Later in the day she had remembered quite clearly that she herself had opened the freezer after everyone else retired for the evening; she’d been impatient for her tea to cool and wanted an ice cube. She was awash in relief then. Her own carelessness she could bear. With an upwelling of gratitude she knew that she would sacrifice herself in a minute for Matthew and the children.
Last weekend, driving Garrett to a play date in a suburb to the south, she’d gotten trapped on one of those raucous strips of Toyota-Scion-Lexus, malls anchored by a Sam’s Club or a Circuit City. “Here a Trader Joe’s, there a swimming pool supply store,” she sang menacingly, and Garrett, in the backseat, his new haircut squeezing his head, did not comment.
They arrived late, Heather wound up and Garrett disapproving, and she wondered why, if everyone hated play dates (they said they did), they kept performing the ritual. She made her way up the walk staunchly, and there was the mom already at the door, cheep, cheep, cheep, “So shall we say two thirty?”
Heather didn’t have to look at her watch to know she had less than two hours. It might take her forty-five minutes to drive back home through all that traffic. She swallowed her dismay. Of course she didn’t expect the other mom to keep Garrett all day, of course Garrett couldn’t teleport.
She retreated back down the flagstones. A spacious development bracketed by woods, each house was new but different. Lawns maintained by professionals who rolled new lawns out every spring; otherwise, she knew from her own failings, it was a fulltime job of aeration, seeding, fertilizing, weeding, and water. Suddenly she had this crazy idea: what if the other mom hadn’t clocked her arrival? What if—contrary to school mom protocol—the other mom had not taken a peek outside in order to ascertain Heather’s husband’s income, vehicularly reflected? Heather felt a rush of truancy. Weird as it may have been, outlying, really, she walked right past her car (a base-model Honda with decent mileage that reflected nothing but her and Matthew’s disinterest in it) where it was parked against that nap of green, and kept walking.
Where the hell was she?
The question expanded. She felt invisible. The sky shifted and grumbled and she tipped her head to look. She knew her zoology was off, but it seemed like it should have been the lizard brain that couldn’t help imagining the airplane dropping, the lobe of the sky falling. Although lizards, with their eyes like side-view mirrors, weren’t exactly in the business of looking up toward the heavens. She had reached the main road. No houses now, no sidewalk, and she felt repelled by the maple and pine forest, the vining exuberance of blackberry and poison ivy. In fact it was no place to walk, and after the first car swept past her at sixty miles an hour her ears began to buzz, lizard-like, signaling danger.
After a while the road T’d at a bigger road. She turned left and walked a few tentative yards on the shoulder until a truck passed and nearly sucked her into its wind tunnel. She was about to turn around when she saw a break in the thickety woods just ahead, a pull-off. Her body propelled her, suddenly she was jogging, and in a moment she reached the simple rail gate across the entrance to an old carriage road. A wooden sign with that funny wormhole calligraphy: TOWN FOREST.
She felt auspiciously welcomed. The wide pine-needle path was soft and clean and the forest here was light and airy. There was a time when she would have been afraid walking alone; now she thought that the loss of fear of men was perhaps the single substantial perk of getting older. In her day, suburban woods were a free-for-all of crime and litter. Like the ocean. Even good girls like her considered cigarette butts compost. But here in the Town Forest there was not a single wrapper.
By and by she noticed that she was walking through a plantation of blueberries. The bushes were almost lacy, two or three feet high, and dangling with deeply colored berries. Was there some enchantment at large? Let this path go on forever! Let it be her life, the way the sun scrambled through the twigs and branches, the unselfconscious birds, the cars silenced—
She finds herself standing in the middle of the kitchen.
Nothing needs to happen.
Still life with breakfast dishes, with wild blueberry bushes. Her inner life is as big as the Big Bang, in modern times it’s heavy on the bass, on the studio reverb. If a man were to jump her in the Town Forest, if a car were to hit her on a blind curve on the hot and disappointing walk back to the house in the new development—no vulgar plot for her, thanks. It’s all she can do to go back down to the basement with the dishtowels she is always forgetting and eject the ball of them into the barrel. The load’s not full but she’s going to run it anyway. Who is she talking to? What is it about the basement that reminds her of a church? Just its cool and quiet? Small, high windows? At Gilda’s service she was seated so that she had a crotch shot of the 3-D cross that hung from the tiled dome in the center. There was a startling intimacy of skulls around her, she had wondered before she lost it, and Matthew did not merely put his arms around her but locked her to him. Her crying felt like breathing underwater if you could, miraculously, but you were untrained and awkward. She had seen Christine Jones shaking in the pew in front of her, she had seen the tall man in a barn coat come up the aisle, he carried himself like a banker, but that was cheating. She knew who he was immediately, and if she’d had any doubt about Gilda’s ability to pull it off, with gifts of jewelry, etc., now she didn’t and neither did she care to crane around for Dan, Gilda’s husband.
Where does this leave her? She’s not in a detective story, but she always thinks: Gilda who didn’t mean to die, as if it set Gilda apart from all the people who didn’t mean to die by lightning strike, cancer, car accident. Yesterday morning, walking Garrett to soccer camp, passing the windows of the consignment shop where Gilda was a regular treasure hunter, she thought how dying had nothing to do with death and everything to do with life, for Gilda.
Is that the doorbell?
Her train of thought jumps the rails and rolls longwise down the embankment and bursts into flame. The ghost in the cashmere smoke, Gilda with the hood of her Burberry raincoat obscuring not just her face but her entire body, picking her way out of the accident, through the rubble, up the hill toward Heather.
She hurries upstairs. She can see through the sidelights that it’s the cat-lady type who lives on the corner in the baggy Victorian. She fumbles with the alarm, looking up intermittently, apologetically, until finally she manages, and the neighbor, dressed in old gardening jeans and a grown son’s sweatshirt, sidles in, keeping a wary eye on the blinking keypad. Heather doesn’t think they’ve ever properly introduced themselves, but before she can begin, the neighbor produces a letter. “I got your mail?”
Heather sees immediately that it’s not for her but for another neighbor, a woman about her age and stage of life up the block whom she’s on friendly terms with. Obviously, it’s too late now for introductions, and she feels desperate to abort the encounter before the cat-lady discovers her blunder. “Thank you so much!” she cries as she plows her back out through the dark hallway.
Her heart is pounding. She is distressed more than is warranted—derailed, as if she has failed a life-or-death test of her humanity. Finally (how did she get upstairs?) she pitches herself across Garrett’s twin bed. Her shirt catches on the edge and rides up and she sees her bare stomach. It looks like a cadaver. She knows the flesh is numb and she resists the temptation to pinch it.
She rolls onto her back and there’s the cracked ceiling. Plastic gold team trophies poke out of the clothes piled on top of the dresser; Garrett is still in the long middle of the years of trophies like party favors. All the boys still examine the trophies at other boys’ houses. There’s the poster of the frilled lizard he chose from National Geographic when Persia toured him through the website, otherwise the walls are bare, painted watery white in a bygone decade, scuffed and streaked, indifferent to the lizard’s flat eye and the sunlight that wobbles across them.
Gilda once blurted that Garrett’s room was a cell. By accident? Then she’d sh
uffled out backward like a disgraced geisha.
Another time they were sitting at the top of Gilda’s granite stairs drinking white wine, looking out through the linden onto the street, and Gilda said dangerously, “Do you think I should join the Junior League, Heather?” Maggie, the oldest, Gilda’s shadow, preferred to sit with them rather than mix with the younger children, and she listened to every word they said, twisting the ends of her hair in that intense way she had just before puberty. Gilda took a long swallow. She glanced at Maggie. “All tennis and violin and interior decorating?”
But suddenly she dropped her hair in her face, and she looked small and crazy. Reaching for her wine glass she missed and knocked it down the stone stairs in an explosion of crystals.
Heather follows the light bobbing up the wall of her son’s bedroom. Garrett is a tight weave. She doesn’t know anything about weaving, but his warp and his weft are in balance. His ups and downs and crosswises make a durable but supple fabric, Gilda.
Gilda confessed to drugging herself before dinner parties. At first Heather had to work hard to pretend she wasn’t shocked. If there’s anything to help you through you should help yourself, she knows she said once, tightly.
Matthew said Gilda’s dinner parties were Alice in Wonderland, surreal, hysterical, sugar in the saltshaker. There was this air of childish wreckage, as if Gilda set her house up to be toppled. The last Christnukkah party (Gilda punished the holidays by putting them together. One year she called it an Abraham party, but then, after 9/11, she had to admit—everyone had to—she didn’t know anything about Islam) she’d been crazier, to use an inexact word, more off center than usual. Her hair was in a new shag cut and she’d worn a lot of sunset-blue eye shadow, falsies, and a transvestite tutu. She’d corralled and goaded the women to drink her “rowdy rum” punch and the men had caught the spirit and followed heedlessly. Heather herself had thrown up in the third-floor bathroom, efficiently and discreetly, and returned to the scrum with a directive to rescue Gilda. She’d found her practically grinding with Joe Scheidel in the kitchen. Dinner had not been served yet.
Now she wonders if she was enabling when she took over and redirected the party to the table. Was Gilda trying to signal that something more than her inner hostess was off-kilter? Was it Gilda’s fault the evening turned stupid? The men and women like oil and water, the salad dressing painful with vinegar. At some point she had realized that Dan, to whom no one had directed a single question all evening, was drunkenly disassembling Gilda’s parents.
“We put them up at the Westin and they stole the toilet paper. Maggie found four rolls in her grandmother’s bag with the Westin seal still on them.”
Heather knew Maggie would never betray Gilda. She saw very clearly how Dan had rummaged in his mother-in-law’s belongings. Even through the pills and wine, Heather had seen Gilda’s hurt and confusion.
When Heather tiptoed upstairs later, she found Gilda asleep under the bedside lamp beside Lila. Lila’s room was all white, there were little white pompoms on the curtains. On the mantel above the original marble fireplace Gilda and Lila together had arranged small white objects: a German polar bear, a die, a pyramid of white sewing thread.
Gilda’s mouth was draped oddly over her chin and her closed eyes were hollows, as if the eyeballs had sunk to the bottom. Heather leaned closer as she used to do when she was checking her babies. Of course Gilda was breathing. But still, the body was vacated. Gilda was so small when she wasn’t in motion. Heather kept watch for a few moments. When she finally snuck out of Lila’s bedroom and back downstairs she was almost relieved to see that Dan was not in the kitchen; she would be left in peace to do Gilda’s dishes.
Where is she?
Still in Garrett’s bedroom. She fights the cadaver to death quickly. Matthew is faintly offended by her description of her stomach. “I loved it when you were pregnant,” he says. She tugs Garrett’s quilt straight. She saw Gilda asleep but not dead. Everyone is cremated now, but still, you imagine them lying on their backs in corpse pose in their dusky coffins. Mouths slack, but if their eyes were open you’d be able to see they were smiling knowingly. She’s not gothic. But there’s a body to account for. There’s her own body despite herself, slightly slouched all the time now, she’s holding the railing as she takes the stairs, if you took the total population, the seven and a half billion, she’d probably come out in an upper quartile, and in her group of First World females between childbearing and menopause in a third-tier (fourth?) city in the coastal Northeast, she may feel like an outsider but she’s right in the middle. She’s tinkered unadventurously with her hair and settled on a tempered blond; she has a large nose, narrow face, an uncertain voice, and much to her chagrin, because it’s such a stretch it’s a non sequitur, she’s been told she looks like Helen Mirren. What kind of brain tumor—as Persia would say—makes people say you look like an actress? Oh, she knows she fits in, roughly. She knows grief is nothing special.
If she leaves the house now she’ll have time to stop at the community garden before meeting Christine Jones for coffee. Of course she should have taken the tiny detour on her walk this morning to water her tomatoes. But there’s a pall over the garden, she’s avoided it since last week, since what she’s come to think of as the encounter.
She was weeding out crabgrass and amaranth when she realized that the teenage boys in her peripheral vision were stalking the perimeter. She had only a minute to register them before, as if cued by her unease, they hitched up their clothes and took ironic running starts to vault over the split-rail.
She’d let go of the hose and summoned attitude. “You know there’s a gate?” There was a combination lock. They swiveled obediently to look at it. Then they went up and down the rows, sampling a leaf here, a bean there, all artful insouciance. When they arrived at her row she said as coolly as she could manage, “Hey, just steer clear of my tomatoes.”
They nodded solemnly. They continued their subtle pillage, and she kept on watering, her fist cramped around the trigger, until her plot became soup, with stray basil leaves floating on the surface.
Finally, albeit with less brio than their breach, the boys climbed back out over the fence and Heather watched them amble across the playing fields. She tried to tell herself that her stolid presence had at least put a damper on their adventure, but mostly she felt exposed, outstripped, and exhausted.
The day Gilda died Heather had spent too much time with the morning paper and, late for work, she scooted out past Matthew with a last word over her shoulder, “Did you see there were babies?” Plague, war, tsunami—a moment later she realized she’d said it with a kind of easy horror. She’d called Gilda on her first walk break. The sun was still a little green in April but there were daffodils waving in the wind from the industrial fans behind the hospital cafeteria. There was no answer. She left a message. She called Gilda again on her way home from work and left another message, about half an hour after, she would learn, Gilda had passed out in a “Standard” room at the Westin. As is often the case with pills and vodka, Gilda didn’t die instantly—Heather always gives the facts, like she’s the newspaper. She won’t color people’s judgment with her sadness, her sadness is not the story, her sadness is not on trial, it’s Gilda’s death that may be deemed unacceptable. A beautiful young mother of four does not commit suicide. See, Gilda?
So no, she’s not up for policing the community garden, and actually, she never feels like another cup of coffee at eleven o’clock in the morning. But she’ll break the sound barrier of the depressed housewife, she’ll do it for Gilda. Shoe, other shoe, purse, package, keys—she feels around the likely surfaces like a blind person, resigned but confident.
She’d barely known Christine before Gilda died, when Christine was Gilda’s mysterious older friend, out of Heather’s league in the hierarchy of school moms. (Cool moms. Very sweetly Persia insisted Heather was one.) Gilda had told Heather that she and Christine went out drinking, a few times they’d ended up danc
ing at a strip club, and Heather had been intimidated, knowing she didn’t have that kind of imagination.
Suddenly she misses Matthew. Should she stop by his office? He’ll ask her why she’s having coffee with Christine in the first place, and, avoiding the topic of Gilda, she’ll tell him it’s because Persia has a crush on Christine’s son, Jordan, and he’ll look baffled, and she’ll describe Jordan Jones, a beady-eyed sixteen-year-old with a quiff of blond hair like the front man in a boy band.
She’ll perch on Matthew’s desk, feeling more alive for a moment, because even though Jordan has never spoken a word to young Persia, do not, she’ll tell her husband, underestimate our daughter’s power of attraction. Sure, she’ll continue, hectically now, boys can be white men and date rapists, but girls these days take their supremacy for granted. Hillary Clinton is going to seem like such a try-hard when Persia and her friends grow up to be presidents!
Matthew will laugh appreciatively before shooing her out and again she’ll wonder, how could Gilda check out before she got to witness the full force of Maggie and Rachel and Lila?
Why hadn’t she been brave enough to suggest to Christine that they meet somewhere else, in a park, like when the kids were babies?
Where she met Gilda in the very beginning.
The first week of September, the trees were desiccated, their leaves rattled. There was dust in the air, even in the dew, and Persia was still too little to go to preschool. Oh, those gaping weekday mornings when Heather was working half time, leaving more room for post-partum depression; she didn’t make the same mistake twice, Garrett graduated straight from maternity leave to daycare.
She’d noticed Gilda right away, hunched on a park bench: red clogs, black and blond hair extra streaky, very thin (she would learn that Gilda had dramatic cycles), watching a girl a couple of years older than Persia curled in the mouth of the tube slide—Maggie. Persia had already wriggled from the stroller—all of their strollers strewn and abandoned where the young passengers tipped themselves out before their caregivers had even parked them—so that Heather had been forced to approach Gilda without cover.
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