by Greg Johnson
This was probably a good time, Abby had thought. Earlier that afternoon they’d endured a grim Thanksgiving meal with Aunt Millicent and several of her widowed, lonely friends; for Abby, this annual ritual could not end soon enough, but she’d been aware that Lucille had enjoyed the outing. Holiday get-togethers, no matter how dismal, always cheered her. If she were liable ever to think indulgently about Thom, Abby supposed, the hours when she sat digesting Millicent’s dry turkey breast and sugary yams might be the time. Yet when Abby told her, Lucille’s hands gave an involuntary spasm, the needlepoint frame fell to her lap, and in a guilty rush Abby thought of her mother’s last, rancorous encounter with Thom, and all the horror and disruption that had followed. Helplessly she thought, Not again. It won’t happen again…. So she said into her mother’s blank, startled face, as if they might have been discussing what to cook for dinner, “He sounded fine, really—and sort of apologetic. He wants me to fly down there.”
“You? Fly down there?”
“He asked about speaking to you,” Abby said carefully, “but I told him you might not be ready.”
Lucille had nodded, licking her lips. “That was good, honey. Yes.” She clutched the arms of her chair. “Then what did he say?”
“He said…um, he said he understood,” Abby said, groping. “He probably should have written first, he admitted, instead of calling out of the blue. That’s what he said.”
She lied so poorly!—but of course her mother didn’t notice.
Lucille stared into the spotless brick-bordered fireplace—they hadn’t used it once—as though mesmerized by writhing flames. “He was never much of one for writing,” she said.
“No, I guess not. Anyway, he seems to want a reconciliation. He asked if he could come visit, but I said no.”
Lucille gave her a startled look, but then her eyes narrowed, as if her daughter’s refusal masked some shrewd maneuver Lucille couldn’t fathom but was prepared to admire. “You did?” she said, nodding. “And then what did he say?”
“That’s when he asked if I’d fly down there. I said I’d think about it.”
“But what are you going to do?” Lucille said, exasperated. Her voice had turned shrill; in this same tone she often complained she got tired of “dragging” information out of Abby.
Abby had taken a chair opposite her mother’s. Normally she avoided sitting here, and not only because the matching silk-upholstered wing-backs, angled cozily before the fireplace, suggested the kind of tête-à-tête they never had. She was tired generally of feeling paired with her mother, in all sorts of unlikely contexts. It was bad enough they’d bought this suburban town house together with its roommate floor plan—identical bedroom suites on either side of the living area—and that her mother had recently gotten her hair cut short and fluffy about her head, a much younger style than her daughter’s demure little pageboy. Even worse, she’d had it tinted a flame-like reddish-orange, several shades brighter than Abby’s. Why didn’t Abby change her hair after breaking up with Graham? one of her friends at school had suggested, but this idea held no appeal. Shortly after moving to Philadelphia she’d gotten the pageboy cut, impulsively, after thumbing a newsstand copy of Harper’s Bazaar and seeing it on a pouting, soigné model in a sequin-collared tuxedo. She’d never felt comfortable with the haircut but had not wanted to resume the shiny, bouncy, popular-high-school-girl style she’d kept into her thirties. Her mother had urged Abby to copy her new “Shirley MacLaine bob,” as she called it, but to resemble her mother’s younger-looking twin was the last thing Abby wanted. On Lucille the haircut had a pixie-like flair, at least, for someone in her sixties, but on the taller, thinner Abby it would resemble, she knew, a mere shapeless cap stuck onto her head.
Abby had spent little time thinking about her appearance these past few years, as though stubbornly taking a different path from Lucille. (Her mother had also started dressing “younger,” as she admitted freely, now and then buying a blouse or piece of jewelry gaudier than anything Abby would wear.) Lucille crowed with delight whenever one of her friends, or sometimes a perfect stranger—a checkout lady at the A & P, most recently—insisted they looked “like sisters.” Lucille was almost seventy and looked it, and Abby was thirty-six: how could they look like sisters? Since ending her long engagement several months earlier, Abby was hardly prone to vanity, but she bristled at the assumption that she and her mother, because they lived together and seemed to get along, must have a great deal in common. “You’re so lucky,” Abby had heard her Aunt Millicent tell Lucille one day, “to have your daughter as your best friend. I hardly ever hear from Evelyn or Sandra, either one.” The thought of Lucille being mistaken for her best friend had chilled Abby’s heart. She and her mother were no more alike than two women randomly thrown together in a college dormitory.
During their awkward conversation after Thorn’s phone call, Abby had grown tired of the pretense that they were in cahoots against him. She said, “I’m going to do exactly what I told him I’d do. Think about it.”
“What? You’ve got to go,” her mother said. “This was what we were waiting for, the first year or two, wasn’t it?—until we sort of gave up. I thought it was over, really. I thought he’d never call.”
Abby hadn’t given up, but saw no point in telling her mother that.
“I guess you’re right,” she said. She paused, feeling a childish intransigence. “But I’ll have to think about it.”
“What for? You can go down, spend a few days, and then you can both come back here. You gave your last exams on Tuesday, didn’t you?—so this is perfect timing. And we’ve still got several weeks to work everything out before Christmas. We’ll have Millicent and her girls over, of course, and the kids. We’ll have a little reunion on Christmas eve.”
Abby knew better than to feel surprised at her mother’s mind racing ahead, the reconciliation all but accomplished, the past forgotten; in another few seconds Lucille would be planning Thorn’s homecoming party, thinking about the food and the color of the napkins. Abby’s need to stop her, to apply the brakes, induced a perilous, quicksilver moment when she longed to blurt out the truth. The force of this yearning pulled her forward in her chair, made her take a deep breath. She said in the calm, even tone her mother would interpret as stubbornness, “I said I have to think about it, Mom. Please try to relax. Please don’t get carried away.”
She stood and left the room, affecting a brisk decidedness though her hands were shaking. Whether this was anger or simple terror she couldn’t have said.
She went to the phone on her bedside table and made the reservation, discussing fares and seating arrangements in the mild, businesslike voice in which she taught her classes and made small talk with colleagues in the faculty lounge. There was no point in waiting or thinking. There was no way to keep Lucille’s fantasies in check, no matter that her children, as she said often, had never failed to disappoint her. But a few days later, strapped into her seat as the plane lumbered into the air, Abby wondered if perhaps their lives shouldn’t remain as they were. As Thom had said, there was surely a good chance that Lucille, who had grown querulous and irrational with age, would interpret his illness as yet another betrayal. Abby could return from Atlanta and say ruefully that she and Thom had quarreled: it was likely, in fact it was certain, that neither of them would hear from him again. No, he hadn’t apologized. He hadn’t sent along any message to his mother. This would bring a few tears, perhaps, but it would also bring closure. (This was a word Lucille had picked up from the talk shows she watched; she only wanted closure with Thom, she would say wistfully.) After a while, Lucille would begin wondering why her children had quarreled, and what Abby had done or said to provoke him, but that was something Abby would refuse to let her mother drag out of her. So Lucille would never suffer the truth, and she could blame her vague unhappiness on her two inconsiderate children for the rest of her life.
But that was fantasy too. Abby took a deep breath and opened the paperback sh
e’d brought, but within seconds Valerie Patten, that pert little made-up woman she’d all but forgotten, interrupted her.
“Is anything wrong?” the woman asked.
“Wrong?” Abby said.
“That book you’re reading—are you enjoying it?”
“Yes, it’s—” Then she saw: she was holding the book upside down.
Valerie Patten laughed brightly. “Sorry,” she said, touching Abby’s wrist. “I couldn’t help but notice.”
Abby closed the book and put it aside. “I’m a little preoccupied,” she admitted. “And flying makes me nervous.”
“Me, too. I can’t even pretend to read.” She laughed again, her tiny palms held upward in comic resignation. Abby smiled. There was something sad but sympathetic in the dogged effort implied by the woman’s clothes, jewelry, make-up. Almost everyone on this flight wore ordinary jeans and jackets, or sweatshirts. (Abby had already tugged one sleeve of her old blue sweater down over the cuff with the missing button, which she’d fastened with a safety pin this morning; and she wished she’d at least bothered with some lipstick—and some polish for her bitten-down nails.) Perhaps Valerie had imagined being paired at random with some handsome stranger who would become helplessly smitten and take her to lunch at the Ritz-Carlton when they reached Atlanta. Ten years ago, Abby herself might have entertained such a fantasy.
“Speaking of reading,” Valerie said, “I went to a fortune teller yesterday down on South Street. That’s what they call it, you know—a reading. She used the Tarot cards, she stared at my palms for a while, and guess what. A new man is about to enter my life! I thought to myself, four husbands and you’re telling me there’s going to be another man? Why not remind me, too, that after Tuesday comes Wednesday? Anyway, for this I paid $60. The woman claimed to be Jamaican, she wore some sort of native costume and talked about voodoo for a while, but she didn’t fool me. I know she was just a little black girl from North Philly. She sounded about as Jamaican as I do. It was fun, I guess, but really—a new man!”
Abby nodded. “My brother and I did that once, when we were in college. It was my birthday, and he took me to an old woman in Little Five Points. I think her name was Sister Amelia—a spiritual reader and adviser, she called herself. She assumed Thom was my boyfriend, and in the first five minutes she told us we should go ahead and get married.”
“Oh, you’re kidding. How hilarious!” Valerie cried. When she laughed, her eyes crinkled agreeably. Abby noticed that some of the glossy lipstick had rubbed onto her front teeth. “Then what happened, did you tell her the truth?” she asked.
Before Abby could reply, a male flight attendant appeared in the aisle, tugging at his beverage cart and asking what they’d like to drink. Valerie quickly turned to him, asking questions, prolonging the transaction with some flirtatious banter, even though the attendant, a handsome, dimpled man with curly blond hair, looked no older than twenty-five. Abby ordered a diet cola, but to her surprise Valerie asked for a glass of red wine though it wasn’t yet eleven o’clock. After serving their drinks the attendant handed them each a foil-wrapped bag of peanuts and moved to the next row.
Valerie sipped gingerly at her wine. “This should help,” she murmured, then amended: “This should help a lot.”
Abby didn’t ask her to explain, and wondered if that fruity odor might be more than just perfume. She wondered, too, if it would be rude to pick up her book again, since Valerie Patten was clearly in the mood to talk.
“Do you live in Atlanta?” Valerie asked. “You don’t sound like you’re from Philly, either.”
“We moved north a few years ago, my mother and I,” Abby said quickly, “but my brother stayed behind. We grew up in Atlanta.”
“So you’re going to visit him? That’s nice,” Valerie said vaguely. “I haven’t seen either one of my brothers in years. They disapproved of my second husband, thinking I shouldn’t have divorced the first one. They were probably right, as it turned out. They never even met number three or four! And now I’ve gone back to ‘Patten,’ my maiden name. What about you, hon? You married?”
Valerie had slipped the question in so swiftly that Abby answered without thinking, “No, I just broke off a long engagement.” She bit her lip. Normally, she was skilled at evading such queries. Even the other day on the phone, she’d managed to sidestep certain oblique questions from Thom, disguised as casual conversation: What was she doing with herself lately? How was the nightlife in Philly? Abby had said she stayed very busy with her work and then changed the subject.
“Oh, sorry to hear that,” the woman said, and the sympathy in her voice did sound genuine. “But you’re younger than I am and probably smarter too.” She touched two fingers to her lips and hiccuped briefly. “Better you broke it off than to be stuck in a bad marriage,” she added. “Believe you me.”
Abby allowed the image of Graham’s face—tense, anguished in disbelief—to drift into her mind’s eye. She felt a bit light-headed, as if she were the one drinking a glass of wine. The altitude, she supposed. Valerie Patten, after all, was a woman she didn’t know and would never see again. So she said the words she hadn’t said to her mother or her friends, or even to Graham. “I didn’t love him. Simple as that.” She knew her voice sounded cool and unconcerned—again, her schoolteacher’s voice—but she supposed it didn’t matter. “I don’t know why I ever agreed to marry him.”
“God, do I know that feeling,” Valerie laughed. She sipped her wine, her necklace of tiny, tilted gold hearts winking brightly. “Especially with Marty, the guy I married two years ago. In fact,” and now Valerie leaned close, her voice husky and conspiratorial, “that’s why I’m going to Atlanta. To try and get things settled, once and for all.”
Abby had tensed, resisting the urge to draw back in her seat. The blend of the woman’s cloying perfume and wine-soaked breath was faintly repellent.
“Do you mean…are you reconciling?” Abby said.
Valerie shook her head. “No, no. That’s what he wants, but—” She paused. “Well, I hope you don’t mind listening to this, but Marty sent me a letter. It came just yesterday.” She stopped again, giving Abby a sideways look. “I’m just wondering,” she added, “how you would handle this. You seem like such a sensible girl. Not a sentimental fool like me.”
But Valerie said “fuel,” not “fool”; Abby wondered how much the woman had drunk before boarding the plane.
“I don’t mind,” Abby said doubtfully. “He sent you a letter? Your ex-husband?”
Valerie nodded. She’d nestled her small leather handbag between her hip and the armrest, and now she undid the clasp and extracted a small, folded-over envelope.
“It’s just a note, really.” She held it in the air between them, turning it over as though displaying evidence. “See, I’ve been staying with my sister for a while. She’s divorced, too, but she’s still got her big place in Society Hill. Anyway, Marty doesn’t have Andrea’s address or phone number, so he sends letters to my mom’s house—she lives in Miami Beach—and begs her to forward them. I’ve gotten two, three letters a week, sometimes more, all pleading with me to come back, let’s give it another try. Never mind that we’ve already given it thirty-five tries. Andrea thought I should return the letters unopened, but I didn’t have the heart. The letters were so sweet, in a way. Marty always wrote very well. In fact, he works for an ad firm.”
She laughed, as if recalling some private joke.
“I guess he figured I wasn’t buying, since the letters stopped coming about a month ago. I hadn’t answered a single one, you see. Andrea insisted I shouldn’t. She was afraid he’d turn into a psycho stalker and come murder us in our beds or something. If I ignored him, she said, he’d eventually give up, and for awhile I really thought he had. I was so relieved. I thought he’d finally gotten on with his life, you know? But then yesterday, out of the blue”—she flicked the envelope with one of her crimson nails—“comes this.”
She paused; her face had sagged a
little.
“I—I just wondered what you would do, if you got a letter like this.” Again she stopped. To Abby’s surprise, the woman’s pale-blue eyes glistened with tears.
“But what’s in it?” Abby said, trying not to sound too eager. “What did he write?”
Valerie said, sniffling, “I shouldn’t bother you with this. You’d rather be reading your book.” Again she rooted in her purse. She brought out a wrinkled blue Kleenex and dabbed at her eyes.
“I really don’t mind—”
“Nope, I’ve got to stop acting this way. It’s so foolish and irrational.”
Valerie dropped the envelope back in her purse, then fastened the clasp with a decisive twist of her fingers. Again she brought the Kleenex to her eyes.
Abby said, her gaze fixed on the purse, “Are you OK?”
Valerie gave a brief, pained-looking smile. She’d begun fiddling with her seat belt.
“Sure, I’m fine—thanks for asking.” She patted Abby’s hand. “I’d better get to the little girls’ room. This wine is going right through me.”
Valerie fastened the tray table, neatly depositing the empty bottle in the seat pocket and cradling the plastic cup of wine in her hand. As she stood, steadying herself against the seatback, Abby’s attention stayed on the purse, which Valerie had casually dropped onto her seat.
A small, vanilla-suede clutch purse, expensive-looking but soiled around the edges.
Abby took a breath. She recalled guiltily the time when she was about fourteen and Lucille had scolded her. Aunt Millicent had come to visit, and one morning when Millicent had gone out Lucille had caught Abby and Thom in the guest room, systematically rifling through their aunt’s private things. Abby had just held up one of Millicent’s ancient corsets—an impossibly complicated, heavy contraption, faded from its original white to a pale ivory—for Thorn’s inspection. Both had been giggling, joking back and forth, tugging at the corset between them, when Lucille appeared at the doorway, hands on her hips: “Abigail! Thomas!” She’d given them a predictable lecture about respecting the privacy of others, about the ignominious character of people who descended to “snooping.” Twelve-year-old Thom had hurried off, snickering under his breath and leaving Abby to another volley of scolding. “I might have expected this of Thom,” Lucille fumed. “He’s still a boy, after all, and he’s always been prankish. But you, Abigail.”