The Meryl Streep Movie Club
Page 7
How could Carolyn have trumped that? How?
“If it’s what someone’s looking for,” Kat said. “What they need, at a particular time. Don’t you remember how Meryl couldn’t even remember how many years she’d been married when Clint asked? She was counting on her fingers and couldn’t even remember. Because she’d been married forever and lost track of herself. And here Clint was, reminding her she’d been someone. Someone else, once. And Clint was the man who saw that woman she’d been.”
Isabel felt herself tremble. What had Edward felt in Carolyn’s presence? Someone he’d become? Someone who didn’t know who he once was? Maybe he wanted the opposite.
Isabel shook her head. “You know who else saw the woman she’d been? Her husband. She met her husband in Italy when he was a soldier. Her husband fell in love with her. So he knew who she was too.”
“But now—”
Isabel cut off June. “She slept with another man for four days while her husband and children were away. She cheated. Broke her vows. And then she says good-bye to her affair, knowing it won’t last anyway, and her life went on as though she didn’t do something awful—and almost left twice.”
June stared at her. “Whoa. Did we watch the same movie? Meryl gave herself up when she married the Iowa farmer. She was expecting something else when she married him and came to America. She wasn’t expecting a farm in Iowa. Remember when she said, ‘This is not what I dreamed of when I was a little girl’? In those four days with Clint, she found herself again. But she gave up her own happiness to do the right thing. Which was the wrong thing. I think.”
“I know what you mean,” Kat said, poking at the wrapper of her cupcake. “It’s not like I wanted her to go off with Clint and leave her family. But I didn’t want her to betray herself, either.”
Isabel stared at Kat. “Betray herself ? What about her husband ?”
“I agree,” Carrie said. “She married him knowing what she was getting, just like I chose what I’m getting. Guess who barely wanted to walk around town today? Guess who’s upstairs watching the Red Sox on his iPad? She chose that life, just like I chose mine.”
“She didn’t know, not really,” June said. “Remember she said that all she could think of was America? She wanted the adventure. Instead she got a rural farm in Iowa.”
“I do think you know what you’re getting, though,” Lolly said, glancing out the window again. “How dashing could her husband have been when she met him? How exciting and adventurous could his personality have been? I think he just represented adventure to her. His very foreignness to her was enough then.”
Kat’s gaze was thoughtful on her mother. “And like Meryl said, ‘We are the choices we’ve made.’” Kat let out a breath. “Make a mistake and…”
“I wonder if she did make a mistake,” Carrie said. “She has her children, yes. And the farm is beautiful. But she was emotionally lonely. That’s a high price to pay.”
Everyone nodded at that. Isabel looked out the window, at the harbor lights. She’d been emotionally lonely for months. Much longer, if she let herself really pinpoint it.
“My favorite part,” June said, “was when Clint and Meryl were lying together on the floor in front of the fireplace after they slept together, and she’s crying and she asks him to take her someplace he’s been, someplace on the other side of the world—”
Kat nodded. “And he takes her to her hometown. A tiny town in Italy that he just happened to have gone to because he thought it was pretty.”
“I think that’s when Meryl fell completely in love,” June said. “He gave her back herself, gave her back the woman she feels like inside, the one no one sees, not her husband or her children.”
“And she made him need something again—her,” Lolly said.
Isabel stared at Lolly. Carolyn had something that had trumped Isabel’s sixteen years and everything those years were. Had she made him need her? What was that need?
Maybe just something different. Excitement. Hot new sex.
“It wouldn’t have lasted, though,” Isabel said, though she wasn’t really sure of that. “Maybe it would have. But ninety-nine percent it wouldn’t have, for exactly the reasons Meryl had said. She would have resented Clint for everything he took her away from. When he said that ‘this kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime,’ Meryl knew he could have meant her certainty about everything—herself, her family’s happiness—the world around them.”
She wondered how long Edward’s affair with Carolyn would last. A few weeks, now that he didn’t have to skulk around at 6:00 p.m.? According to Edward on the phone today, Carolyn’s husband had left her months ago for another woman. Isabel always thought the illicit quality of affairs was what sustained them, the drama of it, not any real feeling. But Meryl and Clint’s affair was about feeling.
“I was kind of torn about one of the reasons she stays,” Carrie said. “She’s worried about what leaving will say to her daughter, who’s sixteen and about to discover love and relationships for the first time. And what did her mother’s life of quiet desperation say? The daughter ended up staying in a bad marriage for twenty years. So maybe staying wasn’t the heroic thing.”
“I do like what she writes in the letter to her children,” Lolly said. “ ‘Do what you have to, to be happy in this life.’ That has to be individual. I think Meryl’s character was happy and miserable staying, just as she would have been happy and miserable leaving. She was trapped either way. She made the honorable choice for the right reasons.”
Was this how Edward felt? Trapped? In love with another woman, but trapped by his wife, by the promises they’d made?
“I think she should have gone,” Kat said, her voice quieter, sadder. “Life is too short, isn’t that what everyone says? And isn’t that so clear now?”
“Too short to hurt the people you claim to love,” Isabel shot back. Kat glanced at her, surprised, and Isabel wanted to apologize, but Kat turned away, and Isabel didn’t know quite what to say.
“There’s no one answer,” June said.
We are the choices we have made went through Isabel’s head over and over.
It was true, Isabel knew. She’d chosen to change. She’d chosen to let the tiny glimmer of wanting a baby to blossom in her heart. She had chosen to share that with her husband instead of keeping it in the vault. She’d chosen to bust the pact.
“I think Meryl did the right thing,” Lolly said, standing up and scooping up the empty cupcake wrappers and errant pieces of popcorn. “Why is her happiness more important than her husband’s or her children’s? Why is her happiness more important than what it will mean to her children, how it will color their lives?”
“I’m not sure I agree,” June said, getting up to help collect glasses. “Unhappiness colors lives too. The daughter is proof of that, isn’t she? I’m not saying she could just run off with Clint and walk away from her life. But to betray yourself, to break your own heart like that…”
She shouldn’t have had the affair at all, Isabel wanted to shout. If she hadn’t let herself fall for Clint… But Isabel understood why she had. She burst into tears and sat there shaking.
“Isabel?” Lolly said.
“I caught Edward with another woman.”
June gasped. “Edward?”
“I’m so sorry, Isabel,” Kat said, laying her hand on Isabel’s arm.
“Oh, no,” Lolly said. “I don’t believe it.”
Isabel told them about yesterday. About the note. About the stupid, lumpy pasta dough and their anniversary. About walking up those white stairs. About the look on Edward’s face. “And when I finally answered the phone today, he told me it wasn’t just sex, it’s not just an affair, that he’s fallen in love with this woman, that he’d loved her for months before he even let himself—” Isabel couldn’t say the rest.
Isabel looked at her sister. “But is it defendable? Because he’s supposedly in love, it’s okay? He didn’t betray me and his vows? Everything’s all good because he fell in love?”
I think it’s important that you know that I love her, Isabel. It’s not just sex, it’s not just some torrid affair. I wouldn’t do that to you.
Thoughtful. He’d done that to her for the real thing.
This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime…
Obviously it didn’t. Edward had been that certain about her once. Now he was certain about pushy Carolyn Chenowith. For now, anyway.
Isabel wrapped her arms around her legs and hugged her knees to her chest. She wasn’t the same Isabel who’d fallen for Edward at sixteen. She wasn’t that same scared girl anymore, that girl who thought she was terrible. She wasn’t exactly sure who she was anymore. She wasn’t going back to her house in Connecticut—except eventually to pack up her belongings and divvy up the contents of their big house. As if she wanted her soft and cozy down comforter that used to remind both her and Edward of Maine. Or paintings they’d picked out together on their honeymoon and vacations. What was she going to do now? Just stay at the inn with her aunt and help with whatever needed doing, she told herself, needing a solid plan to hang on to.
Lolly took her hand. “I’m glad you’re with all of us.”
Isabel let herself cry. Lolly tightened her grip, and for a moment Isabel felt her mother’s hand on hers, more of a comfort than anything else could possibly be.
CHAPTER 5
June
The Movie Night dishes were washed, the parlor cleaned of every last trace of popcorn, and a quick google of pancreatic cancer both reassured and scared June, Isabel, and Kat from doing much more research on the subject tonight. June sat on the balcony of Kat’s room, staring out at the harbor, at the lights on the boats, on the white and red lighthouse just visible. Pearl had been right about how a movie could transport you out of your life for a couple of hours; The Bridges of Madison County had touched June so deeply that she could talk about it for hours more. But it wasn’t Meryl Streep dancing with Clint Eastwood to Italian opera in her farmhouse kitchen that she was thinking about right then. It was that rat bastard Edward.
At age thirteen, it had taken June only months to realize that her “dream boy,” the one she’d taken quizzes over in Seventeen magazine, the one her prettier, sexier, worldlier older sister had won, was more nightmare boy and a jerk. Edward says had become sixteen-year-old Isabel’s new way of beginning sentences. Edward says cursing is totally uncivilized. Edward says sugary cereals like Lucky Charms will rot your teeth and lower your chances of getting into an Ivy. Edward says everyone grieves in his own way and you have to let them.
That last one had been the only right thing Edward McNeal had ever said. He could talk about grief like no one else, make you feel so comforted, so wrapped in a cocoon of understanding that you almost forgot why you were in the Center for Grieving Children in the first place. For a few minutes, anyway. So, yeah, June had always gotten why Isabel had fallen so hard for him; June had too, for a few weeks until the Edward says began and Isabel began changing so drastically.
“She’s changing for the good,” Lolly would say when June had followed her aunt around the inn as Lolly dusted and polished, confused about what had happened to her loud, selfish, class-cutting, cigarette-sneaking, pot-trying, slutty older sister.
“But she’s suddenly a Goody Two-shoes… like me,” June had said. “She says please and thank you!”
“And that’s a bad thing?” Lolly asked, the smell of lemon polish tickling June’s nose.
“She’s a weirdo robot now,” June had explained, not wanting her mean sister back but not sure she liked this new one either. This controlled one—controlled by Edward says.
Not until much later, years later, did June realize Isabel wasn’t controlled by Edward, but by her grief. And Edward was good at grief.
“Better she’s going to school and eating healthfully and saying please than what she used to do,” Lolly had said. “Cut her some slack, let her develop into who she needs to be right now. She’s not hurting anyone. Remember that. She’ll find herself, people always do.”
That had stayed with June for a long time. The people always do. Did they? Had her aunt found herself after her husband and sister and brother-in-law were killed and she’d turned quiet, speaking only when spoken to? At least Lolly said a lot when spoken to. But unless you sought Lolly out, asked her something, she’d never engage you in conversation. Not about if you had homework or if anyone had asked you to the dance at school or why you looked sad. Once, when June had screamed, “You don’t even care that I’m sitting here looking like I’m about to cry!” Lolly had said, “I do care, June. But my way is to give you space to do that.”
June hadn’t been sure she wanted space in those days. Not that space was something she’d gotten much of, crowded into one big room with her air-sucking sister and quiet cousin who stared at them both. If June felt eyes on her, she knew Kat was around.
When the three of them had been in a room together, any room, one or two of them always left. It was no wonder why.
June stared up at the sky, just a few stars out, and focused on one, hoping it wouldn’t turn out to be a plane. She needed that star to stay fixed. Isabel’s news had shaken her. Edward might be an ass, but he’d been there—always. Once, a few years ago, after Edward had said something over Thanksgiving that had hurt June’s feelings—she’d always cursed her sensitivity—something about giving Charlie American cheese in his grilled cheese instead of a healthy cheese such as Swiss or cheddar and didn’t she care what she was putting into his growing brain and body, she’d whispered to Isabel, “God, I really dodged a bullet with Edward.”
Isabel had winced, and June had felt sorry right away that she’d said it—to Isabel, anyway. But then Isabel had shot back, “Like you ever had a chance? And your one big romance lasted all of how long? Two days? Don’t talk about what you know nothing about.”
By the time the last of the stuffing and pumpkin pies had been gobbled up, Isabel and June wouldn’t even look at each other. They’d politely avoided each other until the next get-together, Christmas. In between, they’d sent obligatory birthday cards. But then every year, Isabel and Edward would show up for Charlie’s birthday party—a five-hour drive each way, every year, no matter if the party was held in a kiddie gym or at the playground or in her little apartment over the bookstore. Isabel was there, with a big wrapped gift, something amazing that June would never have been able to afford, such as a red PlasmaCar or an Indiana Jones LEGO City set, Charlie so excited he’d run around in circles clapping, and June would find all the anger going out of her. Five, ten minutes later, either Isabel or Edward would ruin it, say something awful about the public schools in Portland or how June was just scraping by, and the momentary magic was poof—gone.
June had always wished her relationship with her sister could be more like June’s relationship with Kat. Polite. No slung comments—well, except for tonight, but June understood and then some. She and Kat had always spoken to each other like acquaintance coworkers at a company function. No depth, but no feelings got hurt, either.
“June? Help with the bed? I think it’s stuck.”
June ducked inside to find Kat wrestling with the trundle bed across the room, trying to pull out the lower, full-size bed. She yanked and then kicked it, dropping down onto the top bed.
June sat beside her. “Your mom can beat this. She will beat this.”
Kat leaned her head back and let out a deep breath. “Let’s get the bed out, okay?”
June peered at her cousin, wishing they were closer, wishing she knew just what to say. But she was scared
about Lolly’s diagnosis too, and being scared together was probably the best any of them could do.
It took a few minutes, but they finally wedged the bed out and it sprang up. June wheeled the bed by the balcony so that if she was on her stomach and kept her pillow at the near end, she could see the stars and the harbor. In minutes they made up both beds, spreading out the light summer quilts. Even though it was late August, it rarely got hot enough to warrant the noise the fan made, but Kat had the antique bronze one in the corner, just in case. June glanced at the bed where she’d spend the foreseeable future. The soft, faded shams and the old starfish quilt looked so inviting June could imagine falling asleep in two seconds.
The bathroom door opened with a cloud of steam, and Isabel appeared in a pink tank top and gray yoga pants, her long brown hair with its pretty gold highlights wet around her shoulders.
“Are you okay, Isabel?” June asked. Stupid question, she realized. Of course Isabel wasn’t okay.
Isabel stared down at her feet, at her shimmery-pink toenails. “No.”
June glanced at Kat. Clearly, neither had expected the honesty, even after the confession in the parlor.
“I’m so sorry, Isabel.” Kat sat cross-legged on her bed, then pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. Also clearly, Kat wanted to say something else but wasn’t sure what.
June sat down on her bed. “What do you think’s going to happen now? He’ll get her out of his system and you two will work it out?”
Isabel walked over to the balcony and just stood there, staring out. June’s gaze landed on Isabel’s rings, the two-carat, round diamond that had long-ago replaced the tiny chip on her original engagement ring and the diamond-studded, gold wedding band.
“Is that how it works?” Kat asked. “I mean, how do you get past that?”