But she wasn’t home, not at home and not at Tom’s house (she had just two days ago given me permission to call her there, jotting down the number on a piece of personalized notebook paper with her name and a pink-petaled daisy in the bottom-right-hand corner, ripping it out and handing it to me with a jaunty nonchalance so studied and so clearly proclaiming, “I have nothing to hide,” that it gave my heart a twinge). Due to my admittedly old-ladyish uneasiness with cell phone culture (you know what I mean, it blurs the boundaries between the public/private realms, discourages quiet introspection, results in abominable driving, fills the world with silly noises, et cetera), I try not to pester people when they’re not at home, but I broke my own rule and had started to dial Piper’s cell number when I remembered that she had an appointment that afternoon for several, thankfully unspecified forms of waxing. Although I am not a waxer myself (when I told Piper this, she gave me the sort of look you’d give someone who claimed not to brush her teeth), I could imagine that even a hotshot cell phone user like Piper would prefer not to have a conversation while hair was being systematically ripped from her body.
In my current two-local-friends existence, that left Lake. “The elusive Lake,” Teo called her, or sometimes “your imaginary friend.” He was referring to the fact that, in all the months I had known her and that we had known Dev, he had never met her, had only even spoken to her on the phone a handful of times, but Lake was elusive in other ways as well. She was elusive when she was in the same room with me, as I’ve described, and sometimes, in flashes so fleeting and inexplicable that I could never be sure they had really happened, I thought Teo might be right about the imaginary friend part, too. A barbed glance, an icy pause, a shift in tone of voice, and I would wonder if Lake considered me a friend at all.
But mostly, she was lovely: droll, sly, smart, and affectionate. And mostly, she seemed to think I was lovely, too, so I called her. It was two o’clock. She would be nearly finished with her shift at Vincente’s.
As soon as the hostess handed Lake the phone, she demanded, “Are you hungry?”
“Did Vinny tell you to ask me that?” Despite the many plates of pasta I had annihilated in his presence, Vinny labored under the misapprehension that I was scandalously underfed. “A nibbler,” he would accuse, with hurt in his eyes, “a guinea pig!”
“Who else?” said Lake.
“That baby is crying for some pasta!” Vinny shouted in the background. “Don’t be a stingy mama!”
“No pasta,” I told Lake, groaning, “no garlic.”
“Ah,” she said, sagely, “you’ve entered the indigestion stage. The diminished-appetite stage.”
“Diminished appetite?” shouted Vinny in horror.
“Tell him that’s what happens when someone does headstands on your digestive system all day long.”
Lake laughed and said, “Come over and tell him yourself.”
Once we were sipping our coffees—mine, in a sad oxymoron, a decaf cappuccino—and spooning in the heavenly crema caramella gelato Vinny had forced upon us, I told her my good news about Penny. I hadn’t been sure if I would because while Lake was happy to discuss pregnancy as a general, physical phenomenon, the few times I’d ventured into the realm of the personal and emotional, she had clapped shut like a clam. The last time this had happened, after I’d told her about Teo confessing his secret wish that Penny would be a girl (“I wouldn’t be disappointed with a boy,” he’d quickly clarified, “are you kidding? a son? But right now I’d say it’s sixty-forty, girl”), I’d sworn off disclosing anything close to my heart. But I decided that if Lake could not rejoice in Penny’s emergence from the woods, it was best to know that now and walk away from her forever.
I told her, and she didn’t say a word, just leaned over, placed one long hand on either side of my face and kept them there for a few seconds, giving me a smile of sweet, undiluted gladness.
“Thank you,” I told her.
After she took her hands away, I said, “Now, you tell me something.”
“Like what?”
“Like anything,” I said. “Something about you. How is…” I smiled mischievously, then finished, “Dev?”
Lake laughed. “Dev, huh? Dev is Dev. Cutting grass with Aidan, playing basketball, riding his bike, reading his head off, and awaiting the second coming of Clare. I don’t feel like I see him that much, to tell you the truth. He’s outside a lot and getting a little distant and teenagery on me, which I suppose had to happen. But he’s fine.” She gave me a narrow-eyed, knowing look. “Next question.”
“What do you mean?” I said, innocently.
“Rafferty’s good. Working a lot.”
“Oh, working a lot. That’s what I was wondering about, his work.”
“All right.” She made an exasperated sound. “Rafferty’s doing what he always does: muddying the waters, stirring the pot, driving me up the frigging wall.”
“Elaborate,” I instructed.
“He’s just so sure of everything.”
“About being in love with you.”
“For starters. He loves me. He loves Dev. He wants us to all move together to his pretty white house and live happily ever after.”
“The rat bastard.”
“And you know what? Fine, fine, let him be sure, but he has to be so open about it? He can’t just keep it to himself?”
“An honest man. The nerve.”
“Men are supposed to toy with you, am I right? Play games? Get cagey every time someone mentions the word ‘commitment’?”
“That’s what you want?”
She swirled her spoon through the melted ice cream and sighed. “That’s what I know. I don’t know what I want.”
“Do you love him?”
“Don’t ask that like the answer to it is the answer to everything,” she snapped.
I eyed her, sipping my cappuccino.
“Okay, okay, yes, I love him. I can’t help it.” Then she added, in a small, forlorn, un-Lake-like voice, “The trouble is, he’s too good for me. And don’t say he’s not, because he is.”
“He probably thinks the same thing about you. People in love feel that way all the time, like they don’t know what they’ve done to deserve each other.”
“Is that how you feel?” asked Lake, raising one eloquent eyebrow. “Like you don’t deserve…Teo?”
For some reason, this question caught me off guard. Maybe it was the unexpected shift from her life to mine or the almost imperceptible chill that blew through our conversation like a draft. I didn’t want her disappearing on me, so I trod lightly with my answer, honestly, but lightly.
I gave her an okay-you-caught-me look, and said, “No, I guess not. I definitely feel lucky.” Blessed is what I really meant. Chosen. Consecrated. (I know, I know, but you try it someday, being honest about love without sounding extravagant or self-important; love is extravagant; it makes you important; I can’t help that any more than you can.) I left it at lucky and moved on. “But deserving or not deserving doesn’t seem to have anything to do with me and Teo. We just”—I hesitated, then tried to undercut the rest with an apologetic shrug—“belong to each other.”
“I can believe that,” said Lake, pensively, but with no chilliness at all. “You’re two nice people who belong together. And maybe what I mean is that even though I want Rafferty, he belongs with someone else.”
“Why?”
A long, prickly silence ensued, during which Lake began to change before my eyes, and even though I knew I should have been used to these abrupt transmutations, these hairpin turns, they made me dizzy every time. Now it was awful to watch the way Lake grew smaller and more slumped. The energy seemed to be draining out of her, even out of the kinetic corkscrews of her hair, but when her eyes finally met mine, I was unprepared for the misery I saw there.
“I have made a god-awful mess of my life,” she said, desolately. “And other people’s.”
“Lake,” I said, putting my hand on top of hers, “wh
at is it? What’s wrong?”
She stared at me. I watched her face, her deep breaths, and I understood that Lake, who seemed fearless, was afraid. She was gathering her courage, moving, step by trepid step, toward something big and scary, and she was taking me with her.
But we never got there. At least, I don’t think we did because what she said next was serious and profound, but it was not a revelation. It was something I’ve known since the first week I met her. She squeezed my hand, let go, and said, slapping the words down one by one, like playing cards, “Everything was for Dev.”
So that was it: the old sorrows. I exhaled, getting my bearings like someone who’s felt the rush of the traffic on her face and then stepped back onto the curb. “But you told Rafferty about all of that, right? Brown, your parents. He knows.”
Lake shook her head. “He doesn’t know the half of it. No one does.”
“So tell him. He’s a father. He’ll understand.”
“I was trying to make a good world for Dev, but I screwed up a lot. I crossed too many lines. Rafferty might understand the motivation, but there are mistakes even he won’t be able to forgive.”
“I bet he will.”
“I hope so,” she said, but there wasn’t a trace of hope in her voice. She scanned my face with her piercing blue eyes, and I was unprepared for what she said next, in the same lost-cause tone. “I hope you will, too, Cornelia.”
“Me?” I tried to imagine regret so voluminous that it extended to people you hadn’t even hurt.
Lake sat very still and I had that feeling again, as though we stood on the brink of something momentous, but then all she did was smile a lopsided, dispirited smile and say, “Everyone.”
Later that day, as I sat in the Donahue kitchen talking to Piper, I had the unexpected experience of recalling, in full-color, lurid detail, an episode from Star Trek, the original series. I say “unexpected” for a host of reasons, not least among them the fact that for most of my life, Star Trek, original and otherwise, had existed, if it had existed at all, as an amorphous smudge on the farthest-flung periphery of my consciousness. In fact, I lived a blissful thirty-two years without ever watching a single episode, and then, on a gray Saturday in February, all of that changed.
Teo was laid low by an upper respiratory infection and had languished on the couch all day enduring myriad symptoms, including fever, sore throat, seemingly ceaseless complaining, and a harsh and primitive cough, like the call of a pterodactyl. While ibuprofen, chocolate milk shakes, and constant attention seemed to offer him some relief, it wasn’t until his feverish channel surfing hit pay dirt in the form of a Trekathon (not, obviously, my word) that he truly took a turn for the better. He asked me to watch with him, and because he’s a hard man to refuse, avalanche-inducing cough notwithstanding, and because playing nursemaid had worn me to a frazzle, I plopped myself down and watched, first skeptically, then with increasing, and increasingly morbid, fascination.
In the kitchen with Piper, the episode that came back to me was one (of many, I suspect) involving a parallel universe in which every major character has a doppelgänger with an evil heart and disastrous fashion sense. Despite the wanton torture, the massacre and assassination plots, the goatees, hip-hugging sashes, and biceps-baring gold vests, there is the suggestion that the mirror crew members bear core similarities to the real ones, that the good Spock (whom I kept calling Dr. Spock, much to Teo’s disgust, and who would, on twenty-first-century planet earth, be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome so fast it would make his pointy-eared head spin) and the bad Spock are not as different as they seem, that they are merely products of their radically different environments: there, but for the grace of God, go I, off to commit genocide in a terrible outfit.
Transitioning so quickly from Lake at Vincente’s to Piper in the Donahues’ showplace kitchen was not unlike slipping from one universe to the next, but this thought did not come to me right away. When I arrived, Piper was ferociously slapping kosher salt onto a large, probably free-range, probably vegetarian chicken and didn’t stop until I began to tell her about Penny. After I’d finished talking, she raised a finger, said, “One sec,” and proceeded to soap and scrub her hands with such verve and thoroughness that for two crazy seconds, I thought she might be planning to snap on gloves and deliver Penny herself. When she was sufficiently sterile, she walked around the counter and, expertly sidestepping my belly, enfolded me in a breathtaking hug.
When she had stopped hugging but was still gently holding on to my upper arms, Piper explained, “Salmonella. You can’t be too careful.” But I wasn’t fooled. I’d seen her swipe her fingers under her eyes before she’d turned from the sink. While I didn’t doubt that Piper was a meticulous hand washer by nature, I knew she’d been buying time, getting her pesky emotions under control. If you had told me six months ago that Piper Truitt would be shedding tears of joy for me, I would have sent you home, your tail between your legs, my derisive laughter ringing in your ears.
But even with the tearful moment safely behind her, it was clear from the way she gritted her perfect teeth and began to viciously attack a bulb of elephant garlic that Piper’s emotions were a long way from being in check.
“Piper?” I said, tentatively.
“What?”
“Is something wrong?”
Piper dislodged a giant clove of garlic and placed it on the cutting board, fire in her eyes and a Henckels chef’s knife flashing in her hand. When she brought her fist down on the flat side of the knife, the unshakable granite counter shook, and when she lifted the knife to survey her handiwork—the clove smashed beyond all recognition—the satisfaction on her face was out-and-out scary.
Picking out the papery clove covering, she made her lips into a tight line and shook her head.
“It’s Tom,” she growled, at last.
“What about Tom?”
Piper put one fisted hand on one cocked hip and pointed the knife at me.
“Guess,” she demanded, “guess what he said to me this morning.”
I liked Tom. He was funny and sweet, and if you caught him in the right light, he bore a mild resemblance to Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. I tried to think of what he could have said to make Piper so furious.
“That you should’ve waxed weeks ago.”
But Piper would not allow the mood to be lightened.
“He said, ‘I’ve been thinking. Why don’t we just do this? You put your house on the market and the three of you move in with us.’” Piper gestured madly with the knife as she said this.
“Wow,” I said.
Piper glowered. “Wow is right. Wow is the understatement of the century.” Two stabs in the air, one for each “Wow.”
“Piper, could you put that knife down?”
She glared at the knife as though it had leaped into her hand of its own annoying accord and set it on the cutting board.
“So is he suggesting…” I paused. The question had to be asked, but very, very carefully. “Is he thinking that the two of you will alter the, um, platonic nature of your relationship if you agree to…cohabitate?”
Piper spat out a caustic laugh. “Don’t be insane, Cornelia. I’ve had enough lunatic talk for one day.”
“Sorry. So, what did you tell him? That he was a lunatic for suggesting you move in?”
Piper’s face lost a little of its scorn. “Well, no,” she said, in a quieter voice, “I thanked him for the offer, but told him he was being naïve. Families don’t just shack up together. That’s not how the world works.”
“Actually, I think most of the world does work that way.”
“I’m talking about the civilized world, Cornelia, not rain forest people with plates in their lips.”
(I know. I’d wondered it many times myself: how Piper had lived thirty-five years without learning that you are not allowed to say things like this.)
“Are you just worrying about what people will think?”
“Just?” Piper drew hers
elf up. “I have to live in this town, and so do my kids, and I’m already being shunned by most of it.” She shook her head in disgust. “Shunned! Like an Amish woman who forgot to wear her stinking bonnet.”
I suppressed a smile. “That wasn’t a trivializing ‘just.’”
“What?” I could tell by Piper’s grimace that “That wasn’t a trivializing ‘just’” fell into the category of “Quirky Turns of Phrase Uttered by Cornelia That Bug the Shit out of Piper.” The trouble was that I never knew which phrases fell into that category until I saw the grimace, by which time it was too late. The other trouble was that I didn’t really care.
“By ‘just’ I meant is that your only worry, the single thing standing between you and doing it.”
Piper’s head gave a son-of-a-gun shake. “You. You and Tom.”
“Me and Tom what?”
“I knew you’d agree with him.”
I could see Piper scanning her piles of vegetables, considering what to brutalize next.
“I didn’t say I agreed with him.”
“Tom thinks you just do things.” She gave a frustrated whinny. “He’s so damn sure of everything.”
As soon as she said it, I heard Lake’s huskier, but no less peevish, voice saying the same words, minus the expletive, which was rather funny given the fact that not long ago, when it came to slinging around expletives, I’d have put my money on Lake over Piper every time. And that’s when the Star Trek episode came hurtling, unbidden, out of the blue, to squeal to a stop in the forefront of my brain. Two women, one blond, one brunette, both stymied by a kind and decent man’s unbewildered offer of a home. Two sides of the same coin. I could hear the Star Trek voice-over man saying those words (actually, I can’t swear it wasn’t the Twilight Zone voice-over man), although I would’ve bet that he couldn’t tell you any more than I could which was the pure-hearted friend and which the cold-blooded knockoff.
I amused myself, briefly, with the image of Piper sporting a bouffant shag and a two-piece polyester starship suit, then said, “You didn’t answer my question. Is worrying about what people will say the only thing stopping you from moving in?”
Belong to Me: A Novel Page 31