Bitter Sweet (3 page)
“There, that’s it.’ Katy straightened and dropped the seat back into place. She turned to Maggie - a pretty young woman with her father’s brown eyes, Maggie’s cleft chin, and a cosmic hairdo appropriate for the cover of a science fiction novel, a look to which her mother had never grown accustomed. Viewing it now, at the hour of parting, Maggie recalled with a pang of nostalgia when it had been downy and she’d combed it in a top curl.
Katy broke the sad silence. ‘Thanks for the peanut-butter muffins, Mom. They’ll taste good around
Spokane
or so.’
‘l put some apples in there, too, and a couple cans of cherry Coke for each of you. Now are you sure you’ve got enough money?’
‘I’ve got everything, Mom.’
‘Remember what I said about speeding on the interstates.’ TII use the cruise control, don’t worry.’ ‘And if you get sleepy -‘
‘Let Smitty drive. I know, Mom.’
I’m so glad she’s going with you, that you’ll be together.’ ‘So am
I.
’ ‘Well...’
The reality of parting crowded in; they had grown so close in the last year, since Phillip’s death.
‘I’d better go,’ Katy said quietly. ‘I told Smitty I’d be at her house at five-thirty sharp.’
‘Yes, you’d better.’
Their eyes met, misty with good-bye, and sorrow created an awesome gulf between them.
‘Oh, Mom...’ Katy dived into her mother’s arms, clinging hard, her blue jeans lost in the folds of Maggie’s long quilted robe. I’m going to miss you. “I miss you, ‘too, honey.” Pressed breast to breast, with the scent of marigolds hanging musty-strong in the air and droplets of moisture plopping off the house roof onto the flower beds below, they exchanged a heartrending goodbye.
‘Thanks for letting me go, and for everything you bought.’
A mere movement of Maggie’s head answered; her throat was too constricted to emit a sound.
‘I hate leaving you here alone.’
“I know.’ Maggie held her daughter fast, feeling the tears - her own? Katy’s? - run in warm trickles down her neck, and Katy dinging hard and rocking her from side to side. ‘I love you, Mom.’ ‘I love you, too.’
‘And I’ll be home for Thanksgiving.’ “I’ll count on that. Be careful, and call really often.’
‘I will, I promise.’
They walked to the car, hip to hip, chins down, idling. “You know, it’s hard to believe you’re the same little girl who threw such a fit when I left her the first day of kindergarten.’ Maggie rubbed Katy’s arm.
Katy gave the obligatory laugh as she slid into the driver’s seat.
I’m going to be one hell of a child psychologist though, ‘cause I understand days like that.”
She looked up at her mother. ‘And days like this.’
Their eyes exchanged a final goodbye.
Katy started the engine, Maggie slammed the door and leaned on it with both hands. The headlights came on, throwing a cone of gold into the dense haze of the wooded yard.
Through the open window, Maggie kissed her daughter’s lips.
‘Keep mellow,’ Katy said.
Maggie gave their familiar all-level sign.
‘Bye,” Katy mouthed.
‘Bye.’ Maggie tried to say, but only her lips moved. The car engine purred a dolorous note as the vehicle backed down the driveway, turned, stopped, changed gears. Then it was gone, the tyres hissing softly on the wet pavement, leaving a last memory of a young girl’s hand waving out the open window.
Left behind in the quiet, Maggie gripped her arms, tilted her head back to its limits and searched for a hint of dawn. The tips of the pines remained invisible against the ebony sky.
Droplets still fell into the marigold bed. She experienced a slight lightheadedness, a queer out-of-body sensation, as if she were Maggie Stearn, but standing apart, watching for her own reaction. To fall apart would mean certain disaster. Instead, she walked around the house, soaking her slippers in the wet grass and collecting scratchy pine needles in the hem of her robe. Heedless of them she moved past trapezoids of incandescence slanting into the yard from the windows of the bathroom, where Katy had taken her last shower, and from the kitchen, where she’d eaten her last breakfast.
I will get through this day. Just this one. And the next will be easier. And the next easier yet.
At the rear of the house she straightened a clump of petunias that had been flattened by the rain; brushed two fallen pinecones off the redwood deck; replaced three pieces of firewood that had tumbled from the tier against the rear garage wall.
The aluminium extension ladder lay on the north side of the garage. You must put that away, It’s been there since you cleaned the pine needles out of the gutters last spring.
What would Phillip say? But she walked on, leaving the ladder where it was.
In the garage her car was parked, a new luxurious Lincoln Town Car, purchased with Phillip’s death money. She passed it, heading up the walk between the marigold borders. On the front step she sat, huddled, wrapped in her own arms, the moisture from the wet concrete seeping through her robe.
Afraid. Lonely. Despairing.
Thinking about Tammi and how loneliness like this had driven her over the edge. Afraid she wouldn’t recognize it if she ever got that bad.
She made it through that first day by going to
She didn’t give a damn about denim or its construction. The prospect of another year of teaching the same thing she’d been teaching for fifteen years seemed as pointless as cooking for one. In the afternoon the house waited, permanently empty, filled with wrenching memories of the place astir with the daily activities of three. She called the hospital to check on Tammi and learned that her condition was still critical.
For supper she fried two slices of French toast and sat down to eat them at the kitchen counter, accompanied by the evening news on a ten-inch TV. In the middle of her meal the phone rang and she leapt to answer it, expecting to hear Katy’s voice saying she was all right and in a motel somewhere near
Butte
,
She slammed down the receiver and stared at it in revulsion, as if its message had been obscene. She spun away angrily, feeling somehow threatened by the fact that the instrument whose ring had often been a source of irritation in the past could now raise her pulse with anticipation.
The remaining half-slice of French toast swam before her eyes. Without bothering to throw it away she wandered into the study and sat in Phillip’s large green leather chair, gripping the arms, pressing her head against its padded back, as he had often sat if she’d had Phillip’s Seahawks sweatshirt, she’d have put it on, but it was gone, so instead she dialled Nelda. The phone rang thirteen times without an answer. Next she tried Diane, but it rang and rang and Maggie finally realized Diane had probably gone up to
Whidbey Island
with her kids. At Claire’s she got an answer, but Claire’s daughter said her mother had gone to a meeting and wouldn’t be back until late.
She hung up and sat staring at the phone with a thumbnail between her teeth.
Cliff? She threw her head back in the chair. Poor Cliff couldn’t resolve his own loss much less help anyone else resolve theirs.
She thought about her mother, but the thought brought a shudder.
Only when all her other possibilities were exhausted did Maggie remember Dr Feldstein’s prescription.
Call old friends, the older the better, friends you’ve lost touch with...
But who?
The answer came as if preordained: Brookie.
The name brought a flash of memory so vivid it seemed as if it had happened only yesterday. She and Glenda Holbrook - both altes - were standing side by side in the front row of the Gibraltar High School Choir, mercilessly aggravating the choir director, Mr. Pruitt, by softly humming an unauthorized note on the final chord of the song, making of an unadulterated C-major, an impertinent, jazzy C-seventh.
...... -..,.... ,vu news, ora, altl’t-a that good newwwwws?
Sometimes Pruitt would let their creativity pass, but more often he’d frown and wag a finger to restore purity to the chord. One time he’d stopped the entire choir and ordered, ‘Holbrook and Pearson, go stand out in the hall and sing your dissonant notes to your hearts’ content.
When you’re ready to sing the music the way it’s written, you can come back in.’
Glenda Holbrook and Maggie Pearson had been first—graders together. They had been stood in the corner for whispering on the second day of school. In the third grade they’d received scoldings from the school principal for breaking off Timothy Ostmeier’s front tooth when a rock was thrown in the middle of an acorn fight, though neither girl would divulge who’d thrown it. In the fifth grade they’d been caught by Miss Hartman during
recess with pointed Dixie Cups inside their blouses. Miss Hartman, a flat-chested, sour-faced spinster with one crossed eye, opened the door of the girls’ lavatory at the very moment
Glenda had said, ‘If we had titties like this we could probably be movie stars!’ In the sixth grade the girls along with Lisa Eidelbach had won praises for singing in three-part harmony, ‘Three White Doves Went Seaward Flying’, for a monthly meting of the PTA. In junior high they had attended Bible Study Class together and had pencilled into their Bible Study books clever, irreverent answers to the questions. In the margins of their health books they’d drawn stupendous male body parts, years before they knew what those parts really looked like.
In senior high they’d been cheerleaders, nursing aching muscles after the first practice of the season, making blue- and-gold pom-poms, riding on pep buses and attending postgame dances in the school gym. They had double- dated, worn each other’s clothes, shared a thousand teenage confidences, and slept at each other’s houses with such regularity that each began keeping a spare toothbrush in the other family’s medicine cabinet.
Brookie and Maggie- friends forever, they’d thought back then.
But Maggie had gone to Northwestern University in Chicago, married an aeronautical engineer and moved to Seattle, while Glenda attended beauty school in Green Bay, married a Door County, Wisconsin, cherry grower, moved out to his farm, bore six - or was it seven?- of his children and had never cut hair in a beauty shop again.
How long had it been since they’d lost touch? For a while after their ten-year class reunion they’d corresponded regularly. Then time bad grown longer between letters, which had dwindled to annual Christmas cards until eventually those, too, had stopped. Maggie had missed their twenty-year reunion, and on her infrequent visits to her parents she and Brookie had always managed to miss bumping into each other.
Call Brookie? And say what? What could they possibly have in common anymore?
Out of mere curiosity, Maggie leaned forward in Phillip’s green chair and selected H on the metal telephone index. The top popped open revealing Phillip’s neat handwriting, done in mechanical lead pencil.
Sure enough, it was still there, under her maiden name: Holbrook, Glenda (Mrs Eugene Kerschner), R.R. ,
Fish Creek
,
On impulse, Maggie picked up the phone and dialled.
Someone answered after the third ring. ‘Hullo?’ A malevoice, young and booming.
‘Is Glenda there?’
‘Ma!’ the voice shouted. ‘It’s for you!’ The phone clunked as if dropped on a wooden surface, and after a brief pause someone picked it up.
‘Hello?’
‘Glenda Kerschner?’
‘Yo!’
Maggie was already smiling. ‘Brookie, is that you?”
......... voice across the line Maggie sensed Brookie’s surprise. ‘Maggie, is that you?’
‘It’s me.’
‘Where are you? Are you in Door? Can you come over?’ “I wish I could but I’m in
Seattle
.’
‘Oh, shit. Just a minute.’ To someone at the other end she shouted, ‘Todd, unplug that damn thing and take it in the other room so I can hear. Sorry, Maggie. Todd is making popcorn here with a bunch of his friends, and you know how loud a pack of boys can be. Gal, how are you?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Are you really, Mag? We heard about your husband dying in that plane crash. The Advocate ran an article, I meant to send you a sympathy card, I even bought one, but somehow the time got away from me and I never got it in the mail. It was cherry season, and you know how crazy things get around here at picking time. Maggie, I’m so sorry about it. I’ve thought of you a thousand times.’