The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (11 page)

Kate read, both chastised and amused. You did this, she thought. We did this, together, all of the time.

Kate had not been the exuberant babysitting type herself, yet she’d always found children entertaining—mispronunciations, boots on the wrong feets, costumes worn long after Halloween. She hadn’t planned a timetable for parenthood; children would doubtless happen, her thinking had gone; at least she’d hoped they would, when the time was right.

Elizabeth’s dismissiveness about children was strange. How did someone who did not enjoy the company of children, who felt them to be an irritation, come to so thoroughly embrace not just her own but all the children in their playgroup? The pictures didn’t jibe.

Elizabeth didn’t write about her semester in Florence so much as she drew it, page after page of art and architecture, parks with sculptural trees, Florentine bustle with commentary in the margins. She’d drawn the Duomo, reworking its bell towers from many angles. She sketched the commercial curve of the Ponte Vecchio, and the statues and fountains of the Boboli Gardens. An entire section of one notebook was dedicated to Michelangelo’s
David
. To Kate’s untrained eye, the drawings were the work of a gifted hand, realistic sketches on one page and offbeat departures from them
on the next. She couldn’t imagine being this talented at anything, then simply giving it up.

In Florence, Elizabeth lived in a small pension near the Pitti Palace with a handful of students in her program, and appeared to spend a good amount of time with the house’s
patrona
and her three young children. There were domestic sketches, a square-faced woman chopping at the counter, a young boy feeding cats, curls unruly over his collar. Recipes written in the margin for carbonara and chestnut cake, the best starter for two-day bread.

When the semester ended Elizabeth decided to stay longer, and her adviser agreed to freeze her student status. Her mother visited her then, and it was clear to Elizabeth that the agenda was to convince her to return to school.
She showed her true wacky colors: It’s about finishing something, she said, seeing it through. It’s bad karma to leave your life out of balance
. Elizabeth stayed through the fall, took a night job at a trattoria and spent several days a week working for an art instructor in Santo Spirito, cleaning brushes and handling registrations in exchange for work space in his studio.

Kate flipped through the pages as if she were viewing a travelogue. She’d been to exotic places with Chris and had done a few foreign locations for her cooking program, but had never been to Italy. In fact, she’d never been out of the U.S. for more than a week at a time, never long enough to participate in the culture of a place as more than a spectator. The times she’d talked with Elizabeth about how she envied Chris his trips, Elizabeth had listened with her attentive smile, but had only mentioned passingly her semester abroad.

In Florence, Elizabeth sounded happier than Kate had ever read in her journals. It was not just a matter of pleasure or confidence, though they both played a part. There was an optimism to the way she wrote about her circumstances and her future; there was no sense of longing to be anywhere other than where she was. Yet it
was still not the friend she had known. Kate struggled to put her finger on the difference: It was a matter of vitality, and of candor. Not the tranquil observer she’d become.

T
HE BIKE PATH RAN
along the northernmost stretch of Great Rock, a five-mile loop that extended to the lobster-boat docks, passing through conservation land and the meadow of a llama farm known for its hand-dyed wool. It was too far for Piper to ride and she had paired off with Chris, fishing. They claimed responsibility for dinner, if not by rods then by way of the fish shop by the docks.

Five miles of biking was a reasonable goal for James. Back home, Kate had taken him on a three-mile ride early one Saturday morning in the spring. A residue of sunrise had still stained the sky as they’d ridden past the monuments and around the tidal basin, cherry blossoms dusting the trees like a late-season snowstorm. They tried to see the White House, but some latest terrorist threat had scrambled security forces into defensive positions. So they peered from behind tall barricades trying to catch a glimpse of the famous white pillars. As they stood staring, the presidential helicopter had flown above and away,
chuck-chuck-chucking
in a sky trailing pink. Watching it grow small in the distance Kate had felt extraordinarily earthbound, tethered in every way.

For years, traveling as a family had been something undertaken with determination, their agility weighed by bulky gear and days defined by naps, meals, moods. It had seemed as if those years
would last forever, though a small part of her wished they would. Memories of even the difficult times—children crying themselves to exhaustion in cars, planes, hotels—were beginning to take on the cast of nostalgia. She had watched them fall asleep at last, puffy mouths gone slack, with equal parts relief and heartbreak. They would never, she’d thought, be as fully hers as they were at that moment of surrender. The dawn of traveling freedom shimmered ahead. But Kate suspected this, like other things that surprised her, would come with a wistfulness for what had passed too quickly.

The paved path ran parallel to Harvest Road, wide enough for two bikers to ride abreast or to pass in opposite directions. Between the path and the road was a low split-rail fence that trellised in some sections with unkempt wild roses, in others with poison ivy. The fields to their right grew with black huckleberry and sweet fern and rolled hill upon creasing hill down to the tidal pond. Plover Neck Sanctuary was Kate’s favorite place to ride. Elsewhere on the island swaths of fields and marshes were being clear-cut for development, but the sanctuary had been secured. The land was following its natural ebb and flow, the fields in slow transition to woodland. Uphill from the tidal pond, white spruce and Scotch pine grew in stealth, a silent guerrilla movement encroaching on the meadow.

A line of riders approached from the other direction, and Kate could see James teeter, rattled by the pressure of keeping his bike to the side. The greater his concentration to avoid them, the more his bike followed the magnetic pull of suggestion. Resistance stiffened his small earnest back.

“James, just keep on looking straight ahead. You’re doing great,” Kate called to him. The riders passed one by one, giving him wide berth. The last one, a woman about ten years older than Kate, gave her a knowing smile.
So sweet
, it said. And
Passes so fast
.

After they’d gone by, he pressed the pedals backward and slowed
with a small skid. “Stopping,” he called back to her. “I’m stopping for a water break.”

That was his pattern: press himself to do the thing, then stop immediately once he was in the clear. Angst, achievement, relax. He was tense about taking risks, always had been. But lately he’d begun trying to pretend otherwise, blasé when he was successful and feigning indifference when he was not. It was like watching a documentary on developmental psychology playing out before her eyes, the emerging skills shaped with the attributes of each parent—Chris’s natural aptitudes, Kate’s intense focus. Subtle, but so much change in him in such a short time. It reminded her of a sign in the hospital where she’d delivered both kids, lettered in Crayola colors and hung over the door of the nursery. “If You Look Closely Enough You Can See Us Growing!”

Of course change didn’t happen in tangible bursts, but if she went back to work it would seem as if it did. She would come home one night to hear from the nanny that James’s bike was missing. When she prodded, he’d admit he left it in the front bushes the day before, which she wouldn’t have noticed when she drove in late at night. Press further, and she’d hear that he had been teased by older boys who could pop wheelies when he couldn’t, and that he didn’t want to ride his bike anymore, and wanted to take up something tough, like karate. And she wouldn’t know any of it until the bike had gone missing, 80 percent of the way through the drama.

Elizabeth had been the first to know about almost everything, because almost everything had taken place at her house. She’d never worked outside the home once her children were born. There’d once been a career in advertising, some department assistant position, but it was hard to say because she rarely talked about her old career, or much of anything about her life before children. She’d treated her singlehood as if those years were uninteresting to her, details of a forgettable novel read long ago. Yet the episodes of her life in Florence reminded Kate of the rich travelogues of writers who’d lived abroad, people who had discovered themselves through their fascination
with another culture and their pleasure at finding themselves embraced by it as well. Since reading the Florentine journals, Kate’s sense of loss when she thought of Elizabeth had changed. It had become tinged with a bitterness of having been denied something she’d not been given, not quite, but under different circumstances might have.