by Julia Glass
“Another what? That was my guy Luke. You don’t know about him. He’s in Alaska for the summer.” She turned toward the mirror, arched her eyebrows to put on lipstick. She moved her hips to the music out in the bar and, before closing the lipstick, looped it through the air like a stunt plane, part of her dance.
“Who’d you steal him from? Is he a dogsled champion, too?”
Clem giggled. She worked at coaxing her hair behind her ears. “What about me? Think I could do it, Lou, the race to the Pole?”
She offered me her lipstick. Angrily, I took it. It was exponentially brighter than any color I’d ever worn. “You are so stoned,” I said. “But, sure, why not? That’s you, isn’t it? Adventures right and left just begging to let them be yours. Same as all the men.”
“Ouch.” Clem looked at me in the mirror. “Is this about Mike?”
“No,” I said.
“Yes, it is. Christ, it is.” She gazed at the ceiling. “I guess I’d be stupid to think you’ve forgiven me after all this time, right? Did you come out here to, like, reinforce the grudge, is that it?”
“I came out here to pay my respects,” I said. “And not to you.”
“Oh that is such bullshit,” said Clem. “Louisa, are you lonely or angry or both? Or am I deluded when I remember we used to have fun?”
Instead of answering, I looked at myself in the mirror and put on the lipstick. “I don’t think so,” I said, but I was talking about the color.
“Wow,” said Clem. “So. Who gets to be the Soviet Union and who gets to be the U.S.A.?”
A very drunk girl entered the bathroom and stopped to brace herself on the paper towel dispenser. She caught my eye in the mirror and laughed. “Uh-oh,” she said. I asked if she was all right, but she was already lurching into a stall. Clem and I listened to her retch. I started for the door back to civilization.
“No,” said Clem, blocking my way. “You’ve got this idea of me.”
I sighed. “Okay, sure, we did have fun. We used to.”
“So, if I say I’m sorry, will you snap out of this funk?”
Another girl came in, calling loudly, “Fran? Fran, are you in here?”
Clem started laughing. The new girl glared at her. As we left the restroom, Clem leaned against me and said in a soft voice, “Listen. I’m trying monogamy on for size. And you know, it’s not like I’ve been … promiscuous.” She sounded out the word with care. “Which I know is how you see me. Well, you’re wrong.”
Barry White was singing. Hector and Ralph were dancing. Together.
“Hoo, will you look at those boys,” said Clem. “Delicious, aren’t they?”
Clem saw my ruefulness, written all over my face. “Guys. Deceptive, even when they’re not trying. Always a challenge.”
“Well, for some of us.”
“Even for me,” said Clem, barring me with her arm for an instant, to make me look her in the face. “Lou, I am not who you think.” I had no answer, and I don’t think she wanted one.
I let her lead the way back to our table. We watched the men dance.
Clem said, “If I could steal one of those wonderful guys from the other, I just might.”
“So much for your monogamy pledge.” But I couldn’t help laughing. Mostly at myself.
Mike was the guy she’d stolen from under my nose, two summers before. I was twenty-two; Clem was eighteen. It was the last summer we were both at home, living with our parents. Mike lived down the road. He collected motorcycles, repaired our neighbors’ sports cars, and, I’m guessing in retrospect, serviced the neighbors’ wives with a parallel expertise. One day I got him to look at my rusty Dodge Dart, which had developed yet another ominous rattle or squeal. In his driveway, I thought those easy smiles were personal, mine alone. We spent one fragrant sticky night on the hammock behind his garage apartment, and oh, what ridiculous notions I had about what that night meant. Two days later, he picked me up on one of his bikes and sped me to a distant beach. We went at each other, clumsy and hot, against a hedge of prickly beach plum.
A week went by; I stayed late a few nights at the museum where I worked, putting up a show of new photographers (which is how I met the one I followed out west—Clem’s fault if I factored in Mike and the rebound effect). One night when I got back, the two of them were on the porch. I assumed Mike was waiting for me. After we watched the news together, me sitting tight by his side, he said he still had work to do. When he didn’t take me with him, I thought, All right, a little distance is natural. Next night, Clem’s bicycle was gone and stayed gone till morning. The phone rang forever at Mike’s. The night after that, under a crazy quilt of stars, I crossed five backyards in my bare feet. I heard them long before I saw them, but that didn’t send me home. I had to see them with my own eyes, all but naked on the chaise by Dr. Eccleston’s pool. Going back, I stepped on a piece of glass.
He had the nerve to come to my parents’ Fourth of July barbecue, and Clem had the nerve, even worse, to borrow a dress from my closet. It’s quite something, watching your favorite dress make time with the guy you’re crazy about—without you in it. I walked right over and threw my Mateus rosé in her face. I drove to the beach and lay on the sand till fireworks erupted from the trees. When I told her she was the scum of the earth, she said I might have a good case.
LUCY’S ROUTINES BECAME MINE, so whenever she broke them, I was thrown off balance. One breezy Saturday evening, once I’d parked the car near the Burlington green and helped her out onto the sidewalk, she said brightly, “No shops, not tonight.” She put her arm through mine, the way she asked for support without asking. “Show me the town, Clement dear.”
“The town?”
She laughed. “Don’t play the innocent. I know a party girl when I see one. Take me to your favorite nightclub, your … hangout? Den of iniquity?”
I laughed, too. What was I afraid of?
The Galaxy was filling up fast. We got a few odd looks, but there was Ralph, waving from a table beside a window. Bob Marley was singing “Positive Vibration.” Ralph called out, “Cool runnin’s, baby!”
“Africa, unite!” I called back, raising a fist. “I know those guys,” I said to Lucy, leading her carefully through the crowd.
Ralph and Hector stood up like our fathers would and pulled out a chair between them. They acted like it was the most normal thing in the world, taking your great-great-aunt to your local bar. That’s when I really fell for them. Ralph took Lucy’s handbag and put it under his coat on the windowsill. Hector insisted on treating us.
Having settled herself and looked around, she turned to him and said, “Africa? Is this Black Panther talk?”
Ralph laughed loudly and leaned close to Lucy. “Mrs. Jardine, it’s reggae talk. We’re just into the lingo of the music, it’s a fantasy. We’re too pathetically white to be Rastafarians.”
She told him to call her Lucy. “I have never been a Mrs. and will never be a Ms.” She frowned. “Rosicrucians, did you say? The Rosicrucians make music?”
“Just listen for a little,” he said. “Let me be your deejay.” And off he went to the jukebox.
We watched her take in the music and the surroundings. Hector set her cream sherry in the center of a napkin, like a waiter in a white-glove hotel.
Lucy cupped a hand behind her best ear, to hear the music over the voices in the crowded bar. She repeated carefully, uncertainly, “ ‘In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty’? Is that what he just sang?” She went back to listening, and then she looked at me. “So if I were a young girl now, this is the music I would like?”
Oh Lucy, I wanted to say, you are a young girl. I felt so moved by the look on her face that I couldn’t quite answer. I asked, “Well, are you thinking of, like, revolutionizing your tastes?”
“Revolution is no longer a possibility,” she said. “My tastes, like my bones, fossilized decades ago. Reach a certain age and you are obliged to become an anthropologist. It’s the only way to ignore that the rest
of the world regards you as an artifact, that your culture has faded beyond the horizon, leaving you adrift on your tiny, solitary life raft.” She said this without self-pity or sadness. I’d lived with her for a month and hadn’t stopped to think, till then, that she no longer had any friends her own age. Not a one.
Ralph returned. “Bob Dylan, the Dead, Marianne Faithfull, Lou Reed, Al Green, Hendrix. It’s a start.”
Lucy closed her eyes. She looked as if she was listening in order to memorize. For Jimi Hendrix, she sat forward and squeezed her eyes tight. At first, I assumed she found the din of his guitar unbearable. Then she opened her eyes and said, “He’s kissing the sky?”
Her sherry glass was empty; with a slight nod, she passed it to Hector, who rose at once to get her a refill.
“What a lovely thought. Kissing the sky,” she mused, a ghost of southern girlhood in her voice.
Several songs later, she asked me if we could go to a music store the next day. “You’ll remember what we’ve heard this evening, won’t you?” she said as we helped her up. I assured her that I would.
“Come again, anytime,” said the bartender as we passed him.
“I just might,” Lucy told him. “I just might become a regular.”
But she never did ask to go back. Two weeks later she died, as she deserved to, in her sleep. I’d made our dinner, poured her sherry, but she didn’t respond to my knocking. The night before, she’d said she was too tired for a drive, said she’d go to bed early and read. Just after dawn, I was sure I’d heard her in the kitchen below my room. But the night we went to the Galaxy, she was tireless, as much a party girl in her way as I am in mine. Going home, she made me stop at the all-night Star Market. “Carrots,” she said. “I want to try out my little blue gigolo.” She waited in the car; when I came back, I noticed that her nose just barely cleared the dashboard.
Lucy insisted on a pitcher, tray, crystal glasses, and mint from the patch that grew wild by the old water pump. I carried this Swanee-style production onto the porch.
“This is like punch! Miraculous! Splendid!” she said. My hands were stained bright orange, along with my Red Stripe T-shirt and most of the kitchen counter.
While I was lighting the mosquito candles, I said, “If this is disrespectful or nosy, just say, but I’ve been wondering—living here, you know, with you—about Aunt Vetty. She’s like this gothic character everyone whispers about. As if she was a ghost even when she was alive. And that spooky room, with all her stuff up there …”
“Well, my dear, in every family lucky enough to inherit stories, there will always be specters.”
“What inspectors?”
“No, Clement dear.” She laughed. “Perhaps I should say, Many a hope chest contains a suit of rattling bones.” She sipped her juice, pushing the suspense. I waited. Finally she said, “I used to wonder if your father knew. He’s the only one of the current crop who might.”
“Everybody agrees you saved her life, that you were incredibly selfless.” For the second time that night, but differently, I was nervous.
Lucy looked at me, silent again for what felt like ages. I thought she might be angry until she said, “Do you know, Clement dear, that not one member of this prolific family has ever asked me for my version of events until now? Until you? As if they think I’d keel over from recalling the sheer disgrace of it.” She smiled what I thought of now as her little-blue-gigolo smile, practically sexual, a come-on. I thought, sadly, how she never got to use that smile the way it was meant to be used. “Not that I know if I would have told anyone,” she said. “There is a secret—only because no one’s pried. And which, if you stay up, I see no reason not to tell you. Consider it a dividend of all your hard work. Keeping me in the strait and narrow. I think your father must be pleased.”
I waited. I laughed my nervous laugh. “Well, I hope it involves a trunk of money buried in the yard that will support me like royalty the rest of my life.”
Right away, I was sorry for the joke, but Lucy kept on smiling, more like a grandmother now. “As you might say, don’t I wish.” She touched her throat for a moment, the place where she had worn that old cameo before we jazzed up her wardrobe. She kept doing that, always forgetting she’d given it up.
“My sister Vetty was thirty-seven when I met her for the first time,” she said. “Imagine that. And all I knew of her till then was that she had done this rash, impetuous, ruinous thing: run off with what sounded to me like a perfectly respectable young man whose only shame was provenance. Isn’t that a comic, lamentable slap of fate?” She directed this question out toward the holly trees, the fireflies, the chorus of crickets.
“When I met her, this husband had left her, just as you’ve heard—no thanks, mind you, to our sanctimonious parents. Vetty and Josiah had no children, but she loved him. Such a passion for such an ordinary man, and oh how she tried to hold him! When he left the army after the Indian Wars, he came home—here—to run his father’s sawmill. Vetty was thrilled. He would be safe; they would sleep under the same roof! But after five years he moved across town to look for another bride. I think if she’d had a family to meddle and cajole, events might have turned out otherwise. Never mind, though: he still gave her money, still split her wood, still went to their church—she was the one who had to change pews—but she was alone as could be. The more so for his being near. She had a talent, thank heaven, and by the time I arrived, she had a solid business as a seamstress. She was pitied, but also respected. No one blamed her. Hand of God and such.”
I watched Lucy closely. “But you … you came up here to rescue her.”
“Oh no.” She looked at me, this time without a smile of any kind. “I came up here so she could rescue me.” Lucy reached down slowly and lifted her glass from the floor. “Another, thank you.”
I poured her the rest of the carrot juice. “Clement dear, when I was eighteen years old, I met a man of my own. A man the family couldn’t have approved of more! A man with whom I was smitten! Everything splendid! A nascent betrothal in everyone’s eyes, as it turned out, but his. There I was, six months later, not a gem on my hand, but pregnant as the sky is blue. So ordinary, as sins go; even that seemed sinful, how viciously ordinary it was. The most common of female mishaps. Now, my daddy could bear many less-than-agreeable things, but common things, no. My daddy belonged to the same club as my young man’s daddy, but they shared no business, so there was no leverage. We were one year into a fine new century. Duels were a thing of the past. And what could possibly make more sense, in my parents’ desperation to bury another scandal, than to ferret out and repossess fallen daughter number one to gain a refuge for number two? Logical, don’t you agree, Clement dear?” She drained her glass with a flourish and held it tight in her lap.
“Vetty. Imagine how ecstatically she must have awaited my arrival—the sister she’d never laid eyes on, soon to deliver a baby, to give poor Vetty a flesh-and-blood purpose. Misfortune it might seem to some, but to her, it meant reunion with her family and the gift of the child she’d always longed for. As for alibis, I was said to be on a tour of Europe recovering from the attentions of a cad—a colorful affliction at best—and would return to the marriage market evanescent and worldly. I would be fed stories of Paris and Constantinople with which to charm new ranks of suitors. How clever my parents were. How thorough.”
“You had a baby?” I said. “You had a baby?” I was longing for a beer but didn’t dare leave the porch.
“A little boy,” she said. Not a hint of tears. She smiled rapturously at the night. “He was with us, Vetty and me, for less than a month when our father arrived. You could have knocked us down with a butterfly wing.
My, but his particular coldness … something more climatically suited to these parts than to steamy, gay New Orleans. A gene, I’m thankful to say, that seems to have dwindled into extinction.”
She laughed a tight, dry little laugh. “Our father was such a shrewd strategist. I suppose it didn’t take him lon
g to see how very useful it was that our sister Amy was expecting her fourth child. Aristide, your great-grandfather and my brother, would never have let it happen. He’d always written, secretly, to Vetty and her husband. His twin sister and his best friend from school: the union always seemed right to him. But he was abroad at the time of my calamity, ignorant of the entire affair. I sometimes think my parents sat quietly on their decision till after he had shipped out to the far, far East. So Amy, our favored sister, the only one not to betray and disappoint, well bless her soul if she didn’t all of a sudden have twins. One quite the bruiser, astonishing! No one ever saw a newborn baby so big, no mother was prouder. She wrote me often, I will say that. She sent me a portrait every year at Christmas: my son in her lap. Sometimes, you know, I think about the pressure on Amy to be the good one, how much more strenuous that must have felt once I fell by the wayside, too.”
“Wait,” I said. I belong to one of those families in which every single member could produce under torture a flawless family tree, every gnarl and knot in place, reaching back five generations. I was doing some hasty scrambling through the branches. Amy’s twins were my great-uncles Charles and Christopher, both recently dead. I asked her, Which one?
“Ah,” she said, “here ends my confession, dear one.” She handed me her empty glass, stood, and leaned against the back of her chair.
“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to. I’ll keep it a secret.” Mentally, I was busy reconfiguring two batches of second cousins; which were in fact descendants of Lucy?
“If you should be so lucky as to live a life this long—that is, if you consider it luck, and I am not saying you shouldn’t—I cannot possibly hold you to a promise like that. But promise me this.” She put her arm through mine. As she leaned against me, I could smell her gardenia powder, a smell like attic and garden together. “Promise they’ll burn me in that splendid green dress you made me buy, the one with the golden sash.”
The next day, when I came home for lunch, she looked as if she’d been impatient for me to arrive. She asked if I had time to drive her to the bank. On a table in the living room sat a large box covered with dark green alligator skin. She had no further use for jewelry, she said; it might as well be somewhere safe. Then she reached out and pressed something into my hand. I felt a slight prick and looked down at the old blue cameo. Its sheer familiarity, as something inseparable from her, made me lightheaded, yet I felt I had to tell her it shouldn’t go to me because I’d never, ever wear it. But she said, “Can you please send this to your cousin Gaia? She likes Victorian. And please insure it, Clement dear.”