by Ann Hood
Katherine says, “Andy has a new girlfriend. And she’s painting all of our antique furniture.”
Spencer nods.
“Her name is Shelly,” Katherine says. Then she adds, “She’s an ophthalmologist.”
Spencer brightens. “That’s one of the most commonly misspelled words,” he says. “Everyone forgets there’s an H after the P. Oph.”
“How can it be one of the most commonly misspelled words?” Katherine says. “Who ever spells the damn thing?”
Spencer stops walking. “Ooooh,” he tells her. “You’re jealous.”
“Of an ophthalmologist?” she laughs. “Hardly.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I just don’t want to see all that good furniture ruined.” She starts to head down Seventh Avenue again, walking faster so that Spencer has to hurry to keep up.
“Prerogative is another one,” he says, grabbing her elbow.
“Prerogative.”
“A lot of people spell it P-E-R instead of P-R-E.”
“Fascinating,” Katherine mumbles.
“Like, it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind and not get married to someone she doesn’t want to marry,” he says.
“Uh-huh,” Katherine says.
Spencer starts bouncing along beside her again. “That’s what I like about fifth-graders,” he says. “Improving their spelling and vocabulary. I’m real tough on them when it comes to spelling.”
Katherine glances over at him. His face is relaxed and happy. She softens a little. Spencer is a teacher like her. They share the same joy in giving children knowledge. That is, after all, something special between them. She tries not to think about how Andy and Shelly are both doctors.
“It starts with you,” Spencer is saying. “Right in first grade good spelling habits begin.”
When he tries to take her arm in his, Katherine lets him.
“Here we are!” Spencer announces.
He points upward.
Katherine stares into the sky. It is a gray December late afternoon, the sky full of clouds, the moon a smudge of white.
“What?” Katherine says.
Spencer stands on tiptoe to reach her face, then slants it downward slightly. “There,” he says. He holds her chin in his gloved hands.
She sees it then. They are on the corner of Bedford and Barrow.
“Our names intersect,” Spencer says. He is grinning as if he is responsible for this juncture. “Katherine Bedford. Spencer Barrow.”
Katherine nods. “That’s really something,” she says.
Spencer starts to bounce across the street. “Chumley’s,” he says. “We’ll eat here, on our corner. This will be our place from now on.”
Katherine does not know why she does it, but she does. Later, she blames it on too much red wine, the warmth of the restaurant, the shepherd’s pie and Spencer’s face softened in the dim light. But after they eat, even though it is late, when Spencer asks her to go back to his apartment in Queens with him, Katherine goes. On the E train, their two gloved hands hold each other. They stare straight ahead and don’t speak until they are in his apartment.
He pours them each a glass of brandy.
He lights candles and puts on a jazz album.
“Miles Davis,” he tells her.
Katherine nods. She has not slept with anyone except Andy in her whole life. This is not something she has ever told anyone. She even sometimes pretends that she’s had a few flings, one on a cruise she took with her sister, one in Greece the summer after she graduated from college. If she were to choose a different lover, she would not choose Spencer. He is too short. His clothes don’t really match. His manners are poor.
But here she is on a sofa somewhere in Queens, letting Spencer undress her, letting him touch her. Her mind races. She thinks of all the men she has dated since she came to New York. Handsome ones. Successful ones. But she has not let them do what she is letting Spencer do to her. And she feels oddly detached from the action, the way she feels when she thinks back to college and it appears in her mind like a home movie.
She watches in that way as his mouth circles her breasts, as he undresses himself and leads her down the hallway to his bedroom. She registers his naked body as if from a distance, as if she can’t smell his carefully splashed Aramis, as if she cannot see his surprisingly compact body, his strong arms and flat stomach. She knows he plays racquetball before school every morning and guesses that accounts for his good muscle tone. On the outside, Spencer looks like the guy who gets sand kicked in his face by the bully, but underneath, Katherine notes, he is well-built, almost sexy. But still all of it seems like it’s happening to someone else.
When it’s over, Katherine starts to sob. She feels all wrong suddenly. She has kept this act private, as something between Andy and her. Now she is with a man who reveres Elvis Presley, and she imagines that Andy is in bed in Boston with an ophthalmologist.
Spencer, looking dreamy and satisfied, pats her back as if he’s trying to burp her. “I know,” he whispers. “I know.”
In the morning, Katherine wakes up to the feeling of Spencer’s mouth settling between her legs. She feels herself stiffen. She and Andy did not do this. He used to beg her to take him in her mouth, but she thought it was too disgusting. “But everyone does it,” he told her. “You pee out of there,” she said. “No way.”
Katherine tries to lift Spencer’s head, to pull it away, but he is persistent. She thinks about too many things—how she must smell and taste, why she didn’t shave her legs yesterday—until somewhere in her center she goes completely soft. Her mind goes blank. She hears heavy breathing and doesn’t realize for an instant that it is her own.
When Spencer finally does move, and slides into her, Katherine feels as if she is starting to fall, the way she feels sometimes in dreams when she is on a cliff or stairway, beginning to lose her footing.
She manages to start to say something about it to Spencer, to warn him, but then it’s too late and she is lost in that feeling.
When she catches her breath, she opens her eyes and sees Spencer, still on top of her, watching her closely.
“I’ve never …” she begins. She remembers how she used to ask Lucy to describe an orgasm to her and Lucy telling her it was impossible to describe. “But I don’t know if I’ve ever had one,” Katherine told her. Lucy used to laugh. “When you have one, you’ll know. You won’t have to ask me.”
“Never?” Spencer says.
She shakes her head.
“Really?”
“Don’t go getting a swollen head,” she tells him. She is waiting for her mind to clear, for her energy to come back.
He is smiling at her like crazy. She sees a bit of bread caught in his teeth. Katherine cannot believe what has happened, what is happening. She sits up quickly. She wants to leave, but can’t think where to go. She can’t face Meryl right now. And Lucy is on a Whirlwind Weekend. She feels lost.
Spencer is gently pushing her back down onto the bed.
“I’ll make you breakfast,” he whispers. “Stay here.”
She turns her head from his nakedness as he pads out of the room. Outside the window, fat snowflakes are falling, all slow and lazy. Katherine pulls the sheets and blankets around her tightly, and tries to figure it all out.
Snugglys
SOMETIMES LUCY WAKES UP in the middle of the night and thinks, Even if I walk out of my apartment right now and meet someone, I wouldn’t marry him for a couple of years. It would be another couple of years before we had a child. The numbers begin to click off in her mind, the years add up and she realizes that would make her thirty-five years old. If she meets someone today, when she walks out the door.
Lucy wishes she had been born ten years earlier or ten years later. Either way, things would have been simpler. She would have fallen in love and gotten married without all the questions that fill her now. Or she would have been more sure of her place in the world and tried to have it all. As it is, she’s c
aught somewhere between those two places. She feels she has missed out. There is no certainty for her. She wonders how Katherine, embarrassed as she is by her admission, knows what she wants. She wonders how Julia gets along without these questions plaguing her.
It’s three A.M. and Lucy has looked into a fictional crystal ball once again. There she is, the only gray-haired mother at the kindergarten PTA. Or with her young daughter being mistaken for her granddaughter. Or worse, there she is in this very spot five years from now, still calculating what will happen if she walks out the door and falls in love.
That is when she calls Jasper. She doesn’t even think about it. She just picks up the phone and dials his number, her fingers banging out the familiar beeps and tones by memory.
Even though it’s the middle of the night, Jasper’s voice sounds wide-awake. He is still a night owl, Lucy thinks. She remembers how he would pad around the apartment long after she’d fall asleep. She used to hear him eating in the kitchen, or the sounds of late night television coming from the living room.
Lucy thinks all this when she hears his voice, so that is just what she says.
“Still up and around while the rest of the city sleeps,” she says. She tries to make her voice sound lighter than she feels.
There is a loud silence before Jasper speaks. “Lucy,” he says. His voice cracks.
“I thought you might want to have some breakfast,” she says, thinking of the idea just then.
“Okay,” Jasper says quickly. “The place on your corner?”
“Okay.” Her hands are trembling as she hangs up the phone.
Lucy’s mother is a walking dictionary of clichés, and right now she would be saying this one: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, Lucy.” Lucy thinks that too. In the past, she has given that same advice to friends who return to old lovers who drank too much, or had affairs. “You’d be crazy to go back with them,” she has said.
As she dresses, she tries to figure out what it is about Jasper that needs changing. He needs to communicate with her, she decides. He needs to dance. No. He needs to get that fire back in his eyes. There is a feeling in her that is bigger than logic. It is telling her that she and Jasper are meant for each other. It is saying that when she walks out the door, the man she will meet will be the right one after all.
Although he has come from uptown to see her, he has arrived first. When Lucy walks in, there he is, sipping coffee, frowning, waiting.
“Hi,” she says. She can’t stop smiling. That other part of her has her almost convinced that Jasper is back to his old self.
When he raises his eyes to her, they are sad. They break her heart.
“What?” she asks him. “What?”
“I feel like I’m split in two,” he says. “I feel like I’ve lost my arms or my legs. My heart.”
“Me too,” she says. She slides beside him in the booth. “But it’ll be different now,” she tells him. “You’ll see.”
Jasper shakes his head. “What if it isn’t?”
“It has to be,” Lucy says.
He sits there, looking into his coffee cup, and shaking his head.
“Don’t you think we can make it better?” she asks him. She thinks of all his cures. Turkey for jet lag. Sea salt baths for tired feet.
He doesn’t answer her.
“Come on,” she says. “Talk to me.”
But he doesn’t.
Lucy sinks back against the booth. She is suddenly very tired. So tired that she thinks she could rest her head here on the shiny blue Formica table and sleep, despite the fluorescent diner lights, the crashing of plates and cups against saucers, despite the sinking feeling that is enveloping her.
Instead, she stands, her legs all shaky, and she says, “If you think of a way to fix this, let me know.”
He smiles up at her. “I could make you a turkey,” he says.
She has not even taken her coat off yet. Her fingers tug on the big black buttons. “Does that cure broken hearts?” she asks him.
“It’s worth a try,” he says.
“Call me when you want to try it then,” she says.
He nods. He watches her walk away. Lucy wants him to jump up and come running after her. She wants a movie ending to this. Jasper wet from rain, coming to her, fixing it all. She wants love to win out. At the corner she stops. She waits for the door to open, for him to come out to her. She waits and waits but he doesn’t appear. As she walks back to her apartment, a group of laughing teenagers pass her. A man walking his dog smiles at her. But Lucy feels like she is the only person in the world.
Lucy is from a small town in western Massachusetts. The town is rimmed with mountains and factories. When she goes back there, everyone complains about developers moving in and cutting down trees. They talk about night shifts and layoffs, Nintendo and sitcoms. Sometimes she feels like she has arrived here from outer space. She does not even speak the same language as her relatives anymore.
She doesn’t go back often. But lately, Lucy has felt a great need to get away from the city, from the street corners and restaurants that remind her of Jasper. So she accepts an invitation to her cousin Jackie’s baby shower, for no other reason than to hide from her hurt.
Her parents’ house is in the middle of a development of nearly identical homes built in the late fifties. The lawns are scattered with ornaments—badly painted elves or smiling plaster rabbits. There are small flower gardens with wooden decorations of Pilgrims who churn butter when the wind blows. To Lucy, it all seems so busy. The fake kittens climbing the side of a house, the hedges cut into geometric shapes, the mailbox that looks like a barn door. She supposes it is a way to claim their individuality in a neighborhood of small square ranch houses. But it all makes her dizzy and she is relieved when she arrives in her rented car at her parents’ own moss green and brick house.
The living room is already filled with people—relatives and friends. There is a fire blazing in the fireplace, and a folding table set up with cold cuts and breads, store-bought potato salad and coleslaw. These are the parties that Lucy grew up with, and the familiarity of it makes her glad to be here, in the middle of the Berkshires on a cold March Sunday afternoon.
Jackie sits in the center of everyone, round and swollen, dressed in a horizontally striped dress that makes her look even larger.
“I can’t get up too easy,” she laughs.
So Lucy goes to her cousin and hugs her. Jackie is five years younger than Lucy, and in Lucy’s memory she is a chubby little girl with a pixie cut, always trying to play with the older girls.
Everyone starts to talk to Lucy at once. “Where’s your boyfriend?” they ask. “When are we going to dance at your wedding?”
She finds her mother in the crowd and smiles over at her.
“Lucy wants a career,” her mother says. She tries to sound proud, but everyone knows she isn’t. Of the cousins her age, Lucy is the only one not married. The others, all here today, have two, three, even four children already. They own houses just like this one. They eat dinner with their parents every Sunday, and rent houses on the lake for the summer.
“Big city girl,” someone mumbles.
Lucy knows how to avoid this. She turns to Jackie. “How do you feel?” she asks her.
Jackie rolls her eyes. There is nothing of the little girl Lucy remembers in this woman.
The other women laugh.
“You’ll know soon enough,” her Aunt Rhoda says.
Paula, Jackie’s older sister, says, “Not if she doesn’t hurry up. Lucy’s the same age as me. It’s almost too late to start a family now.”
Paula rubs her own pregnant belly. Lucy has lost track, but knows Paula already has a few children. She has been married for as long as Lucy has lived in New York.
“Don’t make Lucy feel bad,” Aunt Rhoda says. “Your Great-aunt Tess never had children.”
“She couldn’t though,” someone says.
Lucy swallows hard. “So, when are you due?’
<
br /> “Two weeks,” Jackie says. “Thank God.”
This time it works. Everyone launches into their own stories of childbirth. Late babies, forceps babies, C-sections, preemies. Lucy steps back. Coming here was wrong, she thinks, watching them. She counts four more pregnant women her own age. These are the same people who, as children, she tried to be like. The ones she wanted as friends. This could have been her baby shower. She could be sitting here, happy, not worrying about illustrating children’s books, or trying to figure out what lies ahead. But instead, knowing exactly what comes next.
Her mother comes over to her, with a pale blue paper plate heaped with food.
“She knows it’s a boy,” her mother says. “They have this test now. Jackie told me all about it. They made her drink a lot of water, then before she peed they took an X ray of her stomach—”
“A sonogram,” Lucy says.
Her mother looks at her, surprised. “She told you about it?”
“Everybody has them,” she says. She doesn’t add that she had one herself for an ovarian cyst scare a few years back. In this room, sonograms are unusual. Abortions are not mentioned. The women here could be from another generation.
“She showed me the picture,” her mother says. She laughs. “It’s a boy all right.”
Lucy nods.
Her mother pats her shoulder. “It’s not too late for you,” she says.
“Ma,” Lucy says, “women today have babies into their forties. I’ve got a long way to go before it’s too late.”
“Forties?” Her mother laughs again. “You watch too much Donahue. All those women starting families when they’re old.”
“I didn’t see it on Donahue,” Lucy mumbles.
Aunt Rhoda has joined them, and is nodding her head with great enthusiasm. “I saw that one,” she says. “That one woman, the one with the dyed blond hair? Had her first baby when she was forty-four and her second when she was forty-six. Crazy.”
Aunt Rhoda is wearing a bright blue polyester dress that is shiny and ruffled. Lucy supposes she is wearing blue in honor of this baby boy.
“And that lady who said people who have babies young are making a mistake?” Aunt Rhoda is saying.