Sylvie shook her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, but I’m not doing interviews right now.”
“Just a few quick questions?”
She shook her head again, her hand on the car’s hot chrome door handle. She’d gotten the door open when the woman blurted out, “Why?”
Without meaning to, Sylvie turned.
“I just want to know,” said the woman. Her notebook was closed, and beads of sweat dotted her hairline and her upper lip. “I mean, as a woman. What were you doing up there onstage with him? You didn’t have to be there.”
Sylvie opened her mouth. She thought about explaining, or trying to—that if it wasn’t her up there, it would have been her daughters, that she loved her husband, loved him in spite of it all, in a way that a woman as young as the one in front of her would never be able to understand. The life they’d built together, the history they shared—that meant something. But she knew whatever answer she could give wouldn’t satisfy her inquisitor. To Mandy Miller from the Miami Herald, Sylvie was a symbol, a feminist heroine who’d failed her, and no explanation or amount of rationalizing would change that.
“I’m sorry I disappointed you,” she said. Then she got into the car and bowed her head and cried silently all the way to the airport, where she wiped her eyes and checked her bag and boarded a flight back home.
Two weeks later she woke up to the sound of pounding surf and the shrill crying of birds. In her dream, the girls had been young again, and they’d been at the beach. Diana, tall and lean and already with a teenager’s disdainful attitude, lay on a towel on the sand, while Sylvie bobbed in the shallows with Lizzie in her arms. In her dream, Lizzie was little, plump and tow-headed, dressed not in a swimsuit, like she should have been, but in the pale pink leotard she’d worn for ballet class, the one that, somehow, always left an inch or two of underwear drooping out underneath the leg bands. Sylvie turned toward the horizon and saw a wave swelling in the distance. Heart pounding, mouth dry, she held her daughter in her arms and started swimming for the shore, but the sand was sucked backward underneath her feet, and she couldn’t move. The wave crested, breaking over her head, yanking her down. She struggled toward the surface, managing to get her head, and Lizzie’s, above water. Save her, she thought. I have to save her. But her feet kept going out from under her, and the water kept crashing and pounding, and when she finally managed to thrust her head into the air again she saw, high on the bluff, not the Connecticut house, but her New York City apartment building, and it was on fire. Flames leapt out from every window, and, before the waves took her down, she saw the western-facing wall crumble down to the street.
She jerked upright in her bed, dry-mouthed and gasping. It took her a minute to remember the specifics of her life: that she was in Connecticut, that Richard had cheated on her, that she was alone.
Except she wasn’t.
“Hello, missus,” called a voice from downstairs. Quickly, Sylvie got out of bed, wincing at the ache in her back. She scrambled into her clothes and hurried her stiff legs down the stairs as fast as they’d go to meet Mel, the caretaker, who’d been calling since she’d arrived, trying to set up a time when he could stop by and see how she was getting on.
Mel was tall, and painfully thin, bent like a string bean someone had tried to snap. “Hello, missus,” he said, sneaking a quick look at her face before dropping his eyes. Sylvie turned away. She’d have to get used to this: people looking at her, and then turning their heads. They had television in Connecticut, the same channels featuring the same rogue’s gallery of pundits pulling back the covers of her marital bed and speculating about what was, or was not, happening beneath them.
She put on a pleasant half-smile. After her plane had landed at LaGuardia, she’d driven up to Connecticut, and spent the drive flipping through the talk-radio stations, where the hosts and callers blathered on about biblical judgment and the sanctity of marriage and whether a senator sleeping with another woman really mattered in this day and age. By far the number one topic, the one they came back to over and over again, was why his wife would choose to stand up on a stage beside a man who had disgraced her. Sylvie would force herself to listen calmly for a minute or two. Then she’d start arguing in her head with the callers. Soon she’d be arguing out loud. “For your information, Suzanne from Falls Church, I have children. Better I was the one standing up there on that podium than my daughters, don’t you think?” she demanded. “Well, Fred from Dallas,” she said, after a man had called in to read Bible verses in a thick Southern accent, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone. You ever heard that one?” She flipped until she recognized the voice of the brittle redhead, the one who laughed at her own jokes and salted her Sunday columns with the boldfaced names of politicians and Washington insiders she inevitably identified as “my close friend.” (Richard had once been one of them.) “If I were Sylvie Woodruff, I’d just be grateful that it wasn’t a live boy or a dead girl,” she said. “Plagiarist!” Sylvie hollered, thumping the leather-wrapped wheel with her hand. “That’s Edwin Edwards’s line!”
She’d made it to Fairview at just after five o’clock on a bright blue afternoon. Downtown was as pretty as she’d remembered it: neatly kept buildings of clapboard and brick lining sidewalks so pristine it looked as if they’d been swept. There were boutiques and bakeries and coffee shops to go along with the places she remembered, the library and town hall and the emerald square of the town green behind it. The corner store, Simmons Grocery, was now a yarn shop, but Violet’s ice cream parlor was there, its painted sign advertising sixteen flavors faded, but otherwise the same as Sylvie remembered it. A brisk wind rattled the leaves. It had been hot and humid when she’d left the airport, but there was always a breeze by the ocean, and fall had made some inroads here. She was north, away from home, feeling hollow and empty, sick with sorrow, and utterly unlike herself.
“I see you got things in shape,” Mel said, looking around. Sylvie nodded. As miserable and furious as she’d been on the drive up from the city, her heart had lifted a bit as she’d steered the car up the long driveway and parked in front of the rambling white Colonial that hunkered on top of the bluff. She’d always been happy to come here, as a child and as a bride and a young mother, excited for the promise of summer, and all the things she’d loved: the swims in the bracing ocean water, the barbecues and the picnics they’d pack to watch the Little League games on the town green, riding her bicycle, or napping on the daybed on the porch with a novel and a glass of iced tea waiting on the coffee table.
The house had looked good, the porch freshly painted and the lawn newly mowed. Jan had told her that the house had been empty all summer. None of the cousins had wanted or, Sylvie guessed, been able to afford to come. When Sylvie had wiped her feet on the you ARE WELCOME HERE mat and turned the key in the weathered oak door, a puff of warm, stale air hit her face, a smell of mold and mouse. Breathing through her mouth, she dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and walked toward the windows, drawn by the view—the crescent of dark-gold sand, the gently churning gray-green water. She stood, entranced, listening to the sound of the waves until she realized that she’d left the front door wide open, and that she needed to unpack.
She walked back through the big room that ran the length of the first floor. In the living room section there was a pair of overstuffed couches, their upholstery clawed by long-dead cats, and another table for playing cards or board games. The bookshelves were full of law journals and stained, water-bloated paperbacks—the romances and Agatha Christie books her grandmother had favored, the westerns and mysteries her grandfather had loved—and a mounted deer’s head hung over the fireplace in the middle. Past the great room was a porch that stood under a deep awning and was lined with lounge chairs, a glider for two, and little wicker tables. Out past the porch was the sea, with white-curdled waves rolling gently over the sand.
Selma and Dave, together with Selma’s sister, Ruth, and her husband, Freddie, had bought the place
forty years ago, with the idea that they’d spend summers there, and that Sylvie and her daughters would visit, along with Selma’s parents, Freddie and Ruth’s children, kooky cousin Jan and her brother, George, now a dentist in Reno. With its mismatched furniture, hodgepodge of castoff coffee tables and plates and dishes purchased at tag sales or donated from the cousins’ homes, the house was far from fancy, but there were five bedrooms: room enough, Sylvie remembered her mother saying, for everyone to be together, to have a place at the table and a bed to sleep in.
Sylvie closed the front door. It was so quiet here. No cabs zipping down the street, no buses belching toxic clouds, no businesspeople chattering into their earpieces; just the sound of the water, and the occasional seagull squawking into the waves. She could smell dust and mildew and decaying paper and the bracing scent of the salt water, and found herself unexpectedly filled with a buoyant sensation that it took her a minute to recognize as excitement. She’d gotten through the press conference, and the terrible weeks that followed. She had driven herself here (and how long had it been since she’d driven herself anywhere, since it wasn’t Richard or Derek behind the wheel? She thought it was the long weekend three or four years ago when she and Ceil had gone to Canyon Ranch in Lenox and, in spite of the GPS that came with the rental car, gotten themselves hopelessly lost). Standing in the house, which needed her love and attention in a way that nothing had in years, she felt, on top of her sadness, a bit of that old first-day-of-school lightness, when the world was brighter than normal, and filled with possibilities. Never mind that all she’d done during her stay so far was sleep, drink whiskey from an old bottle she’d found in the kitchen, eat peanut-butter-on-Wonder-bread sandwiches (she’d bought the peanut butter and the Wonder bread at the gas station where she’d stopped to fill the car), take long, aimless walks on the beach, and sleep some more.
Mel led her through the living room, telling her that the oil tank had been filled, the plumbing lines flushed, and the gas bill paid, that if she planned on staying through the winter (here, he chanced a quick look at her face), she had only to let him know.
“You seen any critters?” he asked.
“Not live ones,” Sylvie said. Ten minutes after she’d brought her luggage—what there was of it—into the kitchen, she’d gone looking for the source of the bad smell and found a desiccated mouse corpse, caught in a snap trap in a corner of the pantry. She’d stared at it for a moment, wondering what to do. They’d had mice in Brooklyn. Sylvie had vivid memories of being home with baby Diana and spying a furry little visitor scurrying along the floorboards of the kitchen. She’d screamed an extremely clichéd “eek!” and jumped up on one of the kitchen chairs with the telephone in her hand and the baby in her arms, and stayed there, terrified, until Richard came running up the stairs to their third-floor apartment. He’d gone to the hardware store and paved their floor with snap traps, and convinced Sylvie that he would keep her safe, that mice didn’t bite or carry diseases, and that they did not need, nor could they afford, to decamp to a hotel. Every morning he’d bring the baby into bed, and she’d sit up, nursing, while he went to check the traps to see if they’d caught anything. “Home is the hunter, home from the sea,” he’d proclaim, thumping his bare chest and dropping the dead mouse into one of the paper bags they’d started collecting just for that purpose. “Don’t show me,” she’d begged, with her eyes squeezed shut, and Richard never had.
Sylvie had lifted the trap by its edges, and then, feeling queasy and sick with the memory of a younger Richard who’d once loved and cared for her and kept her and their baby safe, she dropped it into a trash bag, tied the top shut and set it on the porch, where, presumably, it still was. She hoped Mel hadn’t noticed it. She hoped it didn’t smell.
Mel hitched up his pants and led her back to the kitchen. “You haven’t been in here in a while.”
“Twelve years,” said Sylvie. She could hardly believe it had been so long. From the time she was a baby until she’d left for college, she’d spent three weeks every August at this house, along with her Aunt Ruth and Uncle Freddie and their children, her cousins Jan and George. They were the happiest times: building sandcastles, roasting hot dogs over the fire in the sandy pit that her Uncle Freddie would dig, complaining bitterly with each turn of the shovel; braving the icy water in her one-piece Jantzens and, later, as a teenager, wearing bikinis, basting her body with baby oil and dousing her hair with lemon juice and barely touching a toe to the surf. There had been bikes in the garage, and one was always just the right size for her every summer she came. Best of all, she’d gotten to be part of a tribe. They’d play tricks on the grown-ups: telling Aunt Ruth that Jan was missing was a perennial hit; hiding Uncle Freddie’s Budweiser was another, and moving her mother’s legal pads had been Sylvie’s favorite of all. “Goddamnit, I’ve got work to do!” Selma would holler. With a streak of white zinc on her nose, in her flowered, skirted bathing suit, she looked like a cross between an alien and an angry couch. Dave, with a mesh fisherman’s hat over his bald head and his cigar clamped between his teeth, would pat her shoulder. “Selma, relax! You’re on vacation!” “I’ve got a deadline!” she’d yell. The cousins would stay up late scaring one another with ghost stories, and wake up to the smell of French toast. Once every summer, on the last Friday before school, she and Jan and George would take sleeping bags and blankets down the rickety wooden steps that led to the water and spend the night camped out on the beach.
She and Richard had come up with the girls every summer, but when Richard started commuting to Washington, it was clear that he couldn’t afford to spend two or three prime summer weeks cloistered in an out-of-the-way town in Connecticut. Although trophy homes had blossomed along the coastline, Fairview was too far away to become fashionable with New York’s smart set. The people with summer homes here were from Connecticut and Massachusetts; a lot of the money was still old money, Republican money that did Richard no good. The last time up, twelve years ago, Richard had gotten in a fight with Uncle Freddie about gay marriage that had almost come to blows. Uncle Freddie and his family had left two days early. Richard spent the remainder of the visit in their bedroom on the telephone, sneezing and complaining about the mold, while Sylvie stayed downstairs, sitting at the dining room table, pounding out press releases on the Mac Classic she’d brought up from New York.
Mel was still talking, demonstrating the improvements: the electric baseboard heating on the second floor; the powder room that had been added onto the kitchen five years ago—“shipshape,” said Mel, through a pair of bright white dentures, except that the toilet handle needed a jiggle in order to flush.
Following his plaid-shirted back up the staircase, Sylvie remembered what a wonder this house had been when she was a bookish girl with a vivid imagination. It had been her enchanted castle, her Narnia, her attic garret and her secret garden. When she was a girl here she’d slept next to her cousin Jan, beneath faded cotton comforters, whispering secrets until one parent or another would make the trip to the third floor and tell them to quiet down and go to sleep, that tomorrow would be another beautiful day at the beach.
“You gonna be all right?” Mel asked, after he’d shown her the thermometers and the closet where the extra lightbulbs were stored.
She nodded. Mel looked down, shuffling his feet. “I’m sorry for your troubles,” he finally said, and Sylvie, surprised, said, “Thank you,” before walking him out to the porch.
The plastic bag with the dead mouse was still next to the door, where she’d left it, and she was, she knew, out of food. She’d scraped the last bit of peanut butter out of the jar the night before.
Time to deal with it. Time to deal with all of it.
She walked through the living room, past the television set, which she’d refused to turn on since she’d arrived. She could imagine what they were saying. She’d heard it all before, about every other politician’s wife (and there were so many of them, such an unhappy sorority to have joined). Bet
ter to try to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t happening, to hope that, in the intervening days and weeks, some public figure, some politician or professional athlete had made a bigger fool of himself than her Richard. She swallowed hard, letting the familiar mix of sorrow and rage and shame fill her as she imagined herself like an ostrich, its big behind waving in the air and its head stuck firmly in the sand. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are gone. Even though she could try to ignore it, to stick her head in the sand or jam her fingers in her ears and not listen, it didn’t stop what was happening out there, the things they were saying about Richard, the names they were calling him, and her, and their daughters.
Never mind. She’d faced Mel, and it had gone all right. She’d get some food, diversify her diet. Then, eventually, she’d worry about the rest of it.
Simmons Grocery had once been a glorified convenience store with sandy wooden floors and a single cash register and a smell of sour milk, a place where vacationers would stop on their way back from the beach to pick up a package of hot dogs, canned soup, or disposable diapers. There’d been a cooler full of ice cream sandwiches and popsicles by the door, and dirty magazines high on a shelf that the boys would dare one another to look at.
Simmons was enormous now, housed in a red brick building on the edge of town, with lots of glass windows, tiled floors and fluorescent lights, a bank of a dozen conveyer belts and cash registers, and an entire section devoted to organic foods. Had all supermarkets swollen in this steroidal manner? Sylvie had no idea. For the past five years, she’d had her groceries delivered from a service where one (or, in her case, one’s nutritionist) could plug in a shopping list, and, each week at a predetermined time, your groceries would be delivered right to your kitchen.
She shoved the bagged mouse into a trash can at the store’s entrance, then spent thirty minutes pushing her cart up and down the aisles, marveling first at the selection, then at the prices (five dollars for a gallon of milk! When had that happened?). She piled a few low-cal frozen dinners into her cart, then wandered around, picking up items—a box of crackers, a can of soup, a bundle of rosemary—before setting them down again.
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