The Carriage House (7 page)

They were sitting at the same glass table on the patio where Margaux had made her announcement. Beyond them, the sound of the pond, trickling. And beyond that, the rows of Margaux’s garden, meticulous and opulent. And then Adelia said the thing that most clinched Diana’s mind. “I say this for the sake of Arthur, too. If you marry him now, your life will be settled. That’s a wonderful feeling. Safe. But it wouldn’t be fair to him. To ask him to settle before he’s had a chance to dream of the person he’d like to become. He’s working construction, but he should be more. He must want more than that for himself.” “He’s going to own a restaurant,” Di murmured without meeting Adelia’s eye. “That’s exactly what I mean,” Adelia agreed, although from the sound of her voice, it was clear that she wasn’t certain that owning a restaurant was a big enough ambition for the man Diana would marry. “A bigger ambition, like owning a restaurant, or whatever else he decides on. He needs time to pursue that on his own. If you get married, he’ll have everything he wants. But now is the time for him to want more.” She gave Diana a moment to contemplate the possibilities she’d take from Arthur if she were to marry him now. When Adelia spoke again, she leaned forward as if sharing a secret from her life that no one else could know. “And Di, listen, if you two are meant to be, you’ll end up back together in the end.”

After that talk, Diana spent the rest of the summer meeting Arthur in the carriage house, pressing her face against the slope of his pale shoulders. He knew she was wearing the ring hidden, but he never pressed her about it. He must have trusted that she was only taking her time. Without telling him the truth, she clung to her final days with him, watching shadows pass across his half-hidden eyes. Treasuring the secrets of their private life in the loft. In the last week of the summer, she told him they needed to fulfill their promise before they could end up together.

“I don’t know what you mean. What is this ‘promise’? We promised to get married. What other kind of promise do you mean?”

Diana’s confidence faltered. “I just mean there are things we should accomplish before we end up together.”

“We will accomplish things. I’m not worried about it.”

“But we should accomplish things for ourselves
before we’ve settled down.” She could feel her logic becoming less clear, but she remembered the certainty in Adelia’s voice.

Arthur watched her stumbling. “Do you want to date other people?” he asked.

Diana hadn’t even considered that. “No, Arthur, it’s just I have this feeling that we’re both becoming different versions of ourselves, and we have to finish that before we marry each other.”

“What is this different version you want to be?”

“I don’t really know,” Diana said. She was getting flustered. “I want to win the NCAAs. I want to do well in school. I want to be an architect or a politician.”

“An architect or a politician?” he repeated, and Diana felt his scorn.

“Arthur,” she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to become, but I want to become something before we settle down.”

And so, with Adelia’s advice echoing in her ears, Diana continued holding on to the familiar shape of his body, aching from head to toe. Finally, exhausted, she told him goodbye, left the ring in his palm, and walked back over the lawn to the house.

The next day she went back to Texas, to the flat, glassy heat of the tennis courts in August. She stood there, alone on the bare expanse of exposed concrete, under the full stands, and only then did she know how much she’d given up. Sleeping got harder. She tried to date other boys, but no one was as good as Arthur. Her knee never fully recovered, or at least that was what she told herself, because something changed about her game. She couldn’t perform as she once had. Tennis was no longer simple. It was an effort that involved her entire body and her entire mind. It became exhausting. She had a bad season, and the next year a new recruit from Florida assumed her spot at number one.

And she lost Arthur for good. He wouldn’t return her calls. There was no “for now” in his mind. His mind had comprehended the concept of forever and didn’t adjust itself back to the level of now. He spent another year working construction, then went out west somewhere for school. She heard he was paying his own way by working in a restaurant, and she tried to call him to offer congratulations—she had never done something so independent or self-directed in her whole small life—but his number had changed.

Now he was here, only a yard behind her, so close that the feel of his jaw in her hand had returned. He was here, and the span of time when Adelia had been so sure Diana would find herself had passed, and there had been no flowering of her potential. She had faded, and that was all. She was pursuing a discipline that didn’t make her father proud, and she wasn’t pursuing it well. For Diana Adair—class president, acer of math and science APs, class pet of the shop teacher with his sawdusty mustache and his missing thumb—architecture school ought to have been a breeze. But she applied three times and was rejected twice. After she was finally accepted, only she, of all her cohort, failed to graduate on time. She left her flawed blueprints on the bus rather than have to defend them. Diana had practiced the art of failure and no longer remembered what it was like to be the successful girl she was when she gave Arthur back his ring.

Tomorrow she would see him. At twenty-seven, she wasn’t as pretty as she was when he met her at seventeen. He had become everything he hoped, and she couldn’t remember how her confident seventeen-year-old self once talked. Restless, Diana stood up. She tested the second step with her foot. She placed half her weight on it, then all. It shifted beneath her. It wouldn’t be safe to try. They’d had a ladder when they slept up there; even then the stairs weren’t safe. She backed down to the floor and considered those sagging stairs. If only she could climb back up to the loft. She wondered whether anything remained up there: the space heater, a blanket, some books. She had no idea. She’d stayed away from the carriage because Arthur wouldn’t talk to her. Without him, she hadn’t wanted to spend time inside.

And now it was going to be demolished unless Adelia’s wild scheme to move it could work. The desire to succeed in the relocation flooded her. She did not want to lose this place. If they could get it onto the Adair property, a renovation could work. She could even help. The structure could be saved, the materials preserved. The idea animated her. She walked out of the carriage house and circled it once. Tomorrow she would talk to the contractors. There were things she could do. Encouraged, she walked back through the garden into the house and climbed the stairs. On the second floor, before she turned in to her bedroom, she caught sight of Adelia walking out of the bathroom. Her hair was tousled, and she was wearing a floor-length white nightgown. The sight of her startled Diana. Adelia was generally so composed. She wore sweater sets and capri pants. There were always earrings in her ears and clips in her neat blond bob. To see her in a nightgown like that, blurry-visioned without her contacts, was somehow upsetting.

“We’re going to get that house back,” Di said, as though to offer strength.

Adelia straightened some, and her eyes came into focus. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we will.” She reached out and took Diana’s hand. “We’ll get it back, sweet Di.”

Chapter 6

M
onday morning was chaos. From the time they woke up to the time they tumbled into the car, the girls were a nightmare to corral, Caroline having left her tennis racket at science camp and Lucy insisting that she had flown on her way down the stairs to breakfast and would they please just come and watch, and Caroline reminding her that flying was impossible for Homo sapiens because of gravity and winglessness and the lack of evolutionary need, and both of them evading their toast with a slipperiness that was incomprehensible to Elizabeth so early in the day. She thought again, with a welling sensation to which she had grown accustomed in the last year and a half, that she was doing all of this all alone, while Mark was probably having morning sex. To settle her nerves, she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, then wrapped the toast in foil and gave it to the girls for the road. She was in the process of reminding herself to feel grateful for her blessings, for these little girls who were her own, when she walked out the front door and caught Lucy throwing the remains of her toast into the pachysandra bed, and Elizabeth flew to pieces again.

By the time they got into the car, there was a pit in Elizabeth’s stomach, the feeling that she had forgotten something important. This pit welled with anxiety when she found herself stuck driving behind a bulldozer, moving at a speed that could only be described as prehistoric. As a result, the girls would probably be late for the tennis court she had reserved in their name, which had been difficult to procure at that hour in the morning, popular with all the undivorced housewives who were not raising children on their own. She attempted to remain calm as she followed the bulldozer for the entire length of Clubhouse Road, but she found herself beating the steering wheel with her palm when it took a left onto Little Lane. At this point she started to wonder what the bulldozer could be doing on their street, which was a cul-de-sac and could not be used as a throughway. And then her anxiety sharpened into something resembling fear because the bulldozer was turning onto Anita Schmidt’s driveway, joining a crane-thing with an actual wrecking ball. She braked in front of the house.

It was Monday. Today was not the day for the demolition. The demolition day was Thursday, was it not? They were meant to have some time to start fighting for neighborhood hearts and minds. Daddy had just had a
stroke
,
and that asshole across the street was speeding up the demolition plan? Elizabeth glared at Anita Schmidt’s house, which was ugly in an old-person-house way: ranch-style, with pale bricks and orange-brown shutters. It was the ugliest house on the block: the neighbors never should have allowed her to build it. Specifications should have been made about shutter color when Granddaddy subdivided the land.

Two construction workers in hard hats climbed out of their machines. They consulted a clipboard; one of them made a joke and the other one laughed, and in her frustration Elizabeth beat the steering wheel again. Now they were waving their hands, and the machines rumbled and moved out onto the lawn, approaching the carriage house. Elizabeth tried to summon inner calm. She needed to think clearly. She attempted to practice her ujjayi breathing, but as she pulled into the driveway of her childhood home, Lucy let out an earth-shattering screech, followed by “I CAN NOSE-FUCKING FLY IF I WANT TO!” The ujjayi breath went out the window, and all Elizabeth could think was, did Lucy have a cursing problem before the divorce, and why had literal-minded Caroline told her she couldn’t fly when it would obviously upset her, and how had Mark left her to do this on her own? But she didn’t have time to think about any of these questions with a peaceful mind or an open heart because there was a fucking bulldozer ready to tear down Daddy’s carriage house and she had to hustle the girls inside so she and Adelia could strategize.

Inside things weren’t less of a wreck. Daddy was sitting at the kitchen table, looking disturbingly discombobulated in an old pair of corduroys and slippers and a patterned sweater. A patterned sweater, of all uncharacteristic things. Elizabeth had never seen him wearing it: he looked like Linus from
Charlie Brown,
defeated and small. And he was just sitting there, looking down at his coffee mug, muttering, “I can’t smell it,” over and over again. Adelia was there, ignoring Daddy, staring out the window with an intensity that made it seem as though she were preparing to dive through the glass. She was wearing some kind of Gothic floor-length nightgown. Even the girls could sense that something was terribly wrong. They clung to Elizabeth’s skirt as though their grandfather were naked and his best friend had transformed overnight into a little vampire girl.

“Shit,” Adelia said. “Shit, shit, shit.” She abruptly fled the kitchen. Elizabeth wondered if that was where Lucy was getting her cursing, and she reminded herself to talk to Adelia about it, but then she heard Daddy saying, “I cannot smell a thing,” so she attempted to focus on her father.

“Daddy,” she said, squatting by his side. “Daddy, what do you mean?”

“I cannot smell this coffee,” he said. “It tastes like nothing. Do you understand?” Elizabeth was trying to listen to him, but a second later, through the kitchen window, she saw a rock the size of a fist fly through the air and strike the ground a foot away from one of the construction workers. The worker spun around, covering his head with his arms. Elizabeth stood up, speechless. “This coffee tastes like dishwater,” Daddy said, and then another rock—this one the size of a sneaker—flew through the air and struck the crane-thing so hard that Elizabeth could hear the clatter from inside. The rock had definitely come from above her.

“Mommy, what’s going on?” asked Caroline. Lucy was gone somewhere, striking a tragic pose, most likely, and then another rock flew through the air and landed with a thud between two other hard-hatted workers, who by this time were cowering in the shadow of their machines.

“Stay here, sweetie,” Elizabeth said, although she was not entirely confident about leaving Caroline with Daddy in his strange condition. She ran up the stairs and saw Adelia standing at the guest room window, in that Gothic-virginal nightgown, launching rocks at the demolition team. She was pulling the rocks from a threatening stockpile that had somehow accumulated on the guest room carpeting, and while she launched, Diana was sitting there on the guest room bed, watching Adelia without making a single move. Then Izzy was running down the stairs from her little lair up in the attic, and there was a crazed flush on her face. “Is she bombing them?” she asked. “Are those coming from Adelia?” When she saw that indeed it was Adelia, she started laughing like a keyed-up lunatic before turning and retreating up to her lair.

Elizabeth rushed into the room. “What are you doing, Adelia?” she asked, then noticed that this was where Lucy had run off to. She had wedged herself between the open door and the corner and was watching Adelia with her mouth slightly ajar. “And Di,” Elizabeth said, “
what
are you
doing
? Why are you letting Lucy
watch
this?” Di, startled, looked back at her with a brand of vague guiltiness that evaporated the last vestiges of Elizabeth’s inner calm. It was unfair for Elizabeth to have to be the voice of reason in this mess. She was only thirty-two, and yet she was as old as if she had lived for a thousand years. That was the saddest thing about being a mother: you gave up your right to youngness forever. She would have liked to run laughing up to her room. Or to sit on the bed and watch the show unfold. But she was a mother. She had to act adult, and here was Adelia, almost fifty-five, pelting rocks out of the window in a nightgown. And where was Margaux? After years of therapy, Elizabeth had learned to stop asking that question, and yet now she wanted to go knock on her mother’s door, to plead with her, “Please just take care of this chaos in your house, I’m so tired of dealing with it all.” But first she had to get Lucy out of there. She took her by the wrist and literally dragged her up to Izzy’s room, where Izzy was sitting at the desk, peering out the window like a cat watching a bunch of crippled canaries. Of all the crazy people in the house, she seemed the least harmful influence at this point, so Elizabeth deposited Lucy there, after which she marched across the hall and took hold of Margaux’s doorknob. Then she stopped. It wouldn’t help. Instead, Elizabeth ran back down the stairs to deal with Adelia, realizing as she did that she would miss her nine o’clock class and she had not called in for a substitute, and in order to get to the ten-thirty class she would have to leave the girls with one of several lunatics.

By the time she got back to the guest room, Diana was gone. Adelia was still launching projectiles, which, Elizabeth recognized, were the rocks Margaux used to line her iris beds.

“Adelia,
stop,
”
she said. But even as she said this, she glanced out the window and saw that the construction workers had taken refuge within their machinery and were backing off the Schmidt lawn, beating a lumbering retreat down the driveway.

Together Elizabeth and Adelia watched the bulldozer and the crane-thing, with its swinging wrecking ball, totter off down Little Lane, away from the carriage house. It was like watching the last two dinosaurs on earth seeking safety in solitude. There was something momentous about the accomplishment. They had vanquished the powerful machines. Elizabeth felt framed by the window, illuminated, caught in a moment that ought to be watched. Adelia was flushed and triumphant in her nightgown. Adelia, Elizabeth realized, had pioneer grit. She was no flabby suburban mother, bent on smoothing rough edges. She thrived at the point of a blade. This incident with the rocks required more courage than any of the women on Little Lane ever could have summoned. Elizabeth enjoyed the understanding for a few minutes, feeling a kinship with Adelia that she had never felt with her mother. They were both women who didn’t belong in a town such as this one. She could see herself and Adelia, standing by the window, as the workers must have seen them: two women, one old and one young, both regal in their way, defending their family.

The sweetness of the moment, however, was short-lived, because suddenly, three police cars rounded the corner from Clubhouse Road onto Little Lane, silent but alarming with their rolling red-blue lights. Panicky sensations were unfurling in various parts of Elizabeth’s body so intensely that she worried she was having an anxiety attack. She closed her eyes and practiced trataka visualization, but all she could see were the flashing lights of the cop cars, and when she opened her eyes, they were still there, pulling into the driveway.

“Shit,” she said. “Shit, Adelia. You should change into some clothes.”