Gaby looked on, arms crossed, that same smirk on her face.
“Shut up,” Sam said.
“What? I said nothing. You’re a growing girl, you need nourishment. Did you remember to pack the lunch essentials—plastic forks? Salt and pepper packets? Condoms?”
“Gaby!” Sam said.
It amazed her that she could do things in bed with Clive that an hour later she was too embarrassed to even acknowledge to her friend. Isabella would pump her for details, and Sam would probably oblige, but she knew she would blush the whole time.
Sam and Clive took the thirty-minute bus ride to Mount Huntington. It was an easy hike, just an hour to the top. She walked behind him, noting the way the muscles in his calves bulged whenever he took a step. She liked his long, skinny legs.
He had to go back to London later that night.
From the top of the mountain, she could see the whole valley below. They sat and talked about next year, what it would be like to wake up together every morning. In the distance, Sam saw the college and the town around it. A cluster of brick buildings and paved roads, surrounded by green trees, some of them beginning to show signs of turning, of the coming fall.
* * *
—
After Clive was gone, Isabella said, “I feel like I haven’t seen you in a week.”
“I know,” Sam said.
“Last night a bunch of us were watching TV in the living room. Everyone was asking where you were. I told them you were busy being in love upstairs. They all thought you’d gone home for a funeral or something. None of them even knew Clive was here.”
Sam laughed.
“Why’d you stay holed up the whole time?” Isabella said. “Were you trying to hide him?”
“Why would I do that?” Sam said.
She wondered if it was exactly what she’d done.
7
Elisabeth
ELISABETH DIDN’T WANT TO GO to book club, but Andrew insisted.
“You’ll feel happier here once you’ve made friends,” he said. “I can hold down the fort. I’ll have my mom come over and keep me company.”
Stephanie Preston lived three houses away. It was harder to come up with an excuse not to attend than it was just to go. Elisabeth supposed it was nice that they had invited her. The five women around her age on the block were a group. Established long before she arrived. They even had a name for themselves. The Laurels.
It wasn’t a group Elisabeth particularly wanted to be part of, and yet.
“I think I’ll fake sick,” she said.
She stood in the front hall with her hummus plate in one hand and a tote bag slung over her shoulder, containing her wallet, phone, book, keys, and breast pump. Andrew and the baby looked so cozy on the sofa. She wanted to nestle in beside them.
“If you stay home, you’ll have to spend an entire evening with my mother. Think of it that way,” he said.
Right on cue, Faye came in the front door, loaded down with plastic bags.
A case of diet soda and a package of Hershey bars poked out.
“You brought us groceries,” Elisabeth said.
“These are mine,” Faye said. “George says I can’t shop at Costco anymore. He says bulk shopping hurts the little guy. We had a blowout fight about it. I need to hide some things in the fridge in your garage.”
“Okay,” Andrew said, like there was nothing unusual about the request.
“I don’t understand how that works,” Elisabeth said.
“Like this,” Faye said. “I bought a twenty-pack of butter. I’ll come over whenever I need a new stick, and I’ll tell George I got it at Gibson’s grocery, and paid a premium.”
Elisabeth tried to catch Andrew’s eye to convey that he should shut this down. Otherwise, Faye would have an excuse to drop in on them whenever she pleased. But Andrew was wiping spit-up off of Gil’s chin.
He wouldn’t have told Faye no even if he had seen her expression.
As the mother of a son, Elisabeth finally grasped why things between her and Faye had always been somewhat strained.
“When Andrew was six, he said he was going to marry me,” Faye told her when they called his parents on the night they got engaged. In response, Elisabeth had only managed to say, “My goodness.”
It had never occurred to her that she might have a boy. Even after a blood test confirmed it, she still could only imagine a smaller version of herself—a mercurial girl, who loved all the girlie things she once did. Elisabeth couldn’t help but feel disappointed. She googled Can you take a boy to the Nutcracker? Do boys read Laura Ingalls Wilder?
But as soon as she saw Gil, she understood.
* * *
—
Arriving at Stephanie’s house, Elisabeth smiled at a pretty strawberry blonde at the door, waiting to be let in. She wore jeans and a Burberry trench coat, and she held a tray covered in tinfoil.
“We haven’t met,” she said. “I’m Gwen Hynes.”
“Elisabeth Ronson. My husband and I moved into the white house over there two months ago. Which house is yours? I thought I’d met everyone on the block.”
The women had come to meet her as a group, the Saturday after she and Andrew moved in. They brought cookies one of them had made and a bottle of wine. They were full of good information—about the local public pool and how to get free trash stickers at town hall, and whom to call if they needed an electrician, a handyman, painters. They were nice enough, but Elisabeth felt like they were sizing her up.
Now Gwen leaned in close and whispered, “I live four blocks away. My admission into the Laurel Street book club was controversial.”
Her tone seemed to suggest that she was both joking and telling the truth.
“Elisabeth Ronson,” she went on. “I recognize your name. You write for the Times.”
“Used to. Yes.”
“I loved your book.”
She had written two, but there was never a need to ask which of them someone was referring to. Her first, an examination of the real and alleged feuds between actresses in old Hollywood, took off. There was a movie deal, coverage in all the right places.
Her second, a history of the diet industry in America, came out the same week as half a dozen huge books, including the one that went on to win the Pulitzer that year. It just got buried. Nobody read it besides Nomi, Andrew, George, and about seventeen strangers.
People regularly came up to her at cocktail parties and praised her first book, then said they were dying for her to write another.
“I did,” Elisabeth would say. “It came out two years ago.”
Privately, she thought her second book was the best thing she’d ever written. Her agent, Amelia, said she agreed, and that all writers were subject to the randomness of the marketplace. It was meant to be comforting, but Elisabeth thought that if she wasn’t supposed to take responsibility for the failure of the second book, then the success of the first one might have also been a fluke.
Now, to Gwen, she said only, “Thanks. That’s nice of you to say.”
“My next-door neighbor teaches narrative nonfiction at the college,” Gwen said. “Would you mind if I let her know you’re living here now? I’m sure she’d love to have you speak to her class.”
“I’d be happy to.”
The door swung open, and there stood Stephanie in bright red lipstick, her hair blown out big. She wore tight black stretch pants and three-inch leopard-print heels. All Elisabeth could think of was Olivia Newton-John in the last scene of Grease.
Instead of hello, Stephanie said, “Wine!”
They followed her to the kitchen, where she filled two goblets that looked like they belonged at a Renaissance fair.
Stephanie handed one to each of them.
“Stephanie, it’s a Wednesday,” Gwen said with a laugh.
“Chuck’s away and the kids are at my mother’s,” Stephanie said. “Let’s party. The girls are in here.”
As she led them into the living room, Stephanie asked Gwen how her weekend in Vermont had been.
“Nice,” Gwen said. “Quiet. We traipsed around in nature and had a couple of dinners out, and slept in on Sunday. We’ve both been working so hard, it was great to decompress.”
“Sleeping in. Dinners out,” Stephanie said. “I think I remember what that was like. Elisabeth, Gwen is the only one in the book group smart enough not to have procreated, in case these sound like foreign concepts to you too.”
Gwen smiled tightly. Elisabeth thought she recognized the expression. It was one she herself had made plenty in recent years.
“Gwen, Elisabeth has a new baby,” Stephanie said. “He’s adorable. What’s his name again?”
“Gilbert,” Elisabeth said, wanting to change the subject for Gwen’s sake.
“That’s right. Gilbert.” Stephanie sounded as if she still wasn’t sure.
Elisabeth and Gwen laid down their offerings on the coffee table, which was already crowded with food no one had touched. A tray heaped with cheese slices and crackers arranged in the shape of a fan. A bowl of onion dip, its smooth brown surface undisturbed, but for a curlicue where the mixing spoon had been lifted out. There were potato chips; blue corn chips; salsa; pigs in a blanket; bruschetta. No rhyme or reason to any of it.
A small white powder puff of a dog kept jumping up on its hind legs and sniffing around the edges of things, making it all that much less appetizing.
Melody, Karen, and Pam were packed onto the love seat. Debbie, the doughy stay-at-home mom who lived directly across the street from Elisabeth, sat to their right, in an upholstered chair pulled in from the dining room.
“We just started our discussion,” Stephanie said as she perched on the arm of the love seat.
Elisabeth was embarrassed to see that she was the only one who had brought her copy of The Group. She took the empty chair beside Debbie. Gwen took the only other available seat, a bench several feet away.
“Pam,” Stephanie said. “You were saying something about the title.”
“I thought it was misleading,” Pam said. “I guess I thought they’d be more like us. More like an actual group.”
“They were a group in college,” Melody said. “Then they grew apart. It’s realistic, right? How many of us are still close to our college besties?”
Besties, Elisabeth thought, trying to push down her disdain.
She thought of Nomi. They hadn’t grown apart, had they? Their degree of closeness at any given moment tended to depend on circumstance—they drifted when Nomi went to Pennsylvania for grad school, came back together when she got a job in New York. Nomi met Brian before Elisabeth met Andrew, and there was a brief period when they didn’t speak as much as they once had. But then they were both coupled up, both getting married. They had things in common again. Motherhood had bonded them more than anything. Through it all, there was a connection that felt far from circumstantial and could not fray with distance. At least this was what she hoped.
“I found most of the characters so unlikable,” Pam said. “Who would want to be friends with someone who has an affair with a married man and then helps him commit his wife to an asylum?”
“I don’t think we’re meant to think of them as our friends,” Gwen said.
Debbie seemed to take this as agreement with her point.
“Blame Melody. She picked it,” she said. Then, to Elisabeth, “Melody’s the brainy one.”
Melody shrugged, guilty as charged. “Sue me, I’m an English major,” she said.
No, you’re a forty-two-year-old realtor, Elisabeth thought.
“She always picks some serious book that the rest of us skipped in high school,” Debbie went on. “Be glad you weren’t here for Rebecca.”
Gwen got up from her seat. “I’m going to grab a drink,” she said. “Anyone want anything?”
They all shook their heads. Elisabeth noticed Gwen hadn’t touched her wine.
“Why don’t we go around and each say one nice thing about the book?” Stephanie said.
“As Mary McCarthy turns in her grave,” Gwen whispered as she passed on her way to the kitchen, her long scarf brushing Elisabeth’s arm.
Elisabeth wanted to follow her, but suspected that might be an odd thing to do.
“I think it would make a good movie,” Karen said.
“You say that about every book,” said Melody.
“I do not.”
“Karen, did you even read it?”
“I read half.”
“I liked the writing,” Debbie said. “But it was confusing. I couldn’t get past the names. I’m sorry, but they were so goofy. Dottie and Polly and Priss.”
If only all parents were sophisticated enough to choose a name like Debbie.
A few years back, a distant cousin of Andrew’s had skied into a tree and suffered a brain injury. Afterward, she couldn’t stop herself from saying out loud whatever came into her head. This sort of thing would be ruinous were it to happen to Elisabeth. No one in her life, with the exception of the baby, would be able to stand her if they knew what she was thinking.
Gwen came back in then, holding a can of seltzer.
A sharp beep emitted from a video baby monitor Debbie clutched in one hand. She held a glass of Chardonnay in the other. At first, Elisabeth thought the monitor was for Stephanie’s kids, upstairs. The screen showed the ghostly black-and-white figures of two bodies lying side by side. But Stephanie had said the kids were at her mother’s.
“Are those your kids?” Elisabeth asked.
Debbie nodded. “No reason to pay a sitter when I’m across the street, right? Craig gets home from poker around eight. He’ll babysit after that.”
Elisabeth made eye contact with Gwen.
She wished she could talk only to her. From that brief exchange on the front stoop, that whispered comment, she was positive the two of them would be friends.
“Debbie, you have to remember The Group was written in the thirties,” Melody said.
“Actually, it was written in the fifties, about the thirties,” Gwen said. “It has such a delicious, detached quality. I love it.”
“I guess I prefer something more modern,” Debbie said. “Something we can relate to. Like Fifty Shades.”
“But it sheds so much light on the present,” Gwen said. “On all that hasn’t changed.”
“Like what?” Debbie said, perplexed.
Elisabeth wished she had the guts to say, Like there are still women who, when their husband is in charge of the kids, will say he’s babysitting.
One scene in the book made her cry. A character wants to nurse her newborn son, but the hospital staff and her husband insist upon formula as the normal course of things. The character is made to lie in her hospital bed listening to her baby wail in a room down the hall. She’s tortured by the sound.
Now the recommendations were flipped, the pressures reversed, but still so much was forced on a mother.
“Among other things,” Gwen said. “There’s the great stuff about women in the workplace, some of which felt grossly contemporary to me. Not to mention, the reminder that we’re always just a voting cycle away from a return to back-alley abortions.”
Debbie looked horrified. “Gwen.”
“Ladies,” Stephanie said. “It’s only a book. It doesn’t matter. Agree to disagree. Here’s something much more interesting: Joan Walker saw Tim Bauer’s car parked in the lot at the Motel Six in Dexter on Tuesday. In the middle of the day. She recognized the plates.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I thought Joan worked at the high school on Tuesdays.”
“She got laid off.�
�
“Again?”
“Yes. Janet was all too happy to rub that in her face.”
Six minutes. That was all the time they were going to spend talking about the novel Elisabeth had stayed up reading, even though she was exhausted, so that she would sound intelligent when they discussed it.
For the next two hours, they conversed with fervor about the secrets of women she didn’t know. Debbie appointed herself Elisabeth’s translator.
“Janet is Stephanie’s sister-in-law,” she whispered. “They don’t get along.”
“Joan’s daughter had a problem with drugs. It was so sad. She’s doing better now, though. She sells mineral makeup on the Internet. Joan says she makes a fortune.”
Elisabeth wanted to say, Thank you, but really, I don’t care.
Would these be her people now?
Stephanie refilled every wineglass as soon as it was halfway empty. Elisabeth put her hand over the top of hers after the second pour. The rest of them were bombed, minus Gwen, who only ever drank water as far as Elisabeth saw. Eventually, Stephanie cleared away the untouched hors d’oeuvres and replaced them with dessert—chocolate-covered strawberries, cookies, and cupcakes and brownies, none of which anyone ate.
“How are things at your house, Elisabeth?” Melody asked.
Elisabeth wasn’t sure what to say. So few words had been directed at her tonight that, like some electronic device, she was still switched on but had gone into sleep mode.
“They’re—good,” she said.
“All unpacked?”
“Yes, finally.”
She had unpacked immediately upon moving in, but that seemed annoying to admit. Elisabeth was good at unpacking, good at anything finite that required no real deliberation.
“No trouble with water in the basement?” Melody said.
“No.”
“We haven’t had much rain since they moved in,” Pam pointed out. “Wait until the snow starts. That’s the real test.”
“It must be a huge change,” Melody said. “Where did you live in the city?”
Friends and Strangers Page 12