Among the families on Witchita Avenue, Zee Mallory was the emotional center of daily life. People loved her, counted on her for their social lives, their sadnesses and troubles, spilled out their secrets without reciprocation. Zee never spoke about her own problems, although there was talk in the neighborhood that she had lost a child years before the twins were born.
THE REAL ESTATE agent for Lucy’s house had kept the neighbors up to date.
“Did I say she was single? Completely single.” Zee Mallory had just come from her house with warm donuts. “She has two children, a boy who’s three and Maggie.”
“Another girl for your happiness,” Lane Sewall said to Zee, who had a softness for girls.
“Divorced?” Robin Robinson asked.
“No husband,” Zee said. “She never had a husband.”
“Good news,” Josie said. “A thinking woman.”
The headlights went off and Lucy dropped down to the street, walking around the truck. Stopping at a car parked in front of her house, she leaned in the window.
“She’s talking to Wendy, the real estate agent who’s been taking care of the place,” Zee said.
“Can you tell what she looks like?” Lane asked.
“Small,” Josie Lerner said, dressed for work, the only one among them who worked downtown, although the others were professional women, working part-time or full-time or in graduate school, women with expectations for themselves.
“I’ve seen her picture on the books,” Zee said. “You know her books—Belly Over the Banana Field and Fervid P. something or another and a couple of others I can’t remember.”
“She has black hair and dimples and sleepy eyes. Pretty. Look at the book jackets,” Josie said.
“Her books are weird,” Lane said.
“Those squat little trolly characters with square bodies and hands and heads in colors like orange and persimmon and electric lime green.” Josie shook her head. “You’re not kidding, they’re weird.”
“Luke and Daniel didn’t love her books, but they’re boys.”
Zee was disinclined to pass judgment on others. She liked to think of herself as open-minded and curious out of an interest in people for their own sake. Not competitive, was what she wanted to believe about herself. But it pleased her to hear the judgments of others. It made her feel better, always struggling to see herself as good, the way she had been as a child in rural Michigan when she was good before circumstances got in the way.
“Sara liked Belly,” Robin said quietly. “It was actually her favorite book when she was little.”
“Girls may have more patience for arty books. That’s what I’ve noticed,” Zee Mallory said, a quick study, a minor expert on many subjects, responsive to every question whether she knew the answer or not.
The Mallorys had come to Washington when Adam took a job with the Justice Department just after the assassination of President Kennedy, and Zee had worked off and on since then as a research assistant for an investigative reporter at the New York Times.
“The perfect job for you,” Adam had said.
And it was. Ever since she could remember, Zee Mallory had needed to know.
“You’re going to be the death of us,” her mother had told her when she was young—always asking questions of everyone in town, the shopkeepers, the Sunday school teachers, and Mr. Barton, who was of particular interest to Zee after he ran over the Brooks’ little boy with his tractor. “A child doesn’t need to know the answers to other people’s lives, Zelda.”
Zee used to think that knowing was her way out of Revere, Michigan. She’d read the newspaper delivered in the morning, the tiny notes of national news on the front page of the local paper, the births and deaths and accidents and marriages. She’d listen to the radio when the news came on and to other people’s lives rolled out in conversations she overheard at the drugstore or market or the public library, gathering bits of personal information, discovering the hidden stories in the lives of citizens of Revere who had reasons to conceal them. Sheila Carney’s illegal abortion, her aunt Brenda’s affair with the pharmacist, Billy Reilly’s trouble with the law.
Knowing would be her wings away from the lives her parents had led, and her grandparents and aunts and uncles, very much like death without the drama of dying.
But Revere and what she had missed by growing up in a provincial midwestern town, stayed with her in all the places she had lived since she left for college. In a place like Washington, D.C., or Philadelphia or San Francisco where she and Adam had lived, she might be found out as a Revere girl. And then what? She had to be vigilant. Even marrying Adam Mallory from a family of means and class in suburban Detroit didn’t suffice.
So she became an investigator to “cover the bases,” as Adam would say. Secrets were her business.
“What factual do you know about her?” Josie asked.
“She’s thirty-three and an illustrator of children’s books and god knows she must be self-sufficient since she’s done it all alone,” Zee said. “But that isn’t a fact, Josie.”
“Those kids came from somewhere,” Josie said.
“She’s moving here alone,” Zee said. “That’s all I know except the stories about the house.”
The house had a reputation. A little run-down, the garden a jungle of weeds, rats occasionally reported in the basement especially during the spring rains, tenants changing almost every year, foreigners to the neighborhood. Rumors that a murder had taken place in the front bedroom, that a member of the FBI had rented the house for liaisons, greeting visitors at the door dressed up in women’s clothes, high heels, and wigs. Nothing substantiated.
They gathered at dawn to watch Lucy’s arrival.
Zee Mallory greeted any stranger as a new opportunity for conquest. Although she didn’t think of herself in such military terms, considering her gestures of friendship open and genuine and uncomplicated. But she was canny enough to know that her way of arbitrating for her own emotional safety was to lay claim to friends as if they could not do without her.
“Now I remember Lucy Painter’s photograph on the jacket of Loop de Loup, about the French monkey,” Josie said. “Why did the stupid monkey have to be French?”
“What did she look like in the picture?” Robin asked.
“Pretty.” Josie shrugged.
“I hope she isn’t so pretty that August Russ takes an interest in her,” Robin said.
“He’s not going to take an interest in her, Robby.” Zee pulled her scarf over her head as the wind picked up. “August’s completely involved in writing a book about American culture and right now he’s working on a chapter on that awful series with the Loud family living out their real lives on TV.”
“An American Family,” Josie said. “I never miss the program.”
“Well, August told me how the Loud family fit perfectly in the introduction to his book.”
“He talks to you?” Josie asked. “I didn’t think he talked.”
“You know he talks. He and I have long conversations about his work.”
“Is that actually true, Zee?” Josie asked.
She shrugged.
“More or less,” she said. “He’s not exactly verbose, but yes, it’s true.”
It actually wasn’t true. Zee had never had a personal conversation with August Russ, although she had spent hours in imaginary conversations with him as she went about her frantic life—her children and her troubled husband, school committees and telephone calls and her job and her friends, all of her friends who counted on her for this and that, who needed her to be the operating center of their lives.
Josie was right. August didn’t talk about himself to anyone, not even to Zee, to whom everyone in the neighborhood spilled their secrets.
MAGGIE HAD CLIMBED out of the U-Haul carrying Felix and started up the steps to the yellow house, a backpack on one shoulder, no coat.
“Adorable,” Lane said. “She looks to be Maeve’s age.”
“Should w
e go over and introduce ourselves?” Josie asked.
“Bring a coffee?” Robin asked.
“No, no, no,” Zee said. “Let them get settled first and tonight we’ll go over to the house with a rosemary plant or tulips or a cake. I’ll bake an angel food.”
The young mothers in Witchita Hills assembled from time to time, mainly on the Mallorys’ front porch at dusk in summer, dark in winter.
They were women from other places, living in a city which had, particularly since the riots of April 1968, following the death of Martin Luther King, aspects of danger they had never anticipated when they left their insulated childhood homes in the middle of the country where change was slow to come.
“We have to stick together,” Zee said, sitting among her friends on the railing of her porch the night of Dr. King’s death. “We’re a team now.”
They would watch over one another’s children the way grandmothers had done in their own youths, the way the aunts and uncles had done for one another. They would be family.
IT WAS BEGINNING to snow, a dusty dry snow gathering on their coats as the women dispersed, calling goodbye in voices loud enough for Lucy Painter, standing on her new front porch, to recognize the sounds of their friendship in the air.
“See you later,” Zee called, running up the front steps, tearing off her scarf as she went.
So much to do and nearly nine already.
She opened the front door, rushing in the house just missing Onion, the tabby cat, who was lying in wait for a quick escape into the street. She kicked aside the twins’ skates left in the middle of the hall, a cereal bowl of half-eaten Cheerios, the milk sticky on the floor, stepped over Blue, her old golden retriever, standing at the entrance to the kitchen considering, she assumed, whether to pee on the rug.
Adam was in his boxers, his bare chest raw with reminders of his tour in Viet Nam, late for work, always a little late for work but smart enough so far to get away with it, to get away with drinking mainly beer but too much of it every night.
He was buttering toast.
When she passed him to put the milk in the refrigerator, he smelled of cheap perfume.
“Greetings, Zelda. All the best,” he said. “How does the high-pressured life of an at-home research assistant strike you this a.m.?”
She rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher, grabbed Blue by the collar and walked outside with him, still in her coat, her cheeks numb to the cold.
“Are you planning to close the door?” Adam asked.
She watched him move through the kitchen, struggling up the back stairs. He was particularly slow this morning.
Mornings were the worst.
No one in the neighborhood needed to know about Adam in the morning. There were enough potlucks and dinner parties and dance contests and barbecues for everyone to know that Adam Mallory drank too much but he could be a warm and affectionate drunk, turning evenings at the Mallorys’ piano into occasions that everyone remembered with his seductive bass voice.
Who would want to know about Zee’s long nights in the queen-size bed, Adam belching and snoring, Zee on the far side, wide awake in the darkness imagining herself dancing with August Russ.
Someday she would do that. Some summer evening, Adam out of town on one litigation or another, the boys at camp, she’d invite August to dinner, light the candles, chicken in thyme and white wine, chocolate mousse. She’d turn on Frank Sinatra in the living room.
August had moved in 1969 to the house next door to the one where Lucy would live, denied tenure in American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. That much everyone knew. For reasons never made clear, certainly not by August, something had happened at the university, something courageous, as the women imagined it in their conversations over coffee or children.
Zee Mallory was only able to find confirmation that he had been denied tenure by his own department and chose not to contest the decision.
“There were no reasons given,” Zee had said. “But I’d guess it was a matter of principle and August took a stand.”
“Of course, that’s exactly what he’d do,” Lane said.
And Zee’s guess became fact among the women.
His wife, Anna, already ill with breast cancer when they moved to Washington to be near her parents, died two years later at home.
It was after Anna died that the women took on August in earnest.
The young mothers, children of the fifties, women of the early seventies on the brink of a different tomorrow, liked to think they were half in love with August.
A crush, a soft flirtation, nothing of consequence.
At night, they sometimes lay next to their own husbands whom they had married, believing these men, silent victims of the war whether they had fought in Viet Nam or not, would escort them through the years without diminishing like their fathers had their mothers. Successful men—already diminished, occasionally replaced in the fantasies of their wives by an out-of-work college professor, a childless widower just past his fortieth birthday.
Upstairs, Adam was making too much noise, stomping his shoes on the hardwood floor, groaning as if he were ill, shouting Where is my striped blue tie and my goddamn new boxers? He had bad dreams and a cruel streak and a habit of falling into bed at night fully dressed.
Zee picked up the telephone. Lane would be at home. Not Robin, who was teaching photography at the Corcoran, or Josie, who would skip her lunch hour to make up for coming in late that morning, or Victoria, who was at work with her patients by the time they gathered for coffee. But Lane, in her third year at Catholic University studying for a Ph.D., had taken a medical leave of absence for the semester to “reconsider her goals,” and mostly she was reconsidering at home.
These women were the core, Zee’s dearest friends, her charges, her chicks, as she called them. Midwesterners all of them, even the larger circle in the neighborhood, and like midwesterners who have moved east, they felt just off-kilter, wary of missteps, of personal failures as if they might be seen even to one another for who they really were. Not quite up to standard issue in the East, was how Zee thought of them all.
Zee was not self-assured but she had confidence. Small, thin with enough bottom and breasts, and thick golden blond hair worn shoulder length and mussed, as if she’d just jumped out of bed, to engage the interest of men and women.
SHE HUNG HER coat on the banister and ran upstairs, still in her nightgown since coffee had been early that morning to coincide with Lucy Painter’s arrival. Adam was sitting on the edge of the bed making an effort to tie his shoe.
She grabbed her clothes out of the closet and went into the bathroom to change. Lately she didn’t want to undress with Adam in the room. Not a matter of modesty, of which she had very little, but of disappointment. Slipping on a short knit skirt, footless black tights, a T-shirt long-sleeved without a bra, seldom a bra, she dressed in darkness. She grabbed the necklaces she always wore, taken from her mother’s costume jewelry shop in Revere, kept in a dish beside the sink, silver links and fake stones on chains, amber and amethyst and turquoise, the jewelry making little crackles when she moved. Sentimental, these necklaces, running up her neck like the collar of an Egyptian princess, a nod to the women of Revere for whom costume jewelry was the real thing.
When she came out of the bathroom, Adam was ready to leave.
A Friday morning in February. They had not made love since before Thanksgiving. The Sunday after Thanksgiving week to be exact. Her parents had been in the house for the holidays.
“We had a call when you were in the bathroom.”
“From Lane?”
“From Vermont.”
Zee’s body tightened.
“They were just checking in to see if we’re still around,” Adam said. “No need to call back.”
“If that’s a backhanded way of asking will I go to Vermont with you,” she said, aware her body was trembling, “I told you the last time you went that I can’t bring myself to go.”
“Got it. Don’t worry. No problem!” Adam said, and pounded down the back steps and out the kitchen door to the driveway.
Zee stood in the window of their bedroom and watched Adam get in the car, turn on the engine, back into the street. Was he looking? she wondered. Did he check if a child was behind the car? A dog?
She dialed Lane.
Lucy Painter possessed her imagination. What little Zee had learned about Lucy was her reputation for a solitary, independent life, and that from the real estate agent who could not exactly be depended on for character analysis. Or was it Maggie who had captured Zee’s interest with her curly red hair, defiant, marching up the front steps of her new house holding her little brother in her arms.
She felt a familiar tension in her body, a focus, and by the time Lane answered the phone, a plan was forming.
“I have an idea,” she said.
“For a neighborhood party tonight?” Lane asked.
“Later in the spring, but for now I’m thinking of asking Robin to take some photographs of Lucy’s house and we’ll give one to her as a Welcome to Witchita surprise tonight. That is, if Robin has time to do them before tonight.”
You Are the Love of My Life Page 4
