Between Husbands and Friends

by Thayer, Nancy

  “If he goes into the hospital, I want to spend as much time with him as possible.”

  “Okay. I’ll look after Abby and Matthew.”

  Kate shakes her head. “I know. And I want to tell Chip I’m with you.”

  “No. Kate, I’m already lying to him.”

  Chip hates it when Kate is with Garrison, so for the past six months Kate’s told Chip that she sees Garrison twice a week, during the day, while the children are in school. In fact she’s been visiting him four or five times a week and telling Chip she’s with me. Kate asked me to help her by perpetuating the lie and I have agreed; it is a good lie, I believe. It does no one harm, and it helps Garrison and Kate.

  I haven’t told Max about this. He hates lies. It’s surprising, how easy it is to pretend to be doing something with large chunks of my day, and my own husband doesn’t know. In a guilty way, I kind of like this. It gives me an illusion of freedom. Still, I don’t like the thought of extending the magnitude of the lie. That would increase the chances of getting caught.

  “Every day but Sunday. Lucy, don’t shake your head, listen to me. Garrison is dying. He’ll be gone by the end of the summer. He has no one else who can care for him like I do.”

  It’s true. Garrison’s lover died of AIDS two years ago. His parents disowned him when he came out to them. He has many friends, but some of them just can’t handle this particular illness, and others are just so busy making a living.

  “I thought we could pretend to be taking a course together. At the community center. A summer course, just six weeks. Exercise or basket weaving, it doesn’t matter, Chip won’t want to hear about it. As long as he thinks you and I are together, he’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t know, Kate. That’s more complicated.” I’m thinking aloud, trying to find a solution. “I haven’t had to say anything to Max about all this yet, and Chip thinks you’ve been coming to our house. But if we’re supposed to be going out, in public, taking a course … why, think about it, Kate. Other people would have to be in the course, people we all know, who Chip might run into. It just wouldn’t work.”

  Kate rises and rinses her face with cold water. “I have to see Garrison every day.”

  “You need to tell Chip that. You need to tell him the truth.”

  “It will initiate World War Three around here.”

  “I know. It will be hard. But it’s the only way. And maybe it will make things better between you and Chip.”

  Kate flashes me an angry look. I’ve overstepped an invisible line, insinuating that things between the Cunninghams are less than perfect. Oddly, the more I stand up for Chip, the more it seems to free Kate to complain about him, and the reverse is true; if I criticize Chip in the slightest, Kate jumps to his defense. I can understand this; it’s the way I feel about Max and my children. But it’s easy for me to champion Chip. Very easy.

  “Mom?”

  Matthew and Margaret stand in the doorway.

  Every time I see the boy his bones seem to have grown. His collarbone almost pokes out of the tanned skin of his shoulders. Only a month older than Margaret, Matthew looks much older: Tall already, five feet ten at age fourteen, he will surely be as tall as his father soon. Matthew doesn’t seem comfortable with his early height and the attendant stretch of his long arms and legs; he trips on the untied laces of his sneakers (but still won’t tie them). His blond hair is clean, but too long and badly cut. It hangs over his eyes and around the sharp planes of his face; clearly he’s using it to hide behind. His chin is spotted with acne and the beginnings of a paltry beard. I know his parents have advised him that the oil from his hair will only exacerbate the acne; I’m also sure that he chooses to ignore their advice.

  Matthew wears a tattered T-shirt and baggy madras shorts; Margaret wears a faded button-down shirt of her father’s and a pair of her enormous jeans. It’s a good guess that she’s trying to hide her body. Over the past year her breasts have sprouted like tubers, like squash, large and firm, organically incontrovertible evidence that she’s growing up. I know Margaret is now absorbed with the vision of herself as someone quite distinct and separate from her family. She wants to travel, she wants to have boyfriends (she wants to have lovers!), she wants all the adventures awaiting her in the wide world.

  Although if Margaret has her way, she might find sufficient adventure right here. She must notice that in spite of his shield of hair, Matthew is as drop-dead handsome as his father. Perhaps that’s why she holds her face so poker-straight, as if she’s numb.

  “Hi, Biggies,” Kate greets Matthew and Margaret. She’s gotten her face and voice under control. “Want to go up to the pond?”

  Margaret shrugs.

  Matthew says, “Sure.”

  “I made a gallon thermos full of iced tea and one of lemonade. Could you carry them, Matthew?” Kate is all business now, assigning tasks, handing me the basket of fruit, Margaret the bag of chips. “Dad already set the lawn chairs out.”

  We head out the door, our arms full.

  We walk along a freshly cut path toward the pond, through a stand of evergreens long ago planted as a wind block. Abby and Jeremy sit on their horses in the shade of a huge maple at the far end of the pasture. The sun beams steadily down without a single cloud to block its strength.

  When they bought the farm, Chip had several loads of sand delivered and dumped at one end of the pond to form a beach, and it’s here that he’s set up the beach chairs. He and Max are on the other side of the pond, working on the dock that extends into the water. One of the rubber inner tubes that supports it has come loose and they are refastening it.

  Kate sinks onto a towel and begins applying suntan lotion. I peel off my jeans and shirt, sink down next to her, and do the same. Matthew walks over to the men and talks a moment, then drags his T-shirt over his head, tosses it aside, runs out onto the dock, and belly flops into the water.

  Margaret spreads her towel out and sits next to me. I bite my lips to keep from asking, “Aren’t you hot?” After a while, with a little moue of resignation, as if she’s being forced against her will, she unbuttons her shirt and steps out of her jeans. She’s wearing a one-piece bathing suit, and her figure is so slim and nubile that tears come to my eyes. She is lovely. She is what men have been writing poems about for centuries. Her hips are narrow, her thighs long and sleek. My beauty. She is a jewel. When I tell her this, she retorts, “Yeah, Mom, just what I want, compliments from a middle-aged woman.”

  She wades into the water, dipping her palms to catch water up and splash it on her shoulders.

  Kate leans close to me. “Look at her,” she whispers. “She’s beautiful. Man, Lucy, she’s really blossomed over the winter!”

  Margaret takes a deep breath and strikes out in a long easy crawl for the middle of the pond. Matthew sees her, grabs a silly alligator-shaped float that the Littlies love, and heads her way. They collide in the middle of the pond and surface and splash and shriek, suddenly transformed back into the childhood buddies they’ve been for eleven years.

  Kate lies back and closes her eyes. I join her. The sun soothes me, makes me drowsy, hypnotizes me. This could be any summer day here or on a Nantucket beach, when our families are together. Good fortune, normal life.

  A commotion of hoofbeats and laughter makes me lift my head. Jeremy and Abby are galloping full speed across the pasture and screaming with glee as they go. Jeremy sits the horse well. I remind myself that he’s a year younger than Abby; that’s why he looks so small beside her. Abby is a tidy child, with her brown hair neatly braided and tied with ribbons that matched the tartan of her shirt. She has a pug nose sprinkled with freckles and her father’s bright blue eyes; she looks brave and bold and good, like a miniature model for a book titled something like Abby Cunningham, Air Force Nurse.

  “Mom!” Jeremy yells from the other side of the fence. “Did you see that?”

  “You were great, Jeremy!” I yell back. “You were flying!”

  “I love this ho
rse!” Jeremy tells me, and begins to cough.

  It’s a moist, webby, mucousy cough that shakes Jeremy’s body. It’s the cough I was dreading. Rising, I walk to the fence on the pretense of petting Princess.

  “Good girl,” I tell her, stroking her velvet nose. I try to keep my voice, my face, serene.

  Jeremy’s cough continues. It seems so out of place here on the farm, in the green grass, beneath the blue sky and the bright sun. Jeremy is almost folded double in the saddle.

  I want to lift my little boy down into my arms. I want to pat his back and carry him to the house and hold him while he coughs. But I can feel my husband’s attitude from clear across the pond. Don’t baby him! Let the boy grow up!

  “Want a sip of water or lemonade?” I ask.

  Jeremy shakes his head. He can’t even speak. His face has taken on the frowning, deeply concentrated look that comes with his worst coughing spells. He is six years old. He can’t get his breath. I’m going to call the pediatrician first thing Monday morning.

  Finally the coughing subsides. Jeremy gasps for breath. The skin beneath his eyes is blue.

  “Let’s go to the barn,” Abby says. “It’s too hot to ride.”

  I know for Abby it’s never too hot, cold, windy, or rainy to ride, and I’m grateful to her for her thoughtfulness of Jeremy.

  “I’ll come help you unsaddle the horses,” I tell the children.

  By the time we’re in the barn, Jeremy is coughing again. It’s impossible to ignore it. “Jeremy, I’m afraid you’re allergic to horses,” I tell him as I lift him down.

  He doesn’t want to be allergic to horses; he pushes away from me, indignant, as if my words are the cause of his coughing. I kneel next to him, trying just to be there, not to pressure him, as his cough subsides.

  The barn is cool and shadowy and clean, but the air dances with dust motes. Abby swings down from her horse with the effortless fluid movement of an old pro.

  “Why don’t you go outside and sit under the tree in the shade,” I suggest. “I’ll help Abby.”

  Jeremy’s too exhausted to argue. Just outside, beneath a dusty lilac bush, he sits down, draws his knees up, folds himself into a ball of a boy, like a turtle drawing its head into its shell. I listen. His coughing has stopped.

  The ponies mutter and step sideways and swish their tails, eager to be out of their gear and back into the pasture. I unbuckle the cinch of Princess’s saddle. She turns her head sideways and eyes me balefully. She knows she can intimidate me. She shakes her beautiful spoiled head, shivering her white mane, making her bridle clank.

  “I’ll do that, Lucy.” Chip comes into the barn. He must have swum across the pond; his wet hair lies plastered against his skull, and beads of water slide down his long torso. He smells of dark, leafy damp, like tea, and of something sweet, like rum.

  “Thanks.” I step back.

  Chip has already spent so much time in the sun that his shoulders and back are spotted, pink patches of burned and peeling skin dotting a layer of deep bronze tan. Under his ministrations Princess subsides, standing with her head low and her eyes closed, as if concentrating on the touch of Chip’s hands.

  I have a sense of being enclosed, for a moment, in this cool and shaded place where sight is a secondary sense and touch and smell are paramount. Putting my hand on her haunches, I move around Princess to help Abby. I lift Brownie’s saddle off and carry it into the tack room. Chip comes in and settles Princess’s saddle onto the rack. This small room smells healthy, masculine, of leather and saddle soap. Chip lifts the saddle from me, and as our hands touch I think how soft skin is, how inviting, more supple and enticing than hide or hay or the smoothest leather. Chip and I are almost naked in this confining room; he wears swimming trunks; I, my two strips of red bikini.

  Chip and I look at each other.

  “Here’s Brownie’s bridle!” Abby enters the room, leather and metal in her hand.

  “Thanks, Pudding,” her father says, turning away from me to take his daughter’s gear.

  I fetch Princess’s bridle and put it away. Chip and Abby lead the ponies out to the pasture. Jeremy has regained his equilibrium and races off toward the pond with Abby. Chip and I follow them up the path, more slowly.

  “Lucy.”

  We pause by the low privet hedge. I look at Chip. My pulse throbs in my neck.

  “I know it’s none of my business,” Chip says, “but I think Jeremy’s cough is worrisome.”

  “I agree. It’s been getting worse and worse this year. I’m going to call Dr. Calder Monday.”

  Max is in the pond, racing with Margaret and Matthew while Kate, Jeremy, and Abby stand cheering from the shore.

  “I’d be surprised if it were just a matter of allergies,” Chip says. “When I took the kids to the Disney movie two weeks ago, Jeremy had a coughing attack.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I told Max.”

  “Max didn’t tell me.” I snatch at a long strand of grass bobbing my way and shred its fuzzy head between my fingers. “He thinks I baby Jeremy. Thinks I’m turning him into a mama’s boy.”

  “Want me to say something to Max?”

  “I’d be grateful. On certain subjects he won’t even listen to me.”

  “Max won!” Abby calls. “Daddy, come on. It’s your turn to race.”

  Chip leaves my side in a flash, running across the sand and diving into the pond. The Littlies scream with delight. I lie down on my stomach on my beach towel next to Kate. The sun massages my shoulders. Together we watch our husbands and children race and splash in the cool fresh water of the pond, and we have no idea how much our lives will change before the storms of autumn.

  1987

  I’ve always believed that real friendship is as much a pure gift from the inconstant gods as is love. I had several close friends in college, but distance separated us after graduation as they went off to law school in California, med school in Iowa, or business school in Pennsylvania. I married Max, got pregnant, and moved with Max to western Massachusetts where he had his first job on a small newspaper. I had just begun to get to know some of the young mothers in that small town when Max took a better job in Northampton, and a year later, a new one in Worcester. I didn’t mind all the moves; it seemed right to be moving. I was elated with everything. At night Max and I plotted and gossiped like children, toasting each other with cheap champagne each step of the way, secretly amazed to be perceived, so early in our lives, as capable adults. Margaret was an easy baby, Max was happy, and if I missed a female voice I could always call my mother. We were exactly where we wanted to be, doing what we had dreamed of doing. We were going to make a difference in the world, one newspaper reader at a time.

  When Max took the job as editor in chief of The Sussex Gazette, we bought our first home. Sussex was just starting to boom, becoming yet another bedroom community for the prosperous Boston doctors, lawyers, and executives who wanted their families to live in a historic, idyllic small town. Of course, as they descended on the town, buying up old houses, old farms, they drove up the prices and sent Main Street into a tailspin of yuppie transformation from which it has never recovered. The community-exploded confrontations about the dump, a proposed road through the cemetery, renovations for the library, development versus conservation, all good copy for newspapers. The Sussex Gazette subscription rate soared and has continued to grow steadily over the years.

  The newspaper was owned by Ann and Paul Richardson, a wealthy couple in their early seventies who lived in a townhouse on Beacon Hill and in Fairfields, a farm in Sussex where Ann kept her horses and rode, and where they held an annual Memorial Day barbecue and an elaborate Christmas party for the newspaper staff. Tall, white-haired Paul Richardson was debonair, charming, and mildly flirtatious in a way it seemed that only men of his generation knew how to be. Bony, angular Ann had a nervous, bossy, preemptory air about her. I admired the Richardsons and had no problem holding my own with them at the necessary social func
tions, but I knew they were not going to become close friends.

  Max wanted to make The Sussex Gazette not just good, but the best small-town weekly in New England. We both wanted to make a difference, however small, in the world. Perhaps we were idealistic to the point of comedy. Certainly we were young.

  The first day Max went off to work as editor in chief, he appeared before me for his morning coffee dressed in what must have been his fantasy of what a small-town newspaper editor should look like: button-down shirt, cord pants, L.L.Bean boots, bow tie, and … a sweater vest.

  “Are you going to start smoking a pipe?” I asked him. He had tried to subdue his wild dark curls with mousse, and he’d cut himself shaving, so that a little red spot of blood bloomed near his left ear. I adored him.

  “I want the community to have a reliable image of me,” my husband replied. “Do I look too much like a horse’s ass?”

  It was hard on us both, how much Max wanted to succeed, how close to the brim of his soul his aspirations surged. I loved him for his optimism and his openness, but by now I knew the other side of the coin, how, when he failed himself, he could plunge into a desperate depression.

  “You look handsome,” I assured him. “Handsome and intellectual …”

  “I don’t want to look like an intellectual! I’ll scare people off.”

  “I take it back. I don’t mean intellectual. I mean intelligent. You look handsome and intelligent and mature.”

  So he went out the door, and from that moment on his family and friends knew what to give him for Christmas. By now Max has a stunning collection of bow ties and sweater vests, probably enough to wear a different one every day of the year. It says something, I think, about his success as an editor and a leader that many of the young men who have interned under him have taken to wearing sweater vests themselves.

  The newspaper offices are in a split-level house at the edge of town, but when we first moved to Sussex, it was in our home where much of the real work got done. I wrote my column here on the kitchen table while Margaret gnawed and drooled on her playpen. I surveyed people by phone from here, and it was here where people gathered to discuss political issues, zoning issues, ideas for features … and all the gossip.