The Girls of Tonsil Lake (2 page)

My son was different. “You want this room?” said Josh, his David-blue eyes wide with incredulity. “Go ahead, but if you find a Reggie Jackson card in a plastic sleeve, it’s mine. I lost it in there in 2003.”

Well, no, I really didn’t want
his
room, the tiniest in the house, so I turned it into a library, which David and I both love.

When Josh and his wife Laurie come to visit, they sleep in Kelly’s sleigh bed. Laurie has thanked me for not bestowing Josh’s old football trophies and rock star posters on her when we cleaned out his room, although she wouldn’t have minded the Reggie Jackson baseball card. She says if she ever kicks him out, it’s perfectly all right with her if he sleeps in the basement.

I love Laurie. She wears a thirty-four A and never tries to make me feel guilty because my son is occasionally a jerk.

But, getting back to my divorce fantasy…David doesn’t think we should change the girls’ rooms against their wishes. So we don’t. And I’m writing my eleventh book as I wrote my first, in the corner of the dining room. It makes me mad, you know, makes me feel as though I don’t count. I don’t tell David that, of course, and don’t ask me to explain why not. I can’t.

This journal, on the other hand, I’m writing in a book Suzanne bought me at the same time she bought Andie’s first one. I write wherever I please, whenever I please. I must admit, it’s liberating.

I’m glad Andie’s speaking to me again. When she found out I’d sent the stories of her illness to Vin, it was a tossup over whether she was going to kill me or just maim me for life. She wouldn’t talk to me for days. I thought it would be bitterly ironic if I lost her friendship to something like that so soon after I’d come so close to losing her altogether.

But then she bought me a package of rainbow-hued gel pens like hers and told me to mind my own blankety-blank business in the future. I almost sang with the relief of it, which would have horrified us both. Better than bursting into tears like Suzanne would have, but still not good.

When I told David about it, he laughed and hugged me, rocking back and forth with our bodies in full contact. “Andie loves you, you dope,” he said, “and you love her. People don’t split up over every fight. We’d never have made our first week’s anniversary if they did, much less our thirtieth year.”

That’s not strictly true. We never have fought very much, just minor skirmishes over money and the kids and toilet seats. One reason we don’t fight is that I hate confrontation. This has led to many, many hours of silent anguish on my part. However, the other reason we don’t fight is that I still love David O’Toole as completely and mindlessly as I did the day I married him.

So divorce is probably out.

I have to admit that I was jealous when Vin’s publisher made an offer for Andie’s story. Her advance is more than mine was after ten books, and
Let There Be Hope
is going to be hardcover. Oprah would probably have wanted to bring her on the show, if she still had one, to talk about it. And there won’t be a nubile young thing in a pushup bra on the dust jacket the way there always is on the covers of my paperbacks.

Vin called me first. “I’m glad for this,” she said, “and I’m sorry. I wish I could buy your stuff, Jean.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m thrilled for you both.”

But then I went over to Suzanne’s and cried and drank a half bottle of white zinfandel, which I usually only do when we’re all together and I know David’s going to drive me home. Then I had to sober up a bit before Suzanne and I could go over to Andie’s and act surprised about Vin’s call to her.

“It’s not fair,” I said, laughing, when we got there. “You get this great contract and I can’t even get an office in my house.”

“Why not?” asked Suzanne.

“Because David says—”

Andie interrupted me. “Wait a minute. Don’t make David the bad guy here. You could have an office if you really wanted one, just by saying so. You’re still playing the ‘let’s please everyone’ game, but you don’t want to take responsibility for it.”

I stiffened right up. What did Andie know about making a marriage work? She’d bailed on hers the first time the going got tough. She didn’t know the first thing about compromise and damage control.

Suzanne was staring at us both with those worried brown eyes of hers, so Andie and I exchanged a scowling glance and let it go at that.

I made up my mind to talk to David that night about remodeling Carrie’s room, but he’d brought home brochures about Hawaii, where neither of us have ever been, and we planned a trip all evening instead. We ended up in bed with the brochures spread all around us, laughing about the roach-laden hotel where we’d spent our wedding night.

Then we made love, and when I was falling asleep with my body spooned into his, he asked, “Was it all worth it, Jeannie? Have the good times made up for all the bad ones?”

I was too drowsy to give much thought to the questions or to the intonation of his voice. I mumbled something, laid my arm over his around my waist, and went to sleep.

I woke at two in the morning, pain in my stomach forcing me into a jackknife position. It went away after a while, mostly, but I made up my mind to confine my wine drinking to a glass with dinner. At least until Vin came home.

Suzanne

Let’s get this straight right off the bat, all right? I’m blonde. Not naturally, but blonde nonetheless. I started frosting my hair in freshman year, when everyone else seemed to fit in at the high school and I didn’t, and it worked so well I’ve never looked back. This does not, regardless of what Andie, Jean, and Vin think, make me stupid. Nor does it make me a bimbo, shallow, or a sex maniac. Just between you and me, I will admit that sometimes I am every one of those things, but it doesn’t have one thing to do with me being blonde.

I went to college to be a kindergarten teacher, attending Indiana State University at Terre Haute. For those of you born outside Indiana, this is pronounced Terra Hote, not Terra Hut or Terra Hoot.

Only a few semesters away from graduation, I got pregnant. The baby’s father, who suddenly discovered he had a wife and kids, paid for the abortion. Andie and Jean drove over from Bloomington, where they were in school, to take me to the clinic. Jean tried to talk me out of the abortion, Andie yelled at both of us all the way across town, and I cried. But I went through with it.

It’s something I try not to think about. I’m not always successful at that in the middle of dark and lonely nights, but uninterrupted nights of sleep are some of those things that reside in the rose gardens no one ever promised me.

There was no concentrating on classes after that, so I sold my books for a pittance, packed up, and left Terre Haute. I got off the bus a couple hours later in Lewis Point, a nice town about an hour south of Indianapolis, and that was where I stayed. I got a job over Christmas in a classy department store, and the most exclusive makeup supplier they had offered me a job as a sales rep.

It’s been the saving of me, I guess, outlasting two marriages and sending both my kids to college. I love what I do, love making women look and feel better about themselves. I wish it was a job that earned respect from others, but I respect it—so maybe that’s enough.

One of the big automotive companies has a plant in Lewis Point. Jean’s new husband David got a job there as soon as he graduated. Jean did her last year by correspondence and at the university extension in town. They moved up steadily—buying a bigger house with each kid—ending up in Willow Wood Estates with the doctors, lawyers, and other people who wore ties to work and drove foreign cars to DAR meetings.

Andie moved here after she got divorced from Jake Logan about twenty years ago. She went to work as a hostess in a swanky restaurant to earn a nest egg so that she could settle in Indy. Eventually she bought the place and then opened three more. When business was booming and her kids were out of college, she sold the whole corporation.

She was having a good time, substitute teaching a couple days a week and taking trips whenever she felt like it. Then she got cancer and it was awful.

I’ve never been one to pray much, but I sure did then. I think we all did. She was so brave about it all, especially the physical disfigurement.

I don’t know if I could handle that. Because truth be told, how I look is all I have. If I lost that, I wouldn’t be anything. They say looks are only skin deep, but I’ve never known any men—outside of possibly David O’Toole—who really felt that way when they were doing the looking.

After she got sick, Andie spent a week in New York with Vin, which none of us had ever done. I think Jean and I were both jealous of that because Vin had never invited us to come and stay—just to call if we ever got to New York. Even when her husband died last year, she didn’t want us to come at all. Not even Andie.

I’ve been to New York a few times for work, and Vin and I always have dinner at least once, and usually see a show, too, but she’s never invited me to her place.

Andie said today that Vin asked her to come back to New York to work on her book, but she isn’t sure she feels well enough for summer in the city. It scares me when Andie admits to not feeling well.

The others would tell you everything scares me, but that’s not true. I just know enough to understand that most men don’t want women who are braver than they are.

I said once that men didn’t want women who were smarter than they were, either, and Vin and Jean got all pissy about it. But Andie said women had no choice but to be smarter, since they didn’t have to think with penises. So now whenever a man says something about
thinking
, I get this picture in my head of a penis with a little cartoon balloon light bulb above it.

Jake Logan’s been calling me from Chicago since Andie got sick. He calls for updates on her condition because he doesn’t trust her to tell him the whole truth. He’s such a nice guy. I wonder if Andie’s ever forgiven him for whatever went wrong between them. She never talks about him. I wonder if he’ll keep calling now that Andie’s out of the woods. I wouldn’t mind if he did.

Vin

I don’t know what made Suzanne send me this journal, even though it’s very nice and looks good lying on the coffee table. I’ve never been the journaling type—even entries in my calendar are terse and businesslike, with no smiley faces or exclamation points.

I must admit that I miss having a confidante. I told Mark everything about me up until the day he died, and now it’s like no one really knows or cares who Vin Stillson is. His children certainly don’t, and we never had any of our own.

Jean and Andie and Suzanne would have come when he died. Jean would probably have carried a casserole all the way on the plane. But I’m not a very good hostess at the best of times, and I couldn’t very well just throw them into a hotel and tell them I’d see them when I had time. They sent a beautiful planter that still sits in the foyer, but to this day I wish I’d just let them come.

When Andie came alone, she didn’t feel well at all, and she mostly just wanted to be away from Lewis Point for a bit. I ordered the best takeout Manhattan has to offer and coerced her to eat.

Sometimes we sat together in front of the fire and talked a lot. But not about who we were. The closest we came to that was when she asked if I was afraid to be on my own and I said, “No, not really. Are you afraid of cancer?” She said, “Oh, hell, I’m forny terrified.”

Then we both started laughing. We may have cried some, too, but we didn’t mention tears to each other. It would have been a good time for Suzanne to be there—she likes crying, likes emoting on all levels. I just don’t.

When Jean sent me Andie’s journal—completely full of writing in a rainbow of colors—I thought, you know, what in the hell is she doing here? Jean’s a fabulous writer, even if it is in a genre I can’t buy at my publishing house, so I assumed she saw something in what Andie had written.

There was something there, all right. I typed it out myself on the computer in Mark’s home office, sitting up late every night until it was finished, scarcely changing a word.

I was only sorry I couldn’t show the emotion Andie’s handwriting did. Sometimes she wrote in big, splashy red or turquoise; other days in somber black; sometimes in hopeless brown, the penmanship reduced to the spidery, wobbly writing of the very old.

At the end of entries on particularly bad days, she wrote, almost as a mantra, “Let there be hope.” I slapped this on the title page and took it in to the senior editor of the division of Gunderson Publishing that does memoirs.

“Tell me what you think,” I said, and walked out. I’ve never especially cared for Marian Nielson, and it grated on me that I was handing her a bestseller as a forny gift.

She had it back to me in twenty-four hours. “It’s splendid,” she said. “It’ll make the
NYT
list in a heartbeat. However, I don’t have five free minutes between now and the next decade. We’re publishing the memoirs of the stars of the moment in every sport there is, not to mention actors and musicians. I’ll buy it if you’ll edit it. I’ve already talked to Gunderson and he says to clear your schedule and go for it if you think it’s viable.”

Speaking of forny gifts.

I wanted Andie to come to New York, but she didn’t feel up to it. I felt a little shudder go through me when she said that. Andie’s always been so strong, and she’s cancer-free, so I found it startling and frightening when she admitted to feeling less than wonderful. But, as
Let There Be Hope
shows, cancer changes one in sometimes indefinable ways. Maybe this is one of those changes.

Mark and I visited some islands off the Maine coast once, in our early days. I was so enthralled that he bought me a house on one of them, a little strip of green called, appropriately enough, Hope Island. It reminds me of Bennett’s Island, the fictitious utopia of Elisabeth Ogilvie’s books, except that Hope has all the mod cons.

I love to go there. It’s a place I can be myself with little regard to what anyone else thinks. I sit in my bathrobe on the wraparound porch of the Victorian horror that is my house and drink coffee with Lucas Bishop, our neighbor. I read Jean’s books without worrying that someone will see the covers. I use expressions like “forny” and “well, shit.”