The Meryl Streep Movie Club

by Mia March

  She took the letter and envelope into the kitchen and set them on the counter, then put a tomato on top as a paperweight, not that she didn’t want the anonymous letter to blow away, fly up into the sky and away. But then it would land on another woman’s doorstep, another woman who knew that something was very, very wrong between herself and her husband and had been for a long time now. Well before their cold war ever began. Isabel knew that.

  But an affair? Edward? No.

  Isabel blinked back tears and measured three cups of flour, dumping them on the wooden cutting board. She made a well in the flour and cracked open four eggs into it, careful to beat the eggs gently and incorporate the flour slowly. Once she started kneading with the heel of her palms, the dough turned lumpy instead of elastic and sticky.

  She was doing something wrong.

  This part of saving her marriage, the remembrance of good things past, might be ridiculous, but Isabel thought if she re-created the evening, that last night in Rome, when everything between Edward and her had been so magical, she would stir something inside him. The mingling of ricotta cheese and sweet marinara sauce would conjure a moonlit table in Italy and remind him of how he once felt about her, how things had once been. She planned to wear one of those sweet, old cotton dresses she’d run around in on her honeymoon and set up a café table in the backyard, under the moon and stars. Re-create the evening emotionally, if not geographically. Bring them back to the start. To the first nine years of their marriage, when everything was good, when she’d felt so safe.

  Things had changed, though, over the past year. But she had a plan for that too: never mentioning what was tearing them apart, what had come between them like a sledgehammer. Something Isabel wanted and Edward didn’t.

  Isabel plucked up the tomato and read the note again.

  The black Mercedes is always parked in the back around 6pm.

  Yes, Edward had a black Mercedes. But so did Darin Finton and the Carmichaels across the street and most of the neighborhood.

  She heard a car pull into the Fintons’ driveway. Isabel rushed back over to the window. Darin Finton was getting out of his dark gray Mercedes. Not black. Goose bumps trailed up her spine as she slowly walked to the windows on the other side of the living room and peered out through the filmy curtains at the Haverhills’ driveway. Please have a black Mercedes, she thought, then realized she was wishing a cheating husband on Victoria Haverhill. But both Haverhill cars were in the driveway—one a dark blue Mercedes.

  Isabel stood still next to the baby grand piano, afraid to breathe, afraid to move.

  You were kind to me once, and in this town, that’s saying something…

  Isabel was generally kind. Sasha Finton had her good days and bad. Victoria Haverhill? Vicious.

  Was the note meant for her? Her heels clattered in her ears as she walked back into the kitchen. She and Edward were both trying, though. They’d both promised to try.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Isabel, but that dough isn’t supposed to look like that.”

  Marian, Isabel’s housekeeper, was putting away her supplies in the kitchen closet, her gaze on the lump of dough, her voice kind. No matter how many times Isabel told Marian to call her Isabel, Marian would shake her head and say, “No Ms.,” with a smile.

  “I’ll stay and fix it for you,” Marian said. “You and Mr. Edward will have a nice dinner.”

  Marian had been their twice-per-week housekeeper and sometimes cook for the five years they’d been living in this huge house in Westport, Connecticut. A house way too big for just two people. Marian would slyly smile and comment how one of the four bedrooms upstairs would be perfect for a nursery with its French doors and arched windows. “Like a fairy tale.”

  At all hours of the day and night, Isabel would go upstairs to the fairy-tale room, yet another guest room that never had guests, and imagine the graceful white sleigh crib, the pale yellow bedding, a softly tinkling mobile, the tiny ducklings she’d commission an artist to paint along the ceiling molding.

  And a baby, Allison McNeal, Allie for short, named for Isabel’s mother, or Marcus McNeal for Edward’s father.

  But there wouldn’t be a baby. There was a pact instead, which Edward reminded Isabel of every time she brought up the subject of a child.

  There was a pact, which she broke her own heart to abide by. So the letter had to be a mistake. There was no affair. There was no room for an affair in a pact.

  Though, now that she thought about it, vows were a pact of their own. And broken all the time.

  She managed something of a smile at her housekeeper. “Thank you, Marian, but I’m just practicing on this dough. For our anniversary next week. Ten years.”

  “You and Mr. Edward are such a nice couple,” Marian said. “I hope he manages to come home before eight o’clock for your anniversary. That man works so late, so hard.”

  56 Hemingway St. The black Mercedes is always parked around back at 6 pm. —Sorry.

  Isabel reached into her handbag for her car keys.

  Isabel had been sixteen and anything but sweet when she’d met Edward McNeal at the Boothbay Regional Center for Grieving Children. He was her teen mentor, having lost his own parents in a plane crash five years earlier. He volunteered at the center every Wednesday after school. When Isabel’s aunt Lolly had taken her and her sister and cousin there two days after the car accident, Isabel had one session with an adult counselor and one with Edward. The first day, she was so struck by him, by the empathy she saw in his eyes, which were the darkest brown, that she forgot for a second where she was, that she was in this place, in this hell, forever, her mother, her father, gone, just like that, while she’d slept on New Year’s Eve.

  She didn’t want to talk about her parents. Or the fight she’d had with her mother that final night. She didn’t want to talk about her sister, June, who cried all the time. Or how she felt moving into her aunt Lolly’s musty old inn with her little cousin Kat, who’d lost her father because he’d gone to pick up Isabel and June’s parents, drunk New Year’s Eve revelers. She’d wanted to hear Edward talk about the moment he’d learned his parents were gone. So he’d talked about the nature of shock, how it had gripped him for so long he’d had a delayed reaction to the actual loss, and that when the shock did finally subside a good six months later, he found himself crying everywhere for months. At school, under the blankets at night, in church, which his older half brother, who was raising him, thought would help and sort of did, for a while. And then one day, Edward said, you realize right in the middle of whatever you’re doing that you’re not thinking about it, and it gets better from there, becoming a piece of you instead of everything you are.

  She’d fallen in love with Edward McNeal by the second Wednesday. So had her sister, though it was more of a crush on an older boy. For a while, the Nash sisters, who’d never gotten along, had focused on that, instead of on their grief, taking their anger out on each other. “The only reason he likes you is because you’re slutty,” June would scream. “No, he likes me because I’m me,” Isabel would scream back, “something you’ll never be, Miss Ass-Kissing Goody Two-Shoes.” They’d said terrible things to each other in those early days, and when Isabel would tell Edward about their vicious arguments, he’d say, “You know, Izzy, if ninety-nine percent of what June says about you isn’t anywhere near the real truth, the same goes for what you say to her. Think about it.” And she would, but then she and her sister would go back to arguing, and June would come out with the one thing that would drain the blood from Isabel and make her shake so badly that June would have to run and get Aunt Lolly.

  Within a day, the fights would resume, June insisting thirteen wasn’t too young for a boyfriend—for a sixteen-year-old boyfriend—and desperately trying to get Edward’s attention by stuffing her bra and wearing peach-scented lip gloss. Aunt Lolly had to switch June to a fourteen-year-old fe
male mentor named Sarah, whom June ended up adoring as well. But the chasm that had always been between Isabel and June widened, and they—and their aunt—had never been able to narrow it. Every time Isabel realized that all she had to do to make peace with her sister was to stop reacting, she would react. Badly.

  And run to Edward. They’d been inseparable that terrible winter. Long walks from pier to pier in Boothbay Harbor, bundled up against the freezing-cold weather, Edward’s strong arms wrapped around her as they sat staring at the docked boats, her back against his puff of navy blue L.L. Bean down jacket, his gloved hands warming her face. They walked miles in the harbor, sipping hot chocolate from take-out cups, and the farther Isabel walked from the inn, the less miserable she was. One night, in the late spring, as she and Edward lay under the oak tree in the backyard of the inn, they’d held hands and stared up at the stars, twinkling with possibilities that made Isabel feel hopeful.

  “We should make a pact,” Edward had said, eyes on the stars. “You and me, together forever. Just us two.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Just us two. Together forever.”

  “And definitely no kids. No kids to turn into grieving, lost orphans like us.”

  She turned to face him then, awed by how right he was. Just sixteen years old and so wise. “No kids.”

  “It’s a pact then,” he said. “No children. Just you and me, forever.”

  They squeezed hands and stared up at the stars until Isabel’s aunt Lolly had called her in for the night.

  For many years, she forgot all about that pact.

  But now they were thirty-one. Married for ten years. Living in Westport, a beautiful Connecticut town filled with young families, with children. Isabel gripped her hand tighter around her car keys, staring at the lumpy pasta dough, remembering how, a year ago, she’d found herself peering into baby strollers at little faces, and strange stirrings would stop her in her tracks, wake her from sleep, make her think that maybe they’d been wrong about how risk worked. Until she was about twenty-eight, twenty-nine, she’d been satisfied with her life. Not a maternal instinct nipping. But as Edward started becoming distant, keeping to himself, working later and later, starting to tell her a story from work and then saying, “Oh, forget it, you wouldn’t understand,” she found herself beginning to need something that she couldn’t put her finger on. Then came the day, over a year ago now, that she’d been counseling a family at the hospital, where she volunteered almost full-time as a grief counselor. A young widowed mother with a seven-month-old baby and a wonderful, caring extended family, and someone asked if Isabel would mind holding the baby for a moment.

  That sweet, soft weight in her arms had made her gasp. She knew right then that she wanted a baby, wanted a child, that the pact she’d agreed to as a grieving teenager had no bearing on her life now. That baby in her arms had lost her father. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be loved, that she wouldn’t have a wonderful life.

  Isabel wanted a baby. And she’d made sure of her feelings. Slept on it for a long time until she was so sure, she wished she could get pregnant that minute.

  Several months ago, she’d fallen asleep imagining what their child would look like—if he or she would have Edward’s chestnut-brown hair and Roman nose, or her hazel-green eyes and heart-shaped face. She’d woken up in the middle of the night and said in the comfort of the dark, “Edward? You awake?” He’d murmured, so she’d taken a breath and said that she’d been thinking a lot lately about the two of them having a baby. He was silent and Isabel figured he’d fallen asleep and hadn’t heard her, after all, but then he’d said, “We made a pact, Iz.” The next morning, he’d reminded her why they’d made their pact. Gently. Then less so.

  “But what if I changed my mind?” she asked.

  “Well, then we’re at a stalemate, aren’t we?” had been his response.

  She’d tried talking to him about how they weren’t those same scared teenagers anymore, that they didn’t have to abide by rules they’d made about the world from a place of sorrow, a place of fear.

  He would stare at her, with anger in his eyes, and say, “I don’t want children, Isabel. End of story. We made a pact.” Then he’d walk away and a door would slam. After a few months of the same conversation, they both started retreating—but from each other instead of from just the conversation. She spent more time at the hospital, helping people who’d just been informed of losses. When she wasn’t needed, which wasn’t often, she’d stand in front of the nursery window, looking at the babies, closing her eyes against the squeeze of her heart, allowing herself to feel every inch of her wish to have a child. Her anger at his resolute stance turned her quiet, and in time he withdrew even further than just being late for dinner or having to work on Saturday mornings. He avoided rooms she was in. And stopped coming up to bed. In the morning she’d find him asleep on the sofa in the living room or the too-small-for-him love seat in his den. The rare times he’d sit down to breakfast, he made her feel a crushing loneliness when he was three feet across the table from her.

  “Edward, we need to talk. We need to fix this,” she’d say over and over, at breakfast, in e-mails, in phone calls, in the middle of the night, when she’d wake and realize she was alone and go downstairs to find him either watching a recorded Red Sox game or just sitting there, head in hands. She’d pause then. Scared. Unsure, suddenly, how to get inside this man she’d known half her life.

  And so months ago, Isabel had stopped taking the elevator to the third-floor nursery at work to see the babies. She’d stopped drifting off to sleep thinking about tiny Roman noses and hazel-green eyes, a combination face of hers and Edward’s. She’d made a pact. She’d married, made vows, under that pact. And she’d abide by it. Edward had saved her, and now she would save them. Save their marriage, which had been so strong, so good, for nine years. For so long, he’d come through the door and swooped her up into a hug and kiss her the way he had on their honeymoon. They’d make love and watch old movies in bed, sharing their favorite Chinese takeout. He’d listen to her stories about the hospital, sad stories, and hold her until she could breathe again. And when they’d dutifully visit her family in Maine for holidays, and it would be too much for Isabel, being in that inn, arguing with her sister, she and Edward would walk around the harbor the way they used to, hand in hand, and everything would be all right.

  You and me together forever, just us two.

  Edward McNeal was her everything. And so she had fought for her marriage these past couple of months. Fought hard.

  At first, he’d responded. Her smile had been genuine, not forced. Her gaze upon him full of love instead of resentment. She would walk up behind him and massage his strong shoulders, breathing in the masculine, soapy scent of him that she’d loved for so long, and he’d turn around and kiss her, deeply, passionately, and lead her upstairs. But afterward, she’d notice something, something just more than subtle, in his expression, in his body language. The damage had been done, perhaps even before she’d brought up the subject of a baby, and something had been lost that smiles and sex and possibly not even time could get back.

  And so she’d waited. And tried. She tried so hard that she’d burst into tears while they made love, and Edward would shake his head and get off her and leave. And not return for hours.

  “You can lie, but you can’t lie to yourself,” her aunt Lolly had always said.

  So she’d tried harder. Just last month, she’d assured Edward she’d made peace with their pact. Yes, she was thirty-one years old now, had been married for ten years, and, yes, she had changed her mind about wanting a baby. And, yes, she believed in her heart that she would be a good and loving mother. But she would put her marriage first. She would take his many suggestions—they’d get two dogs, big ones, like a Rhodesian ridgeback or a greyhound. They’d travel, back to Italy, to India, to the American West she wanted to see so badly, to Afr
ica for a safari, and she’d see how free they could be, just the two of them.

  Just the two of them. Even though their marriage was different, even though something had been lost—perhaps irrevocably—she loved her husband and they’d weather through. Sometimes, late at night, she’d think about what her sister had muttered last Christmas at the inn, in the middle of one of their usual arguments when Isabel had deferred to her husband about something minor: “God, Isabel, do you even know who you are without Edward?” Isabel had been a different person entirely before she’d lost her parents, before she’d met him. And now she was starting to want things she hadn’t before, big, life-changing things. Maybe she was just scared enough to let Edward win. And so that was that. There would be no baby. There would be no pitters and patters of little feet. In the deepest recesses of her heart, Isabel accepted it as enough—almost—that she wanted a child. That told her something. Something good about herself.

  Her car keys now digging into her palm, Isabel thought about how she’d believed they were back on track, at the gate, at least, even though he’d told her that morning he wasn’t going to Maine with her tomorrow. Edward never missed an excuse to go to Maine, to visit his brother and wife, and her aunt Lolly, whom he liked, despite everything. He always had, since the beginning. But when she told him about Lolly’s strange call a few days ago, that her aunt had some kind of big announcement she wouldn’t talk about over the phone, but wanted Isabel, her sister, June, and their cousin Kat to come for dinner at the inn Friday night, Edward said he couldn’t go with her. Meetings. Client dinners. More meetings. On a weekend.

  “I can’t get away tomorrow, Isabel,” he’d said that morning. “Go and see your family. It’s been a long time, right? Stay the weekend or longer, even.”