Saturday Afternoon
Bess is waist-and-elbow-deep in the linen closet, a misnomer of a room as it seems to include only boxes orphaned decades ago, scarcely a linen to be found aside from a yellowed tablecloth and a set of nautical tea towels.
“Yuck,” Bess says with a cough as she lugs a box of themed salt- and-pepper shakers down from the top shelf.
She inspects the collection. Two bunches of bananas. A yellow iron and a black iron. Kittens wearing sailor garb. A disturbing white maid, black mammy combination. Kitschy and cute, some of them, but Bess doesn’t anticipate ever needing salt-and-pepper shakers by the dozens. On the other hand, it seems wrong to sell Ruby’s stuff.
Still undecided on the shakers, Bess drags a 12 × 12 × 12 box out into the hall. It is heavy, weighted down. As she goes to catch her breath, Bess reaches around for Evan’s note. It remains snug against her, in her back pocket.
But how do you say that to someone who looks so beautiful, eyes shining with hope? How do you tell her that she’s not seeing things clearly?
Bess doesn’t know about any shiny-eyed hope, but she remembers talking to him at the rehearsal dinner as she struggled not to weep. At the time, she’d chalked it up to good old mopey-dope nostalgia. They’d had fun, the two of them. A perfect high school dream. Getting herself expelled from Choate was the best move Bess ever made, aside from attending medical school, but you really can’t compare the two.
At the wedding I’ll try not to watch. I won’t say a word to you.
Yeah, well, Bess remembers talking to him at the wedding. He didn’t exactly leave her alone, as promised.
God, Bess ignored so much, for so long. Before the marriage. The four years during the marriage. Bess was busy, a dedicated physician, aggressively head-down and toiling away just as Grandma Ruby always advised. Who needed alcoholism or drug addiction? Become a workaholic and enjoy the twin benefits of avoiding your problems and earning a paycheck.
Bess understands, for the first time, that the shame she has about the divorce is not because she couldn’t make a marriage work. No, Bess’s real regret is that she married him at all. She knew better. She knew she was getting a set of veneers.
With a sigh, Bess peels a strip of tape from the box, though it hardly has any stick left. After lifting the flaps, she wades through mounds of bunched-up newsprint and uncovers a carefully wrapped package. Inside are two dishes, cream-colored with silver scalloped edges, pink and yellow Virginia roses meandering about the perimeter. Grandma Ruby’s china? This is something she will save.
Bess digs deeper into the box, through ever more wads of newsprint and wrapped-up dinner plates and salad plates and saucers. She even finds an empty packet of cigarettes—Gauloises, a French brand. Grandma Ruby smoked one cigarette a week. Every Sunday, five o’clock. Bess smiles at the memory.
She’s enjoying the treasure hunt, cigarette trash and all, until her hand finds a strange clump of paper, distinctly urine in tone. There’s a scattering of brown pellets nearby.
“Ew!” Bess screeches. “Yuck!”
A nest. Mice or rats, most likely.
“Disgusting!”
Bess wipes both hands on her jeans and then picks up the box, holding it far from her body, nose scrunched. The box doesn’t smell necessarily, but it seems like it should. With previously untapped core strength, Bess clambers downstairs, through the French doors, and out onto the patio.
“Bess!” Cissy says from her spot at the bar. She’s mixing a cocktail, of all things. “What on earth…?”
Bess sets down the box, her arms suddenly loose and weak. She is wheezing, a little out of breath.
“Bess?”
“Rodents,” she heaves and gasps, pointing. “Mice. Or rats.”
A swift breeze kicks up then, goosing Bess from behind. Below her a wave crashes, and Bess’s heart gives a skip. She peers over the box and sees nothing but air. Rain begins falling lightly on her head.
“Are you okay, sweetheart?” Cissy calls. “You look ghastly. Come dear, have a drink.”
Cissy waves her over, smiling brightly, as Bess’s eyes narrow.
“Elisabeth?”
“So, darling mother,” she says, sauntering toward her. “What’s new?”
“What’s new?” Cissy takes a sip of her drink, vodka-whatever. “Unfortunately, not much.”
“What about Mr. Mayhew? Anything new with him?”
“Chappy?” Cissy screws up her face. “Not that I know of. Other than the bastard’s probably thrilled that Mike won’t move the house. And neither will anyone else. I’ve tried everyone. Oh, Bessie. I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do.”
Cissy’s eyes begin to water, tugging on Bess’s heart for a second before Bess gets her emotions back in check. She scowls to break free.
“And how would Chappy know the details?” Bess asks. “About the engineers?”
Her mother shrugs.
“It’s a small island,” she says. “And he lives across the road. Good grief, he’s being such an asshole. Chappy, not the engineer. Although Mike’s an asshole, too, seeing as how he won’t do what I ask, no matter how much money I offer.”
“An asshole, huh? So was it angry sex then?”
“Beg pardon?”
“What happened between you and Chappy. This morning. In the dawn’s early light.”
Cissy jolts. She would’ve dropped her highball if she wasn’t holding on to it with such a fierce grip.
“I haven’t a clue what you’re…”
“Can it, Cis. You’ve been catting around with Chappy for the better part of two decades.”
“Wherever you got that ridiculous notion…”
“Evan confirmed it and he always tells the truth.”
Bess thinks of the Book of Summer.
“Okay, not always,” she adds. “Usually. Eventually. Anyway, he’d have no reason to lie about this.”
Cissy nods wearily and sets down her glass, the weight of fifteen years, the weight of ninety-nine, at once heavy upon her. She gazes out toward the horizon as thunder rumbles in the distance. The forecast calls for heavy rains.
“Well, now you know,” Cissy says. “There’s not much else to say.”
“Oh, there’s plenty to say.” Bess walks under the overhang and out of the drizzle. She glances toward the box, half expecting rats and mice to come leaping out. “Like, what the hell, Mom?”
“Bess, be constructive.”
“Fine. Why cheat on Dad? Why maintain such a sham of a marriage?”
“Because of you. And Clay and Lala. Even your dad. Sometimes keeping the family together under one roof is the best option. By the way, I find the word ‘sham’ unnecessarily harsh.”
Bess makes a dramatic show of looking upward at the ceiling above them. She takes several large steps backward, out into the weather, letting her eyes travel the full height of the house.
“Hmmm,” Bess says. “There’s a roof. For now. But I don’t see our family under it. No Dad. No Clay. And definitely no Lala. We are right now at only forty percent.”
She steps back beneath the covering.
“You know very well that ‘under one roof’ is metaphorical,” Cissy says. “And, really, I was referring to your childhood. I did what I needed to and I don’t regret it.” She inhales, taking a shaky, quivery breath down with her. “If it makes you feel any better, Chappy and I are done for good.”
“Of course it doesn’t make me feel better,” Bess says. “Plus you’re not ‘done.’ I’ve heard the two of you are quite prone to the back-and-forth.”
“Not like this. I mean, yes, we’ve, um, severed relations before,” Cis says, starting to tear. “But I’ve instigated it. I’ve been the one to declare ‘enough.’ Never Chappy. That is, until today.”
“Why?” Bess asks as an unexpected surge of protectiveness courses through her. It’s like she wants to go all Cissy Codman on the man and tell him to fuck off. “What’d he say?”
“That he’s too old for this shit.”
Bess fights a hard smirk. Indeed they are both too old for this shit.
“So there’s nothing to get riled up about,” Cissy says. “Because it’s over. Done. All the way finished.”
“I’m sorry you’re upset,” Bess tells her. “I really am. But you’re going to have to give me a minute here. It’s like someone’s pushed me into a wall but, hey, no big, because I don’t have an actual concussion.”
“For goodness’ sake, Bess.”
“My parents’ marriage. Fake.”
“It’s not fake,” Cissy says, and grits her teeth. “It never has been. We know what we are to each other. And that is our concern, not yours.”
“It’s a little bit mine. I did live with you for a good portion of my life.”
“Oh, Bess, don’t be such a baby,” Cissy says, sounding so much like Grandma Ruby it’s like a ghost tickling the back of Bess’s neck. “It’s not the worst thing in the world.”
“Why do people keep saying that?”
“This sort of thing happens all the time. We’ve always done what we believed was best for our children, and each other.”
“You stayed together ‘for the children’?” Bess says. “I guess that sort of thing does ‘happen all the time’ but I thought our family was different.”
“Elisabeth, your father is difficult,” Cissy says. “I recognize that I am, too, but in a completely different way. Dudley and I started in the same place but moved too quickly in opposite directions. I tried with him, even when my own mother said to let him go.”
“Grandma Ruby? She would never!”
“It’s true. I almost left him. I was so close.” She shakes her head. “Then my mom died and I just … couldn’t. You were still in high school and Lala was so young. The loss of your grandmother was hard enough and I didn’t want this family to suffer another blow.”
“I get why you felt that way then,” Bess says. “But we’re adults now and she died twenty years ago. Why not get divorced fifteen years ago? Seven? Last week?”
“Darling, I tell you this with great love—”
“Oh, no, here we go.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Cissy says.
“Right. Because I’ve never been divorced.”
“You’re lucky, Bess. You don’t have kids. In your case, a divorce—not such a big deal.”
“Ha!” Bess laughs, breathless in shock, as if someone’s just punched her in the chest. “Too true. No big deal. What an accurate way to describe it. In fact, we’ve conducted all proceedings via text messages and Facebook chats. As they say in a physician’s office, you’ll only feel a pinch.…”
“I didn’t mean you wouldn’t understand about a divorce in general,” Cissy says. “It’s merely that you seem so sure of yourself. So utterly confident that a permanent split is the best course. I promise it’d be different if kids were involved. If a whole lifetime was.”
“If kids were involved.” Bess snorts. “Well, surprise, Cis, because—”
Bess freezes. There is a kid involved, sort of. For now. But even though Cissy is a lifelong Democrat, the ultimate bleeding heart and a women’s rights drum-pounder to the core, there’s no decent way to explain a proposed abortion. Not even Cissy would understand.
“Because what?” Cissy asks, pink spreading across both cheeks.
Bless it, the woman can hear the patter of potential grandbabies a mile away.
“The decision to get divorced,” Bess stutters. She sniffs but then gets ahold of herself. “The decision is clear-cut, but not because we were child-free. Brandon was … he is … abusive?”
It still sounds strange, not right, like it doesn’t exactly fit. No bruises, no bumps. All the bad stuff that a person cannot see.
“Abusive … question mark?” Cissy says, jacking both eyebrows way up into her hairline. “That doesn’t sound like something you should be on the fence about.”
“He was,” Bess says with a nod.
Was he? He was.
“Oh, Bessie,” her mother says with a sigh.
“Verbally,” Bess adds. “He never hit me, though at times he seemed close. It’s good that I work so much. I stayed out of the cross fire. And who knows, it could’ve gotten physical, eventually, if not for the hookers, who saved me in the end.”
“The hookers?!”
It takes a lot to shock Cissy. A whole hell of a lot. But Bess has surprised her in a way no one else ever has.
“It’s a long story,” she says.
Bess walks over to the rusted green glider and slumps down onto it. Meanwhile, Cissy fiddles with her Red Sox hat, trying to appear unruffled while she searches for the best response.
“Well, Elisabeth,” she says at last, her voice strong and assured. “I can see why you weren’t keen on taking him back. I’d tell him to go fuck himself but my guess is the pervert’s already tried.”