“Can I come in?” I said. “Can we talk?”
“No,” she said, and she pushed the door closed and went back into the kitchen.
I started for my mother’s. The daffodils were in a rubber band, and as I walked I pulled them loose and tossed them into the gutter one by one. I felt like Hansel and Gretel marking a pathway, the long line between where I should be and where I was.
That evening my mother took me out to dinner. Without my saying so she seemed to understand what had gone on with Jamie, and we talked instead about New York and Parsons, the world of possibility I saw now in the world of clothes.
“Clothes are so closely aligned to who we are to ourselves,” she said, and she went on to relate a story of how, as a teenager in the late sixties, she developed a covert obsession with lace-front hip-huggers—first any she came upon in fashion magazines and later an actual pair she saw on a Saturday trip into Madison. “I guess I thought they’d transform me,” she said with a smile. “I never did buy them, though.”
“Why not?”
“I lived in
Baraboo
, honey. And Dad would have had a heart attack.” She paused and then rolled her eyes and laughed a little, since a heart attack was what her father eventually did have, a year before I was born.
My grandmother had lived another five years, but I couldn’t really remember her.
My mother took a sip of her wine. We were at the Good Evening—silly name, but it was the place we usually went together, down south of the Beltline in a residential neighborhood. It looked like what it sounded like—gingham curtains, matching ruffled gingham aprons for the waitresses—but the food was really good.
“Of course, then I met your father,” she said. “He liked, how shall we put it, a modest look.”
“No midriff showing?”
“No midriff showing, not too much leg, no bare shoulders. I was only too happy to oblige.” She gave me a rueful smile. I thought of telling her about my afternoon at the New York Public Library, all those John Bells, but I didn’t.
“Was he a prude?” I said.
“More of a controller. Everything was about imposing his will. When you were born—” She broke off talking and furrowed her brow. “Boy, I must be in my cups to be dredging up this old stuff.”
“What?”
She shrugged. “Well, when you were born he tried to talk me out of breast-feeding. He said it would be hard to go out in public, which it was, but also that it would create—how did he put it?—an unnatural bond between us.”
“Between you and me?”
She shook her head. “What a load of hooey. If I’d wanted to bottle-feed he would’ve had ten sound theories about how that would harm your development.”
I forked up a bite of chicken potpie and chewed. “So did you?” I said.
“Breast-feed?” She twisted a wooden bangle around her wrist. “I tried for a while, but it didn’t really work—you didn’t gain fast enough and Dr. Carlson had me switch to formula.” She touched her knife, ran her finger over the floral pattern on the handle. “I was just crushed,” she added.
Her cheeks were pink, and she spoke in such a heartfelt voice that I felt a little embarrassed and looked away.
“Anyway,” she said, “that’s ancient history.”
We finished dinner and shared a plate of homemade ginger snaps, then sipped coffee while nearby a large family party grew louder and louder. Grandparents, parents, grown kids, babies: there seemed to be four generations.
At last we left. Our coats were on pegs just inside the door, and we put them on and went outside. The night was enormous: bright with stars, full of an endless quiet. So unlike New York. We walked to my mother’s car, our feet crunching on gravel. A grove of maples marked the end of the parking lot, but in the other direction fields ran to the horizon, and a crescent moon glowed halfway up the wall of the sky.
Driving home, we were silent. I felt my father hovering above us; and Mike, whom we’d barely touched on; and even Kilroy. At last my mother pulled into her driveway, igniting a sensor floodlight mounted to the garage. A spring wind had blown in during dinner, and my hair whipped around my face as I got out of the car. She waved in the direction of the next-door neighbor’s kitchen window, then turned to me with her eyes wide. “Do you even know?” she said.
“What?”
“Rooster and Joan live next door—they’re renting the Nilssons’ house. The Nilssons moved to Arizona.”
I turned and looked at the Nilssons’ kitchen window, but whoever she’d waved at was gone. “Rooster Rooster?
My
Rooster?”
“The very same.”
We went inside but I was antsy, couldn’t sit for pacing, avoided the windows that faced the Nilssons’ and then spent long moments in front of them, peering out. Finally I got my coat back on and went over, feeling strange about everything: being back in Madison and not having called Mike; the prospect of seeing Rooster; the notion that he was married in there,
married
.
He opened the door and his look told me he hadn’t seen me when he’d waved at my mother. He was astonished. I thought of the telegram I’d sent in December—
CAN’T MAKE IT AFTER ALL STOP SORRY STOP CONGRATULATIONS STOP
—and I felt sick with remorse.
His red hair caught the hall light and shone like bright copper. He said, “This is weird in so many ways I can’t even count them.”
“I don’t have enough fingers.”
From the doorstep I looked past him into the living room. In the Nilssons’ time it had been decked out in full Scandinavian regalia: lots of bleached pine furniture covered with heart and snowflake stencils, painted clogs displayed on the mantel. Now it was Laura Ashley: flowered couch, flowered armchair, flowered tablecloth covering a round table that held a flowered lamp with a flowered lampshade.
He followed my glance. “Joan’s stuff,” he said with a grin. “Remember my armchair?”
His armchair had been a blue-and-tan plaid La-Z-Boy that shook when you opened it.
“Didn’t make the cut?” I said.
“Not even close. You have no idea.”
He took a step back and I followed him into the kitchen, all bright and cheery, white with a lot of red accents. I noticed with amusement that there was a framed Matisse poster over the table. But was it “hard”?
There was an open can of diet cola on the counter, and he took a sip, then went to the refrigerator and got me one. “Cheers.”
I hadn’t had a diet cola since I’d left. I popped the top and took a drink, the taste dark and sweet and almost forgotten. “You look different somehow,” I said, and it was true: he was trimmer for one thing, but it was more than that, there was something in the very way he stood and watched me. It was as if I’d stumbled upon his double, man where the Rooster I’d known was still boy, self-contained where my Rooster—and I’d never thought of this before—self-contained where my Rooster leaned over you, shadowed you somehow with his grievances and opinions.
He smiled and nodded, but didn’t respond. “So you’re back,” he said after a while.
“Just for a few days.”
“What’s the occasion?”
I hesitated. Would he know? Was it OK to tell him? I said, “Jamie’s family is having problems.”
“Is Jamie OK?”
“I haven’t really talked to her.”
“Oh, you just got back this minute?”
“Yesterday afternoon, actually.”
“O-kay,” he drawled. He moved past me to sit at the table, setting his can down with a sharp tap. He wore a Polarfleece henley over cutoff sweatpants, and as he settled into the chair I was struck by his knees—by the matted red hair, the freckles, the bony definition.
He gave me a flat look. “Mike doesn’t know.”
I shook my head, but he was telling me, not asking. He looked away, took a sip of his cola.
“How is he?” I said after a while.
“Holding steady.”
“Steady?”
“Good days and bad—you can imagine. I took him out for lunch today and he seemed pretty cheerful.”
“You took him out for lunch?” For some reason it seemed odd to me,
as if Rooster’d said they’d gone on a date. But of course Mike couldn’t drive. “Where’d you go?”
“Brenda’s. We go every Friday.”
I was still standing, and I felt awkward suddenly, too exposed. I moved around the butcher-block island so it was between me and Rooster. On the counter by the sink there was a deep white bowl full of Delicious apples, obviously decorative.
Neither of us spoke. It wasn’t that we were waiting each other out, but it got to feeling like that after a while.
“So where’s Joan?” I said at last.
“Working.”
“And how is she?”
“Great.”
“Good,” I said. I had a vision of Joan in her nurse’s whites, standing over Mike’s bed, turning to give me an encouraging look. It was hard to move her out of the hospital, to unpin her hair and put her into jeans, into this kitchen, where she’d wash a bag of apples, then buff each one before arranging them all in a bowl.
I cocked my head. “So marriage is good, huh?”
Rooster gave me a big smile, the kind of wide grin you try to control but can’t. He slid his can from one hand to the other. “I can’t speak for the whole institution, but I certainly like mine.”
“I’m glad for you,” I said. I really meant it. I wanted him to know that, almost said
I really mean it
. But why wouldn’t I?
“Let’s not talk about Mike,” he said then. “OK? Were you wanting to do that? Because I really don’t want to.”
“OK,” I said. “Fine. Agreed.”
We chatted for five or ten minutes and then I left. My mother’s house was silent. I went into the kitchen and found a piece of paper in a drawer, then set about writing to Jamie. I said I was sorry again, and that I’d missed her, and that I just wanted a chance to talk face-to-face. I found a spare key to my mother’s car and drove through the late-night streets to the Fletchers’ house. It was nearly midnight but the lights were all on, upstairs and down, and I wondered if any two of them were together or if each sister was upstairs in her own room while Mr. Fletcher was by himself in the den. My mother had told me that Mrs. Fletcher would be moved to a psychiatric hospital in the next day or two.
I knocked at the front door. After a moment Mr. Fletcher came and opened it, his hair a little grayer than when I’d last seen him, a little sparser. He wore a nubby brown cardigan over his white dress shirt.
“Carrie,” he said. “What a surprise.”
He had always been something of a cipher to me, and I couldn’t tell if he was being cool or just himself. We stood looking at one another for a long moment, he in the entryway and I on the doorstep, until, almost simultaneously, we moved together for a stiff hug.
“Is Jamie here?”
“Well, she … she, uh—” He put his hand in his pocket, then took it out again. “I think she went to bed,” he said. “She’s kind of tired. We all are.”
I ducked my head, sorry I’d made him lie. “I know,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
He nodded.
I held out the note, folded in half with Jamie’s name on it. “Could you give her this?”
“Sure,” he said, taking it from me. He brightened a little, happy to have a task. “Consider it done.”
Jamie’s shift started at noon the next day. I waited until one, then borrowed my mother’s car and drove over, parking where I’d always parked for work. I wondered if Viktor still worked at the library, how he and Ania were doing. It was extraordinary that they’d actually met Kilroy, that anyone in Madison had. Dinner at their house that night, when Kilroy and I’d met: it seemed expendable now, it was no longer part of us.
I locked my mother’s car and headed to State Street, the morning’s conversation with Kilroy on my mind. He’d been impatient, said he didn’t understand my staying if Jamie wouldn’t see me. When I said that I couldn’t give up so easily, he got curt, said he had something on the stove, which I knew wasn’t true.
The copy shop was quiet, not too busy on a Saturday afternoon halfway between midterm and the end of the semester. Jamie was behind the counter talking to one of the machine operators, a tall, gangly guy who’d worked there for years. Her face barely changed when she saw me. I waited until they were done talking, but before I could speak she turned and walked into the storeroom. From where I stood I saw her pick up the wall phone and punch in a number. I thought I could be patient, wait until she was done with the phone, until business brought her back out to the main room, but there was something in the way she stood—right hand at her waist, all her weight on one leg while the other was bent dancerlike at the knee—that collapsed my composure. It was so familiar, that stance, so
Jamie. Affection and regret overcame me like a sudden fever, and I reached around to open the half-door that separated the employee area from the front of the store, then made my way to where she stood.
Her back was to me, but it took her only a moment to turn around. She was still on the phone, and she scowled and turned sideways, then just as quickly turned back—as if she’d realized she should keep an eye on me.
“What are you doing?” she demanded when she’d hung up the phone.
“Nothing. I wanted to see you. I—Did you get my note?”
She stamped her foot. “Yes. And I
don’t care
. This is my place of work—get out of here or I’ll call security.”
“Jamie,” I said. “My God.”
She brushed past me and left the storeroom. Out front, she spoke to the tall guy, glancing back at me while she talked. After a moment he came and stood in the doorway. “Listen,” he said.
I shook my head, unable to speak for the tears all over my face. I made my way past him and then past Jamie, who looked the other way. Out on the street I leaned against a notice-studded kiosk and sobbed—hard, racking sobs that shook my shoulders and caused me to gulp and choke. People stared at me, whispering. Finally I got control of myself. I found some Kleenex in my purse and blew my nose, then swabbed at my face. Before I left I took a last look into the copy shop, and there she was, staring blankly out the window at me.
C
HAPTER
33
My bedroom closet smelled of cardboard. Boxes of my mother’s papers, boxes of mine. Some newer cartons contained the things I’d asked my mother to clear out of my apartment before subletting it. By their weight I could tell which ones held books, and I pushed them aside and found the one full of clothes, then pulled it into the room.