by Cyndi Myers
Alice laughed. “You should have seen me. All bony elbows and knees and stick-straight hair. I wore a white eyelet peasant dress to my wedding. Bobby wore a baby-blue tuxedo. I still wince at my horrible fashion sense when I see the pictures.”
“I bet you were a beautiful bride,” I said. “All brides are.”
“Yes, well, I suppose it could have been worse. We both fancied ourselves sort of hippies. We threatened to get married on the beach, barefoot, before my mother put a stop to it.”
“Why did you pick Amish country for your honeymoon?”
“Like I said, we were into all this natural, back-to-the-land living. We dreamed about building our own cabin in the woods, growing our own food and living happily ever after with no artificial preservatives or corporate claptrap. The Amish seemed like good role models, and Pennsylvania was close enough we could drive there, and we could afford a cheap room.”
I studied Alice’s chic haircut and multiple pierced ears. “I’m trying to picture you as a granola girl,” I said.
She laughed, that wonderful throaty laugh of hers. “I was! I was going to bake my own bread, sew my own clothes and raise chickens and goats and children.”
It sounded like hell to me, but then I’ve never been overly domestic. “What was Bobby going to do while you were the domestic goddess?”
“Work for Markson’s, what else? It’s what half the boys who graduated from Ridgeway High School did in those days. But in the back of our heads we figured he’d eventually be able to quit his job and settle down with me on the homestead, selling handmade furniture or pottery or something like that.”
I was fascinated by this glimpse of my friend that I’d never known. “So how did that work out for you?”
Her laugh was more of a snort this time. “I was a horrible baker, I couldn’t sew a straight line to save my life, and I’d much rather sit on the porch and read novels all day than dig in the garden or clean up after chickens.” She glanced at me. “The Amish make it look easy, but they’ve been trained since birth, plus they all have a houseful of children and relatives to help.”
“How did you end up in California?”
“Bobby had a cousin who worked for Widder Enterprises in Ojai. It was a good job, making real money. We shed our hippie threads faster than you could say ‘Neiman Marcus charge card’ and became Silicon Valley yuppies.” She laughed. “Instead of baking my own bread, I hired a housekeeper and a cook. Bobby traded in his work shirts for three-piece suits and bought a sports car. We were living high on the hog back then.”
She put on her blinker and moved into the right lane and nodded at a billboard up ahead that advertised a local smoke-house. “Speaking of hog, why don’t we get some barbecue for lunch. A pulled pork sandwich sounds so good right now.”
I pretended not to notice the quick change of subject. Maybe Alice really was hungry. Or maybe she didn’t want to talk about her first marriage anymore. I wasn’t about to pry.
“Sure. Barbecue sounds good.” Food was a safe enough topic of conversation. Neutral and not loaded with emotional minefields. Chocolate brownies or French fries are always so much easier to deal with than things like fears or hurts or our real motivations behind the choices we make.
When Alice had asked me to travel with her to Ojai, I’d immediately begun building a fantasy of two carefree pals seeking fun and adventure as they traveled cross-country. Female bonding and empowerment on the open road. We’d sing along with the radio, while away the hours remembering all the great times we’d had together as kids and stop at every tourist trap and souvenir stand on the way. It would be the kind of vacation celebrated in the movies, a time we would remember fondly in our old age.
By the time we pulled into Lancaster that afternoon I’d begun to deal with the reality that two middle-aged women in a moving truck were not exactly an updated version of Thelma and Louise. A giant orange-and-white truck doesn’t have the same cool factor as a red convertible. Neither Alice nor I could carry a tune or remember the words to songs on the radio. You can only talk about the past so long before it begins to sound a little desperate. The souvenir stands and tourist traps had been replaced by McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. And after eight hours of staring out the windshield I was positive no one would mistake me for Susan Sarandon.
Still, for a gal who hadn’t traveled much, I was having fun. Amish country was exactly as I’d always pictured it—black horse-drawn buggies plodding along in the slow lane, women in bonnets and aprons selling fresh produce and colorful quilts from the front porches of neat white frame farmhouses and barefoot children in old-fashioned clothes playing in the fields.
Everything looked like a picture postcard, and many of the businesses continued the Amish theme. Farmer John Real Estate, Plain and Fancy Farm Restaurant, Countryside Apartments.
“It’s more like a theme park than a town,” I said as Alice maneuvered the truck across four spaces in the back lot of the Lancaster Econo Lodge.
“I think that’s why I liked it so much when I was here on my honeymoon,” she said. “It was Williamsburg without the boring guides.”
We ate dinner at a farmhouse-themed restaurant. A strapping German waitress who had probably never bothered to count a calorie in her life brought out steaming bowls of mashed potatoes, beans, country ham and sausage, sauerkraut, creamed corn and a whole loaf of homemade bread. My mouth watered, but I resolutely allowed myself tiny helpings of the least-fattening choices.
I noticed Alice didn’t eat much, either. “Don’t hold back on my account,” I told her.
“Oh, it’s not you.” She laid her fork across her half-full plate and pushed it away. “I still don’t have my appetite back from the chemo.”
“How long has it been?” I asked. For some reason—maybe her hair—I’d assumed Alice had completed her treatments months, maybe even a year or more, ago.
“About three months now.” She sat up straighter. “But I’m doing great. And I’d be a fool to complain about losing the urge to overeat.”
“Yeah.” Twisted as it is, I could see the positives in her situation. When I was the most depressed about being fat, I used to fantasize about developing some mysterious but nonfatal illness that would cause the excess pounds just to melt away.
How many times have you heard someone—almost always a woman—say something like “Yeah, I puked up my guts for three days with the flu. But the good news is, I lost five pounds.”
No telling what our waitress thought about all the food we left uneaten, but we left her a big tip and walked back to the motel. We’d rented a room with two double beds to save money.
Alice kicked off her shoes and crawled onto the bed closest to the door. “When Bobby and I were here, we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast,” she said. “The Farmhouse Inn or something. It really was a room in someone’s farmhouse.” She giggled. “We had to show them our marriage license to prove we really were married.”
“Is the place still here?” I kicked off my own shoes and pulled my hair back into a ponytail.
“Who knows? I didn’t see the name in the tourist brochures I ordered.”
I lay down on the floor and began doing leg lifts.
“How can you do that on a full stomach?” Alice asked.
“Define full.” I rolled over onto my other side.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to exercise too close to bedtime.” She aimed the remote at the television and switched it on, but kept the sound muted.
I stared up at the image of a serious female news anchor narrating video showing a burning house. “I usually try to exercise earlier in the day, but some days that doesn’t happen.” I rolled onto my back, arms overhead, enjoying the stretch. “Better late than never.”
“I still can’t believe you lost a hundred pounds. That’s amazing.”
“It was the hardest thing I ever did.” I hugged my knees to my chest, stretching my lower back. “In fact, if I’d known just how hard it would be, I might not have e
ver started.”
“Not even knowing how great the results would be?” She stretched out on her stomach and looked over the edge of the bed at me. “I mean it. You look great.”
“Reasonably good with clothes on. Naked, my boobs are somewhere around my navel and my butt looks like a sharpei.” I began doing sit-ups, counting in my head, trying not to grunt with each lift.
Alice watched me for a while, silent. I was up to seventy-five when she spoke again. “Still, it must have felt fantastic when you met your goal,” she said.
I lay back, panting. When both my breathing and my heart rate had slowed a little, I said, “It did. But it was scary, too.”
“Change is scary.”
I hugged my arms across my chest. “I’d never been a normal size before—not since I was a little girl. I not only had to find a whole new wardrobe, I had to learn a different way of relating to people.”
“You mean people treated you differently once you were thinner?”
“I mean I acted different with them. I never realized before I lost the weight how much I used my fat as a shield. Now when people look at me, I feel as if they are seeing the real me—the one I’d been hiding. It was terrifying.”
Alice rolled over onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Neither of us said anything for a long while. The picture on the television switched to an ad for trucks. Brawny men in jeans and tight T-shirts raced big black trucks through mud puddles and over rocks.
“I really admire you,” Alice said, her voice thick. “Maybe having you along on this trip, some of your courage will rub off on me.”
“You don’t need my courage.” I sat up and looked at her. “You were never afraid of anything when we were girls.”
“I’m afraid now.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Do you believe in karma?”
A chill washed over me and I rubbed my arms. “Like things we did in some other life coming back to haunt us?”
“I’m talking about things we did in this life coming back to haunt us.” She sat up and pulled the bedspread around her, the quilted chintz billowing around her like a tacky hoop skirt.
I climbed up on the bed beside her. “I think,” I said slowly, “sometimes things just happen and there’s nothing we can do about them. Everybody makes mistakes. It’s part of being human.”
“But we can choose. And when we make the wrong choices, maybe we have to pay.” She watched me out of the corner of her eye, the way you watch a wild animal you know you can’t trust.
“I still don’t think you could have done anything that bad.” Even to me, the protest sounded weak. After all, a lot can happen in twenty years. The girl who’d been my friend possibly didn’t even exist anymore.
Alice smoothed both hands down the folds of bedspread that fanned out from her waist. “When I was twenty-nine, I met a man. A friend of Bobby’s. They played golf together sometimes, worked for the same company, though not in the same department. We met at some charity fundraiser or other. Bobby had begged off coming with me. I think he had to work. Anyway, I was there by myself and I met this man. Travis. The minute his eyes met mine and he smiled at me, it just took my breath away.”
She pressed her palm flat to her chest and her cheeks turned pink, as if even the memory of that evening made her heart beat faster. “It was electric. That’s such a romance-novel cliché, but it really was like sparks arcing between us.”
“You fell in love?”
She frowned. “That’s what I called it. I couldn’t seem to stop myself.” She held out her hands, palms up. “I don’t know if it was hormones or boredom or having married so young or some flaw in my character, but I saw him every chance I could. Soon I couldn’t bear to be away from him for even a few hours. I was reckless.”
“And Bobby found out?” I asked.
She nodded. “I think I knew in the back of my head I’d get caught, but I didn’t care. I think I wanted Bobby to find out. To force me to make a decision.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“He gave me an ultimatum. He told me I had to choose. I suppose he was sure I’d pick him, but I’d convinced myself I needed Travis more than I needed anything else in my life. So I left.”
“You left?” The words sounded so stark. So final.
She nodded. “I told him I’d sign whatever agreement he wanted and I left. Travis lost his job a few weeks after that. I’m sure Bobby had a hand in that. We moved to Chicago and two years later he left me for a woman he worked with.”
She bowed her head, tears making dark splotches on the bedspread.
I reached out and touched her arm. “How awful for you.”
She shook her head. “I remember thinking at the time that I’d gotten exactly what I deserved. As bitter as I felt at his betrayal, it was probably nothing compared to what Bobby must have gone through.”
“Did you try to go back to Bobby? To ask forgiveness?”
“I couldn’t.” The word was a whisper. She took a deep, shaky breath and offered me a too-bright smile. “Anyway, you see what I mean about karma. I figured I’d paid my debt when Travis left. That things were even. Later, when I found out I had cancer, I wondered if I was being punished further.”
“Alice, I don’t believe God punishes people like that.”
“No? But what if all that guilt I’d carried around all these years transformed into that tumor? Sort of a physical manifestation of the emotions that had been eating at me for years anyway.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said again. “If that were true, there would be even more sick people than there already are.”
“Maybe you’re right. But it’s worth thinking about.” She looked at me, calmer now. Almost serene even, the lines around her eyes and mouth smoothed out, some of the pain gone from her eyes. “It’s one reason I want to go back to California—to clear my conscience. No sense taking a chance on a recurrence of the tumor.”
“I’m glad you’re going back if you think it will help you feel better.” I patted her arm again. “And I’m glad I’m coming with you.”
“If nothing else, I figure this will be a fresh start,” she said. “It’s what I need.”
I could use a fresh start, too, I thought as I watched her untangle herself from the blankets and walk to the bathroom. Sure, I’d told myself I was flying back to Virginia to impress my old friends and reconnect with the man of my dreams, but would anyone who was truly satisfied with her life place much importance on either of those things?
The truth was, I was a thirty-eight-year-old single woman who had lived all her life within shouting distance of her older sister. I had a job that sounded exciting but really wasn’t, no truly close friends and a new body I didn’t know what to do with.
I wanted a different life from the one I had, even though I didn’t yet know how to define those dreams. But I had to start somewhere, and this seemed as good a place as any. I liked Alice’s idea of asking forgiveness and healing old wounds, even if the thought of figuring out which of my sins needed forgiving—and which wounds I needed to heal—made me a little queasy.
5
When Frannie and I first moved to Hollywood, we rented a tiny Airstream trailer in a mobile-home park within sight of the famous Hollywood sign. Frannie went to beauty school during the day and worked nights as a switchboard operator at MGM.
I went to school, came home and baked brownies and lay across my bed, making halfhearted attempts to do my homework. Mostly what I did was daydream.
In my fantasies, I took glamorous trips around the world, often in the company of handsome men or with groups of friends—both things were noticeably absent from my life in those days.
Frannie was never part of those dream trips. How ironic that I waited another twenty-two years to actually go anywhere without her.
True, I wasn’t in Morocco or Luxembourg, and there were no rich, dashing men in sight, but Alice and Amish country offered the same escape I’d craved all
those years ago. I figured I was starting small. This year, Pennsylvania. Next year, Paris!
After breakfast the following morning Alice decided she wanted to try to find the place where she’d spent her honeymoon. “I think I remember the road it was on,” she said. “I want to see if the house is still there.”
We set out down a winding two-lane county road, slowing behind the occasional black Amish buggy. The scenery was straight out of a picture book—neat white farmhouses set back from rolling fields, draft horses grazing in pastures, laundry flapping on clotheslines in backyards.
“Briar Rose Lane.” Alice read the wooden sign nailed to a fence corner. “I think this is it.” She slowed and turned the big truck onto an even narrower road. We crept along while she studied the various houses we passed. “This is the one,” she declared at last, stopping in front of a sprawling white house. “I remember the fence in front and that big oak tree with the swing.”
“It looks like a private home,” I said. As I spoke, a woman in a blue dress and white cap came out onto the porch and looked toward us.
“I think it is, now,” Alice said. “It was then, too, but there was a little sign on a post out here that said they had rooms for overnight guests.”
I looked at the woman on the porch again. “What do you want to do?” I asked. “If we keep sitting here, she’s liable to call the cops. She might think we’re casing the place.”
“I’d kind of like to look inside.” Alice glanced at me and shrugged. “Guess I’m feeling nostalgic.”
I thought of my drive out to my childhood home in Ridgeway and wondered if Alice felt the same kind of pull. Except I’d had no desire to enter the house on Amaranth Avenue.
Instead of calling the police, the woman sent one of her children out to talk to us. The boy looked to be about nine. He was barefoot, dressed in too-short black pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His thick blond hair fell over his forehead and he stood on tiptoe to look into the cab of the truck. “Do you ladies need some help?” he asked.
