The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  Will's will. When I opened my eyes I saw at Ginny's bare feet the white envelope she had brought from upstairs. "Is that your father's will?"

  "This? Yeah." She plucked it from the floor while the phone book slid off her lap. "Here." Holding it out to me with the most studied indifference, as if she were passing me a newsletter from her congressman or a Coke can to be recycled.

  It was a slender wad of papers I began to read as I moved to take refuge in the kitchen. The page on top was not his will but a life insurance policy he had had since his children were small. The last time I'd seen it, my name was listed beneath the girls', and I had been entitled to a third of the $300,000 payout. It did not surprise me that my name was no longer there, but I was surprised to find it replaced by Diane Schaefer Berg, Cambridge, Mass., who was to receive my entire share. The papers were dated a month after Will and I had separated.

  When I flipped to the next page, I was looking at the will. My eyes fell to my name, in the fourth line—"I am married to Sophy Chase"—and to my name in the next line: "I give one dollar to Sophy Chase, who, in anticipation of a divorce that she requested, entered into an agreement with me to define our respective financial and property rights and all other rights, remedies, privileges, and obligations which arose out of our marriage."

  "Who were you talking to when I came downstairs before, that you told you wanted to cremate Daddy?"

  I had not made it to the kitchen, only to the dining room table, and when I turned to look at Ginny, she was still studying the phone book, backlit by the sun. I was startled by the glare, the way you are as you come out of a movie theater in the middle of the day. I don't think my hands were shaking, but my voice was. I must have sounded scared or flustered, or maybe the word I mean is "humiliated." "The coroner," I said, but the c caught in my throat, and I had to start over.

  "When will he have the results?"

  "Why don't you put down the phone book for a minute." She did, reluctantly, and I got my voice back; it had been a touch of stage fright. "Come and sit down at the table. There are a few things you need to know." She complied. She took an orange from the fruit bowl and rolled it between her palms and then against the table, like a ball of dough she was trying to smooth. Sitting at the head of the table, I laid out what I thought she needed to know, one, two, three. I spoke more softly than I usually do, and more slowly, because I knew the restraint would help me control my rage. Part of my anger was at myself, over the unfairness of taking any of this out on Ginny, but there it was.

  Yesterday, Ben Gibbs found him naked on the floor beside his bed, but according to the phone bill in the stack of mail, the last phone call he made was on May 31.

  Diane Schaefer Berg, Daddy's friend since grade school, married to a physicist at MIT, suspects suicide.

  The coroner said it was not a stroke and that he'd been dead too long for them to detect a heart attack. He wasn't sure how much he'd be able to learn, given the length of time Daddy had been dead. My version of "no blood left."

  And if you were thinking about a viewing and an open casket, the coroner told me that there is nothing much left to say goodbye to.

  She closed her eyes as the tears poured over her face every which way, as much at the news as at my bluntness. But I don't know whether she understood what had motivated it: the wallop of the will, the specter of her mother's arrival, the sudden ascendancy of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost into the funeral of my atheist husband. Ginny's hair was mostly dry, but her face was sopping wet and swollen, and she pressed her palms to her cheeks and let her head drop into them. I did not get up and comfort her, my stepchild whose father had died. I was, genuinely, for the first time, the wicked stepmother she used to accuse me of being. But I knew I was just angry at all of them, including Clare, whom I barely knew, and Will, who was dead, and I was about to apologize, to explain myself, when I heard the front door open and Evan call my name. At the sound of his voice, Flossie woke up from her nap under the dining room table, where I had forgotten she lay, and hurled herself to the door, barking to the salsa beat of her undipped claws clicking against the floor.

  "We're in here," I called back.

  Ginny pushed away some of her tears and blew her nose in a napkin. I expected to hear a clatter of feet and gear and children's voices, but Evan was alone, red-faced from an afternoon on the water, still wearing a canvas sailing cap, which he removed as he came to the table to shake Ginny's hand.

  "I'm sorry about your father. What a terrible shock. I'm afraid we can't put you up for longer. My brother and his wife and kids arrive the day after tomorrow, and every room is—"

  "My mother's coming and renting us a place for the week."

  "Lucky she could find anything so close to the Fourth of July weekend." He turned to me, and I noticed that his knees were sunburned. The hair on his forearms had blond highlights. There seemed to be more gray at his temples than there had been in the morning, and deeper lines on his forehead. I wondered whether I looked as old as he did. "How was the rest of your day?"

  "As good as can be expected."

  "I'm here to pick up Seth's asthma medicine and feed Flossie, but if you want to join us at the clambake, Mavis and the kids are already there. It's a few miles down the beach. If you take our Saab, you can leave early."

  "Only on Swansea," Ginny said, and you could see her face lose its darkest scrim. "You come for a funeral and end up at a clambake. Daddy would have liked that, wouldn't he?"

  I had to smile, but I could feel the tightness in it, and the fury. I wanted to remind her that ten minutes ago she would not eat anything that moved in salt water except seaweed.

  "Did you get the message that your mother called?" Evan asked me. "Mavis said she left it on your bed."

  "I haven't been up there. Did you tell her?"

  "No. We thought you'd prefer to."

  When I'd called her first thing that morning, I left a vague message. On Swansea for a few days; give me a call. I did not want her rushing to the island, thinking I needed her help or her comfort, when I knew that I would end up helping her, comforting her, chauffeuring her, this woman who had hauled me and her friend Gladys—Whoopi Goldberg in the movie—across the country thirty-five years before in pursuit of a man whose leave-takings she chose to read as a series of hints that he wanted to be found. Now she was frail and forgetful—too forgetful to be properly quixotic and keep track of her delusions—but I still had to tell her that Will was dead, just as I had to inform the bank and Visa and the pension department of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  On the short drive to the Winstons'—Ginny and I followed Evan in his car—there was a woman hitchhiking, thumb pointing in our direction, but we weren't going far enough down the road to do her much good. I didn't stop, but I drove slowly enough to see that she bore some resemblance to me—to me twelve years earlier, thumb out on this same road, her hair in wiry curls because of the sea water, the salt air; a pair of cutoffs, an embroidered Indian blouse; a can of beer. Dumb girl, I thought. I'd never have hitched holding a beer can, even back when I drank the stuff. I didn't drink like that anyway, the slow, steady infusion, the morphine drip, my best friend the bottle. I binged. I could go for weeks with nothing. Then I'd have fourteen beers or seven gin-and-tonics or four giant happy-hour margaritas, whatever it took to render me speechless and horizontal. I knew Will for three weeks before he saw me take a drink. Then he saw me take six.

  This is not a subject that is easy for me to talk about, not only because under the influence I have behaved abominably, but because giving it up was at the heart of the transaction I made with Will. In exchange for my abstinence, he would give me the closest thing to a normal family I'd had since my early childhood, the years before I understood that there was something freaky going on in our house; not everyone's father vanished for months on end. By the time Mom, Gladys, and I drove through Death Valley with a pair of binoculars, as if he might be hiding behind a creosote bush—by then I knew that o
ur trip was not five days and four nights in Fort Lauderdale, not the spring vacation other kids in Mrs. McGrath's third-grade class at Carteret Elementary School went on. One of the things that made my father's leaving puzzling was that when he was with us, he seemed to be enjoying himself. He was not quarrelsome or short-tempered; the mood around the house was not storm, whoosh, bang, I'm outa here. The worst thing you could say about him was that he was remote. The best was that his remoteness was excellent preparation for life without him when he was gone for good.

  It was not a long ride down the asphalt to the Winstons' dirt road, but it was long enough for me to feel the sudden weight of these memories, the intricate ways in which they led to one another and made a mockery of all the work I had done to keep them in the very back of my mind. Now they were front row, center, and my head was swimming.

  "I guess I thought he was over that," Ginny said, and it took me a moment to realize that we had not exchanged a word since leaving the house, and that she was talking about her father.

  "Over what?"

  "Suicide. After Jesse died and Daddy was in the loony bin, whenever the phone rang, I was sure it was someone calling to tell me he was dead. But then he met you, and he was so happy."

  I waited for her to say something more, to acknowledge that that was a long time ago, all that happiness, and there is only so much we can do to make unhappy people happy, and it is not much, after all. But she was only twenty-five, and it takes a few more decades to come to that, if we ever do. In any case, Ginny was way past comforting me. She was doing to me what I was doing to myself, what I had been trying to contain in the back of my mind, a place as crowded with unpleasantness as Pandora's box. Quietly, in only a few words, with all the years between the great happiness and the present disappeared into ellipses, my stepdaughter was blaming me for her father's death, as I was blaming myself.

  7. Slipping

  LOW TIDE.

  Piping plovers.

  Sanderlings with their toothpick legs, skittering over the shoreline like wind-up toys on speed.

  A light canopy of clouds far out over the ocean, which I knew would tint pink when the sun began to drop in a few hours.

  The bustle and buzz of a cocktail party, a catered clambake for forty. Voices coasting on the wind, wholesome early evening laughter, a parade of small children chasing a beach ball. The sassafras fire in a sand pit, lobsters, clams, corn, all cooking beneath a canvas tarp, the guy cooking, whom they kept calling the Bake Master, in a butcher's apron and corny chef's cap, telling stories of getting his eyebrows singed and his forearms blackened. The name of the catering company across the apron, something about lobster tails or sea legs. I don't remember anymore.

  I remember the oddness of the wild setting and the precious dinner decorations, Martha Stewart fetched up on the shores of Swansea. Bales of hay covered with blue-and-white-checked tablecloths and baskets of baguettes and trays of miniature carrots and zucchini. Galvanized tin pails of wildflowers and sunflowers, cloth napkins that matched the flowers, a wicker basket of lobster bibs. A high school girl, maybe the Winstons' daughter, going around with a petition on a clipboard to build a series of airborne nests on the public beach to save the plovers from certain extinction. This was not public beach. And the dogs. I remember the dogs.

  I remember that I kept looking low to the ground for hideous Henry, but these dogs were fleet, pure goldens and Labs, made to run, made to be cuddled and kept close by, not abandoned, as Will must have abandoned Henry, because I could imagine no other fate for him.

  I remember wondering what I was doing there, waiting on the drink line to get a glass of club soda from a kid who could be a Kennedy, a young man with lopsided Irish good looks and a toothy, bright smile. I was half-listening to the hostess, Sue Winston, tell a woman with an English accent about her forthcoming biography of Louisa May Alcott. Behind me another woman was talking about the celebrity auction always held in the middle of the summer, to which celebrities in years past had donated lunch or dinner with themselves to raise money for the social service agency that provides help for winter people impoverished by the departure of summer people at Labor Day. And then Hunter Abbott's voice began to come in clearly, a bit upwind, the familiar stories of the aging newspaperman, a cranky widower who still smoked Lucky Strikes, whose favorite subject was still the Old Days in Saigon. He and Will could work up a routine, even though they had been there on opposing teams, Hunter in the press and Will in the CIA. Will's distinction was that he was one of the few CIA people deeply opposed to the war, which made his life there another kind of hell from the hell of the war itself. After I got my club soda, I would stroll over to the circle where he stood and tell him Will was dead.

  The surprise of a hand on my shoulder made me jump. It was Evan. "How're you doing?" he said quietly.

  I did not know where to begin. I was not sure I wanted to begin. I noticed Ginny at the foot of the sand dunes talking intently to Mavis, Mavis nodding and then reaching to pat and hold Ginny's arm. It hurt me to think of my awfulness toward her; it made me want to flee from myself and from here, and once I felt that, or named it, everything I heard and saw encouraged flight, especially the silly sight of the beach done up as a Pottery Barn display window.

  "Did Ginny have a copy of the will?" Evan asked.

  "Did she ever."

  "Surprises?"

  "He left me a dollar."

  "Ouch."

  "Made his grade school friend one of the beneficiaries on his life insurance policy. She got the share that used to have my name on it, but it was only a hundred thousand. I know in your crowd that's chopped liver."

  "Hardly, my dear."

  "Evan, this looks like a wonderful party, but I—"

  "I'm not sure what the law is, but I think that in the middle of a divorce—"

  "I'm not quite in the mood for this—the lobster or the law. You wont be offended if I take a powder, will you?"

  "Don't run off to be by yourself. After my father died ... You're not going to look for the dog, are you? I know you're tough as nails, but—"

  "Nails? Me?" Crying with Ben today? At the airport with Ginny sobbing in my arms?

  "I meant that you're strong and you don't seem to need a lot of—"

  "Maybe Styrofoam, Evan, but not steel."

  "Will was angry, Sophy. That's all the dollar was about. But whether the whole package will stand up in court..."

  "That makes two of us who are angry. And you know what?" This had just come to me, this nugget of justice or wisdom, though I am no longer sure it was either. "Now we're even. He got back at me for leaving him, so I don't have to feel guilty anymore."

  "I'm a lawyer, not a psychiatrist," Evan said, "but this line of thinking could impair your judgment about suing his estate, which I believe you have every reason to pursue."

  "Evan, may I have a word with you?" It was a man who looked silvery, distinguished, already tanned, a man who went around saying, May I have a word with you, and got all the words he wanted.

  "Sophy, would you excuse me for a moment?"

  I nodded and walked a few steps to the drinks table and asked for a club soda. "How's it going?" said the bartender.

  "Swell."

  "You look familiar. Did you ever wait tables at Bradey's? Lemon or lime?"

  "Yes lime. No Bradey's."

  "Were you the receptionist in Dr. Crane's office?"

  "No, sorry."

  I was not in the mood to play Where Do I Know You From. I took my drink and scanned the nearby conversation circles, looking for Hunter, looking for the plume of cigarette smoke that was always rising from him. I didn't know anyone else here, but what I understood, as I crossed the beach with my club soda, weaving through the clusters of beautiful people and their beautiful children, was that none of them would be at a clambake among strangers the night after a father or a spouse died, the way Ginny and I were. These people did not have to reinvent their lives every day. All they had to do was show up
for the ones they'd been born into or signed onto. And when one of them died, an elaborate protocol system fell into place and operated with a balletic grace and precision of the sort used to get children into the best schools and then the best law firms. Though all these people had servants and secretaries, the calls around death, even to the florist, were made by principals, by Mr. or Mrs. And there were always two or three in a circle who knew exactly whom to call about obits in the Times, the Globe, the Washington Post.

  "Could that be Sophy Chase?"

  It was Betsy Schmidt, who, with her flirtatious husband, Terry, owned the only bookstore on the island, in a refurbished old barn out by the airport, with its own café and art gallery to lure people out there. She was conspicuous in this Town and Country crowd, her dyed, rust-colored hair, her permanent winter pallor, the cigarette always at her side, springing up to her mouth between conversations so that she wouldn't blow smoke in anyone's face. What was she doing here? Of course. Sue Winston had her Louisa May Alcott book coming out and wanted to ingratiate herself with Betsy and Terry in the hope that they would bestow on her the honor of a reading at their store.

  "I didn't know jo‹ knew the Winstons," Betsy said.

  "I didn't know you knew them either." I was surprised by her invitation to do the island minuet: jockeying for position. It hadn't gone out of fashion in my absence.

  "Any interesting plans for the summer?"

  "I don't live here anymore. I'm back briefly under difficult circumstances. My husband—we just separated—he died."

  "Oh," she said brightly. "Is that good news or bad news?"

  The statement hung in the air, and hangs still in my memory, like an enormous red flag. It stunned me. It stung me. It provoked me. Then it enraged me. It revisited the accumulated shocks and humiliations of the previous twenty-four hours and added another, the suggestion that I might be having a good time. I can articulate this now, but in that moment I was so rattled that this woman's pitiful attempt at levity, or sisterhood or whatever it was, shot through me like a seismic tremor, the earth violently rearranging itself, and all I could do was gape at her and try to remain standing. I lost the capacity to speak. And the will to speak. And the energy to say one more civilized thing to one more person who saw me as a bystander at the scene of my husband's death. I had not uttered a syllable, but the venom in my gaze had penetrated Betsy's skin, and it was she who spoke, or tried to, next.