sophia woke to the sound of Monty’s tail thumping under the bed. She knew something had changed but it took a few seconds to remember what it was. Right, Darius was gone. Lying back on her pillow, she examined the fact in the light of day. She had seen enough friends divorce to understand how differently it affected people. Some women were hastened into old age by the surprise of loneliness after so many years of crowded rooms, while others—no other way to put it—blossomed like flowers. Without even realizing it, they’d been slowly bored to death by their angry husbands and solipsistic children. They made new friends, began working out, changed their wardrobes, took vitamins, traveled the world. Some went back to work or quit bad jobs for better ones. Every one of them said they had never been so happy. Darius had been a good husband, but it only took Sophia a second to choose the kind of ex-wife she wanted to be.
She began to feel a stirring of optimism, the way she had felt when she was eighteen and leaving home for the first time. Back then, she’d been convinced that one day she’d be famous and successful. She hadn’t even picked a field—maybe art, maybe politics. The world, she felt, would point her in the proper direction after she’d done some real living. The young, she now understood, always feel that way. She could see the same certainty in her daughters and their friends. It never occurred to them that things might not go well for them. Even Miranda, whose cynicism was supposed to protect her from disappointment, felt special. Sophia supposed all that idiot optimism was a good thing. If somebody had told her when she was eighteen that she’d be doing what she was doing now, she’d have laughed. No way. And she wasn’t even doing so badly. She knew women who had it much worse. Women whose lumps weren’t the result of too much coffee. Career-obsessed women who’d woken up at forty-five, bored by their jobs and suddenly desperate to be a mother. Women whose husbands had cleaned out the joint checking account and left no forwarding address.
She went downstairs and made herself a pot of coffee, something Darius, the early riser, usually did. By the time she came down, it was always slightly burned. She could have thrown it out and made a fresh pot, but that would have been wasteful. For years, she had simply put up with bitter coffee until it became what she knew and expected. She savored the taste of a fresh cup and looked out the window. The neighbor’s automatic sprinkler system turned on. She and Darius looked down on the wastefulness of watering the desert. “If they want to live in Connecticut, they should move there,” he always said. But, as a gardener, she knew her lawn benefited from the runoff—the side that bordered them was much greener than any other part. Now that Darius was gone, maybe she’d put in her own sprinkler system? No, she made an effort to clear her mind of those kinds of thoughts. They were too small. Too minor. What was required of her now was something large. Something radical. Darius needed the house for Helen. She needed to leave. It was that simple.
She took a piece of paper and a pen out of the kitchen drawer and sat down at the kitchen table. The phone rang. For a second, she let herself believe it was Darius calling to say he had made a mistake and wanted to come home. But of course it wouldn’t be. He wasn’t the type. She let the answering machine pick up. A few seconds later, Harry’s voice filled the room. “Hi! It’s Harry. Harlow. I just wanted to call and see how you are doing. Last night was…” He paused and laughed nervously. “I mean, I hope I helped. If you need something. Anything. Please. Call me. I mean that.”
Sophia started writing.
Paris was out of the question. Her French was not very good, the exchange rate was terrible, and she didn’t even like the city. When she was nineteen and the currency had been in her favor, she and the rest of America had gone for a visit. Everywhere she went, Moroccan men with bad teeth followed her, certain that she was eager to have sex after only five minutes of conversation concerning the new Michael Jackson album. Now she might be tempted to take them up on their offer—no-strings-attached sex with beautiful young men actually sounded pretty good, bad teeth or not—but now they wouldn’t be interested in her. Too old. Perverse world. She’d only put Istanbul down to make herself seem more interesting than she was. She had no interest in a city of Muslims. An island was tempting. She had it in her to withdraw completely from the world. Once, she and Darius had rented a cabin for two weeks in the boundary waters of Minnesota. She had loved the perfect stillness of the place, but Darius had gotten lonely for the girls and suggested they leave four days before their lease was up. It was too soon for that. Also, she feared she might drink too much if left on her own.
That left New York and London. Several years before, Darius had exchanged jobs for a semester with a professor from the University of London. They had gone to live in the man’s house in Camden Town while the man had moved with his wife and family into their Los Angeles home. Everybody in the family hated it. Except her.
“When are we going home?” the girls would ask after each friendless London school day.
“Soon,” Sophia would reassure them, momentarily vexed by the intractable cool of the Brits. It was one thing to be snooty to her—she liked being left alone—but to children? The entire time they lived there, the girls were never asked on a single playdate. The few times she brought up the subject with other mothers, she’d been met with reactions ranging from bafflement to what seemed like outright hostility. Finally, an American mother with older boys (and therefore useless) told her that playdates were unheard of in London. “The family knows you or they don’t. Plus, I don’t think the English really want to encourage ‘playing.’” It was even worse for Darius. He liked to joke that an Irishman from the United States teaching Shakespeare in En gland was like walking around with a Kick Me sign taped to your back. Even his students would say things like, “Well, I guess in the New World…”
“Can you believe they still think of America as the New World?” he’d fume when he arrived home.
But Sophia had loved it. After dropping the girls at school, she’d get a newspaper, sit and read in a café near the tube station, and spend each day exploring a new part of the city. She began with the obvious places—Hyde Park, Holland Park, Hampstead Heath, Cheyne Walk—but even the less touristy neighborhoods she wandered into—the tail end of King’s Row, the nondescript row houses behind Victoria Station, the Indian hotels near Hyde Park Gate, the Arab embassies near Sloane Square—all stirred memories of the novels she had read as a girl. The Bennetts coming to London for the season; Isabel Archer buying, buying, buying; the dissolute party girls of Evelyn Waugh; the clerks of Shaw; the Schlegels of Howards End; the urchins of Dickens. Those characters had been her companions in a lonely childhood. Their lives and histories were vividly alive to her even now. The fact that London had changed, become a world capital struggling with waves of immigrants from places like India and Pakistan, made it even more interesting. When the nine months were up, she made tentative noises about making it permanent, but her family had been adamant. They wanted to go home. London without them was unthinkable. She’d read too many contemporary British novels about lonely middle-aged women to have any illusions about what her life would be like. In nine months of ordering meat from her local butcher, the man never once smiled at her.
So, New York. Sophia looked out her window at the bright white California sun. She’d been so entranced with the weather when they had first moved there. How could anyone live anywhere else, she’d ask Darius as each day bloomed more gloriously than the next. But now the sun had come to oppress her. She knew how ultraviolet rays could unscramble your DNA, sending silent, deadly messengers deep into the epidermis. She was ready for seasons. Rain and snow. A place where things died but then came back to life. A place where you could believe in new beginnings.
“Mrs. McMartin?”
The sound of a voice made her jump. Maria, the cleaning lady, came every Wednesday but Sophia was usually at work or, more recently, the hospital. It must have been a year since they’d actually seen each other.
“Maria! You scared me. How are you?”
“I am fine. I heard about your hija. I am so sorry.”
“Oh.” Sophia looked down at the table. “Thank you.” She stood up. She hated sitting while others worked. “I’ll be upstairs.”
Maria nodded and turned toward the sink. Sophia noticed the bag of sugar where she’d left it the previous night.
“Maria,” she said, “can you throw the sugar out?” She couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Maria looked at the bag. “Okay,” she said, and nodded. “Bugs?”
Sophia hesitated, then agreed. “Yes. Bugs.”