Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (11 page)

“That’s not the point.” Peggy regarded him out of the corner of her eye. She wanted to poke him in the chin dimple, sock him
in his Disney-prince jaw, tell him it was would
have
, not would of. “The point is we’re a couple. Couples don’t make big decisions without talking to each other first.…”

Her indignation dissolved there, at the corner of Amsterdam and Sixty-eighth Street. Brock wasn’t the deceitful one. He hadn’t
gone and accidentally gotten married. He wasn’t conning an old lady. He wasn’t carrying on a false relationship behind her
back. Peggy was hardly in a position to claim the high ground.

She stopped walking, no longer angry. “Did you mean what you told me, that you’re working to save money for our wedding?”

“Well,” Brock said. “Yeah.”

A block behind them, a trio of young women erupted in shrieks of laughter. They were falling all over one another, doubled
up over some private joke. They were twenty-two or twenty-three, maybe. As she waited for Brock to elaborate, Peggy envied
them. They had a few years left before it was time to agonize over where their lives were going.

“Brock.” Peggy couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t wait any longer. She had to ask. “What if I paid for our wedding?” She had
to know. “What if I could raise the money for the big wedding you say you want by, say, next fall?”

Brock swung his arm.

“Just theoretically. If the cost weren’t a problem anymore,
then
could we get married?”

The three women broke out in fresh peals of laughter.

Brock turned to look at them.

Peggy wanted to scream, to run around him in mad circles.

He turned back to Peggy. She held her breath.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The trio walked around them on the sidewalk—split up and passed them on either side without looking at them, as if Peggy and
Brock were no more than a physical obstacle in the landscape. A boulder. A sinkhole. A vortex that would devour them the way
this relationship had devoured seven years of Peggy’s life.

Seven years she wouldn’t get back. And for what?

“I think I should move out,” Peggy said.

Brock stopped rotating his camera shoulder. “Out of where?”

“Our apartment.” Peggy couldn’t believe she was saying it. “I can’t do this, Brock. You and I want completely different things.
I’ve been waiting and waiting, thinking you’d come around, that you’d come to want the life I want. But I don’t think you
will come around, and I’d be an idiot to wait any longer. You can keep the apartment. I’ll move back in with Bex.”

Brock scratched his head. “You want to take a break?”

“I think it’s a break
up.
” Peggy removed her pre-engagement ring and held it out to him, one part of her on the verge of tears, another amazed at how
free she felt, a third aware that despite her resolve, Brock would try to talk her out of leaving.

She’d go to Bex’s. The building was back in the direction she and Brock had just come. Peggy started walking. Brock would
say something before she reached the end of the block. He would call after her, and she would explain, kind but resolute,
that her decision was final.

But he didn’t call, and she continued walking, until there were so many blocks between them that she wouldn’t have heard him
if he had.

On Friday afternoon, after market close, Luke telephoned Nicki to set up a Monday-night date.

“Why can’t I see you tonight?” Nicki countered. “There are all sorts of things I’d like to do to you…” She left the rest of
the sentence to his imagination.

Luke was no longer listening. Out of nowhere, he’d remembered a line from his wedding vows in Las Vegas, something about committing
himself constantly and faithfully.

“Come over tonight,” Nicki repeated.

“I can’t,” he told her. Peggy was set to arrive in a few hours, and it would seem strange to Abigail if he wasn’t home.

Yet Abby had long since retired to bed by the time Peggy showed up. Luke was immersed in paying bills when he heard a noise.
He found her on the doorstep, pounding the massive knocker hard enough to wake the dead.

“I’ve been out here five minutes!” Her breath came out in angry white puffs. There were as yet unshed tears in her voice.
“It’s pitch dark! Anyone could have grabbed me and slit my throat!”

You had to pity her, so unnecessarily wound up. “Why didn’t you let yourself in?”

He turned the knob to demonstrate that the door had been unlocked, but that didn’t seem to appease her. He decided to let
her pull herself together in peace and went out to her car to collect her suitcase, the same gigantic one from last week,
except—he wouldn’t have thought it possible—heavier. One thing she was right about: The light over the front door wasn’t working.
He’d have to check the wiring in the morning.

“You’ll lock the house, right?” Peggy didn’t sound any less upset when he returned.

“This is New Nineveh,” he tried to reassure her.

By ten the next morning, Luke, Peggy, and his great-aunt were at what had once been the New Nineveh Grocery until it had been
bought out and turned into a Stop & Shop, a change Abby had never acknowledged. Abigail waved the shopping list she’d painstakingly
written in her spidery cursive and gave orders like a general.

“Luke, you get the crackers. Peggy, you get the spray cheddar, and a little Monterey Jack and some Brie, because it’s a special
occasion. And cream cheese, and celery…”

Peggy nodded. She had been uncharacteristically quiet since last night’s harangue on the doorstep. Luke would have expected
a few more complaints by now. He chuckled to himself. They’d surely come later.

“… bacon and two jars of mayonnaise and four cans of cream of mushroom soup,” Abigail was saying. “Do we have toothpicks,
Luke? I forgot to check.”

“I’ll pick up a box.”

“I hate to waste the money.” Abigail made a disapproving noise. She turned to Peggy. “Don’t forget the celery, dear.”

Caught trying to camouflage a yawn, Peggy dropped her hand to her side. Luke stared at it. She was wearing the most obnoxious,
ostentatious diamond he’d ever seen. He wasn’t one to pay attention to jewelry but couldn’t imagine how he’d missed the ring
before. Engaged to be engaged. That was the phrase Peggy had used when he’d called to tell her they were married. “I have
a promise ring,” she’d said. Well, it was one hell of a promise ring. The guy had to be from either Hollywood or the Mafia.

“I saw a cheese shop near Mr. Mayhew’s office,” Peggy was telling Abigail. “Should we get the cheese there?”

Here we go,
Luke thought.

Abigail patted her pocketbook. “That store is for the weekend people, dear. The cheese here is much cheaper and just as good.”

“It’s a Yankee thing,” Luke murmured to Peggy, who didn’t answer.

Abigail didn’t appear to have heard. “There’s the Reverend Matthews. I’d like you to start coming with me to church tomorrow,
Peggy. You too, Luke. You haven’t been to a meeting since Easter.” She started toward the condiments aisle, stopping to greet
the pastor of the First Congregational Church of New Nineveh, who was loading his cart with bags of Snickers bars and a decorative
spiderweb from the Halloween display.

“I should start on the crackers.” Luke headed to the appropriate aisle.

Twenty minutes later, he and his great-aunt had reconvened in a checkout line, but Peggy was nowhere to be seen. Luke tracked
her down in the pasta and rice section, gulping from a cup of store coffee. “I thought I’d make a dish or two for the party.”
She tossed a bag of beans into the cart.

“There’s no need. Abigail has the food taken care of. There’ll be the cheese and crackers, and she’s making clam dip.” He
didn’t have the heart to tell her that at WASP parties the food was little more than a decoration.

“I need garlic.” She turned at the end of the aisle and was gone again.

Luke returned to his great-aunt in the checkout line. “Peggy would like to cook for the party. I believe she’s worried we’ll
run out of hors d’oeuvres.”

Abigail scrutinized him with her clever brown eyes. “She’s a flighty one, isn’t she?”

“A little.” Luke focused on the magazines by the register, scanning the tabloid headlines. Trouble for the Royal Family, one
proclaimed over a grainy photograph of a grimacing Prince William. Or was it Prince Harry?

“I know exactly why you married her.”

Luke read more headlines. She couldn’t possibly know. Could she? “And why is that?”

Abigail broke out in a raspy squawk of delighted laughter. “It’s plain as day. You’re exactly alike. In all my years I’ve
never seen two people more suited for each other.”

P
eggy woke on Sunday, checked the time, and leaped out of bed. After returning from the market, she’d spent the rest of yesterday
trying to rid the Silas Sedgwick House of two hundred years of dust. Afterward, she’d worked well past midnight making party
appetizers in a kitchen utterly lacking in modern appliances. The whole house, in fact, was a graveyard of archaic tools.
The vacuum cleaner had to be at least as old as she was. The sole television, in the den, actually had antennae; it got three
snowy channels. There was a percolator instead of a coffeemaker. There was no dishwasher, an absence Peggy hadn’t noticed
until three o’clock this morning. Not for the first time since her breakup with Brock, she’d wondered as she cooked whether
she should call off this deal with Luke, too. But that would be foolish. She might not have a wedding to pay for, but there
was still the rent on the store to contend with.

She’d crawled into bed wearier than she thought she’d ever been but had slept fitfully. Her dreams had been full of Brock—of
him standing under the streetlamp, watching her leave. She would wake periodically to the sound of the Thing in her room.
Why didn’t he go after you?
Peggy imagined it was whispering.
Why didn’t he put up a fight after seven years?

And already, it was noon. It was clear by now the Sedgwicks were early risers, and bathing, putting on makeup, and drying
her hair would delay her appearance in the kitchen by at least another forty minutes. Peggy decided to go down, apologize
for sleeping late yet again, and then get cleaned up. But Miss Abigail wasn’t at her spot on the rubbed-away patch of linoleum
in front of the sink; and Luke wasn’t rustling through the
Courant
or the
Litchfield County Times
. A slip of notepaper lay on the table, anchored with a porcelain sugar bowl matching the blue-and-white Sedgwick china:

Dear Peggy,

Luke is doing errands. I have gone to church.

Yours,
Abigail A. S. Sedgwick.

Peggy sighed. Of all the obligations to sleep through, church with her new great-aunt-in-law was probably not the one. She
only hoped her party appetizers would make up for it and imagined the impressed look on Miss Abigail’s face as she sampled
Peggy’s famous spicy Mediterranean artichoke squares, the old woman reassuring her that skipping church was understandable
when one’s cooking was this heavenly.

She meandered through vacant rooms toward a screen porch she’d discovered yesterday at the back of the house: a peaceful place
in which to settle into a rocking chair and watch birds flittering in the garden on a summer morning. But the October cool
crept through the lacy knit of Peggy’s sweater, and a desolate feeling fell over her. She retreated back inside, retraced
her steps through the kitchen, her boot-steps deafening in the grave-silent house, crossed the grand parlor she’d spent much
of yesterday dusting and mopping, and started up the staircase—the third step from the bottom gave an unearthly creak—to the
top floor.

Luke’s ballroom-study, at the top of the stairs, was on the west, street-facing wall. Peggy had seen the other rooms on her
side of the third floor but burned with curiosity over the hallway on the north side of the house. Luke’s bedroom was there,
and what else?

There was no reason she shouldn’t find out. She clomped past the ballroom toward unexplored northern territory.

It was dim back here, and it took a while until the outlines of two closed doors revealed themselves. Peggy tried the first
and saw the room had nothing in it but a few sagging cardboard boxes sealed with masking tape. She moved on to the next, reached
out to open it, then hesitated. She knocked softly. This would be Luke’s room. “Anyone home?”

The question ricocheted eerily off the far end of the corridor.

Peggy bolted, pounding back toward Luke’s study. One of the double doors was slightly ajar, and she stopped, heart hammering,
and tested the door with the tips of her fingers. It opened a few inches with an anemic
skreek
. Peggy whispered, “Are you in there?”

A soundless sliver of movement flashed behind her.
Luke!
Peggy whipped around, full of adrenaline, but there was no sign of him.

Once, at the store, a tourist whose first language hadn’t been English had referred to goose bumps as “ghost skin.” The phrase
came back to Peggy as the flesh rose on her arms. If there were such a thing as ghosts, this house would have generations
of them—malevolent spirits who would understand only that she was an outsider here, a Sedgwick impostor.

“This is absurd,” she said, and because this time she was expecting the echo, it didn’t frighten her. Not as much. She squeezed
inside the ballroom. What did Luke do for a living, anyway? She’d not thought to ask. Despite herself, she wanted to know
more about him. She had to have seen something in him that night in Las Vegas.

Luke’s desk was covered with papers in messy piles. A pencil whose point looked to have been whittled, not sharpened, lay
alongside a scattering of paper clips. Peggy picked up a scuffed glasses case, inspected it, and put it back down.

On the computer, a geometric screen saver morphed from cube to ball to helix and back again. Peggy tapped the keyboard; the
screen brightened into a list of numbers and three-letter abbreviations—stock symbols. She lifted the corner of a sheet of
paper lying facedown at the top of the biggest pile. “Connecticut Light and Power,” it read; the electric bill. The bill underneath,
“Naugatuck Fuel.” But these had to be mistakes: The two bills totaled over two thousand dollars for September.