“I just didn’t think you were . . . at that point,” Helen said delicately. She sipped her coffee and shook her head at the cake I offered her. I set it down on the table in front of her.
Kate stopped her chair in front of the fire. She said something, but I couldn’t understand her when her face was backlit. I turned on the lamp and she spoke again. “He knows what I want,” she said slowly. “And I know what he wants. And we aren’t making any progress.” She paused after each statement, looking back and forth at Helen and at Lisa, and let me repeat it. “There are things I can’t count on him for.”
Lisa took a bite of cake and chewed, staring down at her plate. “Are
you sure you’re not doing something really impulsive just to show Evan you aren’t paralyzed?”
Kate laughed. Lisa blushed. “Emotionally paralyzed,” she corrected herself, smiling thinly. “You know what I’m saying. It’s such a big thing to ditch a marriage.”
“Why are you saying this to
me
?” Kate asked. Her eyebrows were knit, her head tilted incredulously.
“ ‘Why are you saying this to me?’ ” I repeated. It came out sounding flat and odd, as though I were reading from a cue card. I shot her a look of apology, but she didn’t notice. Lisa glared into the fire. Helen picked up her plate, took a miniscule bite of cake, and set it back down. I wished I could have crossed Kate’s arms for her; she looked as if that was what she would have liked to do right then. Pointlessly, I crossed my own.
“Chambers Street is one of my favorite streets in Madison,” Jill announced.
AFTER JILL AND HELEN
left, I got Kate to bed and left her with Lisa while I did the dishes. When I left them Lisa was sitting in a chair next to the bed with her stockinged feet up on the mattress, Kate’s face turned toward her. Around eleven Lisa came back out and got her cape from the back of the chair where she’d left it. She stood there for a second in the doorway to the kitchen, hefting the leather lightly with one hand, as though she were testing its weight, and then she said, “So how do you like this new house?”
I turned around and faced her, drying my hands on a towel. “It’s very cozy,” I said. “And it’ll be beautiful. She’s really going to make it over.”
Lisa nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t act as enthusiastically as I could have,” she began.
“You don’t have to apologize to me.”
“I know. I’ve been hoping she and Evan could work this out, though, and this just feels like the ax falling.”
“Have you said that to Evan?” I asked.
She lifted her hands and dropped them to the tabletop. “Yeah,” she admitted. “I’m not making excuses for him. But I’ve seen this Cynthia woman. She’s just a replacement.”
“Obviously.”
“No, I mean she’s very much like Kate.”
“But that’s worse!” I glanced toward the back of the house and lowered my voice. “Kate’s not exactly
gone
. He’s trying to replace her and she’s still here. You know, when I think that we used to sit around here and have a really good time together—and we
did
; they were
fun
—and he was saying he was going to the store or something and really going off . . . it just, it humiliates me that I believed him. I know it’s dumb; it wasn’t my marriage.” It was a huge relief to say this. Maybe I had had too much wine, but it had always bothered me, to be so close to them, in proximity, anyway, and to have misunderstood or missed the biggest undercurrents. It was humiliating to have been so clueless, especially when I’d thought I was picking up on everything.
Lisa was watching me, expressionless. “You didn’t know them years ago,” she said, as if that explained it all. “For a while I was living with this professor and the four of us were together all the time. We went on vacations; we rented beach houses. I really thought all of us could have bought a house and lived together till we got old and feeble, that’s how close we were.”
I didn’t see the point. “So what happened?”
“The guy and I broke up, Kate got sick . . .” She stood up and put her poncho on. “There’s no moral or anything. I miss it, is all. I want her to be happy and if a new house does it, fine.” She paused, chewing her lower lip. “I’ve known her for almost twenty years. I love her more than my own family. But I worry about how fast she’s moving. She doesn’t like waiting for people to catch up, you know? It’s not like I don’t understand why. Evan has a hard time with change in general, but especially with the ALS. It took him forever just to accept what was happening to her, and she didn’t have the luxury of kidding herself like he did. He was way behind the acceptance curve, you know? Talking about orthopedic shoes when she was trying to write a will. I don’t think she’s ever forgotten having to prop him up.”
She rubbed her eyes and sighed, leaning back against the wall. “You really can’t imagine how strange those first several months were, especially. Your default mode when your best friend tells you she’s trembling all the time is that it’s nothing. I said it would be nothing so
many times I felt guilty when it was
some
thing, like I deceived her. And it moved really fast. It wasn’t like these last few months. We kept trying to do things, you know—plan to walk downtown, try to handle the stairs at Le Champignon. We just didn’t get it; we didn’t get that this stuff was over and done with. She had to keep telling us it was.”
LIAM CALLED ONE MORE
time, later that week. I was at home, flipping through a magazine. I was stretched out on my stomach on the couch, the phone on the floor next to me. I remember touching the receiver, the vibration ringing through my hand. When his voice came on the answering machine I felt a charge go right through me, a flash of heat range over my skin. Two calls in one week. Maybe he really did have something to say. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to end everything.
“Hi, Bec,” he said to the machine. “It’s been a while. I thought we could catch up. Just to talk. Nothing, um . . . nothing else.”
There was a long pause, while I listened to the staticky answering-machine tape running in the living room. My hand was still on the phone. I thought, He is right there.
“Coffee, maybe,” he continued. “Or lunch, if you want. It seems really odd not to be talking to you these days, that’s all.”
I almost picked up the phone. What could coffee hurt? I started to pick up the receiver and it made a loud clicking noise over the machine. But then I put it back.
Liam sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re right, I know. Don’t pick up.”
W
E WERE GOING TO
have the windows, doorways, and shower widened in the new house. Kate also made plans to tear down a kitchen wall and add ramps to the front door and off the back porch. I had to learn a whole new set of terms when talking to the architect. She gave me a book to read so I would understand her when she said words like “load-bearing.” Our conversation was filled with references to treatments and fabrics and weird objects:
swags, sconces, andirons
.
After a while I would have simply closed my eyes and pointed, and if I ended up with celadon instead of sage, I probably wouldn’t even know. I blamed my upbringing. My own mother’s decorating had consisted of replacing the carpet each time I made the final, irreparable spill and sticking with wire-haired dogs that didn’t shed. But Kate could file away every visual permutation, recalling each gradation of flame into scarlet, navy into indigo. (The names of the various hues turned out to have oddly political leanings: Many of the reds, for instance, referred obliquely or directly to Russia or China. I hoped against hope to encounter a true Commie Red.)
I had never had the urge to paint a room in my life until one day I saw a gallon of saffron and went for it, and now my bedroom walls glowed cozily. Kate gave me one of her copper pans, a little shallow one for omelets, and I kept it in my room, where it reflected the burnish of the saffron paint, and where Jill knew it was off-limits.
We drove over to the new place about once a week, watching as the workers set the ramps in place and reinforced them, installed the mechanical doors, and tore up the carpet of the front room, uncovering a
honey-colored maple floor. (“I knew it,” said Kate.) The two bedrooms at the back of the house were now a sunny yellow and a robin’s egg blue. The kitchen, though it wouldn’t fit an island, had vast expanses of counter space and a skylight. I tried not to add up the bills as I wrote checks for them, but the whole project was astronomical. The numbers, in fact, no longer meant anything to me. I found myself making very blasé statements about “what quality costs.” It was enough to let me forget that my own money managing had its drawbacks—last month I had bought a new leather jacket and then bounced a check for ramen noodles and frozen corn.
But I was enjoying myself, and as the days passed I didn’t even notice Thanksgiving was on its way until my mother called. I hadn’t planned on going home this year. Thanksgiving never changed at my house and I had offered to be with Kate that day. My mother wasn’t pleased.
“If you say,” she began, “as I have a creeping sense you just might, that this woman you work for needs you on a holiday, then I am assuming the next thing I hear will be the astronomical sum she’ll pay you.”
I’d evoked my mother’s angry scholar tone: the twisting syntax she navigated effortlessly, the clipped pronunciation and long words. You would never guess, when she got going this way, that she had never even finished college. I admired her for it, when it wasn’t directed at me.
“I offered, as a matter of fact,” I informed her. “And she said she’d pay time and a half.”
“I’d ask for double.” My mother sighed. “What about your father and your grandmother?”
“I can see everyone at Christmas.”
“What does she need you for on Thanksgiving?”
“Just to go to a friend’s house for dinner.”
“No one else can do this for her?”
I held the phone to my chin while I took off my jeans. Actually, Simone had offered to do it.
Thanksgiving means nothing to me
, she had said.
Although I sometimes find that sculpting on holidays leads me to some very intriguing conceptuals
. I was about to agree to let her take a long shift that day when I saw Kate close her eyes. I knew she wanted to say innocently,
What’s a conceptual
? I didn’t think she wanted to be with Simone on a holiday, not when they’d be at Lisa’s house and it could be pure fun. There had
been a long pause while I mulled it over. I almost never minded taking on extra shifts, and it was true that Kate hadn’t asked me outright. But sometimes I thought it would be better if she did. I could read her so well that I never got to just be oblivious anymore, even when I wanted to be. Sometimes she let me intuit what she wanted me to do without asking, and when that meant,
Offer to leave me alone in the bathroom for a while
, it was fine. But when it was,
Don’t stick me with Simone on Thanksgiving
, I wished I were blind to her, like someone who doesn’t waste time on household chores because she doesn’t notice the crack in the window or the dusty picture frames. Still. It was her first holiday without Evan and I wanted her to have fun, so I said to Simone,
No, no, I’ll do it; you sculpt
.
“Look, Mom, I’ll be there for Christmas,” I began, but she interrupted.
“You know your grandmother is looking forward to showing you how to make her pie crust,” she informed me. “Now that you’ve taken such an interest. She switched to frozen crusts years ago, Bec, but the woman has me buying lard so she can show you the old-fashioned way—”
“I’ll come!” I blurted. “God! I’ll call Simone.”
I RETURNED FROM THANKSGIVING
bloated with apple pie and beer and faintly ashamed for having flown the coop and even having a little fun. I’d gone out a couple nights while I was there, having run into some girls I knew from high school at the grocery store, where we were both in line with cans of cranberry sauce and bags of sliced almonds. I always wondered if the people who still lived there felt as regressed as I did, notebook paper with shopping lists in our mothers’ writing stuffed in the pockets of our winter coats, waving outside our parents’ cars.
I still had a few old boyfriends strewn around town, but I no longer appraised them as a possibility for an evening or a few weeks. Even my favorite high school boyfriend, Mike, now greeted me like a cousin. You’d never guess that over Christmas break our freshman year in college we’d spent every night together, right back to eating fish fry at the Gasthaus and going to movies just to have something to do, trying to show off new maneuvers to bluff each other into believing we’d slept
with hordes of people in the first four months of college. (Maybe he had. I chose the tactic of referring endlessly to unnamed “guys,” all of whom were actually a single boy in our dorm who, Jill still delighted in reminding me, had gone by the newly adopted name of Dylan.) It had been a depressing exercise in the end—suddenly we were calling each other when our families weren’t home, driving out of town to buy condoms. I found myself bumming clove cigarettes, chattering in his ear at bars, and stealing up behind him to wrap my arms around his waist as though I was hoping to borrow his letterman’s jacket. By New Year’s Eve of that winter break I had regressed so far I almost teased my bangs.
This visit was better. For once I enjoyed telling people what I was doing these days. It sounded so much better than waitressing.
“So, how was it?” I asked Kate the next week. I was helping her back into the car after we had driven by Chambers Street. I tried to move quickly and get her out of the cold as fast as possible, or else it took her forever to warm up again. She was so thin that she was always cold, so I took to carrying a chocolate-colored cashmere shawl everywhere we went. She looked beautiful in that shawl; it brought out her eyes and made her cheeks pinker.
It was amazing how few people noticed how lovely she was. They glanced at us and instantly turned in the other direction, as though it would be rude to linger. Two years ago, I was certain, people had gazed appreciatively at her all the time. I tried to make up for it with incessant compliments. I told her her eyes looked especially bright with the shawl on, that her hair color, recently dyed a slightly darker, richer tawny blond, flattered her skin tone. I said she didn’t need lipstick, just gloss, because her lips had such color. I said her new earrings looked lovely when her hair was up. I said,
You look so pretty today
, and I said it a lot.