While I Was Gone (24 page)

I didn’t know what to say. I bit my lip.

“Well, I’m touched,” I managed. I reached out and set my hand on his arm. And felt again the thick massiveness of Eli, the unexpected heat. We stood there for moment. He was looking down at me, and I was aware, as I never was with Daniel, of feeling small, of feeling very female. Then I moved my hand away. I turned and began to work again.

He said, “It’s an odd kind of bond, wouldn’t you say? It’s as though we’d committed some kind of crime together.”

“Eli, no!” I cried. I’d stood up straight.

“No, not at all. You mustn’t feel guilty about it. No. It’s as though we’ve endured the death . the death of a friend together. That’s all.”

“I know. I know you’re right.”

I turned away from his gaze. It was too serious, too open for me.

“And we have endured the death of a friend, haven’t we?”

He was standing very close to me, and his voice was deep, intimate.

“I

mean Dana,” he said.

I felt a kind of thrill, the near dizziness you get when someone first speaks of love. I lifted my hand to my throat and swallowed. I said, “I’m so glad to have you speak her name.”

“Sometime it would be good to talk about all that.”

“Yes.” I turned and began to bend and reach over the table again, sliding the last wedges of cheese onto the platter.

“I’ve been feeling… pleased, Jo. I wanted you to know this. That if I had to meet someone from that time again, it should be you.”

Now I looked hard at him.

“Thanks. I think thanks,” I said.

He laughed quickly and stepped back. I picked up one platter, and he followed me in to the living room, carrying the other.

He and Jean left shortly after that. At the door, she promised they’d have us to their house soon—maybe a light supper the next week, before the holiday rush started? Lovely, I said. They turned and waved under the porch light as they started across the snowy yard.

The kids had definitively jacked the music up in the living room by now, and their dancing had gotten wilder, claimed more space.

Finally the adults retreated to the kitchen, those who were left—a familiar core of us, a group that had had babies at the same time, that had traded child care and sat in each other’s yards at summer barbecues until there was no light left, or in one another’s kitchens on winter nights, reluctant to end the evening, to drive home down the empty, snowy roads. We talked now of the town elections, of the scandalous breakup of a friend’s marriage, of the lives and doings of the nearly grown-up children in the next room.

Shortly after midnight, the last two couples left, together. Daniel went into the living room and announced he was cleaning up. Several of the kids helped, and then slowly they began to drift away too.

the music was soft now. As I undressed, I could hear the voices calling good night in the yard, the wbumps of the car doors.

It was around one-thirty when I climbed into bed next to I was thrumming with energy still, wildly alert.

“It was a nice party, wasn’t it?” I said.

“Mmm.”

“I heard a really funny discussion with Mary Ellen and some others about Watergate at one point. Watergate! Can you believe it?” I began to recount it to him. He made no response. I stopped and after a moment said, “You’re not too interested in this, are you?”

“I’m interested, Jo. Tomorrow I’ll be interested. I have to sleep now.”

“I can’t, yet.”

“Get the light, though, will you?” He was frowning, his eyes shut.

I flicked the light off and lay in the dark. My ears were ringing, as though I’d been on an airplane. And indeed I felt that way after the noise and energy of the party, a kind of traveler’s speedy dizziness. I wasn’t ready yet to be Lying here. To sleep. I got up and shut the door as quietly as I could behind me. The murmur of the girls’ voices pulled me through the darkened living room to the kitchen. They were sitting at the table, with the overhead light on. It looked like a painting, framed by the kitchen doors. They laughed as one, the same uplifted faces. Then I saw that Cass was smoking. I resolved to say nothing, though it was a house rule that she shouldn’t inside. But I didn’t want to interrupt what seemed their easy familiarity, I didn’t want to give her a reason to be angry at me tonight.

Nora’s eyes focused on me in the doorway.

“Mumster!” she announced. They all looked over.

“Hey, are you pleased with your party, Mommy?” Sadie asked. She was already in a nightgown. The other two were still dressed.

“Of course. Are you? Did enough good things happen?” I pulled out a chair and sat down with them.

“Umm,” Sadie said.

“I’ll say! I got to dance with Ivan Baloff, the hunkiest hunk of honey here.”

“No way,” said Cass.

“I did too. And not just once. A bunch of times. We were hot.”

“I mean, no way was he the hunkiest hunk.”

“Who was, then?” Sadie asked.

Cass thought for a moment.

“I’d have to vote for Guy Talbot,” she said.

“Guy Talbot?” I cried. This was one of our friends, a real mope.

“But he’s such a gloomy Gus, Cassie. He’s like a character out of Dostoyevsky. He’s always in some kind of agony.” He was handsome, though, I realized that suddenly. Handsome in a way that didn’t matter in the least to me.

“But see, I love that,” Cass said.

“I love tormented guys.”

“Well, you won’t later,” I said. And instantly regretted it. I could feel Cass bristle, her eyebrows arched aristocratically.

“Oh, I think I will,” she said coolly.

“I have earlier, and I think I will later.”

“Oh, how do you know, Cass?” asked Nora. She was smiling at me and Sadie.

“I know,” Cass said. She turned to me.

“See, I’m just not interested in what you and Dad have. In a safe life,” she said.

“In sweetness and light.” She made a fist and brought it down on the table. The glasses and dishes jumped, and she smiled. Her lips were still a deep brown red

“I want things to be hard,” she announced.

“Things will be hard. You don’t have to want them to,” I said.

“Yeah,” Nora said.

“Hard is easy to get. It’s when you want things to be good, when you want all sweetness and light, that you understand what’s really hard.” She was the grown-up, talking to the child.

“Well, if you mean boredom is hard, I’d agree with you there.”

Cass drew fiercely on the last of her cigarette, her cheeks pulling in, and began to crush it in a coffee saucer. She turned her face away slightly to blow her smoke out.

“What are you suggesting, Cass?” Nora said. Her face was flushed.

“That what I wanted with Brian is boring? That Mother’s life with Daddy is boring?”

Cassie’s green eyes flickered from face to face. She nervously pulled another cigarette out of the pack Lying on the table and began to tap it. She shrugged suddenly. She was backing away from the argument.

“It’s just not for me, that’s all.” She sounded infinitely superior.

“No,” Nora said.

“No, you’d rather fuck in the van in some dark alley, with three guys sitting there watching it all.”

There was a long, terrible silence. I could feel Sadie looking quickly from one of us to another.

Finally Cass stood up. She stretched lazily, an unfolding of long bones.

“You should try it sometime, Nora. It adds a certain zing.

It ain’t boring anyway.” She turned at the door and pointed her unlighted cigarette at her twin.

“And by the way, remind me, sweetie, never to confide in you again.”

We heard her shoes clunk across the living room, up the stairs. I looked over at Nora. She looked slapped, white around the eyes. She caught me watching her and turned away quickly. Her chair made a scraping noise as she stood, and two of the sleeping dogs jumped up and swam around her.

“She never changes.” Her voice was trembling.

“I should never have come home.” And she, too, walked out of the room.

For a long moment Sadie and I sat staring at each other.

Her hair was wet and lank with sweat, her makeup had worn off. She looked about ten years old. She raised her eyebrows.

“Zowie!” she said.

Ylkes,” I answered. I put my face in my hands and rubbed my eyes.

“Maybe both those things are true,” I said.

“That Cass will never change and that Nora shouldn’t have come home. Wouldn’t that be awful?”

“Don’t feel bad, Mom. They’ll get over it.” She had a little wine left in her glass, and now she finished it, leaning her head all the way back. I saw the flick of her tongue.

“What were you guys talking about before I so rudely interrupted? ” “Nothing, really. Just the party.” She set the glass down.

“Who was cute, who likes who. Et cetera.”

“The chemistry sure hit the fan when I arrived.”

“Well, it always does,” she said cheerfully, as though reassuring me of something.

“It always does?” I cried.

“Yes, you know that.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, it’s cause they’re both so jealous about you.

That’s my theory anyway.”

“Of me?”

“Duh, Mom. Yes, of you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re so…” She tilted her head, made a face.

“Elusive.

You know, Dad is just always there, the same, steady as a rock and all like that. And you… you’re different.”

“You find me elusive.”

“Well, I don’t, but that’s me. They do. But it’s, like, neither of them can admit it? So they kind of vie for you. Or with each other.

Or something.”

I picked up the saucer with Cassie’s cigarette butts—two of them-and took it over to the trash can. When I came back, I announced, “If I thought I caused their antagonism to each other, I’d kill myself.

If I thought I seemed elusive to my children, I’d kill myself.” I sat down.

Sadie was immune to my histrionics.

“Well, you have to admit you’re secretive.”

“Sadie, I am not! I always tell the truth. You guys can ask me anything.”

“Okay. Fine. How’s this.” She leaned forward.

“You lived with Jean’s husband?”

“Oh! That.”

Sadie laughed, and I did, too, for a few seconds, sheepishly.

“You make me laugh,” she said.

“So I see.”

“Well?”

“Well, that was years ago. Obviously. I was in a group house with him. That’s all. A kind of quasi commune of the sixties.”

“Before you were married?”

“No, I was married then, to Ted. But I’d left him for a while.”

There was a quick puff of exasperated breath, See what I mean?

“I left him twice, actually, poor man.”

“God, Mom!” she protested.

“Well, that first time it was a kind of experiment, when I was in the group house. And then I went back. and then I left him again, for good, because I’d learned something from the experiment. That I couldn’t live with him anymore. But that was when I knew Eli. I was about… I was twenty-two. A little older than your age.”

“But he wasn’t, like, your boyfriend or anything.” Her voice said please don’t tell me that.

“I was married, Sadie. I didn’t let myself have a boyfriend.”

After a moment, she frowned and said, “So when, exactly, did you meet Dad?”

They all knew the part of the story that had me and Daniel meeting at an airport when I was still married to someone else, that had me calling Daniel three years later, when I was divorced. I’d used it too many times when they mooned over boys as adolescents, hoping to be chosen, hoping to be called. The last time, I’d barely begun the tale when Nora said, “Don’t, Mom. We all know,” and she chanted it, “You were the one who picked up the phone and called Dad. ” I told Sadie a longer version now, about my confusion in running away from Ted, about my staying out of touch with him and my mother for all those months, about my return, my leaving again for Maine, my depression, and then my finding my way—to my work, to her father, to the life that brought us here in the middle of a cold New England night, to this room, this table, this story.

I didn’t talk about Dana, though. I’m not sure why.

I saw her face as I was speaking. She was especially in my mind, of course, because of seeing Eli and talking to him at the party, because he’d brought up her name at last. I’d thought of her earlier, too, at the moment when Cass seemed to be suggesting I’d led a boring life. Thought of her and knew I would say nothing. I would not use the drama of Dana’s random, senseless murder to make myself seem more interesting to my difficult daughter.

I think that I was also aware that Sadie might have heard a great deal in the last few days from Cass and Nora about what was hard, as Cass put it, in their lives, and I didn’t feel I needed to add the terrible lesson from my life to all that. So I didn’t speak of Dana, of Dana or her death.

The house was still, the dogs and people were all sound asleep, when Sadie and I stood at the foot of the stairs and said good night, whispering.

“I love talking to you, Mom.” She reached out and hooked my hair behind my ear.

“Do you, Sadie?” I was surprised and moved, by her sweetness, by her willingness to touch me.

“Mmm,” she said.

“And thanks for inviting Jean to the party. That was great.” Then she hoisted her nightie slightly, like a nineteenth century belle lifting her long skirts, and turned, and I watched the bottoms of her grimy white bare feet winking up the ladder like stairs.

IT WAS ABOUT A WEEK AND A HALF LATER THAT DANIEL AND

I went to hear Cass and her band play. She’d hit the road again the Saturday after Thanksgiving, with the last flurry of gigs.

Providence was the closest venue, and we’d promised to show up there.

After we’d found the place and parked, Daniel cut the engine, and we sat silent for a moment. Then he said, “I wonder who it is that books a place like this. How do they even know about them?” The street was empty, littered, completely cheerless. The neighborhood surrounding it was full of triple-deckers with aluminum or asphalt siding. Sodium-vapor light fell on everything with an unhealthy orange glow. Here and there a collapsing porch roof was propped up with long pieces of raw lumber. The plate-glass windows on the storefront next to Al Priest’s, the bar Cassie was playing in, were papered on the inside with long-faded banners reading EVERYTHING MUST GO. BARGAINS GALORE! On the other side was a locksmith shop, and on the corner, a small bodega, closed for the night, with a faint fluorescent light glowing somewhere deep within.