My Dearest Friend (2 page)

“It’s patriotic, at least,” Hudson said. He walked off into the living room, came back to stand just inside the kitchen door. “Daphne, I can’t see you living here. It’s so isolated. It’s so much of a change.”

“Well, my dearest friend,” Daphne said, “there’s not much I can do about change, is there? I mean,
change
seems to be the order of the day for me recently. We’ve been over this all, Hudson. I had no choice, what choice was there, some dreadful rented box of an apartment? Besides, with Cynthia leaving, I had to do something special. Something different. You know that.”

“I would have given you the down payment for a house in town. I still would. I could easily, just a gift. You would never have to pay it back.”

Daphne looked at Hudson and knew that as much as he loved her, and for as long as he had known her—seventeen years now—he would never understand that she could
not take a gift of money from him. Life must be lived by certain rules.

“Hudson,” she said. “Don’t. Just don’t. We’ve been over this all before, too many times.” She looked at her watch. “Anyway, you have to go.”

It was five-thirty. Claire worried if Hudson didn’t get home in time for drinks at six. Claire relied on order in her life, and she relied on Hudson.

“You are sure you want to stay out here all alone tonight?” Hudson asked as he headed for the door.

“I’m sure,” Daphne said.

“No car, no phone. Dickens isn’t here. Won’t you be frightened?” Hudson turned to look back at her.

“Oh, Hudson, what should I be frightened of?” Daphne said, thinking: What else can be taken from me?, sighing. Then, seeing his face, she made herself brighten. “Don’t be silly!” she said. “This is just what I want! I’ve told you that. I’ve been looking forward to it all week. The movers come tomorrow with all my stuff, and then this house will be transformed, taken over by me and mine. But tonight it’s bare, just itself, and I want to get the feel of it. Well, think, Hudson, it’s like me being alone. Without Joe or Cyn or my friends or you. Or it’s like what you might be, if you suddenly were alone somewhere and you weren’t a college professor or a husband. Elemental.”

“I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hudson said.

Daphne crossed the living room and leaned up to kiss his cheek. It was the most they permitted themselves. “Thanks for bringing me out.”

“Shall I fetch you in the morning and take you to your Jeep?”

“Yes. Please.” Daphne smiled. Their eyes met, held.

“All right, then,” Hudson said, turning to go.

Daphne watched as the brown Volvo turned around and moved down the lane. Her own car, a “new” car for her, for this place, was a 1979 red Jeep, scarred and bouncy, but with four-wheel drive for the winter. She had traded her Citation in on it, and the automobile salesmen were just finishing up what they called the “prep” job. The Jeep would be hers tomorrow; until then Hudson had offered to chauffeur her around. He always did what he could to help.

Her old home, the house she had rented for fourteen years, was down in Westhampton, just over the Massachusetts border, on a pleasant residential street lined with trees, near the college where she worked, within calling distance of other houses,
other people, within walking distance of friends. The same week that her daughter had decided to go live with her father, the father Cynthia had not seen, had not received a birthday card from for fourteen years, Daphne had been told by the owners of the house that they were going to raise the rent by four hundred dollars a month, the exact amount of child support Daphne had been receiving all those years from Cynthia’s father. The exact amount that, now that Cynthia was going to live with him, he would not be sending any longer. Daphne could not afford to stay in the rented house that had become home to her and her daughter. And she didn’t know if Cynthia would ever live with her again.

Life often did things like that, hit you twice in the very same place—Daphne didn’t know why people believed that lightning wouldn’t strike twice in the same place. Of course it would.

Frantic, in shock, Daphne had wanted to run, to move, to change her luck, her life, and the most she could do was this wild thing: she had rushed out and discovered and made a down payment on this inexpensive and ugly little cottage set off a dead-end road partway up a rolling mountain in Plover, Vermont.

She was seriously thinking of naming the house Dead End. Her life had, after all, come to a dead end, had it not?

No. She would not dwell with bitterness.

Daphne went back through her house, which at least now without furniture seemed quite spacious, and into the kitchen. She opened a bottle of inexpensive champagne, which made a lovely celebratory pop, and poured it into a paper cup, then took it outside. She sat on the top step and surveyed her property. The sky was still a bright blue bowl overhead, but evening was on its way, in the blue air, and in the long sea-green shadows that floated on the heavy grass.

I have a house, Daphne thought. This house is mine. She liked those words, that thought. She rose, and slowly sipping her champagne, she circled her house.

God, what a place. It was crooked, angled, lopsided, it needed sanding and caulking and filling, and especially it needed painting. She would not be able to get that job done this year, not with fall and winter approaching.

Well, this would not be the biggest house she had ever lived in, nor the most expensive or elaborately decorated. But it would be the best. She would see to that.

She raised her glass and toasted her house. Her ramshackle house. As if in response, a cardinal called out and flew past, its passage reflected in the kitchen
windows. Daphne turned in time to see the bird swerve off into the trees behind the garden.

She loved cardinals. They were perhaps her favorite bird. She thought of them as omens of good luck. Or once had. That was when she was a believer: in the luck of houses, in wishes coming true, in fortune-cookie fortunes, the I Ching, shooting stars, and God. And love. It was a relief to give up all that, and yet it left her strangely limitless; it was odd to have nothing left to pray to in a crisis, nothing superstitious to do when in agony.

But here would be comfort. In this house would be comfort. She was going to wrench this much from life.

How Cynthia would have scorned this place, Daphne thought. The chicken-wire fence was truly ugly. The encircling forest made the house seem more isolated from the world than it was—and Cynthia would have hated that, because she craved the world. Now sixteen, Cyn could never get enough of friends and boyfriends, of admiring teachers and children to baby-sit, tests and challenges, parties, dances, tennis, recitals, plays …

Of course, Daphne would not be here if Cyn had not first decided to leave. So the question would never have arisen.

The snake struck: bitterness and anger raced through her veins. Think of something else, Daphne ordered herself; something else, quick. She turned from the house and looked at the sweep of ground around her. She now owned an entire acre of land—so much grass to mow!

Setting the cup down on the back stoop, she crossed the yard to the wooden shed that stood near the garden, leaning toward the house as if it missed it. As she pulled the doors open, she noted from the squeaks and drag that they needed new hinges. The whole shed needed painting as much as the house. Inside, the concrete floor seemed in good condition, not cracked, but covered with general crud bequeathed to her by the former owners: leaves, dust, seeds, manure, bits of paper, small objects rusted past recognition, bits of rubber, dented empty oil cans, and what had once, not so long ago, been a mouse.

An old hand lawn mower was also inside, and, delighted to discover it, Daphne eagerly pulled it out from where it was entangled with rakes, spades, and shovels in various states of dilapidation. Taking hold of the splintering handle, she pushed it; it shrieked and caught and would not move. She turned it around and pushed it the other way. It shrieked again, caught, then something gave, and as she pushed it, it whirred
noisily around as if it had remembered what it was meant for. Daphne made three swaths across the yard, the mower clattering along merrily, before she looked down to see that it was doing absolutely no good at all. The heavy grass was only bent. The blades were too dull, she supposed.

She sagged a moment, balancing her weight against the little old mower, waiting for the despair to pass. It was at times like this, when some slight thing thwarted her, that she most strongly felt the need to give up. It was at times like this that she could feel how her entire life, all her talent and potential and hard work, her devotion and perseverance and courage, had brought her only to this: loneliness so deep, tribulations so dense, like the sea of grass around her, that she could never fight her way out. And the things she counted on, hoped for as objects of assistance, like this mower, failed her every time. She sighed, rolled it across the yard, and put it back in the shed. She grabbed up her cup of champagne and headed for the front of the house.

The view was less demanding here. No unworked garden to chide her vision, no sagging shed. She sank down on the top step and tried to clear her mind, to observe. Light was fading from the sky, colors deepening. Birds were calling out and flicking through the trees. Daphne relaxed, leaned back against the screen door, stretched out her legs. Really, it was very nice here, like living in the middle of a Pissarro. Life imitated art, and the leaves on all the slender or thick-trunked trees were like so many millions of dots, silver-green, blue-green, jade and chartreuse.

Shadows shifted across the grass like ghosts, then vanished, absorbed into the gray late-evening light. Behind her, her house was dark, and this seemed somehow to make it loom bigger, to take on size and density. In a minute she would go in, turn on the radio, turn on the lights, live in the present. In a minute.

For now she sat staring. As darkness became complete, the individual trees of the forest were blotted out, one by one, until she saw the edge of her property as all of a piece, one dim and motionless mass. Now if she walked toward the woods, the trees as she came closer would take on life, silhouettes, individuality. Just as in her mind, when she walked deep into memory, the people she had loved and lost and let fade came clear, presented themselves to her in the flesh with their old alluring charm and smiles and voices, and the clarity of their margins, the expressions on their faces, and what they had meant to her, and meant to her still, could pierce her like a hook. For they were inside her, after all, a black mass of significance that she carried everywhere, unlike the forest
around her, outside her, which she could always escape, if only by closing her eyes.

Cynthia. Joe. David. Laura. And Hudson too, though she saw him still, saw him every day. All gone from her now, yet never far away from her thoughts. What was her life about? Shadows?

Boy, it was amazing how fast a life could get fouled up, Jack Hamilton was thinking. It was amazing. He pulled his old silver Honda into the drive next to his wife’s white Mustang convertible (a present from her father), gathered up the sacks of easy deli foods—salty meats, oily salads, oniony buns—beer, and milk for Alexandra’s bottle, and made his way up the gravel drive into the A-frame house, the first house he had ever owned.

Here he was, coming home. Dr. Jack Hamilton (although they didn’t use that title here in the East), a college professor, the newest member of the Westhampton College English department, dapper and trim in his gray flannels and blue blazer. Arms laden, still he managed to open the front door. It swung inward, and his two-year-old daughter, dressed in pink, came flying across the room to him.

“Daddy! Daddy!” Alexandra tackled him at knee level, almost knocking him off his feet.

Jack set the groceries on the table and bent down to pick her up. He tossed her above his head, brought her down to nuzzle her stomach, his mustache tickling her soft skin so that she giggled and writhed with helpless glee. Her soft fat tummy smelled of baby powder and she wriggled like a puppy.

Across the long sweep of room, an actress in a dress coated with sequins glittered on the television screen, drinking champagne and looking scornfully at an actor in swimming trunks and a gold necklace. Carey Ann pulled her attention away from the drama and came to greet Jack. Barefoot, she made her way carefully across a floor littered with what seemed to be three million wooden and rubber toys: rock-a-stack rings, puzzle pieces, building blocks, bright pink naked baby dolls.

“Hi, darlin’,” she said.

Whatever else Jack would ever think of his wife, he would always think she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She had long blond shimmery hair, huge blue eyes, a perfect figure. Now she was wearing jean shorts and a white T-shirt, and Jack loved the way her nipples showed like buttons through the soft cotton. And Carey Ann
loved him too; that showed in her eyes.

“Glad you’re home,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss Jack, who tried to tuck Alexandra into one arm, but didn’t succeed; their daughter put out her fat hands to push her mother away, crying, “No! Mine!”

Sighing, unkissed, Carey Ann stepped away, discouraged. “I just don’t know when she’s going to stop that,” she said. She followed Jack into the kitchen to help him unpack the groceries. “I’m sorry the place is still such a mess. I did get all the towels and linens unpacked today. While Lexi napped. And believe it or not, I had all her toys in the playroom, but she insisted on bringing them in here. I don’t know. How was your day?”

“Cracker!” Alexandra yelled, seeing Jack bring out a box.

“Fine,” Jack said, handing his daughter a fist of crackers. “Look what I brought for dinner.”

“Oh, Jack,” Carey Ann said happily, seeing the beers he pulled from the sack. “You sweetie. I’ve been wanting one so much.”

“Me drink too!” Lexi cried.

“Here’s your drink,” Carey Ann said lovingly, getting the bottle from the refrigerator and handing it to Alexandra.

“
No!
That!” Lexi pointed to the beer bottles in her mother’s and father’s hands.