by Ann Packer
In the kitchen, her coffeemaker hissed. In a while it hissed again, and though she found it difficult to move away from the window, away she went: to fill a mug, stir in a knobby brown lump of sugar. She was a creature of habit: she had tea first and then coffee, every morning. She carried her mug back to her lookout, but still there was no sign of the Heidts.
Surrounding her, filling her, was what Lauren had done. And what she herself had done, had failed to do. “It must have been really hard for you,” Liz had said on the phone Tuesday morning. “It’s so understandable that you’d have trouble with this.” Warm, she’d been. Forgiving. But when Sarabeth called again—and she called again several times—Liz didn’t answer.
It felt almost like a weekend, and she was tempted to have her weekend breakfast of lemon pound cake. Instead, she returned to the kitchen and started toast. On the shelf behind the toaster an old gift of Esther’s had gathered dust, and she reached for it across the heating slots. She unwrapped the cellophane and pressed the surface of one of the cookies. Hard as a rock. She had no idea where she’d left off in Anna Karenina, but she’d figure it out before tonight. She had quite a group these days—more even than she’d had for Madame Bovary. Adultery. You might not commit it yourself, but you were sure going to be interested in it.
Guilt is a useless emotion. Billy was always saying that—being philosophical, telling her to let it go. As if it were so easy! As if it were morally acceptable. He’d hardly been speaking from a neutral position.
She popped the toast, and though it wasn’t as dark as she liked, she plucked it from the toaster and spread it with almond butter. At her table she ate quickly, three or four bites. There was a feeling in her chest that she didn’t like—from eating too fast? “Esophagus” had been a favorite word of Lauren’s in early childhood. To hear it spoken or to speak it herself had sent her into fits of giggles.
How was Liz surviving? She had sounded calm on the phone, but she couldn’t be calm; she couldn’t be anything but devastated. “No, thanks” had been her response to Sarabeth’s offer to drive over. “Nothing, thanks” to what Sarabeth could do to help. Someone else might just go, but not Sarabeth. Was she respecting Liz’s boundaries? Or being a bad friend? A worse question: Would Liz be talking to her if Sarabeth hadn’t failed her so horribly? Confiding in her, telling her how she felt? Had Liz ever truly depended on her? Sarabeth thought of when Ted, Liz’s boyfriend before Brody, broke up with her, one of the coldest, out-of-the-bluest breakups she’d ever seen. Liz had gone underground then, and Sarabeth had worried and wondered why. But she hadn’t forced herself on Liz. Hadn’t said: I will not leave until you are well again.
She went to take a shower, and it was there, waiting for the water to heat, thinking maybe she’d call Jim about touring, that she realized: today was Thanksgiving. There was no tour today. The Heidts were home because there was no work today, no school. It didn’t matter where in Anna Karenina she was, because the Center was closed today, a fact she had known, had owned, once upon a time. “See you in December,” she’d said at the end last time. “That’s marvelous,” Esther had said as she hobbled out of the room. “Marvelous.”
Sarabeth shut off the water and sat on the closed toilet. How could she have forgotten Thanksgiving? When had it happened, when was the last moment she’d known? She wondered what she should do. What were the Mackays doing? How odd that she had not thought of it on Tuesday, talking to Liz. Heat filled her face, and she felt sick with shame at the possibility that if she’d remembered she might have asked Liz if dinner was still on.
She took her shower, dried off, returned to the bedroom. For an hour or so she lay on her bed and read, until at last she got up and made her way to the living room window. She had begun to hear voices a while back, and in fact the Heidts’ yard was full of children—at a quick count nine of them, all wearing paper headgear appropriate to the holiday. Chloe had on a black-and-white pilgrim hat, while Pilar and Isaac both sported elaborate feather headdresses. Had Bonnie made these hats in advance of the party, or would each child have been welcomed with the opportunity to make one for him-or herself?
It was after one o’clock somehow, and Sarabeth went into the kitchen and made tuna salad, thinking, as she always did, that no-drain vacuum bags of tuna were among the world’s greatest inventions. She ate six huge forkfuls standing at the sink, then covered the bowl and stashed it in the refrigerator.
She wandered into her workroom and gazed at the carton that had arrived yesterday. She thought of opening it, but she knew what was inside—two dozen ring sets—and she had no desire to see two dozen ring sets. She crouched at her scrap box and dug through it until a piece of shiny silver paper caught her eye. She began folding it, randomly she would have thought, but then she recalled the cootie catchers she and Liz used to make, origami-like structures of folded paper that you could ask questions, and she realized she was folding with them in mind. Deep inside you wrote answers: “yes” and “no” and “maybe,” say, or “dentist” and “hula girl” and “teacher.” She remembered one of Liz’s, where the question was “Who will you marry?” Sarabeth chose a flap, and Liz opened it for her, and they both shrieked with laughter because what was written there was “Steve.” “At least we’ll be sisters,” Sarabeth said, and Liz said, “We already are.”
She abandoned the paper and returned to her bedroom. She took up a volume of Hemingway stories and began reading “Hills Like White Elephants,” but the cloistered conversation made her restless, and she closed the book and instead thought of the pale hills, the heat, the dust, the drone of insects. She had never been to Spain. Her father had offered to take her to Spain and France one summer, but she’d declined. It was the summer after her freshman year at Berkeley: he was in Baltimore, and she told him, truthfully, that she’d just rented a room in a house and wanted to get used to living there before school started up again in the fall. She was working at a café, reading a lot. It wasn’t bad. But after that, after she passed up his offer, their communication fell away with surprising speed, and when he died a few years later, just two months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, her life in some way got simpler. It had been hard, being cowitnesses to a disaster.
The children had fallen silent, and she went to investigate. The Heidts’ yard was empty; she figured they were inside eating. Would there be a separate children’s table? She thought of the holiday dinners of her childhood, how much she’d disliked sitting at the children’s table, how she’d felt suspended in time, waiting for her parents to claim her again. Once, a man looked over from the adult table and told her not to eat with her fingers. She was eating a roll, but she was mortified anyway.
She would have been wearing a fancy dress; her mother bought her two each year, one for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas. Velvet or silk. She wasn’t allowed to put them on until the holiday in question arrived, and then only at the last minute. Beforehand, she would watch her mother’s preparations, the brushing of her hair, the fastening of a necklace, and when her mother was all ready—perfect from top to toe, and very beautiful—they would go together into Sarabeth’s bathroom, and under her mother’s terrifying gaze Sarabeth would carefully scrub her hands in preparation for putting on the special dress.
Liz didn’t do that kind of thing. She was such a good mother. One Thanksgiving Joe wore his soccer uniform. Another year Lauren decorated the table with rocks and pinecones from the backyard, and then placed among them her collection of rubber trolls. Sarabeth’s mother would have died before allowing a table of hers to look like that. Actually, she had.
It was remarkably warm, and Sarabeth thought that if she had a private porch she’d sit outside and read. If she had a private porch, she might have a place to sit outside and read; as it was, she’d barely swept. She sat on her top step and looked at the Heidts’ yard: a single abandoned feathered headdress lay on the lawn. She wondered if it was Pilar’s.
With a creak, the Heidts’ back door opened, and out came some
of the children, Isaac and some of the other little ones, holding cupcakes. Isaac glanced at Sarabeth; it was not typical for her to be on her porch. He set his cupcake on the sandbox ledge, stood next to it with his feet side by side, and with a great whoop jumped into the sand. Another boy stood outside the box eating his cupcake, eyeing Isaac’s from time to time.
With another creak the door opened again, and now Pilar emerged with another girl. They both carried cupcakes, the girl in a pilgrim hat, Pilar’s head bare. “My feathers!” she cried, and she set her cupcake on the patio table and hurried to rescue her headdress. She gave Sarabeth a funny little wave as she settled the feathers on her head. She turned and went back to the table for her cupcake. Sarabeth wondered if she should get up and go inside, but it was so nice and sunny, and there was nothing inside but tuna and Hemingway, and so she stayed. Pilar and the other girl were talking quietly, while the sandbox now contained Isaac and three other kids, each of whom had frosting around the mouth and a big plastic truck in hand. “Beep, beep,” they said. “Rrrrrm, rrrrrm.”
Pilar approached the sandbox. She wore a purple jumper over a patterned turtleneck, yellow tights, and very elfin purple-and-green maryjanes. She stopped and surveyed the younger children’s work, then continued past the sandbox toward Sarabeth.
“Hi,” Sarabeth called, and Pilar waved again.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” she shouted. She approached the jasmine that separated the Heidts’ property from Sarabeth’s, picked her way through it, and in a moment was at the base of Sarabeth’s steps.
“Happy Thanksgiving to you,” Sarabeth said.
“I’m a squaw,” Pilar announced, touching her feathers. “My mom said I could be a squaw with extra feathers if I wanted.”
Sarabeth pondered this for a moment, then remembered that only the chief wore lots of feathers—and did the women wear any? “Why not?” she said.
“Thanksgiving is for being creative.”
“I should say so.”
Pilar was eating her cupcake between statements—or eating the frosting, anyway, a business requiring tongue and lips but no teeth.
“How’s your cupcake?” Sarabeth said.
“Good. The frosting is chocolate and the cupcake part is pumpkin, which isn’t very good but is better than pumpkin pie.”
“You don’t like pumpkin pie?”
“Blech,” Pilar said with a shudder. “My brother and I hate it. My sister likes it so-so. My brother threw up last time we had it, but he might have been getting sick anyway, we’re not sure.”
“It’s hard to know what’s caused by what.”
Pilar held the cupcake out, empty of frosting, its surface shiny wet. “Want the rest?”
“No, thanks,” Sarabeth said, “but it’s nice of you to offer.”
“On Thanksgiving you’re supposed to be nice to people,” Pilar said. “It’s a day of caring and sharing. My sister and I aren’t allowed to fight unless we have to.”
“I see,” said Sarabeth.
“Did you make any friends yet?”
“Excuse me?”
“My mom says that’s why you look at us. Because you’re lonely.”
Heat flooded Sarabeth’s face, and her stomach churned. She turned away from Pilar and breathed hard. Pilar stood there, just over her shoulder, but Sarabeth couldn’t move. She was sick, sick. Yet she feared she was upsetting Pilar, and with great effort she turned back. Pilar watched her solemnly, the only evidence of disturbance the fact that she was plucking crumbs from the cupcake and dropping them to the ground. Sarabeth tried to think of something to say.
“It’s Thanksgiving for the birds, too,” Pilar said.
“It is. You’re sharing with them.”
“Bye,” Pilar said, and she made the jasmine in two long steps, leaped over it, and strode through the yard and into the house without a moment’s pause.
Sarabeth went inside and locked the door. Her living room was so dark she could hardly see. She closed her eyes and by feel—touching first the plant table by the door and then an armchair—she found the couch and slowly eased herself onto it. She lay down, resting her head on a throw pillow she’d made by embroidering flowers onto a pink silk handkerchief and wrapping it around a pillow form. Against her face the flowers felt scratchy, and she pulled the pillow out from under her head and tossed it to the floor. She hesitated a moment and then with her feet grabbed the white lace pillow at the other end of the couch, took hold of it, and tossed it to the floor, too. She sat up quickly, and when the room stopped spinning she crossed to the mantel and moved each of the seven silver candlesticks to the floor. From her bedroom she got the wire-and-mesh Eiffel Tower that held her earring collection, then went back for the majolica plate on her bedside table, where she kept ChapStick, lotion, and a notepad and pen. On the living room floor there was now quite a collection of stuff, and she added the Eiffel Tower and the plate, which she’d bought at some antique store in the city because she’d felt she had to have it—whereas she felt like kicking it now. She brought in a few more things from her bedroom, then turned her attention to the bathroom. From the wall she took a paper silhouette of a woman carrying an umbrella. With her free hand she put a wire basket of soap balls into Billy’s abalone shell, and she carried all of this into the living room and set it on the floor. She went back to the bathroom for the little pink dish Liz had brought her from France, one of her most beloved possessions: an opalescent pink oval in the middle of which had been painted the words Jerêve. I dream. Liz had bought it for her at a flea market in Montpellier. She set it on the floor and went into the kitchen, where she gathered a blue glass bowl, her two favorite mugs—one still holding an inch of this morning’s coffee—and a creamer in the shape of a cow.
On the couch again but sitting up now, she surveyed the things on the floor. This was her life, a life of talismanic objects. Or it had been. The truth was that the pillow with the amateurish embroidery was nothing. The wire-and-mesh Eiffel Tower was nothing. Billy’s abalone shell, Liz’s pink dish—they were neither Billy’s nor Liz’s, they were her own, and they were nothing. What did these objects know? They had been endowed with meaning, even power, but to do what? They were entirely empty now—so much matter that didn’t matter. Not even worth the effort to kick or destroy. The company she keeps—was that a book title? The company Sarabeth kept was a collection of inanimate objects she kept for company, and she saw now with a mixture of disgust and grief that they’d been empty all along. No, she should have told Pilar, I haven’t made any friends. She had feared, always, that at some moment she would understand that she was not a sprightly gal in a little house, a free spirit, creative and bohemian, but rather an eccentric, a crank. Here it was. The moment was upon her, it was now. She had a floor full of junk, and she watched people.
16
At meals all week, Lucas sat with Lauren. He talked to her and talked to her, telling her his story: how since he was twelve he’d been drinking and doing drugs—“for fun and profit.” Sometimes, all of a sudden, he’d get silent or crabby, but mostly he talked nonstop. He told her about the night not long ago when, after a period of wakefulness that had lasted two days, he found himself walking the sound wall on 101 at 2:00 a.m., cars rushing below him, wind in his face. It was incredible up there, the perfect balance his feet found on the narrow wall, the impenetrability of his glee. Cops came to both sides of the wall and shone Maglites at him, though, and now here he was, locked up. His parents didn’t give a fuck, he told Lauren, though she was sure they did.
It was Saturday now, and for some reason he hadn’t been at breakfast or check-in. Because of the weekend there was no morning school, so people were just hanging out, in the lounge or in their rooms. Lauren was in her room. She was on fifteen-minute checks now, and she’d just been checked, so she headed for the bathroom. People used bedsheets to hang themselves—Lucas said it was the only way. Lauren thought you ought to be able to drown yourself in a toilet, but you’d need a lot of wi
llpower. She had no desire to kill herself, but she couldn’t get anyone to see that, so she was stuck. Last night she’d met with Dr. Lewis and her parents, and it had been awful, her mom looking petrified, Dr. Lewis saying, “It’s hard to acknowledge problems” and “Maybe you can each start by saying how you feel right now.” Her dad sitting there like he’d rather be anywhere else.
The drug was making Lauren really thirsty, and she turned on the water and used her hands for a cup. Outside the bathroom she paused, then headed to the lounge to see if Lucas was around yet. Sometimes he switched subjects—from himself to the other kids—and that was interesting, too. At bedtime one night Abby had told Lauren that she shouldn’t hang out with Lucas, but then she’d refused to say why. Abby pretty much didn’t talk to Lauren.
In the last bedroom before the lounge, she saw through the open door that Callie was in there making out with Turner. Callie looked up just as Lauren passed, and she ran her tongue over her upper lip and gave Lauren a sick smile. Total time-out if they were found, but they probably wouldn’t be: everything here was at the wrong speed. According to Lucas, Callie had been sexually abused for years. Whatever, she was gross.
In the lounge, Abby and the other anorexics were folded onto the couches in the corner. It freaked Lauren out to look at them, but at the same time she was always staring. They were tall and short, blond and brunette, but for some reason none of that really registered. What registered was their likeness to one another. Their bony bodies.
Casey and another girl who cut herself were playing cards with Ivan, one of the non-nurse staff people. He was tall and green eyed, and Lauren thought Casey was in love with him.
Lucas was sitting alone, reading something. Lauren crossed the room and sat opposite him. He was wearing a T-shirt with a bloody face pictured on it, along with the name of a band. He looked up, then looked back at his book.
“Where were you at breakfast?” she said.
