The Girls of Tonsil Lake

by Liz Flaherty

  Suzanne was staring at us both with those worried brown eyes of hers, so Andie and I exchanged a scowling glance and let it go at that.

  I made up my mind to talk to David that night about remodeling Carrie’s room, but he’d brought home brochures about Hawaii, where neither of us have ever been, and we planned a trip all evening instead. We ended up in bed with the brochures spread all around us, laughing about the roach-laden hotel where we’d spent our wedding night.

  Then we made love, and when I was falling asleep with my body spooned into his, he asked, “Was it all worth it, Jeannie? Have the good times made up for all the bad ones?”

  I was too drowsy to give much thought to the questions or to the intonation of his voice. I mumbled something, laid my arm over his around my waist, and went to sleep.

  I woke at two in the morning, pain in my stomach forcing me into a jackknife position. It went away after a while, mostly, but I made up my mind to confine my wine drinking to a glass with dinner. At least until Vin came home.

  Suzanne

  Let’s get this straight right off the bat, all right? I’m blonde. Not naturally, but blonde nonetheless. I started frosting my hair in freshman year, when everyone else seemed to fit in at the high school and I didn’t, and it worked so well I’ve never looked back. This does not, regardless of what Andie, Jean, and Vin think, make me stupid. Nor does it make me a bimbo, shallow, or a sex maniac. Just between you and me, I will admit that sometimes I am every one of those things, but it doesn’t have one thing to do with me being blonde.

  I went to college to be a kindergarten teacher, attending Indiana State University at Terre Haute. For those of you born outside Indiana, this is pronounced Terra Hote, not Terra Hut or Terra Hoot.

  Only a few semesters away from graduation, I got pregnant. The baby’s father, who suddenly discovered he had a wife and kids, paid for the abortion. Andie and Jean drove over from Bloomington, where they were in school, to take me to the clinic. Jean tried to talk me out of the abortion, Andie yelled at both of us all the way across town, and I cried. But I went through with it.

  It’s something I try not to think about. I’m not always successful at that in the middle of dark and lonely nights, but uninterrupted nights of sleep are some of those things that reside in the rose gardens no one ever promised me.

  There was no concentrating on classes after that, so I sold my books for a pittance, packed up, and left Terre Haute. I got off the bus a couple hours later in Lewis Point, a nice town about an hour south of Indianapolis, and that was where I stayed. I got a job over Christmas in a classy department store, and the most exclusive makeup supplier they had offered me a job as a sales rep.

  It’s been the saving of me, I guess, outlasting two marriages and sending both my kids to college. I love what I do, love making women look and feel better about themselves. I wish it was a job that earned respect from others, but I respect it—so maybe that’s enough.

  One of the big automotive companies has a plant in Lewis Point. Jean’s new husband David got a job there as soon as he graduated. Jean did her last year by correspondence and at the university extension in town. They moved up steadily—buying a bigger house with each kid—ending up in Willow Wood Estates with the doctors, lawyers, and other people who wore ties to work and drove foreign cars to DAR meetings.

  Andie moved here after she got divorced from Jake Logan about twenty years ago. She went to work as a hostess in a swanky restaurant to earn a nest egg so that she could settle in Indy. Eventually she bought the place and then opened three more. When business was booming and her kids were out of college, she sold the whole corporation.

  She was having a good time, substitute teaching a couple days a week and taking trips whenever she felt like it. Then she got cancer and it was awful.

  I’ve never been one to pray much, but I sure did then. I think we all did. She was so brave about it all, especially the physical disfigurement.

  I don’t know if I could handle that. Because truth be told, how I look is all I have. If I lost that, I wouldn’t be anything. They say looks are only skin deep, but I’ve never known any men—outside of possibly David O’Toole—who really felt that way when they were doing the looking.

  After she got sick, Andie spent a week in New York with Vin, which none of us had ever done. I think Jean and I were both jealous of that because Vin had never invited us to come and stay—just to call if we ever got to New York. Even when her husband died last year, she didn’t want us to come at all. Not even Andie.

  I’ve been to New York a few times for work, and Vin and I always have dinner at least once, and usually see a show, too, but she’s never invited me to her place.

  Andie said today that Vin asked her to come back to New York to work on her book, but she isn’t sure she feels well enough for summer in the city. It scares me when Andie admits to not feeling well.

  The others would tell you everything scares me, but that’s not true. I just know enough to understand that most men don’t want women who are braver than they are.

  I said once that men didn’t want women who were smarter than they were, either, and Vin and Jean got all pissy about it. But Andie said women had no choice but to be smarter, since they didn’t have to think with penises. So now whenever a man says something about thinking, I get this picture in my head of a penis with a little cartoon balloon light bulb above it.

  Jake Logan’s been calling me from Chicago since Andie got sick. He calls for updates on her condition because he doesn’t trust her to tell him the whole truth. He’s such a nice guy. I wonder if Andie’s ever forgiven him for whatever went wrong between them. She never talks about him. I wonder if he’ll keep calling now that Andie’s out of the woods. I wouldn’t mind if he did.

  Vin

  I don’t know what made Suzanne send me this journal, even though it’s very nice and looks good lying on the coffee table. I’ve never been the journaling type—even entries in my calendar are terse and businesslike, with no smiley faces or exclamation points.

  I must admit that I miss having a confidante. I told Mark everything about me up until the day he died, and now it’s like no one really knows or cares who Vin Stillson is. His children certainly don’t, and we never had any of our own.

  Jean and Andie and Suzanne would have come when he died. Jean would probably have carried a casserole all the way on the plane. But I’m not a very good hostess at the best of times, and I couldn’t very well just throw them into a hotel and tell them I’d see them when I had time. They sent a beautiful planter that still sits in the foyer, but to this day I wish I’d just let them come.

  When Andie came alone, she didn’t feel well at all, and she mostly just wanted to be away from Lewis Point for a bit. I ordered the best takeout Manhattan has to offer and coerced her to eat.

  Sometimes we sat together in front of the fire and talked a lot. But not about who we were. The closest we came to that was when she asked if I was afraid to be on my own and I said, “No, not really. Are you afraid of cancer?” She said, “Oh, hell, I’m forny terrified.”

  Then we both started laughing. We may have cried some, too, but we didn’t mention tears to each other. It would have been a good time for Suzanne to be there—she likes crying, likes emoting on all levels. I just don’t.

  When Jean sent me Andie’s journal—completely full of writing in a rainbow of colors—I thought, you know, what in the hell is she doing here? Jean’s a fabulous writer, even if it is in a genre I can’t buy at my publishing house, so I assumed she saw something in what Andie had written.

  There was something there, all right. I typed it out myself on the computer in Mark’s home office, sitting up late every night until it was finished, scarcely changing a word.

  I was only sorry I couldn’t show the emotion Andie’s handwriting did. Sometimes she wrote in big, splashy red or turquoise; other days in somber black; sometimes in hopeless brown, the penmanship reduced to the spidery, wobbly writing of
the very old.

  At the end of entries on particularly bad days, she wrote, almost as a mantra, “Let there be hope.” I slapped this on the title page and took it in to the senior editor of the division of Gunderson Publishing that does memoirs.

  “Tell me what you think,” I said, and walked out. I’ve never especially cared for Marian Nielson, and it grated on me that I was handing her a bestseller as a forny gift.

  She had it back to me in twenty-four hours. “It’s splendid,” she said. “It’ll make the NYT list in a heartbeat. However, I don’t have five free minutes between now and the next decade. We’re publishing the memoirs of the stars of the moment in every sport there is, not to mention actors and musicians. I’ll buy it if you’ll edit it. I’ve already talked to Gunderson and he says to clear your schedule and go for it if you think it’s viable.”

  Speaking of forny gifts.

  I wanted Andie to come to New York, but she didn’t feel up to it. I felt a little shudder go through me when she said that. Andie’s always been so strong, and she’s cancer-free, so I found it startling and frightening when she admitted to feeling less than wonderful. But, as Let There Be Hope shows, cancer changes one in sometimes indefinable ways. Maybe this is one of those changes.

  Mark and I visited some islands off the Maine coast once, in our early days. I was so enthralled that he bought me a house on one of them, a little strip of green called, appropriately enough, Hope Island. It reminds me of Bennett’s Island, the fictitious utopia of Elisabeth Ogilvie’s books, except that Hope has all the mod cons.

  I love to go there. It’s a place I can be myself with little regard to what anyone else thinks. I sit in my bathrobe on the wraparound porch of the Victorian horror that is my house and drink coffee with Lucas Bishop, our neighbor. I read Jean’s books without worrying that someone will see the covers. I use expressions like “forny” and “well, shit.”

  I’ve never taken anyone else—it was Mark’s and my private getaway—but I wouldn’t mind if it was Andie who was there. Or Jean and even Suzanne. Andie and I could work on her book. Jean could cook and keep house since she’s so crazy about doing that, and maybe even spin out one of her romances placed on an island. And Suzanne could…do our hair or something.

  We would all be together as we are that single night every year when we drive to the lake and pretend we’re facing down our ghosts. I am a little afraid that the day will come that we’ll have to face them down for real.

  Well, shit. I wonder if they’d come.

  Chapter Two

  Andie

  Vin has asked me to spend a month with her on an island off the coast of Maine. It sounds like a setting straight out of one of Jean’s books. All we need is a gorgeous heroine and a guy who doesn’t want to fall in love. Vin says it’s nice there, and quiet, and not nearly as hot and humid as it gets here.

  At first I thought maybe I was dying and no one wanted to tell me. Vin’s never been one to invite company before—just that week last fall when I was sick as a goddamned horse and she was still reeling from Mark’s death. I don’t remember if she invited me then or if I just went to prove I was still alive and could do things like book flights and wear real clothes instead of the sweats I wear around the house. I puked all the way to New York, but I never told anyone that.

  Vin reminded me we need to work on that book, and I put dying out of my mind again. I feel stupid saying “my book,” since I never meant for it to be one, so I just call it that book without even any capital letters. I think the title she gave it sounds way too…oh, poor little me, I guess, but she swears it’s good.

  I was just starting to like the idea of a month on her island when she told me she invited Jean and Suzanne, too. “What were you thinking?” I bellowed into the phone—it’s good to have my bellow back. “Jean would be fine. She’ll cook for us rather than entrust her palate to anything we might conjure up. But Suzanne? She’ll be holding us down for makeovers every morning and giving us pedicures after our showers. Pedicures, for Christ’s sake.”

  Vin was laughing, which was good to hear—she doesn’t laugh near enough. “Oh, stop being such a bitch, Andie. They won’t come anyway, except maybe for a weekend.”

  I have undoubtedly been called a bitch more in the past month than I have in all my life before. At least to my face. I’ve never been much for name-calling, since we heard more than our share of it growing up on Tonsil Lake. But it’s different when it’s Jean or Vin doing it. It’s like they’re saying “we’re there for you” in tongues or something.

  My daughter Miranda, who’s a schoolteacher married to another schoolteacher, was over here this morning before her kids got up. “Mom,” she said, “why didn’t you ever get married again?” She looked down at her hands and her face got red. “Was it because us kids were terrible to every guy you ever dated?”

  I was surprised at her perception and bothered by her guilt. “I made my own choices,” I said.

  But I spent the rest of the morning thinking of Paul Lindquist. We had met at the all-night pharmacy when Miranda had an ear infection and Paul’s wife was dying. We talked as we waited—me in my flannel pajamas and my older-than-God car coat and him in butt-hugging jeans and a faded blue shirt that pulled tight over his shoulders when he moved.

  I remembered there had been a little three-corner tear in the sleeve of that shirt I’d wanted to mend. That should have told me something right there, since I’ve never purposefully mended a goddamned thing.

  Though he’d lived in Lewis Point most of his life, I had never seen him before. But after that night I saw him every time I turned around. He coached young Jake’s Little League team, drove in Miranda’s carpool, and, that Labor Day weekend, held out his firefighter’s boot to collect money for the muscular dystrophy telethon. I put in a ten-dollar bill I couldn’t afford.

  When his wife died, I sent a card. And every time I saw him after that, my heart would do weird things and I’d get so damned horny it felt like a hot flash.

  A year later, when he asked me for a date, I said no.

  Because I knew I would love Paul Lindquist, and I wasn’t going to do that again. Ever.

  And I never did.

  But every couple of weeks while I was sick, he sent me a card—never anything sentimental or familiar, just funny or mildly obscene. The first ones, he’d signed “Take care, Paul Lindquist,” but by the time the cards slowed to a stop, he was scrawling, “Best, Paul,” across the bottom. I’d missed those cards when I got better.

  All this retrospection makes me restless. I called Jean to invite her to lunch, and she said no, sounding frazzled.

  “I have to send this book in by Monday and I’ve still got fifty pages to write. I always make my deadlines, and I don’t want that to change because every other forny thing in my life has.”

  “Okay, go back to work. I won’t bother you.”

  I hung up quickly, but then I got to thinking about all the time Jean had spent with me over the past year. I was probably the reason she only had three days to write fifty pages. Oh, Christ, more guilt. I don’t like guilt in the first place, and Miranda had already given me my dose for the day. Even though it was hers instead of mine, I’d felt it.

  At noon, I went through a drive-through and got two burgers, two orders of fries, and two vanilla shakes and drove out to Jean’s house in Willow Wood Estates.

  She was in her dining room at her computer, wearing a nightshirt. She hadn’t put on her makeup or combed her hair and she looked like shit. It was like seeing the American flag lying on the ground, incongruous and probably illegal. Jean was always neat. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup, but she wore it right, and her soft brown hair was always in this smooth curve with the sides tucked behind her ears.

  One of the things I love about her is that she’s always the same. She doesn’t look as young as Suzanne or as elegant as Vin, though she could still pass for an attractive forty-five. But today she looked every minute of her fifty-one—even
her gray roots were showing. I’d never seen this before. Root concealment is like a religion with her and Suzanne.

  “Shut it down,” I said. I thought about bellowing it, since I’d rediscovered my bellow, but Jean looked too fragile to be yelled at.

  I thought for a minute she was going to cry, but she didn’t. She stuck her chin out and got up. “I’m sorry for the mess.”

  There wasn’t a thing out of place in her house—there never was—and no dust mote had dared to land on any of the shining surfaces. The only mess was her. God, I hated that.

  When we were sitting at the bar in the kitchen sucking down sloppy, artery-clogging cheeseburgers and fries, I said, “Call your editor. Ask for an extension,” just like I knew what I was talking about.

  “You don’t understand. My editor’s about twelve years old. She inherited me. She’d much rather develop her own stable of writers than nurse along an over-the-hill veteran.”

  “Then tell her to forny off. Ask for a new editor, one that is at least of legal drinking age.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  As soon as we’d finished eating, she threw me out. “I have to work.”

  “All right, but tell David I need someone to take me out to supper. He’s a good guy. He’ll volunteer.”

  For a minute there, she smiled, so I did, too. But I wasn’t happy when I went away. Not happy at all.

  Jean

  When I sold my first book, I got flowers from David, and also from every one of the other Tonsil Lake girls. My kids hung a banner from the roof over the front porch proclaiming their mother to be a published author. I spent an entire afternoon on the phone with other members of my writers’ group saying, “Yes, it’s really true. Can you believe it?”

  Then I made the beds, dusted the living room, did three loads of laundry, and cooked a dinner that included all the major food groups. David was surprised.