You Are Not A Stranger Here (21 page)

"That's
so
cool," he says to her. "I got you some lipstick."

And then Heather is standing in front of them, rage of a prosecutor emblazoned on her face, and she says she's leaving, there's another party at the Putnams', and if they want a ride they better come.

II

T H E H O L I D AY S B R I N G Christmas lights and family visits to Plymouth Brewster, along with the news that Mrs. Johnson is retiring at the end of the year. The new man, Mr. Attwater, young and handsome in a boring sort of way, wears dark suits and shakes everyone's hand. The older women coo, the younger women are suspicious, the men play cards. Rehearsals for
Our Town
keep Ted from coming the first two weeks of December, though he calls to tell Elizabeth and says he's sorry.

The second time he phones they speak a long while. Ted sounds reluctant to hang up. Finally, Elizabeth steels her courage and asks, "Have you seen Lauren?" They have not mentioned their trip to the mall.

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"Yeah," he replies with the quick, breathless voice she's come to recognize as his unconscious signal of interest.

"Yeah, she's in the play. I get to narrate what she does and stuff."

"I'm sorry, Ted, that we didn't get her a gift."

"Oh no, that's cool. I actually gave her the lipstick anyway. She was kinda into it." He pauses. "I've been sort of wondering, like when you were married . . ."

"Yes?"

"Or like before that, when you guys were dating . . . I mean at some point, you guys, like, got together so you must have let him know when it was cool to do that, right?"

"That's right," Elizabeth says. "He would call the dorm. I would tell him if I were free on the evening he suggested. He was very reliable in that regard. He always called when he said he would. You should remember that, Ted. Politeness is a tremendous asset."

"Yeah, right," he says. "But like after that, I mean after you decided to hang out, did you let him know when other stuff should happen, or did he kinda . . . let you know?"

"Oh. I see. You mean about sex."

She can almost feel his wince at the other end of the line; she restrains a giggle.

"Yes," he whispers.

"I'm afraid I'm not much of one to ask about these things. But you're a good person. You're kind. Be kind to her."

"Okay."

The next time he calls he tells her it's coming up for winter break at the high school, and with performances and 220

things he and the other volunteer won't be back until January. Elizabeth hadn't been told about a break over the vacation, and she takes it hard. But Ted calls each week, once on Christmas, and with this she thinks she will get by until the day he returns.

Judith, the nurse, has grown suspicious of her behavior over the last few weeks, hearing her talk sometimes, and Elizabeth has begun flushing her Primidone down the toilet rather than risk discovery. She's been on the drugs so long she's forgotten many ordinary satisfactions. What cold water feels like in a parched mouth. The pleasure concentration on a single thought can yield. The days bring with them the pulse, the hum, joyous sometimes, terrifying others, but alive, full and alive. And they bring Hester, never now a day without her. In the midst of it all, there is so much she wants to ask Ted that she's started making a list so she won't forget. N E W Y E A R ' S E V E begins with a clear, bright sky, flooding Elizabeth's room in light. The annual party is scheduled for after dinner. Families will drop by in the early evening and everyone will be in bed by ten. It is Mrs. Johnson's last day as director and she makes the rounds of the rooms saying goodbye. Some of these men and women she's known twenty-five years. It's just after lunch, as the sky clouds over and snow begins to fall, that she comes to Elizabeth. They start as they always do by Mrs. Johnson reporting what she's been reading--a book written by a foreigner about traveling in America, she says, full of suggestions for places to visit. She and her 221

husband plan a trip across the country in the spring. She's never been to the South and wants to go.

To snap pictures of plantations and muse at the faded grandeur of it all, I suppose. What a blissful forgetting it must be.

In the mornings, it is easier to reply without speaking aloud (at night it has become impossible), so Elizabeth tells Hester to be quiet, which for the moment she is. There is a sad expression on Mrs. Johnson's face and Elizabeth wonders if she actually wants to retire, or if perhaps she has been made to by others.

"You haven't been in touch with your husband, have you?" she says. It is odd that Mrs. Johnson should ask this question. Elizabeth hasn't spoken to Will in more than twenty years. He lives in California with a wife and three children. Mrs. Johnson knows this well enough.

"No," Elizabeth says.

"And Ginny, she's never mentioned anything about other arrangements?"

"Is something the matter? Do I have to leave?"

Mrs. Johnson shakes her head. "It's just that the new director and I have been reviewing things. I'm sure he's right, there are issues of liability, legal things we have to be careful about. There was concern about your outing with Ted.

"Elizabeth, I tried to convince him otherwise, but Mr. Attwater's decided that as long as you're here, you're not to have visits from a volunteer. God knows it's the last thing I wanted to tell you today, but I wanted it at least to be me who told you."

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Elizabeth tilts her head to one side. "No visits?"

Mrs. Johnson folds her hands in her lap.

"I see," Elizabeth says. "Mr. Attwater. He's decided."

"Yes."

H E C A N N O T E V E N commence an attempt to concentrate on the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. As he sits in the cinema with Lauren on one side and Heather and Stevie, who've started dating, on the other, the deep irrelevance of the movie strikes him like an epiphany. In a few hours he, Ted, will be naked in a bed with a girl he loves, and the whole miserable material world seems a mighty petty thing in comparison to this. It seems it might never matter again. The date has been set for a week, her Christmas present to him whispered in his ear, the whole thing so damn sophisticated he feels like one of those men in top hat and tails who dance on moonlit balconies in the black-and-white movies his parents used to watch. "Suave" is the word.

Finally, the stupid flick ends and they follow the crowd out into the parking lot, where the snow has begun to fall heavily now and the plows have started their work for the night.

"You guys coming to the party?" Heather asks.

Ted squints, shrugs, looks off into the distance. "Sounds kinda cool, I'm thinking maybe not, though, you know. It's getting late."

"Hello? It's New Year's Eve."

Lauren, dressed in sheer black club pants and a simple 223

black leather jacket, interrupts Ted's nonchalance by informing the others that her parents are away and she and Ted are going back to her place--no interruption of his hipness, he realizes, but a cubing of it.

"What do you think, Heather?" Stevie asks, rolling onto the balls of his feet. "Maybe you and me could go play some cops and robbers too."

Heather gives a mocking snort. "Please. I'll probably be bailing you out when you get arrested with your gay little drugs."

"Have fun," Lauren says, taking Ted's hand, something she's never done in front of other people. Instantly, he has an erection. As they walk toward his car, he wonders how premature premature ejaculation is, if men come miles from their girlfriends' homes, if they'll make it to her house in time. On the highway, Lauren puts in an ambient house tape, a slow beat, the volume way down. Wet flakes zoom into the windshield out of the dark hills of the sky. The mall lots they pass are lit and empty. The stores are closed, the car dealerships vanishing beneath the snow. Tonight, Ted doesn't see this familiar landscape as a present fact, but already as a memory, a scene he will one day recall. It's strange and exciting to perceive things from such a distance. He glimpses how beautiful even this world can be if you aren't actually in it. On the passenger's side, Lauren sits quietly, her leather jacket unzipped, the orange cardigan they've joked about buttoned underneath it. Her face has an oddly purposeful expression, her eyes fixed on the dashboard. In the month 224

they've been going out, there's been a fair amount of silence between them, which Lauren doesn't seem to mind, though it makes Ted anxious. They've talked about her family some. At first he thought she loathed her parents in the way some of his other wealthy friends do, with a kind of casual cynicism, as if their mothers and fathers were minor officials in the national corruption--illegitimate people living illegitimate lives. He's always thought with bitterness it was a luxury to view your parents this way--as people strong enough to withstand your derision. But the more time he spends with Lauren, the more he thinks she understands this, that she could hurt her parents. Her determination, her careful plan for their getting together, it's about something different, about being in control. Her house is a six-month-old mock chateau with a threecar garage, a fountain, and a turret. Inside, it's wired like a spaceship: thermostats, alarms, humidifiers, key pads to control it all. Most of the time half the shit is broken, the living room tropical, the doorbell not even working. Her father spends evenings yelling at contractors. His work has something to do with money. They're down at their condo in Florida this weekend with Lauren's brother.

"Want a glass of wine?" she asks when they get into the kitchen.

"Yeah," he says, "that would be cool."

The high-ceilinged room is an odd combination of expensive chrome appliances and peeling wood furniture that looks like it was bought at a yard sale.

As Lauren hands Ted his glass, she leans forward to kiss 225

him gently on the lips, a touch he receives, as always, weak kneed and nervous. He puts his free arm around her. He tries not to think about this evening in his own house, his brother out with friends, his father reading the paper in the living room, alone, his mother upstairs in bed, alone, their empty kitchen smelling slightly of the cleaning spray his father will have used on the counters after making dinner and washing the dishes.

"What's up with the table?" he says.

"Having decrepit old shit you pay through the nose for is the latest thing. They can't get enough of it. Perverse, isn't it?"

Ted supposes that it is. She leans her head into the hollow of his shoulder and puts her hand in his back pocket, palming the cheek of his ass. He thinks they better hurry. Be kind to her, Mrs. Maynard said. He imagines he's the only kid at his school who gets his romantic advice from a schizophrenic. Taking his hand, Lauren leads him through rooms of fine rugs and distressed furniture, chandeliers and gilt-framed paintings, up a staircase wide enough to sleep on. T I R E S O F PA S S I N G cars send arcs of snow into the air, dotting the skirt of her coat. She pauses now and then to wipe the fur clean with her gloved hands. Several inches have already accumulated on the road's shoulder, but she manages all right in her boots, huffing a bit as she goes, unused to the exertion of a walk longer than the circumference of the grounds. In the hubbub of the New Year's party, no one noticed her leaving. Headlights flash up into her eyes, pass, and vanish. Wind 226

drives snow down out of the sky. She reaches an intersection and sees it's the old Plymouth Road, gas stations on three corners now. She turns north, ears full of the storm and Hester's voice.

You should have heard the animals dying that winter in the cold, how the horse groaned in the frost, sheep starving in their pens, snow past the windows. And you know my eldest died of her cough in my arms when the ground was covered and too hard to bury her, so she lay under a sheet in the woodshed, where for a month I saw her every time I went to gather fuel for our fire. And we weren't the worst off, sick at least with diseases we knew.

"I don't care," Elizabeth says, though it isn't true and she can't help seeing Hester in the woodshed. Her responses go unheeded now in any case. She starts up a rise she can remember being driven along by her grandfather in his Packard.

Eighty years the owners of a sawmill and merchants through the Revolution, and of course, you know the cellar was fitted with a second cellar covered with a boulder lowered from an oak beam by rope, where our family hid during raids by the British, relying on the appointed neighbor--

should he survive--to come and lift the stone when the soldiers had quit their burning. And merchants still in the early days of the Republic, selectmen at town hall, teachers, a judge, a colonel, a daughter ended in the river, never mentioned, a graveyard full of us. On the sidewalk, she shakes her head back and forth, back and forth. "I know this. What does it matter?"

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Witnesses by news and action to the slaughters here and abroad; money in the banks that made the wars; snobbery; polite unspoken belief in the city on the hill and our place at its center; disdain; a preference for distant justice; lives of comfort made from other people's labor; and don't tell me it doesn't matter, that it's all too complex now, because it isn't and you know it and we always have. One eye on heaven, the other blind.

At the top of the rise, Elizabeth sees the factory where they make cranberry juice and she remembers walking in the fields behind the house with Will, past the old bogs, thinking to herself how they would one day walk those paths with their child, how once he was born, life would be about the future. The oval Ocean Spray insignia is painted in red and blue on the side of the building, perched there on the shore against the icy, churning sea.

Farther from the center of town, traffic lights hang over deserted intersections. She walks on and on past fields and houses, another group of stores, a liquor market, a fast food restaurant. She crosses the town line out of Plymouth and keeps going, the snow coming faster. At the highway overpass there is no more Howard Johnson's, some other motel now.

"He's out this evening," Ted's father said when she called from her room. Then she remembered him telling her he and Lauren were spending New Year's together. At the end of Winthrop Street, he'd said her place was, the day they visited Lord & Taylor.