“You’re one to talk about alphabetizing books, Jules,” I said.
“But you alphabetize your underwear, Hope,” Anna Page said.
“I do not alphabetize my underwear.”
“You keep them in a tidy stack,” Julie said, “with your favorites always at the top.”
“Kevin loves you, Hope,” Anna Page said.
“I can’t wash a damn pan without him telling me how to do it better!”
We sipped our tea and looked out at the gray water, trying to pretend I’d said that with less emotion than I had.
“He’s a teacher,” Anna Page said. “He spends all day herding ten-year-olds. Tell him—”
“But I have, Anna Page. I’ve told him, and he knows how much it bugs me, and still he tells me how to wash a pan, like I haven’t been doing it for thirty years. And when I say, ‘You’re not really going to tell me how to wash a pan, are you?’ he says no, he wanted to suggest how to save the sponge.”
Anna Page laughed, and Julie looked amused. When I didn’t join them, Anna Page said, “He was joking about the sponge, right? It’s part of his charm, the self-deprecating humor.”
I tried to rewind the memory, but my back had been turned to him. If there had been humor in his voice, I’d missed it.
“He sang to the baby. Kevin did,” I said. Like my father had done when Mom was pregnant with me, although the songs Dad sang were Hindi songs, words even Mom couldn’t understand. Thank God we hadn’t told our parents about the baby. “ ‘Imagine there’s no heaven,’ that’s what he sang,” I said. “He would rest his head on my stomach and sing to the baby that wasn’t there.” I said it easily, as if it were cute or laughable rather than the terrifying thing it somehow was to have him so invested in what I’d expected him to think of as a few dividing cells, something that in any event wouldn’t have a soul, because Kevin doesn’t believe in souls. He believes in rings of universes preceding the big bang and the possibility of cold fusion, particles moving fast enough through space to allow humans to travel forward and back through time, but he can’t get his head around any god of any sort, anywhere.
Julie put a hand on my chair, and Anna Page covered my fingers with hers, and we looked out across the lake, no longer talking, just listening to the extraordinary silence and thinking—or at least I was thinking—about going to the beach when we were children, the Wednesday Gang piling into Aunt Linda’s Volkswagen van and Aunt Brett’s station wagon, our dads carrying us out into the water, teaching us to bodysurf, building sand castles with moats that would fill as the surf came in. My dad was the master castle maker; while the other dads made dumped-bucket towers with finger-prick windows, he oversaw foot-wide steps up to raised castles with high center towers and winding stairs. When, as grown-ups, we’d all started going to the beach together again, Dad and Kevin would help the Wednesday Grandkids build Taj Mahals, shaping the central domed marble tomb, the unequal octagon with its chamfered corners, its spindly outer towers. “He’s going to be an amazing father,” Mom would say of Kevin. “He gets children in a way so very few grown-ups do.” And sometimes, “You’re a partner in your firm now, Hope, you can do what you want,” as if my career were nothing and children were everything, as if anyone could birth the dozens of businesses every year that I helped bring into the world, even if no one could save a heart like Anna Page could.
“I think, if my mother’s ghost is still on this earth, she’s soaking in that slipper tub,” I said.
Anna Page said, “I used to love the smell of her bathroom. Not Ma’s Chanel No. 5, but warmer, almost edible.”
The smell of her bathroom. In the words, I saw Anna Page as a fifteen-year-old creeping into my parents’ private place after she’d gotten Sammy and me to bed, opening Mom’s bottles and smelling them, lighting her candles, perhaps even taking a bath in my mother’s tub while my parents were out at a party, not expected home till late.
“For God’s sake, Ape,” Julie said.
“What?” Anna Page said.
“You wanted to claim my grief when Jamie—”
“Jamie was my best friend.” Anna Page turned her gaze to the hills across the water, the reddening bracken and the stone walls, the certainty in her expression draining as quickly as it had filled. “Jamie was my best friend,” she repeated. “Aunt Ally was the only real mother I knew.”
I looked down at my hands, dark hands like my father’s, that spent their days turning the pages of legal documents, like his did.
“Why didn’t your mother ever publish Mom’s books, Anna Page?” I asked. “Why does she want the damn Potter book now, when publishing it does Mom no good?”
“That’s Ma,” she said, her eyes her mother’s, her substantial chin her mother’s as well. “That’s not me.”
Across the water—a hard gray under the overcast late-day sky—a hint of peach underlined the clouds. The sheep on the hillside were growing fainter, the stone walls forming their maze.
“My mom wasn’t your mother, Anna Page,” I said quietly.
Her eyes that were her mother’s eyes were full of the memory of all the things my mother had done for her when her own mother was working a job, earning money they might need to pay the mortgage—who could have known back then what Uncle Lee would do? The term-paper help and the meeting of boyfriends. The baking together. The honest conversations she had with Mom.
She looked to the blue cottage door, the geraniums, the old bicycle moved from the kitchen to the protection of the mossy roof overhang. “But I wished she’d been my mother, Hope,” she said. “My whole life, I wished your parents who loved each other were my parents, that I had that to live with instead of this screwed-up thing Daddy and Ma tried to pass off as a marriage. Does it lessen your grief for me to be grieving?” She wiped her eyes, her nose. “Can’t you see how I might need to tuck little bits of what’s left of your mama into my pocket, too?”
I write carefully because I enjoy my writing, and enjoy taking pains over it. I have always disliked writing to order; I write to please myself.
—BEATRIX POTTER, IN A NOVEMBER 25, 1940, LETTER TO BERTHA MAHONY MILLER
WHEN ROBBIE SHOWED UP IN HIS LAUNCH TO FERRY US ACROSS THE lake for our cookery lesson the next morning, Julie balked for no reason having to do with the boat itself: a gorgeous polished wood with a cabin of wide glass windows and a long stretch of bow that allowed for a lovely view, if not for hearing the quiet of the evening coming up. Anna Page only shrugged and whispered, “It’s a boat taxi, Jules. We need a boat taxi. You want to miss ‘Afternoon Tea and Temptations’?”
She had been haranguing Julie again about her relationship with Isaac while we waited, saying she knew Julie and Isaac’s relationship was none of her business, but—
“You don’t know anything about Noah or me or our marriage or any marriage, Ape,” Julie insisted. “You think you know exactly which guy each of us should love. You want to make a match for your own damned mother, for God’s sake! Well, if you’re so brilliant at picking out men, why can’t you find one for yourself?”
“Brilliant.” A word Mom had brought back from the Lakes.
As Robbie eased the boat to the pier, I looked uplake to Wray Castle, where the two hands of a clock set in the stone tower both pointed straight down, too weary to keep time if no one was there much to care. I knew I ought to stop Julie from saying too much, going too far, but she’d already gone too far, hadn’t she, sleeping with Isaac? And not telling even me, her closest friend.
“You’d have me screwing Robbie in his damned rowboat, Ape,” Julie whispered, one last shot at Anna Page as Robbie hopped from boat to pier and began to tie up. She gathered her humor, then, and patted the lovely polished wood hull of Robbie’s launch, where the boat’s name—Argo—was painted. “What prophesy you, oh bow?” she asked.
“We’re too busy living in the moment of having three beauties on board to worry about the future,” Robbie answered, his short hair a bit wild with the wind, his face th
e red that some blonds turn in weather of almost any kind. “We’re imagining we might grow up to be a constellation someday.”
“You’d be unwieldy,” Julie said.
“We’d be broken in three,” Robbie agreed. “Three beauties.”
Anna Page, who had no more idea what they were talking about than I had, told him we were going to Ambleside to learn to cook cross buns and scones.
“Lucy’s on a Plate, that’ll be in Ambleside, sure it will, along with her grocery,” Robbie said. “But Lucy Cooks will be in Staveley, out the A591. You’ll have a car waiting across the lake?”
He sailed us to Bowness rather than Ambleside, where Anna Page, without a thought of doing otherwise, took the front passenger seat of Robbie’s old Aston Martin—“a DB5, James Bond’s favorite,” he said, as if that would make his car any bigger or safer. Anna Page called the hospital from the car while Julie, squeezed into the tiny backseat with me, directed Robbie, never mind that she would have taken us to the wrong town.
The logo on the door to Lucy Cooks—sporting the same charming woman-chef-holding-whisk icon Julie had found on the Internet—was a surprisingly good representation of the black-aproned blond woman who introduced herself as Lucy and handed us identical aprons. “You’ll be wanting your apron as well, Robbie?” she asked, not giving him a chance to say no. She introduced Janet, a dark-haired, dark-shirted woman in her own dark apron, whom she described as “the head of the BBC.” Breads, Bakes, and Cakes.
Lucy and Janet showed us into a brightly lit room where several kitchen stations with cooktops and stainless-steel sinks were set in granite counters dotted with cheerfully colored canisters, cutting boards, colanders, and utensils. We all donned the black aprons—all but Robbie, who sported a black-and-white-striped one.
“These’d be me prison stripes,” he said.
Lucy said, “You’ll think our Robbie is just your average Irish wordsmith, but he’s cracker with a hob as well. His speciality is afters, but he does a fine chunky beef and swede pasty as well.”
“A wordsmith?” Julie said with a lift of her straight-across brows.
“You can drop me pasties down a mine shaft or take them out on a boat to see the stars,” Robbie said, whereupon Lucy explained that pasties were meant originally for miners, who held the folded pies by the crimped edges to eat around their dirty fingers.
We were measuring out 450 grams of flour for hot cross buns when Anna Page’s phone rang. She excused herself to take the call, leaving us to explain that she was a heart surgeon. She did not look happy when she returned, but by then Lucy had left us in Janet’s hands, and Janet was directing us in sifting the flour with salt and cinnamon and “mixed spice”—some British combination with nutmeg and something more I couldn’t identify.
When we had it all together and set out to rise, Robbie went with Janet to swap out the dough we’d made for some that was already risen, which we could punch down and shape. The minute they’d left, Anna Page said, “That was Ma on the phone, Hope. She’s coming up tomorrow, on the first train.”
“But she wasn’t going to come until next week.”
“I know, but listen, Graham offered to put her up at his—”
“It’s not up to her when she comes.”
Anna Page leaned back against the countertop. “I tried to tell her that, but she’s got some bee in her ‘proper lady’s hat.’ ”
Julie said, “What could possibly be so important that—”
“I don’t know, Jules,” Anna Page interrupted. She crossed her arms over the cartoon Lucy on her black apron. “Maybe she’s been talking to Isaac. Maybe she’s learned about that.”
Julie’s silver-ringed fingers went to the several small silver globes in her right ear, her eyes crescenting and the cords of her neck tightening. “Isaac is none of her business and none of yours, either.”
“But it is our business, Jules,” Anna Page insisted. “It’s all of our business, because of Oliver. Fine, have a rebound relationship. I would, too, if Noah had left me the way he left you. But not with Isaac.”
“The way Noah left me?”
“We all think he’s behaved terribly,” Anna Page said. “I’m on your side about that. He’s changed his mind, and I know your parents think you should take him back, but I don’t think you should if you don’t want to.”
“Behaved terribly?” Julie pulled an orange spatula from a red canister and examined it as if judging its effectiveness for beaning Anna Page’s head. “You don’t even know what you don’t know. Noah didn’t leave me. I left him.” She returned the spatula to the canister and selected a yellow slotted spoon. “Unwed sisters used always to marry their widowed brothers-in-law,” she said.
“You’re going to marry Isaac?” Anna Page’s voice the quietest whisper.
“That’s worse than screwing him and walking away, like you did?”
“What are you talking about? I would never do that to Isaac. God, even if I would have, I don’t look exactly like Oliver’s mother!”
Julie paled. “You slept with your own sister’s fiancé.”
“Lacy was going to marry that turd,” Anna Page said.
“So you slept with him and told her.”
“Not then. Before they met.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
“You want to feel sorry for me, Anna Page. You want to think I’m devastated because I have silicone where you have breasts. But I chose these breasts. I feel liberated by these breasts. I’m not sitting around waiting for them to betray me. I feel more sexy with them, not less.” She stared at Anna Page’s breasts behind the cartoon Lucy on the apron, and didn’t say anything. It was unsettling, Julie who’d had her breasts removed looking so directly at Anna Page’s chest. “If you want to feel sorry for anyone, Anna Page,” Julie finally continued, weighing her words like she was weighing the slotted spoon, “feel sorry for your jealous little self.”
Before Anna Page could respond, Robbie and Janet returned with bowls of yeasty-sweet pre-risen dough, and Julie, as if to prove her point about feeling sexier, smiled and arched her back, stretching her long body. Her new same-sized breasts pressed against the top edge of her black apron, leaving me thinking that Henry VIII had married his dead brother’s widow, and in the George Cukor movie Wild Is the Wind, the widower had married his wife’s sister, although that, too, hadn’t ended well.
Julie took one of the bowls of dough from Robbie, saying, “So you get hungry out at night in a boat, do you?”
Robbie, clearly sensing the tension but with nothing to hang it on, set his second bowl on the countertop Anna Page still leaned against. She turned to it and stuck a fist in, punching the dough down before Janet could show us how.
“Now, for midnight, midlake stargazing,” Robbie said to Julie, “I prefer a two-course pasty, one end savory and the other end sweet. Where the savory and sweet mingle in the middle, that’s the best part, idn’ it?”
We pulled ourselves together long enough to follow Janet’s instructions for punching down the dough and sprinkling flour on the countertop.
“You’re a writer of some sort, Robbie?” Julie asked as she turned her dough out from the bowl.
“You can’t believe everything you hear about me,” he offered with an untrustworthy grin. “Despite what Lucy said, my speciality is not afters or beef and swede pasties. My speciality is a fine bit of fry on a silver tray, with a pot of tea and cross buns, and a single flower in a bud vase.”
“A moonflower,” Julie said.
“A morning glory, to be sure. It’s bang on with the kippers and eggs.”
The suggestiveness in his tone made Julie and me laugh, even if Anna Page only frowned.
We spent several minutes choosing rolling pins and rolling the cross bun dough flat.
“ ‘His tail is sticking out! You did not fetch enough dough,’ Anna Page,” I said to her, hearing my mother quoting that line from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers—mischievous
Tom Kitten nearly ending up in a pastry made by Samuel and Anna Maria, but saved by John Joiner, who could not stay for dinner as he had to finish a wheelbarrow for Miss Potter. Mom had always substituted “Anna Page” for “Anna Maria,” even when Anna Page wasn’t there.
Anna Page, leaning hard into her rolling pin, responded in a subdued voice, “ ‘I fear that we shall be obliged to leave this pudding. But I am persuaded the knots would have proved indigestible.’ ” She knew the lines from all those afternoons baking with Mom and me while Aunt Kath was at work.
“But I am persuaded that the knots would have proved indigestible” was the line, and she’d skipped the part about the dough smelling sooty.
“ ‘Make it properly, Anna Page, with bread crumbs,’ ” I said.
“ ‘Nonsense!’ ” she replied. “ ‘Butter and dough.’ ”
We’d shaped the buns and set them on pans to let them rise again, and Janet was starting to talk about how to make scones when Julie leaned close to Anna Page and whispered, “You’ve always been jealous of Jamie and me.”
Anna Page straightened a hot cross bun so that her pan was perfectly symmetrical, and laid a cloth over the dough. “Robbie,” she said, with her gaze fixed on Julie, “what kind of writing do you dabble in?”
Robbie glanced from Anna Page to Julie. “I write beef and swede pasty recipes,” he said lightly. “And I’m starting a show for the telly: ‘Chef Robbie.’ ”
“ ‘Nonsense! Butter and dough,’ ” I said.
“ ‘Nonsense!’ ” Anna Page repeated. “ ‘Butter and dough.’ ”
But upon the table—oh joy! the tailor gave a shout—there, where he had left plain cuttings of silk—there lay the most beautifullest coat.… Everything was finished except just one single cherry-coloured button-hole, and where that button-hole was wanting there was pinned a scrap of paper with these words—in little teeny weeny writing—
NO MORE TWIST
And from then began the luck of the Tailor of Gloucester; he grew quite stout, and he grew quite rich.
The Wednesday Daughters Page 12
