Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

  Emily Post had very high standards for guest rooms and thought every hostess should be obliged to spend twenty-four hours now and then in her own to better understand its strengths and deficiencies. Is the lighting adequate? Are there enough blankets? She even insisted on a shelf of good books. Post would have been mortified by the common, modern-day interpretation of a guest room as storage space, stuffed with old exercise equipment and off-season clothing, maybe an inflatable mattress and a rolling desk chair bumping around. Lindy’s guest room was somewhere in the middle: no books and the walls were bare, but there was a real bed, a good lamp, and plenty of blankets. I also had my own tabletop Christmas tree decorated with tiny red balls and baby candy canes. Next to it was a little framed quote: The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it (no attribution). It still had the price tag on the back and I couldn’t help wondering if Lindy had just acquired it.

  “Your guest room is lovely,” I called in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Oh, thanks,” she called back. “It’s a work in progress.”

  There’s always something nice to say about someone’s home—the light through the front windows, the color of the kitchen—and it is important to find that thing and say it.

  After lunch and the baby’s nap, Lindy, the children, and I drove to a place where there was a boardwalk along the ocean. It is a rule of visiting, I think, that the things that make real estate valuable also make an outing pleasant: a water view, elevation, and local attractions, with the water view being perhaps the most popular. A museum or historic village? Not everyone will share your interest. A bike ride? Not everyone will have the energy. A drive or a walk can be nice, if there’s something to see, such as a mountain or waterfall. And it is always a good idea to have a place in mind for a snack. This is why the English have tea, the Germans have the Kuchenstunde (cake hour), and Americans eat too much ice cream. No one needs to eat between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, but it is a pleasure. It is also the best way to extend good cheer until cocktail hour.

  We followed the boardwalk along the rocky coast and at the end there was an observation tower. It was mild for a December day in Connecticut, but windy, which made conversation difficult. We were constantly brushing the hair out of our eyes, or turning an ear out of the wind to hear each other better. Lindy asked if I was going to see Vanessa during my travels. I said yes but we hadn’t settled on dates yet.

  “I’ll be curious what you think,” she said.

  The wind blew the hair across her face and I couldn’t read her.

  “About what?” I asked. But she didn’t hear me, or didn’t answer, I couldn’t tell which.

  We climbed up the tower (all of us except the preteen), agreed that, yes, we could see even farther, then climbed down and followed the boardwalk back to the parking lot. We were almost to the car when Mona raced to the top of a nearby hill, so we went up after her (all of us except the preteen). Elevation was the theme of the day, it seemed. I practiced my winter tree identification while Mona ran in circles. People are surprisingly impressed when you can point to a bare tree and say, “Common lime.” Or, “Ginkgo.” The second is particularly easy because when leafless the branches look like model train tracks against the sky.

  On the way home we stopped for ice cream.

  Catching Up

  Saturday morning Max took Mona and the preteen to ballet so Lindy and I could have some time alone. I had been about to take a shower, but instead we lingered over coffee in the kitchen while the baby played in a bouncy seat. Lindy couldn’t quite believe I wasn’t traveling for another reason.

  “You don’t have a work conference?”

  “No.”

  “Is there a garden you need to see?”

  “No.”

  “This is just . . . vacation.”

  “Yes, kind of. I’m trying to pay more attention to my friends.”

  Lindy glanced around her kitchen. It was cozy and warm and in need of a good sweeping, which she probably knew. Her gaze fell on a large bouquet of juniper and birch branches I’d already seen on Instagram, where a week ago it had had a sepia filter. In front of us now, something felt decidedly lost, but what exactly? Should I mention I’d seen it on Instagram?

  I pointed at the arrangement. “That was so pretty,” I said.

  Lindy shrugged. “Do you want something to eat?” she asked, an edge to her voice.

  I remembered something I’d read about May Sarton, who looked forward to her friends’ visits with singular intensity. On one occasion, when a friend made a comment about some wilted flowers, Sarton became furious and spoke so harshly—screamed—that she lost her voice. Her inner life was in turmoil and she had a great need for the spaces of her life to be seen and appreciated. If any crack in the façade was noticed, her anger rose quickly.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said.

  “I almost planned a party,” Lindy said.

  “What?”

  “For you. And the holidays. I’d love for you to meet some of my friends up here, and for them to meet you. But”—she looked down at the baby, who had started to fuss—“I just couldn’t pull it off.”

  “I’m so glad you didn’t.” The extent of my relief must have alarmed her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. Fit as a fiddle. I just came to see you.” The thought of the almost-thrown party had me desperate not to waste any more time. I gestured at the pot of honey on the table. “You know what I should have brought you? A honey pot with the proverb ‘Yet there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.’”

  Lindy looked confused.

  “You know. Gift shops sell all kinds of stuff—spoon rests and dish towels—with sayings on them.”

  “I know.”

  “So that would be funny. Because honey is sticky?”

  She shook her head. “That is so you,” she said. Affectionately, I thought.

  “I mean it,” I said. “You’re my oldest friend. I’ve known you longer than anyone else.”

  Lindy leaned forward and gently bounced the baby. “It has been a really long time.”

  “You were always so happy.”

  “Was I?” She shook her head in disbelief and I knew why. Her mother had been drinking too much when we met, though we didn’t understand that at the time.

  “What do you remember about me?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. The way you did your hair. Your ponytail had to be perfectly smooth, remember? No bumps. And you were so neat. Remember how you would blow on your notebooks to get all the eraser dust off?”

  The baby fell asleep and Lindy sat back in her chair. She looked at me intently, then, in a voice that was a notch or two quieter, said, “I used to leave at night and drive around.”

  “What?”

  “I’d find a parking lot, usually that one at the mall, you know, close to the interstate. I’d park and just sit there, listening to the highway.”

  “Was it safe?”

  “Probably not. There was that movie theater, so people would come out from late shows. I don’t know. I just sat there. I thought I was going crazy,” Lindy said. “My father acted like everything was normal, so I didn’t know what was real.” She poured more coffee for us. “I feel like we should be drinking wine, but that would be ironic.”

  “We were so good,” I said, after a minute.

  She knew what I meant. Vanessa had been more fun, more wild. Anchored by her stable parents, she seemed to have the necessary leeway Lindy and I did not.

  “Poor Vanessa,” Lindy said.

  “Why? Isn’t she happy?”

  “It’s a lot all at once, you know? Marriage, twin boys. A dog. Have you met Richard yet?”

  “No.” They’d gotten married at a courthouse, with only a small celebration for family afterward.

  “Well
.” Lindy seemed at a loss for words. “It’s true I don’t know him well yet, but we had a picnic in Central Park with them recently and she was trying so hard. Taking care of Richard, playing with the kids. She was tireless, but didn’t seem quite herself.” Lindy sighed. “She’ll be fine, she always is. She has her mom. You know they talk every day?”

  We shook our heads, both of us trying to imagine what that would be like. Then we saw Max turn into the driveway with the girls. We pressed our cheeks and wiped our eyes. “We’ll talk more tonight,” she said.

  I nodded and prepared myself for the family’s full presence in the kitchen. Sometimes as a guest it’s hard to know where to be. “Would now be a good time to take a shower?” I asked.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER LUNCH WE WENT TO a bookstore so Mona could use a gift card she’d won at school. Lindy bought some Christmas presents and we waited while they were gift wrapped.

  “I used to do all my own wrapping,” she said sadly.

  On the way home, we stopped for a snack at a café in a barn. There were several farm cats roaming about and a deck with a view of fields. The blended scent of coffee and manure was strange, but Lindy settled at a table to nurse the baby. Just as that was done, Mona spilled her juice, so I held the baby while she took Mona to the bathroom. When they got back to the table, the baby’s diaper needed to be changed, so we wordlessly switched children and Lindy went back inside again. It was exhausting.

  I felt some pressure to make conversation with Mona, so I asked her if she wanted anything else.

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  I looked at the clouds, which were of many shapes and shadings that afternoon. I told Mona that a cloud has to be 150 feet thick before it blocks the sun.

  “Why?” she said.

  “That’s just how much cloud it takes.”

  “Cloudy days are warmer than sunny ones,” she said.

  “Yes, that’s sometimes true.”

  “My mom says it’s always true.”

  “Oh, okay. Well warm air rises and the clouds probably keep it locked in.”

  “Why?” she said.

  I sighed. “Because they’re mean.”

  Lindy reemerged with a sleepy baby and settled her into the stroller. We still had some coffee in our mugs, so she relaxed into her seat with a sigh. Then Mona said she was cold and wanted to go home.

  In the car Lindy apologized, but I told her not to. The best way to travel is to surrender a little bit of your personality, and I was enjoying not being the most difficult one.

  * * *

  —

  ODYSSEUS MIGHT HAVE HAD to make speeches and outwit gods, but no less difficult is having to wait out the children to have time with your host. That night, when the children were finally in bed and the wine was poured, Lindy and I had a chance to resume our talk. We’d been looking forward to it all day, but now that the time had come, we were both tired. Lindy admitted to being so tired and overwhelmed lately that she’d started outsourcing everything: landscaping, housecleaning, carpooling, cooking. “There just isn’t enough time,” she said. She was unwrapping the Christmas village as she spoke.

  “But you can’t outsource friends,” I said. I’d meant it as a joke, but it came out sounding melancholy.

  “True,” she said, unwrapping a porcelain rural skating pond.

  “You’re in charge of a lot,” I said.

  Next she unwrapped the two little magnetic figures that spun wildly around the frosted-mirror ice when she wound the key on the bottom. She set the whole thing down on the coffee table and we watched it together for a moment.

  “I, on the other hand, sometimes get home from work and don’t know what to do with myself,” I said.

  “Oh, May. Really?”

  I hadn’t meant to talk about the challenge of living alone, so turned my attention to landscaping, since she’d brought it up. I told Lindy it felt like everyone now aspired to outsourcing their yard work. It was happening in Duck Woods, too. Then I told her about a yard I loved in which the owner, in an effort to ward off deer from her rhododendrons, had tied perfumed strips of white cloth to every plant.

  “It’s ghostly at night, but it’s also kind of beautiful. It shows how much she cares. Poetry only exists in a garden if it’s tended by the people who live there.” Suddenly I remembered Lindy’s manicured lawn and that she was one of the outsourcers.

  “Did you say ghostly or ghastly?” Lindy said. She smiled, and we both sipped our wine. I remembered that when she moved into the house years ago she’d ripped out a whole bank of wild hydrangea (Hydrangea arborescens).

  Now Lindy unwrapped a little snow-covered drugstore and put it on the table next to the pond. “You know,” she said, “when we were little, you were the one who was more into decorating your room. Remember?”

  I did.

  “I’d come over to your house and you’d have a new poster or you’d have rearranged the furniture or something. And it was always so neat and perfect. I shared a room with my sister and couldn’t change anything without her consent. I was so jealous.”

  “And now you’re the one who’s mastered the art,” I said.

  She unwrapped a glittery carousel. Next came a tiny train station.

  I thought I was ready for bed, but I surprised myself. The light was dim and Lindy was burning an impressive number of votive candles placed strategically around the room. I don’t know if it was the late hour, the flickering light, or the fairy tale quality of the village being unwrapped, but I found myself sharing more than I usually do.

  “You know, after my mom stopped getting out of bed,” I said, “I’d clean my room at night. And I turned my bed around so that I was facing the window when I fell asleep. Do you remember that?”

  “I do. I didn’t know it meant anything.”

  “I thought if I could keep my eyes on the trees and the sky something magical would happen.”

  Lindy shook her head. “All this stuff going on and then we’d get together and study for algebra.”

  “I wonder why I brought that up,” I said, staring at the very polished floor as if I might read the answer there.

  “You don’t need to have a reason,” Lindy said. She finished her wine and set down her glass. “Wait here. I need to give you something.” She left the room and came back holding a small white box.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Open it.”

  Inside on a bed of cotton was a deer, a little fawn, made of glass. It had long spindly legs that were ridiculously fragile. One of them was broken and had been inexpertly mended with glue.

  “I wanted my room to be more like yours,” Lindy said. “This was going to be the start of my own collection, but I never got any more.”

  “You took it?” I’d had a collection of these glass animals when I was little and the deer had been my favorite.

  “I put it in my pocket when I was at your house. That’s how the leg broke.”

  “I can’t believe you never told me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, it’s okay. I mean, you could have told me. I don’t think I would have been that mad.”

  “Your whole house was so cozy compared to mine.”

  “Really? That’s not how I remember it.”

  “Your mom made dinner and lit candles every night.”

  “Your mom went shopping with you and hemmed all your pants.”

  These things were true, and neither of us knew what they’d meant at the time. Our sad mothers, doing their best.

  “But Vanessa’s house,” Lindy said.

  She meant that of the three homes, Vanessa’s had been our favorite. Her mother often invited us for school-night dinners and weekend sleepovers, things that were impossible at our houses. Her father took piano lessons and her mother playe
d tennis. They seemed to be working on themselves still, which was not the mode of our parents. Eventually Vanessa had parties when her parents were out of town, and even unattended, Vanessa’s home somehow felt the most secure.

  “Whenever I tried to invite someone over for dinner,” Lindy said, “my mother would say, ‘We don’t have enough.’ What does that even mean? We had enough food.”

  “It means it was too hard for her.”

  “I fly to the grocery store if one of the girls wants to have a friend over. Last week I got a speeding ticket going to get ground turkey for one more burger.”

  We were too tired to laugh or cry. We hugged, then Lindy turned to straighten the living room before bed. Each of my friends has a distinguishing trait or gesture that I sometimes don’t identify until I see it in a stranger. Then a flash of something—the reaching for a hug on tiptoe, Neera’s steady walk, the way Vanessa presses her lips together and Rose stuffs her hands in her pockets—will remind me of my friend and I’ll wonder why I hadn’t noticed it before.

  Watching Lindy’s back as she leaned over to fluff the sofa cushions where we’d been sitting, and straighten the Christmas village pieces on the coffee table, then work her way around the room to blow out each of the votive candles, I wondered what it felt like to work so hard on a home. She’d told me earlier that she matched the liquid hand soaps in the bathrooms to the color of the walls. She was thrilled when a brand she liked introduced a French lavender because it solved the problem of the upstairs bath.

  In the guest room, I tried to put the fawn on the bedside table, but the mended leg was longer than the others and it couldn’t stand. I settled it on its side and turned off the light.

  That night I dreamed I lured someone or something out of the house on Todd Lane and we fought on a hilly slope that doesn’t exist in Duck Woods. We fought for a long time, until finally I tore off his arm (without any blood or gore), and he was on the ground, crying, “All I did was grow up.”