Mouthing the Words (19 page)

“Thelma, I love your hat!” she exclaims as we step out of our embrace. “You’ve always had such a sense of style,” she flatters me.

“Have I really?” I say, blushing.

Mary says, “Well, how do you think you got the job? Not just your brains, my dear. The moment we saw you show up in that red and green jester hat, we thought, This one’s either crazy or a keeper.” We all laugh. Heroin’s obviously been borrowing my clothes.

Molly leads us through a kitchen bustling with activity and out into the back yard. “Everybody,” she says to the small crowd gathered there, “meet the women who supported me through this case.” She introduces each of us in turn. “But I particularly want to thank Mary and Thelma, who were most directly involved. I wouldn’t have had the faith to continue without them,” she says, beaming at us. Molly’s friends and family start to clap and I am so embarrassed that I can only look at my shoes and wonder if the ground is about to open up and suck me in whole.

“Martinis?” Molly asks us.

“Great,” I say.

“Good. Come help me, Thelma?” she asks, and I follow her into the kitchen. She pulls me aside and takes my hands in hers. “You know, you’re the one I owe the greatest thanks to, Thelma,” she says.

I blush and say, “But you know, everybody’s worked just as hard on your behalf.”

“The best thing to come out of this whole nightmare is this connection with you. I don’t know what I would have done these last few months without you.” She
reaches
out to hug me and says, “I love you, goofy girl,” as she squeezes me.

Her brother Philip has made martinis for us and tells me how very glad he is to meet me. How much Molly has told him about me. I am nervous and giddy from all the excitement and attention and by the time I carry the tray out to my colleagues, I have demolished two martinis.

Mary is talking to a tall, thin man who is grilling tandoori chicken on the barbecue. “Madame?” I say, approaching her with the tray. “May I offer you a martini? Olive or a twist?”

“Thank you, Thelma.” She introduces me to Molly’s other brother, Scott, and I trip over my words as I shake his hand. He has exactly those eyes, Molly’s eyes, cool grey pools like a dew-covered English morning meadow.

Mary turns me aside and grips my forearm and whispers, “What is it between you and Molly?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, slightly defensively. What is between us? A love, a grown-up thing, a place for being.

Molly comes up behind us then and says, “Not already discussing your next case, are you?”

Mary laughs and says, “Just conspiring to find a way to secure Thelma a permanent place with us.”

“Wow, Thelma. That’s fantastic.”

“Seriously?” I ask Mary.

“You just ace those exams next month and then we’ll see what we can offer you.”

“Oh my God, Mary. Thank you.”

Oh my God, I am definitely going to fail. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Mary has no idea. When I get really intimidated or overwhelmed these days, I just turn into a fish and swim off in the other direction, leaving Thelma’s body behind. At least I no longer turn into a corpse. At least if someone sneezes I don’t crack and crumble into dust.

“This woman has been like a rock for me,” Molly says, her arm around my shoulder as she introduces me to her mother.

I am a rock? I am a rock. I am a solid stone hard lump propping open somebody’s porch door or held in the hand of a child who has no other weapon. I am not a rock in a desert, I am a rock in a cave of the world, and there are voices everywhere bouncing off walls and lifting me into action.

—

I wake up later that night with Heroin’s muffled voice pleading, “Thel—Thel, could you budge a little? You’re squashing me.” She wriggles out from under me.

“Jesus, Thelma, you’ve got to learn to hold your liquor,” she grumbles.

“What happened?” I ask her.

“Well, you just came home and passed out on top of me!”

“But what happened before that?”

“Oh honey, four martinis in quick succession does not suit you. Not a really class act, my dear.”

“Well, what do I know?” I defend. “I’ve never had a martini before.” I pause. “Did I completely humiliate myself?”

“No. Molly saw you looking woozy and you said a very loud and gregarious goodbye to everybody. Don’t worry, they all thought you were lovely and commented on your charming and unusual fashion sense. And then Molly bid you adieu with a loving kiss on the forehead and stuck you in a taxi.”

Kissed a princess goodnight and willed her to sleep through a ride across a city night where she tumbled into bed and slept on a pea.

“God, I hope I didn’t embarrass her,” I wince.

Not Designed for Comfort

I AM TELLING
Dr. N. about family as if I am the first to discover it. I have seen family and friends celebrating together. I have felt their warmth and generosity. Watched it rise like irrepressible bubbles surging upward from a hot spring. “My family is incredible,” Molly had said.

“I want family. I want this feeling,” I tell Dr. N. She is happy for me. “I want a big house where you and I live with Molly and Sadie and we have lots of animals. Roger the tortoise and Teddy the boy-cat and a parakeet named Cocker Spaniel. And Heroin.”

“A house full of women?” Dr. N. asks me.

“Yeah.”

“You lived in a house full of women once,” she reminds me. “The vicarage.”

“No. We weren’t women. We were ghosts.” I don’t remember women. I remember white dust swirling by
me
on the staircase. Particles of cremated bodies getting caught in my hair. I remember noises coming out of walls, not out of people’s mouths. I remember feeling blind in a maze of unintelligible languages. Our trade—voodoo dolls.

“I thought Jesus was watching,” I reflected. Watching me like a stalker, waiting for the glimpse of my nakedness that would make him rise.

“But you don’t have religious beliefs, do you, Thelma?” she asks, although she knows perfectly well that I don’t.

“No,” I say. “He was just a guy who didn’t know when enough was enough.”

“So he was just a guy.”

“Yeah.”

“And just being a guy is creepy?”

“Sometimes. I mean, I don’t think Jesus would freak me out now, but I still wouldn’t feel like asking him over to dinner.”

“Is there anyone you would ask over for dinner?”

“Maybe Patrick.”

“Have you heard from him lately?”

“He calls sometimes. He doesn’t sound very happy, though.”

“Has he ever?”

That I don’t know, actually. Too much noise in my head to ever hear him. “Fuck, poor Patrick,” I say, sadly. “I mean, he hardly knew what he was up against. There were just a whole lot of us talking at the same
time
and cancelling each other out. Oh God. You know, I used to see other men living in his eyes. I mean literally, there’d be little heads in his irises with nasty smirks on their faces. I didn’t blame him. He didn’t know they were there. I just thought he’d been like, invaded by fucking body snatchers.”

“Do you think you might have put the men in his eyes?”

“No. I mean, I was obviously the only one who saw them there. But I didn’t put them there. There’s no way I could have put them there.”

Or could I? I had to peer deep, beyond my superficial reflection, in order to see them. They were lurking insidiously in the places I wanted to look. Staring back at me with lascivious grins and running their tongues over my reflection and around the rims of Patrick’s eyes.

—

I want to swim the ocean now. I want to scale the cliffs of Dover and ride Heroin’s horse over fields of damp green grass to the towers in the distance. I want Patrick to open the tower door to me and I want to see clarity in his eyes. I want his eyes to be a mirror. I want to make sure his body has not been invaded by others. I want to make sure his insides have not been ravaged by the men I might have put there.

“Are you happy, Patrick?” I ask him on the phone.

“What a strange question,” he laughs.

“Strange?”

“Well, yes, coming from you,” he says, though not meanly.

“I’m just concerned,” I say. “I want to know that you’re happy.”

“Well, I wouldn’t concern yourself with that, Thelma. I don’t know that I ever expect to be happy. I thought you didn’t either.”

“No, I don’t suppose I do,” I reflect. “But there are moments.”

“You’re funny,” he says.

“I miss you,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I miss you too, baby.”

—

Molly asks me if I’m serious. “I have to see him again,” I tell her. “I just have to know that he’s all right.”

“Are you sure you can handle it all, though? You have a lot of negative associations with that place.”

It does make me feel sick to think of England. But I like the thought of Molly coming with me. I want her to meet Patrick. I want to make a sandwich out of the people I love, with me as the squishy filling soaking this blessed bread.

“Of course I’ll come with you, Thelma. But you know, just make sure it’s what you want to do.”

Heroin won’t be coming. She’s far too exhausted. She says she must have made that trip about fifteen hundred times by now. She’s three feet tall now and looks adorable and I make her a cup of hot chocolate but she acts like it is too heavy for her to lift.

“He’ll miss not seeing you,” I tell her, still trying to convince her.

“Honey, he was barely aware of my presence,” she tells me. “I’m afraid you stole my thunder.”

I stole Heroin’s thunder. I stole the power of stomping hooves travelling at light speed over the cavernous fields, trampling all obstacles on the path.

“It’s OK. You can take my horse,” she offers.

—

“Bless you for coming with me,” I say, squeezing Molly’s hand.

“Just get me another vodka,” she says. “I can’t stand flying.” We are flying again, space-time travel, losing hours over miles. After half a Valium and her third vodka, Molly is sleeping against my shoulder and I am afraid to move, afraid I’ll wake her. She snores in a rather embarrassing way and when people look over to see who’s making the noise, I smile, as if to say, It’s not me.

We are spending a day in London before going to Oxford. Molly has never been to London and she wants to “do” the museums and Harrods. We see a Leather Fashion and Fetish exhibit at the Victoria and Albert and I am shocked. Not the land of double cream and scones and grey sunless faces that I know. Not the public-school-cum-biscuit, headmaster-who-fondles, repressed world of British sex which simultaneously creates, titillates and destroys an empire. This is
brazen
, this is female, this is—when Molly forces me to look—even a little bit exciting.

Inspired, Molly drags me to the lingerie department at Harrods. I can’t seem to justify spending fifty-six pounds on a pair of underwear but Molly insists that it will make me feel sexy. I feel a little bit ridiculous. “The best thing is, no one has to know,” she says, as she parades in front of the mirror in a leopard skin bra. I can’t look.

We drink beer and remind each other that we are on holiday in order to justify sharing a plate of chips. This feels really criminal. We are seated in a booth at the Ox and Hammer and it is standing room only as men in suits crowd in for lunch. “This is so civilized,” says Molly. “These people know how to live.”

A large man with curly black hair, greying at the front, nudges his friend and points to our booth. “Do you mind if we join you, ladies?” his friend asks us.

Just as I’m about to say,
We were just leaving
, Molly says, “Of course, gentlemen. And we wouldn’t say no to another drink either, would we, Thelma?”

“Right. Bitter, then?” the large man asks.

“Lovely,” Molly says, smiling, as he and his friend make their way to the bar.

“Molly! What are you doing! Why are you encouraging them?” I exclaim, although they are barely out of earshot.

“Encouraging what?” she defends. “It’s a drink.
They’re
sharing our table. I’m just having fun. Getting to know the locals.”

“You can’t do that.” I shake my head at her.

“Why not?” she demands.

“Well, they could be rapists or something.”

“Oh, Thelma. They are probably two boring advertising executives who come here every day for lunch and consume a thousand calories before going back to their desks to fart their way through the afternoon. Trust me, we have just made their day.”

They return to the table carrying four pints and introduce themselves as Peter and Paul.

“I know, it’s pretty bloody funny,” Peter, the large man, says. “I won’t be offended if you make a joke.” They sit down beside us and Peter says, “So are you ladies American, then?”

“Canadian,” I say.

“Oh, sorry,” he says. “I know that’s terribly offensive. On holiday?”

“It’s sort of a reconnaissance mission,” says Molly.

“Well, I lived here for a couple of years,” I explain. “I was a student at Oxford.”

“Paul was at Cambridge. Got a first in Iranian Studies.”

Paul blushes and says, “Which somehow qualifies one to work in a bank. There’s a whole floor of us from Cambridge.”

“Did you row?” I ask politely.

“Me? Naah. Too many early mornings for me. Too desperately competitive. I much preferred the library.”

Good to be housed between books, I think. Good to be silent among words.

“And what did you read?” he asks me.

“Law,” I reply.

“And that allows you to practice in Canada?” Peter asks.

“Well, yeah, same law. Different exams.”

“And are you a lawyer, too?” he asks Molly.

“A journalist,” she says.

“The really bright sparks at Cambridge all become journalists,” says Paul. “Mediocre types like me end up in merchant banking.”

—

“What a couple of bores,” Molly says, as soon as we get outdoors.

“Oh, I thought they were nice,” I say, surprised. “You know, decent.”

“You’re funny, Thelma,” she laughs.

“What?” I ask defensively.

“Well, so much for a couple of rapists. Except maybe they’re stalking us now. Maybe what they really wanted to do was throw us on the table and lift up our skirts and have themselves a little poke for lunch.”