by Cathy Holton
They had thrown her a going-away party at work, a Deliverance theme party complete with dueling banjos and white-trash martinis. Colleen, drunk, had stood up and given a nice little speech, ending with the warning, “And whatever you do, don’t get off the expressway! For Christ’s sake, stay on the expressway.” Everyone at work thought of the South as a place of hillbillies and moonshine, and Ava had to admit (although only to herself) that she felt the same way. Perhaps this was why she had forced herself to get off the expressway just north of Louisville, and, buying a map, proceeded to drive bravely along curving picturesque county roads past small-frame farmhouses and tall-steepled churches and mobile homes with elaborately attached decks and discarded appliances rusting in the yards.
Beside her, buckled safely into the passenger seat, Clotilde rested quietly in her enameled urn like a genie waiting for someone to come and rub her lamp.
They passed a wide field and a weathered barn with See Rock City painted on its sagging roof. There was something insubstantial and airy about the shimmering light and the varying shades of green, like a landscape from a dream or a long-forgotten fairy tale.
“It’s so green,” Ava said to Clotilde.
A hawk circled lazily above the tree line. Far off in the distance, a rim of blue mountains rose into the hazy sky.
She had told Will everything: about her mother, about Jacob, about her job that she detested. She unburdened herself to him like she once had about Michael, droning on and on while he listened quietly. It was the alcohol, she told herself later, that had made her so garrulous. That and the fact that she wasn’t sleeping well.
“You can quit your job and move down here and write your novel,” he said when she’d finished, and she’d laughed disparagingly. He had continued in a placid voice as if trying to soothe a fussy child. “No, really. Woodburn is a sleepy little town. Nothing much ever happens around here. There are no distractions, and you can stay with Josephine and Fanny. They live in an old house near the town square, and you’d have a suite of rooms to yourself. You wouldn’t be disturbed. It’s a large house. I tease them that they should turn it into a bed-and-breakfast one of these days.”
“Do you live with them?”
“No, I live at Longford.”
“Where’s that?”
“The family farm. Out from town. I inherited it when I turned twenty-one. I’d ask you to stay with me but I’m renovating the house and it’s pretty primitive right now.”
“Shouldn’t you ask your aunts before you offer to move me in?”
“Actually, they were the ones who suggested it.”
“Really? Why?”
He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “they remembered you from that day at Bard, the day I graduated. ‘Your little friend Ava,’ Fanny calls you. ‘The one with the lovely hair.’ I told them you were looking for a quiet place to write your first novel and they said, ‘Oh, tell her to come down here. She can stay with us.’ ”
“That’s very generous of them.”
“You sound surprised.”
“It’s just that I got the feeling the stern aunt, the tall one …”
“Josephine?”
“Yes, Josephine. I got the feeling she didn’t like me.”
“That’s just her way. The Woodburns are Scottish, and they tend to be reserved.”
“And you’re a Woodburn?”
“On my mother’s side. My grandmother Celia was Josephine and Fanny’s sister.”
“I can’t quit my job,” Ava said. “I need to work to eat.”
“It’s free room and board. Think of it as a writing retreat. One of those communes where artists spend the summer.”
Despite her gloomy mood, Ava was flattered by his enthusiasm. He was kind and considerate, the sort of man she didn’t usually fall for. Unfortunately, she and Clotilde had shared more than their hair color; they both had bad judgment when it came to men. Ava was determined to remedy this in the future.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you have to lose?” he asked.
The road rose slightly, following a low ridge. A line of pink-blossomed trees with fringed leaves swayed in the breeze. On the other side of the highway, trailing vines mounded over distant pines and telephone poles, and dangled from utility lines, creating a series of undulating green hills. The whole landscape was lush and alien; Ava had the feeling that a seed tossed haphazardly from the window of a speeding car would take root in the rich soil and blossom to monstrous proportions.
What do I have to lose? she thought. Nothing. Everything. She turned her head and glanced at the ceramic urn in the seat beside her.
“Isn’t that right, Mother?” she said.
She had moved back to Chicago after she graduated from Bard. She knew the city; she and Clotilde had landed there her sophomore year of high school. They’d lived at first in a ratty walk-up in Rogers Park before moving to a more promising neighborhood on the outskirts of Wicker Park.
By then her nomadic lifestyle with Clotilde had paled. They were always starting over, always fleeing some creditor or landlord, always packing their meager belongings into the car in the dead of night.
“I’m a gypsy!” Clotilde would crow, her long red-blonde hair falling around her shoulders, her silver-ringed fingers clutching the steering wheel.
Often fleeing some jaded boyfriend, too. By now Clotilde herself had begun to pale. Ava fantasized about getting her driver’s license and driving away from her mother, leaving her stranded in some gray-skied industrial city. But then they had landed in Chicago and Ava had refused to leave until she had finished high school. She took a test, was accepted at a good Catholic school, got herself a scholarship, and for the first time in her life Ava had friends and did things normal kids did; she went to movies and parties and even dated a little. Chicago began to feel like home.
But living in Chicago after college graduation was different. For one thing, Clotilde had moved away, hooking up with a ski bum who was headed to Durango, Colorado. And the friends Ava had made in high school had gone away to college and settled elsewhere or else they’d stayed, married, and started families. Ava kept up with one or two friends from Bard who had left New York and moved back to Chicago, occasionally meeting for drinks in a small sports bar near the Loop; it was through one of them that she had landed her first job, as a writer for a local entertainment magazine. This led to a stint at a start-up public relations firm, which led to a position as a junior copywriter with a small ad agency, which eventually led to a job as a copywriter with a large, well-known agency. Each professional advance was accompanied by a raise in salary that bumped her standard of living accordingly so that by the time she landed at the large agency and met Jacob, she was living in a fifth-floor one-bedroom on Lakeshore Drive, the kind of apartment she could only have dreamed of living in during her days with Clotilde.
But regardless of her promising career, she was always broke. She never seemed to save any money. With each step up the professional ladder, she felt more and more trapped, knowing that she’d never be able to go back to living on what she’d made before. Knowing that she’d never be able to do the thing she most wanted to do, which was to stop working at the ad agency and write novels full-time. She’d wanted to be a writer her whole life, ever since third grade. On career day, all the kids had stood up and said that when they grew up they wanted to be astronauts and firemen and ballerinas, and Ava had realized, in a sudden flash of insight, that she could be all three (well, maybe not a ballerina, that wasn’t her style). She could be whatever she wanted to be just by using her imagination and writing stories. From that point forward, she had never questioned her destiny, studying creative writing at Bard, and sending out an endless stream of unpublishable short stories to various literary magazines.
But after college she found that making a living as a writer was difficult. Freelance work was unreliable, magazine work was competitive, and the pay, at least for beginning writers, was poor. She
had been lured into advertising by the promise of a steady paycheck and the hope that a higher salary would enable her to save enough money to eventually quit and write novels full-time. But that wasn’t how things worked out. First there was the car payment and then the new apartment and the new furniture. And always there were the clothes and shoes and handbags necessary to convince everyone, to convince herself, that she was a professional woman. Her writing began to take a backseat to her ad agency work until it became more of a hobby than a career.
To make matters worse, she was lonely. She and Michael had finally broken up her senior year of college, having given the long-distance relationship one year before calling it off. Although she dated sporadically once she moved to Chicago, none of those affairs lasted longer than six months.
And then she met Jacob.
She hadn’t even liked him at first. He was difficult to work for. He was loud and brash and told inappropriate jokes, so she was not surprised, one day over lunch eight months after she’d joined the agency, when he suggested a sexual rendezvous as casually as if he were pitching a proposal to a client. She wasn’t surprised at Jacob but she was surprised at herself. She accepted.
No one in the office guessed that they were sleeping together. Ava was attractive enough, with a trim figure and large, dark eyes. Still, she was not a bombshell. She was not the type anyone would have pictured Jacob with. She did not wear low-cut blouses or her skirts too short. She did not color her hair. Her face, in some lights, could be almost plain. Perhaps it was the fact that none of the other women in the office thought he could find her attractive that drove her into Jacob’s arms.
Or maybe it was just that he was coldly inattentive, and Ava had a bad habit of falling for unpredictable men who gave her very little attention.
Jacob was in his mid-forties, divorced, with two children. Ava told herself that the affair would be nothing more than a brief fling. A brief respite from her loneliness until she moved on to something more promising.
The sex was good at first, and later less so. At the office they were cordial but professional. He made sure they were never alone together; there was never any hint of impropriety, no fevered glances or hurried embraces in the conference room, no stealthy touches in the corridors.
After nearly a year, the unthinkable had occurred, the thing Ava had promised herself would not happen; she had begun to fall for him. It amazed her that she could fall for someone whom she didn’t really like, that she could wait all night for his phone call, listen for the sound of his voice in the hallway, the tread of his footsteps on the stairs. Whatever slight confidence she had once displayed around him was gone. Now she found herself listening jealously while he flirted with other girls, feeling ugly and awkward. Jacob’s spirits seemed to soar the longer the affair went on, while she grew more and more despondent. She realized now the mistake of sleeping with someone she worked with, someone she had to take orders from. She fantasized about leaving but she’d only been at the agency a short time, and she needed a position on her resume that had lasted longer than twenty months.
If Jacob guessed that she was unhappy he gave no sign of it.
“Take your hair down,” he said once, when they were alone. Her hair was long and thick, and she wore it up at work or pulled back into a sleek ponytail. “You look like one of those pornographic Victorian postcards,” he said, running his hands through the long curls.
Ava said she wouldn’t know anything about that.
He laughed. “I can’t stay,” he said. “I have an early-morning meeting.”
Her friend at work, Colleen, was always trying to fix her up. Because Ava had never talked about a boyfriend, because she had never brought a date to any of the office functions, the rumor was that she was gay. Colleen refused to believe it.
“How about that guy in the building next door to you?” she asked Ava one morning over coffee.
“The one who sits in a lawn chair in the snow reading Dostoyevsky?” Ava had not heard from Jacob in several days and she was irritable and depressed.
“Yeah, him. He seems like your type.”
“Just because I read Russian novels doesn’t make him my type.”
“Was he wearing a wedding ring?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then I’ll restate my question. What are you waiting for?”
“For all I know he could be a serial killer.”
Colleen considered this. “Not in that building,” she said.
Through the glass walls of the soaring atrium, Ava could see the towering skyscrapers of the Loop silhouetted against an ashen sky. They sat at a small table near the entrance to the coffee shop, stirring their lattes.
“How’s Dave?” Ava asked, trying to change the subject. She had run into Jacob on the elevator this morning, and he’d seemed more distracted than usual, giving her a swift, puzzled glance, as if he didn’t recognize her.
“Who?”
“Dave. The guy you’re dating.”
“Oh, Dave,” Colleen said, waving her hand dismissively. “I’m bored with Dave.” Colleen seemed to have a new boyfriend every week; she changed men the way some women change purses, a different one for each outfit.
She ducked her head and gave Ava a sly smile. “Guess what?” She crossed her arms on the table and leaned forward, glancing around to make sure she wouldn’t be overheard.
“What?” Ava asked, sipping her coffee.
Colleen giggled and put one hand over her mouth. She smirked at Ava, lifting her eyebrows comically.
“Come on,” Ava said. She stared at Colleen irritably over the rim of her cup. “Tell me. It’s too early in the morning for guessing games.”
“I’m sleeping with Jacob.”
Ava sputtered and choked, spitting coffee all over the table. Colleen’s eyes widened. She leaned over and thumped Ava on the back. “Are you okay? Did you swallow wrong?” She took a napkin from the metallic container and mopped up Ava’s spilled coffee. “I know it’s crazy but I couldn’t help it,” she said, avoiding Ava’s eyes. “We were having lunch together and something happened. Something totally unexpected. He says he’s had a thing for me since the beginning but hasn’t been able to bring himself to tell me. We spent the whole afternoon at the Hyatt Regency. We didn’t even come back to the office.”
Ava coughed into her fist. She said, “Our boss Jacob?”
“It’s a huge secret. You’re the only one who knows, and you can’t tell anyone.”
Two days later Clotilde died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm. Ava flew to Colorado to make the final arrangements, which consisted of having her mother cremated and donating her few possessions to the local Goodwill. There was no memorial service. The ski bum had long since disappeared, and Clotilde had been living alone in a small duplex off the main street and working as a desk clerk at the Strater Hotel. Ava found a boot box filled with Clotilde’s important documents: several tax returns, an affidavit signed by two people with the unlikely names of Doobie Moonshine and Skye Rain, and her own birth certificate. Her birth name was listed as Summer Rayne Dabrowski, and her father was listed as Frank Dabrowski. He was a shadowy figure known only to Ava in myth. He had left when she was still a toddler and, according to Clotilde, had died in an ice-fishing accident on the Detroit River when Ava was ten years old.
Her mother was listed as Margaret Anne Govan, aka Dharma Dabrowski.
There were also photographs: several of a chubby blonde Ava and Clotilde on a beach, in front of a merry-go-round, or posed (dangerously close) to the edge of a scenic overlook. There was one of Clotilde with a handsome, long-haired boy (her father, Ava guessed) and one of Clotilde in a multicolored granny gown standing in front of a purple bus decorated with peace signs.
Also enclosed was an envelope containing Ava’s baby teeth and several locks of bright blonde baby hair tied up with a ribbon.
All the meaningful highlights of Clotilde’s short life distilled into a reliquary the size of a shoebox.
> It took about a week to tie up all the loose ends of her mother’s death, and when she returned to Chicago, Ava went immediately to the office. She sailed past Jacob’s receptionist, closing the door behind her. He was sitting with his feet up on his desk, and when he looked up and saw her, an expression of alarm spread swiftly across his face. (She wished then that she’d carried something in her hands, a letter opener or a three-hole punch, anything he might view as a potential weapon. She was enjoying the look of fear on his face, his mouth stretched into a grimace, eyes darting like a cornered rodent.)
She told him that it was over between them, that she knew about Colleen, and that if he ever told Colleen about the two of them, she would see to it that his partners got a full report of his activities. She told him she expected their working relationship to go on as before, cordial and professional, and she intimated, without ever actually saying it, that should this not occur she would certainly look into filing a sexual-harassment suit that would probably prove fruitless but would, no doubt, open him up to a career-ending scandal and expose him as the worthless son of a bitch that he was. He listened, speechless (the only time she had ever seen him speechless), while she spoke, his only signs of distress a faint flush of color along his brow and a furtive squint to his eyes as he glanced from her to the door and back again. When she had finished speaking she turned and left, leaving the door open behind her.
She floated along the corridor as if in a dream. Halfway to her office she was overcome by a feeling of relief so intense she thought her knees might buckle.
Several weeks later, Will Fraser called her and asked her to come to Tennessee. She was sitting by her apartment window wrapped in a blanket, her slippered feet slung over one arm of the chair, a glass of red wine and a book in her hands. It was a Saturday evening, and a fresh blanket of snow lay over the city. The lights of the apartments across the way gleamed wetly, and the distant lake was a pale, vaporous fog. She was reading Wuthering Heights and daydreaming of a savage, other-worldly lover, wondering at Emily Brontë’s ability to tell such a brutal, magnificent tale.
