The Liar's Wife

Fiction

The Love of My Youth

The Stories of Mary Gordon

Pearl

Final Payments

The Company of Women

Men and Angels

Temporary Shelter

The Other Side

The Rest of Life

Spending

Nonfiction

Reading Jesus

Circling My Mother

Good Boys and Dead Girls

The Shadow Man

Seeing Through Places

Joan of Arc

A
YELLOW TRUCK WAS PARKED
across the street, in front of the Chelford-Johnsons'.

It looked all wrong.

It was a delivery truck, but if the Chelford-Johnsons were having something delivered, why wasn't the truck parked in the driveway?

The truck, parked where it was, made Jocelyn uneasy. She was alone in the house. She had just come in from the back garden, closing the curtains for the night. Until she saw the truck she had been happy.

It was early evening, August 7. She had been standing out on the lawn, holding her glass of wine, lifting it up so that the sun's last rays were trapped in it.

Summer evening, her favorite kind of weather.

Heat was a presence, a companion, but not, as in the daytime, an oppressor. And the heaviness was potent; it reminded you that you were a creature with a body, and sometimes it made the body's longing sharp for sex, food, simple touch, and sometimes it made the body feel at peace with itself. Sometimes a warm breeze skittered along the surface of the skin like a flame along pavement, a match dropped onto a thin, invisible stream of gasoline.

When she was younger, these summer evenings had everything to do with sex. She had felt herself desirable on evenings such as this. Her sense of her own desire and her own desirability made her feel the simultaneous heaviness and lightness that made her love this weather. When no one was looking, she would fall to the ground, crouch on the grass or roll in it, or sometimes she literally flapped her arms, expecting to take flight.

But that was over. She had the compulsion neither to drop down nor to fly up. Still she was happy. Very happy here, tonight.

“Jossie,” her mother would call out from the back porch when Jocelyn was standing here among the trees, wanting to fall or fly. “Come have some lemonade.”

She had loved her mother.

I couldn't sell this house because I loved my mother.

Her mother. Always when she thought of her mother she thought of her lovely hands, always cool and the beautifully shaped nails, polished with clear varnish, and the exposed half-moons that she, as a child, had traced with her small, shapeless fingers. Her hands had become her mother's, and she was grateful that, like her mother's, her hands had not grown gnarled or twisted or spotted as she aged. She thought of the cool feeling of her mother's hands on her forehead when she had a fever. And her mother sitting in her study, bent over her work. She made anatomical drawings to illustrate medical textbooks. As a child, Jocelyn had loved watching her create veins and arteries, then the larger projects: kidney, liver, lungs. Jocelyn couldn't draw “for beans,” as she often said, sometimes wondering what beans had to do with it, and who had originally been paid in beans.

Her mother had been dead two years. She had died in the house, her house, but not in her own bed; it was a hospital bed, metallic, mechanical, which had been brought in to replace the beautiful mahogany four-poster with the pineapple corner posts. But at least she had died among her own things. Her silver-backed hairbrushes, her scent bottles on a lace cloth on top of the Sheraton chest, below the oval mirror. The mirror in which her mother had seen herself a young bride, a young mother, then aging, and finally, old, near death. It would have been
sensible to sell the house when her mother died, but Jocelyn had not. Because she hadn't wanted to. Simply, she hadn't wanted to give it up. She didn't want to give up what she thought of as
her
trees: chestnut, oak, hickory, sugar maple. She didn't want them to belong to someone else.

So she had made up a kind of story. First to herself, and then she began saying it aloud. “We're keeping the house in New Canaan as a weekend house. A getaway from the city. Nantucket is just too far.” Her husband's family had bought a house on Nantucket in the thirties. Richard had inherited it.

“It's that damn ferry,” she would say, as if she needed to justify herself, though no one had accused her. “You wouldn't think of going there for a weekend, even a long weekend, even a very, very long weekend,” she would say, cocking her head as if to make a joke of her own position, which she knew to be extreme. “This way, we can just nip up here anytime for a little R & R. Just a nip,” she said, using, she knew, the alcoholic's diction of evasion. Just a nip.

Her next-door neighbor, seeing her at the house, had brought a small bunch of sweet peas. She'd been moved by her neighbor's kindness. Janet Wilkinson, who had lived next door for more than twenty years, and kept an eye out, always, for Jocelyn's mother. What was her work? Jocelyn tried to remember. Telecommunications. That was the kind of word that stopped the mind making pictures. Or at least her mind.

The sweet peas were a dark purple that seemed almost navy blue, almost not a proper color for a flower. Such a saturated darkness, and weren't flowers supposed to invoke brightness, not the dark? But they were lovely in their saturated darkness, and the graceful folding of their petals, leaning inwards, almost touching, tender on their light green, fragile stems.

Janet Wilkinson had brought her purple sweet peas in a plain glass bottle which might very well have once held medicine. But the shape was pleasing.

What did Janet Wilkinson make of Jocelyn's uneven habitation of the house? It almost shamed her, with its hint of wastefulness, of laxity.
The house was large. A large house in New Canaan, Connecticut. “Worth a fortune” is the phrase she knew would come first to people's minds.

“I love the scent of sweet peas,” Janet Wilkinson had said, putting her face (which was almost a perfect oval, tan now: she'd had two weeks in Martha's Vineyard) close to the elegant flowers. Jocelyn had been surprised. She hadn't thought of sweet peas as having a scent. And the scent was, in itself, surprising. Neither sweet nor sharp, subtle but direct, a kind of simple presence with a plain insistence on itself.

People didn't credit the sense of smell nearly enough. Jocelyn believed that firmly. For thirty-five years, she'd worked in a lab that was involved in the study of mosquitoes, and the life, the fate, the impact on the world of mosquitoes was inextricably connected with their extraordinarily well-developed sense of smell.

Standing on the back porch, Jocelyn could see Janet Wilkinson walking around in the half-light of her kitchen. Had Janet Wilkinson ever married? She had come to Phillips Road as a woman in late middle age. She could have married and divorced; somehow it was something that neither Jocelyn nor her mother had felt free to ask, and Janet had never spoken of it. Was Janet Wilkinson a lesbian? Or not very sexual? Or just unlucky in love? Not being very sexual was, Jocelyn had come to believe, a much more common, much more deeply kept secret in these post-Freudian, post–sexual liberation days. She had come to believe it only recently, when she'd experienced it herself.

She preferred to think that Janet loved women. She preferred thinking of it that way, she didn't like the word “lesbian,” with its swampy sound, although she liked lesbians, had loved some, though she hadn't gone so far as to make love to another woman. Not yet, she'd always said. Certainly the excitant of a loved, an admired woman, made the skin ripple in a way that was something like what one felt for a desired man. But only something like. Well, she would never know now. Although she'd seen surprising things among her cohort, she believed there would be no new surprises in her life. Not good surprises, anyway. It was, perhaps, another instance of her lack of courage.

Was it lack of courage that kept her from selling the house?

She had long ago come to terms with the idea that she was not a courageous person. A courageous person would not be made uneasy by a yellow truck parked on the street. But the truck had wrecked her peace; she could no longer keep herself from peeking from behind the curtains to see if the truck was still there.

It had not moved. In the dim light she could make out the writing on the truck's side.
FRITO
-
LAY
, it said. The words alarmed her. There was no reason for a Frito-Lay truck to be parked on Phillips Road in New Canaan, Connecticut. Dire thoughts raced through her brain. She began with the simplest. They were burglars. Or it could be much worse. They could be kidnappers; the Chelford-Johnsons were a young couple; they had two children, both, Jocelyn was sure, under ten. Or it could be even worse than that: perhaps they were terrorists, perhaps in the yellow body of the enormous truck there was an arsenal that would destroy the neighborhood, the town. She saw the street littered with arms and legs strewn on the pavement like leafy branches after a violent storm. She thought of calling Janet Wilkinson. But that would be absurd, it would be shaming. She was seventy-two years old, and at her age, one had to be careful of many things, not the least of which was appearing to be a scared old lady. A crazy old lady. A crackpot. A pain in the neck.