by Karen Brown
The thought of Del seated at a dining-room table covered in a lace cloth with Alice and her grandmother and Erika—tan and striking against the gray scene through the picture window—didn’t make me feel any better. Next, Del would be planning her own trip to Florida, she and Alice with Erika in her convertible speeding along some palm-lined boulevard.
As we drove it grew dark, making the ride to Anne’s feel longer than it had before. Although I’d driven the route myself, I wasn’t ever sure where I was. I shouldn’t have gone without Del. On Main Street I barely recognized the landmarks I’d driven past in my search for Del on All Hallows’ Eve—the bandstand, the Agway, the funeral home, the diner—all of it transformed by the snow, by the deserted quality of the town’s roads. Anne’s house, too, seemed changed, the snow’s sheen lit by the lamppost, the lights beaming yellow from the house windows. The same cars from last time were there—the Chevy Nova, the Camaro, Randy’s Firebird, a pickup truck—now splattered with salt and sand thrown by snowplows. I had thought the Milton girls would be with their families—but it seemed that they were as displaced as Del and I, and Anne was their family. I had a vague hope that Del would be there, but then I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. We walked up the ice-coated walkway to the front of the house. Geoff opened the storm door and we stepped inside.
After days in our cold apartment, the warmth of the place struck me immediately. We’d stepped into a room with low, beamed ceilings and white-painted walls. There were shelves of old books, a fire in the hearth, and two long green velvet couches in an L. On one wall were what I took to be Anne’s work—portraits of nude women done in an impressionist style in oil. The colors were subdued, the texture of the paint heavy. Along the main wall, high above the door frame, mounted heads of stag and elk peered down at us from the shadows.
“Her trophies.” William laughed.
Down a narrow hallway was the kitchen—I could hear everyone talking all at once, not garrulous or cheery, but subdued—still tinged with the tragedy of Mary Rae.
I slipped off my coat, and William took it. Geoff went down the hall calling, “Hello!” and then, “Well, surprise, surprise.”
Del slipped past him and appeared in the doorway wearing an apron with I PUT THE FUN IN DYSFUNCTIONAL printed on the front. I felt angry, almost left out.
“What are you doing here?”
“Cooking dinner,” she said. Her hair was twisted up on the top of her head. A few stray pieces had fallen loose.
“Since when do you know how to cook?” I said.
“I needed something to do with my time,” Del said. She tugged on the apron. “Isn’t this funny? We should get one for Mother.”
“When would she wear it?” I said, and Del laughed, though it was hesitant. She didn’t know our mother had nearly quit cooking altogether.
What was Del’s life like at the manor—had she had a job there? If she knew little about my mother’s and my life, I knew just as little about the last three years of hers. I’d allowed her to become part of mine again, and then I’d met William and practically abandoned her. William moved behind me in the hallway and grabbed my shoulders.
“God, it smells fantastic!” he said.
He’d never seemed to care about food, and I felt like a bad housewife in a sitcom, the one who’d burned every dish. I began to protest, to ask him why he never wanted me to cook, but he maneuvered me out of the way and stepped around me. Del and I were left to file behind him, down the narrow hallway into the kitchen.
15
School had let out a few days before Thanksgiving, and students had flocked to the public transit system for home. Our mother had said she was going to Leanne’s for the traditional feast. She’d called yesterday, and there’d been a moment on the phone when I thought she might insist Del and I join her, but she did not. Instead, I heard her open a kitchen cabinet, listened to her sort through the glass casserole dishes on the shelf.
“Leanne didn’t invite us,” I said.
In the old house’s kitchen, my mother ran the electric can opener. She would be assembling her traditional canned green beans almondine.
“You said you weren’t coming last time we talked,” she said.
I stood in front of the window and fogged the glass with my breath. Below me, Mary Rae tipped her face to meet my gaze.
“You told me you weren’t having Thanksgiving,” I said.
My mother clanked the side of the can of green beans against the glass dish. “I said I wasn’t hosting.”
Del hadn’t attended family gatherings for three years. The first year she’d been in the Institute, and the doctors had recommended she skip the holidays at my mother’s. The following Thanksgiving, all of us girls went to our father’s house. He claimed he’d invited Del, but when I arrived—to find Leanne with her new husband, Sarah with her fiancé, and my father and his wife, all of them at the bar in the family room, mixing gimlets—my father told me Del had other plans.
“With whom?” I said. I stood in the foyer in my coat and considered heading home. My mother would spend that holiday with my grandmother, and at least we would be three women alone.
My father came around the bar with a frosty glass and handed it to me.
“Oh, let her take off her coat first,” his wife said. Her name was Jill, a name for a character in a children’s beginner reader, Del would have said.
That year, Jill tried too hard and served what to Leanne and Sarah and me seemed exotic dishes: individual acorn squash halves stuffed with mushrooms and rice, bleu cheese mashed potatoes.
“I miss plain corn,” Sarah said. The three of us had offered to wash the dishes, and we were alone in the kitchen.
Leanne finished a glass of wine and re-poured. “Wasn’t maize a Pilgrim staple?”
For once, we had been united, though it was in our dislike of the food and at Jill’s expense. If not for Del’s absence, one I felt obligated to fill with her scornful comments, we might have continued to get along.
I ran a dish towel over the china plate Sarah had set in the drainer. “I’m pretty sure Squanto wouldn’t have enjoyed green beans almondine,” I said.
Sarah washed another plate and handed it to me, her pink nails shiny with suds. “Why don’t you let Leanne dry now?” she said.
Last Thanksgiving, we’d all gathered at the old house. Leanne and her husband had picked up my grandmother at Essex Meadows on the way over, and my mother had gone to the manor to get Del. Sitting in a rocker on the cold front porch, I waited for them to return. My mother and I had potted mums the month before, and their colors were bright against the painted gray boards and against the dried grass of the lawn. Inside the house, my grandmother oversaw preparations, and Leanne and Sarah’s husbands watched football in the den. When the Cadillac turned down the pebbled drive, I stood and went to the car. Del hadn’t come.
“She wouldn’t get in the car,” my mother said. “She wanted to know where you were.”
My hands and face were numb from standing outside. “You told me it was better if you went alone.”
“How could I know?” she said. Her eyes were angry and sad at once. I followed her onto the porch and she tore off her gloves. “It’s probably for the best.”
Inside the kitchen my grandmother sat at the scarred farm table, her arms covered in flour. Leanne crimped the pastry crust. “A chore for a three-year-old,” Del might have said. I knew that as long as I was separated from Del, I would channel her dry observations.
Yesterday, on the phone, as my mother put together her green bean dish, I’d paced my small apartment. Del hadn’t mentioned going home for Thanksgiving—she hadn’t acknowledged the holiday at all. Perhaps she knew her absence had become part of our family’s holiday ritual, and Leanne, this year’s Thanksgiving hostess, wouldn’t have wanted to change that. Del often knew more than I gave her credit for.
“Don’t worry about us,” I’d said. “And don’t worry about Christmas, either. We’re fine here
. We have a lot of friends to make plans with.”
Appropriating Del’s new life seemed perfectly acceptable. I’d had no plans to mention William to my mother, who had attempted a protest before I’d hung up the phone. Still, I’d worried. Should I have convinced Del to go home? Even if we would have arrived at the big, empty house, and headed upstairs to our old bedroom as if we were visitors to some roped-off scene from our childhood—we belonged there more than at Anne’s. I felt in some ways like a fugitive.
16
After the meal, Anne sat in the living room on her green velvet couch with a glass of sherry. She wore a red head scarf, a white sweater, and white wool pants, and she looked beautiful, if drained. Alice was there, along with Lucie, and Kitty, another girl, whose parents owned a farm in Cortland. Kitty’s mother sold Mary Kay cosmetics, and Kitty wore lipstick I was certain came from her mother’s product samples—tuscan rose or sienne brulee. I greeted them all in a friendly way, but they were cool toward me. They’d been so open the night I met them. I could only surmise that it had something to do with Del.
Anne patted the couch next to her, and I sat down, and all of the girls but Alice got up and disappeared down the hallway to the kitchen. Anne took a sip of her drink and set it down on the coffee table next to a small wooden box painted to look like a miniature bookcase. I asked Anne what it was, and she told me to push the button on the front. When I did, a mechanism lifted a panel at the top, and a black dog holding a cigarette in his paws emerged to the tinny sound of “Smoke Gets in My Eyes.”
“It was my mother’s,” she told me. “Isn’t it funny?”
I told her I liked it, and she grew serious.
“It’s yours then,” she said. “When I die.”
Although I tried to object, she pushed the button again, and the melody played and the dog’s head appeared. Anne took the cigarette and handed it to me. I couldn’t say I didn’t smoke.
“It was going to be Mary Rae’s, but now it will be yours.”
I accepted the light she gave me, and then I held the cigarette between my two fingers like an actress playing a part. Alice sat on a pillow in the corner of the room, braiding the pillow’s fringe. I knew she had to have been listening.
“Maybe one of the others might like it,” I said.
The girl stood, unfolding like an agile bird, and left the room to report to everyone in the other kitchen, I assumed.
“They have their little tchotchkes picked out.” Anne set her cigarette in an ashtray, a black ceramic cat’s head, its mouth yawning open, its painted eyes bright and shrewd. Smoke spiraled out of two holes in the ashtray cat’s nose, and I wondered who had claimed this memento.
All the girls wore their dark hair long, and it was often difficult to distinguish among them, especially after a few glasses of wine. Alice’s hair was heavier, a reddish mane that she often played with—her fingers lithe and slender and always moving. She had a sprinkling of freckles, and that afternoon wore a plaid wool skirt and tights, like a school uniform. Lucie was so tiny she seemed like a child, and whenever Joseph came into the room she rushed up and grabbed him and pulled him down with her onto the couch. Kitty was the rudest to me. She was tall and dark-eyed, her lipstick bright, and when I would catch her watching me she’d continue to stare for a beat before she looked away. There was another girl, Jeanette, who came in late, letting in the smell of snow. She caught sight of me and quickly pretended I was invisible.
The music on the stereo was Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Geoff played host, making rounds with the wine bottle, refilling glasses, so I didn’t know how many I’d had to drink. The more I drank, the less I monitored Del, who shouldn’t have been drinking at all. She was often nestled on the couch between two of the girls, or with Randy, who was surprisingly handsome, fair, and chiseled, and who wore a pair of cowboy boots he must have owned since high school—the toes misshapen, the heels worn down. Joseph wore, like William, a stretched-out sweater and corduroys with a hole in the knee. His hair was longish and stringy, and he became boisterous when he drank too much. The empties littered the floor around the chair where he sat, sometimes with Lucie on his lap. It was clear to me that William was older than everyone there, save Anne and Geoff, and I wondered about his connection to all of them.
“What are we doing here?” I wanted to say to Del, but she never caught my eye. She had found acceptance with the Milton girls—replacements for the sisters who’d snubbed the two of us all of our lives. Maybe we had both found a way to be happy. That the Milton girls ignored me didn’t hurt my feelings. I had William.
The focus of the evening, I gathered, was to give thanks to Mary Rae’s memory. The girls told more stories about her—these less complimentary than the ones I heard on All Hallows’ Eve—how she slashed an ex-boyfriend’s tires in high school, how after an abortion she decided never to have children and would only care for the children of others as her penance. She had been attending Tompkins Cortland Community College and wanted to one day run a child care center. It seemed unfair that Mary Rae, the object of so many stories, was unable to correct anyone or set the record straight.
I wanted to know who had gotten her pregnant, but Mary Rae, listening in from the ether, knew their talk had turned to gossip, and if I indulged them they’d find other cruel things to say about her. The whole discussion felt wrong.
“She misses us,” Kitty said. “Yesterday I found a rose petal in the snow in front of my house.”
“Where could that have come from?” Lucie said. She seemed the most practical—looking for reasonable explanations.
“A florist delivering roses to your neighbor for her first anniversary was careless,” I said.
“The spirit has spoken,” Del said in her medium’s voice.
Del had obviously been talking about the Spiritualists by the Sea and our childhood séances.
After the meal, the girls all stayed together in the living room smoking clove cigarettes, the smell competing with the roasted meat, the wood smoke. No one seemed queasy about smoking indoors. William spent time in the kitchen with the men. When I managed to slip away from the living room, I found them all leaning against the kitchen counter with cigars and glasses of brandy, having their own quiet conversation. I looked in at them and the talking ceased.
“Lost?” Geoff said.
The dirty dishes piled on the counter glistened with fat and butter, with the remains of the turkey bones. “Are you going to do the dishes?” I asked.
William said that Anne had a maid who would do them the next day. Randy shuffled his boots on the slate floor. “Are you looking for the bathroom?” William asked.
“Are you planning a bank robbery?” I said.
Joseph slapped the counter. “Hah!” he said. He kept the cigar in his teeth and used both hands to tuck his hair behind his ears.
William raised his eyebrows at me. He was the odd man out in this group. I got the impression that he was avoiding the living room and the Milton girls.
“I’ll show you the way,” he said, and he came toward me and slid his hand into mine. He led me to a narrow back staircase, which we climbed, single-file, our hands joined between us. Upstairs he stepped into a small room with a twin bed and a painted pine bureau. He closed the door behind us. I looked around for the bathroom, but it was clear that there wasn’t one.
“What’s this?” I said.
He pulled me in. I smelled the roasted poultry on his sweater, and I almost told him no before his mouth found mine and quieted me, his hands slipping beneath my clothes, cool and quick. One plunged down the front of my jeans, and I knew that we would have only a short amount of time, but we were good at this, having found ourselves able to complete the act any number of places at short notice—his office, with a line of students in the hall, at the back of the library, behind the last stack of books, beneath the dust-filled light of the projector, the only patrons in the little cinema downtown. The coolness of his hand on me made me tremble, and
I bit his lip, and he moaned and turned me facedown on the bed. He unzipped his pants, and then he was on top of me, inside me, and the bed’s old springs recoiled against his thrusting, a sound amplified in my ear, my face flat against the raised pattern of the bedspread. There was no explanation for his sudden desire, there never really was. Just the darkness of the stairs, our bodies in that close space, the idea of the other, and the pleasure that could be ours in a matter of moments.
Afterward, in the bathroom downstairs, I rubbed at the mark of the bedspread on my face and swung my hair over my cheek to cover it. I felt slightly abject. It never occurred to me to protest or refuse him, yet he’d refused me just that afternoon. Back in the living room, I took a seat on the floor by the fire, separate from the others. I knew they all knew. “It’s obvious they’re fucking,” the girls would say to each other out of my earshot.
“Mary Rae would have liked you, Del,” Alice said across the room. “You’re just the right amount of smart and crazy.” An irritating remark. Mary Rae had chosen me.
I felt too warm by the fire and regretted sitting there. Anne was watching me, making me feel odd. William’s semen seeped into my underwear.
“Have the police found any clues about what happened?” I said.
A log fell into the flames. Kitty, sitting the closest to me on the floor, bit her fingernails, smearing her lipstick. Alice played with the fringe on the afghan she’d wrapped around her and Del’s shoulders. I’d made yet another mistake.
“No one seems to know anything,” Anne said, her cigarette dangling from her bony fingers. “Her mother has been hounding the police. But they aren’t used to this sort of thing. This is a small town.”
I angled myself away from the fire and imagined the heat of it catching the loose pieces of my hair. I smelled the singed pelt of the stag mounted above my head. “Was she seeing someone?” I asked.
What if it had been a situation like the one in the movie Laura, in which a spurned lover decides if he can’t have the woman, no one will? In the dim room the pale faces of the Milton girls seemed detached from their darker clothes and hair, from the green velvet of the couches they sat on.