When the sweetest stockbroker in Harrisburg married his childhood sweetheart and moved into his dream house it cheered us up. Everyone in town was excited about it. His first wife had gone crazy and started screwing the carpenters. Then she divorced him and took his home and half his money. Then he drank for a year. Then he went up to Chicago and brought back the girl he should have married thirty years before. The one he took to the prom. The one he laughed with when he was young.
They bought an old house out on lovers’ lane. We all thought it must be where they necked when they were young. Anyway, they tore it to pieces and built a dream house on top of the shell. They planted roses everywhere. They put up a flagpole and flew a different flag every day. The American flag, the state flag of Illinois, the flag of the United Nations, the Australian flag, the Betsy Ross flag, the flag of the forty-eight states before we added Hawaii and Alaska. When the town stopped talking about them getting married, it started talking about the flags. Some people thought it was unpatriotic to fly other flags. Others thought it was “cute.”
I live a mile from the dream house. I pass by there every day taking the cocker spaniels for a walk. Suzanne Smith was the bride’s name before she became Suzanne Mayfield. She was a tall blonde who had been the drum majorette, always twirling, twirling, twirling, wearing her boots, carrying her baton. She had gone to Chicago when she finished high school and had not come back. There was rumor she was involved in some sort of problem at a savings and loan up there but none of us pushed that rumor. We were glad to see something good happen in the world. This isn’t a mean town. We were pulling for them. I’d be pulling for them still if I thought it would do any good. I don’t blame other people for things I do. If I ended up at an orgy right here in Harrisburg, it’s my own fault. No one made me go to that party. No one made me stay. It’s not the first time I have strayed from my decision to live an orderly life and only serve Athena.
I first learned about the marriage of Davis and Suzanne when the sound of machinery woke me at dawn. By the time I had gathered the dogs and gone out on the road it sounded like the whole woods was being razed. As I drew near the house I could see it was two bulldozers tearing off the porch and clearing the back lot. “What’s going on here?” I asked the dozer driver. “You’ve woken the whole neighborhood.”
“Davis Mayfield’s bringing home a bride,” the man answered. “We have to rebuild this house in a hurry.”
By the end of the week every carpenter and plumber in town was at work. Even some of the carpenters who had hastened the demise of Davis’s first marriage were out there. This is a small town. You can’t worry about things like that if you want to get anything done around here.
“He’s trying to outdo the other house,” everyone said. “He’s going to show her how to get a restoration done.”
“She never has finished that other house,” others agreed. “After the divorce she just let it go to pot. She’s living like a pig.”
Davis and Suzanne went off to California to get married. They stayed four weeks, driving around the West, getting used to each other and letting the house be finished and the town get over the shock. Then they came home and started having parties. First they had a benefit for the Handicapped Bus. They had it on the lawn before the roses even started blooming. I baked three cakes for the benefit and dressed up in my best lavender slacks and top and went over to see how Suzanne had fared. She looked pretty good for fifty years old. Pert and not half as crazy as she had been in high school. Davis runs to crazy women because his mother drank herself to death when he was thirteen.
“Hey, Suzanne,” I called out as I came walking up the new brick sidewalk. “We are all so glad to have you back here.”
“Hello, Anne,” she answered. “Davis told me you lived down the road.”
“I walk by every morning. I have these cocker spaniels my daughter left with me two years ago. I am waiting for them to die. In the meantime they must be walked.”
“William died?” She was speaking of my late husband.
“His heart stopped last Christmas Eve. It’s all right. We had a good life.”
“What happened to you and Bras?” She was talking of my old boyfriend.
“He’s drinking himself to death. He’s around town. You’ll run into him.”
“He was a beautiful man. Is he still pretty?”
“I suppose he is. I try not to dwell on it. What a waste.”
“Well, you’re looking very well.”
“So are you. You’ve made Davis a happy man.”
“It’s mutual.” He came walking toward us and put his arm around her waist.
“Come upstairs,” Suzanne said. “I’ll show you our rogues’ gallery.” So the next thing I knew I was up in their bedroom looking at about four hundred photographs of them when they were young and them with their separate children and her grandchild and her old house in Chicago and a blown-up photograph of them at the prom.
“I really can’t stay too long,” I said at last. “I just came to bring the cakes and put in an appearance.”
“What do you do with yourself?” she asked. “Come and see me. Let’s be friends.”
“Of course,” I answered. “I’d like that. Well, I really have to go.” I made my escape, and it felt like one. What was there about her that bothered me? I chastised myself. Harrisburg is too small for petty discriminations. Still, I hurried past the flagpole and the gardens. I hurried back to my car and drove home. Why hadn’t I answered her questions? Why didn’t I want to help?
She called the next morning and wanted to go to lunch downtown at the hotel. “I can’t today,” I answered. “I have to go to work.”
“Oh, where are you working?”
“Here. At my house. I’m writing a dissertation. I’m taking anthropology at Carbondale. I went on a dig last year in Missouri. I have to write it up.”
“That’s fascinating. Davis said no one ever sees you anymore, except when you walk the dogs.”
“Well, of course they see me. I’m right here where I’ve always been. I’m getting a degree in anthropology. I’ve been busy.” I was bristling. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I be nice to people?
“Well, you always were a loner.”
“You don’t know what I am, Suzanne,” I answered. “Well, I have to go now. Thanks for asking me. We’ll do it another time.” I hung up. My problem, I decided, was that Suzanne was noticing me. In a small town, if you are quiet, people forget you are there. They leave you alone. Whoever you decide you are, you are free to be. When someone new comes along and starts asking questions, it stirs things up. We are not sessile like trees, but we depend on roots as they do. A root system needs to be left alone. It needs to do its work in the dark, find its boulders, suit itself to the terrain. Suzanne wanted to shake me up, but I wasn’t in the mood for it. And what of poor old Davis? He needed to make a happy home so much that he would keep on marrying crazy women and letting them stir up his life. What he was really doing, of course, was trying to recreate his childhood and fix it up. Make a world where his mother did not die. Except the only women he could love were ones who reminded him of the one he had lost. Doomed to repeat our failures. Doomed to sacrifice the present to the past.
Not me, I decided. I will learn from this not to love another running back no matter how much they remind me of my father. I will get my degree in anthropology. By then, maybe these dogs will have died. I will go to France. I will bribe people until I get to go into those caves and see those paintings.
Meanwhile, I have been playing the market and taking scuba diving lessons at the Y. My father left me two hundred thousand dollars in blue chip stocks. I have turned that into five. When it reaches seven I will leave. The underwater cave is the one I really want to see. I have a theory about those handprints with the missing fingers. I am writing my dissertation on it. I had a life and I had a plan. I just wasn’t talking about it or letting it show. And I sure wasn’t going to let Suzanne Mayfield in on it.
She tried to draw me out. She fixated on me. She couldn’t leave me alone. Finally I relented and told her to meet me at the gate and she could walk with me. “Be waiting,” I told her. “I don’t want to slow down. Do you have some walking shoes?”
“I think so. I’ll do the best I can.”
She was waiting at the gate and I picked her up and we started down toward the creek that runs into the Morgans’ land. “I used to park by that creek with William,” I began. “Did you and Davis ever park there?”
“His daughter’s coming to spend the winter with us,” Suzanne replied. “What’s she like? I’m scared to death of what this will mean.”
“Why doesn’t she stay with her mother? Her mother’s right over there on Willow Street in the big house.”
“She doesn’t like her mother. Davis says we have to let her stay. What’s she like, Anne? You’ve got to help me out. I have to be prepared.”
“She used to be into drugs. Then they sent her off to school. I don’t know. She isn’t pretty. Sallow-faced and thin. She doesn’t smile much. Can’t you get out of it? Get her an apartment. That’s my advice.”
“Oh, God. That sounds terrible. I don’t want to be involved in this.”
“You married him. You’re involved in his life. Didn’t you ask any questions before you married him?”
“I didn’t even sleep with him. He wanted to wait. I thought he had enough money to make up for whatever happened.”
“It won’t make up for Livingston. That’s what they call her. Well, maybe she’s changed. She might be better now.”
“I should have slept with him.” We were almost to the dirt path that led to the creek. I turned on the path and walked deep into the woods. Suzanne followed me. “If I’d slept with him, I wouldn’t be here. He hardly ever makes love to me. He says he’s going to but he never does. Then he says he’s too worried or too sad or he doesn’t feel like going to bed.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I turned and faced her. I held a branch out of her way. This town is too small to know things like this. We have to maintain our secrets. We have to believe in one another. We have to leave our sadnesses in our rooms.
She moved nearer to me. She moved too close. “I thought you might want to kiss me,” she said. She reached out a hand and put it on my shoulder. She looked at me. I took her hand and removed it from my shoulder. “I don’t kiss girls,” I said. “I only kiss running backs and I’m about to quit kissing them.”
“Yes. Go on.”
“I’m fifty years old. I’m trying to find out how to be useful in the world. I’m not going to start kissing girls at this late date.”
“Have you ever tried it?”
“Look, Suzanne. If you like to kiss girls, it’s fine with me. But don’t get me in it.”
“If you change your mind, let me know. You and Davis and I could have dinner, drink Champagne, get in bed and have some fun. We got some girls in Las Vegas and really had a party. Made all our dreams come true.”
“Suzanne. This is a small town. My dream is to get a degree in anthropology. Also, I do business with Davis. I don’t want to be privy to the sex lives of people I do business with.” I turned before she could answer and plunged deeper into the woods. I had been walking slowly so she could keep up but now I walked as fast as I could go. If she was so brave and could think up doing threesomes in Harrisburg, she could get her heartbeat up. Let her get bit by chiggers, I decided. She is welcome to all the excitement she can generate. As for me, I’m out for a walk. The dogs were ahead of me now, running madly into the bushes. They are very crazy, city dogs. I would never have picked these dogs in a million lifetimes to be my own.
I came to the creek. I bent over and tasted the water. I took off my shoes and socks and set them on a rock. I waded into the water, walking along on the clean white stones with the sunlight coming down between the leaves making patterns on the water. I could hear her behind me. She followed me into the water. “Just remember I asked you,” she said. “If you change your mind, call me up.”
“Don’t worry, Suzanne, I won’t change my mind about that.”
“You have beautiful shoulders,” she said. “From the back you look like a goddess.” I turned around. She had taken off her shirt and bra. She stood in the water in a pair of faded blue jeans. Her breasts hung down like a native’s in the National Geographic magazine. Was I suppose to think that was funny? Was I supposed to say something?
“What do you think?” she asked. “Pretty sexy, huh? Do you like what you see?” I waded back to where my shoes were sitting on a stone. I put them on. I walked back to the road and ran the rest of the way home. I could feel her laughing after me. I could hear her laughing even after I bolted my doors and threw myself on my bed and covered my head with my pillow.
I started walking the cocker spaniels in the other direction in the mornings. You must change your life, Rilke said, and I am always willing to change mine when I have to. I figured out a route that led down past the old junior high, which is now a sixth grade. I went past the street where Dixie Lee Carouthers had lived. In that house I shaved my legs for the first time. It was the night of the first football game when Dixie and I were seventh-grade cheerleaders. Later that night two of the players sneaked in the door and I stood guard while Dixie necked with them. Story of my life, I decided. I’m always watching while some hot girl gets laid. Why don’t I ever get to be part of the hot, fast life? Why do I always run away or turn everyone down? Except for Bras and William, the doomed backfield of the Harrisburg Panthers. One deceased, one drunk, leaving me alone. Why don’t I ever get to marry my childhood sweetheart on the spur of the moment or kiss women or take my shirt off at the creek? Not my role, I decided. I’m the girl who makes good grades. I’m the one at the library looking up seven-syllable words in the OED. I’m the one who gets excited about ordering a new magazine. I’m the one who is going to get a degree in anthropology. I’m the one who makes money in the stock market. It’s not a bad life. It’s mine. I’m in charge of it and it’s going to stay that way. At least I’m not married to Davis Mayfield and getting ready to spend the winter with his crazy daughter.
I began to see Livingston Mayfield’s truck coming and going on the road. She drives a green pickup and wears black and looks like she hasn’t done anything with her hair since the last ice age. She didn’t wave when she passed my house. She looked straight ahead. Driving sixty-five or seventy, as fast as the truck would go. Windows down, even though fall was here and it was getting colder every day. Windows down, arm hanging out the window. Cigarette burning.
The second week she had a passenger when she would drive past the yard, coming and going, going and coming. It was Suzanne. They were both smoking now. Wearing old sweaters, headbands, tennis shoes. Good God in Heaven, I decided. The neighborhood is starting to look like L.A.
I ran into Davis about that time. He was at the drugstore picking up a prescription. He looked terrible. Worse than he had after the divorce. I guess he’s drinking again, I decided. Well, who could blame him? Imagine being in that house with Suzanne and Livingston and both of them smoking.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him. “Why do you need a prescription?”
“Something to sleep,” he answered. He held the bottle out to me. “Do you think this will kill me?” It was Ambien. I had read about it in Scientific American. I studied the printed warnings on the label.
“It looks all right. You could just hypnotize yourself. That’s what I do. Prescription drugs are systemic. I try to stay away from them.”
“Livingston’s here,” he added. “She’s come to stay awhile.”
“I heard about that and I’ve seen her truck. Walk with me to the car. I want to talk to you. I’ve been thinking about you. How are things going, with Suzanne? with your work? with your life?” It was the most intimate conversation I had ever had with Davis. I had always just been his distant friend although we had gone to school together for twelve years and to the same church and walked the same paths all our lives.
“It’s all right. We covered the roses for the winter. I hope they make it. I especially liked those white ones. You are still going to Carbondale to school then?”
“Four days a week. I’ll graduate in May. Then I might go to France to see those caves.”
“Oh, the painted caves. I think about those hands in the underwater cave. The ones with missing fingers. I have a theory about them.” We had reached my car. He held his hands up in the air, bent down two fingers to make a shadow hand on the hood. The moon was very bright. The shadow was lovely.
“That’s my thesis. That’s what my dissertation is about! That’s why I’m going to France. I’m taking scuba diving at the Carbondale Y. In December I’m going on a dive in Belize to get certified. Imagine going down into the sea to arrive at thirty thousand years ago. I’m going to bribe officials if it comes to that. I’m going to see those hands for myself. I might come by the office and get you to figure out how I should carry the money. I don’t care what it takes. It’s my dream, my principal obsession and goal.”
“I understand entirely. I could do that with my life. It’s absolutely worthy. Good for you.” He stood beside my car. He was wearing a black cashmere coat over a white shirt and business slacks and shoes. A darling man. A man I had overlooked in my life of running backs. Civilized, that’s what Davis is. A gentleman.
“I hope everything works out for you,” I said. “I’m sorry we don’t know each other better, Davis. Sorry we don’t see each other more. I’m thrilled you adore those hands. Not many people understand about them.” I paused, then looked at him. “Crisis is to be expected in the world right now,” I added. “The world is changing very rapidly. It speeds up good and bad alike. It’s all one can do to stay in orbit.”
“Please come out for dinner,” he answered. “Livingston would like to see you. She admires you so much. She asked about you the other day.”
Subject to flattery just like every other member of my species. I guess I had forgotten about when I was famous. Well, not very famous, but in Southern Illinois I had had my moment. I had been the first woman state senator from my district. I had been elected when I was thirty-two years old and served two terms before I quit in disgust. While in the senate I had led the pro-abortion forces and had some triumphs. Anyway, if Livingston admired me it could only be for that. The remainder of my life had been quiet. Will be quiet, I thundered in my brain. No one will disturb the peaceful passage of my days.
Suzanne called the next afternoon to ask me to dinner and I said yes. I had been sucked in by curiosity, flattery, and kindness. Not to mention having Davis understand about the hands painted on the caves. Do you know they used saliva for moisture when they painted them? This was when the cave was not underwater, of course. They mixed pigment, then put it in their mouth and spit it on the wall. Can you imagine a more intimate art? No, you cannot. Although hand-thrown pottery is close. Van Gogh probably died from the yellow pigment on the brushes he held in his mouth and Van Gogh painted the great paintings of his late life only miles from the painted caves. Is it something in the soil, the air, a magnetic field? You can’t rule out anything in human life. You can’t leave a stone unturned if you are truly curious. So of course I put on my new white wool pants and a dark green turtleneck and walked at dusk the mile to the dream house. Why did I walk? you well might ask. I think I felt it gave me some control over the situation. I should have known it was going to snow. I have lived in this climate all my life. I should be able to smell snow clouds coming our way across the plains but I was busy planning how to swim into the dangerous deep waters of the Mayfield craziness and look around and swim right out carrying my satisfied curiosity in my teeth. Only the water was deeper than I had predicted and I needed a regulator and a tank.
“Darling Anne,” Suzanne said, opening the door. “Where’s your car? Don’t tell me you walked?”
“I always walk in the evenings. In the morning I walk the cocker spaniels and in the afternoons I walk without them to bother me. It’s a compromise I make with the universe. Where’s Livingston? I’ve been seeing her driving by.” She appeared in the hall, wearing a long embroidered robe, looking like a person who had just come back from some exotic port.
“Hello, Mrs. Watson,” she said. “We’re mighty glad you came to have dinner with us. I’m making dinner. Come in the kitchen and watch me cook.” I followed her into the kitchen. Suzanne and Davis were drinking wine but Livingston appeared to be sober and not under the influence of anything worse than the music that was playing. Some plaintive American Indian chant, something played on a flute.
“I hope you like Indian curry?” Livingston said. “That’s what I’m cooking. If you hate it, I’ll make you some soup and a salad.”
“Curry’s fine. I’m fond of curry. Where did you learn to cook it?”
“In New York City. I lived in Manhattan last year with a girl from Cincinnati. Her dad has an apartment there and he let us have it for a year. We lived a block from Jackie Onassis. We were there when she died. Anyway, I learned to cook by running out of money and asking questions.”
“What did you do when you were there?”
“Nothing. Hanging out. Talking to people. Going to museums. Seeing plays.” She poured boiled rice into a bowl. It steamed beautifully. She put the bowl on a tray. “We’re almost ready to eat,” she said. “Did someone get you a glass of wine?” Davis was holding one out to me and I took it although I almost never drink. Davis and Suzanne were standing in the doorway to the dining room. The night was Livingston’s. We were letting her have it.
“I stopped being a dope addict,” she said. She was grinning now and I could see all four of her grandparents in that face. This is the reason to stay in Harrisburg. To watch the generations form. To see what happens next to people I have been watching all my life. Here was Livingston, a girl I had completely written off, cooking Indian food and smiling huge smiles that made her absolutely pretty. She poured the curry into a second bowl, added it to the tray with the rice, and led the way into the dining room.
We had a feast. I was feeling so guilty about the bad report I had made to Suzanne over Livingston that I drank too much. At least four glasses of wine. I must have been on the fifth when my old boyfriend, Braswell Carter, knocked on the door and Suzanne let him in. He is the best lover that has ever lived, in all probability. Three other women in Harrisburg will attest to that. Georgia Blake, who dated him after I broke up with him our senior year. Lucy Morrow, who married him the year after that. And Tera Thompson, who drank with him for five years. In between them I was coming and going in and out of his bed. I slept with him on and off until I was forty-five. I had written him off also. After the tenth rehabilitation program failed and after he threw a gin bottle through my bedroom window one Friday night when I wouldn’t answer the phone or let him in. I called the cops that night and since then we have only nodded when we met.
“The best.” That’s what all four of us say. “The best in the world, in all probability.” I have talked to them about it, here and there across the years. We don’t know why he is the best. It’s not his physical beauty It’s something else, some rhythm, some deep humanity, some tenderness, some keen desire or drive or timing. Anyway, you don’t forget it.
“Hello, everyone,” he said. “Hello, Annie. I’ve been missing you.”
“How have you been?” I asked, wondering if he was drinking. This is the main question you ask when you see Bras. Is he drunk? Is he drinking? Will he throw something at me?
“It’s snowing outside,” he said. “Did you all know it’s snowing?”
That was the beginning of the night. He was not drinking, having just come back from dry-out program number eleven. The snow piled up. The snow covered the trees and the cars and the roads and the hills and the streetlights. The snow was magical and pure. We all went outside and caught it in our hands and giggled and ate flan for dessert and drank black coffee. Bras and I held hands on the sofa. Someone called. In a few minutes a four-wheel-drive vehicle came sliding into the yard and a young man who coaches the high school football team was there for Livingston and we turned off the lights and watched the fire and listened to Whitney Houston and Carly Simon and something else.
“Well, you can’t go home now,” Suzanne said at last. “No one should drive in this snow. There are four bedrooms empty. Everyone take your pick. Davis and I are in the new suite.”
“There are plenty of blankets in all the rooms,” Livingston said to me. “Suzanne’s a bedding freak.”
Suzanne left the room and returned carrying robes and slippers and handed them to me. I was drinking brandy but I was still the one studying anthropology. So here we are back where we started, I decided. A snowy night in Harrisburg, Illinois. Nothing to do. An empty house the adults have abandoned. We are getting to use the beds and we will use them. I had a memory of a night at Dixie Lee Carouthers’s when her mother was out of town and six of us were necking together on her mother’s bed. Suzanne had been at that party. Come to think of it she might have been one of the ones on the bed. All the lights had been out that night and afterward I was so guilt stricken I had erased the memory.
“Suzanne,” I said. “Do you remember one time when Dixie Carouthers’s mother was gone and we had a party there after a football game? Were you at that party?”
“I thought that party up, honey,” she said to me. “It was the first blanket party in Harrisburg. Then we went inside.”
“That’s right, I remember now. I was carrying a blanket on my bike all the way down Elm Street. I was feeling like a criminal with that blanket.”
“Well, we aren’t criminals now,” she said and handed me the robes. “We are grown people and can have all the blankets we want.”
Livingston started laughing at that and Bras slipped his hand around my waist and started caressing my ribs as though not a day had passed since the last time I told him I wouldn’t see him anymore.
Davis banked the fire. Someone turned off the lights. Bras and I found a room upstairs and opened the heat vents and got into bed with our clothes on and started kissing. We kissed and kissed and kissed. The rest is private.
We all had breakfast watching the still falling snow and acted like normal people and helped Suzanne pick up all the glasses from the night before. Bras drove me home in his truck and stayed a couple of days until the snow melted.
So what was the problem? you might well ask. There should be some happy endings here. Not the same old unhappy patterns. Not snow turning into rain, as it says in the country-western song. Bras going back to drinking. Livingston continuing her work of breaking up her father’s marriage. Davis always getting rid of his crazy women before they can get rid of him. Prophecies and patterns. There should be a happy ending here. Not a dark and empty dream house with the roses dead as doornails and the people in separate apartments talking to their lawyers. That’s how it ended up. Davis got tired of the parties and Suzanne packed up and moved back to Chicago. Livingston moved in with the football coach for a while, then disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since. I guess she went back to New York. Bras went back to drinking. He was good for three weeks this time. It was a nice three weeks and worth the two rounds of antibiotics I had to take to cure cystitis.
It makes me sad to pass that empty house when I walk the cocker spaniels. I refuse to look at it. I look up into the trees. I see squirrels and birds and visions. I see the dark architecture of the winter. I see the buds of spring. I see the lush, hot foliage of summer. Our oxygen factories. Our true and faithful lovers. I think about calling Davis and seeing how he’s doing but I never do it. I’ve run the money up to six hundred and fifty thousand as of last week. I have the degree in anthropology on my wall. I’ll be in France before too long. I’ll be diving down into the cold blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. I’ll be breathing oxygen from a tank. I will have taken the stuff the leaves give us out of their love, and contained it in a tank and carried it down beneath the water to feed my blood while I swim past the French guards and along the passageway and when I surface I will see the hundreds of hands painted by their owners on the walls. I don’t believe the theory of ritual mutilation. They didn’t cut their fingers off on purpose. They lost them to cold or bears or spiders or snakes. Then they went into the cave and painted them to get the lost parts back. I know what people want. They want to be whole. Perhaps we were whole that night we all spent together in the snow. Like a family ought to be, but who can bear that burden, that Procrustean bed? Who can bear to fight off all those other needs, neuroses, and obsessions? Not me. Not Anne Watson, age fifty-one and on her way to France.