Souvenir of Cold Springs (3 page)

“You did a basket of pinecones two years ago.” Margaret had had the calendar in her room at Adams House. That November—the pinecone November—she had met Roddie. She had circled November twenty-ninth in red because that was the first time they had slept together. Big deal. She had thought it would lead to better things, but it had only led to a blob of blood and tissue thrown out with the trash at Cambridge Hospital. She counted back in her mind: Roddie hadn't called her in two and a half weeks.
Gloria in excelsis Deo
.

Her mother finally decided on the trees and the broken-down fence, and she praised Margaret's taste. For years, she had paid compliments meant to encourage Margaret's artistic talent. She thought Margaret should be a painter. Margaret hadn't painted in years, not since high school. She hated to think of the paintings she had produced, the lame attempts at drama and shock (a dead squirrel she found in the backyard that she painted in various stages of decomposition, a sequence of dead flowers in expensive cut-glass vases) and the cheap symbolism she sometimes attempted as a commentary on current events—like Reagan grinning on a television screen that was really a coffin. She knew she couldn't paint, even if her mother didn't have the sense to realize it. Or maybe her mother did, and encouraged her anyway because she was perverse, or because she wanted Margaret to be mediocre, or because she wanted Margaret to get off her butt and back in touch with reality.

Except that now she was exempt from getting off her butt because she had a cold. She wondered how long she could hang on to her precious germs. She thought about writing a poem, “To a Virus,” the way poets used to write poems to mice and fleas.
Hail thou microscopic beastie. On my blood thou hast thy feastie
. It was pleasant to be sick. Her father ran errands for her. Her mother made hot toddies, lentil soup, custards. She framed a print of the trees and gave it to Margaret to cheer her up, propping it on the top shelf of her bookcase between the pottery vase full of chrysanthemums and the old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock.

Her mother's passionate quest for domestic perfection usually seemed to Margaret a form of insanity—everything relentlessly clean, tidy, and aesthetically pleasing, the whole house a monument to anal retentiveness. Or to her parents' empty marriage. Or her mother's vague but stifled creativity. Whatever. But when she was ill she liked it. Sunlight, flowers, neat bare surfaces—they made her feel pampered, like a movie heroine with a wasting disease, someone beloved who would be missed when she was gone. Everything was ready: the camera crew could move right in, wouldn't have to touch a thing. Just dab some makeup on her red nose.

She liked the tree photograph. It would be one of the things she would take to California, as a souvenir. It was perfect: dead-looking trees, photographed by her mother.

“It looks nice on the shelf,” Margaret said.

“It's pretty bleak,” her mother said dubiously.

“It's supposed to be bleak, Ma. November is the bleakest month.”

Her mother smiled at her, as she always did at the hint of a literary allusion, any evidence that nearly three years at Harvard plus a home life rich in culture had done its work. “Are you reading anything good?” she asked. “Besides
House and Garden
?”

Margaret held it up, open to the stables people. “James goes to Oxford, Alexander's at Eton, and Charlotte's won the watercolor prize three years in a row at her school. And look—that's Tony's little playhouse.”

“Please, Margaret,” her mother said. “Let's not have our
House and Garden
argument again.”

“I'm also reading
Middlemarch
.”

“God—what's that? The fifth time?” Her mother used to be proud of her for reading it so many times. Lately it was worrying her. It was like when Margaret was eleven and used to read about keeping bees. She wrote to the Department of Agriculture and the National Beekeepers' League for pamphlets, and subscribed to an English publication called
The Apiarist
. Her Bible had been
The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture
. At first her mother thought it was cute, an eleven-year-old who knew, and would tell you, that bees won't fly unless the temperature is at least 55 degrees Fahrenheit, that drones have 37,800 olfactory centers in each antenna. Then she started thinking it was weird, and kept trying to distract Margaret by buying her things: a boom box, a fish tank, a set of wooden chickens that nested one inside the other like Russian dolls, an
Alice in Wonderland
pop-up book from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was much too young for her. Also, that was the summer they went to England. When the beekeeping craze was safely over, she heard her mother say to her father, “I suppose she gets
something
out of these obsessions,” and for years afterward she wondered what she had gotten out of her love for bees besides a love for bees.

“Or the sixth?” her mother asked, picking up
Middlemarch
and squinting at the painting on the cover: a woman in a fussy Victorian dress, languishing in an uncomfortable-looking chair.

It was only the fifth time, but Margaret said, “Seventh.”

At the end of the week, when she was beginning to feel better, a postcard came from Heather. Fast work: hard to believe, from a cousin whose busiest moments used to involve putting three coats of polish on each nail and drying each coat separately in a nail-drying machine she had conned Uncle Teddy into buying her. Margaret was glad she was home alone when the mail came; her plans were private, as Heather should have known. Margaret assumed she did know, and that was why she'd chosen to expose them on the back of a postcard.

She took the card up to her room to read it. In her tiny cramped printing, Heather said that if Margaret was serious about coming to San Francisco, she should get in touch with Rob at his bank, where they always needed teller trainees, though the pay was lousy. Heather and Rob were in the process of breaking up. Heather was living in a tiny studio apartment, but she might be able to put Margaret up for a night or two if she didn't mind sleeping on the floor. There was a PS.:

As for the weather, you've probably heard Mark Twain's famous line that the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco, so don't expect much
.

Margaret turned the postcard over: a tinted photograph of a 1957 Chevy in front of a hot dog stand with carhops. She tried to visualize someone going into a shop and actually buying this card. Then she read Heather's tiny cramped printing again and decided the message was hostile. But it told her one thing she needed to know: avoid Heather like the plague. She ripped the card into four pieces and tucked them in her sweatshirt pocket.

Her mother was out at the supermarket, so she couldn't ring the cowbell. She blew her nose and went down to the kitchen to make tea. She hadn't had a cup of tea since she got the cold: tea with milk tasted terrible when you had a cold, like drinking mucus, and she hated tea plain. She put Heather's postcard down the garbage disposal and put on water for a pot of Jackson's Queen Mary, her favorite. While she waited for the kettle to boil, she stared at a photograph hanging over the sink: herself at fourteen—one of her more awkward ages—wearing a denim jacket and trying to look tough, but looking, in fact, harmless to the point of geekiness—which was why her mother had framed the thing and hung it on the wall. God forbid she should just thumbtack it up. That photograph was one of the million things Margaret wanted to escape. If she made a list of them, it would stretch from Brookline to San Francisco.

She carried the tea and a tin of shortbread cookies upstairs on a tray. She had planned to pig out on cookies washed down with tea and make a leisurely list of her options, but before she took three bites it was clear to her that her only hope was Aunt Nell—her mother's aunt, actually, a no-nonsense ex-schoolteacher who wore sandals with colored cotton socks and was probably a lesbian. Aunt Nell was the only one of her generation left, and she had all the money.

But Margaret hesitated to ask her, not because she thought her aunt would refuse but because she was pretty sure she'd agree. It made her feel guilty. What did the old lady have in her life? A cat. A big old house full of stuff nobody wanted. Bran cereal and prunes. Relatives who coveted her dough.

When Margaret was little she used to like going to Aunt Nell's every year for the big family Thanksgiving dinner. She and her parents always stayed overnight. There was always a cat, that Aunt Nell always named Dinah. There was an antique bed with pineapple posts. There was the dusty attic where she could take the cat and hide from her cousins. There was Aunt Nell's friend Thea, who kept chocolate kisses in the pocket of her apron. There was Aunt Nell herself, who at some point always used to tuck a folded ten-dollar bill into Margaret's palm and say, “This is for you to spend, don't tell your parents about it.”

As Margaret got older she dreaded those reunions. Her cousins always seemed to be going through unpleasant stages. After Thea died, Aunt Nell became crabby, and the food wasn't as good. And it was boring there—nothing to do but pet the cat or sneak away with a book or be snubbed by Heather or watch Uncle Teddy get drunk. She was still fond of Aunt Nell, and sometimes thought of going up to Syracuse to visit her, but she never did. She couldn't believe she would be anything but a burden, an awkward young niece who didn't have a lot to say. After Thea's funeral, when they were all up at her aunt's house eating lunch, Margaret had tried to tell her aunt how much she had liked Thea, how sorry she was, and Nell had been mean to her for the first time in her life—brushed her aside, said it didn't matter, what good did anyone's sympathy do.

She sat on her bed and finished the tea and cookies. She tried to empty her mind by staring at the alarm clock. The tick was so loud she couldn't actually use the clock, and when she was eight years old she had permanently stopped it at 8:13, which someone told her was the time Lincoln was shot. She used to stare at the Roman-numeraled face until she got double vision and began to feel dizzy, and then she would close her eyes, open them, and something significant would come into her mind. She tried it, but the only thing that came into her mind was the doctor who had scraped her clean, Dr. O'Something, she could never remember, trying to hide his disapproval behind an unconvincingly brisk manner, calling her “Ms. Neal,” scribbling on her chart and refusing to look her in the eye.

Q: Should I or shouldn't I?

A: Go ahead. See if you can take advantage of an old lady on top of everything else you've done.

She went to the desk for more stationery and wrote:

Dear Aunt Nell, I wonder if you could lend me the price of a plane ticket to San Francisco. My parents are still mad at me for leaving Harvard, and I'm afraid to ask them for anything. In fact, I try to stay as unobtrusive as possible around here. I've been in touch with Heather, and she has promised to look after me, help me find a job, etc. But I can't make any definite plans until I have plane fare, which I figure is about $250, say $300 (one way), although I'll fly the cheapest airline possible and send you back any extra. I hate to ask you, but you've always been so good to me, not that that's a good reason, I don't like to impose on your goodwill, but I'm really desperate. I've had so much bad luck in Boston and vicinity that I just feel the need to make a fresh start somewhere. So for any assistance you can give, the undersigned will be eternally grateful. Love, Margaret
.

PS. Good luck with selling the house and your new condo. I guess we'll see you at Thanksgiving unless I'm in California by then—???

Margaret took the letter downstairs. She was definitely beginning to feel better. Writing the letter had helped, even though it might annoy her aunt to death and was riddled with lies. It wasn't true, for instance, that she was afraid to ask her parents for the money; the problem was that she was too proud, and she didn't want to endure the lectures that would accompany their refusal. And Heather wasn't going to look after her. And she wasn't planning to refund any extra money she might get beyond the plane fare. And she was going to do her best to avoid the usual family Thanksgiving. But a lot of the letter was true: her bad luck, her eternal gratitude, even
Love, Margaret
. She did love her old auntie.

She put the letter out for the mail carrier to pick up and went back to bed. She definitely felt better, but she was in an uncertain state, neither sick nor well, so that she didn't know whether or not the cold still qualified as D.S. or if she should find something else. Could Heather's postcard count? It had involved a certain amount of mental anguish. She decided to give her illness one more day, settled back into the pillows, and sank like a stone into the familiar troubles of
Middlemarch
.

Sometimes she dreamed
about Matthew. She always thought of him as Matthew, though in real life she had never called him that. She had called him Mr. Nicholson like everyone else. The dreams were very boring. He was walking down a hall, usually with his back to her, his wild white hair flying around his head. He was sitting in an airport on a blue plastic chair, looking mournful, a suitcase beside him. Once she had a wonderful dream where he was in a garden smiling at her—at least, she hoped the smile was for her, but she realized when she woke up that it could have been directed at anyone.

Sometimes she woke up from the dreams missing him and humiliated. For a while after the abortion she thought constantly about being in bed with him. She had hated making love with Roddie, always. She never got to like it better, even back in the days when she liked Roddie's long, dopey face and sweet smile.

With Matthew it had been completely different, in spite of the amount he'd had to drink. When Roddie was drunk he was a dead weight, half-asleep, and things were worse than usual. But Matthew had been wonderful. The booze hadn't made him tired, it had made him reckless and loving. He had taken such care of her; he had taught her to like sex the way he had taught her to like the Augustan poets. She had been nothing, and that long afternoon in his bed he had made her into something.