The Light of Paris (12 page)

“I'm not an old maid,” she said, finally, miserably.

Evelyn stood. Shrugging her wrap onto her shoulders with a sigh, she shook her head, her bobbed hair moving slightly, then falling perfectly back into place. “I'm not staying with you one minute longer, Margie. Can't you take a hint? You're like a puppy following me around, and I don't want you. Now give me my money and let me go.”

“What should I tell your mother?”

“Tell her whatever you want. What's she going to do? Come over here to fetch me? She's too scared even to leave New York. I'm not going to be her. I'm not going to live my entire life wishing I had done things—I'm going to do them. And I'm not going to drag you around with me. You're deadweight.”

Margie thought of the plans, the telegrams, the letters written, the hotel arrangements, the itinerary, the list of places she was never going to see now. She thought of the promise this trip had offered her, the relief, and she thought of getting on the ship alone to go home, now weighed down not only by the future that awaited her but by the heaviness of this failure, her inability to control one silly, spoiled girl. Anger welled up inside her, resentment toward Evelyn for her selfishness, her childishness, her ungratefulness for all she had been given, for how easy it had been for her, how luminous and golden her future was, how she was sure it was okay to do anything she wanted, while Margie's own future looked dark and uncertain as a wave.

To her own surprise, her anger roiled out of her, her voice and her hands shaking in equal measure. “You're spoiled, Evelyn. You're spoiled and selfish and cruel, and you always have been. Go on, go on to your silly parties with your silly friends. But I'm not lying for you, and I'm not protecting you. I'm writing our mothers in the morning and I'm going to tell them the whole story, and you can go right ahead and deal with it yourself.”

Evelyn huffed in a breath as though she were about to respond, and then clamped her jaw shut so strongly Margie could hear the click of her
teeth. Her own heart was pounding so loudly she was sure the entire hotel could hear it, and the furious blood rushed in her ears in waves that sounded like the buzzing of bees. She felt a little faint. Had she ever spoken so plainly before? Ever stood up for herself before? She couldn't remember a time. “Agreeable,” people had always said. “Dreamy.” Too lost in her own fantasies to make a fuss. But here she was, making an absolutely enormous fuss.

Apparently Evelyn was equally shocked. Her delicate nostrils flared so she looked uncharacteristically unattractive and bull-like, and her eyes were hard and angry. Margie braced herself for a torrent of abuse, but Evelyn finally simply reached out, grabbing for Margie's bag. She shook it out onto Margie's neatly made bed, picking up her passport and the wad of money Margie had carried so carefully, so safely until now, turned on her heel, and stalked off. She put her hand on the door handle and then turned back. The last of the light fell through the window, making her skin glow, her dress glitter. Evelyn always knew how to make the most theatrical presentation. “Go home, Margie. Paris isn't for someone like you.” And then she opened the door and let it slam shut behind her.

Margie stood there, her heartbeat slowing, her anger abating, Evelyn's words ringing in her head. It wasn't true. It wasn't. Paris had opened its arms to her over the past week. It was far more her city than it was Evelyn's. And now it didn't matter at all, she thought bitterly. Because without Evelyn, she had no reason to stay. She was going to have to go home, and she would never see Paris again, and she would never, ever be the woman she had known Paris would let her become.

When I thought of Chicago, I could picture only its gleam—the glare of the sun on the water, and the thousands of windows in the skyscrapers, nothing but brilliant glass, reflecting and refracting the light back in an infinite loop. It seemed white in my memory, its brilliance blinding.

The seasons were short there, except for winter. It always seemed to be cold, to be frozen, so far north it might as well have been a city of ice, rather than glass and steel. It was the ice I remembered more than the snow. Fall came and went in a moment, the trees turning brilliant overnight, a hopeful blast of color, spring in reverse, and then, just as rapidly, winter would come, and ice would cover the city, nature adding its own glimmer to those shining silos of glass lining the streets. The ice coated the pavement in thick sheets, alluring and dangerous, before the leaves had been swept away, so walking down the street you were likely to see them frozen there, the burgundy and gold of fall overlaid with the cold blue of winter, like an insect trapped in amber, a curiosity from a foreign and forgotten time.

And it was winter for so long. When I got into bed at night, I piled blankets and quilts on myself, the weight as comforting as the warmth. The thermostat might have claimed the temperature was just fine, but the cold sat deep in my bones, where I could feel it even if I was sweating.
And then spring came in a burst, overnight the ice melting, giving way to a damp chill that the buds of trees fought through nonetheless, revealing their hopeful promise, white-green and palest yellow clearing away the coating of frost on the branches. Water ran in the gutters, the river's banks bloomed high and full, and the city's residents emerged, blinking and shaken, eyes wide open to the miracle of spring. But spring, like fall, does not last. Summer would come in a brief gasp, as though the other seasons had been holding it underwater, and it could raise its head only long enough to exhale the delicious heat, the pressure of the sun, the long, luxurious hours of daylight, before it gasped and went under again.

And even though Magnolia has a winter of its own, I could only imagine its summer. In the depths of winter, when I pictured Magnolia, I could only remember wet, humid days, the air lying on my skin, a soft, damp caress. I thought of how the underside of my hair was always damp, my face always flushed and pink. I thought of my mother's gardens, an explosion of greenery in soft fronds, long spikes, the pale undersides of leaves, the seductive petals of flowers, coyly hiding their hearts until the sun coaxed them open—roses of butter yellow, peonies pink like ballet slippers, stalks of gladiolus in royal purple, marching up the back fence, dahlia and amaryllis in violent, brazen red. I thought of ice cream cones melting onto my hands, and long, lazy sunsets, and the smell of chlorine and the way the light lay, as though it had been filtered through a golden sieve, on everyone and everything, making the world seem bright and vulnerable and just a little bit more perfect.

And though it wasn't summer in Magnolia yet, I felt something awakening in me very much like it, the fingers of the sun finding their way into the parts of my heart that had frozen solid, the slow drip of melting in my belly. I stayed up late with my grandmother's journals, reading about her fear of facing Paris alone, her embrace of it, and Evelyn's betrayal. It made me think of the pain of not being beautiful, and
the wonder of a kiss, and the excitement of discovery, and it made me cry a little for the girls we had been. I wished I had known her.

My own debut had been a disappointment. I had waited for it for years, sat through endless hours of cotillion and deportment classes, thinking the ball would be the brass ring at the end of it all. I'd be a caterpillar turned into a butterfly, an ugly duckling turned into a swan. I'd been part of that existence since I was born, but I had never felt I belonged. My friends and classmates had never gone through an awkward stage. Their hair was smooth and straight, while mine was wavy and disobedient. They were slender and delicate, while I was thick and swimmer-shouldered.

No one was overtly unkind to me. We were all vaguely friends in the way you must all be friends if your entire graduating class numbers a total of eighty girls, but I was never fully included, always on the edge. Most weekend nights I spent alone, painting or reading, or going to a movie with my childhood best friend, Amanda, who had switched to public school and therefore might as well not have existed. During the week, I went to school and then swimming, or to one of the various preparatory functions our mothers set up for us, cotillion or piano lessons, or some fresh hell like the Junior Ladies Association. We were thoroughbreds, led around a ring and told to leap over fences until we learned the skills by heart.

Other girls went to dances, had boyfriends, but as they had been to my grandmother, to me, boys were as mysterious and foreign a substance as radium. There was a boy I saw sometimes at the bookstore, all angles and loose limbs and sleepy eyes that, in retrospect, were probably drug-induced, but at the time simply made him look thoughtful and romantic. Once I dropped my scarf and he picked it up and handed it to me and I blushed. It turned out he went to school with Amanda, but I never asked her to find out more, never told her I was interested in him, never told her I daydreamed of kissing him, of running along River Street
with him down to the water, never told her sometimes I looked forward to seeing him, to brushing past him in the fiction section, all week long.

Looking through my high school yearbooks, I pored over photos from parties and dances I hadn't gone to, looking at my classmates' pretty Laura Ashley dresses, their wide, bright smiles, their dates. The girls in those pictures were confident and poised, and I was awkward of voice and nervous of stomach. Some nights I lay in bed and the thought of what they had, what I knew, even then, I would never be, made me ache.

At first I thought college would be my moment. I rushed Chi Gamma Delta because my mother insisted, and I was admitted because I was a legacy. They liked me fine, but in the chapter photos, I was always standing in the back row, somehow never managing to smile when the shutter clicked, my face red, my shirt wrinkled, looking like someone who had wandered into the picture accidentally instead of someone who belonged there just as much as anybody else.

My debutante ball had been my last hope, but at my first dress fitting, I knew it was all wrong. I had dreamed for years of an off-the-shoulder dress, had pictured it all, how perfect I would look, like Scarlett O'Hara or Princess Di. When my mother took me shopping, I practically grabbed a dress off the rack, exactly what I had pictured, a perfect white with an off-the-shoulder neckline and a full skirt. But when I had slipped it on and looked at myself in the mirror, my mother and the saleswoman waiting outside, the former imperiously, the latter obsequiously, my heart broke for a last and final time. I leaned my forehead against the cool mirror, closed my eyes, and cried. The neckline I had dreamed of for so many years was unflattering, the folds of fabric on my upper arms made my shoulders look even wider, and the dropped waist hit the center of my hips before billowing out, making me look like a sausage being pushed into its casing. Crying made my face and my chest blotchy. “Come out, Madeleine,” my mother trilled, and I clomped out of the dressing room.

“Oh, my,” the saleswoman said, looking at me in my dream dress.

“That is a disaster,” my mother said. “Certainly we can do better,” she said to the saleswoman, who nodded and practically fled back out onto the floor to find some alternatives. When we were alone, my mother looked at me. “Don't cry. We'll find something suitable. Now take that off. Please,” she said, and her voice was almost pleading. We found a dress, of course, but it wasn't the one. It wasn't the one I had dreamed of. Nothing ever seemed to be the way I had dreamed it.

•   •   •

I spent my morning
cleaning the kitchen while my mother flitted in and out, sitting down at my father's desk to make phone calls (apparently this was Serious Business and needed to be conducted in the office, because every other phone call I'd ever known her to make had been in the kitchen or the living room), and then dashing out to a meeting or to sort donations for the Collegiate Women's Society rummage sale. Next door at the restaurant, they served lunch and then dinner, and I heard the sounds of laughter from the back yard as I worked my grim way through the house. I had grown so used to the condo, to living on one level, that each trip up and down the stairs seemed exhausting. No wonder my mother wanted to sell that place; everything seemed to take ten minutes longer than it should have.

A little after eight, my mother out at another dinner that I had politely refused to attend, my cell phone finally rang. I had to rush madly for it, scrambling for my purse on the front table, as it trilled robotically at me once, twice, three times. The blossoms in the flower arrangement on the front table were fading, and a few petals had fallen onto my bag while it sat there. They fluttered to the floor while I finally pulled out the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” Phillip said.

My stomach sank a little, but why? A few days ago, hadn't I been calling him, praying for him to answer, to tell me it was all a mistake?

“Hello,” I said again, because I wasn't sure what to say next.

“I'm home from New York.”

I wasn't sure what the appropriate response to that was. “Congratulations?” I said finally.

He didn't laugh. “I was calling to check when your flight arrives on Saturday.” All business. Of course. He wasn't calling because he missed me. It was as impersonal as scheduling a doctor's appointment. And there was no forgiveness—and no apology.

“I don't know,” I said. “I'll have to check.” There was a touch of defensiveness in my tone. Hadn't I come here to wear a hairshirt, to wait for him to forgive me? But I hadn't been doing that. I'd been imagining what it might be like to live here, what it might feel like to have Cassandra and Sharon and Henry as my friends, how I could forge a life that didn't include the Chicago Women's Club or the Magnolia Ladies Association, and I realized none of those thoughts had included him.

“There's a dinner with one of the investors on Saturday night. You'll be expected to be there.”

Another dinner. I thought of the last one, of Dimpy Stockton's braying laugh, the conversations about the cost of vacations and jewelry that could have funded a charity for a month, the endless one-upmanship, and was flooded with the painful desire not to have to go to that dinner, not to have to go to a dinner like that ever again. “Look, I don't know if I'll be back on Saturday.” I tensed, waiting for his response.

“You have to. The dinner is on Saturday night,” Phillip repeated, but he didn't sound angry, only irritated, as though I were keeping him from something he'd rather be doing.

“That's the thing. Mother has decided to sell the house, and she needs help getting it ready.” I made myself sound busy, sound confident. He couldn't be mad at me for helping my mother, right?

“Can't someone else do it?” Phillip asked peevishly. I felt my own ire rising in response.

“Well, I'm an only child,” I said, explaining it as though he and I had never met, as though I hadn't ever told him how I'd longed for a sibling, how disappointed I was that his sisters and I hadn't grown close. “And yes, she can pay someone, but there are things to go through. Family things.”

“But the dinner is this Saturday. What do you expect me to tell them?” His voice was reedy and querulous. I could picture him standing in the living room, looking out over the lake. There would be takeout containers on the island in the kitchen (he had never learned to cook, and whenever I was away I came back to find a trash can full of plastic forks and Phillip complaining about the weight he'd put on in his stomach, as though it were my fault), and there would be a growing pile of dress shirts on my side of the bed because he thought he was too busy to go to the dry cleaner himself.

“I don't know,” I said honestly. It felt so far from being my problem.

“You're not even close. When did you start caring about your mother?” he asked.

His words stung. How many times had I complained to him about my mother, wished aloud that we were more alike, that I wasn't such a disappointment to her? How many times had I groaned and procrastinated about packing before going to visit her?

I knew what I should do. I should tell him that of course I was coming home. Getting him to forget about divorce, to realize he missed me had been the whole point—give him a little space, come back and smooth everything over. Except shouldn't it have been different? Shouldn't he have apologized? Shouldn't he want me to come back?

And shouldn't I want to go back?

Because I knew now I didn't want that. I didn't want that at all.