Evelyn laughed, but not meanly. “I don’t think anyone does,” she said.
“No,” Ingrid agreed, “they probably don’t.” She pulled up a handful of grass and threw it away again. “Now they just think I’m weird.”
“But that’s what you want them to think, isn’t it?”
“Well, no. I mean, I don’t want them to think anything. It’s just, you know, I guess some people just naturally fit in and others don’t. And I would feel like I was a big fake if I tried to go around dressing like—well, like you. Not there’s anything wrong with that,” she added hastily, lest Evelyn be offended, “it’s just that that’s the way you are, so it matches you, but for me it somehow doesn’t.”
“Oh, boy.” Evelyn tossed the magazine onto the lawn. “If you only knew.”
“What?”
If you only knew what’s under these pastels, Evelyn thought, but said aloud, “Do you know what I went through to get these clothes?”
“A Filene’s basement sale,” Ingrid said.
“It was Jordan Marsh, but what I meant was, when I first moved up here—” She paused a moment. Why was she telling Ingrid this? It’s not safe, said a small voice inside her. But there was another voice there too; a voice, she realized, that was desperate to have a normal conversation with a girlfriend, to talk about real things, not one of those exchanges with Ray’s friends that always felt like a contest she could never win.
“When I went to meet Ray for our second date,” Evelyn continued, “I had to borrow a dress from a girl down the hall just to have something to wear. I was from down south, and I didn’t have much money, and I didn’t have anything for cold weather, let alone fancy.”
“So what were you doing up here?”
“Oh—” Evelyn paused. “Working in a beauty salon. Called Hollywood, actually, the Hollywood House of Beauty. Which I guess is funny, because it wasn’t a glamorous place at all, it was what you said—scuzzy.”
Ingrid laughed, a real laugh, a friendly laugh. “See?” she said. “I know what I’m talking about. So hey, if you cut hair and stuff, maybe you could shave my head sometime. I always nick myself when I do it.”
Evelyn said nothing, thinking, Why on earth would you want to shave your head, and will you keep being nice to me if we keep talking, or is this some kind of trick and I should get up now and enjoy this feeling of having a girlfriend before it bursts and ends?
She had lost the thread of the conversation. What were they talking about? “I didn’t cut hair,” she said finally. “I did manicures.”
“Where’d you learn that?”
“I’ve always known how to do it. My mother used to do manicures in the wintertime when we weren’t—when we needed extra money. But I quit when I married Ray.”
“Why?”
Oh, Ingrid knew nothing about the world, Evelyn thought, nothing at all if she did not know the answer to that.
“It must have been boring,” Ingrid guessed.
No, boring was not the reason she’d quit. In fact she’d missed the companionship of the other girls in the salon; though she hadn’t talked with them much, she knew they had the same problems she did: not enough money, boyfriends or husbands that drank or ran around, dreams that weren’t likely to come true any time soon. Half their clientele had been hookers. No, she had quit because when she married Ray it became an impossible juxtaposition: there was no way she was going to live in this beautiful house in Randall and then go to work in a salon in the Combat Zone.
“I didn’t need the money any more,” Evelyn said. “And like I said, it was scuzzy. It was right near a bunch of strip clubs.”
“Really.” Ingrid thought this over. Then she said, “But why’d you come up here from the south? I mean, people don’t move to Boston just so they can give manicures.”
To buy time, Evelyn reached for her magazine. To tell Ingrid about the circus would feel like too much of an exposure, but she did want the two of them to go on talking like this. It felt as if, with each successful back and forth, a tiny bit of pressure escaped from her and her face felt softer, her chest more able to breathe. She looked down at the magazine, at Faye Dunaway’s inscrutable marble face and said, “I was up here in Boston after my first husband died. I came up here to find his family.”
“Your first husband died?” Ingrid was impressed. “Wow. I mean, I’m sorry, that’s sad.” She pulled up another handful of grass and studied it. Life: Complicated. “Did he have cancer or something?”
“No, he died in an accident,” Evelyn said. Thinking as she said it what an understatement it was—he had lived in an accident. A long series of accidents, all blurring into one big continuous one.
“What kind of accident?” Ingrid asked.
“He fell down some steps and broke his neck.”
Ingrid sat all the way back in the grass. “Jeez. That’s awful. Did he just like, trip, or what?”
Evelyn felt a small shudder travel through her. She had said too much about it already.
“My goodness,” she said, “how did we get onto this depressing subject when we were talking about California?”
“People say that if you talk about a tragedy, you feel better,” Ingrid said.
“Who says that?”
“You know, therapists and stuff. When my mom died I had to go to a bunch of child psychologists to make sure I was, you know, ‘adjusting to the trauma.’”
“Your mother’s dead?” Evelyn was startled. She looked at Ingrid—the awful hair, the ragged clothes, the safety pins in the ears—through this new lens of dead mother. “Gosh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that. You’d think the school would have told us.”
“It’s okay.” Ingrid threw her chewed cigarette in the grass and shook another one out of the package. “I barely remember her. She died when I was four. She had cancer.”
“How sad.”
“I guess so. Like I said, I barely remember her. It was worse for my dad. I mean, he lost his wife. Well, I guess you know what that’s like if your husband died. Do you think it was worse that he died suddenly? I mean, my dad at least had time to prepare.”
“Actually,” Evelyn said, “when he died we were kind of separated. I was going to divorce him—he was killing himself with drink.”
“‘Killing himself with drink?’ You mean he was drunk when he fell?”
“Killing yourself with drink is an expression,” Evelyn said, surprised she knew this and Ingrid didn’t. “But yes, he was drunk when he fell. He was drunk all the time.”
She picked turned a page of the magazine, scrutinized a toothpaste ad. As if she had just been asked the time of day on a bus and now, obligation discharged, could go back to reading.
Ingrid didn’t take the hint. “So how did it happen?”
“I don’t like to think about it,” Evelyn said. She looked down at the blue and white-striped toothpaste arranged in a curl on the toothbrush, stopped seeing it. There was Joe, staggering on the aluminum steps outside the trailer in the rain. The smell of mud and dirty carpet, the sour beer smell of his breath. The noise. As if it were all still happening.
“I don’t like to think about my mom too much now either,” Ingrid said. “It’s kind of depressing. But when I was little I thought about her all the time.”
She paused, and Evelyn looked up from the rainy night and the drunk but still-alive Joe.
Ingrid took this as encouragement, and continued: “I used to worry that if I hugged my father when he came home from the lab at night, the radiation from his experiments would rub off on my skin and get into my bones the way it got into the bones of my mother. But I never told anyone that, so nobody could figure out why I wouldn’t let my dad hug me. So I had to go to the psychologist.”
“Ingrid,” said Evelyn, “that’s so sad.” On impulse, she reached out and stroked Ingrid’s arm. “That’s just the saddest thing.”
At the feel of Evelyn’s palm sliding the length of her forearm, Ingrid felt a jolt of electricity that
was like nothing she’d ever experienced. An electric shock she’d once gotten came close. But then in the aftermath of Evelyn’s touch came a light delicious quiver, like the first drag of a cigarette you’ve been wanting to smoke for hours. A relief, an exhalation, a yes. But now her face was burning red, and the relief became a queasy jitter, like when she drank too much coffee. What was going on?
Mister, someone had slipped me a Mickey. The room started spinning. I’d heard the Soviets had something like this they gave their moles to keep them in line. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was her face—
Behind them, the screen door of the kitchen opened. Ingrid looked toward the sound of the door, feeling dazed.
“Hello ladies,” Ray called. He came down the steps of the deck and across the lawn and kissed Evelyn on the forehead. “Anyone want to take a ramble up to the ridge and watch the sunset?”
“Me,” Ingrid said, and jumped up, eager to get away from whatever it was that had just happened to her.
“And you, sweetheart?”
Evelyn closed the magazine, opened it again. It had been so nice talking to Ingrid, and now here was Ray, who would want to walk up the path to the ridge telling her the names of all the trees and whether they were coniferous or the other kind, who would want to sit on the top of the ridge and talk about what a crime it was that they were erecting a housing development on something that used to be called Kendall Farms, who would want to say the clouds were cumulo-something, and then Ingrid would join in and it would be back to business as usual.
“I have to clean up,” she said to Ray. “You two go.”
“The dishes are being power-scrubbed even as we speak, so let’s all three take a walk.”
“No,” said Evelyn forcefully, “there’s still the kitchen floor. I want to mop it.”
“Is having a floor clean enough to eat off of better than watching a sunset?” Ray asked. “Seriously, I was thinking about this anyway: let’s hire someone to come in twice a week. There’s no reason you should be knocking yourself out.”
“Is there something wrong with the way I’m doing it?” Evelyn asked.
“No, of course not.”
“If there is, tell me.”
Ray stifled a huff of exasperation. “You’re a very thorough and conscientious housekeeper,and there’s no need for you to do it when we can afford to pay a cleaning lady. You could do any number of other things in your free time instead—whatever you wanted, you know, take a class or something. In any case, you don’t have to do it, that’s all I meant. Just think about it.”
“Fine, I’ll think about it,” Evelyn said, more because she didn’t want to argue in front of Ingrid than because she had any intention of considering the idea. There was no way she could explain to Ray that doing the housework gave her a claim on the house itself that she otherwise lacked; everything was so thoroughly his. To vacuum the expensive rug in the living room, to wash the good teacups by hand, to scrub out the claw-foot bathtub was in some small way to own them, to be invested in their upkeep, their well-being, their future. If they had a cleaning lady, as Ray called it, meaning a maid, Evelyn’s tentative right of ownership would be usurped. Besides, she had no idea what you said to maids, how you worked out the power of who was boss, how things should be done. Whatever it was, she would do it wrong and it would be a disaster. No, there was no way.
“So come up to the ridge.”
“You two go,” Evelyn said. She turned to Ingrid. “Go with him; Ray says it’s the nicest view in the neighborhood—” and then to Ray: “I’m just a little tired, sweetheart. Honestly, I just want to lie here in this chair, not go hiking. I’ll skip doing the floor, all right?”
“Come on, then,” Ingrid said to Ray, “or it’ll be too dark.”
They started off toward the ravine at the end of the backyard. When they had climbed the hill, they came out of the trees into open meadow. A wide flat seam of rock marked where the hill sloped steeply down again. They crossed the grass and sat down there. Ray was right, Ingrid thought, this was the nicest view. You could see all the old farm fields below, and the dark lines of stone walls, and an old barn that Ingrid recognized from having passed it on her bike. They were facing west, and the sun was already down behind the tops of the pine trees on the hills in the distance. Far off to the left in a bare patch of earth, a yellow backhoe, looking small as a toy, stood parked beside the pile of dirt it had excavated.
Ingrid realized she felt better; the complicated feeling Evelyn’s hand on her harm had sent crawling through her was dissipating. Ray was quiet beside her and they sat in silence for a while, watching the sun drop between the trees.
Then Ingrid said, “Can you really kill yourself with drink?”
“What? Sure. Not very efficiently, though.”
Had Ray been paying more attention he would have wondered at the origin of the question, but he was thinking about his conversation with Evelyn. How much easier it would be if she would just try to enjoy the pleasures life offered! A walk in the woods after dinner, a Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts. This weekend they had tickets with the Yeagers for Vladimir Horowitz at Symphony Hall. If Evelyn acted the way she just had—defensive, disinterested—the evening would be a disaster.
Perhaps, he reflected, he should take Evelyn out to dinner alone first, rather than making dinner a foursome. Then she’d have had his undivided attention and a few of glasses of wine to cocoon herself in before they met the Yeagers; she’d feel safer and less inclined to be paranoid—maybe she’d even have a good time.
“If I were going to kill myself I’d take hemlock,” Ingrid announced.
“What?” Ray shook away his thoughts and looked at her. “I trust you’re not thinking of doing so.”
“No—I’m just saying. I have a book on plant identification that tells you everything about poisoning yourself. You don’t even need to eat that much of it. What method would you do?”
“I wouldn’t kill myself.”
“Just suppose.”
“I’ve never thought about it,” he said.
Ingrid made an exasperated sound in her throat. “Well think about it. There must be some circumstance. Just suppose.”
“Well, all right.” He would indulge her. He thought for a moment. “I suppose, perhaps if I were, who was that explorer? Oates? He was stranded in the Antarctic with a party of men and they were starving. It was clear they would all perish in a matter of days, so he decided to meet death gallantly. He got up, very weak, and looked out of the tent at the blizzard. ‘I think I’ll just step out for a bit, ’he said to his men, and he walked out into the storm, out to his death.
“I wouldn’t mind dying like that—doing something adventurous. Climbing a mountain and dying up on some lonely peak. Being devoured later by mountain lions.”
Ingrid looked at Ray, at his round tortoise-shell glasses, at the slight protrusion of his belly visible against his shirt, at his clean fingers twirling a long piece of grass. He would never die from too much nature in a faraway place. And he didn’t even know it. Ingrid felt a rush of sympathy for him. But there was no way to express it and the sympathy nose-dived into depression. She foraged in the pocket of her shirt and pulled out a cigarette, the last one in the package.
“You really shouldn’t smoke so much,” Ray said.
“Why?”
“Cancer, Ingrid, emphysema. You cough a lot. I’ve heard you.”
“Aah.” Ingrid got the cigarette lit and took a deep drag. “I figure we’re all going to get blown up in a few years anyway, so there’s no point worrying about cancer. Do you think it would be worse dying a sudden violent death, like in an explosion, or dying slowly from radiation sickness?”
“Good Lord. You shouldn’t be thinking about such morbid things at your age.”
“At what age should I be thinking about them?” She attempted a smoke ring. “There are six nuclear reactors in New England alone. So even if we don’t blow each other up with missiles, i
n all likelihood we’ll melt ourselves down. Incidentally, there are only four reactors in California, so the one drawback of my coming east is that I’ve upped my chances of being in a meltdown by fifty percent.”
“That’s rather a bleak outlook, don’t you think?”
“Bleak and realistic: Three-mile Island? Or hello—Hiroshima? It’s not exactly comforting to be part of a species that would just go murder two hundred and fifty thousand people. Or exterminate six million, for that matter.”
“That’s true,” Ray said. Ingrid was right, in a way: human beings had been doing stupid and even evil things throughout history, and with each new century, the degree of stupidity and evil seemed to increase tenfold. But there was another way to look at it, a way Ingrid wasn’t seeing. “You have to remember,” he said, “that what we’re capable of as a species is something we’re continually discovering. Our great evils certainly do seem to find new ways of expressing themselves, but we discover we’re capable of great acts of love, too.”
“That is so reassuring,” said Ingrid.
He ignored her eye-rolling. “And not only the kinds of love that make headlines—the great political movements of nonviolence, or people who dedicate their lives to a cause and such. I think all of us have a greater capacity for love than we realize. And if we’re lucky, we find ourselves in a situation that brings it out.”
Ingrid said nothing, and Ray took the absence of a sarcastic remark as a sign that she was at least considering what he’d said. But the silence allowed him to replay his words, and hearing them in his head, he felt embarrassed. Why was he trying to convince a sixteen-year-old nihilist that love was a redeeming force in the universe? He turned his attention to the view. The sun had almost completely disappeared, and beneath the fanfare of pink and orange clouds, the grasses in the field had turned from a radiant green-gold to a dark gray. All at once he felt deeply depressed. He stood up and dusted his hands on his khakis, as if the feeling were one that might be brushed away like dirt.
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