by Peggy Webb
“It’s not like you to give up.”
“Who said I’m giving up? I’m just shifting gears, that’s all.”
Thinking about the changes I’ve made and all the ones I want to make, I’m suddenly seized by inspiration.
“I want you to cut my hair, Jane. And dye it red.”
“I haven’t done hair since college.” She put herself through school working in an on-campus salon. “What if it comes out looking like a buzzard’s butt?”
“Then it will be an improvement.”
Our project requires a whirlwind trip to Walgreen’s for Lady Clairol, then lots of towels, sticky buns and giggling. By lunchtime I’m viewing the results in the mirror—a flaming red pixie cut that suits my face as well as my newly acquired image, Elizabeth Holt Martin, a woman going places.
Now, if only I can decide which direction to go…
“You look ten years younger,” Jane says.
“Do you think Howard will like it?”
“He’s crazy if he doesn’t.”
The changes I’ve made so far are all cosmetic, but as I walk across the stretch of lawn that divides our houses, I feel a surge of hope. If I can change the externals, surely I can change the internals, the things that really matter.
I’m trying to decide whether to call Kate or just go over, when the doorbell rings. Standing on my front steps is a dowdy woman with ugly brown shoes and a starched hairdo that looks as if it wouldn’t move in fifty-mile-an-hour winds. She introduces herself as Letitia Johnson from Beautiful Home Designs.
“I’m here to redecorate,” she says.
“I’m sorry. You must have the wrong house.”
She consults her notes and the brass numbers beside my front door, then nods and gives a self-satisfied smile.
“Didn’t Dr. Martin tell you? He wants me to redo your entire house.”
This is exactly the kind of thing Howard would do—hire somebody else to fix whatever he thinks is wrong. Why can’t he get personally involved in our lives?
“I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time, but I don’t need your services.”
“Oh, but you haven’t seen my swatches. Dr. Martin’s receptionist said he wanted conservative, and I thought something in a nice scheme of blue and beige.”
I swing open the door and she sees the long expanse of hallway leading into the great room.
“Oh…well, we could change that blue to green and perhaps warm up the beige a bit, and with new cushions and draperies everything would be just like new.”
“No, it would be just like the old, except with a fresh coat of paint.”
“Pardon?”
“I’m sorry. None of this is your fault. I’ve changed my mind about decorating, but I’m sure Howard will pay you for your time.”
As Letitia heads down my sidewalk with her boring color schemes and bland ideas, I feel as if I’m caught up in the same old song and dance, a marriage that keeps spinning around to a tune that never changes. If I want something, Howard pulls out his checkbook and buys it. If he wants something, he never says and I never ask. We’re moving on automatic, keeping time to the same “Skater’s Waltz” when we ought to be jiving and rocking to “Jukebox Saturday Night.”
There was a time once—so long ago I hardly remember—when we talked of buying a small yacht and sailing around the world, taking a year off from everything and letting the wind take us to exotic adventures in faraway places. If we wanted to stop a spell in, say, Australia, we’d find temporary work and live like the natives. Then we’d sail away, revitalized, alive in ways we never could be if we’d remained in one place, landlocked and fearful.
We never did sail away. We never took a cruise. We never even took a detour.
Once when the girls were small and we’d driven to Disney World in Orlando, I suggested we come back through Atlanta and tour Six Flags, but Howard said we’d better stick to our plan, that he had the map already marked.
Last Christmas in a last-ditch effort for adventure, I got a brochure that featured a luxury cruise to the Bahamas, but Howard said he was too busy, and that I’d get homesick for Bonnie if I stayed away two weeks.
Well, I’ve proved him wrong. Sure, I got a little homesick while I was in Florida, but I didn’t scuttle home in a weeping heap. I carried on.
Isn’t that something to be proud of? Isn’t it proof that I have the courage to turn over a new leaf? The only problem is, I don’t know which leaf to turn over.
All this soul-searching is giving me a headache. I go into the bathroom to get a cold cloth and almost jump out of my skin. The redhead staring back at me looks like somebody I don’t even know, a feisty woman ready to take on the world.
I turn this way and that, fluffing my hair and feeling a redhead’s piss and vinegar flowing through my veins. Suddenly, I’m racing toward my car. Of course, I don’t have to call ahead to visit my own daughter. I hardly ever do. Why should I start now?
By the time I’ve parked the car, Kate’s already on the front porch. A good sign, I think.
“Goodness gracious…Mom…” She hangs back like a shy child afraid to ask for cookies. “What have you done to yourself?”
“This is the new me.”
“There was nothing wrong with the old you.”
“You think not?”
She’s hanging on to the doorknob and I’m clinging to the porch railing, both of us trying to figure out how to navigate the distance that separates us. Finally she swings the front door open.
“Come on in. Bonnie’s napping, but I’ll pour us some tea and we can talk.”
She precedes me, plucking Bonnie’s stuffed bear off the sofa, plumping the cushions that don’t need it, straightening a stack of magazines that are already perfect.
“You’ll have to excuse the mess. I haven’t had time to dust and vacuum today. I’ve been making cupcakes for Rick’s office staff.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“A big law firm like that surely has a budget for snacks.”
“Rick likes to take homemade. They’re much better.”
“Then why doesn’t he spend some time with you and Bonnie making cookies and cupcakes instead of going off to golf every single Sunday afternoon?”
Instead of answering she vanishes into the kitchen and returns with two china cups of perfectly brewed hot tea served with silver spoons and real cloth napkins.
“I mean it, Kate. I don’t want to see you making the same mistakes I did.”
She sips her tea and then sets it on the coffee table and races off to get a sponge where it sloshed over. I’ve never seen her this nervous, this uncertain.
Leaving my chair I take the sponge before giving her hand a quick squeeze.
“Kate, quit fooling with that housekeeping shit and sit down.”
“Mother!”
“I mean it. I’ve spent all my life trying to shape myself into the square box I was in, and it breaks my heart to see you doing the same thing.”
She sinks into the sofa cushions, suddenly so boneless she looks as if she’s disappearing into the plaid.
“I always thought you were perfect. I wanted to be just like you.”
Now I’m the one shocked into silence. All those years wasted, I think. All those times I thought Howard was her hero, Kate was watching me, planning how she would imitate me.
But she used the past tense, so obviously I’m no longer perfect in her eyes. I have to make her see the truth.
“Kate, I was never perfect. I was just an ordinary woman coping. I left to change the landscape.”
“Well, Florida is certainly that.”
“I meant the internal landscape.”
“Couldn’t you have talked it over with Daddy first? That’s what I would do with Rick.”
“Maybe I was wrong about that. But he was so busy I thought he didn’t care.”
“You think he didn’t? Why, he nearly cried sometimes when he talked about you.”
“Thank you, honey.”
“For what?”
“You’ve given me hope.” Sipping my tea, I watch Kate’s keen mind process this information. “Everybody needs hope, but sometimes we have to make brave and scary choices to make wonderful things happen.”
I get up and hug her, really hug her.
“Please think about what I said, Kate.”
Going down the steps I realize I didn’t say everything I needed to or should have. Rick is only the tip of the iceberg. The real heart of the matter lies in all those childhood years when I stood back and let Howard take over Kate’s upbringing, and maybe that’s why she merely went through the motions when she hugged me back.
The car has been sitting in the sun, and everything is too hot to touch—a metaphor for my life. The list of hands-off things ranges from sex to past mistakes.
“It’ll take time, that’s all,” I tell myself, and then I head toward Emmaline’s store, Delicious Designs & More, and the two of us spend a giddy hour imagining the varying shades of purple on my bedroom wall.
“Good God!”
Howard’s disbelieving tone nearly topples me from the ladder.
“I didn’t hear you come in.”
Obviously shock has rendered him speechless, because Howard just stands there glancing from my hair to the bedroom walls and back.
“What have you done?”
He sounds just like Kate, and it strikes me that I didn’t try hard enough with my older daughter, that I sat back in a newly married stupor and squelched my wild impulses while Howard turned her into the only three-year-old spinster on the block.
“You said you didn’t want purple, so I got American Beauty Rose.”
“I thought the interior decorator was coming.”
“I sent her screaming back to the little square gray box she came from.”
His shoulders sag, and all of a sudden I realize that Howard and I don’t have a thing in common anymore. Maybe we never did. Maybe his early gallantry made me believe that he was my knight in shining armor and that I was the kind of woman who would always need rescuing.
“You didn’t say a thing about my new hairdo.” I run my fingers through it, purposely forcing the top into outrageous spikes.
“I liked it the old way.”
“That’s part of our trouble, Howard. You like everything the old way.”
We stare at each other across a wrecked bedroom. Was it mere coincidence that I started painting here, or was it an unconscious desire to make this room uninhabitable, unable to accommodate two people who can no longer find their way across the bed?
There are a number of things I could say to end this impasse—How was your day? Do you want a drink?—but I don’t. The ball’s in Howard’s court, and I’m waiting for his next move. Will he go for the goal this time?
“What’s for dinner?”
I’m so sick of that question I could croak. I’ve heard it a million times, two million, three. It seems to be the overriding question in my marriage.
Instead of dignifying it with an answer, I climb back onto the ladder and swab vibrant paths of color across the drab walls while Pavarotti croons “Che gelida manina,” from Puccini’s La Boheme. I wish I’d turned the volume up loud enough to rattle the china. I wish I had it loud enough to create a seismic disturbance. I wish anything except to be here in the disquiet of this room with Howard staring at my back.
The ringing of the phone slices the silence, and I pause with my roller brush in the air while Howard says, “Hello.”
Then, “Slow down, Jenny. Are you okay?”
I’m off the ladder, across the room and jerking up the extension in the bathroom. The connection is filled with static, but I can hear enough to know that she’s more than okay; she’s excited.
“Fine,” she says. “In fact, I couldn’t be better.”
“Hey, baby,” I tell her.
“Mom! When did you get home?”
Years ago. Decades ago. In fact, I never left.
“Yesterday,” I tell her.
“Great, Mom. Then you can pack some of my things and send them to me.”
“What are you talking about?” Howard says.
“I’m staying in Sedona, Daddy. With Dean and his aunt Angel. She has the neatest house. It’s on the side of these beautiful red cliffs overlooking the city, and I’ve got this great job as a waitress.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind, young lady,” Howard snaps.
“But, Daddy…”
“You’ll get on the next bus and come home.”
“Howard, let’s hear what Jenny has to say first.”
“You stay out of this, Elizabeth. She wouldn’t be out there in the first place if you hadn’t taken her side.”
“This is not about taking sides. It’s about Jenny’s future.”
“What kind of future does she have shacking up with that Clark boy?”
“Good grief,” Jenny says. “I’m out of here.”
“No,” I yell. “Wait.”
But my daughter is already off the phone. I storm out of the bathroom so mad I want to turn the paint bucket over Howard’s head.
“Now see what you’ve done,” I say. “She’s just trying out her wings.”
“It’s not her wings I’m worried about. Tomorrow after lunch, I’m heading west to bring her home.”
“Not without me, you won’t”
“Fine. If you want to come, you can. But I’m warning you, Elizabeth. She’s coming home to attend school in the fall, and that’s that.”
He marches toward the door, but wheels around for one last directive.
“We’ll leave after lunch. I’ll keep my morning appointments and have Lucille reschedule the rest. Before you pack, make sure my blue shirt and my shorts are clean.”
I shoot him the finger behind his back, and then slam and lock the door.
“We’ll just see about all that,” I mutter, rummaging around the paint paraphernalia till I find my cell phone. After I punch in the number, it rings and rings, but Jenny never answers.
Who can blame her?
I’m going to kill Howard.
CHAPTER 14
“If it’s raining, why don’t I have an umbrella?”
—Kate
Here I am with dinner on the table, candles lit, one cupcake by each plate, the rest on a paper platter under plastic wrap, and not a sign of Rick. Not even a phone call. The clock’s inching toward seven and he said he’d be home at six.
I fed Bonnie at five-thirty and if I don’t get started with her bath and bedtime story, it will be nine o’clock before I get her into bed and she’ll be cranky all day tomorrow.
“Come on, punkin’. Bath time.”
The way my luck’s running Rick will come home when I’m up to my elbows in Big Bird bubble bath and I’ll look like something the cat left over.
I hate schedules that go awry and plans that don’t pan out. It leaves me feeling as if I’ve been caught with my thumb up my nose and my brain at half-mast.
That’s exactly the way I felt today with Mom’s unexpected visit. Not that I wasn’t glad to see her. I always am. Still, I didn’t expect her to dig around in my marriage and unearth discontent.
And I certainly didn’t expect confessions of inadequacy from her.
It’s my vision of Mom as the perfect wife and mother that has kept me content to stay home and take care of Bonnie and Rick instead of doing something to satisfy my creative urges. To be honest, though, Mom’s not the entire reason. I love Rick and want the same thing every woman dreams of: a happy home and a loving partner who makes everything else in life seem worthwhile.
Today Mom shattered any lingering illusions of herself as the role model of marital contentment. All thos
e years I strived to get the attention of this goddess of home and family, all those years I viewed her as an icon of perfection just beyond my reach…gone. Wiped out in a searing moment of truth.
Now I’m kneeling in a puddle of sloshed-out bathwater, wishing I could shut my eyes and wake up to discover spring was just starting and Mom had never left.
She called change scary, and it is. I don’t want to be scared. I just want things to be the way they used to be.
I want my heroes back. I want Mom planning the Fourth of July picnic and I want Rick whistling through the house, saying, “I’m home.”
If he was going to be late for dinner, why didn’t he call? And if he’s in the middle of a big meeting, why didn’t he have his secretary call?
It’s common courtesy. Especially to a wife.
Make that a very wet wife because Bonnie decided to a dive into the bathwater and be a dancing mermaid, and now I have bubbles dripping off my hair and into my eyes.
“Okay, Bonnie. Enough of that. Settle down.”
I’m reaching blindly for the towel when the phone rings. Well, let it. Only a complete fool would leave a three-year-old in the tub to answer the phone, even if it’s the president of the United States on the line.
While I’m bundling Bonnie in a towel, Rick’s voice comes over the answering machine.
“Sorry I missed dinner. Something important came up.”
More important than a wife?
“I’ll be working until about nine. Keep my dinner warm.”
What about me? Don’t I rate higher than roast beef?
“Oh, and don’t forget the cupcakes. Everybody’s looking forward to them. They know what a great cook my wife is.”
Is that what my greatest achievement of the day is? A plateful of really good cupcakes?
A line from Mom’s letter to Dad plays through my mind: I don’t want the most important thing I do all day to be making sure the toilet paper rolls out because that’s the way you like it.
Still thinking about her letter, I put Bonnie to bed, then go into the kitchen and eat roast beef, the fat already congealing on the top. I’m getting up to put Rick’s in the warmer when a thought sinks me to my chair. Why did I eat mine cold? Why didn’t I warm up my own supper?
