Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  Bath was the bath-and-body chain based in Ohio. Peggy felt as if she’d been hit with a two-by-four.

  “They might as well name it Put ACME Out of Business,” Bex continued.

  “Bloodbath,” Peggy suggested, and laughed, though it wasn’t funny. She couldn’t imagine what the second piece of news was. How much worse could it get? “What was the other thing?” she asked.

  Bex’s smile lit up her whole face.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  “You smell delicious.” Jeremy’s breathed words were steamy in her ear. “What are you wearing?”

  “Nothing.” Peggy fumbled with her key and unlocked the apartment building door, and the two stumbled, attached at the lips, into the building’s day-bright hallway with its institutional white walls and pitched staircase. “I mean”—she felt the need to clarify—“I don’t wear perfume. Obviously I’m not wearing nothing, as in no clothes.” Peggy, shut up. “What did you think of the movie?”

  “It was okay.” Jeremy kissed the side of her neck.

  She made a split-second decision. “Would you like to come up?”

  “God, yes,” he said, and she led him up the stairs, hoping she didn’t have panty lines, that her skirt didn’t make her appear too broad in back, that he wouldn’t be turned off by the view. He’d better not be ambivalent about what was about to happen, even if she was. No—she wasn’t ambivalent. Not since her twenties, before she’d met Brock, had she gone so long without sex. She felt as if she were about to lose her virginity for a second time. It would be good for her. She could move on from Brock and get over what seemed to be a growing obsession with Luke. And Jeremy was a nice person. And they had so much in common.

  They were both out of breath when they reached the fifth floor. Peggy applauded herself for making a rational choice in love for the first time in her life and opened the door.

  “How’d it go?” Josh called, his eyes on the television screen.

  “Come watch with us,” Bex added. “It’s The Philadelphia Story. You’ve seen it, right? Katharine Hepburn has to choose between three men…” She turned around. “Oh! Hi!” She elbowed Josh, who finally took his eyes from the movie. The two got to their feet and shook Jeremy’s hand. Peggy felt as if she’d been ambushed by her parents.

  She led Jeremy back out into the corridor.

  “They’re never awake this late. They don’t even sleep here, usually.” Peggy felt sheepish. “But Bex got good news today and—”

  The blinking gadget on Jeremy’s belt emitted a piercing beep. Peggy held her breath, sensing an uncontrollable fit of church giggles coming on.

  “I have an idea.” Jeremy absently checked the gadget. “If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right. Let’s go away for a weekend. This coming Saturday.”

  “But this weekend is Thanksgiving,” Peggy said, and cleared her throat to cover up the last vestige of giggle.

  Jeremy touched her arm. “Then the weekend after. I read about this great country inn, totally hidden away. Let’s go there.”

  It was the holy grail of dating: a man who wanted to whisk her off on a romantic rendezvous. In all her years with Brock, his schedule had allowed them perhaps two weekends away together. And this would be a weekend off from Luke.

  “It’s a date.” She smiled at Jeremy. And kept on smiling, out of real pleasure or of habit she wasn’t sure, as he kissed her good night and left in a cloud of his cedar-lime aftershave.

  Monday at the store brought browsers but few buyers and a new batch of flowers from Brock—a raft of speckled orchids that left Peggy depressed. On the card he’d invited her to dinner the Saturday after Thanksgiving weekend. She was glad to get Brock’s voice mail when she called and left a terse message that she couldn’t see him the Saturday after next because she’d be out of town. Peggy wished already she hadn’t agreed to the weekend away. Her heart wasn’t in it, and now, alone at the shop, she understood why. Each time she thought about it, she pictured not Jeremy but Luke—Luke sharing a romantic dinner, kissing her in front of a roaring fire, leading her to bed, and undressing her slowly, sensually, as if unwrapping a gift…

  “I assume you’ll take this back.”

  Peggy hadn’t heard the customer enter. The woman was perhaps a decade older than Peggy, carrying a handbag with a yapping dog inside. She held out a half-used bar of blue soap in a hand Peggy couldn’t help but notice lacked a wedding ring.

  “It was bright cobalt when it was bigger. As you can see, it’s faded to azure, and it clashes with my powder room. I had a dinner party last night and was humiliated to notice, minutes before my guests arrived, that my soap was off.”

  Peggy refunded the woman’s money grimly. This is me in ten years, she thought. Single, with a purse-dog and a soap obsession. It occurred to her that after ten years, she might be tired of peddling bath-and-body products to uppity New Yorkers.

  She had to stop this mooning over Luke, too. From now on she’d be polite to him, nothing more.

  She decided she’d better give Jeremy a chance.

  His desk had gotten out of hand. It was overrun with paper, weeks’ worth of orphan lines of poetry. On Wednesday, Luke rummaged through opened envelopes, bill stubs, Seymour’s Hardware receipts, torn bits of yellow legal paper. His eyes lit on the flyer he’d politely accepted at some point from one of the picketers on the town green—was this it?—and flipped it over to read:

  The soggiest grand smear of autumn leaves,

  rain-polished, dank, wind-streaked across my path,

  can brighten in an instant. I believe

  in fortune changing too, the fates’ pure wrath

  gone soft without warning. Success at last!

  Irritation with himself burned like bile in his throat. The repetitiousness of “rain-polished” followed by “dank” perturbed him; the end of line five, which he’d liked at first, was hackneyed—a corny greeting card sentiment written two weeks ago in a fit of foolish optimism. He slipped the flyer, poem-side down, into his wastebasket and kept searching his desk, stumbling onto a photo Nicki had given him back in the spring, taken in her loft. They’d argued that day; Luke couldn’t recall why. He studied Nicki’s sexy, strong-featured face, testing himself, and found no attraction to it. He put the photo into a drawer and continued his excavation until he uncovered the shard he was searching for:

  An aphrodisiac will disappear,

  delusional, like permanence or wealth

  a shimmering, as if love were a ghost

  As he’d hoped, it had held up well. He added a fourth line:

  and yet my passion for you seethes and sears

  And reread the words until they blurred together. He’d written the first three lines the day Peggy had arrived at the house. Her appearance in his life had coincided with the most productive writing bout he’d had in years. It figured. Maybe she was his muse, and here she was telling another man “I love you” on the telephone in the middle of the night.

  Luke wondered if he was writing this poem for Peggy.

  For the rest of the afternoon, he walked up and down the ballroom, unable to concentrate. He was glad for his poker game that night; by the time he arrived home to find Peggy’s rental car in the driveway, he knew she had long since gone to sleep.

  He stayed upstairs as long as he could on Thanksgiving morning and came down to find Peggy and his great-aunt in the midst of dinner preparations.

  “Would you like anything in the stuffing other than celery?” Peggy, in one of Abby’s old aprons, dumped a bag of stuffing mix into a bowl. “I like to put water chestnuts and mandarin oranges in it. It’s really good.”

  Abby, looking only as nonplussed as propriety would allow, slid an intact cylinder of canned cranberry sauce into a crystal dish. “Celery will do, dear. We’ve always made it that way.”

  He kept catching himself watching Peggy—in the kitchen, as she sprinkled French fried onions onto the green bean casserole; over dinner, where she spoke little
and ate less; as the three of them washed dishes together afterward and Abby chattered about how pleased she was Peggy’s parents were coming for Christmas. Luke had assumed there would be an opportunity to take Peggy aside and tell her he was sorry for the way he’d behaved on Sunday. But she wouldn’t meet his gaze. And if she had, and if he had been able to confess he’d been jealous, plain and simple—then what? She was with another man who was clearly not going away.

  Peggy left for the city as soon as the kitchen was clean and Abby had gone to bed, and returned again two days later, late Saturday night. Luke was up in the study listening for her car in the gravel driveway; when she drove up, his heart seemed to catch, then resume beating at double speed. He rushed downstairs to meet her.

  She was hauling her bag out of the car.

  “Let me help you,” he said.

  “I’ve got it. Thanks. You can go back inside.”

  “It’s dark. I’ll walk you to the door.”

  “No need. This is New Nineveh, remember?”

  He accompanied her in silence back to the house.

  On Sunday, it was as if she were going out of her way to stay busy and keep Abby close at hand. When it was time for her to leave again Sunday evening, he followed her to the front door, helpless, as she carried her own suitcase. He stepped aside to let her out and said to her back, “I’ll see you next weekend.”

  She stopped and turned around. “Actually, I thought I’d skip next weekend.”

  “What do you mean, skip it?”

  “I thought we could use some time apart. If that’s all right with you.”

  Luke could see her mind was made up already, that whether he approved the decision or not was immaterial. So he assured her, WASPily, that he couldn’t agree with her more and ushered her out the imposing front door into the frosty, star-spangled darkness.

  FIFTEEN

  December

  It had all gone remarkably smoothly, Peggy thought the following Friday night, when she’d normally be driving to New Nineveh—from telling Luke she wouldn’t be coming up, to securing Padma to work extra hours so Bex wouldn’t be stuck there if she started not to feel well, to successfully booking an eleventh-hour leg-waxing appointment. A different, sunnier person, a Bex or a Tiffany, would take all this as a sign her weekend with Jeremy would be lovely. But Peggy could see only portentous omens. She was stumped over what to wear to bed (silk nightgown, too sexy; cotton pajamas, too not-sexy). Now that it seemed she would be disrobing in front of a new man, she seemed to have gained five pounds. And Luke had been entirely too quick to agree to a weekend apart. Why did he need a weekend apart? She couldn’t bear the answer—to spend it with that detestable redheaded hussy.

  On Saturday morning, an hour before Jeremy was due to pick her up, she returned from a desperate, last-minute trip to the gym to find Bex on the couch, grim-faced, the telephone clutched to her ear, while Josh lingered nearby. “Uh-huh, but it doesn’t feel normal. I can’t get out of bed,” Bex was saying.

  “She’s talking to her OB. She slept sixteen hours last night,” Josh whispered. “Says she’s never been this tired in her life.”

  Peggy’s heart whooshed into her shoes.

  Bex hung up. “She says I’m probably working too hard and should go ahead and sleep as much as I need. No, Peggy, do not cancel your weekend. And Josh, don’t start telling her she shouldn’t go because she’s married.”

  “But I am married.” Peggy’s legs were already aching from her spin on the elliptical trainer. What had she expected after not exercising in aeons—that she’d sail through her workout like a marathon runner?

  “Get out of here,” Bex ordered. “Have fun. I’m going back to bed.”

  At twenty minutes to pickup time, with wet hair and a half-packed suitcase, Peggy answered her cell phone. It was Brock, performing a desperate monologue: “I have to see you. I can’t stop thinking about you!”

  Bad omen number two. Peggy pleaded a bad connection, turned off her cell, and left a note for Josh and Bex that she’d call with the number of the inn. She used Bex’s phone to call Padma and told her the same thing, leaving her strict instructions not to bother Bex with any minor problems.

  “Okay, have a blast,” Padma said. “Where are you staying, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. He wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “Oooh. He must really like you.”

  Jeremy showed up fifteen minutes late, apologetic, wearing his cyborg earpiece, saying he’d tried her cell but hadn’t gotten an answer. They brought Peggy’s suitcase down to the street. There was an orange parking ticket on the windshield of Jeremy’s double-parked rented car. Bad omen number three.

  Jeremy stuffed the ticket into the glove compartment and started the car—outfitted, Peggy noticed, with every electronic accessory yet invented. She looked out the window as Jeremy obeyed the generic female voice of the global positioning system and maneuvered onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, the same road Peggy took out of town on Friday nights, although he didn’t turn off onto the Cross Bronx Express-way as she did. After two months of driving to New Nineveh, Peggy was again used to being behind the wheel, but she was glad to relax in the passenger’s seat, to enjoy the view of the Hudson River.

  She addressed Jeremy’s profile. “Where is this mysterious place you’re taking me?”

  Jeremy slowed to pay the toll on the Henry Hudson Bridge. “The Colonial Inn, about two hours north.” He fiddled with the satellite radio. “It was written up in New York as best weekend spot. Heard of it?”

  Oddly enough, Peggy had, but she couldn’t remember how. She turned her phone back on long enough to leave Bex and Padma the inn’s toll-free number, then turned it off again and continued to admire the scenery—people had already begun to decorate their homes for the holidays—as Jeremy sped through the northern suburbs of New York City. She listened to him describe his Thanksgiving and thought about how perfectly nice he was, exactly the kind of man she’d told herself she wanted, and he was interested in her—though she did wish he would take that cyborg thing off his ear.

  They were an hour into the trip when Peggy spotted a green highway sign with a familiar state outline.

  “Connecticut?” she wheezed through constricting lungs. She hadn’t known you could get there this way.

  “Merge…onto…Interstate…Eighty…Four…East,” the cool, modulated GPS voice instructed.

  Jeremy’s tone was light. “You have a problem with Connecticut?”

  She laughed. “Not at all.” Fiddle-dee-dee. It’s just that my husband lives here.

  Jeremy took his right hand off the wheel and laid it on Peggy’s left knee.

  Peggy felt it there, heavy, and told herself not to be silly; Connecticut was a big state. But half an hour later, when the GPS lady exhorted them to “exit…onto…Route Two…Zero…Two,” the alarm bell rang in her head. “We aren’t going to Litchfield County, are we?”

  Jeremy exited onto Route 202. “You have a problem with Litchfield County?” He was taking all of this as banter. She started to tell him she was serious, but she couldn’t. Anxiety had paralyzed her vocal cords, and she had no credible reason for needing to go back home to New York this instant. Besides, Jeremy was still talking: “… have lunch in the inn restaurant after we check in. Or we could go for a drive. There are a lot of really pretty towns up here: Litchfield and Norfolk and New Nineveh.”

  “I’m not feeling very well.” It was nothing if not accurate.

  “Really?” Jeremy looked at her. “When we get to the inn, you can relax, get a massage at the spa.”

  “Turn…right…on…Roxbury…Road,” the GPS lady cooed. Peggy felt like slapping her.

  And then she remembered: the Colonial Inn.

  She and Luke had supposedly stayed there on their wedding night.

  Connecticut probably had hundreds of romantic inns. Thousands, scattered over the countryside between the picturesque farms and the antiques stores. The entire state was a weekend
getaway paradise. America’s Founding Fathers had probably set it up that way when choosing it as one of the original thirteen colonies: Two hundred years hence, these vistas shall be a tonic for stressed-out New Yorkers. And in this state bursting with bucolic quaintness and charming country retreats, Jeremy had chosen the Colonial?

  “You…have…reached…your…destination,” the GPS lady announced.

  Jeremy drove up to the rambling wood-shingled inn, with its twin gambrel roofs and evergreen-swagged porch. As they crossed the lobby, festive with white poinsettias and a floorto-ceiling Christmas tree that filled the room with the aroma of fresh pine, and Jeremy went to check in, Peggy found she was feeling better. She could handle this. She would handle this. What was her alternative—to crumble? Moreover, the inn was a beautiful old place—lovingly restored, exquisitely appointed, all that the Sedgwick House ought to be. No wonder Luke had chosen it for their fictional—

  Ernestine Riga was walking across the lobby. She stopped, spotted Peggy, and stared.

  Peggy darted around the corner into a wood-paneled library nook. Maybe Ernestine hadn’t actually seen her. Maybe she’d been looking at someone else. No such luck: Ernestine, in a pastel tracksuit, appeared around the corner. “Why, Peggy, what brings you here? Are you and Luke having lunch?”

  Peggy’s heart pounded wildly. Jeremy was going to appear any minute, and the jig would be up. She couldn’t let that happen, not this far into it. “He’s parking the car.” Peggy was starting to perspire. Was Ernestine here for lunch, too?

  “Isn’t that romantic.” Ernestine gave her a syrupy smile. “My daughter-in-law gave me a gift certificate for a massage. Matter of fact, I’m due at the spa this minute. Toodles!” She patted Peggy on the arm and hustled out of the library nook, the legs of her nylon pants scritching together loudly. Peggy was beyond grateful for this stroke of good fortune.

  Jeremy rounded the corner, his cyborg ear still attached.