Women in Sunlight

by Frances Mayes

  “Very bad. Sorry to hear that.” He decides to come clean. “Hey, I’m actually looking for a southern woman. About thirty-five. Her family hasn’t heard from her in a while. This is confidential but I’m wondering if this woman who came to your rescue might be the one. How many southern belles are there in halfway houses? This cross street is her last known address.”

  The Pakistani looks wary. “I couldn’t say. Go across the street and ask those losers.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. Probably a mistake anyway. Thanks, man.”

  “Ah, well. What the fuck. The woman is called Liz. Is that the name you’re looking for? She’s long gone. Ambulance took her away. She’s probably overdosed.”

  * * *

  —

  Chris drives on to the super-cool graphic design studio on a leafy section of Pacific Avenue and orders the slight redesign of his label. The front image, a simple pen and ink of a vine at bud break, remains but he’s revised the back. The young woman working with him wears a flared black skirt in stiff panels and a white blouse with winged sleeves, Comme des Garçons, or maybe something even more hip, black ankle boots, her hair—structured to the max—falling like a raven wing across half her face. Chris flashes on the woman smoking on the steps at Lizzie’s halfway house. Her mouse-colored hair in ropy strands. Eyes lost in space. Her legs askew so that if anyone wanted to, he could see her crotch. Chris didn’t want to. Hell, no. But her doleful look, glazed, sad, barely registering him as he passed, sends a frisson of sympathy through him for her, for Lizzie’s lost potential, for Julia’s sorrow, even for the ass Wade, what he’d endured with the two women he loved.

  * * *

  —

  Cara Julia, he writes, I tried to call but got the unavailable message. I know you said no to me looking for Lizzie. I overrode that because you hesitated, and I’m sure you want news. I didn’t plan to encounter her, just to see if she’s still there. I did go to the intersection. The mom-and-pop owner knew her. He said that she isn’t there anymore. An ambulance took her away.

  He told her about the mugging and Lizzie getting the man to the hospital and continues: There are others at the house who might know where she is. Do you want me to go back and ask? This sounds seriously bad.

  He went on, writing about his day, pausing to pour a stony white from his neighbor down the road, to slice into the roast chicken he picked up at Whole Foods.

  Wondering what you are up to, where you are. Sometime, I want to show you San Francisco…Un abbraccio forte!

  A strong hug. Now, wondering, tonight, where is that Lizzie?

  In late winter, a blissful day arrives. Soft air descends. Mild enough to open a window. Margaret always maintained that pressure systems become blocked at Gibraltar, allowing the warm Mediterranean on our side to work its magic. True or not, I always imagine massive storms held back by a big rock. The almond tree just outside my study blooms, albeit tentatively, the unostentatious flowers sending out a faint scent, not of almonds but of the white paste one of my friends used to eat in kindergarten. Such a mild winter that I never uprooted the white geraniums in pots along the stone wall. Now I’ll only have to trim the dead away and they’ll reboot for summer.

  What winter there was, we missed while in sunny Florida. We came back here to days of long walks up the mountains, our boots slushing through damp leaves, to a skittish pair of caprioli leaping among our olive trees, and to the grunts of wild boars searching for acorns in the night. All our friends were ready to serve forth ribollita and sausages and beef stews, especially Julia, who completed a study of Tuscan pork with Gilda over the winter. They sliced and parsed local pigs, especially the boars that are hunted assiduously but still manage to double their population every couple of years. (Margaret said she wanted to write Wild Bores I Have Known.) Julia is making her own fennel-flavored sausages and grilling the big liver, which I’ve managed to avoid. Her first fricassee tasted gamey but after she got the soaking-in-vinegar part down, her daubes have been succulent and fall-off-the-bone tender.

  With Colin away in London, I have the day and I need it. Since we returned, I still haven’t completely unpacked. The work I did there lies on my desk, a stack of notes, and one folder with six poems. Margaret’s manuscript, too, is part of the pile, her work and mine now hopelessly entwined. Instead of diving into that wreck, I step outside to clip almond branches and stand them in a jar on the kitchen counter. Spring. Coming.

  At five months, I have a lunar curve. The little moonwalker baby-steps around once or twice a day. Late at night I feel her, weightless, somersaulting. Or him, undocked and floating in the mother ship. We elected not to be told the sex. I don’t know why, except that it gives us more room to imagine the mystery of this mystery being.

  Never, since playing with dolls, have I thought of myself as a mother. I aligned with the many women writers who never had children and who knew that motherhood strikes the death knell for creativity. (Knell. Old English: cnyllen. Old Norse knylla, to beat, to strike.) Imagine Virginia Woolf with a passel of brats. Jane Austen. Eudora Welty. Colette. Simone de Beauvoir. Edith Wharton. Elizabeth Bishop. Willa Cather. Well, Margaret, too, so I thought.

  Now I’m scurrying around to find counterexamples for new role models. Sylvia Plath—we know how that ended. Joan Didion, not ideal. Jhumpa Lahiri. Zadie Smith. She’s a strong one. No others come to mind but I’ll keep thinking. My mother maintained she double-doted on me because pregnancy and birth were horrible enough that she never had the nerve to try again. Mine has been sweet, but coming up are the months when my body billows outward, and I’m left just holding up a flapping flag on this ship that has set sail. Who knows, if Virginia Woolf had birthed sweet sons, maybe she wouldn’t have loaded her pockets with rocks and waded into the River Ouse.

  Our family doctor in Miami was happy to be proven wrong. He gave me good news, too: if you have a child after forty, you’re four times more likely to live to be one hundred. That takes away some of the anxiety about leaving a motherless college student. Miss X may be in her midfifties when I am swooped into the beyond.

  The most surprised person I encountered on our Florida trip was my first love, now friend, Ger. I had to meet with him and Stacy, the woman who rented my parents’ house, because of the screen porch wood rot. (Plus I wanted to see the house.) Two window frames in my mother’s room need replacing. I agreed also to paint the kitchen and put in a new dishwasher. (Their rent is so low that I thought they could just do these things themselves, but no.)

  Ger didn’t notice. I was wearing a bulky cardigan and leggings. It was only when Stacy stepped out to make coffee that he asked in a pinched voice, “What’s new with you?”

  I doubtlessly beamed, and said, “I am expecting a baby in June.” He almost swallowed his teeth as he restrained from asking how that could be. I answered for him. “I was shocked, too. Accident! I’m thrilled. I was blown sideways at first. As you know, I could never…”

  His partner’s girls prance in, sweet, all ponytails and flounce and mouthfuls of braces. I’m happy for him. If we come back, either they’ll have to move, or maybe I’ll sell them the house, which is hard to imagine. It’s my only major asset; what money my parents left (dwindled by my mother’s long illness) I used to buy Fonte delle Foglie. My parents loved every wall and footpath and keyhole of our sprawling stucco house set back from the street and surrounded by palms and moss-hung live oaks. I told Ger that Colin has a chance to work out of Miami and that we might be spending time here. I asked him his plans.

  “I think we’ll marry. She makes me happy and I hope I do the same. Who wouldn’t love those girls? They light up any room. You know, this house still reeks of you and your family. Sometimes I think I’m going to see you flying down the stairs with an armful of books, or your mother lying on the chaise longue in the sunroom. That pink silk throw over her legs, her head in a cloud of smoke. Your dad’s workshop still has his tools all
lined up on the pegboard. Anyway, I’m thinking we’ll move soon. Start fresh in one of those waterfront spec houses. Hot tub and Weber, the works.” He grinned, knowing my disdain for spec and tract housing.

  Reeks offended a bit, but I knew what he meant.

  I saw friends who shrieked and jumped up and down. A couple of writers from the University of Miami writing program invited me out for Cuban food. (Garlic chicken = soul food.) The chair, also a poet, asked me to teach as an adjunct anytime. Good to know.

  * * *

  —

  Last, best, surprisingly, oh madre di Dio, we married. Why not now, we thought. I arranged everything in two days, and let me say that’s the best way—no stress, no huge expense, and the element of spontaneity intact. The ceremony took place in the clapboard chapel where I was baptized and where my parents married. In the end, we only had Ger and Stacy, a colleague of Colin’s and his partner, three of my high school friends (all divorced!), and six of my parents’ close friends who’d helped raise me. The Episcopal priest looked rheumy and bored but delivered the vows in a strong voice. Gladys, my mother’s best friend, read a poem I requested by Jaime Sabines. Melanie, who went off to college with me and was my roommate until she dropped out to travel with a band, merely said she’d sing a surprise song. I thought the priest would go into nuclear meltdown when she started belting out Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” After, we took everyone to dinner and that was that. Everyone toasted, reminisced, and then Melanie became the DJ and everyone danced to “I’ll Be There.” Colin’s parents couldn’t come but sent a nice check and a set of sheets that will not fit an Italian bed. I asked Ger to store them at my mother’s house.

  Wed, we are. I wanted to keep my mother’s sapphire and diamonds wedding ring, and Colin wanted me to have his grandmother’s wide gold band with a single emerald. I’m laden and sparkling. I gave him my father’s wedding ring, not mentioning that it had been cut off his water-swollen fingers and repaired. We had the word forever engraved inside the rings. A fearfully big word.

  * * *

  —

  On planes, in the condo we rented, on sleepless nights—this man I married sometimes sings in his sleep, which may be the single most endearing thing about him—I wrote, read, took notes. After absorbing Margaret’s manuscript, I know that I’ll not find out anything else. What I have is plenty for the book I want to write so that her work is not forgotten. The rest, the secrets I found, the complexity of her character, the sorrows and surprises I will leave alone except for judicious gleanings. I always thought she fell for Colin. I found out why. I thought she was jealous of me—what on earth have I done that she hasn’t done better—and I found out why. Other things. She’s still a cipher and will remain so. But I think maybe I’ve come closer to her than to anyone I’ve known, Colin included. And she left a paradigm novella.

  When I wonder what I should do, what I should write, when a moral issue arises, or even when political candidates debate (she had a clear bullshit radar), it’s the Margaret-in-my-head that I consult. What would Margaret think? Margaret would be all over that. Often there’s a clear answer for me to contemplate, maybe not agree with, but there she is, compass rose, keeping me on course. Maybe everyone needs a mentor like that.

  * * *

  —

  NOTEBOOK:

  The start of a poem, after reading Margaret’s manuscript:

  I know what I know. You don’t know.

  How can you be and not be me? But that poem of Ovid’s

  I read during siesta about the same siesta in 8 BC.

  Easier than calling on a telefonino

  while whizzing down the autostrada, I touched

  old Publius Ovidius Naso.

  I’ve touched the river merchant’s wife

  and a white rooster killed

  by a fox thirteen hundred years ago. But you’re Not Me.

  And I only work here. The owner is out, no one is

  here to take your call. Your settings

  have been changed by a remote host.

  And if everyone lit just one little what,

  we could take back the light. At least.

  Eat more, weigh less. Lean on me.

  I’d know your hand in a bucket of hands.

  (Ovid’s siesta poem—or as we say, riposa—could have been written today. “The River Merchant’s Wife”: Ezra Pound. The rooster, an anonymous ancient Chinese poem, I think. I’ve lost the reference.)

  * * *

  —

  In the found stash from Margaret’s suitcase:

  I became pregnant [Margaret writing, 2008? Not exactly sure of the year] in January of my senior year at Georgetown. Since I was living at home, it was easy to keep my changing shape a secret, even from my father. My mother had left him two years ago. I elected to move home from the dorm to keep him company, to try to fill the house with activity. He adored my friends. He didn’t mind waking up to find that he had to tiptoe through the living room if a couple of girls had stayed over.

  The father of my child sounds grandiose. He was, actually. It was a Chekhovian thing: I was in love with let’s call him Mark. He was in love with my friend Millicent, who loved herself. Beyond that, she went from crush to crush. We were all twenty. No idea what we were doing. After a party at my house one night when my father was out of town, Mark stayed after Millicent went off with a snotty law school student, a mouth-breather already spotted as someone likely to go into politics. You’d recognize the name but that’s not part of my saga of getting knocked up by someone who only liked me. Mark stayed to help me clean up the glasses, ashtrays, empty pizza boxes, and then we sat in front of the fire for one of our usual talks about What Millicent Wants. The talk veered into our own plans. I knew I would travel. I already was clearly on the writing path. He’d applied for law school, like many of our friends, but he lacked the ambition that marked our group. He’d always known he’d go back to Richmond to take his place in the long family line of attorneys with a vast local practice. I saw museum board meetings, historical society, portraits in the dining room, him growing stout. Not for me. But, oh, really, I saw his square shoulders, face like the statue of David, the same pouty lips and serene, confident gaze as he appraises Goliath. I wanted to run my hands over his toned marble body. That I did, after we split a bottle of wine, started singing camp songs, giggling, and then he picked me up like Rhett did Scarlett and took me to my childhood bed, where we made love like crazy three times. Mark fell asleep until morning. Michelangelo should have carved a sleeping David as well as the tensile standing youth. I lay awake all night. In thrall. This was not my first time, but never had I experienced real lovemaking before. Such joy in our two bodies swirling and soaring. He would love me. My lips pressed his damp spine. Once in the night he turned and reached for me. It was the longest night of my life and that includes those in a concrete block hotel in Iraq with guns strafing and bombs in the streets.

  After amorous protestations, amorous compliments, and several cups of coffee, he was off to class. Then, nothing. I only saw him one more time, seven weeks later. Meanwhile, Millicent reclaimed him. I dropped her as a friend. When I knew I was pregnant, I felt obligated to tell him. The father of a child. He was—well, you’ve already guessed. This can’t happen, are you sure, why didn’t you…His good breeding surfaced, if only slightly. He offered to help me “take care of it.” Oxymoronic, I thought. He even would go with me.

  So long ago, dearest reader. Era of coat hangers and chemical douches but abortions not unknown. I still can see my own stark face in the mirror as I faced impossible facts. Old story. Always new for the bearer.

  With my novels, there were various ways a story could work out. In life, the conclusions are few. You keep it; you give it away. And isn’t “it” such a clue. If “it” were Adam or Lucinda, the conclusion veers.

  W
hen Mark called the next day, I told him I had arranged the abortion. He dropped an envelope with eight hundred dollars through our mail slot. Easy peasy. I turned hard against him. How could I have “loved” such a callous twit? I never heard from him again.

  I won’t go into the agonies of my decision. I did not have the abortion. I dropped the group I hung out with, changed my way of dressing to loose tops, shapeless skirts, and always carried my notebooks clutched in front of me. That way, I finished the semester. In April, I confessed to my father, who dropped his glass of sherry onto his shoe. After graduation, which I did not attend, my father drove me to New York, where he’d found a studio apartment for me in the West Village. I got an unpaid internship at the Village Voice. Oddly, no one asked questions as I ballooned forth. Was I obligated to tell Mark that I was carrying the child? I thought he forfeited his right by wanting to get rid of it. I loved the work; the editors were impressed, really impressed. Later, after the baby came, they offered me a real job.

  I have been unbearably lonely at times. That summer was the first of my frequent bouts of intense loneliness. Estranged from my mother, who was off in a new life with an East Indian man fifteen years younger, I had no one but my father to call. My other relatives would have been horrified, forever referring to me as “unfortunate” as well as their previous judgments (spoiled, cheeky, too smart for her own good, and stubborn). “She always was a sassy child,” I once overheard.

  I’d drink iced tea out on the fire escape and thumb through my address book. What friend to call? But (too smart for her own good) I knew this juicy piece of gossip could not possibly be kept secret.

  I felt like Gregor in the story, who woke up and was a bug with six legs and a shell. Metamorphosis, indeed. Moving from wafer thin to bulbous. Except at work, I lost my core self. It was a summer of reading Elizabeth Bowen, Henry James (I walked by his house), and Betty Friedan’s book explicating “the problem with no name.” It was a summer of canned tomato soup, roast chicken for protein, protein, protein, and chocolate milk—I was still partly a child. I never thought that I could keep a baby, though my father offered to help me raise her or him, not it.