Marry or Burn (28 page)

It was in the early afternoon of the day Lynnette died that she called me. She was at school but couldn't work. Finally she slammed the door of the art room on her students and shut herself in the teachers' lounge to call me. “Were you up in time to see the beautiful
fog
? Oh, it's set me off. I'm on the move!” She told me about the tree in the shape of an
h
, and the boy with the kayak, and the duck. She told me about the resolve that had flooded her, when she stood up with a series of paintings firmly in her mind.

Not only that, she was about to make her first trip home in thirty years. She had gone out at lunchtime and made a plane reservation, and bought paints and brushes. Because there were colors, dark burned yellows, maple reds, thin poplar greens,
colors present to her since that morning—“Don't laugh, it was the most heavenly thing”—in the very words
West Virginia
.

And she was going to look people up. Teachers, if they were still alive, and the sponsor of the cheerleaders, and the clerk in her father's store who had let her doodle up and down the adding machine tape. She was going to pay her respects to people she had never written to and barely thought of in thirty years, who had never written to her either or even sent a Christmas card, and probably wouldn't have any notion of who it was saying hello. A few her age might recall Travis Miller the quarterback. On the other hand Travis might be living right there in their midst, in Classic. Why not? Of course she would ask for news of him, there and in the next town where they had lived above the Rexall.

Much would be changed. A huge outlet mall had gone in. She was going to see what it had left of the Methodist church at the edge of town and the steep ground behind it where the cemetery was. Her mother's grave was there.

She was going to paint. These new paintings would not proceed from anything she had been doing in her prints. They would be static, all their energy held in reserve. It was not that she repudiated the work she had done. But she was finished with fabric, with collage, with making plates, with printing altogether, with
playing
. She had
seen.
“I think they have to be
landscapes
.”

 

DON'T GET HUNG up on something-or-other
.
I forget what the warning was.

This is four or five years earlier. We were sitting in Lynnette's car while she finished her cigarette and the tail end of one of her tapes, before we got out to start to walk and she reasoned with me, as she always did, illogically, comfortingly, telling me a dream
of hers in which Cy had figured, laying out the signs that pointed to reconciliation.

Don't get hung up on . . . The writer on the tape, to judge by her voice, was a young woman hardly older than my daughters. When I said that, Lynnette replied with dignity, “This woman has written several novels.”

We were going to walk around the lake to talk about a desperate situation involving Cy. I had to decide. In a book he was reading I had found a snapshot of a tall, beautiful, unstable friend of our daughters'. There was no doubt about this delicate, hungry face; the picture was inscribed to him on the back. The shocking words of love were not written in cursive but heavily printed, as if with malice. You could tell the person who wrote them was not in good control of herself. The letters, in the slant-tip pen she must have used for musical notation, had run a little where they had been touched.

I had burned up this picture, along with some of our own photographs, albums of them, in the fireplace. The fire got out of hand and oily smoke rolled out and blackened the fireplace wall and the ceiling. They were vinyl albums and they had those self-sealing plastic sheets over the pictures, which made it necessary for me and our son Ben to move to Kate and Joe's for a few days while the chemicals that broke down were fanned out the open windows and the room was repainted. Cy went to a hotel. All day and all night Ben, who was fourteen, was lying in Kate and Joe's messy living room on the floor behind the couch, with his earphones in and his hands pressed between his knees. He would not go to school. Sometimes at night I heard sounds, floors creaking, books falling off the stack at the foot of the stairs, and I knew from the uneven beat of one voice coming up through the floor of their daughter's room where I was staying that Joe had gotten out of bed and gone down to see about Ben.

Cy called in the daytime but I didn't go to the phone. Kate's voice, floating in to me, went on for a long time in the kitchen. It's too late, this time. Almost. It's almost too late. He can't come back to us as he was, not this time. That's what Kate had to argue.

When Kate went to give her lecture I sat out on the deck under the tree.

Days went by like this, and on one of them I looked up to see the beautiful next-door neighbor. She was climbing over the railing of her own deck. She pushed through the hedge and slid on her heels and her rump down through the ivy on the bank. She walked over to me, brushing off her long thighs in their ironed jeans.

“I'm making some tea,” she said in a high, whispery voice, oddly old-fashioned, like a voice I ought to have known. I do remember: Jackie Kennedy doing the White House tour. “It's ‘Evening in Missoula' tea,” she said. “I thought I would bring it over. I came to tell you so you'd open the front door, because I can't bring it down the bank. I heard you.”

I did not know anyone would be home during the day. I should have, though; I should have known this particular woman would not leave the house, she would be in there holding the wand over whatever room was being changed into something else.

I was just sitting there under the tree with my head in my arms on the picnic table but I might have been making noise. I had stopped my monotonous crying for the time being because I had given myself a sinus headache. Maybe I had been banging my head.

“My name is Kristen,” she said when I let her in the front door with her painted tray and her beautiful Italian mugs.

“I'm Sheila. This is my son Ben,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

Ben didn't take off his earphones, but from the floor his half-closed eyes followed Kristen. Yes, beauty strikes the little cold flint of life, there is no denying that.

The last thing most people would do is interfere in someone's private grief. And here was a person dedicated to the exactly right thing, a person none of us had said more than hello to after the day the moving van pulled up and Kate went over with coffee and sat on a box marked GOURMET MAGAZINE.

Kristen Riley did not apologize. “I've seen you on this deck so many times,” she said by way of explanation. “Drink some tea. You'll feel better. It's a man, isn't it. Your husband. I've seen him.”

“He's seen you too,” I said through my hiccups.

We went out the back door onto the deck and she poured the tea into the Italian mugs, which had pomegranates and long-tailed, fanciful, tufted birds on them. She had slices of lemon and a little crock of sparkling Demerara sugar, with a ceramic spoon.

We talked all afternoon. I told her the story of my life and she told me the story of hers. We began with that day and worked back.

We got all the way back to our home towns and our parents and our sisters and brothers and the people they had married. We dwelt for a long time on our high school boyfriends, and on what it meant that we had chosen those particular ones. Her husband could not be exposed to the story of any boyfriend prior to himself, so many of these stories had lain dormant in her for years. Once married, she was not a person who made new friends. Talk had its ramifications.

Roy Riley did not like talk between women. He grilled her when she came back from shopping for clothes, in case she had stood there in her underwear with her bruises showing and
confessed to some salesgirl, “My husband almost tore my arm out of the socket.”

And the house took up all of her time.

We talked about her high school days in Florida. Her husband was from the same area, a swampy part of the state, out in the middle of nowhere. She told about a friend who drove into the swamp when his girlfriend broke up with him, and I told about the pills my roommate took in college when her boyfriend called to say he was getting married. We picked up the fruits of love and pressed their skins: abortions and silent warts that turned to tumors, and in vitro fertilizations and adoptions that went awry and the bisexual triangle marriage of a woman she knew, whose husband's lover finally shot her, which led us into crimes of passion, and pleas of insanity and diminished capacity. We stranded men and women we had known or heard of on a sea of custody kidnappings and restraining orders and breakdowns leading to charges of shoplifting and DUI, with infuriated children stealing cars, and voyeurs in the guestroom, and physical jeopardy: floods and mudslides and the San Francisco earthquake. The stories rolled from us: the man she knew who crawled in under the collapsed freeway to look for his ex-wife, the couple I knew who died in their tent in an avalanche. The more we told the hungrier we got. We barely took turns; if one of us paused the other leapt in with a guess, as to the most awful, the most cruelly inevitable detail. We tossed them out faster and faster like bones with the meat still on them. I began to make them up. Kristen's was a purer nature and she kept, I think, to the factual.

She told of a sorority sister of hers (they had sororities in high school, in that part of Florida) who broke down after being levitated at a slumber party, and had to be taken to an institute where she underwent shock treatments for years. The truth was
that she had been sleeping with the boy who was her parents' foster child, who lived in the house as her brother. She was fourteen at the time. It wasn't sex at all, it was love: some years later she got out and married him, in a church wedding put on by his birth mother, whom he had searched for and found. In the interim her own family had made a strange choice: they had sued the family of the girl who held the slumber party where the levitation took place.

We talked as if there had been a great deal of choosing done by us and by everyone else in our stories, and little of it regretted, despite the absurd details we laughed about until we choked on our tea.

I didn't want to come to a stop but finally I told her I had to, my friend from work would be coming for me any minute. I said my friend was taking time off that she couldn't afford, to drive me over to the lake and walk with me. She didn't want me to pick her up at work because I had had several little accidents in the car. I said that for some reason I listened to this friend's advice when the subject was love, though she was divorced herself and had written a book, more or less, that was no good.

That reminded Kristen of her cousin, who had entered a contest for a part in an opera but had not won. The cousin's first baby had lived two days. She had been born with an undeveloped twin inside her body.
Fetus in fetu
was the Latin for it
.
The cruel wonder of this, indeed of everything, set us off again.

Now Kristen was pregnant herself. She said that shyly, pausing at the front door and balancing the tea tray on one hand while she stroked her flat stomach. Then her whole face drew down. She got the pale-eyed stare of a wolf. She said if he was ever rough with a child of hers, she would kill him.

Sometimes when Kristen Riley is on her deck we have smiled at each other through the leaves, but as for friendship, that was
it, that was the talk we had. It was the only one. She was not free to repeat it, and I had decided to say no more.

I told Lynnette a little of Kristen's story in the car. To keep names out of it I said I had just hung up from talking to a friend long distance. That had the ring of a lie, and made Lynnette think it was my own situation that I was trying to trick her into commenting on. “Is that so? Hmm. Physical violence is the last thing I would have expected of
Cy
,” she said shrewdly. When we got that straightened out Lynnette said her mother had had at least two friends in Classic who had married men like that and who would die before they let anybody see them in a bathing suit. “That was a thing with some of those boys,” she said. “You got laid off, you slapped her around a little, let off steam.” She eyed me sharply. “
Travis
was as gentle as a lamb.”

“Well, don't let him do it, that's all!” That's what Lynnette said, stubbing out her cigarette in the car ashtray as the tape went into its final admonitions. “Get rid of superfluous information. Don't get hung up on . . .” I wish I could remember what that one was, that impediment. We'd been talking loudly over the woman's voice, which no longer commanded Lynnette's full attention.

“Don't let him.” She repeated it as we walked. “You don't have to let him go.”

How did Lynnette know this? She didn't seem to know much of anything—this was the year before she threw out the novel and embarked on her real art—and yet I listened to her.
You don't have to let him go.

“And never hinge a story on a dream.”

 

THAT WAS A resolution I didn't keep: not to go on about Cy. To be, instead, the way Lynnette's mother had been with her father. To do whatever I might have to do but not to complain. Because
at the time I didn't see how I could take it back if I did complain. Later I changed my mind, or maybe the firm hand of conviction just opened and dropped me. It was nothing anyway but an old half-tormenting idea that there had to be a thread in life that never broke. Right then I didn't see how I could keep saying, “Oh, that. It was nothing in the long run. It blew over,” even if that was how it might seem to me on some future day.