by Mary Rickert
Nan and Ruthie muffle giggles behind their hands. Howard and Bay sit at Mavis’s feet, their backs toward Nan; she imagines adoring expressions.
“I plan to live in Africa.” Mavis’s raspy voice rises out of the dark.
Ruthie turns to Nan, eyebrows raised. “Doesn’t she realize she’s old?”
Nan shrugs. Mavis can’t be serious. Had she really wanted to go to Africa, she would have done so, instead of talking about it for sixty-some years! The realization makes Nan sad. If there was anyone who seemed destined to follow her dreams, it was Mavis. How does it happen? Nan wonders. How do the girls with dreams as big as the world end up old women with regrets?
Bay appears to be focusing most of her attention on Howard. It is difficult to hear what he is saying, his voice is gently modulated, but it sounds as though he might be reciting a poem. Nan wishes she could hear better, but Howard has one of those voices that always makes the listener lean close. It would be annoying, if he didn’t have such a pleasant face for leaning closer to, in spite of the troublesome bruise.
When he finishes, there is a long silence until Bay and Mavis speak at once. Bay stops short, of course. Mavis has a powerful voice.
“That needs work, darling.”
Howard lowers his head. Bay’s sweet voice gushes, “It’s a really nice poem.”
“It’s not good enough, not nearly good enough, but who knows how good you could be if you dedicate your life to it?”
Howard speaks, again too low to hear.
Ruthie sighs. “Here she goes again. How does she make people listen to her?”
Well, there it is, the unbearable truth. When it mattered most, when Nan knew better, she buckled under the great weight of Mavis’s certainty. It’s a wonder thoughts of Eve stayed at a distance this long. She should be at this reunion, sitting at the table with them, talking about her family, her own children and grandchildren. After all, Eve was the one out of the four of them who the children really loved.
Mavis was so bossy, the kids at camp were afraid of her. Ruthie liked the children, and they seemed to like her, but she was forgetful, tended to be late to activities, and had trouble with the physical exertion. Nan tried to be interested in the young campers, but the truth is she’d taken the job to be with her friends and get away from her mother. Also, Nan can admit this now: she much preferred reading books in the shade of her porch, a big glass of lemonade nearby, to the buggy forest, or the stinky glue of pinecone crafts, which gave her a headache. Eve taught the girls how to weave dandelion chains and do water ballet, cheering the little ones whose toes barely cleared the surface. It was Eve who organized the campfires and told the best stories. “They have to be just a little scary,” she scolded Mavis one night after she’d offered up a terrible tale about a murderer in the woods. Later, when the girls had nightmares, it was Eve’s name they called.
Of course, Eve was made immediately older by her mother’s death. She had to learn at a very young age how to take care of her little brothers and run a household. Now Nan wonders if Eve’s wild side was part of her character or a rebellion of sorts. She was the one, after all, who stole the bottles of wine from the camp kitchen after the end of summer dance, saying she didn’t care that James never arrived, getting quite drunk until the rain that held off for hours exploded onto their cabin, and Ruthie said it was a shame, because whatever had kept James away, he wouldn’t be able to come now. That’s when Eve, lying on her bunk with that orange dress fanned around her pale face, surprised them by saying he never existed. “I made him up,” she said, smiling through her tears. “I guess I fooled you all pretty good.”
Nan shakes her head, glancing at Ruthie, who sits with her hands folded neatly in her lap, staring off into space, while Bay and Howard sit at Mavis’s feet, looking up at her admiringly. “In Africa,” Mavis starts, and Nan sighs, remembering Eve as a girl in ankle socks, her dark braid coming undone in loose curls around her face, showing Nan how to eat the honeysuckle growing up the side of the house. When Nan asked how she’d learned to do it, Eve said her mother taught her, which Nan found remarkable. She couldn’t imagine having a mother who would encourage such a thing. It was Eve who showed them the back way to school, past the neighborhood gardens, picking beans and pulling carrots, brushing them with her fingers and eating through the dirt.
She was the smallest, but that didn’t stop her from scrambling up and down the Haverstone’s apple tree, her legs red as though the tree had clawed her, showing the bottom of her white underpants as she ran toward them, half her skirt tucked under her elbow, making a bowl for the stolen apples.
“I’m not sure you should be playing with Eve so much,” Nan’s mother said. “I’m afraid that girl’s going wild. Why don’t you play with that nice Mavis more?”
Nan’s mother thought Mavis was a perfect little girl. Once, when Nan was caught in some transgression, she can’t remember what it was, her mother embarrassed her by saying, in front of the others, “Why can’t you be more like your friend Mavis here?” which might have ended the friendship right there, had Mavis not been standing behind Mrs. Singer, mimicking her sharp gestures and pursed lips.
They grew up together, but they also grew up apart. Isn’t it true, Nan thinks, that all intimacy is defined by the space between distant points? Wasn’t that the terrible lesson of her life? Who can ever really know anyone?
Nan can’t bear it. She rises quickly and bumps the table, causing a clatter of plates and silverware; the candles waver, but she ignores them, stacking the dishes, not caring about making a ruckus.
“The lasagna was divine,” Ruthie says.
Nan nods, perhaps too enthusiastically, trying to shake the past from her mind.
Ruthie collects the silverware tenderly, as though the forks, knives, and spoons are made of glass, as though any rough movement will cause a disaster.
“Ruthie,” Nan says, “you have to tell me what happened to you.”
Ruthie stops in midreach, her thin hand hovering over the table. “I didn’t think you’d notice.”
“Not notice?” Nan looks up, startled by Ruthie’s eyes. Were they always so blue? “How could I not notice? You must have lost fifty pounds at least.”
“Oh, you mean—” Ruthie spreads her arms out wide beside her hips.
“You were never that big.”
“I got to be. I was huge. One of those women people fear, a monster.”
“Oh, Ruthie, no.”
Ruthie shakes her head. “You don’t know what it’s like. I can say this now because I’m…I’m—”
“Thin,” Nan says. “You’re quite thin.”
“Well, normal size at least. I’m a bit of an expert on the way fat affects how people are treated, and I guarantee you, it wasn’t pleasant.”
“I wish I’d known.”
“What was I supposed to do, call and say, ‘I’ve gotten horribly fat, would you like to visit?’ I wish I’d known about Bay. It can’t have been easy to raise her alone, Nan. My son was enough to keep both my husband and me pulling each other’s hair out. I always wanted a daughter, but it was not to be.” She leans close and lowers her voice. “I lost all my girl babies before they were born. I always felt like it was, you know, some kind of curse.”
Nan feels the pain in her chest like the crushing of a flower. Sometimes she thinks her whole life is best described as a ruined garden. Well, not everything. Not Bay, of course.
“I can’t tell you that I didn’t think of you and her”—Ruthie juts her chin toward Mavis, still sitting on the steps, enchanting Bay and Howard—“and wished we’d stayed in touch. I never had any other friends like you girls. If we’d stayed in touch—”
“If we’d stayed in touch, everything would be different.”
It is true that they are old and given to sentiment, but Nan and Ruthie look at each other across the table. The candleligh
t softens the wrinkled dimensions of their faces, and for just a moment, Nan actually sees Ruthie the way she was as a young woman: earnest, trusting, innocent. Nan never took Ruthie seriously. Mavis didn’t either. They thought she was silly.
Nan pretends absorption in the stacking of plates. Had she really been the sort of person who let such cruel judgment cloud her affection? How could she not have remembered this about herself? How could she have let so much time pass? How different her life would be if they had remained friends! How tragic, really, to be lonely all these years.
Snap out of it, Nan tells herself. There’s business to be taken care of. They are here now, and everything is going rather well. The recipe Bay found for the lasagna turned out to be quite good; what a wonderful invention no-boil noodles are! There’s only one sad-looking, sauce-depleted piece left. There was that business with the boy yelling out the car window of course, but things went no further. It was unfortunate, but it certainly didn’t prevent them from sharing a lovely evening. The phone hasn’t rung for days, ever since Nan had the number changed. She isn’t so foolish as to think Sheriff Henry won’t appear eventually. In fact, he almost certainly will. By then, Nan hopes, she’ll have made arrangements. Obviously, it isn’t a perfect solution, but she is far too old for perfection.
“Why settle when you’re young?” Mavis’s voice coils out of the dark. “You can do anything, be anything, live any way at all. Why choose to be ordinary? Why choose to be boring? Of course you can choose that sort of life, almost everyone does, but why?”
With a grunt, Nan picks up the stack of dishes. Ruthie follows, carrying the nearly empty lasagna pan and silverware through the foyer, past the dining room, pushing the swinging door open into the kitchen, which is its own little climate zone, overly warm and humid, with the mingled scents of chocolate tomato sauce and the persistent moonflowers whispering through the screen door and open window.
“I forgot how bossy Mavis can be,” Ruthie says. “Where’s the dishwasher?”
Nan points at herself.
Ruthie runs hot water and squeezes out a generous portion of dish soap. “Nan, I have to say, listening to Bay scold Mavis for getting that boy’s name wrong was the high beam of my day, after seeing you again, of course.”
Nan widens her eyes, pulls her chin in slightly, and lowers her voice, trying to affect Mavis’s rasp. “In Africa, there will be no young people with impossible names, like Howard!”
Ruthie has a surprising laugh, girlishly clean and light. She lifts a soapy hand, waving tiny bubbles in the air, signaling Nan to stop, which only inspires her all the more.
“In Africa, there will be no tiresome people. I shall sleep with lions and dine with kings.”
Ruthie splashes one hand into the bubbles and presses the other tightly over her mouth. Nan suspects immediately what has happened. She composes herself as she turns, but how funny is this, Mavis standing there, holding the door open with one foot, her red lips smeared, her drawn eyebrows sharp against her pasty skin, blinking like someone surprised by the light.
Nan steals herself for the imperious remark sure to come, but Mavis only cocks her head ever so slightly, shakes it a bit, and says, “I wonder if either of you have seen my cigarettes?”
Nan points at the pack on the kitchen counter. “Mavis, I hope I didn’t make you feel bad. The wine has made me silly and…”
“Feel bad?” Mavis says sharply as she drops one hand, clawlike, across the cigarettes. “Why would I feel bad about being made to look ridiculous?”
“Are you upset?” Ruthie asks.
“I’m too old to be upset, don’t you know? Too old for Africa, but you do know that, don’t you? Just too damn old for almost anything.”
It is quite shocking to hear Mavis’s voice tremble. Ruthie rushes to give her a hug. After a moment, Nan joins them, noting that Ruthie smells like lemons but Mavis smells like dust. Ruthie, though she has lost all that weight, is soft and easy to hold, while Mavis is hard as stone, which has the effect of quickly dispersing them.
“We need to discuss why we’re here,” Mavis says.
“Well, I figured it out.” Ruthie squirts more dish soap into the water; Nan makes a mental note that she’ll need to restock soon. “I wrote the date down correctly. I know because I have my book with me. Every time Nan and I talked, I checked. I always had it right. I had the date right, it’s the day I got mixed up. Do you see? I had the right date all along; I just thought it fell on a different day! I do this sort of thing frequently. My husband says I’m an idiot half the time and the other half…well, any who, do you see what I mean? Am I making sense?”
“What are you talking about?” Mavis asks. “This is the right day. I wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”
Nan looks at the plate she is drying, a white plate with a border of pink and yellow flowers. Strange, the things one remembers: the sunny morning when she bought it at a tag sale forty-some years ago, when she thought mixed china would be her pattern of choice for all those dinner parties that never happened. She tries to concentrate, but she is tired, and nothing Ruthie says makes much sense.
“I’m just saying it was meant to be, that’s all,” Ruthie says.
With a grunt, Mavis pulls out a chair and sits, taps out a cigarette and places it, unlit, between her lips, where it droops from her bright red mouth. Beneath the glare of kitchen light, the lipstick’s glamorous effect has been replaced by something else; her complexion, white, her hooded, lashless eyes, the drawn eyebrows beneath the shock of lavender hair—why, Mavis looks a bit clownish! She turns slowly, her head held at an odd angle as if burdened by some invisible weight, as though she read Nan’s mind while Nan, for her part, is suddenly filled with dread. After all, in spite of Mavis’s new appearance, her attitude remains unchanged, as if she has never been guilty of anything.
“Where’s Bay?” Nan asks.
Mavis talks around the unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. “She’s with the boy.”
“You left her alone with him?”
“She’s perfectly safe.”
“How do you know that? How do you know she’s safe? Have you seen the way she looks at him?”
Mavis takes a cold drag on her cigarette. “And?”
“And what?”
“Have you noticed what part of the formula is missing?”
“Mavis, I don’t—”
“The boy is not interested.”
Of course Bay is too young for romance and doesn’t need some boy to save her life. Yet, how could Howard not feel honored to be a recipient of her affection? “How is that possible?”
“Gay.”
“Howard? Are you sure?”
“He told me so himself. That’s why he came home this weekend. To tell his folks.”
“They don’t know?” Nan asks, wondering at Mavis’s power to charm deep secrets from dark hiding places.
“They know now. They didn’t take it well, especially the father. Trust me, Nan; he has absolutely no interest in Bailey.”
Nan can’t help but feel a little sad. It’s ridiculous, of course. Doesn’t she know she can’t protect Bay from life’s disappointments? Isn’t that why she’s invited her old friends here? On the scale of disappointments, an unrequited crush, given no chance for hint of blossom, is very minor as opposed to, oh, having a mother sent to prison, for instance.
“Can we get back to something that matters?” Mavis rasps.
“Right,” says Nan, already annoyed with Mavis’s bossy ways. “I think I might be going away for a while, and I need someone to take care of Bay. You can see for yourself what a remarkable child she is, no trouble at all.” Nan works against the grimace engendered by the salty lie. “Well, hardly any.”
“Remember when Grace Winter went away,” Ruthie says. “Oh, remember that weekend?”
Nan finds herself quite relieve
d to be taken off this difficult subject by one of Ruthie’s strange associations. “I haven’t thought about that night in years,” Ruthie says. “We were such bad girls.”
“Bad girls?”
“I’m not talking about what happened with Eve,” Ruthie says, which in itself is shockingly close to doing so. “I haven’t forgotten our promise.”
Nan tries to hold her breath against the scent of memory, but there they are, the three of them in whispered conference, standing in the snow, promising to die with the secret of Eve’s last hours, bound by the very oath that would tear them asunder.
“I’m talking about sneaking into Miss Winter’s house.” Ruthie’s voice, cheery even in dispute, breaks through the past, and Nan squints at the summer kitchen with its divine perfume: floral, savory—a fertile scent, Nan thinks, shaking her head at the irony.
“We didn’t sneak in.”
“Nan had a key.”
“Well, of course we weren’t robbers. I’m just saying Miss Winter wouldn’t have wanted us going through her personal things. I know how I would feel if someone went through all my stuff like that. Besides, isn’t that the night we…” Ruthie stops midsentence, staring into space for so long Nan begins to wonder if she will have to slap her old friend to bring her back to her senses, but before there is time to act, Ruthie walks across the room, trailing tiny bubbles, to sit on the chair across from Mavis. “Oh, remember?”
Nan doesn’t know why they have to talk about this now. Unlike Ruthie, apparently, Nan’s spent most of her life avoiding the memory of the string of events that led from Eve’s death to Miss Winter’s house burning down: the flames swallowing the pine-swathed arbor, the snow melting at Nan’s feet, that strange noise that sounded so much like moaning. Nan pictures, as if it were a memory, though it is not, the cat’s corpse; poor Fairy, dead. She remembers Miss Winter, wrapped in an old quilt, slowly turning away from the burning to look across the not very large distance at Nan—both of them standing alone, neither making a move toward the other.