Love Walked In (23 page)

“I’m going anyway.” He sounded brusque and offhand, but I wasn’t fooled for a second.

At
this juncture, I’d like to say a few words about cars. I don’t own one, which some would label as downright un-American of me, on par with, say, holing up in a shack in Montana and refusing to pay taxes or with failing to take proper care of my lawn. Quite deliberately, I’d arranged my life in such a way that I almost never had to set foot in a motorized vehicle of any kind, buses included. These boots were made for walking, walking, walking—leaving size-five footprints all over town—and I’d rather spend the gas money on really beautiful ones: hand-crafted, high-heeled, and made in the mountains of Italy.

But don’t picture me on a soapbox, preaching about greenhouse gases and the paving-over of America, although those up on that particular soapbox make quite a bit of sense, when you think about it. But the reasons the soapbox people give for living car-free lives are not my reasons, alas.

Cars just don’t interest me, for one thing. Once when someone at the café asked what kind of car Martin drove, the best I could come up with was “silver-ish.”

For another thing, I’m chickenshit, as I think I’ve told you, and cars are plain scary.

Having said all that, however, I must also say that some of my most treasured memories involve being in a car. Or maybe not individual, individuated memories so much as a general recollected sense of joy and well-being. Childhood happiness means car rides, sleepy ones, in the backseat with hazy, golden light pouring in or hazy silver light, depending on the hour, leaning against Ollie or Toby or Cam, music on the radio, the sound of our parents talking—and always our parents, there, up front, capable, keeping watch, protecting us with a boundless benevolence, carrying all of us down the right road.

Magic can happen in a car, a warm, intimate magic born of being in an enclosed, particular place and, simultaneously, being nowhere, passing through. No one leaves her troubles behind, not really, but you can believe you have. You can believe you’re in an in-between space where trouble can’t find you, and Clare and I believed this as we sat together in Teo’s car, sunshine pouring in on us. Teo believed it too, maybe, although if he had troubles of his own, he wasn’t telling me. Magic worked on all three of us, though, and all three of us, for a little while anyway, were unburdened, light of heart.

Clare was sleeping in the backseat, her face as peaceful as I’d ever seen it, and I’d just finished telling Teo a funny story whose funniness turned on the fact that I am ludicrously short (showing you what a very good mood I was in) when Teo got this ruminative expression on his face and said what no one has ever said to me before: “You know, I don’t think of you as short.”

“You don’t?” I asked, incredulous. “What do you think of me as?” Because when someone voices an opinion that outrageous, you must pursue it like a bloodhound.

Teo paused, as though searching for the proper word and then said, “Runty” with admirable deadpan.

“You’d make a great stand-up comedian,” I said in a bored voice. “If you weren’t so staggeringly unfunny.”

“Seriously,” said Teo seriously. “I guess you are short, but I’ve never thought of you that way.”

“You think of me as…” I waited.

“Essential,” he said.

I laughed because it was unexpected and also because, although I didn’t know what it meant, I liked it.

“I mean, if you gave some guy the assignment of creating a woman using as little material as possible but without cutting any corners, he’d make you.”

“Why, Teo, that’s so—sweet?” But it was sweet. No one had ever told me my corners were uncut before.

“I don’t know if it’s sweet, but it’s true. When you’re around other women, they end up looking sprawling and overdone, like whoever made them got carried away.”

“Went way overbudget,” I said.

“Right.” Teo glanced over at me. “Although, the person who made you may have gotten a little extravagant with your face, but probably because he had some left over to spend.”

“Economical guy that he was.” I laughed, and so did Teo, but when I turned to see
his
face, he looked a bit embarrassed, or not embarrassed exactly, but shy.

Now,
don’t go thinking I fell in love with a man because he told me he didn’t think of me as short. First of all, I’m not nearly so frivolous or so insecure as that. And second of all, I didn’t fall in love with Teo.

What happened was this.

Like most people, when I’m in a warm car, tucked up in the front passenger seat with a cold day outside and sunlight lying over me like a yellow blanket, I get sleepy. Sometimes I get sleepy enough to fall asleep, and this was one of those times. I drifted off—an easy, golden drifting.

I slept. I woke. When I woke, I saw Teo’s hands on the steering wheel, his wrists emerging from the once-rolled cuffs of his soft denim shirt. The shirt, blue; the wrists and hands, brown, dusted over with a light, gold-dust dusting of glittery, butterscotch-colored hair. Shirt, wrists, hands. I saw them more clearly than I’d ever seen anything, and the sight of them moved me as I’d never been moved in my life.

This person, I said to myself, this one person, of course, of course, of course. The words became my breathing and my pulse, the whole world reverberated with them. “Of course.” I didn’t think the words “I love you,” so obvious were they, so
given
, thinking them would have been sheer superfluity.

But I did love him. Teo. I was in love with him. I would always be in love with him. Of course, I was. Of course, I am. Of course.

So,
you see that I didn’t fall in love with Teo Sandoval. Falling is a process and what happened to me wasn’t process. It wasn’t sequential or gradual. It wasn’t falling.

A sea change. Transubstantiation. One minute, I was a woman not in love with Teo, and the next minute, I was a woman in love with him. Bones, blood, skin, every cell changed over into something new.

“Teo?” I said, awestruck.

“Yeah. Teo.” He smiled, thinking I was only half-awake. “Remember me?”

Remember him?

I had just buried my lover; I was on my way to another funeral; a child, possibly motherless, possibly kidnapped, rode in the backseat; and I was in love with my sister’s husband. Trust me, no one plans for her life to become the plot of a Bette Davis movie. No one wants that, and all of it would come crashing down on me. Soon. But just then, in that car, for the duration of the ride, I was allowed to forget everything
but
Teo. Call it denial, if you want. I call it grace.

Teo.
His eyes. His mouth. His shoulders inside his shirt. I’d never wanted to touch someone so much, and at the same time, I didn’t need to touch him at all. In love, I grew large, boundless. I was not contained between my hat and boots. I rose up. I embraced Teo. I surrounded him.

Clare slept in the backseat. Out the window, mountains emerged, subtle and ocean-colored. I sat in one seat. Teo sat in the other. And I held him all the way home.

“I
hope when I said it was quiet around here, you didn’t think I meant literally,” said Cornelia wryly, and Clare laughed because they weren’t even in the house yet, had just gotten out of Teo’s car, and were standing on the wide, circular drive, and already Clare could hear the noise: music and shouting and someone singing unbeautifully but with great enthusiasm,
“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

“I wonder if he knows it’s not snowing,” said Clare.

“What he doesn’t know could fill the Grand Canyon,” said Cornelia. She pointed at a dark blue, old, beat-up Jeep Cherokee with a University of Vermont sticker in the back window and said, “Cam.”

“And Toby,” she said, pointing to a dark green, slightly younger, slightly less beat-up Jeep Cherokee with a CU Boulder sticker in the back window and another one that said VT inside a green oval.

Clare’s gaze took in the cars and then the yard with its big trees wrapped up in switched-off Christmas lights and then the house itself—redbrick with white trim, black shutters, and a black door with a brass knocker shaped like a pineapple. On either side of the door hung a wreath studded with pinecones and red berries. The house was not nearly as capacious or as castle-like as Clare’s own house, which had an actual turret with a pointed roof, but Clare liked its broad shoulders and the way it rose solidly up out of the ground as though it had never not been there. And she liked that its yard spread out around it like a skirt but that it wasn’t so wide that you couldn’t see the houses on either side of it. A regular house on a regular street, she thought. A neighborhood.

“Onward?” asked Cornelia, tugging a piece of Clare’s hair.

“Onward,” said Clare, a little nervously, then turned to Teo, who was getting bags out of his trunk. “Can you come too?”

“Are you kidding?” said Cornelia, smiling at Teo, “If he left without saying Happy New Year, he’d be boiled in oil.”

“Yuck.” Clare grimaced.

“I would,” agreed Teo. “Boiled twice. Once here and again at my parents’ house. If my mom asks how the Browns are and I don’t know…”

“Better come with us, then,” said Clare, “Boiled twice is bad.”

Cornelia smiled at Clare reassuringly, “Don’t worry, honey. The natives are friendly. Loud but friendly. And only some of them are loud.” With that, she took Clare’s hand and, instead of going to the front door, led Clare, with Teo following, down a curving brick path to another door on the side of the house.

They stepped into a mudroom with a stone floor, sky blue walls and ceiling, pell-mell rows of boots and shoes of all different sizes, and milk crates filled with a tumbled stew of mittens, gloves, hats and bright tangles of scarves. Jackets and coats hung from brass hooks on the wall. Teo helped Clare off with her cardinal-red wool jacket, and Clare hung it up, feeling glad to see it add itself to the riot of color.

She felt a pang as she remembered her mother’s mink, still on Cornelia’s coatrack where she’d left it. But then she relaxed. That was OK too. The mink meant she’d be going back. Her mother would find the note they’d taped to Cornelia’s door, and she would call, and Clare and Cornelia would go back, and her mother would come get her at Cornelia’s apartment, and her mother would wear the coat home. There in the festive clutter of that little room, Clare had no trouble believing this, accepting it even as a sure thing, like a promise from a true friend who would never lie.

Almost as soon as they’d stepped from the mudroom into the kitchen, before the smell of baking and the sound of Christmas music had fully registered on Clare’s senses, a tall, rangy boy in a red ski sweater bounded in, shouted, “Hey!” scooped Cornelia up and, cradling her baby-fashion, galloped around the kitchen.

“Mom, Dad, Tobe! They’re here!” the boy—Cam, Clare guessed—bellowed.

Another boy, shorter, with curly hair, appeared. The first boy tossed Cornelia into the arms of the other boy, who spun around in time to the music.

“Erggh!” shouted Cornelia. “You are such
puppies
!”

Toby stopped spinning and bounced Cornelia in his arms as though testing her weight.

“Man, you’re fat. No offense or anything, but you are one fat individual, Cornelia.” He put her down and turned to Teo. “What do you think, Dr. Sandoval, am I right or am I right?”

“Too many cheesesteaks.” Teo grinned. He put out his hand, and Toby shook it first, then Cam.

“Still ugly as ever, I see,” said Cam to Teo. Then, to Clare’s surprise, he stage-whispered in her ear, “
Uglier
than ever, but don’t tell him I said that.”

Before she could answer, Cam seemed to remember something. To Cornelia he said, “Sucks about Mrs. Goldberg. You doing OK?”

“Sucks, indeed,” said Cornelia dryly, then she softened. “I’m doing pretty OK, Cammy.”

“Fat, though,” added Toby. “Fat as a blue-ribbon hog.”

He looked at Cam, who gave him a high five.

“That’s a relief,” said Cornelia, “We’d been here two whole minutes without a single high five. I thought you two might be sick. Spinal meningitis, maybe.”

She put her arm through Clare’s. “These are my hooligan brothers for whom the frat-boy flame burns eternal. Hooligan brothers,” she said, “this is Clare.”

As they were shaking hands with her, two more people entered the room: a man with wire-rimmed glasses, cropped gray hair, and a sweater vest (like a professor in a movie, thought Clare) and a pretty woman with blue eyes—cat eyes, like Cornelia’s.

The woman went straight to Cornelia and folded her into her arms. She hugged and Cornelia hugged back. Finally the woman let go. She held Cornelia at arm’s length and stared hard at her face. “Let me look at you, baby,” she said. As Clare watched, Cornelia stood, as docile as Clare had ever seen her, and let herself be looked at. Then Cornelia smiled a sweet, sweet smile. “Hi, Mom,” she said softly.

The man, Cornelia’s father, ruffled Cornelia’s cropped, unruffleable hair, then looked over her sleek head at Teo. “Still ugly as ever, I see, Teo,” he said cheerily.

Clare
stood there in the middle of Cornelia’s family, and something happened to her, something tremendous.

She felt like she was floating on a deep cushion of cinnamon-scented air. She felt as though she were the one who’d been scooped up, cradled, and tossed around. Inside her chest, she felt her heart beat: blossoming and shutting, blossoming and shutting, blossoming. Before either of Cornelia’s parents had said a word to her, before Cornelia’s mother had touched her cheek and said, “Clare, of course.” Before she’d been sat down to a feast of turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce sandwiches and cinnamon buns rich with yeast and butter—the best food she’d ever had. Before she’d thrown a football with Cam and Toby, the air stinging in her lungs, before she’d lit candles for dinner. Before she’d taken an evening walk in the starlit, Christmas-light-lit night with Cornelia, who had pointed out the sledding hill and Teo’s house, the spot where she’d first been kissed, her favorite climbing tree, and had stood before Mrs. Goldberg’s house with tears on her face. Before Clare had beaten Cornelia’s dad at checkers, before she’d slept in the attic bedroom under the fragrant weight of flannel sheets and hand-pieced quilts with stars beaming outside the window. Before she’d written the word “home” in her notebook.

Before any of this, as she stood in the kitchen and pressed one hand to her chest, before and even more so afterward, Clare knew: She was in love.