The two women sat at the round, claw-foot oak table, drinking tea from blue-and-white cups, on which were depicted pastoral scenes. Angela held hers in both hands and gazed into the fawn-coloured liquid. She remembered her grandmother, whom everyone called Gypsy despite her name being Edith, because although her brothers and sisters were blond-haired, blue-eyed and so pale they were nearly translucent, Gypsy’s hair was raven, her skin a light brown, and her eyes the colour of topaz. Family secrets, no doubt. So much of who one was in the present was predetermined by those who cradled our genes before us. Gypsy read tea leaves. When Angela was twelve, her grandmother stared into the cup and showed Angela a large clump near the handle, surrounded by long stalks. “Trouble of your own making,” she said, “and much having to do with men.” Even then, Angela considered having to live under a prediction like that unfair.
As the words of Angela’s discontent floated on the air between them, Angela wondered whether Deedee would understand what she was feeling. Deedee’s husband, Ed, played golf with Philip. Both women deplored the game — ruined a perfectly good walk, as someone once said. Deedee and her husband seemed to live independent lives, she with her animals, he with whatever amused him. Ed was a long-legged, slow-talking man with a sly sense of humour who’d inherited his money. Deedee jokingly called him her real-stone cowboy. Angela thought they looked hilarious together — Ed was a good six foot five and Deedee hardly topped five-two and couldn’t possibly weigh more than a hundred and five pounds even with her pockets full of horseshoes. Of course, Deedee had never said a word about not loving Ed.
“Huh,” said Deedee. “Going to be that kind of conversation, is it? Well then, break out the bourbon.”
“It’s after four, right?” Angela smiled, pulled a tissue out of her jeans pocket, and blew her nose.
“Honey, where I come from the old ladies keep a bottle of bourbon in their purses for moments such as these, no matter the time of day. Always a porch party going on somewhere.”
Deedee disappeared into the kitchen, her thin blond ponytail bouncing behind her, and returned with a bottle of Blanton’s Bourbon and two cut-crystal glasses. The ornate bottle, with the silver racehorse stopper, looked more like a perfume than a liquor bottle. Eau de Stables, perhaps, thought Angela. Deedee poured two healthy shots and they clinked glasses. The bourbon’s scent was tinged with orange and tasted of caramel and cloves.
Deedee sipped. “So, you have a little passion problem.”
“It’s not just about sex. It’s an attitude to life. He’s a barnacle. I want to be a …”
“Great white shark?” Deedee chuckled.
“No, Deedee. Not a shark. I want to be the waves, the wind, maybe even the goddamned storm.” This sounded faintly ridiculous, melodramatic, even, to Angela’s ears. She glanced at Deedee and was relieved to see only concern in her expression.
“When did all this start?”
“Damned if I know. But it’s here now.”
“You want a passionate life.” Deedee held the glass to her nose and breathed in, her eyes on Angela.
Angela felt her neck redden. “You make it sound silly. I wish you wouldn’t.” She took a gulp of the bourbon. The warmth spread through her like warm honey. Belly and arms and legs. Sweet warmth.
Deedee leaned forward. “I don’t want to sound like some agony aunt larding on the wisdom, but, well, I think the thing is, you must decide, honey. You must ask yourself if you want to live a compassionate life or a passionate one.”
Angela’s face tightened, and she knew her annoyance was evident. She put her glass down and folded her arms. Her mother had always laughed at what she called her “Chief Thundercloud face” and said she should never play poker. How she’d hated that, although only later did she realize how racist it was.
“Can’t you be passionate and compassionate? Passionate about compassion? Passionate about love, about art, about justice, about equality, and do so with a compassionate heart?”
“Of course,” Deedee said. “I like to think I’m both about animals, for example, although the compassion there led to the passion, do you see? When it comes to love, however, I believe there are two ways of loving: passionately and compassionately. Not my idea. A psychologist about twenty-five years ago, Elaine Hatfield, opened the discussion on the kinds of love, although you might say C.S. Lewis did it earlier, and I don’t know, probably Socrates or Aristotle before that … but, any old way, Hatfield talked specifically about passionate and compassionate love. Compassionate love, she said, involves feelings of mutual respect, trust, and affection, while passionate love involves intense longing of union with the other, and sexual attraction.”
“What if I want both?”
“I’m not sure passionate love lasts, and then all you end up with are a series of wild affairs, going from one to the next. Does that sound satisfying? Sustaining?”
Angela shook her head, for who would admit a life of wild affairs sounded exceptionally enticing?
In the garden, a frantic squirrel ran about looking for a safe place to bury a hickory nut it carried in its mouth. It began to dig in the garden near the toad lily, then dashed across the lawn and up a fir tree with the nut still in its mouth. The ragged, slightly malodorous heap of dogs slept on.
“With great luck,” Deedee said, “a passionate love grows into a compassionate love. Passion is a peak experience, if you know what I mean. I might even be so bold as to say it’s an undeveloped sort of love.” She smiled and rolled the glass in her palms. “From the look on your face, I see you don’t like that. Well, let me put it this way: it’s the sort of experience that can create a good deal of drama in one’s life. Lots of slapped faces and slammed doors, a bit like a French film. Do you want all that drama?”
Angela spoke into her glass. “The alternative sounds, well, beige. Just a vast landscape of beige.”
“Does it? How sad.” She looked at Angela with something like pity on her pale, nearly eyebrow-less face.
“Tell me about the donkeys,” Angela said. “How are they getting on with the goats?”
Deedee didn’t skip a beat. With her impeccable, if sometimes inscrutable, Southern manners she said, “Why, like old friends. Like they were just made to be together. It’s one big frolic out there in the pasture — goats and horses and donkeys, oh my!” Her chuckle was so deep and full, it seemed to come from another body entirely.
ANGELA DROVE HOME two hours later, only slightly sleepy from the bourbon, and since the highway didn’t seem prudent with a couple of shots under her belt, she took the side streets. Mothers picked their kids up at school bus stops along the route while Angela waited, almost patiently, for the stop sign attached to the metal arm to click back into place on the side of the bus so she could safely continue. Crossing guards guided children through the dangers of four-way stops. People walked their Labradors and Jack Russells and golden retrievers. Simple lives, she thought. Tidy, freshly painted clapboard lives. Had they all chosen these lives, or had they washed up, drifted, eddy-flung into them the way she had?
Her conversation with Deedee lingered. Angela pulled a bit of chapped skin off her lower lip with her teeth. She wanted to be good, to do good, to be a kind and compassionate person, and she considered herself such, but these days … oh … she longed for passion’s fizz and bubble in the blood. She missed passion’s power. As the street scenes flicked by, they brought flashing images up from the basement of memory, and she pondered if there was some key to the discontent of the present down there in her past. Mothers. Well, if it wasn’t one thing, it was your mother. She chuckled.
Daddy disappeared before she had any clear memories of him. Being raised by a single mother who thought she was Stevie Nicks contributed to Angela’s aversion to flowy scarves and perhaps to her shaky self-esteem. That boy on the corner, tall and slouching, with a flop of blond hair over his eyes, reminded her of Daniel, her cousin. She had lost her virginity to Daniel when she was thirteen and he eighteen. Statutory
rape is what it would have been called if she’d ever told anyone. It hadn’t seemed like that at the time, though, only deeply erotic, perhaps more so because of the taboo. Key to her discontented present? Probably not, just a mundane set of occurrences and environmental factors, which, along with that ancestral soup of genetic code embodied in her odd-duck Nana Gypsy, had mixed together to create Angela, just as she was.
The small bungalows and split-levels ended at an intersection, and beyond that stood Lawrenceville, where Connor boarded, a private school with its own golf course and a bevy of diplomats’ kids; and now she coasted along the leafy streets of Princeton. Prosperous Princeton. Town of professors and pharmaceutical executives and high mucky-mucks of banking and finance like Philip, whose financial acumen paid for their six-bedroom faux-Tudor with the marble bath and kitchen, the linen sheets on the king-size bed, the Persian carpets, the espresso maker, the many flat-screen TVs, the twice-a-week cleaning lady and the conservatory full of Angela’s orchids.
Mulling over the life she’d led as a girl and sticking her family under a microscope was pointless. She was now a woman in her forties, living this life; old enough to have broken free of all those sticky predictable membranes. She sighed. Why was she suddenly trying to rip through? She had wanted all these things she had, had wanted exactly this way of life, and she had it. So now, having accomplished so much, she thought with a snort, what was she to do with this one life — with the years to come?
Sister Eileen
Eileen and Caroline walked through the early-morning streets of Trenton. Eileen was, as always, struck by the contrasts. She tried to take in everything, a kind of practice in loving all the world. Large shiny SUVs dotted the streets, probably owned by the more successful drug dealers, next to rundown, dented old junkers with mismatched paint jobs and side mirrors held on with duct tape. The streets were potholed, the sidewalks cracked and weed-riddled, blotched with trash. The sky on this March morning was a smooth blue egg overhead, but the walls on the boarded-up and derelict buildings were scarred with gang tags: black, red, gold, and blue. Sometimes the sound of rap music drifted from an apartment building, and someone sang along. Now and again, a young boy was visible near a window on the second floor of that building right there, learning to “spit rhymes” as the kids said, practising, no doubt, to be a rapper himself. He was skinny as a fox, wearing a white undershirt, hands punctuating the air with his syllables. A poetic shadow boxer. Not this morning, though. The window was a blind eye. A clump of grass grew next to a telephone pole on which fluttered a remnant of yellow police tape left over from a recent shooting. A stunted tree stood in front of Poppi’s, a tiny shop selling nearly-out-of-date milk, soft drinks, junk food, Mexican spices and canned goods, a few dusty magazines, and cigarettes. Poppi, a large Hispanic man wearing an apron under his puffy jacket, sat on a folding chair in front of the shop, his head tilted back, welcoming the sun’s appearance.
“Hey, Sisters. How you doing this morning? You doing good?”
“Doing great, Poppi,” said Eileen. “How’s your daughter? She need anything for the new baby?”
Poppi reached up his jacket sleeve and scratched, revealing a faded five-point crown tattoo on his forearm. He had once been a member of the Latin Kings but had left the gang after doing time for aggravated assault. When he came out of prison, he was older, tired. He tried to keep the kids on the street out of gangs now. He and Doug, one of the program coordinators at the Pantry, along with a few other men, teamed up to patrol the streets at night, herding what kids they could back inside and out of harm’s way.
“Naw, we doing all right,” he said. “Man, she a sweet little baby, that one. Don’t hardly cry at all. Sleeps through the night, like six hours at a time. She gonna be a beauty.”
Caroline said, “I’ll come round to see them, if that’s okay. Maybe this weekend?”
“You always welcome, Sister. Bless you.”
“And you, Poppi.”
As they turned the corner, a brindled pit bull rushed the fence surrounding a tiny house and threw its weight against the chain links, barking, making the fence bulge and shiver.
“Caesar! You scared me!” Eileen laughed, while Caroline stepped back.
The dog stopped barking and seemed to laugh, its wide jaws open, tongue lolling.
“Every day! Do we have to go through this every single day?” Eileen reached over the fence and petted the dog’s massive head. He licked her hand. “Come on, Caroline, give him a pet. He’s just a big baby.” She pulled a dog biscuit from the tote she carried and offered it to the younger sister, who took it, her eyebrow raised skeptically.
“I’m not wonderful with dogs,” said Caroline.
Caesar danced in anticipation.
“Go on, “said Eileen. “Hold your palm flat and don’t pull away or he might snap and nip you without meaning to. Just trying to catch the treat, you know?”
“Not really,” said Caroline, but she did what she was told, and Caesar gently took the biscuit and trotted off to eat it.
“You see?”
Caroline grinned widely. “He is rather sweet, isn’t he?”
Caesar was relentlessly optimistic, thought Eileen. The yard was dirt and his shelter nothing more than a makeshift plywood box with a filthy pillow and what looked like a towel in it. A battered blue plastic bowl, the edges chewed, served as a water dish, although there often was no water in it and Eileen always made sure she had some in case Caesar was thirsty, especially in summer. It wasn’t that the old woman who owned him was cruel or didn’t care about the dog, but Caesar wasn’t a pet; Caesar was a security system. He was treated much the same way a car would be. Minimum maintenance. Eileen thought she might bring him a ball to play with. The sheet tacked over the bungalow’s front window moved, a hand pulling it aside. Eileen waved, and the sheet fell back into place.
“I’m not sure his owner is happy with you taming him,” said Caroline.
“Oh, he’s a smart dog,” said Eileen. “He knows friend from foe.”
There weren’t many people on the streets in this part of Trenton, away from the government offices, and the ones who were out sat on the stoops or shuffled off to get morning coffee and breakfast from one of the local fast food spots. The only real business left in the state capital was that of government. Everything else had moved out years ago and what was once a shining city by the river was now a poverty-eaten mess. Drugs and violence and lots of funerals. Not today, though. As they walked, Eileen talked again about how excited she was about the man coming to help plan the vegetable garden the Pantry was starting in the vacant lot next door.
“I’m so glad,” said Eileen, “that you’re here today. The end of the month, you know, so it’ll be busy.”
So many cupboards were bare this time of month. Food stamps didn’t go far enough. Money ran out. The Pantry would probably serve seventy families before they closed for the day.
Birdy and her sister, Carmen, with Carmen’s two grandbabies, Tyler and Tyko, walked toward the nuns. The babies were twins, not quite two, with snotty noses. Tyler sat in a battered stroller and Tyko tottered alongside, trying to climb in. Eileen could see the screaming was about to begin. Carmen, her hair in a turban, her enormous arms straining the denim jacket she wore, pushed Tyko down.
“Not yet, you. You wait your turn,” she said.
Eileen was wondering if she should pick Tyko up when Birdy, who looked enough like her sister to be her twin, scooped the child off the sidewalk and balanced him on her hip. She dangled her keys in front of him and he quieted. Birdy wiped the mucous off his lip with her hand and then wiped her hand on the back of her jeans. Eileen sighed.
“Good morning,” she said. “Got your hands full there.”
Tyko stared at them as they approached, his big, brown eyes liquid and open, his cheeks chubby and his hair softly curling. Caroline waggled her fingers and he took the keys out of his mouth and smiled at her. She took his face in her hands and kissed hi
s forehead, making him giggle.
Eileen asked after the women’s families. Carmen’s son had been in prison in Bordentown but had recently been transferred to the evaluation centre in Trenton, which meant he was one step closer to release. Might be home in a couple of months. He’d be looking for work when he got out and was, Carmen assured her, a good boy who just made a stupid mistake. Eileen seemed to remember it was more like three stupid mistakes.
“Tell him to call me when he gets home,” she said. “He did tile work, didn’t he? I might know someone. There might be space for him in the Work Development Program, although that’s only an intern position.”
“Construction, you know,” said Carmen, “something that pays. Boy’s got to start feeding these babies.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Thanks, Sister. God bless you.”
“I can’t promise anything, but I’ll do my best. You coming by later?”
“Yup.”
As the women walked off, Eileen said to Caroline, “Babies are so much easier to love when in someone else’s arms.”
“Sister Eileen!”
“Does that shock you? Well, God forgive me. I know. It’s hard to admit I don’t like children all that much; no, I shouldn’t say that. I don’t dislike them. I do, however, find them exhausting, and so very messy. Perhaps being the oldest of six children and having been expected to care for the youngers before I was old enough to do so has made me defensive around children. They need so much, and make so much noise, and leak from everywhere.”
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