The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D

by Nichole Bernier

  “I still can’t believe she never told me about her sister.” As she said “sister,” Kate was thinking affair.

  “Maybe she just got used to keeping it to herself. Or the time was never right. It was years before our CFO told me he was a recovering alcoholic.” Then Chris thought a moment. “You know Andy, our communications director?”

  “Sure. The guy we had dinner with? And his wife, just before we moved.”

  “I just found out she’s actually his second wife. His first wife, the mother of their kids, died of cancer a few years ago.”

  Kate tried to remember their dinner together, whether there was anything that came up that would have suggested that it was a second marriage. “He just mentioned it now? You guys travel a lot together.”

  “A decent amount. Like I said, I guess it just never came up.”

  The waiter brought their desserts, a cheesecake with pomegranate sauce for Chris, a fondue for Kate. She speared a chain of berries and swirled it in small chocolate circles. The impression of the fruit stayed for a few seconds, then smoothed itself as if the fruit had never made a mark.

  “The fifteenth was Elizabeth’s birthday. She would have been thirty-nine.” Kate stroked at the surface of the chocolate with the long, thin fork. “Last year on her birthday Emily was only a month old. A year ago at this time, they had no idea what was ahead of them.” She wondered what had been on Elizabeth’s mind as she blew out her candles. Each year Kate always thought happy and healthy family, but on her own thirty-eighth birthday three months before, her wish had struck her as meaningless. How happy is happy? How healthy is healthy?

  “I wonder if she would have done anything differently if she could have known it was her last year.”

  Chris studied her, quiet a moment. “You do that a lot these days.”

  “Do what?”

  “Look back. Analyze in hindsight. ‘A year ago today.’ ‘At this time two months ago.’ ” He stretched his legs, and his knees gave a small pop, one first and then the other. “I don’t understand why you find that so interesting.”

  He said it as though he were merely curious, but something else was there too. Patience. Or impatience. One done carefully enough was sometimes a mask for the other.

  “Well, I guess it’s poignant, looking back at the person who doesn’t know what’s about to hit her. To think that someone can be going along, naïve and content, having no idea a major event is about to shake up her world. Sometimes I wonder how we’d live if we could know in advance.”

  The levity she’d felt from the wine had dissipated, and now she felt only tired. She did not remember how she’d gotten into this line of conversation, but it was not where she wanted to be. She looked over her shoulder for the waiter. She needed a transition; a cup of coffee, maybe a glass of port.

  “Well, whatever’s going to happen is whatever’s going to happen, and the person of a year ago couldn’t know it,” he said. “It doesn’t cast any judgment on the person you were, or make you naïve.”

  She’d touched a nerve. “It’s not a judgment.” He minded the notion that a person could be accountable for what he hadn’t known and had not done. “It’s just a point of curiosity. If anything, it’s a reality check for the way you’re living today. Take that bomb scare in the Metro.…”

  He shook his head. “You have to let that go, Kate. It was a false alarm.”

  So slowly, in the dim tunnel. They’d all moved up and out so slowly. She was sure she’d smelled smoke, had put her hand to her mouth anticipating the choke and burn.

  The fondue fork shook in her fingers, and she placed it on the dessert plate. “I know. That’s not the point.”

  “The point is that you’re fine, the kids are fine, we’re all fine. You never know what’s going to happen, so just live each day with no regrets, no loose ends. Right?”

  That wasn’t her point at all. She frowned at the chocolate.

  “I just wish you’d move past that ‘one day left to live’ mind-set, Kate. That flashback thinking, dwelling on the past, trying to figure out how to live differently because of what you didn’t see coming. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t make anything turn out differently.” He flicked a few crumbs from the table into the pool, and the fat koi turned toward them mechanically.

  Flashback thinking. That was one way of putting it. He wasn’t wrong; in the past year it had become a reflexive part of her mental toolbox, the way she measured and made sense of time. On this day last year. As if it were possible to wrinkle a gap in time and align two moments side by side, to let the knowledge of the later moment rub shoulders with the naïveté of the first, and soften the blow. There was the person she’d been before last autumn, when the world had gone all wrong not once but twice. And there was the person she was after.

  “You know,” he said, sticking his fork into the last of the cheesecake, “I read that there’s a baby boom coming, all the people who reacted to the past year by hunkering down, having another kid. Investing in the future, optimism and hope, all that stuff.”

  He was using his nonchalant voice, or rather his trying-to-be-nonchalant voice, looking down at his dessert plate. But he glanced up to see how she was reacting to his words, flashing a crooked smile.

  She laughed, incredulous. “You’re serious. Even with your travel schedule, you’re serious?”

  “It’s gotten better. You know it’s better than it was.” That was true. It was also true that she had become accustomed to his travel, and that there were small compensations. She cooked more simply. There were fewer sounds to wake her in the night. When he’d first begun to travel so much, she would not have thought she’d come to feel this way.

  Kate shook her head. “What happened to Mr. Two and Through?”

  “Well, we’re doing a pretty good job of two, aren’t we? Tell me these aren’t two of the happiest, most well-adjusted kids around.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes.”

  Kate thought of Emily Martin on her lap, curious sausage fingers reaching for the food on her plate. The smell of her baby shampoo. She would be lying if she said it hadn’t crossed her mind. But not in a long while. It seemed a dangerous thing, having more children than hands.

  When they arrived back at the house and paid the sitter, Chris said he wanted to walk down to the beach, get some fresh air and check out the ships in the harbor. Kate peeked into the kids’ room, tucked Piper’s splayed legs back under the covers and retrieved James’s stuffed dinosaur from the floor, the one he claimed not to sleep with anymore. The light was already on in the master bedroom, and she stepped out of the pink dress and pulled on a black tank top. She would not be reading the notebooks tonight.

  She brushed her teeth and rushed through her facial regimen, some anti-aging foolishness recommended by a dermatological spa. She’d won a free consultation in the preschool auction but that’s where the free part had ended, and she still felt buyer’s remorse each time she opened the two tiny bottles of serum. That’s what they’d called it—serum—with the gravity of something that sprang from James Bond’s briefcase, most likely to justify its cost. Still, she’d bought them. Well, what if there was something to it, the molecular sugars, the unpronounceable acids? Why was it hard to believe that things you couldn’t see or understand might help, when God knows there were plenty that did harm? She turned away from the mirror and clicked off the bathroom light.

  When she stepped back into the bedroom she noticed a notebook lying open on her bed. It was the same size as the rest of Elizabeth’s journals but with an unfamiliar cover, apparently one from deeper in the trunk. The closet door was open. So was the trapdoor at the top of the ladder. Why would the babysitter go snooping? How would she know about the loft, or care about the notebooks?

  The back door opened and closed with the soft sound of someone trying not to wake children, and Kate moved the notebook to her nightstand. Chris appeared in the doorway, hair windblown and shirt unbuttoned, and leaned agai
nst the frame looking at her in the tight threadbare tank.

  In a marriage certain things become predictable, certain signals and routines, and Kate felt the women’s magazines had it wrong when they wrote off predictability as a bad thing. Questions and answers are conveyed in a shorthand of touch so that no one’s feelings need be hurt with mixed messages. A hand on the shoulder means one thing, a hand on the lower back, another; a glancing kiss on the cheek, good night, but a half second longer, not good night. Even an old tank top could have a translation. Not good night.

  So after they’d rolled apart from one another in bed and he turned back toward her a moment later, kissed her slowly, then hesitated, she knew the shorthand. We’re okay, right? He’d been dismissive at dinner and he knew it; it hadn’t precluded intimacy, but it didn’t necessarily mean all was forgotten, either. She could return the kiss, drawing it out in the same way he had, reassure him that there was no offense taken and that all was as it always had been. No matter that all wasn’t, not quite. But that was not on the table at the moment, the subtle drift. Nor was the fact that the desire that used to come so naturally, the instincts, the intentions, and the effectiveness of touch, no longer came quite so naturally.

  When she returned the kiss, she drew it out a moment longer than usual. We’re okay.

  As she did she tasted something under the toothpaste she hadn’t noticed before, a flavor that was not Pinot Noir or cheesecake or mussels. Sharp and acrid, layered under toothpaste and mouthwash, was the bite of tobacco.

  No, she thought. Oh, no. You worked so hard.

  She imagined him on the beach. Looking over his shoulder to be sure the house was out of view before lighting up, face low to his cupped hand, inhaling deeply and squinting his eyes in appreciation of the pleasure, a pleasure made richer for having to enjoy it in secret.

  EIGHT

  THE MONTHS CHRIS HAD struggled to stop smoking had not been their proudest as a couple. Shortly after they had gotten engaged, Kate urged him to quit. He knew the gloom-and-doom statistics but claimed not to believe them, blaming an overzealous medical establishment, health extremists, the media.

  Then one day he announced he had quit. He did not want to dwell on his methods or his achievement—he had just wanted to do the thing quietly. Only as it turned out, he never had. During the months between his vow to stop and her discovery that he hadn’t, there were times she’d found stubs in his apartment, matches in his car. Those were from the old days, he’d say with a wave of the hand, or they belonged to someone else. Once he’d looked her in the eye, forthright and calm, and told her what she smelled on him was not in fact cigarette smoke. It was as if he were telling her the earth was flat, and she faced him trying to reconcile contradictory things she knew to be true. This was how tobacco smelled. And: Chris did not lie.

  He was so matter-of-fact in this and other denials that when she learned the truth, she was more than hurt by his dishonesty. She was embarrassed by her own naïveté, and with this new feeling of being found a fool, it was as if something in her definition of herself had slipped off its rails.

  They had moved on, because it was just smoking after all. But two things stayed with her: his ability to conceal, and the proof that she could be blind to something so close at hand.

  Long after Chris rolled over and his breathing went deep and steady, Kate was still awake. When it was clear she wouldn’t be getting to sleep, she climbed the stairs into the loft with the journal she’d found open on her bed. Before she returned it to the trunk she held it a moment; the book was several years beyond the one she was currently reading. She flipped through a few of the pages, saw the phrase “my punishment,” and began to read.

  But as she did she felt a movement on her shoulder, or in her shoulder. It wasn’t a touch exactly, likely just the quiver of tired muscles, but the sensation was one of being touched, the way a grandmother would place a gentle reminding hand on a child’s shoulder. Up the length of her arm the follicles puckered. Each pale hair rose on her tanned skin. She gave a cautious sidelong look, knowing even as she did that she would not see anything, or anyone. Then, slowly, she put the book back in the trunk.

  She sat down on the chaise with the older notebook she’d been reading, the one that had begun Elizabeth’s college years.

  October 5, 1981 NYU

  I was smart, I was careful, but not smart or careful enough. It’s inconceivable. (Terrible word choice.) I have no idea what to do.

  That’s not true. I know.

  Stupid, stupid girl. And I’ll have to deal with this myself, because calling Michael is out of the question after how he acted at the end of summer. I told him about Anna and the accident, and by the time I finished I was bawling like a baby, and he acted as if I’d just signed him up for couples therapy. When I left for school I gave him my new number at the dorm, and he looked at it like he couldn’t wait to throw it away.

  Last night after I found out, I couldn’t stand to be around anyone so I went walking. Washington Square to Union Square up Park Avenue, up to Grand Central, up to the park, past the Plaza, where a bride was fairytaling her dumb way down the steps, then back down to Gramercy and turned onto 20th, and sat in front of the fence facing the National Arts Club, where I swore just last week that I’d have an exhibit someday.

  I sat there for a long time. It’s just the most spectacular little building, brilliant people going in the door and appearing up in that big bay window a few minutes later holding a glass of wine, and even the way these people scratch their noses is creative and sophisticated. They look immune to everything, like nothing disastrous ever happens to derail their plans. Is it possible to take a detour like quitting college and working to raise a kid by yourself, and still end up standing in that parlor soaking up compliments on your exhibition? Not likely. I can’t envision a single solitary scenario that makes any sense at all. I have no business being a mother. I’m barely responsible for myself.

  My appointment is next week. It’s just a tiny ball of cells, like a yogurt culture or something. This is what I tell myself.

  Kate had to read the entry and the next few pages several times. It was not the disbelief that Elizabeth had had an abortion, or that she had never told Kate. It was how little Elizabeth appeared to dwell upon it, or at least not in writing. After the next page, it was no longer mentioned.

  Reading about Elizabeth’s college years was like fiction, it bore so little resemblance to the woman Kate had known. Elizabeth had thrown herself into the New York art scene. She joined a student artists’ collective and worked on mixed-media exhibitions. Photos wedged between the pages showed unusually shaped canvases with bold patterns, some with ribbons from competitions, all signed in the lower right corner, Elizabeth D.

  Her writing was alternately angry and detached, then at times coolly independent. She declared her major in psychology, and spooled theories about what makes people do the things that they do. She wrote frequently with curiosity about her mother—the privacy, the obsession with self-help literature. Mentions of her father were infrequent. He came into the city occasionally to take her to dinner and once came to one of her exhibits, but she fumed after he said her portraits reminded him of Van Gogh. (I’m sure the only thing he could think of to say because it’s the only PAINTER he could think of.) She stayed in New York over the summer, amassing extra psych credits with an aim toward spending a junior semester abroad studying art in Florence.

  In her sophomore year Elizabeth lived in an industrial walk-up on Avenue A with two women from the collective, Haviland and Rue, and their apartment became a gathering place for artists and writers. They smoked clove cigarettes and bought cases of cheap wine, and admired the works of Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo. Toward the end of her sophomore year she mentioned dating a few men, one Vietnamese, and another Pakistani. Her writing about race and culture suggested she was either worldly in her loves, or in love with the idea of being worldly.

  A photo paper-clipped to a page
showed her nestled on a couch between two flamboyant women. Kate pulled the photograph from the paper clip and held it between her thumb and forefinger. Elizabeth was almost unrecognizable. Her hair was cut in an asymmetrical style, the left side reaching to her chin, the right side buzzed to a curve above her ear. She was curled affectionately toward a woman with wild dark hair and heavy kohl liner around her eyes, smoking theatrically with her chin in the air. Kate held the picture up close, as if bringing it nearer would make it more believable.

  Elizabeth’s parents were paying her tuition, but she worked at a café in the West Village to cover rent and supplies, earning tips that equaled about a tube of cadmium an hour. She loved the café, the pre-opening ritual of grinding the coffee du jour and frothing the perfect cappuccino foam, spooned from the tin pitcher in the consistency of stiff whipped cream. But she wrote critically about the patrons, corporate types who talked about buying a cute place like this someday, and mothers who strollered in with loud children, stayed too long, and left in their wake all the whining and crumbs. Why bring kids to coffee shops? The moms aren’t happy, the kids aren’t happy, and the people around them sure aren’t.

  Kate read, both chastised and amused. You did this, she thought. We did this, together, all of the time.

  Kate had not been the exuberant babysitting type herself, yet she’d always found children entertaining—mispronunciations, boots on the wrong feets, costumes worn long after Halloween. She hadn’t planned a timetable for parenthood; children would doubtless happen, her thinking had gone; at least she’d hoped they would, when the time was right.

  Elizabeth’s dismissiveness about children was strange. How did someone who did not enjoy the company of children, who felt them to be an irritation, come to so thoroughly embrace not just her own but all the children in their playgroup? The pictures didn’t jibe.