by Karen Brown
Del didn’t have a cell phone, and I didn’t know the town well enough to find her, although I could guess where she’d gone with the driver of the Firebird—some unmarked road leading to a lakeside, or up a rutted, abandoned cart path to some dark field to have sex. I could only hope that Randy was, as Geoff suggested, “a good sort,” and I gave up, finally, and found the main road out of the village, following Geoff’s directions back through the empty stretch of open land, past the garden store with its sheds for sale, its lawn statuary, its jewel-colored globes shimmering. Del wasn’t an innocent. She always went after what she wanted, while I waited behind, the cautious bystander, embarrassed by the virginity I kept a careful secret. “Sister,” Del would call me, after our great-aunt, and it annoyed me just to think about her saying it.
At my apartment I parked in front of the house, half-expecting Mary Rae to be standing under the elm, but the street was quiet, save a few bands of older trick-or-treaters who probably were planning some mischief. I had hoped to find Del at home, and the porch light was on, but the house rose, hulking and unfathomable over me, its windows all dark. I climbed the staircase and put the car keys under Geoff’s mat. Suzie, on the other side of Geoff’s door, poked her nose at the bottom, sniffing me out. My sweatshirt hadn’t been warm enough, and I was chilled. Inside my apartment I turned on the lamp, put on my warm coat, and lay down on the bed. We’d stopped folding it up every morning, and it had become a landing place for books and bags, a place where we lounged to read or talk. I must have fallen asleep, and I awoke when my cell rang. I answered expecting Del—a plea to come pick her up back at the party or at the local Viking Lanes. Instead, William’s voice filled the apartment, clear and deep.
“Is that you, Martha?” he said.
I sat upright, nervously, his voice ringing out of the phone as if he were beside me. “It’s you,” I said.
He laughed. “Yes, William, from the party.”
He said he was sorry for calling so late, and although I had no idea what time it was, I suspected it must have been past midnight. Del wasn’t home yet, and I was relieved to have the place to myself to talk. William said he was a bit of an insomniac, and he was going to try to wait until morning to call, but there wasn’t anything else of equal importance to do until then. He felt we were connected somehow—though he wasn’t sure why he felt it. My head swam, the confession so intimate I didn’t know what to say back. I couldn’t let silence be my only reply.
“Maybe there is something unexplainable at work,” I said, and instantly regretted it. “I’m just kidding,” I said, which was just as bad.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m not suggesting anything otherworldly.”
I leaned back onto the pillows on my bed. I didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs, but Del burst into the room.
“It’s snowing!” she said.
Out the window, in the streetlight, snow was whitening the branches of the elm. I was so unnerved by William’s call, I didn’t care where Del had been, what she’d done. I kept seeing his eyes on me at the party, and the way his cheeks reddened from the cold.
“Who is ‘D’?” he wanted to know. “And are you ‘M’?”
He was reading off the scorecard, where my sisters and I put our initials. My older sisters and I were competitive miniature golfers and played with our father on a course near his ranch house every summer. I told him I was “M,” the one with two holes-in-one. I didn’t say that “D” was for “Daddy” and not “Del,” who had always refused to play.
Del had turned on the TV and made hot chocolate spiked with Kahlúa. She sat a few feet away from me, shushing me every so often so she could hear, dropping handfuls of candy corn onto the bed for me. I told William I was an art major, and then I told him about my Women and Grief course.
“We listen to tapes of keening women from Ireland and Greece,” I said. “I can barely stand it.”
“I can understand why,” he said.
I tried to explain how it was so awful I wanted to laugh, and how hard it was not to. At that point, Del gave me a look. “My sister says I’m crazy,” I said.
“You’re interesting,” he said.
He said he, too, was an artist, and he taught at the university. A photographer. “Like you,” he said. He’d heard of my work—abandoned places, landscapes—from another professor. I asked him who, surprised, and he brushed this off. “Just another professor in the department.” I didn’t want to seem as if I was encouraging him to gossip, so I let it go.
“I’m just an adjunct,” he said. “I’m hoping to find something more permanent.”
I asked him what his work was like, and he said he’d been inspired by Ted Spagna’s sleep studies. “Something like that,” he said.
All very vague, but at the time his hedging and easy side-stepping hadn’t been obvious to me. I would push him away, ruin it, if I was too inquisitive, but it was difficult to negotiate closeness over the telephone. I was struck, then, that this was something out of the ordinary—a man calling me up in the middle of the night to talk.
“Why abandoned places?” he asked.
I could make out his breathing on the other end, waiting.
“You’ll have to see for yourself,” I said.
Below my window, beneath the elm, Mary Rae waited, though for what I hadn’t yet decided. I wondered how well William had known her, and then decided it was wrong, at this point, to bring her up.
“The places must seem like the women on the tapes,” he said.
“Yes, keening,” I said. We were both quiet for a moment, deciding what to say next.
Del turned off the television and stood in the center of the room. She, too, had put on her coat, and I made a mental note to ask Geoff about the heat.
“Let’s call it a night,” she said.
“It is three a.m.,” William said. He’d heard Del, and it rankled that somehow she had become part of our conversation. “I have class tomorrow. Do you?”
“No,” I said, though I did. I wasn’t ready to run into him in person on campus, to have him take my arm again and lead me into the Green Dragon for coffee. Talking to him had filled me with some sense of promise that I might become someone other than myself, and I wanted time to fashion this person. When I hung up the phone Del came out of the bathroom in a T-shirt, and slipped quickly under the sheets of the bed. We had a few blankets, including the afghan my grandmother had crocheted for me, and she pulled them all up. Beneath the covers I could feel her shivering. She smelled of cigarettes, and a cologne that must have been worn by the Firebird guy.
“That was him, wasn’t it?” she said. “The weirdo from the party?”
“He’s an artist,” I said, sounding like Charles Wu. “Besides, a Firebird? Really?”
I could tell Del was falling asleep. “He had on a leather jacket,” she said. “A 1950s hoodlum jacket.”
“What was his name?” I said.
“Don’t know,” Del mumbled.
“Randy,” I told her. “Geoff said his name was Randy.”
“Are you sure he didn’t say he was randy?” Del said.
“No, he said he was a good sort,” I said.
“It’s snowing,” she said, and fell quickly asleep.
10
William called every day that week. We learned how to interpret each other’s silences, which direction to take our resumed words—back to our childhoods, or simply to daily occurrences to fill the spaces in our conversations.
“I slipped off the steps of my porch today,” I said. Then I worried he would think me ungraceful or foolish.
“She fell arse over tit!” Del cried out so William could hear. She was imitating Geoff, something she’d begun doing unconsciously, without any malice.
“Oh God, Martha. Are you all right?” William asked, and I was touched by the caring in his voice and by the sound of him speaking my name.
He invited me to one of his classes, but I had a class of my own at the same time,
so I left mine a little early and stood outside his door. The inside of the classroom was dark—the lights were off, and he had a slide up on a screen, an Edward Weston nude. He was talking about the work, his voice different than the one I’d become accustomed to on the phone—not its sound, but its tone, more goading. The students’ replies were soft and tentative, as if they were a little afraid of him. Did I know the man in the room at all? Before the class let out I left. I worried about his calling me that night. How would I react? But when he did call, he was the same as always, and I relaxed.
By then our talking had become spotted with whispered intimations—things taking on a double meaning, the equivalent of him pressing his thigh against mine under a dinner-party table.
“Anne is right,” he said. “You’d be a perfect subject.”
It had been a Wednesday evening, two weeks after we’d met.
“Do you even remember what I look like?” I stood in front of the mirror by the door and looked at myself talking on the phone as if I were someone I didn’t know. Had he overheard Anne mention wanting to paint me? Or had he spoken to her about me?
“You had a few buttons undone on your blouse,” he said.
“Could you see anything?”
“Do you want to know if I was looking?”
“Obviously you were looking.” I was not at all bothered by his looking.
He told me after classes that day he’d gone out for a walk, and had crossed a brook, and had found that the stones at the bottom were the same color as my eyes.
“I could be wrong,” he said. “It was such a brief meeting.”
He said we should have the predicted coffee somewhere, or lunch, if I wanted. But I was imagining something else. The old rules didn’t seem to apply to us—all that holding out interminably, waiting for something to be proven. I had no reason to dicker with my body. I’d done that enough with boys at home—pushing them away after a kiss good night, expecting more from them—a dinner date, an afternoon watching old movies, a gift or two—before I gave more. I wasn’t sure why I’d behaved the way I had, why I’d refused them all. Even poor Charles Wu. I was determined to overcome my hesitation. William was, after all, a professor who found me interesting, and I had heard yearning in his voice. I invited him to come to my apartment. There was an awful halting silence, the kind that is so long you worry the other person has been disconnected. But then his voice sounded in agreement, and I forgot completely about what his indecision might have been.
During all of this Del had refused to return to the manor. Our mother called and lectured me about keeping Del in my apartment. She bought an airline ticket for Del to go back. “We worked hard to get her in that place. Your father pulled strings,” she said. “She’s going to lose her spot. And then where will she be? A homeless person.”
Our mother, in that big empty house. I wondered if both Del and I were banned from returning home—if we could even view the old house as home anymore.
A week after the party at Anne’s, I had talked to Del about going back. It was a Saturday, and we walked through the slush from my apartment to the bakery, and we went inside for éclairs and coffee.
“Don’t you miss your boyfriend?” I asked her. We’d taken a round café table in the corner by the window, and Del flipped through the newspaper someone had left behind.
“No,” she said. “He’s not my boyfriend anymore.”
I thought about the Firebird guy, Randy, but decided not to mention him. I didn’t know if Del had continued to see him. Often when I left for class she’d be asleep, and when I returned the apartment was empty, and she’d be gone for hours. If I questioned her she only half-answered, and William would call, and I’d get distracted. I hoped she hadn’t been visiting Sybil Townsend in the encampment. I’d made it clear that she shouldn’t go back there, that it wasn’t the best thing for her. Some days I’d get out of class and she’d be waiting for me on campus.
“Surprise!” she’d say. Her roots had begun to grow out—her true blond showing through, and she often looked out of place in her faded purple parka. Students passing her would eye her, though Del never seemed to notice or care.
“We need to get you a new coat,” I said.
That day in the bakery she had on a dark green wool duffle coat she claimed one of her Milton friends had given her. “You remember Alice, right?”
She tore sugar packets and dumped the crystals into her coffee. The shop window steamed up behind her, the people beyond it on the sidewalk blurred shapes trundling past.
“How do you get to Milton?” I asked her.
“The bus?” she said. She raised the large mug up toward her face. “Or someone picks me up.”
In my preoccupation with William I’d lost track of Del. I pushed her éclair on its china plate toward her.
“It’s a nice coat,” I said.
“It’s Mary Rae’s,” Del said. “She left it at Alice’s house.”
She set her coffee down and picked up her éclair. At the table next to us a man blew his nose, and she set the éclair back on the plate without taking a bite. I’d never thought she’d wear a dead girl’s coat, though there wasn’t any proof yet that Mary Rae was dead.
“Well,” I said. “It’s warm and new-looking.”
“There’s nothing in the pockets. No clues. I checked.”
I sorted through the sugar packets spread on the tabletop. “That’s a relief.”
“We want to find out what happened to her,” Del said.
I lifted my cup to my mouth and the coffee was bitter and hot. Del had used all of the sugar.
“You know, all of us,” she said. “The girls in Milton, and Anne.”
The bell on the door rang as people came in—husbands and wives with small children for doughnuts, couples with their arms linked.
“What about your friends in Connecticut?” I said.
“I should just stay here. I can get a job,” she said, her voice sounding almost plaintive. Del, as far as I knew, had never held a job before. The cars sped past us in the new slush, their tires wet and churning. I wondered if life at the Manor was dispiriting and lonely. Once, I’d driven by the place—an old house with a porch and a newer addition with large plate-glass windows where everyone gathered for Ping-Pong. Del twirled her hair. She told me she could stay with Sybil in the encampment.
“I don’t think that’s an option,” I said.
“Or with Alice. She lives with her grandmother, though. Her mother might move back from Florida and then I’d be in her room—sort of awkward.”
Del told me the whole story about Alice and her mother, whose name was once Hester, and who’d changed it when she turned eighteen to Erika. Alice’s mother had moved to Florida when Alice was little, and she arrived home every so often to “recharge.” Erika had a tan, and long, dark hair, and wore beautiful clothes that made her seem like a bright bird against the backdrop of gloomy Milton. Summers, she set up lounge chairs in the backyard and she and Alice spent hours there sunbathing, planning when Alice would move to Florida with her, planning the name Alice would change hers to when she turned eighteen: Vanessa, Brooke, Tiffany.
“But Alice never changed her name?” I said.
“I guess not.”
Then, with a mischievous look, Del confessed that Professor McCall, who lived downstairs next to Professor Whitman, had gone out of town on leave and was looking for someone to sublet her apartment. Geoff had told her this.
“But you’d have to talk Mother into it,” she said.
My immediate reaction was irritation that Geoff hadn’t consulted me first. But I knew he saw Del as an independent adult.
“When did Geoff tell you this?”
Del spun her coffee cup in circles on the tabletop. “He saw me yesterday and he told me about the professor. She’d left to take care of her sick mother in California.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted Del so close by, but I couldn’t have her living in some encampment with a self-proclai
med medium named Sybil. She picked at the chocolate on her éclair and stared out the window.
“You’ll have to talk Mother into it,” I said.
Del wore her sly look.
“Well, she’s a big pushover,” she said. In our childhood years, our mother had relegated Del to my care. “Watch out for your sister,” she would remind me. “Include your sister,” she’d say when I had friends over swimming, or if I went bike riding into town. To my mother Del was always in need of watching, and part of my job had been to pretend that was true, to hide the fact that Del had been off on her own for years, doing whatever she wanted to do, and keeping much of it a secret.
The day Del was admitted to the Institute had been a dreary November one, wet and cold. I was a senior in high school. My friend Jane Roberts was driving me home from school, and we passed Del walking up the street in that same awful purple parka she’d shown up wearing in Ithaca, her hair and pants legs blowing back, the fallen leaves eddying around her feet. On her face was a look of purposeful concentration. Jane slowed, but I told her to keep going, and she drove up the hill to my house, and I got out. My mother was in the doorway wearing her cashmere car coat as if she were heading out to the store. My father’s car was there as well, which was unusual. After their divorce we rarely saw our parents in close proximity to each other, and our father never came to the old house. But that day he was there in the driveway, sitting in his new BMW with the engine running.
I’d heard our mother talking to our grandmother, and talking on the phone, endless days of consulting friends and doctors—a threat to herself or others, she’d said. So far, she’d been told that walking around town and refusing to bathe didn’t merit the kind of help Del needed. But I understood someone had “pulled strings,” and I saw what Del was walking into that day, and I let her walk.
