Lippman, Laura (18 page)

She studied her reflection in the window above the sink.
A woman must have a window over her sink
, her mother had said.
Washing dishes is so boring there must be a view
. To her knowledge it was the only demand her mother had ever uttered. Certainly, she had never questioned that it was the woman who would wash the dishes and make the meals and clean the house, much less seek a place for herself outside the house. Women of Miriam’s generation were beginning to ask for so much, but her mother, miserable as she was living in Ottawa, had asked for nothing but a window, and Miriam had followed suit. Here, during daylight hours, she could see the large, overgrown-verging-on-wild yard. The wildness was a carefully cultivated illusion. Miriam had tended to her yard as she had reared her children, allowing it to follow its instincts, respecting what was there—honeysuckle, mint, jack-in-the-pulpit—and not trying to force things that were never meant to be, such as roses or hydrangeas. The things she added had been compatible, unobtrusive, perennials capable of thriving in the shade.

But once the sun went down, all the window provided was one’s own face. The woman that Miriam saw looked exhausted, yet still attractive. She would have no problem finding a new man. In fact, men seemed more drawn to her than ever in the past year. Chet clearly had a crush on her, and not only because she was a damsel in distress. The knowledge of Miriam’s affair, the secret that he had continued to safeguard, excited him. She was a bad woman. And Willoughby, despite being a detective, didn’t seem to have a lot of firsthand experience with bad women.

Other men, not privy to what Willoughby knew, were attracted to Miriam by the palpable sense of doom and damage, the exhausted eyes that clearly said,
I’m out of the game
. It was frightening, really, how many men responded to damage in a woman. Yes, she could easily find another man. But she didn’t want another man. What she wanted was an excuse to leave, a definitive reason to go upstairs, pack a bag and drive away, without being seen as the cold, unnatural woman who had abandoned her husband when he needed her most. The husband who had forgiven her, so generously, so unstintingly. Then again, how magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity?

She would give it six more months. That would take them to October. But October had been so hard on Dave last fall—the beautiful weather, Halloween, with neighborhood children in their costumes. November, December? But the holidays were more painful still. January brought Sunny’s birthday, and then it would be March again, the second anniversary, with Heather’s birthday the following week. There would never be a right time to leave, Miriam thought. There would just be a time. Soon.

She imagined herself on the highway, heading to…Texas. She knew a girl from her college days who had settled in Austin and raved about its free-and-easy lifestyle. Miriam saw herself in her car, driving west, then south through Virginia, through the long Shenandoah Valley, past the destinations they had visited with the girls—Luray Caverns, Skyline Drive, Monticello—deeper and deeper, all the way to Abingdon and into Tennessee. She experienced a chill. Ah, right. Abingdon was the locale of another alleged sighting. A well-intentioned one, but those clueless busybodies bothered Miriam more than the out-and-out hoaxes did.

Of all the things that she had cause to resent, Miriam most despised how her private tragedy had become a public one, something that others claimed to be affected by. Look at these reporters today, pretending they had a clue how she felt. The deluded witnesses were just another variation, people seeking ownership, as if the “Bethany girls” were a public resource or treasure, too great for one family to own, like the Hope Diamond down in the Smithsonian. Of course, that gem was said to be cursed.

The Hope Diamond made her think of that huge diamond that Richard Burton gave Elizabeth Taylor. Miriam remembered watching the once-glorious couple on
Here’s Lucy
, with Sunny and Heather. Lucille Ball always made Miriam slightly anxious; a beautiful woman should not have to be so silly to get attention. Beauty was its own excuse for being—just look at Elizabeth Taylor if you doubted that fact. But the girls loved Lucy as if she were a cherished aunt, and the comedienne had raised them in a sense, amusing them many an afternoon, on the fuzzy feed from one of the Washington stations. Even the girls recognized that the current nighttime series couldn’t begin to touch the magic of the original, but they watched out of loyalty. In the show Miriam remembered, Ball tried on Taylor’s ring and couldn’t get it off. High jinks ensued, with lots of popping eyes and wide mouths.

People tried on Miriam’s pain in that way, modeled it for her, almost as if they expected her to be flattered by their interest. But they never had any trouble shedding it when the time came. They plucked it off and handed it back to her, continuing with their blessedly uneventful lives.

It had taken a lot of begging and promising and negotiating, but she finally got permission to attend a party. She had argued—well, not argued, a voice raised in anger was considered unacceptable—she had said that it would appear odd, forever saying no to the invitations at school. She was supposed to be a kid like any other, and kids went to parties. Uncle and Auntie, as she had been instructed to call them in public, were keen not to seem odd to others. That made sense to her, given all the secrets they were keeping and all the lies they were telling, but she couldn’t understand how they managed to hide their oddness from themselves. How could they not know how weird they were, how out of step in every way? Outside the house it was 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, in the middle of a decade that had proved that anything could happen, even in a small town such as this. A war had ended, a president had been toppled, because people had demanded change. Spoke for it, marched for it, died for it in some cases. She was not thinking of the soldiers in Vietnam. She never thought about them. She was thinking about Kent State, an event she wished she’d paid more attention to when it happened, but she’d been so much younger then. It wasn’t the kind of thing that a little girl could understand, much less care about.

She cared about it now, though. In the library she had found a copy of
Time
magazine with the photo of the girl crouching by the boy. The girl was a runaway, dislocated, not where she was supposed to be, and she had wandered into history. The photograph became a kind of promise: She could run away. She could find history. And if she found history, if she could do something large and important enough, then maybe she could be forgiven.

But, for now, she was happy to be in a basement party room in a house in town, waiting to see if anyone would call her number for Five Minutes in Heaven. The game had started contentiously, not because some girls didn’t want to play—everyone had been eager to play—but because there was much disagreement on how long couples should stay in the closet. Some said two, citing no less an authority than
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
, while others said it should be seven, because that sounded right:
Seven
Minutes in
Heaven
. “We’ll split the difference,” decreed the hostess, Kathy. A popular girl but a nice one, she wielded her power with grace. If Kathy said it was okay to play Five Minutes in Heaven, then it was definitely okay.

That was something else that Uncle and Auntie didn’t know about the world right outside their door: Sex was everywhere, even here, even among the very young, especially among the very young. Doctor, Spin the Bottle, now Five Minutes (or Two or Seven) in Heaven. Sex came first, well before drinking and drugs, although drugs were largely disdained here. Too hippie-ish. Her classmates were groping their way into adolescence, literally and figuratively.

She was the only one having full-out intercourse in a feather bed, however. She was pretty sure of that, not that she dared to compare notes. If she told anyone about life at home, they would take her away, and that might actually be worse.

It was hard to think about kissing in daylight, on a Saturday afternoon. Sex was a nighttime activity, grim and silent, in a house where everyone pretended not to hear the squeak of the springs, the way the bedstead swayed, pressing against the wall with a muted thump, like waves lapping a pier. Waves against a pier…She was in Annapolis, at the clam festival. She was eight. She wore orange-and-pink culottes. She didn’t like clams, but she liked the festival. Everyone was happy, back when she was eight.

By day she was a distant cousin, arrived from Ohio, saddled with a name she truly hated, Ruth. So plain, so stark that name. Ruth. If she had to have a new one, why not Cordelia or Geraldine, one of the names that Anne of Green Gables had chosen for herself? But Uncle explained that the choices were limited, and Ruth was the best he could do. Ruth was a real girl, once upon a time, a girl who lived to be only three or four, then burned up in a fire with her whole family in a place called Bexley. Ruth had a different birthday than she did, so they put her in the wrong grade, which she had expected to be boring and repetitive. But her new school, Shrine of the Little Flower, was actually harder than her old one. She wasn’t sure if that was because of the nuns or the fact that the class was small, maybe both. With so much schoolwork, she didn’t have time to learn all the things she should know about her new self, and she worried that someone was going to ask her questions about Ohio that she couldn’t answer—the capital, the state flower, the state bird. But no one ever did. Her new classmates had grown up together and had little experience dealing with strangers. And they’d been instructed explicitly not to talk to Ruth about the horrible things that had happened to her family back in Ohio.

One girl, someone who would have been called a spastic back home, although that term didn’t appear to be in use here, asked her about the cigars.

“Cigars?”

“From the burns?”

“Oh. Scars.” She needed to think for only a second. Lying was becoming second nature to her. “They’re where you can’t see them.”

She regretted this, because it got back to the boys from Little Flower and they had been gossiping about who might be the first to see Ruth’s secret scars. Even today, when Five Minutes in Heaven was proposed, she saw Jeffrey point to her and punch Bill in the arm, saying in a hoarse stage whisper, “Maybe you’ll get to see Ruth’s scars.” She knew that Jeffrey liked her, that his teasing was a form of flirtation, but she was too tired to care. If the girls at Little Flower didn’t know what to do with a new girl, the boys did, or thought they did. They liked her, mysterious, forbidden Ruth, with her tragic history that no one was supposed to mention. She worried that they could smell all the sex on her, despite the long showers she took morning and night, earning her harsh lectures about the limits of well water and the cost of natural gas.

“Forty-seven!” Bill called out. That was her number. The other kids whooped, as they did each time. She walked to the closet with as much dignity as possible, knowing that Bill was capering after her, making faces at his buddies behind her back. Again, this was what all the confident boys did, she reminded herself.

The closet was really a pantry, where Kathy’s mom put up her summer canning. Tomatoes and peppers and peaches stared down at them. They made her think of the jars in a horror movie, of the brains floating in brine in
Young Frankenstein
. Abbie. Abbie Normal! That would be a good fake name. Auntie put up food, too, and made wonderful jams and preserves. Apple, peach, plum, cherries—No, don’t think about the cherry tree. There was a large cooler on the floor, and they sat on it, hip to hip, shy and awkward.

“What do you want to do?” Bill asked.

“What do you want to do?” she countered.

He shrugged, as if the situation bored him, as if he’d seen it all and done it all.

“Do you want to kiss me?” she ventured.

“Yeah, I guess.”

His breath tasted of cake and potato chips, which was kind of pleasant. He parted his lips but didn’t try to put his tongue in her mouth. And he kept his hands to his sides, almost as if he were afraid to touch her.

“Nice,” she said, being polite but also meaning it.

“Do you want to do it again?”

“Sure.” They had five minutes.

This time he stuck the tiniest tip of his tongue between her lips and let it hang there, barely breathing, as if he expected her to object or push him away. Instead she had to concentrate on not widening her mouth reflexively and drawing his tongue in the rest of the way. She was well trained by now, expert in the techniques it took to speed through the nightly transaction. What would Ruth, the real Ruth, do, if she hadn’t burned up in a fire when she was four years old? What would Ruth know, how would she act? The tip of Bill’s tongue rested on her lower lip, like a fleck of food or a strand of hair she wanted to brush away. But she let it stay.

“What else do you want to do?” Bill asked, pulling back to breathe.

He didn’t know, she realized. He had no idea of all the things that could be done, even in five minutes. For one moment she considered showing him, but she knew that would be disastrous. When their five minutes finally ended with the others pounding on the closet door, screaming at them to put back on the clothes that weren’t even disheveled, Bill was still as ignorant as she wished she were. Then Kathy’s mother called downstairs that it was time to go home, and she didn’t have to call anyone’s number.

“HOW WAS THE PARTY?” Uncle asked.

“Boring,” she said, telling the truth, but a truth she knew that would make him happy. If the party were boring, maybe she wouldn’t want to go to another one. He worried about her when she was out in public, without someone in the family watching her. He didn’t quite trust her when she was out of the house. Besides, she liked to make him happy. In his own strange way, he was on her side, and no one else in the house really was, not even the dogs, who were rough and nasty, good only for muddying coats and tearing her tights.