The Way Back to Happiness (14 page)

“I bet the bride was going to do her hair up in a beehive,” Stuart said over the music. “Wouldn’t that have been cool?”

They grabbed iced tea out of the fridge and Alabama unearthed a package of cigarettes Derek had left behind. She lit one and the two of them hopped around dancing and laughing until Rhoda in her dress began to seem like a guest at the party. Stuart even took one of the long gossamer sleeves in his hands and did a spin into her.

Alabama laughed, but the sound died when Stuart stopped, his face so pale it was almost green. “Is it the smoke?” she asked.

He shook his head as his eyes remained fixed over her shoulder. “Hello, Ms. Putterman.”

Laughter bubbled to her lips. He was pulling her leg. Then she turned.

Her aunt stood next to Derek, gaping at the dress. Her face was nearly as pale as Stuart’s. “What do you think you’re doing! Where did you find that dress?”

“It was in the attic,” Alabama said, as reasonably as she could manage.

“I never said you could go up there.”

“You never said I couldn’t.”

“Is that a wedding dress?” Derek asked.

“Yes.” The word snapped out of Bev in answer to Derek’s question, but she was staring daggers at Alabama.

“Did you sew it, Ms. Putterman?” Stuart asked feebly. “It’s really cool. I was telling Alabama that it’s—”

Bev cut him off. “I’m disappointed in you, Stuart Looney. Snooping?
Smoking?
You know how bad that is for you. It’s a disgusting, filthy, lowlife habit.”

Derek scowled at her. “Thanks.”

“Of course it’s different for adults,” Bev said.

“What age does it become not filthy and disgusting?” Derek asked. “Sixteen? Eighteen? Twenty-one?”

For once, Alabama wanted to high-five Derek, but from the deepening color of Bev’s face, she could tell his questions were making everything worse.

“Stuart had nothing to do with it,” Alabama explained. “He thinks smoking’s disgusting, too.”

“It just makes me sort of vomit,” he piped up quickly.

“I’m going to have to call your parents,” Bev said.

“I understand.” Stuart was backing toward the door. “In fact, I’ll go tell them myself right now. I’m sorry to have disappointed you, Ms. Putterman.”

He turned and fled—a rat leaving a sinking ship. Alabama wished she could escape with him. When the door closed behind Stuart, Bev laid into her again.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!”

Even Derek flinched. “Jesus Pete, Bev, it was one lousy cigarette. They said they were sorry.”

“
They
didn’t. Stuart did. Alabama’s not sorry.”

“Yes I am.” Suddenly, frustration and tension got the best of her. “Sorry for everything. Sorry for being stuck here. Sorry for being alive!”

Bev started crying.

“Oh Christ.” Derek sighed. “I should go.”

“No, don’t,” Alabama said. “I’ll go to my room.” She stomped off, but she could still hear Derek trying to get away.

“I really couldn’t stay anyway,” he told Bev. “I’ve got that job in Waxahachie. I won’t be around much for the next couple of weeks.”

A minute later, his truck’s engine revved and then she heard the tires peeling off down the street.

She kept to her room. Even with her headphones on, she could hear Bev stomping around the house, overhead in the attic, and then back down in the kitchen. Then came the sounds of dinner being made, resentfully. Cabinets and drawers smacked shut . . . pots clashed against burners . . . silverware clattered on Formica.

She couldn’t concentrate on
Great Expectations,
which she was almost done with, way ahead of the class. Tension clouded her thoughts. What she wouldn’t have given to be able to beam herself out of this house, like they did on
Star Trek
. Just transport herself back in time, to last year.

What had she been up to? Beginning eighth grade. Not in a new school, so there was less stress than usual. And her mom had started her job at the department store, and was going out with a musician—a saxophone player named Charlie. Whenever he stayed the night after a gig, the case of his baritone saxophone had taken up half their living room. But in December he’d up and gone to Chicago and hadn’t come back. Her mom had wanted to move, too, but then she’d called Charlie’s place one night and a woman had answered. That had made for a rough Christmas. And things had limped along afterward, until late in the spring, when her mother was fired from the store. And then she’d announced that Gladdie had offered to send Alabama to camp....

Alabama buried her head in her pillow. Even fantasy didn’t provide a good escape. Teleporting back would just mean that she would have to live through it all over again.

Hiding from her aunt wasn’t doing any good, either. Maybe if she went out and faced her, Bev would vent all her anger and get it over with.

But when she entered the kitchen, slipping into a chair at the table as quietly as possible, her aunt seemed to be doubling down in her effort to keep a lid on her emotions. Usually during dinner preparations Peter Jennings would read them the news, or Bev would play an album from her folk rock collection and hum along. Not tonight. Now the silence was broken only by the angry squidge of her Naturalizers against linoleum.

“Do you want me to put on a record?” Alabama asked, as a peace offering. “
Best of Bread
? Jim Croce?” Bev often cleaned house to Croce, boogying around to “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”

“No.” Bev plopped a plate in front of Alabama. Tuna croquettes, string beans with pimentos, a wedge of lettuce, and a roll. Even raging mad, her aunt could produce a dinner that looked like an ad in
Family Circle
.

They ate in rigid silence, the kind of silence where crunching a lettuce leaf sounded like an ax chopping wood.

Ten minutes of it was all Alabama could endure. “It was one little cigarette.”

Irritation flared in Bev’s eyes. “It wasn’t the smoking.”

“Then what?”

“You went through my things.”

“We were just up in the attic, loafing around. We thought it was a cool dress. Did you make it?”

“Yes.” The word came out a staccato.

“Whose is it?”

“It’s in my house, obviously, so it belongs to me.”

“Oh—so it’s just your house now.” Alabama grunted a sarcastic laugh. “So much for making myself at home.”

Bev tossed her napkin onto the table. “You’ve never opened up to me or confided in me. You’ve barely been civil—and that’s fine. But excuse me if, in return, I don’t feel like divulging matters that are none of your concern.”

She stood and marched out of the room. For the first time in their short history of housekeeping, Bev was the one who went into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

B
ev lay in bed, sleepless, eyes closed. Just when she thought she’d finally regained control of her emotions, she’d remember walking in the door and seeing that beautiful dress, and Alabama and Stuart goofing around with it. And her anger would surge all over again.

They had no right to that little bit of her past, that scrap of personal history she kept to herself and held sacred. The reminder of that last moment of innocence in her life. Maybe they’d found the pictures, too. She should probably bring all those things in the attic back down. She could get a lock for the closet door. Or better yet, rent one of those storage lockers.

She let out a breath. Renting storage for old memories was probably the first step on the road to Cuckooland.

Seeing that dress on Rhoda Morgenstern had thrown her off balance. How long had it been since she had taken it out and looked at it? In some recess of her mind, she’d been patting herself on the back for her restraint. Not obsessing over the old days anymore felt like a sign that she was progressing. Of course she didn’t want to forget completely. But she didn’t want to go back to the time when the mere touch of the silk of that dress could send her into a weeklong funk.

But it was always worse when other people violated her privacy. Like Diana had done the day Tom had come to visit. That horrible date that was scratched into her psyche forever: May 1, 1970. Friday afternoon. The day everything went kerblooey.

That afternoon, during the bus ride home from the school where she was student teaching, she’d felt woozy and tired. She’d distracted herself by thinking about her dress lying nearly finished in the bottom drawer of her bureau. She’d been working on it forever—she’d bought the pattern while she was in college, and squirreled materials away as she found them. Finally, this spring, she’d broken down and made it—all except the finishing touches. This was going to be her masterpiece. An heirloom.

The only thing that made her slightly nervous was the fact that Tom hadn’t proposed yet. Was putting a wedding dress together before there was an engagement ring jinxing her hopes?

She’d never fretted about these things before. All during college, where she and Tom had met, they’d taken it slow. No pressure. Bev had assumed things would happen in due time. And of course Tom was a gentleman—a real gentleman—and she appreciated that trait in him. She did. And yet, the yearning they felt when they were together sometimes felt hopelessly old-fashioned, when half the other students around them were going at it like rabbits.

Then again, the other girls she saw didn’t seem any happier than she was. Giving themselves so freely seemed to go hand in hand with heartbreak.

Besides, in college Bev had focused on her own goals. Her degree. Teaching. And she never worried about Tom, or was jealous of other girls. If anything, she was jealous of his family. He had bucked his father, once a colonel and now the head of the family’s lumber business, by going to a regular college instead of a military school. Then he’d majored in liberal arts instead of engineering, when engineering was his father’s choice. Tom prided himself on being a black sheep, marching to his own drummer, yet he never seemed to be able to shake the fact that he was marching along in the shadow of his family’s disappointment. Parental pressure lived in his head like an ever-present, messy roommate.

As school had drawn to a close and it came time to find a job, Tom was at sea, and the I-told-you-so’s from his parents wounded him. Bev had tried to explain that starting out could be the hardest moment of any career. She suggested he apply for teacher training, too. The long months after graduation he’d flailed, finally taking a job at the family business.

In letters and phone conversations, he’d seemed increasingly depressed. They so rarely got together that he might have been on the moon, not a four-hour drive away. Then, in February, he’d stunned her by calling her to announce that he’d joined the army. He was on the way to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for basic training, and he wanted to stop in Dallas to see her.

The news had thrown her for a loop. The idea of gentle, bookish Tom being sent off to a jungle filled her with horror. Several boys from her high school class had become casualties of the war. And Tom was such a sweet, goofy soul. He loved Edmund Spenser and Chaucer, Simon & Garfunkel, and romantic movies. His idea of fun was trying to carry on a conversation in Old English. He was obsessive, yet absentminded. In school, he would burn the midnight oil to finish a reading assignment, only to realize the next day that he’d picked the wrong book off his shelf. He was always forgetting to bring pen and paper to class.

And now . . .
the army?
How could this end well? She imagined him going out on patrol and forgetting his rifle. Setting off to face wily guerillas armed only with a head full of
The Faerie Queene.

After Tom arrived in Dallas, she wasn’t surprised or shocked when he asked her to stay the night with him. It didn’t cross her mind to refuse. Here he was, about to risk making the ultimate sacrifice for his country. How could she begrudge him physical closeness and love before he left her? There was a chance she would never see him again.

He rented a hotel room near Love Field airport, and there they’d spent a night dispensing with her virginity. Tom seemed to enjoy it. Bev had been mortified, not to mention confused. How could something accompanied in movies by stirring string orchestral arrangements and fireworks turn out to be so painful and sticky?

But then there was Tom, cuddling her, clinging (she couldn’t quite banish the sticky nature of it all from her thoughts, even in the good moments). Every time she closed her eyes, their relationship would unspool in her mind, from the first moment she’d spotted him in the student center, looking sweet and gangly like Jimmy Stewart, right through to the present and even forward, to an unimaginable tragic end. The war that awaited him. The fear that their time together might be ticking down to final minutes panicked her, and she would tilt toward him again, offering herself.

In the early morning, their eyes gritty from lack of sleep, Tom had taken her home, bid her good-bye in Old English, and driven off down the street. That morning, he’d mentioned writing to her, loving her, but not marriage. But that was okay. Later, in his letters from camp, he revealed that he kept her picture by his bed and wrote often, albeit vaguely, about their future.

A wedding would come, she was sure. Tom was an honorable boy—an honorable man—and their relationship had lasted three years. Marriage was the next logical step. So she’d worked on the wedding dress and waited.

In the past week, however, setting a date had come to seem imperative. She’d often felt dizzy, feverish, and she’d missed a period. After basic training, Tom had gone directly to his parents’ house, but he’d promised to spend time with her before returning to Fort Sill for officer training.

The day of his scheduled visit was a long one—the Friday after a long week teaching during the day and trying to get the house in spic-and-span order at night—and she felt tired and weak.

Even more than seeing Tom, she wanted to curl up and go to bed. She headed straight to her room and got out the dress to add a few more beads. Her vision seemed unfocused, however, and she had to put her needle and the dress aside.
I’m just keyed up,
she assured herself. Tonight, Tom would be here, staying with her family for the first time ever. Aside from the time she’d spent a long—very long—weekend with his family, they’d always met on neutral ground. So his insistence that he wanted to meet her family and stay the weekend was a huge step.

There was still so much to do. She needed to give the kitchen and bathrooms another pass before he got here. But she couldn’t seem to pull herself off the bed.

The scratch of Diana’s stereo came through the wall separating their rooms—The Beatles singing “Across the Universe,” which might have been a good song but was really beginning to grate on her nerves. Bev flopped back against the chenille bedspread. Diana overplayed records until the grooves were etched on the brains of everyone in the house.

The volume increased suddenly and Bev heard Diana’s Dr. Scholl’s clopping toward her down the hallway. Without knocking, her sister poked her head into her bedroom.

“You look shitty,” Diana said.

The vulgarity made Bev sit up. “I hope you’re not going to use language like that while Tom’s here.”

Diana leaned a bony, shorts-clad hip against the door frame and laughed. “Right—wouldn’t want to shock him. No one cusses in the army.” As always, she looked great, even with her hair just parted in the center and hanging lank.
Why couldn’t I have inherited red hair instead of dishwater blond?
Diana’s long, slim legs were tanned, too, and it was only April. How had she managed that?

Of course, Diana worked nights at a restaurant, so she was free to laze about in a lounge chair in the backyard during the day, soaking in sun. It was hard to look at that tanned, lithe body without feeling a pang of envy. Especially when she felt like a sore, puffy blob. Bev shivered, fighting back another wave of exhaustion.

“What’s Tom like?” Diana asked.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Well, if we’re going to be entertaining him this weekend . . .”

“
We?
Aren’t you going to be busy, as usual?”

“Nope—I quit my job. The boss was a groper.” Diana grinned. “I was thinking I need to look for something better anyway. And maybe Mama will stake me to some dance classes this summer.”

“Dance classes?” Was she twelve?

“Well, why not? You went to college.”

Bev sputtered. Where to begin? And now there would be this family drama playing out during the weekend, with Tom here.

Diana inched farther into the room.

“So is he all starch and snap, your guy? Gets a woody during John Wayne movies?”

“You are revolting. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Whose fault is that? You’ve been dating the guy forever and kept him hidden from us the whole time. Like you think he’s too good for us.”

She did think that. He was.

Why
had she thought it would be a good idea for Tom to spend time with her family?

Diana’s eyes focused on the bed. “What’s this?” Coming closer, she grabbed the dress before Bev could snatch it away. Her pointy jaw went slack. “Has Tom popped the question already?”

Her sister was the last person in the universe she wanted to confide in. “It’s just something I’ve been working on.”

“It is not. It’s a wedding dress.” Diana lifted up the dress and held it at arm’s length for inspection. “Hello, 1966! How we’ve missed you.”

“Put it down,” Bev said.

Her sister did, dropping it into a small heap on the coverlet. “Wow, what a vision you’re going to be, Bevvie. I’ll bet on your big day you’ll have as much sex appeal as Pat Nixon. Maybe more, even, if Dora at the Chat-n-Curl does a really bang-up job with your perm and set. Snappy Tom won’t be able to keep his hands off you on the wedding night.”

She was so irritating. Like the persistent
buzz buzz buzz
of a gnat in her ear. Bev wanted to slap her away.

“That’ll be a gruesome crash course in the birds and bees,” Diana drawled.

In this one key area of life—sex—Diana had always been years ahead of Bev. Bev had resented it, especially since Diana’s staying out past curfew, or sneaking out and not coming back till morning, had caused so much friction during their high school years. She’d run with a bad crowd—and the boys she’d picked up! Every fuzzy-wuzzy scuzzball who’d come down the pike. Diana’s teachers, the principal, their pastor, and their old family doctor had all predicted a dire end for a girl who didn’t take school seriously, drank and smoked, and was boy-crazy so young.

Yet somehow, Diana had managed to graduate from high school—heaven only knows by what miracle—and worked steadily, even though she changed waitressing jobs so often Bev often had a hard time remembering what restaurant to avoid. All these years of screwing up, and somehow Diana always landed on her feet. True, her life wasn’t anything to crow about, but she hadn’t crashed and burned as predicted. Booze, drugs, late nights, bad boys—nothing seemed to affect her.

And yet, after one measly night at a hotel with the boy who was practically her fiancé, Bev was the one who was
in trouble.
Life was so unfair.

“Marriage is a trap invented by barbarians,” Diana said. “But I guess it will be fine for you and your soldier. These G.I. Joe types always want a wifey and a brood of kids, don’t they?”

The idea of Tom as a G.I. Joe type was almost too laughable, but the crack about the brood of kids hit the epicenter of her frayed nerves. “You don’t know Tom.”

Diana lifted her brows. “So . . . he
doesn’t
want to marry you? What’s the dress for, then? You’re stampeding him to the altar?”

Bev growled in frustration. “I’m not doing anything!” She collapsed against her pillows. “I’m trying to take a nap.”

Diana stepped closer, eyes narrowed. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I think I might be getting sick.”

“Do you want some water or something?”

Bev nodded and Diana darted out. A minute later she came back, a glass of water in her shaky hand. Bev took a sip, but swallowing required effort.

“What am I going to do?” The plaintive question crossed Bev’s lips before she could think. Obviously, Diana was the last person to ask for practical advice.

But Diana shocked her by coming up with a reasonable idea. “I could call Dr. Gary.”

Dr. Gary. The man who had been called since they were babies, who kept lollipops in his medical bag for rewards after shots. She couldn’t bear the thought of having to confess her condition to him.