The Violet Hour: A Novel (20 page)

Bewildered, she returned to the kitchen. Finding it empty and her wine right where she’d left it, she took the glass and bottle to the screened-in sunporch, one of the few places in the house where she could still hide as a fully grown adult. She poured another glass and settled into the rattan sofa, stuffing extra, vaguely mildewed cushions behind her back for support. The backyard, where no one had ventured much since Sunday, stretched raw and abandoned before her, the sky the color of a dirty dishrag. On the front porch, she might’ve watched the town go about its business, but watching other people meant being watched. It meant opening herself to whatever Dorothy Chamberlain wanted to say to her, to conversing with whomever was brave enough to give her a few words of encouragement.

She did not want to talk to, or listen to, or be seen by anyone. She wanted the shelter of a backyard and a flat suburban sky: real, American privacy. It still existed in her infinite country. A nation that offered doors to close, and rooms with no one else in them. A nation that needed space, and always found it.

E
LIZABETH STORMED DOWN
the sidewalk until she came to a large intersection dominated by a multiplex theater. A free tabloid newspaper rested on the curb, its ad-filled pages idly flipping in the hot breeze. Beyond it, the marquee announced ten films in tall black letters. The last time she’d been to the movies, Kyle had canceled at the last minute, when she was already on line; his rehearsal was going to run all night. Hurt, she’d bought a ticket anyway—plus popcorn, which she spilled fantastically just as the opening credits began. She’d made a further ruckus trying to scoop up the kernels at her feet, drawing a chorus of indignant shushes from all sides. Eventually, though, she’d settled in, found she rather liked being there by herself. The warm bath of the movie soothed her thin skin, and dampened her irritation with Kyle.

Today again she needed something to distract her, something that would spirit her away from the painful drama of being her parents’ child. In a movie, she’d be unreachable for at least two hours. But then they might start looking for her, combing the streets, while she sat calming herself in the dark, chewing her way through a box of Swedish Fish. She scanned the marquee. None of the movies interested her, anyway. She picked up the newspaper, the lone piece of litter on the otherwise spotless street, and deposited it in the nearest trash can.

In New York, she calmed herself by wandering. She enjoyed ducking into shops, even ones in which she knew she’d never make a purchase. In between, she’d take in the life of the street—the stoop-sitters, the stroller mothers, the skateboarders in backpacks and Chucks. She’d wonder where these people lived, what histories they contained—not only where their ancestors were born but also what operations they’d had, what medical quirks ran in their families. Aside from sleeping, it was the thing she most liked to do when she had a few hours off. More than running. More than talking to her parents or any of her friends, more than talking to anyone at all.

New York. Her stomach fluttered at the thought that she might
soon have to leave. All of her top-choice residency programs were in the five boroughs, yet even so, there were no guarantees. Her record was excellent, but so was everyone’s, and in the end, she’d have to go where the system placed her—or, in the romantic parlance of her field, where she matched. Lately, every chance she got to make a dumb, superstitious wish—fountains full of pennies, fallen eyelashes—she wished she would match in New York.

She came now to a sign staked in the grassy strip in front of a row of plush furniture and carpet showrooms. OPEN HOUSE, it said in large capitals, a bundle of red and white helium balloons waving flirtatiously in the gusts from passing traffic. An arrow affixed to the bottom of the sign pointed her off the main drag, down a residential side street. Small but sufficient lawns came marching up to smooth sidewalks; in the dense leaf cover beyond were porches and gables and crisp college flags.

The open house was beige with white trim, and it completely filled its narrow lot. Flanked on two sides by matching bungalows, it was an obviously new stone-and-siding construction with windows of various shapes and dimensions. She felt a little embarrassed for it, the way it had used every trick in the book to appear as storied and venerable as its more modest neighbors. It sat up high over its green garage, which gave anyone who entered the front door the opportunity to process grandly up a flight of steps that bent at an angle, like the stony elbow of some comfortably middling medieval castle. Still, it wasn’t awful, and through the large picture window in the front, she could see a dark-haired woman in a suit—the agent, she assumed—looking right at her through the blemishless glass. The woman smiled at Elizabeth in a way that could only be construed as friendly and beckoned her inside.

She had no business at an open house, much less an open house in a town where she didn’t live and where she had never and would never dream of moving. But she could see beyond the agent a cavernous, near-empty room painted a neutral tone that glowed a little, like skin, so that you knew it was alive, and on the street around her not
a person in sight to suggest that anyone else would bother her if she went inside for a look.

She climbed, holding the iron handrail and counting the steps as she went. At the top—fourteen—she was met by the agent, who already had the paneled green door open for her to enter.

“Welcome,” she said brightly. Her cheeks were high and cupped, like nutshells, and she wore a bracelet that had been a popular style at some point, made of large, silvery links, either from Tiffany’s or a perfect knock-off. Elizabeth was reminded of countless girls she’d known in college, starting with silly, decorous Jane Donaughey, and she realized how little thought she had given to this diversion. Now she would have to talk to this person. She would have to tell at least a half-dozen lies. She stood with her careless hands behind her back as though trying to hide the bag she hadn’t brought. She hadn’t brought anything, not even keys.

The agent, though, was unsuspicious, and, despite their closeness in age and background—she couldn’t have been much older than thirty—she appeared uninterested in chat. “Feel free to have a look around,” she said. “The fact sheet is on the bookshelf.” She returned to her station in front of the picture window, where she had a little armchair and a celebrity magazine.

Gratefully, Elizabeth took one of the sheets from under a domed glass paperweight. The number at the top was nearly a million. She folded the sheet in half and took it with her like a ticket.

The rooms opened one after another, each with no more than a few pieces of furniture to suggest habitation. Wood floors ran beneath her feet throughout, lighting the way from one room to the next. Upstairs, she found the bedrooms. They had windows with plantation shutters and closets that rolled open on tracks. She could park cars in these rooms. She could nest inside them whole apartments from Manhattan. The largest was at the back of the house, and in the center, under an angled skylight, was a white sheeted queen-size bed, topped with two plump white pillows and a folded beige coverlet, just like in any chain hotel.

It looked awfully comfortable. On her way to the window, she placed her palm on the coverlet, testing the firmness of the mattress. Her detour here was not a total lie. She might buy a house one day—she might buy anything one day—and surely she couldn’t be expected to buy a house without first imagining how it would feel to live in it.

She’d share the house, of course. It was too much for one person, even a person who liked to be alone. So there would have to be a husband, and possibly a few children, though the latter were still difficult to envision. A husband was easier: tall, respected, assured. A vigorous athlete who knew things about the world but never made her feel stupid. She sat in the window seat and looked at the little patch of grass out back, a patch she imagined he’d know how to mow. Would he be white? Probably. Most of the people in her life were white. Even her dad was, basically. Few people looked at him and thought otherwise.

She looked back at the pristine bed. Would her husband make it regularly, or would that be their constant quarrel, that because she cared more about well-tucked sheets, she had to be the one who tucked them? She tried to imagine waking up here. Would her husband be an early riser, already brewing coffee in the dark downstairs, or would he be more like Kyle, up late on the other side of darkness, glowing, gaining strength and momentum as everyone else dropped off?

Kyle.

It was the first she’d thought of him. She looked around. She couldn’t imagine him here. She couldn’t imagine herself here, not really, but she couldn’t imagine him at all. At the moment, she was having trouble even picturing his face. Elizabeth the future doctor; Kyle the future—what? Was he really going to get that TV show, suddenly make it at twenty-nine? All of a sudden she felt certain they were headed nowhere together, a pair of mismatched carousel animals spinning around and around. She the standard, purposeful horse, he the extravagant lion. It wasn’t the first time she’d had doubts. She recalled, early on, watching him play a soldier in
Coriolanus,
a role that showcased his wide stance, his muscles on a machine gun, and little else. As he jogged onstage with theatrical
importance, she was struck by the searing notion that he was trying to be an artist and she was trying to be a doctor, just like her parents. Her mouth grew dry at the obvious parallel and she found herself rushing to the lobby at intermission, determined to beat the crowd to the water fountain. Of course, everyone else wanted the bathroom or the bar, so she was able to take her time, glugging swallow after swallow as the cool water plastered her lips, and a tiny distortion of herself regarded her from the base of the brushed metal head. Since then, she’d found ways of dismissing the fear. She was much more forgiving than her dad, and Kyle was much less needy than her mom. They certainly hadn’t married in a rush. It was important to her not to be traumatized by her parents’ separation, not to have hang-ups or types she just wouldn’t date. But it was also important not to make their same dumb mistakes.

So what could you do? You had to test things out. You had to tour the house, try the life.

And really, she wondered as she moved away from the window, why not? She still had no idea what kind of person she would be. She slipped off her sandals and reclined on the bed. It felt normal, as normal as trying on a cocktail dress before buying it. She imagined Kyle beside her, breathing heavily. Above her, the skylight framed a blank sheet of atmosphere that she could color however she liked. Downstairs, she heard the ring of a cell phone followed by the agent’s upbeat voice. She was a nurturing person, this agent; she was reassuring someone of something. Elizabeth freed her hair from under her shoulders and gently closed her eyes.

Soon she began to feel light, buoyed by an unseen force. A quiet raged as it rages underwater, thick and active and endless in her ears. She was at sea. Her hair stretched outward to infinity, lashed by currents in the water’s surface while her body rocked gently beneath. She felt a warmth on her shoulder where a handsome male was pressed. They had to get out of there, he told her, but when she failed to do or say anything in response, he raised an arm and paddled off. She wished for a moment that he would come back, but it was a halfhearted wish
at best. His back shrank into the waves, leaving her alone and feeling magnificent, far away from even herself.

Voices crackled somewhere. She looked toward land, where the people calling to her were no bigger than periods, punctuating the shore. There was grass on the shore, a slather of green on top of beige. A grass-and-sand sandwich on two generous slices of blue.

The voices again. She turned and kicked, pushing toward land. Now she was deeper in the bay, looking up at an approaching ship. Now she had made it to the grass, looking up at a house’s wood frame.

“Master bedroom,” said one of the voices.

Three faces peered down quizzically. She blinked, not understanding where she was. She was her grandpa, flat on his back in the grass. Neck snapped, paralyzed; the irrevocable ribbon of blood.

“I can’t move my legs,” she said, panicked.

“What?” This was the agent, the nurturing woman with the patrician face. She was pressing her lips into blades. Next to her was a middle-aged couple, he in wire-rimmed glasses fencing a field of doctorly gray, she in highlights and bangles, a brown leather notepad under her arm. They looked torn between concern and accusation, like parents in a hospital room.

Elizabeth sprang from the bed. “I’m sorry!” she blurted. “I must really need some coffee!”

“Oh, don’t worry,” the agent said in her hospitable way.

“That skylight!” Elizabeth gushed, to make up for it. She was hopping on one foot, pulling her sandal back over her heel. “Thank you for letting me look around. It’s such a lovely space.” The couple was conferring in the corner, not even waiting for her to clear out. Already they were counting outlets, deciding which walls to knock down. She fled the room, hating them, hating herself.

“Thanks for stopping in!” the agent called as Elizabeth clambered down the stairs, one sandal still half unstrapped.

Back on the sidewalk, she hefted her foot onto a nearby bumper just long enough to secure the buckle, then took off again, dodging the remnants of her dream. She tumbled from the shady block into
near-blindness on the main thoroughfare, whitewashed and steamy in heavy afternoon sun. She took a hasty survey as her eyes adjusted: there were the carpet stores, the glassy banks, and at the next corner a familiar disk that soon revealed itself to be green. Starbucks.

A middle-aged dad in board shorts and Birkenstocks stood by the concrete planter at the entrance, his tanned arms lassoing the shoulders of a boy and a girl doing noisy, openmouthed battle with their rapidly slumping soft-serve cones. She stared at him, trying to understand why she’d been so embarrassed on the bed. She was never going to see that agent or that conniving couple again. So what? she asked herself. So what so what so what? The dad caught her eye and grinned as if to suggest she might want to chill out. Fuming, she flounced past him.