Dive From Clausen's Pier

by Ann Packer

  “Carrie.”

  I turned back.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  She put two fingers to her mouth and blew against them. “Miss Wolf left me her letters.” She moved her hand away and I could see that she was biting the inside of her lower lip. “I haven’t told anyone in New York yet.”

  I put the duffel bag down. “What do you mean, left you her letters?”

  “To edit,” she said. “Into a book. The letters she got from people and copies of lots that she sent.”

  Now I understood, and I understood the enormity of it. Simon had told me once that Miss Wolf had been a central figure in society—in several societies. What was his line? She knew everyone from Lionel Trilling to Grace Kelly.

  “Are you going to do it?” I asked Lane.

  She shook her head slowly. “I haven’t decided. It’s tempting, and if I don’t they’re supposed to be burned. But it’s not fair to put that decision on to me!” she cried. “It’s up to me to decide how she’s thought of from now on! If I don’t do it, she’s Monique Wolf, remember her, that writer from whenever it was. If I do she could end up being the flavor of the month or the year and people would have a completely different perspective on her. She could end up a hot literary topic.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “You could, too.”

  Lane’s pale face filled with color, and she looked down. “I know.” With the toe of her black Converse sneaker she traced a series of short lines, one after another. “You know what?” she said, looking up. “I’m not sure I want to go that deeply into her life. I’m not sure I want to get to know her that well.”

  “You knew her really well.”

  “I knew what I knew. Do I want that to change?” Suddenly tears streamed from her eyes, thin trails running down her cheeks. She stretched the neck of her T-shirt up to blot her face dry. “Isn’t this stupid?” she sobbed. “I can’t stop crying.”

  “It’s not stupid, it’s normal.”

  “I’m a wreck,” she said. “Your mother’ll think I’m a real nutcase.”

  I shook my head and put my arm around her, her shoulder bony under my hand. “No she won’t,” I said. “And if she does, then you’ll just seem very familiar.”

  In fact, my mother took to Lane right away. We lingered over dinner for nearly two hours that night, easily quadrupling my mother’s and my average. My mother seemed interested in Lane, as if she wanted to figure something out: maybe me.

  Lane thought she was wonderful. “She’s so low-key you don’t really think much is going on at first, and then boom, she comes up with these incredibly smart responses to things.” She was talking about something my mother had said about Miss Wolf’s death: that the writer in Lane had to mourn the loss of the writer in Miss Wolf just as much as the companion had to mourn the employer. “And the lesbian has to mourn the lesbian,” Lane said, and my mother cast me a curious glance.

  Later, she went upstairs, while Lane and I stayed in the kitchen and made tea. Lane asked about Kilroy, and I told her about how our longdistance phone conversations had become impossible, about how torn I’d been feeling. And then more: about meeting his parents back in March, and the pall that seeing them had cast over him.

  “It’s not even like he doesn’t like them,” I said. “It’s like he can’t.”

  “You know,” Lane said, “I didn’t want to tell you this before, but remember how Maura felt like she recognized him from somewhere?”

  I remembered Thanksgiving, Maura’s curious glances. I nodded.

  “She realized why. His name is Fraser, right? One of the big honchos on Wall Street—and I mean big honchos—is a man named Morton Fraser. Is that his father’s name?”

  Indeed it was. I thought of how we’d gone to the Empire State Building late on Thanksgiving night, and how, turning to look toward Wall Street, he’d asked, not quite casually, What does Maura do? As if, I understood now, he feared she’d made—or would make—the connection. But why did he care?

  I told Lane about the note I’d read, You must be thinking of the date as much as we are. “What could it be?” I said. “The anniversary of something awful, I figure.”

  She stared at me. “Why don’t you just ask him?”

  I laced my fingers together, twisted my engagement ring around and then back. I’d caught Mike staring at it a few days earlier; when he saw that I’d noticed, he quickly looked away.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “According to whose rules?”

  “His.”

  “Why do you play by his rules?”

  I thought of the night at McClanahan’s when I asked about other women. The day at MOMA when I asked who I reminded him of. So many other times. “You know,” I said, “I didn’t entirely. It’s more like there were rules and I broke them and it didn’t matter.”

  Lane looked at me carefully. “You’re using the past tense.”

  I remembered the moment earlier in the day, at the airport, when I saw my duffel bag. Then I thought of Kilroy alone in New York—his slight frame disappearing around a corner, seen by no one—and my insides lurched. I was still swinging back and forth, though I imagined a moment would come when the swinging would change: no longer a movement between choices, but a movement into memory and regret, and back out again.

  We slept late the next morning, Lane on my bedroom floor in a sleeping bag that hadn’t been used in at least ten years. The contents of the duffel were in piles on my desk, and after my shower I peeled pants and a shirt off the top and put them on, thrilled to have something new to wear.

  At lunchtime I took her to meet Mike. I was nervous, although I wasn’t sure which of them I hoped would impress the other. Actually, it wasn’t that: I was nervous over whether there was a single me I could be in the presence of them both.

  We borrowed the van and drove to James Madison Park. Lake Mendota glittered in the sun, aquamarine with foamy white peaks on the little wavelets. Sailboats raced along in a light wind. The lake at last, the great blue spill of it. I breathed in deeply, as if I could breathe in the lake, the entire blue sky.

  We sat at a picnic table and ate sandwiches I’d made, the same table I’d stood on with Jamie to watch Paddle ’n’ Portage nearly a year ago.

  “This is so beautiful,” Lane said.

  “Madison at its best,” Mike said. “This exact moment in May.”

  Lane smiled. “ ‘Life, London, this moment of June.’ ”

  “Huh?” he said with a grin.

  “Virginia Woolf. Miss Wolf loved her.”

  She’d told him a little about Miss Wolf earlier, and he nodded. “Well, that makes sense,” he said after a while. “Woolf and Wolf.”

  I was afraid she’d laugh at him—or worse, not—but she smiled and said, “That’s what I always think.”

  We ate our sandwiches. I’d brought a thermos of iced tea and Mike’s special cup, and from his place at the end of the table he leaned over and drank. A guy with blond dreadlocks walked past and gave us the peace sign, and Mike and Lane exchanged an amused look.

  “So you grew up in Connecticut?” he said. “Were you a sailing type of girl—summers at the marina and all that?”

  Lane shook her head. “My corner of Connecticut is pretty landlocked. Besides which, I’ve always really hated that crap. When I was ten my mother decided I should try to come out of my shell, so she sent me to this sailing camp in Maine where I spent the entire two weeks hiding in my bunk reading Hardy Boys books.”

  Mike smiled. “Not Nancy Drew?”

  “Nancy made me ill. Or maybe it was her roadster.”

  We all laughed. I bit into a carrot stick and chewed happily, the sun hard on my back and the lake in front of me, a feeling of peace at hand.

  “Why were you in a shell?” Mike said.

  Lane set her sandwich down. “Probably because my father had died a few years earlier.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. He
hesitated a moment and then looked at me. “You know, I always used to sort of hope your father would come back so I’d be able to stand up for you and tell him off.”

  I was surprised. “You did?”

  “ ’Fraid so,” he said with a self-conscious smile.

  Lane leaned forward. “Why did you think Carrie wouldn’t be able to stand up for herself?”

  He didn’t respond at first, and for a moment I feared she’d offended him. But then he shrugged and said, “That wasn’t an issue. Standing up for her was what I felt I’d been born to do.”

  It was hard for me to swallow, and I took a long drink of my iced tea. I’d always known this, but for so long it had discomfited me. Why? Why did it feel so different now, so good? I wanted to stand up for him, too, to be there for him—every cliché in the book was what I wanted. There was only one way, though: to be there, period.

  Lane left two days later, the empty duffel folded into her shoulder bag. We were both a little teary when we hugged goodbye, and as I watched her plane back away from the gate I wondered when I’d ever see her again.

  I’d only gotten about halfway through putting away the clothes she’d brought me, and when I got back from the airport I continued, meeting each garment with a sense of reunion, as if it had been years since I’d seen it, and it was an old, good friend.

  One thing I hadn’t asked for was the green velvet dress. It was hanging in my closet in the brownstone, and though I knew Lane or Simon would send it to me anytime, I found myself wondering if I even wanted it anymore. I recalled the December day I went to Bergdorf’s, the eerie quiet as I moved from expensive dress to expensive dress, from dream to dream, imagining myself as someone who would wear such things. Maybe that was it: I’d made a dress for a life that wasn’t right for me. As I put my clothes away, I thought I might just leave the dress where it was, a talisman for some future occupant of the brownstone as she forged a life for herself in New York.

  I had asked for my silk nightgown and robe, and here they were. After all those months in my bottom drawer, plus the journey in Lane’s duffel, they were crumpled and sad-looking, and I set up my mother’s ironing board and ironed them carefully, the hot, dry scent putting me firmly back in my old apartment. I remembered so clearly how trapped I’d felt then, but I remembered it from the outside: the feeling but not how it felt, not exactly. Was it something I could penetrate? The question scared me, and I thought the answer must be yes.

  I finished ironing and hung the nightgown on one hanger and the robe on another. I put my arm between them and moved it back and forth, the feel of the fabric as exquisite as I remembered. There would come a day when I would wear them, I was sure of it—a day when I wouldn’t worry about the reaction I’d get. I would wear them happily, proudly. At that future point, would I remember this moment? Would I look back and think: That was when I knew I was home?

  My oldest jeans were at the bottom of the pile. Folded tight, they felt funny, a little stiff, and when I shook them out a thin blue thing fell onto the floor. I bent to pick it up. Parapraxis and Eurydice. Poems by Lane Driscoll. It was Lane’s book—her chapbook. She’d never said a word about having brought it. She’d bought wine for my mother, and flowers at a stand one afternoon, but this she’d left behind for me to find once she was gone. I flipped it open and saw that there was something written on the title page, an inscription. For Carrie, it said. Always my friend.

  CHAPTER 40

  At the top of the Mayers’ basement stairs I hesitated. I could hear the dryer pounding, smell detergent and heated cotton. Mike was in his room resting, and I started down, wishing there was something to knock on. This was Mrs. Mayer’s domain.

  She was standing at a long table, a huge basket of laundry at her feet. In front of her everything was in neat stacks, socks sorted, shirts folded just so. It was warm and steamy.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  She looked up and frowned a little. “Oh, hi.”

  I continued down the stairs until I’d reached the concrete floor. “Can I talk to you? About next weekend?”

  She pursed her lips. Memorial Day was nearly upon us—Memorial Day itself, the first anniversary of Mike’s accident, but also Memorial Day weekend, which she and Mr. Mayer traditionally spent up in Door County, at an annual conference put on by his office. It had been from Door County that they’d been summoned to the hospital last year, pulled off the golf course and flown down in a twin engine that belonged to one of the other VPs. I was in the emergency room waiting area when they arrived, Mr. Mayer running in ahead of her, holding his glasses to his face so they wouldn’t slip off.

  “What about it?” she said. She reached into the basket, laid a pair of plaid boxers on the table, and folded them into a neat square. “It’s already decided—I’m not going.”

  “I know,” I said. “But Mike really wants you to.”

  She frowned. “You don’t have to tell me what Mike wants. I know John Junior will be here, but that’s not enough. Things can happen.”

  “Like what?” I’d asked Mike what was holding her back, and he’d said, “The fact that I might drop my rattle, waah, waah.”

  “Well, autonomic dysreflexia,” she snapped. “You probably don’t know about this, but there are a number of things—even just his bladder or bowel getting too full—that can send his blood pressure through the roof really fast. People can die if they don’t get the right treatment immediately.” She reached into the basket again, this time picking up a striped dress shirt of Mr. Mayer’s, which she sprayed with a mister and then rolled into a ball and set aside.

  “Are there symptoms?” I said. “Of the blood pressure rising?”

  She had another pair of boxers in her hand, and she sighed and set them down. “What are you getting at, Carrie?”

  “I’d like to stay for the weekend so you can go. I’ll come on Friday and stay till you get back Tuesday morning. You can tell me everything I need to know. I’ll be responsible.”

  Her mouth tightened.

  “I want to do it,” I said. “You can hate me for the rest of your life, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m here now, I’m back, and I want to be part of Mike’s life. And I’m going to be.”

  “Carrie Bell,” she said. “Well, well.” She smiled a little. “Mr. Mayer does want me to go.”

  “Then go,” I said. “Don’t you want to? Spend a weekend away, go antiquing? Have a martini on Saturday night? You always loved going.”

  She patted her hair and looked down for a moment, her hand at her chin. “John Junior can do the catheter,” she said.

  I went over on the Friday afternoon. I baked a meatloaf Mrs. Mayer had left and put out a salad that was already in the bowl and needed only to be dressed. John had a friend over, and the four of us ate in the kitchen, the little countertop TV tuned to a baseball game on ESPN. John was already deep in training for his senior-year hockey season, and he had three helpings of meatloaf and at least a quart of milk.

  “That’s rude,” his friend said when John found a container of cottage cheese in the refrigerator and spooned a large mound onto his plate.

  “He’s growing,” Mike said, and he gave me a big grin from across the table.

  After dinner John and his friend went out. I cleaned up and then joined Mike in the living room. “What’ll we do?” he said. “Rent a video? I’m wiped, but you could go get one.”

  I opened my mouth to protest that I didn’t want to leave him, and he gave me a look. “Just go.”

  I drove as fast as I could, grabbed something I couldn’t have said the title of two minutes later, and hurried back. It wasn’t until I’d parked that I could get myself to slow down. I didn’t want to be like Mrs. Mayer.

  Saturday morning after breakfast we sat in the kitchen waiting for the doorbell. Mike’s attendant was due to arrive at nine, to help him shower and go to the bathroom—“administer his BP,” as Mrs. Mayer said, his bowel program. It involved rubber gloves, lubricating jell
y—Mike wouldn’t let anyone in his family do it.

  I sat on the deck while they were busy. Finally he wheeled outside, his hair still wet, a sheepish smile on his lips. “Remember when BP stood for Beautiful People?” he said. “The times, they have changed.”

  We got into the van and drove over to the State Capitol. The Farmers’ Market at the end of May: there were tender lettuces, spears of rhubarb, tiny carrots and potatoes. We joined the crowd circling the stands. I bought some potted herbs and a jar of honey for my mother. A farmwife with worn-out fingers sold us a massive bear claw, and I tore off little bits and fed them to Mike, then licked the almondy crumbs from my fingertips. Green apples, big purple bulbs of garlic. It was still too early for sour cherries.

  Back at home Mike was exhausted. A simple excursion could do him in. He took a nap while I worked on dinner, chicken stew with dumplings from Mrs. Mayer’s recipe box. We ate early and then went for a walk. The sky was hazy, colorless. We passed people working in their gardens. They might not actually know each other, but they understood who each other was. Turning back toward the Mayers’, we came upon a man playing catch with a little girl. On his back there was a baby in a backpack who laughed a toothless little laugh every time he caught the ball.

  When we got back we could hear the shower running upstairs, John’s voice hitting the high notes of the Sears jingle from TV. He came downstairs a little later with his hair blown dry.

  “Hot date?” I said. He looked so much like Mike at seventeen, rangy but broad-shouldered, the same thin face.

  “Yeah, where are you going?” Mike said.

  John grinned.

  “I think John might be a lady-killer,” Mike told me.

  “It’s all in the Z,” John said. He meant the 280 Z, the car Mr. Mayer had handed down to Mike. John drove it now.

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” Mike said. “That cologne you’re wearing counts, too.”

  I suppressed a smile. John smelled a little like a drugstore.