Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  “I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been up since five.”

  “You’re a better woman than I.”

  “No argument there,” Hannah said.

  The exquisite La Vache buffet scarcely tempted Liz.

  Jeanne eyed the sparse fare arranged on Liz’s plate. “You dieting?” Her own plate was segregated into neat vegetarian piles. “Try the crepes.”

  Hannah said, “You know at our age, it really isn’t a good idea to diet. I read an article that said there’s estrogen in our fat cells. God knows, we need all of that we can get.” Hannah put her elbows on the table—her about-to-tell-a-story position. “Last summer I was in Nordstrom buying a shirt for Dan. It was the middle of summer, heat wave outside and the air conditioning going like crazy, and right then, while I was talking to the sales boy, I felt myself begin to flush. Like mercury rising in a thermometer? And these great rivers of sweat started to pour down my face.” She rolled her eyes. “Cataracts.”

  Liz laughed sympathetically; though she had not had the experience herself, it would come. “At least in the tropics you can blame the humidity.”

  “I don’t want to blame the humidity. I’m not ashamed of being middle-aged.” Hannah sat back, straightening the lapel of her lemon-colored blazer.

  “Hannah’s a bit of a zealot on this subject,” Jeanne said.

  “I just refuse to be humiliated because I have a normal, healthy, fifty-year-old body.” Hannah wagged her fork at them. “I went through puberty, now I’m going through this. So?”

  Methinks she doth . . .

  “You on HRT, Liz?”

  Just at the moment she seemed to have all the hormones she needed, quite naturally.

  “What kind of doctor do you have?”

  “Regular,” Liz said. “Nose to toes.”

  Jeanne said, “I read in the paper about how writers of a sex education curriculum had to change all references to vagina to ‘down there.’ Penis stayed penis, but vagina became ‘down there.’ ”

  “One of Ingrid’s friends used to call it her Christmas purse.” Hannah was the only person Liz knew who could eat and talk and laugh at the same time and not look disgusting. “Before you go back, you should go in and see my doctor.” She put down her fork and added with forced carelessness, “I forget, the doctor you saw on Friday, was it a woman? What was that all about, anyway? Hormones and stuff?” Hannah pushed her plate away and put her elbows on the table again, ready to dish. “Why were you so secretive? You told me not to worry but it’s hard, you know? Don’t tell me you were embarrassed to talk about it.” She looked at Jeanne and barreled on. “See, this is what I mean. It doesn’t matter how much education a woman has, there’s this kind of shame—”

  Stop talking, Hannah. Breathe, Hannah. Quiet and distracted last night. Wound up like a spring doll today. What’s the matter, Hannah?

  “So who was this doctor?” Jeanne asked.

  “A clinic in Miami recommended him. It’s not about menopause. And it’s not cancer.” Liz felt the beat of her heart, the flick of a feather up under her ribs and imagined she could feel another below it, keeping time. “I was going to tell you both today. I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh. My. God,” Hannah said.

  Jeanne sat back and stared. “I can’t believe you’d be so careless. After all these years . . .”

  “Shut up, Jeanne. She’s going to have a baby.” Hannah sounded like an announcer declaring a lottery winner. “I’m so happy for you, Lizzie.”

  “Don’t rush out and buy me a layette, Hannah. That’s why I came home. I’m having an abortion while I’m here. Friday.”

  Silence. Liz watched a hummingbird pierce the heart of a potted fuchsia on the railing behind Hannah.

  “You can’t do that. Why would you do that?”

  “Hannah? I thought you approved of abortion. In fact, it seems to me you had one yourself.”

  “I was a college student. I wasn’t married. I hadn’t even met Dan. It’s a totally different thing. You’re fifty years old and you’re going to be a mother.” A light had gone on beneath Hannah’s skin. Liz recognized the glow from peace marches and campaigns to save whales and polar bears and wolves. “It’s a miracle, Liz. You can’t abort a miracle.”

  “They’re all miracles,” Jeanne said quietly.

  “I know it’s a miracle but that doesn’t mean I want to be a mother. And anyway, Jeanne, you don’t even believe in miracles.” Liz’s head had begun to spin. “This is unreal. I particularly remember conversations we all had. I can remember you saying—”

  “People change,” Jeanne said.

  Liz felt sucker-punched. “I guess I’m finding that out.”

  “I’m a vegetarian because I don’t believe we have the right to kill anything with a beating heart.” Jeanne put her hand on her chest as if she needed to demonstrate that she qualified. “I also oppose the death penalty and war and abortion. Killing is killing is killing and I’m against it all.”

  “Is that why you won’t talk about Bluegang?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” Hannah said.

  Her friends had vanished and been replaced by strangers. “Of all the people in the world, I expected you to support me, Jeanne.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I just know you’ll regret it. You’ll grieve.”

  “How do you know? Have you been fifty years old and pregnant?” She let out a short breathless laugh. “When this is over, I’m going to celebrate.”

  “Why can’t you keep it?” Jeanne asked.

  “I can’t believe you’d ask me that. I’ve never wanted a family. I can’t remember ever once thinking to myself how grand it would be to play mommy.”

  “Why do you have to use such an insulting tone? There are millions of women who’d—”

  “Shit, Hannah, this is about me, not you or millions of other women. You know what it was like when I was a kid. If my parents remembered to say good morning, I thought I was being spoiled. When I had my first period, it was your mother who explained it to me.”

  Jeanne said, “You’d bond. It’s instinctive.”

  “This is bizarre, Jeanne. There’s no such thing as the mothering instinct. It has to be learned and, frankly, I’m never going to get it.” She turned back to Hannah, desperate for support. “If you’ve got troubles with Ingrid now, how would it be for my child when she’s seventeen and I’m almost seventy.”

  “She?” Jeanne said. “It’s a girl?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to.”

  “If you have a good relationship, age won’t matter.”

  “Jeanne, you’re blowing smoke. You don’t have any more experience with mothering than I do. You’ve never had a child.”

  “She’s had a whole school full,” Hannah said.

  “I know it’s wrong to kill a living soul.”

  Soul. Did the fetus in her womb have a soul? Liz did not think so. Not yet, anyway. And if it did, would it be murder to abort it? Again, she didn’t think so. If there was such a thing as the soul, it was spirit, immortal, not rooted in the flesh it inhabited. Abortion could never destroy a soul, only flesh and blood.

  “I’m free to disagree,” Liz said quietly. Not because she was calm, because if she didn’t control herself she would scream. “Free to choose.”

  “Since when does anyone have the right to choose murder?”

  Liz wanted to throw down her napkin and walk out. But where would she go?

  Hannah spoke up. “What about Gerard? What does he think? Maybe he’d like to be a father.”

  “Does he know? Have you told him?”

  “Of course he knows, Jeanne.”

  “And he wants you to have an abortion? What kind of a guy is he?”

  “He wants me to decide for myself.” The air fluttered in Liz’s lungs as she rushed to Gerard’s defense. “He knows it’s up to me what I do with my body. He loves me. He wants to marry me.”

  Hannah laughed and her hands dithered in the air. “What a day! A b
aby and a wedding. Oh, Liz—”

  “I didn’t say we were going to do it.” Liz sank back in her chair, flattened by the weight of so much explaining. “We’ve done well, all these years. Why mess up a good thing?”

  “I don’t get it.” Jeanne pushed her plate away. “You come up here and you tell me you want to talk about Bluegang, about how you should have done this or that, all kinds of talk about taking responsibility, and then you tell us you’re getting an abortion. Isn’t it just more of the same? Isn’t it more Liz putting Liz first?”

  Hannah said, “What’s Bluegang got to do with—”

  “If you want to make up for Billy Phillips you should do the responsible thing. Have the baby. Marry Gerard and have the baby.”

  “One child is not equal to another.” Liz moved her plate aside and leaned forward, speaking quietly. “And as for responsibility, Jeanne, it would be totally irresponsible if I went ahead and had this baby out of guilt or romantic notions of motherhood or to make up for something that happened years ago. And my bet is, if we were talking about someone else—say Mindy got pregnant—you’d both feel just like I do. It’s because it’s me, Jeanne.”

  “And you, of course, are the most important person in the world. How could I forget?”

  Hannah grabbed Liz’s hand and squeezed it. “Jeanne, you’re being mean. Stop it.” She held on to Liz’s hand. “I believe in a woman’s right to choose, Liz, you know that. You can choose not to have this baby but you can also choose to have it. Choice goes both ways. In all the rhetoric, you seem to have forgotten that.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.” Liz sighed.

  “You’re being a hypocrite,” Jeanne said. “If Billy Phillips haunts you now—”

  “We can’t weigh lives, this one for that one.” Liz held up her hand, asking for silence. “We should have told our parents what happened that day. I knew that but I didn’t push it and that’s the deep shame of my life. I knew it was wrong to leave him there on the rocks for a couple of kids to find, wrong to make his mother worry all night long. That poor sad woman who had nothing else in the world but her one boy. I’m ashamed of letting that happen. But having a baby at my age won’t undo any of it.”

  And I’m not going to let you bully me into doing what you want. Again.

  Hannah said softly, “He would have raped me. I pushed him away. It was an accident.”

  “Of course it was. You know I don’t blame you. And I don’t blame Jeanne either. You both did what you thought was right. The only one who didn’t was me.” She took a deep breath. “I did what I knew was wrong.”

  “More Liz thinking first, last and always about Liz.”

  “No, what’s wrong is forever putting yourself last.” Liz had had enough of Jeanne. “What’s wrong is wasting your whole life married to a man you don’t love. It’s never saying to yourself, I have the right to be happy. What’s really, really wrong is letting your husband drive you to drink.”

  “Oh, boy.” Hannah sat back.

  Jeanne stared at Liz and then down at her hands clasped in her lap. At the table next to them a man told his companion if she would just learn to focus, her golf swing would improve seventy-five percent.

  Jeanne’s eyebrow shot up. “Have you two been discussing this between you?”

  Hannah and Liz looked at each other and nodded.

  Jeanne smiled.

  Her composure was frightening, a body of water thick with snakes whose movements made not a ripple on the surface.

  “I’m glad you care about me, but honestly, alcohol just isn’t a problem. If it were, my work would suffer. But the school is thriving. My father was an alcoholic and near the end of his life, he let the school run down. But there’s nothing like that going on with me. I know my limits.”

  It was bullshit, but it sounded so damn logical.

  “And as far as my marriage is concerned—”

  “It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “But you always do. You ask questions, you have your theories of how I ought to live . . . Teddy and I have had our down times, Liz. But we’ve made a contract and we’ve produced something worthwhile out of the terms of the contract. He’s not the man I thought he was when we married; but then, I’m not that starry eyed Phi Beta Kappa either. The point is that change doesn’t nullify the contract. Or make the results any less worthwhile.”

  “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  Liz wished she could go away somewhere and cry for an hour or the rest of the afternoon. Instead they went back to twirling and pirouetting. They were old friends and they had argued before—though never so intensely over matters so personal. They went back to the buffet for dessert. They talked about Gail Bacci and wondered aloud about Mindy’s sex life. Anyone passing their table would have thought they were having a good time. Jeanne ordered a second glass of wine as if to spite them.

  In the middle of a reminiscence about Mario, a laugh burst from Hannah. “I just got the most wonderful idea. It takes care of everything.” She leaned forward. “You don’t have to have an abortion. You can have the baby and I’ll raise it for you. You can be its mother and Gerard can be its father, but it can live up here in Rinconada with Dan and me.”

  Liz stared at her and took a long drink of iced tea.

  “Dan’s a wonderful father. You know that, Liz. You already love him madly and you could totally trust . . .”

  “Thank you. Thank you, for that.”

  She looked from Hannah to Jeanne and back to Hannah. Her oldest friends, the best friends she would ever have. Yet to call them friends was a misnomer for they were neither friends nor family but some category of relationship between the two. The first time she saw Hannah, Liz and her mother had been standing in line to enter the first grade classroom. ‘I’m late for my lecture, ’ her mother said to the mother of the curly haired blonde girl in front of her. ‘Would you mind taking Elizabeth in?’ Jeanne, when Liz met her, was punching a black leather bag hung from the branch of a prune tree, wearing Buster Browns and a faded dress with puffed sleeves. She drove her fist into the bag; it swung away and her braids swung too.

  So what if they didn’t really know each other anymore? So what if they didn’t seem to get that she was a grown woman, and able to make her own choices in life. Maybe what counted most were the memories and shared experiences. Hannah had said it an hour earlier, speaking of Gail and Mario. They’ve been together so long, they’d be lost on their own. Liz wanted to go on believing what they had was something extraordinary and profound. It was either that, it seemed, or let Jeanne and Hannah skate away. She couldn’t bear the thought, not for a moment, but neither could she return to the box where they obviously wanted her kept.

  She took their hands in hers and brought them to her lips, shaking her head.

  “That is the kindest offer anyone ever made me. But it wouldn’t work, Hannah. My mind’s made up.”

  It was almost five when Jeanne walked through the oleander hedge and into the house. On the kitchen counter she found a note from Teddy telling her to come down to the school right away. She drank a glass of wine, brushed her teeth and gargled, changed her clothes and went down.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he said when she entered her office. The air conditioning was on but sweat slicked Teddy’s forehead. “I heard the car thirty minutes ago.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “It’s that goddamn Adam Weed. I wish to hell you’d consulted me before you accepted his application. We have enough to worry about with normal boys—”

  Jeanne made herself take a deep breath. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “The little bastard’s disappeared. No one’s seen him since games.” Teddy sank into a chair and looked up at her. “You should have been here, Jeanne. It’s not like I can run this school alone, you know.”

  She took a seat beside him and asked again, more gently, “I need to know what you’ve done, Teddy.” />
  “That friend of his, his Big Brother, Robby: I told him and his pal to look for him.”

  “Where?”

  “Where do you think? Around the school.”

  “Did you tell them to check Bluegang?”

  “I wish you’d been here, Jeanne. You know I’m not good at this kind of thing.”

  “We’ll find him, Teddy. He’ll be okay.”

  He smelled sour and she was glad to move away from him, glad to go to her desk and sit down. She turned on her computer and called up Adam’s file.

  “It said in his records from Wisconsin that he hates games. He’s so small and uncoordinated.” Speaking to herself she said, “I should have known he’d do something like this.”

  “A little late to think of that now.” Teddy’s tone made her look up. “You should have warned the staff the kid’d bolt if he had to play sports. It was your responsibility. But if something happens to him, I’m the one gets the blame.” He paced. “You realize that, don’t you? You can fuck up royally, but I’m the one who has to take it in the ass.”

  Jeanne picked up the phone.

  He grabbed her wrist.

  “We can’t call the police. If the police find out we’ve lost a kid, it’ll be in all the papers . . .”

  “I’m only making an intercom call.” She pulled his hand away from her wrist finger by finger. “It’s what you should have done in the first place. We need to alert the resident staff and have a meeting. Someone must go down to the creek.”

  There was a knock and the office door opened a crack. Robby McFadden looked in. “Found him.”

  Teddy strode to the door and swung it wide. Adam stood behind Robby and another boy.

  Jeanne stood up. “Where was he?”

  “Just walking in the hall,” Robby said.

  “Going back to his room, I think,” the other boy added.

  Teddy grabbed Adam by the arm and jerked him into the office. “Where were you?”

  “Teddy. Let him go.”

  The older boys gawked at the scene. Jeanne turned back to them and said in her business-as-usual voice, “Excellent work, boys. Now you must go over to the dining hall and find cook.” She wrote a quick note and held it out to Robby. “There’s a lemon coconut cake in the pantry and some Cokes.”