The Carriage House (22 page)

Chapter 27

O
n Monday morning, Diana went back to Little Lane to oversee the painting. Picking colors was difficult, since the paint on the original carriage house had been discolored by the time she was old enough to remember it, and the only pictures of the house that she could find in the attic were washed with the lemony tint that creeps over aging photographs. She knew that the sides were originally white, but within the spectrum of sixty whites to which the representative at Benjamin Moore introduced her, she was adrift. In the end, she asked Adelia to come down and help.

“It was almost glossy,” Adelia reported, splaying out color sticks. “Like a house in a magazine picture.”

Diana moved toward the glossier shades. She pointed at Glacier White, Ice Mist, Paper White, and Snow.

“Yes,” Adelia said, tapping the wall with her fingernail. “It was Snow. I think it was Snow.”

They went home with a carload of Snow, and in the afternoon the painters arrived. One hour into the job, however, Diana could see that the color wasn’t right. It blazed in its whiteness, as though someone had transplanted a glacier to the mellowing light of Margaux’s October garden. It was too bright. Even Adelia understood; she’d been biting her lip all morning, watching the glint of it spread across the wooden lines of the house.

“It looks too new,” Diana said, standing by Adelia’s shoulder.

“Yes,” Adelia agreed. “It’s not right. It’s not right at all.”

Back at Benjamin Moore, they faced the expanse of the color wall again. They considered Paper White. They considered Wedding Veil and Chantilly Lace, Gardenia and Baby’s Breath, then turned to Rice Paper and Parchment. Adelia could remember the color’s freshness, the crisp cool of it against the sweep of summer trees. She remembered an American flag snapping from the pole, patriotic and new. Diana remembered the way the building had been sinking into the ground on one side. She remembered the bare flagpole, reaching its iron arm out of the loft window, dripping with icicles in the winter. She remembered cocoons that nestled in the eaves, far whiter in their spun solitude than the peeling paint outside. In the end, they settled on Rice Paper and drove back to Little Lane in silence, consulting memories of a carriage house that existed as a different entity in each of their minds.

By the time they got back to Little Lane, Diana was eager to test their color choice, so she couldn’t help feeling irritated when Elaine Weld called out to them in the driveway. She was hurrying over to catch them, clutching an armload of catalogs and an apple. Diana and Adelia waited for her to approach.

“The house looks lovely,” she said. “You’ve done such a good job.”

Diana smiled politely. Adelia was staring past Elaine Weld’s left ear. A frosty silence opened between them, and Elaine angled herself more sharply toward Diana.

“We’ve missed your dad this summer. Has he had a good time at the beach?”

Adelia’s face tensed.

“It’s been fine,” Diana said. “Izzy’s enjoying herself.”

“And how is sweet Isabelle?” Elaine asked. “We’ve been so worried about her. Abby called from Amherst the other day to ask if we’d heard about her health.”

“She’s better,” Diana said. “She’s out of her cast, and there haven’t been complications since the surgery. She’s doing well.”

“Oh, thank God. We were all so concerned. My husband acted as if it were his own daughter in the hospital.”

“Your husband is an asshole,” said Adelia.

Elaine stared for a moment, taken aback. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I said your husband is an asshole.”

“I don’t appreciate that,” Elaine said, coloring.

“No, I’m sure you don’t,” Adelia said. She crossed her arms over her chest and finally looked Elaine in the eye. “Listen, Elaine, I’d love to chat until the sun goes down, but we’re very busy right now.”

“You threw rocks at those builders, didn’t you,” Elaine said. Her hands were clenched into fists. “You were the one who threw those rocks. My husband said so, but I told him he should be more generous. I told him that you were a good person at heart.” Adelia had turned her back on Elaine’s outrage and was busying herself unloading cans of Rice Paper paint, but Elaine hadn’t finished with her. “
I
told him that we should have pity on
all
of you,” Elaine continued, her voice rising to a new pitch. “I told him that even though William was on an ego trip, we should feel sorry for him because his wife was sick. And I said that women our age grew up in a frustrating time and that your meanness was disguised unhappiness. And even though Isabelle was always a bad seed, I reminded myself that she was only Abby’s age, and I pitied her because she had
you
instead of a mother.”

Adelia was already moving up the walk, carrying two plastic bags of Rice Paper, but at this point she turned around and her eyes were electric. “And your husband, did he pity her? Just how much did he pity her?”

Diana could feel Elaine trembling under the strength of Adelia’s gaze.

“Grow up, Elaine,” Adelia said. “You’ve lived your entire life as a child.” She took her burden of paint and headed into the house.

Elaine’s face was drained of its color. Diana was tempted to apologize for Adelia, but she did not. “We’ve got to get back to work,” she said instead. There was some comfort in standing up for Adelia. Though Elaine refused to look at her, Diana lingered a moment longer, unapologetic, then followed Adelia into the house.

That night Diana and Adelia set up the card table inside the carriage house. They made plates of ravioli and carried them out to eat in the newly hewn, cedary space. Through the open window frames, they could hear the last bullfrogs croaking. Since the incident in the driveway, Adelia’s eyes had softened as she watched the new shade of paint spread across the front of the house. Now she held a glass of white wine in one hand and closed her eyes, inhaling the cedar. “It’s perfect, Diana,” she said.

Diana looked out the side windows to the Schmidts’ house. Two bedroom lights were on, the shades half drawn. It was like an island just off the shore on which occasional glittering lights signaled the presence of living inhabitants. “I love it in here,” she said.

“You remembered it so well.”

“As soon as I started, it came back to me. Complete. I couldn’t remember it at all, and then as soon as I put my pencil to paper, the whole thing was there.”

They ate their ravioli in silence until Adelia looked out the window. Diana followed her eyes to the half-drawn windows down the street, still glowing against the darkness. “Do you miss him?” Adelia asked. “The way he was before?” Diana nodded. Parts of Arthur that she’d forgotten over the years had also come back to her while she drew the carriage house. The downward slope of his voice, the way his eyelids were heavy over his eyes. For years, the fact that she had once been loved by him had been nothing more than a hollow idea, and only when she started to draw could she remember how it felt. The memory altered her, even though she knew that time was over. She had told his grandmother that she was finishing their carriage house, and he hadn’t come back. He had stayed in Breacon long enough to know that Isabelle was fine, and then he’d left. He had a life of his own. Diana would have liked to explain to Adelia that she was strong enough to survive that. She didn’t need Arthur as she once had, now that she could remember how to draw as she used to.

“I miss him, too,” Adelia said, breaking the silence. Surprised, Diana turned back to Adelia. “You should have seen him playing tennis,” she said. “Or at a dinner party, wearing a green sweater, telling a story that made everyone laugh.” Diana began to understand. Adelia wasn’t looking at the Schmidts’ house anymore; instead, she had angled herself back to the Adair house, three-storied and haughty against the darkening sky. She was talking about William, not Arthur, as he was before the stroke. “I remember when he would tell me about your tournaments. I’ve never seen a father so proud. You could hear it even in the way he said your name. He could do that. I still remember the way he used to call my name when he walked into my house, so that the whole empty place was suddenly full.”

“But that’s him,” Diana said. “He’s still that person.”

“He is, isn’t he?” Adelia asked, then amended her tone to sound more certain. “Of course he is.”

“He’s the same as he always was,” Diana said, although he wasn’t, none of them was, and here they were in the carriage house wishing they could just go home, except that they were already there.

Chapter 28

B
ecause it was a Saturday and she had no practice with the performance art group, and because there was a chill in the air that made the girls huddle closer to her, flushed with an excitement they couldn’t explain, Elizabeth decided to make an Autumnal Feast. She felt alive, as she always did when she brought the girls to Rock Harbor for the weekend. Somehow, away from Breacon, her mood lifted and she remembered all the possibility in her life. She was sitting on the front stoop of the shore house, scraping the seeds out of a pumpkin so she could roast it for soup, when Arthur drove up. As she scooped seeds and shook them into a metal bowl, each wet spoonful landed with a
whap
. Her toes, warm in gray wool tights, flexed and unflexed around the edge of the stoop. She was wearing a poplin dress under a gray cardigan, and she was thinking to herself that she must have cut a picture of real domestic bliss, sitting there, scooping her pumpkin. Like the kind of woman who doesn’t experience such a thing as divorce. Just an attractive woman in a poplin dress, scooping seeds out of a gourd. She was happy. As Arthur parked and got out of his car, she saw herself through his eyes and thought that only now had she
become herself. Later this evening she would drive to the junkyard with Jeanine from the Performance Art Group, and they would sift through discarded domestic appliances. She and Jeanine would talk about what it meant to be a woman, so that when she came home to kiss her children on their damp fragrant foreheads, she would feel as though she were returning to a secret corner of her life, kept safe by her trips to the junkyard with Jeanine. Sheltered, even if she had no husband to kiss her own forehead after she had gone to sleep. It occurred to Elizabeth, as she gripped the pumpkin between her knees to scrape out the last remaining seeds, that now that she had gotten to this point, it was likely that there would be a man in her life, and probably soon. How could someone stroll by and see her in her poplin dress, the late-October sunlight soft across her face, and
not
want to make her his own?

So Elizabeth was feeling composed and sure of herself when Arthur walked up the step, his slouch slight now, his eyes still a little hooded. Despite her confidence, as Arthur approached, she found herself becoming slightly disoriented by his presence, which dredged up memories of those awful final days on Little Lane. She thought of that soured dinner party with Adelia’s briny chicken, and she vaguely remembered Adelia saying, “I think Arthur’s charmed by Isabelle.” She remembered that Isabelle had been drinking with him before she stupidly went out in the Jeep, and so as he approached, she straightened her shoulders and gave him a look that said,
We have moved on beyond Little Lane, and we are happy here without you.

“Hi, Elizabeth,” he said.

She offered him her most regal smile. He stood in front of her, confident in the way of successful men. She realized that he was looking past her into the house, probably for a glimpse of Isabelle, and Elizabeth felt invisible. “She’s not here,” Elizabeth told him, recovering herself.

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“I’m not sure. She’s playing tennis with our father.”

He didn’t move. She had never particularly warmed to him. His success in the restaurant business had momentarily impressed her, but she had her doubts about his substance. As a kid, he seemed unimpressed by her family to the point of disrespect. He came to Little Lane wearing sneakers with holes in the toes, and Elizabeth’s own sister had fallen in love with him, and he had spent a good deal of his time in the Adair house. Despite all this, he always glazed over when they showed him the clippings about their tournaments, or told him about when William was a kid on the same street, walking over the same golf course to the same club. Those stories were who they
were,
and if Arthur had no interest in them, Elizabeth wasn’t sure how he could have
known
Diana. Or how he could possibly care about Isabelle, except to assuage his own guilty conscience over drinking with someone who was only eighteen before letting her burn down a historical monument and then drive off in the Jeep.

“Look, Arthur,” she said without standing, one hand on the pumpkin for support. She was taking care of her sister, tending to her family. She was proud of her ability to be strong in this role. “I’ll let her know you came by. But I have to tell you that she’s been doing very well this summer, and I think it’s best if she doesn’t spend too much time in the past. What’s done is done. She’s moving on. She has a sense of purpose now. I don’t want to see her lingering over things that are over and finished.”

“Sure,” Arthur said. “Of course.” With some triumph, Elizabeth thought she could detect a deepening of his slouch. “That’s good,” he tried again, then broke off. “I’m glad she’s done well this summer.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “It is good. We’re proud of her.”

He was studying Margaux’s shrub roses, and he didn’t respond immediately. When he did, his voice was steadier. “Please tell her I came by,” he said. “I won’t bother you again, but will you tell her I went back to Little Lane and I saw everything she’s done? It’s beautiful. Could you tell her that for me?”

Elizabeth watched him go. She was perplexed about what exactly Isabelle had done in Breacon other than burning down the carriage house. She experienced a moment of doubt about whether she had understood anything he had been talking about, and she was irritated by the way this doubt clouded her autumnal mood. Arthur hadn’t once asked about her. She wondered why people on Little Lane were so narcissistic that they never thought to show interest in
her
life, as though they assumed, now that she had kids, she was boring and plain and content to live in the shadow of a husband somewhere, projecting former glory onto her children. She remembered again, as Arthur drove off, that on Sunday night she would have to chauffeur the girls back to Breacon, and the ascent that she experienced in herself at the shore would once again come under attack by suburban mediocrity. There she would fall into an uncomfortable nap until she could return to the beach, and that would be the pattern of her life as long as the girls were in school. Even as she comprehended this, she detected the faintest smell of winter in the air, wafting from inland to the beach. A slight uptake in the wind and a clamping down of the light. Elizabeth took the emptied pumpkin and went inside to the kitchen. Heaving her whole weight into the task, she cut it into segments that she could lay in a pan, and as she did that, Diana and Adelia came in from their trip to Breacon to deal with the painting of the carriage house. Feeling their entrance behind her, Elizabeth was suddenly terribly angry that she had been left to deal with Arthur’s visit on her own.

“Well, we found the right shade,” Adelia said. Diana beamed. They were so busy with their triumphs that they didn’t notice how hard she was working, on her own, without anyone to help.

“That’s wonderful,” she said, chopping an onion.

“You can’t believe how many colors they offer. It’s confounding, trying to find the differences between a thousand different variations of white.”

“I’m glad you found the right one,” Elizabeth said, but she was not glad, and it made her no more glad when Isabelle and William came in with their deep tans, flushed from exercise and carrying their discarded sweaters. She remembered once more that it was only she who would have to go back to Breacon on Monday in order to live her life and raise her children, and the rest of them would continue to live in a beachy dreamland where people did not get divorced and sick people never declined. She felt bitterly alone, the only one who had to go home, which may have been what prompted her not to keep Arthur’s visit from Isabelle, as she had planned to do.

“Izzy,” she said, “Arthur Schmidt stopped by to see you. He told me to tell you hello.”

There was a halting of activity and a spreading silence. William sighed and lowered himself onto the couch to bend over the jigsaw puzzle with which he had become morbidly involved since coming to the beach.

“He probably wanted to be sure that you’re better, since the accident and the carriage house fire,” she said, emphasizing “carriage house fire.” Even as she did, she felt uneasy in the awareness of her ill intentions.

“What did he say?” Isabelle asked. She was standing with her tennis bag sloping over her scarred shoulder.

“He said that he’s glad you’re doing better. I said you’ve moved on and none of us are lingering in the past. He said he was happy for you.”

Diana sat down abruptly. Isabelle unshouldered her tennis bag and sat down opposite William, watching him work. Adelia was staring with her uncomfortably protruding eyes. There was the sound of William dragging puzzle pieces across the glass coffee table.

“The soup will be ready in an hour,” Elizabeth said, trying to change the subject. She looked over at the vase of sunflowers that she had placed at the center of the table back when she was excited about the idea of making an Autumnal Feast to celebrate her family.

“He didn’t want to stay for dinner?” Isabelle asked weakly, as though she didn’t know what else to say to break the awkward silence.

“No, he was just checking on you. He said he was leaving again, and he only wanted to stop by.” Elizabeth looked around at the room. Everyone was strangely quiet. She felt confused. She had
defended
them against an intrusion from the early summer, and they were acting as though she’d lost a crucial battle. Were they worried for Diana? Diana, who was so triumphant about her success with the carriage house that surely she was no longer nostalgic for a slouchy kid she dated when she was just eighteen? Elizabeth looked around. Other than the sounds of William’s puzzle pieces, they were completely silent. Adelia and Diana hadn’t moved. Why were they so hideously mute? What strange new weight had settled on them all? She wanted to reach out and shake them. “Why are you all so quiet?” she asked. “It’s not as though the pope stopped by.”

Without answering, Adelia swooped in and grabbed the colander of peas that Elizabeth had placed in the sink. “I’ll make these,” she said severely, and Elizabeth knew she would boil them into oblivion. She felt helpless as she watched Adelia dumping the peas into the water she had prepared for the soup, aware that she had miscalculated her announcement about Arthur but not entirely sure how. She had the sinking feeling that they might all stand there forever, suspended in the rental kitchen, having each individually missed each other’s point and therefore doomed to a lifetime of paralysis.

“Why are you all so quiet tonight?” she asked again. No one said anything. “This is our last weekend here for a while, and I’d rather, when the girls come in from the yard, if you could act as though you’re not all slaughtered seals.”

No one said anything. William did not look up from his puzzle. That goddamned puzzle and his renewed closeness with Margaux were infuriating to Elizabeth, as if he had given up on his vitality and decided to prematurely age along with his wife. She wanted to go get her crowbar and bash it over the coffee table, sending fragments of glass and puzzle flying into the oppressive air. “Is no one going to say anything? We’re going back tomorrow, and you’re all just going to sit there and ruin the weekend we have left?”

“You don’t have to go back, Lizzie,” William said. “You could stay here, and the girls could go to school. You can keep acting with the company.”

“We’re not going back to Breacon?” came Lucy’s voice from the door. “Wait, we’re not going back to Breacon?” She was hovering on the verge of tears.

“No, honey pie, we’re going back,” Elizabeth said, lifting Lucy up. She had gotten too heavy to pick up easily, but Elizabeth wanted to be holding something close to her in the midst of this strange, unfriendly living room. “We’re going back, but Granddaddy and Grandmama and Izzy are staying here for a while.”

“Why aren’t they coming with us?” Lucy asked, and Elizabeth wanted to tell her that it was because they were the only grown-ups in the family, but she noticed that Lucy hadn’t cursed once in her distress, and somehow that disturbed her, so she said, “How the fuck do I know?” Lucy’s eyes widened. “Huh, honey pie?” Elizabeth asked. “How the fuck do I know?”

Lucy grinned. It had been right to say that. She opened in Elizabeth’s arms. “How the fuck-fishing damn-balls do we know?” she asked Elizabeth, and Elizabeth buried her face in Lucy’s neck.

“You shouldn’t let her curse like that,” Adelia said, but Elizabeth didn’t care. She wanted her girls to be tough and she wanted them to be happy and she wanted them not to care what Adelia thought or why Isabelle looked so lost or why Diana sat so heavily in her chair. Leave them their complicated weakness. Elizabeth wanted her girls to be strong.

“We’re going back on Monday,” Elizabeth said. “So you can go to shit-school.”

And then Lucy was laughing, and her neck smelled like dirt, and she was heavy in Elizabeth’s arms, but Elizabeth had gotten strong from a summer of bashing things in with her crowbar, so she carried Lucy out of the kitchen to the yard, where she let her drop like a wheelbarrow onto the earth. Lucy used her hands to lead Elizabeth over to where Caroline was testing the pH of the vegetable garden soil, and the three of them sat together low and close to the solid earth for one more weekend before they went back home.