Up Island (2 page)

8 / Anne Rivers Siddons

Coach handbag, nothing trendy or with initials on it that were not mine. All my totems were in order. But my heart was banging in slow, cold, breath-sucking beats.

My chastely Cliniqued mouth smiled wider.

I was nearly down to the entrance to Colonial Homes Drive, where for decades all the singles in my set lived until marriage and the move to Collier Hills on the way to Habersham Road or Ansley Park, when I heard a voice I knew shouting at me from the eddy of traffic.

Livvy Bowen was calling to me from her dirty old Saab, stopped beside me at a red light.

“Where on earth are you going?” she yelled in her not unpleasant New England honk. Livvy came south for the first time from a Boston suburb ten years before, when her husband, Caleb, was transferred to Coke headquarters to work on Tee’s marketing team. Caleb was Harvard and Livvy was Radcliffe, and Atlanta was a thick stew of culture shock for both. Caleb had read the handwriting on the corporate walls and adjusted fast; Livvy never had. She hated the South in general, Atlanta in particular, liked Tee all right, and for some reason loved me. She had instantly, as I had her. Something in her raw bones and narrow, unmade-up face and acid tongue spoke to what my mother called the damnyankee in me. Mother spoke allegorically, of course; my parents were both Southern, back to their families’ arrivals from England and Ireland, and that was more than two hundred years ago.

I knew what my mother meant, though, and so, apparently, did Livvy. In her mouth, “damnyankee” was not a pejorative term.

“You’re the only woman I know below the UP ISLAND / 9

Mason-Dixon line who doesn’t run by Saks on her way to the grocery store,” she said in the early days of our friendship,

“and the only one who doesn’t own a Judith Leiber bag. Do you even know what a Judith Leiber bag is?”

I didn’t then, and can’t remember now.

I said nothing on this morning, only smiled brilliantly at her. I couldn’t think where to put her in this teetering new scheme of things.

“You’ve got on lipstick and panty hose,” she said and grinned, gunning the hideous Saab’s engine. “Who’s died?”

I continued to smile. “Hi, Livvy,” I ventured as the light changed. She did not move the Saab forward. Behind her, horns began to blow.

She stared at me for another moment and then said, “Get in the car.”

“Livvy—”

“I’m not moving till you get in this car,” she said, with the iron of old Massachusetts money in her voice. The chorus of horns swelled. I got into the car and slammed the door and she screeched away up Peachtree Street.

We did not speak again until she swerved into the fake fifties diner that newly occupied an old car wash and stopped.

“Where’s your car?” she said. “Where have you been?

What’s the matter with you? You’ve got red blotches all over your neck and chest.”

“I’ve been to the doctor,” I said in my grandmother Bell’s dreadful, sunny voice. “I’ve got some kind of allergy; it’s nothing. Charlie Davies gave me some stuff for it. My car…my car…” I looked down at my blossoming chest; my backside was indeed colonizing

10 / Anne Rivers Siddons

new flesh. I smiled at Livvy. Even I knew it was what Tee calls a shit-eating grin; I could taste it on my mouth.

“I guess I left my car in the parking lot at Charlie’s.”

“Uh-huh. And you were going where?”

A little lick of annoyance managed to penetrate the smog of Bell denial.

“Who are you, Joseph Mengele? ‘Vee haff ways to make you talk.’ I was going home, of course; where do you think I was going?”

She just looked at me. My face flamed and my chest burst into a Flanders Field of red; I could feel it. I lived in Ansley Park, in the opposite direction of the way I had been walking, and had for nearly twenty years. I had been making for my parents’ old home, the one I had grown up in, on Peachtree Hills Avenue. They had not lived there for the past five years, but in a condominium behind St. Philips Episcopal Cathedral in Buckhead.

I knew that Livvy knew that. I put my face in my hands and began to cry.

“Tee is having an affair,” I sobbed. “I just found out. I don’t know what to do about the family.”

Livvy and Caleb live in a sprawling brick house in Brookwood Hills, a leafy old family enclave across from Piedmont Hospital and its attendant doctors’ buildings. I have always loved that neighborhood. I wanted to look there when we were finally able to leave the Collier Hills starter house, but Tee felt Ansley Park had a more international feeling to it, and that was the direction Coke was going in. Many of the new transferees were buying and gentrifying the old town houses there, and besides, you could walk to the UP ISLAND / 11

Piedmont Driving Club. Tee’s family had always belonged.

Mine had never even been to a wedding reception there. So we found and remodeled our own tall town house with a tiny walled garden. I liked it, and had sunk a few roots and had raised my children there, but it never felt like Atlanta to me. “You can’t just walk down the street on a spring evening in Ansley Park,” I told Livvy once. “You have to have the right kind of suit. A jogging suit, or a cycling suit, or a Rollerblading suit, or a dog-walking suit…and the right kind of dog, of course. Lazarus definitely does not cut it in AP.

I’m thinking of renting a dalmatian just to walk it.”

“I’d be thinking of moving,” Livvy snapped. “A dalmatian would be laughed out of Brookwood Hills.”

We skidded through traffic and she hung a heart-stopping left across two lanes; we were in her sunny kitchen with cups of coffee before I could stop the treacherous sobs. I could not even remember the last time I had cried.

“Tell,” she said, handing me a hot washcloth, and I mopped my face and told.

When I stopped talking, she snorted and said, “That’s just shit, Molly. Tee’s not having any affair. In the first place, you-all are joined at the hip. In the second place, when would he? Caleb’s out with him when he’s traveling; don’t you think I’d know if Tee wasn’t where…he said he was? Some doctor you’ve got. Some friend, too.”

“Charlie
saw
him, Livvy—”

“Excuse me, pet, but how does Charlie know it was Tee?

Every man in Atlanta in a certain class and age group looks just like Tee. Most of them work for Coke.”

12 / Anne Rivers Siddons

I had to smile, even through the thready galloping of my heart, because she was right, or partly. There is a type of wellborn Atlanta man who looks enough like Tee to be his kin, and may be: tall, lanky, blond-going-gray, hands jammed in pockets, with the shambling gait of the college athlete most of them were. Tee was the starting forward on UGA’s basketball team the year we graduated and the team won the SEC

championship; he still had the loose-jointed, pigeon-toed lope that went with the position. His hair was short now and gilded with gray, and fell over his forehead, and there were fine wrinkles at the corners of his blue eyes, but he was still snub-nosed and thin to the point of boniness, and his grin still charmed and warmed. We had been a stunning couple in college, a study in opposites but of nearly matched height, and we had known it then. I had long since forgotten. I wondered if Tee had.

“Charlie was Tee’s roommate for four years,” I said. “He’d know him if he saw him. He thought the girl—the woman—was Caroline. So she must be tall and dark and very young. And pretty, of course. Caroline is a very pretty girl.”

“Crap. If the guy was hidden behind a palm tree, how could this wonderful Charlie be sure? It’s not like you to jump to this kind of silly conclusion, Molly. You’ve never had any reason to doubt Tee’s faithfulness…have you?”

“No,” I said, and knew that it was true, knew it with the same baseless interior certainty with which I had known the truth of Charlie’s words this morning. Tee had not strayed before this.

“If he was going to, don’t you think he’d pick a better time?” Livvy said. “He’s traveling with a team UP ISLAND / 13

of nine people. He’s almost never in the same city two nights in a row. He’s in meetings from breakfast until midnight.

Unless she’s a stewardess with a key to the rest room, Tee’s not banging anybody but you. And he’s
sure
not doing it in those particular condos. Half of Coke lives there.”

“But I’ve had this breaking out since Christmas, and that’s when he started traveling…it’s gotten really bad. It’s like my body knew something that my head didn’t, yet. I feel so damned sure, Livvy…and Charlie said stress could do that to you.”

“So can poison ivy. So can whatever you wash your underwear in. I think you’ve slipped a cog. What could Tee possibly want that you don’t give him?”

“I’ve gained a lot of weight,” I said in a low voice. “I don’t think about it much, but I know I have. I don’t take the pains with myself that I used to. You should have seen me in college, Liv. I was homecoming queen my junior year. Tee and I…we were something to see together.”

“You still are,” she said. “Don’t you know people turn around on the street to look at you? You look glorious. You look like an Amazon princess, or like…like…”

“If you say Moonbeam McSwine, I’ll throttle you,” I said, beginning to grin in spite of myself. Some of the cold weight had lifted off my chest. The fire in my fanny and neck was cooling.

“That, too,” Livvy said, and reached over and put her hands over mine. Hers were warm. I realized only then that despite the day’s sullen heat, I was as cold as ice, as death.

“Listen,” she said. “I don’t for a minute think you’ve got anything to worry about, and if you look at
14 / Anne Rivers Siddons

it rationally, you’ll see that I’m right. But Moll…what if, just what
if,
there was somebody else? What would it mean to you, what would you do?”

I stared at her. What would it mean? Why…the end of everything. The end of the family. God, the family…why didn’t she see?

“What do you think it would mean?” I said. “What would it mean to you? If it was Caleb, I mean?”

She shrugged. “Depends. On whether it was serious or a fling or some kind of silly midlife thing. Depends on how sorry he was.”

She smiled. Her long Back Bay teeth were the color of rich old ivory. No anxious cosmetic bonding or bleaching for Olivia Carrington Bowen; even loving Carrie Davies, who knew how close I was to Livvy, had said once that Livvy looked like a horse.

“But the thoroughest of thoroughbreds,” I’d rejoined shortly. Carrie had snorted, sounding herself like a horse. I knew that she did not approve of Livvy’s and my friendship.

“She’s not like us, Moll,” Carrie had said. “She won’t ever be. She doesn’t even try.”

“And that’s why I like her,” I snapped, hoping to put an end to the subject. And I had. My old crowd did not espouse Livvy Bowen, but in my presence they no longer denigrated her, either.

“And what would you do?”

“I’d snatch him baldheaded, and then her,” Livvy said. “I’d give him two hours to wind it up quietly, and if he didn’t, I’d tell Coke he couldn’t keep it zipped, and tell her he had a penile implant. And if he still wouldn’t, I’d throw his stuff out the door and change the locks and hire the meanest lawyer this side of the Mississippi River.”

UP ISLAND / 15

She looked at me with only a half smile. I thought that she was not altogether kidding.

“What about Dana and Elizabeth?” I said, thinking of Livvy and Caleb’s two daughters, both in college in the East. “What about the family?”

“Dana and Elizabeth are neither one coming back home after school,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve always known that. Much as I love them, they aren’t going to be a big factor in my future. They’d have to make their own separate peaces with it. Molly, that’s the third time you’ve said ‘the family.’

Not ‘my family,’ but ‘
the
family.’ What is it with you and

‘the family’? It’s like you mean some kind of idea, instead of your own people…”

The family. The family…

When my mother married my father, she was twenty-one years old and an actress and dancer, or at least aspiring to be one. She was, he said once, as lovely as a silver minnow in a creek. Her name was Mary Belinda Fallon, but she called herself Belle Fallon professionally. She had had unpaid parts in a number of local theatrical productions and one badly paid part in the chorus of a touring company of
Lilli
at Chastain Amphitheatre in Buckhead, and was scheduled for a far better speaking and dancing role in the next year’s touring production of
West Side Story.
Her blue-black hair and milky skin had caught the eye of more than one regional producer; she had reason to think she could go as far as her lithe legs and low, purring voice could take her. But then she met and married Timothy Bell, and since she could not be billed as Belle Bell, took the fatuous stage name Tinker Bell.

It

16 / Anne Rivers Siddons

was Dad’s nickname for her; he’d called her Tinker from the day he’d met her. She was as erratic and glinting and shining and ethereal as the frail, jealous sprite in
Peter Pan,
and she might well have gone on to make a name for herself on the stage, for she had, in addition to her looks and a middling talent, enormous presence. Even at home she had it, even at rest. I really think she was born with it.

But she was pregnant when she married Daddy, and by the time I was born, a giant of a baby according to her—a wrecker of pelvises and stomach muscles—her trajectory was broken, and she climbed into no more rarefied air than that of local theatrical productions and later, acting and dancing lessons. My poor mother: the heart of a gypsy, the soul of a prowling tiger, forever trapped in local productions of
Showboat
and
Auntie Mame,
and once, with notable success,
Hedda Gabler.
It was a bitter loss to her, and perhaps worse for the rest of us. It was catastrophic for me. She never ceased blaming me for it.

Oh, she never would admit that she did that, and in all fairness, probably did not know it. I certainly did not. I knew only that something about my size, my very person, was unseemly and worse: damaging. Dangerous. I can remember trying to fold myself into a smaller shape when I was no more than four, and slouching like a little old osteoporosis victim when my real spurt of growth started, at nine or ten. By twelve I was five feet eleven inches, within a hair of what I am now, and felt as unclean as a leper. Of us all in the smallish house on Peachtree Hills Avenue—my mother, my father, my granny Bell, my brother, Kevin, and me—only my father seemed to know what Tinker Bell was about with her little jeweled barbs flung