Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  I stirred and poured, seeing what was coming and wishing I could stop it.

  “But, no, here she calls from God Knows Where, South America, and is big chums with everybody but me. She has some Battle-of-Shiloh gag going with Will, when I’m the one who practically reenacted the Civil War with Knox.” She tore out her words, loud and rasping. “Then she says she’s sending your Katie this money she was saving for Fannin’s miscarried number five, the Gospelette.” She beat her fists on the kitchen table. “But what really took the cake, what really wiped me out, was both of them, these nobodys-come-lately in your life, calling her Edith. I never called her Edith in my entire life. ‘Harriet’s here,’ you said, and she probably said, ‘Who?’ I could have sunk right through the floor on the spot. I mean, at Doll’s there are more pictures of you in that damn album than there are of me. My mom doesn’t even know I ever had another friend; she hardly knew I had a husband. She thinks Birthday Club is one of those things I order over the phone like Potato of the Month or Fifty Designer Day Lilies—”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, slipping the greased glass pan into the oven, setting a timer and sinking into the chair opposite Harriet, “the stew tonight had your August potato, the shepody, in it. A long white potato with a fine flavor.”

  She sulked, “You didn’t happen to mention that.”

  “I didn’t.” I felt myself wish for a cigarette and then bit my lip at the thought. How much harder it must be for Harriet every moment. “I suppose,” I said, “I didn’t want to mention Nolan tonight. The potatoes, his present, seemed to be a present to me; I built the stew around them.”

  “You could have said—” She picked at her nail polish.

  “I should have.” Had we carried on this way in boarding school days? The anger I remembered most clearly was my own. Flashes of white rage that I was cooped up with not even a bedroom of my own, no place that was mine alone. The frustration of never being by myself. Except for the times with Ned on that drafty wood floor, I’d done everything as part of a group, including showering in that vast bathroom of stalls and tubs.

  What Harriet had said about her and Edith was true. My mother did feel closer to Katie and that was a fact. Part of it was because she saw in Katie someone who’d made it the hard way and she related to that. But, more, she kept up with Katie because she was in my life on a daily basis. She was someone whose voice Edith knew on the phone; she was someone in the present. Harriet my mother dismissed as someone I’d known at boarding school, someone on a page she’d turned. The way Bess had known Nolan’s sister when they were horse-crazy girls together at Redfield’s: not in her frame of reference today.

  My mother tended to shed the past as a locust did its shell. Periodically bursting forth into her new projects, her wings green and slick and ready to fly, she thought the past and its people encased your options, held you clinging to that old bark with outgrown arms.

  “My mother,” I said, wanting to be truthful and to deal with what had hurt Harriet, “does not like the past. It seems a baggage she doesn’t want to carry. I think you remind her of old times and she doesn’t wish to be reminded of old times. Whereas your mother, whereas Doll, loves old times. She likes to have that childhood again and again, that daddy who shot the squirrel down in the creek bed. They’re just two different ways of getting to the same fork in the road: old age. Look at them. How many women make it to their eighties in such fine shape?” I stopped. I’d almost said: How many women make it to their eighties? How careful we must be. How much of our language deals with the future.

  Harriet drained her brandy. “I guess I’m feeling rejected,” she said. She leaned forward and let her hair cover her face. “You know?”

  I asked her, “By—?” wanting to let her talk.

  “Who not? Knox, nothing like being rejected posthumously when you can’t carve the guy’s throat out. David, the fact that he didn’t try to ravish me over the game dinner the first time we went out. I’m kidding, but not really. And let’s don’t forget my daughter, although we’ve had enough of that for one visit.”

  I went to the back door, then remembered that Will had taken Ben home for the night. I’d promised to call him if Harriet had any more trouble, but I didn’t think he meant of this nature. I sat back down. “I can see that,” I said.

  Harriet started to speak, choked, started again. “By my body.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That was really cute, that little picture you did. Of my lung and heart. I’m going to show that to my doctor. Or maybe carry it with me, and if any nosy ninnies ask me what’s wrong when I’m coughing up the soles of my feet, I’m going to show it to them.” She looked across the table, her eyes filling. “You drew that because you were worried about me.”

  “I guess I did,” I admitted.

  And then it was time to frost the fudgies.

  “DO YOU THINK ALL men have names for their dicks?” Harriet had scooted down under the covers of the twin bed the way she used to at Pritchard’s, so that only her face was visible. She used to say it was easier to tell secrets if you were just peeking out.

  We’d sat on the stairs with the plate of fudgies, our shoes off, and I’d tried to re-create the forbidden feel of sitting on the floor after lights out, indulging in a chocolate feast. When she’d had her fill and licked her fingers, I sent her upstairs to take what Will had left for her and get herself ready for bed. For our slumber party.

  Winded in some essential way, as if after a marathon, I took a moment before locking up to stand on the front porch in the cool air. Last night had been the dark of the moon, and a faint waxing sliver slipped from behind a cloud. I missed Ben, and felt the need to call him in to bed. I missed Will as well.

  Now Harriet and I were piled up on the high single beds, back in our hot-pink T-shirts with the schoolgirl pictures of us on the front. I had unbraided my hair and left it loose, hanging straight to my shoulders. Harriet had left off her bow and hers fell across her cheeks a shiny gold. We could have been back in school—that was how it felt—sleeping in men’s shirts and our panties, our faces scrubbed, our hair brushed, whispering past our bedtimes.

  “I haven’t had a very large sample,” I answered, glad that she was in good spirits again, wanting to keep my tone light, my answers right.

  “I think they do. I think they all have secret names for their dicks—Charlie, Big Ed, Roscoe.”

  “Richard?”

  We laughed.

  “Do you remember,” Harriet asked, her voice faint over the top of the white spread, “those books we read years ago when we were trying to be good liberated wives? All of us, not just you and me. I mean, women were doing that then. The Ploy of Sex, Hardly Anything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex. One of them—I forget which—said to think of it as if there were three of you in bed: you, him, his thingamabob. A ménage à trois. You, him and—Old Blue?”

  “That’s a dog,” I said.

  And we laughed again.

  “I bet they do. I bet Nolan did. Something he called it to his horseshoe buddies, that you never heard. I bet Knox did, too. I bet he had some name he never told me and never even told his stump-legged lady friend, some name he used to joke around with his golfing chums.”

  “Ringer? Putter?” I was getting silly, straining to sustain the mood.

  “Think about it, Sarah,” she said. “All those years we were married—and if you add them together we had sixty-five married years between us—we never talked about sex to each other, not the nitty-gritty. I mean, we talked about absolutely everything else. I bet I know the kind of toilet paper you use and the details of your dental work—but zip about you and your broad-shouldered North Carolina man in bed. I’m saying if Nolan had a problem, if he couldn’t get it up, or had a prosthesis, or had some weird fetish—like coming on your feet”—she giggled—“I’d have been the last person to know it.”

  I said, “You read about boys who half hang themselves with nooses to get it off. Do y
ou suppose there are women who marry and find out that’s what they’ve got?”

  “And we didn’t even tell the whole truth when we did say something,” Harriet went on. “I bragged, ‘Things are romantic now that we’re in separate rooms.’ I’m sure I told you that a dozen times. When what really happened was that we had started sleeping across the hall from each other and I didn’t know what that meant except that I was fixing up my room like a bordello and putting on my satin scanties—and waiting.”

  I said, “I don’t think women in general talk about sex. I mean, even to themselves. It isn’t a matter of not sharing so much as not—voicing.” I knew that it had taken me years before I’d admitted to myself my anger at Nolan for never pleasuring my body, for never thinking of my need for arousal and satisfaction. I surely wasn’t the only female who tended herself and resented the fact. Women complained about being sex objects—but wasn’t the real problem, I thought, that you weren’t an object at all to them, but an appendage, an extension, something slightly better than their hand to facilitate orgasm? An object is out there: you see it, you wax/tune/adjust/play with/listen to/send messages on/implement/fix/tend it. It doesn’t tend you.

  I began to brush my hair slowly, something I had often done in bed at school. I didn’t want to think about Nolan in that way, not now, not anymore.

  “You’re right,” Harriet agreed, sitting up and propping herself with pillows. “Women don’t talk to other women about sex, period. It’s hammered into us that it’s disloyal. We don’t call each other up after the honeymoon to say, Do you know how many times we did it? Or didn’t do it? We see it as our duty, covering for men, protecting men, not saying anything that would in any way let anybody think their performance wasn’t the best. Men don’t want to share their dicks with you, that’s the truth, because they feel vulnerable; you might pass judgment on their wienies. I mean, have you ever once asked Famous Edith about Spider Sex?”

  “I have never asked her about sex, no. Since my dad died, I don’t have a clue about her private life.…” I said, thinking that the same thing applied to my sister, Bess, for that matter. Perhaps with family members you are especially reticent.

  “You think I knew what Doll and Nat did under the covers? Except that Mom seemed mighty glad to get out from under them.” She made a face.

  “We’ll never know,” I said, seeing that the breakup still bothered her. It was a shame about Nat and Doll. She was such a generous, ample woman in several senses, and he would have made someone a fine lover, observant, good with his hands, his head always buzzing along trying to figure out how things worked. Something about them reminded me of Nolan and me, despite my resolve not to think of him: their going from good to bad, from helpful to hurtful, and not knowing when or how it happened.

  Harriet asked, “You think most women our age still want it?”

  “Most women? Any age? I don’t know,” I told her. “You read about how they say, Hurrah, it’s over. Or you hear men going on as if they’ve tried to get some for years or to warm her up or that they can’t get enough. But none of that fits my observation.” Or my experience, it would have been more accurate to say. I had the conviction that most women wanted a lot more sex than they got, that most women would be limitless in their enthusiasm if they had the opportunity.

  Harriet began to cough, and put another pillow behind her back. “Damn. Damn,” she said, holding herself and rocking while I brought her a glass of water and two more of Will’s pills. When she’d stopped, she pulled up the covers and said, “We should have had a half dozen years of wild affairs before we got married. Boys did that back then, or pretended they did.”

  I stayed sitting on the edge of my bed, waiting to see if she was all right. After a minute, deciding she was, I nodded. “Back in our day you were fast if you were kissing two boys at the same time.”

  “Do I remember.” Harriet rolled her eyes. “It was considered fickle not to go steady. It was absolutely promiscuous to see three Stus at once. And if you let more than one of them unhook your bra, you practically had to wear a scarlet letter.” She drew one on her T-shirt.

  I could see the Harriet of those days so clearly in my mind: popular, pretty, in her saddle shoes and ponytail, talking about how some cadet had wanted to get his hands in her panties, how he’d wanted to feel her treasure. How she’d let him French-kiss her twice but that was all.

  “Then’s when it starts,” she said, bending forward as if to make her point, “when they begin to train us not to get in any situation where we can compare them. Making sure we won’t ever talk about who is the best kisser, or compare whose Jimbo is the longest.”

  I relaxed and leaned back on my own stack of pillows. She was looking fine, her color good. She was enjoying our talk. “I knew a man who called his Henry Adams,” I said slyly. (“You’re agitating my Henry Adams, Cooper,” Ned had said.)

  Harriet sat bolt upright. “Who? Tell. Not Nolan Rankin. No way. He could not possibly have had a Henry Adams. A Rambo, maybe, a Lone Ranger. But not a Henry Adams. Who? You don’t mean the old doctor? I don’t believe this, you have to tell. Whisper it, the way we used to, you know, the way we’d pretend that whispering didn’t count?”

  I’d sworn never to tell, not ever, even on my death bed. “Swear in blood,” I’d said to Ned, ready to open a vein if he asked.

  “Never say never,” he’d told me. “Your lips are sealed for forty years.”

  Young, black-haired, consumptive, kindly Ned had looked down the road forty years and that had seemed an eternity then, a lifetime. Now we were almost there. I hoped he was still around somewhere, getting ready to confess also. To his trustworthy wife of thirty years, or, more likely, to some youngish post-doc who had lured him to her papered rooms. I wished him well, and, in my mind, freed him to tell. What possible difference could it make after all this time? What harm could it do?

  Harriet wanted some secret, some confidence, that no one else had had, not Katie or Bess or my children or my mother. Not even Will, who was, as I was, content to have what we had now and not fret over who’d been where before.

  What could it matter now to tell?

  “Do you remember,” I asked Harriet, in a teasing tone, “our history teacher, junior year? The one who left at the end of the spring term to go back for his Ph.D.?”

  Titillated, she sucked in her breath. “The one who looked like Heathcliff?”

  “That one. He’s the one.”

  She pulled up her knees and hugged them. “Really? Mr. Brown? How did you know? You eavesdropped on him? You read his letters? You caught him with someone? Oh, tell me, Sarah.” She swung her feet out of the covers, toes painted, ready to climb into my bed for every whispered detail.

  I shook my head. I leaned back against the pile of pillows, arms behind my head, just the way I’d done at school. “I heard it from the horse’s mouth.”

  “He told you that?”

  I smiled. Would that sex had been that way for nearly forty years. Enough, I thought, it was again with Will. “He showed me.”

  “He did what?” Harriet gasped. “Exposed himself? Mr. Brown? I don’t believe it. We used to say he must be dying of tuberculosis, and when he didn’t come back we pretended he’d gone to a sanatorium. You remember?” Her voice higher, squeaking slightly with excitement, she sounded no more than fifteen.

  What I could never have told in those old days, I told now. “We were lovers, Mr. Brown and I. Ned.”

  Harriet slid till her feet touched the floor. She stood very still between the two beds. Her impulse to climb onto my bed to hear the juicy news had stopped. She stared at me. “Did Nolan know?”

  “Not who, just that.” I felt suddenly on the defensive. “I was afraid he could tell I wasn’t a virgin; in those days we thought it was so obvious. Besides, he had to know I was on birth control already.”

  “When did you tell him? On your wedding night? Before? I’m going to absolutely die of shock.” She climbed back on the side
of her bed and sat looking at me, her legs hanging down.

  “I told him the summer after Ned left, before my senior year. Nolan and I met then, when his family came to visit mine. Our sisters were friends from Redfield Academy.” I made a gesture that meant she knew all that.

  “You and Nolan had sex? Is that what you’re saying? When you came back to school in the fall, you’d had sex with Nolan?”

  “In those days,” I said, “it was such a deep dark secret—” I was pleading silently for her not to be angry.

  “I can’t believe it.” Her voice had become a hoarse whisper. Her face had grown pale and silent tears rolled down her cheeks. “You’d had two lovers by the time you got out of Pritchard’s, you, who weren’t even interested in boys, and I haven’t had one yet. Stupid me. The last to know. Dumb me, thinking that you were just chums with that old medic when he’d been sleeping in this very room. You’ve probably been lovers with him, too, since the day you met. How many more?” She ground her fists in her eyes.

  “No, there was no one while I was married—”

  She turned her back on me, her shoulders hunched, her breathing labored. “I’ve been on the outside of everybody’s life all along, haven’t I? I could understand Knox—a man doesn’t tell his wife he’s cheating on her. But Pammy—to tell him about her man, to know about her daddy’s woman. I thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen to me in my whole entire life.”

  I sat on the bed, not knowing what to say. Or, rather, how to undo what I’d said.

  Harriet walked around, her shoulders thrust back, her hands on her hips. “I thought at least you, you, were someone I knew. We always did everything together. Every step of the way. Boarding school, our weddings, our babies, even losing our men. All of it.” She sobbed. “I thought we were the longest-running buddy movie in history.”

  “Please, I’m so sorry.” I pressed my palms on my knees. What could I say?