Wish You Were Here

by Stewart O'Nan

  “Like how?”

  There was no one home except them and Rufus, but Sarah glanced toward the stairs before leaning over and whispering, “She always screamed at us, okay? Now when she does it, she starts crying like right away, and then she’ll hold on to you while she’s crying.” She lay back on her pillow. “I mean, it’s weird.”

  “Yeah,” Ella agreed. She tried to be nonchalant, but hearing another person’s secrets was new to her. In school, the few friends she had were like her. Not like Sarah, who was smart and beautiful too. At her school, someone like Sarah didn’t hang out with someone like her. Sarah was the kind of girl boys talked about on the bus right in front of you like you were invisible. “Sarah Carlisle,” they’d say, trying to top each other like it was a game, and then the rest of them would groan. They didn’t even have to know her, her name would be famous. No boy would ever say “Ella Maxwell” except to get a laugh.

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said. “I guess she’s just sad, but … You can’t be sad all the time. She lost her job. She’d turn her alarm off and I’d have to make Justin breakfast. And then when she did go to work she’d come home and go right to bed.” She rolled over so the two of them were facing each other, lying on their sides. “One week we had takeout the whole week because she didn’t feel like cooking.”

  Ella had never heard any of this from her mother, and she believed every word. Aunt Margaret walked around the house in her bathrobe. Aunt Margaret forgot to buy groceries. Sarah told it all plainly, and Ella wondered if she could be that brave if her mother went crazy (but she wouldn’t have to do everything like Sarah, she had her dad). She wished she had a secret she could give her in return, but her life was dull, nothing ever happened to her. Except this, she thought, this sudden closeness between them, and how it made her feel, but she couldn’t tell her that.

  She didn’t have to. Sarah reached over and took her in her arms, a quick squeeze of a hug.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t mean to dump all this stuff on you.”

  “It’s okay,” Ella said, surprised by the firmness of her, the musk of her hair.

  “They’ll be home soon,” Sarah said. “We should get up.”

  Ella didn’t want to but agreed. She watched Sarah walk across the carpet in her nightshirt, then close the door to the bathroom. Even her feet were pretty, her calves strong as a ballerina’s. With anyone else she would have been jealous, but with Sarah there was no reason to be. She thought that she’d never met anyone whose looks matched their inner beauty so perfectly. The shower came on, and Ella lay there, her book no longer interesting, listening to the water splash, Sarah’s secrets warm and safe inside her.

  7

  The Institute was free on Sundays, and this was the only chance they’d have, so after lunch Arlene and Emily left Margaret in charge of the children and hopped in the car. It had been sitting in the sun with the windows up. The interior was stale and smelled faintly of dog, but Arlene didn’t mention it. After the racket of the boys, she was just glad to have some quiet. She’d spent thirty-five years listening to children, and while she would keep each of their smiling faces and eager spirits with her (and did, of a winter’s day, occasionally page through a thick album of class pictures that showed the tall young woman slowly grow old and bent while the children stayed the same), very early the music had gone out of their voices.

  This was the difference between the lake and the city: once they got going, it was too cool to keep the windows open. At home she’d be blasting the air conditioner and wouldn’t see these cornfields butted up against the road like a fence, or the ponytailed girl in her convertible making a call from the box outside the Wagon Wheel. Though they had nothing to do with her, these random scenes pleased her, and Arlene thought it didn’t make sense. She felt closer to life away from her own. That was why people traveled, she thought, but they wanted majesty, natural wonders and scenic views. She was happy enough to watch other people. On the golf course, a foursome retreated from a green, the last man flipping his ball in the air and catching it, and for the moment she was satisfied.

  “I’m going to miss coming up,” she said.

  “So will I,” Emily said.

  “Do you think we might rent a place next year?”

  “Possibly. I know I can’t stay in the city all summer.”

  “We could stay on the grounds,” Arlene offered. She’d wanted to since she was a little girl, enchanted with the stately mansard of the Athenaeum, the pink and green cottages and their gingerbread eaves and scalloped shingling, the neat lawns and dazzling gardens. One of her earliest memories was her mother guiding her hand to toss a penny in the hotel’s indoor fountain.

  “Can you imagine?” Emily said. “We’d fit right in with all the other old biddies. I can just see us hustling off to the amphitheater after dinner to hear some professor from SUNY Buffalo enlighten us on God and Public Policy.”

  “Or the opera,” Arlene countered. “Or the symphony. Or the theater.”

  “What about the children? We couldn’t get a place big enough— if we could get in at all. I know Don and Martha Shepard tried to buy a place and were basically told there weren’t any, and that had to have been five years ago. I’m sure it’s worse now.”

  “We’d have to look into it.”

  “Now wouldn’t be the season.”

  “I’ll give Mrs. Klinginsmith a call tomorrow and see what she thinks,” Arlene said.

  She’d never said to Emily that the cottage wasn’t hers to sell, that by rights it still belonged to the Maxwell family, of which she was the eldest living member, but she suspected Emily knew how she felt. Not that Emily had ever asked for her input or apologized for her decision. That wasn’t Emily. In the same way, Arlene never pressed her claim, naturally accepted Henry’s choice, thoughtless as it was.

  The main gate was busy, a guard in white gloves manning the crosswalk as a gaggle of older ladies waddled past, aimed for the turnstiles. They moved as a group and seemed to have dressed as one, all sporting a uniform of floppy sunbonnets and sunglasses tinted the purple of jellyfish, flowered blouses and pastel polyester slacks and what seemed to be nurse’s shoes. Probably a wing of a local senior center, overdue for a dose of fresh air and culture. Arlene thought she and Emily weren’t so different, drawn by habit and the lure of free admission.

  At home she’d be back from cleaning up after coffee at church and halfway through the Times, saving the puzzle for last, struggling with an acrostic her mother would have finished in a snap. A day like today she’d lock the apartment and walk to the park where couples would be playing tennis, young mothers shepherding their toddlers through the playground. She’d find a bench in the shade and read, looking up when an ambulance screamed by or something happened in the pickup baseball game, happy to be the still center of so much motion. Back in her apartment, the illusion drained away, and when the weather was bad there was nowhere to go. She was bored with the Frick Museum, the Scaife Gallery. Some days she didn’t speak to anyone except Emily, over the phone. The mail disappointed her, nothing but second-class junk, offers for credit cards with her name misspelled. She read the Post-Gazette and watched the local news, became, like her mother, intimate with the public life of the city, tracing the intrigues of business and city government as if she were involved. She became—again, like her mother—a dedicated baseball fan, listening to the Pirates on the kitchen radio as she cleaned. She knew the Steelers needed a new quarterback, and that debating with the checkout girl at the Giant Eagle exactly how they should go about getting one was a pleasant break from the monotony of her own thoughts. So was this. It had been the one thing she could count on. She’d been coming here over sixty years.

  When she’d first come, the whole family had taken a clicking trolley along the shore, boys and dogs chasing after it. Henry wore mustard knickers and a short, wide tie, his hair brilliantined, grooved. Her church dress was linen, and the breeze off the lake was delicious. All the gir
ls wore white gloves.

  Now they followed the cars in front of them through the gravel lot—an acre of glinting windshields—and up a dusty cut, jouncing over a grassy field with traffic cones laid out like a driver’s test.

  “Look where we are,” Emily said, but Arlene was trying to mind the teenager in his Institute uniform of white shirt and black slacks waving her into the space. It wasn’t until she’d muscled the shift into park that she saw they were right behind the Putt-Putt.

  On their way to the gate they stopped to take a look. Not even the concrete remained, the slabs dug up and smashed, chips lying under the pines. In one corner an orange-and-white barrel the size of a wine vat listed, its bull’s-eye drifted with needles, a pop can stuck dead center.

  “There’s a picture,” Emily said.

  “He was upset that nobody told him.”

  “I completely forgot. Did you remember?” She chose that note to move on, and Arlene followed.

  “He’s an adult,” Emily said when they were across from the practice shacks, and to Arlene she sounded frustrated. It was nothing new. When Henry was alive, he’d discussed Kenneth with her—his lack of ambition, his problems holding jobs. After all their heartbreak with Margaret, they’d put their hopes in him, only to be disappointed. Privately, Henry worried that he was too soft, always taking his setbacks personally, letting Lisa make his decisions. Through the years, Arlene had seen a thousand oversensitive boys like him and was convinced that their desperate eagerness to please came not from a lack of confidence but from how much their parents needed them to succeed. They were good at taking tests and following directions, but left to themselves, they floundered. They were part of that small subset of students she felt sorry for, seeing, as she could, how life would be unkind to them and how they would never quite understand why—a subset she recognized easily, having narrowly escaped it herself, and then only by finding her life’s work.

  “Is he still with Merck?” she asked.

  “You know, Arlene, at this point I honestly don’t know what he’s doing for a living. What do you think of that?”

  “I think it’s pretty apparent what you think of it.”

  “I think as his mother I deserve some explanation, don’t you?”

  She agreed. “But obviously he feels he can’t tell you for some reason.”

  “I don’t know why. I’ve always supported him, even when he pulled that grad-school stunt.”

  “He may not think that.”

  “Then he would be wrong,” Emily said. They were part of a crowd now, drawn out along the highway like refugees, but Emily spoke as if they were alone. “I’ve watched him do this for thirty-eight years, and I’m tired of it. The least he could do is be honest with me.”

  The woman in front of them stopped short, and Arlene nearly ran into her. They’d reached the crosswalk by the main gate and waited with the rest of the old ladies, the conversation simmering in her. She would not presume to give Emily advice on her children, since, having none of her own, she was supposed to be ignorant, but Margaret and Kenneth, in a way, were hers too, and she would fight for them with a teacher’s instinctive fair-handedness. Henry would expect that of her.

  Inside the turnstiles, girls in matching skirts were handing out the day’s program. Both she and Emily accepted one and fit them into their purses. It was enough to know the chamber concerts and lectures were being offered. If they had more time, perhaps they would take one in, but today they had come, as they did every year, to reacquaint themselves with the Institute, to stroll the shady lanes between the storybook cottages and geometric flowerbeds and enjoy the feeling that time stood still here or at least moved at a more stately pace, the same families come up from Pittsburgh or down from Buffalo to pay tribute to the eternal virtues of beauty in art and progress through moral education. They came, Arlene thought, as her great-grandmother had come a hundred years ago, walking these same carless streets with her grandmother, to renew their faith in Knowledge and Society and God. They came, like her own family before the war, to have high tea on the porch of the Athenaeum and watch the sailboats race buoy to buoy.

  “What do you think it was?” Emily asked.

  She’d lost her, and Arlene had to excuse herself.

  “At the gas station.”

  “I don’t know,” Arlene said. “A robbery.”

  “I think the police are serious when they put up that tape. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was killed.”

  “I’m sure he’ll fill us in.”

  “I doubt the police would tell him anything. I expect they’ll ask him not to talk about the case with anyone.”

  “Like jury duty,” Arlene said, partly mocking.

  Emily’s legal expertise came from the mysteries she read. Her only real experience with the law was one week of jury duty, an ex-convict from Hazelwood charged with a parole violation, illegal possession of firearms, after which she went over the case with any and all who would listen to her, the moral of the story being how shockingly ill prepared the lawyers were.

  Emily ignored the remark. “I wonder if he’ll have to come back and testify if there’s a trial, or if they can just take a statement.”

  The brick walk swept them directly through a clutch of fussy two-story cottages, each flying a pair of flags from the upstairs porch—one American and one Irish, one American and one French, as if they were miniature embassies. The railings were too beautiful for flower boxes, and it appeared the entire block had agreed on hanging baskets of red geraniums. The crowd had thinned out, milling. A man in a Hawaiian shirt was videotaping everything for posterity.

  “Imagine the upkeep on these,” Emily said. “They probably have to paint them every other year.”

  “How much do you think they go for?” Arlene asked.

  “I have no idea,” Emily said.

  “It’s been such a good year for roses.”

  “With the heat. I doubt very seriously any of these would be for sale. The condos are what they’re trying to get rid of. I think they overbuilt. People don’t want condos when they’re at Chautauqua. They would have served themselves better if they’d built more cottages.”

  “There’s one for you.” It was lemon with pink eaves and gobs of scrollwork, trumpet vines twining up a coach light. “I think it would be fun for a week.”

  “You’re not going to let go of this, are you?”

  “How much could it cost to rent one?”

  “Two thousand. Twenty-five hundred.”

  “Split four ways, that’s not outrageous.”

  “I don’t think Kenneth or Margaret have that kind of money.”

  “Maybe we could foot the bill,” Arlene suggested, and when Emily didn’t respond, added, “It wouldn’t be summer without us coming here.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Emily said. “If worse comes to worse, we’ll get ourselves a room at the Saint Elmo with all the other spinsters and widow ladies.”

  She said it so dryly it could have been a joke or a promise.

  “I think I prefer the Athenaeum.”

  “We couldn’t afford it. It’s where they put up church bigwigs and special guests now. My mother stayed there when Gershwin was here. She said he would walk into the lobby after composing all day in one of those god-awful huts and sit down at the piano and just go to town. He’d take requests, and he knew everything—not that that’s surprising. What is surprising is that she said he had a wonderful voice. I always think of him as rather quiet, and Ira as the more public one, but it turns out he was very outgoing.”

  Like most of Emily’s tidbits, this seemed to have no point except to impress Arlene, who’d heard it at least ten times before, usually on the porch of the Athenaeum itself, among company. She decided not to pursue her own point for now, but let it flutter untouched between them.

  As they wandered deeper into the grounds, the brick path gave way to lumpy asphalt that looked strangely out of place, as if it were temporary, the remnan
t of some construction project. The cottages were less showy back here, more utilitarian, tucked under the shadows of peeling oaks. Instead of cushioned wicker, the porch furniture was ugly resin, and Arlene thought they could surely afford this.

  On the plaza the Crafts Alliance was having its weekly festival, makeshift booths lining the four sides. After having spent the morning at the flea market, she was in no mood to shop, but Emily seemed interested, so she followed dutifully, giving her opinion on scarves and earrings, geode paperweights and sand paintings, windchimes made from nylon fishing line and someone’s tarnished, discarded silver. On the grass, two little boys were throwing a Frisbee ineptly, with no parents in view. As she and Emily moved from booth to booth, Arlene kept an eye on them, until finally the boys’ father showed up with ice-cream cones.

  “Should we get something for the children?” Emily asked.

  “Do you think they really need anything?”

  “The girls might like these,” she said, meaning the beaten silver rings a shaggy man in a denim jacket had laid out in black velvet trays. Unlike much of the jewelry there, these were noticeably handmade; the man had a red beard and his hands were tough as roots. Emily found two plain bands that were nearly identical. “They’re only nine dollars,” she said (“Two for fifteen,” the man bettered her), and looked to her as if for permission, and Arlene said Yes, that would be nice for them, but then they’d have to get the boys something, and boys were impossible.

  They were. There was nothing here that would interest a ten-year-old boy. There were not very many things in the world that would interest a ten-year-old boy, Arlene thought, plumbing her memory. Sports equipment and video games, possibly frogs and snakes, but those only for a moment. There were years when she confiscated hundreds of comic books, dozens of yo-yos, a drawerful of the big McDonald’s straws they used to shoot spitballs, but not once had she caught a boy with a scented candle or a crocheted pot holder. “This is a waste of time,” she said, but in the name of justice Emily persisted. They walked all the way around the plaza before giving in and buying cheap, prepackaged kites from the gift shop by the cafeteria, and then had to drag them around all afternoon.