The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "I thought you might want to get out," Kitty said. "Mom said you wanted some pens to do Bertie's invitations."

  Sabine did want to get out. She did want pens. Yes. "Don't you have to work?"

  Kitty shrugged and unlooped her scarf. Her hair was down, straight and shiny in the wonderful overhead light of the kitchen. "I'm working less now, now that we're getting this money from Guy. I'm going three days a week regular, plus filling in for people when they're sick. I figured if I didn't cut back, Howard would. I beat him to it."

  Sabine pulled on her coat. "It is your money."

  "That's the way I see it. I mean, most of it will go to college for the boys, assuming I can talk them into going. Neither one of them seems to think that spending their lives in Alliance working at the Woolrich plant like their parents would be such a bad way to go. How's got good grades and Guy is smart enough, if I can just sit on him and make him work. They could go to college."

  "I don't see why not."

  Parsifal had always been so proud of having gone to Dartmouth. He followed their mediocre football team with interest. He would sing the Dartmouth fight song in the shower.

  Come stand up, men, and shout for Dartmouth.

  Cheer when the team in GREEN appears;

  For naught avails the strength of Harvard—

  When they hear our mighty cheers:

  Wah-who-wah-who-wah!

  Now Sabine had no idea whether or not he had gone to college at all.

  "Maybe you could mention it to the boys," Kitty said, her face turned away. "Tell them it's important. They'll listen to you."

  "Why would they listen to me? They hardly know me." Sabine pushed her feet and their two layers of socks into a pair of warmer boots she'd borrowed from Bertie.

  "They're crazy about you. They think you're famous."

  "Famous?"

  "You were married to their famous uncle. You won't tell them how you got on your head, and besides, as far as they're concerned, you've been on television with Johnny Carson every night for the last fifteen years." She looked at Sabine. "Hat."

  Sabine touched her bare head.

  If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need. It gave the world the feeling of organization and purpose. Get on one of these paths and it would take you directly to where you need to go, the ice slipping you quickly forward.

  In the car Sabine fished her sunglasses out of her purse. "Do you get used to it?"

  "To what?" Kitty said, one mittened hand guiding the steering wheel.

  "The winter, all this snow. I think I'd feel a little panicked after a while. Trapped."

  "I can't blame my panic on the weather," Kitty said. "It's bigger than that."

  Sabine smiled because it was what Parsifal would have said, smiled because even if Kitty were serious, she herself had meant it as a joke. Maybe Kitty and Parsifal's similarities were all genetic, the tilt of the eyes, the length of the leg; or maybe they had formed themselves carefully into one person those first fifteen years and it lasted them each a lifetime. Sabine looked out the window. A puff of a child, sexless in a yellow snowsuit, was pulled by a woman with a sled. It felt good to be out. The heater blew warm air on Sabine's feet almost to the point of discomfort. The houses were painted blue, then green, then yellow, and the colors looked so good against the snow, like the green of those tough evergreens and boxwoods.

  "I live down there." Kitty pointed down one of the identical chutes.

  "It's nice that you're so close." Just as quickly as it had been there, Kitty's street was gone. Sabine wanted to look over her shoulder. She hadn't seen the name.

  "Sometimes. My mother and I used to fight a lot. Now everybody's older, it's not so much of an issue anymore. She worries about me too much, though. I don't like that. I have to worry about the boys and worry about myself, and then I have to worry about the fact that I make my mother worry. Wears me out." Kitty pulled off one mitten with her teeth and punched down the cigarette lighter in the station wagon. She took a cigarette out of the pack on the dashboard while she waited for the lighter to pop back out again.

  "So why is your mother worrying about you?"

  "Why do you think?"

  "No one seems to like your husband very much, including you, if you don't mind my saying."

  Pop. Kitty held the hot orange coil up to light her cigarette. "We're a fairly transparent bunch."

  "How long have you been married?"

  Kitty cracked the window and exhaled. It was a long, exhausted sound that was meant to account for all of those years. The sharp, cold air outside blended with the cigarette smoke and then shot it back into the car. "I'm forty-four, so it would be twenty-four years."

  "Young." But Sabine would have married at twenty if Parsifal would have married her then.

  "So young. There should be laws about getting married so young." Far, far ahead the traffic light switched from green to yellow to red, and Kitty began to pump her brakes slowly in anticipation of the stop. "I would have done it even if there had been a law. It made my mother so mad. I couldn't resist. We got married in the Box Butte hospital. Howard and I were dating and he fell off a train. He was working at the trainyard then. There was some ice on the runner and off he went, right on his head, smashed the whole side of his face in."

  "That must have been awful." Sabine remembered the light from the living room lamp throwing a dark shadow into the hole of Howard's cheek, the nest of scars like knotted fishhooks.

  "Oh, you should have seen me at the hospital. I sat by his bed crying and crying, the doctor saying he was probably going to die. I grew very attached to Howard when he was unconscious. I'd lost my father and I'd lost Guy, and there I was about to lose this boy I was dating that I didn't even especially like, but at the time it all felt very connected. He was such a sweetheart in that bed, sleeping, all bandaged up. Nobody thought he'd pull through, and then when he did the first thing he said was that he wanted to marry me. I got up from my plastic chair, went down the hall, and got the chaplain. There's something about a boy with a smashed-in head that's very hard to resist when you're twenty."

  "But that's not why Dot didn't want you to marry him."

  "Oh, God, no, nothing like that. Howard was a hoodlum when he was young. My mother was convinced somebody threw him off that train for gambling debts or stealing cars or some such thing. I'm sure he was just drunk or stoned. I never did ask him. The truth is, he turned out better than anybody thought he would. He's kept a job, he's stayed with us. But pretty much as soon as the pain medication wore off, we both knew we'd made a real mistake." Kitty eased the car into a plowed lot. "Wal-Mart."

  "Is there any sort of art-supply store?"

  "The general wisdom around here is if you can't get it at Wal-Mart, you don't need it."

  Sabine looked up at the brown building, which was itself the size of another parking lot. "I've never actually been in one of these."

  "Go on," Kitty said.

  Sabine shook her head. "I've just never had any reason to."

  Kitty stubbed out her cigarette and replaced her mitten. "Well, you are in for a treat."

  As they walked together towards the store she told Sabine, "I bring the boys here in the dead of winter when the weather is awful and they're bored, and I come here when I want to be alone. My mother and I come here when we want to talk privately, and Bertie and I come here when we feel like seeing people. I come here when the air conditioner goes out in the summer and I buy popcorn and just walk around. Most of the times I can remember that Howard and I were actually getting along he'd ask me if I wanted to go to Wal-Mart with him, and we'd look at stuff we wanted to buy and talk about it—wouldn't it b
e nice to have a Cuisinart, wouldn't it be nice to have a sixty-four-piece sprocket set. It's a very romantic place, really."

  On the curb was a soda machine, all drinks a quarter. Kitty leaned in towards Sabine as they pushed open the glass-and-metal doors. The warm air smelled like popcorn and Coke. It smelled like a carnival wearing new clothes. An older woman in a blue tunic who seemed to be patterned on Dot, the same plastic glasses and gray curls, the same roundness, pushed out a shopping cart for them to take. She greeted Kitty by name.

  "I buy books here," Kitty said. "I buy my shampoo and underwear and cassette tapes and potato chips, sheets and towels and motor oil." There was something in her tone, so low and conspiratorial, that Sabine put her gloved hand over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

  "Why?" Sabine said. "Why?"

  Kitty raised a hand over her head, gestured magnificently towards the fluorescent lights, the banners hanging from the ceiling that pointed you to specific departments and special values. "There is no place else in town. No place to go. This is it, Sabine."

  The place was an airport. Not an airport, but a hangar where planes were kept. Sabine thought of the marketplace in Bangkok, everything you wanted available to you. Somewhere, if they turned the right corner, there would be a row of live rabbits and chickens to buy for their supper. There would be gauzy sarongs and bright green songbirds and huge red fruits for which there was no name. Somewhere there would be an aisle of prostitutes, women and girls and boys in different sizes that could be purchased on an hourly basis. Sabine curled her fingers around the blue push-bar on the cart, even though Kitty had been steering.

  "Can you think of anything you need?" Kitty asked. "Anything at all?"

  "Just the pens."

  There was not one thing that was true about all the people in the store, but so many things repeated themselves, women with perms, men in dark blue jeans and cowboy boots, the dearth of color in their skin and eyes and hair. The people began to run together. And then she realized, they were all white people. Where had she ever been in Los Angeles where all the people were white? The white people looked at Sabine. Some doubled back down the same aisle twice to see her again. In the Alliance Wal-Mart, Sabine appeared famous. Maybe, without being able to remember the exact incident, they sensed that she had been on television. Maybe they could smell all the other places she had been to in her life. They didn't know why it was exactly, but they knew she was different.

  Kitty stopped the cart and put in two three-packs of paper towels. "Sale."

  Sabine nodded. Was $2.49 a good price? To know if paper towels were a deal this time, you'd have to remember what they cost last time. Sabine could never remember. They passed through the paper products, past the baby oils, lotions, diapers, shampoos. They went through Electronics. The bank of televisions played three different channels. They were all set to soap operas because it was that time of day. Women wearing jewelry and elaborate outfits mouthed their love to handsome men with slicked-back hair. They looked like they meant it, their eyes were bright with tears. The volume was off. Sabine started watching and fell behind. Kitty was making her way towards School Supplies, and Sabine hurried to catch up with her.

  "Guy needs posterboard," Kitty said and ran her fingers over the ten available colors. "He's doing a project on food chains."

  Ahead of them, a man bent over a stack of spiral notebooks. Sabine recognized his coat, the curve of his shoulders, but couldn't place him until he straightened up. Her mistake had been in trying to remember him as someone she knew in Los Angeles. "Haas," she said.

  Haas looked up through his glasses and smiled. "Hey, there." He took a step forward but didn't quite reach them.

  "Hooky?" Kitty said.

  "Lunch. I needed some things." Haas looked more comfortable in the Wal-Mart than he did in the Fetters kitchen. He smiled easily.

  "We came to get some pens. Sabine is going to do your wedding invitations."

  "That's what Bertie told me," he said. "It's very nice of you. I think Bertie has good handwriting but she feels self-conscious about it. She wants everything to be perfect."

  "She was just trying to give me a task," Sabine said. "I know she could do them."

  Haas shook his head. "She's grateful for your help. Bertie's so glad you're here. We both are. It means a lot to have all the family together for the wedding."

  "Won't be long now," Kitty said.

  Haas picked up a package of gold tinfoil stars and ran his fingers over the edges thoughtfully. "We've waited a long time. If it was up to me we'd go ahead and get married tomorrow, but Bertie wants a nice wedding and she should have one." Haas waited through an awkward moment of silence and then tossed the stars in his basket. "I should go. The lines looked pretty long when I came in, and I've got to be back in class by one."

  "Sure," Kitty said.

  "It was good to see you again." He hesitated and then held out his hand to Sabine, who shook it and said good-bye.

  "He thinks you're famous, too," Kitty whispered as Haas was walking away. "They make him watch the video every night."

  Sabine turned to watch him recede towards Checkout. His legs were thin and long beneath his coat. "Do you think Bertie's doing the right thing? He seems so solemn."

  "Did you look in his basket? Almond Roca. Bertie loves that stuff and it's not cheap. He'll buy a couple of notebooks as a cover but he was over here to get her a present, you can bet your life on it. He loves her and she loves him. If you ask me, Bertie made him wait way too long. Even if the women in my family don't have such a good track record with men, she's never had anything to worry about with Haas. He's always going to be good to her."

  That's what Parsifal had been, good to her. It was the thing that Sabine believed in, more than passion, more than tradition. Find a man you love who is good to you. She looked at the pens: razor point, fine point, ballpoint, Roller-ball, indelible. There was one felt-tipped calligraphy pen, but it wasn't what she'd hoped for. She liked the old-fashioned kind, a set with changeable nibs and a bottle of ink. "It seems like they're waiting kind of late to get these invitations done."

  "I don't know why they're bothering to send them at all." Kitty added a box of envelopes to the cart. "Everybody knows they're getting married two weeks from Saturday. They know when it is and where it is and whether or not they're coming. It's all a formality, sending out the cards."

  "Sentimental words from a woman who got married in a hospital room."

  "It was a ward," Kitty corrected. "No private room for Howard."

  Sabine dropped the pen in the basket and was ready to push on when she was sidetracked by the glue sticks. They looked so much like ChapSticks. Next to them were the X-acto knives. The posterboard was flimsy and cheap, but there was some illustration board that was almost as good as Bristol board. She picked up a metal ruler for a straight edge. Making models of buildings was how Sabine was used to filling up her time. In Los Angeles she was in demand. There was always a greater need than she could possibly meet. "I think I'm going to buy a couple more things, just to give myself something to do."

  "Sure," Kitty said. "We're in no hurry."

  What she needed she already owned. She had it in triplicate at home. But she wasn't home, and suddenly the idea of building something appealed to her. Maybe she could make something Dot would like. She filled the basket with wire and tempera paint. She found things she never knew she wanted in the hardware section, a lovely jeweler's file and a three-ounce hammer. She doubled back to Beauty and bought Q-tips and rolled cotton. She bought straight pins in the sewing section and pushpins in School Supplies.

  Kitty looked in the basket. "We always buy things we didn't mean to. That's the whole point of the place. It's cold outside, there's nowhere else to go, so you might as well stay in here and shop."

  Before they left, Sabine bought herself a pair of men's jeans in dark blue denim.

  Kitty and Sabine were home long before anyone else. The day, which had been so bright when
they left the house, had clouded over while they had been shopping, and by the time they were home again they had to turn on the light in the kitchen in order to see properly. Kitty made tuna-fish sandwiches while Sabine sorted through her purchases.

  "My mother told me you took an egg out of her ear," Kitty said.

  "I did."

  Kitty nodded, mixing a spoonful of mayonnaise into the bowl. "She said you did a great job. I'd like it if you could take one out of my ear sometime, not to show me how to do it, I know you wouldn't do that, but I'd like to see the trick."

  "I can't do it if you ask me to. It only works if you catch someone off-guard. I'll take an egg out of your ear sometime when you're not expecting it."

  "Guy had a hell of a time with that one. He never could get it right."

  Sabine shook her head. "I just can't imagine that. It was the easiest thing in the world for him." When there were omelettes for breakfast he took all the eggs out of Phan's ear. Something about the cold shell on the soft skin of his ears made Phan crazy. He would fall on the floor, giggling and squirming, while Parsifal pulled out another and another. Sabine knew how to palm an egg so well because she had seen it done right there on her kitchen floor a hundred times. Parsifal never did the trick again after Phan died. He wouldn't even eat eggs. "Do you have a deck of cards?" Sabine asked. Think of something else.