Shakespeare's Christmas (3 page)

“Are you out of school for the holidays?” I asked.

“Yes, and after that I’ll start back here at U of A.” The University of Arkansas had a large campus at Montrose, though some of the Shakespeare kids preferred the biggest establishment in Fayetteville, or the Little Rock branch.

We looked at each other, in silent agreement not to discuss the reasons Bobo had left the state for a while.

“What are you doing today, Lily? Not at work?”

“No,” I answered shortly, hoping he wouldn’t ask me to spell out the fact that his mother no longer employed me, and as a result, I’d lost a couple of other clients.

He gave me a look that I could only characterize as assessing. “And you’re here shopping?”

“My sister’s getting married. I have to go home for the wedding and the prewedding parties.”

“So, you’re here to get something to wear.” Bobo eyed me a minute more. “And you don’t like to shop.”

“Right,” I said disconsolately.

“Got to go to a shower?”

“I have a list,” I told him, aware of how bleak my voice sounded.

“Let’s see.”

I handed him the sheet of stationery.

“A shower . . . two showers. A dinner. Then the rehearsal dinner. The wedding. You’ll be a bridesmaid?”

I nodded.

“So she’s got your dress for that?”

I nodded again.

“So, what do you need?”

“I have a nice black suit,” I said.

Bobo looked expectantly at me.

“That’s it.”

“Oh, wow, Lily,” he said, suddenly sounding his age. “Do you ever have
shopping
to do.”

 

THAT EVENING I spread out my purchases on the bed. I’d had to use my charge card, but everything I’d gotten I could use for a long time.

A pair of well-cut black slacks. For one shower, I’d wear them with a gold satin vest and an off-white silk blouse. For the second, I’d wear them with an electric blue silk shell and a black jacket. I could wear the shoes that went with the black suit, or a pair of blue leather pumps that had been on sale. I could wear my good black suit to the rehearsal dinner. For the dinner party I had a white dress, sleeveless, that I could wear in the winter with the black jacket, in the summer by itself. I had the correct underpinnings for each outfit, and I had bought a pair of gold hoop earrings and a big gold free-form pin. I already had diamond earrings and a diamond bar pin my grandmother had left me.

This was all thanks to Bobo’s advice.

“You must have read some of Amber Jean’s girls’ magazines,” I had accused him. Bobo had a younger sister.

“Nah. That’s the only shopping wisdom I have to offer. ‘Everything has to match or coordinate.’ I guess I learned it from my mom. She has whole sections of clothes that can be mixed and matched.”

I should have remembered that. I used to clean out Beanie Winthrop’s closet twice a year.

“Are you living at home?” I had asked when he’d turned to go. I was a little hesitant about asking Bobo any questions that might pertain to his family, so strained was the Winthrop situation.

“No. I have an apartment here. On Chert Avenue. I just moved in, to be ready for the spring semester.” Bobo had flushed, for the first time looking awkward. “I’m trying to spend some time at home, so my folks don’t feel too . . . ditched.” He’d run his fingers through his floppy blond hair. “How’ve you been doing? You still seeing that private detective?”

“Yeah.”

“Still working out?” he’d added hastily, getting off dangerous ground.

I’d nodded.

He’d hugged me again and gone about whatever his errand was, leaving me to a saleswoman named Marianna. She’d homed in on us when Bobo had joined me, and now that he had left, she was stuck with me.

 

 

AFTER I’D GOTTEN over the sticker shock, it felt almost good to have new clothes. I cut off the tags and hung all the new things in the closet in the guest bedroom, spacing the hangers so the clothes wouldn’t wrinkle. Days afterward, I found myself looking at them from time to time, opening the door suspiciously as if my new garments might have gone back to the store.

I’d always been very careful with makeup, with my hair; I keep my legs shaved as smooth as a baby’s bottom. I like to know what I look like; I like to control it. But I don’t want people to turn to look at me, I don’t want people to notice me. The jeans and sweats I wore to clean houses, to bathe dogs, to fill some shut-in’s grocery list, acted as camouflage. Practical, cheap, camouflage.

People would look at me when I wore my new clothes.

 

MAD E UNEASY BY all these changes, by the prospect of going back to Bartley, I plunged myself into what work I had. I still cleaned Carrie Thrush’s office every Saturday, and Carrie had mentioned she wanted me to come more often, but I had to be sure it wasn’t because she thought I was hurting financially. Pity shouldn’t have any part in a business arrangement, or a friendship.

I had the Drinkwaters’ house, and the travel agent’s office, and Dr. Sizemore’s office. I still cleaned Deedra Dean’s apartment, and I was working more hours for Mrs. Rossiter, who had broken her arm while she was walking Durwood, her old cocker spaniel. But it wasn’t enough.

I did get the job of decorating two more office Christmas trees, and I did a good job on one and an outstanding job on the other, which was a very visible advertisement since it stood in the Chamber of Commerce office. I used birds and fruit for that one, and the warm, hushed colors and carefully concealed lights made the tree a little more peaceful than some of the others I saw around town.

I’d quit taking the Little Rock newspaper to cut back on expenses until my client list built up. So I was in Dr. Sizemore’s office, on a Tuesday afternoon, when I saw the creased section from one of the Sunday editions. I scooped it up to dump into the recycle bin, and my gaze happened to land on the headline “Unsolved Crimes Mean No Happy Holiday.” The paper was dated two days after Thanksgiving, which told me that one of the office staff had stuffed it somewhere and then unearthed it in her pre-Christmas cleaning.

I sank down onto the edge of one of the waiting room chairs to read the first three paragraphs.

In the yearly effort to pack as many holiday-related stories as possible into the paper, the
Arkansas Democrat Gazette
had interviewed the families of people who had been murdered (if the murder was unsolved) or abducted (if the abductee hadn’t been found).

I wouldn’t have continued to read the article, since it’s just the kind of thing that brings back too many bad memories, if it hadn’t been for the picture of the baby.

The cutline under the picture read, “Summer Dawn Macklesby at the time of her disappearance. Summer has been missing for almost eight years.”

She was a tiny infant in the picture, perhaps a week old. She had a little lace bow attached somehow to a scanty strand of hair.

Though I knew it would make me miserable, I found myself searching for the child’s name again, in the column of text. It jumped out at me about halfway through the story, past the mother of three who’d been gunned down at an automated teller on Christmas Eve and the engaged convenience store clerk raped and knifed to death on her Thanksgiving birthday.

“Eight years ago this week, Summer Dawn Macklesby was snatched from her infant seat on her parents’ enclosed front porch in suburban Conway,” the sentence began. “Teresa Macklesby, preparing for a shopping expedition, left her infant daughter on the porch while she stepped back into the house to retrieve a package she intended to mail before Christmas. While she was in the house, the telephone rang, and though Macklesby is sure she was absent from the porch no longer than five minutes, by the time she returned Summer Dawn had vanished.”

I closed my eyes. I folded the paper so I couldn’t read the rest of the story and carried it to the recycle bin and dumped it in as if it were contaminated with the grief and agony implied in that one partial story.

That night I had to walk.

Some nights sleep played a cheap trick on me and hid. Those nights, no matter how tired I was, no matter what energy I needed for the day to come, I had to walk. Though these episodes were less frequent than even a year ago, they still occurred perhaps once every two weeks.

Sometimes I made sure nobody saw me. Sometimes I strode down the middle of the street. My thoughts were seldom pleasant on walking nights, and yet my mind could not be at peace any more than my body.

I haven’t ever understood it.

After all, as I often tell myself, the Bad Thing has already happened. I do not need to fear anymore.

Doesn’t everyone wait for the Bad Thing? Every woman I’ve ever known does. Maybe men have a Bad Thing, too, and they don’t admit it. A woman’s Bad Thing, of course, is being abducted, raped, and knifed; left bleeding, an object of revulsion and pity to those who find her, be she dead or alive.

Well, that had happened to me.

Since I had never been a mother, I had never had to imagine any other disasters. But tonight I thought maybe there was a Worse Thing. The Worse Thing would be years of imagining that child’s bones lying in the mud in some ditch, or your child alive and being molested methodically by some monster.

Not knowing.

Thanks to that glimpse of newspaper, I was imagining that now.

I hoped Summer Dawn Macklesby was dead. I hoped she had died within an hour of her abduction. I hoped for that hour she had been unconscious. As I walked and walked in the cold night, that seemed to me to be the best-case scenario.

Of course, it was possible that some loving couple who desperately wanted a little girl had just picked up Summer Dawn and had bought her everything her heart desired and enrolled her in an excellent school and were doing a great job of raising her.

But I didn’t believe that stories like Summer Dawn Macklesby’s could have a happy ending, just like I didn’t believe that all people are basically good. I didn’t believe that God gave you compensation for your griefs. I didn’t believe that when one door closes, another opens.

I believed that was crap.

 

I WAS GOING to miss some karate classes while I was in Bartley. And the gym would be closed for Christmas Eve, Christmas, and the day after. Maybe I could do calisthenics in my room to compensate? And my sore shoulder could use a rest. So as I packed my bag to leave, I tried not to grumble any more than I already had. I had to make this visit, had to do it with grace.

As I drove to Bartley, which was about a three-hour journey east and a little north from Shakespeare, I tried to drum up some sort of pleasurable anticipation about the coming visit.

It would have been more straightforward if I hated my parents. I loved them.

It was in no way their fault that my abduction, rape, and mutilation had made such a media roar that my life, and theirs, had changed even more than was inevitable.

And it was in no way their fault that no one I’d grown up with seemed to be able to treat me as a normal person, after that second, public, rape in the spotlight of the press and the TV cameras.

Nor was it my parents’ fault that my boyfriend of two years had quit seeing me after the press turned their attention away from him.

None of it was their fault—or mine—but it had permanently altered the relationships between us. My mother and father couldn’t look at me without thinking of what had happened to me. They couldn’t talk to me without it coloring the most commonplace conversation. My only sibling, Varena, who had always been more relaxed and elastic than I had, had never been able to understand why I didn’t recover more swiftly and get on with my life as it had been before; and my parents didn’t know how to get in contact with the woman I’d become.

Weary of scrambling through this emotional equivalent of a hamster exercise wheel, I was nearly glad to see the outskirts of Bartley—the poor rickety homes and marginal businesses that blotch the approach to most small towns.

Then I was rolling past the filling station where my parents gassed their cars; past the dry cleaner where Mother took their coats; past the Presbyterian church they’d attended all their lives, where they’d been baptized, married, christened their daughters, from which they would be buried.

I turned down the familiar street. On the next block, the house I grew up in was wearing its winter coat. The rose-bushes had been trimmed back. The smooth grass of the big yard was pale after the frost. The house sat in the middle of the large lot, surrounded by my father’s rose beds. A huge Christmas wreath made from twined grapevines and little gold toy trumpets hung on the front door, and the decorated tree was visible in the big picture window in the living room. Mom and Dad had repainted the house when Varena and Dill got engaged, so it was gleaming white for the wedding festivities.

I parked to the side of the driveway on a concrete apron my parents had poured when Varena and I began driving. We’d had friends over all the time, and my folks got tired of their own vehicles getting blocked in.

I eased out of my car and looked at the house for a long moment, stretching my legs after the drive. It had seemed so big when I’d lived in it. I had always felt so lucky to grow up in this house.

Now I saw a fairly typical built-in-the-fifties house, with a double garage, a living room, a den, a big kitchen, a dining room, and three bedrooms, two baths.

There was a workroom at the back of the garage for my father—not that he ever did anything in it, but men needed a workroom. Just like there was a sewing machine in the corner of my parents’ bedroom, because a woman ought to have a sewing machine—not that my mother ever sewed more than a ripped seam. And we Bards had a full complement of family silver—not that we ever ate with it. Someday, in the course of time, Varena and I would divide that silver between us, and the care of it would be on our shoulders; that heavy, ornate silver that was too fine and too much trouble to use.