Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (35 page)

Roxy pulls into their driveway which is almost covered by the winter’s blowing sand, as usual. She’ll have to get out here and sweep like hell. Somehow she is always surprised to find the cottage still here. When she doesn’t see it for a while, she starts thinking maybe she just dreamed it up. She feels like that about Willie too. She forgets what he looks like whenever he’s away — she still can’t believe she ever met him, she still can’t believe he’s hers, even after all these years.
Lord!
Where did the years go, anyway? The little ramshackle frame house has been added on to haphazardly from time to time, a room here, a room there, like a house built by children. The deck sags. It’s still painted white, but peeling, with green woodwork and a Pepto-Bismol pink front door, the same colors it had when they bought it. Willie likes for everything to stay the same.

Roxy takes the door key out from under the rubber mat that says go away!

Their sentiments exactly.

She lets herself in, then goes around raising all the shades. She
slides the glass doors open onto the deck and the beach. They’re hard to push on their gritty tracks. A red paper Japanese lantern hangs down low over the big battered oak table, always littered with whatever Willie has found on the beach. Every morning he walks for miles, then makes a different arrangement to amuse her. Often,
I love you
in shells — oyster shells, mussel shells, shiny coquina shells. Today there’s a funny cat face left over from last fall, with round startled shell eyes, a giant curved rusty nail for a mouth, and seaweed whiskers. The iron smile looks wry and seductive. Roxy remembers sitting at this table herself with Lilah and her little friends, making ballerinas out of pipe cleaners, using those delicate white hinged shells as the skirts. Sometimes they even glued on yarn for hair. Sometimes Willie still quotes that poem he used to say to her, the one about loving all the little things, and that’s still true. He still does. Roxy loves it when Willie says poetry out loud to her, she never heard anybody do this before she met him.

Roxy runs her hand over the pile of starfish and horseshoe crabs on the end of the table. Used to be, she didn’t give a damn about stuff like this. She would have thrown this whole mess in the trash. In a certain way, Willie has given her the natural world, as he has given her a stepdaughter, Lilah, the joy of their hearts. Pictures of Lilah are everywhere. Roxy believes in lots of pictures, though she has taken down almost all the photographs of little Alice now. Todd and Seth, her sons by her first marriage, are everywhere too: nice-looking boys, nice-looking men. She got their names from TV, to give them a good start in life, a plan that has clearly worked.

Willie likes to say that Roxy saved him, which is not true. It’s more true that
he
saved
her,
from a regular comfortable life of
schedules and dinner parties and country clubs. Not that there is anything wrong with such a life. But if she had met Willie first, it would have been another story. She didn’t, though.

Willie is the love of her life. And actually, she met him
twice.

T
HE FIRST TIME
, Roxy was married to the father of her sons, a law student named Livingston Lovett Carter the Fourth, like a king of England. “But what do people
call
him?” Roxy’s sister, Frances, had asked, wrinkling her nose, when Roxy took him up home. Roxy just looked at her. “They call him Livingston,” she said. This should have been a warning, but it wasn’t.

Roxy was crazy about Livingston from the first time she saw him at a wedding reception at the country club in Athens, Georgia, where she worked sometimes catering parties, one of three part-time jobs she took on during her sophomore year to supplement her scholarship. Frances kept telling her that she ought to just bag it and come back home and take classes at the community college like everybody else, and Roxy knew that made good sense, but she just loved Athens. She felt like
herself
in Athens, some way, which she never had back home in Rose Hill where she’d felt like an impostor in her own family all along. She knew this was crazy, but it was true. She could be Roxy in Athens but she was still Shelby Roxanne back in Rose Hill where she had been everything: a cheerleader, the vice president of the Beta Club, a star in all the plays.

She had even been crowned Miss Rose Hill in a pageant, reciting a poem she had written herself as her talent. That poem has been lost for years now. As Miss Rose Hill, Shelby Roxanne won a set of white Samsonite luggage and a steam iron, gifts which seemed to carry opposing messages: stay home and get married
and iron your brains out, versus
travel.
She had picked travel, over everyone’s objections, accepting the scholarship in Athens. Her family was a close family, nobody had ever left the county. Roxy’s mother was one of the very few outsiders; she had come there to teach home economics in the high school, and fallen in love with Roxy’s dad, and then she never left either.

Roxy’s mother had made her and her sisters join the 4-H Club against their wishes, but then Roxy loved it, she loved to go off to 4-H conventions and contests in other towns, and to 4-H camp in Homosassee, Florida, where she got a new and better boyfriend every year. She loved the home demonstration part of 4-H, where you got to stand up in front of the judge and make a speech about whatever you were demonstrating, it was just exactly like being in a play. When she was a junior, Shelby Roxanne developed her own recipe for potato salad (her secret: the dressing was half French, half mayonnaise, so the potato salad was sort of pink). She learned all about the nutrient values of the potato and the history of the potato, including the Irish potato famine. She delivered her potato salad speech wearing a red and white checked blouse and a blue denim skirt, made by her mother and designed to look both patriotic
and
country at the same time (this was Shelby Roxanne’s own idea). She was the cutest girl in the contest. Her potato salad, prepared ahead of time and tasted by the judges, was good too. In fact, it was delicious. She won at the local level, then went on to the state contest in Atlanta where she lost in the finals because she didn’t wear a hairnet.

But she got her picture in the
Rose Hill Record
wearing her potato outfit anyway, along with a “little write-up” as her aunt Suetta always called it. Her aunt Suetta was making a scrapbook about her. Everything she did went into this scrapbook — every
program from the times she sang in church, every play she ever starred in, the invitation to her high school graduation, the announcement of her scholarship to the university. The summer before she left, Shelby Roxanne and Frances and their first cousin, Darlene, got up a little trio named the Gospel Girls and sang at revivals and church homecomings all over their area, chauffeured by Aunt Suetta.

Later, in Athens, Roxy sang with a rock group named Steel Wool and slept with the bass player, named Skye Westbrooke. Skye thought the potato salad story was a riot, he was always getting her to tell it to his friends. At first Roxy enjoyed doing this, she enjoyed the big laugh she got every time, but after a while, she began to feel disloyal to
somebody
. . . her family? Or maybe her old self, that good, sweet Shelby Roxanne? She wasn’t exactly sure. So she quit, she refused to tell the potato story anymore, and she and the bass player had a fight, and that’s when she met Livingston at that wedding reception at the Athens country club in 1965, wearing the little black skirt and white blouse of caterers everywhere, serving tiny crab cakes on a silver tray.

Or to be exact, when Livingston met her.

Because whatever happened, Livingston took it over. This was his nature. He would make it
his
thing, and then he would make everything happen
his
way, whatever he wanted. It never occurred to him not to do this. And it never occurred to Roxy not to go along with it, either, because whatever Livingston wanted, he wanted in the most intense and focused way imaginable. So of course she was flattered — who wouldn’t be? There is nothing as persuasive as somebody who wants you very, very much.

Livingston was cute, too, in a preppy way, before Roxy had ever heard that word. He had perfect blond hair that fell forward
into his eyes just a little bit, and loafers with no socks (“Where are his socks?” Frances asked). He wore knit shirts with the collars turned up, which looked stupid in Roxy’s opinion, though she held her tongue. She would hold her tongue for years and years, about everything.

Now she is ashamed of this. But she felt guilty because she got pregnant. The modest wedding reception was held at that same Athens country club, paid for by Livingston’s mother and father who actually turned out to have a lot less money than a person might have supposed. Mostly what they had was a sense of style, like Livingston. They had expected him to marry money, and were disappointed when he didn’t. They were disappointed by the circumstances, as well. So it was Roxy’s own idea to invite only her own immediate family to the wedding, not all those tacky cousins from up in the hollers.

“Listen,” Frances whispered fiercely in the moment just before Roxy and their dad started down the aisle, “
Don’t do it.
Just don’t do it. This is not the love of your life.” Frances herself was holding out for Mr. Right. But Roxy did it anyway. It was also her own idea to drop out of college and start working a series of jobs to put Livingston through law school, where he was fast becoming a star: editor of the
Law Review,
Order of the Coif. He studied all the time. He was there, but not there. Of course she was very proud of him.

Roxy put the baby, Todd, in day care and worked as the receptionist at an insurance office, then as the manager at a swim club, and then she sold ads for the newspaper. Meanwhile her own degree hung out there in the future like a sign on an inn, lit up in the foggy night someplace on the other side of town. She always thought she’d finish it, but she never did. She was so good
at jobs, so good with people. Everybody liked her. After Seth was born, Roxy stayed home and started selling Mary Kay cosmetics at night, at Mary Kay parties in people’s homes. Soon she was a Ruby, then a Double Ruby, then a Diamond, then a Double Diamond, moving right up the Mary Kay pyramid. She was about to earn a pink Cadillac. Roxy was making a small fortune selling Mary Kay when she found out that both her mother-in-law and the dean’s wife were scandalized by this career, that Mary Kay was considered somehow low class. It “would not do” for a lawyer’s wife to drive a pink Cadillac. So Roxy switched to real estate when Livingston finally graduated and got a job clerking for the federal judge in Macon. Real estate gave her more flexible hours for the little boys, anyway, and this is how she met Willie the first time, at an open house.

T
HIS HOUSE HAD BEEN
on the market for almost two years because the owners were asking too much for it. It was an ultramodern split-level overlooking Lake Heron, north of town. Everything in it was chrome, beige, or black. Cold. Roxy could see why the people who lived here had split up, she couldn’t have lived in a house like this for five minutes herself. But you couldn’t have guessed this if you had come to the open house that Sunday afternoon, and Roxy had showed you around. The
real
problem, she soon figured out, was that people old enough to afford this house were put off by the style, and people young enough to appreciate the style didn’t have the money.

The open house had already been going on for two hours when Willie showed up with his wife, Lucinda, who was very tall, very pregnant, and incredibly beautiful. Roxy noticed her right off. You couldn’t help it. Lucinda had enormous blue eyes, like Lake
Heron, and waist-length naturally blonde hair, as opposed to Roxy’s own not naturally blonde hair. Lucinda had a Kim Novak nose and a small pretty mouth with perfect white teeth. She wore a glittering lavender top over a flowing patchwork skirt. She was the most beautiful person that Roxy had ever seen in real life, like a movie star, or somebody on television. Maybe this was actually true, because she looked down all the time, like she was afraid of being recognized. Willie was sort of scruffy and nondescript beside his huge beautiful wife, a normal-size red-bearded man who wore a weird medallion on a chain. Willie had long scraggly red hair and an open shirt that showed even more red hair on his chest. Both of them were barefooted. Of course it
was
the early seventies, but
still
— this was
Georgia,
for Pete’s sake!

W
ILLIE INTRODUCED HIMSELF
, then Lucinda, first names only, then went straight over to the refreshment table where he poured himself a plastic cupful of wine right up to the top and drank it all down in one gulp, then another. There was nothing to eat, all the peanuts and Roxy’s homemade cheese straws were long gone. She had already decided that these people couldn’t possibly afford this house when Lucinda went over to Willie and took his hand tentatively and whispered something in his ear. Lucinda moved slowly, like a woman walking through water.

Willie cleared his throat. “I guess we’d like to look at it,” he told Roxy.

“Okay.” She went into her spiel. “There’s a whole master suite upstairs with its own balcony overlooking the lake, and a choice of other rooms for the baby.” Though she couldn’t imagine anybody having a baby in this house — would it have a chrome crib? “And this is a great area for children,” she added. “There’s a Montessori
school about a mile up the road.” These people looked like Montessori types to Roxy.

Lucinda gave her a shy half smile, then looked back down. Willie poured himself another cup of wine (“A traveler?” Roxy almost asked him) for the house tour. Upstairs and down they all went, then into the enormous gleaming kitchen where Lucinda barely glanced at the state-of-the-art appliances, clinging to her husband’s hand. Something was wrong with her, Roxy decided. Maybe she was terminally ill like Ali McGraw in
Love Story,
which had just come out. Or maybe she was on drugs. Actually they
both
looked like they might be on drugs.