The First Time

by Joy Fielding

  Watch how regally Barbara slides off her chair and onto the floor, casually securing her skirt beneath her knees while showing her eighteen-month-old daughter the best way to stack the blocks she’s been struggling with, patiently picking them up whenever they fall down, encouraging Tracey to try again, ultimately stacking them herself, then restacking them each time her daughter accidentally knocks them over. Any second now, Tracey will climb into her mother’s protective arms, the dark curls she has inherited from Barbara surrounding her porcelain-doll face, and close her eyes in sleep.

  “There was a little girl,” I can still hear Barbara say, in that soothing, singsongy voice she always affected when talking to her daughter, as I watch her lips moving silently on the film, “who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good, she was very, very good. And when she was bad, she was—”

  “A really bad girl!” Tracey shouted gleefully, chocolate brown eyes popping open. And we all laughed.

  Barbara laughed the loudest, although her face moved the least. Terrified of those impending wrinkles, and, at 32, the oldest of the women present, she’d perfected the art of laughing without actually breaking into a smile. Her mouth would open and a loud, even raucous, sound would emerge, but her lips remained curiously static, refusing either to wiggle or curl. This was in marked contrast to Chris, whose every feature was engaged when she laughed, her mouth twisting this way and that in careless abandon, although the resulting sound was delicate, even tentative, as if she knew there was a price to pay for having too good a time.

  Amazingly, Barbara and Chris had never even seen each other before that afternoon, despite that we’d all lived on Grand Avenue for at least a year, but they instantly became the best of friends, proof positive of the old adage that opposites attract. Aside from the obvious physical differences—blond versus brunette, short versus tall, fresh-faced glow versus Day-Glo sheen—their inner natures were as different as their outer surfaces. Yet they complemented each other perfectly, Chris soft where Barbara was hard, strong where Barbara was weak, demure where Barbara was anything but. They quickly became inseparable.

  That’s Vicki, pushing herself into the frame, making her presence felt, the way she did with just about everything in her life. At twenty-eight, Vicki was the youngest of the women and easily the most accomplished. She was a lawyer, and, at the time, the only one of us who worked outside the home, although Susan was enrolled at the university, working toward a degree in English literature. Vicki had short reddish-brown hair, cut on the diagonal, a style that emphasized the sharp planes of her long, thin face. Her eyes were hazel and small, although almost alarmingly intense, even intimidating, no doubt a plus for an ambitious litigator with a prestigious downtown law firm. Vicki was shorter than Barbara, taller than Chris, and at 105 pounds, the thinnest of the group. Her small-boned frame made her look deceptively fragile, but she had hidden strength and boundless energy. Even when sitting still, as she is here, she seemed to be moving, her body vibrating, like a tuning fork.

  Her daughter, Kirsten, at only twenty-two months, was already her mother’s clone. She had the same delicate bone structure and clear hazel eyes, the same way of looking just past you when you spoke, as if there might be something more interesting, more engaging, more important, going on just behind you that she couldn’t chance missing. The toddler was forever up and down, down and up, back and forth, clamoring for her mother’s attention and approval. Vicki gave her daughter an occasional, absentminded pat on the head, but their eyes rarely connected. Maybe the child was blinded, as we all were initially, by the enormous diamond sparkler on the third finger of Vicki’s left hand. Watch how it temporarily obliterates all other images, turning the screen a ghostly white.

  Vicki was married to a man some twenty-five years her senior, whom she’d known since childhood. In fact, she and his eldest son had been high school classmates and budding sweethearts. Until, of course, Vicki decided she preferred the father to the son, and the resulting scandal tore the family apart. “You can’t break up a happy marriage,” Vicki assured us that afternoon, stealing a quote from Elizabeth Taylor’s résumé, and the rest of the women nodded in unison, although they couldn’t quite hide their shock.

  Vicki liked to shock, the women quickly learned, just as they learned to secretly enjoy being shocked. For whatever her faults, and they were many, Vicki was rarely less than totally entertaining. She was the spark that ignited the flame, the presence who signaled the party could officially begin, the mover, the shaker, the one whom everyone clucked over and fussed about. Even if she wasn’t the one who got the ball rolling—surprisingly, it was usually the more unassuming Susan who did that—Vicki was invariably the one who ran with it, who made sure her team scored the winning touchdown. And Vicki always played to win.

  Next to Vicki’s coiled intensity, Susan seems almost stately, sitting there with her hands clasped easily in her lap, light brown hair folding neatly under at her chin, the quintessential Breck girl, except that she was still carrying around fifteen of the thirty-five pounds she’d gained when pregnant and hadn’t been able to shed since Ariel’s birth. The extra pounds made her noticeably self-conscious and camera-shy, although she’d always preferred the sidelines to center stage. The other women offered their encouragement and advice, shared their diet and exercise regimes, and Susan listened, not out of politeness, but because she’d always enjoyed listening more than speaking, her mind a sponge, absorbing each proffered tidbit. She’d make note of their suggestions later in the journal she’d been keeping since Ariel was born. She’d once had dreams of being a writer, she admitted when pressed, and Vicki told her that she should speak to her husband, who owned a string of trade magazines and was thinking of expanding his growing empire.

  Susan smiled, her daughter tickling her feet as she played happily with Susan’s bare toes, and changed the subject, preferring to talk about her courses at the university. They were more tangible than dreams, and Susan was nothing if not practical. She’d quit school when she got married to help put her husband through medical school. Only now that his practice was established and going strong had she decided to return to school to finish her degree. Her husband was very supportive of her decision, she told the women, and her mother was helping out by looking after Ariel during the day.

  “You’re lucky,” Chris told her. “My mother lives in California.”

  “My mother died just after Tracey was born,” Barbara said, eyes instantly filling with tears.

  “I haven’t seen my mother since I was four years old,” Vicki announced. “She ran off with my father’s business partner. Haven’t heard from the bitch since.”

  And then the room fell silent, as was so often the case after one of Vicki’s calculated pronouncements.

  Susan glanced at her watch. The others followed suit. Someone mentioned the lateness of the hour, that they should probably be getting home. We decided on a group picture to commemorate the afternoon, and together we managed to prop the camera on top of a stack of books at the far end of the room and arrange ourselves and our daughters so that we all fit inside the camera’s scope.

  So there we are, ladies and gentlemen.

  In one corner, Susan, wearing blue jeans and a sloppy, loose-fitting shirt, balancing daughter Ariel on her lap, the child’s wiry little body in marked contrast to her mother’s quiet bulk.

  In the other corner, Vicki, wearing white shorts and a polka-dot halter top, trying to extricate daughter Kirsten’s arms from around her neck, small eyes mischievously ablaze as she mouths a silent obscenity directly into the lens of the camera.

  In between, Barbara and Chris, Chris wearing white pants and a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, straining to prevent her daughter, Montana, from abandoning her yet again, while Tracey sits obediently on her mother’s skirted lap, Barbara manipulating Tracey’s hand up and down, as both mother and daughter wave as one.

  The Grand Dames.

  Friends fo
r life.

  Of course, one of us turned out not to be a friend at all, but we didn’t know it then.

  Nor could any of us have predicted that twenty-three years later, two of the women would be dead, one murdered in the crudest of fashions.

  Which, of course, leaves me.

  I press another button, listen as the tape rewinds, shift expectantly on my chair, waiting for the film to start afresh. Perhaps, I think, as the women suddenly reappear, their babies in their laps, their futures in their faces, this will be the time it all makes sense. I will find the justice I seek, the peace I desire, the resolution I need.

  I hear the women’s laughter. The story begins.

  Look for

  Grand Avenue

  Wherever Books Are Sold

  Hardcover available October 2001

  from

  Doubleday Canada