Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

by Lorna Landvik

  “Where did it come back, Slip?” It seemed desperately important that I know the cancer’s location.

  “In my back,” said Slip. “In my hip.”

  “Your back and your hip?” I could hear the hysteria in my voice, and I knew Audrey did too, because she said, “Get your coat on, Grant, and let’s all take a walk.”

  Our boots sounded like squeegees against glass as we plowed new tracks through the white-and-blue snow. It was the only sound we made as we trudged down the block, the moon small and dim in the sky, like a nightlight that needed to be recharged.

  “Jerry’s in Canada,” said Slip as we passed her house. “At a conference on glacial ice. I haven’t even told him yet.”

  What could we say to that? There weren’t words, although I saw Kari, whose arm was looped through Slip’s, pull her a little closer.

  We sidestepped our way down the hill that led down to the creek, and when we reached the basin, we stood there for a bit, a mute herd of middle-agers in winter wear, needing a wrangler to tell us what to do.

  “Remember our first-ever snowball fight?” asked Faith.

  There are times in life when exactly the right thing is spoken. For instance, there is no more perfect answer than “I do” when asked if you’ll love, honor, and cherish the person wearing a veil (or, in my case, a tuxedo) next to you. When you’re delivering foodstuffs and medical supplies to a starved, war-torn country, “Don’t shoot! Red Cross!” is a pretty good password. And when you’re huddled in sadness with your dearest friends, a reminder about how you all began can have amazing restorative powers.

  At least it did for us.

  “Of course, I wasn’t here on that night, but if I had been,” I said, squatting down to pack some snow, “I could have taken everyone on with one hand tied behind my back.”

  “He just challenged us, girls,” said Faith, and within seconds snowballs were flying through the frosty January night.

  Merit knocked off my ratty Russian fur hat (it was politically incorrect—the fur, not the Russian part—but it was a remnant from the costume department of the Sexual Freedom Theater, and I figured the beaver or whatever animal it was who gave its pelt would have been long dead anyway) with a well-aimed fastball, and Slip threw one that cannonballed on my right shoulder.

  When I had heard the story of that first snowball fight (it was part of the lore and I had heard it several times), I was always told of the laughter, the cackling, but now I got to hear it, contribute to it. I’ll have to discuss this theosophical theory with Audrey: hysterical laughter might not be the rapture, but it’s at least a rapture.

  Splat! Speaking of the pastor, I got her good.

  We threw and laughed, our breaths blasts of vapor in the air, and threw some more. When a snowball Kari threw clipped me on the jaw, I pretended the force knocked me back into the snow. I was tired, and it was a good dramatic effect.

  “Women win in a knockout,” said Audrey, standing over me.

  “It wasn’t a fair fight,” I complained.

  “It never is.”

  “Hey,” said Merit, watching as I moved my hands up and down and my feet back and forth, “he’s making a snow angel.”

  Everyone followed her over to a fresh patch of snow that hadn’t been trampled in our snow fight and lay down in a wide circle, giving the person next to us room to make wings and a skirt.

  “What a beautiful night,” said Faith, “except there aren’t any stars out.”

  “Cloud cover,” said Slip. “It’ll probably snow again tonight.”

  “Well, let’s not lie around here till it does,” said Audrey. “I’m freezing.”

  We got up to admire our circle of angels, and then Merit took Slip’s arm.

  “Those are yours, Slip,” she said. “Your angels, who are going to watch over you and keep you safe.”

  I thought it was a wonderful sentiment, but apparently Slip did not agree.

  “They’re just going to get covered up by snow,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Audrey, taking her other arm. “But they’ll still be there. We’ll still be there, whenever you need us.”

  “Do you think I’m stupid?” asked Slip. We were all taken aback for a moment until she added, her voice ten times softer, “Don’t you think I already know that? Holy what-do-you-think-I-count-on—it’s our pledge.”

  I hung back a little with Slip; we held hands as we trudged up the hill.

  “I hate that your cancer’s back,” I told her.

  “Me too. Although I knew it had come back, even before the doctor’s report. I’ve just been feeling sort of punk.”

  “Are you going to have chemo again?”

  Slip nodded.

  “Well, look on the bright side,” I said. “Last time after your hair fell out it came back straight. Maybe this time it won’t come back red.”

  “God,” said Slip with a laugh. “That would almost make all of this worth it.”

  EPILOGUE

  September 1998

  FAITH

  In the hospital, we had learned that the busier our hands were, the less often we used them to grab at tissues to wipe our eyes or blow our noses. And Slip was still adamant: no crying.

  Audrey was a veritable knitting factory, churning out enough baby paraphernalia to keep her grandchildren in sweaters and booties until far past the time they’d be able to fit into such stuff. Grant, her knitting pupil, worked on a muffler that was lopsided and knobby with mistakes. Kari solicited from us all our mending projects, and she patched and darned and let out the hems of Portia’s dresses (she was a rare breed, a tomboy who loved dresses). Merit read, or at least she always had a book on her lap, and I worked on my scrapbook.

  OF COURSE, Flan agreed to be the visiting author at our book club, and we pulled out all the stops. Slip’s dining room table looked like a bakery outlet, loaded with bars and cookies and pies.

  “Wow,” said Flan, “I remember you guys eating a lot, but I don’t remember this much food.”

  Audrey added a brownie to her plate. “I’d probably be a size six if it weren’t for these meetings.”

  “You’ve never been a size six in your life,” said Grant.

  “Shut up and pass me a lemon bar.”

  It was our best meeting ever; how could it not be? Bonnie (she and Flan still keep their little book club going in a fashion, e-mailing their comments on books) came, and while we thought of swinging open our usually locked gate and inviting all family members, we decided no, we wanted our first real live author all to ourselves. Besides, a big publishing party/reunion picnic (we were so excited—practically everyone’s kids were coming home) had been planned for the next day, so it wasn’t as if we were completely selfish.

  We all wore the T-shirts Merit and Mr. Paradise had made for us, and every time we looked at the columns that scrolled down our bustlines, we were swept away by a memory.

  “Oh, The Martian Chronicles!” said Audrey, pointing at my chest. “Remember how we discussed that the day after Nixon resigned?”

  “A bad year for America, a good year for books,” said Kari. “Look, that was the year we read The Age of Innocence and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”

  “Oh, my gosh—look at what’s under 1984! The Drifters! You all complained that it was too long, but when Bryan had his accident it consoled me because it was so long. That same year I plowed through three other Michener books.”

  “And look under 1969,” said Merit. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor—and now we’ve got our own writer Flannery right here!”

  “And speaking of Ms. McMahon, how about we get started with the discussion?” said Slip from her chair. “We don’t want to keep the esteemed author waiting.”

  “SO WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR INSPIRATION?” Merit asked once we had finally settled in the living room.

  “From everything,” said Flan. “From real things—an old man’s face, the sky, the smell of Dentyne gum. From imagination. And from memory
—what started my first chapter was the memory of my mother pushing my stroller with one hand and carrying a picket sign in the other.”

  Slip dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, her hand a small bony claw. “And at the time I thought I was only trying to stop a war or get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Little did I know you were going to make a novel out of it.”

  As Flan talked about her book and answered our questions, Slip’s face was flushed, her cinnamon-colored eyes glittering with excitement. She looked positively feverish, but I chose to think it was due to maternal pride and not to her illness. I clung to denial the way Beau had clung to his baby blanket—until it was a patch, and then a rag, and then a shred.

  It was pretty hard not to see that the possibility of her rebounding this time was remote; there was hardly any of her to see. She sat on Jerry’s recliner, buried up to her neck under a quilt. (The rest of us were sweating in our shorts and commemorative T-shirts.) Slip had always been tiny, but she had been huge in her tininess; now I was afraid that if I pulled away the quilt, I’d find nothing there at all.

  As sick as she was, though, she was in her glory, whether listening to Flan tell the story of how she got her agent or to Bonnie telling us she’d been worried about not liking the book and then having to fake liking it.

  “But I really liked it, Flan. I started highlighting the parts I thought were really well written, and look.” She flipped through some pages. “It’s full of highlight.”

  The smile on Slip’s tiny, flushed face was beatific. “Damn right it’s full of highlight.”

  At the backyard picnic the next day, Slip oohed and ahhed at Dave’s children and Julia’s new baby boy, Bjorn. “Are you getting any ideas, kids?” she asked Flan and her son Joe, sitting nearby. She ate nothing but drank something out of a sipper cup (“hundred-proof rye whiskey,” she claimed) and laughed as hard as anyone when Beau walked over to her—on his hands.

  “He used to be the star of our neighborhood circus,” she explained to the Wahlbergs, the couple who had bought Grant’s house. “Well, next to me.”

  “You used to put on a neighborhood circus?” said Regina Wahlberg.

  “Yeah,” piped in Portia. “And they were the funnest thing ever.” She glared at her mother. “At least that’s what my sisters say.”

  Merit smiled, patting her daughter’s wild, dandelion-colored hair. “It’s her deepest regret that they were pretty much over by the time she came along.”

  “You would like to be in a circus, wouldn’t you, Matt?” Regina said to her wriggly baby who was trying to climb over her shoulder. “You could be an acrobat.”

  It was a perfect day (except for the mosquitoes and a crop of bees that wanted to pollinate the potato salad), and when Slip’s son Gil and Merit’s daughter Jewel announced their engagement—well, stars exploded in the sky, nightingales sang, Dean Martin reunited with Jerry Lewis.

  “You’ll be Jewel’s mother-in-law!” Merit said to Slip.

  “You’ll be Gil’s!”

  “We’ll be related!”

  BUT NIGHT FALLS on perfect days, and less than a week after the reunion, Slip was in the hospital again, and for what we knew would be the last time.

  “Jerry wants me to come home,” confided Slip to the Angry Housewives, “but I’m only going home when I know I’m going to die. And ladies, that time is not now.”

  Slip, for all her practicality, was not willing to concede her battle and thought that if victory was possible, it was in the hospital, near doctors and drugs that might offer a last-minute medical miracle, a stay of execution.

  There was a steady stream of visitors: work friends, protest friends, Habitat for Humanity friends, and Slip’s family—her kids, her parents, and her brothers.

  “Fred?” I said, running into a red-haired, bearded man in a hallway.

  “Faith!” he answered, holding his arms out.

  “You hug hard,” I said after our embrace. “Just like Slip.”

  Fred laughed. “Well, as she always says, if you’re gonna hug, hug.”

  A pregnant woman emerged from the rest room and took Fred’s arm.

  “Honey, this is one of my sister’s good friends,” said Fred. “Faith, this is my wife, Paula.”

  “You’re one of the Angry Housewives?” asked the petite, dark-skinned woman, who was at least twenty years younger than her husband. When I nodded, she said, “Fred’s told me all about you. In fact, we met in a book club he started at our local library.”

  “You guys turned me on to the power of book discussion,” said Fred. “I even wrote a letter to the president, telling him he should start a monthly book club with all the other world leaders. The only catch is, I get to choose the books for them. The first one would be The Feminine Mystique, the second would be Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things, and the third would be Huckleberry Finn.”

  “Interesting selection,” I said. “Have you heard back from him?”

  “Not yet,” said Fred. “But I’m hoping he’ll recognize a good peace plan when he sees it.”

  ONE NIGHT Wade and Mr. Paradise spirited Jerry off to a nearby bar (“You need a change of scenery and you need a drink,” Wade told him), leaving us Angry Housewives alone with Slip.

  “How’s the scrapbook coming, Faith?” asked Kari.

  “Great,” I said, pulling a packet of photographs from my purse. “Look at this one.”

  I handed her a picture of Slip taken at one of Kari’s Christmas parties, unwrapping a hugely padded bra.

  “Let me see that,” whispered Slip, and Kari leaned toward the bed, holding the snapshot out for her to see. Slip smiled. “I think you all got a perverse pleasure in being my Secret Santa.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” I said. “That’ll be my caption.”

  I had gotten the idea of making a scrapbook of the Angry Housewives after I had made a scrapbook of my family for my sister, Vivien. I know she got it because her signature was needed for delivery, but so far I hadn’t heard anything back from her. And that was back in March.

  Looking through all my photographs, I’d come across a lot of the Angry Housewives, and it had made me want to document our history (or herstory, as Slip would say) too.

  “Hey, pass those around,” said Audrey, and when I handed her the stack of photographs, she laughed. “Oh, you guys, look at this one—it’s from our California trip.”

  In this picture, all the Angry Housewives are standing in front of this little roadhouse, next to a big, bearded guy wearing a Hell’s Angels T-shirt. He looks wild, and so do we.

  “I wish I were a founding member,” said Grant. “Look at all I missed out on.”

  “Yeah, but think what’s ahead in the next thirty years,” said Kari.

  “I can just imagine,” said Slip. We all grew quiet; Slip could command our complete attention with one word. “You know what I’ve been thinking?”

  “What, Slip?” Merit asked.

  “Let’s ask Regina Wahlberg to join the book club,” said Slip in the slow, whispery voice that was so unlike the way she usually spoke. “I know she likes to read—I always run into her at the library. Plus she’s worked for Wellstone’s Senate campaigns.”

  Leave it to Slip to try to ensure that her replacement (if that’s what she was trying, in her sneaky way, to do) not only liked to read but was a liberal Democrat.

  None of us had anything to say after that, but even if we had, Slip didn’t stay awake to hear it.

  “Man, she can fall asleep fast,” said Audrey.

  “With all the drugs she’s getting, I’m surprised she stays awake as much as she does,” said Kari, her blue eyes misting with tears. She stood up and, yawning, stretched with her hand at the base of her back. “Anybody else ready to call it a night?”

  Everyone else was, in fact, but me.

  “I’m so wired from coffee,” I said, “I’m just going to stay here a little longer and work on the scrapbook.”

  “Be careful out in the parking lot,
” said Grant.

  “On my honor,” I promised.

  EVEN WITH THE CLICKING AND WHIRRING of the hospital machinery, the room was doused in a certain peacefulness, as if the molecules themselves had settled down after the departure of the other Angry Housewives.

  Chuckling, I studied a snapshot taken the summer we had first gotten together. I loved coming across a photograph that could immediately take me back to a memory that had long been tucked away in an inactive file.

  On a hot, sunny summer’s day, Audrey had told us to pack up our kids and our swimsuits; she’d been invited to use the pool at a friend’s house, and we were all invited too. While the host’s teenage daughter kept the kids busy (not hard to do on a three-acre property with a playground, a playhouse, and three friendly dogs who were willing to fetch as many balls as the kids threw), we a spent a luxurious, lazy afternoon in the swimming pool.

  We had lolled around it in floats, all the while drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes.

  “What’s so funny?” said Slip now.

  “Oh!” I said, my heart knocking. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was,” she said, her voice raspy. “Till you started laughing. Now let me see that.”

  I handed her the snapshot and watched as a whisper of a smile crossed the sunken planes of her face.

  “That’s the day we taught Merit how to play poker.”

  “Yeah, remember how Audrey won all those pennies but they got knocked off that floating table?”

  “And later we had the kids dive for buried treasure.” Slip squinted. “My God, look at those hats. Not even Shriners would wear hats like that.”

  I laughed. “Hey, that’s why we look so young now, Slip. Because we wore hats like that in the sun.”

  Slip looked at the picture for a moment more before handing it back to me.

  “Do you think I’m going to die, Faith?”

  Heat pumped to my face. “I . . . we all are going to die, Slip.”