“On the license plates,” Pet explains, as if it were plain. “Live free or die. I’m driving here, middle of the night, I pull over for gas, and every car at the pump has to tell me this. Live free or die. Live free or die. Like I need all these cars to be telling me this.”
“It’s the state motto.”
“Figures,” Pet says, realizing. “But what does it mean? Think about it. Live free or die. What the hell is that doing on everyone’s car?”
“You know, I don’t really know,” Anita allows. She’s never considered the question before, and this surprises her, now that she’s been asked. She’s lived in New Hampshire a half-dozen years, and it’s never come up. “Probably just a patriot thing,” she guesses.
“Patriots, the football team?”
“No, patriots the patriots,” Anita says. “American Revolution. Paul Revere. Taxation without representation. That whole deal.”
“Oh,” Pet says, realizing again. “Right.” For a moment, she’d forgotten where she was. She downs her tap water in one long pull, presses the cool of the empty glass against her forehead, rolls it around up there like she saw someone do in a movie. Faye Dunaway, maybe. She’s trying to startle herself awake, into focus. Pay attention, she summons herself. Pay attention. “What’s to eat?” she wonders, thinking food might help.
Anita stands, peeks into the fridge. “Eggs,” she announces. “I could make omelettes.”
“Omelettes sounds good.”
“Better yet,” Anita continues, now by the pantry closet, “there should be a box of matzos in here, still good.” She’s rummaging among her shelves, back to where the hardly used containers of honey and syrup have left their gooey imprints on her flowery shelving paper. There’s rice back here from the day she moved in; she’s afraid to open the package to see what’s inside.
Pet sees where her friend is going with this and smiles, remembering. Wife number one, Elaine (or, “the Jewess,” as she is alternately known to wives two and three), used to cook up this breakfast thing called matzo bry, which was basically just scrambled eggs and crackers. Wood went crazy for the stuff, and he was always asking Anita and, later, Pet to whip him up some. He was no more Jewish than Billy Graham, but this was his idea of a treat, and he had Anita collect the recipe from Elaine, and Pet from Anita, like it was some goddamn heirloom. And it’s not like it was any big deal of a recipe, just eggs and matzo, hard to screw up eggs and matzo, but he liked it prepared with Tabasco sauce and dill leaves and whatever else Elaine used to throw into the mix. (Also ketchup, in the pan, if she’s remembering it right.) Tell the truth, Pet developed a taste for the stuff herself, although not to where she would ever fix a plate without Wood. “You keep matzo?” she asks her friend. “What’s that all about? Nils is Jewish? Veerhoven is a Jewish name?”
Anita, from inside the pantry: “About as Jewish as Mamie Eisenhower.” She doesn’t know where she gets this, but the connection makes her laugh.
Pet, too, and, for a moment, the two wives are lost in a wave of shared silliness. “So?” she presses, out from under her laughing.
“I cook with it,” Anita says, emerging from the pantry to explain her matzo stash. “Puddings, soup stock, things like that. Not much lately, but I keep some around.” She places the box down on the counter and begins breaking sheets of matzo into bite-size pieces.
Pet steps from the table to help with the eggs. She cracks them awkwardly with two hands, as if she hasn’t spent much time in a kitchen. She has her thumbs do most of the work. “One or two?” she asks, holding up an egg. “Eggs.”
“Whatever,” Anita says. “Might as well do them all. Maybe Nils will want.”
Cracking, Pet tells how once she left the matzo to soak in the egg-beat for something like four or five minutes, and how when she cooked it all up, she was left with a plate of what basically amounted to eggs and wet soup crackers. “Wood didn’t say anything, though,” she says, “just cleaned his plate without a word.”
“He’d eat anything.”
“Telling me.”
“Him and his Oreos,” Anita recalls. “Remember?”
How could Pet forget? She still has a shelf full of them in her own cupboard back home. She’s been doling them out to herself, one a day, since Wood moved out. She tells this to her friend.
“You’re holding on to him,” Anita interprets. “When you eat the last cookie, that’s when you can let him go. I’m surprised you don’t see it.”
“You think?”
“Yes, I think. I don’t see what else it could be. You don’t eat Oreos. Why else would you be eating Oreos all of a sudden?”
Pet shrugs. “It’s just one a day.”
“This is why,” Anita concludes. “My God, this is exactly what you’re doing. Exactly. You’re usually so on about these things.”
“But we were getting a divorce,” Pet says, trying to understand herself. “This is stupid. We were divorcing.”
“But there’s a piece of you thinks maybe you would have worked it out, am I right?”
“What, worked it out? There were teams of lawyers on this thing. It was ugly. It wasn’t a work-it-out kind of thing.”
“What about maybe underneath the ugliness, maybe there was some secret hope, something, that things could get back to how they were?”
Pet looks at Anita blankly.
“Don’t tell me you never thought of it,” Anita says.
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“I won’t tell you I never thought of it.”
“Seriously, Pet.”
“I am being serious. What we had was gone. Just like what you had was gone. That’s Wood.”
“But privately, in your most secret, secret places, tell me you’re not still in love with him.” Beat. “Forget me. Tell yourself.”
She’s fishing here, Anita, but she fishes with such conviction that Pet begins to recognize herself. She wants to accept what Anita is saying. Of course, she lets herself think. She’s too close to have seen it, but suddenly it’s clear. It’s so obvious. Of course she still loves him. This is just her way of keeping him near. Oreos. One each day. Now and forever. And now especially. She can’t let go. It doesn’t occur to Pet that Wood is dead or even that he might be dead. She’s forgotten, for a moment, the dreadful news that brought her here. She’s thinking in terms of the day before yesterday, of calling off her attorneys, of going back home to her husband. She’s thinking everything is as it was, and maybe she’ll just go back into therapy to figure this further. Maybe she’ll find some way to control herself and bring her emotions into better check, or maybe, when she gets home, she’ll simply take all those unopened bags of Oreos over to the food drop by her dry cleaners. But, as she’s thinking these things, her friend is busy reeling in an even better explanation for her behavior.
“Of course,” Anita continues, this time with not nearly so much conviction, “there’s always the possibility that maybe you just like Oreos. Maybe after all these years he just wore you down.” She laughs as she says this, mostly because it strikes her as funny, but also because she wants Pet to know she’s just fooling around.
Petra Wood ponders this and feels taken, duped. First Anita gets her going on what might have been a momentous personal revelation, and then she makes like she’s just kidding. Boom. Never mind. Ha ha. “Fuck you,” Pet says. She’s pissed, but she’s trying to return Anita’s playfulness. “Fuck you very much.” She grabs the empty egg carton and tosses it at her friend. It lands at her feet.
“My pleasure,” Anita says, stepping over the carton to the stove. She flicks some of her own saliva into the saucepan to see if it sizzles.
“Gross,” Pet says, noticing.
“Oh, come on. Like you’ve never done it.”
“Not when I’m cooking for someone else,” Pet insists. “And not when someone else could see me, no.”
“Well, we’ll just pretend you didn’t see, okay?”
“Easy for you to
say,” Pet says, and then lets it drop. Her mind is someplace else.
“Dry or runny?” Anita asks, spilling the egg-beat into the pan.
Pet comes back from wherever she was and thinks they’re still talking about the spittle, but then she gets that it’s about the eggs. “In between,” she says.
Nils’s pickup rumbles unmuffled into the carport. He was out on an early flood job this morning before the rest of the house was awake, and he’s not sure what he’ll find back inside. This has troubled him all morning.
Pet hasn’t seen him yet—he couldn’t wait up last night with Anita—and she goes to intercept him and make trouble. “Nilsy!” she cries, throwing open her arms. She’s wearing one of Anita’s robes, no sash, and when she spreads her arms, the robe opens with them. Underneath, she’s got on an Everything’s Archie T-shirt from Wood’s last movie, nonmerchandized panties, and that’s it. She knows poor Nils will blush from the exposure. “How’s my Swedish meatball?” she says, collecting him for a hug and adding all kinds of color to his face. She doesn’t care that he’s from Norway. Norway, Sweden, it’s all the same to her. Denmark, even.
Petra Wood is everywhere on Nils, all at once. She kisses him on the lips, cups his ass, runs her fingers through his thick curls.
“Pet,” he says, untangling himself from her groping. “Good that you’re here.” He’s flustered, his cheeks the color of cartoon embarrassment. “You might want to do something about that robe.”
“Oh, don’t be such a prude,” Pet chides, and then she snaps the robe open and shut, and open and shut, like a flasher. “Wake up, Nashua!” she screams across the street. “It’s showtime!” Then to Anita, who has joined them on the front walk, she says, “He’s mine, you know. I’m next in line.” To Nils: “I get all her leftovers.”
“I’m not through with him yet,” Anita says, moving to rescue her proper husband from Pet’s teasing. She wraps his arm around her shoulders like a stole.
“Yeah, well, when you’re done,” Pet says, taking Nils’s other arm. To Nils, in a hot whisper: “We share everything, you know.”
Nils laughs uncertainly and walks the two women to his kitchen door. This is not a comfortable thing for him. This is not the way he is with people, not what he expected to find here this morning, but he can’t think how to move the situation to where he can relax around it. There is no gentlemanly way for him to squirm free of Petra without also losing hold of Anita, so he leaves his arms where they are. And there is no way for him to silence his wife’s friend or voice his disapproval without setting an unpleasant tone for the rest of the morning. All he can do is wait for it to pass. This is not the way he expected his day to go. He spent the morning pumping three inches of water from a flooded basement, hauling the wet vac down and up the stairs, and when he stopped to think about Nita and Pet back here waiting on breakfast, he imagined they’d be all over themselves with tears and grief and worry. Last thing he expected was to find them whooping it up, laughing, like their ex-husband hadn’t just driven off a cliff, like there was nothing going on.
“I’ll just wash up,” he says, when they finally reach the door. He steps clear of Pet and makes for the stairs, thinking, okay, I’ll go change my clothes and catch my breath and by the time I come down she’ll have tired of this game. By the time I come down she’ll be back in the kitchen, brooding over her precious Terence, weaving her worst-case scenarios together with Anita’s to where there will no longer be room for such flirtation.
“Not so fast,” Pet says, grabbing for his shirt. She’s not finished with Nils just yet, and he can’t think quickly enough to stop her. She untucks the back of his shirt and pulls herself up the stairs toward him by its tail. He doesn’t want to appear rude or unfriendly, so he doesn’t shake her off the way he might. She throws off her robe and turns to Anita on the landing below. “Me and Nilsy,” she says, mock-sweet, “we got time for a tumble before breakfast?”
Wood needs cash and coffee. He’s down to about thirty dollars, with no place to stay and no prospects. Last night was dry and reasonably warm, and he didn’t do too badly on a bench in an unlit corner of a municipal parking lot, but he feels like shit this morning. Looks like shit, too, he imagines, although perhaps this last is not quite so unfortunate. He thinks maybe it’ll be easier to blend in if he’s not himself, if his two days growth of beard and dead skin cells leave him looking, smelling a shade more like the day laborers crowding into Two Stools’s coffee shop for their morning caffeine, and a little less like the hulking, tortured presence of an untethered movie star he had only recently been. Like shit is a good thing, probably.
“Harlan,” Two Stools greets, as Wood sits himself at one of her loose tables. Her tone is agreeable, but she’s got her head down. She’s wiping at the table with a once-wet rag from her apron belt and righting the ash tray, sugar tower, and salt and pepper shakers into a kind of arrangement at the center. Her entire upper body sways with the choreographed effort, even after she is through. She goes through these motions a hundred times each day; she’s all business, and yet Wood can find no dullness to her routine.
“Grace,” he says back.
She smiles shyly, recalling her first encounter with this unusual man. “Coffee?” she says, stepping away from the table after she’s set it right.
“Decaf?”
“No,” she says. “Coffee. My people drink it straight.”
“Coffee, then.” Actually, he can always use the caffeine, now especially.
“Black?”
Wood nods and watches as she retreats, reaches behind the counter for the coffee pot, a cup and saucer, and returns with these to his table. She carries the cup and saucer individually, each pressed flat between the flesh of one forearm and breast and not fitted together collectively the way Wood is accustomed to seeing. He notices this, thinks it strange, but it doesn’t do any more than occur to him.
“What kind of name is Harlan?” Two Stools asks, setting down the saucer and cup.
“Gaelic,” Wood guesses.
“Gaelic?”
“Maybe. I don’t really know. I used to know when I was a kid.”
“Gaelic, like Celtic? Up here, we know about the Celtics.”
He’s about to be tripped up and quickly shifts to safer ground: “I’ve always thought it’s not where a name comes from that’s important, but where you take it, what you do to make it your own.” Drivel. This is what these people are good at. This is what he’ll have to learn.
Two Stools weighs Wood’s nonsense, but it proves too much for her. “I’ve never known a Harlan before,” she manages.
“Well,” Wood says, “here I am.” He twirls his right hand against the air with a flourish, as if he might take a bow the way Carson used to do in his Carnac bit.
“Only other Harlan I even heard of was Colonel Sanders,” Two Stools offers. “You know the Colonel Sanders I mean?”
This Grace, Wood’s thinking. She moves from one thing to the next and expects the world to follow. That he has strikes him as remarkable. “Colonel Sanders, the chicken guy?” he says.
“That’s the one. Colonel Harlan Sanders’s Famous Recipe Chicken.”
“He’s a Harlan?” Wood asks. This might be a good thing to know.
“Was,” Two Stools reports. “Dead now, pretty sure.”
Wood files this away, wonders how it is that the kind of woman who would retain a piece of information like this hasn’t yet shown herself to be the kind of woman who would also recognize his hulking, tortured self. Probably, she picked up this morsel on the Kentucky Fried Chicken guy from People or Entertainment Tonight—where else would she learn something like that?—and it follows that a frequent consumer of such infotainments might have come upon an item regarding Terence Wood, with accompanying photo, at one time or another. Surely, if this Grace can identify the Kentucky Fried Chicken guy by his given name, then it’s only a matter of time before she identifies the internationally famous Terence Wood. Maybe she alrea
dy has. Maybe she’s seen the papers and heard the news on the radio and put it together and figured it wasn’t a big enough deal to say anything about it. Maybe she’s showing great restraint in not revealing Wood to her other customers, keeping him for herself. Maybe she’s picking her spots, working some unforseen angle. Maybe she’s some backwater Kathy Bates, stalking him, planning to inflict unspeakable miseries on his presumed dead body, deep fry his body parts and serve him up in a red and white bucket.
She disappears for a bit and returns with what appears to Wood to be a plate of corned beef hash. Where it comes from, he’s got no idea. Doesn’t seem to Wood she had time to slip back into the kitchen to pick up an order, but here it is, and it looks to be heading his way. This must be considered. Last time Wood ate hash was from a vacuum-packed tin on maneuvers, and the idea of interacting with Two Stools’s version is perhaps more than his uneasy stomach can manage. Still, he does not want to appear rude or suspect, so he prepares himself for a couple polite mouthfuls. Better to accept her good will, he overthinks, than to send it back untouched.
“Look here, sailor,” Grace announces, laying the plate before Wood with importance. “Jimmy over there said he wasn’t much for hash this morning.” She flits her eyes across the room to indicate an oily little man with someone else’s name stitched over the pocket of his mechanic’s overalls. “Said he’d rather just have a bowl of oatmeal. H’only took but a few bites. Shame to waste it.”
Wood doesn’t catch Two Stools’s meaning straight off, and when he does, he is thrown: she means for him to finish this oily man’s breakfast. This is what he looks like to her, a man who might welcome a hardly touched plate of used hash. This is what he has become overnight, and the realization leaves him pleased, uncertain, disoriented. He gets a thick noseful of the gestured food and it mixes with the idea of where it’s been to leave Wood feeling queasy—happy at the ease of his transformation and yet unsure of his ability to walk about in his new role.
Mourning Wood Page 9
