Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  I asked, “What would you like? A glass of wine, a little more gin? Or something sweet?” I stooped to pick up our plates, not wanting to remark on the fact that Harriet’s lunch was almost untouched.

  “Something chocolate?”

  I brought out what I had, a Hershey’s chocolate almond bar. “I didn’t have time to make anything. This is from the airport,” I told her.

  “Yum,” Harriet said. “Aren’t you an angel. The best I can ever get from Mom is chocolate sauce on top of whatever she’s serving. Last week it was tapioca. Really. Sauce with glue: Mom’s specialty.”

  What I heard as she complained was that she had been to Doll’s a lot recently—that was the implication—with or without her handsome young David. Perhaps she wanted to go back to a time when her mother had worried over her; perhaps she felt that only her mother would know whether this was really something to fear or not. “Anything Doll fixed was fine with me,” I said.

  “So, Fan lost this one—baby Revelations.”

  “Yes. I think she was worn out.”

  “There’s no book named for a woman in the New Testament. Did you know that? The Gospel Quartet and Salome? Ruth? Esther?”

  I was tired of the joking about my grandsons’ names. “Rankin, she was going to call it.”

  “For her daddy, I remember. At least she wanted to see you when she was in trouble.”

  “She wanted me to be sorry,” I said. “To admit it was a loss for her.” I sighed. “I don’t know how well I did, but I went anyway.” I made a gesture with my hands, indicating that I was sorry it had meant postponing Harriet’s trip.

  “I guess that’s why I got mad. Because she asked for you. I finally got the story on why my daughter decided not to have children in the foreseeable future. Apparently I am the last to know.”

  I watched her break off squares of chocolate and melt them on her tongue. We always got around to daughters, I thought, sooner or later. And wondered if our daughters got around to us, with their friends. How hard both our girls had worked not to repeat the lives of their mothers and grandmothers. Fannin acting out of what she perceived it cost women—Edith, me—to leave home, to work; Pammy, out of what she judged it cost the women in her life—Doll, Harriet—to stay at home and not to work.

  “Good or bad?” I asked, wondering if Pammy had made partner, and also wondering what if anything Harriet would have considered reason enough not to have children.

  “What do you think?” She crossed her slim legs out in front of her and finished the last bite of almond Hershey. “I couldn’t bear to tell you on the phone, particularly after you told me about Fan and the lost lamb. I figured we’d be grieving in different directions. You know. But she chopped me with the ultimate ax Wednesday. I’d finished my treatments and got my strength back. I’d had my eye tuck. I thought I was looking pretty fine, and was up to standing the bombardment of my children, a worse beam, as we know well, than what the labs hand out. I’d survived the Midsummer Night’s Party and finding myself about to pull a gun, and I was on my way to see you. I felt ready to handle whatever they could dish out.

  “We were going to have dinner, paid for by me, needless to say, at The Bayou, their favorite small, intime cafe not remotely accessible off the loop or the interstate. So I’d braved the five o’clock plague of lotus-eaters in their Japanese cars bumper to bumper. When I arrived, there was Pammy, early, checking her watch, with no sign of her brother, late as usual.”

  I looked out across the deep oak-shaded yard. It felt strange to be out here in the afternoon. I felt I should be shelling peas, as my grandmother had done. “I’m listening,” I told my friend. Women must have sat here and talked about their children since the early days of the spa.

  “We were at the table.” She was talking in spurts, short of breath. “We’d ordered our summer greens and a bit of fish with puree of something; we weren’t going to wait for Dwayne. We weren’t saying a word.”

  I hadn’t seen Pammy in years. Not since she became a lawyer, really. Surely she was shaken by her dad’s death; they were very close, or seemed to be to someone on the outside. It was hard to think of her in the way Harriet described. She’d been a total charmer: Miss Congeniality and Best All Around at summer camp, Class Favorite every year in school. She’d been everybody’s favorite. When she was small and they came to visit as a family, she’d coax Nolan into taking her on his lap; she’d call him Fan’s Man right to his face. She used to tell me I was the best cook in the world, and then whisper to her mother that Aunt Sarah, as she called me, wasn’t “near as pretty as you, Mom.” She had those big dimples and the square jaw of her daddy, and that same thousand-watt smile, which she turned on everyone.

  She used to charm circles around her big brother’s friends, her daddy’s friends, too, or so Harriet said. When she graduated, she’d turned down Harriet’s offer to go away to school, saying as far back as I could remember, certainly as far back as sixth grade, that she was going to be a Texas lawyer so she would have to go to school in Texas. An Outstanding Student and Bluebonnet Belle at the university, she had refused to get pinned or engaged, being everybody’s prize date but nobody’s catch. That was about the time, when her senior year came and went with no ring on her finger, that she and Harriet began to be at odds. She was small-boned like her dad, with his brown eyes and hair, but her mother’s creamy skin. And legs. A single-minded ambition behind an easygoing style. But sitting at the table not speaking? Being unresponsive? It didn’t fit the old Pammy, the Pammy Calhoun I had known.

  “By the time Dwayne joined us,” Harriet was saying, “I felt tomahawked. Scalped. Tied to the wagon. Pammy and I had been sitting in stony silence; even our small talk had blown out to the Gulf. Dwayne, being Dwayne, didn’t seem to notice. He was just there, looking scrawny and undernourished in some basic way. And I was thinking, as we do, Is it my fault?

  “He started right in, as usual, about how I ought to have a computer. And for once, I didn’t even mind. He went on and on about hard drive and ram, and about slots and floppies, and the more he talked, the more sexual it sounded. I almost had to laugh; he sounded just like some boy entering puberty. Do they know how it sounds when they use those terms? He was all excited because Apple had a new division called ‘personal interactive electronics’—do I have that right?—which they were calling Apple PIE. ‘Get it, Mom?’ he said.”

  I remembered Dwayne as a boy, and Harriet was right, he had been scrawny, tense but also inventive, talky and full of ideas. I’d always thought he had his granddad’s mind. Electronics came easily to him, in whole chunks, in concepts that translated up and down into the smallest details. I used to think he’d have been at home back in the Twenties, building that super-heterodyne radio receiver, grounding it to the garage’s water pipes, getting it completed in time for the first-ever Rose Bowl broadcast. Or with the modern equivalent: somebody in his own garage tinkering with microchips and daydreaming while he designed. He would have done well to marry an engineer, some female computer whiz herself who thought scrawny guys with horn-rims were cool. But trapped in the financial set, without his daddy’s womanizing charm, he was a fish out of water. Another version of the sad saga of boys and their fathers.

  As if reading my mind, Harriet said, “I like to blame it on Knox, them never having two consecutive words to say to one another, even though they were both in money. And whether you call it banking, investments, brokering, bond trading, you’re still talking about spending your life making money out of money. You’re not even spinning flax into gold like in the old stories; you’re just spinning gold into gold.” She had been talking in jerks and now stopped, held back a cough and washed down another pill. “Maybe it’s not his fault,” she continued after a minute, “maybe it’s mine.” She wrapped her arms around her pink T-shirt. “How can you not take it personally when you have two children in their thirties and neither one is married?”

  “Maybe that’s not the worst thing,” I suggested. I coul
d remember Edith’s dismay at my going with Nolan all through school, at my marrying him forthwith upon graduation. What hopes had she had for me? What reservations about the life I was entering into? How we do plunge headlong into our lives without giving a thought to our elders. We did; ours had.

  “No fair,” Harriet said, making a bitter laugh. “You’re stealing my punch line.” She wadded up the Hershey wrapper and tossed it over the porch rail. “Anyway, that was the moment Pammy picked. Picture her in those horrid worker’s shoes and a casket-black dress almost to her ankles, with her hair chopped off shorter than her brother’s. A onetime Bluebonnet Belle, this daughter of mine. She leaned forward and said in her now nearly inaudible voice, ‘I had lunch with Madge yesterday, Mom. I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t think it mattered now, since Daddy’s dead and she’s moved to Houston and all.’

  “It was like one of those movies where a platform in the floor falls away and you see someone drop right out of sight into the dungeon. That was me. Me, who had barely put two and two together over the weekend. I asked her, ‘Did you call her or did she call you?’ ‘What difference does that make?’ she asked. She might as well have driven a butcher knife through my—chest.” Tears sprang to Harriet’s eyes. She grasped the arms of the rocker and sucked in air.

  I took away the iced tea glass I’d brought with the candy bar and fetched her another gin and juice.

  “And then, Sarah, I knew. I knew. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before. I’d gone over every single reason in the universe why a girl of thirty as pretty as she is, as smart, didn’t have a boyfriend and wasn’t even interested in finding one. I’d even—don’t laugh, please—wondered if maybe she didn’t like men. I had; I had even wondered that. And never once had I thought she might be carrying on with someone who already had a wife and more than likely children. ‘Pammy, are you seeing a married man?’ I asked her, right there in front of her brother and his hard drive. ‘What if I am?’ she said to me, bold as you please.”

  I felt my heart go out to both of them. To my old friend, but to her daughter also. What was it with these girls of ours that they had to tear themselves to pieces one way or another? In their effort to be grown-up and better at it than their mothers. “Did she talk about him?”

  “Not who he was, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t care. I don’t care about that at all; it doesn’t matter. She is obviously in love with the impossibility of him, the inevitable destruction of going with him. What was there for me to ask or her to tell?” Harriet leaned her head back and drained her glass. “What I did ask, all I wanted to know, was, ‘Did your dad tell you about Madge? Did he know about your—man?’ ‘I don’t have to answer that,’ she said. ‘Yes, you do, Pammy,’ I told her. ‘Yes, you do.’

  “Then we all had mousse au chocolat, at five times what it was worth, I picked up the bill and we all climbed into our separate cars. That’s Houston: a city of two million and every single person has a car.” She put on her heels and held on to her knees with both hands. “I don’t think Pammy and I will ever mend this.”

  “I’m sorry.…” I said, and I was. It was too painful to think about, this new estrangement at which families were so skilled. Part of me was wishing I wasn’t here on my porch but was wandering around one of the old historic homes in Clemson or Pendleton. What could I say to Harriet? The fault lay in the institution, not in us. Marriage was a fence that invited leaping. How else could people agree to being penned?

  With a groan, Harriet asked, “What on earth could we have done to prepare for having children?”

  WITH GREAT PLEASURE I had invited the three of them, those friends closest to me, to my table for supper. And although all three had been at my home many times through the course of many years, it seemed to me a first in some way with each of them.

  Harriet was here for the first time without my having a family or husband to juggle. Without my having to say good night to her, in her robe, in the hall, settle her (or, in the early years, her and her children or her and Knox) and close the door on whatever room Nolan and I were sharing when company was in the house. I could recall the strain of our lying there in the dark, in one bed and later in two, exchanging heated words—Nolan having had a great deal to drink and needing to comment on Harriet, how she talked too much or to inquire how long she was staying this time. Words that caused the tightening in the stomach which went with the divided loyalties of a married woman’s life: husband and children, husband and friends.

  Will, too, had been at our house as often, for almost as long as she, but in a different context. There was the strain of keeping us dog-friends only, with an occasional off-the-record comment, the unveiling of some private part of our lives. My revealing the confining nature of the married state; his confessing that he was close to trying it again. But with us both aware at all times that he was a guest in Nolan’s home, invited at Nolan’s behest; that he was Nolan’s doctor.

  The greatest joy was in having Katie at what was now my house for a company meal. Katie, who had helped me prepare for more than a dozen parties but who had never attended one at my home before.

  Inviting her had been a bitter point between Nolan and me.

  “How can I not have my partner?” I’d asked him.

  “This is in no way racist, Sarah,” he’d responded, on the defensive, “not with today’s tricolored bank employees. You can hardly say I’m prejudiced. But right there’s the key word: employee. This is a party for our friends, for clients.”

  “Katie Pegues is not an employee,” I’d countered, deeply angry. “Our Rooms account is with your bank; half of our clients are yours as well.”

  “No and no,” he said. “For the people who remember—we’re talking long memories here—she used to be an employee here. I’m talking maid. Do her a favor, your friend, okay? Do her a favor so some drunk vice-president doesn’t hand her his empty glass, okay?” He’d been proud of that line of reasoning—standing knotting his rep tie, checking his Swiss watch. It was to spare Katie. Katie, whom he would not have recognized if he’d seen her on the street.

  It did no good to say she’d never been a maid, she’d been a party service. Did he ask the bank caterers to come? Did I include the German woman who cooked for parties? He would not budge.

  In the long run, it had had one good result. Katie and I had got into the habit, which we liked immensely, of having all our clients for a sherry party at the shop on the day after Christmas. It was a way of offering them someplace to go after they’d showed off their newly papered rooms in their refurbished homes to all their kith and kin. After they’d hung all the holly and evergreens, and filled all their kitchens with food, they were ready to get together with Sarah and Katie at Rooms of One’s Own, for this one evening truly a room of their own, and let down their hair.

  Sometimes literally. One woman had done it the first year: Jameson, who wore her hair in a large, tight bun, was never without her three strands of pearls, and who came all the way from Athens, Georgia. She’d come with her graying hair long and loose, held back with two old tortoiseshell combs that had been her mother’s. She’d also come in jeans and a heavy cable-knit gray sweater. “You said to let down our hair,” she’d reminded us, looking around at the mostly Carolina people who were there. “What’s with this getting all dressed up?”

  After that year, a number of other women had done the same, those with short hair wearing it wash-and-wear, not straight from the salon all poked and sprayed. The second year, I had let mine down, too, unbraided it and worn barrettes the way I’d done as a girl. That had pleased them, the clients, seeing me off duty, informal. It had freed them to be comfortable, commenting on Katie’s hair, the changes she’d gone through, the scalp-tight cut, the cornrows, now the current rooster-comb style. What was more intimate for women than hair?

  And of course shoes. I had decided earlier today before our lunch, watching Harriet stop to look at the old collection of salesman’s samples, that they woul
d go nicely in the shop. I could set up a table in front of the wall of house photos. Women in their homes; women in their shoes. Those little enclosures, those mobile homes.

  The next year Jameson had showed up in walking shoes. And by this past Christmas—something of a blur for me, with Nolan going downhill—they’d all come in serious shoes. I’d worn my dog-walking shoes; Katie her Doc Martens. Some had paid designer prices, some had bought theirs in the boys’ department at Sears, and some from athletic shoe outlets. If it hadn’t been for Harriet’s sore feelings about Pammy, when she first mentioned her daughter’s awful “killer shoes,” I would have said that seemed to me to speak well for the law firm’s attitude.

  Getting ready for my company, I’d braided my hair loosely and left the plait hanging down. I’d put on a long blue gored skirt which I liked a lot, two smudged shades of smoky blue, a V-necked blouse and sandals. I felt festive; blessed because of the evening ahead. I reddened my cheeks and lips, realizing that I could have my friends over every week if I liked. On the spur of the moment. For great formal banquets. For fresh peaches on the front porch. At least I could have Katie and Will, who were already in my life every day. What a marvel that would be: to meld the parts of my life. Home, work, sex, friendship. How marriage did compartmentalize. How it did foster gender-distinct, function-distinct, affection-distinct divisions. And to what end? I darkened my brows. To perpetuate itself.

  I could have done well back in farming days, running commercial orchards—all the hands pruning and feeding, picking and marketing, family members and hands sitting down to meals together, at the groaning board, for green beans and pork, cornbread and biscuits, cobblers and vats of sun-made tea. But why did I have to think of that as something I had forgone, that belonged to a time past? Why not think of it as a glimpse of my future? I liked that idea: seeing myself the age of my mother now, waxing enthusiastic, as Edith did, about the possibilities of the seventies, declaring it a good decade for a woman. Me supervising my fruit trees, looking over acres of them, perhaps on that good climbing land north toward the lakes. Me managing Cooper Crops.