Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (16 page)

“His central problem seemed to be one of longing,” Miz June said.

“Everyone’s central problem is longing,” Harold shouted from the bathroom over the monsoon sound of his own peeing. Harold drank too much of Miz June’s tea.

“There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with longing,” Anna Bee said. “Longing has led to great things. Every great discovery and accomplishment has its base in longing. It’s only when you look to someone else to fill that longing that there are problems.”

“She read ahead,” Harold shouted from the bathroom again. He had great hearing for an old guy.

“How would you know if you didn’t read ahead too?” Peach shouted back.

“Both of you read ahead,” Miz June said. She probably did too.

“At any rate, love shouldn’t be the answer. It’s not even the big question,” Anna Bee said. “It’s more . . .” Anna Bee’s hand trembled gently as she held her teacup, like a blade of grass in a slight breeze.

“Background music,” Miz June said. “The perfect background music.”

“Setting?” my mother ventured. I heard a flush, then the faucet running, and then Harold appeared.

“The yeast, but not the flour,” he said.

“Christ, give me a hankie,” Peach said.

“Background music,” Miz June insisted. “Benny Goodman.” She snapped her fingers.

“Well, I for one know someone who let love take the place of everything else,” Harold said.

“Mrs. Wilson-now-Mrs. Thrumond,” Anna Bee said quickly. The tag was sticking out of her sweatshirt.

“Ditching us the moment she got married.” Mom had made Chip Jr. and me go to the wedding at the Senior Center. Mrs. Wilson-now-Mrs. Thrumond wore a white dress and a veil, and some old guy who looked barely alive played the accordion. The little plastic people on top of the cake had shiny black hair and looked about twenty. Mr. Thrumond had to sit down and rest after their first dance.

“Never trust a man,” Mrs. Wong said. “Mr. Wong
cheats on me every chance he gets. Men are trouble.” Poor Mr. Wong. According to my mother, he was as faithful as Mrs. Wong’s slippers, formed to the very curves of her feet and willing to walk a million miles for her. He’d never had the full love of Mrs. Wong, or of anyone else, for that matter.

“Amen to that,” Peach said.

“You were happily married for fifty years,” Miz June said. “I’m not sure why you’re agreeing.”

“He left me,” Peach said.

“He
died,
” Miz June said.

“Same thing,” Peach said.

“I’d like to read one more passage before we end,” my mother said. “It marks the transition, the turning point in the book and in Charles Whitney’s life. V.J. Day 1942. It’s the passage just after Charles sees Rose for the second time that day—imagine the odds? In that chaos of New York City.

‘There was something about her mouth that made me feel possibilities
,’” my mother read. “‘
The way a train ticket holds possibilities, the way a boat docked at sunset does, the way a voice on the radio announcing victory does. A mouth can have that. It can seem brave, and bold. Finite and infinite. After a war, you need both of those things.
“Why don’t you kiss me,” she said. “Celebrate a new world.”
And so I did. I could not forget that kiss. I still cannot. I put my fingertips to her face. Indeed, the world
changed that day, but the change in my life was no smaller or less significant. That moment took my sorrow and made it swarm the streets in victory, shouting in joy and rightness, and from that I have never quite recovered.’”

We were all quiet for a moment. My mother always did read beautifully.

“Lovely,” Anna Bee said.

“Refreshing. Now that’s the way it should be. Today everything is sex, sex, sex,” Peach said. “Love today is
undulating.
Oh, no.”

We followed Peach’s eyes. Lillian had begun to cry.

“It was your undulating comment,” Harold said.

“It was not, you idiot. It was the book.”

Tears rolled down Lillian’s wrinkled face; her thin white hair seemed as soft as dandelion fluff that might blow away with a puff of air. She was too fragile for pain. The wristwatch she wore seemed cruel, like a
KICK ME
sign stuck on someone’s back. A lump grew in my throat. I was embarrassed and ashamed to be young and witnessing what should be private.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” my mother said.

“I will get a tissue,” Mrs. Wong said, and got up.

“Lillian?” Peach said, and patted Lillian’s small shoulder.

Lillian raised her good hand from her lap. It trembled as she moved it toward her face, which she touched with her fingertips. Harold looked down at his lap.

“Didn’t I tell you people?” Peach said softly. She kissed the top of Lillian’s head, the little white poof. “It’s all right, dear.”

“Harold!” Mrs. Wong shrieked from the bathroom.
Herro!
it sounded like. She appeared in the doorway, tissues in one hand, her blouse and the front of her pants splotched with water. Apparently Harold had moved on to the second phase of his two-part faucet plan, and had been having some fun with the masking tape again.

“It wasn’t me,” Harold lied.

It was true that I didn’t think about Travis Becker the whole time I was there with the Casserole Queens. It was not just distraction, though, the way it was with the Frankenstein movie. Maybe all of the years in that room just made the world seem bigger. Being with them had been like sleep, the way it steals your mind sure as a thief and takes you to this land you both are and are not fully a part of. And then you wake up, of course, and there is the life you know, which you look at blind and blinking, like you’ve just come out of the movie theater.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The moon was nearly full and it was a hot night, and I stuck various parts of me out of the sheet to see what they would look like in the zebra stripes made by the moonlight coming through the slats of the venetian blinds. I gave my legs zebra stockings and my arms zebra gloves, and my foot a zebra boot. I turned over my pillow to the cool side, a fresh start on a new attempt to sleep, but that didn’t work either. Thoughts
nagged at me—my father, a baby. Charles Whitney on that crowded New York street. But more than that, one particular thought nagged at me, and it was the image of that phone number written on my arm, that blackness like a vein under my skin, coursing with blood and with a life of its own.

I imagined my finger on those numbers, could see them glowing green on the phone in the night, a loud buzz of the dial tone in my ear. I could imagine the ringing in Travis’ dark house, breaking his sleep in his turret room. He would know it was me, of course. I did not think about what the Casserole Queens had said about longing. To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master’s painting and a forgery. All I could do right then was feel this wrenching hole in my stomach and heart and call it love. It felt something like Travis’s hand on my head, pushing me down, down under that water.

I rolled over for the hundredth time and realized that there was a sliver of yellow light under my doorway. Someone was up, and after a few minutes I decided to investigate. Before I knocked at her bedroom door, I could hear that my mother had the computer in her bedroom on. It was an old one; it had a loud hum that was annoying and comforting. The thing was heavy enough to anchor a small ship, but she’d gotten it free from the library when they got newer models.

“Come on in,” my mother said. “Did I wake you?” Her hair was frazzled and looked confused and cranky to be awake at that hour. She wore a huge white T-shirt (a
pang—I hoped it wasn’t an old one of my father’s) and her glasses.

“It’s just hot,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Something stupid. Ridiculous. A stupid idea.”

We McQueens were hard on ourselves.

“What?”

“Don’t laugh.”

“I won’t.”

“I’m thinking about Lillian. And Charles Whitney. What Peach said. I’m doing a search on him.”

“Uh oh.”

“I know it, I know it. They get me every time. I
vowed
I wouldn’t let it happen again. I told myself,
Remember the dead body. Remember the dead body.
It’s crazy.”

“Maybe it’s not so crazy.”

“Something about that book has really gotten to me too. I feel awake again. For the first time since your father told me about the baby. It makes you remember that this is only one chapter in a long life.”

“It would be so great if Lillian really did know Charles.”

“Oh, God, you see? That’s exactly how I get into these things. Come on,
Charles Whitney?
I’m sure Peach is just concocting a little excitement for her life. Again. She wants to be Miss Marple.”

“Why should we think that just because we know Lillian, she shouldn’t know someone famous?”

“We don’t even know Lillian. She’s like an unopened box.”

“Who knows? She could have been someone important in his life.”

“I had a friend in high school whose mother claimed to have dated Elvis. We all made fun of her.”

“Maybe she really did.”

“It just seems so improbable. A regular life, a regular person, intersecting with something large. Fiction, right?”

“Let me know if you find anything.”

“Ha. You’re hooked too.”

“Think dead body.”

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” she said.

I knew exactly what she meant.

I called him, of course.

“That didn’t take long,” Travis Becker said. His voice was like honey over the phone. I wished he were beside me; I wanted to taste that voice in my mouth.

We didn’t have much to say to each other. Talking wasn’t mostly what we were about. We listened to each other’s breath in the phone. Travis told me he wanted to see me. He had something to show me. I told him no more going to other people’s houses when they weren’t there. I didn’t,
couldn’t,
use the words
breaking in.
He said okay. He said it wasn’t like that—he wanted me to go to his house that coming weekend, Saturday night, after nine. I told him I would think about it. We both knew, I guess, that that meant I would go.

For a few days I was like a chocolate in a box, looking
well behaved and perfectly in place, all the while harboring a secret center. The guilty knowledge I held of a wrongdoing about to occur made me brim with goodwill, as if already trying to atone for what I hadn’t even done yet. Might as well get a jump start.

My intentions screamed. I thought they did, anyway. I gave off a thousand clues that I was only going through the motions of living until Saturday night came. I figured that anyone who knew me well would just have to take one look at me to know that an imposter had taken my place. My eyes had a way of wandering off, seeking that figure in black that I felt might be watching me from anywhere. At Johnson’s Nursery, I would try to hold my focus, try, try, yet my gaze was pulled from Libby as she spoke to me, moving slowly toward that greenhouse and the glass panes where the orchids sat, tender and open. Libby’s mouth was moving, her hands gesturing, the words
Corsican mint
and
weeping larch
and
pink wisteria
flowing to my ears dreamily, like the words of an ancient, unfamiliar language. I had begun to doubt that anyone really knew me, or ever really paid attention. No one noticed a thing.

My mother was also obviously struggling with intentions of her own—for the last three days a letter addressed to my father sat on the table by the front door, stamp affixed in the corner and ready to go. She hadn’t yet made any moves to fix the hole in the kitchen. It gaped, open and hurting, and the bad part was I was getting used to the way it looked. Chip Jr., in what I guessed was an
action meant to make us see the hole again, put an old G.I. Joe inside, facing out, as if he were a soldier in a bombed-out building in some war-torn country.