The lawyer had told her they were junkies, but even at the time it had seemed an ungenerous description, because she could sense in the father a certain dignity and intelligence and pride. The father worked part time in construction and he was built that way, wiry and strong and tall and he had that particular electric energy that drug addicts get, teetering on the cold edge of need, and she remembered the sleeves of his borrowed suit were too short. He had the same lovely color to his hair that Willa had now, like the leaves outside, reddish brown. And the eyes of a sailor, gray as the ocean in winter. Their eyes had met only once, she recalled, when he’d handed her the baby: Take care of her.
And she had nodded that she would.
Over the years, especially when Willa was little, people would squint at her face, comparing her features to Candace’s and Joe’s, and they’d make that irritating, humming sound of confusion and say, “Let’s see, who does she look like?” To which they’d respond, “Willa’s adopted. She looks like herself.” And the person, chagrined, would reply, “Well, isn’t that nice!”
Inevitably, whenever she told people that Willa was adopted there was a pause—not necessarily an awkward one—maybe thoughtful was a better word. And people generally felt the need to express their feelings about it. Some were naive enough to ask what had prompted them to adopt. How good of you to take a stranger’s child into your hearts, some would say, as though it were a kind of pitiable charity. What a marvelous thing adoption is. It’s so wonderful. But underlying the sentiment they never let you forget that you were raising someone else’s baby. It was a subtlety that seemed to separate her from the other mothers, even now. And it wasn’t only evident in conversation. Often the newspapers would print the phrase adoptive parents or the adopted child of . . . which burned Candy up. Willa was her daughter, no one else’s—and she was Willa’s mother—the whole adoption thing had become irrelevant.
Filled with sudden emotion, she inched her hand over and took hold of Willa’s and squeezed, but Willa gave her an imploring look, apparently mortified: What’s your problem? So Candace let go, reminding herself not to take it personally. Adopted or not, Willa was a teenager. She was supposed to disparage her mother.
The minute they got into the car after services, Willa took off her heels and stockings and put on her high-tops. On the way home, they stopped for apples—it was Joe’s idea. Candace stayed in the car while Joe and Willa went up the hill into the orchard, pulling apples off the trees. She watched them climb the hill, eating apples as they went, and she wished now that she had joined them. She imagined running barefoot through the wet, muddy grass, the feeling of the cool grass under her feet. She watched them for a long time, weaving in and out of the trees, laughing, filling up their bags, until the afternoon sun became so bright that she had to look away.
20
They would talk in the van. Mr. Heath would look at her in the rearview mirror and she would look at him and she imagined that she could see beneath his headmaster’s façade into the person underneath. They talked about all sorts of things. He confided in her, she thought. He trusted her. The idea of him whirled up in her dreams. Sometimes she’d imagine him touching her, recalling the way he’d brushed her knee that night in his car, by accident of course, when he’d opened the glove compartment. It had sent a thrill up her leg, like the sting of a yellow jacket. Sometimes, when she was bored, she’d try to imagine him with Mrs. Heath. She would bet Mrs. Heath didn’t give blow jobs. God Forbid! Willa knew she was no expert, but she couldn’t imagine a man who would refuse that. In a way, it made her feel a little sorry for him, having a wife like Mrs. Heath. He was trapped, he’d told her, like a mime in a glass box.
Ada had been bugging Willa about helping her paint her room. She made it seem like Willa owed it to her, not as a favor, but as a payback. Why she owed Ada, Willa didn’t know, but she thought it might have something to do with Teddy Squire, who obviously liked Willa better. Ada wanted to paint each wall a different color, something Willa’s mother would never allow. Ada was not especially creative, and whereas she did better in the regular classes, Willa always did better in art. Willa felt sorry for her because her parents were weird and because she wasn’t pretty and tended to put on weight. Plus, Ada had a mean streak. She was the kind of person who fought for things regardless of whether or not she wanted them. It was the competition that drove her, the idea of winning, and when it seemed like a futile pursuit, she’d get depressed and go on an eating binge. When she’d found out that Willa had gotten the Sunrise Internship, she’d stopped speaking to her for three days. Later, she’d admitted to Willa that she’d eaten four boxes of Yodels and a bag of beef jerky before throwing up.
Their house smelled faintly of cigarettes and something else, dirt maybe. In Ada’s room, they painted one wall yellow, one pink, one blue. Ada’s mother didn’t use a decorator like Willa’s mother did. Ada’s room was small and messy. She had a double bed, lumpy with tattered, defected stuffed animals. Her closet door was plastered with pages from magazines, another thing her own mother did not allow, and the boy from Polo, the enormously cute one, was smack in the middle. He was the boy Willa had chosen when they were looking through magazines, picking out who they wanted to marry one day, but it was Ada who’d put him on her wall.
He was probably gay anyway.
“You like?” Ada held up a new pair of earrings. They were pretty, but Willa didn’t wear dangly earrings. She thought they were trashy, but said, “Nice.” She only wore posts, tiny black stones. They did their nails and Willa told Ada what she’d done to Teddy Squire. Ada only shrugged as if she didn’t care, as if she was above it, but Willa figured she was jealous. She used Ada’s bathroom and saw that it was filthy with little hairs all over the place and all of Ada’s beauty products, none of which Willa recognized. Ada bought most of her beauty supplies at the drugstore, whereas Willa bought hers at Gatsby’s. Willa had a Mason Pearson hairbrush, like all the models, and used Kiehl’s, and she’d had her own personal scent designed by a perfume company in the city. Her skin was better than Ada’s, and her mother was prettier too and knew so much more about clothes and makeup and style than Mrs. Heath did, whose skirts hung down her hips like a pillowcase.
She heard Ada downstairs, fixing a snack. She glanced into the Heaths’ bedroom and saw an unmade bed, books scattered across the floor, dirty clothes piled up on a chair. In contrast, her parents’ bedroom was always neat, the bed always made, the small pillows her mother’s decorator had ordered from Turkey strategically placed.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Ada had put out chips and salsa. They sat together at the table pigging out. As they ate, Willa couldn’t help wondering if Ada was going to make herself throw up afterward. The kitchen was messy, dishes in the sink. There were some plants on the windowsill that needed watering. Willa’s kitchen was always spotless, thanks to Argentina, their housekeeper. After they ate, Ada said, “I’ll be right back,” and went up to her room. Willa figured she was going to throw up. It made her queasy. She sat there, waiting. She leafed through an L.L. Bean catalog. A few of the women’s items had been circled with pen: a pink cardigan, a pair of woolen clogs, a dorky pair of khakis. A car drove up and parked and a minute later Mrs. Heath came through the door in her pillowcase skirt, flushed and rumpled. Willa closed the catalog and put it back where she’d found it while Mrs. Heath hung up her coat and her keys and bustled in. “How nice to see you, Willa,” she said.
“You too.” Willa smiled brightly.
“Where’s Ada?”
“She’s upstairs.” Puking her brains out. It isn’t easy having a mother who’s two sizes smaller! How could you be so cruel?
Her mother looked confused, then called up the stairs, “Ada!”
Willa heard the growl of the flushing toilet. A moment later Ada appeared on the stairs. Aside from the fact that her eyes looked teary, you couldn’t tell if she’d done it or not. Your fingertips are yellow.
“Willa’s helping me pa
int my room,” she told her mother.
“That’s very nice of you, Willa,” Maggie Heath said. “I’ve heard some very good things about your work this year. Congratulations on the Sunrise Internship by the way.”
“Thank you.”
“I imagine you’ve been working especially hard.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, good for you.”
Say it like you mean it.
“Would you like to stay for dinner?”
“I have to call and ask.”
“Go ahead, honey.”
No wonder he’s not into you.
Mrs. Heath’s bones were sticking out. You could see the bones in her back, the knobby knot at the base of her neck. Her cheekbones seemed distorted, too big for the rest of her face. How had things become so messed up? Willa wondered. There were people starving in foreign countries, their bellies swollen from malnutrition, and here in America there were smart women like Mrs. Heath who refused to eat. She was on a hunger strike, Willa thought, but it was unclear what she was protesting.
It made Willa want to get fat as some kind of political statement. She wanted to fight the world sometimes. She imagined herself on a galloping horse, holding a spear like Joan of Arc. She just wanted to be different. She wanted to be free. She wanted to travel. To wear long skirts with bells on her ankles. She wanted to go to India. She wanted to fall in love. She wanted to fall madly in love with someone who would whisper to her and write songs about her. She wanted to have babies, lots and lots of babies, and live on a farm somewhere and grow her hair down her back. She would be very beautiful. These things would happen, she knew. One day.
When Mr. Heath came home, he seemed surprised and glad to see her. He kissed Mrs. Heath, a peck on the cheek, but she could tell he didn’t really mean it. When Mrs. Heath was out of the room, Mr. Heath studied her face and asked, “What’s different about you, Willa?”
She shrugged; she couldn’t help smiling. “Nothing.”
“Something’s different.” He squinted, deliberately perplexed.
She laughed. “Nothing! Just the same old me.”
Ada appeared in the doorway with the paintbrushes and started washing them in the sink. “And how’s my Ada Potata?”
“Fine.” But she didn’t sound fine.
He put his hand on Ada’s head and she shook him off. “I have to wash these.”
“How’d it come out?”
“It looks really good,” Willa said.
“Nothing like a fresh coat of paint,” Mr. Heath said. “I wish the rest of the world were so easy to fix.”
Ada smiled at him, but it wasn’t a real smile, Willa thought, just a mean flash that conveyed to Willa that she thought her father was an asshole. Mr. Heath made himself a drink, first ice then gin then some tonic, and took the glass down the hall and disappeared inside a small room, his office. A moment later, Willa could hear him on the phone. Ada rolled her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Willa asked.
“He’s talking to his girlfriend.”
Willa felt a little stab in her chest. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Should I go?”
“No,” she said, and tried to smile. “Stay.”
Mrs. Heath served baked fish and sweet peas. She was a good cook, but Willa had lost her appetite. He’s talking to his girlfriend. Ada ate quickly and drank her milk noisily. The food seemed very bright: the yellow fish, the green peas, the vivid lemons. Mrs. Heath poked peas with the tines of her fork. She looked as if she were someplace else, far away from there. In a way, Willa hoped she was. She thought of those coloring books she’d used as a child, which would ask: What’s wrong with this picture? And you would circle the answers with your pencil. She would circle Mr. Heath’s glass of gin, which he repeatedly replenished, and Mrs. Heath’s distant gaze, and their daughter’s eager appetite. She would circle the pasty white bread, the tub of margarine, the cheesy bottle of salad dressing. Nobody talked, just ate and drank. It felt like they were part of a strange play and everyone had forgotten their lines. Mr. Heath used his silverware strategically, foraging his flounder for tiny bones. Sometimes he had to use his fingertip, just to be sure. He drank his gin, squeezing half a lime into the glass. Like her mother, Mrs. Heath did all the serving and all the clearing. There was the strong smell of fish in the kitchen. Mr. Heath smiled at her across the table and she smiled back, even though she’d decided, right then and there, that she didn’t really like him. Still, he captured her eyes and wouldn’t let go and it was awkward. It was as though they were above the others, floating in a privileged space, speaking their own private language without words.
21
They all became friends, Claire and Greta and the Goldings and the Fairchilds and the Liddys and the Witherspoons and James Alden, a neurosurgeon who had recently lost his wife to cancer and would sit on the periphery, drinking and speaking to no one. They would meet at parties on weekends and drink entirely too much alcohol and flirt with one another, married or not. It seemed typical to her that the one person in the group who might be available for a relationship had absolutely no interest in her. Claire hadn’t had a real group of friends since CalArts. Except for the occasional bed partner, she’d been alone for a long time, too busy trying to pay the rent and raise Teddy to have lasting relationships. These people were smart, interesting, accomplished. They all had kids in the school. Most of them lived in beautiful, unusual homes. Even Greta had a simple and lovely cottage on the lake. She’d had coffee with Greta in Lenox a few times and they’d shared their secrets with each other like expensive party favors.
Golding had a fabulous wine cellar. Elaborate meals were planned and cooked, a filet, perhaps, with roasted potatoes and asparagus, whatever vegetable happened to be in season, and after the meal, a little drunk, they would walk outside into the field, ankle-deep in mist, and you could hear the horses stamping the dirt and the distant train. The men would smoke cigars out in the field, while the women stood together with their arms linked to ward off the chill, and they would all look up at the sky, either splattered with stars or moonless and black, and each one would sigh with appreciation, knowing just how good they all had it. There was such openness there in the Berkshires, such freedom, and she would spread out her arms and let her head drop back and think: This is it! This is life! And then inside more drinking and sitting on the old furniture, antiques that creaked and complained whenever you moved, upholstered in weary velvet, or fabric sprawling with pheasants or horses or dogs, and it would occur to Claire how they were all just borrowers—of the furniture—of the old beautiful houses—and of the moments, even, because she was certain that they had each come before, the husbands and wives, the unattached spinster—the divorcée—even the heady conversations about books and politics and art, and poetry, yes, that too had come before, lines of famous poetry exchanged like spoonfuls of rich desserts. Someone would begin reciting a poem—Joe, or Diane Fair-child, who’d gone to Wellesley, something like Milton, fucking Milton, and then someone else would snicker and laugh and recite another, Neruda perhaps, or often Yeats—Yeats of course was a favorite among the women—and it created a rhythm in the room, an appreciation of beauty, of the richness in life.
And it was on one such occasion, they were at her house this time—her father’s house—and she had passed around hats, all different kinds of hats, and she was wearing an old Turkish hat, and it was all of a sudden very cold out, very damp, and they were out on the porch, all eight or ten of them, and they were all quietly drunk, had been drinking for hours, and the stars were enormous and the sky incredibly black, and Joe touched her on her back, he touched her on the small of her back, her most elegant mysterious place, and that was it—she knew.
The next morning he came to the barn. He pulled up in a little car, an Austin Healey. She’d been working all morning, her hands thick with plaster. She washed her hands and dried them on a towel, then went to the door.<
br />
“I thought you might be looking for this,” he said, holding up Teddy’s backpack. “You might want to look inside it.”
“Why, did you?”
“I thought it was Willa’s.” He shrugged, apologetically. “There’s some very powerful stuff in there.”
“Really?” She opened the pack and dug around and discovered a Baggie of weed.
“It’s not something they should be doing.”
“I know,” she said, but Teddy had been smoking pot for years. He went to great lengths to disguise it, spraying his room with Lysol. “It’s better than drinking,” she offered.
He stood there with the chimes clanging.
“Do you want to come in?”
“You’re working.”
“But you’re a very nice distraction.” She held out her hand as if to a child. “Come see. Come see my feminist art.”
He glanced up at her sheepishly. “I feel sort of bad about that. It was stupid, wasn’t it?”
“It wasn’t stupid,” she heard herself lie. Even now, at her age, she could feel herself sliding into old habits from her youth, the way she’d been encouraged to behave around men she found attractive. Making it easier for them, not wanting to hurt their feelings, more than willing to compromise her own. “Maybe that’s not the right word for it. It’s a difficult subject and, as you can see, it’s one that’s had my attention for a while.” She gestured to the room, her work. “Anyway, it’s complicated. Men and women. The way we define ourselves. It shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be complicated, but it is.” She looked at him. “I guess we can’t seem to get our story straight.”
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