by Sue Miller
‘He’s the kind of person – I’m sure you know this kind of person – who simply won’t acknowledge the effect his behavior has on other people.’
Lottie was much more careful when she spoke about her life. She felt oddly protective of everyone in it, as though Elizabeth posed some danger to them all. She said nothing about her difficulties with Jack, about his grief. She made it sound as though Evelyn had died years before, as though the folding together of their families had been smoothly accomplished.
Elizabeth sighed and lifted her hands to her heart. ‘A newly wed. How nice.’ Lottie noticed that the cuticles around her polished nails were ragged and torn. She was wearing the same heavy, cufflike bracelets. Elizabeth smiled. ‘And all that success too. I love your articles. Whenever I see there’s one somewhere, I buy the magazine instantly.’
Lottie smiled too. ‘That’s awfully nice to hear,’ she said.
Elizabeth flung herself back in her chair, dramatically. She had drunk two gin and tonics with lunch. ‘God, who would have thought, all those years ago, that we would have ended up like this?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, positions reversed, as it were. I was the one who was supposed to go on to fame and glory, wasn’t I?’
‘Oh.’ Lottie nodded. And then she asked, with deliberate innocence, ‘And what was supposed to become of me?’
‘Well …’ There was a pause as Elizabeth saw what she’d stepped into. ‘You were sort of going somewhere else.’ She laughed, nervously. ‘And look at me now,’ she said rapidly. ‘What a mess I’ve made of everything.’ She leaned forward and tapped the table with a polished nail. ‘Much good it did to spend all those years studying Keats and Shelley. I might as well have made my way to some stud farm in Kentucky and learned how to be a brood mare. And how very appropriate.’ Her splayed hands gestured wildly, as though she thought she could distract Lottie with enough activity. ‘Brood is of course precisely the word …’
But as she talked, Lottie was feeling a pulse of confused anger left over from so long ago that she might have been holding the sticky Tampax in her pocket. She watched Elizabeth’s bright calculated smile flashing at her as she spun her apologetic fantasy, and she thought of that sadder, stupider Charlotte who lived inside her still.
Elizabeth had barely finished speaking when Lottie set her coffee cup down and said, in a friendly tone, ‘You know, Cameron still lives in town.’ Elizabeth’s expression behind the dark glasses didn’t change, but her body quieted abruptly. ‘I’m sure he’d love to see you. Maybe you should call him.’
Before they left the restaurant, Lottie and Elizabeth went to the ladies’ room, a tiny box with two stalls wedged into it. Lottie finished first. She stood in front of the mirror over the sink, looking at herself in the bright overhead spotlight. Behind her, Elizabeth’s modest trickle seemed pathetically human, her story suddenly so sad. Under the harsh glare of the light, Lottie looked older than she was; the lines at the corners of her mouth were fierce and embittered. Why had she said what she’d said about Cameron? How could it possibly serve her leftover anger for Elizabeth and Cameron to come together again? She would remember this moment weeks later, when she heard about the accident; but even now she felt guilty, thinking of Cam. She felt she’d sacrificed him to some ancient, childish need of her own. Something she should have outgrown long ago.
Elizabeth flushed, began talking loudly over the gurgling water. Lottie leaned toward herself into the shadow and applied her lipstick. She shrugged. Well, they were both adults now. And they almost certainly would have bumped into each other anyway. Whatever happened between them at this stage of their lives, surely none of it was her responsibility.
CHAPTER VI
Lottie was making a plate of deviled eggs for the cookout. She had boiled them early in the morning, a dozen of them, and all day the kitchen had held that gassy, sulfuric odor. While she was working at the counter, still in her bathrobe after her run and a shower, Ryan came in from the backyard to get cleaned up. He had warned her he wouldn’t stay at Elizabeth’s for very long, that he had friends he was meeting later in the Square.
‘Now who is this dame supposed to be again?’ he asked, standing by the open refrigerator with a glass jug of Gatorade in his hand. The cold air around him was visible, a faint, smoky mist.
‘Shut the door,’ she said. Half the eggs were finished, and Lottie picked up another oval, rubbery white and began to fill the perfect little hollow with stiffened yolk.
The door whumped. ‘Okay, it’s shut. Who is she?’
‘She lived across the street when we were growing up. Elizabeth. Née Harbour. It’s something else now. Elizabeth Something-or-other. She’s married. Though actually she’s separated now. I had lunch with her last week.’
‘So she was a friend in the old days?’ He was smiling at her, a teasing smile. ‘So very long ago, when you were young?’
She made a moue. He was like an old man in the way he kept reworking the same familiar jokes, she thought. She remembered Derek’s grandfather, who’d told Derek every time he met Lottie that Derek better watch out or he’d run off with her himself. ‘More Cameron’s friend than mine,’ she said. ‘An old lover of his, actually.’
‘Aha!’ He set the jug down on the counter.
‘Aha’ what?’
‘Aha, the plot thickens. Aha, the story becomes more complicated. Aha, perhaps we watch them rekindle their romance.’ He was walking by her. As he passed the plate, he picked up a stuffed egg, popped the whole thing into his mouth.
‘Ryan! Come on!’
He grinned, a disgusting eggy grin, and then he was gone.
Lottie continued to work. Then she stopped and laughed out loud. She’d suddenly realized she was humming ‘The Second Time Around.’
Because Elizabeth had called Cameron, of course. Probably thinking only that Cameron’s was a devotion she could count on having lasted all these years, and that she could use a good dose of devotion. All she’d told Lottie yesterday when she called to invite them to the cookout was that she and Cameron had been ‘having a lovely time.’
Lottie got ready for the party at a leisurely pace, trying on first one dress, then another. Though she wore the scruffiest of clothes around the house to write in – she was often still in her bathrobe at noon, at two or three o’clock; or wearing faded jeans, old shirts of Ryan’s – she liked fine clothes. Even when she was her poorest, she’d worked hard for a worn elegance, anyway, when she went out. She’d bought things secondhand then, or at antique-dress shops. And she had drawers of scarves and jewelry she liked to experiment with.
Tonight she finally decided on a loose black cotton-knit dress with a scooping back, and therefore shoulders that occasionally slid a little way down her arms – a dress Jack had once said made her look ‘eminently fuckable.’ She belted it with a bright, narrow scarf and slid into a pair of low-heeled sandals. She hooked long, filigree-delicate earrings into her earlobes and applied a lot of shadowy eye makeup.
As they crossed the impossibly wide street, Ryan said to Lottie, ‘I feel weird. I feel like we’re the slaves being invited up to the massa’s house for some completely irrelevant celebration. His birthday. The acquisition of another hundred acres.’
Lottie smiled. ‘That’s probably apt,’ she said. ‘In fact, I bet the little houses were built for servants of people in the big houses.’
‘Think so?’
‘Well, a very different class of people anyway. Just look.’
They stopped in the middle of the street and looked back at Lottie’s mother’s house, crammed in a row next to the other two miniatures; and then over at Elizabeth’s house, with its wastefully deep, curving porch, its sloping lawn, its porte cochere, its turrets and elaboration of ornate woodwork.
‘Say no more,’ he said, and started for the curb. He had dressed up a little too, in baggy cotton shorts and a clean black T-shirt. He wore European sandals on his feet, sandals that oddly looke
d almost exactly like the ones he’d worn as a little boy. He seemed, to Lottie, unbelievably handsome.
‘When I was a kid, though,’ she said, trailing him, ‘it was all invisible to me, these differences. Up to a point, of course.’
‘Yeah. Kids don’t care, do they? Until they do care.’
‘That’s about it,’ Lottie said.
As they walked up Elizabeth’s driveway, they could hear her children’s shrill voices out in the backyard, so they continued under the porte cochere and came out behind the house. The backyard opened before them, huge and slowly sloped uphill to a row of tall evergreen trees at the property line. The children were playing badminton on a net set up just in front of these trees. In the corner of the yard loomed a carriage house that was probably larger than two of Lottie’s mother’s house. Elizabeth waved from the flagstone terrace off the kitchen. She and her mother and Cameron were sitting in wooden chairs there. Cam got up and strode barefoot across the grass to them. He shook Ryan’s hand, kissed Lottie on the cheek. Loose blades of grass clung to his white, arched feet. He wore slacks and an old shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His collar was so frayed it had split along its top edge. ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said, with a gratitude that seemed proprietarial to Lottie. As they all walked back to the terrace, she filed this away mentally.
Emily Harbour, heavy and slow, was struggling up out of her chair. She had sturdy sandals strapped on to her swollen, bruised-looking feet. Her varicosed legs were partly covered by an unfashionable wraparound skirt, and her doughy white arms looped out of a wrinkled sleeveless blouse. Her face was still pretty, though, the way fat women’s faces can be as they get elderly – plump and unlined. And she still wore her hair exactly as she had in Lottie’s childhood, in a wispy bun low on her neck. It was a pure yellowy-white now.
She greeted Lottie warmly, was pleased, pleased indeed to meet Ryan, and effusive about the eggs. She asked Lottie to help her, and Lottie followed her into the house, into the cavernous old kitchen, unchanged in twenty-five years it seemed, except that the gray walls had darkened – the higher, the darker – with greasy soot. Emily spoke in a steady, unpunctuated, and gentle stream, with a light, girlish voice. ‘It was just so kind of you, Charlotte, to bring over deviled eggs, and I can’t begin to thank you, they are beautiful, I’ve never been able to make a reasonable deviled egg myself, they always run a bit and they’re not supposed to do that, of course, so I just confine myself – here you go,’ she said, handing Lottie a plate from the refrigerator, ‘– to slicing things, it’s much safer and it takes much less of a knack, you know what I mean, just whack whack whack and you’re finished.’ On the chilled platter under the plastic wrap there were tomatoes, radishes, celery, carrots, flat glistening circles of Bermuda onion. Lottie unwrapped this and set it on the big square table in the middle of the old-fashioned room.
Someone would certainly redo this kitchen, Lottie thought, as she followed Emily’s instructions for finding additional bowls and plates in the Hoosier cabinet. There were no countertops, just a series of separate pieces of kitchen furniture set against the walls – a sink with a drooping grimy skirt of faded blue gingham, an old electric stove, the Hoosier cabinet, painted a pale green, and another cabinet, a hutch, really, stacked with plates. There were also several wooden tables of various heights, and a huge, bulbous refrigerator with bright strips of shining metal on its door in an art deco pattern. It reminded Lottie of the Chrysler Building.
Emily was lumbering painfully back and forth from the pantry to the big table in the middle of the room, bringing jars of pickles and olives, mustard, mayonnaise, talking all the while. First about picnics: ‘… some Latin derivation for the word, I believe, but it’s charming, nonetheless, when you think of it, isn’t it? pic, nic, pic, nic. But basically such a wonderful idea too, just to escape from the necessity for all that fancy folderol at the dining room table, especially with the children here, don’t you know …’ She ripped open several bags of potato chips and dumped them into one of the bowls Lottie had found. ‘Here they come now, tumbling out, pure salt, pure fat, dreadful for you, I’d never allow myself to have them if I didn’t pretend I was getting them for the children, in fact I adore them, and the children are such a wonderful excuse, aren’t they?’
Lottie murmured her unnecessary responses. She was remembering how proud she had felt as a girl of her mother’s kitchen when she compared it to the Harbours’. Her mother’s kitchen was modern, that was the point. The linoleum counter with the gleaming aluminum strip along the front edge, the fluorescent bulb overhead, the marbled plastic table with matching chairs: these were things you saw in magazines. This room, by contrast, had seemed pathetically dumpy and old-fashioned to Lottie, and her mother had confirmed that for her. ‘I don’t know what they think they’re saving it for,’ her mother would say after one of her rare visits to the Harbours. ‘You can’t take it with you.’
When Emily had everything ready to her satisfaction, Lottie went in and out several times, setting the food, the plates and napkins and bowls, on the large wooden picnic table on the terrace. Cam helped too, bringing out candles in colored glass jars, and then a plate of uncooked hamburgers the children had apparently shaped earlier in the afternoon.
Ryan had joined the badminton game – Lottie saw there was a girl his age playing, a girl with long dark hair tenting her shoulders – and Elizabeth was at the net too, talking to the youngest child, her daughter, who was upset about something. Cameron had started some coals earlier, in a round metal grill. (‘I don’t know why one feels a man has to start the coals, but one just does, I suppose, and anyway it’s such a messy job, if there’s a man around I’d just as soon foist it off on him in the name of whatever – male superiority, fine with me.’) Now he began to cook the hamburgers. Elizabeth drifted back down from the game, carrying her daughter. The child was so big Elizabeth seemed engulfed, wrapped in the girl’s long, skinny arms and legs. Emily, she said the child’s name was. After her grandmother. ‘This is Charlotte, sweetheart. Can you say hello?’
The girl turned her face for a second to look at Lottie and then buried it again in her mother’s neck, tightened her limbs’ clutch on Elizabeth. She was a pretty girl, with a long oval face and Elizabeth’s red hair. She’d been crying.
Now Lottie sat down by Emily Harbour, as instructed, and as the older woman talked, she kept offering the requisite supporting murmurs and comments. But she was watching Elizabeth and Cameron together. Normally Elizabeth had an exaggerated, stylized animation, but she was even more dramatic tonight than usual. You could hear where the italics would fall when she spoke. She laughed often, a bright, gay laugh that made Cam’s head swing toward her, even when she had wandered off again with little Emily, even when he began talking to Lottie and Elizabeth’s mother.
Finally the meal was cooked, and the sweaty children and Jessica, the au-pair girl, trooped down to the terrace. They all sat on the long wooden benches at the sides of the table. Big Emily, as they were instructed to call her – horrible, Lottie thought – and Cameron were on chairs pulled up to the ends of the table, but Lottie was squished among the children, between Jessica and one of Elizabeth’s boys. There was a frenzy of questions: what grade, what school, what sport, what major, and so on. They were eating too, of course. There were plates, condiments, pushed and passed up and down the table along with the conversation, and people had to raise their voices to be heard.
‘Well, I think Cambridge is sucky,’ Elizabeth’s smaller boy said.
‘Oh, Jeff. What do you even know about it? Nothing. Have you ever even been to Harvard Square at night? No, you haven’t.’ This was Michael, the oldest. His eyes skipped around the table, asking the adults to notice how much more like them than his siblings he was. He was fourteen or so, Lottie guessed. Both boys were dark and stockier than the little girl. Little Emily.
‘Sucky is an awful, awful word, darling. I won’t even discuss its meaning with you. Just do not, please, do
not ever use it again in my hearing.’
‘Where is the mustard? Or did big fat Jeffrey eat it all?’
Now big Emily’s voice floated down the table toward Lottie, and Lottie leaned forward to hear. ‘Elizabeth tells me you’re a writer, Charlotte. Now there’s a hard job, so solitary, inner strength, it just befuddled me how long my husband could just sit alone all day, writing, writing, writing.’
‘I suppose so,’ Lottie answered. She had to pitch her voice above the squabbling children next to her. ‘But I suppose if you do it willingly, there’s a part of you that likes to be alone.’
‘Yes, I can see that, one gets used to solitude.’ The old woman’s head bobbed thoughtfully, and she was off: ‘I enjoy it myself, finally, though I never thought I would when I had a houseful of children and my husband, oh, that was lovely, and of course’ – she lifted a fat hand in a circling gesture meant to include her daughter, her grandchildren – ‘this is always wonderful too, but I know what you mean, it can be very satisfying, though of course I don’t claim to do anything much of use with it, just putter around, keeping busy, but one does like it …’
Lottie kept nodding in the swirl of voices around her. She saw Elizabeth smile radiantly past her at Cameron. He had been describing what sounded like a convention for booksellers, Lottie thought.
‘So, Ryan, when do you start?’ Jessica’s voice, behind her. This was Jessica’s third or fourth question to Ryan, Lottie noticed. He was sitting on the bench across from Lottie and Jessica.
‘Classes? I guess the seventeenth or something. Registration is a little earlier.’
Elizabeth got up and went into the house. Lottie had begun to talk to Michael about school. He was polite and thorough in his answers. She was learning more than she’d ever wanted to know about the cutoff ages for junior high and high school, and how much you could and couldn’t manipulate them to get maximum playing time on the basketball teams. But she kept sneaking glances at Cameron, and she could tell without looking up when Elizabeth was approaching again, his face was so altered, so lifted – though he too was talking, politely, to Ryan and Jessica.