“We should have stayed home,” Haley said. They’d driven in from Colorado. “It’s too much hassle. But Mom and Dad insisted.”
“Well, you know, first Christmas, first grandkids.” Bonnie had to raise her voice to be heard above a particularly penetrating bout of screaming. Although this was only a first for Claudia. There were already some StanGrands. “When did you get here?”
“Lunchtime. It was Mom’s chili. So we didn’t exactly get off to a good start.”
“Your dad kept calling Leah ‘Layla,’” Scott put in. “And Benjamin, he was ‘Boris.’”
“Get used to that,” Bonnie told him. “He means it affectionately.” Mostly.
“Mom never nursed any of her kids, did you know that? So of course she wasn’t thinking. Scott had to go out and find formula. Plus I’m leaking all over.”
“That’s . . .” Bonnie was at a loss. Too much information, but she couldn’t say that.
Haley didn’t notice; she was still recounting grievances. “Not to mention they make a total mockery of anything religious.” Six years younger than Bonnie, Haley had dropped out of college to live in a Christian commune. “Hippies at prayer,” Stan called them. Scott worked as a carpenter. Most of the commune’s men seemed to be carpenters.
“I wouldn’t say mockery. More like, disregard,” Bonnie said, trying to put the best face on it. None of them had been raised with any sort of religion, unless you counted Stan as the high priest of Art.
“You think? Remember the party where they had the chorus line of nuns?”
“They weren’t real nuns,” Bonnie said. Going all Christian was probably an irresistible way for the child of a rebel to rebel, though Bonnie congratulated herself on finding more interesting paths. At least her sister’s commune wasn’t the kind where the women had to deck themselves out in ruffled prairie dresses. Both Scott and Haley wore a lot of flannel shirts. It was hard to see anything overtly pious about either of them, only a certain morose seriousness.
“Whatever. Our kids are going to be raised differently.” Bonnie was sure of that. She envisioned the home-school lessons, the joyless indoctrinations. “Scott,” Haley complained, “all you’re doing is making a lot of smoke.”
The babies were still going off like alarms. Smoke alarms? “Can I do anything?” Bonnie asked. “Tell them bedtime stories?”
“Here, walk Benjamin. Sometimes that calms him down.”
Haley handed over one of the squalling bundles and Bonnie draped it over her shoulder.
“Wait a minute,” Haley said. “Burp cloth.”
Bonnie jiggled and patted at the baby. “Hey little man.” He was having none of it. His sister’s wails were diminishing, but he was one of those kids who was going to cry himself into complete exhaustion. “Go for it,” Bonnie murmured. What were you supposed to do if they screamed themselves insensible and stopped breathing? She paced up and down in front of the full length glass windows. It was a walk-out basement and there was a steep, snow-covered slope just beyond the glass, leading down to the woods. It looked delicious out there, dark and crisp and blue-cold. She put her forehead to the sliding glass door, just to feel the coolness.
“I give up,” Scott said, turning his back on the fireplace. “The wood’s wet or something. I wouldn’t bother except it’s too cold down here for the babies. They could get pneumonia.”
“Not to mention we have to sleep on this sucky fold-out couch,” Haley added. “Mom and Dad seem to think we live in a barn, well, we don’t. We have our own cabin with kerosene heat and a composting toilet.”
“Trade,” Bonnie said, shifting the baby to her other shoulder. “Take your old room back, I’ll stay in the basement.”
“They won’t like it,” Haley said. “We’re down here so nobody has to listen to us.”
“They don’t have to like it. It’s a health and well-being issue. Child welfare.” She was taken with the idea of having the basement all to herself. She’d get the fire to burn, sneak up to the kitchen and raid the refrigerator. Not to mention she’d have her own bathroom. “Is there a crib? Can I help you move stuff?”
“We didn’t set up the crib yet,” Scott said, looking hopeful at the notion of sleeping elsewhere. “I guess it’s still in the garage.”
“You don’t mind the fold-out?”
“Think of it as my Christmas present.”
“Well . . .”
“Why don’t you guys take the babies,” Bonnie said. “I’ll get your suitcases together. Don’t worry, you’ve got them outnumbered, four to two.”
She stayed downstairs and gathered up infant paraphernalia, keeping an ear out for sounds of negotiations and protest overhead. The babies’ noise masked most of it. The crying had a heartbroken quality now, as if they had realized there was no easy way out of their small, hurting bodies.
After a while, hearing nothing, she grabbed a quilted bag with BABY spelled out in patchwork letters on the side, full of diapers and tiny garments, and ventured upstairs. The kitchen was empty. The broth for Claudia’s fish stew simmered, and the counter held small saucers of chopped mushrooms, parsley, strips of red and green pepper. It looked like one of Grandma Somebody’s recipes. (There was also a Grandma Somebody Else, but she did not cook.) Some new commotion was going on in the main room. There was a back passage and a half flight of stairs you could take to the bedrooms, and she chose this route, wanting to lay low for a time. She guessed she felt a little guilty for disrupting Claudia’s arrangements. At least the babies had stopped crying. Maybe they really did want to be upstairs.
Ahead of her in the hallway, someone was running water behind a bathroom door. Bonnie hurried to get past it, but the door opened and she nearly collided with a man coming out.
“Jesus!”
“Bonnie?”
She staggered back against the wall. “What are you doing here?” She was afraid she might faint, actually up and faint.
“I came with Charlie,” the man said. “And Diane,” he added, after a moment.
“Sure.” Bonnie nodded. Nodding made her head feel tilted. Waves of vicious heat dizzied her. “Jesus, Will,” she said again, attempting to sound lighthearted, humorous.
“Charlie didn’t think you were coming.”
“Got that wrong.”
“We’re only staying the one night.” He had backed himself into the bathroom in an attempt not to crowd her. “So, wow, did you . . .” He pointed at the BABY bag.
“Yeah, don’t worry, it’s not yours.” He looked stricken. “God no, that’s a joke. It’s my sister’s. She has twins.”
“Twins. Amazing.”
“I guess Charlie didn’t mention it. “
“I guess not.”
“He isn’t, you know, a reliable source of information.”
“Yeah.” It was as if they were locked into a death spiral of stupid conversation. “Look, I gotta . . .”
“Yeah, see you later, I guess.”
They nodded, grimaced, and hurried off in opposite directions.
Oh Jesus Jesus Jesus oh shit.
Bonnie got herself down the hallway to Haley’s room, mercifully empty. She dumped the BABY bag, closed the door, and stood on the other side of it, waiting to see what she would do next. Because you had to do something. You couldn’t just stop, freeze frame, end of story. Or you could, but only if you managed to fall down dead on the spot.
At one time she had thought he was the goddamned love of her goddamned stupid fucked-up life.
Had he been? Was he still? Did that ever change? Should you want it to, since no further good was ever going to come of it? You ought to be able to put things behind you and move on, sadder but wiser, etc. Especially since the alternative was all this pointless mooning around and self-dramatizing and tearing of hair and rending of garments and being entirely shallow and witless and worthless.
Her stomach heaved. She grabbed one of the diapers from the bag and threw up into it.
Once she was finished, she listened again at the door and, hearing nothing, made her way back to the bathroom. She rinsed the diaper in the toilet, threw up a little more from the sick-making smell of it, and hid the mess away in the bottom of the wastebasket. She ran cold water in the sink, cleared her mouth, and wrung out a washcloth to blot her face. At least she looked the part of the haggard, cast-off lover. All she needed was a ragged shawl.
But nobody else knew that was what she was. Or what he was to her. They’d kept it a secret from everyone, especially the pretty, pretty girl he wound up engaged to this summer. Was no doubt still engaged to. Unless they’d gone ahead and gotten married. She thought she would have heard, but maybe not.
Because he might have been the love of her life, but she was obviously not the love of his.
She heard laughter, a great rolling wave of it, from the main room. She smoothed her hair, used the mouthwash she found in the medicine cabinet, and willed her face in the mirror into its usual wry, skeptical expression. In the kitchen she poured white wine into a water glass, enough to keep her going a long time. Then she walked out to join the party.
Two years ago. More than two, August. Every morning the city woke up to heat haze and the same forecast, two, six, ten days in a row, hot and hotter. Bonnie’s air conditioner couldn’t keep up. Bonnie and Will drank cold beer and ate popsicles and took showers with towels that never quite dried. In bed they lay in the grand ruin of the sheets. A rotating fan sent a current of silky air across them. Outside, buses coughed exhaust. Somebody’s radio played at headache volume, tamped down by glass and the window air conditioner.
Oh holy God, the way they’d had each other. It was not quite a memory. It was still in her skin. She stayed as still as she could to keep what they’d done from receding, minute by minute by minute, into the past. A losing fight against time and an already-forming sense of loss. The fan revolved once more. The small wind passed over their salt skins. He put his mouth to her ear. “I have to go . . .”
If only you could stay in bed forever! But sex was the opposite of forever. So insubstantial, and yet it was the root and branch of everything, seed, flower, tree. It was ravishment and chiming skin. She was always getting it mixed up with love, or maybe you were supposed to. And what happened when the sex got tired or went stale, because of course that happened, in spite of everyone’s best efforts. She didn’t know. She hadn’t stayed around for that part often enough to know.
Will had not stayed around. He was moving to Phoenix to work for Honeywell. An engineer, he would work in aerospace technology. It was all set up before they met. Phoenix, another hot place. “I’ll find an apartment with a pool. And a swamp cooler. You can get used to weather.” What was the name for that hollowed out space beneath the collarbone? It should have a name. She wanted to open his shirt and rest her two hands there. Confound everybody in the nice restaurant where he’d taken her to say good-bye. He was leaving in two days.
Bonnie wasn’t going with him. His plans were complete. They did not include her. He was excited about his brand new life, all the splendid possibilities. Bonnie was something that had already happened. Why secret? Why not tell people? Well, he was her brother’s friend, it was a little embarrassing. Good Time Charlie. She didn’t want Charlie knowing her business. He talked about all the wrong things to all the wrong people. So they kept it on the down low. Who would they tell, anyway? Then, as time went on, they liked having a secret, an intrigue, like something out of an old French scandal, everybody dressed up in wigs and satin. Not that there was, technically, anything scandalous. They were both healthy, unattached, of age. But what they did with and to each other was meant to be secret.
“I’ve never been to Phoenix,” Bonnie said. She’d ordered a salad that was composed of a great many confusing things: slices of egg, beets, olives, knobs of cauliflower. Every so often she raked through it with her fork, but that only brought up more alarming ingredients. Was that bacon? No, an anchovy. She hadn’t been paying attention when she’d ordered. She was waiting for him to say she could at least come visit him and he wasn’t saying it.
“It has a lot going for it. Did you know that it’s the sixth largest U.S. city?”
“I did not know that.”
“Golf is huge there. You can play all year round.”
“I bet.”
“Don’t hate me,” he said, switching tones. “Would you rather it had never happened? I don’t.”
“Yeah, great memories. I can never have too many of those.”
“You’re angry, you’re hurt. I wish you weren’t but you are. I’m sorry if you thought it was going to end some other way.”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking about the ending.” Bonnie gave up on the salad. She could say she was going to the ladies’ room and just leave, spare herself this part. But she wouldn’t. Soon enough she wouldn’t be able see or hear him at all.
He reached across the table and took one of her hands in both of his. “You are the most amazing, lovely person.”
Bonnie snatched her hand away. “Don’t make me hate you.”
A heaviness came over his face. “You aren’t being fair. Come on, we never had enough time. It’s not like we even know each other all that well.”
“So when you tell me I’m ‘amazing’ and ‘lovely,’ that’s just something you pulled out of your ass?”
“You know I mean it,” he said, and then they were both quiet for a while.
Bonnie looked down at her salad. It looked back. She said, “How long is enough? Is there some established minimum? OK. We could make more time. But you won’t. You could but you won’t. It’s only Phoenix, it’s not like you’re going off to war.”
“I can’t ask you to leave everything and move out there. It’s not fair, I’d feel responsible for you.”
“You could stay here,” Bonnie said, in a smaller voice, and she watched him go miles and miles away without ever leaving his chair.
Some of the things she knew about him: Where he grew up (Pennsylvania), his parents’ names (Wade and Virginia), siblings (two sisters), the dog, a terrier, who slept on his bed when he was a kid, the shin splints he got running cross-country, his sensitivity to insect bites, fondness for terrible crappy science fiction, his beautiful squared-off handwriting, how particular he was about his car and how you were not allowed to tease him about it, his sense of fair play when it came to competitions of all sorts, his devotion to those incomprehensible, to her at least, calculations and computer models and metrics which made up his profession. His mouth, his hands, his voice. How he whispered, “Wait, wait,” while he teased and stroked his way into her. How, when leaving, he always looked up at her window so they could wave good-bye.
Charlie said: “You remember Diane, right? Well, they broke up for a while, then when he got out to Arizona they started up again, long distance at first, your basic hot and heavy rendezvous, and I guess they decided to just go for it, kind of a surprise, you never know, but they seem real happy.”
It was true that Bonnie had her well-articulated objections to marriage. But she would have married him. “My ex,” Will had called Diane, with a raised and wriggling eyebrow, as if he might have said more, except for gentlemanly restraint. Nice girl, everybody said so. Pretty. Lacking in some respect? Too smiley-anxious? Needy? Clingy? Maybe all that meant was that she had demanded he take her seriously.
Coming into the large and laughing room, Bonnie spotted them first thing. They were sitting together on the hearth. Don’t look. Claudia was saying, “‘Have a Holly Jolly Christmas’ is not a carol. A carol is something like ‘Adeste Fidelis.’”
“What’s that?”
“‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ in Latin. Not that any of you heathen are aware of that.” Stan, who liked to demonstrate that he
knew a thing or two about a thing or two. He was sitting in his oversized leather chair. It made him look both regal and stunted, the king of the dwarves.
“So, ‘Frosty the Snowman’ and ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’ don’t count either? Mom, all those years, you let me believe. You suck.” This from her brother Charlie. He was standing at one end of the fireplace, throwing pistachio shells into the flames. He wore an old, too-small Christmas sweater, a joke one, with panicked gingerbread people being scooped up by a big Santa hand.
Claudia said, “Where did I go wrong with you, Charlie?” Only pretending to be displeased. She loved it when her men acted up. Scott and Haley, along with the babies, were bestowed at one end of the sofa. Presumably they had an opinion about sacred music, but they were keeping it to themselves. Other people standing around, who were they? And that sad sack Franklin guy.
“Bonnie!” Her mother turned and extended an arm, draping it around her. “You used to love Christmas carols, ‘Silent Night’ and ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem.’ She had the most precious little voice,” Claudia informed the room. “She had just the slightest bit of a speech defect, so it was ‘Thilent Night.’”
“Yeah, precious. Hi Charlie.”
“Hi Bon. So, everybody, this is my sexpot sister.”
“Nice.”
“Charlie,” their mother scolded.
“It’s OK, Mom. Nobody believes him.”
Haley said, “Honestly, Charlie. Some things are not funny.”
“Did you want to be the sexpot sister? I didn’t think so. Hey Bonnie, this is Jack and Irina and Sam and and . . . oh, you know these guys.”
“Nice to see you again,” Bonnie said, in her most comradely voice. Will said Nice to see you too. Diane gave her one of those great big smiles, like she’d been waiting all day for whoever she was smiling at to show up. But that was the worst Bonnie could say about her. Hers was a purely technical hatred.
Charlie poked at a log with a fireplace iron. The log broke and sent red sparks shooting out onto the rug. “Sparks fly,” he said, to no one in particular.
She Poured Out Her Heart Page 9
