Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  Brock, out of town covering football playoffs, called constantly from the road. “Hey, Pegs,” he’d say. “Whatcha up to?”

  “I’m at the store,” she’d tell him. Just like I was two hours ago.

  They settled on a date—the first Saturday in June. For a few hours, Peggy was glad to have at least made one decision. Then came a new flurry of calls from Sharon Clovis, who peppered her with questions about menus and guest lists. By Friday afternoon, Peggy had switched off her phone and had stopped dreading her trip to New Nineveh. Signing annulment papers and crushing Miss Abigail with news of her impending split from Luke seemed preferable to another moment of wedding talk.

  But when she drove up, the Sedgwick House was empty.

  “Luke? Miss Abigail?” Peggy stood in the frigid foyer, her call reverberating back at her. Why hadn’t they left the light on? Where would they be at ten o’clock at night? Luke wasn’t in his study, and Miss Abigail’s bedroom door was wide open—only she wasn’t in it, or in the kitchen, or in the library—

  She was standing next to the black phone in the den when its bell broke the silence. Too worried to be startled, she grabbed it up before the first ring had finished.

  “You’re there.” It was Luke. “We’re at the hospital.”

  It was like a recurring bad dream in which she kept returning to Torrington General, hoping Miss Abigail would be all right. The emergency room waiting area was exactly as it had been last time—the same sea-foam green walls, a similar cast of unhappy patients and their companions, the same dog-eared issues of AARP and Field & Stream. A nurse motioned Peggy past the triage area toward a drawn curtain. Behind it, Miss Abigail was in bed, asleep, a bloodied dressing on her forehead and a cast on one arm.

  “You should have heard her when they went to stitch her up.” Luke looked drained. “‘No lidocaine,’ she said. The doctors took it as a sign of dementia, but I told them, no, that’s just my great-aunt.”

  They’d been cleaning out Miss Abigail’s bedroom, Luke explained, searching for something, and she’d tripped or lost her balance. She had a fractured wrist and a gash from scraping her forehead against a drawer pull on her dresser. She didn’t seem to have a concussion, but the doctors were keeping her again for observation. “The concern is that she may have had another one of those practice strokes.”

  Peggy patted Miss Abigail’s good arm and smoothed her hair. She doesn’t belong in here. She should be home, in her own bed. For the first time in months, she understood that this indomitable, seemingly indestructible old woman couldn’t have more than a few years left. Soon Luke really would be the only living Sedgwick.

  Luke motioned Peggy away from his sleeping great-aunt. “I’d like you to do me a favor,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t for…” He nodded toward the bed to finish the sentence.

  Peggy was shocked at how weary he appeared. She longed to take his hand, to let him rest his head on her shoulder. “Whatever you need.”

  “I don’t think Abigail can handle the idea of an early annulment.”

  Peggy’s mood soared. It was exactly what she had been thinking. How could they break up now, with Miss Abigail in this weakened state?

  She’d postpone the wedding. Brock would be upset, but she’d think up a reasonable excuse. It was her duty. She’d stay married to Luke until September, fulfill the promise she’d made, do the right thing by Miss Abigail. By then, too, she’d be more used to the idea of marrying Brock. She’d be excited about her dress and her wedding and the napkin colors and all the things brides were supposed to be excited about. She would be ready.

  “That would be fine,” she told Luke. “We’ll stick to the original plan. September isn’t that far off anyway. I’ll wait and get married after that.” If Brock couldn’t spare a weekend, they’d go to City Hall on a weekday, between his assignments.

  Luke didn’t seem appeased; his eyes held a sadness Peggy couldn’t remember having seen before.

  What was wrong with her? She had that “I have a crush on Luke Sedgwick” sensation again. She racked her brain for an unflattering memory of him but could remember nothing—nothing but Christmas Eve in his bedroom, his hands under her laughable thermal top, his lips on her throat. For the first time, she let herself not force the thought to one side—to imagine what Luke Sedgwick might be like in bed. “White bread with mayonnaise,” Tiffany had once said. Peggy didn’t doubt her friend’s authority on the subject of preppy sex, but she had to think, from the way Luke’s kiss had left her aching for more, that making love with him would be anything but bland.

  “P-pardon?” She snapped back to reality. Luke had just spoken, and Miss Abigail was not two feet away in a hospital bed with a cast on her wrist and stitches in her forehead. How could Peggy think about sex at a time like this?

  “You won’t have to wait for September,” Luke repeated. “I wasn’t suggesting we put off the annulment.”

  “You weren’t?” She avoided his eyes, glancing down at her hands, at the phony Connecticut wedding ring she’d once thought so spectacular. It wasn’t right. Luke wouldn’t have given her a ring like this. It was too big, too shiny, too—just too. Too everything.

  “You’re getting married, aren’t you?” He sounded impatient, almost harsh. “You’ll sign the papers this weekend and Mayhew will file them next week, as we discussed. I wasn’t suggesting we postpone getting the annulment—” He left off; Miss Abigail was muttering something in her sleep. When she seemed to settle, he finished in a ragged whisper, “Only that we put off telling her about it.”

  A nurse came in. “Why don’t you two go home and get some rest? She’s stable. We’ll call you if there’s any change overnight.”

  There were only a handful of cars left in the parking lot. Luke walked Peggy to this week’s rental, and Peggy searched for the key in her purse before finding it in her coat pocket. Her face was stiff in the frozen air. “So what you’re saying is, we fake being happily married for ninety more days until the annulment goes through, and then hit your great-aunt with the bad news? Why do you assume in three months she’ll be in better shape to handle it?”

  “Do you have a better suggestion?”

  She lifted her arms and dropped them against her sides.

  “I didn’t think so.” He drove out of the lot behind her, his car’s headlights on her back like accusing eyes all the way to New Nineveh.

  After a sleepless night, Luke returned with Peggy to the hospital Saturday and found Abigail in a regular room, awake and insisting on a second helping of creamed chipped beef. Luke assured the nurse that Abigail’s appreciation of the hospital food was also not a sign of dementia. He saw Peggy had her hand pressed over her mouth as if trying to suppress laughter and surmised she was thinking Abby’s own cooking wasn’t far off from hospital food. He couldn’t disagree.

  There was good news from Abby’s doctors: Their tests showed no sign of another ministroke, and they concluded her fall had been a simple accident. “Go home, Miss Sedgwick,” one said. “You’ll probably outlive all of us.”

  Luke settled his great-aunt into her bed, surrounded with propped-up pillows, and Peggy brought up a tray with tea and crackers, and together they kept her company into the early evening as she reminisced about her privileged childhood, about the summer lawn parties and winter sleigh rides and games of hide-and-seek with the staff’s children.

  “The Sedgwicks had it better than most,” she said just before she fell asleep. “But I learned the value of a penny saved. A few pennies over time can add up, you two. Don’t forget that.”

  Peggy retired wordlessly to her own bedroom not long afterward, and soon Luke could hear the muffled sound of a one-sided telephone conversation. He shut himself into the ballroom, in the pool of light cast by his desk lamp, going over his budget until the numbers became meaningless. Then he turned from his computer and began to write.

  WIDOW IN THE WOODS

  A hundred years or more, she’s bent her c
rown

  in storm, in sun, in moonsplashed midnight breeze,

  surviving all the random vagaries

  of this harsh world. A dense-twigged veil drifts down

  from crown along her trunk—mourning slow wood

  that rustles, tattered, in a hint of wind

  this January dusk, cloudy, purpling

  the ground with sudden shadows.

  How she broods—

  you speculate—on dark surprise and loss,

  alone these many years, despondent, bent,

  her bolt-cracked mate transformed to splinters, moss.

  Though not alone, you feel the sadness of

  a twilight breeze. There’s never enough love;

  the widow nods to you. Her branches moan.

  The sky had grown lighter by the time he’d finished Sunday morning.

  He should have been exhausted, but he was more energized than he had been since—really, since Christmas Eve. He read the finished sonnet twice, three times, four times. For once, he didn’t want to change a word or consign it to the garbage.

  Avoiding Peggy’s room, he took the back staircase to the second floor to peek at Abigail, snoring steadily under her Hudson’s Bay blanket with Quibble curled at her feet, then continued to the kitchen. He rested at the chilly table, his head in his hands.

  “What are you doing?”

  Luke blinked. Peggy was in the kitchen doorway. Wintry sunlight dappled the sweater and skirt she often wore to church.

  “Your great-aunt would like tea and a poached egg on toast. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s enjoying being waited on.” Peggy took a pot from the rack. “I wish I knew why it’s called a poached egg, as if it had been stolen.”

  Luke wished he knew how Peggy could be so chipper at five in the morning. He wished he knew how Peggy could be awake at five in the morning. Or how the sun could be full in the sky when ten seconds ago it hadn’t yet risen. “What time is it?” His throat was dry and creaky.

  “Nine-thirty.” She took from the bread box a loaf of Pepperidge Farm Original White, the same bread Abigail had been eating for Luke’s entire life. “What happened to you? Did you sleep here all night?”

  “I wasn’t asleep.” But he must have been. And now Peggy had caught him.

  Peggy put two slices of bread in the toaster. “I thought I’d go to church alone, if you don’t mind bringing your great-aunt her breakfast. And I signed the annulment papers. They’re on my dresser. For heaven’s sake, please tell Lowell to make sure Geri doesn’t see them.”

  “Thank you.” Luke knew Peggy wouldn’t suspect how painful the words were to say. He was trained to keep his emotions in.

  TWENTY

  At the end of January, Bath opened across the street. “I bet that store doesn’t last three months,” Bex scoffed.

  “They can’t be that smart if they couldn’t open in time for the holidays.”

  “I think I’ll write them a note to welcome them to the neighborhood.” Peggy brushed a fine layer of grit from a piece of the store stationery they kept near the cash register.

  “But they’re the competition!”

  “We should still be polite,” Peggy insisted. But her confidence waned when she went to deliver the note and introduce herself, and the store manager, rail thin and imperious, neither opened it nor offered her own name. A few days later, Peggy spotted an ACME Cleaning Supply regular, the mint foot-scrub woman, leaving Bath with a shopping bag in each hand. Already, Bex and Peggy were noticing a downturn in business.

  They reminded each other that it was always slow in the dead of winter; shoppers didn’t venture outside when it was cold, and it had been particularly frigid for the past couple of weeks, with temperatures in the twenties. As the month came to a close, Peggy envied Tiffany, who had migrated to Palm Beach shortly after Christmas. Even Brock was in Florida, setting up for the Super Bowl.

  Florida. Peggy tried not to dwell on it too much.

  “Do you think if a man cheats once, he’ll be a cheater for life?” Peggy asked at her next massage appointment. As always, she was glad to be facing down, speaking toward the floor through the doughnut-shaped face rest.

  “I had a boyfriend once who was a yoga instructor. I’m pretty sure he slept with every one of his students.” Marlene pressed her fingers into Peggy’s spine. “The man could not keep his prana in his pants. Is Brock cheating again?”

  “Not at all. I was asking theoretically—ouch!”

  “Sorry, Peggy. You’ve got that same knot in your shoulder you had two years ago.”

  It occurred to Peggy that instead of trying to massage away what was bothering her, she could face what was bothering her. On the bus home, she called Brock. There was nothing to arouse her suspicions. The hollow sound of the stadium was behind him: the noise and exclamations of cameramen and sound technicians setting up their equipment. Nothing to worry about. He was at work, where he’d said he would be. “Just called to say hello,” she told him. A few days later, he left for Hawaii to work on the surf documentary. He’d travel to Brazil after that, and then Australia, and be away until shortly before their wedding.

  And so it would go in their marriage. She’d be without Brock for days, weeks, possibly months at a time. Even if Brock weren’t unfaithful, could she tolerate the loneliness? Was her mother right about husbands and wives needing to be physically together to stay together?

  Maybe other couples did, Peggy concluded, but she was used to Brock’s lifestyle.

  She continued to spend her weekends in New Nineveh, keeping Miss Abigail, still bandaged and in a cast but long past convalescing in bed, entertained and out of trouble. Luke rarely came out of his study, except for meals, and Peggy was glad. The less she saw of him, the clearer it was that marrying Brock was the right decision.

  Still, she couldn’t get past her guilt over Miss Abigail.

  “Luke will need you here every day once I’m gone,” Luke’s great-aunt announced one Saturday afternoon as she oversaw Peggy in the kitchen.

  Peggy shook paprika into the casserole she was preparing, an old Sedgwick recipe. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “That boy wouldn’t eat if he didn’t have someone to make him supper. Now mix in the celery and two tablespoons of onion flakes, and then you’ll put it in the casserole dish and top it with the bread crumbs.”

  Peggy knew better than to ask if Miss Abigail had considered using fresh onion instead of dried; she got the onion flakes from the spice cabinet. It was true: Miss Abigail took care of Luke as much as he took care of Miss Abigail. His great-aunt gave Luke direction and purpose and kept him in touch with his family history—a history Luke might claim to disdain, but which defined his every action. Luke’s ancestors had surely displayed the same reserve, the same truculence and seeming inapproachability. You could see it in the portrait of Silas Sedgwick in the library. But the Sedgwick genes carried equal parts kindness, humor, and respect. Peggy measured and stirred her casserole, a little envious that Luke’s whole life was here for him, while her own was fragmented, left behind in a succession of California tract homes.

  “Luke says you aren’t good for each other,” Miss Abigail said.

  Luke had been discussing her with his great-aunt? Peggy occupied herself spreading an even layer of bread crumbs over the casserole. Disturbed, a tiny bit flattered—she couldn’t decide which she should feel. She settled on disgruntled. What did Luke mean, they weren’t good for each other? She’d been a perfect wife.

  Miss Abigail took a sherry glass from a cupboard. “I don’t abide by all the modern foolishness about husbands and wives having to be friends. And Luke can be hard to like, with his brooding and moping. Nevertheless, what matters is, he cares for you.”

  “I don’t think so.” Peggy couldn’t believe she was having this discussion.

  “Hogwash, young lady. Put the casserole in the oven, please, and pour me a sherry.”

  Luke made an informal deal with Grant Atherton
over hamburgers at the Nutmeg Coffee Shop, which had been a downtown fixture for over half a century. The business had recently relocated to Pilgrim Plaza, to a brand-new building done up to look like a fifties diner, with diamond-patterned chrome walls and red vinyl booths. Luke missed the original, shabby Nutmeg on the town green. It had been a genuine fifties diner.

  For the formal deal, Luke put on his dark suit and parked the Volvo in the garage under one of the many glassy, mid-height office boxes that gave downtown Stamford, Connecticut, its ambitious bluster, as if it knew it couldn’t compete with New York but was damn well going to give it the old college try. Atherton’s office, on the ninth floor of the corporate headquarters of Budget Club International, looked out over a visual riot of shopping malls and I-95 and the railroad tracks and the wind-whipped, whitecapped Long Island Sound. Luke signed a contract, returned to New Nineveh, went up to his study, and stayed there for most of the next three days.

  Each year at this time, Luke was reminded how quickly a New England winter could reduce his world, as freezing temperatures and layers of snow and ice confined him, and everyone, to their homes. This year, even without the snow, Luke’s life seemed smaller than ever before. His great-aunt, his investments, his writing—there was nothing else. Except for the Fiorentinos, who stopped in two or three times a week to visit Abigail, he saw no one. Poker night had been temporarily suspended as its members left for ski vacations and winter homes. In years past Luke hadn’t cared, but this year he thought it might have been good for him to leave the house once in a while.

  He supposed he’d learned this from Peggy.

  Peggy’s appearance on weekends might have lifted his spirits, but he couldn’t enjoy her company. Avoiding her was difficult—the freezing cold meant she, too, stayed at home, leaving only to accompany his great-aunt to the Stop & Shop or to church. “You don’t need to take us places anymore,” she told him. “I can drive Miss Abigail myself.”