My Dearest Friend (21 page)

Daphne wanted to hiss and spit at her friend. She wanted to coil up in a long rope of frenzied muscles and strike out at Pauline, flicking at her with her venomous tongue. That was the night the snake came to live inside her, coiling deep in her abdomen, that subtle eager creature that lifted its diamond-shaped head, its glittering eyes, and smiled its evil sneaking smile whenever Daphne thought of her daughter. Or her ex-husband. Or any number of other things. It accompanied Daphne everywhere she went, even in her sleep.

When Daphne finally went back home, she found that Cynthia had eaten dinner and done all the dishes and cleaned the kitchen. She was already asleep in her room, at nine o’clock. Or pretending to be. Between the evening of her announcement and the middle of June when she left for California, Daphne and Cynthia said perhaps eighty-three words to each other, most of them repetitive and mundane: “Will you be home for dinner?” “Did you walk Dickens?” They did not discuss Cynthia’s decision again. Clearly Cyn did not want to know about Daphne’s thoughts—or feelings—on the matter. Cynthia was ostentatiously polite and helpful around the house, always making her bed and doing her chores without being asked, as if heading off any explosion that could lead to a discussion. Daphne was polite in return. She would not let Cynthia see how much she was hurting her. She drove around with a realtor, looking for a house she could afford, put a down payment on the Plover cottage, cleaned out the home she had shared with Cynthia for fourteen years and held a mammoth tag sale, sold the huge grand piano that had been her mother’s, found the dilapidated baby grand, and began sewing curtains for the new house, where she would move at the end of the summer. She acted as if she were excited about her future too.

But in a flash, while Daphne still didn’t believe it would happen, Cynthia was gone. The house was empty. Her clothes and treasures were packed and sent off, and her bedroom, which had been cluttered with the signs of a happy active life, sat in the midst of Daphne’s house as still and tidy as a room in a museum. Daphne wanted to set the house on fire and let it burn down around her.

One good thing: she had lost all the weight she had gained after David’s death. For a long while after Cynthia left her, she had no appetite. Wasn’t that odd? When David had died, she ate and ate; when Cynthia left, she could not swallow. Daphne didn’t know what it meant; she did not care to know. She was relieved when she could finally move into the cottage, leaving behind the house where she had lived so much of her life with her darling daughter.

After the night when Jack had kissed Daphne—and she had kissed him back—he had caught up with her in the college parking lot and awkwardly apologized.

“I’m so sorry,” he had said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s all right,” Daphne had said. She had been so exhausted that she had held on to her car door in order not to sink onto the ground. She had spent the night, after Jack’s kiss, wide-awake, thinking—and longing. Not just for Jack, perhaps, but for someone. She had longed to be in a lover’s arms.

Jack had mistaken her pallor and gravity for censure. “I’ve been so stressed-out and confused lately,” he said. “Carey Ann and I … well, this has been a rough spot in our marriage. The move, I mean.”

“I understand,” Daphne had said. If she had had the energy, she would have been touched by Jack’s agitation and misery; she thought he was feeling guiltier than he should. She was older than he was and knew that often, with friends, the sexual undercurrent broke through the dam of propriety. People were always going around mending their dams, tamping back sex.

“I love my wife,” Jack said. “I really love her. I’ve always intended to be faithful to her. I still do. I don’t know what came over me.” He was sincerely baffled.

“It’s just that I’m so irresistibly attractive,” Daphne said, grinning, trying to break the tension between them. She did not want to lose his friendship. She liked him too much. “Who could blame you?”

Jack laughed gratefully. “Well, you
are
attractive,” he said gallantly. “But I promise to control myself in the future.”

Daphne held out her hand. “Let’s be friends,” she said.

He shook her hand. “Friends,” he answered.

Over the past three months, Daphne and Jack had become real friends. Daphne needed him as a friend. With so many people gone from her life, and as winter set in, she
felt gradually more isolated in her little house at the dead end of the road. Few people read as much as Daphne did, and Jack was a reader. They had an endless supply of things to talk about. Sometimes Daphne would put down a book and want nothing more than to call Jack to talk to him about it.

Jack needed Daphne, and she knew that. As the semester wore on, it became clear that Jack and Hudson Jennings were having difficulties settling into a comfortable relationship with each other. Daphne was caught in the middle. She kept trying to explain one man to the other. Jack was adored by the students, and now he ate his lunch every day in the cafeteria at a table packed with students—some weren’t even in his class—and they talked about everything. He never thought to sit with the faculty members, and when Daphne suggested that it might be politic to do so now and then, Jack said, “But the students are more interesting. And I’m a teacher!”

He
was
a teacher, and that became the focal point of their friendship. He was teaching, in addition to neoclassic lit, three sections of freshman English. He found it a challenge teaching grammar and punctuation to college students who still didn’t “get” it. Sometimes even very brilliant students would have trouble with the basics of sentence structure, while students who were struggling in everything else took instantly to grammar. He almost believed it was genetic, chemical, that there was something physical in the brain that ruled one’s disposition toward language.

Daphne had dug out the old files and lesson plans she had used when she taught freshman English so long ago at U. Mass., and some nights she sat with Jack at his dining-room table, talking about teaching. For Daphne this was as delicious as talking about old lovers with a friend. The pleasures of the classroom! The glory when a student finally got it right!

They had plenty of time to talk, because Carey Ann had become seriously interested in early-childhood learning. Once she had discovered that there were definite things one could do to try to shape a child’s behavior, she attacked the subject with the zeal of a religious convert. She attended her group one night a week, and sat in on a class in early-childhood behavior at a community college two nights a week. She was too late to enroll for credit, but she hoped to start working for a master’s the next semester.

So three nights a week Carey Ann was out, leaving Jack to baby-sit. Alexandra went to bed at nine o’clock now, and after a month of major war and minor skirmishes and a few more weeks of creative rebellions, she had settled down nicely. Most nights
Jack used the quiet for work, but about once a week he invited Daphne down and they would talk about everything—his classes, Hudson, her classes of long ago, the newest novels. Everything, really, but Jack’s marriage. He told Daphne that Carey Ann was happy now, that she had friends, that she loved her night classes. He could see his wife changing before his eyes—as if she were one of his students. He was happy because Carey Ann was happy; a burden had lifted. He was changing too; he was learning that he could do only so much to help his wife and daughter be happy—no matter how hard he worked to protect them, to provide an all-encompassing shelter for them. Life would still find a way to sneak through and wham them, disorient them, discomfort them. Happiness and exhilaration could come to them totally independent of him, too. Jack did not know why this surprised him. After all, he needed his teaching, his work, to make him happy. Carey Ann and Alexandra, in all their amazing beauty, were necessary to him, but he needed his work too.

Sometimes, when Carey Ann got involved in a long telephone conversation with a friend, talking about her course work or her teacher or a rough spot with Alexandra or about food or her period or even a recent argument with Jack, Jack would freeze where he was, listening to his wife with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation. In Kansas City she had spent hours on the phone, and now she was doing it again. He could remember his sister doing it, and his mother. Women channeled the chaos of life into the telephone and came away at peace, as if in the process they had transformed and ordered and tidied up their corner of the universe. He envied Carey Ann the rich pleasure she got from talking on the phone—sometimes her voice was so rich and intimate she sounded almost sexual. He was glad she now had good friends to talk to and good things to talk about. But sometimes he felt left out and sometimes he felt intruded upon, and diminished, as if his wife, with her words, was paring him down, tidying him up, turning him into something much less complex than he really was.

From these telephone conversations he learned that Carey Ann truly did not mind that he spent time with Daphne, that he had drinks with her when Carey Ann was in class, that he spent hours talking to her. According to Carey Ann, Daphne was “as old as the moon.” Sometimes Carey Ann spoke of Daphne with smug pity—she felt so sorry for the older woman because her daughter had left her. Once Carey Ann had spent almost an hour discussing with a friend all the things Daphne might have done to cause Cynthia to leave her for her father. For that was the great mystery—why the girl had left her mother.
What had the mother done to cause it? What terrible monstrous flaw was Daphne hiding, what cruel or crazy thing had Daphne done? Had she secretly abused her daughter somehow, verbally if not physically? Surely Daphne had done
something
wrong, something really dreadful. Carey Ann knew that her own daughter would never choose to leave her; they were so close, they needed each other so much, Alexandra was her sunshine, as Carey Ann was her daughter’s. Well, they would never know about Cynthia and Daphne, they would always wonder. Carey Ann would always be suspicious of Daphne, but she was proud of herself for understanding Jack’s friendship with Daphne. It made her feel
mature,
that she could be relaxed with Jack liking a woman that she herself did not like.

When Cynthia wrote to her mother—for she did write once a month from California (and Daphne wrote to her daughter once a week, at least, having so many things to tell her, missing her so much, wanting Cynthia to know she was loved even though she had chosen to leave)—that she would like to come home for the three weeks of Christmas vacation, Daphne had felt elated. She had spent every extra moment fixing up the attic bedroom, which until then she had left in a general mess. She had dug the box of Cynthia’s old toys out of the storage room and lugged it up to the attic and left it there, casually, half-opened, in the corner, in case Cynthia wanted to look at them for sentimental reasons.

Now it was Christmastime, and here Cynthia was, sitting on the floor with Baby Betsy, the doll she had had since she was four. She was playing dolls with Alexandra, who was enchanted by Baby Betsy and was intently watching Cynthia change its clothes, so that she could learn how to do it too.

With just four days left before Christmas, Daphne, in a spurt of mushy Christmas neighborliness, had invited the three Hamiltons for dinner. Her house was too small to hold a bigger party, although she was going to have some people in for champagne and dessert on Christmas night. But Carey Ann and Alexandra were leaving on Christmas Day to fly back to Kansas City to spend some of the holiday with her family and friends. Jack would remain at home to use the vacation time to write an essay on twentieth-century writers for an international journal.

This holiday night the Hamiltons and Millers were gathered together with good cheer. Tonight Daphne was wearing a red velvet lounging robe and heavy dangling gold
earrings, giving her the majestic look of a Greek oracle or goddess, of warmth perhaps, of comfort. Certainly she had made them all comfortable tonight: a sparkling fire, candles flickering, a British boys’ choir softly heralding them from the stereo. They had just finished their apple pie laced with cinnamon, and were sipping the rest of their champagne. Jack was cozily ensconced on the sofa, Carey Ann nestled against one arm, Daphne leaning near the other, as the three adults looked at old photo albums of Cynthia as a child. On the floor, Cynthia was still enchanting Alexandra with her old doll. When a switch on her back was flicked on, Baby Betsy “crawled” across the floor in stiff, robotlike jerks. Now Cynthia had put Baby Betsy on her stomach and, lifting a hatchway in the doll’s rear end, took out two huge batteries that lay inside the doll like electric intestines.

Daphne laughed. “Is that disgusting or what?” she said.

“Mom!” Cynthia protested. “This was my favorite doll!”

“I know, sweetie,” Daphne said. “I never could understand it. I always preferred those soft cuddly dolls. This doll is hard plastic; it’s like cuddling a kettle.”

“But it crawls, like a real baby!” Cynthia said. She put the batteries back in the baby’s rear end, latched the lid, and held it against her protectively, as if it were a real child. She smoothed its hair—what was left of its hair. The doll had had so much attention over the years that it showed signs of wear and tear—hair gone, eyelashes missing, an overall look of grime coating its plastic skin.

Cynthia handed the doll to Alexandra, who turned it on. Automatically the doll’s arms and legs started flailing in the air, and it whacked Alexandra in the face. Alexandra dropped the doll, startled. Her face scrunched up and her mouth opened to let out a wail. Quickly Cynthia flicked off the doll and handed it back to Alexandra. “There,” she said. “She’s quiet now. Let’s go up to my room and see what else I’ve got that you’d be interested in. My old stuffed animals are still up there.” She took Alexandra’s hand and led her off.

“What a nice girl she is,” Carey Ann said as they heard the two daughters slowly making their way up the steep attic stairs. “She’s so good with Lexi.”