The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D

by Nichole Bernier

  SIX

  KATE RARELY READ THE newspaper anymore. It lay where Chris had left it on the patio table, headlines half obscured by breakfast dishes. Phrases of alarm stood out among the empty cereal bowls and plates of jammy crust. terrorism fears prompt civilian cipro stashes. And down the page, environmental toxins linked to illness. She looked over the paper and to the yard. The children were playing croquet, jumping over wickets with their faces to the sun. attacks in suburbs.

  Against her better judgment, she pushed a plate aside to see the rest of the article.

  Officials Say Suicide-Bomb Attacks in Suburbs Would Be Impossible to Deter

  … Washington officials conceded that if a terrorist were to enter a crowded public place such as a shopping mall or pedestrian plaza, there would be no way to detect or prevent a suicide bombing. “If someone is hell-bent on entering a public place and causing destruction,” said one administration official requesting anonymity, “it is almost impossible to stop them.” Another intelligence official warned of terror-cell interest in small-town attacks as a way to further shake U.S. confidence.

  She put the plate back on the center of the paper and leaned back from the table, watching the children with her coffee held under her chin.

  Each day it was something new, some danger unthinkable just the day before. In the beginning it had seemed anything was possible, that the television might break in with an emergency broadcast announcing a reservoir in California had been poisoned with anthrax, that mad cow disease had been found in U.S. livestock, Ebola was airborne at JFK Airport. The news no longer surprised her, which was not to say she was desensitized. It was more of an amazement that yet another way had been found to make her feel as if she stood in an Escher landscape, the most basic things gone demented.

  She’d always followed common precautions. A fire extinguisher in the kitchen, a burglar alarm on the house. But the nature of danger had changed in the past year. A few months ago, there’d been a scare that someone had tampered with the D.C. water supply, and not long after, a bomb threat had forced the evacuation of the Metro while she’d waited for a train. For thirty minutes she’d moved slowly upward and out through the tunnels, the pack of frightened commuters craning their necks for the scent of information.

  What little could be done, she had done. If things became untenable in Washington, a friend’s cabin in rural Maryland would be their retreat, and the car was stocked with bottled water and canned goods. She and Chris had decided together on the cabin—most people they knew in the District had a designated place—but she’d loaded the car supplies herself, tucking the heavy cardboard box in the corner of the trunk. When he’d seen it, he’d rolled his eyes. You’ve got to be kidding me. This is Washington, D.C., Kate, not Chernobyl. She’d laughed along, and removed it. So far, he hadn’t noticed the supply in the spare-tire well.

  She pushed the newspaper aside and drank the last of her coffee, which was also the last of the coffee at the house. Kate picked up her pen and began jotting a grocery list, beginning with breakfast ingredients and ending with staples for their favorite dinners. Rice wine vinegar, ginger, chicken breasts. In the yard the kids had moved from playing croquet to playing dirt shower, a wash of grass and soil over each other’s heads. Laundry detergent, she added. Shampoo.

  But tonight she would not be cooking, at least not beyond something easy for the children. They had arranged for a sitter from a list of college students on the island, and were celebrating their anniversary at their favorite restaurant. Phlox had opened five years before as an eclectic café in the woods, and had developed a cult following for fresh seafood and its organic produce grown in back. Soon the newspapers and magazines took note, and it had expanded with a lounge, which had drawn the kind of patrons seeking the new hot thing. Reservations became harder to get, even if the quality was lost on much of the clientele, who would have eaten sea bass from tanks slicked with algae if it were printed on the menu in a trendy font.

  She should have been looking forward to dinner, great food prepared and cleared by someone else. She would style her hair and put on her pink sundress, the one too feminine for her taste but that Chris liked. They would have a glass of wine and comment upon the bar crowd, and have uninterrupted conversation that was broad and worldly, like the old days. Her edgy humor would return and he’d smile at her in the loose way that showed pleasure unrelated to his work, and when they returned to the bungalow, the sitter would be hastily paid and there would be no flossing before bed.

  But that apathy was creeping in again, the sense she’d had lately that things didn’t quite live up to their billing, so why bother. It was the same ambivalence and letdown she’d felt a few weeks before, out to dinner with friends. She genuinely liked the women, other mothers from Piper’s preschool, but had had a sense of dislocation all evening. She couldn’t get in sync with the conversation and humor, and her responses felt a quarter-beat off. Home renovations had never been her forte. But even when they’d talked about their kids’ activities she would fish for a contribution and come up empty. None of it mattered; she was unable to shake the sense that none of it could be counted upon to last.

  She had started feeling this way after Elizabeth’s death, but instead of fading as the months passed, it intensified. Sometimes it was a fog, a sense that she had not a single thought in her head worth sharing; sometimes it was a growing panic that at any moment something could go very wrong. She’d always been conscious of her family’s safety, but this was different. Danger was everywhere and nowhere, immediate and elusive, and no one was prepared. It was as if she alone could smell it, subtle as the metallic first moment of rain.

  She hadn’t said anything to Chris, unable to imagine it. But she could imagine his response. After he stopped smiling, because surely his first thought would be that she was kidding, his look would change from one of identification to one of sympathy. He would suggest that she should get out more often—join a gym and get back to swimming, perhaps join one of those women chefs networking clubs. He might even take it as evidence that she should accept this new job after all, that staying at home was making her loony. Or worse, think privately that she was too loony to handle working, and that she should find “someone to talk to,” because it was quite a thing, to lose a friend, and well, maybe everything that followed had hit her especially hard too. The fact of his suggesting it would be enormous, because he was an own-bootstraps sort of man and therapy was not part of his lexicon. That was her fear: not professional help, which had occurred to her but which she believed wasn’t necessary, but that Chris would look at her and see instability, weakness.

  It had been a long time since they’d gone out to dinner together, just the two of them. She could envision a staggered silence, one line of conversation after another failing to catch hold until they finally chatted about the weather expected the next day and whether to go to the beach. There were many evenings back home when they moved around and past one another, wordless for hours at their own tasks. She was thankful for the few hours of quiet focus, but at moments, she felt the loss of quiet companionship, a like-minded silence. Their daily lives were so different; she could no longer say for sure they were of like mind.

  Was it possible, she wondered, to have solitude together? She tried to imagine what he would do if after dinner she went to his study back home with her book or her laptop, and sat on the couch there instead of in the living room, as they had in the early years. He might glance over the top of his computer with a look of surprise and then a smile of welcome. Hey there. Or there might be a moment’s hesitation. She’d sit quietly nearby, each of them feeling the weight of the other in the room and a dampening of his or her own thoughts, each looking up expectantly when the other shifted in a chair or looked off into the middle distance. She might offer a snippet of commentary about something she was reading, but it would not be easily understood out of context. After an hour or so she would stand and stretch, murmur that she thought she’d call
it a night, and the following night she’d go back to the living room. It was a gift, solitude. But solitude with another person, that was an art.

  She’d never thought about Elizabeth and Dave in that way. But if she had, she would have imagined them smoothly companionable. Elizabeth reading a book while Dave sat on the leather couch reviewing promotional materials for some new piece of golf equipment. When he got up for a cup of coffee or a dish of ice cream and asked in his folksy way if she wanted something, she’d smile at his thoughtfulness. Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe she had wished he’d be the kind of man to walk back in with two glasses of wine, step in front of the television, and lift the book out of her hands. Maybe in truth there had been a lot of invisible wishing.

  For two nights Kate had been reading the journal in the loft long after the last of the boats returned across the dark harbor, running lights trailing like phosphorescent fish. The second night she’d opened the notebook with hesitation. If she’d had to guess what her friend had been like in high school, Kate would have imagined a fresh-scrubbed yearbook editor, an all-American girl who babysat for the neighborhood. This emerging person was significantly less sunny, more independent and creative, but much lonelier. Kate found herself wishing for a photo, wondering whether she had been fashionable once, before she became the kind of mother who wore dangling pumpkin earrings at Halloween.

  Last night’s entries followed Elizabeth through her senior year of high school. There was a tremendous amount of writing; Elizabeth recorded details the way others whispered observations to friends. She’d passed the time waiting for college acceptance letters by painting and holding odd jobs. Like her friends, she experimented with alcohol; drinking at weekend parties made her feel indistinct, blurring the line where she ended and others began. She and Michael would sit in his car with the radio on. When he kissed her, he cupped her jaw in one hand and didn’t slip his hand up under her shirt right away, which she saw as a sign of his integrity. She held out hope that soon he’d ask her to sit alone with him during lunch in the cafeteria, as the couples did.

  Her art teacher recommended her to a gallery that carried the work of new artists, and she wrote giddily of the sale of two pieces for $100 each. She kept her favorite; a sketch of it in her journal showed a Warhol-style canvas of repetitive, overlapping bicycle wheels. Finally a thick envelope arrived from NYU.

  She wrote in the journal all spring and summer, pages filled with longing for closer friends, a more conventional mother, a real relationship with Michael. But as the months passed and her hopes were not met, the tenor of her adolescent wishing cooled. She met Michael more often at night, but stopped dreaming he’d ask her to share a table in the cafeteria, and stopped hinting that her family used to be larger when he expressed no curiosity or concern.

  The grandfather clock gonged once from the darkness downstairs, and Kate forced herself to close the book. Don’t, Kate felt herself urging. Don’t trust him. Though of course whatever was done, was done.

  SEVEN

  A BREEZE LIFTED THE edge of the tablecloth as the sommelier opened the wine and poured an inch for Kate. She gave the glass a small swirl, small because she disliked wine showmanship, and nodded at the taste. He poured two glasses, and left quietly.

  The outdoor patio was new, an enhancement like the lounge that had been added after positive reviews in national food publications. Around the flagstone deck, conical topiaries corralled the guests so they did not push back chairs into the organic gardens. Kate and Chris had been seated by the maître d’ near the koi pond, too close. If she were to drop her knife it would enter the water like a harpoon.

  Last summer, in the area where they now sat, there had been only four outdoor tables on a balcony overlooking raised flower beds and rows of mesclun. The tables had been positioned so privately that during dessert Chris had slid a hand under her dress, fingers cool from his wineglass trailing condensation on her thigh.

  Chris leaned back in his chair, one steel leg inches from the pond’s edge, and smiled. He enjoyed it when she ordered the wine, spoke confidently of menu items and pairings. Kate could feel his pleasure in the way he watched her hand on the glass and her lips on the rim, felt his eyes on her throat as she tipped the glass upward. He pinched his fingernail in the cork and looked at her across the table. “I like that dress. You look nice tonight.”

  “So do you.” She meant it. Summer agreed with him. In spite of his coppery coloring, the sun browned his face rather than ruddied it, and brought out the gold in hair threaded with gray. His neck was strong against the collar and his chin hadn’t gone soft. Any weight he’d gained when he gave up smoking had been beaten back with diet and exercise.

  She glanced down at his shoes, tan loafers. “Decided to leave the eco-sandals at home tonight?”

  “You don’t like them? I thought they’d be your thing.” He flexed a foot alongside the table. “I picked them up on the Seattle trip last month. The hotel was threatening one of those team-building ropes courses.”

  “You love those.”

  “Right up there with trust falls and meditations around a campfire.” They shared a knowing smile about forced group intimacy.

  Noise from the lounge came through the doorway, the sociable sound of a party where everyone knows one another. At the back of the patio it was quieter. Fireflies blinked beyond the topiaries, and a light wind rustled the square of linen in Kate’s lap. Koi rested, darted, and went still.

  Chris folded his hands across his stomach and looked at her in a way that she read as expectant. She smiled in the absence of anything to say. She continued to think and smile as the seconds passed, and her mouth felt carved of wood.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Wrong? Nothing. Why?”

  “You just seem a little quiet.” He looked off across the patio, and there was another pause. It was her turn. A flush heated the side of her neck, and she rested cool fingertips against it.

  “So what’s going on with that Seattle project?” she tried. “Is it going to happen?”

  “Probably. It’s a great location. It’s going to take some renovations and a lot of marketing, but it could work.”

  Across the patio a tray clattered, a glass broke, and a woman recoiled from the splash. There were exclamations about a dress, apologies given, soda water rushed in. Grumblings continued for several moments. Kate looked back to Chris and worked to recall the topic.

  “So are you going to have to go out there much?”

  “Probably a few more times. They’ll be quickies.” He smiled, amused; he knew she wasn’t that interested in the Seattle project. “I was thinking we might be able to turn one into a vacation. We could take the kids hiking around Mount Rainier, and get a ferry over to Vancouver Island. Didn’t you know someone from school who opened up a B and B over there?”

  The waiter arrived with their appetizers and placed a bowl of steamed mussels in front of Chris, a beet Gorgonzola salad before her. The cubed beets bloodied the white of the blue-veined cheese.

  She imagined bringing James and Piper to Seattle, going to the fish market and then to Mount Rainier, marching up mountain trails into the thin cloud cover. They’d ferry across Puget Sound to Canada and stroll past the Parliament building and moored yachts, go for high tea at the hotel that was like a castle. They might love it so much that they would want to stay. When she’d traveled in her twenties, she’d sewn a maple leaf on her backpack like most people she knew, the well-known tactic for avoiding anti-American sentiment abroad. Their children would grow up drinking pure glacial water and speaking in sentences that lifted at the end like constant questions, safe from those waging war against the more controversial neighbor to the south. She took a bite of beet, and licked red from the tines of her fork.

  Chris ordered dessert and handed the menu to the waiter. She took the last sip of her wine, her second glass. The effervescence went to her eyes and scalp, her fingers and lips, all weightless and animated. The
morning’s concerns seemed silly. They were doing fine. She was fine. Maybe she just needed to get out of the house more often; it might be as simple as that.

  He leaned back in his chair, crossed his hands over his stomach. “You were reading those journals pretty late again last night,” he said.

  She picked up the bottle and poured a small amount in her glass, then tipped the last into his. “It’s strange, reading about the way a person thinks her life is going to go and she has no idea what’s coming. When Elizabeth was young she really loved art. She wanted to be a painter in New York.”

  He pushed his glass back and forth, watching the wine slide and cling, and looked around the patio. “Do you know yet what she was doing with that Michael guy?”

  That’s what it always came down to in the end. The single greatest point of interest about a woman’s thirty-eight years was not what she had done, but what she hadn’t told anyone she’d done.

  “No,” she said. “I’m still reading about high school. It’s sad. She was a pretty lonely teenager and didn’t have a great relationship with her parents.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Elizabeth.”

  “I know. It’s like I’m reading about a stranger.”

  The playgroup had formed arbitrarily, eight new mothers grouped together by the town Newcomers’ Club. Kate had found them a bit much in the beginning, too polished too early in the morning, and their conversations had had no edge, no spice. But over the three years she’d been part of the group, they’d settled into a camaraderie: parties for the celebrations, meals cooked for the crises. Kate had felt closest to Elizabeth; with her, she hadn’t worked to fill silences when it felt as if there was nothing in particular to say. In the quiet she’d felt tacit understanding of … she didn’t know what, exactly. The simple things, the important things. But silences, like solitude, could contain any amount of comfort or discomfort, any degree of truth.