“No, and I don’t want them to know. Children shouldn’t worry about money.”
“Bull cakes. I knew more about handling my money—what there was of it—at thirteen than my druggie parents did. Not making children worry about it and discussing it honestly with them are two different things entirely. What’s wrong with letting them know money’s tight? They’re not stupid. They’ve probably figured it out already. You’re going to have to tell them something. And soon.” She craned her neck to peer through the arched entry. “By the way, where are the little darlings?”
Eve didn’t think Annie knew what she was talking about when it came to children. At forty-three, Annie had only married a few years earlier. Her big tribute to turning forty, and to a man three years her junior. She’d never opted to have children and often saw them in the same light one would see a mosquito at a picnic.
“They’re at their friends’ houses. They’re always out these days. I don’t think they like being here.” She plucked at the afghan and remembered the years before when the house overflowed with their many friends. Now the house seemed like a mausoleum. “Perhaps too many memories.”
Annie offered a bittersweet smile. “Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to move on after all.”
Eve looked up sharply into Annie’s eyes and saw flash in the pale-blue the icy truth about so many things. Annie was right. The children weren’t that happy here anymore. Neither was she. Their life here was over and staying was like living in limbo. She’d been hanging on to this big house in the hope that somehow she’d get her old life back. The one where Tom carved out most of the decisions and she buffed and polished off the rough edges.
She’d been hanging on, when she ought to have been thinking, carefully planning her next step. She ought to have considered what job she could get, what schools her children could transfer to, where she could afford to move. Instead of dwelling in the past, she should have focused on the future. She ought to have dealt with her emotional upswings about having to leave her home, about having Tom leave her. Instead, she’d wasted months thinking.... No, that was the problem, she realized with sudden clarity. She didn’t think. She’d merely wandered through the rooms of her house and stared blankly at her lovely things. Somehow she’d felt if she just held on a little longer...
What? A miracle would happen? Someone would magically come down the chimney on Christmas Eve and drop a bag full of money under the tree, just because she was being a good girl? Well, standing in the long line at the discount department store to purchase the one or two gifts she could afford only on sale had taught her that Santa Claus wasn’t coming this year. Or next.
“I’ll put the house on the market,” she said. Usually, Eve was good at making quick, strong decisions and she felt a bolt of relief to find that part of herself once more. The dozen smiling, apple-cheeked, potbellied Santas suddenly seemed to be littering her room. She felt the urge to pack them all away, to clear the decks of dreamy clutter and sail on.
“That’s my girl,” exclaimed Annie. Then, “Oh God, did that sound patronizing? I’m sorry.”
Eve shook her head and stared at her hands, clenching white in her lap while realization set in. When she spoke, it was like an avalanche, a bursting of a dam, the opening of a festering wound.
“Annie, I don’t know how to do anything. Anything! Not my taxes, the mortgage, financial planning. I’m scared. I’m not prepared.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I don’t know how to go out there and sign leases,” she raged on, her voice getting higher and higher. “Or figure out insurance payments for the house, for the car, for our health. I don’t even know what questions to ask. God, what job can I get? I haven’t had a job in twenty years. I have to do something.” She paused, stricken. “My children have only me.”
“And you’re more than enough.”
Eve stopped, blinked.
“You are,” Annie repeated.
Eve heard this. For a moment she felt her chest rise and fall heavily as the words sunk in. You’re more than enough. Dear God, help me, she prayed. I have to be.
She leaned back on her side of the sofa, tucking her legs beneath her and tugging the afghan under her chin. Annie did the same. Judy Garland was singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and beside them, the fire crackled and sparked behind the iron grate. Eve felt the warmth of it slowly seep into her soul, gradually thawing the chill that had seized it in the past months and made her numb. An iciness that straightened her spine, stiffened her walk, paled her cheek and made her so very brittle that each time she’d suffered a smile at a sympathetic comment, each time she’d offered a pat reply to a holiday greeting, she felt sure she might shatter into a thousand shards of crystal.
In the quiet peace, however, in the company of her trusted friend, in the aftermath of a decision, Eve felt her wintry depression begin to melt. Deep inside she experienced her first gentle kindling of Christmas spirit.
After a while, Annie spoke again. “I see you have Dickens’s A Christmas Carol on the table. That was this month’s choice for the Book Club.”
“Was it?” she replied vaguely.
Annie twitched her lips. Everyone knew that Eve loved books and reading with a passion and was unforgiving toward anyone who came to the Book Club meetings unprepared. It was the group’s greatest concern that Eve had stopped reading.
“Why didn’t you come to the meeting? We missed you.”
Eve’s toes curled under the afghan and bright-pink spots blossomed on her cheeks. “It was the Christmas party. It wouldn’t have been much of a discussion.”
“That’s not what I meant. You need to be with us. We need you.”
“I...I know. I just wasn’t ready to share my own, personal story yet.”
“The party was at Doris’s house,” Annie continued in a different vein, allowing Eve her space. “Again. As always, it was flawless, right down to the dripless candles and plum pudding.”
“How is she?”
“You mean you don’t know? I thought she was always hanging around here.”
“No, not so much anymore. I like to think it’s because she’s busy. It’s the holidays and R.J. likes to entertain.”
Annie looked away with a harrumph, frowning, registering her doubt that that was the real reason. “Well, I say it’d do you good to come back to the group. Reading, discussing ideas, hell, just laughing it up with the girls. Drink a little wine, get a little silly. It’s good for the heart and the soul.” Her voice altered to reflect her worry. “You shouldn’t be so isolated.”
“Not yet.”
“Okay, okay,” Annie said on a long sigh. “I know that tone well enough after the past six months. But don’t take too long. All the girls are anxious. They’ll be knocking down your door pretty soon.”
“I know. I won’t.” She paused. “You’re all so sweet to be worrying about me.”
“Yep, that’s us all right. A bunch of sweet ol’ ladies,” Annie said in that rollicking manner of hers that threw caution to the wind, dishing it out and taking it back in full measure. At heart, she was a clown and couldn’t stand too much gushy sentiment. Eve loved her for it, loved her tonight especially for taking off the gloves and speaking straight, for teasing her and treating her like a normal person again, not some fragile china doll that had to be handled carefully lest she break.
“I can see us in another ten or twenty years,” Annie said, moving as she acted out the role, “sitting around the rest home table, reading books with large print, gumming our lips together and shouting our opinions at each other because we won’t be able to hear.”
Eve laughed until tears squeezed from her eyes at Annie’s perfect pantomime. “Yes! I can see us now,” she said, joining in. “We’ll all wear large purple hats and clunky brown shoes.”
“And we�
�ll fart out loud and pretend we didn’t notice. Hell, we probably won’t even hear. ‘Eh, what’d you say? Oops, pardon me! What?’”
Eve held her sides. It hurt so good to laugh again, mostly at herself. Annie could always do this to her; it was what cemented their friendship.
“Oh, Annie, stop!”
“What? You don’t think the kids will be calling us ‘old farts’ behind our backs. Ha! Well, we might as well give it right back to them. Both barrels. But I’m givin’ it to them right through my tight, sexy Calvin Klein jeans.”
And she would, too, Eve thought chuckling. Annie Blake joined the Book Club five years earlier and right from the start everyone recognized that Annie was different from the usual Riverton matron. She was a little louder, a little brassier, a little more cool, and her opinions were always honest and on the money. And she had soul. It wasn’t long before Eve discovered that Annie was a kindred spirit—a freer, blithe spirit.
“I’m curious about something,” Annie said, wiping her eyes and settling back into the cushions. “I’ve been hammering at you for months to let go of this house and to get on with your life. And now, suddenly, you decide to do it.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that. What happened? Am I a more persuasive lawyer than I thought or did I miss something here?”
The ghost of a smile crossed Eve’s face as she gazed down at Dickens’s book on the coffee table. How could she explain that all Annie’s numbers on the ledgers, the sheets of meaningless papers that she’d signed, meant nothing to her? That inside the hard covers of that edition of A Christmas Carol lay the pressed petals of three yellow roses, picked six months earlier. That this tale by Charles Dickens, her old friend, was the first book she’d read since Tom’s death. That tonight she felt as though she’d been visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future and was shaken out of her complacency.
“Let’s just say that, like Scrooge, I finally woke up and decided it was time to heed the spirits and change.”
“Well,” Annie replied with brows raised. “Whaddya know?” She swooped over to pick up her coffee cup and raise it in a toast. “Here’s to change, sweetheart.”
Eve picked up her cup and raised it, smiling bravely despite the shivering inside at the prospect of what felt to her like jumping off a cliff.
“God bless us, everyone,” she said, praying fervently.
Five
Before she had married she thought she was in love. But the happiness that should have resulted from this love had not come; she must have deceived herself she thought. Emma sought to learn what was really meant in life by the words “happiness,” “passion,” and “ecstasy”—words that had seemed so beautiful in books.
—Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
January 7, 1998
Doris stood in the foyer of her redbrick colonial home and waited for the Book Club to arrive. A pure, sensual pleasure embraced her as she glanced around her house, making a last-minute check that all was in proper order. It was the first Book Club meeting of the year and she wanted everything to be perfect. The sparkling crystal wineglasses were set out on the Sheraton side table beside the bottles of wine: white, chilled, and red, opened to allow time to breathe—something she’d learned from her father. On the large dining table that had once been her mother’s, she’d draped snowy white linen and lined her grandmother’s crisp damask napkins in an intricate pattern that she’d admired once in a magazine. Someone could photograph this table and put it in a magazine, she thought with a shiver of pride.
And the ladies would be sure to admire the clever arrangement of fresh flowers and greens, cut from her own shrubs that very morning. She’d read somewhere how women of culture and breeding always had their clippers handy, and from that date on she’d hung a pair on a grosgrain ribbon beside her back door.
Her pièce de résistance, however, were the French appetizers that she’d spent hours researching, shopping for and preparing. She had to make something French, of course, because this month’s book was Madame Bovary, a classic that she’d insisted they read after feigning astonishment that no one in the Book Club had actually read the book.
In fact, she herself had never read it, but she’d go to the grave with that secret—and her SAT scores. She’d heard of it, of course, and seen the movie—the old version with Jennifer Jones that everyone knew was the best. Now she’d never have to pretend again because she’d read the novel at last and enjoyed it thoroughly.
Even if she was furious at the character of Emma Bovary. How could she throw away a perfectly good life and husband for the sake of her uncontrolled passion? Doris could feel her heart rate zoom and her breath shorten just thinking about it. What did it matter if Emma had “bliss” or “passion” or “ecstasy”? These had little to do with virtues that were the hallmarks of respectability. Indeed, even womanhood. Virtues such as patience, self-discipline, self-control, chastity, adaptability to others. Yes, especially that. Qualities that her mother had, that her grandmother had, that were instilled in her as a child by example not by name. Emma was, in her opinion, selfish and immoral. She deserved to die.
Well, she thought, stroking her neck, that might be a bit harsh. It was easy to sympathize with Emma’s romantic nature, especially at first. All new brides dream of a perfect marriage with love and passion in the moonlight, husbands on pedestals, pretty curtains on the windows, fringed lampshades, no other bride’s bouquet before hers. She certainly had.
But Emma went too far when she grew bored and forsake her duty, especially to her child. What mother could forgive Emma the desertion of her child! And though her husband may have been a bit dull and plodding, he wasn’t all that bad. Men were men, Doris decided, brushing away the uncomfortable image of her own husband with that phrase.
Emma Bovary should have settled with what she had. She’d settled, hadn’t she? Why, most women settled, dug in, called upon those womanly virtues, and made it work. And Doris was champing at the bit to make that statement tonight.
The Pennsylvania tall clock chimed seven times. Doris shook away her musings and glanced in the magnificent Viennese mirror in the foyer, smoothing her strawberry-blond hair that fell neatly to her double chin, but not too stiffly. That was one of her mother’s cardinal rules: Always make it look effortless. And, Treat your family like guests and your guests like family.
She thought of the Book Club as family—an extended family. With them she wasn’t the wife of the flamboyant builder and architect, R. J. Bridges, or the mother of eighteen-year-old Bob Jr. and fourteen-year-old Sarah. She wasn’t the PTA president or the chairwoman of the Children’s Welfare League. With these four women, some of whom she’d known for over twenty-five years, she was just Doris. With them, especially after a few glasses of wine, Doris might surprise even herself with comments on a book or an issue or a secret that just popped out like a bubble. With the Book Club, Doris always felt uncensored. They weren’t her judge and jury, they were her peers. Her friends.
Friends. A stab of disappointment coursed through her as she recalled that Eve Porter had sent her regrets and would not be coming tonight. How could Eve do that to her, she wondered, hurt? She could understand Eve’s not attending meetings at other women’s houses the past few months; she even forgave her for skipping the Christmas party. After all, hadn’t her mother said, Never bring your problems to a party? It was unforgivable to make things awkward for the hostess and Doris knew Eve was only being sensitive. But not to come to her Book Club meeting? You just didn’t do that to a friend. Ever since Tom’s passing, the only person Eve had depended on was Annie Blake. It was as though all the years of close friendship the two of them had shared—their children playing together, shopping, hair appointments, taking turns for twelve years being room mothers for the girls—had been tossed aside.
The doorbell rang, and like Pavlov’s dog, a smile sprang to her face. She t
ook measured, graceful steps to the front door.
It was Annie Blake. Lately she had a physical reaction to Annie, usually a sucking in of the stomach. Annie seemed to be everything she was not, to have all she did not. Doris held her smile in place by force of the virtue of self-discipline.
“Annie, how nice to see you. Won’t you come in?” She heard the tension in her own voice, saw Annie’s eyes search the room beyond her shoulders, then glaze over when Annie realized that she was the first one here and thus compelled to make polite chitchat. Doris bristled, feeling somehow dismissed in her own home.
“Let me pour you a glass of wine.”
“Thanks,” Annie replied, shaking off her coat. “I could really use one.”
“Oh?” Doris took Annie’s coat, fingering the cashmere wool with quiet envy. “Why is that?”
“It’s been a hell of a day. What is it about the New Year that makes women want to change their lives—and be in a hurry to do it? Is it the New Year’s resolutions? My phone’s been ringing off the hook and poor Lisa is at her wit’s end.”
Lisa, Doris knew, was Annie’s secretary. Again, she felt a slight shudder of insecurity in the presence of this dynamic woman who had such things as her own secretary. That was inconceivable to Doris. She herself had never wanted to work “outside the home,” as she put it. In fact, she thanked God daily that she was wealthy enough not to have to. Yet, there was a worldliness about professional women that intrigued her.
“Red or white?”
“White. Hope it’s cold. I’m parched.”
“But of course.” She made it sound like the French, mais oui!
Following Annie’s long strides into the dining room, Doris surveyed her sleek crepe wool pantsuit in a rich chocolate-brown that slid along her toned, well-exercised body. Her cream-colored silk blouse had the top three buttons left open against her long, slim chest in a sexy insolence that irritated Doris. She thought Annie looked foolish—at her age.
The Book Club Page 6