For Love (15 page)

‘So what?’ she said. She had, briefly.

‘That’s all you’d need,’ he said. ‘To get knocked up by some guy who’s going to end up driving a bus for the MTA.’

‘Elizabeth’s much more likely to get knocked up than I am,’ Lottie said.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked.

But Lottie turned away. She dumped the cereal into the sink, rinsed the bowl. She couldn’t have told him what she knew. She couldn’t have confided it, the secret that had given her a
sense of power over Elizabeth. Besides, she was angry at Cameron for trying to change her.
Not telling him
made a barrier between herself and him that she could use to ward off his advice,
to keep herself deaf to his good sense. She was relieved when Elizabeth came home a week or so later and Cameron left her alone.

That winter, of course, everything changed between Elizabeth and Cameron. At Christmas, he fell from her porch roof as he climbed out of her room at night, and after that Elizabeth was forbidden
to him. At the semester break, there was the drunken scene when Elizabeth’s father walked him home across the snowy street, and then it seemed to be pretty much over. And Lottie was glad.
Glad for his pain: he thought he was so much better than she was! And glad for the possibility that Elizabeth had been hurt too.

All this without once really examining the differences between her life and Elizabeth’s. Because to have thought about them would have been to acknowledge the lack of choice in her own
life, the way in which money and class and circumstance had shaped her sense of who she might be. And that was something she wasn’t ready to think about, that she wouldn’t be ready to
think about for years. Instead she conceived of herself then as hating Elizabeth for purely personal reasons. The differences in their lives reflected only the differences in who they were. She
thought of them as simply being Elizabeth, Charlotte, willfully and freely making all the choices that they made.

Lottie did go to college the next fall – to the University of New Hampshire. She remembered those two months before she dropped out as being among the most miserable of her life. She
missed home, she missed the city, she missed her mother and the dark, stale-smelling living room. She missed the shy greetings of the roomers as they went in and out, the blare of the television
still going as she dropped off to sleep at night, the solitude of the little first-floor bathroom in the mornings. It was easy to leave school, to say she couldn’t afford it anymore, because
this was at least in part the truth.

But when she came back home, she felt somehow unfitted for that life too. She never argued with her mother, but she saw things differently. The house was shabby, dirty. The silent boarders
seemed suddenly like shadowey grotesques. She noticed, for the first time, not just that her mother drank – she’d known that – but that she got shit-faced, as they’d called
it at college, just about every evening. Sometimes Lottie would wake in the night to hear the television still shouting in the living room. She’d go in to turn it off, and her mother would be
asleep in the chair, the bottle she’d fetched after Lottie went to her room within reach, her mouth shaping a slack rictus, her knees flung wide in what seemed to Lottie a hideous parody of
sexuality.

When she’d saved a little money, Lottie moved out. She rented a room in a big boardinghouse on Mass Ave and began a new life. She had a job at the Midget, a deli and restaurant where
students and faculty met for breakfast, for lunch. She made good tips. Somtimes she picked people up, slept with them. She bought herself a hot plate, an Indian bedspread, fat scented candles she
burned when she was alone. She signed up for night courses at the Extension School.

She saw Elizabeth occasionally, heading across Harvard Yard on her way to class or the library in one of her eccentric outfits – sometimes peasant clothing from Turkey or South America,
things her father might have brought back for her from his journeys. Sometimes all black. Always pale lipstick and dark eye makeup. Once Lottie glimpsed her in a rainstorm wearing what clearly was
a flowered pink plastic hair-dryer hood over her dark-red mane. But even then there was a young man walking with her as there usually was, though he looked – they all always looked – as
though he were following a few paces behind. And what Lottie felt then, what she felt whenever she saw Elizabeth, was no pang of envy for her or for the life she was leading, no impulse to compare
what seemed to be their fates. Just the sense of hateful recognition: ‘Ah,
Elizabeth
.’

There was a coach house behind her boardinghouse, rented to a group of graduate students, all men. Lottie met them when she was sunbathing in the side yard the next spring. They invited her to a
party where everyone got very drunk, where someone rode a bicycle in and out of the house, where someone else attacked the police with a squirt gun when they arrived to break things up. It was
1964, 1965, and a brave new world was just beginning, the great romance everyone decided to have with everything that was different. A few years earlier, Lottie couldn’t have made it happen
even with enormous effort, but now she was interesting to several of these men; she represented a half-formed idea that would come to full flower later as the counterculture. They had posters on
their walls of Malcolm X, of Mao, of Che Guevara. Lottie was another, different species of exotic.

She dated Walter a few times. Then she had a long affair with another of them, a graduate student in biochemistry, Al. She virtually moved in with him. But it was Derek she ended up with, Derek
Gardner. She moved in with him, and Al moved out. And then she married him and they began their itinerant life as graduate student and working wife, and then junior faculty member and working wife,
and then assistant professor and working wife with baby. And then she was a young divorcée with a small child. This all happened before she was twenty-five.

She’d ended up in Chicago, far from all thoughts of Elizabeth and Cameron and what had happened in their lives. Cameron wrote to her perhaps twice a year, sketchy, short letters, news of
their mother, his jobs, his plans for the future; but she hadn’t seen him in two years, and they hadn’t really talked since before her marriage to Derek, when he called one day from the
highway. She could hear voices, Muzak behind him, the binging of a cash register or maybe a pinball machine. He said he was in Ohio, he was driving to the West Coast, could he stop and stay with
her overnight?

She was glad to hear from him, mostly in the way a single mother living alone with a very young child is always glad for company, for stimulation. She put Ryan in his carriage and went out and
blew her food money for a week on a jug of wine and some steaks, even a handful of chrome-yellow daffodils, an unspeakable luxury for her. Shortly before Cam was due to arrive, though, while Lottie
was frantically picking up, her downstairs neighbor, who had a little girl six months younger than Ryan, knocked on her door. Nadine baby-sat for Ryan in the mornings while Lottie worked, so it was
necessary to be gracious. Lottie asked her in, but said that her brother was about to arrive. Nadine said she’d only stay a minute, if she could just have some coffee. They were out, she was
desperate.

But while Lottie was dripping the cup through, she saw Nadine bend down and take off Chloe’s sweater. She realized this was to be the standard visit, in spite of Nadine’s promise.
She was talking about Chloe’s cold now, about milk products and mucus. Lottie sighed and put on some water for a cup for herself too.

Twenty minutes or so later, the bell rang. When Lottie answered the door, Cameron took her breath away, he was so changed. It was that era when everyone was allowed to change abruptly. Men grew
beards, shed ties and jackets, and suddenly looked like different people, different
kinds
of people. Women wore costumes: beatnik, mod. Lottie herself was wearing a long flowered skirt. Her
hair was parted in the middle and caught into a fat wispy braid, which rested on one shoulder. She had golden hoops in her ears. She looked like a gypsy girl.

Cameron’s change wasn’t extreme, but it made him more attractive, arresting-looking. His hair lay across his shoulders, thick and black and straight, longer than Lottie had ever seen
it. He was clean-shaven, but he wore jeans, his shirt was open at the neck, and she saw a dark cloud of curling hairs in the V below his collarbone. Unsmiling as ever, he seemed intense, dramatic.
A Method actor, say. His embrace was quick and didn’t involve their bodies touching. He set his suitcase on the floor in the living room and looked around, taking in all that was seedy and
worn, Lottie was sure: the bookcases made of milk boxes and boards, the mattresses on the floor, the toys scattered everywhere. Suddenly the very flowers, in their glass jar, looked shabby –
looked fake.

‘And where’s my famous nephew?’ he asked when his eyes had made their careful circuit of her life.

She brought him into the little kitchen where the children were banging pots and pans, where Nadine sat up straighter now over her coffee. She introduced him to Nadine, to Ryan, who swung his
body shyly behind Lottie’s long skirt. Cameron said yes, he’d have a cup of coffee.

Ryan was silenced, staring in admiration at his uncle, and Cameron turned his chair so he could watch the children. Nadine’s conversation grew livelier, more pointed, for Cameron’s
benefit. Lottie tried to ask about the trip, the drive, but Nadine kept reclaiming the floor. ‘The doctor said there was nothing to be done, nothing. With that kind of fever, you just wait it
out.’

Lottie served Cameron his coffee and stood with her butt resting against the sink, watching the scene, wondering how to rescue them all.

‘Anyway,’ Nadine was saying now, ‘when I got back, I saw that Chloe’s spit-up was all over me, all the way down my back. No wonder they’d been staring. And
I’d thought they might be admiring me. Foolish.’ Her eyes always flickered back to Cameron, who sat glum, sunk in stupefaction, Lottie imagined, to have arrived off the roar of the
highway to this.

‘Maybe you’d like to stretch your legs, Cam? Take a walk?’ she offered when she could, and watched the gratitude lighten his face.

He carried the stroller downstairs for her, while Nadine trailed them, telling Lottie where she should take Cam on the walk, as though Lottie were a stranger, too, to the neighborhood. She was
still calling after them as they set off toward the schoolyard a couple of blocks down. It was late spring, cool. The bright-green shreds of leaves on the trees shook with the wind. Once
they’d crossed the last street and stepped on to the patchy grass, Lottie braked the carriage and set Ryan free. He ran ahead of them up the slow rise, and stopped dead when the playground
equipment came into his view. When she caught up to him, he pointed, awestruck. ‘It’s the swings!’ he said. ‘It’s the big kids’ swings!’ he told his uncle.
Cameron smiled and reached for his uplifted hand.

For a while they took turns pushing Ryan on the swing. Then Lottie spread a blanket on the grass, and she and Cam sat down. From a distance, she thought, they must have looked like a pretty,
young quasi-hippie couple with child. Ryan meandered in a wide circle around them, bringing back treasures he found – a rock, a dandelion – and depositing them worshipfully in
Cameron’s hand. Lottie’s eyes followed him, and every now and then, when he wandered too far or seemed to be putting something in his mouth, she’d get up and run to him; but
within this punctuation she and Cameron were attentive to each other, busy accounting for their lives, for the years that had passed.

Lottie was first. Her story was still new to her then, and she brought a fresh and venomous energy to it. Later she would learn to tell it differently, she would see how she’d used Derek
to escape what was becoming of her life in Cambridge, to open certain doors, to be a new family from which she could launch herself less fearfully into the world. But what she described that day to
Cameron was Derek’s never having time to take care of Ryan when she was both working and trying to go to school. His desire for an open marriage. Their competitive, joyless series of affairs
with other people. She recalled for Cam a party a few months before Ryan was born, at which, coming downstairs from the bathroom, she met Derek on his way up with a woman she knew. She’d
turned sideways to let them pass, and they’d both had to slide along against her big belly.

Lottie was sitting very still on her mother’s back stoop now, remembering all this. Remembering herself pregnant, her unhappiness. Thinking with shame how often she’d used that
detail – the twin touch of her belly – as the final brush stroke in the portrait she painted of Derek for anyone who’d listen in the years after her divorce.

She noticed abruptly that Ryan’s music had changed inside the house. It was classical now. Lottie sipped her wine. As she thought about those long-ago days of her first marriage, it seemed
just possible that it hadn’t really happened that way at the party. There’d been the stairs – oh yes! – and the pretty young woman. She could call up even her name, Barbara
Doyle. But she seemed to remember now that the two of them had been ashamed or embarrassed to see her, that she’d turned away from them, coming down, that there hadn’t therefore been
that doubled caress of her pregnant belly, the detail that made it all so much crueler.

How much else might not have been true? It was so long ago. She remembered that she’d chronicled for Cam a few of her ugly fights with Derek, the days of not speaking. And after the
divorce, the troubles getting child support, the infrequent visits. And Cameron had nodded and agreed: Derek was a bastard. He asked at least several of the right questions.

But once he began to talk, to tell his story, his voice seemed suddenly tuned differently; and Lottie realized he’d simply been enduring everything that came before. That for Cameron,
hearing her story was like her having to listen to Nadine go on about Chloe’s achievements – her progress in toilet training, say. It was the first time it occurred to Lottie that the
intricate shocks and pains of her life could be of no interest whatever to someone else.