Maggie sat on her bed peering through the white ruffled curtains in her window overlooking Witchita Avenue.
It was more night than dawn but she could make out the figure of Will crossing the front lawn and opening the door of his red convertible. He backed out of the driveway and headed in the direction of Connecticut Avenue.
Maeve ducked out of the window and turned on the overhead light so she was visible from the street.
Standing perfectly still in the middle of her bedroom, she shattered the morning silence with a high-pitched scream which trailed off to the wail of an injured animal.
In a breath, Lucy was in Maggie’s room, Felix behind her.
“What was that?”
“Maeve,” Maggie said.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “She just screamed.”
Lucy crawled onto Maggie’s bed and looked out the window, holding back the curtains.
“Will left in his car and Maeve asked him not to go and Will drove on anyway and then she turned on the light in her bedroom and screamed.”
They sat on the side of Maggie’s bed and watched the Sewalls’ house, watched Lane come into the bedroom in her robe and Maeve throw herself facedown on the bed and Lane sit beside her.
Teddy came into the room in his pajama bottoms and leaned against the wall.
“It doesn’t look like a catastrophe,” Lucy said.
Maggie got out of bed and put on shorts and a T-shirt.
“I’m going over to see what happened.”
“Not yet,” Lucy said. “It’s five in the morning and everyone seems to be okay.”
Maggie opened the drawer of her bureau and took out a stack of T-shirts and shorts and long pants, arranging them in piles on the bed. She went into her closet and took two sweaters and a sweatshirt off the shelf, her slicker off the hanger, the only dress she owned, and folded them on the bed.
“What’s going on?” Lucy asked quietly.
“Why are you still dressed in the same clothes you had on last night?”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Lucy said.
MAGGIE WAS BURNING. Her cheeks were hot.
“Are you still in your clothes from yesterday because you’re having an affair with Miles Robinson?” she asked, pleased with the casual sound of her own voice.
Lucy picked up Felix and took him to his own room, taking clothes out of his drawers.
“You get dressed, darling, and then I’ll make muffins and you have a playdate this morning. With Andrew from preschool.”
“Well?” Maggie asked, leaning against the door to Felix’s room, following her mother into her own room.
“Not in front of Felix,” Lucy said evenly. “You wouldn’t be asking me that question about Miles, to which the answer is no, if you believed it was true.”
“Last night the mothers at Zee’s potluck suggested that it was true,” Maggie said. “Even Zee.”
Maggie had slung the straps of her blue duffel bag over her shoulder.
“Things aren’t working out between us,” she said.
“It’s not a question of whether things are working out between us,” Lucy said without breath. “I am your mother and you are my daughter . . .”
“I’m going over to Maeve’s,” Maggie said, articulating as if Lucy were hard of hearing. “That’s what I’m doing now.”
Lucy didn’t try to stop her. She couldn’t stop her. She wasn’t at all sure what she could do with Maggie. There was no map. The rules for raising children had gone out with her parents’ generation of daughters who had lived as Lucy had, in patient silence, acting by standards which had lasted generations, waiting to grow up to make their decisions, following the patterns of their own lives.
THE FRONT DOOR shut and she watched Maggie hop down the steps, run across the street and up the few steps leading to the Sewalls’ front porch and knock.
Lucy was making coffee and blueberry muffins when Maggie came back to the house.
“Did you know Lane Sewall had one breast off because of cancer?”
“I knew that she had cancer,” Lucy said.
“Well they chopped off her breast. How come you didn’t tell me?”
“Because the Sewalls decided to keep it to themselves for the time being.”
“And why would they decide to do that?”
“I don’t know, Maggie. People sometimes decide on the better of two bads and I suppose they thought in Maeve’s case it was better for her not to know.”
“It’s too late!” Maggie said, heading upstairs. “She knows. Will Sewall got a call at five in the morning to go to the White House because President Nixon is sicko and the telephone woke Maeve up and she walked into her parents’ bedroom and there was her mother, who she’d been told was sick with exhaustion, and instead she was sitting on the side of the bed with her robe open and one breast gone.”
She ran upstairs, closed her bedroom door, locked it, and sat at the head of her bed considering the selection of clothes she had organized. It wasn’t even seven o’clock.
THE DAY WAS going to be unbearably hot, the kind of swampy Washington heat that lingers deep in the body, and Lucy was conscious that she had been sitting in her kitchen, her feet on the table, her eyes half closed. Maggie was still upstairs behind locked doors.
Sometime during Lucy’s sleepy reverie, Maggie came downstairs, sat at the kitchen table, and folded her arms.
“What exactly is an affair?”
Lucy was slow to respond.
“I mean is it just sleeping with someone?”
“An affair is when two people have a relationship,” Lucy said, at a loss for the precise language to use, uncertain where these questions were going.
When Maggie was small, Lucy had read somewhere, maybe Dr. Spock, that you answer a child’s question honestly and without elaboration. But that suggestion didn’t work well for Lucy since there was so much she didn’t want her children to know.
“With sex?” Maggie asked. “A relationship with sex?”
“You can have an affair of the heart,” Lucy said. “Without sex like the one I have with August.”
“Or Uncle Reuben,” Maggie said matter-of-factly. “But with my father, you had sex.”
“Well . . .” Lucy’s heart was in her throat. “Yes, with your father. Of course.”
“And he was married then.”
“He was married when I met him,” Lucy said.
“So you had a real affair because he was married, right? And he wouldn’t get unmarried and that’s what an affair is. You have to be married.”
“No, not necessarily,” Lucy began.
But Maggie was done with her investigation. She hurried upstairs and closed her door. Lucy could hear the old lock click shut.
LUCY HAD NEVER undressed with a man until Reuben.
With Reuben, she had shed her clothes, the careful layering of skin that had accompanied her attenuated life for as long as she could remember. They had made love the night she’d gone to New York with her illustrations for Belly Over the Banana Field. He signed a contract for her book, took her out to lunch at a small, dark café, freezing outside, a relentless wind, the promise of an ice storm.
“We can stay here all night,” he said.
And they did. Upstairs in one of the rooms the café rented out for overnight guests, making love on a noisy iron bed. Reuben had undressed her, kissed her lips, soft wet kisses on her neck and forehead, his fingers lacing through her hair, his lips on her belly.
“I was a virgin,” she said, lying in his arms looking out the tiny window at the weather.
“Yes, you were,” he said.
They had the weekend together before his wife returned from Connecticut and they spent the whole of it inside, above the café, coming down occasionally for a cup of coffee or soup or toast. A glass of wine.
“I have never felt this way in my whole life since my father died,” she’d said. “Completely safe.”
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“I am not your father,” Reuben said.
“I don’t want you to be,” Lucy said. “It’s just delicious to feel safe even though I’m not.”
“And I am married.”
She laughed.
“Probably I would prefer that you were not married,” she said.
“So would I.”
But in all the years that she had been with Reuben, more alone than actually with him, no one else had kissed her until last night.
This morning her body tingled with a kind of mindless, languid expectancy as if she had dreamed the kiss, and so she was astonished when the reality of Miles Robinson passed her dining room window. She waited for the doorbell but almost immediately he went by the window again, going in the other direction.
The note he’d left had been stuck in the crack of the door sealed in a business envelope with Lucy Painter typed on the outside.
Dear Lucy,
Thank you for your wise counsel last night. It has been very helpful to me in coming to a decision professionally among other considerations.
Yours sincerely, Miles
Lucy read the note, folded it and put it in the pocket of her jeans. Among other considerations? Whatever he had meant was too strange to decipher.
“Maggie,” she called upstairs, thinking to check on her but already she was late to pick up Felix from his playdate and so she headed out the front door.
“I’ll be back in about fifteen minutes,” she called. “We need milk and cereal. Do you want anything else?”
Maggie didn’t answer. Lucy checked her window as she passed the house and could make out her shadow through the curtains moving back and forth.
When she returned with milk and cereal, M&M’s for Maggie, Felix slung over her shoulder fast asleep, Maggie had gone.
Her bed was made, the clothes she’d been arranging on her bed that morning gone, the duffel and yellow slicker and her dotted Swiss sundress gone. Her toothbrush and toothpaste kept in a mug in the bathroom gone.
Lucy lay Felix carefully on top of her bed, pulled the door to, kicked off her sandals and tiptoed downstairs, standing at the front door, looking out.
The boys in the neighborhood were playing street hockey. Adam Mallory was standing on his front porch with a bottle of beer leaning against a pillar, Will Sewall’s convertible back in the driveway and Josie was on her bike heading towards Connecticut Avenue. The sun was too low and bright to see through the front door of the Mallorys’ house but Lucy imagined that Maggie was inside.
When they left New York City, Maggie had stopped holding Lucy’s hand, the way they used to do wandering through the Village together, swinging their arms in a high arc. She was embarrassed by her mother’s public affection, she’d said.
“I wish you’d be friends with the other mothers in the neighborhood,” Maggie had said recently. “You only have August and we’ve already been here for six months.”
“I’m busy with you and Felix and my work,” Lucy said casually.
If they wanted her to join them, they could insist she come for coffee in the morning or wine at night, was what Lucy said to Reuben.
“I bet they’ve asked you one way or another,” he’d said.
“They’re very different women from me.”
“We’re all pretty much alike, as you know since you write books about the way people are.”
“I write books about animals,” Lucy said.
“Well . . .” he began, and she hung up the phone.
She went upstairs where Felix was sleeping and lay down on the floor listening to his quiet breathing.
Whatever death felt like in its stealthy advance, Lucy was in the process of discovering.
ZEE WASN’T SURPRISED to see Maggie walking up her front steps with a navy blue duffel over her shoulder. Somehow she had expected it intuitively, a kind of inevitability, that one day this month or next, in the fall, in the winter, Maggie would be hers, lodged in her house, her kitchen, her daughter by proxy, sleeping in the guest room next door to her boys on the second floor, across the hall from her.
“This is crazy,” Adam had said under his breath while Maggie was upstairs unpacking her things in the bureau of the blue and white guest room facing the back of the house. “This child has a mother and you’re not it.”
“Temporary, Adam. She’s almost a teenager, hating her mother at the moment and then she won’t hate her. I was like that,” Zee said, making sandwiches for lunch. “We’re a bridge—from here to there and Maggie is walking on the bridge.”
“I’m not worried about Maggie, who will survive without you,” Adam said, taking a beer out of the fridge. “I’m worried about you, my wife, the mother of my three children.”
Zee turned quickly, the breath gone out of her, and walked out the back door, down the alley, leaning against the O’Donnells’ back fence. Sobs lodged somewhere in her belly rising in her throat and she could not stop the plaintive cry of grief, a sound she had never heard uttered from her own mouth.
She had two living children. Twin boys. Miranda was dead.
Mrs. O’Donnell had heard her, must have heard her since she’d opened the back door and Zee crouched on the ground, her face in her arms, muffling the sound of weeping.
Minutes passed before Mrs. O’Donnell went back in her house and closed the door—before Zee stood, rubbing her cheeks pink, deep breaths from the stomach, what she’d learned in childbirth. She shook loose her hair.
“Don’t ever say that again,” she told Adam as she went back into the house.
It was time for Adam to move out, take a room in the lawyers’ club downtown, meals served, a bar, time for them to live in separate places before their marriage actually burned to the ground. There was too much sadness between them.
She would discuss it tonight after supper, after the children were in bed, when she was confident she could speak to him reasonably. She’d make a trade. If he’d go now and stay away until the beginning of September when school started again, giving her time with Maggie, time to settle down, then she would go to Vermont with him right after Labor Day.
When she came back, Adam was sitting at the picnic table with the boys eating sandwiches.
“Hey Mom,” Daniel said, “how come Maggie Painter is moving into our house?”
“Daniel doesn’t like her,” Luke said.
Zee slid into the end of the bench, taking a sandwich from the tray.
“I invited her,” she said. “She’s been having a hard time with her mother.”
“She can’t come in our room,” Daniel said.
“I doubt she wants to,” Zee said. “All I ask is that you’re civil to her. Complain to me if you have to, but quietly.”
“I can’t be civil,” Daniel said.
“What does civil mean?” Luke asked.
“Civil is going to be a problem for me,” Adam said.
“Then make some other plans,” Zee said.
“We could go on a camping trip,” Daniel said.
“Rufus is going to Assateague with his father,” Luke said. “We could go there.”
“What about that, Adam? We don’t have any plans until we go to Michigan for Labor Day,” Zee said. “Maybe this weekend in Assateague? The boys could bring friends.”
“Great, Dad. Let’s do that, just us guys and Mom can stay home with diddly-squat.”
“Let me tell you boys something about diddly-squat. I like Maggie and I like her mother, which is where she ought to be living, but I don’t want to hear anything bad about either one of them from anyone at this table.” Adam got up and looked directly at Zee. “Got it?”
THAT NIGHT, ADAM moved into the study.
“I’ll take the boys to Assateague this weekend because they want to go and we need a break.”
Zee held her breath, trying to focus on Adam’s face but her eyes kept wandering.
“All right,” she said, unwilling to fall into an argument. “That’s a plan.”
“You
have to understand that this is a compromise so you can have the weekend with Maggie, but when I get back, Maggie goes home to her own family and we, you and me, address the truth about ours.”
“That’s fine,” Zee said. “No worries.”
The end of the weekend was a long time away and for the moment, she would buy what time she could in small pieces.
LUCY WAS IN her studio drawing with Felix when Victoria came rushing upstairs in her ballet shoes with a message from August.
“Whew,” she said, cresting the top step to the studio. “A long way up.”
“Mama’s drawing a book with me,” Felix said without looking up.
“Oh, very nice, Felix. So many books. I’ve never been here, you know, and I love the wild pictures of that green whatever it is.”
She reached up to look at a drawing of Vermillion drying on the clothesline.
“Vermillion the Three-Toed Sloth,” Felix said.
“Very fetching, these sloths.”
She leaned over the work table to look at the book Felix was making.
“August wants me to ask you if you’ve had a chance to read the manuscript Gabriel brought over a couple of weeks ago.”
“I know the manuscript is here but I didn’t know Gabriel brought it,” Lucy said.
“You know Gabriel. I got the whole story from him with the conversation repeated verbatim. Maggie was here—you were someplace—Felix was with a babysitter at the library. He said it was a Happy Birthday present for you and he called Maggie Margaret because he doesn’t like nicknames. That sort of Gabriel thing.”
“Maggie didn’t tell me. I found the manuscript under the couch.”
“She probably forgot all about it,” Victoria said. “Girls! I love them but they’re so undependable. Anyway, I came to tell you that August is ready to talk about the book.”
“Tell him of course, I haven’t gotten to it yet but I’ll read it in the next few days.”
So Maggie had been the one to remove the pages and hide the manuscript under the couch. Lucy was not surprised. It was comforting to have proof that at least she knew some of the workings of her daughter’s mind.
“Done,” Victoria said, heading for the stairs. “I’m amazed at how he’s improved, aren’t you?”
You Are the Love of My Life Page 21
