Circle of Three (6 page)

“Would you ever get married again?”

We both stared straight ahead at the TV. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t think so, I doubt it. I can’t imagine it.”

“What if you fell in love with somebody? You’re not that old.”

She made a face. “I feel old.”

“No, but in ten years you could meet some guy and fall in love all over again. You could. It’s possible.”

She pulled her knees up under her nightgown, dropped her head, and ran her fingers through her hair, messing it up.

“I’m just saying it’s possible,” I said, touching her on the foot. She had on a pair of Dad’s old woolly socks. She never used to wear his clothes like this when he was alive. “Right? You can’t be sad forever. Nobody is, except in books. People start up again, they go on.” I had been studying this, noticing. “Sonny Bono’s wife started dating like nine months after he died. Remember? And after Diana’s wreck, the princes went to parties and stuff, they showed pictures of them laughing and looking happy, and you’d never have thought they could do that from the way they were at the funeral. Remember?”

“Yep.” She put her arm around me. I burrowed against her, liking her warmth and her flannel smell, even her dirty hair smell. “Tell me about your day.”

“I already did. Oh, we saw a movie in World Cultures. It was on the Scottish Highlands, which are incredibly cold and barren, but really really beautiful, and they have more sheep there than people. I was thinking how cool it would be to live there.”

“Why? If it’s cold and bleak and nobody lives there.”

“Because, it just would be. Nothing could happen to you because nobody would even know you were there. And the rent would be cheap.”

In fact, I fell asleep tonight thinking about what it would be like to live in a stone cottage with a thatched roof on a hillside all by myself, just a black and white collie for company. I could be either a writer or a painter. People would
talk about me, that American girl who lives alone and doesn’t speak to anyone. They’d observe me walking along the cliffs with my dog and the wind blowing out my hair and my black cape. “How lonely she must be,” the natives would say, seeing my solitary figure. I’d have a walking stick. I’d speak with a hint of a brogue. Then a handsome, older man would move into the cottage on the neighboring cliff. He too would be an artist, but a tortured, unsuccessful one. I would become his muse. Because of me he would regain his ability to write haunting poetry. Together we would win the Pulitzer Prize, and in our acceptance speech he’d say that without me he would be nothing. We’d get a lot of money and live on the barren heath forever.

“I can’t wait for my new job to start,” I said. “When does yours?”

“Next week. Monday morning.”

“So you better start getting ready, huh? Going to bed at eleven or so. Right? So you can get up in the morning.” I gave her pantyhose and perfume for Christmas, and also a new digital alarm clock, so she’s got no excuses.

“Good idea,” she said.

“Mine starts tomorrow.” It would’ve started sooner, but I had to get a work permit because I’m not sixteen.

“I know.”

“It’s so totally cool, Mom, it really is.” She nodded and smiled, but she wasn’t thrilled about it. But that was because she didn’t get it; once she met Krystal and checked out the Mother Earth Palace and all the stuff there, she’d be cool with it. Who wouldn’t? Caitlin was like, “Oh, wow, that is so weird,” but in a good way, and Raven totally gets it, totally thinks it’s an excellent choice. First thing, I have to look up sore throat in one of Krystal’s books, because I’ve had one for two days. Low-grade and not bad enough to stay home, but this is how a lot of things start, including esophageal cancer. But it’s probably not that. It’s probably, like, a cold.

“So what are you going to wear on your first day?”

Mom laughed. “I have absolutely no idea. You think I’ll have to get dressed up?”

“Just show your legs a lot, he’ll like that. Mr.
Wright
.”

“Ruth, what is this with you? Why don’t you like Brian?”

“I just don’t.”

“But why?”

“He’s a jerk. Do you like the way he looks at you?”

“The way he looks at me?”

“The way he does everything.”

She shook her head, like I was speaking in some other language besides English. “Honey—Brian’s okay, he’s just a guy. He’ll make a good boss but nothing else, you know? Know what I’m sayin’?” she tried for a joke. I hunched my shoulder and put it between our faces. “Listen,” she said. “It’s important for you to know that I’m not—playing the field or anything.”

“Gee, Mom, you sure know some hip lingo.”

“I’m just telling you, I’m not available. Nobody is taking your father’s place. Nothing’s going to change.”

“Right.”

“Is that agreement or sarcasm?”

“Did you know him before Dad died?”

“Yes, of course. Not well. We’d run into him at college functions.”

“What was he like then?”

“He was fine—what do you mean?”

“Didn’t you see his eyes that night at dinner? And before, when you were having drinks, how he swooped down on you?”

“Ruth, really—what are you talking about? Brian’s friendly, he’s personable, he likes people. He stands close when he talks to you, he—touches you sometimes, just to make contact. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s probably why he’s good at his job, it’s just the kind of person he is.”

“Right. Like Bill Clinton.” She laughed, so I laughed, too. I wanted to get off this subject anyway. “Where is the Other
School, anyway?” I said. “If it’s near the Mother Earth, we could go home together after work sometimes.”

“Well, except I’ll probably be finishing up about the time you’re just starting.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Too bad.”

She gave me a hug. I didn’t know why until I figured out that she thought it was cool that I wanted to go home from work with her. She’s so easy sometimes. “Listen, you,” she said. “I am going to take your advice and clean up my act, start going to bed early, getting in shape. But you know that I’m really all right, don’t you? You get that?”

“Sure,” I said, “I know.”

“
Really
all right. So don’t worry about me.”

“Okay. And you don’t worry about me.”

“No deal, I’m your mother, I get to do that full-time.”

“Seriously, Mom, because I’m fine, too.”

“I know you are.”

“I
am
.”

“I know.”

Well, somebody was lying. I wondered if she knew it was both of us, and if she thought I believed her, and if she believed me. It didn’t matter that much, though, not while we were huddled up together on the couch, her with her arms wound around my arm, me with my head on her shoulder. Watching Bob Dornan walk down a fancy staircase and explain why
Elephant Walk
was a classic and what Elizabeth Taylor was doing when they made it. Right here under Gram’s soft blanket, we were safe. We had each other, we practically
were
each other, and it was like we were full. For tonight.

A
T EIGHTEEN, I
was thrilled to leave Clayborne for the big city—Washington, D.C. I went to school there, met Stephen, married, moved to Chicago, had Ruth. I thought I was through with small towns, and certainly through with the south. I never reckoned on Stephen’s pleasant liberal arts college denying him tenure, a turn of fortune that effectively rendered him unemployable for any position his pride would let him accept. Except at Remington College, and there only because my father pulled strings.

When we moved back to Clayborne three years ago, I was filled with misgivings. Dread, make that. The things that drove me wild about my hometown were still there, and most of them could be summed up in the word
small
. But something happened to me during my twenty-year self-exile. Smallness didn’t oppress me anymore—now I could even see advantages. Old age, I suppose.

It wasn’t as if
nothing
had changed in Clayborne—shopping malls full of the usual chain stores had sprouted up where pretty farms used to be; we had new glass and metal office buildings, a few gentrified, brick-paved, gaslight-lined streets downtown where cars weren’t allowed. The Leap River had a new four-lane bridge across it, and a “fitness trail” where the old towpath used to be. But the old college
hot spots were in the same wooden two-story buildings on Remington Avenue they’d been in when I was a teenager; only the names had changed. Remington students wore different clothes, different hairstyles, but their faces still looked harried, carefree, snotty, scared, drugged out—same as they did in the sixties and the seventies. And the college still gave Clayborne whatever thin veneer of culture and sophistication it had. Without it, we’d have been just another sleepy Piedmont farm village with tenuous ties to the Confederacy and funky architecture. With it, we were a poor man’s Charlottesville. A wannabe Chapel Hill.

My family always disdained the local paper, the
Morning Record
. Pop wouldn’t read anything but the
New York Times
or, for slumming, the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
; Stephen didn’t even know the
Morning Record
existed. But I liked it. When I was in town, I picked up a copy and read it with as much guilty pleasure as if it were the
National Enquirer
, which it certainly was not. At the
Record
, everything was newsworthy, the school lunch menus, hospital admissions by name—but not ailment, fortunately—minutes of meetings of the zoning board and the PTA, the record of deeds and transfers—they printed how much you paid for your house, how much you got for your farm. Fascinating reading. My favorite section was the police blotter, because there was hardly any crime—teen vandalism, some DUI’s, a lot of college drunkenness, the tantalizing “lewd conduct,” which usually turned out to be peeing in public. That was about it. “Hit and Run” meant somebody had banged into a mailbox and kept going. The commonest headline for traffic accidents was “No One Hurt.”

After Chicago, it was like Oz. When I was a young girl the sleepiness of my town made me crazy, but now I liked it. And it wasn’t
altogether
that middle age had turned me into a fossil, as my daughter claimed. It was also Ruth herself. Bad things could still happen—I knew that, I wasn’t blind—but they weren’t as likely. Simple as that. Here in Clayborne, Virginia, the law of dreadful probabilities was in my child’s
favor. Proximity to my mother, I often had to remind myself, was a small price to pay for peace of mind.

“Look, there’s my first boyfriend,” I said to Modean, my neighbor, on a chilly, sunny, Sunday afternoon in the middle of January. We were sitting on a bench in Monroe Square, Clayborne’s town center, and I was stalling, thinking of things to say so she wouldn’t get up and make me start jogging again.

“Where?” She squinted her kind, nearsighted eyes, looking out across the concrete and grass at the mothers pushing baby strollers, the jostling students, the old men playing checkers. I pointed. “Oh,
him
. Mm, very handsome.”

The Confederate Soldier had been standing in the center of Monroe Square since 1878—the plaque said so. He wasn’t famous for anything in particular; Clayborne had sent plenty of sons off to the War between the States but, except for dying, none of them had done anything spectacular. He wasn’t even on horseback; he was just a regular soldier, rifle over his left shoulder, right leg jutting out as he strode boldly north, toward trouble. “Such a crush I had on him. I even named him,” I confessed to Modean.

“What?”

“Beauregard Rourke. Beau to me.” Modean snickered. “I used to coast my bike around and around him and make up dreamy stories.”

“Like?”

“Like…I was a beautiful spy from Philadelphia and he was my secret contact. And clandestine lover.”

“How romantic.”

“Already I’d figured out the beauty of a bronze boyfriend is that he has to be anything you want, and he can’t change.”

Modean said, “Carrie, how was your Christmas?” She’d asked me that question yesterday, when she and Dave got back from three weeks in Atlanta, where his folks live, and I’d said, “Fine! It went well, really, much better than I expected.”

But now I told her the truth. “It was sad,” I said, leaning
over to rub a sore place on my heel through my sneaker. “Ruth was so sweet. She did everything she could think of to cheer me up. I did the same for her, so by one o’clock we were both exhausted and we hadn’t even gone to my mother’s yet.”

“How was that?”

“Okay. Same as always, pretty much. My cousins were there, and Aunt Fan, my father’s sister. You know my mother always takes over at things like that, the big family occasions. It’s her show. Stephen—well, he tended to recede as much as he could. That was just how he coped.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I know he was quiet in groups. Shy.”

Shy? That was one way to look at it. “Well, he wasn’t much of a participant in family events,” I said. “He observed. If anything. I did the work and Stephen…attended.”

“Oh, well. That’s just how men are.”

“Oh, I know,” I said quickly, “they’re all like that.”

Modean, who saw nothing but good in everyone, was the last person in the world I could complain to about Stephen. Not that I wanted to complain about him. But I wanted to explain to someone why I hadn’t missed him terribly over the holidays. I wanted to tell Modean how he could make himself invisible. He did his duty—strung the lights, wrote checks, bought the booze if we were having a party—then he disappeared. It was the same every year, and eventually I got used to doing everything myself. How could I miss him at my mother’s house on Christmas day? His absence was noticeable, but not remarkable. Without him, Mama’s show really did go on.

“We had an okay time in Atlanta,” Modean was telling me. “Dave’s dad has a drinking problem, I think I told you, but he stayed on good behavior because of the baby. But there was always that tension, you know, and not knowing. I worried a lot about Dave because he was worrying a lot about his father. So mostly I guess everybody just worried.”

Modean was the most perfect friend I’d ever had. She was kindhearted, happy, simple, direct, and together. I’d given up
my cynical search for the crack—the secret drinking, the sudden religious proselytizing, the kleptomania. It wasn’t there, and she was a paragon, with the saving grace of a sense of humor. Dave was a tall, reedy guy with bushy gray hair and a perpetually startled look, as if he couldn’t believe the amazing turn his luck had taken. He was older, widowed for about fifteen years when he found Modean. And Harry was the perfect baby for these perfect parents. I considered it a point in my favor that I had never, even at my lowest, most miserable, self-pitying point, hated the lot of them.

Forcing me, with Ruth’s complicity, to go jogging with her was the first mean thing Modean had ever done to me. “You need to get strong, Carrie, you have to build yourself back up. How do you expect to start working eight-hour days? You’ll collapse at that office before lunchtime.” All true, but I still hated it. When I was in better shape—before Stephen died—I used to jog with him every once in a while, but it never worked out very well. I only did it for the chance to spend time with him, and he preferred to run alone. Cross-purposes.

“Ready to go?” Modean jumped up and started doing stretching exercises. I mimicked her halfheartedly, stiff as a plank. She was ten years younger than me, but even at her age I was never that fit. She was small but strong, with frizzy blonde hair and fair skin, and blue eyes with blonde lashes. She looked like a baby bird. “Okay?” she said, and took off. I followed creakily. It was only eleven blocks from the square to our street, and she regularly ran ten times that without breaking a sweat. I was panting before we hit Jefferson Street.

“So are you all set for work?” She slowed for me, practically running in place. “What are you going to wear tomorrow?”

“Oh, gosh,” I wheezed, “I don’t know—there’s only one other employee besides Brian—a woman—I think it’s pretty casual.”

“A pantsuit, maybe.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Heels?”

“For the first day.”

“Yeah.” She paused, thinking she was letting me catch my breath. “I have a new jacket. Got it in Atlanta. I think it would fit you, and it would be terrific with black slacks. It’s just right for now, and it’s really office-y. I don’t even know why I got it, except that I liked it. You could wear it—you could even have it if you think it looks good. Because I really can’t imagine where I’m going to wear it.”

The only problem with Modean was that she was too good. I’d never had a friend with no edge or shadow at all, no dark spot, some pettiness, a flair for sarcasm,
something
. I was usually the good one—comparatively speaking—in my relationships with women, the one who gasped, “Oh, that’s
terrible
,” while stifling guilty laughter over the other’s wicked observation or unkind gibe. But with Modean, I was the bad one. I worried that I wasn’t up to it, that eventually we’d bore each other to death and drift apart. Well, I hoped not. Because I liked her so much.

The Other School was a two-room storefront on the north side, the rundown side, of Virginia Street. Its neighbor on the left was Dr. Jawaharlal, the chiropractor, and on the right, the Cobra Tae Kwon Do. Across the street the streaky show-room window of Coyle’s Appliances was plastered with yellow, peeling, three-year-old
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS
signs. Clayborne didn’t have a real slum or ghetto, at least not one compacted into a single small, identifiable section of town. If it had a disadvantaged commercial district, though, North Virginia Street was its epicenter.

“Well, hi!” Christine Fledergast said after I told her who I was. She jumped up from a desk behind a waist-high Formica counter that stretched the width of the narrow front room of the Other School. Behind her, a dark doorway opened to another office—Brian’s, I assumed. Christine
came around the counter with one arm stretched out, big smile of welcome on her long, exceptionally plain face. She was at least six feet tall, lanky and rawboned, with coarse blonde hair cut short and spiky; not fashionably spiky, more as if she’d cut it herself. “Hey, how are you, it’s great to meet you! Brian’s out of town—did he tell you?—he won’t be back till tomorrow, so it’s just going to be me showing you the ropes today—sorry about that. He’ll tell you all the important stuff tomorrow.”

Modest self-effacement, I’d find out soon, was typical of Chris Fledergast. By lunchtime I’d figured out who ran the office, and it wasn’t Brian. If he needed somebody “bright” who could make decisions, she was right here. The miracle was that she didn’t seem to resent me, even though I was going to be, in effect, her supervisor. But how could she not? She’d been Brian’s right hand for three years. All my puny work background was in academia, the
fringes
of academia, miles away from a growing, dynamic place like the Other School. What was Brian thinking? What could he see in me that I couldn’t see in myself?

“Brian’s great to work for,” Chris confided over tuna fish sandwiches at Creager’s, the nearest lunch spot. “Whenever you need time off, you usually just have to ask. And for a small business he gives super benefits. He pays attention, he’s appreciative, and he doesn’t make you work any harder than he does.”

“That’s good to know,” I said. Because my salary had been a big disappointment. Brian assured me it was temporary, after a few months he’d be able to pay me a wage “more in keeping with your worth.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was nice to know I’d enjoy enlightened working conditions in return for the pittance he was paying me in the meantime.

Chris’s husband, Oz, was a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company. “He travels a lot. He got back from a trip on Christmas Eve at ten o’clock at night, and he was gone again
the day after. I didn’t see him for a week! He’s got no idea, no conception of what it’s like trying to pull Christmas together for two kids by yourself.”

She didn’t wear a speck of makeup that I could see. She wore flat shoes, hunched her shoulders, and slumped. She was spectacularly unattractive in any conventional way, but I had liked her face the minute I saw it. All of a sudden she clapped her hand to the top of her head. “Oh God, Carrie, I’m sorry.”

“Why? What?”

“Listen to me going on about Oz. Me and my big mouth. I always talk before I think.”

“Oh, no, it’s fine, don’t worry.”

“No, but it must’ve been just a
terrible
holiday for you. I can’t even imagine it. Brian told me about your husband, how sudden it was. I’m so very, very sorry.” Her hazel eyes filled with tears.

Oh, great
. And me a sympathetic crier. I snickered wetly and handed over a Kleenex, taking one for myself. We blew our noses in unison.

Chris apologized—“This is all you need, I am so sorry, I cry at Alpo commercials”—and blushed. “Not that this is like an Alpo commercial, I mean, this is
much
more serious.”