Souvenir of Cold Springs (5 page)

“You'd only graduate a year late,” he said. “If you keep on the way you're going, you're not going to graduate at all.”

She smiled at him and said, “Oh horror.”

He pushed back in his chair, and the table lunged toward her. Their teacups and saucers slid off and crashed to the floor. Rod-die paid no attention. He said, “God damn it, you don't seem to understand that I feel responsible for you. What the hell do you think I'm supposed to do? I can't write my fucking thesis, I can't do my research, I can hardly go to classes, I don't sleep at night—nothing. I think to myself, can I call her, do I dare, is she going to hang up on me or what? All I do is worry about you, and you sit there and laugh.”

He calmed suddenly, made a distracted gesture toward the cups on the floor, ran his fingers through his hair again, looking helpless. The waitress hovered nearby. People were watching them, warily. Margaret put on her jacket and started toward the door. She saw Roddie count out some money. “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, following her. They went out onto Huntington Avenue.

“Get away from me,” she said.

“No,” he said, and took her arm. “Margaret, this is killing me. You never think about what it's doing to me. It's all you, poor Margaret, she's got to punish herself, but you're punishing me too, damn it. I'm suffering, Margaret. I don't need to manufacture any fucking Daily Suffering, I've got it all built in. I'm going crazy because of this.”

At the subway stop he let go of her arm. They stood in silence. I will not cry, she thought. He will not make me cry. He'll get over this. I'll be gone. It doesn't matter. She turned her back to him and stared down the tracks, unblinking.

He said, “Margaret?” She didn't answer. “Margaret?” She could see the T coming, way down the block. She concentrated on trees. There were plenty of them around the museum, most of them bare like those in her mother's photograph, but not bleak. The sky behind them was a brilliant blue that looked fake—dyed by some sentimental optimist. When the car came, she got on and looked behind her for Roddie, but he was gone.

She did nothing
but read. “You could occasionally do something more productive,” her mother said. Her mother had also made several serious speeches about her going back to school. If not Harvard, then how about transferring somewhere else? How about Cornell? Her parents had both gone to Cornell, and had been hurt that Margaret wouldn't even apply. Or B.U.—nothing wrong with B.U. Maybe Uncle Teddy could get her into Brown for spring term. Or she could take a job for the rest of the year and start school again in September. Or at least do some volunteer work. One of the soup kitchens, a literacy program, tutoring in the schools.

Her mother's ideas ran down and finally ended with, “If nothing else, you could paint.” Her smile eager, her eyes bright with stubborn hope.

Margaret hated it that they didn't force her to go out and get a job—though she knew she would hate the job even more. She didn't even have to do housework. They still considered her to be on the brink of some disaster: unbalanced, dangerous. They pretended she didn't revolt them, pretended she was their pet. After six months, her mother was still making all her favorite foods and doing her laundry. Her father was still coming up to her room when he got home from work and asking nervously, “So how's my girl today?”

She always said, “Oh, pretty good, Dad. Hanging in there,” and he would do the fake grin he had perfected over the summer and say something like, “Hey—I see we're having tortellini for dinner. I'd better get down there and see how things are coming along.”

She wished she had the guts to become anorexic or run away or join the homeless on Cambridge Common or at least go officially crazy. She imagined lunging at her father when he came in, making animal noises, slashing with her fingernails. Or tossing the bowl of tortellini through the dining-room window. She hated herself for wolfing down her mother's goodies, and for slopping around the house all day in her old sweatpants, reading. She was even beginning to resent the books she read: in them, things happened. Life went on. People went to work, dressed up, took walks, held conversations, got into their cars or their carriages and drove places. No one hung around in sweatpants and read about it.

She considered calling Roddie up and saying, “Okay, lover-boy, let's get hitched.” She considered showing up at his room with her wrists slashed, bleeding all over him:
this is what blood looks like, Roddie
, and she would smear it on his shirt, his face, his hairy hands. She considered calling him and saying she was in London, Matthew had sent for her, they were living together, and every night they went to the theater and then to a pub and then home where they screwed gloriously, royally, incessantly, so fuck you, buddy, fuck all of you.

She finished
Middlemarch
and reread
Portrait of a Lady
, and she tried and failed for the third time to get past page ten of
Less Than Zero
, and she reread
The Beggar Maid
and
Mr. Bridge
and was halfway through
Mrs. Bridge
when a package came for her in the mail from her aunt Nell.

It was the size of a paperback book, and it was wrapped in brown and tied daintily with white string. Her heart sank when she saw it. It certainly didn't look like anything that was going to get her to California. She tried to think what it could be. Aunt Nell had a sarcastic side. A guidebook to San Francisco? A rubber frog? A photo of her favorite auntie? Whatever it was, it looked like Daily Suffering, neatly packaged.

No one was home, thank God, thank God. Margaret took the package to her room and cut the string with nail scissors. Under the wrapping was a box that had once held Christmas cards—gold bottom and stiff plastic top, with tissue paper inside: tissue wrapped around small hard objects.

Margaret began unwrapping them. A ring, a necklace, more tissue, other things—all small pieces of jewelry, like prizes in a kids' game. She thought at first that she was meant to sell it to finance her trip to California, but the stuff was clearly worthless: a cheap necklace of blue glass beads, another necklace of fake pink pearls, a brass chain with an ebony pendant in the shape of a half-moon, an enamel ring, a cat pin, two thin gold bangles, and a scarab bracelet. Junk.

Then she saw that at the bottom of the box there was an envelope, square and white, with her name on it in Aunt Nell's handwriting. Aunt Nell wrote in blue ink with a broad-nibbed fountain pen, so that the letters were shaded and the writing looked formal and old-fashioned. The
M
in Margaret bore a flourish like a flag blowing in the wind, the
t
was crossed with a plumed streak. Could Aunt Nell write her name with such conviction if there wasn't a check inside? If there was no check, wouldn't she write in small, apologetic letters?

She waited. She looked at the jewelry, piece by piece. The ebony pendant was rather nice—and black, so she could wear it with her mourning clothes. The gold bangles were okay, not exciting. She put the ring on her finger—blue enamel with little pink flowers and
SOUVENIR OF COLD SPRINGS
in yellow. Cute. Kitschy. So what?

The ring seemed familiar, seemed to have a vague unpleasant association, but she couldn't place it. She sat and stared at the way it looked on her finger, waiting. Then she studied her boldly scrawled name. Margaret. Margaret. Margaret.

The envelope, please.

Q: What's in it?

A: What you deserve.

She opened it. Inside was a folded piece of notepaper and inside that a folded check. The check fell out, still folded. Her stomach dropped, and she could hear her pulse beat. She read the note.

Dear Margaret, This is some of your great-aunt Peggy's old jewelry. I'm cleaning out the attic preparing to move, and I thought if anyone should get this, you should, since you're named after her and you look more like her every year. I don't think I'll have the family here at Thanksgiving this year. I'm between houses, and the place is in an uproar. Take care of yourself out in California, let me know how it goes, and don't let Heather boss you. I hope the enclosed will help. Best wishes to all. Love, Aunt Nell

Margaret twisted the ring on her finger, listening to the sound of her blood beating in her head. She looked at the folded check: a square of beige on her bedspread. If she never unfolded it she would never know. She would never have to do anything, ever. She could sit in her parents' house with the check unfolded for the rest of her life. The check would yellow and crumble and disintegrate, her sweatpants would fuse to her legs, she would go blind from reading, she would eat tortellini and ice cream until she croaked. They would have to cut Great-Aunt Peggy's enamel ring off her fat finger.

She touched the check—poked it, hoping it would unfold by itself and reveal its magic. It could be anything—twenty dollars toward her ticket, a hundred.
Hope the enclosed will help
. Aunt Nell was selling the old house and moving to a condo: did that mean she'd be feeling rich or poor? What did
help
mean?
Margaret
in blue ink with a flourish? A cache of worthless jewelry?

She began to think she was incapable of unfolding the check. She would have to take it to someone and get them to do it for her. Mrs. Niedermeier next door. The man at the bank. She twisted the ring around her finger.
SOUVENIR OF COLD SPRINGS
. How strange that the ring fit her so perfectly. Was that a sign? A sign of what?

She picked up the check and held it for a moment without unfolding it, thinking:
this is absurd, you are pathetic, if it's not enough what will you do, what will you do, you'll call Roddie, you'll go to Brown, you'll go back to Harvard and eat dirt, you'll go mad, you'll die, you'll die, you'll die. Oh you melodramatic jerk. Stop it, stop it
. Her stomach churned. She closed her eyes, unfolded the check, opened them.

It was a check for a thousand dollars. She put her head in her hands and cried for the first time since Emerson. She felt her heart begin to unfreeze. The ice melted in her veins. She would live.

HEATHER

1982

Heather had a bad flight from San Francisco—as if the Thanksgiving hordes weren't bad enough, there had been turbulence all the way, and her connecting flight in Pittsburgh had been delayed for two hours because of a bomb threat. By the time she got to Syracuse it was after ten. She checked into the hotel at the airport and called Aunt Nell's house from her room, which had a cockroach in the sink and a mural over the bed of Indians creeping through a forest. Her father answered the phone.

“I'm not going to make it tonight,” she said. “I just got in and I'm really tired. I checked into this Airport Inn place.”

“Heather, for Christ's sake, why are you spending my money on a motel? I'll come over and get you. It's twenty minutes. We're all here waiting for you.”

“Dad, I really feel lousy,” she said. “I'm ready to pass out. Tell Aunt Nell I'm sorry. I'll be there tomorrow early, I promise.”

“How early?”

“By noon. I promise. And I'll take a cab.”

“This is completely unreasonable.”

“I'm exhausted, I can't help it.” She stared at the Indians. They looked like white movie stars in heavy makeup. They wore ponytails and moccasins and loincloths. She heard her father say, “She's tired out, she's going to stay at the Airport Inn,” and someone—Aunt Lucy?—said, “Oh Teddy, can't you put your foot down?”

“Dad?”

He sighed. “Yes, Heather.”

“Has Mom called, by any chance?”

“What? Mom? No. Why? Is she supposed to?”

“Not really. I just thought she might.”

“I very much doubt that your mother would call you at this number, Heather. Frankly.”

“Okay. I just wondered.”

“There's no way we can persuade you to come over here?”

“I'm half-asleep already, Daddy.”

After they hung up, she picked up the roach with a tissue and flushed it down the toilet. In the mirror she saw that her mascara was smeared; she had black rings beneath her eyes, like a punk rocker. She removed the mascara with baby oil, washed her face, and rubbed in moisturizer. Then she took two Seconals and fell asleep before she could start thinking.

The next day they were all mad at her, of course. She was late because there was a snowstorm and it took the guy at the desk forever to get her a taxi. Then the taxi got stuck at Carrier Circle and they sat for half an hour while the driver told her his idea, which was that drug addicts should be rounded up and sent to reservations like Indians used to be. While they were going through withdrawal, they could be looked after by WACs.

“I figure the government could give the WACs the equivalent of combat pay,” he said. “Assign them to, say, six-month hitches out there.”

Heather sat looking at the snow and sucking on a Lifesaver. “Hmm,” she said. “That's a good idea. Really creative.”

“That way you not only get these characters off the streets, but you put the broads in the military to good use.”

“Right,” Heather said. “Brilliant.”

“I think about this stuff a lot,” the cabdriver said.

They made slow progress, but she was, to say the least, in no hurry, and the city was clean and almost pretty in the new snow. They turned up Hillside Street, and her aunt's place looked like something on a Christmas card—the tall white house a bit shabby, maybe, but there were the clean new drifts of snow, the driveway flanked by white-frosted pine trees, a wreath on the front door. She gave the driver a nickel tip, and he stared at it and said, “What kind of shit is this?”

She said, “You should be institutionalized.”

“Fuck you,” he said, and sped away.

Her father answered the door wearing white wool pants, plaid socks, and a black turtleneck sweater with a pendant on a chain around his neck. She clung to him for a moment, then kissed his cheek and said, “Wow, Dad, that's a weird outfit.”