by Kate Walbert
We drove into downtown Rochester fast, through yellow lights just changed to red. She had turned on the radio, and I remember how good it felt to have had one drink and to be riding in the front seat of a warm car in the middle of an afternoon with a new friend. She pulled over once we got to the department store—one of those once-grand chains you find in depressed cities. I felt a bit blue, stepping out of the car into the cold to enter such a faded place. We should have pulled up to Bonwit’s and left the keys in the car for the valet. But soon the mood shifted; there were aisles of brightly lit things and a makeup counter where a few well-preserved women stood in lab coats and beckoned us closer. I was game but Katharine took my hand.
“Come on,” she said and led me to the escalator, one of the old kind with wooden railings. We rode up to the sportswear section on the second floor.
“What are we looking for?” I asked her.
“You’ll see,” she said and smiled.
She led me past sportswear toward the back of the second floor, through a maze of girdled mannequins and mounds of flesh-colored bras and panties on sale. The nightgowns hung along the rear wall, a rack of silky expensive things I would have normally passed right by. Katharine stood in front of them. “Aren’t they divine?” she said.
They were part of some kind of early Easter display—pink and blue and green and yellow silks. “I can’t wear yellow, but you,” Katharine said, choosing a yellow one from the rack. “You could do it.”
She held the yellow nightgown up to me and admired it. I looked back at her, again thinking of her as some kind of mirror in which I stood reflected. “It’s lovely,” I said.
Katharine smiled again. “But you do like it?” she said. I took the hanger from her and carried the nightgown over to the real mirror. It was difficult to tell whether I liked it or not. I felt foolish. There I stood in the middle of a Rochester winter holding a yellow silk nightgown over my wool coat and wool slacks, sure that if I actually tried it on I would look absurd in my thick socks and pale arms.
“It’s lovely, really,” I said, carrying it back to Katharine and putting it on the rack. “Perhaps I’ll come back for the sales.”
Katharine shrugged. “I think it is a wonderful color for you. Not many can wear yellow,” she said.
She stood and stared at me for a moment. I attributed the strangeness I felt to the old fashioned.
* * *
She invited me in as we pulled into her garage and I accepted. I had so rarely had company in the afternoons in Detroit. Once inside, she offered another drink. There was something of a party about that day—a new friend, a spontaneous shopping trip, two old fashioneds before six. I felt as if the world could indeed open up for me and I could step in.
She brought out the fresh drinks on a new tray. I pulled off my snow boots and this time she offered to take my coat and I said yes. I felt so comfortable, as if I could curl up on the mirrored couch and sleep for years. I tried to explain the day to your father that night but I could not find the right words.
With Katharine, the right words were easy. I told her about our moves, and about you and your birth. I told her how your father and I hoped to have another child soon.
She told me again how the R names had been her husband’s idea. She told me again that her parents were missionaries and that the white porcelain elephant in the corner had come directly from Burma, before they had shut the gates, and that her mother was a great beauty with blond hair and that everywhere they had gone the people in the villages had been far more interested in looking at her hair than they had been in hearing her preach about God and Jesus.
Then she asked me did I believe in God and Jesus, and at the time I did, so I said yes.
She said there were plenty of churches she could show me, but that she could not go inside. That she had sworn off it like she had sworn off any more children and any more sex with her husband.
It was at that point I said I should go, not because I disliked her using such an unfamiliar word, but rather because I knew that with Katharine I could say much that I might come to regret, that I could speak words that had been, before this, light as balloons drifting through my mind. To speak them would be to give them heft and weight.
“Goodbye, love,” she said at the door, kissing me on both cheeks. “See you tomorrow?”
“Of course,” I said.
She held my coat up for me and I put my arms through the sleeves and felt so entirely warm, from her, from this, from the promise of another day, that I walked home slowly through the bitter cold, balancing on the ridged rain gutters that ran on either side of Country Club Road, slipping some on the ice. It was the part of the day I would later come to know as the blue hour. Katharine said she had picked it up somewhere, she thought perhaps Paris. L’heure bleu. She said it seemed to her always the best way to describe that time of early evening when the world seemed trapped in melancholy and all its regrets for all its mislaid plans for the day were spelled in the fading clouds.
This is, quite truthfully, how she would phrase things.
Once home, I picked you up and kissed you, and the two of us drove the babysitter back to wherever she had come from. On our return, we stopped for something at the store. Running in, I reached into my coat pocket for my wallet and felt the silk wadded down so deep, I thought for an instant I had never noticed the fine lining of the wool. Then I pulled it out. The yellow nightgown, of course.
* * *
You came to despise Rochester winters, could never play outside, or for only a few hours, since I was a nervous mother and didn’t want you too long in the cold. You would stand, your nose pressed to the plate-glass door, amphibian-like fingers out and spread wide. You would wish for anyplace else.
But the next afternoon you were still excited by the newness of it, of your room, of places to go. The babysitter arrived particularly buoyant, a fresh-faced high school girl you might have grown into if we had stayed. You led her up the stairs to the place in the hallway where you had set up your Barbie palace, and I called to both of you that I would be gone a few hours, that I was visiting a friend. That day shone with an unfamiliar light; it had stopped snowing the night before, and a sun that seemed as foreign to that city as a locust storm or a tornado had appeared in the morning through pale clouds. The sky looked like a Renaissance painting of a sky, with pinks and blues and mother-of-pearl grays. It hurt to look at it but that we did, Katharine and I. She had met me at the door and led me outside, where she told me to stand, my back to her back, and stare straight up. Her hair smelled of something herbal, and I could feel her shoulder blades against my own. She wanted us to have our coats off, to lean against one another and to look straight up and to close our eyes and imagine spring.
“Think of yourself standing in the middle of a whiteout and suddenly the white is blown away by a giant fan and everything’s clear and you can see for miles and miles,” she said, and so I tried, but truth be told I have always had a tough time shutting my eyes and seeing myself. All I could do was smell Katharine’s hair and feel her shoulders through her sweater; all I could picture was the one tiny button, looped with silk thread, at the nape of her neck.
* * *
I visited Katharine every afternoon and every afternoon she met me at the door, glamorous, as if she had slept in her evening clothes. Winter eventually gave way to a wet spring; the trees shook out their new buds and appeared to blossom, collectively, on one particular day in May. It was a few weeks after that that Katharine met me at the door and put her hand over my eyes. I felt a flutter—her heart, though it might have been my own eyelashes against her skin. Her perfume smelled of cinnamon and tea.
“As you know,” she said, leading me in. “I grew up elsewhere. We were missionaries. Or my parents were. Then my mother split. My mother dressed as a boy, a young Arab boy, and toured northern Africa on horseback. I just found out she died, in a flood.” I had heard this story before, or most of it. What I did not know was the part about
Katharine’s mother in costume. My understanding was that she had died years before. My initial reaction was then of surprise not at the news of Katharine’s mother’s death but at the news that during this long winter we had spent in Katharine’s living room, Katharine’s mother had roamed the world.
“This arrived yesterday,” Katharine said, taking her hand away. “Ta-da!”
Before me, raised awkwardly on the Persian rug I had admired many times on the floor of Katharine’s living room, was a tent unlike any I had ever seen. It had many peaks, for starters, and from each a small flag hung, limply; the fabric was the color of sand and across its surface were painted hundreds, perhaps a thousand pairs of eyes, each startled, each oddly female.
“It came in the mail. I think she painted it. I don’t know. Anyway, it arrived in a box, with her.” Katharine lit a cigarette. “She wants me to take her somewhere. To spend the night in this and then to throw her out.”
“Her?” I said.
Katharine gestured to a small urn on the coffee table. “Will you come?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said without consideration. As I have told you, Katharine was my friend.
* * *
We left on a hot June day, the trees now thick with green. Katharine knew of a lake not far from the city where we could pay a small fee and spend the night. We pitched the tent there, near the car and a stucco structure with showers and bathroom stalls. The lake stretched out endlessly beneath the shadow of a mountain known as Mt. Rattlesnake. It was from the top of it, Katharine informed me, that we would toss her mother at sunrise.
That night we built a small fire and fried eggs. Katharine sat on a tree stump and talked. She told me again of her mother, and her brother, who was missing in action in Korea. She told me about her father, whose belief in Jesus, she said, left no room for anything else, no place for a daughter and a son, not to mention a wife. “I can understand why she snapped,” Katharine said. “I mean, think of how dull, no matter where. No one can live like that, in a fishbowl.”
I sat and listened. The heat was god-awful. I had on the yellow nightgown. I had never worn it before; it seemed silly in the winter and when the weather turned warmer I entirely forgot. It was only while packing, reaching into an out-of-the-way drawer for my athletic socks, that I came upon it, crumpled into a silk ball, cocoon-like. I packed it who knows why; it was hot, as I have said, the night balmy in the way summer nights can be in places near Rochester, as if all the melted snow has been absorbed into the air, so heavy with it that your weight feels tripled. No matter. We fanned ourselves outside the strange tent and drank old fashioneds from a thermos that smelled of chicken soup. Katharine talked. She wore her bathing suit—the style popular at the time, polka-dotted, with a ruffled skirt—and her hair, that horse-brown color that is not at all ordinary, she had combed into a tight bun. I could see her through the just dark. I watched her hands, punctuating.
I do not entirely remember what happened next, how it came that the two of us, me in my yellow silk, Katharine in her bathing suit, wandered around the edge of the lake in the moon shadow of Mt. Rattlesnake. There was a tension about the evening, something awkward in the weather, as if a thunderstorm might erupt at any moment or lightning tear across the sky. Swallows behaved as bats, swooping about our heads, and frenzied balls of mosquitoes bred over the shallower parts of the lake water. At some point Katharine took my hand to stress something, and she did not let go.
Before I continue I should say that this was a time when women had clear boundaries, and even in discussion the boundaries were observed. Katharine had already broken down those boundaries between the two of us, and I believed her holding my hand as we walked the lakeshore trail was just a natural extension of all those afternoons together, lying jagged on her Persian rug. I don’t know. I can tell you that the fireflies were thick and that the only sound we could hear across the lake was the sound of fish jumping. My silk nightgown felt light against my skin, damp from the humidity. It was not a weekend; there were no other campers. We were alone. Because of this, perhaps, we drew close, aware, as one becomes in certain moments, of the brevity of life.
After some time Katharine stopped and turned toward me. “Marion,” she said, and put her hands on my shoulders. Her hair, as I have told you, was pulled back tight, and when she smiled her whole face seemed to lean into her mouth or radiate out from it in a way remarkable. Only her eyes were sad.
“You are my best friend,” she said.
You are too young to understand what this once meant between women. No matter. I can tell you that there will be times when you have to choose between beginning again in a cold and lonely place or making do with whatever fragile shelter you have already built. I understood this, and knew that after that night I would never have another friend like Katharine, nor would I return to her house in the late afternoon or lean against her, back to back, to wish for spring. When she tried to kiss me I turned away. “I’m sorry” is what I said.
I slept that night outside and she slept in the tent. The flags hung limply. The next morning we woke before sunrise and climbed Mt. Rattlesnake. The top of the mountain was a collection of rocks, some moss-covered, some bare. From there we looked down at our tent, a miniature in the distance, and saw clearly the path we had walked the night before.
Katharine held the urn up high, intending to scatter her mother’s ashes into the wind, but there was no wind and so the ashes simply fell into a heap on the rock on which we were standing. The two of us used branches to scrape them over the edge and then sat and watched the sun ascend. “I’m afraid she would have been displeased with me,” Katharine said after some time. “I’m afraid she would have been horribly displeased. They all are, aren’t they? Horribly displeased.”
“I don’t know,” I said, and took her hand in mine. “No,” I said.
* * *
Katharine died several years after we moved to Norfolk. I got the news over the telephone. We had lost touch, but that was not so unusual in those days when a woman stayed in a place only until her husband’s next transfer. She had sent me Christmas cards, of course, and a longer note when she heard about your sister’s birth. I still felt close to her in a way I’ve felt with no friend since, though after that excursion we saw each other rarely. Still, I waved whenever I drove down Country Club Road and passed her Tudor, forgetting that her windows were overgrown, imagining that she might be looking out, seeing me.
When Rick called, we were packing for Durham, getting things organized for the movers the next day. I had been feeling the nostalgia I have always felt on those eves of leaving. When I hung up the phone, I went back to what I had been doing, rolling china into sheaves of newspaper, marking cardboard boxes DEN, KITCHEN. I did not think of Katharine. Instead, I thought of the next neighborhood, the next house: how I would paint the living room walls, paper the bedrooms; how I would knock on the front doors of the houses on our new street, introducing myself, introducing you and your sister, accepting when the ones at home invited us in for tea and cookies. It felt somehow impossible to think of anything else, to think of the way she must have looked, so indiscreet, so inelegant, slumped against the steering wheel of that automobile going nowhere, idling in the garage over the long weekend Rick had chosen to take the boys camping. Instead, I pictured her in her coffin, pictured her in a yellow silk nightgown, because she always said things like silky nightgowns helped to chase away the blowsy feeling that came with every blue hour, when no man or beast, she said, should be left to swim alone.
PLAYDATE
Matilda’s mother apologizes for calling so late, but she wonders whether Caroline might be free for a playdate? Like, tomorrow?
“Matilda’s had a cancellation,” she says.
Liz searches the kitchen drawer for Caroline’s Week-at-a-Glance. It’s ten already and she’s had her wine; down the hall the baby nurse, Lorna, is asleep with the twins and Caroline; Ted’s out of town. What the hell is Matilda’s mother’s na
me, anyway? Faith, Frankie, Fern—
“We could do an hour,” Liz says. “We have piano at four-thirty.”
She can picture her clearly: a single woman who hovers in the school hallways wearing the look that Liz has come to associate with certain mothers—a mixture of doe-eyed expectancy and absolute terror, as if at any minute they might be asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or the current policy on plagiarism; the school being one of those places where mothers are kept on their toes and organized into various committees for advance and retreat, their children’s education understood as a mined battlefield that must be properly assaulted. Didn’t she just see her last week at the enlightenment session? A talk given by a Dr. Roberta Friedman, Professor of Something, entitled “Raising a Calm Child in the Age of Anxiety; or, How to Let Go and Lighten Up!” But now, for the life of her, Liz can’t remember whether she and Matilda’s mother exchanged two words, just the way Matilda’s mother balanced on the edge of her folding chair taking notes, the intentional gray streak (intellectual?) of her cropped hair, the fury of her pen.
“Oh, God, that’s great,” Matilda’s mother is saying. “I just need to keep Matilda from losing her gourd.”
“I understand,” Liz says.
“Do you?” says Matilda’s mother. “You do?”
* * *
Her name is Fran, apparently. Fran Spalding. Liz has looked her up in the confidential, you-lose-it-you’re-screwed Parent & Faculty directory. She and Matilda live across the park from the school, on West Eighty-sixth Street. Does anyone not live uptown? Liz wants to know, but she asks the question only of herself, so there’s no answer, just the relative quiet of her studio—a big loft in what was once considered Chinatown. Liz spends most mornings here spinning clay into pots and teacups and dessert plates. At this hour there’s little interruption, just the occasional rumble of a garbage truck and the low chatter of the radio and her own mind: Fran Spalding, daughter Matilda, West Eighty-sixth. They’ll go today after school. They’ll cross the park in a taxi, mothers and daughters, and aim for the apartment building, three-forty-something, where Fran Spalding and Matilda live, and go up to the fifteenth floor, 15A, she knows—the address listed in the second section of the directory, the front pages clotted with emergency numbers and please-put-in-a-place-of-prominence evacuation routes.
