Finding Mrs. Ford

by Deborah Goodrich Royce

  “Susan, listen,” he finally said. “I have a crazy, complicated life. There’s a problem at one of our stores and I need to go help my cousin.”

  “Sure.” Her voice came out as a squeak. “It’s fine. No problem.”

  “Susan, I know it’s not fine. I’m sorry. I hate when this happens, but I can’t leave Jacob alone here. I’ve got to go help him out.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I…Look. I can’t really talk about work stuff. Okay? I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry a lot tonight.” She knew she sounded petulant.

  “I am. I’m truly sorry. Please let me make it up to you. Please?” Sammy reached over and placed his hand on her leg. This was all so strange. Dream dates begun and suspended in minutes. “Susan?”

  “What?” Her mother would have chastised her for answering so snappishly.

  “Please forgive me. I know you’re disappointed. I am too. I’m sorry. I really have to do this.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine. But, it’s the best I can do right now.”

  They drove the rest of the way to her house in silence. Sammy walked her to the door and kissed her. But, she could tell that he was distracted.

  “Goodnight, my beauty. I promise you, I’ll make it up to you.” He touched a little piece of her hair and felt it between his fingers. “I love your hair.”

  “You do?” In the middle of this ruined date, it made her feel better that he liked her hair. He was probably the only one who did.

  “I do.” And he kissed her again with more feeling.

  “Goodnight, Sammy.” She broke away and turned to let herself in.

  Sammy waited until she’d unlocked the door, opened it and shut it behind her. Then, he sprinted to his car. He actually ran. She watched him from the window in the door.

  29

  Wednesday, September 5, 1979

  The moon, in its nearly twenty-eight-day orbit, had almost returned to its fullest since the day when the girls had set off for the mall. Tomorrow, the moon would be full. Tomorrow, Susan would drive back to college. Tomorrow, summer would officially be over.

  She had given her notice at Frankie’s and worked her last night on Sunday, the eve of Labor Day. There had been no cake, no farewell party, no acknowledgment that she would soon be gone. There had been no pool of interns, also returning to college, with whom she could go out for a celebratory drink. Sherry did not say goodbye. Neither did Annie and Frankie. She hadn’t seen Diane for weeks.

  Susan had cleaned up her station alone, slid her tray into the tray rack alone, and, alone, she had prepared to leave Frankie’s for the last time.

  She had changed out of her uniform and folded it into the ragged Bonwit Teller bag, tossing both into the industrial waste bin outside the kitchen door. Arcing high, up and over the side of the dumpster, she watched them disappear.

  Annie had shown no signs of returning to her own studies, whatever those might have been. Susan felt a cringing embarrassment at having been witness to the raw passion of Frankie and Annie’s romance. She did not know what Annie felt. Their friendship appeared to be over.

  And Sammy. Where were things going with Sammy? He had been the bright spot of Susan’s summer. His beautiful eyes, his beautiful smile, his beautiful mind. But he cast a few shadows as well. He had waited in the parking lot for Susan that night. She saw him leaning against her car, head tossed back, looking up. Her gaze followed his to the starry sky above them.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “Ah, ma belle. It’s not like at home. There, from the desert, you can see the whole bowl of the sky filled with stars. Here, there’s too much ambient light from the city.”

  “I’d like to see that.”

  “Someday, I’ll show it to you.”

  “That would be nice.” She waited for Sammy to say something. Something concrete and tangible regarding their future. Something resembling a commitment. She wondered what had happened to him on their date last week and found it strange that they hadn’t discussed it since. But, she would not be the one to bring it up.

  “All right, mademoiselle.” Sammy walked Susan around to the passenger side of her car. “On y va?”

  “Oui.” Susan was glad to vacate the premises of Frankie’s Disco. “On y va.”

  Sammy got into the driver’s seat and started the car. The radio was playing Donna Summers’s Last Dance.

  “This is too good to be true,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You know, all this summer in a discothèque, and you and I have never danced?”

  “Is that what you’re proposing now?”

  “It is.”

  Sammy cranked up the sound and hopped out of the car. He went around to open Susan’s door and extended his hand to her. “Last dance. Last chance for love. Yes, it’s my last chance for romance tonight,” Sammy sang along with Donna Summers. He was off-key, but that only made the effect more touching.

  Susan reached up and took his hand. “I never knew you could sing.”

  “Like I said,” Sammy studiously placed his hands on her in a formal, old-fashioned dance pose—one on her waist and the other holding her right hand aloft. “It’s good to retain a little mystery.”

  “I think you’ve retained more than a little.”

  Sammy moved closer to her, pressing his body against hers as he sang very softly, “I need you. By me. Beside me. To guide me.” Susan relaxed her hold on herself and rested her head on his shoulder. As moments go, this one was near perfect. It went pretty far in helping her forget their broken date.

  Then the tempo picked up—the thump-thumps vibrating out of Susan’s little car. Sammy shifted effortlessly to lead her into the hustle. Susan followed without missing a beat.

  “And I didn’t know you could dance,” Sammy said, spinning her.

  “You never asked.”

  “I’m glad to discover your secret here in the parking lot.” Sammy spun her around and then did it again and again, until Susan was breathless from laughter.

  Sammy slowed to a stop. He took Susan’s face in his hands. “Susan of many secrets,” he softly said to her.

  “You’re pretty secretive yourself,” she responded.

  Sammy brushed his hands down the sides of her face, along her neck, across her shoulders, to rest on her arms. Gently, ever so gently, he pulled her closer.

  “Last dance. Last chance for love,” Sammy whispered. “Susan. May I ask you something now?”

  Susan felt her stomach flip. “All right.”

  “I haven’t told you everything about my life. You can see that, I know. There are parts of it that I just need to sort out and, now that I’ve met you, I’m going to try to do that. You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “No.”

  “No matter. You only need to know that since I met you, I feel like I can see a future that I haven’t been able to see in a very long time.”

  “I’ve felt that way too.”

  “So, I’m going to ask you to promise me something. Like your father asked you.”

  “To go back to college?”

  “Not that!” Sammy laughed. “It sounds crazy, but if things don’t go the way I plan—if anything gets messed up—I want you to meet me, Susan. In one year. In Paris.”

  The brutality of it made her sick. “I don’t understand. Don’t you want to see me anymore?”

  “I do! I haven’t felt this way about anyone. Ever. I just…I don’t know…there are things going on and…I know it’s a lot to ask.”

  “Sammy, what are you saying? I thought we felt the same way. I…are you ending it?”

  “I’m not! I promise you, I’m not! I love you, Susan.”

  So, there it was, exactly what she’d been waiting for—his little gift—but all wrapped up in a package of loss. Why was there always loss? “I don’t understand why you’re saying it like this. One year? What is that supposed to mean?”

 
“I can’t really tell you. Maybe it’s stupid. I fully intend to see you but—I just—if we lose each other somehow, I just want to know that there’s some date in the future when I know we’ll reconnect.”

  Susan started to cry. She tried not to—turned her face away, looked up at the sky, blinked back her tears—but, the flood came anyway.

  “I’m sorry,” Sammy said as he kissed her face, her cheeks, her forehead, her nose. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it. I thought it might come out romantic or, I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “No. No. It’s okay. I just feel like I never, ever get anything whole. Everything in halves or parts or temporaries. I just want something whole.”

  “I love you, Susan. All of me loves all of you. My life is just a mess. I can’t tell you any more than that.”

  Susan looked at him in the moonlight and she had no doubt that she loved him. “What if I say I’ll meet you in a year in Paris? Does that mean we won’t see each other in the meantime?”

  “No! We’ll see each other all the time. I just… Hey, how far is your college?”

  “It’s a four-hour drive.”

  “Well, that sounds just right, in my little Mustang.”

  “It’s really not far. Please come see me, Sammy.”

  “I’ll come. I promise I’ll come.”

  “Everything is so strange!” She suddenly said as she pushed away from Sammy. She faced up to the stars and shouted, “Everyone here is strange!”

  “Well, I hope I’m strange in a good way.” Sammy laughed. “So, what’s today’s date?”

  “Um.” She thought about it as she wiped her eyes. “It’s very early morning on Monday, September third.”

  “Then, September third, nineteen eighty it is. Call it an insurance policy. A little safety marker.”

  Susan stared at him—this beautiful man from another universe—and she engaged her ability to spin reality into fantasy. “I guess it could be kind of like a movie,” she conceded.

  “Well, if we were in a movie,” Sammy pulled her back to him. “We would meet under a clock, wouldn’t we?”

  “I guess so.”

  “How about the clock at the Gare d’Orsay?” he asked.

  “Didn’t that just close? Aren’t they’re turning it into a museum?”

  “Surely, they’ll keep the clock.”

  Susan shook her head in dismay. “All right, then. The Gare d’Orsay in nineteen eighty. Under the clock.”

  “Don’t forget September the third.”

  “I won’t forget if you won’t forget.”

  “Consider me an elephant,” Sammy said. He touched her face once more and then he leaned in to kiss her. Really kiss her finally—a whole kiss, not a half.

  She felt herself fall, as they dropped backward into the tiny back seat of her car.

  * * *

  Susan had spent the following days packing and preparing for her departure. Seeking a degree of normalcy, she had grilled hamburgers on Labor Day and eaten them on a tray in her father’s bedroom. Elton hadn’t had an appetite that day, so Susan ate two, his and hers, which made it feel, illogically, she knew, like they had shared a celebration.

  She ate them both as she sat with William Elton, the television on, playing a holiday back-to-back run of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson oeuvre. She stayed in his room for hours, watching all three movies: Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, Send Me No Flowers. The phone in the kitchen never rang.

  When the films were finished, when Elton was asleep, and Susan could no longer prolong the day, she clicked off the TV, washed the dishes, brushed her teeth, and went to bed.

  “Goodnight, Daddy,” she had said. But she knew he hadn’t heard her.

  By Wednesday, she had packed her bags, cleaned the house and conferred with Elton’s nurse. He was failing, and it was with trepidation that Susan would leave him. But it was her way out of this dead-end town, this crazy summer, this loneliness. Susan knew that, but she also knew that her father would likely be among the ballast jettisoned to the side of the road. Elton, who had been Susan’s rock for the past twenty-one years, might not live to Susan’s graduation. Alive or not, he certainly would not be in attendance.

  On Wednesday night, just like Tuesday and Monday before it, Susan went to bed early. She read for a while, finishing up Le Rouge et Le Noir just in the nick of time. Not her style at all. She set the book on her bedside table, the small wooden stand with her grandmother’s Famille Rose lamp.

  She looked around her childhood room before turning off the light. She saw her twin bed, the grass cloth wallpaper she had put up herself three years before—having refused Todd’s offer of help—the dresser that had been there since she was a toddler and no longer fit her adult clothes, the skirted dressing table with its mirror surrounded by round, Hollywood-style light bulbs. Her mother had given her that mirror. A movie star mirror. Maggie’s touch of glamour.

  Susan turned off the light and laid her head on the pillow.

  She slept fitfully, as she often did before a trip. Travel anxiety kept her turning in bed, as did the fan, which soon made the room feel cold. She got up to switch it off and climbed back into bed, where more hours dragged by. After two, Susan was just beginning to dream when the sound of the fan woke her again, the repetitive little whack that her old fan made as the blades turned around. Susan was slow to consciousness and a bit slower in remembering that she had already turned the fan off.

  That got her attention.

  She opened her ears before opening her eyes. She lay in bed listening hard. There was distinctly a sound that was not the normal sound of a house creaking late at night. Susan strained, trying to understand if it was coming from her father’s room or somewhere else in the house. It was a clicking, like the fan made, but she soon observed that it was not occurring as regularly as the fan sound normally would.

  Susan’s eyes popped wide. The sound was coming from her window.

  She sat up, looked at the curtains softly blowing into the room, and mentally confirmed that this was the source of the sound. Susan sat frozen in place. She could not imagine walking over and parting the curtains and was equally incapable of executing a run to her father’s room. What could he do to help, anyway? There was one phone in the entire house, on the wall of the kitchen.

  It was then that she heard her own name. Someone outside the window distinctly said, “Susan?”

  “Annie?” This was really beyond the pale. Susan had not had a conversation with Annie for nearly a month. Annie hadn’t even spoken to her on her last night at Frankie’s. What on Earth was she doing outside Susan’s window now, at this late hour?

  Susan rose from the bed and parted the curtains. Indeed, there stood Annie on the lawn under the plum tree, chucking stones at her window.

  “Stop it!” Susan hissed. “What are you doing here?”

  “Susan, I need your help.”

  “Annie, we haven’t even talked for weeks. What do you want from me?”

  “I really need you. Please come to the front door. Please.”

  “Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it,” Susan exhaled in a loud, rhythmic stage whisper as she made her way down the hall to the front door.

  “Damn it!” she said again, a little more full-voiced, as she stepped out onto the small porch. “What do you want, Annie? What do you need?”

  “Is that what you wear to sleep in?” Annie giggled as she looked over Susan’s Lanz nightgown, long and frilly in delicate white cotton.

  “No, Annie, I’m going out on a date right now and this is my outfit. Honestly, what do you want from me in the middle of the night?”

  At this, Annie changed on a dime from laughter to tears, “It’s Frankie. He’s with another woman tonight. I know it. He’s on his boat. He takes girls there and he screws them, and he knows I know but he doesn’t care. I need to go there and tell him I can’t take it anymore and I need you to go with me.” All this was delivered in one single breath, no pause for air.

 
“Wait a minute. How do you know he’s there? How do you know any of this?”

  “Jesus Christ!” Annie made another rapid mood switch. “That’s hardly the point, dontcha think?”

  “You know what I think?” Susan had had enough. “I think you’re a really selfish person. You do whatever you want, whenever you want, and you drag anybody you feel like dragging along for the ride. For companionship or…or…I don’t even know what use you have for the people you drag along. Maybe you need a fan club. Well, that was me you were dragging around all summer and I won’t be dragged anymore!”

  “But you’re my best friend!”

  “Your what? That’s ridiculous! You’ve been a complete bitch practically since we started that job and I’m done with it. I leave for college in the morning; my car is already packed up in the garage. You knew I was going and you didn’t even say goodbye!”

  “Well, I’m here now, to say goodbye to you.”

  “Oh bullshit, Annie. You did not come to say goodbye to me!”

  Annie tried another tack. “I’m going to that boat and I’m going to confront him tonight, with or without you.”

  “Is that supposed to entice me?”

  “Susan, if you don’t go with me, you’ll regret this the way you regret not being there for your mother on her deathbed!”

  Susan was stunned. She could not believe that Annie had trotted out her most private shame to get her to go chase after some guy—some idiot guy—who Susan could have told her long ago was not worthy of any woman’s affections. “That’s a low blow, Annie. A really low blow.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m really upset!”

  “That, I would say, is an understatement.” Susan paused, spent of her emotional load, and took a minute to collect herself. Annie was on drugs. That was the only explanation for her reprehensible words and actions. And, as Annie had just pointed out, who was Susan to cast the first stone? Look at the grief her own drug use had caused.

  Susan softened. “Listen, why don’t you come into the house and let me make you some tea or hot milk, something to calm you down?”