And now she is waiting in an interminable line because the store is, of course, perpetually understaffed. She tries to hold on to the serene, wise persona she discovered in the car, focusing on the back of the head in front of her. Be in the moment. Breathe. Live. That’s the secret to happiness. Notice the pink-and-blue flowery scarf, over pink curlers, which are twisted around pinky-red hair, the material of the scarf thin enough so one can see how sparse and dull the hair is. Sad. Ugliness is sad.
The woman turns, as if she knows she’s being judged.
“Oh.” Tally tries to cover the rudeness of her shock, tries to make the exhalation sound more what-a-pleasant-surprise than fuck-you-look-awful. “Hi, Doris.”
“Hello, Tally.” Doris Halloran holds up her box of Hamburger Helper, as if Tally is a higher authority to whom she must report her nutritional decisions. “It’s what they want.”
“Gwen loves it, too. I guess I’m meaner than you because I never let her have it.”
“That girl gets prettier every day.”
Tally wants to say thank you, except she doesn’t feel as if her daughter has been complimented. Doris’s tone is almost accusing, as if Gwen has achieved her prettiness by guile. Custom dictates that Tally should respond with a kind comment about Doris’s children, but she is stumped. She never sees the boys anymore, come to think of it. When did they stop coming around? Mickey, too, no longer visits. The candy drawer hasn’t needed to be replenished in some time. Let’s see—Tim, the lummox as Clem calls him, is probably the same stupid frat-boy-in-training he always was. Go-Go can’t be any worse than he’s been, although there are rumors linking him to the cats that have been found suffocated in the neighborhood’s old insulated milk boxes. Sean, the best of the lot, is a natural-born politician. Tally doesn’t consider that a compliment, but Doris might.
“That Sean,” she says. “He’s a charmer. All your boys have”—grasp, grasp, grasp—“such distinctive personalities.”
Tally wonders if Doris is as curious as Tally is about who broke up with whom, if Doris doubts Sean’s version of events the way Tally doubts Gwen’s. Something happened. Her hunch is that Gwen traded up, realized there was greater cachet in a Gilman boy or a football hero.
Tally wonders if she doubts her daughter because she is aware of her own proclivity for lying. Fudging, as she prefers to think of it. Or maybe nudging—easing a complicated truth toward something simpler, more comprehensible. Tally never lies for advantage or gain. Her lies are no different from, say, a fresh coat of paint or wallpaper in an old house. Something pretty over something unsightly. There’s never been a home that didn’t eventually require updating or renovation. A life is the same way. You live inside it for a long, long time if you’re lucky. Things fray, break, go out of fashion. There’s no shame in bringing a life up-to-date.
She buys her eggs, wishing the store stocked fresh herbs, but one would be hard-pressed to find so much as a jar of dried oregano here. She should have her own herb garden, but the property is too shady to grow anything but ferns and a few complacent flowers. Why hadn’t Clem seen that flaw in his dream lot? It’s formidably dark, with trees to the east, west, and south. The northern light is good for a painter—or would have been, if Clem had been thoughtful enough to include a studio for Tally. She paints in a prefab toolshed bought at Sears, which means choosing between freezing or running a space heater in the winter, a dangerous option around her oil paints and turpentine. I didn’t think you were that serious about painting, Clem said when she asked for her little cabin last year. He was sad; Clem hates to disappoint Tally. Clem, to his credit, did not bring up all the other things tried and abandoned. Throwing her own pots. The novel, which never got far enough along to have a title, other than The Novel. Macramé. Candle making. Jewelry making. Okay, so he was entitled to be dubious, especially given her decision to keep her latest project under wraps, refusing to let anyone see it until she’s finished. But she is finding—what does a painter find? Writers discover their voices. Tally guesses she’s on the verge of achieving her vision of things.
In the parking lot, she notices that Doris Halloran is still sitting in her car, hands gripping the wheel, yet she hasn’t turned on the engine. Poor thing. Although she looks at least ten years older than Tally, she is actually younger, younger even than Tally’s real age, about which she is always a little vague.
“So you started your family young, too,” Doris Halloran said to Tally in this very market, when the Robisons were finally settled in Dickeyville. Settled, but not exactly accepted. Hard feelings lingered about Clement Robison’s dream house, the way he got around the village’s strict rules on historic preservation. He argued that his house, the farthest house down Wetheredsville Road, lying beyond the mill, technically wasn’t part of Dickeyville after all.
“Too?”
“I was married at twenty, but there were two miscarriages before Tim. He’s fourteen now.”
That made Doris, what? Thirty-five, thirty-six? Tally wondered if it was the gray light in the little market that made Doris look so gray. If Tally had been forced to guess—thank God she hadn’t guessed—she would have put the other woman’s age at forty-five, a very hard and unforgiving forty-five.
“Oh, I’m older than I look,” Tally said. Adding swiftly, lest she seem vain, which she was, but why advertise it: “It’s the way I wear my hair that makes me look younger.”
Doris nodded. “We’ve noticed.”
To this day, Tally wonders about that “we.” Doris and her husband? The royal we? All the women of Dickeyville, sitting in silent judgment on the newcomer, with her long corn-silk hair and pretty, impractical clothes, living in the modern monstrosity that no one wanted? The mid-1970s was the era of The Stepford Wives, and if the women of Dickeyville were not the empty-eyed automatons of the book and film, they were not as individualistic as they wanted to believe. They were merely a hipper variation of Stepford wives. Eating granola and living in a historic district didn’t make you a freethinker.
Of course, Doris Halloran was and is a different kettle of fish from the other Dickeyville wives. She still wears housedresses and panty hose. Her pale red hair, on those rare occasions when it is released from its curlers, is worn in tight, unflattering waves. Yet she is younger than Tally. How can that be? Doris Halloran looks as if she has been old all her life. Had the miscarriages done that? Tally yearns to feel superior to her. Why shouldn’t she? She is pretty, vibrant, smart. She paints, and not in a dilettante way. Who is Doris Halloran to be talking about Tally’s hairstyle, to be judging Gwen for breaking up with Sean? Tally may claim to be older than she is, but she could shave five, ten years off her real age and be believed.
Tally has been lying about her age since she and Clem left Boston two years into their marriage. She lies about Clem’s age, too. Not outright lies, but evasive bits of gentle misdirection, fudging and nudging, nudging and fudging. She nudges her husband’s age down, ever so slightly, her own up, thereby narrowing the gap between them, which she finds embarrassing, although not as embarrassing as the fact that she married at eighteen and had her first child at nineteen. It isn’t the math that tortures her, but the other facts that can be inferred from these bits of arithmetic. Tally Duchamp Robison did not graduate from college, maybe didn’t even attend. Among her people—and Tally comes from people who are the sort of people who think of themselves as having people—this was unfathomable, shaming. Her great-great-grandmother had gone to college, her grandmother was a lawyer, her mother is an ob-gyn. OK, maybe she was brought up to bring home the bacon after all, but Betty Friedan be damned, the only rebellion available to Tally was an early, conventional marriage to an older man. It felt exciting and daring at the time. Now, in 1979, no one gets that. To the world at large, she is no different from the Doris Hallorans, marrying at twenty because there were no other options. Tally had all the options in the world when she was eighteen.
And she threw them all away because she was headstron
g and shortsighted—and didn’t know where to go for a pregnancy test without being found out, and didn’t want to wait too long, lest others figure out her predicament.
I want to go to Paris, she thinks, waiting to turn left at the always busy intersection near the store, still overwhelmed by traffic from the Social Security Administration at this time of day. It’s taking the line of cars two, three cycles to get through the light. I want to be the person I’ve been pretending to be all these years.
Tally was never foolish enough to claim to have a degree, but she drops her selected facts like bread crumbs and lets people follow them where they seem to lead. She was accepted at Wellesley. True. She married young. Again, true. Her husband was a college professor—oh no, not at her college—her uncle’s best friend, from the medical school. A bit of a scandale, if one must know. Still true, and is it her fault if people think she was seduced while a college freshman? People eye Clement differently after they hear these bits. With more respect, because a thirty-two-year-old man who had an affair with an eighteen-year-old was not necessarily out of line, especially if he married her in the end. Tally still remembers the gleam of who’d a thunk it in the eyes of their new acquaintances. Clem benefits as much as she does from this misunderstanding. Dear as he is, he is a bit of a fuddy-duddy. At a recent faculty party, someone produced a joint and Clem not only declined to try it, he also insisted they leave immediately. Geriatric specialist? Clem is a geriatric specialty.
But such instances of disharmony are rare. Tally is an old soul, in her opinion, older than Clem in many ways. When Gwen, their surprise baby, was born, Clem was already forty, Tally not even twenty-eight, yet it was Clem who got down on the rug with her and played without inhibition. Tally didn’t have it in her. She felt ancient. She adores Gwen, who has turned out to be a most satisfactory child. But having Gwen—finally, an accident, not that she regrets it—meant postponing her next stage. What if she had started painting in her twenties? Where would she be now?
She is—what is her real age?—forty-two years old, pretending to be forty-six-ish. Clem is fifty-six, although she says early fifties when pressed. Gwen will leave for college in four years. Now throw in another four years. College-age children expect their homes to stand as shrines, as Tally learned from Miller and Fee. She will be forty-six, and Clem will be sixty, married almost thirty years. He probably won’t want to take early retirement, but he’ll be ready to leave teaching at sixty-five, once Gwen is out of college, she’s sure of it. Then they can go to Paris. Somehow, some way. She will go to Paris before she’s fifty-two.
You’ll be dead at fifty-two.
The thought runs an icy finger down her spine. This is not at all like her. She is not morbid. She is not given to dark premonitions. She blames the shiver on the black cat in the window of the dry cleaners, the one holding up its paw in salute to the glories of Black Cat rubber heels. Mired here in the line of traffic waiting to turn left, she has been absentmindedly staring at the cat, whose face has a decidedly sinister cast. “Shoo,” she says as she accelerates, her turn for the green light finally arriving. Shoo. Doris Halloran is still sitting in her car, back at the market. Tally assumes Doris is too exhausted to go home, that the interior of her car is the only place she can be alone. It’s different for Tally. She has her studio, she has a vocation, she has—well, it’s different for her, it just is.
Chapter Sixteen
Winter 1980
Doris gave Go-Go the spare room when he started wetting the bed last fall. Tim Junior raised a stink, of course, and Sean took his side, but she stood up to them, said it made sense because Go-Go has the earlier bedtime. It was odd because bed-wetting was never Go-Go’s problem as a toddler, if only because she was too tired to care much by the time he was born and her very nonchalance succeeded where all her effort never had. Wear diapers the rest of your life if that’s what you want, she told him once, but when you learn how to tie your shoes, you can change your own pants. At his own initiative, Go-Go was completely potty-trained at age two, a feat neither older brother could claim.
It may be his only accomplishment, Doris thinks as she gathers up the sheets one weekday morning. No one else in the household knows about Go-Go’s problem. She doesn’t want his brothers to have any more ammunition for teasing. As for his father—she can’t bear to think what he will do to the boy if he finds out. So no one knows except Doris. At this point, Doris isn’t sure if even Go-Go realizes he’s wetting the bed up to four times a week. Why would he? She does everything possible to minimize, conceal, the problem. There is a plastic mattress pad, at no risk of being discovered, since no one else in this household would ever strip his own bed, much less wash another person’s sheets. She checks Go-Go’s bed every morning as soon as the house is empty, washing the sheets if necessary, often doing all the household linens for cover.
Thank goodness they have a washer-dryer in this house. For the first six years of her marriage, they lived in a brick town house without any laundry facilities and only one bathroom. It was hard, especially after Sean was born. What if she had actually given birth to all the children that she and Tim Senior had conceived? She would have eight children now. They never could have afforded that. Did God know? Was that why God took her children? And of all the children God took, why had he given her Go-Go? Didn’t she deserve a sweet baby, a well-behaved little girl, someone who might take her side from time to time? She had prayed to St. Gerard for such a baby. Instead, she got Go-Go, and no one, not even his mother, could consider Go-Go an answer to a prayer. Still, for all his exhausting craziness, he was sort of sweet, too, the only one of her boys who liked to be cuddled and held. That is, he liked to be cuddled and held until his brothers teased him out of it.
Now Go-Go is all sour, no sweet. Crazy, sullen, sarcastic, more destructive than ever, at least at home. Strangely, his behavior at school seems to be getting marginally better, if not his grades. There is a new priest, Father Andrew from Boston, and he seems to think Go-Go is a good kid at heart. “High-spirited, but wasn’t I the same as a boy?” he asks in his Boston accent. Doris thinks Father Andrew is very good-looking. And smart. She almost wishes he were more worried about Go-Go, which would entail meetings at the school, with Father talking to her in that wonderful voice. He is so masculine. He risks the little kindnesses and sentiments that Tim Senior never attempts. Once, when Doris was arriving at St. Lawrence for altar duty, she saw Go-Go’s class in the yard, playing kickball. Go-Go kicked a magnificent home run, soaring, soaring, soaring over his classmates’ heads and when he trotted to home plate, Father Andrew rubbed his hand across Go-Go’s head, congratulating him. Later, at bedtime, Doris did the same thing. She had forgotten how soft her son’s hair was, how appealing, even when in need of a wash.
“Stop it,” Go-Go said. The next morning, his sheets were yellow again and she wanted to scream. She can’t. She mustn’t. She is all Go-Go has. Tim and Sean will be fine, especially Sean. But Go-Go needs her.
Sheets in the washing machine, she shuffles into the kitchen, but she doesn’t have the energy to face the breakfast mess. Tim Senior insists on eggs and bacon every morning, and how can she deny the boys a full breakfast when their father is having one? He has been out of work since the end of the holiday season, and there was a three-month layoff before that job. He should be able to find something, though, with his experience. Maybe not at one of the big department stores—he’s pretty much burned his bridges there—but at Robert Hall, Tuerkes, Hamburger’s. He says he’s looking, but Doris doesn’t know where he goes during the days, taking their only car. “I’ve got a lead,” he will say, and she doesn’t have the nerve to ask what sort of job interview leaves a man’s breath sour from cigarettes and beer. She has heard he’s hanging out in Monaghan’s over in Woodlawn. It’s a decent place as taverns go. He isn’t running around with women. She is pretty sure he isn’t running around with women. Sex isn’t that important to Tim. After Go-Go, there had been one more miscarriage, and
Doris told Tim that she didn’t think she could take it anymore, that they had to be more careful, find a way to make things work while being true to the church. The miscarriages were harder than the pregnancies. He was very sweet about it, said it was OK, his needs weren’t that great.
Abandoning the kitchen, she takes a cup of lukewarm tea into the living room and turns on the television, catching the last bit of People Are Talking. Exactly, Doris thinks. People are always talking. That’s why she has to be vigilant, keep the family’s secrets. Go-Go doesn’t wet the bed, Tim Senior isn’t out of a job, they didn’t start raiding the boys’ college funds last summer to stay afloat. She misses the program Dialing for Dollars, which is off the air, killed by the state lottery. At least that’s Tim’s take on it. Hard to get excited about winning forty dollars, he says, when you could win thousands and you don’t have to sit around waiting for a phone call. Still, she misses it. Dialing for Dollars was her respite when Go-Go was little. True to his name, he was always in motion, and when his brothers were at school during the day, Doris never knew any rest. However, he would settle in with a bottle of juice to watch Dialing for Dollars with her. Go-Go was frustrated that the host, Stu Kerr, never called them once, but Doris held no grudge. It’s a big city, and Doris never wins anything, small or large. She remembers when Sean put together the fact that Kerr, beneath a wig and funny nose, was also Professor Kool on Professor Kool’s Fun Skool. Sean was outraged. That is, he pretended to be outraged about the principle of the thing, as he saw it, but he was really embarrassed to have been fooled. Sean doesn’t like to be wrong, ever. It’s almost a little unnatural, the one characteristic that makes her nervous for her otherwise most golden child. Only Jesus gets to be perfect.
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