The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "I just meant..." she sputtered. "You know, in terms of resolving the separation, because sometimes the friction in a marriage carries over into a divorce, and you get so angry you think it would be easier—"

  "You must know a lot about that."

  "We do have books on divorce in the store."

  "And you've read those, have you?"

  "Not all of them, but maybe more than your average—"

  I interrupted. "Your average happily married woman? And what about love? Do you read books about that too?" I stared at her until she raised her cigarette and took a deep drag. She forced herself to nod, like a child who has misbehaved; smoke poured from between her lips. "It's one of my favorite subjects. Maybe next time I'm in the store you can point out the ones you like best."

  I saw confusion and a touch of fear in her eyes. She had no idea how to get away from me or how far my hostility might go. I had no idea myself. I could imagine her wishing that I had just told her to fuck off, instead of being so perverse and unrelenting.

  "I'd be happy to, next time you're in the store," she lied, and turned stiffly in the sand, like a penguin, and waddled off toward the cooking pit, to join the huddle of spectators upwind of it, waiting for the canvas to be ceremonially lifted and the steaming feast uncovered, disrobed. I continued to stare, but instead of seeing what was there, a bunch of summer vacationers about to clap for a pile of steaming lobsters and clams, I saw this semicircle of people gaping at the pit, the way I was gaping at them, as spectators in an old operating theater, and the Bake Master, in his butcher's apron, as the surgeon about to saw off someone's limb without anesthesia. I remembered the play Will and I had seen the year before at Island Rep about the history of medicine. In a scene nearly impossible to watch, the writer Fanny Burney had her cancerous breast cut off and described it in a famous missive of 1812. The actress recited bits while the staged operation took place, and I found the text later in a collection of famous letters: When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins—arteries—flesh—nerves—I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision—& I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still, so excruciating was the agony.

  I drank down the club soda in my plastic cup and went again—did I march, did I saunter? I don't know, I found myself there, that's all—to the drinks table. "What kind of beer do you have in a can?"

  He listed a few names. I chose Heineken. I said, "Why don't you give me two of them?" I could feel the tempo of everything speed up and the notes shorten. Like marimba music but sinister. I had lost my balance. I was losing my way.

  He bent over a trash basket filled with crushed ice and drinks in cans. The amount of alcohol in twelve ounces of beer is the same as in a shot of whiskey. Two cans, two shots. I shook with fury. I wanted the alcohol to take the edge off my rage and my rage to fill the well of my grief, and my life—which seemed a distant foreign country—to return to the messy, tattered, serio-comic routine it had been the day before.

  "I know who you are. You're Sophy," the bartender said, and held out two icy, dripping cans of beer.

  "Yeah, that's me." I wiped them on my sleeve and slipped them into my shoulder bag. I was about to say thank you and walk away—I did not want to know he remembered me from the vet's office or the post office or a clambake I'd never been to; all I wanted was to get away from there and drink—when he said something that caused me to shudder.

  "I used to see you at meetings." This was not chipper bartender banter. It was pointed, it had a lot of subtext, we both knew exactly how much. "But I haven't seen you for a while."

  "I don't live here anymore. I'm visiting." I did not say why. I did not want to admit that I was doing the pitifully predictable thing: succumbing to drink in a crisis. They call it "picking up," and if I had not been half mad with Betsy Schmidt and grief, I would have said to myself, "Don't pick up," and would have listened. Instead, I did what lie had just done to me: put him on the spot, called him on his behavior. "I thought it was kind of a no-no for people like us to work as bartenders. All that temptation."

  "I don't usually. I'm helping out a friend who had to go to Boston."

  "You really ought to be careful," I said. "Ciao."

  As I turned, he said the one thing I dreaded he would say—the slogan offered to someone who's recalcitrant or slipping ping or doesn't quite get how the whole thing works: Keep coming back. It means, come to enough meetings, and you'll like your sobriety. You'll find God in the morning sun and in your breakfast cereal. You'll deal with crisis by reaching for a meeting instead of a drink. You'll mutter slogans to yourself without irony, without cynicism, without muttering.

  "Keep coming back," he said as I pressed my way through the sand.

  "Stupid little prick," I said, way under my breath.

  I had not had a drop, but I could already feel I was in danger. I was not sure where I was headed, but I knew I had to stop myself from getting there too fast. I slogged over the dunes and along the dirt road that wound around the Winstons' property, looking for Evan's car. I was nearly trembling with desire for the beer I took out of my bag and popped open, desire not for the taste but for the numbness it would give me, numbness against the dreadful steel plunged into the breast and the dreadful death of my husband, which I felt in the same place and felt as hard.

  I was astonished by how yeasty it was, after all these years away from it. Dumb, dumb girl. Amazing how fast it made my tongue tingle. My tongue, the only part of me that wasn't in pain, that didn't need anesthetizing. I didn't know where I was going, but when I got into the car and maneuvered along the badly pocked road, I told myself I was not going to drink the other beer in my bag. I would throw it into the Dumpster in the lot of Nelson's Supermarket. I took South Road toward Cummington and drove the speed limit, because I knew how easy it would be to go above it. The road was narrow and loopy and passed rolling farmland, meadows, a handpainted sign nailed to an oak tree that said SWEET SWEET CORN. Not thinking about it, I took the left fork where the road divided, and when the landscape changed, the sudden forest, the back woods, when I found myself beneath a canopy of thick green leaves, I remembered that the turn-off for Cynthia Knox's was somewhere around here.

  But I was wrong. There was no turn-off. Her house was the gray-shingled gambrel up ahead, KNOX was painted on mailbox number eight.

  I saw her old Volvo sedan, with a nicked Harvard decal in the rear window, in the driveway. Her office door was around back, but this was nowhere near an office hour, so I walked along the flagstones and onto the porch and rang the bell.

  A moment later, she opened the door and peered at me through the screen. "Yes?"

  "It's Sophy Chase, Will O'Rourke's wife."

  "Oh, my God—" She pushed open the screen and came out. "I heard this afternoon. I'm so sorry. The receptionist in Nancy Goldsmith's office told me when I ran into her at Nelson's." She took my hand firmly in hers, and her smile oozed sympathy. I was struck as always by her aquamarine eyes, her city attire. She was fifty-something, lovely in a natural way, wearing the sort of women's clothes you find in Cambridge, what academics wear when they dress up: the baggy batik vest over the knit cotton top, handmade silver jewelry, silk scarf. She took a lot of trouble with her appearance for a year-rounder. I used to kid Will about his having a crush on her. "Maybe a little one," he'd say sweetly.

  "I was wondering when you last saw Will."

  "You know, I was thinking about that today, after I heard. A month ago? Island Hardware? I was buying a trellis for the garden, and he—"

  "I mean, as a patient."

  "I don't have my book here."

  "Roughly?"

  "Three months ago?"

  "What did he say about the divorce?"

  "You know, I really cant say, Sophy."

  "Did he talk about killing himself?"

  "I cant discuss that, even if—"

  "You m
ean he did, and you didn't do anything?"

  "Sophy, I know this is upsetting, but I can't talk about these matters with you. It wouldn't be ethical to—"

  "Do you know that he may have killed himself?"

  "I was told there's going to be an autopsy, so I'm withholding—"

  "Were you prescribing medication for him?"

  "That's a confidential matter."

  "I was hoping you might tell me something I don't already know, but obviously that's not—"

  "It might be helpful for you to talk to someone on the island. If you need a referral, I'd be happy—"

  "What are you hiding from me?"

  "Only the usual confidences of the doctor-patient relationship."

  "Were you sleeping with him? Is that it?"

  "This line of questioning is not appropriate." She turned and slipped into the house, giving me the back of her subdued and politically correct Cambridge vest, whose red tendrils no doubt came from organic raspberries and cotton from politically correct cotton pickers. She glared at me through the screen and added, "I'm sorry about Will, sorry you're left alone. But I'm in the middle of dinner. Excuse me." After she closed the door in my face, I kicked the flimsy wood frame of the screen and remembered Daniel asking me last night if Swansea wasn't a pastoral playground where everyone was filled with the milk of human kindness. Everyone except me.

  I did not throw away the second can of beer. I drank half of it as I drove through the tunnel of trees on my way to the main road and decided I would return to the awful Winstons' awful party. I could keep drinking there and not worry about driving, the hell with the pious bartender. I bloody well will keep coming back. I didn't know what made me think she'd been sleeping with my husband. I'm not even sure I thought so; maybe it was the bluntest weapon I could find, an attack on her prissy reticence. All I wanted from her was a solid piece of information, anything other than a phone bill or an overdue video or a missing dog. Or was there something twitchy and suspect in her reluctance to speak to me?

  I didn't know, but when I came to the intersection, I did not turn right, toward Evan's house and the Winstons' and the setting sun. I turned left, toward Cummington, toward Will's place. He had a diary, I remembered, and in it might be the answers to all my questions. Unless I got it out of the house tonight, I would lose it tomorrow to Ginny and Susanna and Clare.

  8. Diving into the Wreck

  THE LIGHTS were on in Will's house. All the windows were open. There was a van parked in the driveway, black with white letters stenciled on the side, but when I saw the words, I could not put my foot to the brake, could not bring myself to stop.

  AAA Disaster & Restoration Specialists

  EMERGENCY CLEANING REPAIRS CONSTRUCTION

  WATER FIRE SMOKE WIND

  24-HOUR SERVICE

  But I drove only to the end of the block, where I made a wide U and turned back, because I knew the men working in the house could do what I had come to do, and what I dreaded. I would not even have to go in. I could tell them where it was, where it might be.

  I thought they might object, since I was asking them to give me not a composition book but a laptop computer, bright orange, what the company called tangerine. It made a trilly, musical sound when you lifted the top. But I guess they felt sorry for me, because I said I was the wife, because they didn't know the whole story. All I know is that they ended up replacing a section of the floor beside the bed, four feet by eight feet, the floorboards, the insulation, everything.

  Five minutes later, I drove away with Will's diary on the seat next to me.

  Five minutes after that, I stopped at a place I had not seen inside for many years, Oysterman's Package Store, and bought a half pint of Jack Daniels, because it fit easily into my purse, and because I could not face reading Will's diary without it. Those were the excuses I recited to myself instead of the slogans I could have recited, without irony, cynicism, or muttering. And now, what I tell myself about that night is that it could not have happened any differently, though of course I wish it had.

  I wish, for instance, that I had had the patience to drive out to Evan's house, about forty minutes from Oysterman's, and retreat to his study with the computer before anyone came back from the clambake. Or I wish I had taken it to my friends Sally and Tim Baylor's house, outside Cummington, and plugged it in at their kitchen table, instead of going where I went. I wish, I wish—wishes as pretty and insubstantial as soap bubbles. The truth is that I wanted to do what I did all alone, without having to explain to anyone what I had just done. The computer was not mine to take or borrow—I knew that—and I had no idea what I would do with it once I finished the diary. There was also the small matter of the Tennessee sour mash, which I did not know what I would do with either, once I was done reading. And the notion, the probability, that the bottle might be empty by then—I did not know where in my gallery of terrors that stood. Or maybe I knew exactly.

  It was dark when I turned onto the back road that led to Bell's Cove. I was heading for the secluded grove of old trees near the entrance to the sound, where people parked and then hiked a short distance to the beach. Dark, when I got there, but not pitch dark. There were lights from the occasional passing car, a house across the road, a sliver of the moon. Mine was the only car in the dirt lot at the edge of the grove. I moved into the passenger seat, where there would be room on my lap for the computer, and flipped up the top, hoping it had been plugged in, the battery being charged, until I had removed it from the house. It emitted a cheery twang, and the screen got bright and busy, as if a video game was beginning, and, in a way, it was. Then it surprised me and spoke. A woman's voice said, "Welcome." I reached down to twist the top off the Jack Daniels.

  In a corner of the screen was the folder icon I dreaded: JOURNAL. I took a long swallow and double-clicked on it. A window flashed onto the screen: THIS FILE IS ENCRYPTED. ENTER PASSWORD.

  I typed "Ginny."

  INVALID.

  Susanna.

  INVALID.

  "Jesse."

  INVALID.

  "Henry." Though I knew this was unlikely.

  INVALID.

  "Sophy." This even more so.

  REPEATED INVALID ATTEMPTS DENY ACCESS TO FILE.

  I took another swig of the stuff, calling it "stuff" in my mind because I did not want to call it what it was and call what I was doing what it was. That little bit, the second swallow, surged through me in two directions, north and south, my head and the vast vicinity of my heart, which felt as if it were clenching and expanding in a parody of its normal function. I took another mouthful, because I liked the exaggeration of my heart and the numbing of everything else—my tongue, my lips, the tips of my fingers. And another, which traveled down my throat and to the back of my brain in a great burst of color, Jackson Pollock's paint or the splatter of blood on a wall from a gunshot wound. I mean to impress upon you the drama of the sensation, because it made what happened next, first the one thing, then the other, that much more intense.

  The first was finding, in the right-hand corner of the screen, a folder called CORRESPONDENCE. I clicked on it, and a listing of letters appeared, organized by date, the most recent May 27, five days before the last phone call and the video rentals.

  Dear Svelte, Sophisticated Sailor:

  I noticed the ad you ran in the back of Sailing and thought that if you didn't mind an ace sailor still a little rocky from a divorce (that I didn't want), we might find our way to smooth seas without becoming becalmed. I am a 59-year-old retired diplomat living on Swansea, for the time being anyway, in possession of a somewhat rickety but seaworthy Valient 28' (which my wife had no patience for, though I don't think that had anything to do with the divorce). My friend who urged me to write this letter insists the protocol is to send a photo, so I'm going through a shoe box I have that—

  The letter ended there. The next one was dated the same day, also addressed to the Classified Department of Sailing:

  Please run the follo
wing ad for my boat in the next possible issue.

  Valient 28'. Windwave, 32V130, 1977, $14,000.

  The next letter was dated the day before the classified ad.

  Dear Sophy:

  Here's the $873 from the insurance company, as per our conversation/fight. I know you think I have been a bastard about the money, and maybe I have been. But that's what comes of all my goddam niceness, bottled up until it explodes. I never did figure out how to be more like Evan Lambert, who is too ambitious to waste time being nice, and less like myself, afraid so often, except in situations where everyone else is scared out of their wits: Vietnam in 1968; crossing the Atlantic in a 30' sailboat; at the funeral of my son. I cannot describe my condition at those times, except to say that I lose my self-consciousness, I lose the crushing fear, with me so much of the time, that I am about to fuck up. Was I born like that—poor Mick who seems to have done pretty well, but it's a house of cards, a guy who lives on Swansea, which sounds like the top of the heap, except we're not summer people, and I'm alone again? Ever since Jesse died I have tried to live with less fear, because with his death, I know I faced the most frightening thing a parent possibly could. But I don't...

  The letter did not end here, but my concentration was suddenly severed by what happened next, the second thing in this series, though when I tell you, it may be hard to believe that I didn't see it coming. The truth is that this letter Will had never sent took more than all of my attention, and I didn't notice the car until it was directly beside mine. But it took only a tenth of a second, once I did, to remember the bottle, which I'd had the good sense to keep returning to the purse on the floor between my feet, not to conceal it from anyone except myself. I'd wanted to add another few steps to the process, slow it down, and thank God for that, thank God I was not sitting there swilling it like Diet Sprite, dumb, dumb girl, Jesus H. Christ. It was the State Police.