The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  Sabine looked at the woman at the ticket counter, the man and woman who waited patiently at security, the two girls talking at the car rental booth. She looked at the handful of people who milled around through the airport, and she looked at the Fetters. There was something she couldn't put her finger on exactly, a way they resembled each other and yet resembled no group Sabine had seen before. And they had not seen her before, either, because she felt them looking, the way people had looked at her in the marketplace in Tripoli the first time she went and did not know to cover her head. There was a Lucite display box in the baggage claim area that held three five-gallon cans of house paint, VISIT SHERWOOD HARDWARE, the sign said.

  "Kitty was going to come, but Haas had to drive," Dot said, "so there wasn't enough room in the car."

  "He wanted to come and meet Sabine," Bertie said.

  "I've never seen a man so interested in taking care of a woman as Haas is. 'Let me get you coffee.' 'Are you sure you don't want to take a scarf?' I swear, if he wasn't so nice he'd drive me crazy."

  "You'd get used to it," Bertie said.

  "How long have you been going out?" Sabine asked.

  "Six years." Bertie seemed more self-assured in Nebraska. She was older here. You could see it in the way she held her head. "It was seven years ago he came to teach at the school, and we started going out a year later."

  "As long as you're not rushing into things." Sabine had meant it as a joke, but Bertie just nodded her head as if to say that was how she thought of it, too.

  "No one will ever accuse Bertie of not being cautious," Dot said.

  The man in the jumpsuit brought Sabine her luggage, never for a moment doubting it was hers. She was suddenly embarrassed by having two bags. She had packed carelessly. She had brought Phan's gloves and was wearing his coat. She had brought the sable hat that Parsifal had bought for Phan in Russia. She had brought Parsifal's sweaters. She had thrown anything that caught her eye into the suitcase. In LAX, where skycaps pushed flatbed carts burdened with hat boxes and shoe trunks, Sabine had never even thought about her luggage. Bertie took the heavier bag and led the way out to the car.

  Maybe, if anything, it was like Death Valley. None of the beautiful parts, not Furnace Creek or the range of Funeral Mountains. No place where the rocks were red. Not in the spring, when the ground cactus bloomed with vicious color out of the sand. But maybe this was Death Valley in its endless stretches of flatness. Death Valley in July at noon in the places where people with flat tires managed to walk three miles or four before giving out, their sense of direction destroyed by the 360-degree sweep of nothingness. Add to that the snow, which pelted the car the way the sand could bury you when a windstorm came out of nowhere. Over and over again Sabine tried to fix her eyes on a single flake hurtling towards them, lost it, and found another. It made her head ache but she couldn't make herself stop. Add to the snow the bone-crushing cold, which was a combination of the cold of the atmosphere and the cold of the wind. It was not so unlike the heat in that it permeated every square inch of your skin and deep beneath it. Cold, like heat, quickly became the only thing possible to think about: how to get out of it, how it was going to kill you. There were no towns in the thirty-five miles between Scottsbluff and Alliance. Sometimes there were billboards, but there was little to advertise, places to eat and sleep that were so far away there was no point in even thinking about them now. Most of what there was to look at was flat land and snow.

  "I bet you never thought you'd see Nebraska," Dot said. She was beaming. Nebraska made Dot Fetters whole. They were coming into the town now, driving down streets lined in rows of tiny, identical ranch houses.

  "I never did," Sabine said. Was it the snow that made every house exactly the same? Was there something else under that white blanket?

  "It's hard to tell it now, but in the summer this place is beautiful. In the summer you'd never want to be anyplace else."

  "This winter has been worse than most of them," Bertie said from the front seat, where she sat next to Haas. "Don't think it's always going to be this bad."

  Always? Did they think she was staying? Did they think she'd be around to see the summer or the winter after this? Was that what Parsifal thought as a boy when he looked out into the fields: Do you really expect me to stay through to the summer?

  "It's a shame you didn't bring Rabbit," Bertie said. "Haas, you should see Sabine's rabbit."

  Haas pulled into one of the many driveways there were to choose from. The house was lit up, waiting. They tightened their coats and stepped into the soft, deep snow. They hurried up the front steps and through the unlocked door.

  "This is it," Dot said, stretching out her hands. "This is home. I should feel embarrassed. I've seen your house."

  Over the sofa there was a copy of a painting, an old covered bridge, a horse and wagon approaching. "When I'm king," Parsifal had liked to say as they wandered through antique stores, "my first edict will be to outlaw all covered-bridge paintings and their reproductions."

  Sabine told her she was happy to be there, and it was true.

  Dot smiled at the room, the nappy brown sofa with maple arms, the console television set, the two recliners. The bulb on the ceiling was covered with a piece of frosted glass that resembled a handkerchief pinned at each of its four corners. "I've been here a long time. We moved here when Guy was barely walking and I was still carrying Kitty around. Now I think about this being Guy's house and I don't think I'll ever move. It's one of the only links I've got to him. I started feeling that way a long time before he died."

  Sabine's parents had told her that the house on Oriole was too much for her, that she should give it up and buy someplace that would be easier to manage, but she wasn't moving, either.

  Bertie and Haas, who had been lingering out in the car, came through the door, red faced from the cold or from the pleasure of finding a minute alone. Bertie stamped on the mat to dislodge the snow from the deep treads in her boots. "Kitty!" she called out, her voice loud enough to call Kitty from next door. "Isn't Kitty here?" she asked her mother.

  "Sure she's here." Dot went into the kitchen and then looked down the hallway. "Kitty?"

  "She was supposed to make dinner," Bertie said to Sabine. Haas unzipped his jacket but couldn't quite bring himself to take it off. He stood on the mat by the door, waiting.

  "I'll call her," Dot said.

  "Then you might as well do it in the other room." Bertie sat down heavily in a chair and started to unlace her boots, Haas watching her, longingly.

  "Don't be silly." Dot picked up the phone. "Sit, sit," she said to Sabine. "This will take one minute. I bet she just had to run someplace with the boys. She's probably on her way."

  They were all watching her, waiting quietly while the phone rang for what must have been a long time. Far past the point at which Sabine would have hung up, Dot spoke. "Howard," she said, her voice gone flat. "It's me. Let me talk to Kitty." They waited, all of them. Dot curled the plastic phone cord around her finger. Sabine could barely make out some framed pictures hanging in the hall and wanted to go to them. Now she understood how much Dot had wanted to see the pictures at her house. "Well, she has to be there because she's not here. She was going to come over for supper. Guy's wife is in town from California. You know that." Dot looked at Sabine, to be sure. "Just put her on the phone." After a minute she put the earpiece of the phone on her forehead and tapped the receiver there a few times, then she hung up. "So," she said, her voice steady and reasonable. "Other plans for dinner."

  "I'm going to pick something up," Haas said, and slid the zipper of his jacket back into place.

  "I shouldn't have asked her to make dinner," Dot said. "I should have done it myself."

  "This isn't your fault, no matter how you look at it," Bertie told her mother. Then she put her hands on Sabine's sleeves and she squeezed. Sabine knew that Bertie was telling her something, but she was too tired and confused to figure out what it was. Maybe she meant to say sorry, or,
just bear with this and don't ask. Sabine nodded in general compliance. "We've got really good pizza in town," Bertie said. "Tomorrow night we'll cook." She pushed her feet back down in her boots.

  "Be careful," Dot said. "It's getting worse out there every minute."

  Bertie slipped her hand in the pocket of Haas's coat as if she were looking for something important, and then she left it there. They did not care about the weather.

  Sabine moved her hands inside her own pockets. Snow.

  "Look at you, standing there in your coat," Dot said to Sabine when they were alone. "I don't get enough practice being a hostess."

  Sabine took her coat off and held it in her arms. She would prefer to wear it. The weight of the coat made her feel pinned down. "So, do you want to tell me about this?"

  Dot tilted her head to the lacy piece of crocheting that hung over the back of the chair. She closed her eyes. "Not really," she said. "Not if you're giving me a choice. Everything comes out awfully quick, anyway. Don't you think?"

  Sabine saw her parents standing just inside the kitchen door. Her father did not look judgmental, only sad. He held the rabbit tenderly in his arms. "You're thirty-five miles from the airport," her mother said. "There is a blizzard outside, and you do not know these people. You've come to Nebraska for what, Sabine? What were you thinking about?" They looked cold, standing there in winter clothes meant for Southern California. Her mother shivered and pushed close to her father, close to the rabbit.

  "Let me see Parsifal's room," Sabine said.

  Dot smiled, her eyes still closed. "Good," she said. "Now's the time, when we have the house to ourselves. I still never get this house to myself. Everyone always asks me, 'What will you do with Bertie gone?' Bertie was about ready to ask Haas to move in over here after they got married, she was so worried about me, and you've got to know he'd do it. But I told her, there have been people in my house every day of my life. I moved from my folks to Al's, then I had the kids. It would be nice, you know, to wake up one morning and have a place all to yourself."

  "I just got that little bit of time when I lived with Phan and Parsifal, and then the year after Phan died."

  "I'm not saying I hated it. I'm just saying after a while enough's enough." Dot stood up and stretched. "Come on," she said. "I'll show you."

  There was a hallway with four doors off the living room. Two bedrooms on one side and a bedroom and bathroom on the other. "This is me, this is Bertie," Dot said, and when they got to the last door she opened it and said, "This is you."

  Of course what struck Sabine right away was the rug, which was a red plaid tartan of the kind used to make kilts for Catholic schoolgirls and dog beds in New England, only this plaid was bigger, more inescapable. How he must have lain in bed at night dreaming of carpets, of nimble, delicate fingers securing a thousand knots per square inch. The rug was the only thing that was unexpected. The twin beds were carved from the same light maple as the furniture in the living room. Between them there was a nightstand with a lamp. There was a desk underneath the window, with a straight-back chair. There was a dresser with eight drawers. There was a bookcase full of Hardy Boys mysteries and volumes A through K of an off-brand encyclopedia, the type that comes from filling up stamp books. There were four plastic horses with removable saddles, the tallest one standing twelve inches at the head. There were three small silver trophies and five blue ribbons commemorating moments of honor in baseball. There was a baseball. Sabine wanted time in that room. She wanted to pull up the rug and look beneath it, check inside the coils of the box springs, see if there wasn't something taped behind a picture. Of course there could not be a message for her, and yet she thought there would be something, a clue that only she would understand. There was a framed photograph of four people—Parsifal and Kitty, younger than they had been in the photographs Sabine had already seen, and Dot and a man who was tall and square jawed with dark eyes and dark hair. A man who should have been handsome but, for some reason that had to do with the spacing of his eyes or the shortness of his neck, was not. It was a studio portrait taken before anyone had even the dimmest notion of Bertie coming along. They looked regular, friendly, close.

  "Look how pretty you are," Sabine said, and it was true. Dot Fetters was fine boned, her waist as tiny as a doll's. Her face in the photograph was energetic and bright, hopeful.

  "I was pretty then," Dot said, peering into the small face that was her own face. "But it was wasted on me. I couldn't see it to save my life, thought I was the homeliest thing going. Then one day I woke up and I was old and fat and I knew. You don't miss the water till the well runs dry." She stopped to study Sabine for a minute. "I sure hope Guy had the good sense to tell you how beautiful you are. Even if he did go for the boys, a homosexual's got eyes just like the rest of us. I hope he did that for you."

  He had said Audrey Hepburn's neck, Cyd Charisse's legs. He said she should stand in a room by herself in the Louvre. "I wish you could see yourself in this light," he would tell her, in the bright sun of Malibu or in the kitchen in the morning or beneath the stage lights gelled pink and forgiving. "You are so beautiful in this light."

  "He did that," she said.

  "Good," Dot said, nodding. "I would have been disappointed in him otherwise."

  Sabine pointed to the frame again. "And that's Albert?"

  Dot looked to make sure and then she nodded. "When Guy went away," she said, as if the question had reminded her of something else, "Kitty moved into his room. I was pregnant with Bertie then and not feeling so well, and Kitty made her whole room over for the baby and slept in here. She never changed a thing in Guy's room, never put up any of her stuff. She just made a little place in the closet for her clothes and that was it. Now her boys sleep here when they stay over with me and she won't let them touch anything. She'll let them read the books but only in the room, only if they put them right back, and that's it." She picked up one of the horses and held it to her chest without looking at it. Its beady plastic eyes stared up at her without affection. "I tell her, I don't think it's so healthy. It wasn't so healthy when she was doing it as a girl but then when her boys came along I thought, Hell, these are boy's things, let them have them. Not Kitty. Everything concerning her brother has to be just so. That's why it's such a shame she didn't get to come to Los Angeles. If anyone should have been there it was Kitty, maybe even more than me." Dot looked at Sabine. "There's something I think I should tell you. I kind of told a lie. Not a big one."

  "To me?"

  She shook her head. "To Kitty. When I got back from California I told her that her picture was on his nightstand. I couldn't tell her it was just in a box, jumbled in with everybody else. You and I know it was something that he had it at all, but it meant so much to her, thinking she was right next to him, that he was looking at her and thinking about her." For a moment Dot stopped, her words choked down with worry. "I love my children," she said. "No one will tell you otherwise, but just between the two of us I have to say I admire you for not having any. The ways they break your heart, Jesus, and it never stops. I mean it, it simply does not stop."

  Sabine felt sure that her parents were sitting in Fairfax right this minute saying the same thing about her. She took the horse from Dot's arms and put it back on the shelf. "What do you say you fix me a drink?"

  "Oh," Dot said, lifting her head from the reverie of sadness. "You are talking now."

  Dot produced a bottle of Jack Daniel's from deep in the pantry and the two of them sat quietly at a small table in the kitchen with their glasses, thinking of what had been lost. The drink reminded Sabine of the confession in the Sheraton bar, the Nebraska Boys Reformatory, and she might have asked about it then had the back door not swung open. Snow skittered across the linoleum so fast that in a matter of minutes the apple green floor would have been white. Bertie and Haas, back with pizza.

  In all the confusion over napkins and plates, Haas stayed by the door, his ice-encrusted hat still on his head. In this, her second encounte
r with him, Sabine knew that the door was his spot, that in any fire, he would be the most likely to survive.

  "I'm heading home," Haas said. "Papers to grade."

  "Don't you want something to eat?" Dot asked.

  "I got a little something while we were waiting. I'm set."

  Sabine thanked him for the ride and Haas assured her it was nothing. Bertie gave him a polite kiss and then he was gone.

  "It looks bad out there." Dot stood up to serve their plates.

  "The radio said ten to twelve inches is all." Bertie seemed a little put out, maybe that Haas had left or maybe because she had not gone home with him. She was nearly thirty, surely she must go home with him. "Did Kitty call while we were gone?"

  Dot shook her head. "Your sister gets busy."

  "The hell she gets busy." Bertie didn't so much slam down her fork as place it down decisively. "Howard gets busy."

  "Whatever it is, I don't think it's call to raise your voice when Sabine is here. Let's at least put on a good front for one night, show her what a happy family we are."

  Bertie picked her fork up again and absently began pricking holes in the cheese. "I don't see why we're not allowed to talk about Kitty."

  "We talk plenty and it does no one any good. You can't make somebody else's decisions for them," Dot said wearily. "I've spent my whole life trying."

  Suddenly Bertie turned to Sabine. "Do you have brothers and sisters?" she asked, hoping to guide the conversation into more polite terrain. Her curls were wet from where the snow had melted on them and they glistened as if recently varnished.

  "Just me," Sabine said. "My parents seemed to think that that would be enough."

  Dot and Bertie looked at her in silence, waiting for more, when there was no more coming. They had hoped the question would take them away from their own worries and when it didn't they had no idea what else there was to say. Sabine would have been glad to know the story of Kitty, but if Bertie was interested in telling it, Dot was certainly not interested in hearing it. Besides, Kitty's story was not the one Sabine had come for. She'd just as soon be in Parsifal's bedroom now, staring up at the ceiling he had stared at all those years. "You know, I'm awfully tired, to tell you the truth," she said, and gave a halfhearted stretch.