The Yellow Braid

by Karen Coccioli

  On the subway, she recalled a Sunday morning after she and Zach had made love. Their pleasure in each other had been unexpectedly satisfying; yet what marked the experience for Caro was the connectedness she’d felt in the aftermath of their sex, the ease that came with being with the same man for twenty-five years.

  Marcie had slept over that same weekend. After breakfast on Sunday she and Caro, still wearing their pajamas, had made themselves cozy on the wingback chairs in the den with mugs of coffee. Marcie had recounted the particularly poignant story of her parents’ meeting during the Second World War. She’d wept a bit and in those moments of listening, as Caro wiped the tears from her friend’s cheek, she’d felt an intimacy with Marcie that rivaled what she’d felt with Zach just a couple of hours before.

  Caro recalled how pretty Marcie had looked in the glow of the burgeoning sun, her skin damp from her tears. She’d felt a sudden burst of love for Marcie, so much so that she wanted to take her in her arms with a promise to be with her forever.

  Wasn’t this love as enduring and soulful as the physical bond she shared with Zach? More so, perhaps, because Caro connected with Marcie on an emotional level that she’d never reached with him.

  So what was the best kind of love: the sexual one with Zach, or the platonic love she felt for Marcie, which for her, seemed ever more lasting?

  When Caro arrived at the library, she went directly to the philosophy section and began cruising the stacks. She browsed first through works by those men who came readily to mind in the Eastern and Western traditions, from Confucius to Nietzsche.

  She’d been at her task for several hours and was preparing to go home when she noticed Plato’s Symposium, a text she hadn’t opened since a Philosophy 101 course in her sophomore year at Vassar College. The professor hadn’t spent more than two class periods on it, but the sight of the title now sparked hazy recollections of an unfulfilled interest. She slid the thin volume from the shelf.

  Scrunched up in bed that night with the book resting on her knees, her thoughts percolated with the rich fabric of ancient Greek life. She remembered that the Greek word for love—paiderastia—was derived from pais, the word for boy and eran, the verb meaning to love. The Greek idea of beauty was embodied in the young male.

  Love, for the sagacious Greeks, had nothing to do with sex, which was forbidden as being an unworthy distraction, something to be performed with women only for the purpose of procreation. Beauty in its purest form was the key to Platonic love, and thus attained only between men—the lovers, and their male students, the beloveds—in a joint pilgrimage of knowledge.

  Caro flattened the book on her lap and passed her finger along the inside seam. The more she read, the more the message appealed to her.

  It was true that she had searched for everlasting love with Zach and came up short since Marcie’s death made a greater impact on her psyche. In addition to the demands she put on him for her career, she and Zach had been complacent, relying on their common habits and Abby’s comings and goings to keep equilibrium in their marriage.

  Caro adored Marcie. But even when she was still alive, Caro felt that she was missing something along the way with her, as well. At one point after Zach died, Caro had even discussed the possibility with Marcie of the two of them living together. She’d said to Marcie, “We get along, are both alone, and we already refer to the guest bedroom as M’s room. You probably have half your wardrobe over here already.”

  Marcie had begun shaking her head even before her words came out. “I can’t do that. I’d feel like I was taking Zach’s place somehow.”

  “How can you think that? He was my husband. Of course, I’m not going to argue the point.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Marcie had said. “It’s a gracious offer. But I think we both need our own separate spaces.”

  “It was just an idea,” Caro had said. Nothing was ever mentioned again about Marcie moving in.

  Caro looked at the clock: five-thirty. Her daughter would be just waking up.

  Abby picked up on the second ring. “Mom, you’re calling so early.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I…I was thinking about Marcie, and then Dad, and that got me thinking to call and say good morning before you started getting ready for work.”

  “Good morning to you, too,” Abby said. “I’m glad you did. Nice way to start my day.”

  “So how was your date with Phillip the other night?” Phillip was her daughter’s latest boyfriend.

  “He’s giving me all kinds of grief about turning thirty. Did I tell you that I’m older than him by eight months?”

  Caro chuckled. “No, you didn’t. But that’s not exactly a disastrous amount of time. Besides, from the photos you e-mailed, you look adorable together.”

  “I’m anxious for you to meet him,” Abby said.

  “That’s a hopeful sign since I’m not coming until the end of August.”

  “I know, but we’ve been on more dates in two months than I’ve had with any other guy. I think he’s very special.”

  “And the feeling is mutual?” Caro asked.

  “Yes,” Abby said. “Sounds strange, but it’s as if we feel driven to be with each other. And then there’s the constant coincidences.”

  “Like?” Caro asked.

  “Like him calling at the same moment I have my hand on the phone to dial him. Or having the same thought at the same time. Or showing up at the same place unplanned.”

  By the tenor of her voice Caro could tell that her daughter must have been smiling. “I’m so happy for you, Abby, and I look forward to meeting him. He will make your birthday extra wonderful this year.”

  “Get your airline reservations yet?” Abby asked. “We’re already planning the party. Going to be a big bash.”

  “Not yet.” Caro squeezed her eyes shut and waited for her daughter’s reproach.

  “Mom, you know what you’re like. Don’t disappoint me, okay?”

  “Promise, I won’t. I’ll make them today.”

  Caro heard the BBC news commentator in the background.

  “Got to get going, Mom.”

  “Sure, Hon. Have a good day.”

  “You too. I mean night.”

  Caro fell back on her pillows, suddenly tired. She was envious in a way. Pleased for her daughter but, yes, envious. “Abby and Phillip,” she said aloud. How wonderful new love was!

  And then just at the moment Caro decided not to think anymore, the answer to her previous questions about love came to her. The solution was that one couldn’t come to love casually or with reservation. As with Abby in her relationship with Phillip, underneath the giddy excitement she sounded driven, her voice seemed to carry purpose and direction. Love didn’t just come to her; she came to it.

  Caro sighed. “Perfect love.” Next time she’d make it work. Another sigh transformed into a yawn. And then, sleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Friends can be said to “fall in like” with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love. ~Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  If Marcie had been alive, she and Caro would have driven out to the beach house on Saturday and enjoyed the festivities the Hamptons offered to celebrate the Memorial Day holiday. But the mere thought of throngs of happy-go-lucky vacationers made Caro want to cry, so she arranged a Tuesday arrival with the realtor. By then, most of the tourists would have gone home, leaving only the weekend husbands to drive west toward their jobs and New York flats, as she headed east.

  Marcie had acquired the rental from Gwen Henderson, a friend of a friend who was traveling through Europe for the summer and needed house-sitters. She glanced again at the photo of the house Gwen had sent.

  Located on Dune Road in the village of Westhampton, the house was oceanfront. That fact alone made Caro grin as she crossed over one of the bridges that attached Dune Road to the mainland.

  A paved strip of land and fragile dunes that ran the length of a barrier island defined by beach, ocean, and salt marshes, the island�
�s shores had been inundated since the 1980s by Wall Street millionaires. Consequently, Dune Road hosted an eclectic mix of architecture ranging from steel-embellished post-modern estates to 1920s cottages gone black with age.

  Number 83 was a fern-green Arts and Crafts structure sitting behind a white stucco monstrosity. Caro acknowledged the chauffeur who was wiping down a Bentley and drove the remaining four hundred yards to the house. She passed alongside a dense row of red cedars, which separated the two properties.

  The bungalow was typical of its style: one-and-a-half stories with a long, sloping roofline and a wide overhang that seemed nestled into the earth. This earthen tie was exaggerated by a foundation and pillars made of river rock that broadened at the base; the screened-in porch sat low on the dune.

  Because the house was situated on a high rise, the ocean was out of sight of the circular driveway. Caro stepped out of the car and the sea air grabbed her hair and ballooned out her caftan top like the wings of a giant sting ray. The smell and sound and the salty taste of it made her spread her arms and breathe deep through her nose.

  She stripped off her sandals, tossed them on the porch, and scuttled up the dune by a slim path cut through the cattails and leggy reed grasses. The sand, in early June, was cool. Her feet sunk into it almost to her ankles and she was practically on all fours when she reached the top.

  A hodgepodge of blankets, coolers, and umbrellas defined the boundaries of miniature islands of humanity that ran the length and breadth of the shoreline: mothers with children whose juvenile voices leaped above the din of the breakers; rich twenty- and thirty-year-old women in bikinis; their older counterparts under wide-brimmed hats reading romance novels alongside their gray-haired husbands.

  Caro shaded her eyes against the sun as she followed a pair of gulls diving for some bit of food. A queue of roadrunners, intent on baby hermit crabs, skittered their way in a zigzag across the sand.

  The tableau typified the Hamptons. It was the kind of day that Marcie had valued for her ability to afford renting in a luxury resort area after a career of establishing her worth in the publishing industry. Caro knew from Ethan that this year was to be particularly notable because he had planned to make Marcie a partner. She died without knowing she had achieved her most ambitious goal.

  Caro gave in to a snivel and her eyes teared for the life that Marcie had lost as well as for her own feeling of emptiness. She knew that Marcie wouldn’t want her to brood. Yet Caro passed several minutes staring at two women engaged in energetic conversation before she could turn away and tromp back down the other side of the dune to unload the car.

  Inside the bungalow, a departure from the traditional Arts and Crafts design revealed expansive sheets of glass that opened up the interior. Caro’s heart raced at the sight of the vast ocean; the surging surf that seemed to spill at her feet and confuse the boundaries between inside and outside.

  She opened the sliding French doors. Halfway in and halfway out the door, Caro suddenly felt bisected, cut through the middle: middle-aged, adrift in the mid-ocean of mourning, in the middle of a book, In Search of Eros, her collection of poems whose beginning she could scarcely remember and an ending she could not foresee.

  Glancing over her shoulder into the recesses of the great room, the solidity of the wooden architecture soothed her melancholy, while the sunlight that splashed like giant puddles onto the polished pine floor made her smile.

  On the deck, she squinted to a point on the horizon where she wanted to believe Marcie was looking back at her from the thin crease between sea and sky.

  Later that evening Caro ate sushi in town on the porch of an 1800s converted cottage. The tiny restaurant was situated between a liquor store and barber shop and across from a gourmet deli and an antiques shop—the extent of the storefronts that was considered the community’s main street.

  After dinner she bought wine and a few food staples, taking the opportunity to introduce herself to business owners, and then went home. She was glad that she’d unpacked and stowed everything away upon arrival; now she could enjoy her first night in contented orderliness.

  So thinking, she yanked on an old sweatshirt of Zach’s that she refused to throw away; the fabric was at the baby-soft stage that only comes after hundreds of washings. She poured a glass of chardonnay and made her way barefoot down the steps and along the salt-worn catwalk to the beach.

  It was too early in the season for mosquitoes and the air was benign. A sailboat in the far distance crossed her line of vision, its lights glittering in the coming dusk. She breathed in the pungent smells of the ocean and sipped her wine, letting the corn silk-colored liquid roll against her teeth.

  Caro settled into a welcome reverie. Even after she projected mental images of Marcie she managed to maintain an inner calm. This night was for taking the best of what the moment had to offer.

  She remembered a day when she and Marcie had hunted the East Village for a late-nineteenth-century reticule. It was to be a wedding gift from Marcie for her niece to fulfill the “something old” custom of giving. After a full day of rummaging through vintage clothing stores, Caro spotted a particularly delicate one, embroidered with lace and seed pearls.

  “Perfect!” Marcie pronounced and purchased it.

  Worn out from schlepping the city blocks from East Fourteenth Street to Houston, the north and south boundaries for the Lower East Side, they’d stopped into a bar to relax over drinks.

  They’d ordered then sunk into comfy chairs in peaceful retreat. After a few minutes, Marcie kicked Caro’s foot under the table and nodded to a pair of women kissing over bottles of Guinness. Caro scanned the room: two more women were sitting shoulder to shoulder in a booth, one of them with her arm slung around the other. A college-aged girl behind them read to her companion from Curve Magazine.

  “I love this. Stumbling into a gay bar. What are the chances?” Marcie whispered in Caro’s ear. “It’s so…trendy.”

  Caro frowned. “I think some of these women would take offense at the notion of being considered trendy.”

  “Oh, don’t get on your soap box. I only meant that, well…” She paused and then blurted, “I’m a post-middle-aged divorcee who hasn’t been out on a date in ages.”

  “That’s your own fault. You could have gone out last week with that literary agent Ethan brought around. He seemed really into you,” Caro said.

  “He was ten years my junior,” Marcie retorted. “But that’s not the point. What I’m saying is that it’s just different being here and I like the feel of difference. Makes my social life seem less limited.”

  Caro noted a seldom-heard vulnerability in Marcie’s voice, and asked if she’d ever thought about being with another woman sexually.

  “No. I told you I’m just feeling…out of touch. I’m not looking to change my sexual preference. I like men.”

  “I have…thought about it. Actually, I thought a lot of women did at one time or another. Seems almost natural to me, like masturbation.”

  Marcie screwed up her face in distaste. “Masturbation—”

  “Well, have you ever?” Caro coaxed.

  “I’m not saying.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, we’re best friends. Tighter than tight. If you can’t talk about this stuff with me, than who?”

  “With no one, that’s who,” Marcie said flatly.

  Caro playfully cuffed Marcie on the arm. “Did I ever tell you that you can be a pain-in-the-butt prude sometimes?”

  Marcie nodded.

  “So I guess that means you don’t want to talk about orgasms either, or S&M?”

  “No, and no,” Marcie said, and signaled the waitress for another drink.

  “Well, I like it here,” Caro said in a contented tone. “Makes me feel safe being surrounded my women. Very Sapphic. And that, my dear, is my last word on the subject…”

  A fruit fly buzzing around Caro’s ear interrupted her daydream just as a masculine voice addressed her.

  “Excuse
me. Hello.”

  Caro looked up. She first registered the man’s basso voice and lopsided smile, touches of gentility that countered his shaved head and the matching dagger tattoos on his forearms. A woman was with him. A camera with a zoom lens bumped against her chest as she leaned into her companion and slung her arm around his neck. Her skin was glossy with a dark tan gotten only from dedicated baking; the tangled length of her hair was caught up in a scruffy pony tail.

  “Tommy and Nina Winters,” the man said, nodding to his wife. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Caro got up, wiped herself of sand and shook their hands. “Caro Barrone.”

  “Tommy should explain. Gwen heard from the real estate woman you were coming this afternoon. Great to have you! Gwen wanted someone nice who’d take care of the place,” Nina offered congenially.

  “Settled in yet?” Tommy asked.

  “Pretty much. I kept to the bare minimum. Which is yours?” Caro asked, indicating the line of houses that extended along the beach in both directions.

  Tommy pointed to the neighboring three-story structure with a lighthouse-inspired tower.

  “It’s an incredible design,” Caro said, appreciative of outstanding architecture from years of studying plans that Zach had brought home for her opinion.

  “My brother,” Nina said. “When we decided to build, he invited us to Cape Cod to see the one he’d designed on the bay. I have a special thing for lighthouses and the stories they tell.”

  “We both fell in love,” Tommy said. He put his arm around Nina’s waist. “Listen, next time you’re at the library check out the local author section. She’s got a coffee-table book out called Lighting the Way from Bar Harbor to Key West. The photos taken in North Carolina along the Outer Banks are my favorites.”

  Nina gave her husband’s arm an affectionate hug. “It’s self-published and never made a dime.”

  “It made a few dollars,” Tommy said.

  “Hah!” Nina’s eyes darkened. “Enough to take you out to McDonald’s.”