Souvenir of Cold Springs (2 page)

She looked through the window. Felicity and John Doe were sitting at a table eating pastries and drinking coffee, still talking. How could they have been served already? How long had she been standing there? She felt chilled with horror and also with the cold. I have to get out of here, she thought. I am going crazy for real.

A small wind had come up, and the sky was darker. She headed back toward the subway station. She took the bumper sticker out of her pocket and looked at it:
NO MORE SHIT
. Easy to say, but where else was there to go but home?

She wrote to
her cousin Heather, the only person she knew in California. Heather was twenty-five and had graduated from Berkeley and was working in San Francisco as a paralegal. Heather had been a fastidious teenager who spoke to Margaret only to give her advice about personal grooming. Head & Shoulders for dandruff but follow up with a good-smelling conditioner because Head & Shoulders smells like Lysol. Baby oil on your elbows but make sure you rub it in good or you'll get grease spots on your blouses. Hand lotion on your neck or else when you're old it'll get all stringy like your mother's. They had met a couple of times since then, at family events, and Heather seemed improved. The Thanksgiving before, at Aunt Nell's, they had had a long heart-to-heart about Heather's boyfriend, Rob, who was some kind of banker. Heather was getting tired of him. Rob was obsessed with the West Coast club scene, Heather said. Margaret thought that made him sound interesting, for a banker, but Margaret knew he couldn't really be interesting or he wouldn't be seeing Heather.

She rummaged through her desk for some decent paper to write on. She used her desk to store the junk of her youth, and she had to sift through letters and stickers and school papers and stuff about beekeeping, the English royal family, and the Boston Red Sox—some of her obsessions over the years, most of them from when she was eleven and twelve. Almost all the letters were from the Swiss pen pal she'd had during that time, Annette Brise. They were all in bad English; hers to Annette had been in bad French and quite dull:
ici ca va bien
, she always used to write, forgetting the cedilla. Margaret's mother had bragged so much about that correspondence that she had to end it, even though she liked writing to Annette and liked getting installments about Annette's crush on a boy named Denis: an affair of the heart, she called it.

She found some old stationery with her name and address printed on it, one of her mother's efforts to encourage her to keep writing to Annette. She took it downstairs to the kitchen, made herself a cup of tea, and sat looking at the sheet of notepaper, wondering what to say. Elegant black letters against cream, and the same address she'd had since she was seven, except for Harvard. It hadn't felt like her address for a long time: it was her parents' house, which meant that she was homeless. The
Globe
was folded up on the table; she could just see the headline,
CONCERN FOR HOMELESS TOPS ON DEMS
'
CAMPAIGN AGENDA
. She imagined Dukakis and Gephardt and Jesse Jackson getting together to buy her a plane ticket to San Francisco.

Dear Heather, I'm thinking of lighting out for the territory
—
namely California, preferably San Francisco. I'm getting fed up with the East, the weather, etc. What would you advise in terms of finding a job, a place to live, people? I have no money and will be lucky if I can get out there at all, but if I did
—
do you know anybody who needs a roommate? Do you have any ideas about where I could apply for a job? Are jobs hard to find? Around here, everybody has Help Wanted signs up. I mean waitressing, working in shops, etc. I'm not looking for demanding intellectual work. I'm sorry to lay this on you, I know you're busy, but you're my only contact out there. For any assistance you can give, the undersigned will be eternally grateful. Love, Margaret

She put it in an envelope before she could think about how stupid and desperate and pathetic it sounded, found the address in her mother's address book, and took a stamp from the monogrammed brass stamp dispenser her father had given her mother. She wondered if Heather had heard about her disgrace. Would her mother have told Uncle Teddy? No one would tell Aunt Kay because no one in the family was speaking to her, but her mother had these weird moments of intimacy with her brother, late-night phone calls with a lot of laughter, sometimes tears. Margaret wondered if there had been long-distance tears over her disgrace—or long-distance laughter, which would be even worse. She couldn't imagine her mother laughing over it: enough to make strong men weep, was one of the dumb things her mother had said. But what about weak men like Uncle Teddy? Enough to make weak men laugh, and then call Heather up and chuckle over it with her? I've got to tell you the latest about your cousin Margaret, she got involved with her English professor and then the guy dumped her and she had an abortion and a nervous breakdown and dropped out of school and got this weird haircut and has done nothing since April but sit around the house feeling sorry for herself and driving Lucy and Mark crazy. Isn't that hilarious?

No. Not even an alcoholic nutcase like Uncle Teddy, who wore a smoking jacket, sang Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, and called her mother Pieface. Uncle Teddy wouldn't laugh; he would sympathize. His own life was full of similar disasters and humiliations. She should take off for Providence and get him to adopt her.

Boring though Heather was herself, Margaret always considered her lucky to be part of an interesting family—a father who wrote books and drank, an anorexic drug-addicted sister, a born-again redneck brother, a mother who had deserted them all. Compare that to being an only child with a mother whose main interest in life was keeping everything neat and a father whose idea of fun was to talk about how much it all cost.

She walked down to the mailbox at Cleveland Circle. She could take that walk in her sleep—often did, actually. Awake, asleep, there wasn't all that much difference. The sun shone grudgingly, and off in the distance a huge black storm cloud was riding in from the ocean. It was malevolent-looking, more like a mass of pollution than a natural phenomenon. As she watched it, the sun disappeared again, and she noticed that a similar cloud was approaching from the other direction. They would meet within the hour over Cleveland Circle, she thought. They would meet right over her head, and the heavens would open.

She mailed the letter, walked around for a while looking at the shops, and bought a copy of
House and Garden
at the AM/PM store. Then she went into Eagle's Deli and ordered a cup of coffee. For her Daily Suffering she would walk home in the downpour.

Q: Is that good enough?

A: Probably not. We'll see.

She opened
House and Garden
and read an article about an English family with a hyphenated name who lived in a renovated Victorian horse barn. Their children were James, Charlotte, Alexander, Emma, and Tony. Charlotte was fourteen and had her own studio to paint in. Little Tony had his own playhouse, a hundred years old, with a thatched roof. The stables were like a palace. It would all be jolly good fun for the homeless: fifteen rooms, sixty acres, Hepple-white beds, Chippendale chairs, antlers on the wall to hang hats on, everything dusted by servants, and, through the silk-curtained windows, views of the lime walk, the dovecote, the bell tower.

Margaret loved
House and Garden
. For years, she had given her mother a subscription every Christmas, until her mother refused to read it anymore. She claimed it was a frivolous and decadent magazine. Margaret had asked her if it wasn't more frivolous and decadent to live that way yourself than to read about other people living that way. Her mother had said what nonsense, they didn't live that way, and Margaret had said that they would if they could, wasn't that what this house was all about? Antiques and china and expensive tea and those five-dollar cans of oatmeal imported from Scotland. Admit it, she said—you'd love it if I called you Mummy. And her mother had said you are an absurd, ridiculous girl, you are truly pathetic, you have lost contact with reality.

The rain started when she was halfway through her second cup of coffee, and she left without finishing it in case the rain stopped prematurely. It was a tentative rain, but she was glad to see that it increased as she walked. She put the magazine under her sweater and lifted her face to the clouds, which were now a solid gray mass over her head. In the west there was a window of blue. California, she thought. Water dripped down her neck. She wondered if her earrings would rust. Too bad: part of D.S.

She thought about Roddie, the only person who knew about Daily Suffering. He had said he would do it too, and he probably did for a while, but she was sure he wasn't doing it any more. Not that he didn't feel bad about it—he agreed with her that abortion was an important right for poor black teenagers, etc., but wrong for healthy young spoiled white women who had gotten pregnant through carelessness and a feeling of invincibility. They both knew they should have gone through with it, let the baby live, gotten married or at least had it adopted.

But Roddie didn't feel bad about it quite the way she did. If she knew he felt bad enough, she might want to see him. But he hadn't had the nausea and the swollen breasts, he hadn't had a little thing with arms and legs and a brain scraped out of him, he hadn't bled buckets, he hadn't been told he was a disgrace.

This particular Daily Suffering hadn't seemed like much when she decided on it, but by the time she got home she was soaked through, her teeth were chattering, her feet were frozen. When she looked in the mirror her ears and her nose were bright red, the rest of her face dead white, her hair plastered down to her head like molasses. She thought with satisfaction that she had never seen anything so ugly.
Oh you lovely young thing
.

She ran a hot bath and took off her clothes, shivering. No heat until November first, that was her father's inflexible rule. She threw everything down the laundry chute, even though her mother had made her promise never to throw clothes down wet because of mildew. She stepped into the tub and submerged everything but her head. She had forgotten to take off her earrings, and they were cold against her neck. Even under the hot water, her feet and her knobby knees stayed bluish. She would never warm up. This would be the Ultimate Daily Suffering, to stay cold forever until she froze to death like her mother's aunt Peggy had: until her blood froze in her veins, her brain hardened like a flower after an ice storm, her eyeballs became marble eggs, her heart a Popsicle, her toes and fingers deader than wax.…

She ended up in bed for a week with a major cold. Her mother had been in Vermont taking photographs, but she got home just in time to keep Margaret supplied with vegetarian broth and fruit juice. She put the antique cowbell next to Margaret's bed for her to ring when she wanted anything—an old Neal family tradition. Her mother loved it when she was sick, Margaret could tell; it made her a dependent again, a mother's dream: a daughter whose biggest disgrace was her runny nose.

When her father was home, he answered the cowbell. He stood in the doorway and said, “Your wish is my command.” To prove, contrary to all appearances, that he really did love her, he would go out and get her anything. Mocha lace ice cream, Soho black cherry soda, spinach croissants: nothing was too much trouble except normal conversation. He would bring her what she wanted, ask her how she was feeling, tell her to keep drinking liquids, and return to the basement where he spent his evenings caning chairs and refinishing furniture. He went to bed at 9:30 every night because he had to leave at 6:30 in the morning to avoid rush hour. He was a research physicist at a lab in Watertown. Her mother stayed up half the night and slept the mornings away. For a long time Margaret had wondered how they managed their sex life until it finally occurred to her that they didn't have one.

She and her mother looked at the Vermont photographs together—the usual product, just right for the annual calendar that was her mother's one claim to fame. This would be its eighth year:
Lucy Neal's New England Visions, A Portfolio for All Seasons
, it was officially called—a small but steady seller. Tourists loved it: arty black-and-white views of churches and birches, kittens curled up in baskets made by Native Americans, wheelbarrows, picket fences, village greens with harmless old cannons, hay wagons piled high with pumpkins.

“Pick two,” her mother said. “We're looking for October and November.” She sat at the foot of Margaret's bed, curled up like a kid. Margaret shuffled through the photographs and picked out one of smiling children in Halloween costumes and one of a broken-down fence and leafless trees twisted against the sky. Her mother frowned over them, her light curly hair falling in her face. She tapped her top teeth with one fingernail. Her fingernail was ragged, her cuticles bitten. Her lips were chapped, so she had smeared Vaseline over them. She wore a baggy blue sweater and faded jeans and a necklace made of moldy-looking greenish chunks of something. In contrast to the house, she always looked like a slob.

Her mother said, “I don't know, I don't know, I'm not sure about the trees. They're so depressing.” She sighed, but Margaret could tell she was really in a good mood. There were times when her mother's unhappiness was massive and scary, a force that appeared out of the blue and permeated the whole house like poison gas. Margaret sometimes thought her mother must have a secret life that preoccupied her, that dictated her mysterious ups and downs—a lover in Maine or Vermont, where she took her photographs, or in New York, where she was always going to see her art director. When Margaret was feeling generous, she hoped this was true, though it was hard to imagine. Roddie, whose tastes were bizarre to say the least, thought her mother was good-looking.

Her mother asked, “What about the basket of acorns?”