I dialed her number, just to make sure she was really gone. No answer. Then I called to see if her flight was going to be on time. Ten minutes early. I stationed myself at the window, rigid with anticipation.
Her hair was as long and wild as I’d imagined, though not gray. Instead, it was dyed the same blue-black she’d always had, Archie’s Veronica’s color. After a perfunctory and, at least on my part, rather nervous embrace, we stood on the porch in the cold night air, looking at each other and laughing. Zeke stood behind us at the open door, apparently having appointed himself master of the house.
“This is so strange,” I finally said. “In the wonderful sense of the word.”
“But aren’t you glad I came?”
“Yes. Now come in.”
She put her suitcase at the bottom of the stairs and took off her coat—my God, what a figure she still had! She was wearing skin-tight black pants, a red V-neck sweater—a nice cashmere, it looked like—and many gold bangle bracelets. No gut. No thighs. No arm flab, from what I could tell, but at some point I’d make her let me see. I supposed she worked out at some Teutonic gym—she was never one to shy from physical challenges. Rather, she was one to create them. Oftentimes, after we had all been studying for what she deemed too long a time, she would put herself into some weird pose and say, “Hey girls. Can you do this?” “Fuck you,” Susanna would say, not even looking, and Maddy would almost always get down on the floor and assume the position with ease. As for me, I would decide it was time for refreshments and offer marshmallows on toothpicks. Peanut butter on tablespoons. A Snickers, cut into fourths, with a slight advantage given the cook.
I poured us glasses of wine, and Lorraine and I settled down on opposite ends of the sofa. In the better light, I could see minor signs of aging, but they did not detract from an intimidating beauty. If anything, she looked even better than she had all those years ago.
“You look great,” I said, shaking my head. “How much work have you had done?”
“None,” she said, and I felt a sorrowful astonishment until she said, “Oh come on, are you kidding? I had my first face-lift at thirty-five. Susanna and I did it together, but I came out way better than she did.”
I smiled. “And Maddy?”
“Oh, hell, Maddy is Mother Earth. The only work she’ll have done is on her house. And then she’s right out there with whoever comes, making sure they’re doing it right. Some guy fixing her sewer pipe got so mad at her for interfering he threatened to sue her.” She cocked her head. “You look good, Betta.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Still gracious about taking compliments. You look good, I said!”
I rolled my eyes. “Thank you.”
“So, Betta. What brought you here? I mean, I never featured you as a small-town midwesterner.” She looked around the room as though she herself had suddenly been dropped here.
I told her how my move had come about, then added, “I have to tell you, in some ways, I feel like I’ve come to where I always should have been. I really like it here. I don’t even miss Boston.”
“No surprise there.”
“What do you mean?”
She tossed her hair back, took a drink of wine. “Well, you left us all behind, no problem.”
“Not really. I never did leave any of you behind. John and I were so besotted we just . . . we let ourselves be everything to each other. It was wrong, really.”
“I’ll say! A girl needs her friends, especially at our age.”
“So. Here we are.” I held up my glass.
Lorraine toasted me back, then shifted her position, lengthening her legs and wiggling her toes, now painted a uniform red. “So what will you do here?”
“I don’t know yet, really. I’ve got some ideas. I could always go back to writing, but I don’t really want to. I want to do something different.”
“You could teach.”
“I could.” I started to tell her about the store but decided against it. It seemed silly, now, a girly pipe dream. “I’ve got time. I’ll just take some time. It was all pretty recent that he . . . you know, that all this happened.”
Lorraine looked over at me, a softness in her eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“What, John?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, well, Lorraine . . . He was . . . you would have loved him. He was a gentle intellect, such a sensitive and wonderfully evolved man. He—” I swallowed, took in a breath. “You know, maybe this isn’t a good time. Yet.” Ever so slightly, my throat tightened. I pushed my hair back from my face, smiled brightly, gulped some wine.
“That’s fine,” Lorraine said. “We’ll talk about whatever you want, whenever you want.” She lifted up her hair, let it hang over the top of a pillow. “So what kind of dog is Zeke?”
“I don’t know. He’s not mine. I borrowed him from next door.”
“How come?”
I would spare her the details of the frightening dream I’d had. I knew Lorraine as an instant problem solver—she was more like a man than a woman in that respect. She wouldn’t shiver empathetically and reach out to touch my arm. She’d hold a séance, call some ghost buster, race upstairs to the bedroom, and invite the challenger to do battle with her. She was like a colleague of John’s, who when he was diagnosed with cancer stood naked in front of his mirror weeping and yelling, “Come out where I can see you!” I didn’t want to have Lorraine try to solve my nighttime terrors—that would just make them more real. And so I said, “I just like dogs.” And then, “Hey! Remember when we invited that guy to dinner and he showed up with a gun?”
Lorraine nodded. “We wouldn’t let him in.”
“Right. And he sat on the back steps spouting his terrible poetry—loudly—for what seemed like hours. Remember? It was written on a legal pad? And he just kept reading and reading?”
“Actually, I remember thinking some of it was pretty good. Who was that guy, anyway?”
“His name was initials . . .”
“R.M.,” Lorraine said. “It was R.M. Maddy said it stood for ‘Real Maniac.’ Which I guess he was.”
“Right. Maddy never did like it when you and I dragged strangers home with us, but most of them were good. Remember that guy who worked nights cleaning floors in the grocery store? Who picked us up hitchhiking? And the next day he brought us stolen steaks for dinner? They were porterhouse! Susanna slept with him after dinner to say thank you.”
“He brought us coffee, too, remember?” Lorraine said. “When coffee had gotten so expensive? And a whole bunch of butter. We hadn’t had butter for so long.”
I leaned my head back against the sofa cushion, suddenly dizzy with fatigue. I wanted to look at my watch, but I didn’t want Lorraine to see me doing it. “What do they do, Susanna and Maddy?”
“Susanna’s a divorced divorce attorney—talk to her about marriage. She’s got a gorgeous grown daughter who’s also an attorney—something environmental. Maddy became a nurse-practitioner and married a doctor. They have three sons. The last one just left home.”
“After we were all so sure Susanna would be an actress! And then you turn out to be in theater! What got you into it?”
“When was I ever not onstage? I figured I might as well get paid for it. And then I figured I might as well direct, since I’m so good at bossing people around.”
I yawned, covered my mouth. “Sorry.”
Lorraine squinted at her watch. “Two-forty! Want to go to sleep?”
I nodded gratefully, then followed her upstairs, admiring the dancer’s carriage she still had. In the hall I pointed out the linen closet and the bathroom. Then I embraced her again. “Thank you for coming.”
“No big deal. Frequent-flyer miles.” But then she pulled away from me and smiled. “You’re welcome.” She kissed my forehead and started for her bedroom. Zeke followed her. It was ever thus. I never wanted to introduce her to my boyfriends; they’d all stand transfixed while she ignored them; then they’d tur
n reluctantly to me, their consolation prize.
I turned out my bedside lamp and considered the mix of emotions inside me. I wasn’t sure it was right to abandon myself to lighthearted banter, to allow someone to interfere with my being able to behave in whatever way I chose, whenever I wanted. What if I wanted to enjoy a memory or a good cry? I wasn’t weaned from that yet; I wasn’t finished being with him in the only way I had left.
But how long would she stay, after all? One day? Two? And what harm could there be in revisiting another time and place, one that existed before John, and was therefore free of memories that could trigger another sad implosion? Being with Lorraine was a pleasure, after all, and in that respect was only honoring another promise I had made to John.
I closed my eyes and let myself go back all those years, to that tiny little apartment in a falling-down house that probably no longer even existed. There were high, narrow windows there, warped floors. We had a room-sized braided rug that someone found for five dollars at a garage sale, and it smelled like raw potatoes. We had tall kitchen cupboards with the paint blistered and peeling; we kept red licorice in a jar on the kitchen radiator. There were at least eight tubes of mascara in one of the kitchen drawers, cakes of eyeliner, a couple of sets of false eyelashes, lipsticks in every color, including white. We had miniskirts that came up to the middle of our thighs, bell-bottom jeans, maxi-coats. We wore feathers and rhinestones in our hair. We had a turquoise-colored dial phone that chimed instead of ringing. The bathroom overflowed with boxes of tampons and plastic discs of birth control pills. I turned onto my other side, pulled a pillow close against my stomach. Stop. Go to sleep.
I awakened before Lorraine and took Zeke for a walk around the block before I returned him. When I came back, Lorraine had gotten up and made coffee. We sat at the table together to drink it. “I know this woman,” Lorraine said. “Her husband died suddenly at age fifty—a brain aneurysm that nobody knew about—and she was completely helpless. When I went to see her a couple of weeks after his funeral, she was sitting at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, crying. She said, ‘I don’t even know where the stamps are.’ You’re not like that, are you?”
“Well, no,” I said. “I have my moments, but mostly I feel like I’m doing pretty well. I mean, come on; I moved here by myself. Isn’t that brave?”
Lorraine shrugged. “Might be. Or it might be because you were afraid to stay in your house and deal with everything you needed to.”
“I think it’s brave. But the truth is, I really don’t know much about living an independent life. John did all the tax stuff, paid all the bills, fixed everything that broke.” I sighed.
“You can hire people to do anything, you know,” Lorraine said. “Don’t be afraid to hire people if you can afford to. I pay somebody to clean my condo, to pick up my dry cleaning, to do my taxes, to help me with my computer. To satisfy me sexually.”
I laughed.
“Never mind, that’s next,” she said, grimly.
“Didn’t you ever think of getting married?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Look around. Not much to recommend it.”
“Some of us are lucky in love.”
She crossed her legs, leaned back in her chair. “So tell me what it was like. Tell me a normal day, tell me what that was like.”
“Well, it’s . . . I don’t know, it’s like working with a net. When John and I had just gotten married, the people in the apartment next to us were newlyweds, too. She went and got her hair cut one day, and it was a total disaster, I mean she looked awful. She called me over to see what they’d done to her, and I just put my hand over my mouth. So she was sitting on her sofa crying, and then all of a sudden she looked up and said, ‘God. I’m so glad that I’m married.’ ”
“No,” Lorraine said. “I mean, tell me the specifics of a normal day. Tell me, When the alarm went off, we . . . like that.”
I leaned in close to her. “Okay. When the alarm went off—” I stopped, smiled a wobbly smile, then leaned back and quickly pressed my fingers to the corners of my eyes.
Lorraine reached over to touch my hand. “That’s all right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I asked you that. Don’t tell me. Don’t say any more.”
The phone rang and I leaped up gratefully to answer it. It was Ed Selwin, saying, “Good mornin’! Now, tell me I didn’t wake you up!”
“No,” I said, “you didn’t. I’m just sitting here having coffee with my best friend from a long time ago. It’s a surprise visit, and we have a lot to catch up on—in not much time, I’m afraid.” I pointed to the phone and rolled my eyes at Lorraine. I was sure she could hear him—he was yelling into the phone as though he were on the shore and I on the ship.
“Well, I won’t keep you. Just calling to let you know we can go ahead and tape tomorrow at six-thirty. And seeing as how you have your friend there . . .” He laughed, a whooping sound. Lorraine looked questioningly at me. I held up my finger—I’ll tell you later. Ed went on. “This is how it comes to me, sometimes, you know? Just like that.” He lowered his voice. “Now. Suppose we do a show about you called ‘Old Friends and New’? Right? You can have your friend on to be ‘old,’ and I’ll get Delores Henckley to come on to be ‘new.’ She hasn’t been on since she first started in the real estate business—we did a show we called ‘Bright Buyers and Savvy Sellers’—well, actually, I called it that, that was my idea, with all due modesty. So! What do you say?”
“Well, Ed, that’s a really nice idea, but—”
“Your friend’s right there, idn’t she?”
“Yes, she is.”
“Well, go ahead and ask her! I’ll wait.”
“All right.” Good. I knew what Lorraine would say about getting up at six to appear on a radio show with a listening audience of the host’s mother. I held my hand—lightly—over the mouthpiece of the phone. “Lorraine? Want to be on a radio show?”
“What?”
I spoke slowly and deliberately. “This is the host, Ed Selwin, asking if we’d come and do a segment for his local show. It’s taped in a studio over the drugstore. It’s called Talk of the Town, and this show would be ‘Old Friends and New.’ ”
She smiled. I began to worry that her refusal would contain something not only nasty but obscene, but what she said, loudly enough for Ed to hear, was “Why, certainly.”
“Lorraine!” I whispered.
“I’d love to!” she said—again, loudly.
“We would need to be at the studio at six-thirty,” I said. “In the morning.” I felt as though my eyes would soon bore holes into her.
“Oh, no problem!”
I took my hand off the mouthpiece. “Ed?”
“No need to say a word; I heard everything! So I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow. Now, some people like to not eat until after the show on account of nerves. I been saying that since Sally Rethers lost her breakfast right on the air—we had to get a brand-new microphone, and they don’t come cheap! So I always like to tell people: You are the best judge of your own insides, but be aware of the stomach effect of high nerves. Now, we do have donuts at the station that the bakery gives us—they’re day-old, but I’ll tell you what, you would never know it. And you are welcome to those donuts either before or after. Okay, well, I said I wouldn’t take up much time, and I won’t—I’ll give Delores a call now. Thanks a lot!”
I hung up the phone, turned to Lorraine, and echoed Ed’s last words. She smiled and smiled, stirring more sugar into her coffee, with her pinkie held up high and her lips pooched in that smart-ass way I now remembered so well.
Lorraine was remarkably cheerful at six on Sunday morning. As opposed to me, who, despite a cold shower, was still half asleep. I drove slowly toward Main Street, irritated by what we were about to do.
“I can’t wait to meet him,” Lorraine said. “Can’t you go faster? I don’t want all the donuts to be gone.”
“Ha, ha,” I said.
&n
bsp; “I mean it! I love day-old donuts. Oh, I hope they have the plain kind with chocolate frosting, don’t you love those? They actually improve with age. If we’re really lucky, they’ll be real moldy, and then it will be like we’re eating Maytag blue cheese, you know, all veiny and—”
“Lorraine,” I said.
She grew mercifully quiet except for an occasional “Mmmmm!” to which I did not respond; I remembered that when she got this way, negative attention only encouraged her. With any luck, we could do a quick “interview” and be on our way to Chicago—we were going to tour some of the city before I took her to the airport. We’d meant to go yesterday but instead spent all day lolling around, catching up, changing out of our pajamas only when we’d gone out to dinner. I’d learned that Lorraine was as tired of directing as I was of writing. Both of us were poised for something new. I’d finally told her about my idea and she thought it was wonderful. We’d stood outside the empty store after dinner, peering in. “Put some head scarves and sunglasses in there,” she’d said. “And some huge jars of body creams that work. And journals that lie flat. And that Italian olive oil that comes in the beautiful bottles. And chandelier earrings that don’t make your lobes drop down too far. And spa towels wrapped in really good silk ribbon that you can recycle.” I’d asked if she wanted to be a buyer, and she’d said absolutely.