by Mary Simses
“Well, that’s great,” Regan says. “I didn’t know you were a cyclist.”
I try to look surprised. “Me? Oh, sure. Huge cyclist. I ride in Manhattan all the time. I love dodging the buses and the cabs. It adds an element of danger you don’t get out here.”
Cluny pushes me toward the door. “Come on, I’ve got a proposal to work on. I need to get back.”
She’s about to turn the knob when Regan says, “Sooo, Mitchell, guess who came into my store the other day?” Without waiting for a reply, she adds, “Peter Brooks, the movie director.”
“Hold on,” I whisper to Cluny as we both turn around.
Mitch barely looks up. “The director who’s in town?”
“That’s the one,” Regan says as she leans over the counter, her chest grazing the edge. “I went to high school with him.” She winds a lock of hair around her finger.
“Really,” Mitch says, crumpling up a piece of paper.
“Sure thing.” Regan glances at her fingernails. “He walked into my store and remembered me right off the bat. Oh, he was always the biggest flirt. Had every girl thinking he was in love with her.”
“Seems as though everybody’s going crazy about that movie being filmed here,” Mitch says. “Personally, I don’t think it’s such a big deal.”
“Well, it sure is to me, because I know Peter. And he looks good, by the way. That man is hot.” She shakes her hand as if it’s on fire. “They’ve been filming over at Rance Marina. I went there yesterday and got to see some of the action.” She raises her chin just a little, as though her entire persona might be elevated by the gesture. “Peter said I should stop by again and watch another shoot.”
Mitch nods. “Well, I hope you have fun then.”
I stand there by the door, dumbstruck at how Regan still manages to get under my skin. So what if Peter told her to stop by his shoot? I’m sure he’d make the same offer to me if I saw him. He’s a friendly guy.
“Oh, I sure will have fun,” Regan says. She waves to Mitch. “Well, tootle-loo.” Then she saunters toward Cluny and me. “Are you girls going to watch the filming while the crew’s in town? I’m not sure Peter would remember you, Grace. But you might enjoy it anyway.”
Something twists inside me. “No, we’re not going,” I say. “We’re not interested in any of that.”
Regan leans in close. “Well, if you change your mind, I can probably find out where they’re going to be. Peter and I are like this.” She holds up two fingers, pressed together. “Oh, and you should come into the store sometime. Come look around. See what I’ve done with the place.” She flicks her hair a final time and walks out the door.
I heave a deep sigh. “She hasn’t changed much.”
“No, not too much,” Cluny says.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s go. I know you’ve got work to do, and I guess I have to face the rest of my mother’s to-do list. She’s going to run me ragged helping her get ready for the party.”
Mitch clears his throat. “Uh, about that party…” He flips through the rest of the mail. “I don’t see my invitation here, so don’t forget to send one.” He points to me. “After all, I am supposed to be your date.”
I laugh. “Right,” I say playfully. “I’ll put you on the list.”
Chapter 3
An adjective provides more information about a noun.
Engaging in conversation during a meal can prevent an awkward silence.
At dinner that night, Mom, Dad, and I sit at our usual places at the dining room table, just like we always did. Twilight is settling, the color is receding from the sky, and the evening air is cool. I stir my corn chowder and glance across the table at the empty seat.
I imagine Renny there, the way she looked when she was young, in one of her spaghetti-strap tops, her long hair tied back in a scrunchie. Mom tells her to take off her Walkman headphones while she’s at the table, and Renny obeys but she starts singing some New Kids on the Block song, just to drive Mom and Dad crazy, and then I join in, and we’re laughing, and then Mom and Dad are laughing, too. I want to remember those days, the days before anything bad happened.
“Sorry to hear about the problem with your apartment,” Dad says as he reaches for the salt. “And your job, of course.” He pauses and then adds, tentatively, “And Scott.” His silvery-white hair is combed carefully behind his ears, and his glasses, which look too big on his face, are out of style by at least a few years.
“Yeah, I guess I got the trifecta,” I tell him as the faint sound of a foghorn slips through the open windows. “Bad luck coming in threes.” I lift my spoon from the bowl and study the white kernels of corn, the little bits of bacon, the sprigs of thyme floating on the surface of the chowder.
“I guess you did, Gracie. But I’m glad we’re getting to spend a little time with you. We thought you’d only be here for the party.”
“That’s right,” Mom says. “We don’t get to see you enough.” Her lavender blouse is soft against her fair skin; her ash-gray hair caresses her cheeks. She’s still as trim and petite as ever, and I think about the times I’ve seen men, even a few younger ones, give her a second glance.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “You came into the city last month and we had dinner.”
“No, I mean we don’t get to see you here enough,” she says.
“But I was here…in the fall, wasn’t it? I remember the leaves turning.”
Dad dips his spoon into his chowder. “That was months ago.”
“And you were only here for the day,” Mom says. “You raced back to Manhattan, the way you always have.”
“I probably had a business trip coming up or something.”
Mom dabs the side of her mouth with her napkin and smiles. “Well, now you don’t.”
I want to say, You’re right. Now I’m really stuck here, but I don’t say anything.
Dad looks at me. “So, Grace, what are your plans while you’re here?”
“I don’t really have any plans,” I say. “See some friends. Maybe read a few books. Wait for my apartment to be fixed.”
“And how about your job?” he asks. “Are you going to work on that? Do a little research? You’ll have plenty of time.”
I drag the spoon through my soup. I wish he wouldn’t ask me about this. “I’m supposed to meet with someone from Owens and Fish when I get back to New York.”
“What kind of work would they have for you?” Mom asks, sipping her wine.
“Oh, it wouldn’t be to work there,” I say. “It’s an outplacement firm. You know, where they give you advice on writing your résumé and using your contacts, and you’re supposed to go in every day and sit in a little cubicle and make phone calls.”
“Sounds awful,” Dad says, removing his glasses and rubbing the red spot where they always pinch his nose.
“Doyle.” Mom gives him a stern look. “Don’t be negative. The idea is to stay motivated, keep working on finding the next job.”
He twirls his glasses between his fingers. “How much motivation can you find sitting in a cubicle?”
When I look at it that way, I have to wonder myself. Going in day after day, making cold calls to people, conjuring up everyone I’ve ever known who might know somebody who might know somebody who might be willing to talk to me. Still, I have to do it. How else am I going to find a job?
A bird lands on the windowsill outside, takes a couple of hops, and flutters off. “At least it’s a place to start,” I say, trying to convince myself.
“Well, what are you looking for?” Dad asks, and I know we’re off and running into the land of You Should Be Doing Something Better with Your Life.
I stare at the landscape painting above the fireplace mantel and wish I could walk into those yellow hills and cool myself in the green river rather than sit here and tread the same ground again. “I’m going to keep doing technical writing.”
“More vacuum cleaner manuals?”
“That’s not all I did,” I
remind him. “I was fixing computer translations, and I also wrote promotional material and product brochures. You know that. And, anyway, there’s nothing wrong with writing manuals.” I try another spoonful of the soup, but it’s starting to taste a little too spicy. “Don’t you think it’s important for people to know how things work? So they don’t make mistakes? Use something the wrong way? Maybe get hurt?”
“You hated working there,” Dad says.
“I liked it.”
He sits back in his chair and studies me, his eyes tired, the skin under his chin sagging. “You’ve got a gift, Grace. Those poems and stories you used to write in school, and that play you wrote in college. Not everyone can do that, you know.”
“It was a screenplay. And nobody is advertising for story writers and poets these days, as far as I can see. At least technical writing pays the bills. Well, it did.”
He puts his glasses back on. “I’ll bet there are lots of creative things you could do besides technical writing that would pay the bills. I’m not saying you have to be a poet.”
This is where I need to take a deep breath and count to ten. I need to remember he’s probably just doing what he thinks is best for me. But I don’t do either of those things. “Can we please not get into this again?” I ask. “I’m not Renny. I don’t want to be prodded and pushed.” My spoon clatters into the bowl, sending drops of chowder onto the plate and the table.
My mother rubs her forehead, suddenly looking older than her sixty-two years, and lets out an exasperated sigh. “Your father’s just trying to help.” She glances at Dad, some unspoken language flowing between them.
Maybe it’s always going to be this way. Maybe it will never change. Like that saying Nature abhors a vacuum. My parents want to fill the space that Renny used to take up, and who else is left to do the filling?
Mom stands and collects the soup bowls. I follow her into the kitchen and spoon the chicken curry and rice into serving bowls while she puts the green beans on a platter. The only sounds are the clink and clank of utensils against metal and porcelain.
We sit down at the table and pass around the food. “Your dad’s been busy this summer,” Mom says, and I’m relieved she’s changing the subject. “He’s been writing a lot.”
I think about the envelope I saw in the kitchen. Small, blue spiral-bound notebooks of plain, white paper are what my father usually writes in, but he’ll use whatever is handy in order not to lose his train of thought. The word lightbulb, scrawled on the back of an electrician’s business card, might not be a reminder to have the electrician do something with the lightbulbs in the house. It might be the genesis of a poem about a man who, in changing a lightbulb, begins to think about his father, who was struck by lightning. In fact, that actually happened, and the poem my father wrote was called “Standing on a Ladder in the Kitchen.”
“Is it going well?” I ask him. “The writing?” I think about the envelope. She leaves them in her wake. Was he writing about Renny?
He takes the rice from my mother. “Yes,” he says. “It seems to be going well.”
“Dad’s also teaching,” Mom says. “Modern poetry again. The master class.”
“I figured that,” I say. “I saw some of the books.”
My father takes the serving spoon and drops a large scoop of rice onto his plate. “I’ve been tinkering with the course. Switching out a few of the poets. Adding a little more Millay, some Elizabeth Bishop.”
I’ve always liked Elizabeth Bishop, but I don’t say anything. No sense encouraging him.
“I’m teaching the postmoderns in the fall,” he says, placing the bowl on the table. “Aren’t you a fan of Margaret Atwood? I thought I’d include her.” He keeps his gaze on me, his eyes encouraging me to respond.
“I like some of her poetry.”
“How about ‘The Moment’? Do you remember that one?”
I pretend to think for a second. “Not really.”
“That’s funny. I thought you once wrote a paper about it.”
Freshman English. Mrs. Townsend. “Maybe,” I say. “I don’t know.”
I take a few of the string beans from the platter and arrange them on my plate in neat lines. I can still feel his eyes on me.
“So many implications,” he says as he helps himself to the curry. “Of course, the environmentalists like to take it literally. But there’s so much more—the idea that meaning in life comes only from striving. That as long as you’re striving, you’re part of the world, but once you stop…well, that’s when everything crumbles, isn’t it?”
I wonder if he’s referring to me, specifically, and then he starts to recite the poem. His voice is slow and even, his poetry-reading voice, as he describes the narrator standing in the center of a room, which quickly becomes a house, then a half acre of land, a mile, and, finally, an entire country, all of which the narrator believes he can own, can lay claim to.
My father stops, one side of his mouth rising expectantly as he waits for me to pick up the next line, the way we did when Renny and I were young and he would fill our heads with Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, e. e. cummings. When we’d talk over dinner about imagery, metaphor, and rhyming schemes, discuss assonance and consonance, repetition and rhythm. We’d ponder Robert Frost’s “Birches,” and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse,” all in the course of one meal. But that was a long time ago, and I’m not looking to earn points from him anymore, to try to stake out my little corner of his universe. I’m sure he misses having Renny here to play this game with him. She was always more eager than I was, smarter than I was, and he was always happy to lavish her with attention.
“I don’t remember it,” I tell him, scooping the curry from the bowl.
“Oh, don’t push her, Doyle,” Mom says. “She’s tired.”
He repeats the lines and then, with a defeated look, gives up and turns back to his plate.
Mom starts talking about a meeting she went to this morning about a house she’s designing. “The property is complicated,” she says. “The permitting is killing us, especially the wetlands.”
Dad nods.
“And the owners keep changing their minds about what they want. They’re adding a lap pool, which is going to be an environmental nightmare.” She starts indicating the location of things on the dining room table. “The house is here, and the lap pool would have to be over there somewhere, but the estuary is there…” I’m lost in the invisible landmarks, seeing only the smooth grain of the cherrywood. Then she says, “And now they want a spiral staircase.” She pauses. “In a tower.”
There’s a minute change in her expression at the words in a tower, a little stiffness around the edges of her mouth, although no one but my father or I would notice—at least, not unless they knew the story. About a year after Renny’s accident, Mom began what Dad and I call her shrine period. She started adding extra features into some of the houses she designed, things that hadn’t been requested by her clients, things that reminded her of Renny and her love of books, nature, and sports—a cozy little reading area above an almost hidden back staircase, a grotto-like indoor pool, or a turret room on the top of a house where someone could sit and stare at the treetops. Mom became obsessed with getting these elements into the final plans and into the houses. Maybe she felt she had to do it in order to keep Renny’s memory alive. I don’t know. She stopped after a few years, but not before she almost lost her partnership with the firm because of it.
There were only a few complaints ever made about the shrines, but one of them bubbled up to the senior partner before any of Mom’s allies could run interference for her. The whole thing came to a head on the evening of the high school production of Hamlet, in which I played Ophelia. Mom never made it to the play because she was in the senior partner’s office, fighting to keep her partnership with the firm. In the end, she retained her position, but it was touch-and-go for a while, and she had to agree to go to counseling. The c
omplaint was about a tower with a spiral staircase leading up to it. The tower, with its small window at the top, was reminiscent of the one in the fairy tale “Rapunzel,” a favorite of Renny’s when she was little.
Now that I’m older, I can understand how hard it must have been for Mom back then. I’m sure I saw only a sliver of what she was going through, but I remember the dark circles under her eyes and the clothes she wore that hung on her like hand-me-downs from some absent, larger relative.
“So, how’s the party coming?” I ask, hoping to loosen the tightness around my mother’s jaw.
Dad shakes his head. “I told your mom to keep it simple, but you know how she is. She doesn’t know when to quit. Everything she does, it’s full steam ahead.”
He’s right about that. I glance around the room, admiring her touches—the area rug with its blue and white floral pattern, the powder-blue drapes, the gleaming white fireplace mantel, the painted mural of fields and trees above it, and the antique table where we’re seated.
“I guess you’ve seen her handiwork outside,” he says, winking at Mom. “She whipped those gardens into shape. I don’t think Martha Stewart could have done a better job.” He looks at my mother with pride. “She’s tamed those geraniums and trimmed the echinaceas, and I think the hydrangeas are bluer than your eyes, Gracie.”
He smiles at her, and my heart melts a little.
“The party is coming along fine,” Mom says. “We’re up to ninety-five people.” She reaches for the dish of chutney. “But I’m guessing we’ll end up with over a hundred.” Her face brightens. “Oh, and I heard from Roberta Carson today. They won’t be able to come, but she told me Julie’s getting married. Little Julie. Do you believe it?” She spoons more curry onto her plate.
Julie Carson, getting married? I used to babysit Julie, before the Carsons moved to Milwaukee or Minneapolis or some other place that starts with an M. “No, I don’t believe it. I remember her as a scruffy tomboy.”
