by Kim Wright
“I told you I wanted it,” she says. “I still do. More than anyone.”
“You can come to my house.”
“Why?”
“You don’t think he would ever—”
She shakes her head, gives a little laugh, as if she’s surprised by even the suggestion. “Oh God, no. No. He’s just weird about money, that’s all. Everybody’s got something. Here. Stand on the driveway. You’re sinking.”
“Why’s the ground wet?”
“We have a lot of… you know. What’s the word?”
“Sprinklers?”
The man waiting to back up in the truck looks at me expectantly and I give Kelly a hug, still taking care not to meet her eyes. “I’ll call you later,” I say.
“You don’t understand,” Kelly says. “You can’t. Phil never loses his temper.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
I’m sure our friends think, if they think about it at all, that I’m the one who dragged Kelly into the church and into the suburbs and into her stone-covered house with its sinking lawn. But the truth of the matter is she’s quite right—as illogical as it seems, Kelly wanted this life more than anyone. I found that out years ago, on a December afternoon back when Tory was a toddler. That’s the day that Kelly and I had our first fight.
The women of the church were having a cookie swap and I had agreed to bring twelve dozen cookies. Twelve dozen cookies that had to be baked, cooled, decorated, bagged, and tied with a festive bow.
I’ve never been much of a baker but I tried to get in the mood. I built a fire, plugged in the tree, and cranked up the Kenny G Christmas CD. I had been so excited to move out of our cramped little apartment that I’d gotten overambitious on the Christmas tree. It was so enormous that when Phil and I had finally managed to drag it through the front door we’d been unable to get it upright in the stand. Phil eventually resorted to lassoing the top of the tree and tying it to one of the exposed beams in the ceiling. It leaned a little, and if you knew where to look you could see the rope, two facts that bothered me, although everyone else seemed to think the tree was magnificent. I’d had to go to Target twice for more lights and ornaments.
It was four in the afternoon. The music was playing, the tree was lit, the cookies were strewn all across the countertops, Tory was teetering around underfoot, and I was exhausted to the point of tears. I had dropped a whole bag of sugar somewhere between Batch 3 and Batch 4 (why hadn’t I thought to pick up extra cookie sheets when I was in Target getting the lights and balls?) and the heat in the room felt like it was topping out at 90. The spilled sugar had melted and turned my whole kitchen floor into a sticky mess and the sink was full of cookies with burned bottoms, the result of the time, somewhere between Batch 7 and Batch 8, when Tory’s diaper had turned out to reveal such a major stinky that I’d had to bathe her and had returned to the kitchen to find black smoke rolling from the oven. My jaunty green bows were not jaunty—I have never had the knack for tying bows—and two of the allegedly completed bags were probably unusable. I had bagged Batches 1 and 2 prematurely, before they were completely cooled, and the cookies had permabonded into one lumpy ball, tied with a droopy little knot. I knew I should redo them but I was running out of walnuts and I couldn’t see dressing myself and Tory and driving out to the grocery in the pounding rain.
I was debating whether it would be better to show up with (a) twelve bags of pretty cookies, two of them with no walnuts, (b) twelve bags of walnutty cookies, two of which looked like crap, or (c) ten bags of pretty walnutty cookies when I’d promised them twelve. Just when I’d decided the smart thing to do would be to (d) open up all the bags and take out two cookies from each, Tory came toddling proudly into the kitchen with her hands full of nametags that she had pulled off all the presents under the tree and Kelly walked through the door in her Missoni suit.
“Oy vey,” she said, “such a day I’ve had.” Kelly was dating a Jewish guy at the time and she was always doing a bad Barbra Streisand imitation.
“I can’t stay long,” she added, rumpling Tory’s hair and picking her way across the sticky floor to rummage in my drawer for a corkscrew. “You wouldn’t believe how jet-lagged I am. Todd and I didn’t get back from Maui last night until eleven but I went into work anyway and we have this party tonight. I think it’s at the Duke Mansion but he never tells me anything. It might be all the way up at the lake. It’s not even like I know where we’re going half the time, he just sends the car and I get in. My God, look at you. What are you doing?”
“Making cookies.”
“For what? This looks like about a hundred cookies.”
“Actually it’s about 144 cookies and they’re for a cookie swap.” Kelly took off her jacket and draped it over the back of one of my kitchen chairs. She frowned and rubbed the back of her neck. “A cookie swap,” I explained. “It’s a Christmas tradition. I make a dozen dozen of one kind of cookie and so does everybody else and then we get together and—”
“Swap them?”
“Right.”
“So you make 144 cookies and at the end you have 144 cookies.”
“Right. Only you make 144 of the same kind of cookie and at the end you have twelve of twelve different kinds of cookies.” I looked around my kitchen, a bubble of hysteria forming in my throat. “It’s supposed to save you time.”
Kelly was still frowning, still scratching her neck. “There’s only three of you living here. I don’t understand why you need 144 cookies, no matter what kind they are.”
I leaned against the counter. I felt vaguely sick. “You make an excellent point. What’s wrong with your neck?”
“I burned it in Maui. You wouldn’t believe what a miserable day I’ve had. I wear this suit because it’s a knit, you know, like the softest thing I have that will work in this godawful weather but it’s still rubbed against my sunburn all day long. I tell you, Elyse, I’ve just about had it. The party starts in two hours and I don’t even know if I’ve got the strength to go get my hair blown out.”
“Jesus.”
She poured the wine into first one glass and then the other. “What?”
“Nothing. Christmas just gets me a little wacky.”
She glanced around the room. “It looks to me like you’ve got it all covered. Do you know I haven’t even bought a gift yet? I’ll probably just go online to Crate & Barrel or something and end up paying them a fortune to have it shipped at the last minute. Todd… he doesn’t get Christmas. I mean, of course he doesn’t, why should he? But it makes me kind of sad that he doesn’t get it. I know, I know, I never even bother to put up a tree, I just come over here and get drunk and look at yours. I mean, he’s trying, he really is. He took me to Hawaii and he did leave me a gift, I mean I guess he did, there’s a Tiffany box on my kitchen counter and I don’t know how else it would have gotten there. But you know what bugs me? It’s in the same plain old blue and white wrapping they always use. They don’t do anything special to make it look like a Christmas gift.”
In unison, both of us looked toward my tree. There were probably twenty-five gifts wrapped under it, and I hoped I could remember what was in what box because I was going to have to replace all the nametags the minute Kelly left. It didn’t help that they were every one wrapped in the same paper, an eighty-foot bolt of green and red plaid I’d gotten on sale. Shopping the last minute and having everything shipped was out of the question for me. Phil had sixty-two patients. We counted them. We knew them all by name. When Mr. Ziegler died of old age, we grieved him and we grieved the fact he’d no longer need his biannual cleaning. We worried that we had bought the house prematurely, that we should have stayed in the apartment another year. I read the want ads, periodically and halfheartedly, because I really didn’t want to put Tory in day care. I was selling pots for twenty-five dollars by that time, when I sold them at all, and I’d been buying Christmas gifts slowly, one at a time, since the summer, when we had stopped at the outlet malls on our way to Savannah. Bought them car
efully, stored them in the closet, and then hauled them out just before Christmas and wrapped them in cheap Target paper.
“Well,” said Kelly. “You’re busy. I’m busy. I guess I need to go.” She hadn’t touched her wine. I’d probably knock off the whole bottle when she left.
She stood up, slipped on her Missoni jacket, and kissed the air over my head. I watched her leave, then pushed myself to my feet and headed toward the cookies. If I took a couple of them from each bag I’d have enough to finish the last two without any extra baking and I didn’t really think any of the women would count the cookies and figure out I’d cheated. Of course, with Nancy you could never be sure.
The door creaked. I turned. Kelly was standing in the doorframe, her hair wet with rain.
“I just wanted to thank you,” she said, in a thin reedy voice, “for making me feel like my whole world is shit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your life, Elyse, does it have to be so fucking perfect? The tree and the cookies and the presents and the fire in the fireplace and the Christmas music… does your life have to have a fucking soundtrack? I probably could have gritted my teeth and stood it… I mean, I could have stood the fact that this whole house smells like cinnamon… I smelled it before I was even in the door but I probably could have stood that and the fire and your gigantic fucking tree if you hadn’t been playing fucking ‘Silver Bells’ in the background. Did you know that was my daddy’s favorite Christmas carol? What are you trying to make me do, feel like the most alone person in the world? Like I’m some kind of hooker in the middle of a Hallmark movie? And does your baby have to be so cute? You and Phil both have dark hair… Why is Tory blond? Have you ever wondered about that? Where did she get that blond hair? Did you order her from the perfect-baby catalog or something?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
Kelly slammed down her purse. “What’s wrong with me? I’ve got no home, that’s what’s wrong with me. I’ve got no family. I’ve got no Christmas and at the rate I’m going I never will have. Last night I got in late and the condo was dark and there was nothing but…” She stopped, exhaled. “… a pile of mail on the kitchen table and the place smelled like chemicals because the maid had been there. It was Tilex, I guess, or bleach. It’s all too white, you know, the whole place is white and there’s no food in my cabinets and there’s nothing alive because I’m gone too often to keep a fish or a plant and don’t you tell me that it’s all my fault, don’t you dare. You don’t understand how it is when you come in late at night alone and everything is white and quiet and smells like chemicals. How can you understand it, when your house is perfect and everything smells like cinnamon? Things come easy for you, Elyse. They always have.”
“You must be joking,” I said. I was so angry that the room was swimming. “I’m killing myself here. Is that all you noticed—that it smelled good? Come over here, take a whiff of that trash can. Tory had three stinkys today and I haven’t even had a chance to carry the bag out to the Dumpster. I don’t want to make 144 cookies, Kelly, nobody in her right mind would want to make 144 cookies. My tree is falling. It’s tied to the ceiling and it’s leaning and it’s going to fall over completely one night while I’m asleep and then what am I going to do? How am I going to get it back up with all the lights and ornaments already on it? You waltz in here all dressed up and pretty and have you even noticed that I’m wearing my nightgown? It’s five in the afternoon, it’s almost dark, and I’m still in my nightgown and you tell me that the collar of your fucking eight-hundred-dollar suit is rubbing against your fucking Maui sunburn and you’re jet-lagged and not sure if you can bear to have your hair blown out and well boo-hoo-hoo. We’re broke, Kelly, this house is killing us, and you come crying to me because some Jewish guy gives you a Christmas gift in plain old Tiffany’s blue and white paper and do you know what I want? Do you know what I want for Christmas? If I could go to your nice clean white empty condo where nobody cooks and nobody shits and I could lie down in your nice clean white empty bed for even one night and sleep for eight consecutive hours, I’d think I’d died and gone to heaven, Kelly, I’d think I was in fucking Maui for sure.”
We stood there for a minute, staring at each other.
“Oh,” Kelly finally said. “Wow. I had no idea. That makes me feel better about everything.”
We burst out laughing at the same time and she came over, mindless of her sunburn, and threw her arms around me. Tory, who had been watching us wide-eyed, wedged herself between us and began to pat our thighs with her small hands. Kelly bent down and scooped her up.
“The thing is,” she whispered. “I want what you have.”
She didn’t want what I had. She didn’t know what I had, she only knew what it looked like. But it had been nearly two years since Daniel left and now her daddy had died and it was Christmas. “I know, baby,” I said.
She smiled and pulled out of the hug, with Tory balanced on her hip. She must have cried a little bit, because her eyes were bright. “But in the meantime,” she said bravely, “I’ll settle for a cookie.”
I winced. “You’re not going to believe this, but I don’t have enough to give you one.”
She laughed her easy laugh. Back to the old Kelly. “Your cookie-swap friends,” she said. “Do you think they would like me?”
“They’d fall down on their knees and worship you. But I’m not sure you’d like them. They’re a little bit younger than us, you know, they married straight out of college. It’s a different world, Kelly. Life out here is a little bit plain.”
“Do they drink and curse, these cookie-swap women?”
“Not like we do.”
“Then I’ll stop. I want them to like me.”
“Oh, they’ll like you. They’ll like you a whole lot better than they like me.”
She shook her head and Tory imitated her, violently tossing her little wispy blond curls from side to side. “No, I mean it,” Kelly said, hugging my daughter to her chest. “I want to meet these women. I want to join the church and come to book club and Pilates. I’m going to buy the whole set of Le Creuset, all of them, even the big deep baking dishes that nobody ever uses. I mean, I could live out here, why not? I want what you have.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
She breaks things,” Phil says.
My mind has been wandering so I don’t know exactly what Jeff was saying. Probably something about not wanting to break up a family.
And Phil jumps in with that scary way he has of taking things too literally and says, “Oh no, she likes to break things. She likes to throw them away. You’ve seen our house—you know it isn’t decorated like the other women’s houses. When I bring something in the door she throws it right out.”
“I can’t breathe when the house is too full,” I say. “It closes in on me,” and Jeff winces, evidently thinking of the dozens of Lladro figurines parading across the cabinets of his living room. Nancy already has eight of the apostles. She’s gunning for the full set.
“When people come over they think we’ve just moved in,” Phil says.
“No they don’t.”
“Sometimes they think we’re moving out.”
“I like open spaces,” I tell Jeff, who for some reason writes that down in his notebook.
“It started on our honeymoon,” Phil continues. “She dropped my camera off the side of the ship.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Thank God I didn’t tell him about the pots. Why did I even consider it?
“On the last day. In Martinique.”
“Come off it. That was a disposable camera, the kind you buy in Wal-Mart, and it was an accident. I was leaning over the rail…”
“It had our pictures from the whole trip,” Phil tells Jeff, twisting in his chair. “And she just casually tosses it overboard.”
“Good God,” I say. “Haven’t you ever dropped anything?” I try to think of something Phil has dropped, but I can’t.
�
�The whole week went in the water,” Phil is saying, so curled up in his seat that he almost has his back to me. “I knew right then what it was going to be like to be married to her.”
“We had the pictures that the ship photographer took,” I say, in my most reasonable and cheerful voice, the one I used when I was toilet training Tory. “You’ve got one of us climbing the Dunn’s River Falls framed all nice on your desk.”
“See what I mean? See what I’m saying? Even after all these years she still has no idea what she did.”
When I get home from counseling I spread newspapers all over the studio floor and begin to pick the larger pieces out of the box. I sit like a yogi, sifting through the rubble, a motion that kicks up dust and makes my eyes water. I could go in and take out my contacts but it feels good to weep for a while and I sit on the cold concrete floor and run my hands through the wrecked pots. Maybe I want to be cut. Maybe a woman who breaks so many things deserves to be cut.
But Lewis is right, the pieces are beautiful. And perhaps salvageable. After a while I wipe my face, stand up, wander into the damp room. I pull a plain ceramic vase down from the shelves and try to visualize what it would look like if I glued the shards directly to it. The patterns, now that I stop and study them, are really quite remarkable, more interesting broken that they ever were whole. I am humming as I begin to arrange the pieces around the neck of the vase. It’s not what I showed Mrs. Chapman, but who knows, she might like it. Hard to say yet if I like it. I am so absorbed that I don’t hear the carpool van pull up in the driveway and I am startled when Tory hits the button to open the big garage door and walks in. She drops her backpack beside me.
“I have diphtheria,” she says.
“That sucks,” I say. She’s been playing the Oregon Trail game at school. The kids only have a certain amount of time and money to get their wagon train from St. Louis to San Francisco and all sorts of unexpected things can happen along the way. Now, through no fault of her own, my daughter has drawn a bad card and she’s dying on the prairie. I like this game, and not only because it teaches her math, and history, and geography. I think for a game to be a good one, skill and chance should be equal factors, just as they are in life.
