The Confession Club (ARC)

by Elizabeth Berg

  A few days ago, Iris told Maddy that Monica Dawson had come to Abby’s house to pick her up for a doctor’s appointment. “Maybe we ought to offer to drive Abby to her appointments, too,” Iris said. “Jason is busy trying to hold down the bookstore, and Monica’s making a pretty big sacrifice, taking time away from the Henhouse.”

  “Sure,” Maddy said. “But I don’t think Monica minds. The people in this town don’t look at it that way. You help your neighbor, here. Period.”

  It was true. People left bouquets of flowers on doorsteps, paper bags of tomatoes. If you were the first one out after a snowfall, you shoveled your neighbor’s walk as well as your own.

  Maddy and Iris did offer their driving services, but Abby never took them up on it. Now it occurs to Iris that she and Monica are probably both going to the same OB practice.

  “I’m so happy about this news,” she tells Nola. “Let’s go over to Baby Love and get Abby a little gift.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a pretty maternity top?”

  “Okay.”

  Nola snatches a bag of potato chips before it is bagged, then attempts to bat her eyelashes. It looks like Morse code. “Can I have some?”

  “At home.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want you to fill up on chips.”

  “Why not? They’re good for you. They are made from vegetables.”

  “No.”

  “I will only have six chips.”

  “No.”

  “Four?”

  Maddy gives Nola a That’s enough look.

  Nola drops the chip bag. Then, while Maddy signs the credit card receipt for the groceries, Nola leans on the handle of the cart, moving it back and forth in irritating little jerks.

  “When we get home, I want you to go outside and run around for a while,” Maddy tells her. “Good grief.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I need to keep a lookout for Matthew.”

  Maddy freezes. “What do you mean? Is he coming?”

  Nola sighs. “Sheesh. You don’t know that, either?”

  That night, while Iris pores over cookbooks, Maddy comes to sit with her. “So I’ve got news.”

  “What?”

  “First of all, guess who’s pregnant?”

  Iris looks up. “Oh, my God. You?”

  “Nope. Abby.”

  “Abby?”

  “Yup.”

  Iris closes the cookbook she’s been looking at. “When did she tell you?”

  “She didn’t. Nola did.”

  “Why didn’t Abby tell us?”

  Maddy shrugs. “Maybe she assumed we knew, since the kids did. Or she might have wanted to wait awhile to talk much more about it, just to make sure everything was okay. A lot of people don’t tell anyone until they’re past the first trimester.”

  “Well, this puts a whole different spin on things!” Iris says. “What good news!”

  “I know.” Maddy laughs.

  “And here I was, thinking the worst!” Iris says.

  “Me, too. But then that’s kind of a habit of mine.”

  “But the kids knew.”

  “The kids knew. And here’s even bigger news: Guess what else Nola told me?”

  “What?”

  “Matthew’s coming.”

  “He is?”

  “Yup.”

  “When?” Iris asks.

  “Don’t know. He’s on the way.”

  “Wow.”

  “Right?”

  “Are you glad?” Iris asks.

  “We’ll see,” Maddy says.

  A Visitor

  Iris is sitting at the kitchen table with her computer, writing copy for her baking classes. When she has finished, she checks her email, scrolling quickly through the many messages, deleting several of them without opening them. She remembers when she first got email, a friend of hers saying, “You’ll love it!” She didn’t love it then and she doesn’t love it now. She appreciates the practical aspects, but it seems to her that email has mostly just aided and abetted the slow death of real communication. She won’t use emojis as a matter of principle. At least the junk emails don’t waste paper. But they certainly make you wonder how these people get addresses. Using the computer is becoming less a convenience for her than an exercise in time-wasting and paranoia.

  She feels too young to be so crankily dug in, but the more time she spends on a computer, the less connected to real life she feels. That’s one of the reasons she likes to visit John at the farm. Something about being there makes her feel so relaxed, so connected in a fundamental way to the things that matter most to her.

  Unbenownst to him, she submitted a full-price offer on the place last week. She went to Rhonda House’s office (“Mason’s Make-It-Happen Realtor!”), and after Rhonda asked her a million times if she wouldn’t rather look at cute little houses like this one and that one and Oh, hey, what about that one, she helped Iris fill out the necessary paperwork, and the owners accepted immediately. She’ll offer to rent the farm to John for whatever he can afford, plus his help in fixing the place up. Already she has ideas for the kitchen, including a stone fireplace, and a bedroom that faces east, for the sunrises. She wants to enlarge the garden, and the idea of acquiring a lot of animals—even some llamas and goats!—holds great appeal. Some chickens, too—why not? Iris wonders how many other people who were forbidden to have pets as children (Iris’s mother: That’s what zoos are for) go overboard later on in life. But John could help her; she thinks he might like it a lot. He had told her that coming from a farm himself, his father had taught him a lot about land and animals—his father did like animals; that was one good thing about him, John said. He could whittle, he carved beautiful birds from willow wood. He was quite good-looking, and he had a beautiful tenor voice like Gordon MacCrae, too. He told Iris he figured that’s why his mother fell for his father: Sure, her own Gordie MacCrae, isn’t it, carrying her across the threshold all fine and romantic. That was about it for his father’s good qualities, though. Mostly he had a wildly unpredictable and violent temper that got triggered by anything from the weather to a T-shirt not whitened to his liking. Once, when the phone rang during dinner, he flung his plate across the kitchen. Iris gasped when John told her this; he laughed.

  Considering the life John has had, Iris finds it no surprise that he likes the peace of being in the out-of-doors. And a farmhouse is as close as you can get to still being outside when you’re in. She thinks maybe, in time, they could be happy living there together. She could teach her classes from there as well as she does from the house she’s in now. And what fun for people to go out to the henhouse and gather the eggs they’d need for that day’s recipes!

  She is just about to delete an email from yet another address she doesn’t recognize when she realizes she does recognize it. It’s a new email address, but her ex-husband’s name, Ed, is in it. His message is brief but it makes her slam the lid of her computer down and stare straight ahead:

  Iris. Divorced again. And just wondering. Any chance we could meet? Anytime. Anywhere.

  The doorbell rings, and for one panicked moment she thinks it’s Ed, who did not often wait for her answer to a question he’d asked her before forging full speed ahead on his own. He’d call her at her shop and leave a message asking if she’d like to see a play that night. By the time she called him back, he’d have gotten tickets. One Christmas, when he asked about going to Paris for the holiday, she said, “Huh. Maybe.”

  “Good,” he said, and showed her two first-class tickets on Air France.

  She goes to the door, full of trepidation. But the person standing on the porch is not Ed. “Matthew!” she says.

  “How are you, Iris?” He’s oddly formal. Scared-looking, Iris thinks.

>   She motions him in. “Maddy and Nola are at the grocery store. They’ll be back any minute. Come in! How nice to see you! Would you like some coffee?”

  Matthew sits stiffly in the kitchen with Iris, making idle chitchat while she prepares coffee, and then, after she puts his cup before him, he takes hold of her wrist. “Iris, please tell me. What’s going on with Maddy?”

  “Well, I … I don’t really think I’m the one to answer that, Matthew. When Maddy comes back, why don’t the two of you go out and talk, and I’ll take care of Nola?”

  “But has she—”

  He stops talking as the front door opens.

  “Hey, Iris?” Maddy calls. “Can you help carry bags in? I’m afraid we got way more than we planned on.”

  Matthew goes out into the hall. “Why don’t I do that?” he says.

  “Yay, you’re here!” Nola says, and runs to him.

  Maddy leans against the wall. “Hi, Matthew.” She looks over at Iris, standing behind him. Iris shrugs. Don’t ask me!

  Maddy and Matthew have gone out to dinner, and Nola has asked to take her bath unsupervised in any way, saying that she wants to practice her singing for the talent show at school tomorrow, plus she knows how to swim, plus she is too old to be hovered over by a human drone, so Iris goes into her room to read. But she can’t pay attention to the words on the pages, and so she closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. How unsettling to hear from Ed. She has no idea how to respond to him. She supposes she owes it to him to at least see what he might want to talk about. But what if he wants to get back together? She has no interest in that at all. It would be true even if she weren’t in love with another man. And, like it or not, she is in love with John. Like it or not, she has never felt about anyone what she feels for him, and part of the reason is his extreme differentness.

  When she abruptly revealed her feelings for John at Confession Club, and revealed as well a kind of shame at feeling this way about a homeless man, Joanie said, “Did you ever hear that Elaine May quote ‘The only safe thing is to take a chance’?”

  “No,” Iris said, wondering if that could possibly be true.

  “Well, I’ll tell you a story,” Joanie said. “I was a real Goody Two-shoes in high school. But one night my three best girlfriends and I decided to walk on the wild side. There was this club we’d all heard about right up against the tracks, it was called The Yard Dog, and the bad kids went there, the greasers and the girls who rolled up their skirts and peroxided their hair and put out. Everybody said they did dirty dancing at that club, and we wanted to see. It was supposedly real dirty. We’d heard that when they were dancing, boys would pick up girls and turn them upside down, so that their faces would be right in … well, you know. We’d heard there was drinking there, too, and it didn’t matter if you were underage—they never carded anybody. I had never had a drink.

  “We figured we’d have a great time there because we were all pretty cute.” She looks down at her gut. “I was cute then! I didn’t have all this blubber. I don’t know how I got all this blubber. Well, yes I do, but never mind.

  “Anyway, we got to the club and pulled into the parking lot and then we all got real quiet. There were motorcycles everywhere. There were a bunch of guys wearing black leather jackets grouped around the entrance, smoking and drinking beer and laughing real loud. I was scared but I was mostly excited, and I said, ‘Well, we’ve come this far—let’s go in!’ Emily Smitch made us wait while she wrote her name and address on a gum wrapper and stuck it in her bra so that if she got robbed and killed, someone would know how to reach her family.

  “We went in, and the place reeked of beer and there was so much smoke in the air. It was crowded on the dance floor, and the kids were all pressed up against one another and grinding away. We didn’t quite get what they were simulating, but I thought it was so interesting to watch. And they did that upside-down thing, too, and some of the girls’ skirts flew over their heads and nobody cared except us, standing there holding on to one another with our eyes wide, all of us dressed in our little flowered Villager blouses and A-line skirts and charm bracelets. A boy came over to ask me to dance and I said, ‘No thank you, but I would like a sloe gin fizz.’ ‘A what?’ he said, and I told him again and he just flipped me off and went to ask someone else to dance.

  “We stayed only a little while longer. One of the girls had to pee but she was afraid to go in the bathroom. So we left; we had decided to go to Steak ’n Shake like we usually did. Just after we’d gotten back in the car, a guy came screeching into the parking lot, and he made those other greasers look like altar boys. All the wrong things, as I saw it then: hair slicked back, a car that was just a wreck—pea green, and he’d painted all these things on it. ‘Vomit’ that was one. Now, why would you ever want to write ‘Vomit’ on your car? In bright yellow? He pulled in next to us and revved up his engine real loud before he cut it. We were all looking at him, and the other girls were absolutely horrified when he got out of his car and stood there with his hands on his hips, checking us all out in a kind of squinty-eyed way. I could see that everyone else was petrified, but I was fascinated.

  “He was completely the opposite of the boys we usually went for, the ones from the private school the next town over. Those boys had Beatle cuts and wore madras shirts with status hooks and Weejuns with no socks. They drove GTOs and Mustang convertibles and some of them even had ’Vettes. This guy wore a white T-shirt and black jeans and dirty boots with chains on them and there was a toothpick hanging out the side of his mouth. But there was something about him. I was attracted to him.

  “He came over to our car, where I was riding shotgun, and he leaned in the window and looked at all of us and then he pointed at me and said, ‘Yeah. You. Sheila. Come here for a minute and sit in my car with me. I want to talk to you.’

  “ ‘My name isn’t Sheila,’ I said, and he said, ‘It is now.’ He opened the car door and stood back. And despite the fact that my girlfriends were squealing like little pigs and telling me not to go—in fact, Lindy Miller, who was the head cheerleader, was screaming, “CALL-THE-COPS! CALL-THE-COPS! CALL-THE-COPS!”—in spite of that, I went over and got in his car. He had a six-pack on the floor, and he asked me if I wanted one. I said no, and he nodded and said, ‘I’m not surprised.’ And then he just looked at me and said, ‘Give me a kiss, baby.’ And I did it! And let me tell you something, that guy was some kind of kisser. After that, he said, ‘I know what you think of me. But would you go to a concert with me tomorrow night?’

  “ ‘Who’s playing?’ I asked.

  “ ‘James Brown,’ he said, and I like to flat-out died. I loved James Brown, I still do, I had his record on just the other day when I was cleaning the downstairs powder room. It was the Live at the Apollo album, where the MC introduces James by saying, ‘The hardest-working man in show business, the amazing Mr. Please Please himself!’

  “Anyway, I told my parents I was going to a concert in St. Louis—they probably thought James Brown was a classical pianist—and that boy and I drove all the way to the city, and there James was up on the stage, sweating bullets, falling to his knees and having someone come out and throw a cape over his shoulders and pretend to beg him to get off the stage before he killed himself, but no, he’d get up and fling off his cape and belt out another one. He did that again and again. And the place would just erupt every time, girls screaming so loud you thought your eardrums would burst. The drama at a James Brown concert—If you leave me, I’ll go crazy—beats the hell out of all the pyrotechnics and flying around on wires and wearing meat dresses like they do now, I’ll tell you that. His kind of drama got right into your twiddle-dee-dee.”

  “James Brown beat his wives,” Rosemary said.

  “Rosemary,” Joanie said tiredly.

  “What? He did!”

  “Yes, he did. But that is not the part of James Brown I’m talking about now. Okay?”


  “Fine,” Rosemary said, and crossed her arms, which, as they all knew, meant she wouldn’t talk much or at all for the rest of the night.

  Joanie went on. “That boy I went to the concert with, his name was Raleigh, and he was dressed up so nice when he picked me up, tie and Canoe cologne and everything, and he took me out for some dinner before the concert. It was just a greasy spoon, but it was good. We had fried shrimp, I remember, and it was real good. When he paid the bill, he left the tip in coins, including pennies, and I had the feeling that this date had just wiped him out, that he had used up all the money he had.

  “He was real nice the whole time, and the concert was great, and after it was over, we went to the river and he spread his jacket out for me and we sat on the banks and just talked. His father worked construction; his mom had died when he was four. He had gotten drafted, he was leaving for basic training in a week, and he said he didn’t mind, it was his duty, he just hoped he didn’t get greased and come home in a body bag. He looked over at me and he said, ‘So, Sheila … ’ and he laid me down so gently in the grass and just kissed me and not once did he try to feel me up. And since this is Confession Club, I will confess that I actually wanted him to. I’m telling you, girls, I wanted him to do everything to me. For the first time in my life, I was kind of sticking my boobs up like Woo-hoo, come and get it! and I was writhing around like a serpent—oh, my girlfriends would have called me such a slut. But when he kissed me like that, I couldn’t help it; I felt out of control. Actually, now that I think of it, I’ll bet that concert may have had something to do with it.

  “But you know what? That boy did not touch anything but the side of my face and my neck, and it was so gentle, how he touched me. On the way home, realizing how close I had come to going all the way, I thanked him. I said, ‘Thanks for not taking advantage of me,’ and he laughed and said if he wanted that, he sure enough knew where to get it. And I got jealous! I got jealous of whoever it was who would do things like that with him. When he dropped me off, he asked if we could go out again the next night and I said, ‘Yes, pick me up at seven.’ But my parents were waiting up for me and they gave me the third degree and then said I couldn’t go out with him again. ‘But why?’ I said. ‘Because of his car? That’s just a joke!’ But my dad stood up and said, ‘You’ll not go out with him again,’ and left the room, and that was that.