“I wouldn’t call it the exact same thing,” said Pru. She was annoyed with Patsy for interrupting her when she was trying to make a point. And could they for once have one little conversation about Pru, not about her?
“Excuse me, but we were both in love with guys who happened to be married to someone else. How is that not the same?”
Pru didn’t want to say how, so she said, “I’m not in love with him.”
“Stop that,” Patsy said. “The question is, does he know that you are, or not?”
Pru opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Do you really think I need to spell it out for him?”
“In my experience, you usually do. And I do mean you you. I mean, I didn’t really think you were even that into him, until you reacted that way, back in the shop.”
“Really? I feel like every time I look at him, there are goofy little hearts twirling around my head.”
“Nope. I wouldn’t have said what I did if I had thought that, you know. About fucking him.” Overhearing them, the man with the one eye looked over at them.
“Keep your voice down, Patsy, honestly.” She noticed that the ankle she’d fallen on was beginning to swell up. “Anyway, I don’t see what good it would do.”
“Try not to think of it in those terms,” Patsy said. “Maybe it’s not supposed to do anything.” Before Pru could ask her what the hell that meant, a nurse came through the swinging doors and called her name.
The nurse helped her down the long hall and into one of the examining “rooms,” essentially a bed and some machines separated from other “rooms” by a white curtain on a U-shaped track. Pru sat on the paper-covered table, and listened to the moaning of an elderly woman nearby. “Ma’am!” the woman cried out, every five seconds. “Ma’am!”
Pru’s curtain was being pulled aside and the doctor came in. He was bent over her chart, reading, but Pru recognized him immediately. She almost jumped off the table. It was Jacob, looking not nearly as surprised to see Pru as she was to see him.
“Hello, Prudence Whistler, foot trauma,” he said, pleasantly. He squinted at her chart. “Is this right? You can’t be thirty-six!”
“Can’t I see someone else?” she said, almost desperately.
“This isn’t a restaurant, Pru,” he said, tossing the chart aside. He spoke with a doctor’s assertiveness. “Lie back, please, so I can look at your foot.”
The gauze bandage she’d been given was almost entirely soaked with blood. She thought of the crowd out in the waiting room, and lay back on the bed. She felt as stiff as a plank. Jacob unwound the bandage. She could feel him carefully pry open the wound with his fingers. She felt it all the way up inside her belly.
“What’d you do here?”
“I fell on some glass.”
“Yep. I see it, right there. It’s in pretty deep.”
“Can you get it out?”
“Well, of course I can, silly. I’m a doctor!” He put his fingers on her ankle and the pain that shot through made her gasp. “Sprained, but not broken,” he said, after some probing.
He put his face right up against her foot, to peer inside the wound, and she found herself wondering if she’d showered lately. “First, though, you have to tell me how they’re doing,” he said softly.
She was so astonished that, for a moment, she couldn’t speak. When she collected her thoughts, she said, “You’re bribing me? Can’t I sue you for that?”
“Probably,” he said.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’ve got an eighty-three-year-old woman who no doubt has many long stories to tell me, waiting in the next cubicle,” he said. There was no trace of a smile behind his words. “I could go do that first, or I could just get this little guy out in about two seconds, and you’d be on your way home.”
“They’re fine,” she said, tightly.
“Did Annali ever learn to swim?” He was talking conversationally, as if they were old family friends who happened to bump into each other in the produce section.
“This isn’t funny,” Pru said. “Just take it out and let me go.”
He held up the tweezers, showing her the piece of glass he’d removed from her foot. “Silly,” he said, “I took it out five minutes ago.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, awkwardly. It all seemed so absurd that she was wondering if he was actually licensed. Could she complain to someone? The head of the hospital, or someone?
“I’ll need to stitch you up,” he said. “You really gashed yourself. Here’s a little something for the pain.”
The “little something” stabbed, then burned. Tears came into her eyes. Jacob worked quietly for a while, then said, in a more serious voice, “Does she ever ask about me? Annali?”
“No.”
“Okay, what about your sister, then? Patsy,” he said, and Pru was surprised to hear something in his voice that sounded like regret.
“No. Not really. Both of them got over you pretty quickly.”
He clipped the thread. The sight of it obviously still attached to the bottom of her foot made her stomach tighten. “You sure know how to hurt a guy,” he said.
“You hurt yourself.”
“Very true,” he said, standing up and taking off his gloves. “I will miss them every day of my life. Please tell her that. I’ll get them to discharge you soon.” And with that he was gone. She could hear his voice in the next cubicle: “Mrs. Lambert! You can’t be eighty-three!”
Patsy was asleep in the waiting room when she came out. Pru poked her with one of the crutches the orderly had given her when she was discharged. The orderly had said, “Boy, you must rate. The doc gave you some good drugs. And I never knew him to do his own stitching.”
“I saw Jacob,” she whispered to Patsy.
Patsy sat up, her eyes wide. “My Jacob?”
Pru nodded, and wincing, eased into the seat next to her. “He stitched me up. He wouldn’t do it until I told him how you were. And if Annali had learned to swim.”
Patsy’s eyes darted past her, scanning the corridors behind them. “You’re kidding. What did you say?”
“I said you were fine.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Patsy stared at her for a minute. “Tell me the whole thing,” she said.
Pru told her, word for word, as much as she could remember.
“Weird,” Patsy said, at last.
“I think he was actually in love with you, Pats,” Pru said.
“Yes,” Patsy said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Sorry.”
“Prudence,” Patsy said, looking at the clock above her head. “We open in six hours.”
Twenty
The alarm went off at six o’clock, a mere two hours after they got home from the hospital. Pru hit the clock and groaned. Her ankle throbbed, and the bottom of her right foot felt tight and raw. She didn’t think she’d be able to get out of bed. Then she remembered the piece that was supposed to run in today’s Post, and forced herself up. She was hoping it would generate some interest in the opening. And she wanted to see how she looked in the picture.
When she and Patsy arrived at the shop, it was still dark outside. There was so much to be done, she couldn’t see how they could possibly open the doors by ten. She wasn’t used to the crutches and her foot throbbed constantly, despite the Percocet. She wondered whether Jacob really knew what he was talking about. He’d said that her ankle was only sprained, but it certainly felt worse than that.
They pulled the protective paper off the sign above the door, before going in. The sign looked exactly as she’d hoped, with the store’s name, “peach,” styled in rounded lowercase letters, feminine and hopeful. Inside, they went around turning on the lights. McKay had had the walls painted a soft gray with a slightly blue cast, cool and soothing, and he himself had hand-stenciled a chocolate-brown ribbon around the top, to look as if it were threaded through the walls. A neat, s
quarish bow faced you as you entered the store. That, at least, was perfect. Absolutely perfect.
The air was still permeated with the faint scent of Chinese meat buns, despite all the fig-scented candles Patsy kept lighting. There were cartons of clothes to unpack, steam, price, and hang. They got to work sweeping up the glass still scattered on the floor after last night’s accident. Pru got a call that the shipment of spring dresses she’d been really excited about had been held up; the girl she’d hired to help out was late; the toilet kept running. Then there were all the things that only Pru could see. The price tags, which she’d insisted on doing by hand, looked sloppy and hurried, not homey and cute, as she’d hoped. And there was the matter of her still-throbbing foot. At nine she took another Percocet, and kept going.
She tried to breathe through these things, or accept them into her karma, or whatever it was you were supposed to do in order not to completely lose your cool. It had all sounded so simple: rent a place, buy some clothes, come up with a cute name. Then you find out that there are all these obstacles and problems. You keep thinking: Once I solve this, it’s smooth sailing. But then a leak pops open, as soon as you’ve plugged the previous one. Before you know it, you’ve run out of fingers and the dam is still threatening to burst everywhere.
It was Patsy, oddly enough, who was the calm eye of the storm. They were still writing the tags when the first customers showed up; Pru hadn’t wanted to unlock the door, but Patsy strode over and let them in, practically pushing Pru out of the way. When Patsy realized that the girl Pru had hired was not going to show up, Patsy stepped in, welcoming customers, continuing to pull things out of boxes, ringing up sales. Any minute, Pru thought, someone was going to figure out that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. She hopped around on her crutches clumsily, saying what she was sure were nonsensical things. Her mother and Jimmy Roy showed up in the early afternoon, having driven all morning from Ohio. “Oh!” Nadine said, when she walked in. “I love it! I absolutely love it!” When the cash register’s computer went down, Patsy started writing out each sales receipt by hand. Jimmy Roy fixed the running toilet, and Nadine helped by cleaning out the dressing rooms. By five o’clock, the little shop was crowded with people and noise, things were actually sold, and Pru moved as if in a trance through a swirl of questions, problems, friends, fabric, and Percocet.
And women. Women, women, women, of all shapes and sizes, needs and demands. Some she recognized as former customers of Edie’s. They all seemed to know Pru, probably from the picture of her in the Post, a shot of her from below which made her look, she’d said to Patsy, like Bea Arthur. She’d previewed peach’s inventory for the newspaper’s fashion editor last week, who’d gone mental over it. “Style (at last!) Comes to Adams-Morgan,” read the headline, above the towering photo of Pru.
Patsy had had the brilliant idea to take private appointments— a brilliant idea she’d stolen from Nordstrom’s—and by the end of the day the appointments calendar was booked for the next three weeks. The idea was that you’d come in, after work or at lunchtime, and there’d already be a roomful of clothes in your size waiting for you, chosen by the shop’s stylish proprietor. Patsy suggestedthat the private-appointment customers should get a pot of kukicha tea and a foot massage, too, but Pru wasn’t ready to go that far. Or maybe just the tea—that wasn’t a bad idea. Still, she was happy with the three weeks’ worth of bookings—she hadn’t expected half that many.
At six-thirty she hung out the official CLOSED sign on the door, and Edie started opening champagne. That was when things for Pru started to get fuzzy. She remembered that everyone was there: John, with his friends Ralph and Rona, who made the trip down from New York especially for the opening. Rudy Fisch came, and Pru overheard her mother clucking sympathetically as he ran through his list of symptoms. McKay, who made Pru sit down, and Bill, who was prying the plastic casing off the cash register to have a look at the computer inside. Fiona, who showed everybody the ultrasound pictures of her embryonic girl. And Jimmy Roy, who’d made a bunch of compilation CDs for the shop, and who whistled appreciatively when Pru showed him the Bose sound system. Even Phan from the video store, along with his girlfriend, whose name really was Chuckie, and whom Pru hired on the spot when she offered to replace the girl who didn’t show up; and Lola, her elderly regular from Edie’s, who immediately pointed out that she’d tried on all these shoes, already. Edie kept opening bottle after bottle of champagne, and someone spilled a glass on a lilac satin skirt, and after that it was all pretty much a happy haze of kisses, laughter, Burt Bacharach, and the Sex Pistols.
THREE WEEKS LATER, SHE WAS HURRYING ACROSS THE Mall toward the Hirshhorn Museum, where she was supposed to meet Rona at lunchtime. She winced a little as she jumped up on the curb and landed on her sprained ankle. It still hurt occasionally, but at least the stitches in the bottom of her foot were gone and she could walk without the crutches.
Rona wore the same windbreaker she’d been wearing the first time Pru had met her, the one that matched Ralph’s. Although Pru had seen her only three or four times, she always felt like they were old, old friends. Rona was the kind of woman who took her friendships very seriously. She sent Pru an e-mail at least once a week, chatting about this and that. She made Pru feel carefully vetted and chosen, and as though the fact that Pru liked her, too, was some favor to her.
They exchanged fond hugs and kisses and made their way into the main galleries. The Hirshhorn is a circular building, and as you make your way through it, it gives you the sense of being perpetually around the bend from something great. They circled the galleries, around and around, up and up. Rona chatted about the art, and as she knew something about it her comments weren’t uninteresting, but Pru was having a hard time following her. After half an hour, she was practically crawling out of her skin with curiosity. Why had Rona summoned her? She’d only ever seen her in John’s company, and felt it would be rude to ask if she had some purpose in calling Pru, out of the blue, for lunch. But she couldn’t help thinking that Rona did have an agenda. She wondered if it had to do with John. She hadn’t seen much of him in the past few weeks, she’d been so busy with the shop. There was still no end of things to be done: the toilet refused to run properly, the electrical outlet behind the counter kept shocking her whenever she plugged something in, and she couldn’t for the life of her decipher the assembly instructions for the new Bjärnum/ Järpen shelving units she’d bought at Ikea. She was struggling to stay on top of the marketing and advertising, inventory control, property maintenance. She’d had to come up with a return policy. And, of course, run the shop.
In a way, it was a relief not to see so much of John. The struggle to maintain friendly feelings had taken its toll on her. Sometimes she felt lonelier in his presence than when she was actually alone. She had to watch herself when he was around. Ever since Patsy had confronted her about her feelings for him, she worked harder to tamp them down. Sometimes she could barely speak for fear of revealing her feelings. She felt her personality was slipping away as she tried to remain Miss Neutral Pal. She never could bring herself to ask about Lila, after that first time. And he never volunteered anything, either. Once or twice she’d caught him looking at her, about to say . . . something. He would clear his throat and take a deep, announcing breath. But then what he said was always something silly like, Did you remember to check on your building permits?
Finally, Rona decided she’d had enough art, and they headed to the Air and Space Museum for lunch, because that was where everybody went for lunch.
There weren’t many people outdoors, as they made their way across the Mall. It felt lonely and desolate in the glare of the early-spring sun. Pru preferred the winter’s clean, white snow to this, acres of dead grass mashed into dirt. More in-betweens: late afternoon, early spring, adolescence, falling in love. She hated the in-betweens. Always, she just wanted to get where she was going—to be there already. She was almost paralyzed by in-betweenness. She didn’t know how
she was supposed to behave.
They sat near the big windows of the cafeteria and ate their salads. Rona’s father had just died. He had been very old, in his nineties. Rona had been with him, holding his hand, when he went. “For the first time in my life,” she said, “I felt absolutely and utterly in the right place at the right time. Death has a way of focusing everything like that.” She gave Pru a sidelong look. “Like love. It fixes you, if you know what I mean. You have to be absolutely in that time and that place.”
“You and Ralph seem like you’ve known each other forever.”
“We were lucky. There aren’t many who’ve survived as long as we have.”
“So what’s your secret?” Pru said, smiling.
“I don’t know,” Rona said, spearing a cherry tomato that looked a bit yellow. “It just works. We just can’t shut up, is the truth. Even when we’re mad at each other, you know, neither one of us can walk out on an argument.” She laughed her warm, rough laugh. “Ralph tried to, once. It was when we first got together. We were involved in a terrible fight, and he slammed out of the apartment. He made it about five blocks before he stopped to call and yell at me from a pay phone. He had a terrible temper in those days. We talked for so long that there was a line for the phone, people shouting for him to hurry and hang up, so he comes and yells at me under my window for a while, and when it gets too cold he comes back upstairs to continue. And here we are, forty years later, and we’re still talking.”
“What was the fight about?”
“He was supposed to marry someone else. I knew her, too. A dancer. I liked her.”
“Wow. That sounds awful.”
“Falling in love is always awful, isn’t it?”
“So what happened?”
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