As Good as Dead (27 page)

Throughout the afternoon, I had to leave the house several times for fresh air. The last time, everybody noticed because we were sitting down to eat. One look at all of that food and I sprang from the table we’d set up in the living room, rushed out through the kitchen door and around behind the garage.

Not long after, I heard the kitchen door swing open and closed. It was Jessie, the cuffs of her sweater pulled down over her hands. “Are you okay?” she called. She held her face turned aside, from either politeness or fear of what she might see or both. “They sent me to see if you were okay?”

“I’m okay. I had the flu or something. I keep thinking I’m going to be sick, but mostly I’m not.”

From the house, out of our sight, my dad called, “Charlotte! Get in here! The professor’s on the line! Long distance!”

But this was not a good time for him to call! I crouched and scooped up some of the snow that I earlier had shoveled into a rim along the driveway, and I held handfuls of it to my cheeks.

Jessie came closer. “Are you sure you’re okay, Aunt Charlotte?”

“I’ll be fine, honey.” I stood and used the sleeves of my sweater to wipe the melted snow from my cheeks. “I hope,” I said, “you’re loyal to your girlfriends, Jessie.”

Her cheeks reddened. “I think I am. I try to be.”

“I bring it up only because I haven’t always been good at it,” I said. “I’ve been envious and . . . not so nice. I don’t want to be that way.”

“Sure,” Jessie said, “but hadn’t you better you hurry? For your phone call?”

Will had been invited to spend Christmas Eve with the family of another doctoral student, an Italian woman named Mira. “Well, that was nice of them,” I said, determined not to convey even a smidge of bitterness at his having a good time in the company of another woman. He related the contents of the holiday telephone call he just had finished with his parents, back in Minnesota. They planned to visit him in February. He was trying to find a place for them to stay that wouldn’t be too expensive.

I had met the parents. They had been polite, but distant, and Will admitted, afterward, what I already had guessed: They felt that I was too young for him.

Suppose, in Milan, they tried to convince him to feel the same.

A silver framed wedding picture of my mom and dad sat on my mom’s bedside table. Two smaller framed photographs flanked the wedding picture: my sister and me—a generation apart in terms of hairstyles and makeup but both got up in identical high school graduation caps and gowns, so there was some suggestion that we were bound for identical futures. At thirty-eight, Martie was divorced—with a “broken picker”—and living back in our hometown and teaching at the grade school both of us had attended. Who knew what would happen for me?

“You’re so quiet,” Will said.

“I feel like I’m going to be sick!” I blurted. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go!”

“Oh! I’ll . . . call New Year’s. I love you.”

“You, too,” I said.

I lay back on my parents’ bed, my feet on the floor. I thought:
If I stay very still, maybe I’ll feel better,
but, really, I was not so sure that I felt sick. Really, it had just been too hard to talk to Will.

The shadowy, bumpy surface of the popcorn ceiling over my parents’ bed made me think of the pitted snow along the highway. I shut my eyes against it. Someone went into the bathroom, which sat between the two bedrooms. Closed the door. Locked it. Turned on the faucet. The house was so small that, for privacy’s sake, my mother and I—and Martie, when she had visited—always turned on the faucet when we used the bathroom. This incensed my dad, and I heard him now call from the table, “Turn off that faucet unless you’re washing your hands!”

I sat up at the ringing of the bedroom telephone. Will, I hoped, calling back. I answered with a cheerful “Hello!”

It was a female voice, however—slack with alcohol?—that said, “I miss you!”

Not Aunt Patty. Patty was dead. A wrong number?

The voice continued. “Merry Christmas! We were all sitting around the fireplace, drinking mulled wine—getting cloved!—and I thought,
I have to call Charlotte!
”

Esmé. Not Will, but someone from my other life who wanted to talk to me.
Had
to talk to me. “Merry Christmas!” I said. “I miss you, too!”

A muddle erupted on Esmé’s end of the line, and then a boy, pretending to be a girl, squeaked, “Jeremy! Is that you, honey?”

“Away, fiend!” This was Esmé again, now explaining that the interruption had been her brother, the
Tofferheimer
. “But, listen, I have the best news! I’m cutting short my time here and heading to Mobile tomorrow! I done told Ma and Pa, take back all the rest of that shit! All I really want for Christmas is tickets to ’Bama! Gotta see that boy of mine or I’m gonna slit my ever-loving wrists!”

“Well, that’s good. I definitely don’t want you slitting your ever-loving wrists,” I said.

She rattled off a list of things that she and Jeremy Fletcher were going to do in Mobile and I told her I’d talked to Will,

“Oh, the Scallywag!” she said. “The Scallywag” was what she had taken to calling Will after I’d had no choice but to explain that he had changed his plans about coming back in December. She was joking, of course, and right now she was drunk, but I wanted to switch topics, so I mentioned that I’d been getting a lot of writing done—

“Hold that thought, Charlotte! Hold it! Gotta go in the other room. Okay. Okay. Okay. Gotta ask you something, Charlotte. And you tell me the truth: What d’y’all think of the possibility that Esmé Cole might forget to pack her birth control pills when she goes to Alabama to see her sweetheart? Given that it seems the sweetheart might be the type to require a semi-accidental pregnancy to nudge him to the altar?”

I made a kind of
nnh!
sound that meant
not a great idea
. Unlike Esmé, I had not had any mulled wine to drink. I was stone sober. This did not mean that I was insufficiently romantic to understand Esmé’s desire to marry the man she loved. That the man could be Jeremy Fletcher—
that
I did not understand. Also, the idea of a woman convincing a man to marry her because she was pregnant struck me as not only incredibly old-fashioned but dangerous (suppose the man were old-fashioned enough to marry you but didn’t love you with all his heart and soul?). None of this, however, did I say explicitly.
“Nnh!”
was all that I said, because I was determined, henceforth and ever more, to say absolutely nothing related to Jeremy Fletcher.

Esmé laughed. “Party pooper!”

“Sticks and stones.”

She laughed at that, too. She was still babbling on when I thought:
Why not leave for Iowa City once the kitchen is cleaned up? Why stay?

Because I had not gotten around to bringing in the paper sack that held my toothbrush and a change of clothes, after I helped my mom and sister with the kitchen, I was able to act as if it had never been my intention to stay overnight. “But for heaven’s sake,” my mom said, “you weren’t feeling well a while ago, and . . . it’s Christmas Eve!”

Martie looked into the living room, where the others had settled down with a movie.
A Christmas Story
. “Let her do what she wants, Mom,” she said.

My mom called in to my dad, “Dave, Charlotte’s talking about leaving.”

He walked out into the kitchen. He squinted and raised a hand against the room’s brightness after the relative dark of the living room. He asked, “What’s the fuss? It’s a good time to be driving! Hardly a soul on the road!”

“That’s what worries me!” my mom said. “And she wasn’t feeling well earlier! Besides which, she just got here!”

“Well, dear.” He patted her shoulder. “What’s she got to talk about to a bunch of uneducated yokels like us?” He winked at me, like it was all in good fun.

I laughed, the way I was supposed to. “But, really, I’ve been writing stories most of the break. I need to spend some time getting ready to teach my second-semester classes.”

My dad looked back toward the living room and the movie on the television. Maybe he knew that I was lying, that I really wanted to get back to Iowa City so I could write. “Those who can, do,” he muttered. “Those who can’t, teach.”

“A bit hostile from a guy who has two daughters who teach,” I said. “And I’m trying to
do
, too.”

Martie put her arm over my shoulder and whispered, “Let it go. It’s not worth it. Drive carefully.” Then she walked into the living room and sat down on the couch next to Jessie, who, I was happy to see, snuggled up close.

“That about ruins Christmas for me,” my mother said.

“Christmas is for little kids.” My dad waved toward the living room. “Look in there. They’re enjoying themselves. Don’t bother your little head about it, dear.”

After I got through the good-byes and the door closed behind me and I started across the frozen lawn to the station wagon, I began to feel better. I felt fortified by the icy air and the sound of the grass crunching under my boots. The sky over the tail end of the town was clear and glittered with stars. I breathed it in and felt glad to know that I headed to my desk.

Chapter 19

“
But, Charlotte”—Esmé was doing a Jane Fonda exercise video in the living room; I stood at the bathroom sink, re-brushing my teeth after a bout of mostly ineffectual heaving over the toilet—“what if it turns out you’re pregnant, babe?”

My friend sounded as if the possibility were a happy one! I immediately responded with a shrill, automatic, “I can’t be pregnant! I’m on the pill!”

This was early February. Although Esmé now spent her nights with Jeremy Fletcher, she continued to come by the apartment in the morning to do her beauty regimens and workouts; hence, she had been a witness to my continuing nausea.

“Work it! Work it! Work it!” Jane Fonda urged her legions. I grabbed up the bags and books that I’d dropped by the front door before running to the toilet (my students would arrive at my cubicle for office hours in fifteen minutes).

“Just saying”—Esmé’s voice was strained by the exercises, but nonetheless full of contented teasing—“accidents do happen, Char!”

Ice coated the windows of the station wagon, but, before I started scraping, I hopped inside and switched on the engine, hoping the heater might generate some warmth for my drive to the university. There was a damp to the cold that morning—so pronounced that it weighed down my clothes, my movements. The opaque, pearly sheen of the sky overhead made me think of the lard in white paper tubs that my mother sometimes brought home, a gift from a co-worker at the hatchery who occasionally butchered a hog.

As I drove along, people on NPR discussed the uproar over novelist Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses.
Iran’s leading cleric, the ayatollah Khomeini, had announced that the author must be put to death for blasphemy. Iranian Muslims in England had burned a thousand copies of
The Satanic Verses.
An Iranian businessman was offering a three-million-dollar bounty on Rushdie’s head.

Unbelievable!
I thought. Throughout the day, I asked the students who came to sit across from me in my cubicle of plastic and burlap if they had heard about Rushdie’s troubles. Some of them had. No one seemed to feel nearly as surprised or outraged by the news as I did.

By the time that I finished with office hours, sleet had started to fall. Luckily, not very many people were on the road. As I drove up steep Washington Street, the rear end of Will’s station wagon spun out twice, and it did it again when I made the turn into the parking area alongside the apartment house.

All I wanted to do was get inside, take a bath. A bath with Will—that would have been the best.

Before I entered the apartment, I always knocked—just in case Esmé was home and had something private going on in there. “It’s Charlotte,” I called. There was no response, but while I rummaged through my bag for my key, I heard a telephone start to ring. Our telephone, I was quite sure, and then I was sure, too, that the caller was Will—Will had felt me yearning for him. Why didn’t I always put the key back in the same place?

I dumped my bag upside down and onto the hall floor.
There!

By the time that I got the door’s tricky lock unlocked and reached the telephone, I was breathless.

“Am I speaking to Charlotte Price?” the caller asked. Not Will, but a man with a friendly voice. I had learned from Esmé, however, that I should ask callers to identify themselves before identifying myself, and so I said, “May I ask who is calling, please?”

“This is Mike Curtis. Is this Charlotte Price?”

Mike Curtis, Mike Curtis. Why did I know that name?

“I’m the fiction editor at the
Atlantic Monthly.
Do I have the wrong number?”

C. Michael Curtis, fiction editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
. I had sent C. Michael Curtis my story “The Magic.”

In my excitement at learning that Mike Curtis wanted to publish “The Magic,” I pulled the telephone plug out of the wall, and then had to endure almost a minute of agony while I reinstalled the plug and waited for him to call back.