A Day in June

by Marisa Labozzetta

  Chapter 7

  Wednesday, January 29

  RYAN IS LATE to her date. She should never have agreed to meet this guy way out in Natick on a rainy Wednesday night. Let him come to you, Faye would have said, even though Ryan does like the idea of being the one who comes to so she can be the one to leave from whenever she chooses.

  She met the last prospect, an education consultant, at Pho Pasteur on Washington Street during her lunch hour. The only problem was the noodle soup was too hot to down quickly enough. He was certainly “built,” as he had claimed, but in a way that resulted from having frequented too many restaurants and not enough gyms.

  “I said my body type was average. I never said buff,” he said when he saw the look of surprise she tried to mask.

  He also said he was thirty-five. The man who could be a contestant for the Biggest Loser reality show and who stood up and insisted on kissing her on the cheek was at least fifty. Who would ever trust a man who used vintage photos? Honesty was a must, claimed the girl who had won a contest based on false pretenses. Still, this evening she’s on her way to meet a venture capitalist who had suggested the food court at the Natick mall (his sincerity already in jeopardy since he’d stated he was a foodie) because that was where he was picking up a tux for a charity event and was concerned about wasting good dating time.

  Ryan had taken Faye’s advice and tried JDate this go-around, but she’d been in a car accident and was running forty minutes late for her rendezvous. It was hardly even a fender-bender. Her secondhand hybrid had ever so gently tapped the SUV that hadn’t slowed down but stopped abruptly at the Natick exit tollbooth on the Mass Pike. Ryan couldn’t detect a scratch on either vehicle when she got out to assess the damage and to apologize to the female driver, who was already talking hysterically into her cell phone, telling 911 that she’d been in a bad accident and couldn’t move. Wailing sirens announced the arrival of two cruisers, a fire truck, and an ambulance.

  “This is an accident?” The trooper demanded an explanation from Ryan who was leaning against her car, having pulled it over to the shoulder.

  “I didn’t call you. She did.” Ryan pointed to the woman who sat as motionless as an inflatable doll at the tollbooth gate, rush hour traffic backed up behind her a quarter of a mile, cars zigzagging to change lanes. The officer told the woman to move her car.

  “Can’t. My back hurts.” She did not look at the trooper but kept her sleek black-haired head immobile and facing the windshield.

  “So does mine,” he replied, poking his head into the window to get a better look at her. “Now move your car.”

  “I need to go to the hospital.”

  “Good. Go.”

  “I need to call my lawyer.”

  “Call ten lawyers, lady, but move your car first. By the way—you shop at Whole Foods?”

  “No. I never shop at Whole Foods.”

  “Yeah, right.” The trooper walked back to Ryan’s car.

  “I think I picked her up for shoplifting a few weeks ago. You sure she didn’t back into you?”

  Ryan’s date is even hotter in person than in his profile photo—like a swarthy Rob Lowe. Sitting on a white wire mesh seat, he tells her that tardiness is something he won’t tolerate: his time is valuable, and the time allotted for their date has expired. Picking up a black plastic garment bag, he ends the date before it begins and marches off, leaving a wake of Metro cologne that she will never gain find irresistible.

  “Asshole,” she mutters. Foodie indeed. She was half Italian; her people were born with a foodie gene.

  A small Chinese woman stands on a chair behind the counter at Ming Dynasty and offers Ryan a chunk of Kung pao chicken on a toothpick, a gesture Ryan interprets as some form of consolation for the scene the woman witnessed. Ryan thinks the little square bits of chicken are mushy, so she turns down the offer and moves towards Cajun Grill next door. The Chinese woman grows aggressive, beckoning to her with her skewered chicken in hand.

  “No, thank you,” Ryan says, and places her order for coconut battered shrimp. Fast food aside, she’s starving. She’s also hypoglycemic, which means that not only her energy level but her mood (about to explode in a most unpleasant expression of irritability) is directly correlated with her blood sugar level.

  “That not real shrimp,” the Chinese woman calls out. Ryan ignores her. “Señora, Madam, Lady, you want shrimp? You like spicy? You like sweet? Sesame?” She stabs another toothpick into a pan of shrimp dripping with orange sauce and waves the crustacean in the air. “Señora, take it!”

  “She doesn’t want your shrimp!” the Hispanic Cajun Grill lady shouts back.

  “She no want yours either!”

  The air in the food court grows oppressive to Ryan, now at the head of a line of customers who seem to have appeared out of nowhere. Her armpits are tingling beneath her woolen sweater, already soaked from an overdose of the day’s drama as she becomes the object of bickering between the two vendors. Without a word, she walks toward the escalator.

  “And what am I supposed to do with this?” the Cajun Grill lady, holding up the plate of coconut shrimp and dirty rice, calls after her.

  “I tell you, try my shrimp, crazy lady.” The words of the Chinese woman, still perched on the chair, carry over the crowd and land on Ryan’s ears as she is ever too slowly lifted upward on the moving stairs.

  As she scurries toward the exit, a glamorous Israeli woman at a kiosk grabs her hand and urges her to try an anti-aging miracle cream.

  “I have makeup on,” Ryan says.

  “Put it between thumb and forefinger.”

  Before Ryan can escape, the woman is rubbing a pink dollop on Ryan’s fingers, which she won’t let go of.

  “Now look at other hand and see difference,” the woman tells Ryan.

  “It looks exactly the same.”

  “Is smoother.”

  “Of course it’s smoother. You just put grease on it.” Ryan pulls back her hand.

  “Sometimes it takes a while,” the woman calls after her. “Your lines will disappear.”

  “I don’t have any. I’m twenty-eight!”

  * * *

  She opens the apartment door, anticipating the solitude of home, only to find Starr’s hiking boots in the foyer, dripping onto the Persian prayer rug Tiffany’s parents cast off on them. Starr, with her raspy know-it-all voice, jerky hand movements that startle the tattooed snake on her arm, the watermelon-gel-plastered crew cut she pats with the palm of her left hand every other minute as if to make sure it’s still there. Ryan is about to make an about-face when Starr, her muscular body hidden beneath a plaid woolen jac-shirt, picks up her boots and storms past her. A few heavy footsteps down the stairs and she’s gone.

  “She’s a happy camper,” Ryan tells Tiffany, who’s sitting on the sofa, down in the mouth and alternating puffs from a cigarette in one hand with swigs from a quart bottle of pomegranate juice in the other.

  “It’s over,” Tiff says, moaning.

  “I can see that—you’re smoking. Get another girlfriend fast, because I can’t stand secondhand smoke. I hate your breakups.” Ryan swats the air around her.

  “This could be a tough one.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “I mean it. I thought she was the one.” She takes a drag on her cigarette.

  “Too bossy, too nervous, too rude—”

  “Okay. Okay. You didn’t like her.”

  “What are you doing this weekend, Tiff?”

  “Starr was going to take me ice fishing. Now I’ll be sitting around trying to get over her.”

  “I’ve decided to go up to Vermont. I feel I owe these people an inperson apology. Want to come?”

  “To tell them you’re a fraud?” Tiffany perks up.

  “Maybe. Maybe just to check it out.”

  “Still keeping your options open. I admire your optimism.”

  “A road trip. What do you say?”

  “I don’t know, Ry
an.” She sinks full body into the couch. “I like to really get deep into my depression after a breakup. Works better than trying to ignore it and have the pain linger indefinitely. But, you know, I’ve never been to Vermont. My parents did take me to the von Trapp house in Salzburg.”

  “Of course, they did. Well, I’ve never been to the von Trapp house in Salzburg—or Vermont.”

  “Okay. You’re on!” Tiffany sits back up, takes one last drag, and drops the cigarette into the bottle of pomegranate juice. “How about we order in Chinese and watch some rom-com with a happy ending? Then I’ll have a good cry, go to bed, and feel better in the morning.”

  “I’ll go down and pick up Mexican or Cuban or Ethiopian or anything else your broken little heart desires, but tonight, do me a favor—no Chinese. And on the ride tomorrow—no smoking.”

  Chapter 8

  Saturday, February 1

  WHAT’S LEFT OF the last snowfall has already turned into gray slush in Boston, but the farther northwest they go, the whiter the landscape as they wind through the small towns and stretches of open fields of New Hampshire, then the dairy pastures and rolling hills of Vermont, with white colonial homes with black-paneled doors and American flags.

  “I like the birdhouses, especially the ones in the shape of windmills that spin,” Tiffany says. “There’s one in the shape of a pelican.”

  “They are creative—or tacky.”

  “Wilderness Taxidermy,” Tiffany says, reading and giving a shudder. A pair of giant shellacked grizzly bears carved from tree trunks wave from the porch of a log cabin.

  “They’re everywhere,” Ryan says, pointing to more bears in front of Victorian clapboard houses sorely in need of a paint job. “Two guesses as to what the major occupation of this town is.”

  “I don’t see any doctor’s office or medical building. Maybe people don’t get sick here. Like it’s Brigadoon or something.”

  “I wish this fucking car in front of us would pull over.” Ryan is trying not to tailgate, but the blue Ford Focus with the ski rack and New York plates keeps braking.

  “Let’s stop for a while and put some distance between us. Maybe it’ll turn off,” Tiffany says. “Besides, I have to pee.”

  Ryan pulls into Ernie’s eatery, with the big cup of steaming coffee painted on the sign of the renovated barn from which two bearded guys have just exited. Their work boots leave a trail of giant footprints leading to their pickup as they sink into the crunching snow.

  “They smiled at us,” Tiffany says. “Maybe you can bring one to Brackton.”

  “Go find the restroom. I’ll be over in that Maple Museum.” She points across the road.

  “Coffee?”

  “Thanks. Cream and sweetener.”

  The museum is a room behind the shop in this red cinderblock structure. There’s a white screen on a stand, like the one onto which her grandfather used to project slides of her mother’s childhood: images of her mother looking bored beside her sister Robin, and Faye at the races in Saratoga Springs; bored in a poufy hairdo—white-gloved, and boxy purse dangling from her arm—on High Holy Days; bored in front of the Washington Monument; crying at all her birthday parties, overwhelmed by all the attention of a dozen little kids in cone-shaped party hats singing as Faye presented her with a blazing cake.

  There are a few folding chairs set up in the museum.

  “When’s the next presentation?” Ryan asks the young woman (dirty blond bangs covering half of her eyes and long wavy ringlets weighed down with too much product) who’s standing behind the counter and looking as bored as Ryan’s mother did in all the slides. A little blush would render some life into her cadaverous-looking complexion.

  “Whenever you want. It’s free,” she says in a monotone voice.

  Ryan waits for Tiff and the coffee. The film that depicts the process of tapping maple trees and collecting the sap in buckets or in a series of connected tubes that empty into a large vat, followed by a description of the tedious boiling and bottling process, takes under five minutes.

  “Forty gallons of sap for only one gallon of syrup. That’s amazing,” Ryan says.

  “Yeah,” the woman lacking enthusiasm, confirms. Hopefully it’s only a weekend job and she hasn’t quit high school, Ryan thinks. “Ever been to a sugarhouse?” the woman asks.

  Ryan shakes her head.

  “Nothing like the sweet smell of sap when they’re boiling. Come back when the sap’s running.”

  Ryan fears it’s a full time job, and the line—void of any punch in its pitch—been uttered thousands of times before.

  “When’s that?”

  “Depends. Warm days, freezing nights. Maybe late February, if we’re lucky. Maybe March.” She picks up a brochure from the counter. “List of sugarhouses. You’ll know they’re boiling when you see the steam coming out of the roofs.”

  “My parents used to have that kind.” Ryan points to a bottle of Log Cabin, one of many in a collection of syrup bottles that line the wall behind the cashier’s counter.

  “We have the vintage tin.” She points to a pint-sized can in the shape of a log cabin, complete with red curtains on the paned window and a potbellied stove visible through a partially open door. “The red cap on the tin is supposed to be the chimney. That’s where it poured out. Cute, eh?”

  “Mine used her.” Tiffany, who has just arrived with Ryan’s coffee, points to a brown bottle in the shape of a well-endowed buttoned-up lady.

  “Neither brand has any maple syrup in it,” the shopkeeper says. “The rest have a very small percentage.”

  “Then why do you have them here?” Tiffany asks.

  “It’s an educational display.”

  “We”—she motions to herself and Ryan—“only use real maple syrup. And we pay extra for it in restaurants in Boston where we live. We’re roommates.”

  Why did Tiffany have to profile her life for everyone she met? Ryan preferred to be discreet, blend in with the surrounding culture or at least be mysterious, not an open book inviting prejudgment. Always leave something to be found out—desired. “Never go to bed naked with a man; at least keep your hat on,” Faye once told her. It was a joke, but it wasn’t, really.

  “We only serve the real thing in these parts. No extra charge.”

  “How lucky,” Ryan says, paying for a tall slim bottle of syrup infused with habanero peppers.

  “You know, my uncle has a two-hundred-acre maple sugar farm in Pennsylvania,” Tiffany informs the woman, who is unimpressed.

  “I didn’t know you had an uncle with a farm in Pennsylvania,” Ryan tells Tiffany as they walk back to the parking lot of Ernie’s Eatery.

  “I don’t. I just wanted her to know that Vermont isn’t the only state that produces maple syrup.”

  “Why do you care about these things?”

  “What things?”

  “What people know you know and what they don’t know.”

  “I hate smug.”

  “You could have fooled me. Now I need to pee. I’ll meet you in the car.”

  After using the toilet in the café, Ryan goes to wash her hands but the automatic faucet doesn’t stay on long enough for her to get the soap off. She’s surprised this hole in the wall even has an automatic faucet—talk about smug. She removes her hands from under the spout then returns them. Three seconds later the water shuts off again. Three seconds: This is how long she has to wash her hands. Four more pain-free days left in this month’s menstrual cycle. Eight years to safely conceive a child. Five months to get a husband. Everything in her life is timed.

  * * *

  Eric sits at the counter at the Tandem Café in Peterbury where he likes to go some mornings. It’s almost like getting away: only eight miles outside of town on the road to Middlebury, yet far enough away not to draw a Brackton clientele—no big-city transplants here either. Unlike the well-kept Brackton establishments that beckon to tourists, no one stops in Peterbury, where town planning seems to be a dirty phrase. Six one-story b
uildings with run-down wooden porches missing spindles in the railings and loose shingles constitute the single commercial block on either side of the Peterbury Common. A Chinese restaurant, a gas station, a Rite Aid pharmacy, a barbershop. The sad-looking lace curtains in the window of Lil’s Salon frame a bald mannequin head, and its red-satin-papered interior makes the beauty shop look more like a saloon with a sign made by someone who couldn’t spell.

  There’s a For Sale sign in the window of the Tandem Café. It’s been there for at least fifteen years. The proprietors are a father-daughter team. It used to be the father and his wife, but she died. Before them it was the wife’s parents, and before that Eric has no idea, except that there have always been two—thus tandem. He doesn’t know much about the daughter, who is older than Eric, except that she was married to some guy named Curtis who seems to have gone dark and who gets talked about some by customers in the café.

  It’s quiet this morning as Eric dips his last piece of biscuit into the brown sausage gravy and wipes his plate. In fact, it’s so quiet, every time he takes a sip of coffee and sets the thick white ceramic cup ever so gently on the saucer, the clang echoes through the eatery. Why does he care if he makes a noise? Because he’s not from Peterbury and has been away from the county for a while, which has made him a minor source of suspicion. Not until a lumberjack the owners call Teddy comes blowing through the bell-jingling door—his face so raw from the cold you can hardly tell orange beard stubble from skin, his eyes tearing and nose running, his long honey-colored hair glistening like a surfer’s—calling out for his eggs, steak, and biscuits with sausage gravy as though it were a mantra, and accosting father and daughter, who are behind the counter, with lively banter, does Eric relax some.

  Or maybe it’s the fact that the Boston couple who won the contest is coming today that’s made him uncomfortable. He’s reserved a room for them at the Daffodil. Not the deluxe suite where they’ll stay during the wedding weekend, but one of the standard rooms. Should he have reserved two? Do any couples sleep in separate rooms in this day and age? Certainly not gay guys. Still, he doesn’t want to appear presumptuous, yet not an ignorant country bumpkin. Maybe he should have asked. No, he shouldn’t have asked.