Twenty-One #3
“Mr. Freeman’s going to look out for you, now,” I say. “You do what he tells you to, you hear? He has his own little girl back home, he told me. And do you want to know something very exciting? Mr. Freeman knows Daddy.”
Nathalie’s amazed. “That’s right,” Mr. Freeman says. “Before I worked this line, I worked the Great Northern with your father.”
We all hug and kiss goodbye and Adele and I stand on the platform and wave as the train sounds its whistle and pulls away, and then we cry together in the car the whole drive back home.
She drops me off outside my house. “Two days, and then we’ll get the phone call that they’re safe and sound.”
“Should we chase the train and get them back?”
She laughs through her tears as she pulls away.
It’s Saturday, just before noon, and I don’t know what to do with myself.
I gave in and bought a set of oil paints, have made several paintings, but no subject appeals to me now.
I cook lunch but my stomach’s too nervous to eat it.
I take a long nap and when I wake up, I’m a little better, or at least I tell myself that I am.
I snack on some crackers and walk outside, wander through the yard.
The men did a good job with the patio off the kitchen.
It’s spacious, and flat, and one afternoon the children helped me hang glass lanterns from the oak tree that shades it.
When company comes for dinner, I light candles and place them inside, and they look like fireflies.
But beyond the patio is more land than we know what to do with, and below it still more, all the way to the forest part where we lose control of the land entirely.
I think of all I could do with it, find myself soon overwhelmed.
It’s early evening now. I take The Price of Salt from my nightstand drawer, sit in a garden chair, and enjoy the last of the light.
An empty house. It’s finally time to read it.
I’m back in the department store cafeteria with Therese, waiting to find out who the second woman will be, and then—there she is.
Shopping for a Christmas gift for her daughter.
As the cover hints at, it’s a story of attraction and longing, but I don’t know how far the author will take it.
I can’t trust her to take it all the way to love, for Carol and Therese to name what they’re feeling, though I’m desperate for them to.
I read until it’s dark and I have to pick myself up and take myself to my chair in the living room—finished now, as lovely as I’d hoped.
I turn the pages, hungrily, and there it is: a declaration of love.
There are still chapters more to go, so much that could go wrong.
It’s enough for tonight, I tell myself. I mark my page with Elise’s cream calling card, rummage through the refrigerator for something to eat, step away unsatisfied.
I draw a bath, drop my clothes on the tile floor.
Flash of Hattie, measuring my waist. Flash of Ginny, the moment before she kissed me.
I sink under the water. Open my eyes and everything’s hazy and strange, the pink tub and one of Nathalie’s plastic horses floating above.
I stay under too long, push myself up, gasping.
In bed, I fight against desire. I did so well for so long.
I heeded Delphine’s threat. I chose Nathalie and Clément.
I chose Felix and our home and this life.
And now Ginny’s back and I’m at war with myself again.
The night stretches on, and I get up and pace, put the Sarah Vaughan record on the Victrola, listen to her sing “Black Coffee” over and over.
Eventually, mercifully, the sun rises and the night is over.
I open the novel again. It will surely be a tragedy, which is only right.
Two women don’t get to meet in a department store and fall in love and live happily ever after.
The story unfolds, full of longing and recklessness and mistakes and ambiguity and heartache.
By the early afternoon, I’m finished. Carol is found out and disgraced and she loses her daughter. Another warning.
I go to the kitchen for a glass of water and when I return the light from the window is cast over the rumpled bedsheets, the blanket pulled back, the red novel lying just below the pillow.
I want to take the dress Hattie made for me and add it to the scene, a sweep of chartreuse against white.
I want to paint it. I’ll call it Marriage Bed.
It’s vivid in my mind’s eye, beautiful and revealing, enough to give me away.
Then I remember Hattie in her studio, looking at the portrait I drew of her, cutting it out with a blade. I can’t paint it.
I start the Sarah Vaughan record again and assemble myself a still life.
A bright-blue tin of sardines. A vase with some flowers from the yard.
Nothing inspired, just a place to train my focus.
I draw first with pencil, spend some time mixing the right shade of blue.
I add color, keep adding for hours, painting until my mind is finally tired and I’m able to sleep.