Good Grief: A Novel

by Lolly Winston

  Marion sits at the table, wrapped in her pink chenille robe, hugging herself and shaking her head as she reads Miss Manners. “Freeloaders,” she squawks. “They should pay their share!”

  I’m always relieved to find that Marion’s in the house when I get up in the morning. Once I awoke to discover that she and the car had vanished. I called the senior center, then the coffee shop downtown, then the police. An hour later, an officer called back to report that Marion had been on her way to the senior center—not wanting to bother me by asking for a ride—got muddled, went to the park instead, drove over the grass, got stuck in the mud, and backed into a fountain. Marion and I had a talk about how she shouldn’t drive anymore. She agreed and gave me a little hug. Since then, I hide the car keys in an empty flour canister.

  The doctor in Medford suggested putting Marion in a home. Instead, I’ve convinced Marion to let me use some of her savings to hire a caregiver to come to the house while I’m at work.

  “Good morning.” I kiss Marion on the forehead, then turn on the oven.

  I hoist the turkey out of its brine bath in the refrigerator and pat it dry with paper towels. It took forever to finish the stuffing yesterday because Marion wanted sausage and Crystal wanted plain white bread without any meat. Drew wanted chestnuts, which Crystal said were for squirrels. I ended up fixing three batches, and now I’m not sure which to stuff the bird with. It never occurred to me that my Thanksgiving fantasy dinner would be complicated by so many culinary demands. I choose Marion’s stuffing to fill the bird, honoring her seniority before realizing that she probably won’t remember that she likes sausage. After I shove the roasting pan into the oven, I pour a glass of cranberry juice for Drew.

  Back in my room, I push aside the lace curtains and snap open the window shades. In the distance, snow dusts the Siskiyous.

  Drew lifts his head from the pillow and blinks at the daylight. “Brrrr,” he says as I push open a window, anxious to rid the room of its sour sick odor. The earthy smells of wood fires and damp leaves outside are a relief.

  I turn toward the bed. Drew’s shoulders and chest are smooth and muscular, and I want to touch his skin. I hand him the juice, which he swallows in two gulps.

  “Ow!” He clutches his throat. “Feel my forehead.” He reclines on the pillows, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling dramatically. I sit on the edge of the bed and lay a hand across his brow. It’s damp but cool.

  “I think you’re fine.” I keep one foot firmly on the floor, resisting the temptation to dive under the covers with him. “Why don’t you get up and take a shower? Split some wood and build a fire?”

  “C’mere, Nurse Naughty.” He tugs my arm and I fall onto him, feeling his chest purr. He tightens his hands around my wrists, pinning them behind me. As he burrows his face under my sweater, his whiskers are rough against my belly. “Will you shower with me?” We toss and tumble and giggle, his skin hot and smooth against mine. He tries to pull my sweater over my head, but I tug it back down and free myself, worrying that Dad and Jill might hear us.

  Drew sits up and moans. “My throaaaaat! Would you look in there?” He opens his mouth wide and sticks out his tongue. “Ahhhh,” he honks.

  His throat is rimmed scarlet, with a few raised white spots in the back. He probably needs a throat culture and antibiotics. I should want to coddle him, but I’m irritated by his illness. I don’t want anyone in my life to ever get sick again. Not even a sniffle or hangnail.

  In the bathroom I refill Drew’s glass with water and grab a few Tylenol from the medicine chest.

  “I think you’re fine, Falstaff,” I repeat, handing him the pills. I bend over to retie my sneaker.

  “I love you,” Drew says.

  Panic sears my heart. I retie my other shoe. Now they’re both too tight. “I, uh . . .” I don’t want to stand up. Drew told me he loved me at the bakery party. But he hasn’t said it since. Neither have I. I’ve been resisting loving him the way you’d resist a box of chocolate truffles or a pair of expensive shoes. You can’t get in a train wreck if you don’t board the train. But how can I live happily ever after without loving someone again? How can I love someone again without granting him the power to crush me?

  Suddenly I want to see my entire future. I’d like to be able to drop a quarter into one of those viewing machines at a scenic lookout and gaze all the way past the horizon to the rest home and see whose picture is on my bedside table and how many husbands there were and whether there were children.

  I figured that if Drew and I ever exchanged the L-word again, it would be in front of a roaring fire or after sex. Not while I’m tying my sneaker. And not until a few months from now. After the holidays, maybe.

  “Thanks,” I finally stutter.

  A head rush makes the room tilt sideways as I stand up. Drew’s smiling. His face is flushed and his eyes are glassy. He doesn’t seem to mind that I haven’t reciprocated. I sit beside him on the bed, rubbing his neck and shoulders, then pulling the quilt up to his chin.

  “Let’s go to New York,” he says. “Next week. I’ll treat you. It’s the best time of year in the city. Let me take you to the Waldorf.”

  “I can’t leave work,” I remind him. While it’s the slowest time of year for Ashland, I’ve barely been able to keep up with holiday orders at the bakery. “Maybe in February.” I’m glad I’m unable to bend to Drew’s schedule. When we first started dating, I always seemed to be available.

  “I want to help with dinner,” he says huskily, coughing and then blowing his nose.

  “Forget it. You’re quarantined. I’m not letting you touch the food.”

  “Okay.” He grabs at me again.

  I’d like to strip off my clothes and slide back under the covers, to risk ruining the dinner and catching the white spots in Drew’s throat. Instead, I tip my head toward the door. “The turkey,” I tell him.

  I’m heading down the hall to the kitchen when I hear Crystal calling me.

  “Fannie? Are you there?” At first her voice is quiet, almost a whisper, but then it fills with anxiety.

  I freeze, worried that maybe Crystal’s cut herself, overwhelmed by the holidays. I hurry down the hall and peer into her room. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin peer back at me from posters covering the lilac wallpaper. Red scarves drape the lampshades, giving the room a bordello glow. Instead of stuffed teddy bears, Crystal owns real taxidermist-stuffed animals she bought from a musty antiques store in town—a raccoon rearing on its haunches beside her desk and an opossum crouched on top of her dresser. Crystal’s not in her room. The opossum’s beady eyes make him look guilty, as though he’s stolen something out of her top drawer.

  “Sophie? Can you help me?” Crystal’s voice, from the bathroom across the hall. I knock, then push the door open a crack and find her sitting doubled over on the toilet, her bare knees pressed together, her pajama bottoms tossed in the corner.

  “I got my period.” Her underwear is wadded in her fist.

  I assumed Crystal already had her period. She turned fourteen last month and she’s so worldly and tough—with the smoking, eyeliner, and cutting. Fourteen going on forty. She never brought it up. She just bemoaned her tiny breasts and boyish waistline, which I tried to make her feel better about, telling her that people do crazy stuff to be thin.

  “Oh, okay.” I slide in through the door and close it behind me.

  Are you there, God? It’s me, Sophie! What do I tell a teenage girl who just got her period? I’m not sure, because my mother had already died by the time I got mine, so I never got a proper birds-and-bees, coming-of-age lecture. My father just went to the store and returned with two grocery bags brimming with packages of pads and tampons—probably every variety they sold, unsure of which one I might need. I curled up on the couch with cramps and he fixed me a cup of tea with a tablespoon of whiskey, fetched me the heating pad, and sat with my feet in his lap. He kept opening his mouth as though he were going to say something, but then he’d close it again. Fina
lly we watched The Gong Show on TV.

  I leave Crystal to fetch her some clean underwear, a tampon, and a sanitary pad. When I return to the bathroom, I close the door and hand her the things, wondering if maybe I should have stayed in the hall. “You just—”

  “I know how to use them,” she says, irritated. “I just don’t have any.” She chooses the pad and steps into the underwear I brought her. I pretend to be busy refolding the towels as she flushes the toilet and washes her hands. “I’m, like, the last girl in my class, you know.” She rinses out her underwear in the sink.

  “Oh, honey, that must have been hard. But now you don’t have to worry about it anymore.” The radiator in the bathroom rattles and clanks. I’d like to make an eloquent “You’re a woman now!” speech. “Want to call your mom?” I finally ask Crystal.

  “What for?” She loops her underwear over the towel rack to dry, then leans over the sink to look in the mirror. Her cheeks are red and still creased with wrinkles from the sheets. She rubs at a smudge of black eyeliner under her eye.

  “Right.” A new wave of worry for Crystal washes over me. Now she can get pregnant! I think of the long list of gynecological troubles outlined in Our Bodies, Ourselves, which we all kept tucked under our beds in college. (Not that we were ashamed of the book, but when guys came to your room for a beer, you wanted them to see your Fitzgerald and Hemingway.)

  I reach out to hug Crystal, but she dips her head into the sink to wash her face. When she’s finished I hand her a towel. She turns and pulls on her pajama bottoms, then takes a step toward the door.

  “Gah! This is like having a roll of paper towels in your pants!”

  “They have all kinds of maxi-mini skinny-thinny better ones at the store,” I tell her. “Wait until you see the choices.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay.”

  Somehow, Crystal’s grateful and aggravated with me at the same time. I think I know how the mother of a teenage daughter must feel. Like an indispensable annoyance.

  “Would you like a little glass of wine with dinner?” I ask her.

  “Yes, please.”

  Back in the kitchen, Dad and Jill are up and dressed, peeling potatoes at the table. They look like twins in their matching chamois shirts and khakis, laughing in unison as they work. I hope that by some miracle they die at the same time.

  “How many should we peel?” Jill asks me, holding up a potato. Her white hair is cut into a pageboy that curls around her ears.

  Ruth has arrived and she wants to know about the stuffing. “Should I cover it?” She seems irritated by the stuffing, holding it away from her as though it smells bad. She looks beautiful in her long brown velvet dress, her yellow hair fanning across her narrow waist. Simone clings to her legs, peering out shyly at Dad and Jill, who are trying to coax her across the room with a gingersnap. I’m about to tell Ruth not to worry about the stuffing when Crystal spins into the kitchen in her stocking feet.

  “Hey, does this go?” she asks me, holding a necklace up to the collar of her dress. The dress has a black velvet bodice and long lacy sleeves that are pretty in a Gothic sort of way. As she does a pirouette to model the ensemble, she loses her balance and stumbles.

  “Sophie?” Drew calls out raspily from the bedroom. “Hot tea?”

  I turn from Dad to Jill to Ruth to Crystal toward my bedroom. Everyone is asking me what to do here. Wears-her-bathrobe-to-work me. I’m in charge.

  “Peel all of the potatoes, please,” I tell Jill.

  “Just throw some foil over it,” I tell Ruth. “Then sit down and relax.”

  I put the kettle on for Drew’s tea.

  “That looks pretty, honey,” I tell Crystal, clasping her necklace.

  The doorbell rings; I answer it to find Jasper Jenkins standing on the porch in a Goodwill ensemble that suggests he might be color blind. His signature khakis are fastened with a woman’s belt, and he’s replaced Ethan’s ski sweater with a kelly green button-down shirt and a purple tie speckled with yellow diamonds. I feel silly for missing the sweater. Jasper’s outfit is finished off with a professorial tweed jacket, the too-short sleeves exposing tufts of curly white hair around his wrists. One arm is bent behind his back. He brings it forward to present a bouquet of gold mums tied with a red ribbon.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” he says.

  Stepping off the porch, I take the flowers and give him a hug. His scratchy blazer smells of cherry pipe tobacco. He smiles broadly, exposing a flash of glossy white dentures.

  In the kitchen, I introduce Jasper. He’s more nervous and formal than usual, kneading his hands and bowing ceremoniously. Jill makes a fuss over the flowers, putting them in a vase on the hutch in the dining room.

  “Would you like a glass of wine?” Ruth asks Jasper.

  “I’m off the sauce,” he tells her.

  There’s a silence, the kitchen timer ticking. Pots of water for the potatoes and peas boil away on the stove, steam filling the room. Jasper dabs perspiration from his forehead with a tweed sleeve as Ruth pours him a ginger ale. Finally he sheds the jacket. The outline of his belly button looks like an eye peering through the thin knit fabric of his shirt.

  Simone claps and points a finger at his white beard, which he seems to have trimmed for the occasion. “Santa!”

  Soon the whole house smells like Thanksgiving—like sage, cinnamon, and pie filling that’s dribbled over onto the bottom of the oven and burned. The sky clears and sun filters through the dining room windows, making the crystal and china on the table twinkle. I’ve set out my grandmother’s silver, which I’ve rarely had occasion to use before today. There are a few odd pieces I’m unsure of.

  “What’s this?” I ask Ruth, holding up a wide, flat, forklike spatula.

  She pours ice water into the goblets. “Cucumber and tomato server,” she says. She points to another piece that I always assumed was for picking up ice cubes. “Asparagus tongs.”

  “How did you know that?” Jill asks.

  “She knows everything,” I tell her. “It’s annoying.”

  Ruth sets the water pitcher on the buffet. “That thing would be handy to clean out the cat’s box,” she says bitterly, pointing to the tomato server. I notice that her hands tremble and her eyes are glassy with tears.

  “You okay?” I ask Ruth after Jill leaves the room.

  “Today is the first day of the rest of my nervous breakdown,” she says, running a finger through the condensation on the water pitcher.

  “I know the holidays are hard.”

  “Yeah. Mark called last night. He and Missy are back together for good.”

  “I’m sorry.” Only a few weeks ago, Ruth and Mark had talked again about patching things up.

  “Missy’s pregnant.”

  “Oh, Ruth.” I give her a hug, closing my eyes, wishing there were something more I could do.

  “Apparently my husband’s midlife crisis is a whole-life crisis.”

  I’d like to assure her that she’s not going to be alone forever, but I’m not sure this is true for either of us.

  “Who’s going to say grace?” Marion asks as we finally sit down to eat. Her face clouds with worry. She smoothes the napkin in her lap over and over, as if the cloth won’t hold still. “Charlie?”

  There’s a moment of silence in which pained glances are exchanged across the table.

  Dad bows his head. “Whoever you are up there, thank you for this wonderful meal and for bringing us together—”

  “Amen!” Jasper says.

  I don’t think Dad was finished, but he looks relieved. We begin passing the platters and bowls and tureens of food.

  “Look at this,” Jill says of Marion’s yam puff, which is cobbled with a coating of golden brown marshmallows.

  “That’s Drew’s stuffing with chestnuts,” I explain, “and that’s Crystal’s with white bread, and Marion’s with sausage.”

  “Wow! Thank you,” Drew says with a nasally twang, cradling a cup of hot tea in his hand
s.

  “Where’s my customized stuffing?” Ruth asks loudly. “You know how I like mine with oysters and prawns.” Missy and Mark have clearly ruined the day for her.

  Crystal giggles. She looks up to Ruth when Ruth’s in smart-ass mode.

  Jill fusses over Simone, buttering her roll and cutting her turkey into teeny pieces.

  “Now what do you do?” Marion asks, turning to Jasper, who’s seated beside her. She sets her fork on her plate, brings two polished fingertips demurely to her lips, and bats her eyelashes. I wish I could have told her ten months ago that she’d be flirting with a guy who collects cans for a living.

  “Sell real estate,” Jasper tells her. “Mostly commercial.” His gray hair is parted neatly in the middle and greased down a bit in two flat sheets.

  “Oh,” Marion coos. “Real estate.”

  I look at Ruth, who knows from what I’ve told her that Jasper used to sell life insurance but hasn’t worked for years.

  “Big stuff,” Jasper continues. “Stores, office buildings, supermarkets.” He takes a bite of turkey.

  “My,” Marion says, splaying a hand across his sleeve. As far as I know, she’s never dated anyone since Charlie died. There was a man who played the cello in the San Jose Symphony, but they seemed to be just friends, meeting for coffee on Sunday afternoons.

  “Don’t you usually lease commercial real estate?” Dad asks. “Rather than selling it?”

  “Exactly,” Jasper says, leaning over the table and pointing at Dad as though he’d just solved a great puzzle.

  “Sophie has a commercial lease,” Crystal says proudly.

  “Before that I was an inventor,” Jasper says, herding peas to the edge of his plate.

  “What did you invent?” Drew asks him.

  “Nondairy creamer.”

  “Gross!” Crystal says.

  “Well, I like it,” Jill says. “You know, in a pinch.”

  “I must have gone through a case in college,” Ruth tells Jasper. She isn’t really touching her food, focusing instead on her wine.