Superior Women (45 page)

At other times Candy is saner than anyone. When Megan calls to tell Peg that Cathy has died, it is Candy who comforts her mother, pointing out, “In an odd way it all seems to have worked out right. Cathy’s child, and her mother, and her mother’s new husband. Was Cathy married to the father of her child?”

“I don’t know. At first Megan said she was, and he died, but Lavinia always said there was something funny going on. ‘Funny’ seems an odd word for it all, somehow.”

“Well, Cathy must have felt sort of good about the way it worked out. Her mother getting married and taking care of the child.”

“I don’t know if she felt good about anything.” Peg sighs.

•     •     •

Lavinia also calls about Cathy’s death; she and Peg have a brief, awkward conversation about that (Peg has already heard how “rude” Cathy was, on Lavinia’s visit) and then Lavinia goes on to scold Peg about her new living arrangements (about which she knows very little).

“I’m sure you know what you’re doing, dearest Peglet,” says Lavinia, clearly not sure at all, “but I can’t believe you did right in leaving that nice old Cameron.”

“Well, I hope I did.”

“He did say you’d taken your maid along.”

“My maid
? What on earth is he talking about?”

It is true that Cornelia has said she will come to visit, but surely that is not what Cameron meant? “I’m living here with Candy and a friend I met here before, that summer I spent working here,” Peg halfway explains. And then, with more courage than she would have known she had, she adds, “Possibly because my friend is a Mexican-American Cameron chose to refer to her as my maid.”

“Oh, well, yes, I guess.” Lavinia trails off, and they both get off the phone as soon as possible.

And then, on one of her “good” days Candy announces that she is tired of the tobacco barn; she wants to move into the house.

“But darling, where?” Peg would also like to know for how long, but she cannot ask that, not of her daughter. Nor could she expect Candy to know.

But Candy’s modest request has the (perhaps intended) effect of making Peg feel guilty for the very large amount of space that she, Peg, has had in mind for herself and Vera, that whole long room. Of course they do not need all that.

She also wonders what, at close range, as it were, Candy will make of her own connection with Vera, but decides rather easily not to worry; she somehow concludes that whatever Candy thinks could in no way be harmful to herself, to Candy.

•     •     •

In a gradual way, Peg begins to notice that on those good days, Candy seems to have a particular friend among the kids who are working on the house: a small, very thin, very black young man, the probable youngest of the group—he looks about sixteen.

Peg sees Candy and Russell, who is smaller than Candy is, engaged in serious, rather hurried private conversations, here and there, during Russell’s coffee breaks, or at lunch.

With Peg, Candy does not mention Russell at all, and so Peg sees fit not to ask, but she wonders about their connection, and she worries, a little. Although they never seem to smile at each other, Peg of course considers the possibility that they are lovers, and then chastises herself for doing so. She knows nothing at all about Candy’s sexual life, she does not want to know. But she has to admit that she finds that possibility disturbing. Mainly because she does not think that Candy is well enough, really, to handle anything as serious as sex. Peg has never believed that the young are as light-hearted about sexual matters as they say they are; if they were they would all be much happier, wouldn’t they?

“Russell is really upset,” Candy tells Peg, one day (one good day). Candy’s tone, though, is so tense, so enforcedly calm, or so it seems to Peg, that Peg is frightened, for Candy. She cannot quite focus on Russell’s upset.

Candy continues: “His sister gets out of jail next week, he says she got into a fight with her husband, and she cut him so he wouldn’t kill her. But they locked her up, not him. And now she’s getting out, with no place to go, and her husband’s going to be looking for her. And Mom, do you think she could stay here with us for a while?”

Even as Peg is saying, Yes, of course, her mind is running ahead, to her own long dream of a bedroom, which she now begins to see that she was not supposed to have. It will be diminished by one, by two, and who knows who will come next? She sees that she
should perhaps have left the house as it was. She and Vera could have the attic (or half the attic).

The next day, a Saturday, about midafternoon, from nowhere strange yellowish heavy clouds appear, all around the green horizon, and distant rumblings of thunder sound. Peg summons Vera to come and sit out on the porch, to watch.

Vera laughs at her. “It’s just a thunderstorm. You’re so funny, you think everything that happens down here is strange and wonderful. Like Oz.”

Peg cheerfully agrees. “I guess I do. It is Oz, for me.”

They sit in adjacent rockers, on the long wide-open porch—like an old couple, people who have been together forever (like the Sawyers), Peg thinks, and she next thinks: dear God, please let us be that, an endless couple.

The sky darkens, and is split by a single crack of lightning, and then, in the weird sulfurous half-light, the threatened rain pours down.

“You’re not cold?” Peg asks Vera.

“No, it’s so warm out. And you’re right, it’s wonderful to watch.”

Peg tells herself to stop worrying over Vera’s health—and in fact Vera has never looked better. Her delicate dusky skin is lightly flushed, her dark eyes clear. She is not only pretty, she is a healthy young woman, Peg firmly tells herself. To Vera she says, “It’s a little worrying, all these people suddenly moving in. And this summer Cornelia wants to come to visit. And Megan.”

Surprisingly, Vera takes this up very seriously. “I think we have to talk about where we’re going,” she says.

Peg’s heart clenches: does she mean, she’ll move out if all those people come? She’ll find someone else, some new woman, or a man? Too quickly she says, “Well, they don’t have to come, I mean we don’t have to have Russell’s sister, or anyone, if you don’t want—”

“But we do have to, and I do want. And I want to stay with you, silly Peg.” Vera reaches out to Peg, her long cool fingers close around Peg’s wrist.

Peg’s skin burns, at that touch. She says, “Well, all right.”

“We just have to talk about what we’re going to do with the house,” says Vera.

Half waking from the lively nonsleep of a drugged insomniac, at 4
A.M.
(too late for another pill), Lavinia, alone in the house in Fredericksburg, begins to contemplate the rest of her life. Ahead she can only see, like giant impending tombstones, a row of unbearable anniversaries, all close at hand: the day on which her father will have been dead for a year; the anniversary of Watergate, which sent Harvey Rodman finally off to the Bahamas; her fiftieth birthday; her thirtieth college reunion (Christ, thirty years since that hopeful—well, fairly hopeful, very pretty June?). And the final tombstone, the largest, marks thirty years of marriage to Potter, which will require an enormous party, and she simply cannot, cannot do it.

What she will do, she thinks—what she often, almost always plans at that hour—will be what she thinks of as “take-some-pills.” She will do it very carefully, too: she will not eat a big dinner (perhaps no dinner is best, just a lot of wine?) so as not to throw up, and live. So disgusting—an ambulance, stomach pump, retrieval. Everyone’s curiosity as to why, and their flowers, sympathy. Herself looking awful.
No.
She will go about it properly, systematically, scientifically (she smiles to herself just slightly at that last). She will very successfully take-some-pills. Instant sleep, lovely, permanent sleep.

If she could stop smoking, could possibly, conceivably just quit, Lavinia thinks, several hours later, over morning coffee and her
third cigarette (possibly her fourth, if you count the one in bed, at five)—if she could possibly stop smoking her skin would most assuredly improve, not to mention the dry cough that seems to attack her voice, especially at the end of phone calls.

Dry. Dry skin, a dry cough, a dry, uh, “place.” (At that moment she curiously recalls Henry Stuyvesant, who used to talk, or whisper, rather, about her “lovely cunt,” a word she has never brought herself to use. In any case, not lovely now.) Hot, dry. Would an ice cube possibly—God, she might try anything—would an ice cube there do anything for her?

Sipping coffee, smoking, in the prettyish (it should be redone) breakfast room, on the cold Virginia morning, Lavinia is wearing a long white quilted satin robe, which is warm but rather old, at least three or four years old, but whoever except Potter will possibly see her in it? It is even somewhat stained, she then notices, looking down, with the interesting interior frown that no one is there to observe. Lavinia has then an instant of pure déjà vu: with a lopsided jolt of her heart she sees that her robe could be the old one she always wore around Barnard Hall (although it is not, of course not; nothing lasts that long, thank God).

However, in 1943, or ’44, ’45—for years, whatever she wore (it didn’t matter) Lavinia was so beautiful, a rarely lovely young blond girl, who could get by with wearing anything at all. Whereas now—now she needs everything she can buy, all the Laszlo and Elizabeth Arden, the Valentino, Gucci, everyone. She needs them all desperately, and still they are not enough.

All the men she has known have loved her clothes, Lavinia recalls, with a diffuse affection that includes both the men and the clothing. Even Gordon Shaughnessey (she won’t think how long ago that was,
will not
count back), even poor Gordon always loved the silk and lace panties she used to wear, on top of her lace garter belt. She thinks of Gordon touching all that silk and lace that he never actually saw, since they never took off clothes, never actually (thank God, Potter had to have his virgin) ever did anything but touch.

Even Henry Stuyvesant, who turned out to be such a horrible radical Communist—Henry always loved, or said he did, the dresses that Lavinia wore, the scarves, the tiny bras, from France.

Whereas, whatever Megan wore would be just not right, no matter where she shopped or how much money she spent. Lavinia sits up taller and she almost smiles at this, her most cheering thought in hours. Something to do with coming from California, probably, or more to the point, with coming from nothing, in terms of family. No real family, no money.

Style in dress is rather like an accent, one’s way of speaking, Lavinia concludes; a notion that she finds extremely interesting. No matter how people try to change they can never really hide where or from whom they come. Poor Harvey Rodman, with his careful (well yes, too careful) Ivy League clothes, and that perfect Princeton accent (and at least that part was true; he did go to Princeton); but sometimes some other telltale vowel would escape, and Lavinia would be reminded that before Princeton there was probably a public high school, and not the quite uncheckable Midwestern Catholic military place he named. Just as Megan’s shoes or her gloves or her makeup or something would always be
just wrong.

But it does not make Lavinia happy to think of Megan and Henry Stuyvesant together—even if she is quite sure that Henry must wish that Megan had more
style.
And they have been together for years, although of course with Megan so busy in New York and Henry still (incomprehensibly) down there in Chapel Hill, they probably do not spend much time together. And of course she, Lavinia, could always get Henry back, if she should condescend to do so.

That last sentence, like a tiny bead, a bright gleam among Lavinia’s now habitually shadowy thoughts, drops entirely from her mind, for most of the hours of that day, as she goes about doing nothing: some phone calls, reading, out for shopping, eating, resting. She achieves nothing but further steps toward age: aging, drying, gravity pulling at everything, all of her sagging downward, until she begins to wonder: Why not now? Why not today, to take pills?

But then that small sentence about Henry reappears, this time expanded and much more clear: I could get Henry back, if I condescended to do so, and then make sure Megan found out, and then I would drop him cold, Lavinia thinks. Of course she will do no such thing, but the certainty that she could—she could ruin everything, for them both!—makes Lavinia smile, for the second time that day. And it makes her decide that no, no: no need to take pills just yet. She might as well stick around for a while and see what happens.

Although she rarely drinks at all (well, Potter drinks enough for both of them, God knows), she decides to have a glass of wine with her dinner.

“It’s odd that you should call,” says Henry Stuyvesant.

Lavinia laughs, rather sadly. It is about ten, that night, and all the monsters that haunt her mind are out in force. And so, having more or less planned that her tone with Henry would be frightened, close to panic, even, she now finds no need for pretense. She is frightened. It is raining outside, and cold, with a bellowing wind, and the images in her mind are worse than any possible weather. “I called you because I hate everything so much,” she now says to Henry, “and I didn’t use to. I mean, when I knew you I was okay, and now I’m not.”

A pause, before Henry clears his throat. “Well, dear Lavinia. You mustn’t feel like that. Although we all do sometimes, I suppose.”

“Oh, Henry, please don’t lecture me. I honestly can’t bear it.”

“I didn’t mean to, Lavinia. I’m upset at how you sound. I’d like to help.”

They settle, at last, on his stopping by the next day. He is driving up to Washington, then going on to New York. They do not mention Megan.

After all that wind and rain, the following day is brilliant, washed all clean and perfectly clear, except for some low-lying silver mists down on the river, far below Lavinia’s house.

All day she has moved in a dreamy, tranced way, avoiding Jethro, the black man who is there to clean. Everything that Jethro does makes so much noise, the vacuum, with all its attachments, all the cleaning water that he runs; Jethro even makes furniture polish whine.