Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  “You’re insane,” Bex’s disembodied voice barked out from the intercom at the entrance to her and Josh’s building. “I mean, you’re insane generally, but scared-of-everything insane, not throw-all-caution-to-the-wind insane.” Peggy shifted the six-pack of beer she was carrying and waited for Bex to wrap up the lecture. “Nobody does this,” Bex continued. “I wouldn’t do this, and I’d do a lot more than you would.” The interior doors buzzed open, and Peggy scaled the five flights of stairs and found Bex, furiously gnawing a half-eaten slice of pizza, and Josh, holding a sheaf of legal documents, standing together out in the building corridor at the open doorway to Josh’s apartment.

  Peggy handed the beer to Josh. “Your fee.” She looked at Bex. “So much for the organic food, then?”

  “I can’t help it. The Pill makes me starving all the time. I’m not even pregnant and I’m turning into a whale.” Bex sank her teeth into her pizza and continued with her mouth full, “You should be anxious. You don’t even know the man! Why aren’t you anxious? Josh, tell her she should be anxious.”

  “No way.” Bex’s husband bent to retrieve a piece of pepperoni on the floor. “I’m Switzerland over here.”

  “Let’s go inside.” Peggy stepped between her friends to enter the apartment. Wasn’t Bex always pushing her to break out of her comfort zone? Peggy felt no anxiety whatsoever about what was happening. No anxiety—like a normal person. She felt insulated, as if enjoying a madcap play in which the spunky heroine, Peggy Adams, was preparing to drive up to Connecticut tomorrow to start her brand-new double life. Or a stirring drama at the end of which brave Peggy would save her business, help her beloved best friend, and end up married to the real man she loved. The only hard part would be making sure Miss Abigail thought she and Luke were truly mad for each other, like real newlyweds, making a go of their marriage instead of just biding time to win their prize. That would be no small feat.

  “The terms of the deal look fine.” Josh hugged Peggy and gave her the papers. “I also had a guy I know in Connecticut look it over, and he says it’s pretty straightforward stuff. Turns out this lawyer, Andy, has a cousin who went to Yale with your new weekend hubby. Says Sedgwick’s an okay guy.”

  Bex plopped down on Josh’s scratchy plaid couch. “I’m working weekends so you can go live with an okay guy.”

  “An okay guy who’s sitting on a gold mine,” Josh said. “Andy checked into the value of the house. Based on its last tax assessment, it’s worth about three million.”

  “Three million dollars!” Bex bounced on the sofa.

  Peggy wasn’t surprised. She had done her own due diligence. She’d researched Sedgwick genealogy on the Internet. The family dated back to Mayflower times. Silas Ebenezer, the patriarch, was a Revolutionary War hero who’d made his fortune importing goods from Europe. And then there was the Silas Sedgwick House. The New Nineveh Historical Society called it “a Litchfield County architectural landmark,” “a Colonial Revival gem.” It had three stories, two rambling additions, and twenty-one rooms. Black-and-white photos on the society’s Web site showed a spectacular mansion set behind towering trees with a formal garden. Peggy had hardly been able to believe her luck, even when she’d learned she’d be staying there with not just Luke, but his great-aunt, too—one big happy family.

  “I know it sounds insane, Bex, but everything is falling into place.” Peggy sat squeamishly on the coffee table, checking first to make sure it wasn’t sticky. You never knew in Josh’s apartment. “It’ll be good for the store. It will be good for me and Brock. And it’ll be good for you. I’ve been letting you take care of me for far too long. It’s time I made a contribution. Besides, it’s only until next September.”

  Bex had a fleck of tomato sauce on her cheek. “What if the old lady lives another twenty years? You’ll never get to marry Brock. Not a huge tragedy in my opinion, but still, you’re stuck in a sexless marriage to a random person you don’t care about. Have you thought of that?”

  “She can always back out, sweetie,” Josh said. “The will just says if they’re still married in twelve months, they’ll get the house. There’s nothing forcing them to stay together for life.”

  On Saturday, Peggy turned her rental car, a Pontiac this time, onto Church Street, toward the traffic light that swung on a cable over the center of town—the intersection of Church and Main. As she waited at the light, she leaned over the steering wheel to get a better look at New Nineveh. She couldn’t get over how postcard pretty it was, with its picturesque churches and shops arranged around a central lawn. The single incongruity was a group of picketers on the grass. “Save Our Town!” their signs read. “Stop Destroying History!” It was surprising to find strife in this serene setting. She’d have to find out what they were protesting.

  She peered up Main Street, trying to locate the Silas Sedgwick House, but the homes were set back behind yellow-and magenta-leafed trees. When the light changed, she turned left onto Main and counted houses in from the corner on the right: One. Two. And then, three.

  Her arms broke out in goose bumps.

  It was a breathtaking, magnificent white-clapboard structure. Two pairs of first-and second-story windows with black-painted shutters were set on either side of a grand front door flanked with four columns. Above the door, on the second story, a dramatic central window arched toward the third floor, where a smaller crescent window curved up toward a graceful, sloping roof. The roof was crowned with a flat widow’s walk surrounded by an ornate balustrade.

  Four sturdy chimneys rose, one from each corner. On the front of the house was a neat white plaque with black-painted lettering:

  Silas Ebenezer Sedgwick 1796

  The historical society photographs hadn’t done it justice.

  Awed, Peggy turned into the shallow semicircular gravel driveway between Main Street and the house so abruptly that the Pontiac’s tires squealed. She stepped out of the car, locked the door, and stood in the fall air.

  Balanced high on a ladder in the front yard, a frail figure was sawing branches from an oranging maple.

  Peggy’s breath caught in her chest. A low picket fence separated the front yard from the sidewalk, and she hurried through its gate and across the lawn, afraid of startling Miss Abigail off her unsteady perch. Why wasn’t Luke pruning the trees? Really, why wasn’t a gardener doing it? A house this size would have a gardener.

  At the tree, bits of wood rained onto the lawn. Peggy stepped between fallen branches, dodging another that was plummeting to the ground. “Should you be up there? Isn’t this considered strenuous—”

  “Look out below!” Miss Abigail called. Another slender branch dropped near Peggy’s feet. Miss Abigail regarded it with a cold eye and nodded. “That should do for today.” She started down the ladder, disregarding the hand Peggy held out to her, passing Peggy the saw instead. “If Luke asks, our neighbor Mr. Fiorentino chopped off those branches, and I was not on that ladder.”

  For the first time since she’d called Luke two weeks and a day ago, Peggy felt an unwelcome pang of apprehension: What have I gotten myself into? She made the decision to ignore it and carried the saw carefully as Miss Abigail hauled the severed branches to a small stand Peggy hadn’t noticed at the edge of the front yard. A wooden box with the words Honor System on it sat on the counter next to half a dozen metal buckets. Miss Abigail panted a bit as she arranged the branches in the buckets, one eye on a woman who was coming up the sidewalk. “The Sedgwick maple is the oldest tree in town.” She stopped as the woman arrived, then continued, “Silas had it planted when the house was built.”

  The woman, who was around seventy, wore impenetrable round sunglasses. “‘One dollar a branch,’ ” she read. “Hmm. Interesting. You’ve lowered your prices.”

  Miss Abigail smiled. “Mrs. Riga, may I present Mrs. Sedgwick.”

  Peggy didn’t understand why Mrs. Riga was watching her expectantly. Then—oh, dear—was she supposed to be Mrs. Sedgwick? “Call me Peggy.” She felt li
ke a mouse under the woman’s owlish stare.

  “Call me Ernestine. My husband and I live back on Market Road, in what used to be the Sedgwick carriage house.” The woman cocked her head to one side. “Let’s see the ring.”

  Oh, dear. The ring. Still holding the saw, Peggy showed Ernestine Brock’s promise ring uncomfortably. I’m doing this for him, she reminded herself.

  “That from Star Jewelers, honey?” Ernestine listed to the left as her oversize designer handbag slid off her shoulder onto her arm. “Remember my grandma pin, Abigail—the one with all the children’s birthstones? It took that place nearly a month to fix the clasp. A month! It’s so New Nineveh. What else does that jeweler have to do?” She pushed the bag back up where it belonged. “Now, Peggy, I hear you’re only here on weekends. Why?”

  “Peggy has a little business in the city,” Miss Abigail explained. “She sells mops and buckets.”

  “Well, that’ll come in handy around the Sedgwick House.” Ernestine sounded perhaps the tiniest bit contemptuous. It was hard to tell.

  Peggy hesitated. She wanted to set the record straight but didn’t want to be disrespectful to Miss Abigail. “It isn’t mops and buckets, though,” she said carefully. “It’s called ACME Cleaning Supply, but we sell bath products, like soap.”

  “Well, it won’t be forever, will it, dear? You’ll be moving up to New Nineveh soon enough, I’m sure,” Miss Abigail said. Peggy felt as if she were being interrogated.

  It was Ernestine who ended the grilling. “I’m off. Peggy, you’ll come over sometime for a look at my flower stand. See you at the party!”

  Miss Abigail held on to her smile until Ernestine was well down the sidewalk. “I’ll be introducing you at a small reception, dear, next Sunday afternoon. I presume your family is in New York? I’d like to invite them—your parents and brothers and sisters.”

  Peggy imagined the look on Miss Abigail’s face when Max and Madeleine Adams parked their RV in Silas Ebenezer Sedgwick’s driveway. “I’m an only child. We’re from Northern California, but right now my parents are traveling. They’d love to be here otherwise.”

  It wasn’t entirely false. Peggy’s father had been a middle manager for a California department store chain and had moved from town to town, assignment to assignment, when the mood struck. Peggy had spent her last two years of high school, anyway, in Northern California. And her parents were traveling; a few years ago, Max had cashed in his retirement nest egg to finance his dream of crisscrossing the West in perpetuity in a recreational vehicle. Peggy suspected her parents’ lifestyle choice would not sit well with Miss Abigail. It didn’t sit well with Peggy, though the RV wasn’t what bothered her—it was that their future was too precarious, too uncertain.

  “Let’s go inside.” Miss Abigail started toward the house, her steps short and slow across the leaf-scattered lawn.

  “Who’ll watch the flower stand?” Peggy considered volunteering to stay outside. Her decision to remain married to Luke was seeming hasty and foolish. She doubted she could keep up the charade for an hour, let alone a year. “That box isn’t locked. Anyone could walk off with your money.”

  “This isn’t New York City, dear.”

  Up close, the Silas Sedgwick House front door was even more imposing than it was from the car—perhaps nine feet tall and broader than a regular door, with a weathered brass knocker set squarely in the center, a good foot above Miss Abigail’s cotton candy head. But it also needed a paint job. Strips of black had peeled away, revealing bare wood underneath like the glimpse of shirt through the elbows of Luke’s shabby sweater.

  Miss Abigail threw her whole body against the door, and it creaked open. “Welcome,” she said, ushering Peggy inside.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know what to say. You’re a writer. Or so you claim.” Nicki brandished her cell phone at Luke. “You know lots of words. How about these? ‘Stop. Leave me alone, bitch. I’m backing out.’ ”

  The couch opposite Nicki was littered with lacy pillows. Luke shoved them to one side and sat down. “I’m not backing out.” This scheme with Peggy was repugnant and unseemly and went against every fiber of his being. It was also the best thing to happen to the family finances in half a century—and, to Luke himself, ever. He’d been shocked at first at Peggy’s proposal and hung up summarily, but by morning he’d reversed his thinking and called her back. Hadn’t he dreamed his entire life of living someplace where no one knew his business back for generations? Hadn’t he longed to pursue his poetry, to break free of the Sedgwick name, to escape the ingrained notions of how to live, whom to be friends with, what to do? Now he could and, more crucially, ensure his great-aunt had the kind of medical care she deserved. “It’s a winning situation for all of us,” he told Nicki, sounding like one of the speakers at the Family Asset Management Conference.

  Nicki waved the phone at him. “What’s her number? I’ll call her myself.”

  “Put that down,” Luke said coolly. The third or fourth time he and Nicki had broken up, right here in her artist’s loft in South Norwalk, with its bohemian view of the New Haven line train trestle, she’d thrown her coffee at him. It had hit the back wall and splattered to the floor, ruining the weaving project Nicki had been working on at the time, a shawl-like garment fashioned from what looked like pink barbed wire. Luke secretly believed he had saved the world from it.

  Nicki shut the phone but didn’t put it down. “What about me? I’m supposed to stay out of your life for a year?”

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “You mean if I want to sneak around, see you only during the week, and stay away from New Nineveh completely.”

  “You’re at craft shows nearly every weekend anyway. And if you don’t come to New Nineveh, you won’t have to visit with my great-aunt.”

  Luke was worried about Abby. She’d returned from the hospital uncharacteristically docile, obediently following her doctor’s orders to avoid taxing activities, like gardening, that she’d always enjoyed. She was more muddled, too; he’d tried to make her understand Peggy Adams was not related to the extinct Adams family of New Nineveh, which had once rivaled the Sedgwicks in importance, but she couldn’t grasp it.

  He frowned. “I’m afraid Abby might not be around very long.”

  “You’d better hope she isn’t. It’ll kill the old lady for sure when you dump that Vegas whore after a year.”

  “Don’t call her that. It’s unbecoming to you.”

  “Well, la-di-da.”

  “Anyway, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” Luke was thinking, suddenly, that he and Nicki should break up once and for all. Life would be considerably easier.

  Then he thought, Bridge. The word brought to mind Peggy Adams. But why, he didn’t know.

  “What’s she like?” Nicki asked. “The Vegas whor—”

  “Her name is Peggy.”

  Nicki rolled her eyes. “What’s she like?”

  In a tray on the trunk Nicki used as a coffee table, scuffed nuggets of sea glass surrounded a dusty collection of candles. “I don’t know. Nervous.” Luke poked at the candles. “Why don’t you ever light these things?”

  “Is she pretty?”

  He knew he should jump in with the objective truth, that given the choice between Peggy and a five-foot-ten-inch redheaded Amazon goddess, few men would notice Peggy was in the room. He had vaguely remembered Peggy as being vivacious and intelligent, but he’d seen none of that in Mayhew’s office. Obviously his attraction had been to the situation. The liquor, a stranger in a strange city: The combination had proven a potent but all-too-fleeting aphrodisiac.

  Aphrodisiac. The word had great rhythm—perfectly trochaic on its own, but ideal for iambic pentameter: An all-toofleeting aphrodisiac. An aphrodisiac that vanishes.

  “Don’t think I don’t notice you aren’t answering my question. Which means you think she’s pretty. You want to fuck her. Why else would you stay married to her?”

  She was jealous. Nic
ole Pappas—jealous. Like a vulnerable child, she curled her legs underneath her. Her dark snake-eyes faded back to green.

  “You have nothing to worry about.” Luke, the product of a culture in which the unchecked display of feeling was proof of an insufficiently rigorous upbringing, was surprised by an overwhelming surge of sappy, sloppy affection for his girlfriend. Nicki was sexy, vulgar, and dangerous. She cared about him, in her own peculiar way. They understood each other. They had never promised each other more than they were able to give.

  A pillow from the pile next to him tumbled into his lap. He flipped it onto the floor. “Come over here.”

  She stroked the arm of her chair. “You come over here.”

  Luke’s nerves vibrated with the inevitability of what would happen next. He pointed down at the throw pillows scattered on the rug. “I’ll meet you halfway. Right there.”

  “That’s not halfway. That’s halfway.” She pointed to a spot on the floor a few inches closer to her side of the rug.

  Luke’s nerves began to vibrate a little less. Did everything have to be a dispute, every time?

  Nicki continued pointing fixedly at her spot on the rug.

  Luke glanced past her, at the rhinestone clock some artisan had given her in barter at a crafts show. He could stay and negotiate inches, or he could leave, drive the sixty miles back to New Nineveh, and get on with the charade.

  “I’ll see you next week,” he told Nicki.

  He left his girlfriend sulking in her chair and headed out to meet the wife he’d never wanted.

  Peggy blinked. She and Miss Abigail were standing in a dim front hall. A simple iron lamp hung from a medallion in the center of the high ceiling; the weak flicker of its one working bulb did nothing to dispel the gloom. To the left and right, wide door frames led into twin front parlors. In front of them, a steep staircase made a right angle as it ascended to unseen floors above, while beyond it, on this level, a narrow corridor led farther into the house. Peggy’s impression was that it was a beautiful entrance, if smaller than she’d expected for a house this grand. But as her eyes adjusted, she began to make out odd details: a brown water stain on the ceiling, a monstrous cobweb in the bend in the staircase. The house smelled of ten thousand spent fireplace fires, with notes of mildew. It occurred to her that she hadn’t checked the date of the historical society photos. They could easily be fifty or sixty years old.