Step-Ball-Change (12 page)

Kay shook her head. “I’m thirty years old. I want to have children. There’s a wonderful guy in the living room who wants to marry me and who I am almost entirely sure I love. I don’t think it’s going to get much better than that.”

“Thirty is nothing,” I said. “It’s just the start.”

“That’s not what you would have said when you were thirty.” Kay mopped up the last of her tears and combed out her hair with her fingers. “I’m going in there,” she said. “Do I look all right?”

T
HAT NIGHT WHEN
Tom and I went to bed I asked him, “When you asked me to marry you, were you sure about it?”

“Sure, I was sure about it. Why? Did Kay say she wasn’t sure?”

The room was dark. I propped up on one elbow and looked at what little I could see of my husband’s head on his pillow. I had been looking at him for more than two-thirds of my life. In the bad light, with my glasses off, he was exactly the boy I had married. Tom at twenty-three was in bed next to me, wanting to get some sleep. “Let’s forget about Kay for one minute.”

“I can do that.”

“When you asked me to marry you, was it because you were sure I was the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with?”

“I guess I must have been if I asked you.”

I had lived too long with lawyers to accept that as an answer. “Come on now and think about this for a minute. I’m serious. Why did you ask me to marry you?”

Tom sighed and closed his eyes. I knew exactly what he was thinking: His daughter was getting married, his sister-in-law had moved in, his house was falling down, he’d been bitten by a dog, and now his wife wanted to know why they had gotten married. It was too much for a Wednesday. “We had had that fight.”

“The fight no one can remember.”

Tom was quiet for a minute. “I remember it.”

“Are you serious? All these years we’ve told the kids we couldn’t remember and you knew? What was the fight about?”

“Basketball.”

“We broke up over basketball?”

“I had promised to take you out to dinner for your birthday, but then at the last minute I got tickets to the Duke-Alabama game and so I told you I was sick.”

And there it was, the missing piece of the story, the least important element: the fight that had been obliterated by its own outcome. Once prompted, I could half remember it: I had made some sort of soup. Chicken soup. I made the noodles myself in the kitchen of a friend who had an apartment. I spent my birthday making noodles and soup, and when I took it over to Tom’s, his roommate told me he had gone to the game. At the time I’m certain I had been furious, but now it seemed funny. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you remembered?”

“Why do you think? It didn’t come up for ten years, and when it finally did, I was thrilled that you had forgotten. I’d done something stupid and you had the decency to forget it.”

“So why did you want to marry me?”

Tom mulled over the question in the dark. Maybe he hadn’t thought about it in forty-two years, or maybe he had never thought about it, but the answer was a long time coming. “It was the soup, I think,” he said finally. “You had left me the soup even though you knew I wasn’t sick and I had lied to you. When I went over to talk to you that night, you said you could never date a person who lied and that was that. I went back to my dorm and I ate the soup. It was so wonderful. I kept thinking, Where am I ever going to find another girl who would spend her birthday making me soup when she thought I was sick? Where am I going to find a girl who would still give me the soup even though she knew I was a lying creep? The more soup I ate, the worse I felt about the whole thing.”

“You married me because the soup was good?”

“I asked you to marry me because after the fight I missed you. I figured if I missed you that much then you must be the person I was supposed to marry.”

“But that’s not the same as being completely sure.”

“Well, that depends. Is being sure you don’t want to be apart from someone the same thing as being sure you want to be with them?”

“It’s probably close enough.”

Tom slid one arm under my waist and pulled me to him and pulled himself over to me. I put my head on his chest and listened to his heart. It had been the single most consistent sound in my life. “Do you want to tell me what’s stirred all this up?”

“You were right. It was Kay. She wants to know how a person is supposed to be sure about who they marry.”

“First you find someone who knows how to dance.” Tom rubbed my hip, the little knot that was always there. He found it and untied it. “Then you wait to see if they bring you soup.”

I kissed him and then broke away to pull my nightgown over my head. I dropped it on the floor and then I kissed him again. “And if they bring you soup?”

“Marry that person immediately.”

chapter eight

T
HREE DAYS LATER
L
ILA
B
ENNETT CALLED AND INVITED
me to lunch. I immediately regretted not having made the preemptive strike. We should have invited the Bennetts out to dinner, then the four of us could have met together. Tom and I could have touched our shoes under the table in the reassuring way we did in certain social situations. We could have dissected the evening in the car on the way home and made something funny out of it no matter how badly things might have gone. But it was all too late for that. She had asked and there was nothing to do but to go. I was on my own.

“Shouldn’t we invite Tom and Scout?” I had asked hopefully on the phone. It was Sport. Sport. Scout was the little girl in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

“Just the mothers this time,” she had said to me, graciously ignoring my gaff. “There’s so much work to be done.”

“Well, you can’t wear any of this,” Taffy said, sliding my clothing piece by piece down the bar in the closet while I sat on the bed.

“Oh, come on, there has to be something in there.”

She held up my favorite black blazer, tilted her head to one side. “I don’t think so.”

I was a fairly secure person, but I knew that fashion wasn’t my strong point. I tended to favor clothes that could be worn over other clothes. “What about the dark purple dress?”

Taffy laughed and closed the closet door. “Forget this. Come with me.” She waved me down the hall and I followed her to her room, sat down on her bed, Kay’s bed. How many times had I sat on this bed while Kay dug through her closet trying to decide what to wear on a date? “Why do I have three brothers?” she would wail. “I need somebody I can borrow clothes from.” She never thought of my clothes as a possibility, either.

But I had never worn my sister’s clothes. Growing up in the same house, it never would have occurred to either one of us to borrow something from the other one. Our sense of style was defined by our direct opposition to each other. Now there was a rain of featherlight cashmere sweaters falling all around me. Stamp jumped up on the bed and made himself comfortable in a red cardigan. Stamp was only allowed off the leash when he was in Taffy’s bedroom with the door closed.

“Woodrow said Stamp wasn’t supposed to be on the furniture,” I said.

“Not true,” Taffy said. “He is allowed to get on my bed. I already told Woodrow, I sleep with Stamp. There’s no point in even having a small dog if you can’t sleep with it.”

“Did he sleep with you and Neddy?”

Taffy just looked at me. Stamp looked at me. Of course they all slept together.

She looked at a beautiful navy dress with a scoop neck and then put it back. Then she pulled out a gray pantsuit made out of some kind of soft knit. She held that one up for a while and I started feeling hopeful, but then she shook her head. She went
back into the closet. “Here we go. This is nice. This would be good on you.” Taffy pulled out a green suit that was neither drab nor bright but the rich color of a holly leaf. She held it in front of her and looked in the mirror. “This is your color,” she said to her reflection.

“Do you think?”

“Trust me.”

“I’m taller than you are.”

She tossed the suit on my lap. “You are two inches taller than I am, maybe less. That doesn’t mean that you can’t wear my clothes.”

I touched the fabric. It was a wool gabardine as light as silk. It was gorgeous. Why in the world did she think to bring clothes like this with her in the first place? Maybe we should start taking her out more. Taffy shuffled through her closet for a blouse. “Shouldn’t I be myself? If Kay and Trey get married, we’re going to be seeing these people. Sooner or later she’s going to know what I really look like.”

“First impressions.” Taffy held up a blouse that at first I thought was off-white but on closer inspection I could see was ever so slightly peach. “This gives you power. You’re going to need power. Take your clothes off.”

Taffy had been notoriously modest when we were young. Not only did she refuse to change clothes unless the door of her room was bolted shut, she would scream if anyone else tried to change clothes in front of her. As I pulled my sweater over my head, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her naked since she was seven years old. “We never did this,” I said, picking up her blouse. It slipped over my arms like a breeze. I caught the name of an impossibly famous and expensive Italian designer before I buttoned up.

“Did what?”

“Tried on each other’s clothes.”

“I’m not trying on your clothes.”

“You wore my tap shoes.”

She thought about this and nodded. “True enough. Still, it would have been hard to imagine doing something like this when we were young.”

I stepped into the skirt and zipped it up. “It’s shorter than what I usually wear.”

“That’s because most of your skirts hit your ankles. How can a person who spends half her day wearing a leotard be modest? You worked hard for those legs. You should show them off.” She draped a scarf around my neck and then helped me on with the jacket. I looked like the chairman of the board, the extremely stylish, slightly sexy chairman of the board. “Shoes,” she said.

“I have shoes.”

“I refuse to let you wear that suit with flats.” She went back to the closet.

“I’ve always found high heels to be uncomfortable.”

Taffy stared at me. “Do you think that is specific to you?”

“We don’t have the same size feet,” I reminded her.

“Shut up,” she said kindly, and handed me a pair of heels.

I looked in the mirror. From the neck up I was still myself, but from the neck down I had never looked better. “I love it. I will live in fear of spilling something on it, but won’t I be seriously overdressed for lunch?” I slipped on the shoes and felt my hip shift forward.

“You won’t even be in the ballpark of overdressed.” Taffy took a step back, gave me a look of hard assessment, and then smiled. She took the heavy gold hoops off her ears and handed them to me.
They were warm. “When she asks you where you got the suit, and she will, do not say your sister’s closet. Say, Atlanta.”

“A
TLANTA,”
I
TOLD
Lila Bennett. “I was visiting my sister.”

“They have the best shopping in Atlanta.” Lila Bennett ordered us each a glass of white wine and handed the menus back to the waiter.