by Amity Gaige
“The Lippets’ old house!” yelled the old man’s wife before Clark could answer. “They said that already. That’s where they live. They just moved in this winter. Where Bob and Marion Lippet used to live.”
Clark leaned forward, careful not to touch himself anywhere. “The Lippets?” he said. “What were they like?”
The old woman looked up at him and waited for his question to float down to her. A cloud of barbecue smoke wafted over to them and then out of the gate through which Clark and Charlotte had recently entered. A crowd of about twenty-five decent-looking people milled on the perfect grass beyond.
Charlotte had been overjoyed to discover the very impersonal Xeroxed invitation to the barbecue stuffed into their mailbox. They hadn’t yet been invited to anything in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, Clark had looked at the hill up which he would soon be forced to march, his sunburned skin smarting all over, and he felt with sudden conviction that going to a neighborhood barbecue would be cruel and unusual. He didn’t want to meet anybody. He didn’t feel like meeting anybody. If you were meant to meet people, you’d meet them by chance, in the rain. But she had looked so excited, and he could never resist any girlish expression on her part. And of course, it was sort of lonely to be the New People, lost in your own neighborhood.
“Bob and Marion Lippet,” said the old lady. “He was some sort of a chemist and she taught music. Very nice young couple. We were all so sad when they left. It was rather sudden. They left without a word. Just drove away. Nobody knows where they went.”
“Just like the ones before them,” said the old man. “The ones always fighting. You could hear them in the summertime.”
“No need to talk about all that,” said the woman. “Pure coincidence.”
“And the ones before them,” said the man. “A coincidence too? Makes you wonder.”
Clark cocked his head. “What?” he said.
“Now, Marion Lippet,” said the old man, “was a nurse.”
“Marion Lippet was a music teacher,” said his wife. “She always carried rosin in her skirt pocket.”
“Marion Lippet was a nurse,” said the old man. “I’m sure of it.”
Clark looked back and forth at them.
“Marion Lippet was a music teacher,” said the old lady. “They had a baby grand in the living room. You could hear the music all afternoon. Child’s music. Practicing scales. ‘Für Elise,’ ‘The March of the Woodchucks.’ Always children around but none of their own.”
“Marion Lippet was barren,” said the old man.
“Bob Lippet was a burn victim,” said the old woman. “He was very handsome in an Irish way. A broad, intelligent forehead and shining blue eyes. But he’d been in a terrible fire as a child, and his body was covered with scars to the neck. It looked almost as if he was wearing a suit of them. He wore gloves sometimes so as not to scare the children when they came for lessons with Marion.”
“Marion drank a bit.”
“Marion drank an awful lot. But never were there two more charming people. God knows if you scratch anyone deep enough…”
“The Fiorellos!” cried the old man. “That was the name of the couple before. Ran away too!”
“All right already,” said his wife. “Enough of that.”
The old lady smiled up at Clark.
Clark looked back at the old couple, and after a moment he smiled back. To his surprise, he was actually enjoying the barbecue. He was enjoying hearing about the Lippets. He liked them. Suddenly, they were very real to him and he liked them. He pictured Bob walking around the house, pensively rubbing ointment on his arms. He pictured barren Marion swaying to music in some gauzy, sun-illuminated dress. And then they left, in a mysterious flourish, leaving hairpins on the floor and music fading in the rafters. Clark got the sense, now that he thought of it, of music left behind. And as Charlotte looped her arm through his, he also remembered the feminine shadow crossing the door. Makes you wonder.
“Well,” said Charlotte, who had not been listening. “I guess I’ll go get a hamburger or something.” She was gazing into the yard at the people. A child ran by holding a lit sparkler. A young, glossy-haired woman lurched after him a couple steps and said, “Remember it’s not for eating, Freddie.” The woman smiled, drew her hair back from her eyes, sighed, and walked after the child.
“Would you like to come, Clark?” said Charlotte. “And meet some more neighbors? I’d sure like to get to know some more of our neighbors.”
“No,” said Clark, smiling down at the old couple. “I’ll stay right here with…”
“Edith and Stan.”
“Oh,” Charlotte said. “All right.” She bent down toward the old man. “Which ones are the Girgises?”
The old man indicated the host couple, who were standing by the grill, dressed in bold primary colors. In fact, it was the comely Mrs. Girgis who’d walked past in a shower-fresh cloud just a moment earlier, and seeing her swinging hair filled Charlotte with a spoony feeling. She was just the sort of girl that other girls would have found desirable in the school yard, the sort of girl Charlotte would not have been able to win the heart of back then, as Chops. Briefly, she indulged the image of the two of them throwing apples at each other in the orchard. She left Clark at the periphery and went to introduce herself. For this was the neighborhood she had once dreamed of, now miraculously delivered on a platter of grass. This was the safety, the belonging, the boring beauty. This was the wagon circle. A haven inscribed by the smell of creosote and bug spray.
Smiling, the breeze on her bare arms, Charlotte crossed the yard. Somehow, despite all this—the breeze, the creosote—she was fleetingly troubled by the sense that she was walking up to the front of a classroom. Walking up to take the pointer from Mrs. Lines, who stood before the map of the world. Where was Oman, after all? She still didn’t know. And was the teacher’s name really Mrs. Lines, or was the name merely an association with all those red hash marks on paper, all those shameful errors? The sight of a corrected paper used to make Charlotte dizzy. They know, she would think. They have now seen the flaws that made me what I am, ugly even to my own mother.
Then just as suddenly, her hand was holding the fine-boned hand of a smiling Meg Girgis, who was pulling her forward and out, back into the circle. A sandy-haired man emerged from a cloud of smoke, a child on his hip. Mrs. Lines shrank back into a whisper, and soon Charlotte and her hosts were laughing like old friends. Meg Girgis, raven-haired and tennisy looking, detached the child from her husband’s hip, and set him down in the grass.
“And did your husband come along, Charlotte? Is he that tall fellow over with Stan and Edith?”
“Yes he is,” said Charlotte, turning and waving. “Clark!”
Clark did not hear. He was still talking to the old couple by the fence, who were stretching up on their toes to listen to him. Charlotte cleared her throat.
“Clark!” she called again. She turned back. “Oh well,” she said.
“And do you two have any children, Charlotte?” asked Meg.
“Lord, no,” said Charlotte. Then, shaking her head rapidly, “Not yet, I mean.”
Meg turned to her husband. “Charlotte and Clark just moved into the Lippets’ old house.”
“Oh,” said Glen. His face took on a concerned, probing look. “How’s it going? Everything OK?”
“Oh great,” said Charlotte. “Just great.”
“Well, we were hoping you’d come,” said Meg gently.
“Of course we’d come,” said Charlotte. “We don’t know anybody at all in town. We don’t know a soul. We just sit around and stare at each other. It’s like we live in a little diorama or something. Help, help! Let us out!”
Meg and Glen smiled but did not laugh. They were very nice people. Charlotte turned around and tried to get Clark’s attention again, but he was still absorbed in his conversation with the old couple. In fact, the old couple were leaning toward him with expressions of almost desperate intensity. Charlotte fel
t a shudder run up her body.
“Wow,” Meg said. “He must be very interesting, your Clark.”
“He is,” said Charlotte. “I wonder what he’s yakking about. I’ll just go and get him. I’d like him to meet you.”
As she recrossed the perfect Girgisian grass, she watched her husband’s hands gesturing in the dusk. When she reached them, she tugged on his shirtsleeve and was about to ask him to excuse himself when she stopped short. The old couple’s mouths were open. Their eyes rolled toward her vacantly. The old man’s glasses slid to the end of his nose. Clark straightened and scratched his cheek.
“I was just telling Edith and Stan a story,” he said.
The old woman clutched Charlotte on the elbow, and put one hand over her heart.
“I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “I can’t believe he escaped with his life!”
The man drew a long breath. “To put the map inside a cake. Who would have thought of it?”
“Of what?” said Charlotte.
“The Revolution!” bellowed the man, pushing out his chest. Several of the guests turned to look. “When your husband saved the Revolution from defeat!”
Clark scratched his cheek again.
“Please. Please go on,” begged the woman. “You were leaving the jail after giving the general the cake…”
“What general?” laughed Charlotte. “What cake?”
Standing there, Charlotte felt dizzy. The Revolution! Of course. She looked around, as if she might see Vera herself stride out of the rhododendron, dusting off her hands, saying, Let me tell it! The story was one of her classics, one of her fantasies! And now Clark had rewritten it with himself as the hero? Charlotte drew the back of her wrist across her forehead. Suddenly the sky and the air seemed too close—a small box she was shut in.
Just then, Meg Girgis flounced off the porch and begin to walk across the yard toward the group of them, perfect tan knees moving underneath her plastic apron. Her approach made Charlotte freeze; she could never be friends with a woman like that. She spun around to collide with the body of her husband, his sunburnt skin making him only vaguely familiar, his eyes astral blue. The sky slid around like jelly behind him.
“Let’s go,” Charlotte said. The old couple protested and reached after them as they passed hurriedly through the gate and disappeared back down the hill, to where the Lippets used to live.
EXTRAVAGANCE
“You don’t like it?” Clark said. “I got a very good deal on it.”
Charlotte stood over the gleaming machine with a blank expression on her face. She blinked twice, her brow furrowing. She had just come home from work. The summer sky behind her was deepening. She removed her pumps and stood in the yard without responding.
Clark looked over at her. “I got a very good deal on it, I said. End of summer closeout.”
“I don’t want to know how much,” she said.
“Guess how much.”
“I don’t want to guess. I don’t like to guess. Let’s not turn this into a thing. I don’t care. I want to go inside where there’s no bugs.”
“Three hundred dollars,” he said, and Charlotte flinched at the number, closing her eyes. “It was advertised for twice that. Look,” he patted the saddle, “power steering, four-wheel drive. I could take this out on the freeway.”
“I want to have a gin and tonic,” she said. “I want to sit inside and drink it where there’s no bugs.”
“And look,” he said, catching her wrist and dragging her around the other side. “Stainless steel body, fenders, just like a car. Oh, and a self-contained removal system. See, the grass gets chewed up there under the rotor,” he pointed vaguely underneath the little tractor, “and then it comes through this pipe here, and gets shunted into this sack back here, which has a little chute on the bottom, and if you raise it…” he struggled to move the arm, his T-shirt sliding up over his back. “If you raise it…”
Charlotte turned and went inside.
He came after her in the kitchen.
“You don’t like it,” he said.
“We don’t need it,” she said. “It’s an extravagance.”
“Well, if you look at it that way, we don’t really need that oven. We don’t need chairs or beds or indoor plumbing. Hell, we don’t even need this damn house. A house is an extravagance. We could live under the stars, like antelope.”
Charlotte was holding her special glass with nothing in it. He stood between her and the freezer.
“I can return it, if you absolutely hate it,” said Clark. “If you really want me to.”
“I’d like some ice, please,” said Charlotte.
“How extravagant of you.” He stepped aside.
“So you disapprove,” he said.
She moved past him, took several frostbitten ice cubes from the tray and placed them in the glass. She poured herself some gin, screwed the cap on hard, and looked at him.
“What the hell is wrong with you these days?” she said.
“What,” he said. “With me?”
“You’ve been behaving so strangely. You walk around in a daze. You pace around at night. You do strange things.” She looked down into her glass. “I don’t feel you’re really here.”
“I’m right here!” Clark laughed expansively.
“But what are you thinking?” she said. She pointed at him with her gin. “A sit-down mower? A baby pool? Last week, you bought a baby pool, Clark.”
“Yes?” he said, waiting.
“Is it—is it for yourself?”
“I sit in it. I cool off in it, it’s so damned hot in this town.”
“But you cool off at the pool,” she said. “You go to the pool every day. All you do is go to the pool and eat your mayonnaise sandwiches. I’ve been wanting to ask you about those for weeks. It’s weird.” She switched her glass from one hand to the other. “I mean, I’d like to understand. Are they something—are they something your—” she looked down again into her glass, “—your mother used to make for you? Is this some way of—of dealing with her absence? Is this some kind of ‘reenactment’?”
“Ha,” said Clark. “Where are you getting these words?”
“From the books by your bed. For your night class.”
“Those are academic words, Charlotte. They’re not for people.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“You lied to those old people,” she said. “At the barbecue.”
“Good grief. Not this again.”
“Why did you lie to them, Clark? I don’t understand.”
“I was bored. I was bored! I’m bored right now just thinking about that stupid picnic. All the stupid things. Barbecues. Housework. Painting. Dusting. Parent–teacher conferences. It’s busywork. It’s dreck. It’s unimaginative.”
“But it’s life!” cried Charlotte. “Your life. It’s a nice life.”
He walked around in a small circle and came back to where he’d been standing.
“Are we done with this subject?” he said.
“What about when they find out you were lying? What will people think of you?”
“To hell with when they find out,” Clark said. “It was funny. It was a joke. It was for fun.”
“But it was a lie. A fantasy. You understand that, right?” Charlotte touched him on the hand, but he moved his hand.
“Of course I understand that,” he said, tugging at the collar of his T-shirt. “I didn’t mean to upset the exquisite balance of the universe.”
“Stop,” Charlotte said. Her eyes were glassy. “We never used to talk like this. Did we? Sometimes these days I don’t recognize you. Not since we moved in here. Don’t you feel it too? A strangeness.”
She put out her hand and Clark moved just out of reach. He looked across the counter at her, and gestured at her glass.
“Have about six more of those rickeys of yours and everything will be just fine.” He laughed harshly. “And quit being so Christly, Charlotte. What, you never lied?
You didn’t even tell me your big secret until we were already engaged. You remember? For the longest time, you let me go around thinking you were the natural daughter of two elderly Italians. That’s a pretty big lie, isn’t it? I was pretty damned confused by that myself.”
Now Charlotte stepped back. Her expression was that of such disappointment that Clark felt a twitch in his hand as if he wanted to strike his own face. She held the glass of gin limply in her hand, and some of it dripped onto the linoleum floor. Without another word, she turned and disappeared into the dark living room.
Clark stood with his hands open as one falsely accused of stealing. Around him, the appliances hummed in disuse. He leaned against the counter, rubbing his head. So what if she was right. He had been feeling strange. Tired. Immobilized. Surrounded on all sides, as if he was living in a ditch. For several weeks now, he hadn’t once slept through the night. Fatigued throughout the day, simple things had become difficult, and the truth about the mayonnaise sandwiches was that they were the easiest things to make.
Worse than all that, his reasoning was compromised, his ability to tell something real from something imagined. He thought of the feminine shape he’d seen cross the bedroom doorway, and how he decided it was a shadow from the trees. But since then, he’d heard murmured words in the pantry, a flash of a naked thigh in the guest bedroom that dissolved upon second look. Recently, he’d been awoken in the night by what he thought was a man blowing his nose, but when he listened, there was nothing. How could he tell Charlotte, queen of reason, who would only think him crazy? And was he? He threw a dishrag into the sink.
“Damn it,” he said to the empty room.
He looked out at the lawn mower in the backyard. It was an extravagance. He tried to think of what had compelled him to go and buy it in the first place. He had intended to go and do something helpful, to buy a spade or some marigold seeds for Charlotte’s theoretical garden. The salesman had shown him the mower instead. There was a certain scent that new machinery gave off. It smelled of promise and of industry. At one point in his boyhood, he had seen, with his father, a series of freshly assembled cars come out of their hangars on rolling treads, each one shinier than the next. When he saw the mower and he saw himself on its saddle, he thought, aren’t I that man, the sort of man for whom such inventions are made?
