by Sarah S.
Dan leaned over and patted Sylvie’s hand. Jonathan brought her a box of tissues from the librarian’s desk. Or maybe they thought that with James’s passing so recent, Sylvie couldn’t talk about death right now. If that was the case, it was wrong to accept their pity.
The topic moved off Christian immediately, and the rest of the meeting bumped along. They made decisions and doled out who should do what. As they were finally leaving, Geoff reminded them of the cocktail party at his house next week for his wife’s birthday. “The party’s on a Monday,” he warned. “But she insisted on having it on the day.” He rolled his eyes as if to say ah, youth. This was Geoff’s second wife; she was twenty years younger than him, than all of them.
From there Martha caught up to Jonathan, and they walked out of the library together, rehashing the laptop details. Geoff and Dan were already on their cell phones. Sylvie lingered behind, gazing after them. All of her colleagues walked with such assured entitlement. But my grandfather told me all this was mine, she wanted to tell them. I’m the rightful owner of this place, not you.
And she wanted to say something else, too. She wanted to yell out to them to be careful—their good fortunes might be more precarious than they thought. It could blow away in the blink of an eye, especially when they weren’t paying attention.
………………………………………………………… four
The first time Joanna heard about the Bates-McAllister family, she had been a few weeks shy of eleven years old. She and her mother, Catherine, were waiting at the orthodontist’s
office for an appointment to see whether or not Joanna would need braces—unfortunately, she would—when Catherine noticed a Main Line newspaper that was wedged between a Highlights for Children and Woman’s Day. It was the kind of paper that announced community activities, openings of new local restaurants, and road construction. In the back, it featured a society page.
Catherine folded back the page and passed it to Joanna. She pointed to a picture of a woman wearing a long velvet gown, sporting a nest of diamonds on her head. Two young boys stood next to the woman, both of them about Joanna’s age, wearing suit jackets and ties. “Sylvie Bates-McAllister and family, attending the annual gala for the Swithin School,” said the caption.
The waiting room was empty, Joanna remembered, save for the team of receptionists behind the desk, women who were made to wear matching purple sweaters and floral-print turtlenecks. Joanna’s mother had specifically chosen this orthodontist because he was the best. All the women in the grocery store or at the PTA meetings or at Catherine’s health club said that he was the only reputable guy to send one’s children to, and because the hygienists and receptionists were featured in a local newspaper not long ago for their brisk cheerfulness, their annual all-patients-invited Fourth of July parties, and their matching uniforms. In Joanna’s slowly forming consciousness about money and class, she had begun to realize that Catherine often sought out the best of things, even if they couldn’t always afford them. Catherine chose to plant Japanese maples in their front yard, instead of run-of-the-mill sequoias or pines, trying to make their little split-level just on the outskirts of the Main Line stand out. She insisted that the family go on vacation to Avalon or Cape May, where the people in the bigger, newer, cleaner houses went—and, incidentally, where the Bates-McAllisters went—instead of Ocean City or Wildwood, where the people in the shabbier ranch houses gravitated. And then, after returning from the only beach house they were able to afford in Avalon or Cape May, which inevitably bordered a house shared by no less than twenty sorority sisters, Catherine made sure to paste an Avalon sticker on their Volvo so everyone would know where they’d gone.
The summers they didn’t go away, Catherine enrolled the family at the local country club, which, in spite of not having a golf course or a bar, was pretentious and exclusive all the same. Catherine dragged Joanna to the country club every day those summers, seating them on Adirondack chairs near the tanned, pinched-faced women who lived a few train stops closer to the Main Line, hanging on their every sentence, desperate for any scrap of conversation. The country club was a sticking point between Joanna’s mother and her father. He wanted to know why they couldn’t just join the Y instead, which had two outdoor pools and more kids Joanna’s age, at a quarter of the cost. But Catherine never relinquished the country-club membership. She went, she sat in that Adirondack chair, and she belonged.
And so when Catherine saw the photo of Sylvie Bates-McAllister and her boys in the Main Line Times at the orthodontist’s office, her eyes glistened with envy. “Would you look at them,” she gushed. She placed her thumb under Charles and Scott’s faces. Their hair was slicked; their bow ties were neat and straight. She zeroed in on Scott, who even then was strikingly handsome, with big, round eyes, enviable cheekbones, and thick black hair. “Lovely.”
“What’s a gala?” Joanna asked, reading the caption.
“A big party,” Catherine said knowingly. “Probably to raise money.” As if she’d been to plenty of galas herself. After that first mention of Sylvie Bates-McAllister, Catherine would bring her up again and again. At a jewelry store at the mall, eyeing the displays: “I bet Sylvie Bates-McAllister buys diamonds like that and thinks nothing of it.” Passing by a stable: “Do you think Sylvie Bates-McAllister takes riding lessons there? Goodness, I’d love to learn how to jump, I should inquire about lessons.” When spotting a stretch limo paused at a traffic light next to them: “Perhaps Sylvie’s in there.” She would say, peering longingly into the tinted windows.
She started to spend like Sylvie Bates-McAllister, too. Every time Joanna’s father received the monthly credit card bill in the mail, her parents would have the same, tired argument. “This is where the money goes?” her father would boom to Catherine, who would be sitting at the kitchen table, doing her nails. “I just want things to be nice,” she’d holler back. “Is that too much to ask? I deserve this.” “If you want all this shit, get a job,” he’d say. To which Catherine would say that she absolutely would not get a job, no self-respecting Main Line woman had a job, to which Joanna’s father would stomp down to the basement, where he kept a weight bench and a few free barbells. Bruce Springsteen would start blaring, and Joanna would listen to the sound of metal against metal, the grunt of heavy weights being thrust over his head. Catherine would put down her nail file and little bottle of polish, look at Joanna and say, “This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.”
Nothing was ever right for Catherine. Nothing was ever good enough. When her health problems developed—episodes that made her writhe and faint and spend hours in the ER, begging to be examined—Joanna was certain it was because of her crippling dissatisfaction. It had metastasized through her body, Joanna figured, in precisely the same way her friend Chelsea’s mother’s breast tumor had metastasized to her lungs and liver. If one could die from cancer, then one could certainly die from unhappiness and unfulfilled dreams.
For a long time, Joanna didn’t notice the looks the ER nurses gave one another when Catherine was wheeled in yet again. Nor did she question why her mother was never really given a diagnosis, or why she was never properly admitted to the hospital, or why her father only dropped the two of them off at the ER entrance, wanting nothing to do with them. She’d just assumed that her father was mean and insensitive, burdening Joanna with all the responsibility so he could spend more time lifting weights or tinkering with his Ham radio. On Joanna’s eleventh birthday, just as Joanna was welcoming the first of her friends to their house—she was having a sleepover party in the finished part of the basement—her mother got that pale, vague look again, and Joanna knew what was coming. Joanna hustled her friends downstairs, watching with trepidation as her mother yet again collected her things to go to the ER. “I can’t go with you this time,” Joanna said.
Catherine’s eyes widened. “Why?”
Joanna was suddenly near tears. “My friends are here,” she answered. And then, more
indignantly, “It’s my birthday. Maybe Dad could go.”
Catherine looked terrified. “No! It has to be you!”
And then Joanna’s father had stepped in, forming a barricade between mother and daughter. “It’s her fucking birthday, Catherine,” he reiterated. Before Catherine could react, Joanna’s father grabbed her by the arm, announcing that he was taking her and her friends out for birthday pizza. If Catherine needed to go to the ER, she would have to drive herself. Instead of going to the ER, Catherine had stormed up to the bedroom and slammed the door. Which confused Joanna— didn’t her mother need the ER? Wouldn’t she die if she didn’t go? And then she realized how foolish she’d been. The discovery hit her hard, rippling through her whole body. Though she uncovered her mother’s secret that night, she kept it to herself, never admitting to anyone she knew.
After that birthday, Joanna started to also daydream about the Bates-McAllister family. She brought the magazine home from the dentist one visit and stashed it in her nightstand drawer, looking every so often at Sylvie’s smiling face, so poised, so serene. Sylvie wasn’t a striver; she was already there. Could a life like hers solve everything? As time passed, she collected more photos of the Bates-McAllister family, following their lives the way other girls followed the goings-on of popular bands. She kept a photo of Charles at Swithin, a photo of James and Sylvie at a ball for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a photo of Charles and Scott standing outside a new running trail on the east side of the county, and a clipping of Sylvie alone, holding a plaque indicating she was being honored at a Swithin charity event. Joanna dug out a worn map from the junk drawer in the kitchen and found the Swithin grounds, which were a few towns away, and then Roderick, nestled in the woods of Devon. The more trips her mother took to the hospital, the more complex Joanna’s fantasies grew. She envisioned herself and her mother going over to Roderick for a family dinner, though the interior of the house looked very different in Joanna’s imagination than it did in reality. Whenever her father was kind enough to drive Joanna and her mother to the hospital Joanna would shut her eyes and imagine them in the Bates-McAllisters’ car instead. It would be a very fancy car, of course—a Rolls-Royce. They would listen to the classical radio station, not the angry, evangelical talk radio her father preferred. In reality, after her mom had been discharged and they waited at the curb for Joanna’s dad to pick them up, she would imagine that Sylvie Bates-McAllister would pull up to the curb instead. Maybe Sylvie and Catherine would become friends. Maybe Sylvie Bates-McAllister would die young and include Catherine in her will.
After fantasizing through her high-school years, Joanna earned a scholarship to Temple that allowed her to move out of her family’s house and into the school’s dorms in Philadelphia. After that there was a string of jobs and boyfriends, and her parents’ inevitable divorce. Out of the suburbs and that house, the cloud over Joanna’s head finally began to clear. Her mother would call with reports of yet more ER visits, and though Joanna would sometimes accompany her, she no longer felt responsible for pulling Catherine out of her misery. She lived her own life. She had all but forgotten about the Bates-McAllisters until the day she saw Charles in a bar in Philadelphia, standing across the big, square room, a beer in his hand.
She’d nearly dropped her glass of wine. It was startling that Charles was real, standing a mere twenty feet away. His posture wasn’t as upright as she’d imagined, and his pants were a little high-waisted. He had razor burn on his jaw line, and his leather jacket fit like a poncho. And his voice, which she could hear across the mostly empty room, was wholly different than she had imagined—a bit flat and gravelly, without any accent at all. For some reason, Joanna had always assumed he would sound like John F. Kennedy.
Seeing Charles filled Joanna with bittersweet nostalgia—Oh, there’s that boy whose family I used to be obsessed with! And she could have left it as a sad, funny, odd little moment and gone home, closing that chapter of her life, except Charles walked over to her. He bent over at the bar right next to her, and ordered another beer, even though there were other empty spots at the counter closer to his friends.
So Joanna said something to him. Maybe something about his complicated platinum watch, maybe something about what he was drinking, she couldn’t remember now. Charles said something back, looking her over and smiling. It was surreal, Charles Bates-McAllister smiling at her, like a character from a book coming off the page and asking her to dance. After about a half hour of talking, Joanna dared to take him by the hand, lean over the bar, and kiss him. Charles’s eyes popped in surprise, but then he kissed her back. Charles Bates-McAllister kissed her back. She pulled away and sat back on the stool, grinning, and noticed he was grinning, too. Later that night, when she left with her roommate, Faith, she asked why Joanna had thrown herself at the short guy with the ugly tie and terrible shoes. “He’s an old friend,” was the only way Joanna could explain.
Charles called later that week. After they had been dating for three months, Joanna decided to finally break the news to Catherine that she had a new boyfriend—someone whose name she might recognize. It felt like the biggest moment in her life. After she made her announcement there was a long pause. Catherine stared at her, a nail file in one hand. Finally, she set the file on the table. “Why in God’s name would he be interested in you?” she cried.
Joanna was taken aback. “What?”
“You don’t know how to hang pants on a hanger. You don’t know how to set a table. You always put the knives on the wrong side of the plate.”
Joanna had stood up, walked to the bathroom, and inspected her reflection, looking for . . . well, she wasn’t sure what. A blemish? Some visible ugliness? She looked the same as she always did: her thick dark hair past her shoulders, her gray, almond-shaped eyes bright and alert, and straight teeth from years of treatments from the right orthodontist. For a moment she thought worriedly about Charles’s old girlfriend, Bronwyn, whom he’d told her about by then. The thought of Bronwyn had made Joanna very nervous and cagey, but Charles assured her that Bronwyn didn’t matter and that he wouldn’t bring her up again. But Bronwyn would know how to put knives on the right side of the plate, certainly. She sounded so perfect, the daughter of a brilliant physician and a professor, the girl whose parents gave her every opportunity in the world. In fact, Joanna could easily imagine Bronwyn standing beside Charles in those old, dusty Main Line Times photographs that were still in a box at her mother’s house. Was her mother on to something? Should Charles be with someone like Bronwyn instead?
And then she’d snapped out of it. Who the hell cared about knives and plates? She emerged from the bathroom, her composure regained. “Charles likes me,” she insisted.
“Okay,” her mother said suspiciously, not letting down her guard. Why wasn’t she happy? Wasn’t this what Catherine was attempting to groom her for?
“He does,” Joanna protested. “And I like him, too.” She hated how hard she was trying.
She did like Charles. He was just what she’d imagined he’d be and much more. He took her to great places in the city for dinner. He had season tickets, courtesy of his parents, to the Philadelphia Orchestra. He enjoyed going to plays and museums. When they went shopping, he didn’t sit sullenly on the couches put out for bored husbands and boyfriends, but instead helped Joanna pick out items that fit her best. Whatever she liked, he bought for her. Whenever they went out to dinner, he paid. His apartment in Rittenhouse Square was clean but not generic. He read Civil War biographies and Vanity Fair. He had square ceramic plates and a collection of old Star Wars toys. He saved his old baseball and concert ticket stubs in a leather-bound black book. Once, when he was taking a shower, she’d found a lined notebook full of original poetry. In that same book, she’d found a creased flyer that said, Redemption Is Near. Repent! A man had shoved it at them on their first date; they’d laughed about it in the restaurant, making a jokey second date to attend the prepare-for-the-apocalypse meeting advertised. They’d gone to a ba
r instead of that meeting and then back to Joanna’s apartment. But Charles had saved that flyer. It meant something to him.
After Joanna found that flyer, she gave herself over to Charles. He became more than just the boy in the magazines she had saved, but someone real. The first time she cried in front of him—recounting an old argument her parents had had that culminated in her dad throwing a plate and her mom sobbing on the kitchen floor—she felt safe and protected. Charles unburdened himself to her, too, telling her about his stilted relationships with his father and brother, recounting memories of being ostracized at summer camps, and sadly wishing he were better with his hands. He had flaws, which she liked. It drew her closer to him, made him more attractive. When he came over she would tear off his clothes. She liked the way he kissed her all over, and she liked the way he stared at her as if she was beautiful and unique. When Charles asked her to marry him at their favorite Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, the one with the homemade pastas and the exuberantly touchy-feely proprietor, Joanna had been rendered speechless. All those pictures she’d saved of Charles’s family, all that wanting. But what made it even sweeter was that where Charles came from didn’t matter anymore. She would have chosen him out of anyone. And she’d thought he’d chosen her out of everyone, too.
Now, though, she wasn’t entirely sure how the choosing had happened.
