Willa wondered. There were people starving in foreign countries, their bellies swollen from malnutrition, and here in America there were smart women like Mrs. Heath who refused to eat. She was on a hunger strike, Willa thought, but it was unclear what she was protesting.
It made Willa want to get fat as some kind of political statement. She wanted to fight the world sometimes. She imagined herself on a galloping horse, holding a spear like Joan of Arc. She just wanted to be different. She wanted to be free. She wanted to travel. To wear long skirts with bells on her ankles. She wanted to go to India. She wanted to fall in love. She wanted to fall madly in love with someone who would whisper to her and write songs about her. She wanted to have babies, lots and lots of babies, and live on a farm somewhere and grow her hair down her back. She would be very beautiful. These things would happen, she knew. One day.
When Mr. Heath came home, he seemed surprised and glad to see her. He kissed Mrs. Heath, a peck on the cheek, but she could tell he didn't really mean it. When Mrs. Heath was out of the room, Mr. Heath studied her face and asked, “What's different about you, Willa?”
She shrugged; she couldn't help smiling. “Nothing.”
“Something's different.” He squinted, deliberately perplexed.
She laughed. “Nothing! Just the same old me.”
Ada appeared in the doorway with the paintbrushes and started washing them in the sink. “And how's my Ada Potata?”
“Fine.” But she didn't sound fine.
He put his hand on Ada's head and she shook him off. “I have to wash these.”
“How'd it come out?”
“It looks really good,” Willa said.
“Nothing like a fresh coat of paint,” Mr. Heath said. “I wish the rest of the world were so easy to fix.”
Ada smiled at him, but it wasn't a real smile, Willa thought, just a mean flash that conveyed to Willa that she thought her father was an asshole. Mr. Heath made himself a drink, first ice then gin then some tonic, and took the glass down the hall and disappeared inside a small room, his office. A moment later, Willa could hear him on the phone. Ada rolled her eyes.
“What's wrong?” Willa asked.
“He's talking to his girlfriend.”
Willa felt a little stab in her chest. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Should I go?”
“No,” she said, and tried to smile. “Stay.”
Mrs. Heath served baked fish and sweet peas. She was a good cook, but Willa had lost her appetite.
He's talking to his girlfriend.
Ada ate quickly and drank her milk noisily. The food seemed very bright: the yellow fish, the green peas, the vivid lemons. Mrs. Heath poked peas with the tines of her fork. She looked as if she were someplace else, far away from there. In a way, Willa hoped she was. She thought of those coloring books she'd used as a child, which would ask:
What's wrong with this picture?
And you would circle the answers with your pencil. She would circle Mr. Heath's glass of gin, which he repeatedly replenished, and Mrs. Heath's distant gaze, and their daughter's eager appetite. She would circle the pasty white bread, the tub of margarine, the cheesy bottle of salad dressing. Nobody talked, just ate and drank. It felt like they were part of a strange play and everyone had forgotten their lines. Mr. Heath used his silverware strategically, foraging his flounder for tiny bones. Sometimes he had to use his fingertip, just to be sure. He drank his gin, squeezing half a lime into the glass. Like her mother, Mrs. Heath did all the serving and all the clearing. There was the strong smell of fish in the kitchen. Mr. Heath smiled at her across the table and she smiled back, even though she'd decided, right then and there, that she didn't really like him. Still, he captured her eyes and wouldn't let go and it was awkward. It was as though they were above the others, floating in a privileged space, speaking their own private language without words.
21
They all became friends, Claire and Greta and the Goldings and the Fairchilds and the Liddys and the Witherspoons and James Alden, a neurosurgeon who had recently lost his wife to cancer and would sit on the periphery, drinking and speaking to no one. They would meet at parties on weekends and drink entirely too much alcohol and flirt with one another, married or not. It seemed typical to her that the one person in the group who might be available for a relationship had absolutely no interest in her. Claire hadn't had a real group of friends since CalArts. Except for the occasional bed partner, she'd been alone for a long time, too busy trying to pay the rent and raise Teddy to have lasting relationships. These people were smart, interesting, accomplished. They all had kids in the school. Most of them lived in beautiful, unusual homes. Even Greta had a simple and lovely cottage on the lake. She'd had coffee with Greta in Lenox a few times and they'd shared their secrets with each other like expensive party favors.
Golding had a fabulous wine cellar. Elaborate meals were planned and cooked, a filet, perhaps, with roasted potatoes and asparagus, whatever vegetable happened to be in season, and after the meal, a little drunk, they would walk outside into the field, ankle-deep in mist, and you could hear the horses stamping the dirt and the distant train. The men would smoke cigars out in the field, while the women stood together with their arms linked to ward off the chill, and they would all look up at the sky, either splattered with stars or moonless and black, and each one would sigh with appreciation, knowing just how good they all had it. There was such openness there in the Berkshires, such
freedom,
and she would spread out her arms and let her head drop back and think:
This is it! This is life!
And then inside more drinking and sitting on the old furniture, antiques that creaked and complained whenever you moved, upholstered in weary velvet, or fabric sprawling with pheasants or horses or dogs, and it would occur to Claire how they were all just borrowersâof the furnitureâof the old beautiful housesâand of the moments, even, because she was certain that they had each come before, the husbands and wives, the unattached spinsterâthe divorcéeâeven the heady conversations about books and politics and art, and poetry, yes, that too had come before, lines of famous poetry exchanged like spoonfuls of rich desserts. Someone would begin reciting a poemâJoe, or Diane Fair-child, who'd gone to Wellesley, something like Milton,
fucking
Milton, and then someone else would snicker and laugh and recite another, Neruda perhaps, or often YeatsâYeats of course was a favorite among the womenâand it created a rhythm in the room, an appreciation of beauty, of the richness in life.
And it was on one such occasion, they were at
her
house this timeâher father's houseâand she had passed around hats, all different kinds of hats, and she was wearing an old Turkish hat, and it was all of a sudden very cold out, very damp, and they were out on the porch, all eight or ten of them, and they were all quietly drunk, had been drinking for hours, and the stars were enormous and the sky incredibly black, and Joe touched her on her back, he
touched
her on the small of her back, her most elegant mysterious place, and that was itâshe
knew.
The next morning he came to the barn. He pulled up in a little car, an Austin Healey. She'd been working all morning, her hands thick with plaster. She washed her hands and dried them on a towel, then went to the door.
“I thought you might be looking for this,” he said, holding up Teddy's backpack. “You might want to look inside it.”
“Why, did you?”
“I thought it was Willa's.” He shrugged, apologetically. “There's some very powerful stuff in there.”
“Really?” She opened the pack and dug around and discovered a Baggie of weed.
“It's not something they should be doing.”
“I know,” she said, but Teddy had been smoking pot for years. He went to great lengths to disguise it, spraying his room with Lysol. “It's better than drinking,” she offered.
He stood there with the chimes clanging.
“Do you want to come in?”
“You're working.”
“But you're a very nice distraction.” She held out her hand as if to a child. “Come see. Come see my
feminist
art.”
He glanced up at her sheepishly. “I feel sort of bad about that. It was stupid, wasn't it?”
“It wasn't stupid,” she heard herself lie. Even now, at her age, she could feel herself sliding into old habits from her youth, the way she'd been encouraged to behave around men she found attractive. Making it easier for them, not wanting to hurt their feelings, more than willing to compromise her own. “Maybe that's not the right word for it. It's a difficult subject and, as you can see, it's one that's had my attention for a while.” She gestured to the room, her work. “Anyway, it's complicated. Men and women. The way we define ourselves. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be complicated, but it is.” She looked at him. “I guess we can't seem to get our story straight.”
“It's certainly open to interpretation,” he said. “It all depends on how you see things, where you come from, your background, what your life experiences have been. It's impossible for everyone to agree, don't you think?”
“Maybe, but then everyone's justified in their thinking, and there's no right and wrong. Laws become arbitrary decisions. That doesn't work either. Then you have teams. You're either on one team or another, right or left, Red Sox or Yankeesâeven the judges on the Supreme Court. It becomes more about the teams and the players than the issues.”
“I hate politics, don't you?” He smiled at her. “But I happen to love baseball.”
He looked at her work. He walked around the sculptures in the way that people do, contemplatively tilting his head to one side then the other. “These are very good.” He looked at her. “You're very talented.”
“Thank you.”
He lingered over her sculpture called
Spanking Machine,
the inspiration of which had been stirred up years before, watching children on a playground.
“Still one of my favorite games,” he said.
She laughed as he pondered
Road Map,
a naked woman standing in a puddle of tar.
“She looks sad,” he said.
“I know.”
“Are you?”
“Sad?” She shrugged. “Sometimes. There's a sense of loss in people's faces that interests me. In their bodies. The way the shoulders roll forward, the spine, the heavy head. Gravity. The way you get pulled down over time.”
“These are really good. I like the way you think.”
“Do you want some coffee? I was just about to have some.”
“I would.” They walked outside. The trees shook off their leaves.
“That's some car. What is it?”
“A '57 Austin Healey. A bunch of us are in a club. We share vintage cars.”
“It's adorable.”
“A great car. A work of art.”
“What is it with men and cars?”
“They're like women, but they don't lie.” He smiled and held up his hands, as if to defend himself.
“Don't worry, I won't hit you. Not yet anyway.”
They went into the kitchen through the side door. He sat in her father's old Windsor chair and she put more wood in the woodstove. “It's impossible to heat this place,” she said. “The stove helps.”
“It's quite a house.”
It was still early, a windy day that gossiped of winter. The trees scratched against the glass. The sun roamed the wood table. Joe rubbed his hands together. “You look hungry,” she said. “Do you want to eat?” She poured him coffee.
His dark eyes caught the sunlight. He shook his head. “Would you mind very much if I kissed you?”
“What?”
“I've been thinking about it for a long time.” He held his hands out before her like a criminal caught in the act. “I just want to hold your face,” he said.
“But you're married.”
“We haven't had sex in years. Half the time we sleep in separate rooms.”
Now she was feeling sorry for him, which, she imagined, was exactly what he wanted. “It's important, sex. It's good for the soul.”
She nodded. She couldn't help agreeing with him. “But it's not fair to Candace.”
“Is it fair that she doesn't sleep with me?”
“Why doesn't she?”
He shrugged. “I don't know. Menopause.”
“That's not why.”
He looked at her. “It's not about the sex anyway. It's something else. We're,” he paused, trying to find the exact words, “out of synch. When I'm with her, it's like watching a movie without sound. You only get half of what's going on. The other half, the important half, is this huge mystery.”
“So you're not communicating.”
“We don't speak the same language.”
“Maybe you need a translator.”
“What, a shrink?” He scoffed. “We've been down that road before. I'll be sitting in the guy's office thinking: What the fuck is
his
problem.”
She smiled, she understood.