“How about we watch a movie together before we go?” Camille offers. “What would you like to see?”
Avis chooses a DVD about Sleeping Beauty, or Beauty and the Beast, or whatever Beauty, and sinks to the rug as if tranquilized. On the screen, a golden-haired girl sits down at a spinning wheel and emits a perfect drop of ruby blood. Strangely, watching the horror dawn on the animated girl’s face, Camille feels a sting of sympathy. It was just a simple, wrong motion that cannot be reversed. Before the creature understands the consequences, claws of sleep pull her under.
How smoothly Nick had slipped out of the yoke. Now, she supposes, he’ll trap this new woman into it, who has no idea how thoroughly a strong woman can be bent and broken. Or maybe she does know. Maybe she has already made arrangements for exhaustive child care. Maybe Victoria is smarter than Camille will ever be.
“Are we going to the parade now?” Avis asks when the movie ends.
Camille looks at her daughter. She has forgotten the town parade. The tantrum comes immediately, subdued by an impulsive offer to have dinner at Gulliver’s.
At the restaurant, Camille allows Avis to order whatever she wants. This, of course, is French fries and ice cream. Camille splurges on a fifteen-dollar grilled chicken salad for herself, in hopes of losing five pounds before Paris. The restaurant is full and loud. It was good, she tells herself, to take Avis out. It is something they should do more often. Perhaps Camille has failed her daughter in not orchestrating more contact with the world, not arranging the usual playdates or swim classes or story hours. She watches Avis across the table, bobbing for ice cubes in her water glass, and concedes that it would be nice for her to have some little friends of her own, little princes and princesses to accompany trick-or-treating. But not now. It makes more sense to start over in France. She hasn’t told Avis about the plan, but perhaps she will tonight. This might be just the time for it.
As they are waiting for their food, a large family comes into the restaurant, all costumed in some kind of Arabic dress. Camille smiles wryly. This kind of team costume is perfect, so typical, just the kind of thing that people here think is cute. The mother of the clan—Jesus, how many kids are there, six?—wears a look of proud satisfaction, her eyes scanning the dining room as she steers her herd to their table. This is probably a major outing for her, a highlight of her year. Halloween, Camille thinks, is such an American holiday, so thoroughly geared to a country of frustrated adults desperate to play dress-up.
Her gaze travels over this family and freezes. What she is seeing does not register at first. Her eyes are telling her that her doctor is there, sitting down with this family, wearing some sort of tunic. Her breath stops. It is not unusual, she reminds herself, in times of infatuation, to see a man’s face in all faces. She looks away, and then back. It is him, she is certain. But why is he with these people? Why is he dressed this way? He does not see her as the family settles around a table, and he takes a seat between two adolescent boys.
She does not notice her own food arrive. When she glances back at her daughter, who is methodically dipping French fries into apple juice, it is like viewing her through a glass wall. Her eyes return helplessly to the doctor and remain there, watching his movements. Finally, he looks up and sees her. There is a hollow instant before the glimmer of recognition, but that is all. There is no surprise on his face. Instead, his exquisite mouth forms a sly smile, as if they are sharing a joke. She goes cold.
His eyes slide away, and he laughs at something one of the boys is saying. Camille’s ears fill with loud static, so that she can no longer hear the noise of the restaurant. The mother of the family glances toward her and gazes blankly for a moment. She is tragic in her sequined sari and painted eye makeup, her face round and overfed like a pink, all-American sow.
Camille forces herself to remain at the table until Avis has finished her ice cream. She leaves her own salad untouched, with its tight cranberries, baby oranges, and frilly wreath of greens, like a careful little Eden.
The static remains in her ears through the drive home and crackles as she climbs the chipped concrete steps of her house. Avis vanishes inside. Camille follows, closes the door, and sits. There on the battle-torn sofa that has served her through two decades, she sits very still and tries to unpuzzle the riddle.
“To what end?” is the phrase that comes to her. To what end? She is not upset, she tells herself, not really. Just mystified. The picture of Paris—the bed and windows, the little gilt breakfast tray with bread and cheese and honey, the silver dress—glides smoothly away. She looks down at her legs on the couch. She is still here, as she was before. She is still safe, intact, shod in calfskin Steve Madden boots. To what end?
She finds a rumpled blanket at the end of the couch and pulls it over herself. The chill she’d felt in the restaurant is still with her. Even now, in her own house, she feels exposed, unsheltered, as if the walls were translucent and she were on display like a lab rat.
Avis comes running out of her bedroom and rushes to the front door holding a pumpkin pail. Her little pink gown is blotched with ketchup, and her hair has already snagged in her tiara. She clutches the doorknob with such naked hope that Camille feels a roll of nausea. The idea of taking her daughter outside, of holding her hand along the night-shaded, sinister streets of this town, of any town, is too much. It would be better for both of them to stay inside, it seems, to find a spot in the center of the house, far from the windows, and huddle together for a little while.
“Are you sure you want to go back out?” Camille asks lightly. “Maybe we could have some candy here and watch TV instead.”
“Mommy!” Avis shrieks.
“Come on, let’s cuddle up on the couch together.”
Her daughter’s dress puddles as she collapses to the floor.
“All right, all right,” Camille says, “let’s go.”
She wears a scarf and hat, although the night is not cold enough to steam her breath. The house next door is darkened. The couple who lives there is older, she believes, probably pretending not to be home. Camille is envious tonight of their immunity. She and Avis keep walking through the unlit span to the next house. There are far-off sounds of children’s voices, beams of flashlights sweeping through the trees. Camille walks quickly, battling an icy dread. She nearly jogs from house to house, trailing her child princess behind. It is rude, she knows, how curtly she responds to the fawning of the neighbors who answer their doors. She just wants this night to be over, this night of all nights, this never-ending night. Her heart keeps a crazed beat. When she wakes in the morning, she tells herself, the sky will be white, scraped clean. It will be the first day of November. The winter will loom close.
As they walk, Avis helps herself to candy from her pail, and by the time they return home, her face is bloodied with chocolate. She stands patiently as Camille unfastens the costume and lets the pink cloud deflate at her feet. Her little girl’s body is thin and swaybacked, painfully fragile. Camille draws a wet washcloth over the smeared face and puts her to bed. Avis lies with wide-open eyes as Camille pulls the covers to her chin and kisses her good night, then shuts off the porch light and drops the deadbolt on the door.
THE VIRGINALS
THERE ARE no boxwood wreaths on the Ezekiel Slater house, no pine garlands around the batten heart pine door. There is no amber candlelight behind the twelve-by-twelve, divided-light windows.
“They’re not living there,” Cheryl Foster tells her husband. “They’re not even trying to pretend.”
Everyone decorates for Christmas on Cannonfield Road. As early as the second week of November, dark workmen appear on ladders, affixing red ribbons to window sashes, installing real pineapples and holly berries into triangular cornices. Cheryl and Roger decorate, too, with the most understated of candle glow, if only to avoid derision. What they’d prefer to do is hang a banner informing the neighbors that all their ornamentations
are historically incorrect. The original owners of these homes were strict Puritans, forbidden to acknowledge the popish holiday. The colonists, in their plain way, would have worked through Christmas as through any day of the year, not a pineapple in sight.
It would be a stretch of incredible naïveté, of course, to think that the new owners of the Slater house are adhering to historical authenticity. It’s true that she knows nothing of these newcomers other than that they are young, childless, and in possession of a preposterous Aston Martin that appears in the driveway from time to time like a mute foreigner. Its owners have shown themselves in full form only once. Cheryl and Roger had watched from the kitchen window one summer morning as the young couple slowly circled the august white saltbox across the street, freshly theirs, with the assessment of predator birds. Finally they disappeared inside, and as evening fell, Cheryl and Roger had seen a cool unfamiliar light appear in the window of the second-floor bedroom. Harriet’s bedroom. Harriet’s window: one of the beautiful, spit-perfect windows that Lars had installed with his own hands when he and Harriet were newlyweds. Those windows, like all things with flawless beginnings, had slackened with age and begun to gap over the years. There were drafts, Cheryl knew, that kept Harriet beneath a stack of quilts on winter nights.
They haven’t seen a light in that bedroom since. There has been no moving van, no contractor’s truck, no roofing ladder, no silver car.
“It’s the Spaulding house all over again,” Cheryl says to Roger. “I was afraid this might happen.”
She still has nightmares about the Spaulding house, the wrecking ball slamming into its cedar shingles again and again, the front elevation crumpling inward as from a punch in the gut. Just like that, in one spinning flash of stupidity, two hundred years of history obliterated.
“I’m going to say something,” Cheryl states, “at the next meeting.”
Roger nods. Now that winter has descended, he has brought his file and spokeshave into the kitchen and works continuously at shaping spindles. His decision to specialize in the art of steam bending has paid off splendidly. There may be more multitalented carpenters around, but now that the legendary Thomas Whitman has hung up his adz, there exists no better maker of eighteenth-century Windsor chairs on the planet. The jump in demand after the Colonial Faire suggests that Roger has been crowned the living history community’s chair-maker of choice. And once these people have chosen, they are loyal for the duration.
Roger shakes his head. “It’s a bloody shame, it is.”
It irks Cheryl when he slips like this, tainting the colonial manner of speaking with cockney syntax. She presses her lips together. At least he is trying. At home, she grooms her own speech but does not force it. Even with years of practice, she is drained by the effort of sustaining proper diction for any length of time, and reserves her thees and thous for sanctioned gatherings.
“You know Harriet would be turning in her grave,” she tells Roger. “And Lars, too. And Ezekiel Slater, for that matter, and Jeremiah and all the grandchildren. You can be sure that Benjamin and Comfort would have done something. It’s the duty of friends, then as now.”
Roger does not reply at once, but holds a spindle aloft and examines it. Watching him, Cheryl feels a crawling vexation. He has slipped so comfortably into success. He has absorbed the admiration so easily, as if it were long due. He has cut his billable hours at work without a jag of self-doubt. His transformation from lawyer to chair-maker has been as fluid as tadpole to toad.
Her own enterprise is a slower slog. She has to remind herself that only the most refined slice of the community will ever appreciate her work. Most are content to settle for buttons made of horn, pewter, or even tin. Among those who understand the superiority of thread, there are even fewer who recognize the beauty and accuracy of the death’s-head tradition. In her workshop at the faire, she’d been visited by a small handful of exultant admirers in flawless midcentury dress and had sold three sets of astral-style buttons. She has to remind herself that it is her own choice to reject dressmaking, that wide and easy highway—and in no way is it Roger’s fault.
“You’re a good friend,” he tells her at last, fitting the spindle into a chair seat.
Cheryl feels a sudden threat of tears. Harriet is there, all at once, in her vegetable garden, dwarfed by sunflowers and tomato plants, bending with a watering can of dented metal. To Cheryl’s surprise, this old woman had twined her way into her heart. She had risen above the general populace of scuttling, self-involved citizens and demonstrated what a full human being should be. Faithful and industrious, there could be no better heir to Reverend Slater’s homestead, no better steward of the virtues of loyalty, sacrifice, and humility.
This image of Harriet in her garden is what Cheryl holds in her mind, three weeks later, as she sits at the massive oak table with her fellow commission members.
“Before we begin our scheduled agenda,” she says, making eye contact with each of them in turn, “I’d like to bring an urgent matter to your attention.”
The other commission members are sloppily dressed, in today’s way, and slump in their chairs. No particular light of attention springs to their eyes. Cheryl, however, has honed the forgotten art of rhetoric. She has learned to use her voice like an instrument, strong and clear. She likes to think that her immersion into the past has opened her to the voices of the ancestors, given her the ability to channel them for present-day purposes. There is no denying that exceptional fervor comes through her voice, like a clarion call, as she eloquently skewers applications for certificates of appropriateness. The renovation plans that homeowners submit would be laughable were they not so sickening, tantamount to decimating original structures and hiding vulgar McMansions behind their facades. The homeowners—usually young, urbane couples—stare at her as she lambasts their building plans. When the commission votes with her, the husbands protest like teenagers given a bad grade. The women clutch their designer purses with intertwined initials and push back their ironed hair. Sometimes they cry. They should have stayed in the city where they belong, Cheryl thinks, in their elevator buildings with awnings and entrance rugs and sycophantic doormen.
“As you may be aware,” she begins, “the Ezekiel Slater house at 430 Cannonfield Road, built in 1740 by the Reverend Ezekiel Slater, has recently passed into new ownership. As a neighbor of close proximity to the Slater homestead, it has come to my attention that the new proprietors have been absent from the premises for months. As a confidante of the former owner, Mrs. Harriet Hertz, I am privy to the fact that the house has long been in need of substantial repair. Mrs. Hertz, having become infirm and impecunious in her final years, was unable to finance said repairs, but took solace in the certainty that they would be conscientiously performed after her passing by the purchasers of the home.”
Cheryl pauses, glances at the faces around the table. Victor Conetta gazes up at her with the eyes of an elderly beagle.
“However”—she pauses as she imagines an ancestral orator would—“as further weeks pass without bodily sign of the purchasers, it has become apparent to me that the acquisition of this venerable home was in fact made with an eye to circumventing the regulations of this commission through gradual and insidious demolition by neglect.”
She lets these final, horrible words settle upon the table. A long moment passes.
“It is imperative that the commission take immediate action. We delay at our peril. The fate of one of this region’s most historic structures is at stake.”
A chair creaks, and Edward Drayton clears his throat.
“Pardon me, Cheryl, but is there visible evidence of neglect?” he asks in his slow, weary voice, gesturing as if his hands were underwater. “Are there broken windows, missing shingles, water stains on the roof?”
Cheryl straightens her posture and meets his gaze. “No, of course not. Not as yet, anyway.”
Drayton turns his pa
lms to the ceiling. “Without visible evidence, we can’t accuse the owners of wrongdoing.” He smiles, as if speaking to a child. “You know that.”
“I am giving the commission concrete information about the interior condition of a significant structure located within this town’s defined historic district. Are you saying that we passively watch the house deteriorate until the owners waltz in with a demolition application?”
“If the house is truly in bad shape, we’ll see it on the outside eventually. Then we can contact the owners and discuss it.”
Cheryl sniffs. “Like we did with the Spaulding house? You may notice there is no more Spaulding house.”
“Again, Cheryl, I must remind you that it’s not within our jurisdiction to intervene into the upkeep of privately owned properties without cause, even within the historic district. Unless there is unmistakable evidence of neglect.” Drayton joins his hands and fingers together like the laces of a woman’s stays. “Thank you, regardless, for bringing this to the commission’s attention. We’ll keep an eye on it. Now, let’s move on to the written agenda.”
Cheryl breathes in and holds the air for a moment, feeling the boning of the hidden jumps beneath her own clothing. Most women save their stays for formal events, but Cheryl has found that wearing at least an informal pair of jumps on a daily basis has improved her posture and general outlook. She has grown to dislike how she feels without them.
After the meeting, she sits for a while before bed with her thread and button forms. She replays the commission meeting in her mind until the repetitive focus of her work calms her. Threading buttons never fails to renew her sense of simple purpose. Upstairs, in her chemise and cap, she tells Roger about the outcome of her appeal at the meeting.
The Wonder Garden Page 14