by Louisa Hall
“Could you take these out?” she asked Adelia. She went back to the laundry room full of magnified sensation and called him again. Again, he didn’t pick up, so this time she said, “M, I will love you for the rest of my life because you are the father of our girls,” and when she hung up, she felt pleased. It was a beautiful thing to say. She was a woman who was full of noble ideas, and perhaps she had forgotten that sometimes, but she remembered it now. She remembered who she had always been, and when he saw that, he would leave the usurper again and invite Elizabeth back and they would be whole in a city that did not make her feel so horribly out of place.
When she went out to the patio, Isabelle was whispering with Arthur, and then Jack tapped on his glass with his dessert fork to get their attention, and when he had drawn them in, he said, “First of all, I want to thank you all for hosting such a wonderful party. And second, I just wanted to let you know, because I’m sure it’s in the back of your minds, that I haven’t forgotten about the carriage house. The neighborhood is dead set against it, and there are the rats to deal with, of course. But who knows, there may be things I can do. I’d like to be able to help, if I can.”
“If we could only have a few more days,” Diana said. This was a shock, since she’d been virtually mute throughout the course of the party.
“I don’t know what a few more days will do,” Daddy said. Elizabeth noticed that he hadn’t brushed his hair as he usually did. She wished she could fly to him and smooth his hair, of which he had always been so proud.
“Just to move it,” Di said. “A few more days to move it out of Mrs. Schmidt’s yard . . .”
“It will fall apart,” Daddy said.
“There’s extensive termite damage,” Jack agreed. “Di, I appreciate your determination, but I’m with your father here. I just don’t think it’ll hold.”
“I’m working on a plan,” she said, her voice as stiff as the collar of her dress.
“She says she’s working on a plan,” Daddy said to Adelia across the table. “How long do you think we’ll have to wait?” He smiled, as though expecting Adelia to laugh, but Adelia only looked down at her tart. Everyone at the table was quiet, and Elizabeth felt as if she could pierce her own heart with the tines of her dessert fork, and even Adelia could think of nothing to say, so that everything at the table but the flame of the candle was motionless, until Arthur spoke up.
“I’d like to see it, Diana,” he said. Diana nodded to herself, refusing to acknowledge him. He was watching the side of her face, his head tilted slightly, and Elizabeth wanted to force her sister to look up and show some gratitude for the interest he had taken. But Diana murmured something unintelligible, and William remained stubbornly silent, and Elizabeth wondered whether this depressing moment would last until everyone decided to leave. Then Arthur rekindled his conversation with Isabelle, and Adelia said something funny to Elaine, and there was life again on the patio. Isabelle went on pulsing with her prettiness, and upstairs Caroline was sleeping with that nearsighted furrow between her eyebrows, and Elizabeth revived enough to engage Jack Weld about his practice. Things were fine except for Diana sitting with that hand against her temple, looking exhausted. It might have gone on for hours, everyone was having so much fun, except that Arthur glanced at his watch and said he hadn’t realized how late it was. Then the Welds were gathering their things, and Daddy was sitting there looking off into the night, so Elizabeth rushed to see them all off. She was a good hostess. She packed them slices of tart to take home. She thanked them. Elaine Weld complimented the candles, and Elizabeth walked with them out to the front stoop, where Arthur kissed her lightly on the cheek and a wave of honeysuckle swept over her so that she felt lyrical and generous. When they had gone, she went back into the kitchen, past Adelia consulting with Isabelle at the kitchen table, and shut herself in the cool angles of the laundry room. She wanted to leave him one last message, to let him know how lovely the evening had been, but this time he picked up and said, “What, Elizabeth, what do you want?”
Even that didn’t bother her, because she had remembered herself. She had remembered the grace she had taken with her out to L.A.
“I’m just calling to tell you I’ve had a wonderful evening,” she said.
“I’m glad,” he said. Nothing more.
“Yes,” she said. “And I’m calling to say I remember how I used to be. It’s strange, I can remember it perfectly now. I just feel sorry that I forgot. But I remember now, perfectly.”
“Yes,” he said. “Okay.”
And then she heard someone in the background, and the possibility that the ex was there, in the house that used to be her house, occurred to Elizabeth, and the laundry room was drained of air. She reached for her glass of wine, felt the thin cylinder of its neck between her thumb and forefinger.
“I remember how we used to be,” she faltered.
“I have to go. I can’t have this conversation now.”
“You picked up,” she said.
“You called three times. I was worried about the girls.”
“They’re beautiful,” she said, summoning her dignity, lifting her face against defeat.
There was a silence on the other line. “I can’t talk to you right now,” he said, and there was the click, and then silence ringing, and she couldn’t feel any of her large sensations anymore. And this time when she walked back out to the patio, she saw William with his disheveled hair, and she saw that Diana had gone off somewhere, and Isabelle was walking over to Arthur’s house with a bottle of wine, and the candles had burned down to nothing so the gnomes stretched out their empty palms, and at the center of the table the peonies bent their heavy heads so low it seemed their bending necks would break.
Chapter 13
After the dinner party, as she climbed the stairs to her room, all she could hear was his voice. “I’d like to see it, Diana.” Her name in his voice. He said it just when the silence had gotten cruel, but he waited until that point. It was clear that he hadn’t forgiven her fully. When he was most vulnerable—abandoned by his mother, facing an uncertain future—she had let him go. Years later, why would he want to intervene on her behalf? He hadn’t looked at her all night. From the beginning of the party, he was occupied with Isabelle, laughing at her jokes, letting her whisper in his ear. Diana had a headache all night. She thought the party would go on forever, those candles burning down to the last drip, Isabelle flirting, Elizabeth demanding more than her fair share of attention, Jack Weld flashing his lupine smile. And Arthur, sitting so close, withholding himself. But then, for the second time, he intervened on her behalf. At the moment when she thought she couldn’t sit at that table any longer, he looked at his watch and ended the party. As if he knew. As if he’d noticed her headache, felt it, and refused to let the party go on.
Her notebook was resting on her desk. Its black cover was closed. Inside, the pages were empty. Over the past few days of promising to work on a plan, its pages had become more and more empty. The more time passed, the denser her notebook started to look, as though if she tried to lift it, it would be heavy with sketches of nothing. Tonight she picked it up and put it under her arm. When she went down to the kitchen, Isabelle and Adelia were talking at the table; they didn’t look up from their conversation to acknowledge her. Elizabeth was absent, and the door to the laundry room was shut. Diana went over to her mother’s old desk to pick up one of the pencils that jutted out of the flour jar; it smelled like fresh wood shavings, as though Margaux had just sharpened it in the crank sharpener that crouched like a metal frog on the corner of her desk. Margaux had always liked her pencils perfectly sharp. She used to draw maps of the garden, labeling each new shrub with its Latin name. As a little girl, Di liked to be close to her mother when she was engaged in projects like that one. Just to hang around her, allowing her elbow to brush almost imperceptibly against Margaux’s. Seeing how long she could keep it there before M
argaux moved her elbow away.
Since the diagnosis, Di had spent less time with her mother. Maybe she’d grown tired of the long silences; maybe she was afraid of the similarities she might notice. Now she lifted Margaux’s pencil up to her nose. It smelled like the inside of a new house. Holding it in her right fist, she walked through the garden to the carriage house and took a seat on the bottom step. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Without opening her notebook, she looked around. The ceiling was tall. Two stories and nothing but the narrow loft between the floor and the roof. It stretched up and up, arching over its termite-infested beams. She closed her eyes and felt what it meant to exist in a room of that shape. She felt the top of her head rising up toward the roof. She breathed, her rib cage a structure of arched wood beams, clasped around space that was empty except for herself. She opened her eyes again. Something was moving outside. From the frame of the door, Diana saw that Isabelle was striding across the lawn with a bottle of wine. She stopped at the Schmidts’ kitchen and knocked at the screen door. Arthur came out, and while they talked, he leaned against the frame of the door. Then they were moving toward her and the carriage house. Diana ducked back inside. She held her breath as the sound of their voices approached, then stopped in front of the door.
“Let’s stay out here,” Arthur said. Diana could hear them settling down on the grass in front of the door.
“Have some,” Isabelle said. The wash of a bottle passed through the night.
“Thanks. I’m glad you came over. I’ve been alone in that house every night since I came back.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Almost a month. I go up to New York sometimes, but mostly, I can work from the house.”
“How long are you planning to stay?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re loyal.”
“You would be, too.”
“I’m not sure,” Izzy said. “I was watching Dad at the table tonight, wondering how much would I do for him to help him now that he needs me. I’m really not sure.”
“If it came down to the wire, you’d be there for him.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I have that kind of loyalty. Di’s the only loyal one, and look what it’s done to her.”
Inside the carriage house, Diana winced. She tried to think of the ceiling’s loft to comfort herself. She tried to imagine flying up into its rafters.
“What has it done to her?”
“You saw her tonight.”
There was a long pause. Diana listened for what he would say next. “I guess there are kinds of loyalty that aren’t advisable,” he said.
“You can say that again,” Isabelle said, and then there was another silence. “Adelia wants me to talk to Jack Weld about the carriage house. She says he’s ‘fond’ of me. She thinks I could persuade him to block the demolition.”
There was a silence, but Diana could hear Isabelle getting angry. That Diana could hear the sound of Isabelle getting angry must have been a sign that there was sisterly closeness between them, despite the fact that there was so little understanding. Why did it make Isabelle so upset, the idea of talking to Jack Weld? Why did she flicker on and off so wildly? Diana could hear nothing but the sound of Isabelle pulling every inch of anger from the widest corners of the sky into her dense, unknowable center.
“Why does she think he’s so ‘fond’ of you?” Arthur asked.
“I don’t know,” Izzy said. Diana could hear wine sloshing forward as Izzy tilted the bottle to drink. “We used to play tennis together,” she said. “Jack and I. One day I came home and told Adelia I hated him. She said, ‘He’s fond of you,’ but there was this awful little smile on her face. She was proud of me for drawing him in. It made him seem foolish. That’s what that smile meant. When she scheduled another match for us at the club, I went, but this time I felt powerful. Like I was on a special-ops mission with a stolen identity. Like I could be any kind of person at the drop of a hat. Does that make sense? I thought I could be anyone.” Izzy broke off as if considering the veracity of her testimony so far. “It’s what good parents tell you, isn’t it?” she continued. “That you can be anyone you want to be? Or maybe that’s wrong. Anything you want to be, not anyone.” Izzy paused. When she started again her voice was more flat. The thoughtfulness had passed, replaced by something else. “Anyway, I believed it. Anyone I wanted to be. I was no one; I could be anyone. It was our shared conspiracy. Our little joke. The kind of joke that you know, even while you’re telling it, is actually sad. No one’s going to laugh, but you can’t go back. You’ve already gone too far. I felt it as it was happening. For a second I was powerful, but it slipped out of my hands. At some point, you can see it in everyone’s eyes when they look at you. They can tell you took it a little too far. They know you crossed over.” Isabelle paused to take another drink of wine. “Sometimes,” she continued, “if you try on a certain kind of person for size, you end up getting stuck inside her. For years I’ve been stuck, and all I want to do is get out of this neighborhood so maybe I can be myself someplace where no one knows me. Someplace where people don’t think their cul-de-sac is the world. With stakes that high, as though the neighborhood association is the UN, and war is imminent, and sacrifices are necessary. I just want to go someplace where I can look back at all this and laugh and know that none of it mattered. But now Adelia wants me to talk to Jack to plead for the life of my father, and to tell you the truth I’m half tempted to do it, even though the whole thing makes me sick.”
After a long time Arthur spoke. “I’m not sure . . .” he started, then stopped. “I’m sorry, Izzy.”
“Could you wait here?” Isabelle said. “While I go get another bottle from the basement?”
“Do you think you should? We’ve had a lot. And you’re not really supposed to be drinking, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
There was another silence so long and complete that Diana worried they would hear her breathing. Finally, Isabelle broke it.
“Can you smell the honeysuckle?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice soft and even in the night.
“Dad can’t smell it anymore.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I imagine him losing pieces of himself, one by one, until he’s completely gone. And then there will be nothing left. Only Mom, fading away, and Adelia. But he’s the only parent I’ve really had.”
“I know.”
“You’ve never even had a parent. You’re here for your grandmother, and I won’t lift a finger to help my own father.”
“I admire you, too. Your independence. You know what’s important to you. You’ll choose your loyalties.”
He was speaking directly to Diana. The rebuke was so pointed that Diana wondered if he knew she was there, if he was speaking those words to her so she’d know why he hadn’t forgiven the way she followed her family’s advice.
“What’s important to me,” Isabelle repeated. She laughed a jagged laugh. “Like not caring about this fucking carriage house. Like wishing it would burn to the ground and we could all find better things to worry about.”
Arthur was quiet.
“Will you stay out here with me for a while?” Izzy asked. “I’ll get another bottle of wine. I feel so strange.”
“Izzy, we should go back in,” he said. “Or I’ll stay out here, if you really want, but I don’t think you should get more wine.”
“What I’d like is to have another couple of drinks, then help my father get his historical carriage house, then leave this absurd little suburb forever. I’d like to drink another glass or ten of wine, then close my eyes and open them in a world where miraculously, the carriage house would fly to our backyard, where we’d all be ourselves again so that I could leave us behind.” She laughed harshly, and then there was a tense silence. Finally, the sound of Is
abelle standing. “I’m going home,” she said. “Thanks for talking.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to stay?” he asked. “I’m happy to. Were you finished with what you wanted to say?”
“Sure,” she said. “Sure, I’m all finished.” There was the sound of her movement through the grass, and the feeling of his presence, alone with her in the dark. Diana stayed quiet, holding her breath, until he, too, stood and walked away, and she was free to breathe. When she had exhaled fully, and her breath had settled into the beams, Diana opened her notebook and drew the shape of the roof. She drew its long straight spine, the wooden ribs that curved away from it, tapering into the walls. And when she had drawn that skeleton—capped by the iron weather vane that spun its ghoulish wings in the wind—she drew the outlines of walls, rimming negative space. To get the shape of the windows right, she ran her finger along their sills, leaving pale stripes in the dust. They were tall and narrow, strict in their corners, and she took comfort in running her finger along them until she felt the shape of a rectangle open in her chest, through which there was the possibility of escape. Then she rushed to her notebook to draw them: six windows, narrowly rectangular. Her hand pressed so firmly that a thin wake of lead dust trailed her pencil as it moved. This she picked up with the tip of her finger, ever so gently, to keep it from smudging. When the drawing was done, she held it before her and felt cleaner than she had in a very long time.
