by Ann Hood
“LET’S BRING THE CHEAPEST Chianti we can find,” Claudia had said.
She had always loved liquor stores, the bottles lined up in perfect order, like books in a library. She ran her fingers over the glass as she walked behind Elizabeth toward a swaying sign: WINE. Her fingers touched scotch, vermouth, vodka.
“I don’t know. She’s a big executive now.” Elizabeth stood in front of CALIFORNIA WINES. “These seem right somehow. Nouveau wine.”
“No. I’m telling you, she’ll die laughing if we give her a cheap Chianti like the ones we used to guzzle in school.”
Elizabeth smiled. “The stories those bottles could tell.”
“How many of these did we drink in those days?” Claudia held up a bottle of $2.99 Chianti. “What do you say?”
“What the hell?” Elizabeth laughed. “Get two.”
Claudia had been trying for months to get them together. Just the three of them. We’re neighbors now, she had told Suzanne over the telephone. Ninety miles down the pike and you can be in rural bliss, laughing about old times. Perhaps sometime soon, Suzanne usually said. It was Elizabeth who suggested that maybe Suzanne didn’t want to see them. Are you crazy? Claudia had laughed. Who else can remind her of the time that Abel stood up in class and read his essay about the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen?
Now they were heading east on Route 90 in their dusty red pickup truck, two bottles of Chianti wedged between them. Elizabeth drove.
“Remember that time we went to the all-night Howard Johnson’s and there was only one waitress?” Claudia said. “The place was packed and she just couldn’t handle all those people? I started making sundaes and you brought them to the tables.”
“Suzanne kept saying, ‘We’re going to get in trouble.’”
“We had to convince her to do everything. She had the potential to be very uptight.”
“We sort of had to convince her to get together today,” Elizabeth said.
“It’s just that she’s so busy with this new job and everything. And Sparrow.”
The leaves were just beginning to turn colors. Here and there was a yellow leaf. A few red ones. But as they neared Boston, the trees were all dark green.
“Newton,” Claudia announced. She had read the toll card the entire way. As they passed a town she would find it on the card, then read all the towns still to come.
“This is it,” Claudia said. “Boston’s coming right up.”
“You know,” Elizabeth said, “maybe we shouldn’t talk too much about the past.”
“What do you mean? That’s what brought us together, that’s who we are.”
“But Suzanne may not want to talk about Abel.”
Claudia studied the directions she had neatly written down. She had everything organized. Maps, directions, change for the tolls.
“Did she ever tell you what happened between them?” Claudia asked without looking up.
“What’s there to tell?”
“The details,” Claudia said.
“That’s what I mean. She doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Maybe she needs to.” Claudia looked out the window. “That’s it. The one closest to the water.” She pointed to two tall towers, slabs of concrete with evenly spaced windows and balconies.
When they got out of the truck, Claudia said, “We made over forty dollars that night.”
“What night?”
“At Howard Johnson’s. Remember what we talked about before we went there? We were up in our room, drinking wine, and we told each other our deepest secrets. Remember?”
Elizabeth put her arm around her friend. “We took that money and bought lobsters. The next night we took them to Suzanne and Abel’s and cooked them on the beach.”
“Suzanne was the only one who knew all the words to ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’ She sang the entire song that night.”
That was the image Claudia held as they walked toward the tower overlooking the bay—Suzanne’s face in the light of the fire they’d built on the beach that night, her hair hanging past her shoulders, hugging herself in an old green sweater of Abel’s. Behind her the waves beat the shore and the smell of salt and lobster was thick. “And then one day it happened / Jackie Paper came no more / And Puff that mighty dragon / He ceased his fearless roar.” Suzanne’s voice had been clear and low, just loud enough to be heard above the ocean behind them.
Claudia hummed the tune now, softly. She still didn’t know all the words.
THE STREETS AROUND ELIZABETH and Howard’s loft on Broome Street had been filled with Italians—old men and women sitting on the stoops, children playing on the sidewalks, spilling into the street. The hallways always smelled of garlic and sausage. Beneath their open windows, the city had shouted.
Here, at Suzanne’s, there was no noise. The hushed tones the doorman spoke in, the soundless elevator that whisked them up to the nineteenth floor, made Elizabeth feel as if she were in a tomb. The walls and carpets of the lobby and hallway were muted grays and tans, and the air smelled like a vacuum cleaner. The doorbell Claudia pushed sent a single low cry into the apartment.
It had been over three years since Elizabeth had seen Suzanne. The woman who opened the door seemed like an older sister to the girl she had known. Her hair was chin-length, evenly cut, and unnaturally highlighted. Elizabeth’s mind flashed to a hysterical Suzanne, her long hair soaked with tears and sweat, her eyes puffy, red blotches on her face. “Peter married Claudia,” she had cried. “But Abel doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want our baby.”
“Well, you two haven’t changed at all,” Suzanne said brusquely.
The frightened girl had vanished. Elizabeth focused on the women in front of her.
Claudia laughed, a sharp nervous laugh that pierced all the silence around them.
“I know,” Claudia said, “long hair went out last year, right?”
Suzanne blinked at them as if in too-bright lighting, then led them inside, her high heels clicking across the parquet floors. They walked through a nearly empty foyer and into the expansive room that served as both dining room and living room. There was a sweeping view of Boston Harbor and, across it, Logan Airport.
“Wow!” Claudia said. “Beachfront property.”
Blink. Blink.
Elizabeth cleared her throat. “This is lovely. Really lovely.”
No one noticed the little girl in the pink dress sitting on the couch, her feet sticking straight out, her hands folded, until Suzanne pointed toward her.
“Sparrow,” she said.
As if on command, the little girl rose and started to walk toward them. She hesitated until her mother said, “Yes,” then came over to them.
“This is Claudia and Elizabeth.”
“How do you do?” Sparrow said. She looked at her mother for approval. Suzanne nodded.
“You should see where we live,” Claudia said, bending down to the little girl’s height. “On a farm.”
“With animals?”
“No animals. But there’s a big barn and a pond. Can you swim, Sparrow?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you know, Sparrow,” Suzanne said sharply.
The little girl frowned.
“I have a big boy named Simon. He could teach you. He taught Elizabeth’s little girl, and she’s as big as you. Would you like to come visit us and learn to swim?”
“She had instruction this summer,” Suzanne said. “Formal instruction. Didn’t you, Sparrow?”
“We blew bubbles in the pool.”
“And kicked your feet as well.” Silence.
Silence until Suzanne said, “Are you ready to play for the ladies?”
Sparrow walked to the white baby grand piano, climbed onto the stool, and played her rehearsed piece.
“Bravo!” Claudia said when she finished.
“Play something else for us,” Elizabeth said.
Sparrow looked at her mother.
“It’s time to do what now?” Suzanne sa
id. “What did we discuss?”
“Time to eat.”
“And let the ladies what?”
“Have a nice visit.”
“There’s plenty of time for that,” Claudia said, and sat beside her at the piano. “Can you play this?” Slowly, Claudia picked out the melody to “Puff the Magic Dragon.” “Your mommy knows the words. Come on, Suzanne.”
“Do you, Mommy?”
In that instant, Suzanne was flooded with memories. She thought she could embrace her old friends and draw them into her life again. But the memories were too full of Abel, of failures, for that. Had she worked this hard to let all of that back in? For a moment, she smelled the salty Maine air. She exhaled to release it. The past, these friendships, had to stay behind her.
“Sparrow, you may get your plate now,” Suzanne said.
The little girl opened her mouth, then closed it again quickly.
“Nice little robot you’ve got there,” Claudia said after Sparrow left the room.
“She’s lovely,” Elizabeth said quickly. “Very lovely.” How many times have I said lovely? Elizabeth wondered.
The three women looked at one another.
Claudia laughed, loud and shaky. “We almost forgot the wine!”
She handed the bag to Suzanne. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she smiled. “It was the least we can do.”
Suzanne pulled out the bottles, blinked.
“You’ve entered a totally new dimension,” Claudia said in her best Rod Serling voice, after humming the beginning of the Twilight Zone opening, “the 1960’s zone! Suzanne thought she was in the seventies, but suddenly strange things began to happen to her. ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ played on the piano. Women with long hair showed up on her doorstep. And cheap Chianti appeared in her hand. Without realizing it, Suzanne had stepped into the sixties zone.”
Elizabeth laughed until she looked at Suzanne, who smiled politely, then said, “Well, I think I’ll return to the present and get us a little Pouilly-Fuissé. Excuse me.”
“I thought it was funny,” Elizabeth said when they were alone.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have made that robot comment.”
When Suzanne returned with the wine, they sat on the couch facing her, and the water beyond the window. Claudia produced a snapshot.
“Here’s our crew,” she said, and handed it to Suzanne.
It was a picture of the boys and Rebekah. Simon is holding up two fingers like horns behind Henry’s head. Sitting in front of them is Rebekah, frowning into the camera.
Claudia waited for Suzanne’s facade to crack. In a way, she seemed more like that college girl with the music box and stuffed animals. What about all those nights we talked in the dark? Claudia thought. In the same way Claudia clung to the past, she saw that Suzanne had severed it. Sadly, she took the picture back and looked right into her old friend’s eyes. Remember all my yearning, my wondering, Claudia thought, as if the words could somehow reach Suzanne. This is what filled it, these little boys. But Suzanne averted her gaze and stood up.
They moved, stiffly and silently, to the dining area.
“Oh, no,” Suzanne said as she placed the platter of chicken on the table. “I hope you’re over that vegetarian thing, Elizabeth.”
“I haven’t eaten meat since I was seventeen, Suzanne. I would hardly call that a thing.”
Claudia laughed loudly.
“At least you can eat the bisque,” Suzanne said.
They did. Silently.
Elizabeth thought there was something funereal in the silence. She had felt that day Suzanne abruptly walked out of her loft in New York that their friendship had somehow changed forever. Seeing her today, Elizabeth realized that Suzanne had to let the three of them go to move forward. And as her friend, Elizabeth had to let her go, to let her put those days in Maine behind her.
“I made it from scratch,” Suzanne said as she cleared the dishes. “Fresh lobster.”
Claudia smiled. “Speaking of lobsters, Elizabeth and I were just talking about that night we ate lobster on the beach? Remember?”
She waited for an answer, but when no one spoke, she went on. “Do you remember how we got the money for those lobsters?”
“I barely remember the evening.”
Elizabeth cleared her throat.
“Barely recall the evening? Before we left, Elizabeth was in our room and we—”
“What a lovely salad,” Elizabeth said.
“Thank you. You know, the thing about that bisque is that I used fresh lobster meat.”
“Lobster,” Claudia said, “is exactly what we bought with those tips. We cooked them on the beach in front of Abel’s, for God’s sake. We built a big fire right there on the beach.”
Suzanne blinked her bright-light blink.
“Well,” Elizabeth said, “everything looks really beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Suzanne said.
“It was,” Claudia said, “the best lobster I ever ate.”
Claudia, 1979•
THE LAST THING PETER gave Claudia was a bird. A lime green parakeet in an antique silver cage. And when she let it go, when she opened the cage and let it perch on her finger, blinking and cooing at her, when she brought it upstairs and opened the window and released it, she let them all go—the boys and Peter and the little parakeet. It was the only way. Until the day she and Johnathan left the farm, the cage stood in the living room, dusty and blackened and empty.
There had never been love between Peter and Claudia. At least not like the love Elizabeth had with Howard or even like Suzanne and Abel had. Claudia knew that when she had gone to Peter and told him she was pregnant and he was the father, he had not believed her. He just looked at her and she knew that he thought the baby could be almost anyone’s. He had been a drifter, in Maine helping out on a friend’s dairy farm. Unlike the boys she had known back home, or the ones she met at college, or the professor who promised her he’d leave his wife soon, Peter frightened her with his intense stare and quick temper. He frightened her in a way that drew her to him. She would skip classes and go to his friend’s farm to meet him and they would make love to the sound of cows mooing, with the smell of manure and hay all around them.
The first night they met, at a bar full of locals dancing to banjo music, songs like “Oh! Susannah” and “Camptown Races,” he had taken her fiercely in the parking lot, the gravel making tiny red dents in her knees. Later, back inside, she stood on one of the wooden tables and drank beer from a pitcher and tequila straight from the bottle as he stood beneath her, roughly clutching her calves and staring at her hard.
The baby was his and she knew it and she didn’t care if he believed her. In fact, it wasn’t until Simon had emerged from her, bald and bloody but even then with his father’s angular face, that Peter believed her and, perhaps, started to love her just a little. And with each blond boy she gave him, he loved her a little more, gazed at her in awe as if she alone had created them, as if their strong lovemaking had nothing to do with these babies at all. She would tell him each time, “Look what you gave me,” but he would shake his own blond head and touch the baby’s fingers and toes, amazed.
THE LAST THING HE gave her was the parakeet in the silver cage. Peter brought it home one day after Claudia had had an episode at the pond. That’s what he called them, episodes. “Your mother had an episode last night,” he would tell Johnathan and Henry. And then the boys began to say it too. “Hurry! Mom’s having an episode at the pond.”
“Look what I have for you,” he told her when he brought the bird home. This was before he sold copy machines, when he was trying to work the farm alone, after Howard had left.
Peter set the stand up and put the cage on top of it, then pulled off the little green cloth that was over it. The bird tucked its head under its wing.
Claudia walked up to the cage. For an instant, Peter was afraid she would hurt the little bird. But she walked right up to the cage, stuck her finger in between the bars, and said, �
�Hello, Polly. Hello.”
No one ever called it Polly except for Claudia. Everyone else had their own name for it. Shakespeare. Gatsby. Alcatraz.
Johnathan would take the bird into his room and let it perch on his head. They would whistle together, Johnathan able to duplicate the bird’s shrill sound.
“Don’t get too attached to Polly,” Claudia would warn him. “You can never tell when someone will leave.”
“You won’t leave me, Shakespeare, will you?”
The little green parakeet would just cock its head.
FOR A TIME CLAUDIA HAD DONE graduate work at the University of Massachusetts. She’d uprooted all of them—Peter, Simon, and Henry—and moved the whole family to Western Massachusetts, where they’d lived in a series of second-floor apartments in two-family houses. Everyone had left Maine. Suzanne had gone to Boston and Elizabeth to New York. She’d had to move on too. But at night, as Peter paced the slanted wooden floors, Claudia knew that this wasn’t right, and she would lay in bed and try to devise a new plan.
It wasn’t until she was pregnant with Johnathan that she thought of buying the farm. Elizabeth wrote her long letters from New York about the city stifling her creativity. “When Howard gets back,” she wrote, “we’ll start a new life somewhere. We want Rebekah to grow up free, for her to look up at night and see the stars.”
Peter had no real ambition. He never did. Instead, he worked at various jobs—carpentry, roofing, whatever came along. He always spoke fondly of his time in Maine, helping out on his friend’s farm. “That’s real work,” he would say. And so Claudia drove little back roads of the Berkshires, through towns with names like Florence and Chester, singing “99 Bottles of Beer” with Simon. Until one day she found it, a farm with a crab apple tree in bloom and a clump of tall daisies in front of the house. By this time Johnathan was born and she sat on a tree that had fallen in a storm, the baby on her back, watching the two older boys run over the sloping land, and she knew that, finally, she had found them all a home.
PETER WASN’T ENOUGH. THAT was what Claudia knew. He was big and blond and made fierce love to her, biting her shoulders and tugging her hair. But alone at night, in that time between dinner and bed, with the boys already asleep and darkness all around, the only thing they could do was stare at one another. Sometimes, if she was enrolled in a class, Claudia would explain a battle she was studying and Peter would look at her without expression. Ancient Greece meant nothing to him. “It’s such a waste of time,” he would say sometimes. But usually he remained silent. What had they talked about before they were married? Claudia would wonder. Surely they had spoken, laughed, argued. But all she could remember was the smell of the farm as they made love in the tall scratchy grass. The only laughter she could recall was that of the others around them, crammed into Abel’s van looking for adventures.