Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (19 page)

“We’re here to see the house,” announces the very tan blonde standing closest to Lynn.

“This house is not on the tour,” Lynn says. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, it most certainly
is
! Tour Site number 14!” The brunette abandons the staircase and elbows her way through the group. “Look at this!” Her dark eyes, set too close together, are snapping. She thrusts a brochure at Lynn.

“Let me see that.” Luckily Lynn still has her reading glasses on. She examines the map, which has been badly drawn and badly printed. “You’re looking for the Barkley School,” she explains. “It’s on the
next
corner, see? One more block up Main Street. It was a boarding school before the Civil War,” she adds, trying to seem friendly.

“But we already walked all the way up this
hill,
” moans a pale, plump woman whose red hat is as round as her face.

“Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t help that,” Lynn says firmly. “As you can see, this house is not on the tour. Just look at it.”

“But look at poor little Melissa, why she’s just about to die! She pushed her walker all the way up here!” The plump woman points at the older one, who has now turned her walker into a seat and sits upon it, breathing hard. “If we could just stay for a
minute,
” Melissa begs softly.

“When was this house built?” the tan one asks. Her cap of
blonde hair sits on her head like a mushroom. “You ought to be on the tour anyway. This a lot better than the last house we went in.”

“We’re not, though,” Lynn says hopelessly. “We’re not on the tour.”

But now they are all milling about, widening their area, peeping into other doors that open off the central hall. “That’s a beautiful sideboard.” Several peer past Lynn into the dining room.

“Rita, come look at this, you won’t believe such a mess!” The mushroom blonde peers into Lawrence’s study, where no one is allowed. “Why, it’s just a pigpen in there.”

Suddenly Lynn can’t help it, she starts laughing uncontrollably.

“Now come on.” The tall brunette nudges Lynn. “Can’t you just let us look around for a minute? After all,” she adds reasonably, “we’re already
here.
”

“Well, you certainly are,” Lynn hears herself say, then, “Okay. What the hell? Why the hell not?” Some of the ladies glance at each other, suddenly wary, when she says “hell.” But Lynn continues, “Come on. Sure. I’ll give you your own personal house tour. Why not? I haven’t got one other single goddamn thing to do.”

“I think we’d better go.” A thin redhead wearing a lot of gold jewelry speaks up for the first time.

“Georgia, are you
crazy
?” somebody else says. “Think about that hill. We’d have to walk all the way down it, then go a whole block up again, to that school, then climb up
that
hill . . .”

“Who cares about a school anyway?” the pale fat one says. “I vote we stay here.”

“Then we’d better introduce ourselves.” The brunette with the too-close-together eyes is obviously the leader, she reminds Lynn of a high school principal. No! Of an
assistant
high school
principal. “I am Robin Atwater,” she says, “and this is Mary Lane Faucette” — gesturing toward the pale plump woman who looks like a snow lady, Lynn realizes now, exactly like the snow lady and snowman her kids used to build out there on the front lawn every winter. “Angela Flack” — Robin indicates the blonde. “Melisssa Cheatham,” who nods from her walker, hand to chest. What if she
dies
in my front hall? Lynn is thinking. What then? Georgia Mayo is the thin redhead with the gold jewelry. Rita Goins is the big-haired one wearing the mink coat and all the makeup; she used to be very pretty, Lynn can tell. You can always tell. But that Angela Flack looks like she has spent half her life in a tanning booth. What is it with all this tanning anyway? Lynn has always wondered. Doesn’t Angela know how bad this is for her? Doesn’t she even read
Parade
magazine?

Robin introduces them all, then pauses expectantly.

But instead of introducing herself in return, Lynn asks, “So what’s with the red hats?”

“Oh, don’t you
know
?” several of them cry out, obviously surprised. “Don’t you know who we are?”

Lynn shakes her head. “Sorry,” she says.

“It’s all based on a poem,” the snow lady offers.

“What poem?” Lynn is really surprised.

“It’s this poem that goes, ‘When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple / with a red hat . . .’ and I forget the rest . . .”

“Who’s it by?”

“Oh, who cares?” Robin snaps. “The point is how we interpret it, what we
do.
”

“But what
do
you do?” Lynn asks.
Besides breaking into innocent people’s houses,
she does not say.

The women look at each other. Then Georgia stands to attention.
She looks like a soldier in her bright red blazer and all that gold jewelry. “Nothing!” she cries.

“What?” Lynn must have misunderstood.

“Nothing! I said,
nothing
!” Georgia shrieks, giggling.

The others chime in like a high Greek chorus: “We’ve been doing things for other people our whole lives, and now it’s time for
us
to enjoy ourselves . . . so we take trips, we go out to lunch . . . Our entire purpose is having fun! We are releasing our inner child!”

“Well, I suppose the least I can do is show you around the house, then,” Lynn says. “Let’s start with the pigpen. But just stick your heads in the door, please, there’s really no place to stand, as you will see.”

Obediently, they bunch up at the study door.

“My goodness, I have never seen that many books in one place in my life except in a library,” Angela remarks. “Who reads?”

It’s like an accusation. They all turn to stare at Lynn.

“Well, we both do,” she says finally.

“You do? All these books?”

“Yes, we both read quite a lot. In fact, we’ve both been teachers all our lives, and actually, my husband is a writer, as well. Quite a famous writer. And I used to be a writer too.” Lynn can’t imagine why she’s adding this part. But now they are all staring at her.

“Oh, that must be so
boring,
” Georgia — the redhead — finally says.

“Why, what do you mean?”

“I mean, well . . . you have to write all those ‘he saids’ and ‘she saids’ all the time, don’t you get really tired of it? I
would,
” Georgia announces decisively.

“I guess I’ve never thought of it quite that way,” Lynn says
politely, thinking
damn good point
as she ushers them into the living room.

“Well, you certainly haven’t decorated for Christmas, have you?” Robin asks pointedly.

“I’m not on the tour,” Lynn reminds them, overwhelmed suddenly by the clutter of their lives, which now strikes her as appalling rather than eclectic — hodgepodge furniture bought here and there; her grandmother’s antique crewel-work armchair; that huge, square glass coffee table they got in New York, covered with art books, most of them Lawrence’s beloved German expressionism; the Chinese porcelain vases they brought back from China when Lawrence was invited to participate in that PEN tour (and they went down the Yangtze in that yellow boat just at dawn, oh God); and that half-woman, half-horse sculpture from New Mexico bolted to the chimney (Lynn has never been sure whether Lawrence was fucking the sculptor or not). The rugs from Turkey, the brass elephant from Morocco, the Tibetan temple door on the landing, the tapestry they bought from the old man in Turkey. Lynn loved Africa best of all, the Serengeti, looking out across those endless plains.

The women stop before one of Lawrence’s treasured Max Beck-mann prints hanging in the hallway, a formally dressed man holding a cigarette in one hand, staring insolently out of the frame. Rita says, “I think that’s what you call undressing somebody with your eyes,” while the rest of them giggle. “I wouldn’t have that man in my house!” somebody else declares.

Lynn points to a sketch of San Galgano, in Tuscany. “I did that,” she says, and they turn to stare at her.

“You
did
?” says Georgia, as if she doesn’t quite believe it.

“And this watercolor too.” Lynn indicates a placid canal in
Belgium, a trip they took with their best friends from Berkeley, the Hoffbergers, long since divorced.

“Now that’s a nice one.” Robin pauses at an old photograph of Lynn’s family out on the rocky shore of their house at Cape Breton, Lawrence in his most disreputable fishing hat, the children in shorts, herself in rolled-up jeans throwing a stick for their beloved dogs Plato and Emily Dickinson, long since dead. Maybe Lynn should get herself a dog, now there’s a thought.

“Those must be your children?” Robin prompts, and Lynn says yes, that Anne lives in California with her husband and two daughters, both adopted — little Chinese girls — and Jeffrey is in Rome for the year on a fellowship.

“Really?”
This idea seems to strike Robin as radical. “They’re not coming home for Christmas? Your son will be over there all by himself ?”

“Well.” Lynn tries to hide a smile. “He’s thirty-five, and he has a partner.” An Italian hairdresser, she does not say, whom they have never met.

“I see.” Robin squinches her eyes even closer together.

Lynn is beginning to hate her.

But the women will not move on. “And when was this picture taken?” Angela asks.

“Oh, years ago,” Lynn says, “but we still have this house in Nova Scotia, we go up there every summer. We’ve been going for thirty years. The children love it, they always come for a while, no matter where they’re living, especially for the Fourth of July. That’s sort of what we do instead of Christmas. We boil lobsters out on the beach, and corn and clams in this big iron pot . . .” Lynn goes on and on describing their Fourth of July ritual, unable to stop, furious at herself for telling these women these details. Because this
will be the sore point, the sticking point, won’t it? Who will get this house? This house that you can’t quite see in this photo graph, hidden back there behind the birches. This house where the children spent every summer of their childhoods, which the children love. Which Lawrence loves, and she loves too, thinking of those long red sunsets and the spray in her face as they head out into the bay in the ancient Boston Whaler which used to belong to Lawrence’s first wife’s first husband. Could these women even follow that? Could they ever understand anything at all about our lives?

“Dave and I went to Canada once,” Mary Lane says, “but the water was too cold to swim.”

Lynn hears Georgia say to Robin in an undertone, “You know, you could really do something with this house if you got all the junk out of it. Look at all this crown molding,” as the group goes through the dining room.

“Wait, oh wait!” Melissa cries piteously, falling behind on her walker.

The kitchen is such a disaster (dishes in the sink, groceries still in their paper bags on the counter) that Lynn tries to rush the red hat ladies on through, but by now they’re totally into the tour, pausing to exclaim over the ferns that Lynn has brought inside for the winter — “Why, it’s practically a greenhouse in here!” — and the hand-painted tiles all around the sink and stove, tiles which Lynn carried back so carefully from Italy where they had had that lovely high pink house in Lucca with a view of the sea from the bedroom window and those long lace curtains sweeping the floor, that passionate year of fights (that cleaning girl) and then making up, why once she’d let the baby — this was Anne — cry for half the morning while she made love to Lawrence, swept up in overwhelming guilt and desire. She and Lawrence used to dance
out on the balcony too, as she recalls, to the music of the village band coming up from the piazza, and once they had danced in the kitchen, to no music at all. What would the red hat ladies think of that? But surely they had had
some
fun with their own husbands? Surely it hadn’t been all duty, all carpools and PTA?

But she too has spent a large part of her life taking care of others, Lynn realizes. She is as old as these red hat ladies, even older than Georgia and Robin. So why isn’t she out there fulfilling herself too, having fun? Releasing her own inner child? Or does she still have one? Maybe that child has been killed off now by too much drinking and too many very long dinner parties with other overeducated supercilious people such as herself and Lawrence. Maybe she ought to join the red hat ladies. Or maybe she ought to become a Republican. She’d been amazed when Gore lost. She’d been amazed every time Jesse Helms won, all these years of living in North Carolina and they’d never known one single person, not one, who ever admitted to voting for Jesse Helms. But somebody did, because then the vote rolled in. Lynn bets that most of the people in that Christmas parade voted for him, possibly some of these ladies in the red hats as well. Some of them must be Republicans. Robin is one for sure. Momentarily Lynn envies them, at least if she were a Republican, she could be so goddamn
positive
about things, about
something
at least, about anything. Anything at all. She’d like to become a truly positive person like Doug and Mike and Louise at physical therapy, and improve her ADL. Improvement is possible, Doug has said so. Doug has promised. A great deal of improvement is still possible! Things can be fixed! Maybe Lynn should just break her other ankle, so she can go back to the cheerful little gym — no, that’s ridiculous!

She leads the women into the back hallway.

“Well!” Robin stops dead in her tracks, eyeing the broken dishwasher with the box of wine on top of it.

“Oh. Who drinks?” Angela asks, and Lynn says, “I do.”

This cracks them up, these red hat ladies, but Lynn has had about enough of them by now. She shows them the music room. “Is that really a Steinway?” Georgia wants to know, and Lynn says yes, it is, adding that Jeffrey is really a concert pianist. She leads them down the hall toward the front door, but clearly they don’t want to leave yet, they dawdle, they don’t want to set off down that long hill.