Ladies of the House

by Lauren Edmondson

  “I wouldn’t know how to change oil, either,” I said, unconvinced by her words. “And Grandduff owned car dealerships.”

  “Yes, and you helped me write the jingle! Remember? If you’re talkin’ about savin’, you’re talkin’ ’bout gettin’...” she prompted me.

  “Rich...” I sang, obliging but unenthused.

  She belted out the grand finale, still able to hit the high note after all these years: “...ardson’s!”

  I clapped limply and Cricket patted me on the back. “No oil,” she said, “but she can write a dynamite hook, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “I should put that on my résumé,” I said, resting my head on her shoulder. “Maybe it’s time I update it.”

  “Nonsense,” said Cricket. “Miles won’t even make it a week before he begs you to come back. Mark my words. In the meantime, enjoy your time off. You’ve barely had a break in months. Even when you took the time in January, you were still working to get us on our feet. Take it one day at a time. One thing at a time, even.”

  I breathed deeply. Two weeks. It was manageable. I could do this. “One thing at a time,” I said to Cricket, picking myself up from the couch, giving myself a mental brush off. “Starting with your broken mouse.”

  “And then a nap.”

  The mouse was not so much broken as unplugged from the monitor. Although it took me all of ten seconds of labor, Cricket was pleased.

  She had nothing else for me to do. No documents to review, calls to make, ice maker to fix, nothing. Believe me when I say I asked. I considered for a minute organizing Wallis’s jammed closet, but I decided against it. Knowing Wallis, within the mess there would be a system, and I would just disrupt it. I was on my way out the door when Cricket summoned me to her bedroom, where she still had a few unpacked boxes stacked in a corner.

  “The last of them,” she said, ripping off the packing tape. “Your and Wallis’s stuff from P, I think. Once you go through them, I’ll be able to move my computer desk to that corner. Maybe I’ll get one of those chairs that’s really an exercise ball. Work on my abs.”

  “I knew you were thinking about boys,” I said, smirking.

  “My new abs will not be for men,” she said before she slipped from the room with a wink, her laptop tucked under an arm. “They will be for me.”

  Cricket had been only marginally accurate. The boxes did contain some of my old history and poli-sci textbooks, but mostly they housed my father’s yellowed photographs from college and early adulthood, some Princeton yearbooks, and seemingly the entire cannon of Shakespeare’s tragedies, all in soft paperbacks printed before 1970. Gregory Richardson had written his name in pencil on the inside covers of many of them, as well as the address of his eating club, where he could be found if the book were lost. Underneath his name, he’d written, President, Undergrad Student Assoc.

  I wasn’t sure what to do with these relics, so I called Cricket back. She crouched next to me. “He took a class with a famous professor about Shakespeare,” she said. “It was the semester I met him.”

  “He never seemed like a Shakespeare fan,” I said.

  “I think he wanted to believe he’d be good at it.” Cricket put her wineglass down on the old parquet floor and leafed through a copy of Richard II. “No notes in the margins.” She smiled weakly. “Not surprising one bit. He wasn’t so interested in subjects that didn’t come easy for him. I wonder why he kept them. Maybe he had plans to read them, eventually. He had so many plans, I couldn’t keep track.”

  Before she went back to the living room and her laptop, I asked what I should do with the books. Over her shoulder, she said, “You might ask Wallis. She loves The Bard.”

  I turned back to the boxes, all the stuff from a part of my father’s life when he’d demonstrably done good. He whipped the votes to allow women as members of his eating club, mobilized antiwar protests, marched for civil rights. Over the decades, he’d worn these actions like a cape, and they’d made him appear noble to most of the public. To me. But the rot from the last years of Gregory’s life had spread, and I was finding it hard to keep the good he did from being spoiled.

  Perhaps Atlas’s article could help with the containment. But, even if I were interested in excavating the past, I’d just been placed on leave because of one photo. Miles’s strident reaction hadn’t come as a complete surprise. After all, he’d been generous to keep me on after my father’s scandal; less confident, less loyal politicians would have made a different call. But his political pragmatism also ran deep, and I could now predict with some certainty how he would react if I sat down with a journalist to discuss in-depth my father’s legitimate crimes. There would be no leave of absence next time, and my window to redeem myself in the wake of Gregory’s scandal would slam shut.

  Atlas’s article was scheduled to run in a couple weeks. I hadn’t seen him since the graveyard, and I knew he was still waiting for my answer. It was time to deliver it.

  It took only one ring for him to pick up. “One second,” he said quietly, and I heard the sound of a door shutting. “Sorry, just had to step out of a meeting.”

  “I interrupted you.” My voice was timid, already regretful of letting him down.

  “Blessedly.” He chuckled. “What’s up?”

  Though I knew what I needed to say, the words were all of a sudden gone. I shifted the phone from one ear to the other. “Well,” I began. Then I groaned. “This is hard.”

  “I think I know what you’re going to say,” he said, patient. “It’s about going on record, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t,” I said. Now that he’d given me the opening, I found it easier to explain. Briefly, I summarized. Miles, the picture, the fire and the fury. “You understand?” I asked when I was done.

  “God, Daisy. Miles is a fool for casting you out because of one fluke run-in with the enemy.”

  “He’s not.” Quickly, so as not to think too hard about what I was doing, I stuffed the majority of Gregory’s old things back into the smallest box. “If I were Miles, I would’ve done the same thing.”

  “Really?” Atlas wasn’t convinced.

  “Miles had to protect his office. I could distract the public, his Senate colleagues, from his goals, impede on his ability to get things done, hurt his credibility.” I held the phone between my shoulder and ear and took the box out of Cricket’s apartment and to the trash room on the other side of the hall. “Cricket just gave me a lovely little pep talk. Part of moving forward means finding a way to protect myself, too. The Melinda Darley thing made that more than clear.” Into the chute went the box, thudding on the way down—the sound, I imagined, of my father spinning in his grave. “So, first, I’m going to rest. Then, I’m going to try my hardest not to say the name Gregory for a few days, or maybe ever again. My family needs me employed. I need myself employed. Forgive me?”

  “Nothing to forgive,” he said. “You think this is the right thing, Daisy, and I believe you.”

  “Okay,” I said, not knowing what else there was to say.

  “Okay,” he said. And the silence between us, usually comfortable, grew awkward.

  Once I was back in the hall, I gave conversation another try, hoping our friendship could resume as normal without this decision hanging over our heads. “Well, I guess—”

  But just then he spoke, too. “I’ll let you—”

  We both said oops, and Atlas laughed, but it was tinny and weird, and once again things ground to a halt.

  “I was going to say, if you’d like, you can read the piece before it runs.”

  “Thank you. I’d like that,” I said, simultaneously appreciating the gesture and dreading it.

  He said something like, I’ll let you go. And I said okay for what felt like the hundredth time. Then we hung up.

  In the end, I saved a picture of Gregory in a suit—probably a class photo—and his yearboo
k from 1973. I also kept Richard II. I stored them in a plastic grocery bag in the back of my closet, imagining that one day, far in the future, I might draw Wallis’s children around and say:

  Here, you see? Witness the artifacts of a man who treated politics as an art until it became a business. Notice how it began. Remember how it ended.

  April

  Seventeen

  A gloomy Sunday afternoon; winter was back, annoyingly, and DC was complaining that we had already suffered enough. There was talk of frozen cherry trees and frost on the Mall.

  Thirteen days out of the office, and I was running out of things to keep me occupied. Out of habit, I still wrote tasks in my day planner. I didn’t like seeing it empty of meetings, panels, commitments.

  I’d made some decent progress on my to-be-read pile of books. I’d cleaned out my meager pantry, throwing away old pancake mix and bread crumbs. I’d organized my bag of bags, separating plastic and paper. I’d taken very old, empty shoeboxes from the back of my closet to the recycling room. I’d watched online videos and fixed my leaking bathroom pipe, and it took only three trips to the corner hardware store. When thoughts of Atlas’s face or Miles’s disappointment arose, I did not beat them back, but instead tried to look at them as objectively as possible, as though gazing at a passing cloud. My therapist was rah-rah about this way of framing problems, and I did have to concede that 50 percent of the time, it worked.

  The other 50 percent, though, my fingers reached for my briefing binder before I remembered it wasn’t in my bag. I scrolled compulsively, through my news feeds, through my work email, searching for tidbits I could use, new ideas, opportunities I might leverage with Miles. My two weeks were up tomorrow, and when he called I wanted to sound fresh, rested. I was decontaminated, ready to get back to making the world better. All this I’d have to prove over the phone; Miles was traveling for a summit. I knew it because I’d booked the trip. I was supposed to be going with him—to Paris, of all places. On the other hand, it might be to my benefit that he was overseas when Atlas’s story was published tomorrow. Just in case it brought renewed attention to our family.

  We hadn’t spoken much since our previous conversation, but Atlas had phoned earlier and asked if he could pop by that evening to discuss the story. I’d agreed, hoping there would be no surprises, no twists. A courtesy call. That’s what it had to be, what it needed to be. In the meantime, Cricket and I would be spending the afternoon at the National Gallery of Art. She’d proposed the outing in part, I think, because she was worried about me. The day before yesterday, she’d used my key to enter my apartment, and upon seeing me splayed out on the couch, unable to even pull my yoga pants up to cover my underwear completely, she’d tenderly suggested I get my hormones checked. She recommended yoga. I’d been half dressed for it already. She went out to the twenty-four-hour pharmacy to get me probiotics. Tired, I had said. That’s all. I hadn’t fooled her. So today I took care to put on real clothes with buttons and zippers, even put on a touch of makeup. I didn’t want her to think I’d gone off the rails completely.

  At the gallery, I was reminded that Cricket was my ideal museum buddy; my father never had any patience for them, and while Wallis was always appreciative, she zoomed through at her own pace, never bothering to read more than one or two descriptions. My mother and I, on the other hand, meandered the airy rooms, marveling at the bold hand of Calder, the deft, lacy brushstrokes of Monet’s cathedral, following the sun as it dappled the marble floors. We stood for a long time in front of Titian’s voluptuous Venus and Rembrandt’s unflinching self-portrait. Cricket and I both observed the same feature in the painting of Emperor Napoleon: his infuriating smirk. Afterward, we got large coffees and wandered through the sculpture garden beside the Mall, watching children in Velcro sneakers run circles around massive bronzes. We sat for a while on a stone bench under a budding elm tree, huddled in our jackets, and read news on our phones. Every so often Cricket would show me a headline, shake her head, and cluck her tongue.

  On our return to the apartment, I recognized Blake’s car parked in the space directly in front of our building. I pointed this out to Cricket, and when we made it inside the vestibule, we paused wondering if we should call Wallis before barging into the apartment. As we debated, Blake himself came hurrying down the stairs. It may have been his hastiness or something on his face, but I felt no small amount of wariness as he approached us.

  Cricket asked if he was all right.

  “I am,” Blake said, contorting his mouth into a smile that was supposed to fool us into believing what he said was true. “I mean... I am physically fine.” There were red splotches around his eyes, and his clothes, normally so neat, were hanging off his frame.

  “Come back upstairs,” Cricket said, concerned, motherly, patting his upper arm. “Something has clearly happened to have you so rattled.”

  “I wish I could.” He swallowed hard and continued, “But I am actually on my way back to the airport. I have to be back in Charleston tonight. My mother has recently lost her reelection campaign manager. She’s called for me to fill in while a replacement is found.”

  “But you just got here! Wallis said you only landed this morning.” Cricket turned to me, as though I could change his mind.

  “When will you be back?” I asked. Hurried footsteps on the stairs, and I thought it might be Wallis, coming after him. No, I soon saw—it was just the nice couple from 2B, who squeezed by us in the narrow hall with a friendly, Hi, guys.

  “Not for a while, I’m sorry to say,” Blake said after they’d gone out the front door. “I have to stay in Charleston through the summer at least.”

  “Through the summer!” Cricket exclaimed. “I don’t believe it. You absolutely can find excuses to come back up here, surely. We’d miss you entirely too much.”

  “My mother has been flexible with me up until now,” Blake replied, halting, awkward. It was strange behavior for a man usually so confident. “But she’s pulled rank, so to speak. I have to commit myself to the work in South Carolina.”

  “I suppose Wallis will join you down there soon enough,” said Cricket. “We can spare her some weekends, I suppose.”

  Blake’s eyes fixed over Cricket’s shoulder, at the neat rows of metal mailboxes on the wall. When he didn’t respond, Cricket looked at me with amazement.

  “The Charleston office must really need you,” I said softly, wondering at my desire to console him. “I know you wouldn’t be leaving so suddenly without good reason. We understand, right, Cricket? We—” I almost said We trust you, but I stopped myself when he shook his head.

  “I don’t really want to keep doing this,” he said, pained. “The conversation I had with Wallis was hard enough. I have to go. Can you let me through? Sorry, but I just have to go.”

  We could do nothing but move aside, and he brushed past us without a backward glance, pushing open the door with enough force that it crashed into the railing outside. Cricket and I, from the doorway, watched him fumble for his car keys at the curb. Within moments, with a squeal of tires one doesn’t often hear in the city, he was gone.

  “What in the world was that about?” Cricket asked, letting the door shut before moving swiftly toward the stairs.

  “They must’ve had a fight,” I said, close behind her. We had made it to the second-floor landing and were trucking it toward the third. A lovers’ spat was the sensible explanation, but my mind revolted. I couldn’t picture an argument between two people so determined to be in perfect love.

  Cricket and I entered their apartment, looking for signs of Wallis. She wasn’t in the main room, so Cricket knocked gently on her closed bedroom door. “Wallis?” Cricket’s palm rested on the door. “We just saw Blake downstairs. Are you all right?”

  “No,” Wallis cried.

  “Ask her what’s wrong,” I whispered to Cricket. “Ask her if we can come in.”

  “Stop mu
ttering about me,” Wallis ordered. “You’re making it worse.”

  “We just want to talk to you,” Cricket said.

  “Then just come in already.”

  Cricket charged in first; I followed. Wallis was curled on her side on the bed, and when she removed her hands from her face, I could tell she’d been crying. My throat tightened.

  “What’s going on?” asked Cricket, emphasis on the final word.

  “Blake told his mother how serious we are last week. It did not go well.” Wallis sniffed, wiped her nose with the sleeve of her sweater. “And, I don’t know if this is a coincidence or not, but his mother’s chief of staff in the Charleston office quit, and she wants Blake to fill in while a replacement is found. It’s going to be, like, weeks.” I noted here this word—weeks. Minutes ago, Blake had said it would be months.

  “Wallis, my love.” I moved past my mother, sat down next to Wallis on the bed, rubbed her arm. “I’m so sorry.”

  Wallis, embittered, laughed. Or maybe it was a groan. “I had convinced myself his mother’s approval wouldn’t matter to him.”

  “I would expect for this to be hard for him. I know his family is important to him, even if he doesn’t agree with them a lot of the time.”

  She looked at me with swollen eyes. “I don’t need an explanation, Dodo.”

  Cricket handed Wallis a tissue from the box on her side table. Wallis took it, blew, and commenced staring at her phone.

  “I’m sorry,” I offered. I turned on her floor lamp—it was the best I could do—and withdrew silently to the living room with Cricket.

  * * *

  Wallis usually cooked for us on Sunday evenings. She’d been into ancient grains recently, and fish prepared a dozen different ways, including shrimp and okra stew that had made Blake euphoric. I doubted Wallis would be in the mood tonight. I ordered pizza. When I’d hung up, Cricket busied herself getting comfortable next to me on the couch.