Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  Elizabeth sees the blue veins of the other woman’s ankles below the line of the robe.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Edie says. “I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “I had heartburn,” Elizabeth says. “That woke me.” She opens the cabinet over the refrigerator and brings out a bottle of Maalox.

  “I have it every night,” Edie says. “No matter what I eat.”

  Elizabeth offers her the bottle, and she takes it, pours a few tablets t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  out in her rough palm. Edie chews them like candy, and then sips her coffee.

  “Coffee’s not good for it,” Elizabeth says.

  “No, I know.”

  She doesn’t feel at all like company, any other someone to contend with or consider, especially not a stranger; she wants to sit alone and wait for the heartburn to go away. But the coffee smells good, and she’s come down here, and, since withdrawing would seem ungracious, she sits across from the other woman and takes three of the Maalox tablets herself. “I’m not much in the mood for feasting.”

  “Not with heartburn, no,” Edie says.

  “I don’t usually get it—I’ve got it tonight.”

  “Gail made extra coffee.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Bed.” Edie sips the coffee. She doesn’t look as strange out of her street clothes; there’s something almost schoolgirlish about her, sitting here in the white flannels with the little flower pattern in them, wearing her glasses.

  “I’m not up for this holiday,” Elizabeth hears herself say.

  “It’s been so long since I celebrated Thanksgiving with anyone,” says Edie.

  Elizabeth looks at her.

  “I don’t have any brothers or sisters. My mother and father live apart, and in California. I’m adopted, anyway. They’re—”

  Elizabeth interrupts. “Gail’s mother was, too.”

  “Yes, I knew that.”

  “Of course you did.”

  Edie smiles tolerantly, and then seems to catch herself. “You probably came down here to be alone.”

  “No,” says Elizabeth. “You were saying.”

  “I was? Oh—right, my parents. I was saying they’re good people but they didn’t like each other. That’s how I got into this work, you know, of helping people look for people. I spent several years looking for my own biological mother.”

  “Did you find her?”

  Edie nods, sipping the coffee. “A perfectly nice lady living with her 374

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  family in Provo, Utah, three girls, a husband who wouldn’t understand an illegitimate child from another life. I left her alone.”

  During this speech, it occurs to Elizabeth that she’s no longer so conscious of the other woman’s accent, or, anyhow, she’s not as predisposed to be annoyed by it. Indeed, looking into Edie’s moist eyes in their am-plified state, she experiences a sort of free-floating, detached affection for her, a little like that feeling she has had watching a celebrity on television, when an aspect of the real person showed through. There’s something charming about Edie’s accent now, something pleasing about the sounds resonating in her words.

  “I’m sorry,” Elizabeth says.

  “No big,” says Edie.

  They’re quiet for a space. And there’s a component of this particular silence that seems freighted with their whole lives. They breathe.

  They are in this proximity to each other, two strangers in the kitchen of a house snug against wintry weather. Elizabeth feels an abrupt desire to say something defining in the moment. But nothing comes. Every thought embarrasses her.

  Edie goes on: “I didn’t have the heart to make her pay more than she already had for her mistake. She had me, anyway, and I don’t suppose she had to, even then. I went my way, glad that I got to see her.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  Edie lifts her coffee cup and holds it with both hands, resting her elbows on the table. “We met for coffee at ten o’clock one morning. I got in touch discreetly, like they—like we tell people to. Better chance the person will agree to see you. And she did—she agreed. We met at a restaurant the next town over. Orem. Ever been there?”

  “Never been to Utah.”

  “Nice country,” Edie says. “Pretty country.”

  Elizabeth gets up and pours some coffee for herself, then she walks over and pours more in Edie’s cup. It occurs to her now that she does want company. The windows are so dark; the wind moans in the angles of roof and gutter, followed by a metallic rattle, some part of the drain spout having shaken loose. She sits across from this woman, her stepdaughter’s lover, such a strange thing to think of, under the circum-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  stances. It’s as if she has to remind herself that her marriage is over. “I think I’d like having a few Thanksgivings alone,” she says.

  “I probably should’ve stayed in Philadelphia,” says Edie.

  “No— I didn’t mean that.”

  “I know.”

  Elizabeth sits back and looks at the room, the doorway, half-expecting someone to walk through it.

  “But you don’t need extra stress.”

  “My mother-in-law and her crazy aunt are causing most of it. It’s all right.”

  “But there’s other stress, too, isn’t there.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth says, surprised at herself.

  The other woman puts her cup down and looks at her out of those imploring-seeming hazel eyes, in which, Elizabeth sees, there is a kindly—

  even nurturing—light. Something in them, something beyond the fact that they are magnified by the lenses of her glasses, invites confidence.

  “We’re breaking up,” Elizabeth hears herself say. “I’m leaving—or he’s leaving. We haven’t figured that part out yet.”

  The response comes quickly and without a trace of apparent doubt as to its appropriateness. “Why?”

  “He cheated on me and I just found out.”

  “Is it still going on? The cheating, I mean.”

  “No. She—the one—she had a breakdown. She was—she was having a breakdown and she went to him with it and he cheated on me with her. I can’t believe I’m telling you this. God. Mark and Gail don’t even know it yet.”

  Now the response issues forth more slowly: “Has anything like this ever happened before?”

  Elizabeth puts her face down in her hands and tries to fight back the tears that want to come. She has a tremendous urge to move across the table and be taken into the other woman’s arms and held and soothed. “I don’t know,” she manages. “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t mean to pry,” Edie says.

  And Elizabeth does begin to cry. “Not prying,” she gets out. “Forgive this. I can’t believe myself.” She moves to the sink and runs water, 376

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  dampens a paper towel and wipes her eyes and nose with it. “I’m sorry.”

  “He’s confessed to it?”

  She nods, crying. Angry at her own failure to keep it in. She returns to the breakfast nook and sits, holding another paper towel to her mouth. “He says she came at him, and he was weak. He says he doesn’t understand it either.”

  The other woman waits for her to go on.

  “I don’t want to talk about this. Don’t—I don’t know why I said anything. Please don’t tell Gail or Mark—”

  “Of course I won’t. But Gail thinks something’s wrong. She said as much to me tonight.”

  “I just want to get through this day, you know?”

  “You will. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.”

  Now, of course, it’s only polite-seeming talk, reassurance that comes automatically.

  But then Edie says, “Sometimes, you know—I’m—I’m just talking.

  But you already know this. Sorry. But a man is—a man can be susceptible to a thing, right? That kind of thing. Nobody talks about it because it so
unds like double-standard sort of stuff. But I believe a man can be—well, as much as raped.”

  Elizabeth blows her nose, looking down, and she feels the other woman’s gaze on her. “Everything’s broken,” she says. “It’s all in pieces.”

  “I know the feeling,” Edie tells her. “Believe me. My husband left me after twenty years.”

  Elizabeth stares, nearly dumbfounded.

  “Sometimes finding out our nature is a journey we don’t want to make.”

  There seems nothing whatever to say in response to this.

  “God, forgive me—such a bromide. I don’t talk like that, you’ll have to trust me. But it’s true that I got left after twenty years.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” says Elizabeth.

  “Don’t be. He was right to. You see, the truth is, I didn’t desire him, in the end. I never admitted that to myself while it was going on.”

  A moment passes, in which the only sound is Elizabeth’s sniffling.

  Finally, she says, “I can’t get past what he did. Can’t get it out of my mind. Can’t stop seeing it.”

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  “That’s the hard part of it,” Edie tells her. “I know.”

  Again, they’re quiet.

  “I really didn’t mean to pry.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Well. You welcomed me to the family.”

  Elizabeth nods.

  “Do you know how much that meant to me?”

  “You’re sweet. It was just a gesture.”

  The other woman stares down into her coffee, swirling it, as Eliza -

  beth always does when it has begun to cool. She recognizes the motion as something that belongs to her own habits and attempts to put into words the feeling that this engenders in her. No words will come.

  Evidently, the other is having the same trouble. The pause that ensues begins to feel awkward.

  Abruptly, Edie says, “I had no idea Gail and I would—that we’d be together. I wanted to help her.”

  “None of this that is going on here is about you,” Elizabeth says. “Or Gail and Mark.”

  “I know.”

  Presently, she changes direction: “Do you think you’ll be able to locate their mother?”

  The other ponders this for a moment. Finally, she shrugs and leans across the table. “It is true that someone who wants to disappear can do it and keep it that way. I’m afraid it’s a dry trail right now. And I can’t get Gail to admit it to herself.”

  “Gail gets things in her head.”

  “I do love that about her,” Edie says.

  “But there’s even a chance the woman’s dead, isn’t there. And you wouldn’t know it. Wouldn’t be able to find it out, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Edie says. “That’s unfortunately true.”

  Elizabeth moves to the sink again and pours out the dregs of her coffee. The other woman is up, too, now. “Thank you,” Elizabeth says to her.

  “Thank you.”

  They embrace. It is as if they are sisters and have just spent a quiet hour catching up. There’s a softness to Edie’s shoulders, and she smells 378

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  of lavender and vanilla and spices, fresh out of a bath before she came downstairs, hair washed and brushed. Elizabeth is aware that she herself must be wretchedly stale, still wearing the clothes of her long day and her troubled fall into heavy sleep and reflux, still carrying the dust of her movements, the traces of sweat and stress and the sour minutes and hours she spent clenched in the contemplation of her grief and anger.

  She steps back from the other woman and again begs forgiveness for involving her.

  “No,” Edie says. “Please. Please don’t say that again.”

  “Well, then I’m sorry for repeating it.”

  They go upstairs together and depart in the upstairs hall, this time with just a passing touch of the ends of the fingers. “Good night,” Elizabeth says, and watches the door close quietly on Gail’s room.

  Will is still slumped in the chair, still in that pose of desperate acceptance, fingers spread across his eyes.

  She gets out of her clothes and into the bed, and thinks of waking him. But she can’t. Not yet. The wound is still so fresh; it scrapes through her each time she thinks of it, and her mind won’t let it go, keeps presenting her with the fact, almost as if to taunt her with it.

  Once, long ago, she had read that a quality of obsession is that the person suffering from it often wills the fixed idea into being, almost as if to test the mind with it, to grade the effect on the emotions. She lies quite still, thinking about that for a time, and then thinks about taking more Maalox. The body has its own will, too. She hears his breathing on the other side of the room, hears him stir, whimper high in his throat, and grow quiet again. It comes to her that in this present state of anguish, she can’t believe in the passage of time; it’s an intellectual construct, something she can hold in her mind, but viscerally it is as fabulous as the always-chilly weather on the surface of the moon.

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  7.

  Alison wakes to her father playing his guitar. The chords are not quite sounding fully; there’s something faintly tentative and halting about it, and she remembers with a jolt that he has come home from weeks of recuperation. It’s as if she had forgotten this altogether in the good feeling of having him here. He pauses and then starts again. She’s curled on her side, and behind her is Kalie, making a small, snoring sound.

  Alison carefully turns and cradles the little girl, until she grows sleepily irritable and moves away. Alison lies on her back with her hands behind her head and listens to the morning and is happy.

  Oliver’s playing “Blue Bayou.” Such a simple, pretty song. She rises finally, puts her robe on, and looks out the window. A gray, late-November day; the sky is a pale screen, without a wrinkle in it. There’s still snow on the grass and piled along the curb, but it’s melting rapidly now. She walks to the entrance of the living room. Here’s her father, sitting in his chair, fumblingly working the song, concentrating.

  When he sees her, he says, “Oh, good morning,” and puts the guitar down.

  “Keep playing,” Alison says. “Please?”

  He picks it up and starts the song over. She leans on the frame of the door, arms folded, watching him. At one point, singing the chorus, he loses his voice. Then he laughs and finishes and puts the guitar down.

  “That song always chokes me up. That stuff about going back someday, you know, the yearning in it.”

  She walks over, leans down, and kisses him on the cheek. “You’re back.”

  “Yes.” His eyes well up. She hugs him. “Home,” he gets out.

  “I’m so happy,” she says.

  “Are you ready—for this—dinner?”

  “Stanley wants to make something here, to take over there. Something his mother taught him to make with blue cheese and flour. Blue cheese chips, they’re called.”

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  “What’re you making?”

  “A couple of pumpkin pies.” She can see that he’s waiting for her to say more about Stanley. But she can’t bring herself to begin.

  “I didn’t think I’d—ever play the guitar again,” he says. And there’s recognition between them, without words, of how well he’s doing with his speech. “But it’s—okay. I’ve got to learn some moves over again. But it’s going to be—okay.”

  “It sounded wonderful, just now.”

  “Well, I’ll have to keep it—simple, for a while. You know.”

  “How do you feel about Stanley?” she asks him. She’s surprised at her own abruptness.

  He doesn’t hesitate. “Well—honey, the question is—how do you—

  feel about him.”

  “I love him.”

  “Well, then— I love him.”

  After a time, he says, “Are you in lov
e with him.”

  She nods, though she isn’t as sure as she supposes she ought to be.

  It raked through her to learn that Teddy is getting remarried, and that confused her. Still does. She sits on the arm of her father’s chair and rests her hand on his shoulder. The sinews and bone there are surprisingly slack, and it makes her pause for a second.

  “What,” he says.

  “Well, would it be—is it all right if Stanley moves in with us?”

  “Hey, I liked—Stanley before you ever—knew him, sweetie. And this is your house.”

  “You live here, too.”

  “It’s all right if Stanley moves in here. Really.”

  “Somebody you work with, though?”

  “Stop—worrying,” Oliver says. “Don’t imagine more trouble than there is.”

  “But what trouble?”

  “See?”

  “Dad, you said ‘trouble.’”

  “Well, we’ve got this big Thanksgiving—dinner to go to, that we really would rather not go to. Our two zany—ladies. My trouble—all that.”

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  “Think there’ll be any roof-sitting?” she asks.

  They hear Kalie in the other room, waking up. Jonathan, too, is stirring. “Go play with my—grandchildren,” Oliver tells her. “And let me do all the worrying for a while.”

  “We won’t do it if you think it’ll cause trouble.”

  “Well, if it comes to—trouble, we could always—partition the house.” He smiles. But then a shadow crosses his face. “Alison,” he says.

  “I hope you’ll ask—Stanley to come live with us.”

  “You mean that. Because Stanley won’t do it if there’s the slightest problem.”

  “What did I just—say?”

  She hugs him again, feels again how much weight he has lost. “I love you,” she says. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

  8.

  Late Thanksgiving morning, a mist forms, as if the sea itself, a hundred fifty miles away, had lifted and trailed in the currents of winter air over the gray mountains, to the shuddering trees lining the streets of Point Royal. The last snow-laden leaves drop heavily, so wet, straight to the sodden, melting ground, and the mist covers the surrounding hills, making the whole town look truncated, buildings seeming to disappear into the murk. Will Butterfield, having slept in a chair across from his wife in their bedroom, rises stiffly, with a catch in his neck and a bad tingle in his hands. He dresses stealthily, worried about the sleeping shape of his wife in the bed, and pads down the stairs, where he finds his daughter sipping a cup of coffee, watching television. VH1. A series of brooding images of a dark, willowy, frowning woman moving in wind and sun, while a song plays, female voices, and then one voice.