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Authors: Drusilla Campbell

BOOK: Wildwood
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“You look like a schoolmarm,” Teddy said.
“That’s what I am.”
“Wear your contacts.”
“The air’s too dry.”
“You’re a good-looking woman, Jeanne. Why don’t you do something with yourself?”
Jeanne went back into the bathroom and wiped down the counter and basin.
Teddy called from the bedroom, “Have you seen my Waterman?”
“You shouldn’t be straining your eyes by writing.”
“That pen cost more than two hundred dollars.”
“Don’t lie flat. It’ll make the sinuses worse. You need extra pillows.”
“I haven’t seen it since last week.”
“Close your eyes.”
“You took the audiotapes.”
“I’m returning them to the library this afternoon when I take the littlies in the van.” She slipped a twisty around her hair and made a bun tight as a fist. “You could listen to music. Would you like me to find the classical station for you?”
Teddy mumbled that he would and closed his eyes.
Jeanne thought it was unfair of the Universe that men aged so handsomely. At fifty-two Teddy’s polished, preppy good looks had hardened, lost the sweetness that was there when he was young. Now he was just plain turn-around-and-gawk handsome. His strong chin and nose gave him the look of a man of character, someone to be relied upon in a pinch or a crisis. This no longer struck her as ironic.
She turned the radio dial. “I met Simon Weed this morning. He seems like a nice man. He told me his wife committed suicide. Hanged herself in the barn and the boy found her.”
“Another traumatized child.” Teddy groaned. “Lucky Hilltop School.”
“He noticed my diploma.”
“So? It’s on the wall.” The music was Wagner. “Turn it down, Jeanne. I can’t take Valhalla this morning.”
She looked at the telephone answering machine on the table next to the radio. She enjoyed talking on the phone, enjoyed being free to speak without being observed. But she resented the demands of the answering machine and would sometimes let twenty calls accumulate before pressing the play button. In her otherwise responsible personality, this was an aberration about which she could seem to do nothing. Did it signal something fundamentally unsound in her? A flaw she had been unable to eradicate?
Only one call today.
“Your sainted friend.” Teddy had never liked Hannah.
“What did she want?”
“I didn’t talk to her, Jeanne.”
“Did she leave a message?”
“I don’t know why we have an answering machine if you won’t use it.”
Jeanne touched the play button. The machine whirred and clicked and Hannah’s deep voice came over the line.
“Come over after school, okay?”
Jeanne pressed rewind.
Teddy thumbed the hollows on either side of the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think I’m going to make it to that building committee meeting, Jeanne. You’re going to have to do it.”
“Teddy, I haven’t seen Liz—”
“Go tonight.”
“It’s board Thursday.”
“The building committee won’t go past five.”
“I promised Edith White I’d listen to the problems the housekeeping staff’s having. Those old bathrooms in Senior House are going to have to be replaced. The maids are sick of the mess. The least we can do is listen to their complaints. You want to do that for me?”
“You’re the one who speaks Spanish.” Teddy sat forward and Jeanne slipped a second pillow behind his head. “Besides, if they don’t like the work, they can quit. It’s not like there’s a shortage of wetbacks.”
Jeanne looked at her husband a long moment.
“Sorry, old girl,” he said. “It’s this headache.”
She returned to the dressing room; and, despite the drought, ran the cold water a few seconds and splashed her face until it tingled. She patted it dry and applied a light sheen of lipstick to her wide mouth. She noted that the lines on either side, the parentheses, were deepening and so were those between her green eyes—eyes like peeled grapes, her brother used to tease. She must frown more than she realized. A little foundation might conceal them but lipstick was the only makeup she wore. When she was a teenager, she’d come home with five dollars’ worth of Tangee cosmetics, and her mother’s inebriated scolding still rang in her mind.
A woman demeans her sex when she paints her face.
In the bedroom again she asked Teddy, “So what are your plans?”
“If I can get up later, I will. That’s about the best I can promise.”
Jeanne stood at the door. “I’ll bring you back some tapes from the library.”
“You’re a saint, Jeanne. What would I do without you?”
 
 
In the weeks following Billy Phillips’s funeral Liz had thought of Bluegang hundreds of times; in a way he was always in her mind in the same way she was always breathing whether she thought about it or not. She had told herself that what happened at Bluegang was an accident, a terrible misstep; and it wasn’t her fault, it was Hannah who pushed him and Jeanne who insisted they say nothing. But that was where her memory came unhinged and sometimes Liz felt like she had pushed Billy Phillips down onto the rocks herself.
Time’s passage rounded off the sharp angles of memory but it didn’t sink to the bottom of her consciousness, it never eroded. It was there like a stone in the shoe, a toothache, cramps, but she learned to ignore it. In time she became good at this—especially after she turned thirteen and got into trouble for smoking down by the old henhouse and kissing Eric Margolis behind the youth center. Her life crowded with new people and ideas and things she knew she should not do—but did anyway. Pretty soon she was kissing a lot of boys and her parents didn’t seem to notice so she kept on doing it. Making good grades: that was all that mattered to them. In history she and Jeanne and Hannah read about the Nonintercourse Act, collapsed in giggles, and got sent to detention.
But even when she wasn’t thinking of him, Billy Phillips was with Liz, and she was pretty sure it was the same for Hannah and Jeanne because sometimes in the middle of an ordinary moment—sitting on the swings at the park, drinking Cokes at the Burger Pit—Hannah’s expression suddenly turned grave and vacant. Her body stayed where it was and she kept on talking, but it was obvious that in her mind she was somewhere else and Liz knew where. It was the same with Jeanne, even tough-minded Jeanne.
The worst of it was, there was nowhere to hide from the memory of what they had done. Or not done. Liz just wasn’t sure about guilt and innocence anymore. Reading was no distraction, not even a really good novel like
Marjorie Morningstar.
And in the middle of a movie she would start to see things on the screen that she knew weren’t really there. A boy tumbling down a hill. A coyote snuffling around a body.
For a while she had been desperate to talk about it, but when she did, Hannah looked at her like she’d suddenly begun to speak Swahili.
Once Liz started up, “You know what happened at Bluegang? . . .” The three of them had been sitting on the edge of the fishpond in front of the high school wearing their roller skates. It was autumn and still warm. They wore shorts and cotton blouses. “Do you guys ever think? . . .”
As if they were dancers set to move on cue, Hannah and Jeanne had stood up and skated away without glancing back at her. Liz could not forget the sight of their narrow backs and swinging shoulders moving farther and farther away, leaving her behind.
After that she kept her mouth shut and gradually she thought less about Bluegang and more about school and boys and clothes. A hundred memories a day became a dozen and then once or twice a week, and after that she went for long stretches without remembering. Occasionally she wondered if the process of forgetting was the same for her friends and supposed it must be, but she knew if she asked them they would skate away again. And what if they stayed away?
They were teenagers and life irresistibly happened all around them constantly, a dance they had to be half-dead not to join in. The arms of the world had opened up and swept them into lives where everything was a challenge or an adventure or a puzzle. Once in a while Liz saw old Mrs. Phillips and Bluegang came back to her. At such times she thought less of Billy’s death than she did of her failure to do the right thing. When her parents asked
Can we depend on you, Liz?
she always said they could but knew it was a lie.
High school was a ball: high grades and student body offices, kissing Mario Bacci, smoking Marlboros in the upstairs girls’ bathroom, breaking rules when they could and just for the fun of it. They went to college—seventy-eight percent of the Rinconada graduating class did. Hannah married a doctor and bought a house on Casabella Road and raised two children. Jeanne married her college sweetheart and made a national reputation as an educator. And Liz grew up and led a disjointed peripatetic life and kept on breaking rules in small ways. She became a successful translator of modestly successful books and lived in France, as she had always wanted. She never spoke of Bluegang to anyone until the night, decades afterwards, when she woke, crying, because a coyote had Billy Phillips’s icy hand in its mouth and then it was her ankle it held and she couldn’t break away or cry for help because she couldn’t breathe.
 
 
As the flight from Miami taxied into place at San Jose Airport, Liz rewound the tape she had been listening to—Gregorian chants, soothing as tranquilizers. She slipped the Walkman into her oversized canvas tote, stood and inched her way down the aisle toward the exit.
She felt her airport demeanor take possession: a longer stride and straighter back, prouder head, expression not excited, never excited, but anticipatory, expectant, busy-busy-busy. She knew the other passengers and the people lined up at the airport windows watched her as she strode across the tarmac between the plane and the terminal. Gerard said they watched because she looked like
Someone.
A woman just back from someplace thrilling, en route to somewhere even better. Though no longer young and never beautiful—her nose was long, a little hooked, and her forehead too high—she attracted more attention now than ever. Gerard said she carried herself with distinction—which was also pretty amusing since she had never felt in the least distinctive. If she had, she would not have had to create her airport personality in the first place.
Once in Heathrow Airport a teenaged girl had asked for her autograph. She signed Amelia Earhart and the girl had said, “I just love your show.”
 
 
Hannah waited behind the barrier. Her round youthful face beamed at Liz through the glass, glowing with health and excitement. She wore a long cotton skirt and a roomy Shaker sweater the color of orange sherbet and her feet were laced into leather espadrilles. A thick braid overpowered her willful silver blond hair and hung to the middle of her back. Exotic bead and turquoise earrings dangled halfway to her shoulders. She looked like a rich grown-up hippie.
They waved, ran and fell into each other’s arms. Let’s not talk, Liz thought. Let’s not spoil this.
 
 
In the car there was suddenly too much to say and no easy place to start so Liz filled up the space with talk about the guest house in Belize, her friends, the way she and Gerard lived.
“While I’m gone he’s starting the new kitchen and that’ll make life much easier. Trying to feed a dozen hungry tourists breakfast and dinner on a gas stove with two burners is a nightmare. When I get back there’ll be a new Aga stove—new to us, anyway; actually we’re buying it from a pair of old British queens; one of them’s sick so they’ve decided to go back to England. And while I was in Miami I ordered a double refrigerator with a huge freezer. Plus a bunch of modular cupboards and some Formica. Bright red, can you believe that? Remember when the stuff only came in speckled and sand? God willing it all gets on the right ship and someone finds the energy to unload it.” She paused for breath. “You and Dan’ll have to quit making excuses and come down before we get too fashionable. Gerard can take you into the rain forest and there’s Mayan ruins.” She must have said all this before on the phone or e-mail. The important thing was to avoid empty air. “It’s super down there, Hannah. In the morning everything drips and the sound of the place is primeval.”
“And Gerard? He’s well?”
Liz took a photo from her purse and held it out. “I don’t think you’ve seen this one.” It showed a tall, dark man, with heavy eyes, strong and vigorous in his sixties, dressed in bush shirt and shorts.
“A hero for the new age,” Hannah said. “The Great White Environmentalist.” She grinned. “Cool.”
Hannah jerked the Volvo into the fast lane and Liz pressed her feet into the floorboards as if the car had dual controls like the one they’d all learned to drive on in Driver Education. Hannah had always been a kind of crazy driver given to last minute turns and tailgating. Liz felt the sonar beep of a headache behind her ears.
In the Santa Clara valley, five years’ absence meant a century of change. Going way back she remembered a time when orchards, not silicon, supported the valley. A time when the fruity summer air sang with susurration of bees and yellow jackets and everyone got stung and bit and knew to jump into an irrigation ditch if a swarm attacked. Today there were freeways where she remembered tacky apartments, malls like castle complexes, and cars, thousands of cars. It was worse than Miami. Overhead the sky was yellow.

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