It was July 15. In two months, give or take a few days, I would be packing up my two suitcases and my laptop and heading to the airport, and seven hours later I would arrive in California to begin my life at Stanford. There was so little written between now and then; even the day I left was hardly marked, except for a simple circle in lipstick I’d done myself, as if it was a big deal only to me.
“Oh, man,” Chris grumbled from in front of the fridge. I glanced over to see him holding an almost empty bag of bread: all that was left were the two end pieces, which I suppose have a real name, but we’d always called the butts. “He did it again.”
Don had lived alone so long that he was having trouble grasping the concept that other people actually came after him and, sometimes, used the same products he did. He thought nothing of finishing off the last of the orange juice, then sticking the empty carton back in the fridge, or taking the last of the usable bread and leaving the butts for Chris to deal with. Even though Chris and I had both asked him, oh so politely, to write things down when he used them up (we kept a list on the fridge, labeled GROCERIES NEEDED) he either forgot or just didn’t care.
Chris shut the fridge door a bit enthusiastically, shaking the rows of Ensures that were stacked there. They clanked against one another, and one toppled off, falling back between the fridge and the wall with a thunk.
“I hate those things,” he grumbled, stuffing the bread butts into the toaster oven. “And, God, I just bought this bag. If he’s sucking down those Ensures, why does he need to eat my bread anyway? Isn’t that a complete meal in itself ?”
“I thought so,” I said.
“I mean,” he went on as the music picked up in the next room, all yeah-yeah-yeahs, “all I’m asking for is a little consideration, you know? Some give-and-take. It’s not too much to ask, I don’t think. Is it?”
I shrugged, looking again at that lipstick circle. Not my problem.
“Remy?” My mother’s voice drifted from the study, the typewriter noises stopping for a second. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure,” I called back to her.
“Bring me some coffee?” The typewriter started up again. “With milk?”
I got up and poured a cup almost to the top, then dumped in skim milk until it reached the rim: one of the only things that we had in common, completely, was taking our coffee the same way. I walked over to the entryway to the study, balancing her cup and mine, and pushed aside the curtain.
The room smelled like vanilla, and I had to move a row of mugs—most half full, their rims stained with the pearly pink that was her “house lipstick”—aside to make room. One of the cats was curled up on the chair next to her, and hissed at me halfheartedly as I slid it out of the way so I could sit down. Next to me was a stack of typewritten pages, neatly aligned. I was right: she was really cooking. The number of the page on the top was 207.
I knew better than to start talking until she was done with whatever sentence, or scene, she was in the midst of writing. So I pulled page 207 off the stack and skimmed it, folding my legs beneath me.
“Luc,” Melanie called to the other room in the suite, but there was only silence beyond. “Please.”No answer from the man who just hours earlier had kissed her under a shower of rose petals, claiming her in front of all Paris society as the one he loved. How could a marriage bed be so cold? Melanie shivered in her lace gown, feeling tears fill her eyes as she caught sight of her bouquet, white roses and purple lilies, lying where the maid had left it on the bedside table. It was still so fresh and new, and Melanie could remember pressing her face to the full blossoms, breathing them in as the realization that she was now Mrs. Luc Perethel washed over her. Once, the words had seemed magical, like a spell cast in a fairy tale. But now, with the city lit up through her open window, Melanie ached not for her new husband but for another man, in another city. Oh, Brock, she thought. She didn’t dare to say the words aloud for fear that they would be carried away, soaring out of her reach, to find the only one true love she’d ever had.
Uh-oh. I glanced up at my mother, who was still typing away, her brow furrowed, lips moving. Now, I knew that what she wrote was pure fiction. After all, this was a woman who’d been constructing stories about the lives and loves of the rich while we were clipping coupons and having our phone cut off on a regular basis. And it wasn’t like Luc, the cold new husband, had a fondness for Ensures or anything. I hoped.“Oh, thank you!” My mother, spying her fresh cup of coffee, stretched her fingers and picked it up, taking a sip. She had her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, no makeup, and was wearing pajamas and the leopard-print bedroom slippers I’d gotten her for her last birthday. She yawned, leaning back in her chair, and said, “I’ve been going all night. What time is it?”
I glanced at the clock in the kitchen, visible through the curtain, which was still swaying slightly. “Eight-fifteen.”
She sighed, putting the cup to her lips again. I glanced over at the sheet in the typewriter, trying to make out what happened next, but all I could see was several lines of dialogue. Apparently, Luc did have something to say after all.
“So it’s going well,” I said, nodding toward the stack next to my elbow.
She flopped her hand at me in a so-so kind of way. “Oh, well, it’s smack in the middle, and you know there’s always a dull spot. But last night I was just about asleep when I had this inspiration. It had to do with swans.”
I waited. But that appeared to be all she would tell me, as now she’d grabbed a nail file from the mug stuffed with pens and pencils and was at work on a pinkie, shaping it deftly.
“Swans,” I said finally.
She chucked the nail file down on the desk and stretched her arms over her head. “You know,” she said, tucking a stray hair behind her ear, “they’re dreadful creatures, really. Beautiful to look at but mean. The Romans used them instead of guard dogs.”
I nodded, drinking my coffee. Across the room, I could hear the cat snoring.
“So,” she went on, “it got me thinking about what cost beauty. Or for that matter, what cost anything? Would you trade love for beauty? Or happiness for beauty? Could a gorgeous person with a mean streak be a worthy trade? And if you did make the trade, decide you’d take that beautiful swan and hope it wouldn’t turn on you, what would you do if it did?”
These were rhetorical questions. I thought.
“I just couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she said, shaking her head. “And then I couldn’t sleep, either. I think it’s that ridiculous tapestry Don insisted we hang on the wall. I can’t relax looking at all these carefully stitched depictions of military battles and people being crucified.”
“It is a little much,” I agreed. Every time I went into her room to get anything I found myself somewhat transfixed by it. It was hard to tear your eyes away from the panel that illustrated the beheading of John the Baptist.
“So I came down here,” she said, “thinking I’d just tinker, and now it’s eight in the A.M. and I’m still not sure what the answer is. How can that be?”
The music faded out now, and it was very, very quiet. I was sure I could feel my ulcer stirring, but it might have just been the coffee. My mother was always very dramatic when she was writing. At least once during every novel she’d fling herself into the kitchen, near tears, hysterical that she’d lost any talent she ever possessed, the book was a quagmire, a disaster, the end of her career, and Chris and I would just sit there, silent, until she wailed out again. After a few minutes, or hours, or—in bad times—days, she’d be right back in the study, curtain closed, typing away. And when the books arrived months later, smelling so new with their smooth, not-yet-cracked spines, she always forgot about the breakdowns that played a part in creating them. If I reminded her, she said writing novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you’d never do it again.
“You’ll work it out,” I said now. “You always do.”
She bit her lip and glanced down
at the page in the typewriter, then out the window. The sunlight was spilling in, and I realized she did look tired, even sad, in a way I hadn’t noticed before. “I know,” she said, as if only agreeing with me to move past this. And then, after a quiet second or two, she switched gears completely and asked, “How’s Dexter?”
“Okay, I guess,” I said.
“I like him very much.” She yawned, then smiled at me apologetically. “He’s not like the other boys you’ve dated.”
“I had a no-musician rule,” I explained.
She sighed. “So did I.”
I laughed, and she did too. Then I said, “Okay, so why’d you break it?”
“Oh, the reason anyone does anything,” she said. “I was in love.”
I heard the front door swing shut as Chris left for work, yelling a good-bye behind him. We watched as he walked down the driveway to his car, a Mountain Dew—his version of coffee—in one hand.
“I think he’s going to buy her a ring, if he hasn’t already,” my mother said thoughtfully. “I just have this feeling.”
Chris started the engine, then pulled out into neighborhood traffic, turning around slowly in the cul-de-sac. He was swigging the Mountain Dew as he drove past.
“Well,” I said, “you would know.”
She finished her coffee, then reached over and brushed her fingers over my cheek, tracing the shape of my face. A dramatic gesture, like most of hers, but it was comforting in that she’d done it for as long as I could remember. Her fingers, as always, were cool.
“Oh, my Remy,” she said. “Only you understand.”
I knew what she meant, and yet I didn’t. I was a lot like my mother, but not in ways I was proud of. If my parents had stayed together and grown to be old hippies singing protest songs as they washed dishes after dinner, maybe I would have been different. If I’d ever seen what love really could do, or was, maybe I’d have believed in it from the start. But too much of my life had been spent watching marriages come together and then fall apart. So I understood, yes. But sometimes, like lately, I wished that I didn’t, not at all.
“But it’s filling up.”
“Filling up but not full.” I took the Tide from him and unscrewed the cap. “It has to be full.”“I always put the soap in right when it starts,” he said.
“Which is why,” I said, pouring a bit of detergent in as the water level rose, “your clothes don’t ever get truly clean. There is a chemistry involved here, Dexter.”
“It’s laundry,” he said.
“Exactly.”
He sighed. “You know,” he said as I poured in the rest of the Tide and eased the lid shut, “the rest of the guys are even worse. They hardly ever even do laundry, much less separate their colors and brights.”
“Colors and whites,” I corrected him. “Colors and brights go together.”
“Are you this anal about everything?”
“Do you want everything to be pink again?”
That shut him up. Our little laundry lesson this evening had been precipitated by his throwing a new red shirt into the hot water cycle, which left everything he’d been wearing lately with a rosy tinge. Since the plastic ware incident I’d been doing all I could to be the very opposite of domestic, but I couldn’t abide a pink boyfriend. So here I was, in the laundry room of the yellow house, a place I normally steadfastedly avoided because of the enormous pile of unwashed underwear, socks, and various T-shirts that dwelled there, often spilling out into the hallway. Which was not surprising, considering that hardly anyone ever bought detergent. Just last week, John Miller had apparently washed all his jeans in Palmolive.
Once the cycle started, I stepped carefully over a pile of nasty socks, back out into the hallway, and eased the door shut as far as it would go. Then I followed Dexter into the kitchen, where Lucas was sitting at the table, eating a tangerine.
“You doing laundry?” he asked Dexter.
“Yep.”
“Again?”
Dexter nodded. “I’m bleaching out my whites.”
Lucas looked impressed. But then, he was wearing a shirt with a ketchup stain on the collar. “Wow,” he said. “That’s—”
And then, suddenly, it was dark. Totally dark. All the lights cut off, the refrigerator whirred to a stop, the swishing of the washing machine went quiet. The only brightness anywhere left that I could see was the porch light of the house next door.
“Hey!” John Miller yelled from the living room, where he was absorbed, as usual about this time each night, in Wheel of Fortune. “I was just about to solve the puzzle, man!”
“Shut up,” Lucas said, standing and walking over to the light switch, which he flipped on and off a couple of times, click-clack-click. “Must be a blown fuse.”
“It’s the whole house,” Dexter said.
“So?”
“So, if it was just one fuse something would still be on.” Dexter picked up a lighter from the middle of the table and flicked it. “Must be a power outage. Probably the whole grid’s out.”
“Oh.” Lucas sat back down. In the living room, there was a crash as John Miller attemped to navigate the darkness.
This wasn’t my problem. Surely it wasn’t. Still, I couldn’t help but point out, “Um, the lights are on next door.”
Dexter leaned back in his chair, glancing out the window to verify this. “So they are,” he said. “In-teresting.”
Lucas started to peel another tangerine as John Miller appeared in the kitchen doorway. His pale skin seemed even brighter in the dark. “Lights are out,” he said, as if we were blind and needed to be told this.
“Thank you, Einstein,” Lucas grumbled.
“It’s a circuitry problem,” Dexter decided. “Bad wiring, maybe.”
John Miller came into the room and flopped down on the couch. For a minute, no one said anything, and it became clear to me that this, to them, wasn’t really that big a problem. Lights, schmights.
“Did you not pay your bill?” I asked Dexter, finally.
“Bill?” he repeated.
“The power bill.”
Silence. Then, from Lucas, “Oh, man. The freaking power bill.”
“But we paid that,” John Miller said. “It was right there on the counter, I saw it yesterday.”
Dexter looked at him. “You saw it, or we paid it?”
“Both?” John Miller said, and Lucas sighed, impatiently.
“Where was it?” I asked John Miller, standing up. Someone had to do something, clearly. “Which counter?”
“There,” he said, pointing, but it was dark and I couldn’t see where. “In that drawer where we keep the important stuff.”
Dexter picked up a lighter and lit a candle, then turned to the drawer and began to dig around, sorting through what, to the guys, was deemed Important. Apparently, this included soy sauce packets, a plastic hula girl toy, and matchbooks from what looked like every convenience store and bar in town.
Oh, and a few pieces of paper, one of which Dexter seized and held aloft. “Is this it?”
I took it from him, squinting down at the writing. “No,” I said, slowly, “this is a notice saying if you didn’t pay your bill by—let’s see—yesterday, they were going to cut the power off.”
“Wow,” John Miller said. “How did that slip past us?”
I turned it over: stuck to the back was a set of pizza coupons with one ripped off, all of those left still a little greasy. “No idea,” I said.
“Yesterday,” Lucas said thoughtfully. “Wow, so they gave us, like, a half day over that. That’s mighty generous of them.”
I just looked at him.
“Okay,” Dexter said cheerfully, “so whose job was it to pay the power bill?”
Another silence. Then John Miller said, “Ted?”
“Ted,” Lucas echoed.
“Ted,” Dexter said, reaching over to the phone and yanking it off the hook. He dialed a number, then sat there, drumming his fingers on the table. “Hi, hey, Ted. Dexte
r. Guess where I am?” He listened for a second. “Nope. The dark. I’m in the dark. Weren’t you supposed to pay the power bill?”
I could hear Ted saying something, talking fast.
“I was about to solve the puzzle!” John Miller yelled. “I only needed an L or a V.”
“Nobody cares,” Lucas told him.
Dexter continued to listen to Ted, who apparently had not taken a breath yet, making only hmm-hmm noises now and then. Finally he said, “Okay then!” and hung up the phone.
“So?” Lucas said.
“So,” Dexter told us, “Ted has it under control.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Meaning that he’s royally pissed, because, apparently, I was supposed to pay the power bill.” Then he smiled. “So! Who wants to tell ghost stories?”
“Dexter, honestly,” I said. This kind of irresponsibility made my ulcer ache, but apparently Lucas and John Miller were used to it. Neither one of them seemed particularly fazed, or even surprised.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said. “Ted’s got the money, he’s going to call them and see what he can do about getting it on tonight or early tomorrow.”
“Good for Ted,” Lucas said. “But what about you?”
“Me?” Dexter seemed surprised. “What about me?”
“He means,” I said, “that you should do something nice for the house by way of apology for this.”
“Exactly,” Lucas said. “Listen to Remy.”
Dexter looked at me. “Honey, you’re not helping.”
“We’re in the dark!” John Miller said. “And it’s your fault, Dexter.”
“Okay, okay,” Dexter said. “Fine. I’ll do something for the house. I’ll—”
“Clean the bathroom?” Lucas said.
“No,” Dexter said flatly.
“Do a load of my laundry?”
“No.”
Finally, John Miller said, “Buy beer?”