by Sands Hall
The strength of Jake’s arm was like a safety railing, and Lizzie leaned into it, shivering. At what point had he slipped that support around her? She could smell the soap on his neck.
“Throw earth,” Summer whispered.
Jeep gave her a little smile and leaned down and threw earth. Sara followed suit. “Go on, Driver, throw,” she said. Driver did as he was told.
They stood and looked at the objects arrayed on the cloth while Maud led them in singing.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun.
Amazing Grace.
Summer gave her egg to Driver, and Hannah her ring to Jeep. Jeep divided up the daffodils so that everyone carried one. Maud’s book was for Jake—an old rhyming dictionary she’d found in a used-book store. Driver lifted the thong with its turquoise bead and gave it to Lizzie. “This comes from Sam,” he said. “A day or two before he died he tugged at it and said, ‘Lizzie.’ I tried to persuade myself that it didn’t belong to you. But it does.”
She bent her head to receive it around her neck. Again she was grateful for Jake’s compact and solid body close by.
Theo began to cry. “I was going to bury this,” Jeep said, picking up the little leather pouch. “But I’ll give it to you instead.” She hung the pouch around Theo’s neck. “He’s getting hungry.”
“We all are,” Lizzie said. “I should get that frittata out of the oven before it turns to stone.” As Maud walked by Lizzie reached out an arm and pulled her in, held her close, feeling Maud’s heart, or was it her own, pulsing along her veins. Maud’s shoulders felt impossibly small, her eyes, as they pulled apart, were wet, dark, shining—reminding Lizzie, impossibly, of a cherry branch, just ready to bud, gleaming with rain.
She was struck by the beauty of the sky, the wind. She remembered how Sam used to say, “You got to catch heaven on the fly, Lizzie. It disappears so fast.” He would hold a hand up, as if feeling for wind, then swing it down in an arc, bringing the other hand up to meet it, catching, just barely, an imaginary ball. “Whoosh.” She could share this memory, Lizzie thought. Maybe she would after breakfast. Ahead of her, the wind lifted and twirled the fabric of the girls’ dresses. Summer had hold of Jeep’s hand. Maud carried Theo, her scarf fluttering out to one side as she walked between Driver and Sara, head bent, listening to something Driver was saying. The wind carried the scent of earth and the piney smoke of someone’s burn pile.
Lizzie reached out and took Jake’s hand.
CHAPTER 32
JAKE
you send me like a first-class letter
many have tried
but none can do it better
Recently Santiago had reminded Jake that in Spanish, wait and hope are the same verb. “This is in our bones,” he said, flashing that big smile. “To us it is the same—I am hoping for the bus. Or, the other way, I am waiting to win the lottery.”
Jake pondered this, sitting at the small built-in booth in the corner of his kitchen. Hope did seem passive. Waiting in the dreary Greyhound bus terminal of the universe. But what could he do but wait. Hope. He could have faith, he supposed. Faith seemed more active. Something you could take part in. Although faith was only a noun. There was no faithing for the bus, just having faith the bus would come.
Ah, Lizzie.
He tapped a pencil against his lips, picked up his guitar from where it leaned against a chair, played through the series of chords again.
i will smoke you out of your loneliness
He wished he could take a torch, a thick, pitch-dripping, black-smoking torch, and explore the paintings on the walls of the dark cave of Lizzie’s psyche. But what would he learn from the figures painted in the colors of dried blood, the color of rust? Was Lizzie the running bison? One of the lean figures pitching a spear?
He spent the night with her more than he didn’t. Several times now she’d reached for him, taken his hand. He made her laugh. Theo called him Dake. They were doing fine. Nothing to complain about. He didn’t know why he had this need to lock it in, make certain it would abide. Nothing could, he knew that. Except the two of them deciding to make it stay, day after day. As far as Lizzie was concerned, a wedding, the ceremony of marriage, didn’t have much to do with that. Yet the idea remained. An ancient six-inch rusty iron nail buried in brick. Be with me, Lizzie.
how do we make it stay
day after day
Terrible. He made a jangling noise across the open guitar strings.
Her parents had decided to visit. Leopold and Agnes. Jake had laughed out loud when he first heard their names. Tonight they were taking Lizzie and the kids out for dinner before going to see the last performance of Maud’s show. Lizzie would drop Theo at a baby-sitter’s. Jake was to meet them at the theater.
“You ashamed of me?” he’d asked. Yesterday morning.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jake!” She pushed a pillow over his face, sat on top of him, pummeled him through the down. “You are out of your mind! Why would I be ashamed of you? For God’s sake. That is the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
She pulled the pillow away, met his eyes for a flashing moment. Stretched her body along the length of his, holding his arms and hands out to the side with her own, keeping her face buried in his chest. Her lips moved against his skin. “We’ll go to El Toro, and he’ll sit there putting down my entire life. They’ll find something wrong with the choice of restaurant, with the fact I want a beer—beverage of the great unwashed and ignorant masses—instead of a glass of the excellent wine he’ll order. There will be complaints about the quality of the service, and comments about the one-horse, hick town that Marengo is. Hannah will do fine. They’ll like her. She’ll tell them about gymnastics, something they approve of. But Summer has baseball, which she likes better than soccer, and it’s the sport of the great unwashed and ignorant masses. She’ll be a grump and slide under the table and I’ll have to tell her a hundred times to sit up. Theo will bang his spoon and make loud noises and drop his food on the floor and make a big mess.”
“Well, I won’t.”
“Won’t what?” Her eyes were at their greenest.
“Drop my food on the floor. Make loud noises. I won’t even slide under the table. Promise.”
She rolled. Pulled the comforter up around her shoulders. Head tiny within the abundance of quilt. “They’re just critical people. They can’t help it.”
“I create software. I play guitar. What’s the matter with that? I’ll be a bank manager. A loan officer? A dentist?”
“They’d think I’d lost my mind. No, software is good, being an artist is good. . . .”
“But not rock and roll. How about I play classical guitar? Cello in a string quartet?”
“We’re grown-up people, Jake! This makes me feel so un-grown-up. Why do I care about this! I don’t care about this.” She pulled the comforter up and over them, a lavender igloo. “Once Maud dated a man who was a contractor and we convinced him to go take a painting class so she could tell The Parents he was an artist. So that maybe they’d accept him as good enough for their daughter. It didn’t work.” She imitated some high British voice. “ ‘Oh, Jim-Bob-Joe-Pete, and what do you do?’ It’s like some nineteenth-century novel.”
Jake stayed silent. Unlike Maud, Lizzie never talked about The Parents, as she and Maud called them, and their possible influence on their lives. Lizzie usually stopped Maud in these discourses by saying, “They did the best they could.” Maud’s mouth would open and shut, fish-like. Jake could see—what response was possible?
It was hot under the down comforter, but he didn’t move. “It was awful, growing up under that kind of judgment,” Lizzie said. “I thought I’d moved beyond it. I was sure I had. But here it comes to hit me in the face. Just when I’m on the verge of thinking I might be able to sort out this thing called life.”
“Marry me.”
He felt rather than heard the thud of their two hearts. She pushed up through t
he comforter, swiping at the curls that tumbled over her face. “Jake.”
“Let me make an honest woman of you.”
She didn’t think this was funny.
“I could give you the T-shirt again. You could pretend to be surprised.”
She groaned. “I can just imagine Leo’s response. A sloganed T-shirt. Clothing of the unwashed and ignorant masses.”
“Well, then, introduce me as your fiancé.”
“ ‘This is Jake? Like, Theo’s dad? Like, he’s my fiancé?’ ” Lizzie used a little-girl voice, each sentence a question. “You are so old-fashioned. It kills me.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“It’s a stupid system, Jake, that’s what’s the matter with it!” She rolled out of bed, yanked open her dresser drawers, pulled on underwear, jeans. “What’s the point? So we can share income? Fight? End up being cold and tense with each other like every married couple I’ve ever known? And then split up and make life miserable for the kids?”
Jake did not point out that without cursing herself with the disease of marriage she’d been through these scenarios several times. Lizzie seemed to catch his thought. “Look, I’ve done it—my life with men, my life with my kids—because I see men and women are usually so much bullshit. It never, it seldom, works, Jake. Marriage doesn’t work.”
“Sure it does.”
She shook her head and a finger at him. “That’s the danger. Sure, sometimes it does, sometimes you see it. Sometimes, sure, I feel we could.” She stopped. Almost panting. Pulled a long sweater on over her jeans. “It’s fun being with you right now. I like how you are with the girls and with Theo. But as my friend Cheryl the lawyer says, marriage is just the predivorced state. What if we change our minds? Then there we are. With each other.”
“We won’t call it marriage! We can call it burriage, like Maud’s story. We can call it—” He moved his hands around, trying to find a different verb. “Braiding, meshing, binding, engaging—an engagement!” She shook her head, disgusted. “We could do it differently, Liz. Like Sam’s memorial service. We can make it up. We’ll call it something else. We won’t name it at all. But we’ll do it.”
She stared at him, lower lip pushed out, as Theo did when he was working with crayons. As she left the bedroom she pulled up her sweater and twitched her rear end at him.
going to hope you,
going to smoke you
going to lure you, love you,
draw you, haul you,
pull, press, pluck, tug, persuade, move, urge
lure you, love you,
let you, get you
out of your lonely lair
Jake put the guitar down and doodled, imagining Lizzie and her father and mother and the three kids at the big round table at El Toro’s. Would Leopold descend to a margarita? Maybe tequila? Or would it be Jameson? Glenlivet? On the rocks. No, a single rock.
“Why El Toro?” he’d asked yesterday, after he showered and came downstairs. “It’s not exactly famous for its food.”
Lizzie handed him a box of Cheerios and a bowl. “Because if I think about it, I’ll get too complex and choose someplace truly inappropriate, or too expensive, or somehow wrong. This way I can say we’re going there because the kids love it.”
“Will Maud join you?”
Lizzie made a face. “I wish. She could talk all about Shakespeare”—she dropped the r at the end of the word, sounding British and effete—“and iambic pentameter and Stratford-upon-Avon, and charm their butts off with her intelligence and knowledge. But she’s nervous about them coming, wants to be ‘calm.’ They’ve never come to see my shows, you know, not even the one at the big hoopla gallery in Santa Fe.”
“They were in Australia, Lizzie.”
“Whose side are you on?” She’d handed him the milk.
but what will I do when I’ve got you out
out in the noonday sun
what will you do when you
if you
see the light
and discover I’m the one ha ha discover I’m the one
Jake groaned, got up to sharpen his pencil. The phone rang.
“I’m such a shit,” Lizzie said. “I tell Sam I’m going to be better and then I’m such a shit. Will you meet us at Harmony House?”
Jake was silent.
“You made plans.” Her voice was flat.
“Of course I’ll be there. But I have to put a suit on. Bank manager, you know.”
“Don’t you dare.”
He arrived at Harmony House just after Lizzie. Hannah wore shiny black shoes and a ribbon in her hair. Summer kept her arms folded across clean overalls. Lizzie wore jeans and a flannel shirt. She lifted Theo from the car seat and gave him to Jake to hold. They turned towards the rental car that parked beside her. A tall, gray-haired, hawk-nosed man—he looked almost exactly as Jake had imagined he would—helped a round sparrow of a woman out of the passenger seat.
“Mr. Maxwell,” Jake said, putting out his hand, “Mrs. Maxwell. It’s a great pleasure.”
“Nessie, please.” Mrs. Maxwell had given Maud her smile.
“Like the monster in the lake!” said Summer.
Mrs. Maxwell made growling noises. Summer giggled.
“And call me Leo.” Leopold shook his hand. His eyes were an amazing shade of blue.
Jake found himself laughing a little. “I never expected this,” he said, “but I see so much of Lizzie in your face.”
“Except she’s a beauty,” Leo said.
Lizzie looked startled, then made a dismissive face.
Hannah took Jake’s hand. The restaurant was devised around the rooms and decor of an old Victorian house. A smiling host escorted them to a table with high-backed chairs. A high chair was brought for Theo, who banged his spoon on the apron. “He’s just like you at this age,” Nessie said. “What a little angel. Aren’t you, snookums?”
Lizzie, sitting opposite Jake, met his eyes. Hers were filled with a kind of panicked laughter.
“Looks like a nice menu.” Leo pulled a pair of glasses from an inside pocket.
“It was Jeep’s idea,” Hannah said. “She’s quitting the Red Garter as soon as a job opens up here. She told me.”
“Never thought I’d crave a hamburger,” said Nessie, “but I’m just so tempted.” She looked up from the menu. “I thought Jeep was going to join us?”
“She’ll meet us later,” Hannah said. “At Aunt Maud’s play.”
“‘She has AA every night,” Summer said.
Jake watched Lizzie’s eyes move back and forth between her parents. Leo looked over the top of his glasses at Nessie, who nodded. “Several acquaintances and even some friends have joined that organization. They clearly do important work!”
Lizzie, dangerously, rolled her eyes. Jake suppressed a strong urge to laugh. When the waitress approached, Leo asked for the wine list. “But have a beer, Lizzie. Jake? Anything you like.”
“Nothing quite like a good beer!” Nessie said. “We got to quite like our afternoon pint. That’s a part of Britain I will definitely miss.”
He avoided Lizzie’s eyes. He was too close to a certain kind of hysteria. Looking confused, Lizzie ordered a beer, and out of loyalty, Jake seconded the order. They examined the large menus. A silence settled over the table. “How’s Maud doing?” Jake asked.
“Nervous!” Hannah said. “She told me her butterflies had never been so bad. She’s been going to the bathroom all day!”
Again Lizzie’s eyes ping-ponged between her mother and father. Leo looked over the top of his menu. “She told me she’s fifty times more nervous than she was on opening night because we’re going to be in the audience. Now what kind of parents would make a child feel that way, eh, Agnes?”
Nessie buttered a piece of bread. “Maybe because you usually found something wrong with anything she ever did.”
“I was nervous,” Leo said. “What if she made a mistake with all those people watching?”
&nb
sp; Nessie leaned towards Jake. “He was such a dragon.” Her voice managed to both confide in Jake and tease Leo. “So afraid they’d let us down.”
“No, no, no,” Leo said. “I’ve thought about this. One does, when your children move far away and don’t write you letters and, when they do call, immediately ask to talk to their mother. But what if someone found fault where I didn’t, or before I did? They might think I was overly fond. A doting parent. An indulgent parent.”
“God forbid,” Nessie said.
Summer had her head on one side. “Were you really a dragon?”
Lizzie’s strangled syllable sounded vaguely like “No.” Leo laughed. “A dragon and a monster in the lake. What a household!”
The wine Leo ordered turned out to be an elegant cabernet, though Jake felt that he was wronging Lizzie in liking it so much. But Lizzie sipped it too, pushing her beer to one side. She grew animated, face flushed, as she talked about how her painting was going. When they asked her about the gallery opening they had missed two years before, Lizzie kicked him under the table, daring him to look at her. She was suddenly knowledgeable on issues he’d never heard her talk about before. The skies of Tourneur, which Nessie loved. The canvases of der Koot, which neither of them did. The Rembrandts Nessie had so admired in the National Gallery.
When their meals came, Hannah made them hold hands while she said grace. After all the stories he’d heard from Maud, Leo’s aplomb was surprising. He held his glass up towards Lizzie. “Whatever you’re doing, Elizabeth, it suits you.”
Nessie nodded. “Both you girls.”
“Look,” Summer said, “Ma’s face is all red.”
It was red. Lizzie stared down at her lap, then met Jake’s eyes, looking mischievous. She stood up, began to unbutton her shirt. “Ma,” Hannah said, “what are you doing?”