Charlie finished his coffee while whipping through two newspapers, then left for the office. I was very conscious of what he would be doing that day—driving Max all over suburban Boston to look for the perfect farmhouse in which he could settle with some nubile young thing.
Ariel arrived at ten and by ten-thirty Winnie and I were off to the mall in Winnie’s Volvo. The parking situation was so bad it took us nearly twenty minutes to find a spot. I was feeling frayed even before we stepped out of the car, but Winnie, usually so lethargic, became a different person. The crowds didn’t bother her. Once inside, she opened her purse and looked at a list. She was on a mission.
Malls make me dizzy. It could be the lighting. I think it is designed to make people crazy so that they lose control of their mental faculties and buy things they neither need nor want. There was a man on the first floor playing Christmas carols on a grand piano. I followed Winnie from store to store. It wasn’t long before Winnie could see that I had lost whatever small amount of enthusiasm I had to begin with. The clue was when I sat on something I thought was a bench and it turned out to be a sculpture.
Winnie came out of a store called Scissors and Knives wielding a bag.
“You are sitting on a head,” she said.
“A what?”
“A head. I’m afraid you’ve mistaken this decorative piece of art for a bench. You are sitting on a head, a child’s head, as a matter of fact.”
I stood up and looked around to see if anyone else had seen me park myself on a bronze head. I thought I was pretty good at recognizing art, but perhaps mall art wasn’t my specialty. As a piece of art, the bronze wasn’t much, but it wasn’t much of a bench either. I might just as well have sat in a flowerpot. There were people looking.
“You were never much of a shopper,” Winnie said. “You never understood the health benefits.”
“Health benefits?” My head was pounding from the fluorescent lights and my feet hurt from the tiled floor.
“Certainly. You walk, for one thing, briskly in a pleasant environment. You get to express yourself with each and every purchase. Everything I buy is an expression of me. It’s one of the most creative acts there is. Come on,” she said. I thought maybe she was going to take me into a special room where they indoctrinated you into the cult of shopping. Instead, she took me to the hair salon on the top floor of Filene’s.
“I’m going to leave you here,” she said. I didn’t care where she left me so long as she left me somewhere. Winnie approached the counter. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Marco,” she said.
“He’s with a customer,” the girl said. Her hairstyle made her look like she’d recently been electrocuted. Perhaps a case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes.
“Tell him it’s Winnie Maple,” Winnie announced in a loud voice. The girl disappeared behind a partition and it wasn’t a moment before Mr. Marco himself came out. Mr. Marco was about five feet tall and bald on top, but he sported a black ponytail, pulled from the hair on the sides of his head.
“Winnie, my love, what are you doing to me? You are not here without an appointment, are you?”
“It isn’t me, Mr. Marco. It’s my sister,” she said.
“Me?” I turned toward Winnie.
“I suddenly had an absolutely marvelous idea.” I noticed that my sister could take on the persona of the person to whom she was speaking. She never tried it with me (maybe my personality wasn’t strong enough to mimic), but it worked like a charm on Mr. Marco. “Look at her,” she said. “Just look at her.” She lifted one of the limp locks that had escaped my ponytail. “My sister is a beautiful woman, but she doesn’t do a thing about it. And you know, Mr. Marco”—she bent her head toward him conspiratorially—“when you reach a certain age it’s incumbent upon you to bring your best qualities to the fore. Don’t you agree?”
“Completely,” he said.
“Ah, I said to myself, Mr. Marco is a genius. If anyone can give her what she needs, it’s Mr. Marco.”
“But without an appointment.”
“Oh, Mr. Marco. You know great art must be the whim of the moment. When I come back, I want to see the hair that launched a thousand ships. Let the artist in you take flight.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to have the hair that launched a thousand ships, maybe the hair that launched a small lobster boat.
A heavy girl in a white jumpsuit washed my hair. When she finished, she wrapped my hair in a towel and took me to a chair next to the one where Mr. Marco was working. I waited while he chopped and frowned and danced around his subject, an elderly woman with severely thinning hair.
Winnie was right. Mr. Marco could work miracles.
After he took a blow dryer to the old lady’s head, she came out looking just like Carol Channing.
He wiped off the chair and blew the stray blond hair to the floor with the blow dryer. Then he motioned for me to sit. He stood behind me and we both looked into the mirror. He put his hands in my hair, fluffed, and puffed.
“You have good hair. Long and thick. I can make you look like Michelle Pfeiffer,” he said.
“I doubt that very much,” I said.
“Watch me.” And he began to snip.
If I didn’t look exactly like Michelle Pfeiffer when he was finished, I did look like a much better version of Jane Fortune. My hair, which had been down to my waist since I was a child, was now shoulder length. Mr. Marco had added some blond highlights “to rid the hair of any hint of its inherent mousiness.”
When Winnie came to get me, her surprise was almost worth the three hours spent in a series of vinyl chairs.
“Jane, you are a knockout,” Winnie said. She paid so much money to retrieve me, I felt as if I’d been ransomed. She was loaded down with bags and I took some of them off her hands.
“Charlie’s going to kill me. I’ll keep some of these bags in the trunk.”
“Why do you buy so much if you know he won’t like it?” I asked.
“It’s one way to get Charlie’s attention.”
“I don’t know if that’s the best way,” I said. I was stepping gingerly because I knew I was entering dangerous territory.
“You’ve never been married.” That was obvious and she didn’t need to point it out.
“What if he gets too annoyed?” I asked.
“He won’t.”
“But what if he does?”
“I don’t know, Jane. I’ve never given it much thought.”
We packed the trunk of the car.
“He just seems a little discouraged, that’s all,” I said.
“Then he should say something. Am I supposed to read his mind?”
“Look, it’s none of my business, really.”
A cardinal rule of being a good single woman—and one I was on the verge of breaking—was never to give advice about someone else’s relationship. The trick behind this rule was to remain as inoffensive as possible so that no one could ever have a reason to object to you. That is the foundation of being a good single woman.
“You’re my sister. Of course it’s your business,” Winnie said.
“Then maybe you should pay a little more attention to Charlie. With all of the responsibilities he has as a young father, you wouldn’t want him looking around for something that seemed like more fun.” I wouldn’t normally have said anything like that, or even thought it (this isn’t the kind of thought a good single woman can allow herself to have), but it was Charlie’s hand placed just a little too long on mine that had started me thinking in that direction.
“He wouldn’t do that. Not Charlie. The boys and I are everything to him. And to tell you the truth, I resent the implication.” We got into the car. “It’s not fair. You haven’t been staying with us for even a week and you’re suggesting that I’m not a good wife.”
“I didn’t say that, Winnie. I would never say that.”
“That’s what it sounded like.”
“I only want what’s best for you, Winnie,” I said.
“I know you do,” she said. She put her hand over mine. “That’s just how I feel about you.”
Chapter 16
Winnie’s secret stash
We burst into the house with only as many packages as Winnie wanted Charlie to know about, but since he wasn’t home yet, we smuggled everything else inside and hid it with the rest of Winnie’s secret stash in the basement next to the laundry room. If you moved the lint-filled wastebasket and the dirty mops, if you had the fortitude to get past the dust bunnies and fallen sheets of fabric softener, there was a secret closet.
“I keep the mess here on purpose,” Winnie said as she moved the trash basket to the side. “Voilà!” She pushed open a hidden door and we stepped in. The walk-in closet looked like it was meant to house out-of-season sports equipment and clothes. Instead of old parkas and ski boots, the closet was filled, floor to ceiling, with new things, many of them not even out of their boxes and bags. Winnie added her purchases to the sweaters, ceramic vases, purses, shoes, children’s clothes, and toys.
“If you see anything you want, just take it,” Winnie said. “Sometimes when I’m depressed I come down here and just pick something. I bring it upstairs and mingle it with the rest of our things. Charlie never notices.”
“But what do you need all this stuff for?” I asked.
“Security, I guess. Whenever I need something new, it’s always here.” She paused and looked at me. “You won’t tell?” she asked.
“Of course not.” I knew she was trying to get closer to me by sharing her secret, and I would never betray that trust.
“Do you see anything you like?” she asked.
“I get confused when I see too many things at once. That’s why I hate shopping,” I said.
“Hate shopping?” She said it as if hating shopping was not only implausible but also ridiculous. She walked over to one corner of the closet and pulled out a bag from Neiman Marcus. There was a dress inside and she removed it with a flourish.
It was a wool dress, long with three-quarter-length sleeves, a dress you could wear on a winter evening with tights and ballet slippers.
“This would look good on you,” she said. “And God knows you could use a few new things. It looks like you haven’t bought anything in years.”
I liked the dress, though I had never pictured myself in puce. The garage door opened and Winnie jumped. “He’s home.” We sneaked out of the closet, closed the door, replaced the trash and cleaning supplies, and rushed upstairs.
Charlie kissed Winnie on the cheek.
“How was your day, dear?” he said. I stood off to the side—single women guests must give couples their private moments.
“Wonderful,” she said. “I can’t wait to do a little disco.” She twirled in a bad imitation of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.
“Where are the boys?” Charlie asked.
“Ariel took them out to play,” Winnie said.
Winnie was assuming that Ariel had taken them out to play. All she knew for sure was that they weren’t here when we came home and their jackets were gone from the front hall closet.
“It’s getting late.” Charlie looked out the window where dusk was falling.
“Don’t worry, you can trust Ariel as much as you trust me.”
I handed Charlie a short glass of scotch. He thanked me, but he was distracted. I had the uncomfortable notion that he didn’t trust Winnie even as much as he trusted Ariel, and Ariel wasn’t even the regular babysitter.
“Jane, what’s different about you?” Charlie asked.
“She got her hair cut, Charlie. I mean, how could you not notice?” Winnie asked.
“I did notice. Very nice, Jane.”
“Thank you, Charlie.” I felt self-conscious, a little like a prize poodle just after a grooming.
“I have to go upstairs and change,” Winnie said.
“I’ll be up in a few,” Charlie said.
“Did you find a place for Max?” I asked.
“We looked at a lot of houses, but we didn’t see anything he really liked.”
I picked up the tea things and started to put them away. Just as I put the last cup into the dishwasher, the door opened and the boys charged in with Ariel.
“I’m sorry we are so late, Mr. Maple,” Ariel said. “We went to play in the park and lost track of time. I’ll take the boys up and get them changed into warm things.”
Trey sneezed. I picked him up and wiped his nose with a tissue. “Got the sniffles?”
He sneezed again. His face was all flushed, but it was probably from playing outside. I kissed his forehead. He was a little warm, but that wasn’t how I knew he was sick. It was that he sat, docile, in my arms while Theo galloped up the stairs.
After I tucked Trey into bed, I found a thermometer in the bathroom and we played a game to see how long he could keep it under his tongue. Theo came in and told Trey to stop being such a baby, but after looking at him for a few minutes and finding him so pathetic, he went downstairs and asked Ariel to make some lemon tea. Theo carried it up carefully in an oversize mug.
Trey had a temperature of 102, which wasn’t anything to be really worried about. Kids get temperatures, but it would definitely hamper the evening’s activities. I was sure that Winnie wouldn’t want to leave him.
“We’ll have to stay home,” Charlie said to Winnie when she came downstairs dressed to go out.
“It’s only a slight fever,” she said.
“You don’t have to stay,” I said.
“It’s just that I’ve really been looking forward to this,” Winnie said.
“We were only invited last night,” Charlie said.
“Well, I’ve been looking forward to it all day.”
Winnie was wearing a rather matronly outfit for a disco. A sweater set, her usual, but in an effort to be hip she had squeezed into a straight black skirt that did nothing to conceal her little round belly.
“Ariel can stay. I already arranged it so Jane could come,” Winnie said.
“Ariel is the one who took Trey out for so long that he got sick,” Charlie said.
“Don’t be so dramatic, Charlie. Kids get colds. It happens. I don’t see why Jane should stay. Trey will probably sleep through the night. He won’t even know we’re gone.”
“I want to stay,” I said.
Staying with Trey was far from a burden; it was such a lucky break that if I were a different kind of person, I would have introduced the germ into the family myself.
“I’ll stay home,” Charlie said.
“You absolutely will not,” Winnie said. “Max is coming and God knows he doesn’t want to be there without you. Your sisters are charming, but even that has its limits.”
“He’ll be fine without me,” Charlie said.
“If you were being honest with yourself, you’d have to admit that your sisters may not have the stuff to entertain Max, but you just idolize those two and frankly I never saw what they did to deserve it.”
“Your point?” Charlie asked.
“Forget it.”
“I don’t want to forget it,” Charlie said. “I want to know what you think is wrong with my sisters.”
“There’s nothing wrong with them,” Winnie said.
“I think you’re jealous of them.”
“Jealous!” Winnie raised her voice. “What on earth of?”
“They have everything in front of them. They aren’t saddled with a husband and a family.”
“I don’t consider myself old and I’m sorry you do. But if I’m old, then you are, too, and if you think I consider you and the boys a burden, then you should look again. Yes, I’ve made some of my choices already, but I’m happy with them.”
As they put on their coats I heard Charlie say to Winnie, “I don’t think you’re old, honey. Besides, grace is far more important than age.”
That was very nice of him to say, since there wasn’t anything especially graceful about Winnie.
The next morni
ng, after checking on Trey, who was much better, Winnie sat with me in the breakfast nook and told me all about the night before. Tweedledee and Tweedledumber, as she sometimes called the Wheaton girls, made a big hit with Max. She couldn’t tell which of them Max preferred, but it was probably Lindsay. After all, they had the writing thing in common. She said this as if Lindsay’s “writing” were on a par with Max’s.
“This guy named Buddy showed up. He was Heather’s high school boyfriend and he obviously hasn’t given up on her. Buddy is at Harvard and I think Heather likes him, but it’s hard to tell with somebody like Max around. Buddy’s not the best-looking boy in the world. He’s got one of those pug Irish noses like Kevin Bacon.”
Winnie said that Max danced with everyone, showing no favorites, but he did dance with Lindsay twice, and one of those dances was a slow one.
I stood up to get another cup of coffee.
“I’ll have one, too,” Winnie said.
Chapter 17
Jane Austen’s head
The Maples were having a tree-trimming party. I liked being part of the Maple family, but Max kept turning up, and every time he did, it threw off my equilibrium—what was left of it.
I left the house before the party, claiming that I had business with Evan Bentley regarding the literary magazine.
“What business could you possibly be doing tonight?” Winnie complained. “It’s Friday.”
“We just have to get some things nailed down before Christmas,” I said.
“I never realized, Jane, just how much work you do for this magazine. I’m actually very impressed.”
Winnie was making Christmas tree decorations with pushpins and Styrofoam and she was hurrying to finish the one she was making for Marion.
“It’s not a magazine,” I said. “It’s a literary journal.”
“What’s the difference?” Winnie asked.
“A literary journal is—I don’t know—it has a different purpose,” I said.
“And what is that?” Winnie asked.
“To promote literature.”
Charlie looked up from his paper and licked the corner of his lip.
The Family Fortune Page 11