Belonging

by Nancy Thayer

  As she talked, Joanna felt the other woman’s keen interest like a scent in the air. She could see how still Madaket was keeping herself, as if trying not to disturb Joanna’s mood. Madaket was not resting back in the chair, arms crossed, or leaning on her elbows on the table in the posture of a listener relaxing into a long tale, but rather she was leaning forward from the waist, as if she expected something to come toward her at any moment, and she wanted to be prepared to hear it clearly.

  She has not had many of these nights, Joanna thought. She has not exchanged many secrets with women.

  Joanna relaxed in her chair. “When my mother took me with her to visit her friends, she always warned me not to fuss or call attention to myself. You remember that old ‘children should be seen but not heard’ adage? That was definitely my mother’s motto. She’d say to friends, ‘Oh, don’t worry about Joanna. She can sleep on the floor or curl up in a chair.’ And often I did.”

  “What happened when you stayed with your father?” Madaket asked.

  “I never stayed with just my father. I always stayed with him and one of his girlfriends, at the woman’s home. The women tried to be nice, and I think some actually liked me, even enjoyed me. But mostly I could tell that my suitcase full of all my stuff—you know, clothes and toothpaste and books and dirty laundry—always presented a problem to those women. It ruined the glamour of their apartments. Usually I had to sleep on the living room sofa. I spoiled their decor.” Joanna went quiet, leaning her chin on her hands, remembering, considering those difficult days and nights. “Some of the women had such cold eyes. Phony smiles. ‘Oh, what a little doll!’ they’d say, and all the time their eyes were like knives.”

  “That’s terrible.” Madaket looked genuinely shaken.

  Joanna roused herself. “Oh, it wasn’t all bad. I got to travel a lot. I’m sure I’ve seen every major city in this country.” Joanna poured herself another cup of decaf. “My parents have both … ‘gone aloft,’ as a friend says.”

  Madaket smiled at the euphemism. “Mine, too.”

  “Do you miss them?”

  Madaket looked down at her hands. “I miss my grandmother. I miss my parents—the way you miss a hurricane. They were exciting to be with, but they made people so mad. They made each other mad. They were always fighting. Sometimes hitting. Always leaving each other.” Madaket looked at Joanna, looked away. “Always leaving me.”

  “Did you, um, did they have a home? I mean a house or an apartment here on the island?”

  “Sometimes. One summer we all lived in the stable where my father worked. We slept in the hayloft and washed from a bucket.”

  “You’re kidding!” Joanna said.

  “No. And it was wonderful.” Madaket lifted her head, suddenly looked years younger. “I loved it. The barn cats and the farm dog, an old mutt named Penny, used to sleep with me. The hay smelled so sweet, and in the morning I could lie on my back and watch the dust motes float in the sunlight. I liked going to sleep with the sounds of all the animals around. I always thought it would be nice to be part of a family with brothers and sisters.”

  “I know what you mean. I liked visiting people who had children my age, especially girls. The boys seldom even talked to me, but sometimes the girls were nice. Some girls had twin beds in their rooms and I got to sleep in one of the beds. Then I’d pretend it was my room and the girl was my sister.”

  “The worst times were when we slept in the car,” Madaket admitted. “I’ve never told anyone that we did that, but you—you can probably understand. My father would come home drunk, or offend the landlord’s wife, or get in a fight with my mother and make a lot of noise, throwing things, and suddenly we’d be tossed out. We never had any money, and sometimes my grandmother told my parents she washed her hands of them, she wouldn’t help, and so they wouldn’t take me to her house, and I had to sleep in the backseat with my mother. Then sometimes the police found us, if Dad hadn’t parked the car far enough out of town, and that was always awful …” Madaket suddenly stopped talking and, pushing back her chair, began to remove the dessert plates.

  “Are you okay, Madaket?” Joanna asked gently.

  “Oh, sure,” Madaket replied with a little shrug. “I just realized it’s getting late.” She disappeared into the kitchen, bearing the dishes with her.

  Joanna waited in silence. The spell of intimacy was broken, and she didn’t want to force herself on Madaket. Clearly the young woman had memories that would make her own childhood seem idyllic, and just as clearly Madaket couldn’t handle remembering it all at once. Joanna shivered.

  When Madaket came back into the dining room, Joanna rose, saying, “I’ll help you with the dishes.”

  “No, please, Joanna. I’ll take care of all this. You need to rest.”

  Joanna was tired, and the thought of merely going up the stairs was daunting. She always slept well when it rained. She crossed the room and looked out the window. Rain was streaming, thundering down.

  “Look, Madaket, it’s foolish for you to even think of going home in this weather. Why not spend the night here?”

  Madaket, on her way to the kitchen, paused with dishes in her hands. “I have to go home. My animals have to be fed, and poor Wolf needs to be let out.”

  “Are you sure? Very well, then, but take the car. I won’t have you trying to ride your bike in this. You’d catch pneumonia. And you’d never get anywhere anyway, not in this rain. The Squam Road will be all mud.”

  “If I take the car, you’ll be all alone out here without transportation. And I’m used to riding my bike in bad weather.”

  Madaket’s reluctance both irritated and amused Joanna. They were two of a kind, she thought, although superficially they looked entirely different, Madaket dark and voluptuous and quick, Joanna so fair and big-boned and big-bellied. They’d turned self-sufficiency into a religion, a doctrine by which they ruled their lives.

  “Suit yourself,” Joanna decided, and walked down the long hallway and up the stairs to her bedroom.

  Looking out the window, she saw only darkness until, in the distance, lightning struck, forking across the blackness, illuminating the rain like a net of sequins glittering against the glass. Joanna grabbed up a sweater and pulled it around her shoulders. She went into the bathroom to prepare for bed, but suddenly, almost without thinking, she strode back out of her bedroom and down the back stairs to the kitchen.

  She threw open the door. Madaket was at the sink, carefully washing the china. She looked over her shoulder at Joanna, who stopped at the bottom step.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Madaket, if you must go out in this wretched weather, take the goddamned car! If you don’t I won’t be able to sleep. The keys are on the hook by the back door. All right?”

  Madaket smiled. “All right,” she said.

  Joanna turned and stomped back up the stairs to bed.

  Thirteen

  One rainy late June evening Joanna was stretched out on her living room sofa, wrapped up in an afghan, watching a video, when lights flashed over the front of her house and the crackle of driveway gravel announced a visitor. Going to a window, she peered out: it was Tory, in a strapless silk sarong. She looked as lithe as an adolescent as she ran through the downpour and through the door Joanna held open.

  Shaking droplets of water from her shaggy white-blond hair, Tory shivered. “I was just coming home from a party in town and thought I’d drop in. Am I interrupting anything?”

  “Not at all. I’m just watching a video. Here, put this sweatshirt on. You look frozen.”

  “Thanks. This weather! Have you ever seen temperature change as quickly as it does here? I was dying of the heat earlier today. Mmm, this feels good.” Her words were muffled as she pulled the navy-blue sweatshirt over her head. It fell almost to her knees. She curtsied, pulling out the hem of her sarong as if it were a gown. “What the best-dressed islander wears.” She kicked off her high-heeled sandals.

  “Where’s John?”

  “
In New York. Working. He’s taken on a tremendous workload this summer. I’m concerned. And a little pissed off, frankly. He knows how important it is for him to spend some time here with me and the kids.”

  “Want some tea?”

  “I’d love some.”

  They walked together back to the kitchen. Joanna put the kettle on and they sat at the long pine table.

  “Whose party?”

  “The Scofields up on the cliff. You don’t know them. They’re nice but boring, and their party was nice but really boring. But I just had a great idea.”

  “Have a date-nut bar.” Joanna unwrapped a plate. “Madaket made them.”

  “Yum,” Tory said. “My dinner was canapés at the party. This can be my dessert. Listen, do you know who George Mullen is?”

  “The zillionaire?”

  “Right. He’s got a yacht as big as this house, and he’s sailing up from Newport on the Fourth of July weekend, and he’s throwing an enormous party on the Fourth, and we’re invited. This is delicious.”

  “We?” Joanna poured the tea, placed a mug in front of Tory, and lazily set the milk carton on the table next to the sugar bowl.

  “John and I actually, but John’s not here, so you can be my date. Mullen won’t know. I’ve been to several of his parties and haven’t even met the man. His private secretary does all the official greeting. Please go with me. The food is out of this world, and every glamorous person you can think of will be there. It’ll be fun.”

  “I’ll have to wear my wig.”

  “Fine.”

  “And I won’t be able to stay as late as you’ll want to. I just get tired earlier than you do.”

  “We’ll leave after the fireworks, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Tory hugged Joanna. “I’m so glad you’re going to do something fun with me. I’ve missed larking around with you.”

  “Me, too,” Joanna answered, hugging her friend.

  At eight-thirty on the Fourth of July, Joanna reluctantly slipped her swollen feet into low-heeled evening sandals. Taking up her shawl and gold mesh bag, she made her way down the stairs just as Tory honked from the driveway.

  “You look amazing,” she exclaimed as she slid into Tory’s Range Rover. Tory was sheathed in what appeared to be a slip of cloth the color of aluminum foil and the thickness of a sheet of phyllo dough.

  “I feel great!” Tory said. “And you look pretty, too.”

  Joanna looked down at her turquoise-swathed girth. “Just as long as I don’t look like Joanna Jones, I’m happy.”

  “If I didn’t know who you were, I wouldn’t recognize you,” Tory assured her. “It’s not just the wig. It’s also your face—you’ve gotten sort of chubby-cheeked with your pregnancy.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  “This is going to be a great party. I feel it in my bones.”

  Joanna smiled at Tory’s excitement. It seemed such a youthful emotion: excitement over a party. As if she thought something marvelous could happen tonight.

  The enormous yacht rode the water all gleaming white, chrome, and silver, with flags flying and sonar cups angled to the sun. It looked like a city from the future that had just dropped into the harbor. Joanna and Tory walked down Old South Wharf, past the quaint, tiny fishermen’s shacks now doing service as boutiques and galleries, and along the weathered plank boardwalk to the slip at the end. Here crew in natty gold-braid-trimmed uniforms stood in attendance to help the two women across the ramp and onto the main deck. Laughter and conversation and whoops of gaiety enveloped them as they made their way through the teak-paneled stateroom to the stern deck of the boat. A bar was set up here, and a raw bar, and a linen-covered table of delicacies: a mountain of peeled shrimp on crushed ice in a crystal bowl, caviar surrounded by sliced lemon and toast, a plate of almonds coated with silver leaf.

  Joanna took a flute of sparkling water, Tory took one of champagne, and together they made their way through the crowd and up the stairs to the top deck. Tory spotted their host, so surrounded by guests that when she pointed him out to Joanna, all Joanna could see was an occasional glimpse of silver hair or navy blazer. Leaning on the railing, they looked out at the panorama of harbor and village and sky, then down to the deck below where clusters of people gathered and regrouped like multicolored chips in a turning kaleidoscope.

  “There’s Claude. Walking up the ramp,” Joanna said. “And the Latherns.”

  “Shall we go back down?”

  “No, they’ll come up. Let’s wait here.”

  “Want to sit for a while?”

  “Yes.” Joanna lowered herself onto a deck chair. “Go on, Tory, make the rounds. I’ll be perfectly happy right here looking at the view.”

  “All right. If I see Claude or the Latherns, I’ll send them your way. I’m going to try to say hello to Mullen.”

  Tory went off. Joanna planted her feet firmly on the floor and relaxed. She studied the other guests: there was a lot of expensive and awfully gaudy jewelry here; this group was a little more flashy than the usual Nantucket crowd. She heard the elaborate, multisyllabic music of Italian being spoken, and after a while a gaggle of gorgeous, emaciated revelers swanked by speaking French. No one stopped to speak to her. People looked at her, then looked away. She was only an anonymous pregnant woman.

  Joanna kept a half-smiling, bemused look on her face, insisting to her private self that she must take advantage of this unusual chance simply to sit and observe. Always before, at a party of this caliber, she would have been unable to detach from her professional self. She’d have cruised this crowd, searching out likely candidates, practically interviewing people about their homes, looking for something new and different for her show. She would have been very charming. And because Carter and his wife, Blair, were often at the same party, she would have also been flirtatious, enticing the best-looking eligible man in the room with every word and gesture, trying to drive Carter wild with jealousy.

  Now she could be serene. Instead, she felt insulted on behalf of both her private and her disguised selves. Was the woman people saw now as they leaned on the railings or strolled across the deck not worthy of someone’s interest? Did people think that because she was pregnant she was therefore boring?

  She couldn’t blame them if they did think that. Now she remembered vividly all the times she’d gone out of her way to avoid pregnant women, assuming that their bovine physicality indicated minds equally softened and dulled.

  But more than that, worse than that: was the Joanna Jones of Fabulous Homes really so easy to disguise, to overlook, to forget? She felt her cheeks flush with anger at the thought and her fingertips and lips went cold as she contemplated the extreme consequences of this possibility. Someone else could do her show. She could be replaced. Her heart knocked in her throat.

  She must stop this, this flooding panic. She forced herself to return to the moment, this Fourth of July.

  Beneath them the yacht shuddered deeply as its motors churned into life. They pulled away from the dock and headed out of the harbor and around the jetties, passing sailboats and smaller yachts waiting for the fireworks. Immediately it was cooler, as the sea breeze rushed against their skin. Scarves and skirts fluttered and the movement of the ship caused the sinking sun to flash sparks of light off the passengers’ jewelry in a Morse code of wealth. They anchored far out from Jetties Beach, where throngs of people were gathering on the sand and in the dunes.

  “Hello, Joanna. What a surprise.” Suddenly Jake stood next to her, casually garbed in deck shoes, blue jeans, white polo shirt, black linen jacket. He had recently acquired a tan which set off his dark eyes and hair and the flash of his white teeth as he laughed.

  Joanna gaped. “Jake! What are you doing here?”

  He bent to kiss her cheek and she inhaled the scent of gin and spice. “George invited me. I motored up here with him from Newport yesterday. What are you doing here? I didn’t know you knew George.”

  “I don’t. Tory knows him.
She brought me. How nice to see you! Please sit down.”

  Jake pulled a deck chair close to Joanna’s and sank into it. “How are you?” His dark eyes were warm.

  “I’m great. Enormous but great. How are you?”

  “To tell you the honest truth, Joanna, I think I’ve been working too hard.”

  She laughed at this, throwing her head back so hard in her delight that her wig almost flew off. “It’s about time you realized it! Have you taken a day off in the past two years?”

  “I don’t think I have. I’ve worked most nights, too, one way or another.” His face grew somber and Joanna knew he was thinking of his wife’s death.

  “It was what you needed to do at the time,” she reminded him.

  “I know. Now I’m trying to see if I’ve entirely lost the knack of having fun.”

  “And have you?”

  “It seems to be returning. If I can’t enjoy myself on this pleasure craft, I’m a doomed man. Want to see my cabin?”

  “I’d love to.”

  For the next hour Jake escorted her through the boat, showing her the various guest rooms with their private baths and walls of burnished rare woods. Opulent touches throughout proclaimed Mullen’s wealth. In the dining room hung a glittering crystal chandelier whose prisms must have tinkled crazily in a rolling sea. The main lounge sported a glowing masterpiece of Turkish carpet. Large, thick, sensual Steuben glass sculptures of seals and whales and naked women graced the curving bank of wood housing the entertainment center.

  “The message seems to be that he’s rich enough not to care if all these treasures are ruined by a storm at sea,” Joanna said.

  “Well, yes, George does have trouble spending his money,” Jake agreed. “But he’s a good sort at heart. Gives a whopping amount to charities.”

  When she’d seen it all, Joanna and Jake stood a moment in the narrow teak passageway, cozily buffered from the noise of the party on the deck above them.

  “Jake,” Joanna ventured casually, “how’s the network?”

  “From hell. A whirling vortex of confusion, frustration, and egotistical maniacs.”