Raising Hope (31 page)
She cries more, and I say, “I’m sorry. Me and my big mouth. Sometimes I joke when I don’t know what to say.”
She lifts her head and wipes her eyes. “No, no, it’s not that. It’s just . . . well, he doesn’t live here. He’s going back to Boston when the summer’s over.”
“And . . . ?” I prod. I’m missing her point here.
“Well, that’ll be it. I won’t be able to see him anymore.”
“Hello?! Cars, telephones? It’s a wonderful age we live in, Sara Lynn.”
I’m trying to make her laugh, but she just shakes her head and says sadly, “It’s just a fling; it can’t possibly amount to anything.”
“Why not?”
“I’m too old,” she bursts out. “He makes me feel so young when I’m with him, but I’m not. I’m thirty-seven!”
“Jesus H. Christ, you’ve got yourself dead and buried. You’re not that old, Sara Lynn! Take a look at Jack, why don’t you—now that’s old.”
She giggles. Phew! Finally. I was beginning to think I was losing my touch.
“And then there’s Hope and my mother,” she says, shaking her head. “How can I be everything they need me to be when I’m running around like a twenty-five-year-old?”
Oh, for Jesus’ sake. “Listen here,” I say, pointing in her face. Someone has to tell her what is what. “You’re afraid. You’re afraid of getting your heart hurt, and you’re using Hope and Mamie as excuses.” I mimic her soft, rich-girl voice. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly have a love affair. I have too many responsibilities at home. I have a mother and a little girl to care for. I’m going to stay right in my little cocoon because it might hurt too much to take a risk.”
She’s sticking her lower lip out at me, like she’s not happy to hear the goddamn truth.
“You know how I know that?” I point to myself. “Because I’ve been going along doing the same thing. Telling Jack for three years that I didn’t want to get serious. Too much to do with Hope, I used to say. How could he ask me to change my way of living? Truth was, I was scared. What if it didn’t work out? What if you thought I was the same old idiot Ruth making another mistake with my life?”
She starts to say, “But I wouldn’t think . . .”
I hold up my hand and keep going. “It took getting pregnant to make me see my life’s going on with or without me and I’d better jump on board and live it. Don’t you think I’m nervous as a cat about moving in with Jack? About getting married? About having a kid? Good God! When I think about it, I get frozen inside. I think I’m crazy for doing all this. But, you know what? I’m going to be happy! Sure, there’ll be days when I wonder what in hell I’ve gone and done. But that’s life. Better to feel that way than to protect yourself from feeling anything at all.”
“My mother won’t approve,” she says in this little, timid voice.
“Your mother won’t approve,” I say slowly in disgust. “Jesus Christ, I’ve just given you this speech that should be in a
Rocky
movie, and that’s all you have to say for yourself?” I take her by the shoulders and stop myself from shaking some sense into her.
“What do you care?”
She looks at me, puzzled.
“What do you care?” I say to her again. I get up and pace a little. “If she says, ‘Oh, Sara Lynn, I don’t like you having sex with a young stud,’ you just say, ‘Well, I hope you’re not keeping yourself up nights worrying about it.’”
She shakes her head. “It’s the guilt, Ruth. She’ll make me feel so guilty and dirty, I won’t be able to stand it.”
“Well, you know what? It’s time you stop feeling it. It’s time you say, ‘Listen, old lady, this is my life and I’ll live it however I want.’ Sara Lynn, what do you want on your gravestone—‘She pleased her mother’?”
She shakes her head, and I see a hint of a smile. “No.”
“Do me a favor,” I say. And I haven’t even thought this out, but it’s exactly what I want.
“What?”
“Be my maid of honor.”
“Really?” she asks. She smiles, and dammit, she’s so pretty just now that I feel my old jealousy gnawing at me, just for a second, and then it stops. Because I love Sara Lynn; I truly do. She’s not Miss Perfect like I thought she was back in high school. She’s Miss Trying to Get Her Shit Together, just like me, just like all of us.
I nudge her. “See? You love that stuff, wearing a pretty dress and carrying flowers.”
“No, it’s just that it’s such an honor. I’m, well, thrilled that you’d—”
“Oh, cut the crap, Sara Lynn. Who the hell else am I going to ask? I’ve been living with you twelve years now. You’re like a goddamn sister to me.”
She hugs me, teary, and says, “I love you, too, Ruth. You know I do even if I never say it.”
I pull away from her and pat her arm. “That’s enough now. If anyone sees, they’ll think they were right all these years—we are gay.”
Sara Lynn laughs and wipes her eyes, and then I spring it on her. “As my maid of honor, you have to do one thing for me.”
“What’s that?” Oh, she’s probably thinking I’ll be asking her to arrange a honeymoon suite or pick out dresses together or some such nonsense.
“You have to bring Sam as your date to my wedding.”
She’s quiet, and then she says, “That’s what you really want?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Ha!” she laughs. Her eyes soften as she says, “I can’t very well refuse the bride’s request, now, can I?” Then she makes a joke, and it perks me up to hear her sassing. “Just don’t blame me if my mother drops dead at your wedding when she sees Sam and me together.”
“We’ll dig a hole in the yard and throw her in,” I say right back. “I’m not letting little old Mamie spoil my wedding.”
Sara Lynn laughs and looks around the yard. Her eyes have fire in them again, and she points down the hill. “I was thinking about the ceremony being down in that clearing in front of the meadow garden. What do you think? And cocktails up here on the terrace? And where to put the tent for the reception? Maybe in the side yard. And we have to come up with a color scheme. You know, for the flowers and tablecloths. . . .”
Same old Sara Lynn all right, and I’m more than satisfied, because that’s just the way I like her.
E
veryone’s in a tizzy because the wedding is in two weeks. Ruth says it has to be that soon because she and Jack are so excited that they don’t want to wait. Ha! Does she think I’m stupid? She just wants to tie the knot before her stomach’s too fat to fit into a pretty white dress.
We went to the bridal shop today to buy our dresses. Since we didn’t have time to special order anything, we had to buy dresses they already had. This was good news for Ruth and Sara Lynn, who
love
their dresses, but bad news for me. My dress isn’t anything like what I hoped it would be. It’s sort of a girly pink with ruffles at the top and bottom and a skirt that poufs out instead of twirling nicely. I look like a freaky child beauty queen without the beauty.
We’re trying on the dresses right now at home so we can double-check to be sure they don’t need any alterations. Guess whose idea that was? Not mine, I can tell you that.
“Can you
please
take out the ruffles?” I ask Sara Lynn, scratching at the flouncy folds of fabric at my chest. Sara Lynn is walking around me and positively beaming as she lifts up the skirt of my dumb Shirley Temple dress and puts it back down again.
“Honey, the ruffles are adorable,” she says. “You’ll ruin the dress if you take them out. Besides, it looks so cute on you.”
Sara Lynn is wearing a softer pink; “blush” is what she keeps calling it. Her dress doesn’t have ruffles or bows. It just sort of drapes over her body, clinging a little bit to her curves. I wish I had a dress like hers, instead of this stupid “adorable” dress she talked me into. She really looks like a knockout. Even Ruth, who can’t think about anything these days except the wedding and the baby, notices how fabulous she looks. “Sara Lynn, that dress was made for you,” she says. “Turn around.”
Sara Lynn smiles and spins around, her blond hair flying out from her and then settling back over her shoulders.
“Whew! Wait till Sam gets a load of you.”
My ears perk up and the back of my neck tingles. I must have heard wrong, but I don’t think so, because I’m getting this awful, sinking feeling in my stomach. “Sam who?” I ask, my heart beating through my dumb ruffled chest.
They’re quiet a minute, and then Sara Lynn says brightly, “Sam Johnson. He’s going to be my date for the wedding.”
“Sam?” I say quietly. Then my voice gets louder because I’ve had enough of everything, enough of people lying to me and leaving and pretending to care about me when they just plain don’t. “
My
Sam? Sam’s your date for the wedding?”
“We’ve been . . . seeing each other,” Sara Lynn says, wringing her hands together and talking all chipper, like she’s not totally guilty of stealing him from me. “I hope that’s okay.”
“You hope it’s okay?” I feel like a parrot repeating back each unbelievable thing she says. “You hope it’s okay? Well, it’s not okay! It’s not.” I rip at the ruffle on my dress that’s itching me like crazy. “Are you fucking blind?” It’s the first time I’ve ever said the f-word, and it feels good. “Are you fucking, fucking, fucking stupid? I hate you!” I grab up my itchy polyester skirt and run from the room. “I hate you and I’ll never forgive you.”
I run downstairs and out to the porch, where Mamie sits rocking. “What on earth?!” she says as I careen past her and out the porch door. I run down the hill in my bare feet, tripping about halfway down. “Shit!” I say as I pick myself up and look at the grass stains I’ve got on my dress. Good! I hope I wreck the damn thing. I’m not going to be in the stupid wedding anyhow.
Then I’m at the bottom of the hill, in Sara Lynn’s special gardens, and before this wild idea inside me even has time to settle, I’m doing it. I’m ripping off all of Sara Lynn’s flowers. Good-bye, roses. Good-bye, scabiosa. Good-bye, hydrangeas. Good-bye, butterfly bushes. Good-bye, meadow flowers. I’m stomping on the low plants and ripping blooms off the high ones, crying and crying as loud as I can. I don’t even care that my hands are getting scraped and cut. It doesn’t bother me at all. I wipe some blood on my dress, hoping it stains and won’t ever come out.
Sara Lynn and Ruth are here now, and Sara Lynn is screaming, “Oh, my God, what have you done?”
“I’ve ruined your garden!” I shout. “How does it feel? How does it feel to have someone wreck something you love?” I turn to Ruth. “And I’m not coming to your stupid wedding. You can just find another junior bridesmaid.” My voice catches, and I fall to the ground, wailing. “It’s not fair,” I cry. “It’s just not fair.”
Ruth bends down to hug me. “No, it sure isn’t fair,” she says. “It sure isn’t. Baby doll, we didn’t know. You were . . . you were in love with Sam?”
In love? In love? He was my soul mate. I loved him so much, it was something I couldn’t say even to myself. He was mine. What about that time he told me he was falling in love and that it was our secret? He was talking about her?! About her?! Oh God! I put my face in my hands and sob. He was going to wait for me, and we were going to change the world together. I think of the way he looked when he called me his little activist, and I realize my stomach’s never going to stop feeling this pain that’s sharp and hollow at the same time. I’m never going to stop hurting. Never. My whole life is ruined.
I nod, still crying, and say, “I still do. I’ll never stop loving him.”
Ruth hugs me tighter and says, “Ah, honey, I know. But you’ll love someone else someday. Someone right for you.”
“Sam
is
right for me,” I tell her. And it’s true, he is. If only Sara Lynn hadn’t taken him away with her big boobs and straight blond hair.
“I want to tell you something,” Sara Lynn says. I jerk my head up and see her staring at the trampled meadow garden, her hand at her throat and tears running down her cheeks. “Something you should know.” She turns to look at me and says, “A long time ago, before you were born, I was in love with your father. And, Hope, I—I never thought I would love anyone after him.”
I’m sitting on the ground, my mouth open in shock. Sara Lynn was in love with my father? “Did he love you back?” I ask meanly, because it’s pretty clear he liked my mother more than he liked her.
“Mmm-hmm.” She nods, wiping her eyes and smiling through her tears, not at me, but at some memory she’s touching with her mind. “We weren’t meant to be together, but we were in love for a brief, wonderful time. And look what he gave me—you, the greatest gift of my life.”
They were in love? But then why . . . ? “How do you know you weren’t meant to be together?” I ask, sniffling. I don’t understand any of this.
“You just know, Hope,” says Sara Lynn.
“Are you meant to live your life with Sam?” I say bitterly. I swear, I won’t be able to stand it if she says yes.
“I don’t know,” Sara Lynn replies. “I don’t know that right now.”
I cry again and say, “I thought I was meant to live my life with Sam.”
It’s Sara Lynn who hugs me now, saying, “I know, sweet girl, I know.”
I stand up quickly, ripping the skirt of my dress as I jerk my body out of her arms. I start walking up to the house, and she comes after me, calling like she’s pleading with me, “Hope . . .”
“Let her go now,” I hear Ruth say. “Let her be alone for a little bit.”
I cry even harder because I think about how alone I’ll be for the rest of my life. No mother. No father. No Ruth. No Sara Lynn. No Sam. I climb the hill and then run up the porch steps and swing open the porch door.
“What in the world, child!” says Mamie. She’s looking at me if I’ve gone stark, raving crazy, and maybe I have. I walk right by her into the kitchen, and then I race up the back stairs and into my room, slamming the door shut. I strip out of this stupid, itchy, ripped, pink, grass- and bloodstained dress and stamp my feet on it. Then I pick it up and throw it in a ball against my bedroom wall. I slide into shorts and a T-shirt as I watch Sara Lynn and Ruth coming up the hill and onto the terrace below my window, and I hate them. I hate them both. I duck down with my ear to the open window so I can hear what they’re saying about me.
“What in heaven was that all about?” Mamie asks from the porch.