Chapter Eighteen #2
Someone else entirely, she thought, and a hot wave flooded her lower back and rose into her shoulders.
The driver behind her tapped his horn, startling her.
She drove home. Felix wasn’t there; she recalled that it was league night.
Tom’s bicycle was gone from the back porch.
She put the dry cleaning away upstairs and drew a bath.
She tried not to see her body in the mirror anymore, tried to assess neither the parts nor the entirety of it, because doing so only made her think of how her body didn’t matter anymore.
In three years, she’d be forty. She’d aged out of childhood at Open Arms, waiting for someone to adopt her.
She’d wandered into middle age in Bonhomie, waiting to be happy. And now?
She sank up to her chin.
Of all people, her mother came to mind. Having never given much thought to who her father was, she now wondered if her mother, by putting her in a basket and walking away, had been deliberately sidestepping a difficult life with someone (besides her).
Was that possible? And would that make it a wise thing to have done?
Maybe, as Lydia had speculated, her mother had left her because of money, not enough of it to feed and take care of a baby.
Or she’d had a lover who wasn’t Margaret’s father.
Or she’d found out Margaret’s father was writing love notes to someone else.
Maybe, knowing she was going to be alone, and a terrible mother, she’d decided to sidestep all that—and sidestep Margaret.
What were you running from? Margaret wanted to ask her.
What were you hoping to avoid? And what did you find, instead of me? Instead of us?
Lydia had been the closest thing she’d had to a mother, and yet Margaret had let their correspondence wither down almost to nothing.
The last postcard she sent to Doyle had been over a year ago, and whatever she’d written on it was empty, a lie.
She regretted, now more than ever, not keeping up, not getting to know Lydia better as an adult, and never being honest with her about the state of things in her marriage, her life—part of the reason she’d pulled away was that she’d gotten sick of maintaining the false front.
Lydia, she thought, was the one person in her life to whom she could spill everything who wouldn’t think she was awful or crazy for what she’d done, or for the way she’d felt.
Lydia’s mind always landed on the practical, on figuring out what you need to do.
And hadn’t Lydia actually loved her for herself—even if Margaret had only been a child?
She stayed in the tub till the water began to cool.
All these years later, the number was still in her address book, under “O. A.” Her heart raced at the thought of dialing it. She thought of waiting, thinking a little about what she wanted to say—but if she did, she knew she’d lose her nerve and never call. She dialed.
A girl answered.
“Hello, my name is Margaret Salt. Is Lydia Verts there?”
“Salt?”
“Yes, Salt. My last name was Anderson when I lived there. May I please speak to Lydia Verts? Is she available?”
There was a pause and a crackle on the line. “She died,” the girl said.
Another pause. Then, “Six months ago.”
“What? I—I don’t understand.” Margaret’s hand went to the page of the address book, as if trying to keep it from flying away. “How—I mean how did she…?”
“They didn’t tell me that,” the girl said. Her voice seemed to reach Margaret from inside an echo. It was a young voice but not terribly young—perhaps one of the more senior girls, now assuming an important duty. “They just told me to answer the phone if it rang.”
—
When Felix got home sometime later, he called out a hello and got no response.
He put his bowling bag in the bottom of the hall closet and found Margaret upstairs by the bedroom window, curled in the green felt rocking chair they used to rock Tom in when he was a baby.
He could tell she’d been crying, asked her what had happened.
Her aunt died, she said, and he knelt down beside the rocker and hugged her and told her how sorry he was.
He asked if she wanted to go, and it took her a moment to realize that he meant to Doyle.
No, she said, she didn’t want to, especially at this point, because Lydia had died a while ago. But, Felix, she wanted to say, who did you write that note to? Enough, though. The news from Open Arms had taken the last of the day’s energy out of her.
“Was she married? Did she have any kids?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if she was married?”
She said—snapped, maybe—that they hadn’t spoken in a while, and that it didn’t matter now, anyway. She was going to bed.
Felix stood, looked at his watch. As if one thing were connected to the other, he said, “Well, then, where’s Tom? It’s almost ten.”
“I’m not sure. His bicycle’s not here, so I guess he’s out somewhere. It’s Saturday.”
—
She slept so deeply that her body felt leaden when she opened her eyes early the next morning.
She looked at the swirls in the ceiling plaster and thought: Lydia’s dead.
She looked at Felix, asleep on his side of the bed, and saw with her mind’s eye the note still in her purse that he’d written to someone who wasn’t her.
The house was quiet, the light barely coming in yet, it was so early in the day.
She walked down the hall, tying the sash of her robe.
Tom’s room was dark, his door standing partly open; she looked in and made out his shape on the bed, asleep.
She didn’t notice, from that angle, the sleeping bag stretched out on the floor.
Downstairs, she walked into the kitchen and shrieked. Skip Jenkins was standing in front of the open refrigerator, holding the milk bottle. Barefoot, in his boxer shorts, his blond hair sticking up around his head. He flinched at the sound she made and nearly dropped the bottle.
It felt like too much to ask of her, this unexpected presence of Cal’s son.
As if he were standing atop a mountain made up of every difficult situation she’d ever gotten herself into, his hulking presence adding another five feet she was going to have to climb.
Unable to suppress the anger and irritation that rode right alongside the surprise in her voice, she asked him what he thought he was doing, and as he tried to answer, she walked over and snatched the milk bottle out of his hand.
She told him he was wanted at his own home and that he should leave.
But he’d been invited, he said, not quite matching her volume and sounding a bit frightened.
He’d been invited. Mr. Salt had gotten the sleeping bag out for him, he added.
He’d slept in Tom’s room, on the floor. He’d been invited.
That was a mistake, Margaret said. Please, you need to leave. Now.
Tom, awakened by their voices, was coming groggily down the stairs as Skip pushed past him, on his way up to get his clothes.
By the time Felix emerged tying the sash of his robe, Skip was walking out onto the front porch with his sneakers in his hand, Tom was crying and yelling at her, and Margaret was holding the door open, wishing she’d never gotten out of bed, filled with a peculiar tightness in her chest that was something between regret and anguish.
—
Tom was furious with her. Felix wasn’t too happy either, she gathered, from the way he steered clear of her for the rest of the morning.
At some point, she heard him make a call from the phone in his den, and she confirmed by listening outside the door that he’d dialed the Jenkinses, though she couldn’t tell which Jenkins he was talking to.
It had been a misunderstanding, Felix was saying.
Skip had caught Margaret off guard, was all. “I’ll speak with her.”
As if she were a child. His easily upsettable wife.
For the balance of the day she waited, braced.
But, like Tom, Felix cold-shouldered her.
She gave it back to them for a while, keeping herself apart.
But she wanted to be alone in a different way.
Late in the afternoon, she announced—to no one in particular, since no one wanted to hear—that she was going out.
The sky was a putty-colored haze over Main Street, where geraniums and marigolds were in full bloom in their planters.
She parked the Packard and walked absently up and down the sidewalks, glancing into the shop windows, admiring the hats in the new hat store, and she felt so sad about Lydia that she could have burst into tears with every step she took.
But Lydia would have hated that. Go eat something, for goodness’ sake, she would have said. Go do something fun.
Margaret picked her way around a Cobb salad at Zuzu’s.
As a paltry ode to the quarters Lydia used to slip her on Saturdays, she walked up to the Bijou window and bought a ticket for something called Rhapsody.
It had already started and was boring as toast, but she cried steadily right to the end, when Elizabeth Taylor and John Ericson fell into each other’s arms and the words The End filled the giant screen over their heads.
When she emerged from the theater, the sun was down and the sky, still hazy, was deep purple and starless.
—
Tom was on the sofa when she got home, reading a Hardy Boys book. Ed Sullivan was on the television.
“Hello, Tom,” she said.
He glanced up at her but said nothing, returned his eyes to his book.
She walked into the kitchen, where Felix was hanging a dish towel across the stove handle. “You disappeared,” he said.
She set her purse on the counter. “I don’t think Tom’s speaking to me.”
“Probably not. Would you join me on the back porch, please?”