Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  “But, Ingrid and Paco—”

  He grabbed her shoulders, his face white with anger. “Look, you want to go off and do your thing with Angel and Betts and whoever the hell lives at that place? Okay, you do it. Meantime, I’m in charge around here, and if I say Ingrid can go to Paco’s, then she can go. The less time you spend with this family, the less you’ve got to say about how things get run. Is that clear?”

  Hannah’s heart contracted. In a fraction of a second, she knew it might be possible to make Dan so mad his anger would flare and not die down again. He could be pushed too far. She wanted to undo the last fifteen minutes, to hold Dan and hug Ingrid until she squealed. She had a quick, urgent longing for Eddie—And then his image repelled her. She didn’t want to hold Eddie. She didn’t even want to pick him up after football practice and buy him shoes. The thought of his hair, thick and oily and long at the neck, disgusted her.

  “Do as you please,” she said and tossed the dishcloth into the sink. “I have to go.”

  Liz settled in the overstuffed wicker chair and put her feet up on the matching hassock. In the sulky light of outdoor flares the party of eight old friends gathered on the patio overlooking the pool and paddock. The sounds of jazz piano came from the CD player in the kitchen. From where Liz sat she saw the silhouette of the wildwood, a black paper cutout against a night sky reddened by the reflection of lights from the busy valley and San Jose. She breathed deep and smelled the creek and wood, the distinctive tang of bay and gum and damp and shadows she knew so well that even in Belize, in her kitchen in the middle of the night, she could summon it. How could Hannah not think of what happened at Bluegang when reminders were all around her?

  Liz sensed trouble between Dan and Hannah; but if it bothered Hannah, she hid it well. In a long black skirt, gored and graceful on her slender body, she sat at ease among her friends, her hair curly and wild, barely controlled by silver combs, wilder than any of their mothers would have approved. So feminine, Liz thought. A pretty mouth and wide eyes, and that hair, that wonderful hair, that silver blonde hair. Liz closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of her friends’ voices, their laughter and banter. It crossed her mind that she had no business coming back to Rinconada loaded down with skeletons, dumping her bag of old bones at Hannah’s feet and expecting her to sort it out. I must be crazy, Liz thought. At best, unkind. Hannah—Jeanne too, for that matter—led more or less contented, settled lives. They were not the lives Liz had ever wanted for herself, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate them. Bluegang had receded in her friends’ minds, and apparently bore no more relevance to this day and place than did the death of Jeanne’s brother and her parents’ alcoholism, or Hannah’s maddeningly mild father and judgmental mother. It was only Liz who could not let the bones rest. Misery loves company. Was that the real motivation behind this trip home? Before tonight she would have insisted it was not but now she wondered if she was deluding herself. Maybe Jeanne was right and Liz was just plain selfish and too imaginative. In the middle of the night in Belize she never would have thought this possible; but in this circle of old friends, it seemed if not absolutely true, at least possibly so. This, she saw at once, was why she didn’t like to come back. In Rinconada it took an effort to hold on to who she was now; it was easy to slip backwards and become again that deferential and neglected child, the accident who had disrupted her parents’ ordered and scholarly lives.

  Mindy Ryder sat beside Hannah on the cushioned bench wearing an ankle length skirt and peasant blouse, an elaborately embroidered shawl across her shoulders. With her long narrow eyes, moody and Slavic, exotic and unlikely above her upturned Irish nose and rosebud mouth, she looked like a gypsy, a description Liz knew would please her.

  Teddy and Jeanne sat side by side on a pair of upholstered Brown Jordan chairs across from Mindy and Hannah. Teddy. Movie star handsome in a loose fitting lime green linen shirt and beige pleated trousers; Jeanne delicately patrician in soft slacks and a light sweater. She wore her hair pulled back and Liz wanted to tell her to let it go, stop looking like a Norman Rockwell schoolteacher. She was on her third drink.

  Who am I? Her conscience?

  So far that evening they had talked about a bestseller everyone was reading, about a Randy Newman concert and could they still get tickets, about trophy wives, and now the topic was rain. The lack of it.

  “If it goes on much longer,” Gail Bacci said, “I won’t be able to give houses away around here.”

  They laughed at that.

  Gail’s homecoming cheerleader features had become marshmallowy with age; but her round blue eyes still sparkled with the energy that had always left Liz slightly breathless. She sat beside her husband, Mario, on the redwood planter seat encircling the trunk of the live oak around which the flagstone patio had been laid. In the half-light Liz could not see Mario’s eyes, but she remembered them. Dark brown with flecks of gold and green, dense lashes and half moon eyelids, bedroom eyes high school girls swooned for. Time wouldn’t have changed those—or the naughty boy behind them either.

  Dan perched on the stone wall beside the steps leading down to the pool. Relaxed, apparently cheerful: like Hannah, he concealed the fact that there was trouble in the family. The years had favored Dan. He was no longer shy and gawky. Like Hannah he seemed perfectly at ease. The pair of them were the weave and fiber of this family and community—schizophrenic as silicon had made it. Liz watched them and listened and occasionally added something to the conversation, but not much and not often. Tonight it took too much energy to fight sliding back into the childhood role assigned to her: Liz the dreamer with nothing important to contribute, one step behind, a little tentative, slightly shabby. Not smart and confident and capable like Jeanne. Not pretty and lovable and well dressed like Hannah. Memory came as a physical sensation, tearing back tissue and making raw again what had never fully healed. She felt as she never did in Belize: a bolt of burlap in the land of silk.

  She accepted another glass of wine. She was among friends and she looked good. Her clothes were right—floaty raw silk pants and shirt in a deep blue that flattered her; her haircut was chic. Why couldn’t she relax, play the role expected of her, and have a pleasant evening?

  “How much rain do you get down in Belize, Lizzie?” Mario asked.

  She never knew the answer to that kind of question.

  “I’m surprised you can’t give us all the vital statistics,” Gail said, laughing. “You were such a bookworm.”

  Despite her new haircut and pretty clothes and never mind that even pregnant she was at least forty pounds slimmer than Gail, Liz felt pissed on, put down, exactly as she had in high school.

  Did anyone ever, really, grow up?

  “I’m still a reader.” So there. “I’ve made the bookseller on our corner a wealthy man.”

  “But, my God,” Teddy Tate bent toward her, “how do you keep from being bored to death?”

  His smugness infuriated her and she tried to recall if she had ever liked Teddy. Maybe for a few hours or days when Jeanne was flush with love, and it had been important that they approve each other’s choices of husbands and lovers.

  “I have friends. Gerard and I talk and cook together.” And read and listen to music. “We have satellite TV. We can pick up Miami if we want to. Which we mostly don’t.” We go for walks and sail our little boat. “The guest house takes a lot of work. I’m exhausted at bedtime but it’s a good life.”

  “You’ll break my heart if you grow a housemaid’s hump, Liz.” The torchlight flared red in Teddy’s eyes. “Spoil that lovely back.”

  The way Teddy looked at her made Liz’s skin pucker, but she acknowledged his compliment with a polite smile. For a moment, no one said anything. She glanced at Jeanne who had gone over to sit on the wall beside Dan. If she heard Teddy or cared what he said, she wasn’t letting on.

  “What about Gerard?” Mindy Ryder’s slanted eyes glittered. “What’s he do? I just want to get a picture of the kind of li
fe you’ve got down there. I mean, hell, I’m fifty plus and the farthest away I’ve been is Acapulco.”

  “That’s a crime,” Gail said. “We flew over to London for a week; easier than driving down to L.A.”

  “Gerard helps when he can, but he’s often gone for weeks in the field.” Liz wanted to bring Gerard alive for these old friends. She could tell them: He knows the name of ten thousand tropical plants, in Latin and English, bird calls too and the history of trees. “He’s a consultant to the Minister for Environmental Affairs. His specialty is rain forest management and since Belize has one of the last undamaged forests in the world and the government wants to keep it that way . . .” She didn’t describe Gerard. She delivered a prose rendition of his résumé. “He’s devoted to his work.”

  Teddy chuckled. “I thought you went in for the artistic type.”

  “Managing a whole goddamn forest sounds like an art to me.” Mindy said and winked at Liz.

  “We should get him up here to tell us what to do about that damn creek.” Gail nodded behind her toward Bluegang. “Did Hannah tell you there’s a committee—”

  “I can’t even manage my own life,” Mindy said. “Let alone an ecosystem.”

  “And speaking of your life, how is that girl of yours?” Gail grinned. “Tell us her name.”

  Mindy sighed. “You know her name, Gail.”

  “Balthazara!” Gail rolled off on wheels of laughter.

  Mindy shook her head and her embroidered shawl slipped a little, revealing plump, tanned and freckled shoulders. “What can I say? She was born in nineteen-sixty-nine. If she’d been a boy I was going to call her Pax. I’m nothing if not a child of my times.”

  “When’s her baby due?” Hannah asked.

  Babies. Fifty years old and we’re always talking about babies.

  “Six weeks.”

  “Lucky you,” Hannah said, “to be a grandmother.”

  Liz shifted in her chair. The waistband of her slacks cut into her skin. She felt hugely fat with breasts like Dolly Parton. Why had no one noticed?

  Because they don’t really see me, she thought. Not even Jeanne and Hannah see the person I really am. They see Liz Shepherd the wild girl in shabby clothes and her hair in tangles because her mother never took the time to notice her. Given enough time these people, out of their affection and concern and totally without thinking, would shove her back into the box that had confined her when she was young. She didn’t know if she would have the strength to resist and declare: Look at me. See me. This is me now.

  Of course she wouldn’t. That was why she had left Rinconada and returned infrequently and was always glad to leave at the end of a week or ten days. She recalled a visit long ago to the La Brea Tar Pits and saw herself, stuck solid in the mud of time. It could have happened to her so easily. How fortunate she had been in her compulsion to escape.

  Mario was speaking to her. “You gotta come in and see the new deli, Lizzie.” His handsome features had coarsened and mousse or spray held his gray-streaked comber in place; but her nickname buzzed on his lips and she felt a little of the old electric charge. “I’ll give you the grand tour. Let you taste the prosciutto straight from Italy.”

  “Twenty-two-fifty a pound,” Gail said. “Make sure it’s a very small taste.”

  “We had some good times, huh, Lizzie?”

  Gail poked him. “Spare us the trip down memory lane, Mario. You’re a middle-aged man with four grown children, remember. A grandfather.” Gail walked over to the drinks table next to the doors into the dining room. She refilled her glass with chilled white wine. “I was going to bring their pictures, Liz, but he wouldn’t let me. He made me promise I wouldn’t go on about being a grandmother. He prefers you remember him as the Rinconada Wildcats’ running quarterback, the dago with the dynamite smile.”

  Teddy told a story about a boy at Hilltop, something about an imaginary football player. As he talked Liz watched Hannah. She sat with her elbows on the arms of her chair, her fingertips together, drumming gently on her lower lip. Impatient, bored or deep in thought, Liz couldn’t tell. Now that the party was established, she seemed less present and to have retreated, content to let her guests take care of themselves. Dan watched her too. Liz couldn’t read his expression and that worried her.

  Conversation ambled on and none of it was important. The air grew chill and the fragrance of the creek and wildwood more intense. Not unpleasant, simply there, alive.

  At the dinner table set with linen and china and ornate old silverware, Hannah ladled curried carrot soup from a tureen decorated with orange flowers and spoke down the table to Mindy, seated on Dan’s right. “We were going to eat Italian, Mindy, but Mario’d run out of your ravioli. Sharon Bell says you make the best pasta she’s ever tasted.”

  “And she bakes all my biscotti,” Mario said. “I could sell twice as much only she’s so lazy.”

  Hannah said to Liz, “Mindy’s a caterer when she isn’t at the clinic. Where do you get your energy?”

  “Drugs,” Mindy said. They all knew she had a long history with cocaine but had not used it in years.

  Teddy raised his glass. “Let’s hear it for drugs.”

  “Are you still working at that horrible place?” Gail asked. “You could make so much more . . .”

  “Gail, it’s not about money. The kids at the center, they’re in bad shape when they come to me, really bad. They need me.”

  “You always were such a good Catholic,” Gail said, her mouth prissy from the put-down.

  “What’s being Catholic got to do with it?” Jeanne’s dark eyes glistened and she enunciated every word a little too carefully. She rocked her wineglass on its round base. Liz watched the Fumé Blanc slosh up one side and then the other. “Mindy’s right. It’s good work.”

  “I guess I’m just not into good deeds,” Gail said.

  Everyone laughed at this.

  “We love you even if you are a selfish bitch,” Mindy said and blew her a kiss.

  Gail blushed, looking pleased. Then she waved her hand, brushing off the subject. “Don’t you think it’s weird how our lives have turned out? I mean, there you are Mindy, you could have been a great artist—or a great caterer—and instead you babysit crazy kids.”

  “You were going to be a movie star,” Mario reminded her.

  Gail fluffed her hair. “I make as much money as a movie star.”

  The table groaned and laughed and groaned.

  “Well? It’s true.” It didn’t matter how it came to her, Gail loved attention. “We all thought Hannah would be someone wonderful, like Mother Teresa.”

  “And instead she’s wonderful like Hannah.” Jeanne raised her glass in a toast.

  “Here, here,” Mario said and did the same. They all toasted Hannah.

  Except Gail, who was on a roll. “And as for you, Jeanne,” Gail pointed a finger, “I would have guessed you’d end up being a judge or an astronaut. Maybe governor. You were absolutely the smartest person I ever knew.”

  Jeanne smiled delicately, but Liz wasn’t sure she was even following the conversation until talk turned to education and Hilltop School and she became animated and pedantic. Watching Jeanne, Liz felt embarrassed for her. Drunk, boring, repetitive. She had always been a little afraid of Jeanne and probably Hannah was too, but her certainty and confidence and control-taking were just a con, a cover-up. To hide what? It was astonishing how little Liz really knew about her best friends. As they had stuck her in a box from childhood, she had done the same to them.

  The conversation moved from educating children to raising them. Teenagers in particular. A chill rose through Liz’s bones when she thought of the tiny thing inside her grown to a blossoming teenager.

  “Meet my mommy. She’s seventy.”

  Jeanne and Hannah cleared the soup bowls and brought in the chicken curry, bowls of rice and trays of condiments.

  Mindy sampled the chutney. “Mango. And spicy. Wow.”

  “It’s a hot flash,”
Teddy said. “Jeanne wakes me up when she has them.”

  “I do not.” Jeanne blushed. “Once I did. Maybe twice.”

  The women at the table laughed, even Liz who wasn’t sure she’d ever had a hot flash. Jeanne’s hair had come undone on one side and she kept pushing it out of her eyes with the back of her hand. Liz felt a rush of concern.

  Gail leaped to her next topic. “I’ve got a proposition for you, Dan.” If the rest of them wore duct tape over their mouths would she just keep on talking, assuming they all wanted to listen? “When you’re ready to sell this wonderful house, just say the word. I could move it in a minute.”

  “Never,” said Dan.

  Teddy said, “If you keep making money, Gail, I’m going to get you to endow something at the school.”

  Jeanne flashed him a poisonous look. Liz looked down the table at Hannah to see if she noticed. She was folding her napkin, pressing the folds with the edge of her index fingernail. Her rice and curry were untouched.

  “When Ingrid and Eddie are off in school or married, you’re going to be like ants in a paper bag.”

  “Gail, you have a gift for language,” Teddy said and raised his glass again in mocking toast.

  He was loaded too. Was that how they tolerated their marriage?

  “Maybe we’ll have another baby,” Hannah said without looking up from the napkin she was carefully pressing.

  “Omigod, at your age!” Gail’s eyes became slits when she laughed. “What a nightmare.”

  Are you in there, little creature? Hear what she calls you?

  Gail said, “Seriously, here’s something that’ll interest you, Hannah. I got a new listing today, that little old Victorian next to the house where you grew up. Down on Casabella flats? A coat of paint and some yard work and it goes on the block for a half million minimum.”

  “Mrs. Phillips’s place,” Jeanne said and looked across the table at Liz. Shadows circled her eyes and the light within them was like something glimpsed at the bottom of a hole. “She was a cook at the school when I was a kid.”