“Tell me the truth, now,” Patsy said loudly, in her stern, motherly way. “Were you even in love with Rudy Fisch?”
“Of course.” She didn’t want to hear again what a loser Rudy was. She thought maybe if she kept her answers short, Patsy would grow bored and eventually stop.
“See? I couldn’t even tell. Okay, so what did you love about him?”
“I don’t know. He made me laugh.”
“He made you laugh,” Patsy repeated flatly. “He was squirrely, and short, and needy. But he made you laugh.”
“You don’t understand. I really love to laugh. Anyway, he wasn’t so short.”
“What else?”
Pru thought for a moment. What she wanted to say—that she never worried about him leaving her—seemed ridiculous now, in light of his doing exactly that. “It just made a lot of sense,” she said finally. “That’s all.”
“You are all this,” Patsy said, circling Pru’s head with her palm. “And no this,” indicating Pru’s torso.
“Oh, I’m plenty of that,” Pru said. Patsy didn’t have to do a thing to keep slender, but Pru didn’t find it that easy to stay at her ideal weight. It was easier without Rudy. Even though he was always dieting, they spent a good deal of their time together focused on food. What to eat, what not to eat, where to eat. Another bad sign, she thought. How hadn’t she noticed this before?
“You can’t think about love, Prudy,” Patsy was saying. “You think too much. You probably made a list to help you decide if you were in love with him or not.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Pru was startled. Was she really so predictable?
“You wouldn’t need it, if you’d learn to listen to your body. The body knows. Your body decides these things, not your head. Your toes tell you when you’re in love. Your pelvic floor tells you.”
“A little louder?” Pru said. The man in front of them had turned his head partway around.
Patsy ignored her. “You have to learn to go with your gut. Why, within two minutes of meeting a guy, I can tell you if I’m going to go to bed with him, fall in love with him, or have nothing to do with him.”
The man in front of them turned around fully now, to look at Patsy. Pru saw a boyish face, a sly grin. Patsy stared right back at him.
“Hello,” he said pleasantly. “Let me know when you decide what you’re going to do with me, okay?”
“It hasn’t been two minutes yet, has it?” said Patsy, archly.
The man looked at his watch. “I can wait.”
“Just because I know doesn’t mean I’m going to tell you,” said Patsy.
Pru saw plenty of guys around D.C. like this one—handsome, well-dressed, confident. It was a type she particularly didn’t like, the Ivy League frat boy with thick hair and good connections. No doubt he’d been handed a position in one of the big law firms by one of his daddy’s friends. She didn’t think he’d be Patsy’s type, either. She couldn’t see one single tattoo, for example.
The man turned to look at Pru, too, and she wondered whether he saw what she saw, reflected back in the Metro car’s window: the same face in two vastly different orientations. Pru’s stark and unframed because her hair, as usual, was pulled back in a smooth ponytail; Patsy’s surrounded by the wisps and tendrils escaping a knot that was secured with chopsticks. Pru’s face smooth and bland, unadorned; Patsy’s punctuated by the diamond stud that drew attention to her pretty nose.
The man was now telling Patsy that she looked like Heather Graham, and before Pru knew it, they were having a full-blown conversation about the state of independent filmmaking. Pru watched their reflections in the window, thinking about what Patsy had said about her gut. She didn’t really know what that meant. Her gut wasn’t really something she consulted for reliable information. More often than not, her body disappointed her, with its bulges, its smells, its refusal to conform to the way she saw herself. It was the dumber, ruder, embarrassing part of her. With its desires, its fears, its needs, her body was hardly a source of trustworthy information.
When they reached Foggy Bottom station, Pru watched as a young man stood to give his seat to a young woman struggling with a baby stroller. Ever since the encounter with her evil pregnant doppelgänger, as McKay called the woman, Pru had been seeing babies everywhere she went. There were babies riding in strollers on Columbia Road, trundling on stout legs in the little park next to her building, nursing in the café where she met Fiona for coffee. It made her think of a line from the book she’d read to Annali so many times that she had it memorized by now: Fat babies, thin babies, small babies, tall babies, winter and spring babies, summer and fall babies. Everywhere babies! Even the celebrities had babies, as she saw from the tabloids at the checkout line at Safeway. As if they were as easily obtained as the ubiquitous Kate Spade handbag.
Patsy and the man were still chatting away. Well, they’d lose him at the next stop. After shopping, she’d take Patsy to the upstairs restaurant they liked, the one that overlooked H Street, and they’d look at the lights of Chinatown and drink mai tais. Then on Saturday they’d hit the Smithsonian museums. They’d have to get there early, since she’d heard there were lines for the de Kooning show at the National Gallery of Art. Saturday night, they’d have dinner at City and see what was playing at the Uptown; and, on Sunday, a long, chatty breakfast with McKay and Bill someplace in Dupont Circle, before Patsy’s flight home. Before they’d gotten off the train, Patsy had given her number to the man in front of her and Pru was making a mental note to call ahead for brunch reservations.
THE NEXT DAY, PATSY CAME HOME FROM HER RUN AND announced that she was having dinner that evening with the guy from the train. Jacob, she was calling him now.
Pru was lying on the couch, headachy and blue. Patsy stood over her, grinning and panting from her run. Right there was the difference between being thirty-six and thirty-two, Pru thought. Patsy seemed to be in about one mai tai better shape than herself.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Patsy said.
Pru didn’t answer. Well, of course she minded. They hadn’t made it to the de Kooning exhibit that morning, and now it wasn’t looking good for the Uptown. And what was Patsy doing, dating in her town? She followed Patsy into the bedroom.
“What do you even know about this guy, Pats? I have to say, I’m surprised. He seems so not your type.”
Patsy was rooting through the “dressy” side of Pru’s closet. Pru hadn’t opened that side of the closet in a long time. Watching Patsy flip through her clothes made her jealous and possessive. Not that one, she kept thinking. Keep flipping, missy.
“He’s a doctor, at GW Emergency, he said. See? I bothered to find that out.” She held up Pru’s best dress, a light-brown silk with a cornflower-blue print. It was her only designer dress, a Marc Jacobs that she’d gotten on eBay. “This here?” she said. It was sweet and feminine and, Pru had to admit, perfect for Patsy. It would provide interesting contrast to the nose ring and the dreads.
“What am I supposed to do while you’re out?” she said, but Patsy had already disappeared into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.
Pru poured herself a glass of wine, feeling rather petulant about this turn of events. She could hear Patsy singing in the shower, The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, the gays on the bus go swish, swish, swish. Pru drank her wine and watched the rain falling outside. The days were getting shorter, she realized. Well, thank goodness. Fewer daylight hours to get through.
She felt shy when Patsy’s date came to the door, and she withdrew to watch them from the other side of the living room, in the bay window seat, with the new pile of blue and lavender silk pillows that she’d bought to match the walls. Jacob didn’t hide his admiration of Patsy, who beamed with pleasure.
Everything was right there, in their full, open smiles.
They were like children at the circus, so openly happy and excited. It was a very different and strange way of doing things, from Pru’s point
of view. She was used to a style of dating that was more like buying a used car. Any outward show of eagerness only put you at a disadvantage, when it came time for negotiations. Pru felt jealous, and annoyed at herself for feeling jealous. For heaven’s sake, Patsy’s last date in Akron had taken her to the Olive Garden, where he’d eaten three baskets of “never-ending breadsticks” before his pasta entree, according to Patsy.
Pru suddenly wanted to go to them, to shake Jacob’s hand and kiss Patsy. She wanted to say “Have a good time!” and see them to the elevator. She wanted them to insist that she come along, too. But Jacob was helping Patsy on with Pru’s good raincoat, and they were already insulated in the cocoon of their date. Pru stayed where she was and waved to them from the living room, as if from the other side of an airport security gate.
SHORTLY AFTER PATSY LEFT, THEIR MOTHER, NADINE, called.
Just hearing Nadine’s voice brought to mind her soft, freckled hands, her broad shoulders, her devotion to the kinds of outmoded products you could get only through the Vermont Country Store catalogue: pastilles and peanut chews, Silver Fox shampoo and Lotil hand cream, Lanz of Salzburg nightgowns and loose face powder and Tangee lipstick, the “secret of beautiful women for over seventy years . . . the orange lipstick that goes on clear and transforms into the perfect shade for you!”
“Is Patsy there? Annali really wants to say good night to her mommy.”
Pru thought perhaps she shouldn’t say that Patsy was out with someone she’d picked up on the train, so she hedged.
“She just ran out for food,” she said, trying to lie as little as possible. “How long will Annali be up?”
“Not long,” said her mother. “Are you girls having fun? What are you doing?”
“Nothing much. We’re being low-key tonight.”
“Make sure Patsy has a good time,” Nadine said. “She really deserves a little fun.”
“Yeah, it’s hard making sure Patsy has a good time,” said Pru, dryly.
Her mother chuckled, and said, “Well . . .”
Her response to almost anything these days seemed to be a low chuckle, followed by a long, “Well . . .” that never went anywhere. There was a vagueness about her, since Leonard’s death. As though she couldn’t quite remember what she was doing at any given moment. Except when she played Scrabble, which she did every night with an online group. She won consistently, skunking her opponents with twice as many points. Pru figured that her mother must be in good mental shape, if she could keep winning like that. Nadine and Leonard had been older than her friends’ parents, almost grandparently by the time Pru entered high school. Still, her father’s death, at seventy-eight, had taken them all by surprise, and Pru couldn’t help feeling anxious over her mother’s odd new behaviors.
“How are you, Mom?” said Pru, pointedly.
“Me? Just fine. I had a four-hundred-point game the other day. Cleaned Maudie’s clock. One of my best.”
“Have you called any of those people about the basement?”
“Just a minute,” Nadine said. Pru heard her cover up the phone and say to Annali, “Find your hat, pumpkin. Then it’s bedtime.” Then, back to Pru: “What people, hon?”
“To come and clean out the basement. I left you some numbers to call, remember?”
Her mother sighed. “No. I don’t know where I put it, now. I’m sure it’s here somewhere . . .”
Exasperation rose in Pru’s chest. She’d left the list with her mother months ago, tacked up on the bulletin board in the kitchen. It had been more than a year since Leonard had died, but the basement was still full of his things. He’d liked to collect useless antiquities: broken clocks, pocket watches, old black telephones, manual typewriters that typed in script. It was the same impulse that had inspired in him his daughters’ antiquarian names, Prudence and Patience. After he’d discovered eBay, during the last year of his life, the stuff had multiplied exponentially. There were packages from Florida and Minnesota that he’d never opened. It was nothing you’d make any money from, and Nadine couldn’t bear to just toss it all in the trash. Pru made a mental note to find the list, the next time she was home, and moved on to the next topic.
“Well, did you ask Mrs. Kovaks about selling the house?”
“Oh, Pru. I’m not ready to leave here yet. Not with Patsy and Annali just down the street.”
That was always the reason Nadine gave. Pru wished she lived closer, so she could help Nadine with some of these things. Patsy, of course, was there every day for dinner, and could easily be helping. But it didn’t seem to bother her in the least that the house was losing whatever value it might still possess while her mother read The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary and ignored the unmoving disaster in the basement, the crumbling roof, the clogged radiators.
“And what about your health?” Pru asked. It was an obligatory question; she knew she would never get any other answer than the one she got:
“Fine, fine.”
“Are you going to confession?”
“Oh, yes,” her mother said, with interest. “Are you?”
“I’m not actually a Catholic,” Pru said.
“Oh, that’s right,” her mother said. “I keep forgetting. Why did I let your father talk me into that, I wonder? Confession’s a wonderful thing.”
“What do you even have to confess?” Pru asked, with a smile. “Tell me. I really want to know. Cleaning Maudie’s clock?”
“Oh,” said her mother. “This and that. My life isn’t as exciting as you girls’.”
“My life isn’t exciting, Mom.”
There was silence.
Then Nadine chuckled. “Well . . .” She heard Annali in the background, beginning to fuss.
“Well, what, Mom?” she pressed. Maybe her mother was getting ready to tell her something about herself, something Pru didn’t know, that would explain how she’d ended up alone on a Saturday night, again, jobless, loveless, and hungover. She held her breath, waiting.
“Hon, I better get our Peachy off to bed.”
“Okay. I wish you were here with us, Mom.”
“Oh, me too, honey. Me too. Call us in the morning, all right?”
PHAN, AT THE VIDEO STORE, WAS WEARING A 1980S Journey T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, when Pru came in later that night for a DVD to watch on her laptop. The hair was still green. He smiled at her, and Pru wondered what it would be like to sleep with him. Since the breakup, she’d begun to do that more than was normal, she felt. Anyone she looked at, she wondered what they’d be like in the sack. The driver of the 42 bus. Her neighbors. Men in the elevator. The silent woman behind the counter at the souvlaki place. Apparently, her loneliness knew no bounds, had no preferences as to gender or age or attractiveness. It was loneliness that could unhinge you quicker than anything, she was beginning to think.
Coming out of the video store, she almost ran straight into the man who had helped her ditch the TV. John Owen, she remembered. He was again wearing chef’s pants, splattered with grease, and his hair was messed up.
“Hi, Prudence,” he said. He looked tired, and the smile he gave her was rather lifeless.
She felt some instinct to hurry away. She was still embarrassed about the night she’d met him.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” John Owen said, falling into step with her. “I sort of thought you’d show up at the café.”
“The café?” she said.
“The Kozy Korner,” he said, gesturing down the street. “It’s my place.”
The divey eggs-and-coffee place. She’d sometimes stopped in there for a coffee on her way to the Metro station, back when she had a job. “Oh, that’s how I know you. So you’re the guy who saved us from Starbucks?”
“With my very last dime,” he said. “And I’d do it again.”
“Listen,” she said, “I am so sorry about the other night. I’m embarrassed, really.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be. How have you been?”
“Oh, you know,” she
said. “I’m getting really good at pool.”
“You play pool?”
“No,” she said. “I mean yes, but I just meant . . .”
“Ah,” he said, apparently not even listening to her. “So what happened that night?”
She’d like to have said something funny. But she couldn’t think of anything, and clearly he wasn’t the jokey type. “My boyfriend broke up with me.”
He nodded. “That part, I got. It was just that you said you didn’t love him very much. I was wondering why you were so upset, if you didn’t.”
“Well, I’d just lost my job, too. I just can’t figure out where everything went wrong. It seemed like it was all going along according to plan. Then, kaplooey.”
“I know kaplooey,” he said. He held up three videos. “Any idea why a happily married woman would rent these?”
She was a little afraid of seeing pornographic titles, something bizarre and relationship-ending. Instead, they were Shirley Valentine , The Hours, and A Doll’s House. The common theme being: women desperately unhappy in their horrible, dying marriages.
“Your wife’s?”
“I believe so. Yes. I mean, I knew she was unhappy, or she wouldn’t have left me, would she?”
“I’m sorry—I’m confused . . .”
“Oh, sorry. First, she left me. Then I found these in the drawer of her bedside table. It’s funny, I have never in my life looked in her bedside table. I wouldn’t dream of it, you know, and why would I? Not that it’s that private, but it was hers. So the other night I’m lying in bed and I think, why not? She’s gone, and it’s all mine now, right? So I just went through all her stuff. These were all I found, of course. Not that I was even looking for anything. It was just for the sake of it, do you know what I mean?”
“I—” She hardly knew what to say.
“No, look—I’m sorry. I must sound insane. I’m just laying all this on you because I have this idea that you understand. I’m having a horrible time being with people right now. I feel like I’m okay, then I hear myself talking. You know, seeing you fall apart that night, it was just how I’d been feeling, inside. Just ripped open, raw, you know.”
Nice to Come Home To Page 6
