The Eliot Girls (24 page)

Ruth didn't answer the phone until the fifth ring. “Hello?” she said edgily.

“It's me. I'm sorry I didn't call sooner. My cell was dead.”

“Jesus!” she exclaimed in a piercing voice. “Where have you been? I've been sick with worry.”

“Sorry. I'm at Arabella Quincy's.”

Ruth breathed asthmatically into the receiver. “Hence the number on the phone.”

“I need you to come get me.”

Ruth was silent. “I can't,” she said at last. “I just put pasta on the stove. Call a taxi. I'll pay when you get here.”

Audrey whispered urgently into the receiver. “I can't call a taxi! They'll think I'm hinting for a ride.”

Again, Audrey was met with silence. “Mother?”

“Fine,” Ruth said. “But listen. I am
not
coming up to the door to get you. I will be there at seven sharp. Come out or you're in deep shit. I mean it, if you get distracted and forget the time, and—”

“I'll be there.”

Audrey was about to hang up when she saw Henry standing in the hallway. She looked at him inquiringly, and he held his hand up, as if in apology, before returning to the living room as if nothing had happened.

 

WHEN THEY GOT OFF
the phone, Ruth poured the pasta water into the sink with an angry whoosh and paced the kitchen biting her nails. She had just arrived home from the fiasco at the motel. The traffic had been terrible, and her nerves were rattled. She had never had such an unsatisfactory meeting with Henry. All the way home, she had fretted about its consequences. She had tried to say goodbye nicely, so that they wouldn't end on such a bad note, but she'd been unable to re-engage him. After their parting kiss—a stodgy, dry affair—she had tried to get him to commit to meeting again, but he had been uncertain about his schedule.

She couldn't show up at his house, not now. Even with a legitimate reason, it was unthinkable. Her first move was to call Richard, but the secretary told her that he was expected to be in surgery for another hour. For several minutes, she sat on the stainless steel stool by the phone and looked at the notepad where she had scribbled the address of the house, barely legibly, a gesture intended as a comforting show of normalcy. She already knew, and struggled not to know, exactly where Henry lived.

The inexorable fluctuation: although a part of her craved information about him, the better, and so far more successful, part of her clung to her limited knowledge. Ignorance was her ally. It was the only way she could preserve her dwindling dignity. One bleak evening over the Christmas break, she had sat in her car in the descending darkness, preparing to drive to Henry's house and sit outside for as long as it took for her to catch a glimpse of Clayton. But she had pulled herself back from that precipice. Yes, there might have been short-term gratification in seeing a fat, dowdy-haired Clayton panting over a snow shovel, or the couple in the tense posture of argument through the living room window, but in the end, the negative consequences of this information would prove far more crushing than any pleasure she would experience. The only way for her to feel she knew Henry, beyond the facts and distractions, beyond the immaterial matters of public life, was to know very little.

Twenty minutes later, she was sitting outside Clayton's house, the heat roaring in her car, cursing Audrey for not coming out at the appointed time. She had been sitting in the car for nearly ten minutes, eyes searching for some sign of exit. In the front door of the house was an octagonal window encircled by an evergreen and pine cone wreath, and she strained to see past it, searching for some interplay of light and shadow, the suggestion of heads moving inside. She was wondering how, without being rude, she could call the house from her cellphone and request that Audrey come out—there was, of course, no way of doing this without being rude, and equally odious was the prospect of honking—when the front door swung open, and a woman waved her inside.

“Fuck, oh fuck. Fuck you, Audrey,” she muttered to herself, opening the car door. As she kicked excess snow off her winter boots, she glanced down at her legs and was visited by horror at the realization that she had not bothered to change out of her red plaid pyjama bottoms.

They waved to her from the door, the image of the perfect family: in the centre, the woman who must be Clayton, to her right, Arabella, to her left, Audrey, and in back of them, Henry, his presence somehow encircling them, the dignified patriarch sheltering his flock. Clayton's arm was around Audrey's shoulder.

“Hello!” Clayton cried. She took Ruth's cold hands into a warm, manly grip. “You have to come in for a minute.”

The group parted to grant Ruth entry.

“Oh, I can't stay,” Ruth said. “I have a roast on for dinner.”

“Five minutes won't burn a roast,” Clayton replied, pulling Ruth indoors.

“I apologize for the way I look,” Ruth said, as Clayton helped her out of her coat, which was not her coat at all but Richard's red hooded dog-walking coat. After trying unsuccessfully to stuff the mammoth bulk of it into the small closet, Clayton gave up and draped it on the banister, then shepherded everyone into the living room. She directed Ruth to an oversized armchair, just one in a set of furniture that seemed designed to make them feel like miniature versions of themselves. Henry stationed himself in the matching chair and Clayton perched on its arm while Audrey and Arabella sank into the couch. An arrangement of raw vegetables and green dip sat in the middle of the coffee table, and Clayton gestured for Ruth to help herself, smiling in uneasy acknowledgment of how little they had to say.

At last, Clayton said, “So we were just talking about the girls' big math test next week.”

“Ah, yes. The math test,” Ruth replied, trying to sound as though she cared.

“Whit heard that Mr. Marostica may be leaving for jury duty,” said Arabella. “Have you heard anything about that, Ms. Brindle?”

“Not a word. Sorry to disappoint you, Arabella.”

“But would you tell us if you knew? Like, would that be a breach of some teachers' etiquette?”

Ruth let out a light laugh. The room was too warm—the undersides of her breasts were already blooming with sweat—amplifying her feeling of suffocation. She kept her eyes studiously trained on the girls across the room. If she tried hard, she could blur her peripheral vision enough to block out Henry and Clayton almost entirely.

“I think the dude is masochistic enough to plant the rumour about jury duty just so that no one studies and we all fail,” Arabella said.

“I doubt that,” replied Clayton.

Ruth tried to calculate how long minimal civility required them to stay. She looked at Audrey, sitting forward at an awkward angle with her arms crossed, and had the impression that Audrey wanted to leave as much as she did. She had no idea that Audrey and Arabella were even friends. Audrey had never mentioned Arabella, and every time Ruth had seen Audrey around Eliot, she was alone. But then, there was so little she knew about Audrey's life lately. She had always thought that Eliot would bring Audrey and her closer together, but Audrey's blatant unhappiness filled her with such a sense of failing that her latest tactic had been to ignore it.

“Well, extra studying never did anyone any harm,” Clayton said.

Ruth turned to Henry with a false smile, trying to transmit her displeasure, but he appeared not to notice. When he had told her that first time in her bedroom that she required no adjustments, she had taken it to mean that Clayton required many. Why had he misled her so? She found it difficult to get beyond her own unease, her frenetically magnifying disbelief, her flustered sense of injustice, and actually
see
Clayton. But when Clayton had stood, she had taken in the full view in an ascending, dissonant scale of fury. The enviable architecture of her face, the man's Rolex watch dangling from her thin wrist, the cellist's erect posture: the effect was of something more penumbral than ordinary prettiness. It was a face that would not grow boring, that would reveal itself slowly, year by year. Ruth stared at her lap. If she wasn't better-looking than Henry's wife, then what was she?

She was so possessed by indignation that it took her a minute to put something else together, something she was surprised she hadn't caught sooner: the shirt Clayton was wearing. Henry's shirt. She knew it from the spot of blue ink on the pocket. That spot of ink for which she claimed credit. Henry had been in her classroom, wrestling her into submission over her desk, and when he had pulled away she had noticed the ink, spreading like a spot of blood. That afternoon had been one of their best. There had been a rough energy about him that made her feel exhilaratingly weak. They had hardly said a word to each other, and she had never felt more sure of her hold on him.

Clayton reached forward to load a piece of red pepper with dip, then with a little laugh delivered it into Henry's waiting mouth.

Looking away in disgust, Ruth found Audrey watching her. She tried to read what she saw in her daughter's face, but lately she couldn't interpret even the most basic of Audrey's expressions. She was surely just being paranoid. There was no suspicion there, no alarming acuity.

“Audrey, we have to go,” Ruth said, standing.

“Oh,” said Clayton. “Can't I convince you to have a cup of tea?”

“Thanks, but no.” Ruth took a dirty Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose. Out in the hallway, she had a clear view through the large kitchen window into the snowy garden, which was lit with the bluish glow of small lanterns placed around its perimeter. She pulled on her coat and opened the front door. In her haste to get outside, she nearly tripped on an enormous stone urn filled with levels and varieties of evergreens, slim cranberry-coloured branches, dried pomegranates and rosehips, and in the middle of this pretty jumble, a tiny rustic birdhouse. Yes, in the contest between them, Clayton won, hands down.

“It was nice to meet you,” Clayton called as Audrey hurried past her, holding her coat over her arm.

Ruth was already closing the car door, starting the engine.

 

“CAN I ASK YOU
something?” Ruth said.

She and Audrey had been silent in the car through blocks of traffic. Ruth had needed that long to regulate her breathing. None of her forethought had prepared her for the rage she would feel at the sight of Henry and Clayton. As they had pulled away from the house, she had feared what Audrey might say about what had passed inside, but luckily Audrey was no more open to conversation than she was. She had withdrawn as far as she could into the corner and was gazing moodily out the window.

“Why did you never tell me that you sit beside Seeta Prasad?” Ruth asked.

“Why would I tell you?”

“With everything that's gone on, I would have expected it to come up.”

“I got stuck with her on the first day of school. It's not like she was my first choice.”

In the windshield, Ruth could almost make out Audrey's distorted reflection, its dubious accompaniment to her removed voice. “So do you like Seeta?” she asked.

“Of course not!”

“Do you know who's been bothering her?”

Audrey paused. “I have no idea.”

“What were you doing at Arabella's house anyway?” Ruth said. “I didn't know you were friends.”

“We're not. Not really.”

At a red light, Ruth watched as a woman pushing a red stroller began her journey across the intersection, stopping every two steps to peer at the baby inside. Ruth didn't think she had ever looked that bloated and haggard, but her unreasonable nostalgia for that period of her life distorted everything. Having a young child had been so preoccupying, so consuming. Even when she had felt most frustrated and trapped, there was fulfillment, too, in being so required, in being sapped by a child's demands, that devoted dependence. She thought of a night several months after Audrey's birth when she had gone out alone to meet a friend for dinner on Queen Street. The chaos of the street had dazzled her, the hurrying pedestrians, the speeding cars, the conversations circling like scrounging birds. She felt like a tourist who'd been transported, blindfolded, to a foreign city, then returned her sight and let loose without a guide. How insignificant she was inside all that motion. How naked she felt without her baby. For so long, she had been either pregnant or accompanied by the child; she'd forgotten how to be a solitary woman. Her empty hands, especially, undermined her composure—what to do with them? Forty, then, had seemed so far away, yet she had already been envious of the years that lay ahead for Audrey. To have her own child, she had learned, was not to embrace, finally, her own adulthood, but to long more achingly for childhood.

Audrey was twirling a lock of hair around her index finger. It occurred to Ruth that there would never be a better opportunity to ask her about Eliot. For weeks, she had wanted an update but had been afraid to disturb the tenuous peace. What did Audrey think about her own circumstances? How on earth had she ended up at Arabella's house? Maybe in the dark, travelling sanctuary of the car, neither here nor there, they could be visited by their old candour. But she couldn't get a proper handle on the words. She was too rattled, still, by the hazardous pleasantries of Clayton's living room, by the sight of Henry's fingers on the small of his wife's back.

She sensed Audrey's eyes searching her face. “Who do you think I look like?” Audrey asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Do I look like you or Dad?”

“I don't know. Not like your father.”

“Not like you.”

“No, I suppose not. But sort of.”

“Nobody thinks I look like you,” Audrey said.

“Well, why should you want to?”

Audrey looked out the window again. “Because everyone thinks you're pretty.”