Lillian nodded. She remembered jumping off the dock. She remembered the annual Fourth of July cookout the neighborhood put on together.
“I still go to that,” said Heather. “Every year.”
It seemed to Lillian now to have happened so quickly, the transition from what she was then—the carefree girl with the peanut butter sandwich—to what she was now. Did it feel that way to everyone? Was this just life?
In between the sandwich and the infidelity, of course, there were other stages: high school, college, the years after college. Wedding planning, preparing for a baby. And now what was she planning for?
“Tell,” said Heather softly. “Tell what happened with Tom.”
Tom. She swallowed hard and clenched her fists. She walked faster.
“Tell me,” said Heather. “That’s what I’m here for.”
So Lillian told. “This girl, Heather—you wouldn’t believe it if you saw her. She’s Tom’s assistant. And he slept with her.”
“Oh, God,” said Heather. “Really? That doesn’t sound like Tom.”
“I know. But he did.”
“Have you met her?”
“Just once, when I swung by to show Philip off to the crew there. She’s young, she’s really young. I mean, she’s just out of college. She’s got a snub nose and a perfectly flat stomach. She’s got this space between her front teeth—oh, I can’t even stand to think about her. She says like every other word, she texts people who are standing right across the room from her.” Lillian paused, then said, “She seriously, legitimately belongs to another generation. That’s how young she is.”
Lillian and Heather sat on a bench by the lake, not far from an outcropping of rocks that Lillian remembered climbing on as a child. There was a group of three boys, teenagers, on the dock. They wore long, bright swimming trunks; they were taking turns jumping into the water from the dock. Lillian watched them for a moment, watched their tanned, sinewy bodies, their complete lack of self-consciousness.
“Oh, Jesus, Lilly, I’m sorry. What do you think you’ll do?”
Lillian wrapped her arms around her knee. “I don’t know. What choice do I have, really?”
Heather lifted her face to the sun and then looked levelly at Lillian. “What choice do you have? Well, you have two choices. Stay, or go. Or make him go. Three choices.”
“But the kids—”
“I know,” said Heather. “The kids. The kids are huge.”
It had come as a surprise to Lillian, motherhood, despite her attempts to prepare beforehand, despite her careful observations of the young mothers in her neighborhood, despite her copious reading of the books her friends who were already mothers had pressed into her hands.
The biggest surprise, in fact, was that her new world, this complex, labyrinthine universe, did not seem to be so different from the world that her mother had inhabited, and that her mother, in turn, had inhabited before her. It confused Lillian that that had happened. The world—society, all of it—seemed to be moving forward, the role of women in the workforce, in business and science, seemed to be changing and strengthening, and yet Lillian’s current position remained essentially unchanged from what it had been for generations.
There was one notable difference, of course.
“What do you call yourself?” she asked Heather. Heather adjusted her sunglasses and looked out at the lake.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean once you stopped working, to be with Max and Ethan. What do you call yourself?”
“A stay-at-home mother.”
“Me too. But isn’t that funny? If anyone asked my mother what she did, she would have said, ‘I’m a housewife.’ Or ‘I’m a homemaker.’ But we—you, me, everyone in my town—we’re stay-at-home mothers. And we’d be insulted if anyone called us housewives. Why is that?”
“I don’t know,” mused Heather. “To me, a housewife insinuates that you wear some sort of a kerchief wrapped around your head to clean the house.”
Lillian laughed. “Or an apron, with piping.”
“See?” said Heather. “You haven’t forgotten how to laugh.”
“But where did that come from, that change? How was it that our mothers’ generation found some pride in making a home, while for us the housekeeping part of the job seems like a slight?”
“I don’t know,” said Heather. “I think maybe because we gave up on keeping things clean?”
Lillian thought of her laundry room, perpetually littered with the detritus of Olivia’s constant costume changes, and of the kitchen, whose countertops seemed never to be free of a certain unidentifiable stickiness, and whose pantry seemed always to be missing two or more crucial items.
Making a home.
Ha.
She looked away for a second, back at the street, where two little girls a bit older than Olivia were navigating bicycles with training wheels while their mothers trailed behind them, one dragged by an enormous German shepherd.
When she turned back to the lake, she saw two of the teenaged boys standing on the dock and leaning over the water. It seemed like a long time that they stood there, and Lillian felt her heartbeat begin to speed up. The third boy was missing.
“Shit,” she heard one of them say.
“Heather.” She gripped Heather’s arm. She felt in her pockets, but they were empty. “I don’t have my cell…”
“Me either,” said Heather. “I could run back—or over across the street.” She stood. Lillian stood also. She was trying to think if she remembered CPR from the class she had taken at the Y.
Suddenly the third boy launched himself out of the water, spitting like a whale, laughing.
“You asshole,” said one of the boys on the dock.
“You total bastard, you suck,” said the other.
“Naw, man.”
“No, you’re an asshole! I though you drowned.”
Only he said “drownded.”
The boys didn’t notice Lillian and Heather. One boy cannonballed off the dock. Be careful, Lillian wanted to say. I grew up here. The rocks are really sharp.
But they wouldn’t want to hear that from her, wouldn’t pay her any heed, and anyway Philip was probably due for a feeding.
“I’ve got to get back,” said Heather, stretching.
“Me too,” said Lillian. “But I’ll walk you to your house first.”
After, Lillian didn’t feel like going back. Instead of turning toward her house she continued up the hill, through the neighborhoods up toward Route 7. The houses were a little smaller here, and closer together, shabby and well kept intermixed.
She passed the road that led to Burton Snowboards. She thought of the boys jumping into the lake. They’d be snowboarders, she could tell by the easy way they had with their bodies, and by the skateboards they’d left in the grass by the docks.
She passed the turnoff to the rock-climbing gym. When she had grown up here, there had been no rock-climbing gym—only a scrubby field where some kids in high school used to come and drink beer from cans late at night in the summer. She felt suddenly, irrationally angry at the rock-climbing gym for not existing during her youth. Perhaps she would have grown into a different person if it had been there: more daring, more adventurous. Perhaps, instead of marrying and having children, she would have become a fabulously audacious rock climber; perhaps she would have traveled the world, tied to nothing or no one but the mountain.
Then she thought of Olivia a month or so ago, calling down the stairs to Lillian when she was supposed to have been sleeping, with a question she deemed important. “If you have lunch and dinner at the same time, would that be linner?”
“Yes,” Lillian said. “Yes, Olivia, that would be linner.” And she and Tom had dissolved into giggles.
She could, if she felt like taking a long walk, go all the way downtown from here. She turned left on Pine Street. She calculated how long it would take to get to Church Street—two miles, more or less, if she went by the road. Perhaps
longer if she cut down to the bike path, but she’d be walking along the water, which would be nicer. But then she wasn’t sure she felt up to dealing with summer crowds on Church Street: all those happy, wholesome families. All that sticky ice cream. And she couldn’t be gone from Philip that long.
She came to the church. The parking lot was empty; the noon Mass was long over. In the corner of the parking lot, there were a couple of kids on scooters. The day had grown warm, and Lillian was sweating and thirsty. She had no water with her, and no money to stop at the convenience store across the street. Perhaps if she could just rest for a moment—perhaps if she stepped inside the church. Surely it was cooler in there than it was out here.
Later, after all that had happened that summer, she would remember the way she felt standing outside the heavy wooden door that day. She would remember, too, the way she felt watching the boys on the dock. She would remember the sun beating down over the water, and she would remember the feeling that despite the clarity of the lake, despite the fact that nothing, after all, had happened, the day had turned dark and sinister.
William had to go to Williston for some bonemeal to put in the flower beds. Olivia wanted to go along.
“Go,” said Ginny. “I’ll watch the little one until Lillian returns. Olivia, run and get your sandals.”
It took William some time to navigate Olivia’s car seat straps. “You know,” he told Olivia. “When your mother and your uncle Stephen and aunt Rachel were young, we didn’t have all of this. We just threw the kids in the back of the car and hoped for the best.”
Once William had pulled out of the neighborhood and onto the highway, he glanced in the rearview mirror. He was startled, for an instant, by how like Lillian at that age Olivia looked: the same flame-colored hair, the same fragile skin, the same thumb sucked in the same unvarying rhythm.
“It’s kind of nice to get away from the baby brother for a while, isn’t it?” he said in a conspiratorial voice.
Olivia nodded.
“Maybe when we’re at the garden center,” he continued, “you can pick out a few flowers for your very own pot.”
“My very own pot?”
“You got it. Would you like that?”
Vigorous nodding from the backseat.
“Okay, then. We’ll do it. Olivia’s Very Own Pot.”
“And I can show my daddy, when he comes.”
“Sure.”
“Grandpa? When is my daddy coming?”
“I don’t know,” said William. “I don’t know how long you’re staying. Do you?”
Olivia shook her head.
“Did your mother say, when you packed up?”
“No. But I brought all my bathing suits.”
“Oh yeah?”
“And I have a lot of bathing suits.”
“Do you? How many?”
“Thirty. A hundred. Thirty a hundred.”
“Wow,” said William. “That’s a lot, all right.”
“I know,” said Olivia proudly. “So I guess we’re staying a long time.”
Lillian pushed open the door of the church. It was dark and heavy—foreboding. You would think that if they really wanted you to go to church they’d make it a little easier to open the door.
She couldn’t recall another time in her life when she’d been in a completely empty church. She couldn’t recall a time when she’d so wholly taken in the atmosphere of this church: the smell of must and incense, and of the bodies that had been there earlier in the day. The worn spots in the carpet up the center aisle. The way the stained glass caught the sunlight and sent it in fragments over the pews. The missalettes leaning in the stands. She could almost feel their tissue-thin paper, and the sturdier pages of the songbooks. Not even on her wedding day had she noticed all of this.
Wedding day: Tom. A pinch beneath her breastbone. She took a deep breath. She chose a pew in the center of the church and pulled out the kneeler. She put her head in her hands. Don’t cry, she told herself. Don’t cry. Just think. Just sit here and think: figure out what to do.
She didn’t hear the door open, and she didn’t hear the footsteps coming up the aisle, but she felt a touch on her shoulder and she started, looking up. “Oh,” she said. This, then, must be the famous Father Colin. Clerical clothing, young. “I’m sorry, I was walking, and I needed a rest. I thought it would be all right—”
“And it is,” he said softly. “The church is always open, whether you’re a parishioner or not.”
“Oh, I am,” she said. “I mean, my parents are. And I was too, a long time ago. I was married here—” She gestured toward the altar.
“How about that,” the priest said. It seemed awkward to have him standing there above her, and it would have been odd of her to stand up, so she moved over in the pew and he sat beside her. “Father Colin,” he said, extending his hand. He wasn’t tall, but his fingers were long and strong, and he had a firm grip. It was the sort of grip Tom’s father, a career military officer, would approve of. “A lovely place to be married,” he said.
“Ha!” she said. “Lovely, yes.” She regarded him for a moment longer and then said, “My mother has been talking about you nonstop. You’re practically famous in our house.” She corrected herself: “Her house.”
He laughed. He didn’t sound like a priest when he laughed; he sounded like a regular man, like someone Tom would be friends with. “I’m just the substitute,” he said. “I’m just doing my bit, until Father Michael improves. Or… or not.”
“Substitute,” she said. “That’s funny. Do they throw spitballs at you and change seats when your back is turned? Pass notes about you?” He laughed again. She could feel her shoulders slumping forward; she straightened and then, as though in unconscious imitation of her, Father Colin straightened too. “You’re young to be a priest,” she said.
“We’re not born old. We just get that way eventually.” He had a way of looking at her that was disarming, as though he could see that there was more going on with her than she let on. The only other person she remembered looking at her that way was an old boyfriend, long before Tom, whose face she could barely call to mind.
“I see.” She rubbed her eyes with both fists. “I’m Lillian,” she said finally. “My parents were here earlier, with my little girl. The Owens. They’re regulars. My mother does all those good-deed things people do when they’re retired with time on their hands. Meals-on-wheels and such. I’m sure you’ll know her soon if you don’t already.”
“God bless her,” said Father Colin. “It’s people like that that make the world go around.”
“I know,” said Lillian. She sighed. “But it just makes the rest of us feel… well, awful.” She looked around. The church was smaller than she’d remembered it being, and older, and it also had a homey quality to it that she’d forgotten about. She had a sudden memory of the church being decorated for Christmas, with poinsettias and evergreen wreaths, the children’s choir at the front.
He laughed again—he really seemed to laugh quite a lot. Or maybe she was just especially funny, sitting in a depressed state in an empty church on a hot Sunday afternoon. “It shouldn’t make you feel bad. If you have a young child, then you are fulfilling the work of God in that way.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course.” Father Colin rubbed at a spot on the pew with one finger. “Not everybody can serve God in all ways. That would be asking too much of us.”
“I guess that’s right.” She examined her fingernails. “So where did you come from, Father?”
“Boston. I’m just on loan.”
“I thought I heard something in your accent there. I went to BC. And I live down that way now.”
“Not local, then?”
“Not anymore. Just visiting.” She paused. “A long visit.”
“Boston College,” he said. “I grew up watching those football games. Born and bred in Southie. I couldn’t get rid of the accent if I tried. And believe me, I tried.”
That see
med right. He reminded her of certain boys she’d gone to college with: the voice, the open, freckled face, the broad smile. He was about her age, maybe—he could be a year or two in either direction. She could imagine him at a fraternity party, or sitting in the back of the lecture hall. This, despite the clerical collar, despite the way he reached into the pew to straighten the books. There was something proprietary in his air inside the church. She could imagine him standing on the altar, delivering a sermon with conviction and authority. She could see now why her mother had gone on about him. The priests she remembered from her childhood had been aging and stooped. She understood how it would be refreshing and uplifting to have someone young behind the pulpit, how it could make it a little easier to believe.
He rose then. “I’ll let you get back to your… to your prayer. Your meditation. Whatever it was you were doing.”
“Moping,” she said. “But thank you. You stay. I’m going anyway. I’ve got to get home.” She stood.
“Moping. I’m sorry to hear that.” Father Colin clasped his hands together and stretched his arms out in front of him. It could have been the gesture of an athlete, not a priest.
“Yes. Well. Long story.” Lillian looked to the altar. Had she really stood there next to Tom, in this very church, with their friends gathered behind them? Had they really promised to love each other forever? Had he really broken that vow to her? Had they really agreed to welcome children into the world, and were those very children really at her parents’ house, waiting for her to return and continue the charade that everything was normal? It didn’t seem possible, suddenly, any of it. Her throat caught.
Father Colin was saying, “For another day, then. It was a pleasure to meet you. Perhaps I’ll see you at Mass next week?”
“Oh, maybe. But my baby is very young. It’s difficult—”
“I see.”
“And I don’t think I really belong.”
Father Colin squinted at her. “Everyone belongs, who wants to be here. Everyone who believes.”
“I’m not sure I’m much of a believer these days,” Lillian said. “In anything.” She saw something unpleasant cross his face and she said quickly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just tired lately.”
The Arrivals: A Novel Page 5
