She Said We
Iwaited a day before I told Regina what I’d learned at the library. I was afraid of what she might do. I’d heard my mother’s assessment: You never know with that woman when the next time will be when she goes off the deep end. I didn’t want that to happen on my watch.
I chose a moment the following afternoon when the children were at sailing lessons. Forrest was gone, of course, off on one of his supposed triathlon-training sessions. Prudence was doing laundry.
I knocked on Regina’s bedroom door.
She was typing one of her to-do lists. She seemed so engrossed in it that I had to say her name twice before she looked up.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
She looked up from her typewriter, identical to the one in the kitchen.
“I guess you never saw this room before, did you?” she said.
I looked around, as if studying the room for the first time.
There were pill bottles everywhere, plus Regina’s record player, with a pile of very old albums strewn across the floor—classical, from the looks of them—along with balls of knitting yarn, a lace shawl, slippers, some kind of animal skin (deer maybe?), and a glass table displaying specimens of exotic insects impaled by pins.
There was a photograph of Regina and Forrest looking young and in love, and a machine that made sounds like the ocean, probably meant to help her sleep.
What looked like a very old Barbie doll on a stand, wearing a black sequined evening gown, was poised next to the bed on what looked like a custom-made stand. Beside her, the red typewriter.
I stood at the foot of the bed. She did not suggest I take a seat.
“I was at the library the other day,” I told Regina. “I went there to pick up a book.”
She didn’t rush me. She did not say, as some might, “Cut to the chase.”
“I heard these two people talking,” I told her. “It turned out to be them, Forrest and . . . Brenda.” For a moment, I resisted speaking her name.
“Oh, really?” Regina’s voice sounded steady. “I wouldn’t have guessed Brenda Barnett as the bookish type.”
“I don’t want to make you mad,” I said. “But they were saying these things to each other. About how much they wanted to be together. They were making a plan to meet up.”
My words seemed to have had less effect than I’d expected. Regina reached for the ball of mohair wool she used in her knitting project and stroked it contemplatively.
“Oh well,” she said. “I guess we knew about this already, didn’t we? It’s just Forrest engaging in his usual summertime hijinks. Forrest being Forrest. This too shall pass.” She let out a long sigh. She looked back at her typewriter keyboard, ready to resume work on her list, apparently.
I could have let it go there. It would have been easy to let her think that nothing more had taken place at the library that afternoon. But I knew this wasn’t the whole story.
And maybe there was something else going on in me that made me push harder.
As much anxiety as I’d felt about delivering the news of what I’d learned at the library and as much personal grief as I’d suffered over it, I’d felt excitement about my role as the one person other than Forrest and Brenda themselves who understood what was going on and was in a position to help Regina.
This conferred a kind of power on me that was all new.
“They were talking like they were going to be together. The word they used was forever.”
“Oh, Frances,” she said. A look of something between sympathy and pity came over her.
“If I’m not mistaken, before you got on this Stephen King kick, you were reading all those Judy Blume books.
Wasn’t there one with that word for the title, about a couple of kids who think they’re each other’s destiny or something?
I read that one too, long ago. As you may remember, it didn’t work out that way. ”
Maybe she was right. I wanted to believe she was.
“What you overheard at the library between Forrest and this little girlfriend of his was just a couple of not-particularly-bright people getting sex confused with love. It’s happened before with my husband—every damn summer, if you must know—and I have every reason to believe it’s going to happen again.
Maybe the two of them think cheating on your partner is more honorable when you call it love.
Whatever their story is, it doesn’t matter all that much to me. ”
“I just thought you should know,” I said.
In truth, I couldn’t even remember what Forrest and Brenda had said to each other that day anymore.
I just remembered the feeling I had hearing them.
That I’d shrunk into nothing again. That in the world of Forrest Emerson, in which Brenda Barnett presided as queen bee—a world in which I had seemed, very briefly, to occupy a place of significance—I now meant no more than a bug.
In the world of Regina Emerson, on the other hand, I was important. Never more so than right now.
She had returned her hands to the keyboard of her typewriter, but she wasn’t typing. I could see her turning it all over in her mind, considering my words. Maybe they were sinking in. Maybe she was beginning to get it.
Regina said nothing for a surprisingly long time then. She just sat there, stroking the sides of her beautiful red Olivetti.
“They just sounded so serious,” I said again.
“Well then,” Regina said, her tone still revealing little in the way of concern. “It may be prudent to keep some sort of record. I suppose we need to protect ourselves.”
She said we. I didn’t get the part about protecting ourselves, but the other part I did.
We.
“That husband of this Brenda person—the car salesman, Kyle—is too weak to do anything,” Regina went on.
The way she named his line of work, she might as well have been telling me he was one of those men who walked along the side of the highway picking up trash. “They’re just renters here, you know.”
Renters. I knew what that meant. Another breed altogether from Regina and her family. The Barnetts weren’t even members of the country club.
“What happens now?” I asked Regina.
“This is where you come in, Frances,” she told me. Her voice, which had sounded so hard, softened now. “I’m lucky you’re at my side here. My only friend.”
Not that there was much competition in that department.
I felt flattered that she described me as she did.
But it was unnerving too. I had the sense she had forgotten I was just a kid, and as much as I wished I were older, or looked older to the rest of the world, at this particular moment I felt I was way too young for this.
I had no idea what any of this had to do with me. Only it did, evidently.
As was often the case with Regina, she seemed to know what I was thinking, even at times when I said nothing.
“I know you haven’t even begun to menstruate yet,” she said.
This was an odd thing to mention—an odd way of putting it, and embarrassing, of course.
But she had nailed it: the source of all my problems, my inadequacies, the reason for my inability to be heard or seen or taken seriously.
“But even when you were very small, I recognized you were old beyond your years. You understood so much more than they did. More than most people.”
As was often the case with Regina, I had no idea what to say. I waited for her to explain.
“I’m going to need your help,” she said. “You’re actually a key player here. The key player.”
All this time I’d been standing at the side of Regina’s bed. Now she patted a spot beside her, indicating I should sit there. She took my hand. She stroked it as if she were petting a dog.
“I need proof,” she told me. “On the chance that I ever feel the need to get a lawyer involved.”
A lawyer?
“For the divorce, naturally. If it comes to that. I’m sure we both hope it won’t.”
There was that word again. We. I wasn’t following her.
But it had an effect. As did the word divorce.
Until now, it had seemed to me that Regina held tenaciously to her marriage.
She might be critical of Forrest (relentlessly so).
She might even be disdainful. But I’d never heard the slightest suggestion that they wouldn’t be together always.
Now a side of her I’d never seen revealed itself. Her eyes had taken on a steely cast. She drew her lips tightly together as if she were sucking on sour fruit.
“I can’t do this without you, Frances,” she told me.
In my whole life, I’m not sure anybody had ever said they needed me.
Oh, maybe Forrest needed me to take the children to their tennis lessons, and sailing.
Prudence needed me to set the table for dinner, or clear off the plates afterward.
My mother mostly needed me to keep quiet and ask as little of her as possible.
My father needed me to listen to him talk about the novel he was never going to finish, the poems and music I didn’t understand.
But Regina Emerson needed me to do something that mattered. To Regina, I was the key player.
“You’re too young to understand all of this, but there’s a lot of money and property at stake here,” Regina said.
“Forrest understands very well that if he leaves me, he’ll be penniless.
If this woman he’s playing around with is foolish enough to throw everything away to be with him, she’ll be penniless too.
” Something like a smile crossed over Regina’s face.
“Brenda.” She spoke the name as if just saying it out loud felt physically disgusting. As if she had maggots in her mouth and needed to spit them out. And then she laughed.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” I told her. What was I saying? What did it matter? Did anything matter anymore?
Regina shifted gears then. She was typing.
“You’ll be like a private investigator,” she said, fingers flying over the keys. “Collecting the evidence.”
“Evidence?”
“We need proof of what’s going on between those two,” she said.
“In the unlikely event that Forrest is actually stupid enough to believe that he and his little girlfriend have a future together. I need proof of what Forrest’s been up to, in case he ever goes after me for some ungodly amount of money he doesn’t deserve so he can start a whole new life with her. ”
This didn’t sound like the Forrest I knew, and it was not how Regina had ever portrayed him to me either.
The Forrest I knew never cared much about money.
On the other hand, the Forrest I thought I knew never would have said those things to Brenda Barnett that day at the library.
Maybe I never really knew Forrest after all. I didn’t know anything anymore.
“He’d have to accuse me of being an unfit mother. He’d probably say I’m a drug addict. He’d testify that I have mental health issues. Just to get his hands on my money.”
“That’s not fair,” I said, indignation rising up in me.
When you thought about it, the potential accusations Forrest might make about Regina were not so far off base. Still, it would be pretty terrible for a person to actually raise them.
“You do a lot around here. Like those lists you make.” There had to be more. I just couldn’t think of it.
“We’ll make sure it never happens,” she said, patting my hand again. “You’ll be my personal detective. Think of yourself like that woman in Murder, She Wrote. Or Nancy Drew. Harriet the Spy.”
“I never did anything like that,” I told her. “I wouldn’t know how.”
“Oh, but you’re a natural,” she said. “You’ve been sitting on the sidelines, watching other people all your life. You notice everything. And you’re so good at being invisible.
“See how interested Brenda Barnett is in sticking around,” she said, “once her dream lover’s sleeping in a double-wide trailer. See if she still believes in forever then.”