The Girls of Tonsil Lake

by Liz Flaherty

  “Well, it kind of pisses me off.”

  “I hear that. Did you see the new associate in the practice? She’s twenty-nine. Looks like she should still be in elementary school. She’s very good, but I’m having to really work at liking her.” She leaned forward in her chair, pinning me with her gaze. “Are you scared, Andie? That it’ll come back? That we’ve missed something?”

  Deep breath. Another. In. Out. Where are you when I need you to help me breathe, Jean? “Yes.”

  “Good. It’ll keep you vigilant.” She looked down at the notes in her lap. “Maine, huh?”

  “Yes, with Jean and Suzanne and our friend Vin. Maybe you should give me a quadruple prescription for Prozac. I’ll just pass it around when we start fighting.”

  She laughed before an expression of concern crossed her face. “Jean doing all right?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, thinking positively. Then I frowned. “Shouldn’t you already know that?”

  “I just haven’t seen her for a while,” she said. “Maybe she’s changed doctors, although no one’s called for her records. At any rate, give her my best when you see her.”

  I did, hissing at her in the hallway of her house so that David wouldn’t hear. “Why aren’t you going to Carolyn for your annual checkup? What did your mother die of, Jean? Do you remember? And who discovered my cancer? It wasn’t me.”

  Jean’s mother had died of ovarian cancer. At the age of fifty-one. And Carolyn had discovered the lump in my breast.

  “What’s that?” she’d said.

  “It’s nothing. I think you have this thing for women’s boobs,” I said. She pressed harder. “Ouch.”

  There were a lot more ouches before we were done.

  Jean stopped at her bedroom door and glared at me. “I’ll take care of it,” she promised in a loud whisper. “Now please shut up. We’re going to Maine. We’re going to have a good time. We’re not going to fight.”

  “The hell we’re not.”

  The telephone rang, and a moment later, David called, “Andie, it’s for you.”

  We met halfway and he handed me the cordless phone. “It’s Paul,” he said. He raised his voice. “Tell him we’re on for the women tonight.”

  “I heard that, David O’Toole,” called Jean from their bedroom. I heard her laughter when he went in, closing the door behind him.

  “Did he say we were on for the women tonight?” asked Paul, after I’d said hello.

  “Yes, he did, but you’re out of luck. The women down at the Senior Center are on to you guys.”

  He laughed, and the sound ran along my nerve endings in a way I found altogether too pleasant. I was fifty-one, not seventeen, which meant I was no longer prepared to deal with that kind of feeling. Except maybe in my stand-up breast, which doesn’t have much feeling at all but does look like it’s seventeen. Oh, I already said that, didn’t I?

  “I just wanted to say goodbye again,” he said, “and to tell you to have a good time.”

  “Thanks,” I said, sounding as breathy as Suzanne at her worst.

  He waited the space of the three loud heartbeats I was all but certain he could hear over the phone. “I’ll miss you, Andie.”

  Jake had said those words the day our divorce was final. If I closed my eyes, I could still see him standing there outside the courthouse while his lover waited in the car. He’d traced a finger down the side of my face and tugged gently at the little gold hoop in my ear he’d bought me the day young Jake was born. “I’ll miss you, Andie.”

  I had turned and walked away. I’d gotten into the car and driven to Lewis Point to Jean and Suzanne. Miranda had ridden beside me, young Jake in the back with the dog. We did not speak until I stopped the car at Suzanne’s house.

  “We’ll be all right,” I said, looking from one of them to the other. “We all will.”

  It had taken me a year to convince them, longer than that to convince myself. The dog never had come around.

  “Is it okay if I call you once a week or so?” asked Paul, bringing me back to the present.

  “I’d like that. Did I give you the number?”

  “Last night.”

  Thinking of last night made my blood start rushing around crazily, and I knew beyond all doubt he could hear my heart beating then. “Oh,” I said, “yes. Last night.”

  I am not prepared to write about last night, even in this coil-bound journal no one will ever see. Let it suffice to say that losing one breast does nothing at all to lessen the pleasurable sensations that can be felt in the other.

  I don’t know whether I am getting prudish in my old age or simply paranoid, but that’s absolutely all I’m going to say on the subject of last night. God knows, if I chose to tell the whole story, Jean would probably send this journal off to her publisher.

  My blood was still thundering. I could hear it.

  David walked past, carrying Jean’s luggage, and I looked at the grandfather clock. “I have to go,” I said.

  “Have fun.”

  “I will. Thanks for calling, Paul.” I waited a second, maybe two. “I’ll miss you, too. Bye.”

  I hung up before he could answer.

  Jean

  Dear David:

  As I said on the phone, the trip was uneventful except for my motion sickness, which took us all by surprise. I’m fine now, although it left me a bit weak in the knees for a while.

  Vin looks well. She’s thinner than she was when I saw her last, and maybe she has some new lines around her eyes, but so do we all except Suzanne. She still has those wonderful cheekbones and the longest legs this side of the NBA.

  It was quite a scene when we all came together at the airport in Bangor. I think we all ended up crying, except maybe Andie. You’d have been appalled! smile

  The house is wonderful. We each have our own room, and we share two bathrooms. There are wraparound porches, upstairs verandas and everything is very light and cozy with mismatched beachy-looking furniture and plenty of old-fashioned lamps so that you never have to look around for a bright spot.

  I don’t know why I’m writing you when I’m sure we’ll talk nearly every day. I guess I need the written word. That’s not bad as vices go, being a written word junkie.

  I love you, David. Be safe.

  I slipped the letter into an envelope on the little white desk in my room and climbed into bed, leaving the windows open. The sea breeze was wonderful, soothing, and cool, and I was exhausted. I fell asleep immediately, with the bedside lamp still burning and Elisabeth Ogilvie’s Rowan Head lying on my chest.

  I woke before dawn with tears on my face, burning up even though the room was cold. I thought about going downstairs, but was reluctant to move in case I got sick again. This was not a good beginning to a vacation.

  The fears that usually stayed in the back of my mind came right straight to the front when David wasn’t in bed beside me, and for a moment I considered getting on the phone and asking him to come for me. Carrie had done that every year at camp.

  “I’m lonely here. Can’t you and Daddy come and get me?”

  “Just give it a day, sweetheart. If you still want to come home tomorrow, we’ll come and get you.” She never called back, and was in fact always reluctant to come home when camp was over.

  So just give it a day, Jean.

  I wished Andie hadn’t mentioned my mother the other morning. Thinking of her illness and death only added darkness to my shadowy fears.

  I had been thirty-two when she died, so busy with the children and the house that there hadn’t been any time to think much about the disease that killed her. I’d done that later, as I sat beside David’s mother’s bed and did for her what I’d never done for Ma.

  “You’re always going to write.” David’s words came back to me as I lay there, and I reached for the notebook computer I had hooked up earlier, just in case. I stacked the feather pillows behind me, wincing as the movements hurt my stomach, and opened the computer.

  I wrote
until I noticed that the letters weren’t very bright on the screen, and when I looked up I discovered that it was full daylight. There were five new pages of manuscript and my stomach had stopped hurting. Well, almost. My bladder, however, was a different story.

  A few minutes later, I followed the smell of coffee down to the kitchen. Vin was there, looking exotic in a long sleeveless black gown that appeared opaque until she moved, when you could the shadows of what was underneath. I spent a moment resenting that what she had underneath wasn’t nearly as lumpy as what I had.

  “I’ve decided”—she poured a mug of coffee and pushed it across the counter to me—“that hot flashes are our punishment for skinny dipping in Tonsil Lake.” Her auburn hair was damp at the temples despite the cool morning.

  I made my eyes as wide as I could and stared over at her. “I never did.”

  “Liar.”

  We laughed softly. “Well, most of the time we didn’t have bathing suits that fit,” I defended, “and we got in trouble if we swam in our clothes. We didn’t really have any choice.”

  “Did you take David back there when you were going together?”

  I looked down at my cup, remembering. “He insisted. When we decided to get married, he said it wasn’t right that he’d never met my parents, never seen where I came from. So we drove up from Bloomington one Friday after we got out of class.

  “When we got there, Dad and Ma were on the couch on that porch he started but never finished. David walked right up and introduced himself and said, ‘I want to marry your daughter.’”

  Vin smiled. “I can just see him. He was such a handsome devil, wasn’t he? What did they say?”

  “Dad looked over at me and said, ‘How far along are you?’ Since David had spent the last three months insisting I was probably the only junior at Indiana University who was still a virgin, that struck me funny, and I started laughing. Dad came up off the couch like he was going to backhand me, and David stepped between us. He said, ‘No, sir’—just that quiet.”

  I sipped the coffee, hoping my stomach would accept its good intentions. “Then we got back in the Mustang—remember that red one, David’s pride and joy?—and left. We didn’t go back until Dad died, what, five years later.

  “He was handsome, wasn’t he?” He still is, for that matter, but I was thinking about him as he had been. I missed the boy I’d fallen in love with a lot more than I was missing the man he’d become. In the clear light of morning, with my stomach no longer trying to turn me inside out, I could forget how much I’d longed for him in the dark hours.

  Andie and Suzanne came into the kitchen arguing. Andie was whining that her hair looked like dandelion fluff because Suzanne had thrown her out of their bathroom before she’d had a chance to put stuff on it to make it lie down.

  Suzanne was obsessing about a zit that had appeared overnight when she had, in a moment of madness, left most of her extensive collection of skin care items in her closet at home. She never would have done this, of course, if it hadn’t been for Andie talking her into it.

  I thought for a minute about what I’d be doing if I was home. The breakfast dishes would be in the dishwasher. David would have already left for the golf course. I would have been at the computer for an hour or so before he got up, and I would go back to it when he left unless Carrie needed me to watch the kids.

  For now at least, I thought as Andie’s and Suzanne’s voices swirled around me, this is better.

  Suzanne

  I called Jake last night, just to let him know the phone number here. We talked for fifteen minutes or so, and since I was lying in bed anyway, I indulged myself with a few fantasies. I feel almost guilty about this, because of Andie, yet I know there’s been nothing between them for years and years except friendship. Well, I sort of know that anyway. Andie’s never been all that forthcoming about her personal life.

  My ex-husbands are not my friends. Trent Taylor, who is Tom’s father, is a doctor in Indianapolis, and you just cannot imagine a more cold and distant human being. I will admit that I married him for the wrong reasons, most of them involving showing the inhabitants of Tonsil Lake that one of its girls could gain success. There were no professionals living on Tonsil Lake, unless you counted Andie’s Aunt Rosie, whose practice of the oldest profession isn’t exactly what I’m talking about.

  Trent and I lived apart five days a week. He was doing his residency in Indy and I was building my reputation as a sales rep with my company, based out of Lewis Point. One Friday when Tommy was three months old, Trent called to say he wouldn’t be home for the weekend because he had to work.

  Thinking to surprise him, I left Tommy with Jean, packed the sexy red lingerie the company had given me as some kind of bonus, and drove up to Tom’s apartment in Indianapolis.

  Well, he wasn’t at the hospital, and he certainly wasn’t working. I threw my red underwear at him and the nurse he was playing doctor with and left. I filed for divorce the following Monday. And, if the story weren’t full enough of soap opera clichés, I married my lawyer six months after my divorce was final.

  In all fairness, Phil Lindsey was a decent husband. He was a good father to our daughter Sarah and tried to be a good stepfather to Tom—who wasn’t having any, thank you.

  We were married for ten years, a typical suburban couple. We lived just two blocks from Jean and David in Willow Wood Estates and did all the right things. We went to barbecues and had barbecues. We belonged to the country club and the big Methodist church out on the edge of town. We went to Sarah’s dance recitals and Tom’s Little League games and to parties held by other lawyers.

  To tell the truth, I hated my life. I was a half-assed mother, not born to it like Jean or even Andie, and I wasn’t that great a wife for a lawyer, either. I was supposed to behave properly at least until he’d been made partner. “Properly” didn’t include being a cosmetics company sales rep, not even when I was promoted to the more prestigious title of consultant.

  Phil was not the type of man to force me to quit, but he did request that I keep a low profile about what I did. I tried to, and things went along okay. But then the Rivers family moved in next door.

  They were a nice couple. Ben was a stockbroker and Kate was a teacher. They had two children and a Dalmatian named Sidney. And they were black.

  Well, this may have been the beginning of the twenty-first century, but let me tell you, some creepy faction in Willow Wood Estates hadn’t yet heard of integration, enlightenment, or diversity. Less than a month after the Rivers moved in, we got up one morning to find their yard totally trashed, windows broken, and an effigy hanging from a willow tree. Someone had spray-painted “niggers, go home” on their white garage door. All that was missing was the burning cross.

  I saw Ben and Kate the same time I saw the mayhem. They were just standing there, hands hanging limply at their sides. I called Jean, yelling, “Get over here now,” and stomped out of my house and into the neighbors’ yard. Jean was there in two minutes, and we got started. Two furious women in pajamas and bathrobes soon became most everybody in the neighborhood and we cleaned that mess up. David even stopped on his way to work and took a can of white spray paint out of his trunk to try to obliterate what had been done to the garage door.

  The picture on the front page of that night’s paper was of Jean and me, flinging broken glass into a trashcan held by Kate Rivers.

  Phil was not pleased. Actually, he was irate. What was wrong with me, he wanted to know. Did I want the neighborhood to be taken over by blacks, gays, and other subversives?

  The kids and I spent the night at Jean’s. The divorce was particularly messy, since Phil was a lawyer, but I ended up with enough money to buy my condo.

  Sarah never forgave me for leaving her father, and Tom never forgave me for anything.

  So why am I digging up all this old history? Maybe because I’m confined in a house with two women who are close to their children in a way I’m not. Maybe because—and let me admit right h
ere and now that Andie’s right when she swears I fall in love at the drop of a zipper—I’m afraid I’m going to fall in love with Jake Logan, who is someone’s ex-husband. No, he’s Andie’s ex-husband, and if there hadn’t been a good reason for divorcing him, she wouldn’t have.

  I’ll just keep telling myself that.

  When I woke this morning, I had a pimple the size of a small city in Vermont on my cheek, right dead in the middle. I panicked, picked a fight with Andie, and covered it as well as I could with the little pat of concealer supplied in the travel-pack of makeup.

  Sitting in the kitchen eating yogurt, looking at Jean’s flat-on-one-side hair, Andie’s dandelion fluff, and the little curls at Vin’s temples that spoke of night sweats or a hot flash, I thought how little some things had changed since Tonsil Lake. We still sat in the kitchen in our nightclothes, still dreamed of the perfect man—whether we’d had him and lost him, still had him, or were sort of hoping—and still got zits.

  Vin

  Jean looked terrible this morning. Although we laughed together over David’s meeting of her parents and that laughter became outright hilarity when Suzanne and Andie came into the room, I sense that all is not well with her. I am not a particularly intuitive person, but this feeling is as strong as it is frightening. Because Jean is always all right.

  I remember when the measles came to Tonsil Lake. While Andie, Suzanne, and I were in our beds groaning and certain we were near death, Jean was sitting beside the lake, spotted but unbowed. She wrote us stories in her tablet with lined yellow paper that sold for a dime in the store at the end of the lake, and stuffed the folded missives between the cracks in the jalousie windows of our trailers. The stories all centered around the dreams we discussed among ourselves and they all ended with the words “they lived happily ever after.”

  When the rest of us had recovered from the measles and were once more terrorizing the residents of the lake, Jean was still a little weak. She sat lakeside while we swam and she went in earlier than we did at night. Her case of measles had been every bit as bad as ours, we all figured out later; she had simply refused to give in to it.