by Kim Wright
Which is true enough, but what Belinda doesn’t understand is that nobody fits in here. We’re all transplants in a way—come from up north or out west—and even me and Kelly, who grew up just a few miles from these very wrought-iron gates, are perhaps the most aware that this isn’t the world we came from. These suburbs didn’t exist twenty years ago but now the farmland where we used to ride our bikes seems to grow red brick. There are no longer open fields, just streets lined with enormous Georgian houses. “They spring out of the ground,” my mother says darkly, and it’s true that if you go six months without driving a particular country road, the odds are that the next time you take that route you won’t recognize it. My mother exists in a permanent state of disorientation, something I believe is common in southerners of her generation. She often calls me crying on her cell phone, reporting that she was just trying to take a shortcut and all of a sudden nothing looks familiar. “I’m lost in my own hometown,” she will say, and I will assure her that she’s not, even though the truth is, I get lost sometimes too.
This would surprise Belinda, who is convinced that all of her self-esteem issues spring from the fact that she was born in Alabama. She came up poor and Michael had been poor too when she met him at the university. Poor but brilliant, one of those lanky stooped-over idiot savant country boys—and who could have foreseen he’d write some sort of computer program when he was still a sophomore, that he’d sell it to the Bank of America before he even graduated? Not her, that’s for sure. Everybody said she really knew how to pick them, but she hated it when people talked like that. It made her sound so calculating, and the truth is, girls never know what boys are going to become. It’s just that once, early in the morning, when they were walking to class, Michael told her she was pretty. She’d met some guy at a kegger the night before, a guy who’d spent six blessed hours humping her and then left without saying goodbye. Belinda had been walking to class hungover with her pajama top on and Michael—sweet, shy Michael—had fallen into step with her and told her she was pretty.
They got married, she got pregnant, or maybe it happened the other way around, and they lived for two years in that awful student housing, and then, bingo-bango, he signs with the bank for six figures. Six figures and five babies in five years and now her mother keeps a picture of Belinda’s house on her refrigerator, held with a magnet. “She doesn’t have a picture of my kids anywhere in her whole trailer,” Belinda has told me, several times, her voice rising in indignation. “But Mama sure is proud of my house.”
So it’s hardly surprising she feels a bit like an imposter, but the truth of the matter is, she belongs here as much as anyone—just one more fact to go into that bulging file labeled Things Belinda Has Not Yet Realized. She’s always trying to catch up. She goes to those expensive old-lady stores and buys sweaters with pictures on them. Not just for holidays. She wears them all the time. Sailboats and dogwoods and animals. Most of the sweaters are stretched in the front from being worn throughout Belinda’s poorly spaced pregnancies and it makes the pictures a little surrealistic. Tonight she is wearing a dog whose legs look much too long. The sweaters, along with ankle-length jean skirts and bright-colored suede flats, are what Belinda imagines the sophisticated suburbanite should wear and she refuses to be deterred from this vision, even though God knows none of the rest of us dress like that. I’ve wondered why Nancy hasn’t tried to set her straight, about the sweaters and other things too. Belinda does everything Nancy tells her to do.
But Nancy, I guess, is uneasy in her own way. She moved down three years ago from New Jersey and she still seems overwhelmed by the sheer size of her house. A lot of people moving in from the Northeast are like that—they had a $400,000 ranch house in some commuter town and then they come down here and it boggles their minds what $400,000 will buy. It’s the way of the world. The Realtor punches some buttons and tells you what you can afford, and it’s more than you think you can afford. But if she says you can qualify, who are you to argue? You move in and then one morning you wake up and wander around and ask yourself how the hell you ended up in this mausoleum of granite and marble. This obscene square footage, it makes us all nervous in a way—me because I retain a little bit of the bohemian artist thing, Kelly because she misses her single-girl condo, Belinda because she’s afraid we can still smell her trailer-park past, and Nancy because she’s not from the South.
Nancy has red hair and very white skin and it’s a great source of pride to her that, despite her vulnerable coloring, she does not freckle. She has a nearly pathological fear of the sun. She dresses as if she’s in the middle of some never-ending safari and she keeps a tube of sunscreen in the compartment between the front seats of her car. Every time she hits a stoplight she dabs some on herself and her kids. The whole family smells like tropical fruit. Nancy keeps the Weather Channel on all day long and surrounds herself with thermometers. At any given time she can tell you what the temperature is. “It’s 94,” she will say, “and it isn’t even noon. Can you believe it? No, wait, wait, look at that. It’s 95.”
She tries, I mean she really tries, but I remember the first time we had book club at Nancy’s house. We came in, we sat down, and then she just started talking about the book. Back then there were seven of us in book club and we all kept glancing around, not quite sure what to do. I was uncomfortable, but then I was a little uncomfortable with how uncomfortable I was, because exactly what did it say about me that I’d let something like that make me so upset? And Nancy just kept talking about the symbolism and the point of view until finally Lynn said, “Excuse me,” as if she was going to the bathroom. But she went into the kitchen and emerged a few minutes later with glasses of iced tea on a tray.
“I think you forgot to set these out,” Lynn said softly, and Nancy stared at the glasses as if she’d never seen them before in her life. She probably hadn’t seen them in years. They looked like her good crystal. God knows how Lynn had managed to find them and drag them out and dust them so fast.
“Oh,” said Nancy, still confused but trying to rise to the occasion as best she could. “Does anybody want anything to drink?”
I think of the Yankee woman in the barbecue scene in Gone With the Wind and how she referred to the southerners as “puzzling, stiff-necked strangers.” I suspect that is how Nancy sees us, as puzzling and stiff-necked, as people who splash around a kind of surface friendliness but who are easily offended when she breaks rules she didn’t know existed. Perhaps she views her time in North Carolina as some sort of extended anthropological study. She does look a bit like Margaret Mead, peering out from her oversized hats and gauzy scarves, taking mental notes about the incomprehensible rituals of the aboriginal people. Because there are a lot of rules and even though Kelly and I may not always follow them, it’s a bit shocking to come up against someone who doesn’t even seem to know what they are. You don’t put dark meat in your chicken salad. You write a thank-you note and send it through the U.S. Postal Service instead of relying on an Ecard. You don’t correct anyone’s pronunciation of anything. You call anyone over seventy “ma’am” and you call your friends “ma’am” if you’re mad at them. You don’t brag about how cheap you got something, or, even worse, how much you paid for it. Especially not real estate. Now, on the flip side, it’s perfectly okay to drink like a fish, or curse, or flirt with someone else’s husband. In fact it’s a little insulting if you don’t. To refuse to flirt with her husband implies your friend chose badly, and if you and she both damn well know she chose badly, you need to flirt a little bit more just to help her cover up the fact.
And when people come to your house, you immediately offer them something to drink. I mean, Jesus, girl, don’t you know it’s 95 degrees out there?
So Jeff took the job down here and Nancy followed—I think that may have been one of the worst days of her life, but she’d never say that. She does what’s expected of her. She joins every club and she chairs every committee. And she has tried to make her house, uncomfortably
large and scantily furnished as it is, into a home. Kelly and I have always laughed at her, just a little bit, with all her crafts and rehabbing and cheap-chic decorating. The fact that she’s painted her master bedroom with some sort of technique that she calls Bellagio faux glazing so that it looks like her bed is floating in a mottled pastel cloud. How she drives around with the back of her old Volvo station wagon full of fabric books and half-filled paint cans and some broken endtable she’s rescued from a yard sale. They greet her by name at the Home Depot. But it makes me sad too. All the hours she sinks into that house, I know she’s just trying to put her mark on something. She’s trying to make it hers, the same way a dog pees on a tree, and it’s not her fault she doesn’t quite get it.
“Elyse didn’t like the book,” Kelly says.
“Ah,” says Nancy. “And exactly what should we be reading, Elyse? Why don’t you just make up the list for the rest of the year? It would save everybody else so much time.”
“I think we should get back to the classics,” I say.
“Well of course you do,” says Nancy.
“It wouldn’t kill us to read something serious once in a while. I was thinking David Copper—”
“Where’s Lynn?” Belinda suddenly asks, and Kelly shrugs. Lynn hasn’t been to book club in months. The official story is that she is too busy with her new job, but we all know something else is afoot.
Maybe it’s not true that none of us was really born to this place. When I first moved into my neighborhood, Lynn was the one I wanted to be like, the one I most admired. She’s the one who started book club and I always tried to be her partner when we had whist night at church. She had—still has—that blue-blooded quality certain women have where they give their children last names as first names and a natural, easy athleticism that reminds me of Kelly. Lynn did a half-marathon and then a marathon and then a triathalon and finally when she dislocated her knee—stepping off a curb, ironically—she switched to walking. Within a couple of months, she had the rest of us walking with her. Yeah, come to think of it, Lynn has always fit in better than anyone, which is what makes it so mind-numbingly ironic that she’s the one who seems to be pulling away. Lynn is subtle, and gracious, and feminine, and kind. The sort of woman who can serve iced tea out of someone else’s kitchen and make it seem okay.
But Lynn is also the only divorced woman among us.
She keeps her chin up—she unloaded her dishwasher and got the kids to school on time the very morning that her husband left her. Rumor has it—at least according to Nancy—that he fucked her one last time for the road and then, while she was pulling her panties and gown back on to go fix the kids’ breakfast, he cheerfully informed her that he had fallen in love with his secretary. Lynn did everything you’re supposed to do—she fought for the house, she got full custody of her boys, she lightened her hair, she went back to school. But she doesn’t come to book club anymore.
At first everyone thought it was because of the money. We used to eat in restaurants. We would get a table in the back and order wine and talk a little bit about the book, but then Nancy pulled us aside one night and said, “You know, not everyone in the group has thirty dollars to throw around on ahi tuna.” Referring of course to Lynn, and we all were quick to say yes, that it would be better if we met in homes, and that was when the competitive brownie making began. Nobody really likes meeting in homes. Everybody liked eating out and drinking wine a lot better. It’s a little funny that we changed because of Lynn and now Lynn no longer shows up and yet no one has suggested that we go back to restaurants. Maybe that would make her absence seem too permanent. That would be admitting that she’s so far outside of the circle that she’s never coming back.
I lean against the counter and watch the others. Nancy and Kelly are talking about how Lynn might be losing her insurance now that the divorce is finally final, Belinda is gazing at the brownies and smoothing back her hair, which is in one of those sloppy French braids you can only get away with if you’re very young. I feel a little nervous being around them, as if they can see—what could they see? I feel as if there is a small high vibration under my skin, running throughout my body, but no one is treating me any differently, not even Kelly, who would be the one most likely to hear the hum. She knows something happened in Phoenix, but she thinks I spent too much on clothes or drank too much in a hotel bar. The thought that I might have kissed a stranger wouldn’t even cross her mind. We are all so thoroughly married. Our idea of being bad is eating cheesecake.
“I would have bet Elyse liked this book,” says Belinda. “It had sex.”
Okay, so maybe I’m wrong.
“Stupid sex,” Nancy mutters. “I almost gagged when I got to the part where he was moving over her like a tiger. Who says that? What woman says, ‘He moved over me like a tiger’?”
“I just about gagged through the whole thing,” I say. “She didn’t have to just stay there all those years and be long-suffering and pitiful. She could have done something.”
“Like what?” asks Belinda. I don’t know like what.
“And it’s an old book,” I say, more to Kelly than anyone else. “Why the hell are we doing such an old book?”
“You wanted to do David Copperfield,” Nancy points out, in that way that makes it hard to know if she’s teasing or really being dumb. “It’s what, two hundred years old? Three hundred?”
“That’s a totally different thing and you know it.”
“Y’all want to move into the den?” says Kelly. “There’s no point in just standing around in the kitchen.”
“What’d you mean she could have done something?” Belinda asks. “Because I was reading along thinking that if some perfect man just showed up at my door one day…”
“She shouldn’t have had the affair in the first place,” Nancy says. “If she wasn’t happy with her lot afterwards she only had herself to blame.”
“She wasn’t happy with her lot before she had the affair,” I say.
“I really don’t know what I’d do,” Belinda keeps going, “if all of a sudden I heard a knock and I looked out and saw a truck in the yard so I opened the door and boom, he was there.”
“Really,” I say. “It’s not like she took some fantastic marriage and ruined it.”
“She was content,” Nancy says.
“Oh wow,” I say. “Content.”
“It’s not such a dirty word,” says Nancy.
“We could sit down,” Kelly says.
“Come on,” I say, “you can’t unexperience something.”
“So what do you think she should have done, Elyse? Please tell us, considering how you’re about a thousand times smarter than everyone else.”
“Of course, when you think about it,” Belinda says, “what are the chances of a perfect man’s truck breaking down in your front yard?”
“Let’s move to the den,” Kelly says. “Everybody’s standing here in the kitchen like they think I don’t even have chairs.”
“Oh, I agree with you, Nancy, I agree with you completely. She never should have had an affair and risked losing all that contentment. While her family was gone to the state fair she should have used the free time to faux glaze her walls…”
The minute it’s out of my mouth I regret it. Nancy and I banter, we banter every month and the other women expect it. It’s probably why they leave their children at home with bleeding gums and travel out at night to discuss books they haven’t read. But I’ve never been mean to her before. Nancy goes white, her lips thin and motionless. I glance at Kelly but she doesn’t meet my eyes. I’ve gone too far this time. And then, quickly and calmly, Nancy unzips her purse, pulls out her keys, and walks out of the kitchen. A few seconds later we hear the crank of her engine.
“Wait a minute,” says Belinda. “I rode with her.”
I’m shocked, even though I’m not totally sure why. We have been meeting for seven years and no one has ever walked out of book club.
“She doesn’t like me,
” I say.
“Why’d you have to say that?” Kelly asks. “That house is her work of art.”
“She’s never liked me.”
“And you make a big deal about having a job.”
“So what, I throw pots. I make like two cents a year.”
“I’m not talking about money. You can be real snotty about things, Elyse. You act like you’re the big intellectual of the group and you’re going slumming by just hanging around with the rest of us…”
“That isn’t it,” Belinda says. Belinda puts her words together slowly when she talks, as if she’s remembering a dream. “I mean, you’re right, Nancy doesn’t like Elyse, but it doesn’t have anything to do with making pots or what we read for book club. Nancy’s mad because Jeff said he wants to climb her.”
A complete silence falls on the kitchen. The word “climb” hangs in the air like a curse. When Kelly slams the pot back into the coffeemaker we all jump.
“You’re telling us,” Kelly says to Belinda, “that Nancy actually told you that Jeff actually told her he wants to climb Elyse.”
“Yeah, but I’m wondering if Nancy thinks he’s really saying something worse. Like saying climb her means, you know, something else.”
“Belinda honey, you’ve got to back up,” says Kelly. “You’re not telling this story in a way that makes any sense.”
Belinda stops, sighs, looks out into space for a moment. “About a month ago we’re all at the pool and it’s getting late, it’s getting a little bit chilly but I can’t get the kids out and dressed, because everybody’s having too much fun. I’m dried off and sitting on a lounge chair shivering and Nancy comes up to me and says, ‘Don’t you even have a coverup?’ and I say, ‘No,’ because you know how it is, you get all the stuff for the kids and load it in the car and forget to bring anything for yourself. So I say no, and she takes off her shirt and wraps it around me. She’s like Jesus, you know, she’s so sweet that way, she’s patient with me even when I can be kind of ditzy, and that night it was cold and she literally gave me the shirt off her back. It’s something I’ll always remember.”
