Wish You Were Here (24 page)

She could. Sometimes she was dissatisfied, and when she said anything, Ken made her feel like she expected too much. She felt caught in an opera, wanted daily to be ravaged by passion, and then, doing the dishes, picking up after the kids, thought it was just her age. She wasn't the only woman bored at forty, wondering what had gone wrong.

The rain turned the highway into a black mirror, taillights caught in spangled drops on the windshield, then swept away.

“What's the weather supposed to be like tomorrow?” Lise asked.

“The same.”

“Don't tell me that.”

“Wednesday too.”

“No,” Lise said. “Someone kidnap me, please.”

“You can't let her get to you.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Just keep doing what you're doing. You haven't said two words to her since we've been here.”

“Is it that noticeable?”

Meg laughed. “Only to everybody.”

“I don't know how you do it.”

“The same way you do it with your folks—just ignore them.”

“No, they drive me crazy too.”

They went on like this, skimming the surface. They could have had the same conversation last year or a decade ago—it was a relic, like Emily's lunch. Out of politeness, Lise stayed away from the two most tempting subjects, Meg's rehab and Jeff. She wished Meg would breach them first, but as the cottages and wet cornfields slipped past, and then, like a highlight, the Book Barn (packed), Lise realized that wouldn't happen. And why should she, she thought. She wasn't eager to discuss what she and Ken were going through, or her fears about money (which she couldn't even talk to Ken about without making him feel bad). The silence reminded her of how little she knew Meg. There were no magic words that would bring them closer, no instantaneous heart-to-heart talks. Meg would not ask her out of the blue what she was thinking or how she felt. It seemed like a missed connection, but missed so long ago and so consistently that Lise wondered why it bothered her now.

The miniature golf went by on their right, streams gushing down the papier-mâché rocks in the rain. The movie theater was jammed, and she was glad that Ken had volunteered to take the kids.

“Where do you want to eat?” Meg asked.

“I don't care. Not McDonald's. Somewhere we can sit down.”

“How's Chinese?”

“I know the place you mean. Sure.”

It was cheap, a family buffet, chafing dishes over Sterno, yellowed reviews framed in the hallway. Better than the chicken, she figured.

But the place was closed, killed by a brand-new Denny's across the road. Its windows were dark, blinded by butcher paper, a big
FOR LEASE
sign on the door proclaiming their failure. Meg slowed and they gawked as if passing an accident, then drove on.

“There's a Red Lobster by the mall,” Meg suggested.

“What the hell,” Lise said. “We've got to go to Wal-Mart anyway.”

Finding a parking spot was a chore, and then when they got inside, they found the vestibule crowded. Where did all these old people come from, Lise wondered. It was a small town, and fading, from the look of the mall. The hostess told them there was a ten-minute wait, maybe less, so they stood by the bubbling lobster tank, Lise feeling conspicuous with her peeling nose.

It was a safe place, she thought. No one would be abducted from a Red Lobster.

Meg leaned over and whispered, “We're the youngest people in here.”

It was true. The padded bench along the wall was all seniors, the men in obsolete suits and wide ties, the women's hair sugar-white and stiff as fiberglass.

“It must be their day out,” Lise muttered, hoping none of them could hear. She was no judge of age, but they had to be in their late seventies, maybe their eighties. Emily was in her early seventies, not so far from them. In ten years Lise would be fifty, an age that seemed impossible.

It was not a subject to dwell on, not on a day like today, and she looked hopefully to the hostess's empty lectern. The walls were done up with nets and oars and lobster pots, a codified lack of imagination. Every time someone opened the doors, a wet gust rushed in.

“Do you want to try someplace else?” Meg asked.

“No, we're here. I'm just getting creeped out thinking how old we are.”

“We're not old.”

“I feel old,” Lise said. “In two weeks Ella's going into high school.”

“So's Sarah, but I don't feel old. I feel a lot of things, but not old.”

Lise wanted to ask Meg what she meant by this, but felt she didn't have the right. As if to trade a confession of her own, she said, “I feel like I could have done more.”

“Everyone feels like that,” Meg said, but so offhand that Lise saw she would not be drawn into a discussion, not here in the lobby.

The hostess moved the old people as a group, then, without the merest attempt at sincerity, thanked Lise and Meg for being so patient and hurried them to a booth, the table still bearing the beaded trail of a washcloth. Once she'd gone, Lise swabbed the surface with her paper napkin and left it by the edge for the waitress to take. The old people were seated far across the room, and most of the booths around them were empty.

“So why did we have to wait?” she asked.

It didn't matter. The idea was to kill time, to pass the afternoon away from Emily and Ken and the kids, and it was working. They talked about nothing, about movies and dry cleaning, about politics and carpeting. Lise felt like ordering a margarita but out of consideration for Meg
had a Diet Pepsi. The menu was vast and bland, as if designed by a child. Everything came with fries and coleslaw.

“Oh God,” Meg said. “Coleslaw.”

Lise knew most if not all of the fish would be frozen and that the crab would be fake, the rubbery stuff made in Japan. She wondered if Meg ever got good seafood, living in the middle of the country. If Lise needed a reason to be proud of New England, it was places like this.

The chowder was paste, but that didn't matter either. She didn't care about the food—or the air-conditioning, the room chilly as a morgue. None of it mattered, yet she could feel herself turning hypercritical, destroying anything set before her, the littlest stupidities turning corrosive. She couldn't figure out why and, worse, couldn't stop herself from doing it.

“Sometimes I feel,” she said, “like I'm sick of everything. Now you can't tell me everyone feels that way.”

“Of course they do. Why do you think we have all those shooting sprees? What do you think road rage is?”

“That's hardly a majority of the country.”

“Those are the worst cases, but think of all the domestic violence. Those are people who are sick of everything and take it out on the people closest to them.”

Lise wanted to read meaning into it at the same time she refuted her argument. “But the majority of people, I think you'd agree, are happy with their lives. Otherwise they'd change them.”

“How? How would you change
your
life?”

Lise thought first of Ella, and then Sam. She wouldn't change Ken, she just wanted him to be closer to her again. But herself, the way she lived her own life, she had no idea.

“I don't know,” she said.

“Because you can't,” Meg said. “You can't just wake up one morning and decide you're not going to live your old life. You can pretend to, but it doesn't work. You're always going to come back to who you are. Some people don't like that, but that's the way it is.”

Lise recognized the rehab platitudes in her speech, and wondered how they applied to Jeff leaving.

“I guess I don't want to change my life, I just want to make it better.”

“That's possible,” Meg allowed. “All you have to do is figure out what you want, then work like hell to get it.”

“Sounds easy.”

“It's easier than trying to fix what you've already ruined. Or so my therapist tells me.”

The waitress came with their entrees and took Lise's unfinished cup. When she'd cleared off, Meg said, “Right now I'm probably going through the worst time of my life, and you know what the biggest thing I'm worried about is?”

“What?”

“Money. Isn't that terrible? I have all this other stuff to deal with, but before I can even start thinking about it, I've got to take care of the money.”

Lise could counter with their own money troubles but thought it was not the same. This was Ken's worst fear, the impossible job of paying bills suddenly far too large and having no one to turn to, the numbers accumulating month after month, their savings dwindling to nothing and then sinking into the negative, the bank sending threatening letters.

She tried to pinpoint the worst time in her own life and couldn't. Her life had been easy—not perfect, but free from any deep loss. Her parents were still alive, her children were healthy, Ken loved her in his own distracted way. To ask for more than that would be greedy.

Even her unhappiness was unearned, and she thought this was more proof that there was nothing wrong with her life but something wrong with her.

Meg was going on about how they might lose the house, and while Lise sympathized with how awful that was, and honestly felt for her, she did not want to hear any more about her tragedies. She knew them anyway. She wanted Meg to be distant again, a mystery. She wanted them to be like the rest of the couples spread around them, chatting meaninglessly, laughing over their heaping plates, happy to be out on the town.

Beside Ella, Sarah watched with her arms crossed over her stomach like she was trying to stay warm. The reflected light of the movie shone on her throat and lips, a dot on the tip of her nose, a bright wash across her broad forehead. Ella could see her breathing, the stripes of her shirt lifting slightly, the different blues black and white in the dark, and then everything shifted as she reached for her Reese's cups, and Ella pretended to be fascinated with Drew Barrymore walking down a long hallway with a candelabra.

Sarah aimed the orange package at her, but Ella waved her off. They rearranged themselves, slouched down against the armrests. Sarah raised the Reese's cup to her mouth and took a tiny bite, showing her teeth, breaking off a ridged edge of chocolate, and Ella thought all she had to do was lean over and kiss her.

That would be the end, she thought. Sarah would push her away, spit at her, never talk to her again.

She could let her hand accidentally fall on Sarah's. She'd say she just wanted a Reese's cup, and Sarah would believe her.

She couldn't believe Sarah didn't already know. Since last night, Ella could feel the secret rising to her cheeks in every conversation. This morning they'd dressed together, and at the last second Ella had turned away, not out of decency but the fear she would be overwhelmed by the sight. She had to watch where her eyes landed, and how she held herself when Sarah was in the room. They were alone together all the time, and Ella thought she couldn't hold on much longer. It would be easier if she could just avoid her, but that wasn't going to happen.

She felt doomed, her fate sealed like the queen in her book, waiting for her ordained murderer in her tower room in her castle in the middle of the forest, except she was the murderer too, and the fortune-teller. Sarah was her cousin, and gorgeous, while she was a geek. No one at school secretly wrote her initials on their book covers and then blacked them
out, or stole glances at her in science lab. No one even looked at her. And Sarah was in love with Dan or Dave or whatever his name was.

All great loves were impossible, she thought. There was Guinevere— but she'd been punished.

It was all wrong, there wasn't a single thing right with it, but all day and all through the hours she lay awake, it was all she could think of. Every song on the radio was about her, and her book, even this idiotic movie. She couldn't stop, even if she wanted to.

She didn't want Sarah to hate her. That was the thing she was afraid of. If she never confessed, that would never happen. She could be with her all day and all night, sleeping right beside her. She could hear her secrets and be her friend, her geeky cousin. Sometimes she thought that would be enough, but it wasn't. She wanted Sarah to be in love with her as helplessly as she was with Sarah. She wanted to bite her on the neck like a vampire, leave her teeth marks like a sign. You're mine, she wanted to say.

Beside her, Sarah took another tiny bite of her Reese's cup, her front teeth glinting liquid for an instant. Ella didn't understand how she could eat it so slowly. She wasn't nearly as patient. Like most people, she just shoved the whole thing in her mouth.

The racket coming from the Smiths' addition reminded Emily of Henry working in the basement, the ring of the table saw reaching her at the cutting board. Each of his machines had its own sound. Standing at the stove, she could locate him beneath her feet by the roar of the belt sander or the buzz of the router, the wobbly shuttle of the lathe. “Dinner's ready,” she'd shout down the stairs during a lull, and he'd scrub his hands at his sink down there and then come up, smelling of burnt sawdust and Lava
soap, blinking like a mole. After dinner he retreated to his burrow, only to pop up at eight o'clock sharp for prime time. He had a radio Kenneth had given him one year for his birthday (still down there, presiding over his spotless workbench, his tools hung like merchandise from the pegboard, filling their prescribed outlines), and while she did the dishes he turned to the station that played Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw, the music they'd fallen in love to, and when she was finished she stood at the top of the stairs and listened as if he were serenading her. Because he was singing down there, his voice a murmur as he moved from one machine to another, trailing off in the middle of a verse, rising for a chorus.