Love in Mid Air (28 page)

“What’s wrong with you?”

Kelly slammed down her purse. “What’s wrong with me? I’ve got no home, that’s what’s wrong with me. I’ve got no family. I’ve
got no Christmas and at the rate I’m going I never will have. Last night I got in late and the condo was dark and there was
nothing but…” She stopped, exhaled. “… a pile of mail on the kitchen table and the place smelled like chemicals because the
maid had been there. It was Tilex, I guess, or bleach. It’s all too white, you know, the whole place is white and there’s
no food in my cabinets and there’s nothing alive because I’m gone too often to keep a fish or a plant and don’t you tell me
that it’s all my fault, don’t you dare. You don’t understand how it is when you come in late at night alone and everything
is white and quiet and smells like chemicals. How can you understand it, when your house is perfect and everything smells
like cinnamon? Things come easy for you, Elyse. They always have.”

“You must be joking,” I said. I was so angry that the room was swimming. “I’m killing myself here. Is that all you noticed—that
it smelled good? Come over here, take a whiff of that trash can. Tory had three stinkys today and I haven’t even had a chance
to carry the bag out to the Dumpster. I don’t want to make 144 cookies, Kelly, nobody in her right mind would want to make
144 cookies. My tree is falling. It’s tied to the ceiling and it’s leaning and it’s going to fall over completely one night
while I’m asleep and then what am I going to do? How am I going to get it back up with all the lights and ornaments already
on it? You waltz in here all dressed up and pretty and have you even noticed that I’m wearing my nightgown? It’s five in the
afternoon, it’s almost dark, and I’m still in my nightgown and you tell me that the collar of your fucking eight-hundred-dollar
suit is rubbing against your fucking Maui sunburn and you’re jet-lagged and not sure if you can bear to have your hair blown
out and well boo-hoo-hoo. We’re broke, Kelly, this house is killing us, and you come crying to me because some Jewish guy
gives you a Christmas gift in plain old Tiffany’s blue and white paper and do you know what I want? Do you know what I want
for Christmas? If I could go to your nice clean white empty condo where nobody cooks and nobody shits and I could lie down
in your nice clean white empty bed for even one night and sleep for eight consecutive hours, I’d think I’d died and gone to
heaven, Kelly, I’d think I was in fucking Maui for sure.”

We stood there for a minute, staring at each other.

“Oh,” Kelly finally said. “Wow. I had no idea. That makes me feel better about everything.”

We burst out laughing at the same time and she came over, mindless of her sunburn, and threw her arms around me. Tory, who
had been watching us wide-eyed, wedged herself between us and began to pat our thighs with her small hands. Kelly bent down
and scooped her up.

“The thing is,” she whispered. “I want what you have.”

She didn’t want what I had. She didn’t know what I had, she only knew what it looked like. But it had been nearly two years
since Daniel left and now her daddy had died and it was Christmas. “I know, baby,” I said.

She smiled and pulled out of the hug, with Tory balanced on her hip. She must have cried a little bit, because her eyes were
bright. “But in the meantime,” she said bravely, “I’ll settle for a cookie.”

I winced. “You’re not going to believe this, but I don’t have enough to give you one.”

She laughed her easy laugh. Back to the old Kelly. “Your cookie-swap friends,” she said. “Do you think they would like me?”

“They’d fall down on their knees and worship you. But I’m not sure you’d like them. They’re a little bit younger than us,
you know, they married straight out of college. It’s a different world, Kelly. Life out here is a little bit plain.”

“Do they drink and curse, these cookie-swap women?”

“Not like we do.”

“Then I’ll stop. I want them to like me.”

“Oh, they’ll like you. They’ll like you a whole lot better than they like me.”

She shook her head and Tory imitated her, violently tossing her little wispy blond curls from side to side. “No, I mean it,”
Kelly said, hugging my daughter to her chest. “I want to meet these women. I want to join the church and come to book club
and Pilates. I’m going to buy the whole set of Le Creuset, all of them, even the big deep baking dishes that nobody ever uses.
I mean, I could live out here, why not? I want what you have.”

S
he breaks things,” Phil says.

My mind has been wandering so I don’t know exactly what Jeff was saying. Probably something about not wanting to break up
a family.

And Phil jumps in with that scary way he has of taking things too literally and says, “Oh no, she likes to break things. She
likes to throw them away. You’ve seen our house—you know it isn’t decorated like the other women’s houses. When I bring something
in the door she throws it right out.”

“I can’t breathe when the house is too full,” I say. “It closes in on me,” and Jeff winces, evidently thinking of the dozens
of Lladro figurines parading across the cabinets of his living room. Nancy already has eight of the apostles. She’s gunning
for the full set.

“When people come over they think we’ve just moved in,” Phil says.

“No they don’t.”

“Sometimes they think we’re moving out.”

“I like open spaces,” I tell Jeff, who for some reason writes that down in his notebook.

“It started on our honeymoon,” Phil continues. “She dropped my camera off the side of the ship.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Thank God I didn’t tell him about the pots. Why did I even consider it?

“On the last day. In Martinique.”

“Come off it. That was a disposable camera, the kind you buy in Wal-Mart, and it was an accident. I was leaning over the rail…”

“It had our pictures from the whole trip,” Phil tells Jeff, twisting in his chair. “And she just casually tosses it overboard.”

“Good God,” I say. “Haven’t you ever dropped anything?” I try to think of something Phil has dropped, but I can’t.

“The whole week went in the water,” Phil is saying, so curled up in his seat that he almost has his back to me. “I knew right
then what it was going to be like to be married to her.”

“We had the pictures that the ship photographer took,” I say, in my most reasonable and cheerful voice, the one I used when
I was toilet training Tory. “You’ve got one of us climbing the Dunn’s River Falls framed all nice on your desk.”

“See what I mean? See what I’m saying? Even after all these years she still has no idea what she did.”

W
hen I get home from counseling I spread newspapers all over the studio floor and begin to pick the larger pieces out of the
box. I sit like a yogi, sifting through the rubble, a motion that kicks up dust and makes my eyes water. I could go in and
take out my contacts but it feels good to weep for a while and I sit on the cold concrete floor and run my hands through the
wrecked pots. Maybe I want to be cut. Maybe a woman who breaks so many things deserves to be cut.

But Lewis is right, the pieces are beautiful. And perhaps salvageable. After a while I wipe my face, stand up, wander into
the damp room. I pull a plain ceramic vase down from the shelves and try to visualize what it would look like if I glued the
shards directly to it. The patterns, now that I stop and study them, are really quite remarkable, more interesting broken
that they ever were whole. I am humming as I begin to arrange the pieces around the neck of the vase. It’s not what I showed
Mrs. Chapman, but who knows, she might like it. Hard to say yet if I like it. I am so absorbed that I don’t hear the carpool
van pull up in the driveway and I am startled when Tory hits the button to open the big garage door and walks in. She drops
her backpack beside me.

“I have diphtheria,” she says.

“That sucks,” I say. She’s been playing the Oregon Trail game at school. The kids only have a certain amount of time and money
to get their wagon train from St. Louis to San Francisco and all sorts of unexpected things can happen along the way. Now,
through no fault of her own, my daughter has drawn a bad card and she’s dying on the prairie. I like this game, and not only
because it teaches her math, and history, and geography. I think for a game to be a good one, skill and chance should be equal
factors, just as they are in life.

“Sucks, sucks, sucks,” she says, pleased that I have tacitly given her permission to use a word that her father forbids. “Because
now I can’t play for two days and I have to write a paper on diphtheria.” She says the word carefully, adding a couple of
unnecessary syllables. Dip-a-the-ree-ree-ah.

“This is a bad day for the Bearden girls,” I say. “Look what happened to Mommy’s pots. Watch it,” I add, as she extends a
finger. “The edges are rough.”

“Why do things have edges?”

“What?”

“Edges hurt people.”

“Not always.”

“You get to the edge and you either cut yourself or fall off.”

I can’t think of anything to say to that. “You can use that medical book of your daddy’s,” I tell her, “to look up diphtheria.”
She looks at me as if I’m nuts.

“I’ll just Google it,” she says.

“Oh. Right.”

“Do people get diphtheria anymore?”

“No, it’s one of the things in the DPT shots they give babies.”

“What do people die from now?”

Cancer, I tell her. Heart attacks. Things that little girls hardly ever get.

The phone rings. She runs to get it and, since my hands are sticky, wedges it under my chin and then disappears into the kitchen.
It’s Belinda.

“I was thinking maybe we could go out and get ice cream.”

“Just us?”

“Us and the kids.”

“I don’t know. We’re having a shitty day over here. Tory got diphtheria on the Oregon Trail and a thousand dollars’ worth
of my pots busted.”

“All the more reason you need ice cream. We’ll come by and get you.”

There was a time when Belinda would never think to initiate an outing, even one as simple as this. And there was a time, maybe
only months ago, when she ran every decision by Nancy, even one as simple as this. But Tory will be thrilled to have a reason
to abandon her homework and I don’t really want to think about the pots. ”Okay,” I tell her. “Ice cream is a good idea.”

W
hile the kids take their cones to the little playground behind the Ben & Jerry’s, Belinda and I sit on a bench and drink our
hot chocolate. We are talking about how Meredith’s math teacher is really too hard on the kids when suddenly Belinda grips
my arm.

“Look,” she says.

It takes me a second to recognize her. Lynn is coming out of the Starbucks across the courtyard. She’s got on the same pink
Chanel-style jacket she was wearing the day I saw her with the contractors, but this time she has it on with jeans and boots.
It looks better this way. There is a man with her, and his arm is around her waist. He is bald but it is the kind of deliberate
shaved baldness of the very young and he pulls her over by the fountain and removes something—maybe a scone—from a flat brown
bag. Lynn is laughing. She looks careless, casual, her hair is a little mussed. She looks just-fucked.

“Oh my God,” says Belinda. “Do you think they’re… dating?”

“It sure seems that way,” I say, dropping my head. Watching her like this makes me uneasy, as if I’m catching her naked.

“Did you know she was seeing somebody?” Belinda has none of my embarrassment. She is staring at Lynn as if she’s the coming
attraction on a movie screen.

I shake my head. “No, but why shouldn’t she? It’s not like she’s doing anything wrong. We need to get out of here. She’d be
mortified if she saw us gawking at her.”

“How old do you think he is, anyway? Late twenties?”

“He’s older than that.”

“Early thirties?”

“I don’t know. We need to get out of here. And we don’t have to tell Nancy about this.”

“Why not?” Belinda asks, reasonably enough. “You said it yourself, it’s not like she’s doing anything wrong, even though I’d
say he’s closer to twenty-five than thirty. I mean, if you want to say thirty, we’ll go with thirty, but I really think he’s…
Oh my God, he’s feeding her.”

“Men do that. Men feed women.”

She shoots me a strange look out of the corner of her eye and I know that she’s thinking that no, women feed men, that’s the
way it really works, and my mind clicks back to New York, to Gerry lifting a mussel to my mouth, tilting the shell so that
butter and salt and white wine poured down my throat.

“Sometimes men feed women,” I repeat, speaking slowly, as if this is something important for Belinda to understand. “When
you really stop to think about it, if you go all the way back to Darwin or something, men feeding women is the way things
are supposed to be.”

“But his fingers were on her tongue. It’s so…”

“I know. We need to get out of here.”

Belinda shudders, as if literally shaking herself out of a stupor. “Did you know she was dating anybody?”