Maybe I’m wrong. But something tells me I’m not.
Something tells me this crush I have on you feels different than anything I’ve had in years because it is different.
Because neither one of us belongs in here and both of us felt so guilty about our old failures that we stupidly, tragically, got ourselves put here. Am I right about this? You tell me.
After that, the letters got heady and overlong. His started filling four or five pages of yellow lined legal-size paper, drawing distinctions between a point he’d just made or clarifying an old one, full of literary references or philosophical musings about the nature of love and the balance that must be struck in any new relationship. I just want to be honest, he said in one, worrying me a little. Hadn’t we always been? Even if it’s difficult, I still want you to be honest with me.
I considered a few confessions I might make: (1) I seem to be infertile though no one knows why; (2) I don’t think I was ever in love with my husband; (3) I’ve suffered from memory lapses and a childhood I don’t remember much about; (4) sometimes I’m afraid there is something unspeakably wrong with me.
I didn’t, of course. Even in the blush of his lavish attentions, I knew all love had its limits.
After a while, I started watching Leo work through the steel-reinforced window outside the library—the curve of his back as he bent over the hoe, the damp patches on his T-shirt. I loved watching his body as he worked under the broiling sun. I imagined touching his wrist, his hands, the back of his neck. I could tell he wasn’t accustomed to the muscles he’d developed in the last year. I gave in to my obsession and stood in the hallway outside the library, wasting hours waiting for him to look up and see me, so I could arrange my face in an expression of surprise as if I’d only just walked up. For months, those vigils were worth it—he’d mouth some joke and I’d cup my hand behind my ear, an exaggerated What?
We’d both laugh and make I’ll call you gestures, as if we were teenagers. We had other signals. A pen scribbling across a flat hand meant Did you get my note? Once, he staggered back, a flat hand on his chest, and I thought he was having a heart attack until I understood what he meant: I got it. I loved it. I blew him a kiss and clapped my own hand to my heart.
For two months I became a person I didn’t recognize. I ironed my jeans and put on makeup to stand by the window and wait for him to look up. I wrote to him every night, and in between I read the books he’d mentioned in his letters to me. I once stood at a window for an hour waiting to show him I’d found a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I still don’t like it much, I tried to mouth, though he couldn’t understand through the window frosted with dirt. He held up his fingers in an L on his chest, a sign we’d developed to say “I love you.”
Ridiculous, of course, when we’d only ever had the one conversation.
CHAPTER 9
Standing in Roland’s basement reminds me of how feelings, once awoken, can’t be so easily set aside. I leave with a flurry of excuses about the work I need to get to, phone calls I must make. In a wave of embarrassment, I retreat to Trish’s bedroom, which has no phone, only the copy of Middlemarch lying on the desk with Geoffrey’s inscription. What was their relationship all those years ago? Did Geoffrey flirt with Trish the way he flirted with all of us—with his friendship and his confessions? Nothing he would get blamed for later, but insidious all the same. Was poor Trish, at age fifteen, in love with him back then?
Was I?
That was the question everyone asked during my trial, and I saw the answer written on their faces: Yes, poor Betsy, she pined like a schoolgirl. But it was never as simple as that. Yes, I thought about him a lot. I saw our life through his eyes. After they moved onto our block, I started gardening more. I looked in the mirror before I walked up the driveway to check the mail. Was that a crime? I had a crush on him, as Paul did, as we all did, graced by a presence that seemed to make our life look more like a happy choice, not an accident. I noticed the distance in Geoffrey’s marriage, the things he and Corinne didn’t know about each other. “Wait, what class are you teaching again?” Geoffrey would ask her at a dinner party midway through the semester. She was teaching in Princeton at that point, a four-hour commute, which meant she stayed there four days a week. They had separate lives, weekends that had nothing to do with the weekdays Geoffrey spent with us, the housewives on the block.
I also remember this: I was there the first time Geoffrey met Linda Sue. She’d moved in only a month earlier. Newly divorced from a husband none of us had ever met, she bought the house kitty-corner to ours that had been empty for six months, whose previous owners hadn’t bothered keeping things up. We all wondered if it would ever sell looking the way it did, with peeling paint and a yard gone to weeds. According to Helen, who knew the real estate agent, Linda Sue had looked it over once, smoked a cigarette on the porch, and nodded when the agent apologized for the dandelions. “It’s fine,” Linda Sue said, grinding out her cigarette. “I like it the way it is.”
We hardly noticed the day she moved in because no truck was necessary to carry in what little furniture she had: a few canvas folding chairs and a lumpy futon. Within a week, everyone had their own story to tell of meeting our new neighbor.
“Where do you come from?” Marianne had asked her, holding a rhubarb cake, the same kind she’d made to welcome us five years earlier.
“Nowhere,” Linda Sue had said, eyeing the cake. “Seriously. Nowhere.”
With me, she was a little more forthcoming. When I told her I worked as a librarian, she asked if people ever returned books with personal items left inside. “As a matter of fact, yes!” I said. Only a few months earlier, I’d placed a cardboard box beneath the front desk to preserve the “bookmarks” we’d found: the snapshots, the personal letters. Once, I found a five-dollar bill folded in such a way I had to assume someone had done it intentionally. I was interested in our “finds” and wondered if we might collect enough to make a temporary display called “Place Holders” in the glass case of our lobby. Viola called the idea a little “out there,” but said I could go ahead with it when I’d collected enough. I started to tell Linda Sue but stopped when I saw she wasn’t listening. She had another question she wanted to ask: “Do you have that problem where crazy people come in and masturbate on your books?”
We never knew where she was from, though Helen Baker-Harrison thought she’d heard of the town, somewhere in upstate Connecticut. Helen waved her hand in a way that we interpreted as west of the river, the side that was both more Bohemian and richer. For a while we wondered if Linda Sue was an artist, based not on anything she said but on the clothes she wore: diaphanous skirts washed to a pale flesh color; men’s undershirts and vests decoupaged with what looked like the contents of a drawer bottom—loose buttons, chipped mirror pieces, and china plate bits.
“Did you make your vest?” I heard Marianne once ask her nervously, eyeing the dried glue.
“Yeah, I took a class,” Linda Sue said, running a hand over its bumpy terrain. “It was kind of a joke.”
Eventually we learned that Linda Sue had lots of opinions and that it didn’t take much prodding to elicit them. She hated public swimming pools and the Baker-Harrisons’ dog, who barked at clouds. When she hadn’t made any move to mow her overgrown yard a month after she moved in, and a couple of husbands had offered to stop by with their mowers, we learned that she liked it the way it was. “It just grows back, right?” she said, as if she were not completely sure. “I guess I don’t see the point. You just end up mowing—what? Every weekend?”
The men were dumbstruck. “Right.”
“So you’d just have to come back. No, thanks.”
Once I saw her in the grocery store, staring at an onion in her hand as if she were trying to remember what it was. I pushed my cart over toward her, thinking, I shouldn’t walk away just because she’s odd. “Hello, Linda Sue!” I called. “Have you got a recipe?”
We all pretended to be avid cooks
in those days. We had cookie exchanges at Christmas and potlucks we came to with recipes written out on index cards. In truth, none of us was very good. Linda Sue threw the onion back in the bin. “Oh, God no,” she said. “I never cook. I didn’t even bring my pots and pans with me. I keep thinking I should buy a can opener and then I don’t.” Was she joking? I wondered, and laughed hopefully. “Mostly I eat cereal,” she said, nodding down at her cart filled with boxes. “But I was trying to remember how you make onion soup. Do you know?”
Paul didn’t eat onions so I never bothered.
“I’m guessing onions, right? But then what?”
Had she lived in a foreign country? Been isolated in some way? “Broth, I guess. Beef, maybe.”
“Right. That makes sense.”
I started to push my cart away but stopped. “Do you need any help, Linda Sue? Setting up your house? Getting situated?” As far as any of us could tell, she still had no curtains or furniture beyond the three canvas director’s chairs she’d arrived with. She had no TV or stereo. From the glimpses we’d gotten, she made an evening’s entertainment out of flicking her lighter and smoking cigarettes. Was all this a cry for help?
“Getting situated?” she said.
“I can help you measure for curtains if you need it. We just got new ones ourselves. It’s a terrible chore, I know.”
She blinked at me. “Why do people buy curtains?”
“Well.” I looked around, wondering if I was on Candid Camera. “Privacy, I guess.”
“Yeah—I don’t care about that.”
“Window treatments can really pull a room together, I find. You’d be surprised.”
“Yeah, I don’t care about that, either.”
As we came to understand, she didn’t care about much. The yard, her trash, what anyone thought of her. All the rules that I’d assumed for so long were sacrosanct.
A month after Linda Sue moved in, Marianne started passing out flyers for a Neighborhood Watch group she wanted to form, not in response to any burglaries reported, she said, but to a “feeling” she had of “menace” in the air. Until Marianne brought it up, none of us had thought much about being robbed. We left our garages open with our dust-covered bikes there for the taking. For Paul and me, it wasn’t unusual to come home and find our door unlocked with nobody home. Sometimes I sat in my car, a four-step walk from rectifying the problem, and thought, Why bother? and drove away. We had so few belongings of value, why would any burglar waste his time with us? And then I thought of something strange: the stain on our mattress, from the night our longest-lasting baby left us after five and a half months of growing what were already tiny hands and feet. It was the closest thing I had to a picture of his face, a brown outline shaped like a swan on our mattress. My heart seized at the thought of someone stealing that.
“All right,” I told Marianne. “I’ll be there.”
At our first meeting, the speaker was a female police officer with ebony hair broken in front by a small stripe of white. She looked like Susan Sontag dressed in a police uniform. “A property crime occurs somewhere in this country every three seconds,” she said. “Every day I see people lose everything they have.”
Earlier, Geoffrey and I had made jokes about this meeting and rolled our eyes, though we both said we would go. The woman up front continued, “You should all know that a hollow core door is a burglary waiting to happen and a solid door is only as good as its lock. Anything less than a double cylinder with a six-inch throw is like leaving your house open. You might as well stick some bubble gum in there.” She opened a briefcase and pulled out the only dead bolt guaranteed to stop a burglar. It took two hands to hold and looked like a tire jack.
As she passed around order forms for purchasing one of her dead bolts, I turned around and saw Geoffrey sitting in the back, wearing a black turtleneck that so flattered him, I once embarrassed myself by saying so. Geoffrey widened his eyes as if to say, Is this woman serious?
Ever since he moved onto our block, I’d worried that the inanity of our lives might be too much for him, that at some point he’d announce the truth: He’d lived here as a research experiment and now he couldn’t take it anymore. I smiled and turned to face front, now so aware of myself in his sight line, I couldn’t listen to anything until Linda Sue, sitting next to me, raised her hand. “I have a question.”
“Yes?”
“You say we should call in if we see a suspicious person driving down our block, but how are we defining suspicious person?”
“That depends. Someone you don’t know driving slowly. Someone who’s dressed badly, or driving an unmarked car. People talk about white vans and there’s truth to that rumor. Some criminals do drive unmarked white vans.”
“I don’t think that’s what you really mean, though, is it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I think you mean we should call the police if we see a black or Hispanic man driving down the street.”
A silence settled over the room.
“Oh, Linda Sue.” Marianne stood up. “Let’s not get into all that right now.” I could hear Marianne’s impatience, as if she hadn’t even wanted to invite Linda Sue, which was possible. When I’d run into Linda Sue that morning and asked if she was going, she said she hadn’t heard anything about it.
“All what, Marianne?” she asked, her voice full of innocence. Marianne crossed her arms over her chest. “All this defensiveness and posturing. I’m sorry, but I’d rather make a mistake and regret it later than get raped at knifepoint.”
Oh, dear, I thought, wishing I were closer to Geoffrey so I could whisper, I’m sure Marianne doesn’t mean to sound so ugly.
“This is exactly our point,” the policewoman said, looking down at Linda Sue. “We believe it’s better to make a mistake than to be sorry later.”
“And what do you tell the law-abiding Puerto Rican family who gets dragged into a police station because they made the mistake of driving on our block?”
Though I thought Linda Sue was brave to hold her ground, I was sorry she’d sat down next to me, afraid that some of the older people might think I was the one making these comments. Anyone could tell this wasn’t the place to say all this. Kim, from Korea was in the room, as was Eleanor, who worked with troubled black teenagers. These were complicated issues, not quite the same as taking a novelty approach to lawn-care chores. If Eleanor wasn’t bringing this up, why was Linda Sue?
The policewoman continued, “If the family checked out, we’d thank them for their time and tell them they’re free to go now.”
Oh, no, I thought. Please. Just say you’d apologize.
“You wouldn’t worry about them suing you for traumatizing their kids?”
Marianne’s face reddened. “If you have problems with this group, Linda Sue, why don’t we talk about it afterward?”
“No, I like the group. It’s fine.” She looked around as if surprised that anyone might have taken her comments the wrong way.
“Good,” Marianne continued, her voice tight with the effort to control it. “Then our time is up. We’ll meet again in two weeks to nominate officers. Maybe we can take up Linda Sue’s questions then.”
Linda Sue stood up and lit a cigarette. “Fat chance,” she said, exhaling. I wondered if she’d seen Marianne’s needlepoint sampler that said, NO SMOKING, LUNGS AT WORK. “Maybe we should go to the porch,” I whispered.
Outside, Linda Sue shook out another cigarette. “Want one?”
The last time I smoked was early in college, hardly a time I remember with great nostalgia, but something compelled me to reach over and take a cigarette. Inhaling gave me a head rush. I felt dizzy and nauseated and drunk all at once. I leaned against the porch railing to steady myself. “Why do you say things like that? Get everyone riled up?”
Lind Sue smiled and caught my eye. I saw it then: She knew exactly the effect her words had and it was all an act—the cereal, the clothes, the way she pretended to care about nothing. “When y
ou’re not married, you can do anything you want,” she said. “It’s fun. You should try it sometime. Pick someone and tell them what you really think.”
I looked up and saw Geoffrey watching us through the sliding-glass doors. I thought about doing what she’d just suggested, walking over to him and saying out loud, I think about you more than I should. I imagine us doing strange things sometimes—buying vegetables together or riding an elevator. I know I shouldn’t but I do. I watched him make a face through the glass door, his hands around his neck, as if to say, I’m dying in here. Let me out. I laughed and waved him over. Good old Geoffrey won’t ostracize Linda Sue for speaking her mind, I thought. He’ll probably like her more.
“Hello, ladies,” he said, walking toward us, nodding. “I’m afraid the paranoia quotient is running a little high in there. I thought maybe I’d get some air before I go home and start pricing handguns.”
I laughed, too loud. An embarrassing bark. Linda Sue looked at me and shook her head. Was it obvious? I wondered. Could everyone see?
“Time for me to go,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe and dropping it between the open slats of the deck. A minute later she was gone, leaving Geoffrey standing there, his hands in his pockets, and me wondering—for the first time—which one of us he’d come outside to talk to.
Later, Geoffrey and I walked home together and he told me that back in Florida people were much more obsessed with self-protection. “Down there, if you don’t have a gun in the house, people think you’re asking for trouble.” He often talked about the old days living in Florida as if it had all been part of a different era—wilder, crazier—where he’d gained his fame and all the problems that came with it. “It was great,” he said the one time I pressed the subject. “But it couldn’t last.” I assumed he meant his own overindulgence—too much drinking and sleeping with the wrong women. Corinne saved him from all that. She was a creature of habit who rose at five, worked until eleven, and taught a full day of classes afterward. But sometimes, I let myself wonder, Would a marriage, embarked on to save him from his own worst impulses, last in the face of his reformation?
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