in which we read Persuasion and find ourselves back at Sylvia’s house
At any given time, most of the people in the California History Room were looking up their own families. Sylvia had worked in the state library since 1989; she’d helped hundreds and hundreds of people load rolls of microfiche into the feeder, adjust the image, master the fast-forward. She’d opened the bride, groom, and death indexes and gone spelunking for great-great-great grandparents. Today had started with a failure—a common name (Tom Burke), a big city (San Francisco), a certain vagueness as to dates, all resulting in a pissed-off descendant who felt Sylvia simply wasn’t trying hard enough. Her resources, her sheer will to succeed, were compared unfavorably with those of the Mormons.
It made Sylvia reflective. Had there always been this level of interest in genealogy, she wondered, even in the sixties, when everything was to be made from scratch? What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?
She supposed she was no better than the rest. She felt a particular pleasure whenever anyone asked for Box 310, a collection of archived Spanish and Mexican documents. She herself had recently translated the “Solemn Espousal of Manuel Rodríguez from Guadalajara, parents deceased, to María Valvanora E La Luz, daughter of a soldier and a resident of Cynaloa.” The date on the document was October 20, 1781. The information, dry. Did they love each other desperately? Were they friends, or did they eat each night in icy silence, have resentful sex? Did they, in fact, go on to marry? Were there children? Did one of the two then leave with little warning, and if so, who left and who was left behind?
Other items in the box included an invitation to a grand ball at the governor’s house in honor of Antonio López de Santa Anna; a photocopy of Andrés Pico’s Articles of Capitulation to John C. Frémont at Cahuenga; a letter to Fra José María de Zalvidea discussing marriage laws among the Indians. This last was tentatively dated 1811. A world away, Jane Austen was finally publishing Sense and Sensibility, on a similar subject.
We were here first, Sylvia’s father used to say to her, although her mother was only second-generation, and even so, of course, they weren’t even close to first, just earlier than some.
For California is a Poem!
The land of romance, of mystery,
of worship, of beauty and of song.
Ina Coolbrith had written it, and the words were now chiseled into the wall near the staircase to the second floor. But the sign Sylvia preferred was upstairs and done in Magic Marker. Quiet, it read. Research in progress.
Sylvia had never come to this library as a child, but she’d grown up not far away, in a gray wood house on Q Street. They’d had a large yard with lemon trees in the front, tomatoes and chili peppers in the back. Her mother was always in the garden; she had the touch. Her mother’s favorite saint was Thérèse, who had promised, after her death, to shower the world with roses.
Sylvia’s mother was doing her bit. She had rosebushes and rose trees and roses that climbed on trellises. She washed them for aphids and fed them with compost and wrapped them in the winter. “How do you know what to do?” Sylvia asked her once, and her mother said that if you only paid attention, the roses told you what they needed.
Sylvia’s father wrote for the Spanish language paper La Raza. At night men would come and sit on the porch, play guitars, talk politics, farming, and immigration. It was Sylvia’s job the next morning to clean up the bottles, the cigarette butts, the dirty dishes.
Her second job was to hurry straight to her grandmother’s house after school and provide a running translation of the daytime soap Young Dr. Malone. Such goings-on in the small town of Denison! Murder, incarceration, drink, and despair. Adultery and hysterical blindness. Thrombosis. Throat cancer. Crippling accidents. Forged wills. And then came episode two.
Afterward Sylvia’s grandmother would analyze the show for character shadings, themes and symbols, useful moral lessons. The analysis took most of the rest of the afternoon. Women had affairs and went blind. Nurses loved doctors with quiet and unrequited devotion, opened pediatric clinics, did good works. Life was made up of medical emergencies, court cases, painful love affairs, and backstabbing relatives.
Sometimes Sylvia’s father read her European fairy tales at bedtime, changing the heroines’ hair from blond to black (as if Sylvia could be fooled by this, as if Diego Sanchez’s daughter would identify with a brunette named Snow White anyway), pointing out class issues whenever they arose. Woodsmen grew up to marry princesses. Queens danced themselves to death in bloody shoes.
Sundays her mother read to her from The Lives of the Saints, about Saint Dorcas, and all the others who’d given away their fortunes, devoted themselves to charity. Her mother flipped hurriedly past the martyrs—Saint Agatha (her breasts were cut from her body), Saint Lucy (her eyes were put out), Saint Perpetua (she guided her executioner’s blade to her throat with her own hand). For years Sylvia didn’t even know those other stories were there. She merely suspected them.
But neither the fairy tales nor the saints had the lasting impact of Young Dr. Malone. Sylvia dated her grandmother’s decline from the day the show was cancelled.
Most of what we knew about Sylvia came from Jocelyn. They’d met at Girl Scout camp when they were eleven years old. Little Jocelyn Morgan and little Sylvia Sanchez. “We were both in the Chippewa cabin,” Jocelyn said. “Sylvia seemed very grown up compared with me. She knew stuff you would never have imagined a little girl would know. History and medicine. She could tell you more things about comas.
“But she always thought the counselors were scheming behind our backs. She was always seeing the most elaborate plots in everything they did. One day four of us Chippewas were taken on a hike away from camp and left to find our own way home. It was part of some merit badge we were getting, or so the counselors said. Sylvia was suspicious of the whole thing. ‘Is there any reason anyone would want you out of the way?’ Sylvia asked each of us. What little girl thinks like that?”
No one in Sylvia’s family knew that her father had stopped drawing a paycheck and started putting their money into the paper until the money was gone. They moved then to the Bay Area, where Sylvia’s uncle gave her father a job working at his restaurant. Sylvia and her brothers traded their two-story Victorian for a small apartment, private school for the large public ones. Her older sister was already married and stayed behind in Sacramento to have babies her parents complained they now never saw.
Sometimes they drove all the way to Sacramento for Sunday with Sylvia’s grandparents. More often Sylvia’s father had to work, and they didn’t. Her father wasn’t used to waiting on people and struck the customers as unfriendly. He had to be reminded not to participate in their conversations, not to talk about unions with the busboys and cooks. The whole tipping process is designed to humiliate. On her mother’s birthday when he serenaded her at five-thirty in the morning just as the sun came up, as he’d done every year since their wedding, Sylvia had seen curious, irritated Anglo lights coming on in the house behind theirs.
One of the cooks at the restaurant had a daughter at the public high school. Sylvia’s father arranged for them to meet so Sylvia would already have a friend when classes started. The daughter was named Constance; she was a year younger than Sylvia. She wore white lipstick and ratted her hair so it cushioned her head like packing material. She’d sewn the name of her boyfriend into the palm of her left hand. Sylvia could hardly look at this, though Constance said it hadn’t hurt; the secret was in shallow stitches. It fell to Sylvia to explain the dangers of infection, the risk of amputation. Plus, it was really gross. Obviously they were not going to be the best of friends.
But there was Jocelyn. And then there was Daniel.
“Is he Catholic?” her mother asked the first time Daniel drove her home from school.
“I’m not going to marry him!” Sylvia had snapped back, because he wasn’t and she didn’t wish to say so.
After their wedding, on the night when Sylvia and Daniel had had their first big fight and she’d driven to her parents’ house and stood on the doorstep with tears on her face and an overnight bag in her hand, her father wouldn’t even let her in. “You go home to your husband,” he said. “You live there now. Work things out.”
Non-Catholics, on the other hand, they believed in divorce. They would become miserable for one reason or another, and then they would leave, and their parents wouldn’t even try to stop them, which was why you didn’t marry non-Catholics in the first place.
And sure enough, thirty-plus years later, wasn’t that exactly what Daniel had done? It was a shame Sylvia’s mother hadn’t lived to see it. She so enjoyed being right.
In all fairness, probably no more than anyone else did.
A stout woman emerged from the Microforms Room and came to the desk. She was dressed in jeans and a green Squaw Valley sweatshirt. She had a pencil balanced between her ear and her head. Since she also wore glasses, the space behind that ear was crowded. “There’s a date missing from the 1890 San Francisco Chronicle,” she told Sylvia. “It skips from May ninth to May eleventh. I looked at the Alta, too. And the Wasp. They just don’t seem to have had a May tenth in 1890.”
Sylvia agreed that this was strange. Since the microfiche came from a central service, she guessed that nothing would be solved by going to another library. Sylvia sent Maggie to the basement to see if she could find the missing date among any of the actual papers.
In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference librarian is someone who likes the chase. When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery. They tend to be cat people as well, for reasons more obscure.
A black man in a gray turtleneck requested an oral-history interview regarding public policy in the Lieutenant Governor’s Office from 1969 to 1972.
An elderly man in a velvet beret called Sylvia over to his table to show her his work. He was lettering his family tree in meticulous and beautiful calligraphy.
Maggie returned, having failed to find the missing date. She offered to put in a call to the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, but the woman who had asked for the Chronicle said she had to go; there was no more time on her parking meter. Maybe next week when she’d be back.
A man with bad skin asked for help printing a copy from the microfiche reader. It was Sylvia’s turn to do this.
The main room was a lovely space, with curving walls, large windows, and red-tile-rooftop views. If you sat at one of the tables you could see the top of the Capitol dome.
The Rare Materials Reading Room was lined with glass bookcases filled with rare books and was, in its way, equally pleasant. You worked there with the door locked and outside noises hushed. Only the librarians could key you in and out.
But the Microforms Room was windowless, lit by overheads and by the screens of the readers. There was a constant hum, with images inevitably warped on one side or the other, no way to bring the whole into focus at once. All very headache-inducing. You had to love research to love the Microforms Room. Sylvia was threading the feeder when Maggie came to get her. “You have a phone call from your husband,” Maggie said. “He says it’s urgent.”
Allegra had been having an excellent day. She’d spent the morning working and put several orders in the mail. She’d thought of a birthday present for Sylvia and was figuring out how to make it. To aid in this she went to the Rocknasium, a local climbing gym. You couldn’t really think about anything but climbing when you climbed, but Allegra always found it a fruitful not-thinking.
She strapped herself into a harness. She was supposed to be meeting her friend Paul; they’d been belaying each other for the last couple of months. Allegra’s level was somewhere in the 5.6 to 5.7 range, Paul’s a bit better. The regulars were almost all men, but the few women who came were Allegra’s sort of women—strong and athletic. The place smelled of chalk and sweat, and those were Allegra’s sort of smells.
The Rocknasium had only nine full-sized walls. These were knobbed and creviced in many places, the holds marked with bright-colored drips like a Jackson Pollock painting. Each wall contained a variety of routes—a red route, a yellow, a blue. You were always passing up a closer hold to find the correct color for the course you were on. The correct hold was inevitably small and far away. Paul had called Allegra the night before to say the routes had just been changed. And about time.
When Allegra first started climbing, she would hang in one spot for too long, contemplating the best way to make her next grab. Her arms and fingers would begin to burn with exhaustion. She noticed that the experienced climbers moved very, very quickly. Staying still was more work than moving; thinking too much was fatal. Allegra supposed there was a lesson there. She learned things quickly, but she didn’t much like lessons.
She’d never been to the Rocknasium during the day. Gone was the intimidating soberness of the regular climbers, the focused quiet. Instead someone was screaming. Someone was singing. Someone was throwing chalk. There was laughing, shouting, all the chaos of a ten-year-old’s birthday party echoing off the fake paint-splotched rocks. Children, sugar coursing through their tiny veins, were everywhere, fastened to the walls on their ropes like spiders. There was so much chalk in the air it made Allegra sneeze. This was intimidation of a different sort.
Allegra liked being an aunt. Her brother Diego had two girls; that was all the kid time Allegra needed. Probably. All she wanted. Mostly. There would certainly be something challenging in a genetic code that made you gay but left your reproductive urge fully functional. Some days Allegra hardly noticed how the years were floating by. “Come on,” some kid shouted impatiently to someone who wasn’t coming on.
Allegra went to warm up on the solo wall while she waited for Paul. This wall was low enough to climb without ropes, no more than seven feet. At the bottom was a very thick mat. Allegra put her foot on a blue hold. She reached for a blue hold above her head. She pulled herself up. Blue hold to blue hold to blue hold. Toward the top she saw some enticing orange paint, farther than the next blue—she’d have to leap—but glittering at the edge of what might be possible. Things worked best if you didn’t think about them. Just jump.
To her right the birthday girl came rappelling down at top speed, her belayer playing the rope out to give her a ride. “Wire work,” someone called. “Hello, Jet Li.”
An adult at another wall was giving instructions. “Look up,” he said. “The purple’s just on your left there. You can reach it. Don’t worry. I’ll catch you.”
I’ll catch you.
Nobody was catching Allegra, but Allegra had never needed catching. She reached back with one hand into the pouch on her harness for chalk. Kicked off and grabbed.
Sylvia called Jocelyn from the car. “Allegra fell at the climbing gym,” she said. She was trying not to picture all the things that might happen to someone who fell. Wheelchairs. Comas. “They’ve taken her to Sutter. I’m on my way, but I don’t know anything. I don’t know how far it was. I don’t know if she’s awake. I don’t know if she’s broken a nail or broken her neck.” She could hardly get the last part out, she was crying so hard.
“I’ll call you as soon as I get there,” Jocelyn said. “I’m sure it’s fine. They don’t let you climb in those gyms without a harness. I don’t think it’s possible to really hurt yourself.”
Jocelyn always thought things were fine. If they weren’t fine when she got there, she made damn sure they were fine before she left. Jocelyn didn’t think about those things she couldn’t make fine until she was forced to. There were days when Sylvia thought about nothing else. Jocelyn had no children; Sylvia had three, plus two grandchildren; that was the difference. Why would Allegra be at the hospital if things were fine?
Bad things did happen, after all. You could be lucky only so long. Sylvia and Daniel had been parked in his car just a couple of blocks from his house on the day his brother died. It was their senior year of high school. They were kissing some and they were talking some. Both the kissing and the talking were fraught. They’d begun to have the same conversation over and over. Would they go to the same college? Should they go to the same college just to be together? If they both wanted to be at the same college, should one of them go elsewhere just to avoid being together? Could their relationship pass the test of a separation? Should it be made to? Who loved whom most? They heard sirens. They kissed.
Daniel’s brother had been hit by a car driven by a sixteen-year-old. Andy was killed instantly, which was the only small mercy, so Daniel didn’t have to spend the rest of his life thinking that if he’d gone home the minute he heard the fire trucks he could have said good-bye.
Sylvia had thought Daniel’s mother a peculiarly affectless woman, polite but distant. This became even more obvious after Sylvia and Daniel were married and had children. Where were the constant complaints about never seeing the grandkids? And where was all the sobbing and hand-wringing when Allegra—such a beautiful girl!—turned out to be gay and would likely have no children of her own?
Sylvia was somewhat affectless herself, but in the general noise of her own dramatic family, no one, including Sylvia, had noticed this yet. She liked Daniel’s mother okay—the woman hardly cast a shadow, what was not to like?—but she would have been insulted to be told they were similar. On the day Andy died she watched Daniel’s mother crumple like paper. Something moved into her face that never moved out.
In Persuasion, Jane Austen mentions the death of a child. She is brief and dismissive. The Musgroves, she says, “had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year.” Dick Musgrove was not loved. When he went to sea, he was not missed. Assigned to a boat under Captain Wentworth’s command, he died in a way never specified, and only death made him valuable to his family.
These are the parents Austen’s heroine, Anne Elliot, describes later in the book as excellent. “What a blessing,” Anne says, “to young people to be in such hands!”
There was traffic on the causeway; the lanes were glutted. Sylvia inched along. Bad things did happen. Now there was glass, now a fractured car on the shoulder of the road, the back door on the driver’s side folded nearly in two. The people had been removed, no way to guess what shape they were in. As soon as she passed this, Sylvia was able to resume a proper freeway speed.
It took Jocelyn fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, another five to find the nurse in the emergency room who’d admitted Allegra. “Are you a relative?” the nurse asked, and then explained very politely that the hospital couldn’t release information on Allegra’s condition to anyone who wasn’t.
Jocelyn believed in rules. She believed in exceptions to rules. Not only for herself, but for anyone just like her. She described with equal courtesy the scene she was capable of making. “I don’t get embarrassed,” she said. “And I’m not tired. Her mother is waiting for me to call.”
The nurse noted that Allegra was also the name of an allergy medication. This was spitefully done and inappropriate, too. When Jocelyn looked back on it later, remembering everything but with the anxiety over Allegra removed, she was quite angry about this part. What a flippant thing to say under the circumstances. And it was a beautiful name. It was from Longfellow.
But then the nurse conceded that X rays had been taken. Allegra was in a brace. There was concern about a head injury, but she was conscious. Dr. Yep was in charge of the case. And no, Jocelyn couldn’t see Allegra. Only her relatives could see her.
Jocelyn was in the midst of explaining why the nurse was mistaken about this as well, when Daniel arrived. He walked in as if it hadn’t been months since they’d spoken, and put his arms around Jocelyn. He smelled just exactly like Daniel.
Times came when you needed someone’s arms around you. Mostly Jocelyn liked being single, but sometimes she thought about that. “She’s been X-rayed. Possible head injury. They won’t tell me anything,” she said into his shoulder. “I have to call Sylvia right away.”
By the time Sylvia saw her, Allegra had been immobile for almost two hours and was furious about it. Sylvia, Daniel, and Jocelyn circled her with white faces, forced smiles. They agreed that it always was Allegra getting hurt, never the boys. Remember how she’d broken her foot falling off the monkey bars? Remember how she’d dislocated her collarbone, tumbling from the elm tree? Remember how she’d crushed her elbow in that bike incident? Accident-prone, they agreed, which made Allegra madder and madder. “I’m not hurt at all,” she said. “I fell maybe four feet and I landed on a mat. I can’t believe they brought me here. I didn’t even black out.”
In fact she had lost consciousness, and she suspected as much. She’d no memory of the fall, nothing until the ambulance came. And certainly she must have dropped more than four feet. She knew about the mat only because she’d seen it. But since she couldn’t remember the details, she felt free to adjust them. How was that lying?
And right then, in the hospital with everyone standing around her bed as though it were the last scene of The Wizard of Oz movie, it seemed that they were all colluding to make a big deal out of nothing. In the context of the white-water rafting, the snowboarding, the surfing, for God’s sake the parachuting, Allegra had done, she felt her record was pretty clean. It looked bad to her parents only because they didn’t know about the white-water rafting, the snowboarding, the surfing, the parachuting.
Finally Dr. Yep entered with the X rays. Allegra couldn’t move an inch to see, but she could never see anything on X rays anyway. She could never see the colors of stars through a telescope, never find birds through binoculars, paramecia through microscopes. This was irritating, but not on a daily basis.
Dr. Yep was talking with her parents, showing them this and that on Allegra’s ribs, her skull. The doctor had a very pleasant voice, which was nice because she talked for a long time. After cataloguing the many things that might have been on Allegra’s X rays, but happily were not, Dr. Yep came to the point. Just as Allegra had said, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. Still, they wanted to keep her overnight for observation and maximum annoyance. Dr. Yep claimed Allegra had given some bizarre answers to questions in the ambulance—what day of the week it was, what was the month. Allegra denied this.
“They just took me so literally,” she said. She didn’t remember her answers, only that the emergency techs, buzzing about like gnats, had provoked her. Perhaps she’d quoted a little Dickinson. In what universe was that a crime? At least she could finally be un-strapped, move from side to side again. It was embarrassing, when she did this, to learn that she had a bandage on her temple, blood on her cheek. Apparently she’d gashed her head.
It took another forty minutes to finish the paperwork and get her checked in upstairs. She was in quite a bit of pain by then, bruised, stiff, with a dreadful headache beginning to stir. Nothing the couple of Tylenol she’d been offered were going to manage. She needed real drugs; she hoped she wasn’t going to be the only one to think so just because no bones were broken.
The nurse on duty turned out to be Callie Abramson. Allegra had gone to high school with Callie, though they hadn’t been in the same year or run in the same circles. Callie’d been yearbook and student government. Allegra, field hockey and art. Still it was nice to see a familiar face in a strange place. Sylvia, at least, was delighted.
While helping Allegra into bed, Callie told her that Travis Browne had become a Muslim. Hard-core, Callie said, whatever that meant. Allegra didn’t suppose she’d ever exchanged two words with Travis. Brittany Auslander had been arrested for stealing computers from the language lab at the university. Everybody but Callie had always thought she was such a good girl. Callie herself was married—no one you’d know, she said—and had two boys. And Melinda Pande turned out gay.
“Hard-core?” Allegra asked. She remembered how Callie had gotten so thin everyone suspected she was anorexic. How she tried out for cheerleading anyway, like a stick figure in a short skirt, her sharp little face shouting to give her an F, give her an I. How she’d freaked out one spring during finals and been taken to the counselor’s office in hysterics, and they’d found pills in her locker, either to help her diet or to kill herself; no one seemed to know, but it didn’t stop them from saying.
Now here she was, thin but not too thin, working, smiling like someone’s mom, and telling Allegra how nice it was to see her again. Allegra was very happy for her. She looked at Callie’s photos of her boys and she got a whole vibe off them of a tolerant, loving, noisy home. She thought Callie was probably a very good mother.
Callie didn’t seem to remember much about Allegra at all, but wasn’t that really what you wanted from the kids at your high school?
Sylvia and Daniel drove back to the house together to collect some things for Allegra—her toothbrush, her slippers. She’d asked for a milk shake, so they’d pick that up, too. “She was very emotional,” Dr. Yep had told Sylvia privately. Clearly she thought it a matter of some concern.
Sylvia heard it as a reassurance. Relief turned to happiness. There was her Allegra, then, undamaged, unchanged. She would rather have taken Allegra home, yet there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to complain about. A narrow escape. Another lucky, lucky day in Sylvia’s lucky, lucky life.
“How’s Pam?” she asked Daniel charitably. Sylvia still hadn’t met Pam. Allegra said she was every bit as tough and opinionated as a family-practice lawyer would have to be.
“Pam’s good. Did Jocelyn seem a bit subdued to you? Of course, she was worried. We were all worried.”
“Jocelyn’s fine. Busy running the world.”
“Thank God,” Daniel said. “I wouldn’t want to live in any world Jocelyn wasn’t running.” As if that weren’t exactly what he’d done, left the world Jocelyn ran, for one she didn’t. Sylvia thought this, but was too relieved, too grateful (though not to Daniel) to say it.
Seeing him in the house again gave Sylvia a peculiar feeling, as though she were dreaming or waking up and couldn’t tell which. Who was she, really—the Sylvia without Daniel or the Sylvia with? In some ways she felt that she’d aged years in the months he’d been gone.
In other ways she’d become her parents’ daughter again. After Daniel had left, she’d found herself remembering things from her childhood, things she hadn’t thought of in forever. As though Daniel had been an interruption that went on most of her life. Suddenly she was dreaming in Spanish again. She found herself thinking more and more about her mother’s roses, her father’s politics, her grandmother’s soaps.
Divorce itself was an inevitable soap opera, of course. The roles were prewritten, no way to do them differently, no way to make them your own. She could see how it was killing Daniel not to be the hero in his own divorce.
“You have to remind yourself that it isn’t just the good Daniel who left,” Jocelyn had told her. “The bad Daniel is gone, too. Wasn’t he insufferable sometimes? Make a list of everything you didn’t like.”
But when Sylvia tried, the things she didn’t like often turned out also to be the things she did like. She would focus on some unpleasant memory—how she’d set out a punishment for one of the children, only to have him grant a parole. How he would ask her what she wanted for Christmas and then shake his head and tell her she didn’t want that, after all. “You’ll put it in the cupboard and never use it,” when she wanted a bread machine. “It looks just like the coat you already have,” when she’d shown him a winter jacket she liked. It was so smug. She really couldn’t stand it.
Then the memory would turn on her. The children had grown up fine; she was proud of them all. The present Daniel would get her would be something she would never have thought of. Usually it would be wonderful.
One night several weeks before Daniel had taken her out to dinner and asked for a divorce, she’d woken up and seen that he wasn’t in bed. She found him in the living room, in the armchair, looking out at the rain. The wind was shrill against the windows, rocking the trees. Sylvia loved a storm at night. It made everything simple. It made you content just to be dry.
Obviously it was having a different effect on Daniel. “Are you happy?” he had asked.
This sounded like the start of a long conversation. Sylvia didn’t have on her robe or her slippers. She was cold. She was tired. “Yes,” she said, not because she was, but because she wanted to keep things short. And she might be happy. She couldn’t think of anything making her unhappy. She hadn’t asked herself that question for a very long time.
“I can’t always tell,” Daniel said.
Sylvia heard this as a criticism. It was a complaint he’d made before—she was too subdued, too reticent. When would she learn to let go? Water poured from the gutters onto the deck. Sylvia could hear a car pass on Fifth Street, the shhh of its tires. “I’m going back to bed,” she said.
“You go on,” Daniel told her. “I’ll be along in a minute.”
But he wasn’t, and she fell asleep. She had a familiar dream. She was in a foreign city and no one spoke the languages she spoke. She tried to call home, but her cell phone was dead. She put the wrong money in the pay phone, and when she finally got it right, a strange man answered. “Daniel’s not here,” he told her. “No, I don’t know where he went. No, I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
In the morning she tried to speak to Daniel, but he was no longer willing. “It was nothing,” he said. “I don’t know what that was about. Forget it.”
Now Daniel was down the hallway in Allegra’s room, packing her things. “Should we take her a book?” he called. “Do you know what she’s reading?”
Sylvia didn’t answer immediately. She’d gone into the bedroom to phone the boys and noticed she had five messages. Four were hang-ups, telemarketers presumably, and one was from Grigg. “I was wondering if we could talk,” he said. “Would you have lunch with me this week? Give me a call.”
Daniel entered just in time to hear the end. She could tell he was surprised. Sylvia, less so. She saw Jocelyn’s fingers all over this. Sylvia had always suspected Grigg was intended for her. Of course, she didn’t want him, but when had that ever stopped Jocelyn? He was far too young.
She could see Daniel not asking her who that was. “Grigg Harris,” she told him. “He’s in my Jane Austen book club.” Let Daniel think another man was interested in her. A suitable man. A man who read Jane Austen.
A man with whom she now had to have an awkward lunch. Damn Jocelyn.
“Should we take Allegra a book?” Daniel asked again.
“She’s rereading Persuasion,” Sylvia said. “We both are.”
Daniel phoned Diego, who was their oldest, an immigration lawyer in L.A. Diego had been named for Sylvia’s father and was the one with his grandfather’s political passions. In other ways, Diego was the child most like Daniel, an early adult, dependable, responsible. The way Daniel used to be.
Sylvia phoned Andy, named for Daniel’s brother. Andy was their easygoing child. He worked for a landscaping firm in Marin and called on his cell whenever he was eating a really great meal or looking at something beautiful. In Andy’s life these things happened frequently. “The most amazing sunset!” he would say. “The most amazing tapas!”
Diego offered to come home and had to be convinced it wasn’t necessary. Andy, who could have made the trip in little more than an hour, didn’t think to make the offer.
Daniel and Sylvia went back to the hospital and sat with Allegra. They stayed all night, dozing in their chairs, because mistakes could happen in hospitals—doctors got distracted by their personal lives, there were romances and jiltings, people went in with fevers and came out with amputations. That was Sylvia’s motivation, anyway. Daniel stayed because he wanted to be there. It was the first night he and Sylvia had spent together since he’d moved out.
“Daniel,” Sylvia said. It was two in the morning, or else it was three. Allegra was sleeping, her face turned toward Sylvia on her pillow. She was dreaming. Sylvia could see her eyes move under her lids. Allegra’s breath was quick and audible. “Daniel?” Sylvia said. “I’m happy.”
Daniel didn’t answer. He, too, might have been asleep.
The next Saturday, Sylvia organized a trip to the beach. She proposed sushi at Osaka in Bodega Bay, because Allegra would never say no to sushi and Osaka was the best they’d ever had. She proposed a run on the sand for Sahara and Thembe, because Jocelyn would never say no to that. There were so few places a Ridgeback could safely run off-leash. They weren’t the kind of dogs who came when they were called. Unless they belonged to Jocelyn.
A trip to the beach would get everyone out of the Valley heat for a day. “And I think I’ll invite Grigg,” Sylvia told Jocelyn, “instead of having lunch with him.” Group activities, your key to avoiding unwanted intimacy.
This was a conversation on the phone, and there’d been a noticeable pause on Jocelyn’s end. Sylvia hadn’t told Jocelyn about the lunch, so perhaps she was just surprised. “All right,” she said finally. “I guess we can fit another person into the car.” Which made no sense. If they took Jocelyn’s van, as they surely would with the dogs, they could fit a couple more people in.
And a good thing, too, because first Grigg said he couldn’t. His sister Cat was visiting. And then he called back and said Cat really wanted to go to the beach, was in fact insistent on it, and could they both come? Cat turned out to look a lot like Grigg, only fatter and without the eyelashes.
The tide had left the graceful curves of its going etched into the sand. The wind came in off the water and the surf was wild. Instead of tidy sets, the waves were broken to bits, white water and green and brown and blue, all battered together. A few shells were washed over at the water’s edge, small and perfect, but everyone was too ecologically well behaved to pick these up.
Allegra was looking out to the ocean, her hair blowing into her eyes, a delicate tattoo of butterfly stitches on her temple. “Austen is so in love with sailors in Persuasion,” she said to Sylvia. “What profession would she admire today?”
“Firemen?” Sylvia guessed. “Just like everyone else?” And then they stopped talking because Jocelyn was approaching, and discussing the book in advance of the meeting, though tolerated, was not encouraged.
The dogs were ecstatic. Sahara raced along the sand with a rope of seaweed in her mouth, dropping it to bark at some sea lions sunning on a rock in the surf. The sea lions barked back; it was all very friendly.
Thembe found a dead gull and rolled over it, so that Jocelyn had to drag him into the icy water and scrub him down with wet sand. Her feet turned white as a fish belly; her teeth chattered—a rare achievement in August. She was looking very nice, her hair tied back with a scarf, her skin polished by the wind. At least Sylvia thought so.
Sylvia was managing never to be alone with Grigg. Jocelyn, she noticed, almost seemed to be doing the same thing. They sat together on the sand while Jocelyn toweled off with her sweatshirt. “When I was driving to the hospital,” Sylvia said, “I thought if Allegra was all right I would be the happiest woman in the world. And she was, and I was. But today the sink is backed up and there are roaches in the garage and I don’t have the time to deal with any of it. The newspaper is filled with misery and war. Already I have to remind myself to be happy. And you know, if it were the other way, if something had happened to Allegra, I wouldn’t have to remind myself to be unhappy. I’d be unhappy the rest of my life. Why should unhappiness be so much more powerful than happiness?”
“One difficult member spoils a whole group,” Jocelyn agreed. “One disappointment ruins a whole day.”
“One infidelity wipes out years of faithfulness.”
“It takes ten weeks to get into shape and ten days to get out of it.”
“That’s my point,” said Sylvia. “We don’t stand a chance.” Jocelyn was closer and more dear to Sylvia than her own sister ever had been. They had quarreled over Sylvia’s tardiness and Jocelyn’s bossiness and Sylvia’s malleability and Jocelyn’s righteousness, but they had never had a serious fight. All those years before, Sylvia had taken Daniel from Jocelyn, and Jocelyn had simply gone on loving them both.
Cat came and sat down beside them. Sylvia had liked Cat instantly. She had a loud laugh, like a duck quacking, and she laughed a lot. “Grigg just loves dogs,” she said. “We were never allowed to have one, so when he was three he decided to be one. We had to pat him on the head and tell him what a good dog he was. Give him little treats.
“And there was this book he absolutely loved. The Green Poodles. Kind of a mystery, took place in Texas, a long-lost cousin from England, a missing painting. And lots and lots of dogs. Our sister Amelia used to read it to us at bedtime. Books and dogs, that’s our Grigg.”
Allegra had discovered tide pools in the hollows of rocks and shouted for the others to come see. Each pool was a world, tiny but complete. The pools had the charm of dollhouses without inspiring the urge toward rearrangement. They were lined with anemones, so thick they were squeezed together; there were limpets and an occasional urchin, abalone the size of fingernails, and a minnow or two. It was a preview of lunch.
On the way home Jocelyn made a wrong turn. They were lost in the wilds of Glen Ellen for half an hour, which was so unlike Jocelyn. Sylvia was in the front with the MapQuest map, which, now that it was needed, appeared to bear no relationship to the realities of roads and distances. In the back, Cat suddenly turned to Grigg. “Oh my God,” she said. “Did you see that sign? To Los Guilicos? You remember the Los Guilicos School for wayward girls? I wonder if it’s still there.”
“My folks were always threatening my sisters with the Los Guilicos School,” Grigg told the rest of the car. “It was a family joke. They’d read about it in the paper. It was supposed to be a pretty tough place.”
“There was a riot there,” Cat said. “I don’t think I was even born yet. It was started by some girls from L.A., so I guess it got a lot of play in the L.A. papers. It lasted four whole days. The police kept arresting girls and taking them away and saying now it was all under control, and the next night the girls who were left would start in again. They broke windows and got drunk, fought with knives from the kitchen and bits of broken glass. They tore up the toilets and threw them out the windows with the rest of the furniture. Went into town and broke the windows there, too. Eventually the National Guard was called in, and even they couldn’t control things. Four days! Gangs of rampaging teenage girls. I always thought it would make a great movie.”
“I never heard of that,” Sylvia said. “What started it?”
“I don’t know,” Cat said. “It was blamed on violent lesbians.”
“Ah,” Allegra said, “of course,” when Sylvia could see no of course about it. How many riots blamed on violent lesbians had Allegra heard about?
Or maybe that had been an impressed “of course.” Maybe Allegra felt a sneaking admiration for toilet-hurling lesbians.
“I used to have nightmares,” Grigg said, “where I was being chased by wayward girls with knives.”
“Of course,” Cat said. “You would. Doesn’t it make you wonder where all those girls are now? What they went on to be?”
“Turn here,” Sylvia told Jocelyn, just because they’d come to a yard filled with roses.
Jocelyn turned. Let Saint Thérèse guide them home.
Or let them all end up at the Los Guilicos School for wayward girls. Sylvia was fine with it either way.
Jocelyn was being very quiet. This was partly because she couldn’t hear the conversation in the backseat. But it was mostly because while they were on the beach, while Allegra and Sylvia were still poking about the tide pools and Grigg was throwing bits of driftwood for the dogs, learning that Ridgebacks weren’t fetchers like that, Cat had abruptly, without warning, had a word with her. “My brother likes you,” she’d said. “He’d kill me if he knew I told you so, but I figure this is for the best. This way it’s up to you. God knows it can’t be left up to him. He’ll never make a move.”
“Did he tell you he liked me?” Jocelyn immediately regretted having asked. How high school had that sounded?
“Please. I know my brother,” which Jocelyn supposed meant he hadn’t. She turned away, looked down the beach toward Grigg and her dogs. They were headed to her, coming at a gallop. She saw that Thembe, at least, was smitten, couldn’t take his eyes off Grigg.
Ridgebacks are hounds, which means friendly, but independent. Jocelyn liked them for the challenge; there’s no glory in a well-behaved shepherd. She liked independent men as well. Before the library fund-raiser Grigg had always seemed so eager to please.
And then he joined them and nothing more could be said. He was obviously fond of his sister; that was attractive. The two of them stood together, his arm around her shoulder. Cat had an open, outdoorish face. She looked her age and then some. But the sun was full on her, which hardly one woman in a thousand could stand the test of. It was obviously a good bloodline. Both brother and sister had good teeth, neat little ears, deep chests, long limbs.
When she dropped Sylvia off, Jocelyn told her what Cat had said. Grigg and Cat had already been taken home. Allegra had gone straight inside to make a phone call. “I’m not at all convinced Cat knew what she was talking about,” Jocelyn said. “Grigg and I had a big fight the other night. Apologies all around, but still . . . Anyway, I kind of had Grigg in mind for you. You’re the one he asked to lunch.”
“Well, I don’t want him,” Sylvia answered. “I took your boyfriend away from you back in high school and it all came to nothing. I’m not doing it again. Do you like him?”
“I’m too old for him.”
“And yet I’m not.”
“He was to be a fling.”
“You fling him.”
“I think I’ll read those books he gave me,” Jocelyn said. “If they turn out to be good books, well then, maybe. Maybe I’ll give it a try.” At least she’d never been, thank God, the kind of woman who stopped liking a guy just because he maybe liked her back.
There was a letter pushed under Sylvia’s door, picked up by Allegra and left on the dining room table. “I want to come home,” the letter said. “I made the most terrible mistake and you should never forgive me, but you should also know that I want to come home.
“I’ve always felt that making everyone happy was my job, and then like a failure if you or the kids couldn’t produce that happiness for me. I didn’t figure this out for myself. I’m seeing a counselor.
“So I was stupid enough to blame you for not being happier. Now I think, if I could come home again, I’d let you have your own moods, your lovely, loving alarms.
“Last week I knew I never wanted to be with a woman I couldn’t bring to my child’s hospital room. I had this dream while we were in those awful chairs. In my dream there was a forest. (Remember how we took the kids to the Snoqualmie National Park and Diego said, ‘You said we were going to a forest. There’s nothing here but trees’?) I couldn’t find you. I got more and more panicked, and then I woke up and you were right across the room from me. It was such a relief I can’t even say. You asked me how Pam was. I haven’t seen Pam for two months. She wasn’t the woman for me after all.
“I’ve been unjust, weak, resentful, and inconstant. But in my heart it’s always been you.”
Sylvia sat folding and unfolding the letter, trying to see how she felt about it. It made her happy. It made her angry. It made her think that Daniel was no prize. He was coming home, because no one else turned out to want him.
She didn’t show the letter to Allegra. She didn’t even tell Jocelyn. Jocelyn would respond however Sylvia wished, but Sylvia didn’t know yet what response that would be. It was too important a moment to ask Jocelyn to go through it unguided. Sylvia wanted things simple, but they refused to simplify. She carried the letter about, rereading and rereading, watching her feelings rearrange about it, sentence by sentence, like a kaleidoscope.
The last official meeting of the Jane Austen book club took place at Sylvia’s again. It had been in the low nineties all day, which is not so bad for August in the Valley. The sun sank and a Delta breeze came up. We sat on Sylvia’s deck, underneath the big walnut tree. She made peach margaritas and served homemade strawberry sherbet with homemade sugar cookies. Really, no one could have asked for a prettier evening.
The meeting began with an unveiling. Sylvia had a birthday coming. It was still a few weeks off, but Allegra had made something she wanted us all to see, so she gave it to Sylvia early, wrapped in last week’s funny papers. It was about the size and shape of a holiday cheese-ball. We would have guessed Sylvia was the sort to unknot the ribbon, carefully remove and fold the paper. Instead she tore it apart. Sahara and Thembe couldn’t have opened it faster, even working together.
Allegra had bought one of those black Magic 8-Balls, reamed it open, replaced the answers, and sealed it. She’d painted it a dark green, and over the old 8, she’d transferred a reproduction of Cassandra Austen’s sketch of her sister, set in a framed oval like a cameo. It wasn’t a very attractive portrait; we were certain she had been prettier than this, but when you need a picture of Jane Austen you don’t have a lot of choices.
A ribbon wound about the ball. Ask Austen was painted in red on the ribbon. Allegra had matched Austen’s writing from a facsimile in the university library.
“Go ahead,” Allegra said. “Ask a question.”
Sylvia got up to give Allegra a kiss. It was the most fantastic present! Allegra was so very clever. But Sylvia couldn’t think of a question benign enough for its maiden forecast. Later, when she was alone, she thought she had some things to ask.
“I’ll go,” Bernadette offered. Bernadette was nicely dressed tonight, not a hair out of place. Her socks didn’t match, but why should they? Her shoes did. It was rakish.
“Should I take a trip?” Bernadette asked Austen. She’d been contemplating a birding expedition to Costa Rica. Pricey, but not if you calculated it bird by bird. She shook the ball, upended it, and waited. It is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves, she read.
“Go in autumn,” Jocelyn translated.
Prudie took the ball next. Something about Prudie just looked right with an object of divination. Her snow-white skin, sharp features, dark, bottomless eyes. We thought how she should always be holding one, like a fashion accessory. “Should I buy a new computer?” Prudie asked.
Austen answered, My good opinion once lost is lost for ever.
“I guess that’s no,” Allegra said. “You have to squint a bit. It’s sort of a Zen experience.”
Next was Grigg. All summer, his hair and lashes had been bleaching at the ends. He obviously tanned easily; even that short trip to the beach made him browner. He looked five years younger, which was unfortunate if you were an older woman and contemplating dating him. “Should I write my book?” Grigg asked. “My roman à clef?”
Austen ignored this, answered a different question, but Grigg was the only one of us who knew it. He advances inch by inch, and will hazard nothing till he believes himself secure.
“I bet you could sell a bunch of these,” Grigg said. “You could put out a whole line, different writers. The Dickens ball. Mark Twain. Mickey Spillane. I’d pay a lot for access to daily advice from Mickey Spillane.”
There was a time when we might have bristled at the devolution from Austen to Spillane. But we were very fond of Grigg now. Probably he was making a joke.
He passed to Jocelyn. Jocelyn was also looking exceptionally good. She was wearing a blouse even Sylvia had never seen, so it must have been brand-new. A long, light khaki skirt. Makeup. “Should I take a chance?” Jocelyn asked.
It is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves, Austen told her.
“Well, that answer works equally well for any question,” Allegra noted. “Anyway, you should always take a chance. Ask Allegra.”
Jocelyn turned directly to Grigg. “I read those two Le Guins you gave me. In fact, I bought a third. I’m halfway through Searoad. She’s just amazing. It’s been forever since I found a new writer I love like that.”
Grigg blinked several times. “Le Guin’s in a league of her own, of course,” he said cautiously. He gained enthusiasm. “But she’s written a bunch. And there are other writers you might like, too. There’s Joanna Russ and Carol Emshwiller.”
Their voices dropped; the conversation became intimate, but the bits we could hear were still about books. So Jocelyn was a science fiction reader now. We had no objection. We could see how it might be unsafe for people prone to dystopian fantasies, but as long as science fiction wasn’t all you read, as long as there was a large allowance of realism, what was the harm? It was nice to see Grigg looking so happy. Perhaps we would all start reading Le Guin.
The globe came back to Sylvia. “Should we talk about Persuasion now?” she asked it. Her answer: It is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves.
“You didn’t shake it,” Allegra complained. The phone rang and she got up, went inside. “Go ahead and start,” she said as she left. “I’ll be right back.”
Sylvia put down the ball, picked up her book, paged through for the passage she wanted. “I was troubled,” she began, “by the difference in the way Austen talks about the death of Dick Musgrove and the way she talks about the death of Fanny Harville. It’s very convenient to the plot that Fanny’s fiancé falls in love with Louisa, since this leaves Captain Wentworth free to marry Anne. Still, you can see Austen doesn’t entirely approve.” Sylvia read aloud. “ ‘ “Poor Fanny!” ’ her brother says. ‘ “She would not have forgotten him so soon!” ’
“But there are no tears at all for Dick Musgrove. The loss of a son is less important than the loss of a fiancée. Austen was never a mother.”
“Austen was never a fiancée,” said Bernadette. “Or just overnight. Not long enough to count. So it’s not son versus fiancée.”
There was a fly on the porch, humming about Bernadette’s head. It was large and loud and slow and distracting. Distracting to us, anyway. It didn’t seem to be bothering Bernadette. “What matters is the worthiness of the person deceased,” she said. “Dick was a useless, incorrigible boy. Fanny was an exceptional woman. People earn the way they’re missed. Persuasion is all about earning your place. The self-made men of the navy are so much more admirable than the high-born Elliots. Anne is so much more valuable than either of her sisters.”
“But Anne earned more than she got,” Grigg said. “Up until the very end. As does poor dead Fanny.”
“I guess I think we all deserve more than we earn,” said Sylvia, “if that makes any sense. I’d like the world to be forgiving. I feel sorry for Dick Musgrove, because no one loved him more than he deserved.”
We were quiet for a minute, listening to the fly buzz, thinking our private thoughts. Who loved us? Who loved us more than we deserved? Prudie had an impulse to go right home to Dean. She didn’t, but she would tell him she’d thought to.
“There aren’t so many deaths in the other Austen novels,” Jocelyn said. She was already helping herself to a bite of Grigg’s sugar cookie without even asking. That was fast! “One wonders how much her own death was on her mind.”
“Did she think she was dying?” Prudie asked, but no one knew the answer.
This is too grim a beginning,” Bernadette said. “I want to talk about Mary. I absolutely love Mary. Except for Collins in Pride and Prejudice, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, too, and Mr. Palmer in Sense and Sensibility, and I love Mr. Woodhouse, of course, in Emma, but except for those, she’s my favorite of all the comic Austen characters. Her constant complaints. Her insistence on being neglected and put-upon.”
Bernadette supported her case with quotes. “ ‘You, who have not a mother’s feelings.’ ‘Everybody is always supposing that I am not a good walker!’ ” and so on and so on. She read several paragraphs aloud. No one was arguing; we were in complete agreement, listening drowsily in the sweet, cool evening. Allegra might have said something sour—she so often did—but she hadn’t come back from her phone call, so not a person there did not love Mary. Mary was an exceptional creation. Mary deserved a toast. Sylvia and Jocelyn were sent to the kitchen for a second round of margaritas.
They passed Allegra, who was gesturing while she talked, as if she could be seen. “ . . . tore out the toilets and threw them out the windows,” she was saying. What a waste of her pretty expressions, her silent-film-star gestures. She had a face made for the videophone. She covered the receiver. “Dr. Yep says hello,” she told Sylvia.
Dr. Yep? Jocelyn waited until Sylvia had finished with the blender to lean in and whisper. “So! What mother doesn’t want her daughter dating a nice doctor?”
Such a thing to say! Obviously Jocelyn had never seen a single episode of Young Dr. Malone. Sylvia knew how these things worked. Any minute now someone would fall into a coma. There’d be an accident in the kitchen with the blender. A suspicious death followed by a trial for murder. Hysterical pregnancies followed by unnecessary abortions. The many, many braided chains of disaster.
“I’m very happy for her,” Sylvia said. She poured the largest margarita for herself. She deserved it. “Dr. Yep seemed like a really lovely woman,” she added insincerely, although, in fact, Dr. Yep had.
Bernadette was still talking when they returned. She’d shifted from Mary to the older sister, Elizabeth. Equally well drawn, but far less funny. Not intended to be, of course. And then the conniving Mrs. Clay. But how was she worse than Charlotte in Pride and Prejudice, and hadn’t they all agreed they loved Charlotte?
Sylvia started to argue on behalf of her adored Charlotte. She was interrupted by the doorbell. She went to answer it and there was Daniel. He had a gray, nervous look, which Sylvia liked better than the lobbyist’s smile he tried immediately to paste over it. “I can’t talk to you now,” Sylvia said. “I got your letter, but I can’t talk. My book club is here.”
“I know. Allegra told me.” Daniel held out his hand, and in it was a book with a woman on the cover, standing in front of a leafy tree. Allegra’s copy of Persuasion. “I looked it over in the hospital. Anyway, I read the afterword. Apparently it’s all about second chances. That’s the book for me, I thought.”
He stopped smiling and the nervous look came back. The book in his hand was shaking. It softened Sylvia. “Allegra thought you were feeling forgiving,” Daniel said. “I took a chance she was right.”
Sylvia had no recollection of having said anything that would give Allegra this impression. She couldn’t remember talking about Daniel much at all. But she stood aside and let him in, let him follow her back to the deck. “Daniel wants to join us,” Sylvia said.
“He’s not in the club.” Jocelyn’s voice was stern. Rules were rules, and no exceptions were made for philanderers and abandoners.
“Persuasion’s my favorite Austen,” Daniel told her.
“Have you read it? Have you read any of them?”
“I’m fully prepared to,” said Daniel. “Every single one. Whatever it takes.”
He had a rosebud, short-stemmed, in the top pocket of his jeans. He pulled it out. “I know you won’t believe this, but I found it lying on the sidewalk in front. Honest to God. I hoped you’d think it was a message.” He gave it to Sylvia, along with a couple of petals that had come loose. “Te hecho de menos,” he said. “Chula.”
“ ‘Les fleurs sont si contradictoires,’ ” Prudie answered coldly, to remind him we didn’t all speak Spanish. Grigg had wanted only a single margarita, so she had taken his second and made it her third. You could hear this on the “sont si.” She gave Daniel the courtesy of a translation, which was more than he had done for her. “From Le Petit Prince. ‘You should never listen to flowers.’ ”
No one was more of a romantic than Prudie, you could ask anyone that! But the rose was a cheap move, and Prudie thought less of Daniel for making it. Added to this was the guilt of knowing the rose was hers. Dean had picked it for her, and the last time she’d looked it had been pinned to her blouse.
She wasn’t sure that Persuasion wasn’t a cheap move, too, but who would put Jane to an evil purpose?
“Ask Austen,” Bernadette suggested.
“Shake it up,” Grigg said. “Shake hard.” Clearly he was rooting for Daniel. So predictable. So tediously Y to Y.
Sylvia set the rose down. It was already limp on its stem; the heavy head rolled from side to side. If it was an omen, it was an unclear one. She cupped the globe and shook. The answer began to settle: My good opinion once lost is lost for ever; but Sylvia didn’t want that. She tipped secretly past it and got: When I am in the country, I never wish to leave it; and when I am in town it is pretty much the same.
“So what does that mean?” Jocelyn asked Sylvia. “Your call.”
“It means he can stay,” Sylvia said, and saw, on Jocelyn’s face, for just one moment, a flash of relief.
Allegra came back outside. “Hola, papá,” she said. “You’ve got my book. You’ve got my margarita. You’re in my chair.” Her voice was suspiciously light. She had the face of an angel, the eyes of a collaborator. Daniel moved to make room for her.
Sylvia watched them settle together, Allegra leaning against her father, her cheek on his shoulder. Sylvia found herself suddenly, desperately missing the boys. Not the grown-up boys who had jobs and wives and children or, at least, girlfriends and cell phones, but the little boys who’d played soccer and sat on her lap while she read The Hobbit to them. She remembered how Diego had decided over dinner that he could ride a two-wheeler, and made them take the training wheels off his bike that very night, how he sailed off without a single wobble. She remembered how Andy used to wake up from dreams laughing, and could never tell them why.
She remembered a ski trip they’d all taken the year of the big floods. ’Eighty-six? They’d rented a cabin in Yosemite and barely gotten home after. Interstate 5 had closed while they were on it, but they’d been able to shift to 99. Highway 99 flooded an hour after they’d driven over it.
While they were in the mountains, it snowed and snowed. This would have been lovely if they’d been sitting in some expensive ski lodge with their feet propped next to a fire. Instead they were standing in the Badger Pass parking lot with hundreds of other families, waiting for the bus to take them down.
It was a long, cold wait, and everyone was unhappy to be doing it. An announcement told them one of the buses had stalled and wouldn’t arrive at all. This worsened the collective mood. The boys were hungry. Allegra was starving. The boys were cold. Allegra was freezing. They hated skiing, they all said, and why had they been made to come?
When a bus did arrive, almost thirty minutes later, a man and a woman pushed their way into line in front of Sylvia. There was little point to this. None of them was close enough to the front to have a shot at this first bus. But Sylvia had been shoved aside and, in her efforts not to step on Diego, had fallen onto the icy pavement. “Hey,” Daniel had said. “That’s my wife you just pushed over.”
“Fuck you,” the man answered.
“What did you say?”
“Fuck your wife,” the woman added.
The kids had scarves wound around their necks, covering their mouths. Over these, their eyes were shiny with excitement. There was going to be a fight! Their father was going to start it! The people nearest gave way so that there was empty space around Daniel and the other man.
“Daniel, don’t,” said Sylvia. One thing she’d always loved about Daniel was his lack of machismo. The boys she’d grown up with were such caballeros. Such cowboys. She’d never found it attractive. Daniel was like her father, self-confident enough to take an insult if one was offered. (On the other hand, she had been pushed and cursed, entirely without provocation. That wasn’t right.)
“I’ll deal with this,” Daniel told her. He was wearing ski pants, soft après-ski boots, and an enormous parka. That was the top layer, but there were many strata beneath. He looked as if he were about to be shot from a cannon. The other man was equally padded, the Michelin man in Patagonia blue. They squared off. Daniel was as angry as Sylvia had ever seen him.
He took a swing, but the ice was so bad he almost went down from his own momentum. He missed the other man’s chest by many inches. The other man rushed him and Daniel side-stepped, so the man slid past and crashed into a pile of skis and poles.
Both regained their balance, turned around. “You’ll be sorry for that,” the man said. He walked toward Daniel, setting each foot onto the ice with care. Daniel took another swing and a miss. His boots slid out from under him; he went down hard. The other man stepped in to hold him there, pin him with a knee, but in his haste slid past again. His wife caught him and propped him upright. Daniel got to his feet, lumbered forward. He took a third swing; it spun him halfway around to face Sylvia.
He was smiling. Fat as a Santa in his big dark parka, there he was, fighting for her honor, but never managing to land a single punch. Windmilling, slipping, falling. Laughing.
Is Anne Elliot really the best heroine Austen ever created?” Daniel asked. “That’s what it says here in the afterword.”
“She’s a little too innately good for my taste,” said Allegra. “I prefer Elizabeth Bennet.”
“I love them all,” Bernadette answered.
“Bernadette,” Prudie said. She’d reached that pensive, sentimental state of drunkenness that everyone watching so enjoys. “You’ve done so many things and read so many books. Do you still believe in happy endings?”
“Oh my Lord, yes.” Bernadette’s hands were pressed against each other like a book, like a prayer. “I guess I would. I’ve had about a hundred of them.”
On the deck behind her was a glass door, and behind the door a dark room. Sylvia was not a happy-ending sort of person herself. In books, yes, they were lovely. But in life everyone has the same ending, and the only question is who will get to it first. She took a drink of peach margarita and looked at Daniel, who was looking back, and didn’t look away.
What if you had a happy ending and didn’t notice? Sylvia made a mental note. Don’t miss the happy ending.
Above Daniel’s head, one leaf, and only one leaf, ticked about on the walnut tree. How exacting, how precise the breeze! It smelled of the river, a green smell in a brown month. She took a deep breath.
“Sometimes a white cat is just a white cat,” Bernadette said.