The Mulberry Tree

  But there was no sex. When Matt and Bailey were alone, it was as though they were brother and sister. He was polite, but a bit distant. And since Bailey’s experience with the only man in her life was that he didn’t like aggressive women, she had no idea about how to approach Matt. And did she want to? She was afraid of messing up something great.

  On the other hand, when people were around, Matt joked about sex often. He teased Bailey in a way that made the others look at them with approval; she knew that they all wanted her and Matt to stay together.

  Matt’s lack of aggression when they were alone made Bailey feel, well, somewhat undesirable, so she teased him back when they were in public. To outsiders, she was sure they sounded as though they were having a great sex life. But sometimes, when she and Matt were alone, Bailey wanted to scream, “I know I said I wasn’t ready yet, but try me now!”

  But Bailey didn’t yell anything. Instead, she cooked huge, wonderful meals. She made a big pot of chili and homemade bread when Matt and four of his friends from high school spent the day clearing the beehive out of the chimney. She made pizzas for the same men when they tore out the green bathroom.

  And when Matt told her that he’d heard the boss of the company he was trying to get to hire him was considered a gourmet, he’d looked at Bailey with pleading eyes. Would she please make a killer dinner and help him get the job? he was silently asking her. Of course she’d volunteered, then spent twelve hours in the kitchen preparing a Moroccan feast. She made phyllo-pastry-wrapped olives and tomatoes, whole fish baked in spices, a seafood tagine fragrant with cardamon and cumin, and saffron chicken sprinkled with apricots, raisins, and almonds. And, of course, she made a b’stilla, that divine Moroccan dish of spiced, chopped chicken, eggs, and almonds wrapped in thin layers of pastry, baked until golden brown, then topped with sugar. For dessert, when the six men were groaning that they couldn’t eat another bite, Bailey served them plum-raspberry sorbet with tiny sugar cookies in the shape of houses. The six men had laughed at the joke, and the boss told Matt that he would be a welcome addition to their firm. “If you can design half as well as she can cook, you’ll double our sales,” the man had said.

  During those weeks, Bailey often saw Janice and Patsy, but when Janice said that she’d “found nothing wrong” in her husband’s account books, even though she’d gone back through nine years, Bailey said nothing. And when Patsy said that her husband and sons had asked her to please not embroider another animal, plant, or fantasy creature on any of their clothing, Bailey had also said nothing. No, Bailey hadn’t wanted to upset the lovely, peaceful life that she’d always craved. Her life with Matt was what she’d tried to make with Jimmie. But Jimmie’s money and his . . . his need for “attention” got in the way of perfect happiness.

  Now Bailey got out of the car and walked onto the front porch of the place. The house was beautiful now, the kind of place she’d always wanted. The deep porch wrapped around a third of the house, furnished with two wooden rockers with cane-bottom seats and three wicker chairs with flowered cushions. Matt had even hung a swing up at one end of it.

  But Bailey didn’t sit on the porch very often. For one thing, she’d rarely seemed able to get out of the kitchen since the porch had been finished. Patsy said that Matt was trying to make up for lost time. “Rick said that when they were kids, Matt was too proud to participate in anything social because their family was too poor to reciprocate. Rick doesn’t have the ridiculous pride that Matt does, so my Rick went to any party anywhere; he and I had a great time in high school. But not Matt. Matt stayed alone. Then, of course, he married Cassandra.” Patsy said the last as though no further explanation was necessary.

  Because of Patsy’s words, Bailey had felt an obligation to entertain half of Calburn and a great deal of the surrounding county over the last six weeks. She couldn’t very well deny Matt something he’d missed out on as a kid, could she? Besides, true to his word, Matt paid for all the food. And he always asked her if she minded cooking for so many people and so often. “No, I love it,” she’d said every time he asked.

  Now she looked at the porch, but what she really saw was the chairs, the swing, and the two little tile-topped tables that had come out of a rented storage unit. It was part of what Matt got in his divorce settlement. “Since Cassandra bought them, I’m sure they must have cost the earth,” he’d said. “And they’re just sitting there, so we might as well use them. If it’s okay with you, that is?” he’d asked, looking at her. “Sure,” Bailey’d said. “Of course we should use them. It would be silly not to.” But she’d never liked the chairs. They were too slick, too “designer,” and the pattern of the chintz was too bright, too modern. Bailey would rather have taken a trip to North Carolina and purchased something made by a craftsman there. But she didn’t tell Matt that.

  Inside the house, she looked around. The living room was a far cry from what it had been when she’d moved in. The kitchen was now open to the living room, with stools at the granite countertop. For the last three Saturdays she’d served the men something called “fried cheese” while they watched a baseball game on the big-screen TV that Matt had brought home one Friday evening. “They’re not used to foreign food,” Matt had said the night before the men, all of whom he’d known in high school, were to come over and help him replace the unstable floor in the attic. “Don’t get me wrong, I love what you cook, but these guys grew up in Calburn, and, well . . . ” He didn’t have to finish; she understood what he meant. The second Saturday the men came (and there were more of them that day), one of them brought her a thank-you gift. It was a machine to cut onions into segments, which, when deep-fried, would make an “onion flower.”

  The men, under Matt’s supervision, had made the room beautiful. The kitchen was small and efficient, with its huge walk-in pantry for storage. There were no overhead cabinets, just open shelves where she stored her most-used items. Matt had borrowed a friend’s woodworking shop, and he’d made her lower cabinets out of knotty pine that he’d pulled off the walls of the garage he’d remodeled. They’d laughed together over the fact that the woman didn’t like the beautiful old pine, but wanted Matt to put up plasterboard in its place. “And she covered it with wallpaper that was printed to look like knotty pine,” he said, making them both howl with laughter.

  Matt filled the nail holes, sanded the pine just enough to take off years of grease and soot, then finished the wood with a matte-finish sealer. The cabinets were so beautiful they made Bailey smile every time she saw them.

  But if the kitchen was all hers, other parts of the house seemed to have no relation to her. What Patsy said about Matt making up for lost time rang in her ears. In a way, Matt seemed to be trying to rewrite history. Matt had been a recluse, Patsy said, when he was in high school, and later he’d left Calburn “before the ink was dry on his diploma.” But now he was constantly calling men he’d gone to high school with and trying to renew friendships that, according to Patsy and Rick, had never existed.

  “You hated him in high school,” Rick said one day when Matt said that a certain “old buddy” was coming over on Saturday. “That jerk wanted everyone to think that he was the best football player Calburn had ever produced, even though he knew that you could out-throw and outrun him. But you had to work after school and on weekends, so you couldn’t be on the team. Remember the showdown you two had in the parking lot when you worked at the Dairy Queen? The manager fired you that night.” “That was a long time ago,” Matt had mumbled, then turned on the TV and refused to comment on the matter any more.

  Now framed photos of Matt’s family hung in Bailey’s house, along with a couple of landscape paintings. They weren’t bad, but Matt had bought them with his ex-wife. “Friend of her father’s painted them,” Matt said. “Not worth much now, but they may be someday.” “So why didn’t Cassandra take them?” Bailey had asked. Matt shrugged. “Carter didn’t like them.” Bailey had wanted to say, “Neither do I,” but she hadn’t.

&nb
sp; The hall closet was packed full of Matt’s sports equipment; she could barely squeeze a broom in the front. The third bedroom was filled with boxes that hadn’t been opened since Matt’s divorce. He said he was going to unpack someday, but he never seemed to find time to do it.

  Upstairs, “her” loft was now packed with Matt’s business equipment. He had bought something called a CAD system to make his designs. The floor on the far side of the attic had been repaired, the little railing taken down, and that area too was filled with Matt’s possessions. He’d set up another drawing board with a drafting machine that slid up and down the surface. “I think better with a pencil in my hand than with a mouse,” he’d said, smiling. In the corner was a fat easy chair with a light over it and a big ottoman. Matt had built shelves all along the walls and filled them with hundreds of his reference books.

  Bailey walked out the back door, across the newly exposed porch, and into the garden. At least the mulberry tree was the same, she thought. Pausing, she looked up at the big, old branches, at the fruit that was nearly ripe. Until today, she’d thought that she loved the way her life was heading, but the double blows of hearing that the shop had been sold, then being taken back to the past by Arleen, seemed to have changed how she was seeing things.

  As she looked up at the mulberry tree, she knew she had reached a turning point in her life. Jimmie’s death had started it, and that event had led up to this moment. She had some important decisions to make. She could allow things to continue as they were—and with that thought, she remembered how she’d always let things “continue as they are.” It was true that Jimmie was already rich and famous when he’d met her, but he’d been as famous for his daredevil stunts as for anything else. After their marriage he’d stopped his more flamboyant pursuits and entered what the media called “the world of the big boys.” Only after he married the young, quiet, plump Lillian Bailey did he become a contender for the coveted title of richest man in the world.

  She knew that what she’d given Jimmie was the knowledge that someone on earth knew him, the real him, and loved him anyway. To be truly loved, wasn’t that the most powerful drug in the world? Jimmie used to pick her up, whirl her about, and say, “You give me the strength to do it, Frecks. I don’t need much in this world, but I need you.”

  And now, just as she’d done with Jimmie, she was beginning to disappear into Matt. She was putting the burden on him that she’d put on Jimmie of being everything and everyone to her. She was staying home, hiding in the kitchen, and expecting Matt to bring the world to her. Bailey was making no effort to create a life of her own. And inside, she was smoldering about furniture she didn’t want and guests she didn’t like.

  Bailey put her hands over her face. She didn’t want to remember it, but she’d been very unhappy the last two years with Jimmie.

  During her twenties she’d been so enamored of him that anything he did, she saw as wonderful. But when she’d hit thirty, just two years ago, something inside her changed. She had no idea what caused it, but seemingly overnight she grew short-tempered and angry about everything. Jimmie would ask her what was wrong, she’d snap that nothing was; then she’d tell him she wanted to go somewhere, anywhere. “You’ll just take yourself with you,” Jimmie had said once, looking at her hard.

  Bailey leaned back against the tree and took a couple of deep, calming breaths. What did she do now that she realized these things about herself? The truth was, she had no idea how to go about doing what the self-help books called “becoming your own person.” Should she say to Matt at dinner tonight, “I’ve decided to become my own person?” Then what? Get up and fetch him a second helping?

  No, Matt wasn’t the problem. He was a nice man. She liked him. There wasn’t much fire between them, but it was comfortable, something that she could live with.

  The problem was that Bailey had spent a lifetime accommodating herself to others, and she wasn’t sure how to change that. She’d grown up under the rule of her mother and her sister Dolores. Both of them were . . .

  For a moment Bailey closed her eyes and remembered her father. Like her, Herbert Bailey had been willing to let others make the decisions and take on the responsibilities. “You and I need people like your mother and Dolores to help us along,” he’d said to Lillian many times. “And, besides, it makes people like them angry when you go against them, so it’s better to let them rule the show.”

  And he’d lived by that ethic. He’d gone to work each day, come home at exactly the same time each evening, and on Friday handed his paycheck to his wife. He let his wife do whatever she wanted with the money, with the house, and with their daughters, content to sit in his easy chair and read his daily newspaper.

  He died one Sunday afternoon while sitting in that same chair. Lillian had been in the kitchen all day, getting ready for a 4-H competition, and she’d gone from the kitchen up the back stairs to bed. Since the lights had been turned off in the living room, she’d assumed that her parents and her sister had already gone to bed. They weren’t the kind of family that informed each other where they were going or when.

  Early the next morning Bailey had gone down the street to baby-sit for a neighbor, and hadn’t returned until after lunch. When she walked into the living room and saw her father sitting in his chair in exactly the same position as the day before, she knew he was gone. When she pressed her lips to his forehead, his body was stiff and cold. The night before, her mother and sister had seen him asleep in his chair, but they hadn’t tried to wake him. Instead, they’d just turned out the lights and gone upstairs to bed. Bailey still remembered the looks of distaste the two policemen had given her mother when one of them said the man had been dead for nearly twenty-four hours before they were called.

  Bailey also remembered the way her mother had shrugged. She’d made sure her husband was well insured, so his demise didn’t interrupt her life much. In fact, it seemed that Bailey was the only person on earth who missed him.

  But now, today, Bailey knew that she no longer wanted to be the child who had been taught by her father that she was like him, that she was a person who let others control her—and that that’s what she should do. Had her father told her those things because he felt as alone as she had? Had he needed an ally in his no-resistance campaign to make him feel that it was the right way to go?

  Bailey tried to clear her thoughts. She’d grown up receiving the only love in her life from her father, but to receive that love, she’d had to constantly take what was handed to her. Whenever she tried to stand up to her mother, she’d glanced at her father, and when she saw his look, which seemed to say that he wouldn’t love her anymore if she became a shrew like her mother, Bailey had backed down.

  A mere three years after her father died, Bailey had run away with James Manville, a man even more controlling than her mother.

  So, she thought, what did she do now? It was all well and good to figure out the past, but what did she do with this knowledge? She could continue as she was, and disappear into Matthew Longacre, just as she’d become the shadow of her father and Jimmie. Or should she do something radical—kick Matt out of her house and say that she wanted to figure out her own life before she entwined herself with another man? Did she then see if she could make it in the world all by herself?

  Not quite. Bailey already knew what was out there in the big, bad world. And she wasn’t so full of this rebellious feeling that she was going to throw away a good man in the hope that another one would appear later, when she was ready. Also, she knew that she wasn’t one of those women who wanted to spend her life without a man. There was a lot of bad about them, but they sure knew how to make you laugh! No, she needed a man in her life, that much she was sure of.

  But then, wasn’t it her need of Jimmie that had made her put up with a lot from him?

  Put up with, she thought. What was that old saying? Whatever you put up with, that’s what you’ll get. She had “put up with” his affairs and . . . the chocolate, she thought, and
again her nails bit into her already sore palms. In truth, hearing that Jimmie had sent her the chocolate when she was dieting, not his grateful clients, made her more angry than the affairs.

  And the man from Heinz! At that memory, her nails dug into her palms so hard that she winced.

  All right, she asked herself, what do I want to do with the rest of my life? Do I want to keep it as it is, or do I want to make some changes? Do I want to bury myself in this man, Matthew Longacre, or do I want to try to find out what I can do? Not what I can accomplish while living as the shadow of a man, but on my own?

  Changes won out easily. So what changes do I want to make? she asked herself. I want to prove to myself that I can do something, was her answer. She didn’t want to be eighty years old and have to tell her grandkids that although she’d grown up in a time when women were running for president, she’d opted to stay home and fry cheese and onions for a bunch of men she couldn’t really say she liked very much.

  So what do I have going for me? she asked herself, then gave a little smile. She’d told Arleen that she’d been involved in Jimmie’s businesses. She’d said that to keep Arleen from thinking she was “a ghost,” as that nasty little Bandy had claimed. But the truth was, that Bailey had learned some things from Jimmie.

  So, first of all, she had some knowledge of business. Second, she knew a few women who needed to do something with their lives as much as she did.

  All right, she thought. Enough whining. No more poor little Bailey. She knew what she had to do; she just had to figure out how. If Jimmie were in a situation like this—not that he would ever be in something that he couldn’t control totally—what would he do?

  “Guerilla warfare,” she could hear Jimmie say. “Underground. Do it, then tell them what you’ve done. When it’s a done deal, they can’t give you ‘advice.’ And make no mistake about it, Frecks, advice is about control—and control is power.”