“Sylvie!” her mother was yelling. “Are you still there? Hello?”
“Yes, I’m here,” she said.
“Well, are you coming?” her mother asked.
“I thought,” said Sylvie, struck by a sudden inspiration, “that we could do Thanksgiving here.”
Sylvie could practically hear her mother’s canny brain turning. “No Richard?”
“No, no Richard.” Maybe Tim, though. Tim was a possibility. But how would she tell her mother, not to mention her daughters, that she’d been seeing someone? Another man, Sylvie? she could hear her mother sigh. Really, do you think that’s going to fix you? Is that the answer here?
Tim wasn’t an answer, she thought stubbornly. Tim was a reward, a reward for what she’d suffered. Listening to his stories about his sons, the trips they’d taken, the time they’d spent together, was like storytime at the library, where she’d taken the girls a few times when they were little. They’d sit cross-legged on the carpeted floor and listen, entranced by stories of magic beanstalks and houses made of candy. She listened the same way when Tim talked.
“If you really want to do it.” Selma sounded dubious. “I’ll bring the turkey.”
“No!” The word burst out of Sylvie’s mouth, a little more vehemently than she’d intended. “No. Just come. I’ll take care of everything.”
Selma sounded amused. “So now you’re a cook?”
“I’ve made a few things.” Driving aimlessly through Fair-view’s streets early one Saturday morning, she’d passed a tag sale, where there’d been a box full of dozens of old issues of cooking magazines, Gourmet and Saveur and Bon Appétit. “You can have them all for five bucks,” said the woman, and Sylvie, who’d been prepared to offer twenty, eagerly handed over a five-dollar bill and loaded the box into her trunk. “They were my mom’s,” the woman said, and Sylvie knew without being told that the woman’s mother had died … that her death might, in fact, have been what occasioned the tag sale, the boxes of cloth napkins and racks of blouses and coats; the piles of word-search and Sudoku books arrayed on the woman’s lawn.
She’d taken the magazines home and spent much of the weekend, when she wasn’t waxing the upstairs floors, poring over their stained and spotted pages. Some of the recipes had been dog-eared, and some had notes written in the margins: “needs more butter” beside a recipe for raspberry cobbler, “Bill likes” next to a chicken-and-sausage stew.
By Sunday night Sylvie had paper clipped a dozen things she thought would be good and, better, would be things she could make, if she got the right ingredients and followed the steps carefully.
Every morning, she’d wake up, feeling tiny and adrift, alone in a queen-size bed with the ache for the life she’d lost threatening to subsume her. The temptation would be to lie in bed all day, feeling sorry for herself. Instead, she’d force herself through her routines: up, out of bed, into her clothes, down to the kitchen. She’d drink coffee, brush her teeth, push her hair back from her face with a terrycloth headband that some cousin or tenant had left behind in the bathroom, loop her recycled shopping bags over her shoulder, and walk to Simmons’s with her shopping list in her pocket. She’d buy her ingredients, maybe stop for tea and a muffin at the coffee shop downtown, then walk home and spend the afternoon in the kitchen, with the radio playing and the sunlight warming the linoleum. Most nights, Tim would come for dinner. It wasn’t anywhere near as busy as the life she’d left behind, with eight A.M. board meetings and luncheons that stretched past three, sessions with the trainer and the daily barrage of e-mails and phone calls, but still, she filled the hours, she kept moving; and she tried as hard as she could not to think about Richard with Joelle, or about Richard alone, which was, somehow, worse.
The first Monday after she’d found the magazines she made soup, roasting butternut squash with sea salt, a slick of olive oil, and a drizzle of maple syrup, then scooping the flesh out of the shells and pureeing it with chicken stock and a bit of cream. Ceil had been thrilled to hear that Sylvie was continuing with her cooking and had offered (“threatened” was probably closer) to send Sylvie her immersion blender. “Picture Richard’s face when you’re whipping,” she’d said. “Or maybe not his face.” Sylvie had declined the offer. The next morning, she’d walked out onto the porch and bumped into a cardboard box from Federal Express, and opened it to find that Ceil had sent her one anyhow. Every woman needs a room of her own, the note with the box had said. You’ve got room, so here’s a blender.
Since the blender’s arrival, Sylvie had produced a credible lentil stew, cinnamon rolls from Ceil’s recipe (lopsided, but still delicious), an approximation of her grandmother’s fried chicken, and Indian pudding, after she’d woken up with an inexplicable craving for it one morning. She’d eaten two bowls of that, with heavy cream on top, and then scraped most of the remaining pudding into a Tupperware container and given it to Tim to take home, along with a half-gallon of French onion soup for which she’d made the stock, from beef bones, by herself. His sons, Frankie and Ollie, were coming for a weekend—they’d go camping, Tim said, the way they did every year. Normally Tim Junior came with them, but he was busy with the baby.
Cooking was a comfort. Making herself a good meal, food that would please her—not a trainer or a picky daughter or her husband—felt good, too. So did the rote work of cleaning up—the warm water on her hands as she washed her pots and pans, the satisfaction of spritzing a countertop with cleanser, then using a rag to wipe away all traces of her work. Arranging a bouquet she’d bought at the farmer’s market that was held on the town green every Saturday, straightening the haphazard stack of cookbooks that had collected in the beach house over the years (including one that had to have been a gift to her Uncle Freddie and featured only recipes with beer), even the donkeywork of polishing the silver was satisfying.
But come Thanksgiving, Selma wouldn’t be impressed by her daughter’s adventures in the kitchen. Selma’s generation had been born a little too late for The Joy of Cooking, and too early for Martha Stewart to reinvent the home as a laboratory-cum-art gallery in which a woman could exercise all of her creative energies and scientific impulses by whipping meringues and hanging her own wallpaper. Sylvie’s mother saw the kitchen as a place of drudgery, a prison she couldn’t escape fast enough, and, as a result, her dinners had fallen into two categories: reheated and frozen. Thanksgiving was the only meal she attempted to cook from scratch, and she could ruin even catered meals by sticking them in the oven and forgetting they were there.
On the telephone, Selma was still talking. “I’ll send you my recipes,” she said.
“Yes, Ma.” Sylvie wondered whether the phrase cook past the point of edible figured prominently in the one for turkey.
Her mother’s voice softened. “Are you doing all right? You’re not lonely up there?”
“I’m fine,” Sylvie said automatically. For the first time since she’d fled to Connecticut she found herself wondering about Clarissa and Derek. They worked for her but they were on Richard’s payroll, Derek as a driver, Clarissa as a social secretary. She hoped that Richard had found them some other work, that he hadn’t laid them off, that there weren’t more people suffering because of what he’d done.
“I remember after your dad died, it took a long time before I stopped seeing him everywhere. I’d turn around and I’d catch a glimpse of him, out of the corner of my eye …” She paused. “Of course, Richard isn’t dead,” she rasped.
“True.” Nor had Richard spent much time in the Connecticut house. Sylvie had never gotten used to seeing him there, coming in from the porch with the paper, or rounding the corner into the kitchen with an empty coffee mug in his hand, so she wasn’t seeing him now. This was her house, her place, with her meals and her memories. She’d washed the curtains and waxed the floors, she’d made each bed and reorganized every closet. She’d thrown out the mouse’s corpse, and that, more than anything else made this place hers. “Can I ask you something?”
“Ask,” said the Honorable Selma.
“Do you think …” Sylvie tried to choose the right words. Should I have seen it coming? Was it my fault? In spite of the routines she’d strung together, in spite of Tim’s company, she still felt unmoored and desperately lonely. She’d lost her husband, her best friend, her personal and professional identity, not to mention her job, all in the span of a few terrible hours, and her daughters, for better or worse, were grown women. Who was she now? What was her purpose? “Was I a good wife?” she finally asked.
“Sylvie,” her mother said, her voice insistent and confiding. “You were a better wife than he deserved. You are a wonderful mother to your daughters.”
Sylvie made some noise of negation. Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. “You are,” Selma insisted. “You did the best you could. That’s all any mother can do. You’ve got two good girls. You’re a good woman. And if Richard can’t see that … if he can’t treat you the way you deserve to be treated … if he’s not even smart enough to keep it a secret …”
“Oh, Ma,” Sylvie said. That wasn’t what she wanted: a husband who fooled around and covered it up, even though she knew, or at least suspected, that there were a number of women in her circle who’d made that very arrangement, who were willing to carry on being Mrs. So-and-So because the perks were so enjoyable, even if they had to look the other way when their husband was seen at a restaurant or a bar or a beach resort with a woman who was not her.
“Well, I’m sorry!” Selma cried. “But every man I know with something on the side at least had enough respect for his wife to make sure she never found out about it. Or at least they wouldn’t rub it in her face.”
Sylvie thought about that. The numbness she’d felt that day on the drive home from Philadelphia was seeping back into her bones. She didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know, but the question felt as if it was swelling in her mouth, a terrible tumor that would burst if she didn’t say the word. “Daddy?”
Her mother answered instantly. “Oh, honey, no. Not him.” A pause. “At least, not that I ever knew about.” She paused again. “Although there was that Miriam Selkin. Remember her? With the bosoms?”
Sylvie didn’t remember Mrs. Selkin, except as a friendly neighbor who’d always bought Girl Scout cookies from Diana, but she did remember her father, a swimmer and a crossword-puzzle enthusiast, a man she would always picture the way he’d been during his final years, round and bald and tanned the golden-brown of a roast chicken from ten years’ worth of winters in Palm Beach, with a sun-spotted scalp and a familiar, comforting smell of cigars and Gold Bond Medicated Foot Powder. Her father would slip notes under her pillow signed “T. Fairy” when she lost her teeth (he’d written them without bothering to disguise his handwriting, on his monogrammed business stationery. Sylvie pointed this out as soon as she was old enough to read, and her dad had shrugged and said, “Maybe T. Fairy just borrowed a piece”). Selma had thanked her husband at a dozen awards dinners as “my biggest supporter and my number one fan,” and Sylvie felt certain that he would never have done anything to disgrace his wife.
“When you get to be as old as I am, sex isn’t as big a part of your life,” Selma explained.
“Ma …”
“And your father, with his bad back …”
“Ma,” she managed. “Please.”
“I don’t know. Maybe if Viagra had come on the market earlier, things would have been different,” Selma mused. Sylvie held the phone pinched between two fingers. Somewhere in the world, there was surely a conversation taking place that she’d less enjoy hearing. Trouble was, she couldn’t imagine what that conversation might be.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, exactly the way Lizzie had said it to her. It was true—Tim was coming for dinner in half an hour, and the table wasn’t set.
“How are the girls?” asked Selma.
“They’re fine,” she answered, again, automatically, knowing in her heart that it wasn’t true, not with Lizzie sounding so strange and Diana not even taking her calls.
“I hope I didn’t upset you,” said Selma. “I just wanted you to know that you never know what’s going on in someone else’s marriage, behind someone else’s bedroom door. Nobody’s perfect,” Selma continued. “Not even your mom and your dad.”
After saying goodbye, Sylvie hung up the phone and hurried upstairs, into the shower, preparing herself for dinner with her … boyfriend? Was Tim her boyfriend? Could a woman her age, a woman who was still, technically, married, even have a boyfriend?
Whether he was her boyfriend or not, she’d been seeing a lot of Tim Simmons. In the mornings, while she did her shopping, there he’d be, conferring with the deli manager or going over an order with the organic produce guy, a young man who’d left Brooklyn in order to minimize his carbon footprint and consume only things he could make or grow himself. This had come to involve, Tim had told her, going toilet-paper free the year before, and making his wife use discarded athletic socks for her monthly cycle. “That poor girl!” said Sylvie, privately resolving to figure out where the young woman was living and anonymously deliver some tampons, the really bad kind, with nonbiodegradable plastic applicators.
Tim usually brought wine or dessert or something else he’d picked up—a novel he’d read about that he thought she might like, a sauté pan he thought she could use, cookbooks for Indian food and Greek food, a soup kit for her slow cooker. Best of all, he would come with stories about his sons—the ski trip Frankie and Ollie had taken, and how they’d decided to rent snowboards, even though they’d never tried them, and how Frank had gotten to the top of a run and then frozen, too terrified to attempt it, and had to unstrap his snowboard and walk all the way down the mountain. Or the time when Ollie had just gotten his license and was taking a turn behind the wheel on the family’s trip to Cape Cod, and had gotten stuck in a rotary and gone around and around and around it, the rest of the family screaming with laughter, until finally he’d worked up the courage to merge. Normally taciturn, low-key, and self-effacing (or maybe, Sylvie thought, any man would pale in contrast to charismatic Richard), Tim would become voluble and vivid when discussing his boys. His cheeks would gain color, his voice would rise, and his booming laugh would fill the kitchen. Tim had pictures, Tim had stories, and, best of all, Tim and his sons had all kinds of rituals and traditions. There was the fall kayaking and camping trip to Arcadia State Park, the rafting trips they were planning for the spring, and how they were already thinking about renting a big RV in a few years and visiting the state parks between Connecticut and Seattle.
Tim and Sylvie would talk about current events, the latest scandal with the latest starlet, keeping far away from politics and from sex (the sex-addicted golfer and the movie star’s husband who’d fooled around with the tattooed white supremacist stripper were never discussed). Sylvie would finish cooking dinner, with Tim leaning easily against the counter, nursing a bottle of beer. They’d eat—Tim complimenting her cooking lavishly—and then they’d clear the table and do the dishes together. She’d make coffee; Tim would build a fire. Then they’d sit on the sofa, and he’d talk more about his boys … which, of course, made her think about her girls. Could she lure Lizzie and Diana, and Milo, of course, to Connecticut, with promises of kayaking or camping? Would those activities please her girls the way they’d pleased Tim’s boys? Maybe, she thought sometimes, when she’d added a bit of brandy to her coffee, she would marry Tim, and they’d be one big blended family, happily hiking and camping the years away. Maybe Lizzie would even fall in love with one of Tim’s sons!
Sylvie would listen to Tim, entertaining herself with these private reveries, for once not thinking of Richard. At the end of the night, usually by eleven, Tim would stand up and shove his hands awkwardly into his pockets. “Well, good night then,” he’d say. The first night, he’d shaken her hand and pulled her into a half-hug. The hugs had gotten less awkward with each meal, and a few times he’d kissed her cheek and once,
briefly, her lips, but it never went beyond that.
Sylvie wondered about those kisses. Did he want more? Did she? She was beginning to think she’d like being with him that way—she’d like the warmth, the comfort of another body in her bed, and she could imagine that once the loving was over, Tim would be even more relaxed and tell her even more about his boys. Maybe the problem was that Tim couldn’t do more than kiss her—from friends and acquaintances, she’d heard that plenty of men their age couldn’t have sex, because of a variety of medical conditions, or because of the drugs they were taking to address them. She knew that he’d been divorced for sixteen years. His ex-wife’s name was Kathy. She’d worked as a school nurse in Rochester when they met. “It’s not much of a story. We grew apart,” he said the first time he’d come for dinner, sharpening her mother’s old knife, then carving the meat into rosy slices.
She supposed that she and Tim were dating. She supposed, even, that he was courting her. Such an old-fashioned word, such an old-fashioned concept. Sylvie had never been courted. She and Richard had, in the parlance of her children, hooked up (although she would die before telling Lizzie and Diana that). They’d noticed each other; they’d talked at that party, they’d tumbled into bed, and then they’d been a couple, which was, in her defense, how many of the couples she knew, including Ceil and Larry, had gotten together.
But Tim took her out on proper dates. “Got any plans for Friday night?” he’d ask when he saw her at the grocery store on a Tuesday morning. When Sylvie told him no, he’d ask if she was interested in accompanying him to a movie at the old, ornate single-screen theater in town, or a chamber music concert, or a high school performance of Our Town (she was certain the last one would be excruciating and amateurish, having suffered through a number of Lizzie’s high school shows and musicals, and was pleasantly surprised by the proficiency of the Fairview students. The girl who played Emily Webb was especially affecting). He’d always drive, and hold her door open before circling the car to climb in; he insisted on paying for dinner, at the French bistro or the wood-burning pizza place. “You’re spending a fortune on groceries,” he said, smiling his old, familiar smile, with his hands tucked into his pockets and his chin tucked into his chest. “It’s the least I can do.” But Sylvie wasn’t sure if this made him her boyfriend or even if a word like that could apply to two people in their fifties.
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