“Not to mention the caterpillar,” Diana put in.
“Do you think perhaps you might be jumping to conclusions?” Sunny said.
“We’re overprotective,” Sylvia said, “with good reason. So sue us.”
“The poor man was clearly just trying to make conversation.”
“Maybe that’s not a chance we’re willing to take.”
“I don’t think—” Cindy started to say, but she was interrupted by Porter’s return.
“One of the nice things about being tall,” he said, sitting down, “is bartenders always see you.” He looked at the group. “You did hear the part where I said that happened a while ago, didn’t you?” he asked. “I don’t do stupid things like that anymore. I don’t get in drunken fights with women. I don’t go out with women I fight with. And the only way I’d ever steal another vehicle is, oh, I don’t know, if some woman went into labor and I had to rush her to the hospital.”
The women breathed a collective sigh of relief. Whatever else Porter might be, and no one really knew yet, at least he wasn’t an Eddie.
“What about your costumes?” Porter looked at Sylvia and Sunny. “You two make a rather original pair.”
“I am her and she is me,” Sunny said. “It is our Wuthering Heights moment.”
“Except I’m not a waitress,” Sylvia said. “I’m a caterer.”
“This is true,” Sunny said. “But if I wore the suit of a chef and a toque, it would have been boring.” He turned to Sylvia. “Would you care to dance, Dr. Goldsmith?”
When the surgeon and waitress were gone, Lise turned to Cindy. “Do you want to shoot some pool? Isn’t that one of the reasons you wanted to come here? To shoot a few games before the baby comes?”
“I don’t think so,” Cindy said. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She made a face. “But now that I’m here, I realize I’m way too big to play now. Just the sheer size of me would probably throw my whole game off; and if I bent over the table, I’d probably need help getting up again. Do me a favor?” She looked wistful again. “You and Diana play, so I can at least watch. Go on. I showed you how when we were down in Georgia.”
• • •
“I’m afraid I’m not very good at this,” Diana said, holding her pool cue. “Would you mind breaking?”
Lise shot, sinking the seven on the break but scratching.
“Have you heard from Dan?” Lise asked as they played.
“We talk,” Diana said. “We talk about what to do about the future. But nothing’s been resolved. I’m not sure how it will be. But never mind about me. What’s going on with you and Tony? Anything?”
“We’re friends now,” Lise said. “We do friend-type things together. Maybe that’s what we should have been in the first place.”
“Look, Lise, I wanted to say…”
Lise had been about to take a shot and stopped. “Yes?”
“Just, thank you for inviting me to join you all tonight. The house is so far back from the road, I doubt I would have gotten any trick-or-treaters, and it would have just been me there all night, alone. It was very kind of you to ask me.”
“I owed you,” Lise said simply.
“For what?”
“For trying to warn me about Dirk. I didn’t listen. I should have listened—but I still owe you.”
“I’m not surprised you didn’t believe me,” Diana allowed. “I’d made a big hash of things with everyone.”
“All water under the bridge now.”
“Is it? That’s funny, because I still feel on the outside of things, looking in.”
• • •
The mayor arrived just before midnight. People were beginning to think he’d never show up and that the Bermuda prize wouldn’t be awarded. But then he was there, glad-handing people as he worked the room, studying each costume.
When he was done, the owner helped him up onto the bar, from where the mayor made his announcement.
“The winner for best costume and the winner of the trip to Bermuda is…the clown!”
The room filled with muttering.
“I can’t believe it,” Lise said. “I spent two hours putting this thing together with a glue gun. I’m a whole season! How can a clown win?”
“Which clown?” someone shouted.
“That clown,” the mayor said, pointing to a woman that no one in the group had noticed before.
Cindy and Carly turned to one another, mouths open, but it was Carly who spoke first.
“Hey,” she said, “what’s that clown got that we don’t?”
Cindy
I didn’t allow myself to think much about Porter. When I did, I told myself he didn’t walk straight out the door again at Chalk Is Cheap because he was too polite. I told myself it didn’t mean anything that he’d slow danced with me after that other damn clown won the trip to Bermuda because he felt sorry for me. I told myself he’d asked for my new number at the end of the night, again because he was being polite. I told myself he kissed me right before he left because that’s what people do.
I told myself maybe he’d be better off with Carly than me, and she’d certainly be better off with him.
• • •
Now that Sylvia was my Lamaze coach, she insisted on going to all the doctor’s visits with me to my ob-gyn. And, when she did, she brought along a list of questions to ask.
“Cindy says she’s noticed small bumps that appear to somehow be rhythmic with her uterus,” Sylvia said to Dr. Carter. “Is that normal?”
Dr. Carter was about halfway between my age and Sylvia’s and, for a doctor, she wore a lot of bling.
“Perfectly normal, Ms. Goldsmith,” she said. “That sort of thing is usually caused by the baby having hiccoughs. There’s no cause for alarm.”
“Cindy says she’s experiencing increasing contractions. In the beginning they felt like practice, but she says these seem like they mean business.”
“That’s a great sign. It means her body is getting ready for labor. If this wasn’t happening now, I’d be worried. Cindy’s right on track to have her baby in about eight weeks.”
“Cindy’s having trouble sleeping at night.”
“Good. That’s Mother Nature’s way of preparing her for life with a new baby. If she was still sleeping eight hours straight through, it’d be an awfully rude awakening once the baby comes and she’s woken up every two hours for the first few weeks. Of course, sometimes sleep is disturbed by the prospective mother worrying.”
“Worrying? About what?”
“Worrying about the health of the baby, worrying about the ordeal of labor, worrying about parenting once the baby is born.” Dr. Carter looked at me. “Are you worrying a lot about those things these days, Cindy?”
“Thank you,” I said, from my prone position on the examining table. “It’s very nice of one of you to finally talk to me as though I’m in the room. And of course I’m worried about those things you said—all of them! I’d have to be insane not to worry about those things.”
Dr. Carter laughed. “You’re going to do great, Cindy.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one with the sore back who’s running to the bathroom to pee every forty-five minutes.”
“What about that, Doctor?” Sylvia asked. “Is all that soreness and peeing normal?”
“Before you go, I’ll give Cindy some exercises she can do to alleviate the back pain. And if she limits her fluids before retiring, it should minimize the amount of times she gets up to go to the bathroom during the night at least. Really, Ms. Goldsmith,”—and here Dr. Carter took one of Sylvia’s hands in both of hers—“Cindy is doing just great. Everything is proceeding as well as it possibly can. Honestly, she’s young, she’s healthy, and there haven’t been any serious complications with this pregnancy; and while I’m no fortune-teller, there’s no reason to imagine there will be.”
Sylvia and I shared a look. The idea of my pregnancy having progressed with no serious complications—wh
en you thought about Eddie, Eddie, and, well, Eddie—made us both bust out laughing so hard, Dr. Carter must’ve thought we were nuts.
• • •
Sylvia’s condo had a basement level. At the foot of the stairs there was a small room with a desk in it in which she did some of the accounting work for her business. Off that room were two doorways, one an open doorway to the laundry room. Sylvia liked to say that before Carly and I moved in, that room got hardly any use at all. But now the machines ran at least once a day. She added, “When the baby comes, they’ll be going twenty-four seven. It’ll be like a Laundromat in here!” The other doorway had an actual door in it that led to the largest room down there. Previously, Sylvia had used it for storage, but now she’d cleaned it out.
“When the baby comes, it’ll be too crowded if you and Carly and the baby are all in the same room. We can move Carly down here.”
“But there are only two tiny windows at the top of the wall right under the ceiling,” I objected. “All she’ll be able to see of the outside world is other people’s feet walking by.”
“True. But it’s the biggest room in the place. We can put a queen-size bed in here. There’s even room for a big couch. That way, she can watch TV down here all she wants to when you’re upstairs taking care of the baby.”
I thought Carly would feel offended, like she was being displaced, but she was thrilled.
“No offense, Cin,” she said, “but you snore at night. Loud. I’m going to love it down there. It’ll be like living on my own, except I won’t be alone.”
With Carly installed in the basement, it was time to turn my bedroom into a nursery that I could share with the baby. The only problem was, no one’d let me do anything.
“I’m not going to go into labor if I screw in a nail to put together the crib or get on a ladder to hang up a mobile,” I objected.
“I’m not taking any chances,” Sylvia said. “You sit.”
There were a lot of beautiful things waiting for the baby; things I’d never dreamed I’d have for her, things I couldn’t afford.
Instead of having a regular baby shower, the other women’d taken me shopping. They told me to pick out whatever I needed, whatever I wanted for the baby.
And Diana had paid for it all.
“I don’t have unlimited use of Dan’s credit cards anymore,” she said with a laugh she was obviously trying to keep light, but it wasn’t. “Still, he did leave me with one with a reasonable limit for shopping.”
“But don’t you need to spend that money on yourself?” I said. “I mean, as you keep getting thinner, won’t you need to buy new clothes?”
“So I’ll tighten my belt a little bit.” This time her laugh was genuine. “Do you think it’ll really destroy me to look sloppy for a bit?”
And so I had a beautiful high-gloss white dresser for the baby, filled with gorgeous tiny clothes. The women had insisted on some neutral colors since I’d refused to find out the sex of the baby, while I’d in turn insisted on a lot of pink since I was sure the baby’d be a girl.
Sylvia had been willing enough to go along with my belief in my baby’s girlhood, enough so that she’d painted the room the palest pink imaginable, putting up the most darling Cinderella border along the top of the walls.
“If it is a boy,” she said, “you and the baby can have my room while I quickly redo this place.”
“You’re not going to have to,” I said, turning in awed circles as I surveyed her work. “It’s so beautiful in here, it’s like a dream.”
“It’s not a dream,” she said. “You’re wide awake.”
“But you put so much work into this, you and Carly. It’s all so permanent. And yet, who knows how long we’ll be here? I can’t go on imposing on you forever, and who knows what the future’ll bring?”
Sylvia’s voice was even deeper than usual when she spoke. “I know I won’t have you forever,” she said, “but as long as you’re here, this is your home.”
“Thank you,” I said simply, because there weren’t enough words to express my gratitude.
Sylvia looked around the room: at the crib, at the changing table, and at the glider chair with footrest where I’d one day breastfeed my baby.
“Are you ever sorry,” she asked, “that Eddie’s not part of the picture?”
“God, no,” I said. “Sure, there are moments when I miss him. But then I think what it’d be really like—the baby waking up at two in the morning, Eddie screaming at me to shut up the baby, little stuff like that—and I don’t miss that lost future at all.”
• • •
“Why don’t you give Porter a call? Here’s his card.”
“What are you talking about?” Carly said to me, pushing away my hand with the card in it. “I’m not calling Porter. God, Cindy, you can be so high school at times. What do you want me to do, call him up to see if he still likes you?”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant you could call him for you. He’s single, you’re single—you two’d make a great pair.”
“I never realized that coupledom was as easy as two single people getting together, so thanks for pointing that out. But…Porter? Eeuw!”
“What do you mean, ‘eeuw’? Porter’s very nice. He’s nice and he’s sweet and he’s funny and he’s smart and he’s handsome and he’s got a good job—”
“And he’s totally not my type. What are you, nuts, Cindy?”
“Yeah,” said Sylvia, walking into the room, “what are you, nuts, Cindy?”
“I was only trying to—”
“Set me up with some guy who’s crazy about you,” Carly cut me off. “No, thank you.”
“What do you mean, crazy about me?”
“Anyone can see it,” they both said at the same time.
“At the very least,” Sylvia added, “he’s very fond of you. You should call him. You should accept his calls when he phones, rather than always telling me to tell him you’re in the shower. How many showers can one woman take?”
“You’re a fine one to be giving advice,” I told her. “You still haven’t resolved things with Sunny.”
“I’m getting to it. I’m getting to it. Stop rushing me. And while you’re busy not rushing me, you might think about calling Porter.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Really,” Sylvia said, “you should just do it. So much of life is: Did you get on the plane or didn’t you? It’s time to get on the plane.”
Diana
I was glad to have had the opportunity and the privilege of helping Cindy buy things for her baby, but I still didn’t feel as though I was a complete part of things. I didn’t feel a complete part of my friends, of my family, and I certainly didn’t feel a complete part of anything with Dan. I was just a woman, albeit an increasingly thin woman, living in a big house. Alone.
• • •
And then Artemis came to town.
Artemis, in all her artemisal glory.
She had on a pink suit and matching pumps, even though, in just another fortnight’s time, the calendar would tick us over into winter.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Some conversations don’t work over the phone or in e-mail. Some conversations require a face-to-face meeting. I’ve come to save you from yourself,” she said grandly. Then she amended, “Or at least talk some sense into you.”
“Who are you supposed to be, George Hamilton?” I asked, surveying the vast array of suitcases around her. Was that an honest-to-God hatbox? Was she moving in? “And how long do you imagine talking some sense into me will take?”
She consulted her watch. “Half a day, perhaps? Maybe a touch more? If we work quickly, I can get back to New York City by tomorrow. Surely you don’t expect me to spend an entire week in Danbury, do you? Do you have any idea how long it took me to get here? A half dozen or so hours on the plane, then, once I landed, imagine my horror when I realized it would take me over another hour to get to you! I certainly wasn’t going to
take the train or, worse, a bus. So I hired a car and driver. That’s him over there.” She turned, switching on her highest-wattage smile as she did so and giving the liveried driver a white-gloved wave. “Could you pay him for me?” she said through her brilliant smile. “And while you’re paying him, could I borrow your shower? I need to wash the airplane out of my hair. God, I can’t believe you live so far from civilization.”
It was the most words anyone had spoken to me in days. And, in its own awful way, it was wonderful.
“You look fantastic,” I said, meaning it.
“Thanks,” she said, peering at me over the top of her Jackie O sunglasses, “so do you. But, my God, Diana, you’re thin. I know you kept e-mailing me and phoning me with the numbers as you lost, but it’s nothing like seeing the change in person.” Then: “I can’t believe it’s so cold here, rainy too. And here I was, expecting a relief from the dismal London weather.”
“It is November in New England,” I pointed out.
“Might as well be Old England if the weather’s going to be like that. And here I thought everywhere in the United States was like Texas.”
Artemis went into the house while I went to pay the driver.
“Your sister,” he said, “is she really royalty? She said the reason she couldn’t pay me up front was that, as a member of the royal family, she’s not allowed to carry cash.”
“She’s a distant member,” I said, “but she is, by marriage of course. Princess Artemis, that’s her.”
“God, but your sister is quite a woman. I didn’t believe half the things she told me but, by the end of the ride, I felt as though I should be paying her.”
• • •
A half hour later, Artemis sat at the island in my kitchen on a high stool, her glorious hair covered by a towel she wore turban style.
“Tea, Diana? I come all this way, and you serve me tea? The least you could do is put something a little alcoholic in it. Your tea has always, frankly, sucked.”
The Sisters Club Page 31
