Everything is so perfect. Just so perfect.
Turning into the parking lot of Gibby’s Restaurant, I say to my family, “Do you picture Jesus as perfectly coiffed or kinda messy?”
“Messy,” Jace.
“Most definitely messy,” Will.
“I’m kinda messy, at least on the inside. Is there a church out there where people can be messy?”
Jace pulls into a space near the back of the lot. “Everybody’s messy, hon.”
“Okay, then, Mr. Smarty-Pants. Is there a church out there where we can admit we’re messy?”
“I’d like to think so.”
Jace hates the church-shopping we’re doing. But right now, at this point in my life, the thought of settling down with another bunch of Christians makes me want to scream. He wasn’t tripping the light fantastic down the aisles either, if I remember correctly. It was such a big church, you see, the faithfuls working their fingers to nubbins so the other 75 percent could sit in the pews without feeling at all uncomfortable.
As far as I remember, the gospel isn’t all marshmallows and cream. But who am I? Just another woman in Christendom who’s trying to figure out why she feels so defeated all the time and is coming up with a long list of problems but a short list of answers.
Is it the church? Is it me? Is it Jesus?
We all go down for a nap, our bellies full of crab cakes, crispy fries, and a snappy coleslaw. But I do not sleep. I wait for Jace’s ripping snore and tiptoe into Will’s room. Yep, his nose-whistle assures me he’s slumbering, dreams of Nicola probably sashaying across his pubescent brain.
Time for a drive. I resist the urge to drive by Gary and Mary’s house. There’s time for that tomorrow or the next day or the next. I just want to drive and find my little house with white rooms, white plates, and an 8 x 8 plot of lawn with white rocks in the flower beds and some angled Japanese shrubbery that points a jointy finger, saying, “Less is more, my friend. Beauty in simplicity is still lavish and full of grace.”
Okay, maybe not.
An hour is all I safely own, so I turn right out of the driveway and head out on Jarrettsville Pike. So many whispering trees and staunch white fences, hay fields and horse pastures, still ponds and winding creeks. Hess Road beckons me onto its twists and turns, and before I even realize it or know quite how I got there, I am in the veterinarian’s office parking lot and the Andrews’s house rests in a puddle of shade from the oak trees surrounding its sides and back. And no one is home again.
FOUR
Well, at least summer throws most of Will’s school and extracurricular activities into hibernation. We zip around like bees all year long, and now summer’s arrived, no school play, no band practice, no Japanese. No. No. No. No art class. No fund-raisers and cleanup days at the school. No “cooking with kids” at the community college.
I love this.
Okay, except for swim team. That party’s just getting started.
Lark calls. “Hey, Heather.”
Lark is the closest thing I have to a best friend.
“Hey, Lark.”
“Summer’s begun. You ready?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“Bring Will down for lunch tomorrow. Leslie needs some fresh faces around here.”
“How’s your mother doing?”
“The cancer is progressing, unfortunately. Six months, they’re telling us.”
“Poor Leslie.”
I can picture her waving a hand.
“Oh, you know her. She’s not admitting anything is wrong. She hired a new housekeeper and is giving the poor person fits.”
Yeah, they’re loaded.
“Nobody can replace Prisma.”
“Obviously. This is number five since Prisma moved. So you coming tomorrow or what?”
“Why not? We could use a drive down into the city.”
“Good. See you around lunchtime. This new housekeeper’s a great cook. Not that Mother appreciates it.” Her voice changes, dripping with aged Southern honey. “‘I’m sick of field greens, Larkspur. If everything’s as bad as you all say, then please get me off this heart-smart stuff so I can enjoy myself to the bitter end.’”
“She’s got a point, Lark.”
“You may be right about that. See you around noon.”
“We’ll be there. Hey, who gets the Christmas stocking this year?”
“Don’t know yet.”
She’s always embroidering a stocking. One a year. Intricate needlework that leaves everybody guessing all year long who will be the lucky recipient.
Ha. Right. I wonder if it’s for me.
* * *
Lark Summerville and I crossed paths a few years ago at a fundraiser for her late father’s charitable foundation, the Summerville Foundation. One of Jace’s surgeon friends dragged us along. I experience a guilty pleasure at these sorts of engagements, I have to admit. I grew up staunchly in the lower realms of the middle class. Dad supported us in our little brick row house on Joppa Road in Towson where our neighbor transformed his small front yard into the formal garden of Versailles. I always knew what the male anatomy looked like, thanks to Mr. lo Fabro. But my dad’s idea of a high time was a Colts game with buddies from work and dinner afterwards at Johnny Unitas’s Golden Arm Restaurant.
She was trying to brush her crazy mane of kinky hair in the bathroom when I first saw her. I thought she was a child at first—she’s that tiny. And as women sometimes do, we just hit it off, were laughing within thirty seconds and revealing our souls. I’ve always felt sorry for men because I don’t believe that happens to them very often.
We ditched the fund-raiser and opted for tea at Starbucks, her treat.
I caught our reflection in the plate glass window of the storefront as we searched for a table outside in the summer air. With my height and weight next to hers, well, we’d have been the perfect choice for the casting director of Of Mice and Men: A Female Review.
Mercy! I was Lenny.
The tea was bitter yet weak, and I didn’t care.
She pulled out her embroidery, that year’s Christmas stocking, and we talked until Jace, after a frantic cell phone call, picked me up to go on home. Lark said, “Oh, lucky you. You get to go home with him. I get to go home to Mother.”
* * *
I belt out a laugh as we travel down 695 toward Charles Street and the home Lark shares with Leslie, Leslie Strawbridge Summerville, a socialite’s socialite in her day. That woman’s royal bearing settles in a subtle cloud of expensive perfume around all who draw near, but according to Lark, she has mellowed a bit in her old age, or as Leslie herself calls it, her “dotage.”
“What’s funny?” Will asks. I tell him the story. Will likes to read.
He gets literary references but fails to see how I could be Lenny under any circumstances. He likes the Beatles too.
“Does Miss Lark still play the organ, Mom?”
“No. She gave that up a few months ago. Had to because of her crazy schedule with her dad’s charity.”
Lark was the organist at St. Dominic’s for years. She plays a mean organ. A raging river of an organ that will pull you downstream if you’re not careful. How that little person can birth such resplendent sound from those childlike hands and feet is about as mystifying as a five-thousand-square-foot house on a quarter-acre lot. She rebelled against her parents’ wealth and situation by impregnating herself via a wild boy from her posh set, running away from home to play keyboard with his rock band and then, after the divorce, running into the arms of the church.
I believe she looked at her music as God’s open arms.
“Maybe she’ll play something for you at the house.” We fly under the overpass for York Road. I always fly places. I have to ease up on the gas pedal one of these days. Jace ribs me for the way I drive. And he’s totally right. Not only do I drive too fast; I’m not really very good at it. I had two accidents in beauty school, one not my fault. Only the grace of God and an enervated guardian angel k
eep Will and me alive, and the other people on the road as well. When I see someone walking with a stroller alongside a busy road with no sidewalks, I want to yell, “Don’t you know there are people like me on the road?”
I turn to Will; he points my gaze back to the road. “You glad school’s out, bud?”
“Most definitely. I don’t think my crotch could stand another month.”
“What!” Oh, dear God. “What do you mean?”
“Wedgies, Mom.”
“They give you wedgies?”
He just nods.
After what I sowed with Gary and Mary Andrews in school, I hoped to counteract any rotten crops that could be reaped by my own children. I volunteer every chance I get, show my face all the time like that bee that won’t go away no matter how hard you bat the air.
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what more I can do to get those kids to leave me alone.”
“There’s nothing you can do with kids like that, believe me.”
“Were you bullied?”
“In the early grades.”
“What happened after that?”
“Julia B. moved in. She liked me and she created a new regime.”
“Oh. Were you one of the mean ones after that?”
“No,” I lie.
“Phew. Good. I’d hate to think of my own mother like that. I think I’d lose all respect for you if you were once one of them.”
Does Will suffer because of my sin? Does God say, “See how it feels to see someone you love ridiculed and ostracized?” He wouldn’t do that to a good boy like my son, would He?
Maybe it’s easier to ride past that house instead, begging forgiveness. From Gary and Mary and Will. And God. Again and again and again.
“Do you want to go to public school next year?”
He taps his fingers on his thigh. “No. They’re jerks, Mom. One day they’ll look back on what they’ve done, maybe when they’ve had their own kids, and they’ll pay. I’m a big believer in justice if we only have a little patience.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And Nicola’s cool. We’re already planning to hang out all the time next year. She doesn’t take anything from anybody. Especially Ronnie Legermin. He won’t come near her!”
“That’s good.”
“Most definitely. Those guys have problems to begin with, Mom, if they keep having to reach down into another guy’s drawers to make themselves feel better.”
“Yeah, but it’s your drawers.” I really am going to talk to the principal about this.
Did I say I hated Ronnie Legermin?
* * *
We pull onto Greenway, a street in Guilford, one of Baltimore’s oldmoney enclaves. Not that Lark’s dad hailed from old money, but Leslie sure grew in a womb of privilege! Generations of money. Horse money, tobacco money, land money, trace-your-lineage-back-to-John-Smith money. Virginia money so old it hasn’t had its own teeth for well over a century. Lark’s dad, James Summerville, founded Baltimore Machinery Parts with a thousand dollars and his brain. Since he could never be old money on his own, he married it. And Leslie never let him forget it! Oh, that woman is a real stinker. But one of those lovable old stinkers who would drop everything to help you at first beck and call. Lark tells me she wasn’t always this way.
In the three years Lark and I have been friends, Will and I have visited the house many times. Lark prefers rambling within the city limits, and the chauffeur—yes, chauffeur—would rather be gardening, so instead of inconveniencing him, she ends up catching the bus or a cab to most of her appointments. That’s Lark in a nutshell.
We turn through the gate in the stone wall surrounding their city acre and pull up to the parking pad at the side of the house. Fashioned of local granite with an olive cast, the house on Greenway is one step away from a haunted manor house in which Mary Shelley would feel quite at home. Perhaps Percy as well. Talk about going against the flow, those two!
The door, slightly medieval and masculine with wrought iron hinges and a ringed latch, fools the first-time visitor about the innards of the house, and Lark once told me what I’d suspected to be true. Her father built the house before he met Leslie Strawbridge. She has never liked it and doesn’t mind saying so. She calls it “my medieval monstrosity.”
Inside, well, it holds everything you’d imagine a gracious Southern woman would deem worthy of her home. Impeccable. Expensive but not flamboyant like something you’d find in a casino or on the Trinity Broadcasting Network or, heaven help us all, in a Yankee’s home. Tasteful reds, greens, and yellows, every stick of furniture an antique or handmade. No Pier 1 or Pottery Barn fare on Greenway. I doubt if Leslie has even heard of those lifestyle purveyors.
I yank on a cord leading to a bell mechanism housed somewhere in the stalwart facade. A Quasimodo bong shivers our eardrums. Leslie must hate that thing. As we wait, the sound of Charles Street traffic borne on the breeze of a waning morning caresses our eardrums. I’ve always loved the city for some reason.
Finally the door is jerked open, and there stands quite the most rough-and-tumble-looking man I’ve seen in a long time. Grizzled, he smiles, his missing left front tooth reminding me of the cook in a stereotypical western, only twice the size and with that Fu Manchu, a little more motorcycle around the edges. “Welcome!” And he bends at the waist in one of the most awkward bows I’ve ever witnessed firsthand. Come to think of it, I believe this is the only bow I’ve ever witnessed firsthand.
“. . . Thanks . . . ?”
A voice calls from the stairway, and Leslie’s slender feet in bonecolored Grasshoppers descend the runnered steps. “Lloyd! For goodness’ sake, we don’t bow around here. Who do you think we have visiting, the Archbishop of Canterbury? Just let them through the door, if you please.”
Lloyd steps aside in his hiking boots. So this is the new housekeeper. I had pictured my grandmother or Hazel, the nutty housekeeper on the old sitcom I used to love as a tot. Mr. B.! Mr. B.!
Maybe I need a housekeeper.
“Hi, Mrs. Summerville.” I hurry over and circle my arms around her bony shoulders. She smells like lemon balm today.
She kisses my cheek and pulls back. “I do enjoy a hug from you, Heather, and truth to tell, I’d rather visit with you than the Archbishop, but it’s your boy I’ve been most looking forward to seeing.”
All this in that buttered rum accent.
Will adores Leslie and throws himself into her arms. He accepts her warm embrace like a sort of tonic to the past year in school.
“Let me introduce Lloyd to you. Heather, this is Lloyd Harmon; Lloyd, meet Heather Curridge and her son, Will Curridge.”
We shake hands.
“Lloyd started a couple of months ago. He thinks it’s some kind of palace or something. You’re not the first people he’s bowed to like a darned footman.”
Lloyd shrugs. “Sorry, Mrs. Summerville. I’m just a highway flagman at heart, I guess.”
“But can he cook.” She places a bumpy, simply manicured hand on his shoulder. “And we always watch Wheel of Fortune together, don’t we? He’s a whiz, I don’t mind telling you!”
“So what’s for lunch, Mr. Harmon?” Will asks Lloyd.
“Fresh salmon and asparagus with hollandaise. Wanna come help? I’ll be grilling outside. And I’m just Lloyd.”
“Okay. What are you marinating it in?” Will follows Lloyd back past the stairs, and I hear Lloyd respond, “No marinade per se, a spicy herb rub . . . ,” and into the kitchen they fade, where they will become one in the nirvana of food preparation. Will has been outcooking me since last Christmas.
Leslie tucks her arm through mine. “Why don’t you come back out to the patio while we wait for Lark? She said she’ll be down in a minute. Honestly, Flannery brought home a straightening iron and she’s trying it out. I told her it would take more than a couple of minutes to handle that head of hair, but”—she flutters her hand up in the air—“what does a silly old woman like me know abou
t these modern beauty conveniences?”
Flannery is Lark’s fabulously artistic twenty-seven-year-old daughter.
She leads me through the formal living room, where a fancifully carved organ—Lark’s organ—looms in the shadows of abstinence, into the walnut-paneled family room complete with requisite plaid furniture a million years old. Although I could be wrong.
The brick patio supports a few new iron chaises, their celery green padding freshly placed. Oh, the colors, the life, the living going on before my eyes as birds bathe in the birdbath and a squirrel steals seeds from a birdfeeder across the lawn. I breathe in to the bottom of my lungs, believing with all my heart that the city fumes stop where their yard begins.
“Please have a seat.”
I obey. For some reason, everybody obeys Leslie without question. As always, her clothing rests without pucker upon her slender frame: ivory pants and blouse, a light sweater in a heathery plum. Pearl jewelry and close-cut silver hair complete the flawless, classic senior-citizen ensemble. I’d hope to look as good at her age, but I don’t look as good now!
“Now tell me how you’ve been.”
“Heather!” Lark’s voice streams through an open window upstairs. “I’m in the bathroom. How are you?” A hand waves from between the sashes.
“Fine!”
“I’ll be down in a few!”
Leslie lays a hand on my knee. “So really, honey, how are you?”
Leslie owns the title to personal questioning with more certainty than her Bentley, which she refuses to drive nowadays, much preferring her granddaughter Flannery’s old Toyota.
“Great. Good. Fine. Okay, I guess. Sometimes not so good. But fine. Really.”
“Well, you’ve sold me on it.” Leslie smirks, then crosses her legs on the chaise. “Oh, come now, Heather. Let’s be honest enough to admit the truth, all right? I won’t tell a soul. We’re all playacting 80 percent of the time, aren’t we?”
“What are we doing the other 20 percent?”
“We’re either with someone very safe, or we’re alone.”
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