Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  “I’ve been out here five minutes!” Her breath came out in angry white puffs. There were as yet unshed tears in her voice. “It’s pitch dark! Anyone could have grabbed me and slit my throat!”

  You had to pity her, so unnecessarily wound up. “Why didn’t you let yourself in?”

  He turned the knob to demonstrate that the door had been unlocked, but that didn’t seem to appease her. He decided to let her pull herself together in peace and went out to her car to collect her suitcase, the same gigantic one from last week, except—he wouldn’t have thought it possible—heavier. One thing she was right about: The light over the front door wasn’t working. He’d have to check the wiring in the morning.

  “You’ll lock the house, right?” Peggy didn’t sound any less upset when he returned.

  “This is New Nineveh,” he tried to reassure her.

  By ten the next morning, Luke, Peggy, and his great-aunt were at what had once been the New Nineveh Grocery until it had been bought out and turned into a Stop & Shop, a change Abby had never acknowledged. Abigail waved the shopping list she’d painstakingly written in her spidery cursive and gave orders like a general.

  “Luke, you get the crackers. Peggy, you get the spray cheddar, and a little Monterey Jack and some Brie, because it’s a special occasion. And cream cheese, and celery…”

  Peggy nodded. She had been uncharacteristically quiet since last night’s harangue on the doorstep. Luke would have expected a few more complaints by now. He chuckled to himself. They’d surely come later.

  “… bacon and two jars of mayonnaise and four cans of cream of mushroom soup,” Abigail was saying. “Do we have toothpicks, Luke? I forgot to check.”

  “I’ll pick up a box.”

  “I hate to waste the money.” Abigail made a disapproving noise. She turned to Peggy. “Don’t forget the celery, dear.”

  Caught trying to camouflage a yawn, Peggy dropped her hand to her side. Luke stared at it. She was wearing the most obnoxious, ostentatious diamond he’d ever seen. He wasn’t one to pay attention to jewelry but couldn’t imagine how he’d missed the ring before. Engaged to be engaged. That was the phrase Peggy had used when he’d called to tell her they were married. “I have a promise ring,” she’d said. Well, it was one hell of a promise ring. The guy had to be from either Hollywood or the Mafia.

  “I saw a cheese shop near Mr. Mayhew’s office,” Peggy was telling Abigail. “Should we get the cheese there?”

  Here we go, Luke thought.

  Abigail patted her pocketbook. “That store is for the weekend people, dear. The cheese here is much cheaper and just as good.”

  “It’s a Yankee thing,” Luke murmured to Peggy, who didn’t answer.

  Abigail didn’t appear to have heard. “There’s the Reverend Matthews. I’d like you to start coming with me to church tomorrow, Peggy. You too, Luke. You haven’t been to a meeting since Easter.” She started toward the condiments aisle, stopping to greet the pastor of the First Congregational Church of New Nineveh, who was loading his cart with bags of Snickers bars and a decorative spiderweb from the Halloween display.

  “I should start on the crackers.” Luke headed to the appropriate aisle.

  Twenty minutes later, he and his great-aunt had reconvened in a checkout line, but Peggy was nowhere to be seen. Luke tracked her down in the pasta and rice section, gulping from a cup of store coffee. “I thought I’d make a dish or two for the party.” She tossed a bag of beans into the cart.

  “There’s no need. Abigail has the food taken care of. There’ll be the cheese and crackers, and she’s making clam dip.” He didn’t have the heart to tell her that at WASP parties the food was little more than a decoration.

  “I need garlic.” She turned at the end of the aisle and was gone again.

  Luke returned to his great-aunt in the checkout line. “Peggy would like to cook for the party. I believe she’s worried we’ll run out of hors d’oeuvres.”

  Abigail scrutinized him with her clever brown eyes. “She’s a flighty one, isn’t she?”

  “A little.” Luke focused on the magazines by the register, scanning the tabloid headlines. Trouble for the Royal Family, one proclaimed over a grainy photograph of a grimacing Prince William. Or was it Prince Harry?

  “I know exactly why you married her.”

  Luke read more headlines. She couldn’t possibly know. Could she? “And why is that?”

  Abigail broke out in a raspy squawk of delighted laughter. “It’s plain as day. You’re exactly alike. In all my years I’ve never seen two people more suited for each other.”

  SEVEN

  Peggy woke on Sunday, checked the time, and leaped out of bed. After returning from the market, she’d spent the rest of yesterday trying to rid the Silas Sedgwick House of two hundred years of dust. Afterward, she’d worked well past midnight making party appetizers in a kitchen utterly lacking in modern appliances. The whole house, in fact, was a graveyard of archaic tools. The vacuum cleaner had to be at least as old as she was. The sole television, in the den, actually had antennae; it got three snowy channels. There was a percolator instead of a coffeemaker. There was no dishwasher, an absence Peggy hadn’t noticed until three o’clock this morning. Not for the first time since her breakup with Brock, she’d wondered as she cooked whether she should call off this deal with Luke, too. But that would be foolish. She might not have a wedding to pay for, but there was still the rent on the store to contend with.

  She’d crawled into bed wearier than she thought she’d ever been but had slept fitfully. Her dreams had been full of Brock—of him standing under the streetlamp, watching her leave. She would wake periodically to the sound of the Thing in her room. Why didn’t he go after you? Peggy imagined it was whispering. Why didn’t he put up a fight after seven years?

  And already, it was noon. It was clear by now the Sedgwicks were early risers, and bathing, putting on makeup, and drying her hair would delay her appearance in the kitchen by at least another forty minutes. Peggy decided to go down, apologize for sleeping late yet again, and then get cleaned up. But Miss Abigail wasn’t at her spot on the rubbed-away patch of linoleum in front of the sink; and Luke wasn’t rustling through the Courant or the Litchfield County Times. A slip of notepaper lay on the table, anchored with a porcelain sugar bowl matching the blue-and-white Sedgwick china:

  Dear Peggy,

  Luke is doing errands. I have gone to church.

  Yours,

  Abigail A. S. Sedgwick.

  Peggy sighed. Of all the obligations to sleep through, church with her new great-aunt-in-law was probably not the one. She only hoped her party appetizers would make up for it and imagined the impressed look on Miss Abigail’s face as she sampled Peggy’s famous spicy Mediterranean artichoke squares, the old woman reassuring her that skipping church was understandable when one’s cooking was this heavenly.

  She meandered through vacant rooms toward a screen porch she’d discovered yesterday at the back of the house: a peaceful place in which to settle into a rocking chair and watch birds flittering in the garden on a summer morning. But the October cool crept through the lacy knit of Peggy’s sweater, and a desolate feeling fell over her. She retreated back inside, retraced her steps through the kitchen, her boot-steps deafening in the grave-silent house, crossed the grand parlor she’d spent much of yesterday dusting and mopping, and started up the staircase—the third step from the bottom gave an unearthly creak—to the top floor.

  Luke’s ballroom-study, at the top of the stairs, was on the west, street-facing wall. Peggy had seen the other rooms on her side of the third floor but burned with curiosity over the hallway on the north side of the house. Luke’s bedroom was there, and what else?

  There was no reason she shouldn’t find out. She clomped past the ballroom toward unexplored northern territory.

  It was dim back here, and it took a while until the outlines of two closed doors revealed themselves. Peggy tried the first and saw the room had nothing
in it but a few sagging cardboard boxes sealed with masking tape. She moved on to the next, reached out to open it, then hesitated. She knocked softly. This would be Luke’s room. “Anyone home?”

  The question ricocheted eerily off the far end of the corridor.

  Peggy bolted, pounding back toward Luke’s study. One of the double doors was slightly ajar, and she stopped, heart hammering, and tested the door with the tips of her fingers. It opened a few inches with an anemic skreek. Peggy whispered, “Are you in there?”

  A soundless sliver of movement flashed behind her. Luke! Peggy whipped around, full of adrenaline, but there was no sign of him.

  Once, at the store, a tourist whose first language hadn’t been English had referred to goose bumps as “ghost skin.” The phrase came back to Peggy as the flesh rose on her arms. If there were such a thing as ghosts, this house would have generations of them—malevolent spirits who would understand only that she was an outsider here, a Sedgwick impostor.

  “This is absurd,” she said, and because this time she was expecting the echo, it didn’t frighten her. Not as much. She squeezed inside the ballroom. What did Luke do for a living, anyway? She’d not thought to ask. Despite herself, she wanted to know more about him. She had to have seen something in him that night in Las Vegas.

  Luke’s desk was covered with papers in messy piles. A pencil whose point looked to have been whittled, not sharpened, lay alongside a scattering of paper clips. Peggy picked up a scuffed glasses case, inspected it, and put it back down.

  On the computer, a geometric screen saver morphed from cube to ball to helix and back again. Peggy tapped the keyboard; the screen brightened into a list of numbers and three-letter abbreviations—stock symbols. She lifted the corner of a sheet of paper lying facedown at the top of the biggest pile. “Connecticut Light and Power,” it read; the electric bill. The bill underneath, “Naugatuck Fuel.” But these had to be mistakes: The two bills totaled over two thousand dollars for September.

  She scanned a smaller pile: opened envelopes, bits of wrinkled scratch paper, the corner of what looked like a photograph at the bottom. It was typical of a man. He’d have a lot more space if he’d throw away his trash instead of arranging it in piles. Why, for example, did he need the opened Connecticut Light and Power envelope? She started to set it aside, then saw penciled on it:

  staid genes worked hot

  from your electric charms

  Peggy sat in Luke’s desk chair and read the lines again and then again. Could Luke have written them?

  It didn’t seem possible, yet all of the bits of paper in this stack had things written on them: sometimes one line, sometimes several. On the back of a credit card receipt was a single word: “enchantment.” The receipt, she saw, was from a restaurant in a place called South Norwalk. It was dated nine days earlier.

  A hard knot formed in her chest. She slipped the receipt back into its place, but as she did so, all of the papers moved an inch, revealing more of the photograph. Peggy slid it out.

  The woman in the snapshot was leaning against the interior wall of what could have been a Manhattan loft—except it wasn’t Manhattan; there were elevated train tracks behind it Peggy didn’t recognize. The woman’s lips were parted, and her face and upper chest were thick with freckles, like a Norman Rockwell character. But there was nothing cuddly about this woman, the feral waves of auburn hair, the cigarette dangling loosely from her long fingers. She was sexy. Treacherously sexy. The kind of woman you hoped never decided to go after your boyfriend.

  Enchantment indeed.

  Peggy thought of Brock, of the incident in Florida.

  She glared at the woman. What was Luke doing with her? Stay away from my husband, she thought irrationally.

  The anxiety expanded inside her chest, pressing on her lungs and gripping her windpipe. She studied the snapshot. Luke would study it, too, for inspiration, as he spun lines like—she shuffled through more scrap paper—“aching for your embrace; us turned to one…”

  They had to be sleeping together. What man could see this woman and not want to—

  She was being watched.

  Peggy was sure of it. The house was observing her, reading her thoughts.

  A low moan sounded from the far corner of the room.

  Peggy turned toward the disturbance and gasped at another flash of motion. The moan was coming from behind the mirror resting on the floor. Miss Abigail’s cat, or a poltergeist? Peggy didn’t want to stay and find out. She caught sight, momentarily, of her fearful reflection before racing for her bedroom.

  For heaven’s sake, it was seven minutes to four; where was she? Punctuality was part of Luke’s social code. It meant you cared enough about your fellow citizens to respect their time.

  Abigail had been tsking and clucking, increasingly loudly, for twenty minutes. Now she came to Luke in the foyer. “Go upstairs and fetch her. They’ll be here any minute.”

  There was no chance Luke was going to risk coming across Peggy in a state of undress. He took his great-aunt’s elbow. “Let’s get you a sherry.”

  Just then the staircase began to tremble, signaling the imminent arrival of someone descending it, and Peggy appeared. Her mouth drew into a shiny pink circle at the sight of Luke and Abigail waiting for her in the foyer. Creak, went the third step from the bottom as she placed one high-heeled shoe on it.

  “You look festive, dear.” Like any good Yankee hostess, Abigail revealed no trace of displeasure at her new great-niece-in-law’s tardiness or choice of getup. Luke, who usually paid no more attention to fashion than he did to jewelry, was certain that Peggy’s short skirt was wholly inappropriate for New Nineveh.

  Though it looked pretty good.

  “You’re late. People will be here any minute.”

  “I thought the reception started at four.” Peggy turned to Abigail, who was rearranging fall branches in a vase on the foyer table. “Won’t everybody be fashionably late?”

  Luke suppressed a smile. “There’s no such thing as fashionably late in New Nineveh.”

  Peggy was uneasy. He could see that. It was intimidating enough for him, having to put on this act for people he at least knew accepted him. He couldn’t imagine being in her shoes—he glanced at her feet, then jerked his head away. Those high heels were far too distracting.

  “Well…” she hesitated. “I think the tub is broken. It took an hour to fill.”

  He decided some levity was in order. “You were lucky. It usually takes two hours.”

  Peggy didn’t laugh. She probably guessed, correctly, that he was telling the truth.

  “Your wife might care for a cup of punch. Why don’t I get one for her.” Abby hurried off.

  “In any case,” Peggy said with a sigh once they were alone, “perhaps I could shower in your bathroom from now on.”

  Luke laughed. “That is my bathroom.”

  “There’s only one bathroom on the entire third floor?”

  “There are only two in the house. Abigail’s doesn’t have a shower, either. But there isn’t time for this.” He checked his watch again. “We need to get our story absolutely straight. Now, a lot of the people coming today have known my family for generations. There’s a group I went to prep school with—that’s Phillips Academy Andover, but just call it Andover—and a few neighbors, and friends of Abby’s and my late parents’. They’ll all want to know about you. You moved around a lot as a child, didn’t you?”

  “Who told you that?”

  He was perplexed. How had he known? “We must have talked about it…” that night. He hoped his discomfort wasn’t as obvious as hers. “Did you live at any time in Palo Alto?”

  “San Jose.”

  “I don’t suppose you went to Stanford?”

  “NYU.”

  “Art history?”

  “English.”

  “Really?” It was the first thing aside from their shared blunder in Las Vegas that he and Peggy had in common. Luke had majored in English and economi
cs at Yale.

  “Yes.” Her words were clipped. “Really.”

  He wondered if he’d said something to insult her. “How did an English major end up selling soap?”

  “I needed the money,” she said.

  He considered telling her he could relate, but time was wasting. “Just say you’re from Palo Alto and have an art history degree from Stanford.”

  “What’s wrong with San Jose and NYU?”

  “I just already told a few people the first story.” He had the distinct impression he was digging himself into a hole. “It’s more, well, authentic.”

  “You mean your friends wouldn’t live in San Jose or go to NYU.”

  “Luke, what was I supposed to be getting for you?” Abigail’s question came from the dining room.

  The distraction couldn’t have come at a better time. “Punch, but we’ll get our own, thank you.” Luke lowered his voice. “All right, Peggy, quickly: After our private wedding in New York, we drove up to the Colonial Inn for the night, and—what?”

  Peggy had raised her hand—a little facetiously, Luke thought. “When?”

  “When what?”

  “When was our wedding—the date? You remember, right? People will ask. And what is the Colonial Inn?”

  “It’s a bed-and-breakfast about ten miles from here.” He shrugged. “People think it’s romantic.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “Sure.” He’d taken Nicki to the Colonial’s restaurant for dinner a couple of times.

  Peggy was quiet for a few seconds. Then she repeated, “And when was our wedding?” She sounded offended. Luke couldn’t imagine why. Before he could take a guess, she went on, “September twenty-sixth. I can’t believe you, Luke.”

  “Of course.” Luke couldn’t imagine how he’d forgotten. “My mistake. September twenty-sixth. The day our year is over.”

  “I’m going to put the bruschetta in the oven.” She started to leave, but Luke blocked her.