Ladies of the House

by Lauren Edmondson

  This was so absurd I almost laughed. I rose from the bed, stood before her, my hands on her shoulders. “That’s objectively false,” I said, recalling Atlas, the way I’d lunged toward him with a passion that was entirely unreciprocated.

  Wallis made a sound like she disagreed, then pulled away to half-heartedly rummage through her suitcase. After she’d tugged on a short-sleeve blouse and frayed jean shorts, she left to find Bo. Meanwhile, I got myself through the airline’s automated system to an actual human, who switched us to a noon flight for the minor fee of a couple hundred dollars. Onto my credit card. A full savings account was officially a distant dream.

  In the hallway, there were shuffles. Floorboards creaked. The house was waking up.

  Wallis came back with word that Bo had accepted her apology, but that Collette Reed was not yet awake to receive ours. We would have to send flowers and a card. As Wallis ordered the car, I calculated how many orange tulips it would take to mop up our mess.

  Twenty-Five

  “Family meeting,” I said from my sister’s doorway, though I wasn’t sure this could be considered such, as Wallis was prone in her bed, Cricket beside her, caressing her hand. “What are we going to do about this?”

  “About what?” Wallis’s back was to me, her pillow muffling her voice. “Blake’s gone. Nothing left to do.”

  “I meant about you,” I said. On the plane, I’d reiterated to myself the importance of keeping the tuition news to myself. Wallis, and now Cricket, too, had enough to deal with. I also wasn’t ready to talk about it, wasn’t even sure how. In the taxi, I proposed ways to keep us both occupied and distracted: an activity, a movie, a hike along Rock Creek, even the mediocre open mic night at the bar down the street. But Wallis had found fault in all my suggestions, and stubbornly remained despondent, her eyes lonely and blank. “We’ve got to figure out a way to piece you back together.”

  “It’s not some switch I can flip,” she argued. “If it were so easy to get it together don’t you think I would’ve done it by now?”

  I was tired, scruffy, in need of a shower. I’d eaten a dense, flavorless muffin in the airport before we’d boarded, hours ago. It had been the opposite of nourishment. Still, I couldn’t let up. “It’s excruciating for me to see you in this pain. Please,” I begged, circling to the other side of the bed. “Remember, my God, there is a silver lining here. And I know you may not want to acknowledge it,” I said as she burrowed deeper in her pillow. I raised my voice. “But think of what might’ve happened if he’d kept you strung along for months and months, through the campaign. Or worse! Think of if you’d gone through this election with him, only to discover who he really is after you’d given up everything.”

  “I’ve already given up so much,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, dropping to my knees, reaching out to tuck back hair that had fallen over her eyes. “What have you given up?”

  “My heart, Daisy. My time. You know, he told me to wait for him until after his mother got reelected. Then he just wanted us to wait until after the confirmation hearings. And so I waited because I believed him. I believed in us.”

  “Cricket?” I looked up at my mother, pleading. “Ideas?”

  She stared at me blankly, then returned to Wallis. “I wish I could take away some of your pain, darling,” she said. “I know how much you love him.”

  “That’s not helpful, Cricket,” I said.

  Cricket released Wallis’s hand and, without preamble, got up and escorted me from the bedroom by the elbow. Once we were out of earshot, she wheeled on me. “You can’t snap at her like that, Daisy. She needs to wallow. She also needs you to allow it.”

  Frustrated, I threw up my arms. “I can’t just sit here—”

  Cricket stopped me. “No one is asking you to. But Wallis isn’t like you. She can’t just keep busy and forget about it.”

  If only I could forget: about Atlas’s text, entrenched in my phone: Stealing seems to have started with your college tuition. There was not enough busywork in the bureaucracy to make me forget those words. They had set up camp in my brain. The tent was pitched, the fire lit. For more than a day it had been blazing, and I still couldn’t figure out how to respond to this news, and to Atlas himself, who was waiting on my response. Cricket sensed me spiraling, I think, because though she still held my elbow, she’d softened her grip.

  “I’m not busy, Cricket. Not anymore. So how am I supposed to deal with everything now?” I closed my eyes. My mother chanted my name. Daisy. Daisy. Daisy. Then we were on the couch, and she was telling me to breathe deeply. I obeyed, but the task was harder than it should’ve been. I had to consciously remind myself that panic was impractical. When I felt more stable, I opened my eyes. Across from us were my father’s same old wing chairs. But the walls—no longer psych ward white. “Cricket,” I said. “The walls are blue.”

  “Delicious color, isn’t it?” She admired the room. “I got the paint at the resale shop. Took a gallon and most of the day. And I only ruined one pair of shoes.”

  “You did this?”

  “Yes, Daisy, I painted a few walls. They say, change your wall color, change your life. Right?”

  “Change your hair,” I said, smiling at the idea of Cricket acclimating to this apartment. “Change your life.”

  “Well, I like my hair currently,” she said, tossing it back. “So, walls it was.”

  “I like it,” I said.

  “That’s a relief. Now, Daisy, you and I both know that Wallis will be fine. But if you tell her she will, she will insist she won’t. This is one of the earliest lessons I learned as a mother.”

  “Reverse psychology?”

  “No,” Cricket said, bemused. “Just backing the hell up.”

  I appreciated her confidence, but she still hadn’t solved the problem of what we should do in the meantime. I searched the room, landing on the television. An idea came to me. “When we were little, when Wallis or I felt lousy, you would pour us a giant bowl of cereal with half-and-half and let us watch soap operas or episodes of ER.”

  Cricket looked confused. “That cheered you up?” she asked. “That was me being lazy.”

  “That was you being wonderful.” There’d been a day, around sixth grade, when a cool girl had made fun of my saddle pants. In retrospect, she’d been right; those pants (violet, stretchy) had been heinous, but she’d been cruel, and I’d been so down about it. Until, that is, Cricket had introduced me to Dr. Ross.

  Cricket gestured toward her refrigerator. “I have some light cream for coffee. Would that work?”

  “Yes. Cereal?” She shook her head no. “I’ll go around the corner to the store. I’ll get some beauty supplies, too. She can wallow in a mud mask.”

  “When you’re back, you can set up the Netflix.”

  I placed my hand on her shoulder. “Cricket, you can set it up yourself. You still have the paper with the instructions I wrote for you? Good. I believe in you.”

  She puffed up her chest, which made me grin. I didn’t actually expect her to succeed; this was a task that required remote control mastery and an understanding of the difference between HDMI 1 and 2 on the outdated television we’d saved from P. Nevertheless, when I returned with bags of feel-better supplies, she stood in the living room, triumphant, a show already queued. Wallis was curled on the couch under a heavy blanket, chewing her cuticles. I knelt before her and wordlessly lined up my drugstore offerings on the coffee table: nail polish, ice cream, fruity loops, fuzzy socks with rainbows, gummy worms.

  “Which one first?” I asked.

  Wallis only hesitated a moment. “All,” she said, not even glancing down at the array of selections.

  Cricket procured spoons. And for a few hours, we practiced the delicate art of forgetting.

  May

  Twenty-Six

  After the night of in
dulgence with Cricket and Wallis, I turned to a blank page in the back of my day planner and began to formulate a list.

  The first bullet point: my job. I needed it back, now more than ever.

  My guilty conscience was thumping from beneath the floorboards. In a way, I envied the person I’d been before, the version of me who had sat through classes and lectures, enjoyed meals with friends and office hours with professors, delighted in books and readings, blithely unaware of how my father had paid for it all. I even looked wistfully on the Daisy of a week ago, who recognized the disgraceful side of her father, but didn’t yet understand how it had benefited her directly. But now I knew, and I couldn’t unknow, and measures needed to be taken to make up for it.

  My father was gone, and so the entirety of restitution rolled forward, onto me. Fine. I was a part of this; I needed urgently to make amends—through work, doing some good. Miles still hadn’t called, but I wouldn’t let a small thing like that derail me.

  As motivation, in case I lost momentum or hope, I jotted down what the Judge had said in Charleston: It is easier for men to take things.

  To get my job, I’d have to take it.

  That’s how I ended up at Union Market on the Thursday after Charleston for lattes with Ari. The workday lunch crowd was there, as was the stroller set. I, in a coat too heavy for the weather, waited for her in the appointed place—an espresso stall selling designer coffee. Naturally, I was blotchy and breathless from the ten-minute power walk from the Red Line. If only I had the courage to dab my cleavage with a napkin, to shrug off my jacket and reveal sweat stains to the neatly aproned baristas and their clientele.

  Ari had texted me midweek. Atlas had informed her I was on leave, and she asked if we could grab dinner, she might have something that could help. I had no desire to get to know her better, but I couldn’t turn down the offer of assistance.

  There was also this issue of loneliness. I’d been out of the office for almost a month, and other than the trip to Charleston, I hadn’t had a lot of variety in my personal life. Cricket was often gone during the day, and Wallis, as despondent as ever, was still dragging herself to work. There was only so much pleasure one could get by making small talk with grocery cashiers and other strangers forced to interact with you. I couldn’t suffer through a whole meal with Ari, but a coffee seemed reasonable and, at this point, preferable to sending a Hey, long time! text to one of my former friends who’d distanced themselves after—everything.

  I could combat my love for Atlas another day, in private. In public, at least, I could pretend that Ari’s presence didn’t bother me. I envisioned bringing up the subject of Atlas myself, as though to say, Oh, I see your superior claims on him, and raise you one tone of nonchalance.

  I’d reread his texts many times since Charleston, though I wasn’t sure why. I knew the lines by heart but still had no answer for him.

  It was possible that Atlas had told her about his discovery; they were sharing a bed, after all. I didn’t know what they talked about on their pillows, but if it were about me, I would be mortified.

  “I love this place,” Ari said when she arrived at the stall’s counter. She wore a beautiful cream coat that tied in the front like a bathrobe. She hugged me—squeezed me, rather—with an enthusiasm I wasn’t ready for. The perfect swoop of her ponytail reminded me of cursive letters, of signatures. “I haven’t been here since I left DC. It makes me think of Borough Market.”

  Union Market was as trendy now as it had been when it opened a handful of years ago. The neighborhood had formerly been known only for its industrial warehouses, but was now dense with cranes and newer structures that advertised themselves as “mixed use.” If you build it, they will come. They weren’t wrong. From the outside, Union Market’s once scruffy exterior had been buffed, so it looked less like a run-down terminal and more like a big, modern food hall. Inside, it was full of colorful stalls selling microgreens, oysters, and tea towels. The butcher would let you taste the difference between soppressata and chorizo before buying. One could purchase a cactus in a pot. Sepia-toned pictures of the original purveyors hung on the interior walls. In the summer, there were beer festivals and crawfish boils. You can easily imagine the lines for the smoked fish counter during the holidays.

  “This is so nice, Daisy,” Ari said after we’d located an unoccupied table next to the glass garage doors that would be raised soon when the weather was warm enough. “I’m so happy we could get together and catch up.” We clinked takeaway cups of chai. “It’s incredibly painful trying to make new friends as an adult.”

  I cleared my throat, preparing to do what was needed to land on her good side. “Yes. And, you know, I feel a little weird about when I ran into you the other week. I was so shocked to see you. I feel like I might’ve come across as cold. I didn’t mean to be.”

  In her response, she managed to both call me ridiculous and a sweetheart, but I let it go. We did the business of stirring, of sipping, of comparing lists of people we knew. Then I let her do most of the talking. Ari spoke like many slender women do—animatedly, with shoulders hunched slightly forward, elbows extended out, creating even more definition in their biceps. She was naturally clever, and had a filthy mouth with a natural instinct for just the right place to use the word fuck for maximum impact.

  It took me by greater surprise how little she did to conceal her opportunism. This was actually pretty rare in Washington—not the ambition, of course, but the acknowledgment of it. Usually these types at minimum attempt to cloak their ferocious ladder-climbing with some humility. DC loves a mythmaker. How often have we heard: My grandfather worked in a factory, or My mother drove a school bus, or I was so poor I didn’t have two nickels to rub together? My father didn’t let a speech go by without informing the crowd he was the son of a car salesman. Not this from Ari. “My lips,” she whispered to me, “were once thinner, before the injections.” That was her harshest criticism of herself, for which I had to give her credit.

  What could I tell her that she didn’t already know? She knew everything, everyone. She’d been living in England for the past three years, had only just moved back, but there she was, insisting she had the best manicurist, the best suite at the baseball park, the best tarot card reader, if I happened to be so inclined. Did I want to try cryotherapy?

  Instead of revealing my ignorance about what in God’s name that was, I changed the subject. “Do you miss London?” Maybe she’d delight me and say yes. Then she’d go back. And though Atlas still wouldn’t love me, at least I wouldn’t be ambushed by visions of them together.

  The night before, Ari had added me as a friend on social media and I became one of two thousand followers. I scrolled for hours. Not one picture was dingy, not one suggested a life less than ideal. There were some photos of Atlas, though never when he was looking straight at the camera, and still more of her, by lakes, in forests, holding wine, holding cupcakes, holding other things she certainly did not end up eating.

  “Not really,” she said. “I mean—I miss some parts. The feeling of living in a city of little villages. The ability to fly anywhere else in Europe pretty easily. The fact that you could buy bags of potato chips in pubs. The shopping and fashion.”

  “I suppose DC doesn’t compare to the London fashion scene,” I said hopefully.

  Ari’s lips curled. “No,” she said. “Have you thought of living abroad?”

  I had the sense, muted but insistent, that we were circling each other. “No,” I said. “I went to Charleston last week and that was enough travel for a while.”

  “Atlas told me you were there.” Of course he did. Lovers told each other things. My jealousy at their intimacy flashed so bright I had to blink it away. How lovely it would be if I could say his name like she could, dropped so casually, like ice into a glass. She continued, “With the Darleys all over the news, there must’ve been a lot of talk of them down there. How is Miles pre
paring for the confirmation hearings next week?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been—”

  “Out, yes.” She sat upright in her dainty chair as though it were a throne. “You’re taking some time off. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “The rumors suggest otherwise. People are saying I’ve been fired. And have you heard the one about my nervous breakdown?” This last one I hated the most for its callousness and objective sexism.

  She smiled. “Yes, that one’s been floated. But don’t worry, Daisy, I’ve been defending you to everyone. Atlas, too.”

  She sounded sincere, looked it, too, so I couldn’t help but lower my defenses and admit, “Miles is having a hard time trusting me. It’s a bit of a problem.”

  She tapped her lips with a manicured finger. “Miles is going to want to dent Melinda Darley’s fender in the confirmation hearings, I assume?”

  “Dent? More like total.”

  She nodded. “I may have some gossip you can bring to him. It may help.”

  I perked up, glad she had brought up the reason for this meeting, finally. “Source?”

  “We have a client who is—shall we say—deathly afraid of Melinda Darley’s nomination.”

  “Big Hospital doesn’t want to lose their Medicare funding,” I said.

  “Of course not,” she said. “More funding, extra cash, big raises for CEOs.”

  The market was getting busier; I moved my chair to the side so people could more easily pass around me. “When you said ‘deathly’ afraid, you’re talking about the very real fear of having to sell your personal helicopter, I assume?”

  “Correct. Okay. So. Hold on to your panties.”