Authors: GINGER STRAND
“Yeah, all right,” Will said. He didn’t want to, but he felt a sudden desire to do something nice for the Kid.
“Flying all night,” the Kid said. “And getting nowhere. Sorry, Will.”
Will shrugged. He thought of Margaret’s voice on the phone that morning, cautiously hopeful. He wanted her to keep the hope, and the caution, too. “That’s the name of the game,” he said. For the first time, he really looked at the Kid. He was young, but that wasn’t all. Sitting there in the half-light, he had a slight sheen to him, the glow of a person at the beginning of everything.
-------------------
The rain is quieter by the time they get off the freeway and head down the road toward home. No one has spoken for thirty miles. Will looks in the rearview mirror at Kit. Sitting there, one arm draped lightly behind Leanne, he has that same glow, that newly made look. According to Carol, he just won some grant to make a film. But it’s more than that. He has the eager energy of someone who still believes, in some corner of his heart, that he has all the time in the world.
“What’s that?” Carol cries, and for the second time on the trip, everyone starts at the sound of a voice. She’s looking ahead, toward their house. The rain has slowed; it’s still steady, but lighter, like a fuzzy curtain. Will makes out a car in their driveway, but not the one he expected, not Margaret and David’s black Corolla.
“Whose car is that?” Leanne says, her voice betraying the first sign of nervousness about the impending three days of preparations and festivities.
“It’s not George or Janice,” Will says. “Maybe it’s the caterers.”
“It’s Margaret,” Carol says, so softly she might be speaking to herself.
“Margaret’s driving a Rabbit?” Leanne says.
“It’s her old car—the one she had in graduate school.” As soon as Carol says it, Will realizes something must have happened. He glances at Carol, who’s frowning slightly.
“Maybe the Corolla’s having trouble,” he says. “I told them to buy American.” His tone is less than convincing, but she turns to him with an almost grateful look. She smiles, the tight smile of forced optimism.
“Yes,” she says. “Those Chicago winters are really tough on cars. All that salt.” She turns and looks back at Kit and Leanne, as if to reassure herself they really are there.
“Well,” she says cheerily. “We’re all here now!”
I’M CALLING BECAUSE MY HUSBAND IS, UM, KEEPING me prisoner in our apartment, and I was wondering if someone might, um, might come and convince him to let me leave.
Margaret is lying on her old bed, the one she slept in as a little girl.
Have the two of you been fighting?
Yes.
Her mother had to redecorate Leanne’s room to make it feel more like a guest room, but Margaret’s room always had a formal air. It features a wooden four-poster bed and a dark walnut dresser topped by a curving, ornate mirror. They were a Christmas gift when she was in seventh grade. It was what she had asked for: a real grown-up bedroom suite. In the corner, there’s a matching armoire.
Yes.
Has he harmed you?
No. Not yet.
The comforter on the bed is a graceful blue chinoiserie with trees and people walking over arched bridges. It looks like the pattern on a china tea set.
Not yet.
Margaret rolls over and tries to clear the voices from her head by focusing on a tree outside the window. In the carpeted basement, Trevor is bouncing something against the wall again and again. Carol keeps a box of toys for him down there.
Thud-slap, thud-slap, thud-slap, goes the ball.
Not yet, not yet, not yet.
Margaret stares at one of her bedposts. It’s a long, grooved taper, topped with a small carved knob. Pinecones, the American acanthus leaf. She left the bedroom suite when she went to college and grad school. Students slept on futons. Fancy meant having a frame for your futon, so you weren’t on the floor. When she and David moved back to Chicago, Margaret proposed collecting the bedroom suite from Michigan, but David said he preferred the firmness of the futon. He didn’t have to say what Margaret had already learned to see: that the bedroom suite was tacky, a striver’s idea of gracious living. She didn’t want it, either. Still, she couldn’t help but feel vaguely insulted by David’s rejection of it.
We’ll send a squad car out.
Okay. Thank you.
Margaret’s call did the police’s work for them. It got David to leave, so she could. She’s lucky they live in Evanston. In Chicago she wouldn’t have had the nerve to call 911. How much did she really require help? Enough to take an officer away from a woman whose husband was already hitting her, not just acting like he might? From an old man hearing gunshots outside his apartment? A little girl whose crack-addicted mother had passed out on the living room floor? Chicago had bigger problems than hers. It couldn’t be bothered with her, and she wouldn’t have asked it to.
And yet some part of her recognizes that when she dialed the phone, it was blind instinct acting, with no reference to her ideals or beliefs, her understanding of the larger forces—social, political, historical—that gave her situation a context and a relative meaning. Lying on her childhood bed, clutching her pillow to her, she can’t stand thinking about what she did, but she can’t imagine having done anything else. He had crossed a line. If he was willing to threaten her physically to hold her prisoner in her own house, what else might he be willing to do?
Now the skein of anxiety tangled around her heart is half for the past and half for the future. What has she done? And what will happen next? She imagines David coming home, walking through the apartment, finding them gone. Will he see the note she left? Will he look out the window and see the absence of her car?
The thudding from the basement has stopped, and a suspicious silence ensues. Margaret listens for a moment.
“Trevor!” she yells. “What’s going on down there?”
The silence changes character slightly before Trevor yells,
“Nothing.” Margaret can tell from his voice that he has moved closer to the basement stairs.
Just envisioning him standing there makes her shaky with love and fear for her son. She wants to go check on him, to calm herself by putting her arms around him. She’s beginning to sit up when she hears the unmistakable thud of a car door outside. Immediately, she feels exhausted at the prospect of talking, and at the same time relieved that something has arrived to distract her from her endlessly cycling thoughts. She gets up and goes to the doorway of her room. The house seems frozen with anticipation of some imminent epiphany. There’s a knot of poised tension in her stomach. She stands, waiting. Voices outside are approaching, but they sound muffled, like harbingers from another world.
“Where’s my grandson?” Carol is the first one into the house, and her shout cracks the stillness. It’s as if light, as well as noise, has flooded the rooms. There’s a brief pause and then the sound of Trevor running up the basement stairs.
“Grandma!” he cries. Margaret finds herself able to step forward, and she moves toward the family room. Everyone has trooped in through the garage. She sees Leanne first and is struck by how good her sister looks, tall and lean, her hair long and gleaming, her eyes bright. Behind her is a blond man—Kit, presumably—whose hair is slightly longer than the Midwest considers appropriate, and whose thin nose and lips edge him from the category of “handsome” and into “interesting-looking.”
Then her father comes in, awkwardly and unnecessarily lugging a rolling suitcase under one arm, and a quick breath catches in Margaret’s throat. His hair is thinner than it was the last time she saw him, but more surprising is how haggard he looks, how his cheeks and shoulders and neck seem to have dropped, like a tired man falling into a chair. He looks up at her, and worry flickers in his eyes. She wonders if he has told Carol about the phone calls they exchanged a while ago, when he was in training on the 767 and she and David were fighting. Somehow she always felt he wouldn’t.
“Oh, you’re getting to be such a little man!” Carol is on the floor embracing Trevor.
“Hey, there,” Will says, coming to embrace her, and the image of him as an old man vanishes. He’s tall enough that her face disappears in his chest, and as she inhales the musty dampness of his coat, Margaret feels a rush of gratitude for the fact that regardless of the cost, she left Chicago and came here, to be part of a family event. She’s safe here, she tells herself, and for the moment, she feels that way. She lets go and turns to Trevor.
“You won’t believe what I’ve got for you,” Carol is telling him. She puts one hand on the ground to help herself get back onto her feet. Margaret sees Leanne move forward and quietly put a hand under their mother’s elbow. Her sister, too, has grown older and more mature.
“Oh, Margaret!” Carol tears herself away from Trevor to throw her arms around her daughter. Margaret returns the embrace with her usual slight discomfort. Her mother’s angularity has become something more fragile than beauty. Margaret draws back to greet the others.
“How was your drive?” Leanne asks, leaning in to give her sister an awkward one-armed shoulder hug.
“Fine. It wasn’t raining until Michigan.”
Carol has turned her attention back to Trevor. “I’ve been saving a surprise for you. Come see.” Leaving the groceries and the others behind, she takes his hand and heads for the kitchen. Margaret and Leanne exchange a look that says
She’s still the same.
Then Margaret leans over and grabs one of the bags of groceries, and they all move toward the kitchen.
“Oh, Margaret, this is Kit,” Leanne says, offhand as ever, as if it’s no big deal to introduce the man she’s bringing into the family.
Margaret turns to him. “Good to meet you,” she says. “Is Kit your real name?”
“It’s Kitto, actually,” he says. “Kind of embarrassing. My father was English, and it’s a perfectly reasonable name over there.”
“I don’t think it’s unreasonable.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” He smiles in an open way, making a joke but including her in it, and Margaret decides she likes his soft, unhandsome looks. Leanne puts a hand on his shoulder blade, as if wanting to assure herself that he’s really there, and he acknowledges her touch by leaning in ever so slightly. There’s a current between them. Margaret glances away.
In the kitchen, Carol has opened a high cupboard and dragged out a large plastic canister. “I’ve been saving them,” she says, handing the canister to Trevor. Trevor’s eyes go round with amazement at his good fortune. Inside the canister are at least thirty different cereal-box prizes.
“Oh, look at that.” Margaret nudges him. “What do you say?”
“Thank you,” the boy breathes, unable to take his eyes off the cornucopia of molded plastic joy awaiting his excavation.
“I got Janice to save them up as well. And I added a few things from bubblegum machines.” Carol looks slightly sheepish at this admission of fraudulence, and Margaret surprises herself by laughing. She disapproves of both sugary breakfast cereals and cheap plastic toys, and has instituted strict rules about what Trevor is allowed to bring home from his grandmother’s, but today she finds herself relieved to be engaged in normal conversation, an exchange of family pleasantries in a bright, cozy kitchen.
“How about some coffee?” Carol asks, and Margaret puts an arm around her mother and squeezes.
“That’d be great, Mom,” she says.
Leanne starts unloading things from the grocery bags, and Kit goes off to help with the luggage. Margaret can hear Will lecturing Kit on how to assess the corn crop, which is looking frail and tentative in the field west of the house.
“Where’s David?” Carol asks. “Resting up after the ride?”
Margaret experiences a slight hiccup in her steadiness, like a car going over a speed bump too fast. She concentrates on watching her mother scoop Maxwell House from a can into her drip coffeemaker. With any luck, it won’t be the disgusting flavored kind. Margaret always makes espresso at home.
“He couldn’t come,” she says, her eyes on her mother’s hands. “Departmental stuff. One of the adjuncts quit, and he had to fill a summer-school teaching position at the last minute.” She hadn’t intended to lie, but somehow the lie manifested itself more easily than any version of the truth she had contemplated telling. How can she ruin her sister’s wedding by dragging her own unhappiness across it? Lying is only fair to Leanne, so she can have a perfectly happy day, as Margaret did when she got married. Or appeared to.
Not yet. Not yet.
She pulls her mind away forcibly and looks at her sister. “David says to tell you he’s really sorry, Leanne.”
Leanne looks down at the counter and shrugs lightly. Her hair slides forward over her shoulder, shining in the kitchen’s overhead light, and Margaret wonders if she’s been doing something special or just using a good conditioner.
“It’s okay,” Leanne says. “These things happen.”
Carol has added water to the coffee machine—too much water, given how little coffee she used—and now she turns a skeptical face to the girls.
“But I don’t understand,” she objects. “Why can’t someone else take care of hiring a summer-school teacher? That’s not such a big deal, is it?”
“Oh, Mom, you don’t understand what goes on in a high-powered department like David’s,” Margaret says. It’s true: Carol has never understood the amount of pressure academia imposes on its denizens. Still, in order to avoid her mother’s eyes, Margaret begins rifling through the last grocery bag.
“But it’s his sister-in-law’s
wedding,
” Carol says.
Margaret has found a large damp package at the bottom of the paper sack. “What’s this?” she says, dredging it up. The bottom of the paper bag is wet and threatening to give way.
“Oh, Margaret, those are the shrimp. I found the most
wonderful
shrimp.” Carol’s mood improves immediately.
“Shrimp?” Margaret studies the package. “Good shrimp out here? Where’d they come from?” Exasperation darts through her, overwhelming the tenuous feelings of goodwill and affection. It’s so
like Carol to convince herself that something is wonderful when it can’t possibly be.