Out of Time

by Deborah Truscott

“You have a heart attack.”

  “Oh!”

  “He was found that afternoon by his cleaning lady.” Henry peered at me. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Except…” I hesitated. “Except every one in that family seems to die in car wrecks,” I went on. “For years I believed that any car I rode in had the potential to become, I don’t know, my own personal Death Vehicle, I guess.”

  “Good God, Kathy Lee. That sounds like something out of Stephen King. Death Vehicle, now in paperback at Border’s Books.”

  “Seriously,” I said.

  “Well, you can rest easy. As far as I know, his car was in the garage and the keys were nowhere on him.”

  I started to giggle. Then suddenly, I began to weep. I ducked my head and lifted the napkin to my face.

  “When you’re done with that,” Henry said casually, “Perhaps we can talk about Cameron.”

  He might as well have tossed cold water in my face. “I’ve known you all your life,” Henry pressed kindly. “We can talk about anything.”

  “No we can’t,” I said quickly. I blotted my eyes, fumbled for the check, my credit card, my jacket. I paid the bill and quickly pressed a kiss to Henry’s cheek. “I’ll call you,” I said.

  “You do that.” Henry squeezed my hand, his eyes dancing mischievously in some sort of warm martini afterglow. “You know, I might be an old pest, Kathy Lee,” he drawled affectionately, “but I’m part of your past. And you know what they say.”

  I bit. “And what is that, Henry?”

  He smiled, not at me this time but at a spot just beyond my right shoulder. The bartender, I thought. And then he caught my eye.

  “The past is never dead for us,” he quoted, “but only sleeping.”

  Chapter 3

  “Sell the house,” Lila advised me in March. She was raking old, damp leaves from her garden at River House, a few miles up the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg, much as Uncle Bennett was doing the month before when his heart stopped beating, dropping him like a stone into a forgiving bed of phlox. “Tell Henry that’s what you want to do, and he’ll arrange it.”

  Lila delivered this last sentence to the rake itself, whose tines she was clearing of leaves and mulch. “You know, I really hate this. It’s one thing to sit on the terrace admiring snapdragons and larkspur, and another thing entirely to actually cultivate them.” She swung the rake over her shoulder, nearly hitting me in the process, and trudged back to the house. I followed.

  “I’m not sure what I want to do with the house, Mother,” I said instead. “Maybe I’ll decide to keep it.”

  Lila propped the rake against the first tree she came to and sighed audibly, clearly burdened by her foolish daughter. On the terrace she collapsed onto a chaise and threw her head back against the cool, stiff plastic of the cushions.

  “Not to live in,” I amended, sitting on a wrought iron chair. “Just to visit on weekends.”

  “Oh, Kathy Lee,” Lila moaned.

  I suppose I should mention that Kathy Lee is not my real name. Before I married Cameron I was Kathleen Langford Tipton, Langford being a reference to my grandmother, Mae-Mae, whose maiden name was Laurel Mae Langford. Somehow Kathleen mutated into Kathy Lee, which is what I’ve been called as long as I can remember. Lila might as well have put it on my birth certificate.

  “Henry said you could sell if you wanted to,” Lila went on. “He said there was no stipulation to the bequest. Henry and I feel—”

  “You and Henry!” I broke in. “I can’t believe he’d discuss my affairs with you—”

  “Of course he would! You’re my only child! Poor Charles was your father!”

  “Do you realize you’ve never been able to mention my father’s name without adjectives? Poor Charles. Unfortunate Charles.”

  “Well, he was unfortunate.” I knew Lila was trying not to smile. “Listen, Kathy Lee. I’m not trying to butt in—”

  “Yes you are—”

  “But I think you should consider something. If you sell the house, you could buy a place of your own. After all, if you’re not going to patch things up with Cameron, then you might as well do something besides live out of your car. Kathy Lee, are you listening to me?”

  Oh, I was listening to her, alright.

  “And if you had your own place, maybe Cameron would realize that it’s over.”

  Lila paused, waiting for me to argue with her. When I didn’t, she moved on to another topic. “You’re living like a gypsy, Kathy Lee. You spend three days with me and a couple with Cameron and the weekends on these road trips you devise, and what worries me, apart from having you on the road like that, is that the children think all this is just lovely, that it’s normal, but it isn’t, Kathy Lee, and you know it.”

  I closed my eyes. Lila writes romance novels so she can be forgiven for the histrionics, but she was annoyingly right about my marriage. My children are the best part of my life, the sanest, happiest part, and when I look at them they put Cameron in perspective. They are worth any price. But the fact was, Cameron and I weren’t going to patch things up. For months now I had been shuttling back and forth between our house and Lila’s, children in tow, trying to avoid their father. Sometimes (more and more frequently, actually) we spent long weekends in Avon, North Carolina, where Lila has her beach house and where I spent all my growing-up summers in carefree bliss. This worked only because the children were three and four and I had Cameron’s credit cards, but it couldn’t go on forever: in September, Sammy would start school.

  So that was the status quo. Cameron wouldn’t talk about divorce, but he didn’t mind my being gone and he never seemed to miss the children. As we careened around the countryside, he was undoubtedly sleeping with his latest conquest — an activity also known as “a late night at the hospital.” Meanwhile, my cat died and then Uncle Bennett passed away, severing my last link (apart from Lila herself) with my father. And in the middle of all this, Lila was busy telling me what was wrong with my life and how to fix it.

  Clearly, things were out of control.

  *****

  No past is dead for us, Henry had said weeks earlier. I looked it up. He was quoting Helen Jackson, a now-obscure American writer and admirer of Emily Dickinson who had, in fact, touched on the current theme of my life. I didn’t want to sell the Tipton house because it offered me a vague connection to my tweedy, distant father. It was the house where he was born, the house his brother spent a lifetime in, and it represented half of me. Over the years Cameron had done a great job on my ego, reducing me to bits and pieces, leaving me as fragile as a poorly mended tea cup. I suppose I felt I needed that house, filled as it was with ghostly Tiptons, as reinforcement. To somehow make me whole.

  The weekend after my conversation with Lila, the kids and I visited the Pennsylvania house. It was an adventure for the children, who had never been there before, but it was something more for me. I was looking for my missing pieces, as if they were scattered across the floor like marbles, but the search proved difficult. All through the spring we returned, weekend after weekend. There was something reassuring, maybe even cathartic in this process, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I watched Blythe and Sammy explore the hidden places of the house, listened to them laugh and quarrel, heard them chasing down the halls, clattering up and down the stairs. They did much the same at Lila’s River House, but here I could give them something I never had. I could give them the past that evaded me. I could give them the melancholy Charles and all the elusive Tiptons. Or so I hoped.

  “Did you live here, Mommy, when you were little?”

  I was sitting crosslegged on the smooth pine floor of the Tipton house one Saturday afternoon, sorting absently through an overloaded bookcase, when Sammy slipped up beside me and threaded his arms around my neck. A steady, solemn child with sly, gentle humor and a sweetness that almost breaks my heart, Sam is my child in looks if not in disposition. I reached my hand up and stroked his honey brown hair.

  “No, Sweetie,” I tol
d him. “I was half grown before I ever came here.”

  Half grown, that's what Uncle Bennett called it. “Why, look at you, Kathy Lee, you're already half grown,” he exclaimed when I first visited this house, a guest on my best behavior, conscious of my manners. But for Blythe and Sammy, there was no self-conscious plasma to stand between them and their grandfather’s house. Nothing to filter what the house would give them.

  And what would the house give me?

  I wondered about that often as I watched the children play within its walls. While I waited weekend after weekend for epiphany, I arranged for a service to clean between our visits, and for someone to tend the lawn. I explored drawers and closets, looked under beds, inspected bookcases and cabinets. I climbed the attic stairs, poked around the cellar, scavenged meals from the pantry. At night I slept in the bedroom which long ago had been my father’s, often with the children curled up beside me, like kittens. And I avoided real estate agents.

  Then one Friday afternoon in June I decided (for reasons I still don’t understand) to visit the house alone. I was tired, for one thing, worn out in part by Lila’s ceaseless arguments, and it seemed simpler, somehow, to make the drive by myself. Blythe greeted this change in plans with the same euphoric enthusiasm she bestowed on almost any activity, and Sammy, who is quieter and less easily excited, seemed equally pleased. Lila is always fun and even at their age the children could clearly see advantages to staying home. For one thing, they’d be spared a 4 hour drive in a small car where the only entertainment is to whine and kick each other.

  So I drove to River House to discharge Blythe and Sammy into Lila’s care. While the children scampered toward the kitchen (and cookies), Lila cornered me in the hall.

  “This has got to stop,” she said.

  “You’re right,” I nodded, deliberately misunderstanding her. “I shouldn’t impose on you like this. I’ll take the children with me.”

  “That’s not what I mean. The children are not the issue. You’re the issue.” Suddenly she laid her hand on my arm. “Sometimes you remind me of poor Charles—”

  I shook her hand away and headed out the front door. Lila came after me.

  “Listen to me, Kathy Lee. I’m worried about you. In all your life you’ve never given me a speck of trouble. I’ve never once had to speak to you, but now, Kathy Lee, now” — a weighty pause here — “I feel I must.”

  I reached the car and stopped. Lila was being very dramatic and annoying, but if I pretended to listen to her, maybe she’d stop bugging me. “What?” I asked ungraciously. “What’s so important that we have to stand out here talking while the kids are in the kitchen drinking Drano?”

  Lila came to the point with uncharacteristic speed. “This isn’t healthy, Kathy Lee, lurking around in that dark house.” Lila had never seen the house; it wasn’t dark, but I wasn’t going to argue the point. While we were busy discussing my life, the children were probably sprinkling Comet on their cookies. “You’ve got to figure out your options and begin making the best of them,” she went on. “Cameron may be difficult about the divorce, but he can’t stop you from living your own life in your own home, by which I do not mean the Tipton house in a state where you know absolutely no one. I mean a house here, near your family and friends—”

  “Mother—”

  “No. Kathy Lee, let me finish. I’m afraid of something. I’m afraid you’re becoming…” Lila waved her perfectly manicured hand, searching for the word. “Melancholy,” she said finally, the word drifting lazily between us. “You’re becoming perfectly melancholy, just like poor Charles.”

  That did it. I got in the car, slammed the door, and angrily rolled down the window. “Maybe I’m just having a spell,” I snapped, and drove like the proverbial bat for Pennsylvania.

  Chapter 4

  I drove on automatic pilot for the first two hours of the trip. When I hit the maze of signs and overpasses near the Fort McHenry Tunnel I surfaced with a jolt, aghast to realize I had no memory of the road from Fredericksburg to Baltimore. Suddenly I envisioned a smoking trail of crumpled cars and broken bodies stretching out for miles behind me. I checked my rearview mirror, reflexively, scanning for the pulsing flash of cruiser lights. Nothing. Of course there was nothing. Even Cameron said I could drive half blind and three-quarters dead, one of the few things about me he ever got right.

  Still, I felt uneasy. I can’t remember ever having blacked out a stretch of road like that. What on earth had I been thinking about for the last one hundred miles?

  And then it came to me: nothing. I had cocooned myself in a pleasant, mindless vacuum to avoid thinking about Lila, or, more accurately, to avoid being angry with her. Because, like it or not, when it came to the issue of selling the house, the woman had a point.

  I thought about that for the next several miles, and then I thought about Lila. Her standard book photo shows a three-quarter view of a tiny (size 4), blond confection of a woman in an ivory silk blouse sitting at a glass-fronted secretary, which happens to be a good piece of reproduction Chippendale. She is beautiful, with wide blue eyes and even, perfect features. She looks old enough for elegance, maybe forty-five, perhaps, with the sort of facial planes and angles you probably wouldn’t see on a younger woman. It is a lovely picture of a lovely woman, the kind of photograph you’d pause over. And it was taken four years ago, when Lila was fifty-three.

  One thing the photo does not show is the steel beneath the silk. Lila has been around the block. She has gone through several husbands. She has been both crazy and sane. She discovered how to write when she was tucked away at Havenhurst, where Mae-Mae sent her to get well, and she has made a good living as a romance novelist. She will tell you flatly that two things have saved her. The first is River House, the Mansfield family farm her father gave her for her (first) wedding present, and the second is her writing. It took her a while to get there, but Lila is strong and rooted in life. Having once been nuts, she hangs onto sanity with both hands, which is more than most of us can say.

  As I reflected on Lila’s two-fisted sanity, I realized that it wasn’t just my footloose life that worried her. Trucking Sammy and Blythe with around with me was bad enough but it didn’t concern her near as much as leaving them behind. Why had I done that? Where was I going, metaphysically speaking, that I couldn’t take the children with me? The fact was, Lila didn’t waste time worrying about mere eccentricities. In our family being eccentric was normal, so if Lila was worried then there really was something profoundly significant to worry about. And suddenly I knew what it was.

  I had come undone. I was unraveling and falling apart and Lila, who years ago had come undone herself, was quick to see the signs.

  Five miles past Wilmington, I began to weep. Eventually, I pulled over on the shoulder of 202, killed the engine and collapsed rather dramatically over on the passenger seat, only to stab myself in the side with the handbrake. I dragged myself partially upright, fumbled blindly in the glove box for tissues, and then buried my face in my arms against the steering wheel.

  Finally, I ran out of tears. I flung my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes, a dozen wet Kleenexes clenched in my fist. There was a whole lot more than a failing marriage that was wrong in my life, but I couldn’t begin to ferret out all the issues. Maybe with a shrink and 10 years I'd get it straight, but right now I needed to pull myself together. And I needed to do it quickly before some well-meaning cop pulled up behind me to see if I needed help.

  Which I did. But not the sort of help that he could give me.

  I blew my nose and turned the key in the ignition. For the rest of the trip I focused hard on concrete things. For starters, I would sell the house. I could do that. I should do that. At the very least, anyway, I would consider it very seriously.

  I thought about the kind of place the kids and I would have in Fredericksburg (assuming I sold the house).

  I thought about what things to take with me from Pennsylvania (assuming I sold the house).
>
  I thought about Sammy entering kindergarten in the autumn, and debated sending Blythe to nursery school. I pondered my very short list of job options, and realized I looked forward to going back to work. By the time I reached Centre Square and turned right onto Skippack Pike, I was in a slightly more constructive frame of mind. I would push Cameron for divorce, and if he was difficult about it, it really didn’t matter. I had my family. I had my friends. I could still manage (I assured myself) a productive and fulfilling life.

  And tomorrow, perhaps, I would start calling real estate agents. There was no reason on earth why I shouldn’t do that.

  *****

  When I called home that evening, Blythe answered the phone as if she had been poised beside it, her three-year old voice breathless in its hello.

  “Mommy!” she exclaimed sharply. “We went to a birthday party. It was for grownups, but Lalla took us anyway.”

  I could tell she was exceptionally pleased by this unexpected treat.

  “It was a friend of Lalla’s,” she went on, “who is old. But it was at a restaurant and we had teenies and cigarettes.” Blythe has a face of delicate sweetness framed by a tumble of blond curls, but for all of that she is scrappy, impatient, dramatic — and unnervingly precocious.

  My eyes narrowed. Teenies? As in martinis? I had visions of Lila and a dozen of her pals sipping vodka and vermouth under a pall of smoke and chatter in the back room of Symington’s. Lila no longer smoked but I could count half a dozen of her friends who did, and any one of them, Lila included, could run up a bar tab rivaling the Bahrainian GNP.

  Thinking this, I could almost see Blythe cruising Helen Keller-like around the table, unnoticed, unsupervised, sampling hors d’ouevres, nibbling crab on toast points, washing it all down with…

  “What were you really drinking?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Really teenies.”

  “Blythe, was it a Shirley Temple?”