The train was finally in motion, creeping through the underground tunnels of Union Station, bumping onto a different track in the train yard, then making its slow progress through city intersections. In Chinatown it loitered on a siding, waiting for a freight train to pass. After that, some haunted-looking old factory buildings. It picked up speed to travel the wonderland of industrial waste at the Indiana border. Here was a field of above-ground piping and submarine-shaped tanks—pressurized
natural gas, Anna guessed—and a little farther along, the marching towers and glittering wires of an electrical plant, like a field of Christmas trees as imagined by aliens. Here the chimneys of a refinery, sending out stinking soot.
Anna turned away from the window. It felt like being confronted with her unmade bed when she was a child. Guilty consumer of electricity and gasoline, user of hair dryers, microwaves, watcher of television, buyer of bottled water. She figured she was in the proper state of self-chastisement to read Ted’s letter.
It was half a dozen sheets of paper, handwritten in thick, soaking blue ink. No one but Ted had time to write long letters anymore. No one else had time to read them. “Dear Anna Mae,” it began, which was not her name. Sometimes he addressed her as Anna Banana, or Anna Livia Plurabelle. When English majors go bad.
Dear Anna Mae,
Now that it’s fall, I’m starting to see more hawks. They ride the thermals through the canyons, silent, mostly, except for the occasional long, drawn-out hunting screech. It’s a falling away sound, a lonesome sound, and if you hear it at twilight, it tears out your heart, just the same as if the hawk itself had landed on your chest.
Anna put the letter down. The scenic view of Gary, Indiana, was preferable to Ted’s inflated prose. Ted had gone to live on a ridge in the Ozarks, ten miles from the nearest paved road. “Wilderness,” he called it, though it sounded more like economically depressed rural life. He was exploring the spiritual aspects of isolation and self-sufficiency. He was building a log house from a kit. He wrote in great detail about his solar panels, his generator, his well-maintained woodpile. The ink on the page had probably been concocted from wild berries and glycerin. This last was an unnecessarily mean thought, and she put it behind her. Thinking about Ted always seemed to require this sort of shifting of equilibrium from her, guilt replaced by scorn, then back to guilt again, with fondness leaking through the seams. Somewhere in the letter was probably another invitation for Anna to come live with him, since isolation and self-sufficiency had their limitations.
There were times when, in spite of everything she could imagine and dread—rusty well water, feeble organic soap,
the failing vegetable garden, the equivocal prospect of Ted himself—she considered it. Run off to the woods, breathe fresh air, cleave to a man and have him cleave to you, come what may. But she had the suspicion that Ted sent similar letters and similar invitations to all his old girlfriends, trying to increase his odds. “Oh, I guess I didn’t get a chance to tell you about Kathy” (or Lauren, or Beth), he’d say, once she showed up at his door, provisioned with flannel shirts, sugar, and a year’s
supply of Tampax. “I’d been meaning to write.” The other
woman would be feeding hens or processing a bucket of gnarled beans as Ted stood at the edge of the narrow, rutted road,
shouting instructions to Anna on how to turn around without breaking an axle. In her rearview mirror, Anna would see him wave good-bye, then drape his arm around Kathy, et cetera, the two of them turning their contented backs to her.
She was too good at this part. Imagining her own defeats, dismissing possibilities without considering them. Her character was built on some bedrock of cynicism, or maybe that was only the smart-aleck variety of fear. The train tracks ran parallel to a section of highway, bare fields sprouting the occasional shopping center or blocky, prisonlike apartment complex. Another four hours to go. Anna picked up the letter again and scanned the blue smears. The part about hawks went on for awhile, and then there was something about fencing, the difficulties of stretching fence, and then:
What do you think about right before you fall asleep? I try to think of everyone I know in the world (you, Anna! You!), name them and call them to mind. What are they doing, right that minute, and when will I see them again, if ever? I’m up here on my little piece of high ground, so far away from everything that at night I have to squint to see a light, but I tell you, I’m at the very center of a network of humming thought.
The train rocked and shimmied. Anna’s Styrofoam cup of tea sloshed in an elliptical pattern and she reached out to steady it. She felt claustrophobic, both from the enclosure of the train itself and from the letter, hemming her in with its proclamations and its neediness. She drank half her tea and didn’t want the rest, so she stood, wanting an excuse to move. The car was full and she braced herself on the seat backs, walking carefully. She deposited the cup in the plastic-lined trash bin and kept going the length of the next two cars, trying to look purposeful rather than aimless.
It was Thanksgiving week and the train was crowded with college students, families with kids, and one wary-looking elderly couple, banished, Anna guessed, from cooking their own holiday dinner, shipped off to some hyper-competent daughter-in-law’s kitchen. In the club car, two dressed-up black ladies were comparing notes on their foot problems, the trials of fallen arches, bunions, heel pain. They appeared not to have known each other previously, but to have established some happy communion of ailments. “And you know,” one said, “with the Lord we have all the help we need.” “That’s true, praise God,” the other chimed in, not missing a beat. Anna felt a little pluck of envy. Where were her fellow sufferers, how would they recognize and console one another?
Anna was traveling to East Lansing, Michigan, to spend Thanksgiving at the home of her old college pal. Lynn, almost alone among their set, had achieved an intact and fruitful marriage. Her husband was a professor in the business school at Michigan State. Her two children had entered their surly teenage years, and Lynn was now free to get back to librarian work, as well as devote more time to her rewarding Audubon Club activities. For Anna, there was a Disneyland quality to the trip, a visit to Normal Land.
She imagined Lynn instructing her husband and kids, laying the groundwork for her arrival. “I don’t want to have to tell you to be nice to Anna.”
“Well duh, that’s exactly what you’re doing,” one of the rotten kids would point out.
“Yeah, why do we have to be nice to her anyway?” the other would chime in.
“Because she’s a guest here. And a dear friend of mine. And because she doesn’t have anybody else to spend Thanksgiving with.”
“Why not, what’s wrong with her?” Yukking it up by now.
“Nothing’s wrong with her. She just never stayed married long enough to have children.”
“That’s weird,” the kids would chorus, delighted now at the idea of the visiting freak.
She really needed to stop this. Try a little positive attitude. Or a lot. It would be good to reconnect with Lynn, a free ticket to the family feast, without any of the encumbrances of family. Anyway, she wasn’t some charity case; she could have organized Thanksgiving with friends or gone to her mother’s in Missouri. In fact, going to Lynn’s had been a way of avoiding her mother in Missouri. Most people had holiday destinations. Anna had escape routes.
Anna guessed they were in Michigan by now. The train made a series of stately curves, north, as far as she could tell, and there were stands of trees, dense and close-packed, and every so often they opened up to reveal a slatternly small town, gone in an instant, then more trees. She must have dozed off. The intercom woke her, announcing a stop in Kalamazoo. Kalamazoo! She hadn’t believed there really was such a place.
She was forty-one years old. The wreckages of two marriages and more lovers than had been strictly necessary trailed behind her like a busted parachute. She had a job which, like most jobs, could have paid her more and aggravated her less. In the last few years, she’d had problems with allergies, dry eye syndrome, brittle nails, constipation, all the diseases of a skittery nervous system. She had, in so many ways, failed to meet expectations. And yet she probably had about half her life left to march or mope through, and she could go out and snag her some happiness if she chose. She was entitled. It was in the Declaration of Independence.
Now the view from the window offered munching black-and-white cows, actual orchards, billboards promoting unborn babies and gun rights. Tawny farm fields swelled under a brisk gray sky. Here was even a fruit and vegetable stand, freighted with pumpkins and bushels of apples. She began to feel mildly hopeful. Live in the moment! Visualize joy!
It’s funny, Anna, because of course I came in part for solitude. I wanted the purity of it, I wanted to wake up in the morning and know that unless I chose to speak out loud, I’d pass the whole day without hearing a human voice. Well, that’s a certain kind of solitude, this diving into the core of yourself and seeing what’s down there under the water. But solitude is different than loneliness, and I’m here to tell you, the loneliest times I’ve ever spent have been in the company of other people.
Lynn had arranged to come to the Lansing station by herself to pick up Anna and drive her back to the house, “so we have a chance to gab.” Anna marshaled her luggage and walked a little distance from the concourse, anxious, as always, that she might be forgotten and unmet. But Lynn stepped out of the waiting crowd, a familiar face among the strangeness, like an optical illusion. They hugged.
“Was the train awful? You’re almost an hour late!”
“Fine, once we got going. Look at you. You are the very model of a modern Michigan matron.”
“Cut it out.”
“No, I meant, you have it down cold,” Anna backpedaled, because maybe it had been a crummy thing to say. “You look really together.”
Lynn sniffed. “I changed out of my sweatsuit. I have a really together sweatsuit too. Is that your only suitcase?”
Both the train and the station had been overheated and filled with lurking, unclean smells: bodies, perfumey lotions, the ancient contents of vending machines ground underfoot. They stepped outside and the sharp wind blew every scrap of it away. “Frigid,” Anna remarked, pleased. Chicago had been unseasonably warm and un-holidaylike.
“A front’s coming through, I guess. Here’s the van. If you say ‘soccer mom,’ I’m going to smack you.”
“It is a powerful, well-engineered vehicle. I like the decals. Are we going to have pie tomorrow? I want to wallow in pie.”
“Apple and pumpkin, from the bakery. Jay’s making a pumpkin cheesecake.” Jay was Lynn’s husband. “He has this whole menu of gourmet creations. Oyster dressing. Bourbon-glazed sweet potatoes. Onions baked with pomegranates. The boys and I said if we didn’t have a turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy and cranberry sauce, we were going to a restaurant.”
“I didn’t know Jay liked to cook.”
“He likes to compete. It’s the latest thing he can do better than me. He watches those TV shows where people cook for prizes and he makes fun of them. He threw out all of our old pots and pans and bought clunky Le Creuset ones. While you’re here, try to say something nice about his food.”
“I will be ravished by gastronomy,” Anna promised. She was enjoying the ride, perched up high in the passenger seat of the van. The elevation made the ordinary view of highway, office buildings, suburban homes, seem like a kingdom she surveyed. Carry on, she instructed her subjects as they went about their labors. I am well pleased.
She kept Lynn in the corner of her vision, biding her time, waiting for them not to feel strange to each other. The first words out of her mouth had been the truest, even though she regretted them. There was a kind of protective coloration people developed to fit their surroundings, so that in the suburbs one saw whole herds of fleece garments, turtlenecks, sporty shoes. Lynn had cut her hair short and permed it, some hairdresser’s version of a casual, fun look. Now it had flattened, like the pelt of an animal. Lynn had always been the light and shiny one, the up to Anna’s down. Something corrosive had been at work on her, but Anna was cautious about voicing any more opinions.
How long had it been since they’d seen each other? Three four five years? Lynn and Jay and their kids had been in Chicago for some kind of conference. Anna and her then-husband had met them for dinner at their hotel. The boys had been sub-adolescents, gangly, inarticulate, suffering through every minute in the presence of adults. The two men had sized each other up and hadn’t much liked each other. Anna and Ex drank too much, gearing up for the fight they’d have once they got home. Lynn had been on alert about children’s table manners (“Sit up straight! Don’t put that whole thing in your mouth at once!”), and she and Anna kept up a false, sprightly banter, every so often giving each other private glances, meaning, they should have ditched all these unsatisfactory males and gone off on their own. “She does enough talking for all of us put together,” Ex observed later, one more thing to fight about. But he hadn’t been wrong.
Now they were setting themselves up for more of the same. Another reunion observed by bored family members. “We have to stop and pick up the pies,” Lynn said. “Are you hungry? Dinner tonight’s just sandwiches. The refrigerator’s full of Thanksgiving stuff.”
“Sure, let’s get a bite.” It was hard to sound enthusiastic when Lynn didn’t seem to be. “I got another letter from Ted,” Anna offered, thinking that might spark something. There were plenty of Ted stories. “He wants me to go live in the woods with him.”
Anna did turn around to look at her then. “Sure. I mean, I don’t see any reason why not.”
“Just a couple of weeks out of the year would do it. Like a retreat.”
“Old part-time Ted,” said Anna, reminiscing. “Not what you’d call dependable. Though he had his good points.” She wasn’t sure why she’d said this last part, except that it made her sound worldly, a connoisseur of men and their good and bad points. Which she guessed she was, but not in any way you’d want to brag about. “His heart was always in the right place,” she finished lamely.
“I guess he could be an option for you. In case nothing else works out.”
“Excuse me?” said Anna, a shocked half beat too late. “What, exactly, do you think I’m trying to work out?”
“Oh, you know. The man thing.” Lynn wrestled the van into a parking lot, scanned for spaces. “Like you’re always complaining.”
“I thought I was allowed to complain,” said Anna, feeling something new and dangerous cresting in her. Skittish anger, a willingness to lash out. “Even lacking, as I do, the advantages of a longtime spouse, always available to be complained about.”
“Funny,” said Lynn, making the mistake of not really paying attention. She was waiting for another van to finish pulling out and unclog the lane.
“You think I’m, what, desperate? Running out of time?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Don’t be dismissive. ‘Poor old Anna. I mean after all, what does she expect?’”
“What?” Now Lynn was paying attention. “You know very well I didn’t say any of that.”
“And don’t use your mommy voice on me.”
“My what?” Lynn spun the steering wheel and the van heaved toward, then away from, a line of shopping carts. The teenage grocery clerk pushing them didn’t register the danger until they’d passed him by. His mouth unhinged and he stared after them. “Are you flipping out on me?”
“I’m past my prime. Stale-dated. Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.”
“Right this minute? I’m feeling sorry for me. And what’s ‘modern Michigan matron,’ huh? You get off the train and start right in sniping at me, and then you say you don’t want sympathy when all I ever hear you talk about is how you’re lonely, you’re horny, you’re broke, you’re old and pitiful, you’re the one feeling sorry for you. I’m just supposed to keep you company.”
“All right,” said Anna. “All right.”
“Get over it. Please.”
“Over it. Sorry.” Her anger flared out like a match and the next instant she had undermined herself, seen herself as Lynn must see her: her black coat, meant to be urban and sleek, was rubbed and discolored at the collar and hem, her boots were scuffed, her jeans drooped and bagged, and God knows what kind of face and hair would present themselves in a mirror. “A little holiday tantrum.”
“Glad we got it out of the way,” said Lynn. But it didn’t feel as if they’d put anything out of the way, only demarcated the distance between them.
They stood in line for the pies, and then stood in another line to get soup and salads, which they carried over to a corner table. Anna shouldn’t have been hungry, after all the upset, but she was, extremely, as if she were venturing into unknown territory where sustenance would be hard to come by.
After awhile Lynn said, “I guess we’re having some weird competition. Who can be the most bitter.”
“Yeah, well, usually I win in a walk.”
“There’s some stuff going on with Jay.”
“Ah,” said Anna, nodding. Stuff.
“You can’t be married almost twenty years without hitting some rough patches. I still love Jay. I do. At the end of the day, he’s the father of my children. My long-term partner. But I need to not be the Great Mommy Satan. The reason for everything that’s lacking in his life.”
“He’d be lost without you,” said Anna, wondering if this was true. She prided herself on having a store of empathy, of being able to figure people out, see them as if they were one of those clocks with transparent cases, the gears and cogs spinning and visible. But Lynn’s husband always stopped her cold. He might be one of those men who walked away from a wife and family without much distress, or even much thought.
“Just as I guess he shouldn’t be entirely responsible for everything that’s lacking in my life. Like, for instance, sex.”
“Uh oh.”
“Maybe most married people don’t, after awhile. God knows there’s enough jokes about it.” She looked at Anna. Her turn.
“It kind of came and went,” said Anna. “Alcohol helped.” She wasn’t inclined, just then, to detail her sexual failures, and besides, she couldn’t speak as to either children or marital longevity, both of them no doubt in play. She wondered why Lynn didn’t compare notes with some other mom. Maybe she did. Or maybe she didn’t want that kind of information loose out there in her world. The dinner guest, looking Jay over with knowing eyes. “But you love the guy, that’s the important thing,” Anna said, aiming for encouragement.
“There’s all different kinds of love,” said Lynn, breaking crackers into her soup bowl.
I know you think I’m out here getting by on roots and grubs and squirrel stew, but in fact I eat pretty well. I’ve got my basics—rice, flour, cornmeal—stowed away in critter-proof containers. I make the world’s best granola and I store that too. I’m good with anything in a can. Working on a root cellar for potatoes and onions, not having much luck, what with all the mud. Someday I’ll set up shop to do some smoking and pickling. Do you know why Johnny Appleseed planted apple trees up and down the frontier? Because you can ferment the juice and make vinegar. Applejack too, I guess.
Anna hadn’t seen Lynn’s house, this new house, before. Lynn pulled in the driveway and Anna said, “Hey, this is nice. This is top of the line.” It always surprised her when people she knew owned real, actual houses with grown-up mortgages. “Is that Jay up there on the ladder?”
“Yeah, he’s installing gutter guards.”
“Oh,” said Anna, not knowing what a gutter guard was, and figuring she didn’t need to know. She waved at Jay, but he gave no sign of seeing her.
The boys were out playing basketball, Lynn explained. The boys’ names were Tim and Dan. They were the complete monosyllabic family. Lynn took her through the house room by room, like a Realtor. She stood aside at doorways so that Anna could peer in, assess, compliment. “The boys’ rooms,” she said, indicating two nests of disordered bedding and strewn clothing. “You’ll have your own bathroom. Be thankful for that.”
The backyard was a wonderland of bird feeders, birdbaths, and birdhouses. There were whirligigs and platforms, hoppers and Plexiglas tubes, bird condos decorated in Cape Cod and rustic styles. “These birds have it good,” said Anna, thinking it was all a little crazed, so much effort, like those folk artists who constructed homemade temples out of bicycle wheels and aluminum foil.
“The best thing about birds is, they don’t ask for anything. You put the seed out, they show up. Forget to fill the feeders and they scram. Simple.”
Back inside, Anna went upstairs to unpack and go through her remaining clothes, see if anything she’d brought held up to scrutiny. She was always doing this, packing with care, then discovering that everything was wrong. She liked the little guest bathroom with its blue tiles and soft towels. She didn’t dwell on her own untidy reflection, except to note that she was the only accessory out of place.
In the bedroom she opened her suitcase and selected the good sweater she’d meant to reserve for Thanksgiving dinner. She was pulling it on when a sound close by startled her, made her panic with her head still stuck within the sweater’s inside-out
complications. She flailed about, bra and bare stomach exposed, and finally freed herself. Jay was on his ladder outside the window, not five feet away, scraping and shoving at the gutters. He was wearing a baseball cap that shaded his face and Anna supposed it was possible he hadn’t seen her—the light outside was getting dim, the room was unlighted. But then, it seemed unlikely that he wouldn’t have seen her, at this distance. Maybe he was pretending not to, just to avoid embarrassing them both. Or, since Jay was so hard for her to figure, he might have positioned the ladder for the express purpose of leering in at her.
Unnerved, she went back downstairs and found Lynn standing in the kitchen, absorbed in reading a piece of mail. She didn’t look up when Anna came in, and Anna was left to direct her guest’s hopeful smile at empty air. Scanning, she didn’t see any evidence of the next day’s Thanksgiving dinner, except for the pies in their bakery boxes. Nothing stewing or soaking or toasting. Her stomach snarled.
Lynn tossed the mail aside. “Wine,” she said. “Cheese and crackers.”
“Yes please,” said Anna, happy now that there would be something to do, sit and drink and feed, while domestic life churned around her. “Red, if you have it.”
Lynn poured them two oversized glasses and set them out on the counter. Anna claimed the stool in the corner, head wedged against a cabinet. Back to the wall, always safest. Jay came in at the kitchen door, making a lot of foot-scraping racket.
“Hey Jay!” Anna greeted him with such apparent delight that he stopped short and gave her a startled, hooded look. Creep. She bet money he’d been spying on her.
Then he rearranged his face into indifference. “Hi,” he said, not looking at her. Instead he sought out Lynn. “That silver maple? It’s leaned in and rotted half the shingles over the west dormer.”
“You should probably cut it down, then,” said Lynn, nodding over her glass. “Bad tree.”
“If you think it’s funny, the roofing bill’s going to be a real scream.”
“Oh honey, I promise I’ll get all kinds of upset the day after tomorrow, but this is Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving Eve.”
Jay went to the sink to wash his hands, and Lynn came up behind him, patted his back. “You hungry? Want some soup? Want me to brine the turkey or anything?”
“I decided not to brine it.”
“There’s chicken noodle, pepper pot, and tomato. We should probably save the tomato for Tim.”
“If nothing else, that maple needs to be cut way the hell back.”
“Or maybe they already ate at Connie’s. Pizza or something.”
Anna drank more wine. It dulled her appetite (she was still unreasonably hungry), as well as giving her the appropriate off-center vantage point. She couldn’t decide if Lynn and Jay were any more discontented than any other married couple, if there was some baseline of low expectations that set in after a time. From her perch in the corner she noted that they were still a good-looking pair. That counted for something. Lynn was still recognizably the pretty blonde of their college days, minus the smile that had been her armor against the world: Don’t hurt me! I am a friendly, approachable girl! And Jay was still tall and straight and comely, even as his neck and chin had thickened, his profile taking on a florid, petulant aspect, the same progression seen over time on the coins depicting certain Roman emperors.
“So, Jay,” Anna began, wanting to make some minimal polite social noise, “how are your classes?”
“I don’t teach classes. I do research and I supervise the thesis and doctoral students.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” Or not. She couldn’t detect any perceptible job satisfaction in him. She wondered if he was this arrogant and unforthcoming at work, or if he unbent, came alive there. Some men were like that, treating their home life like an annoying series of chores to be accomplished.
There was the thundering noise of the garage door rolling up, then down. Tim and Dan (she could never remember which was which) filed in, dressed in their uniforms of sweatshirts and shorts and sneakers. Their bare legs were red with cold. They were tall, like their father, and there was something unsettling about the sheer amount of skin displayed. What must it be like to be a man, take up so much of the world’s volume and acreage? Lynn fussed over them, got them to agree to microwave chili for their supper. The older boy went straight to a cabinet and took out a box of cereal and began munching handfuls of it. The younger fixed himself a glass of chocolate milk. Thanksgiving, Anna could tell, was going to be a special occasion if only because everyone would be sitting down together instead of foraging for themselves.
“You remember Anna, don’t you?” Lynn prodded, and the boys acknowledged her without changing their remote, fixed expressions. “She lives in Chicago. Tim’s always been nuts about Chicago. He’s thinking of applying to Northwestern. Well, that’s Evanston, but close.”
So Tim was the older one. He gave Anna a brief, appraising glance. “What is it you do? In Chicago?”
“I edit a newsletter for the building trades industry and another for a realty group.”
The boy nodded. He’d been right all along. She was boring.
Lynn said, “Anna wrote a humor column for the school paper. All kinds of wacky fun stuff.”
“You had to be there,” said Anna. The humor threshold in this family seemed pretty high.
The younger boy, Dan, said, “So, what was Mom like? In college?”
“Some tales,” said Anna, “are best left untold.”
“Oh, thanks.” Lynn got up to refill the wineglasses. “Thanks heaps. I was a perfectly nice, normal girl.”
“No, really,” the boy persisted. “I bet she did all sorts of stuff she pretends she never heard of.”
“They’re on to you,” Anna told Lynn. “Might as well deal out a few crisp facts, right here at the kitchen table.”
Both boys were now regarding Anna with probational approval, as if she might offer some entertainment value after all. They were nearly identical, two imperfect copies of Jay, brown-eyed, taciturn, equipped with Adam’s apples and jutting wrist bones. Anna didn’t see much of Lynn’s leavening spirit in them, which might have been why they were so intent on hearing naughty stories about her. They wanted some other heritage. How grim it must be, to see your genetic destiny walking around in front of you on a daily basis.
“How about just one little anecdote,” said Anna, enjoying herself now, thinking she just might win them over. She noted that Jay was paying close attention, even as he pretended to be engrossed in a cookbook. He and Lynn hadn’t met until after graduation. “The secret life of Mom.”
“She’s going to make something up,” said Lynn.
“How about the blind date story? They know that one?” Lynn groaned her martyr’s groan. The boys looked nearly jolly. “Okay. The dorm we lived in freshman year always had signs taped to the bathroom mirror: ‘5’8" boy from Scott Hall needs date’ ‘5’10" ATO needs date for mixer.’ That was always the big thing, not wanting to be taller than your date,” said Anna, turning to Tim and Dan. “You guys would have been like, kings.
“Anyway, your mom, being such a shrimp, always ended up with the shorties. So when the 5’5" dude turns up, plus you figure these guys always added a couple of inches to their advertising, she gets the call.”
“Why did they need somebody else finding them dates?” asked Dan, who seemed to be the more lively of the two, Prince Harry to his brother’s Prince William. “They couldn’t just hang out, go to parties?”
Lynn said, “Oh honey, everybody was so terribly dumb about things, and I know we were older than you guys but we seemed so much younger, and here we were at this big new place and every minute we were excited and every other minute were desperate not to be left out, and there’d be some girl who had a boyfriend and the boyfriend would have friends And you’d set it up and the guy would call from downstairs and you’d go out and have a perfectly awkward time. That’s how we did it.”
“So this really short guy,” prompted the relentless Dan.
Lynn was drinking too much or too fast or both, Anna thought. She had a blurred, flushed look that meant sentiments of one sort or another were likely to be dredged up to the surface. “The short guy is your mom’s date, and I’m set up with his friend, who’s some normal height, and we’re all going to a dinner at this frat house.”
“Dad? Were you in a fraternity?”
“Hah,” said Jay, by way of a negative.
“… and yes, the guy is seriously short. Like a hobbit. But not as cute. And with a yappy attitude.”
“Short man’s syndrome,” Jay put in. She couldn’t stand the guy. Really.
“My date just isn’t that into it, or not into me. They were pledges, they had to go to this awards dinner, they had to have dates, no matter how lame. Short guy made gross jokes about the spaghetti looking like worms. Sophisticated repartee. Afterward, we all go down to the make-out room—”
“The what?” She had the boys’ complete attention.
“Well that’s what it was, all the houses had them, though they called them things like the Pit or the Cave. See, unlike you lucky youth of today, we couldn’t have company of the opposite sex in our dorm rooms.” Anna was immediately aware of a current of parental alarm or caution, as if these might not be suitable observations. She began to hurry her story. “Oh, it was just a big ol’ dark TV room, and we were all sitting there, waiting for something thrilling to happen, and I got up to find the bathroom, and when I came back, your mom and my date were in a lip-lock.”
“Eww, Mom,” the boys chorused.
“It was a youthful indiscretion,” said Lynn carelessly. She drained the last of her wine.
“You were like, passion’s plaything.”
“I guess I’m never, ever going to be allowed to live this down.”
“Never,” said Anna cheerfully. Of course that was not the entire story. Left to themselves, Anna and the shorty had made the best of things by groping and mashing with each other. Once he was seated and not talking, he hadn’t been so bad. Lynn hadn’t even noticed. The room had been that dark. And Anna had never told her. A mean little secret.
The microwave chimed. The boys loaded up their bowls of chili and took them upstairs. Lynn announced that she was going to lie down for awhile. Anna and Jay, abandoned, looked at each other, then away. Jay started opening cupboards, hauling out casseroles and flour bins. She decided against making any insincere offers of assistance, and instead filled a bowl with the remainder of the chili and retreated to the den. The backyard light was on, illuminating the patio. Lynn’s bird feeders, she noted, were almost out of seed. They cast elongated shadows that Anna tried not to think resembled something fanciful and inappropriate, like gallows.
She was remembering Ted, back in the old days, back when she and Lynn had shared an apartment and Ted had been her boyfriend, or a certain kind of boyfriend, one who mostly hung around smoking your pot. She couldn’t remember any extravagant sentiments being exchanged, though Ted had extravagant opinions about all manner of things, books and politics and religion, and drugs as the door to perception, and the benefits of going off the grid. She guessed he would have been voted most likely to live in a tree. Just as Lynn was a sure bet to end up married and settled, and Anna herself . . . she didn’t like to think of her future as foretold. Not then, not now. She’d wanted to keep all her options open. Glamorous possibilities which still eluded her. Quirky individuality, fading over time into eccentricity. She crept upstairs as quietly as she could.
I’ve determined to try and get to know some of the locals, who I can see when I go into the post office and the lumberyard. Right now we seem stuck at the nodding and grunting stage.
It smelled like Thanksgiving. Anna woke with her nose curling around the tickling, teasing smells of onion, roasting meat, cinnamon, sage. It was reassuring that Thanksgiving was still Thanksgiving, no matter how far afield you might go. She showered and dressed and felt some of her hopefulness return, or maybe it was just the hope of being hopeful. Good attitude! Smiling face!
The boys were eating cereal in front of the television in the den. She gave them a comradely wave as she passed by. Stopping to make conversation would have risked ruining the fine rapport they’d reached the night before. The kitchen was empty, though the oven was on and the turkey was sending out its good smells. A stock pot burped and simmered on a back burner, while smaller saucepans, some with crusted edges, crowded the rest of the stovetop. Complicated preparations were strewn over the counters: the leafy ends of celery, dark little bottles, packets of raisins, knives and cutting boards, vegetable peelings, measuring cups, wadded sheets of aluminum foil. The garage door activated, and, crossing to the front of the house, Anna saw Jay backing out of the driveway in his black, Dad-sized SUV. Heading out to get currant jelly or leeks or something other perfecting ingredient, she guessed.
There wasn’t any coffee made, so Anna found a packet of cocoa, then helped herself to a carton of yogurt, pleased at her resourcefulness. She wondered if Lynn was still asleep. With nothing else to do, she washed the dirty pots and pans and sieves and spoons that had landed in the sink, stacked them neatly in the dish drainer. Even Jay shouldn’t see that as interference. What was the etiquette for guests these days?
She heard Lynn coming down the stairs, then she appeared in the doorway. “Christ,” she announced, surveying the wreckage of the kitchen.
“The turkey smells great,” Anna offered. Lynn didn’t answer, just set about making coffee. She was wearing pink flannel snowflake pajamas and she looked like something awakened too early from hibernation. “You sleep okay?” Moody shrug from Lynn. “I’ll take that as a no.”
They watched the coffeemaker chug and cycle. Anna said, “Are you mad at me for telling that story?”
“My mom, the make-out slut.”
“You were always popular.”
“It’s such a pathetic little story. I kind of wish you’d told them something racier.”
“You never did anything racy.”
“My point exactly.”
The coffeemaker finished its heaving and Lynn poured them each a cup. “What’s the game plan for dinner?” Anna asked. “Should we be fasting? Carbo-loading?” Maybe she should squirrel away some granola bars in the guest room. “I guess Jay went out to get something,” she added.
“He left?”
“Yeah, ten, fifteen minutes ago.”
“Oh fuck him. Fuck him to death.”
“Lynn?”
Lynn was shaking her head, but it was more like twitching, something she couldn’t help, and Anna crossed the room to her, alarmed, uncertain, but Lynn put up her hands to ward her off. “Okay,” she said. “Right.” She turned and scrabbled in the corner desk. “Keys,” she said. She lifted a coat from a hook by the door and headed out into the garage.
Anna said, “What are you—” and then, “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” She hurried upstairs, found her own coat and purse, then down the stairs again, past the lounging, incurious boys, detouring to grab her coffee mug.
Lynn was already behind the van’s wheel. She was having trouble with the garage door opener. The door came up partly, then banged down again, up down, up down, “… fucking thing,” Anna heard through the van’s closed window.
“Hold on.” A snow shovel had gotten wedged in the door track. Anna straightened it and the door rolled up. She hoisted herself into the van. “Will you tell me what’s the matter?”
“That asshole. I know where he is.” Lynn started the van and they lurched out into the street. “He’s been screwing one of his grad students. It’s supposed to be over. Hah. Even on Thanksgiving he can’t stay away. Goddamn him.”
They were zooming through suburban streets laid out in curves and circles so as to hinder zooming. Anna held on to the door handle. “Wow. Are you sure? I mean . . .” She found herself thinking of the combat-zone kitchen they’d left behind them, the bubbling stock pot, the turkey in need of basting. She hoped the boys would notice if something actually caught on fire. “It could just be an errand.” Not wanting to defend Jay as much as calm Lynn down.
“Oh, he’ll come back with a pound of butter, or some other alibi. We’ve been in counseling for almost a year now. I found a bunch of their emails, he thinks he’s so clever. She’s twenty-three. I’ve seen her, she’s a little business slut.”
“Business—”
“You know, the whole hair-and-makeup package, sits on the desk, shoves her tits in everybody’s face. Business slut.”
“I’m sorry. What are you going to do?”
She’d meant it in the general sense, as in, do about your marriage, your life, but Lynn hit the accelerator in the two-block stretch between stop signs, then slammed on the brakes, sending Anna’s coffee slopping over into her lap. The engine stalled and she cranked it viciously to restart it. “Don’t think I don’t know where she lives. I’m gonna block his car in her driveway so he has to come out and face me. Goddamn his eyes.”
Anna considered that Jay would be facing her too, unless she asked to be dropped off at the corner. They peeled out onto a four-lane road, past apartment complexes, expansive gas stations, through sparse holiday traffic. Sunlight came down in a slant but the rest of the sky was piled-up clouds. The van’s heater was roaring, making her head feel clogged. She said, “I don’t suppose there’s a bar open, anywhere we could sit and talk.”
“I’m in my pajamas.”
“Oh, yeah.” That would look nice in the police report. “Do you want me to talk you out of this or egg you on?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you. It’s too stupid and embarrassing, it’s so common, the cheating rat husband. It’s like getting hemorrhoids.”
“You sort of told me. I knew you weren’t happy.”
“You’re like, psychic, right?”
They turned off the larger highway onto a smaller one. The university district, Anna guessed, since the businesses were named Spartan this or Spartan that: dry cleaning, liquor, shoe repair. Anna’s stomach began to curdle. She hoped that Jay wasn’t really at his girlfriend’s, or if he was, that he’d hide in the house and not come out. “Hey, Lynn? I don’t think this is your best move. Seriously, we should go home.”
“Just this once? I think I get to do something really trashy and sordid.”
“Okay, then. We’re good.”
At the next stoplight, the van’s engine stalled and died. Lynn cranked it; it made a stubborn noise and failed to catch. She tried again. And kept trying, until the starter only clicked.
“You probably flooded it.”
“Crap.”
“I would look on it as a sign from God.”
“Holy crap, then.”
The innards of the car ticked, the engine cooling down. It was going to get very cold very fast. “Do you have AAA or anything?” Anna asked.
Lynn patted at her coat pockets. It didn’t appear to be her coat. “I don’t have the card. Did you bring your phone?” Anna handed it over and Lynn fumbled with the keypad. “Your phone sucks.”
“Don’t throw it,” said Anna, because Lynn looked capable of one last petulant, thwarted act. “Here.” She retrieved the phone, cleared the screen, and handed it back. Lynn punched in the number. One of the boys must have answered, because she asked if Dad was there.
A space of listening, then Lynn said, “All right, here’s what I need you to do.”
Afterward she gave the phone back.
“Was Jay there?”
“Yes. But that doesn’t prove anything.”
“I guess you don’t trust him.”
“No shit.”
“I haven’t heard you swear this much since, like, forever.” Lynn shrugged. “You deserve better. You know that.”
When Lynn didn’t answer, she went on. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t think either Steve or Terry was stepping out on me, or if they were, I didn’t know about it, anyway, that’s not why things didn’t work out.” She sounded glib, false to herself. “Didn’t work out,” what did that mean, it was shorthand for wretchedness, mortal combat, loss, failure, grief. She had the sensation of shouting down a well, sending her words into some echoing, absent space. “I mean, God, you guys have all these assets, we never did. You could probably kick him out, keep the house, get him to pay for the kids’ college. Everything.”
“I don’t want a divorce. Jay doesn’t want one either. At least, that’s what he says.”
“But if you have to check up on him every minute . . .”
“If that’s what I have to do, I’ll do it. You think I’d get some kind of great settlement, forget it, you don’t get bonus money just because the other guy’s screwing around. Assets, forget it. He’d still have his income and his fuckee, or the one that’ll come after this one, or the one after that, and I’d end up all by myself in some crummy little apartment.”
“Like me.”
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s okay,” said Anna, although it wasn’t.
“You know I didn’t—”
Anna held up a hand. “Let’s just drop it.” She was afraid she might cry, furious, squalling tears. She forced them back out of pure self-loathing. They sat without speaking until Tim pulled up behind them in the SUV.
Lynn popped the van’s hood and Tim applied something from a spray can. “Try it now,” he told them, and the engine turned over.
Anna got out of the van and watched him let the hood down, blowing on his bare hands. What was it about boys that made them avoid protective clothing? “All right if I ride back with you?”
You could count on people saying yes as a reflex, if you caught them by surprise, and so Anna climbed into the SUV and waited for Tim to finish talking with his mother. She figured Lynn could explain anything she felt like explaining.
They followed the van on the way back. “Did you guys have a fight or something?”
Anna thought this must be what it was like to be a parent, some part of parenting. When you had to explain to children those things you did not wish to explain to yourself. That it was possible she and Lynn had never really been friends, that over time they had become a reproach to each other, and that people would do almost anything, contend with all manner of injuries to the spirit, just to keep from being alone.
Anna said, “Neither of us is in a very good mood today. When people know each other for a long time, they sort of wear each other out.”
The boy nodded. He was a serious kid; she thought she had been right to talk to him seriously. “Mom wears herself out. I wish—”
He stopped, and Anna was left to wonder what it was he wished, this serious, half-grown creature, and how much the boys knew about their parents’ troubles. Plenty, she guessed. It was even possible that one or both of them, Lynn most probably, had sat them down and made an earnest, awful speech about Mom and Dad having to work some things out, but nobody should worry.
Anna thought she had never had children because she wasn’t optimistic enough. Wouldn’t you have to be deeply hopeful to believe that your own children would end up happier than you were?
Lynn’s van nosed into its spot in the garage and Tim maneuvered the SUV next to it. Following her inside, Anna beheld the kitchen, now tamed and ordered and bristling with edibles. The dining room table was set with a white cloth, with cheerful, harvest-patterned dishes, a centerpiece of tall, yellow candles, grapes, pomegranates, apples. “Oh honey,” Lynn was saying, “this is all just perfect. It’s yummy-scrumptious.”
Now don’t laugh, but I’m thinking of getting a dog. Something big and furry and friendly that’s always, by god, happy to see me.
It just worked out better for Jay to drop her off at the train station, and Anna said that was fine. She and Lynn had made up, or at least they’d said the words necessary for making up. “You big goof. I didn’t mean anything, you’re so silly sometimes.” Oh yes, ha ha, said Anna. Famous for her silliness.
During the drive, Jay played a talk radio station that substituted for actual talk. Fine with Anna. At the train station, he alarmed her by parking and announcing that he was coming in with her.
“Honestly, you don’t have to. I’m fine.”
Jay opened the back of the SUV and hoisted her suitcase. You could almost admire how good he was at ignoring other people, how words, requests, instructions rolled right off of him. “Let’s just make sure your train isn’t going to be late.”
As if she wouldn’t sleep in the station, rather than go back home with him. She followed him through the doors, scanned the waiting crowd. “Looks like everything’s good to go,” she announced, hoping that would be enough to make him leave.
Jay walked her suitcase up to the head of the straggling line of people waiting to board, a minor rudeness. She supposed she could go to the back once he left. “Well, thanks for everything. The dinner was great.” It had been great. In that, at least, she thought Lynn had nothing to complain about. “And thanks for the ride.”
It was his cue to leave. Still he lingered, looking around him peevishly. Or maybe that was just his face in repose, its natural settled expression. He stood out, too tall, too prosperous for the semi-shabby group of travelers. Was she supposed to shake his hand? Embrace him? He said, “That’s really something, you and Lynn knowing each other for so long.”
Anna said yes, it was. Cautious about agreeing with him on anything.
“I don’t know anybody who goes back that far. College or high school. Growing up. I don’t even know where any of those people are anymore.”
“I’m trying to imagine you as a little kid. It’s not coming to me.”
“I wanted to be an archaeologist. I had a map of the world with pins in it, all the important sites, Egypt, Greece, Peru, China. I did an archaeology badge in Boy Scouts. I don’t know why I quit on it. I don’t know why things stop being important, they just do.”
She couldn’t stand the thought that he might be lonely too. She couldn’t stand having to feel sorry for him. “Hey, could I ask you something? When I first got to your house, and you were up on the ladder outside? Were you looking in at me while I was changing clothes?”
“Good God, no.” He was genuinely startled, distressed. “What kind of person would do that?”
He did leave then, and in due course the train came, and Anna boarded and found a seat next to the window. The train nudged forward on schedule, the promise of a smooth ride. She was thinking about Ted, laying in his supplies against the winter. There would be the hunting hawks, and mornings of ghostly frost, and the scouring wind, and the great theater of the sky. In such a bare and gorgeous place, the soul’s ache would find its proper home. What did you need in the wilderness? A kinder, braver heart. When she got home, she would write Ted a nice letter.