by T. Greenwood
He was dressed in a suit, wearing a hat. “Interview!” he hollered at me.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A second interview,” he hollered again. Ridiculously. “At Prudential! I think they’re going to offer me the job!”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say to him.
He nodded at me, and his was the face of a man filled with regret, with shame. I’d never seen him look even one bit repentant before, but his head hung low that morning, and I knew I had to see her again. It wasn’t Ted keeping me away from Eva, but Eva herself.
Donna answered the door, and I said, “Hi, sweetheart, listen, I have something very important I need to talk to your mom about. It’s about the cookie sales this year.” I knew Girl Scout business was something that Donna could not argue against. And there was no refuting the imperative nature of the annual cookie sale, and so, despite whatever Eva had instructed her to do, she reluctantly motioned for me to go upstairs.
Eva was in her room, sitting in the window seat, reading. When she turned toward me, I was startled by what I saw. Her face looked distorted, half of it bruised, soft like rotten fruit, the skin discolored and swollen. She raised her shoulders in a shrug, as if to ask how this could have happened. As if I had any sort of explanation for this.
“Oh, my God, Eva,” I said, dropping to my knees at her feet and resting my head in her lap. “What has he done to you?”
But I didn’t really want to hear. I didn’t want to envision what had transpired between them that had resulted in this. Because imagining it would somehow make this violence, this cruelty part of this world, part of reality. And I wasn’t sure I could live in a world where something like this was possible.
“Ted thinks they’re going to offer him the job,” she said.
“This is his second interview. Of course, it means a pay cut, but work is work.”
“We need to leave,” I said, the words ones I hadn’t dared say out loud since New York. “We’ll take the children and go somewhere. We’ll start over.”
I expected when I looked up at her that she would be smiling sadly, shaking her head at me, that she would continue rambling on about Ted’s possible new job, but instead she was nodding. Her eyes were closed, dreaming our escape.
Ted did get that job, and he started the very next day. But instead of carpooling into the city with Frankie, he took the Caddie, ensuring that Eva remained trapped inside that house, quite literally immobile. And every single day, for the rest of the month, Ted arrived home at exactly five thirty, bearing an armload of flowers. The flowers were dying all over that room. Eva refused to touch them, to smell them, to look at them, or, when they died, to throw their stinking corpses away. The room smelled like fermentation, like rot.
I was so worried about leaving her for Vermont. The idea of even a couple of weeks away from her was unendurable, but Eva had promised that she and the kids would arrive in two weeks, that Ted had no choice now but to let her go; after what he had done, there was almost nothing, save her freedom, that he could deny her.
Ted and Frankie appeared to have patched up whatever tears that night had made in the fabric of their friendship as well. I suppose Ted had to have realized, probably in the hazy achy afterglow of his hangover the next morning, that he’d been insane to think that Eva was flirting with Frankie. For one thing, Frankie was fiercely loyal. Anyone who knew him for five minutes knew this. He was stubbornly faithful to his family, his friends. And he and Ted were, for all intents and purposes, friends. And lucky for Ted, Frankie was a forgiving man (with other men anyway). He wasn’t one to hold a grudge. “Water under the bridge,” he claimed. So much water. So many bridges.
Those two weeks waiting for Eva at the lake passed so slowly. I felt as though we were swimming through molasses, each day like a thousand days. Mosquitoes, grass stains, the lake. All of it was like some sort of photograph, the moment frozen, unmoving.
The girls were so independent now; they barely needed me for anything anymore. I could have spent the entire day in my nightclothes if I’d wanted. I could have stayed in bed. Chessy loved to cook, and her greatest pleasure was getting up early and making breakfast for herself and her sister. By the time I came down from the sleeping loft, my coffee would be percolating, and the kitchen would smell like vanilla and cinnamon. Something about watching her move around the kitchen like this made me terribly sad though, as if the only thing I’d managed to teach her were these domesticities, about how to reside within the four walls of a kitchen. Her happiness killed me a little bit, but what could I do? What could I say that wouldn’t destroy her?
Mouse, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to get outside, to get into the lake, into the woods, into trouble. At nine, she was still just a little girl, a wild little girl who didn’t know how to use a spatula or an egg timer. She knew only the feeling of sun on her shoulders and the cold shock of the lake at dawn. I clung to Mouse’s innocence, her beautiful refusal to fit into the world of adults. I watched her from the grassy shore of the lake and wished she could be like this forever. That it wasn’t too late to save her.
I slept. To pass the time, I lay down on the daybed on the sleeping porch each afternoon after lunch and slept the hours away. Like a child waiting for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, I relied on sleep to bring the morning faster. And I read, slipping into the worlds offered by my books and lingering there. Gussy brought me armloads from the library in Quimby and I devoured them. I couldn’t get enough; I was so hungry for escape. But still, time limped.
My fuse was short and burning those last few days. Gussy came once during the final days before Eva’s arrival, and found me in the kitchen yelling at the girls. I hated my own impatience with them; I hated my temper, but it was as though I had no control over my frustration. I felt more like Frankie than myself: snapping at them over the smallest things. This morning it was over a neglected syrup spill that had run off the table and onto the seat in the breakfast nook, into which I had sat. We had to wash all of our clothes by hand at camp, and hang them to dry on the clotheslines that were stretched between several trees in the backyard. I was down to my very last pair of clean shorts, and it was raining, making clean, dry clothes impossible.
Gussy pulled her car up onto the grass just as I was shooing the girls outside, despite the drizzle, cursing my sticky bottom and scrubbing at the gooey mess on my behind. The girls ran to her, clung to her, and I felt the way Frankie must sometimes feel when the girls ran to me, seeking solace from him in my arms. It felt awful to be on this end of things.
One thing I admired about Eva was her ability, despite the chaos of four children, to never lose her patience. I’d watch her clean up broken plates, wipe up spill after spill, placidly sit and somehow manage an adult conversation as Rose crawled all over her lap, tugging at her sleeves, and Johnny wreaked his usual havoc in the other room. She was a good mother, a natural mother. When I felt myself igniting, that crack and sizzle after something lit me on fire, I tried to think of what Eva would do. But I could never, ever seem to find the calm reserves she had: the patience. It was her best attribute with her children, though her worst when it came to Ted.
Seeing Gussy struggling with something in the trunk of the car, I gave up on the syrup, opened up the screen door, and rushed outside to help her. “Go play!” I said, again, to Chessy and Mouse, who were now under Gussy’s feet instead of my own.
I looked at her and rolled my eyes, threw up my hands in surrender to another lost battle in this endless war of motherhood. Gussy had two daughters, Nancy and Debbie, as well, but they were older than my own. I wished sometimes that we had started our families at the same time. She always seemed to be the first to experience things in life, making her always older, always wiser than I. But I didn’t want a mentor; I wanted a friend to share the experience with. I suppose this was one thing that drew me so strongly to Eva. I never felt Eva judging me, never felt her condescension. She never shook her head knowingly at
me or comforted me that the kids would “grow out of it.”
“Take these?” Gussy said, handing me a box overflowing with curtains I recognized from her house: red gingham ones that made me think of picnics.“I thought we could replace those tired ones in the kitchen.”
I took the box, which was heavier than I expected.
“Oh, I brought some of Mom’s cookbooks too. You must be sick to death of cooking the same old things every night.”
There had been no cookbooks at camp: just a couple of Gussy’s recipes for macaroni salad and hamburger pie handwritten on index cards and stuck with push pins into the insides of the cupboards. I used the lack of a cookbook as an excuse not to cook, making sandwiches most nights, burgers and hot dogs and grilled cheese on others. When Eva had been here before, she’d taken over the kitchen, and I had been grateful for the real food that she somehow managed to coax from thin air.
“Come in,” I said. “Sorry, it’s a bit of a mess. One of the girls spilled syrup all over the table.”
It was always a little strange staying at camp. Gussy and Frank owned the cabin but acted like guests when they came to visit. And while I should have appreciated their efforts, I couldn’t help but feel a little irritated. The idea of knocking on your own door seemed ridiculous to me, but still she knocked. This was my retreat, but it belonged to them. And somehow instead of feeling as though my privacy was being respected, I felt like she was calling even more attention to the fact that the camp was not mine, that it was simply on loan. Even after all these years, I always felt a little snag of irritation each time Gussy asked permission to use her own bathroom.
“I can get that,” Gussy said. “Just use a little vinegar. Here, like this,” she said, opening up the cupboard and grabbing a bottle of white vinegar from inside. And once again, I was the inexperienced little sister at the mercy of her much wiser, older sibling.
I sat down in the kitchen nook, exasperated, and relinquished any sense of equality I had had. The playing field had never been level between us. She would always know more, have more, be better at most things than I was.
“When do the Wilsons get here?” she asked, finishing and sitting down across from me in the nook.
“On Saturday. Frankie’s bringing them up with him when he comes to visit.”
The last time Eva was there, Gussy had given us even more room than normal, only coming once to visit, at my invitation. She and Eva had gotten along so well, I’d even felt a little bristle of that childhood jealousy. My friends had always looked up to Gussy, loved when she paid them any attention.
“She was sick,” I said, not wanting to gossip, but also knowing that Gussy would notice. Gussy was nothing if not attentive. That’s what people loved about her, what, in fact, I loved about her. She paid attention to people. She noticed the little things. She listened when you talked to her.
“With what?” she asked.
“Cancer,” I said. “In her breast. She had both of them removed.”
“Oh, goodness,” Gussy said.“How terrible. Is she okay now?”
My mind flashed on the image of her sitting in her window, her ravaged face, the pulpy cheek that had endured Ted’s wrath. I nodded, but Gussy eyed me suspiciously. She always knew when something was wrong; there was no keeping secrets from Gussy.
“Her husband drinks,” I said.
“Your husband drinks,” she said, laughing, and then as though in apology, “That’s what husbands do. Even Frank drinks.” This was true. Her Frank had a single highball every night after dinner. One cocktail. I’d never seen his eyes grow glassy, his voice deepen and bellow with drink. I’d never seen his knees falter. His hands shake.
I sighed. “It will be good for her to have some time away from him. I don’t think she’s had time to truly heal yet.”
Gussy nodded and reached for my hand. “I am so glad you have such a good friend. She’s lovely. And she’s lucky to have you so close.”
Close. I thought about how far away I’d felt from Eva all summer. First with her sequestered in the house, and then later hiding from me. Ashamed of what her husband had done to her.
Gussy and I hung the curtains that afternoon, and I felt a small ray of optimism as the sun struggled through the ominous clouds. As the rain cleared.
“We should get these clothes out to dry while there’s still sun,” she said, noting the tub of wet clothes on the floor in the bathroom.
As we clipped the clothes to the clothesline, the leaves casting shadows across our faces and hands, the air smelling clean, I even felt my frustration with the children dissipating. And for one moment as we stood on opposite sides of a sheet, Gussy only a silhouette behind the fabric, I thought about telling her. About just opening up, letting the clouds of my secret part and sharing that brilliant and dangerous sun with her. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I trusted my sister. I loved her. But I was also afraid of the advice she would give. I didn’t want her to tell me that what I wanted, what I loved didn’t belong to me. And never could.
The next three days waiting for Eva actually passed fairly quickly. We spent one day visiting my mother and father. While it wasn’t how I would normally have chosen to spend my time, it occupied me. And the girls loved the farm: the animals and the wide open spaces to run. My mother’s bitterness toward me used to sting but had grown into a dull ache. We endured each other for the children. We drank tea, and she showed me things she planned to order from the Montgomery Ward catalogue. And my father worked.
Back at the lake, I busied myself with getting the camp ready for Eva and the kids: sweeping the floors and changing the sheets on the beds. The children and I went on nature walks, collecting twigs and leaves and flowers, which we strung together and hung from the ceiling over my bed. At the end of the last day, I lay on my back, staring up at the mobile, which spun lazily in the breeze coming through the open window.
Ted’s new job didn’t allow him even a moment away; he was working weekends as well as during the week that summer. And so he had no choice but to allow Frankie to drive Eva and the kids up to Vermont. Frankie would stay with us only the first night, and then he would go back to the city, leaving us alone. My whole body buzzed with happy anticipation, but it was also agonizing, this thrilling, trilling feeling in my body.
All morning I paced as the girls readied the camp for their visitors as well. Mouse gathered a bouquet of wildflowers (mostly Queen Anne’s lace and purple puffs of joe-pye weed) which we put in a jelly jar on the kitchen table. Chessy drew her father a WELCOME TO CAMP! sign, which we thumbtacked to one of the exposed beams in the living room.
I, on the other hand, tried to put Frankie out of my mind. Lately Frankie had seemed little more to me than an obstacle to Eva. When I stopped long enough to consider this, I was overwhelmed by guilt. But I was also quickly able to rationalize my behavior, thinking only of the drinking, the anger, the treatment I had endured for the last fourteen years. I was not some broken-down bureau that Frankie could restore. I wasn’t some neglected, abandoned highboy he could rescue and then shove in a corner to look pretty. I was a woman with an intellect, with dreams, and with real desires, wants that were bigger than Frankie. Bigger than this life. He’d never once acknowledged that. He’d never once, in all the years I’d known him, considered that maybe there was more to me than what met the eye. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became, the more frustrated and intent upon pursuing all of the passions that did not include him. With good conscience. With Eva.
But, of course, following these liberating revelations was always the hard, cold hammer of reality. I was a thirty-three-year-old woman with two children, no education, and no real skills, unless you counted my pathetic forty-word-per-minute typing skills or my breaststroke. The house was in Frankie’s name; the car was in Frankie’s name. Even our bank account was not my own. I bristled at the thought of Frankie doling out my weekly allowance, making all of the decisions regarding purchases I made. And Eva was no better of
f than I, and with more children. The fantasy of running off together was just that: a fragile, fantastical mobile. We were tethered to this world, to our lives, by our husbands’ strings. Flight was an illusion.
“They’re here! They’re here!” cried Mouse, scrambling out of the kitchen nook, where she had been worrying the flower arrangement. She was wearing blue jeans rolled up and two different-colored socks. I had learned long ago that a battle over clothing with Mouse was not one I wanted to wage. Chessy, on the other hand, had put on a clean jumper and had even polished her Buster Browns with an old sock and some shoe polish she found in one of Gussy’s drawers that morning. She came bounding from the living room, dropping the book she’d been reading on the table next to me as she made her way to the back door. I pressed my palms flat against the Formica to steady myself.
Frankie was nothing if not a gentleman (during waking hours anyway, especially with other women), and he hurried out and around the car to open Eva’s door: gallantly, I thought, as if he’d only been hired to deliver her to me.
Donna and Sally rushed out of the car and off into the woods with my girls, and Johnny whooping behind them, his cowboy costume replaced by an Indian headdress he’d gotten for his eighth birthday. Rose was still in the backseat, and I went to her first, afraid that if I went to Eva I would embrace her and not be able to let go.
“Rosie Posey!” I said, looking in at Rose, whose cheeks were flushed pink.
“Billie!” Rose cried, leaping into my arms. The Wilson children had stopped calling me Mrs. Valentine long ago. She buried her hot cheeks against my chest, and I breathed the baby shampoo smell of her hair.
I stood up and Eva came to me, hugging me, with Rose still in my arms, and for a brief moment, I had the feeling that this was my family. It was as though I had slipped into some other dimension. The Twilight Zone.