The Last Time I Saw You (5 page)

But children. She recalls a night when Hilly was maybe six years old and Dorothy was tucking her into bed. She pulled up Hilly’s covers and kissed her forehead and said, “Now I’m going to make a magic sign so you will have wonderful dreams.” She made a kind of swirling motion with her hand and Hilly watched solemn faced, believing absolutely in her mother’s powers in the way that children do. Up to a certain age, anyway, after which they believe nothing you say, but never mind. That night, Dorothy had tucked a little blanket she’d made for Hilly’s favorite stuffed animal—a bedraggled Snoopy dog, who at that point seemed held together purely by Hilly’s love for him—around him. Then she’d kissed his nose and said, “Goodnight, Blackie,” and Hilly had said, “Make a sign for Blackie’s dreams, too,” and Dorothy had; and at that point she’d kind of believed in her powers herself. Hilly had sighed and said, “You’re a good mommy.” And something had swelled inside Dorothy’s chest, and she’d thought,
If I never have anything else, at least I had this
.

But now Dorothy tells Hilly, “You don’t
have
to have kids, of course. You can enjoy other people’s children. Or live a life that doesn’t have much to do with children at all—what’s important is that you’re honest with yourself.”

Well! She said that and immediately she wanted to lock herself in the bathroom and sit on the floor and think what it meant. What did that
mean
, to make your own decisions, independent of all the grabby influences in the world? How did it feel to say, “No, I don’t think that’s for me,” and then simply
not do
what it seemed like everyone else was doing? She couldn’t imagine. Yet here is her daughter clearly attempting to be in charge of her own life, to be aware that it is created by the choices she makes, and Dorothy wants to weep in gratitude. It is too late for Dorothy to live a conscious life. She never escaped her mother’s iron hand, she had not even
tried
being a hippie except for one time when she didn’t wear makeup or shave her legs. And even then, she returned quickly enough to her learned standards of hygiene. You did your hair and you shaved your legs and you put your face on, no matter what. But Hilly was out from under something huge. Hilly was able to look up and see the sky. And Dorothy had somehow been a part of making that happen.

“I don’t know about kids,” Hilly says. “But I will get married, I guess. I mean, I kind of have to.”

“You mean because of the money?” Dorothy says. “Because we’ll lose the deposits? Don’t get married for
that
reason! Who
cares
about the money?”
Especially when it’s your father’s
, she thinks. But she feels certain Hilly’s father would offer the same advice.

“No,” Hilly says. “It’s not because of the money we’d lose.” She turns to face her mother. “It’s just that… I don’t think I’ll find anyone better than Mark. If I’m going to get married, I guess he’s the one. But all of a sudden, it feels so… I don’t know.
Arbitrary. Dangerous
. I don’t see how anyone can ever feel completely convinced that marrying someone is the right thing to do, I don’t see how anyone can not be consumed by doubt. Did you feel absolutely sure about marrying Pops?”

Dorothy had felt absolutely sure about being pregnant, that’s what she had felt. But Hilly doesn’t know that. So she says, “Course I wasn’t sure! I was full of doubt, too. I think almost everyone is. You have to be! Who can possibly subscribe to the notion that there’s only one person in the world for you? No. But you find someone you care for, that you think you might be able to build a life with, and then you just go for it!”

“And then you get divorced,” Hilly says bitterly.

Dorothy speaks carefully now. “No, now, Hilly, you know that’s not true. Some people have very happy marriages. I think the biggest problem is people’s expectations are so high. And so wrong! People think marriage is going to be so romantic and fulfilling. They think the other person is going to
complete
them. But that’s not what happens. In a good marriage, you complete yourself while sharing a bathroom. You go through life with company, rather than alone, and humans seem to need company. And… You remember in
Carousel
, when the doctor tells the high school graduating class not to worry about others liking them, that they should just try to like others?”

“I love
Carousel
,” Hilly says, sighing. “I still love it. Everybody makes fun of me, but I still love it. We used to watch it and eat caramel corn and dill pickles.”

“I know,” Dorothy says. “But do you remember that part?”

“Of course.”

“Well, that’s it. That’s what you need to do in your marriage. You need to
give
what you
want
. And don’t expect so much. That only sets you up for disappointment. If you expect anything, expect that marriage will be hard, that it will be work. And expect that the pleasures will be erratic and often small, but they’ll turn out to mean more than you know.”

Dorothy’s voice has thickened; there is a sizable lump in her throat.
Now
look what she has just said! What is she, Dr. Phil? Or whoever? She wishes someone had told
her
the things about marriage she just told her daughter. Her husband might still be with her instead of with Amphibian Face. It comes to her all at once the lack of generosity she showed her husband all the years they were together. The lack of simple kindness. The way she blamed him for everything.

“Where did you read that?” Hilly says. “I might buy the book.”

“Oh, here and there,” Dorothy says. “And of course I’ve had a little experience in learning what
not
to do. Not only in marriage, either.” She inspects the tops of her knees. She stares intently at them as though trying to locate a tiny thing she just felt crawling on them.

Hilly speaks in a small voice, stripped of arrogance or defense. “So… do you think I’ll be okay, then?”

Now Dorothy’s heart warms and opens, and she turns to face her daughter. “Oh, sweetie, I think you’ll be just fine. I think you’ll be great. I think the two of you will have a wonderful marriage. All brides are nervous wrecks in the weeks before their marriage. It’s good luck!” She doubts that this is true, really, but what the heck.

Hilly reaches over to hug her mother, and Dorothy hugs her back, and there,
that’s
how a hug should be given.

“Let’s see that outfit,” Hilly says, standing and reaching out a hand to help pull her mother up.

“I don’t know,” Dorothy says. “Now we’ve had this emotional exchange, and maybe you won’t quite tell me the truth. You’ll think you have to spare my feelings.”

“You know me; I’ll tell you the truth,” Hilly says, and so Dorothy gets up and goes into the bathroom and changes into her outfit, complete with beauty mark that she draws in above her lip. She talks to Hilly about Pete Decker through the closed door, how handsome he was, how popular, what a great car he had, how he’d seemed pretty interested in her at one point.

“So I want to just knock him out,” Dorothy says. “I just want one more chance with him. And the first time he sees me needs to be really memorable.” She opens the door.
“Ta dah!”

Hilly widens her eyes and bites at her bottom lip. Nods.

“See?” Dorothy says. “You hate it but you won’t say so.”

“I don’t
hate
it,” Hilly says. “I think you should wear the blouse with jeans for the breakfast. But for Saturday night, may I make a suggestion? I saw a Stella McCartney the other day that would look terrific on you. Cobalt blue. You look really good in blue. And you’ve lost more weight, you’d look fabulous in it, you’d look absolutely cachectic.”

“Oh, honey,” Dorothy says. “
Thank
you.”

“You’re welcome.” Hilly points to her own upper lip. “You’ve got something on your lip, right here.”

“That’s my beauty mark. I drew it in. I’m going to wear it to the reunion. Kind of fun.”

“Oh.”

“No?”

“It’s your party, Ma.”

“Okay, no.” Dorothy rubs it off. But she will wear it at the reunion. Her daughter doesn’t know everything. Beauty marks aren’t from her time.

Hours later, Dorothy is in her bathrobe and seated on her sofa in front of the television, waiting for her friends to call. She’s put egg white on her face—she’s going to use a different kind of facial every night before the reunion, and her hairdresser told her raw egg whites work wonders. “It feels like a big glob of snot when you first put it on,” she told Dorothy, “but then it tightens your skin like you wouldn’t believe, and it gives it a wonderful glow.” The egg has indeed begun to tighten her skin—she just saw herself in the mirror and she looks like she used to when she would pull a nylon down over her face for Halloween.

The phone rings, and Dorothy answers by saying, “Hi, it’s Candy Sullivan, I can’t come to the phone right now because I’m too busy admiring myself in one of my many gilt-framed mirrors.” It just pops out. She guesses she’s through being all wise and kind and generous in spirit. But she can’t help it; gossip is so delicious and, anyway, Candy will never know.

She hears Judy and Linda laugh, and then Linda says, “Okay, I want to go first. Did you guys ever hear about Candy and George Keethler?”

“Nooooo,” they say together.

“Well, I heard they were in his car and she was giving him oral sex—”

“No way!” Dorothy says, and sees that her fingers have inadvertently flown to her breastbone. She reminds herself to make an appointment for a manicure the day before the reunion, the last appointment of the day. “Candy Sullivan? She would never have done that!”

“Oh, yes, she did!” Linda says. “She gave BJs! The whole football team knew it! And she was giving one to George Keethler and the car’s engine was on ’cause they needed the heater, and her head bumped into the gearshift and they started rolling and he sat up real fast and she
bit
it!”

Judy is laughing, but she says, “How do
you
know this?”

“The guys on the football team! George showed the bite mark to them! And Ross Duggan was a friend of my brother’s and he told my brother, and my brother told me. It was when my brother was pissed off at Candy because she wouldn’t go out with him because she had moved on to the college boys. He made me promise not to tell you guys, but I think we’re past the statute of limitations.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Dorothy is watching a scene on her television show. She reaches for the remote and turns the volume up, just a little. Oh, her life seems suddenly to be an embarrassment of riches. Her daughter and she seem to be getting closer, she’s lost weight, she’s got a beautiful dress in which to seduce Pete Decker, and she’s about to hear more delicious stories about Candy Sullivan. The one she’ll share isn’t nearly as good. She had science class with Candy, and one day the teacher had asked the question “What is matter?” He had called on Candy even though her hand was not up. Dorothy knew the answer and her hand was up, but Mr. Templeton did not call on her. He asked Candy the question, and she answered, “Nothing.” Mr. Templeton’s forehead wrinkled and he said,
“Nothing?”

“Right,” Candy said. “Nothing.” She was wearing a heather pink A-line skirt that day, Dorothy remembers because she loved that skirt, it had a matching cardigan sweater and Candy wore it that day with a floral-print, round-collared Villager blouse and the little cheerleading megaphone necklace that she always wore, all the cheerleaders did, God forbid anyone ever forgot for one moment that they were
cheerleaders
, and her hair had been all the way down that day, she had the most unbelievably thick blond hair that hung down past the middle of her back. Really beautiful hair.

Mr. Templeton frowned at Candy and looked over at Dorothy, still waving her hand in the air like she was trying to flag down roadside assistance. “All right, Dorothy,” he said. “What is matter?” And she answered breathlessly, “Matter is anything that takes up space and has weight.”

“Right,” Mr. Templeton said, and then stared pointedly at Candy. She smiled that unbelievably beautiful smile and said, “Oh! I thought you said, ‘What’s
the
matter?’”

“I’ve got a story,” Judy says, and Dorothy turns the sound back down on the television. They’re showing a commercial for food, and Dorothy doesn’t want to hear a word of it. She’s starving to death but a girl can do anything for four more days.

SIX

“C
OOPER
?” C
ANDY
S
ULLIVAN
A
RMSTRONG SAYS, SOFTLY
. N
O
answer.

“Coop?” She can tell from the sound of her husband’s breathing that he’s deep in sleep. She won’t wake him. He won’t be able to give her what she wants, anyway. What she wants is to say that she’s scared, and for him to take her into his arms and simply hold her. But if she does say that, Coop will sigh and say, “Why are you
scared
? You don’t even
know
anything yet. Go back to sleep.” And then he will do precisely that.

The truth is, she does worry too much. On four separate occasions when awaiting medical test results, she diagnosed herself with terrible diseases; and then it turned out she was just fine. But this time is different, it really is. This time it feels as though something has come into her house and sat in her darkened living room, waiting for her to come upon it. And now that she has, it has said,
Ah. There you are. Don’t be turning on the light, now
.

She pushes the bedclothes off and sits up, slides her feet into the slippers she keeps at her side of the bed. She reaches for her robe, pulls it over her nightgown, and stands for a moment looking at the dim outlines of the furniture in her bedroom: the bed, the night tables and lamps, the antique writing desk, the armoire, the little French sofa and the table that sits before it. Her eyes follow the sweep of the draperies, the line of the velvet cushion on the window seat. She can’t make out the images in the various paintings, but she knows full well what they are, and she loves them, every one. Everything has become precious: the slippers on her feet—her
feet
! She looks back at Coop, still sleeping soundly, and tiptoes out of the bedroom.

When she was a girl, she thought of old age as a kind of insulting, almost humorous infirmity. You got gray and wrinkled, you couldn’t run or even walk fast, you couldn’t see or hear very well, you spoke in a voice that trembled and cracked, you rubbed your aching knees with hands whose knuckles had gone knobby and high. That was all. It astonishes her now to think how she was so unaware of the smorgasbord of frightening diagnoses, or the need for constant doctors’ visits, or the mountains of pills required just to keep up the ever-deteriorating status quo. Her own parents died young, in their late fifties, in a boating accident when they were on vacation in the Bahamas, so she never saw them deal with the trials of living a long life. Cooper’s parents also died relatively young. But she has seen her neighbors Harriet and Arthur Gilbert begin to decline in terrible ways. They were in their early sixties when she moved here, robustly healthy, very active and happy people who went out often: to friends’ houses for dinner, to the symphony, to art exhibitions and county fairs. They loved taking long walks around the neighborhood. Now most of their outings are to doctors’ offices. Last week Candy ran into them as they returned home from the neurologist Harriet has been seeing, and Candy asked how things were going. “We didn’t get the news we were hoping for,” Harriet said. “Nothing awful, but not the news we were hoping for.”

“We decided we are entering the time of life where true courage is called for. True courage and a sense of humor!” Arthur said.

“And
faith
,” Harriet said.

“Well,” Arthur said. “One always needs that.”

In the kitchen, Candy starts a pot of coffee. Then she’ll go out to the front porch to see if the newspapers have been delivered yet. She and Cooper get three papers:
The New York Times, The Boston Globe
, and
The Wall Street Journal
. Coop looks at all three, but normally it’s all Candy can do to get through the
Globe
. It’s because she doesn’t like to skim, as her husband does. If she’s going to read a newspaper, she’s going to
read
it.

She steps out onto the porch and shivers, pulls the edges of her robe closer together. It is still night-cool, a few stars remain in the sky, and the moon looks half erased. The papers are there, lying in a jumbled pile, and she gathers them up with a kind of relief. Today she will read all of them in order to have something to do before she goes to the doctor’s office. Her appointment is for nine-thirty. She and Coop are going together to hear the Report. Coop thinks it’s unnecessary for him to come along. He said if it were bad news, the doctor would have
told
her to bring her husband along, wouldn’t he? But Dr. Johnston hadn’t said a word about Coop. He’d just said that there were some things he needed to talk to her about. “He probably just wants to put you on some new medication,” Coop said. But in the end, he reluctantly agreed to come along. And Candy thanked him.

Candy can hardly believe the way husbands go with their pregnant wives to routine OB visits these days. Coop and Candy didn’t have children, but she bets if they had, Coop wouldn’t have gone with her to the doctor for such visits. Of course, back in the day when she would have been pregnant, not many men did. Back then, they were just starting to let husbands witness the birth. She had really wanted children, but Coop hadn’t. He’d made it plain on their first date that he didn’t want them, and her initial thought was,
That’s the end of
this
relationship!
But she was so attracted to Coop, and she kept going out with him, and finally she thought,
Well, it’s all right if we don’t have children. We’ll have each other
. She has so often recalled the day that she told Coop those very words. It was fall of their junior year, and they’d been sitting on a blanket beside the Charles. Coop was a rower for Harvard, and when he wasn’t on the river, he liked to be by it. He was dancing around the idea of marriage and when she told him she didn’t need children, he squeezed her hand and said, “Well, finally. A girl almost as smart as she is pretty. We’ll be married next June.” And she thought,
What do you mean
, “
finally
”
? How many women have you proposed to?

The last time Candy went for her routine physical, she sat on a narrow table in her doctor’s office in a blue paper gown that had ripped when she put it on. Over her left breast was a wide opening that looked oddly suggestive, and she kept lightly touching the edges as though this would magically repair the tear.

She hates paper gowns, and she always wears a nice pair of earrings and a bracelet whenever she has a doctor’s appointment, so she won’t look so horrible in them. She also ties the thin plastic belt tightly around her still enviable waist, and has on occasion even rolled up the sleeves a turn or two—she doesn’t like the way the sleeves fall to a neither-here-nor-there place on her arm.

Candy doesn’t understand why people being examined by their doctors don’t just get naked and lie under a sheet. What, doctors have never seen a naked body before? And wouldn’t it be easier than the false modesty offered by gowns that only get pulled far down, or pushed to the side, or lifted way up anyway? Or, if you’re going to make patients wear gowns, why not have them be made of bamboo fabric in pale pastels, so they’d be pretty to look at, soft against the skin, and ecofriendly to boot? Candy has a lot of ideas about how medicine should be practiced. She’d gone to Boston University to become a nurse but had never worked as one. Coop didn’t want his wife working. He made enough as a trial lawyer to support five wives. Candy had volunteered at Mass General until the advent of AIDS, and then Coop ordered her to stop, lest she bring home the deadly disease those godforsaken pervs, as he called them, were responsible for creating. She tried arguing with him, but it got her nowhere; not for nothing was he a lawyer who almost never lost a case.

While Candy sat in the examining room listening to the sonorous tones of her doctor talking to a patient in the room next door (a patient who kept
laughing—
oh, how wonderful to hear
that
sound in a doctor’s office!), she leafed through a gossip magazine someone had left behind. She felt sorry for the movie stars who were featured. She stared into the eyes of this beautiful person and that, thinking their rise to stardom may have been awfully exhilarating at first—all that excitement, all that money, all that attention; but now look. Now they couldn’t even go out to an ice cream stand on a hot summer night, and what was a hot summer night without an ice cream stand? They couldn’t even take a walk! No one would ever just nod hello to them and say, “Nice out, huh?” and be done with it. People always
wanted
something from movie stars. They acted foolish around them, too, and Candy thought it must be a lonely feeling to have people act foolish around you all the time.

When her doctor came into the exam room, Candy said, “Boy,
someone’s
in a good mood!” And when he looked confused, she said, “I heard you through the walls. I heard your patient laughing. I wondered why in the world he was so happy! Want to know my fantasy?”

Candy finds Dr. Richard Johnston, whom she calls Dick, an inordinately kind man. He has been Candy’s internist for over thirty-five years. He’s an elegant dresser, and he wears a bow tie with no sense of irony. She used to have a little crush on him, he’s very handsome; and she thought he maybe had a crush on her, too, until the day he told her he was gay. That had been both a comfort and a disappointment to her. Naturally she didn’t tell Coop when she found out Dick was gay; she enjoyed the irony.

Dick had his back to her, washing his hands; and she went ahead and told him what she’d imagined about the patient she’d heard laughing. “I decided it was someone going on a fabulous trip to some exotic place; and he came here today to get his shots. And he’s so excited, he just keeps laughing.”

Dick turned around and gave her one of those raised chin, closed mouth smiles and she realized that it was none of her business. She looked into her lap, embarrassed.

“Not quite that,” he said, and asked her to lie down. Then, as though to mitigate her embarrassment, he shared a little information. “That patient’s been living with a terminal disease for a while, and has learned some terrific coping mechanisms. He’s a pleasure to be around, he’s always cheering everyone else up.”

“Oh,” Candy said, “that’s wonderful.” But now she felt even worse. She felt as though she’d come onstage to audition after someone really, really good had just performed. Not that this was an
audition
, but didn’t one always want to be one’s doctor’s favorite patient?

Dick asked her to lie down and proceeded to examine her. When he pressed on her abdomen, she felt a sudden, deep pain. “
Ouch!
” she said, then, “Sorry, that just kind of hurt a little.”

Dick looked over the top of his bifocals at her. “It
hurt
?”

“No, I guess… not really.” She waved her hand. “I’m sorry. I think you just surprised me.” He pressed again, a little more deeply this time, and she gasped and reflexively pushed his hand away. “What’s
under
there?” she said.

“Your ovary, among other things.” He spoke in the same soothing voice he always used, but wrinkles appeared between his eyebrows and he began pushing again, here, there; and Candy clenched her fists and didn’t make another sound. At one point he looked at her and said, “Is this still hurting?” and she nodded and looked at the wall. He ordered some blood tests and an ultrasound and an MRI. And she had them all done, praying to the blessed Virgin before and after each one.

About a week later, just after Candy had finished eating lunch, her doctor’s office called to say she should come in on Friday morning to get the results. Candy leaned against the kitchen counter and said, “Is it bad?” She looked at the sandwich crust she’d left on the plate, and thought,
I should have eaten it
.

“We’d just like you to come in,” the receptionist said. “It’s pretty standard procedure.”

Pretty
standard. “But is it bad?”

“You know, you’ll have to talk to Dr. Johnston about the results. I don’t even have all the information here. I’m just calling to make an appointment.”

“So it’s bad,” Candy said, and her kitchen suddenly seemed vastly bigger. She made the appointment and then washed her lunch plate and started thinking about what problem she might have that wasn’t
so
bad. In the back of her brain, someone stood clanging a big bell, and the bell did not peal but rather spoke, and what it said was
It’s very hard to survive ovarian cancer
. It said,
Gilda’s fame and fortune couldn’t help her one bit
. At that moment, Candy wanted a sibling more than ever before, and she had spent plenty of her growing up years wanting a sister or a brother. She wanted a sibling or her parents. Or a child. But her only family is Cooper. Who has grown tired of her. To put it mildly. Oh, not that he has cheated on her, not to her knowledge. But they’ve not had sex in years. And for many more years, he has not complimented her, or rushed to tell her anything, or listened with any interest to anything she has to say.

They get along, she supposes she would have to say. They have their routines: Breakfast out every Saturday morning. The Sunday morning news shows. Plays, the symphony. Trips to Europe twice a year. Candy focuses on the house and garden, her visits to various art museums in the city, her donations to this charity and that, and their bulldog, Esther. Cooper works long hours, and then comes home to their huge Wellesley colonial, eats dinner, and watches television until he falls asleep in front of it. When there are terrible headlines, or terrible storms, or something awful happens to someone they know, they talk then. They come together almost like in the old days, then. What a strange way to find intimacy in a marriage, she always thinks.

Candy doesn’t have girlfriends to talk to. Most women don’t like her. Men always did. Boys always did. At first it was because she was so pretty—she was awfully pretty for a very long time. But when they got used to the prettiness, as always happened, then they would like her because she was actually a very nice person. But she is no longer beautiful and Cooper is not particularly gratified by his wife’s being nice. “What’s
that
, being
nice
?” he’d once said, when they were having one of those arguments where she felt compelled to defend her attributes. “How about
interesting
, how about that?” he’d said. “How about
intelligent
?” Well. Maybe he won’t have to endure her vacuity for much longer.