“Wait,” Chloe said, “a musical? How can a story on paper have music in it?”
He grinned as if he were about to doff his black hat. “That’s the trick, isn’t it?”
They were leaning forward over the table. The only other people in the room were three other tutors and a proctor. Outside it was deep spring, warm colors, tulips and grass, outdoor sports and new running shoes, the courtyard full of girls in light summer frocks, the kind she never wore, blowing up in the wind. She could see the three cream-brick dormitories, Payson-Mulford, Webster, and Hastings, arranged in a semi-circle of unchaperoned fun. Every Friday night before curfew, drunken madness. Next to Hastings a fence, a back gate, and a cemetery. Before the fence a tent. And under the tent, a barbecue grill and three picnic tables.
There once was a story with music in it at one of those tables.
Blushing at a hot lick of a nearly forgotten memory, Chloe quickly cantered away from the aching nostalgia of the picnic bench near Hastings, thinking we’ll never be that drunk again, her tongue-tied gaze colliding with Blake’s amused and amiable stare.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She stared at his large, scuffed hands, folded together in calm Zen across the table.
“Tell me why we must go to Europe,” he said.
“To find the blue suitcase, I suppose.”
“Why Barcelona?”
“The question is not why Barcelona,” she replied, gazing out the window. A thousand open questions, invisible to the naked eye, apparent to every living soul. “The question is why anywhere else?”
“Exactly. Who else would know this but you?”
She was trying to answer her own riddles in the unfinished English essay, a treatise on feminism and freedom in Pearl Buck. “You would write about Pearl Buck,” said her English teacher, whose insinuations Chloe didn’t appreciate, but it was too late to change her topic. You would get all As, Chloe. You would have an extra eraser, your neat notes from last year, the report handed in three weeks before deadline, and a yes from all the schools you applied to. Universities of Pennsylvania and Maine. John Kennedy Jr.’s alma mater, and Einstein’s. Every Boston school worth going to, Duke too, and San Diego, that misty Spanish renaissance on Mission Bay. You would. Chloe hated those two words.
It fed too cleanly into the digested and mealy narrative about her, the stereotype she despised and had tried all her life to change. She didn’t want to not do well. She just didn’t want to be known as the girl with the Chinese mother who did well.
You would.
My mother is fifth-generation American, Chloe would answer to every suggestion of the supposed intellectual blessings of her ethnicity. She is more American than I am, since my father’s father was born in Ireland and his mother somewhere in the Baltics. My mother, on the other hand, makes peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. She frequently forgets to buy soy sauce. Does that sound Chinese to you? And yet how else to explain her own relentless quest for excellence? Every revolutionary date, every candidate for president, every battle in the Civil War, every Law and Act, every polynomial and integral domain, every tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow all the way to dusty death had to be not just memorized but internalized?
Pearl Buck wrote about the Chinese woman from a hundred years ago, but she could’ve been writing about Chloe’s mother and father. Jimmy Devine wanted a docile lamb who would be happy to contain herself within his four walls. Pearl Buck said that a woman full of energy and intelligence could not be contained within any man’s walls, but then Pearl Buck, the obedient daughter of a Christian missionary in China, had never met Lang Devine. She can’t be held there, Pearl Buck wrote, even if the walls were lined with satin and studded with diamonds. Chloe disagreed. Her mother’s wood cabin walls weren’t lined or studded with anything but photos of Chloe.
Pearl Buck seemed to think that Lang would soon discover she was living within prison walls. Chloe begged to differ.
Even children were not enough for some women. She may want them, Pearl Buck wrote, need them, and even have them, and love them, and enjoy them. But they wouldn’t be enough for her. “Nobody likes children, Chloe,” her mother would often say. “But we have them anyway.” Chloe was almost sure Lang was joking. Because for some women, children were everything.
Some women didn’t know anything about politics. It took all their effort to be wives and mothers. Well, Ms. Buck opined, that may be sufficient for some women, but their husbands certainly found the time to occupy themselves, not only in their chosen fields and with being husbands and fathers, but also apparently, with other women as well. Just ask Terri Gramm next door who worked sixty hours at L.L.Bean to pay the mortgage while her husband honeymooned in Maui with the assistant baker from Dunkin’ Donuts.
Chloe swore she would grow up to be a different kind of woman, not Terri, not Lang, not the donut-maker-helper.
But what kind of woman?
She had no idea. Chloe had the answer to everything, except the important things.
“Don’t worry about what’s in the suitcase for a moment,” she said to Blake in a voice thick with longing. “And the answer to the why will come. Just start at the beginning. Start with something true and real. Begin with your two main characters, the junk dealers.”
“If you’re going to make fun,” Blake said, “I’m going to give them another livelihood.”
“I’m not making fun. Tell me about them.”
Eagerly Blake opened the notebook to the second section. Character. Pages were filled in pencil in a slow and careful hand, too slow, too careful for Blake. Her delighted skepticism must have been apparent on her face. Without affront, he said, “Did you know, Miss Smartass, that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his entire lifetime?”
She marveled into his grinning face, tedium forgotten, even Barcelona and parents and Hannah’s other lover forgotten for a moment. “The surprise here,” she said, “is that you would know anything about Van Gogh.”
“Come on, Haiku, you know I’m a font of useless information.”
She broke a pencil. “Are you implying that you will also sell only one thing in your lifetime, say your purported story? Or could you possibly be equating yourself with Van Gogh’s talent?”
“Neither.” Blake was unperturbed by her teasing. “Red Vineyard was not even his best painting.”
“It was pretty good, let’s say that, but again, how is that relevant”—she wagged her finger in a small pi-circle at him and his notebook—“to what’s going on here?”
“All I’m saying,” Blake said, “is that if Gerald Ford can be a male model, then yours truly can be a writer.”
“Another metaphor entirely, but at least more apropos.”
“And did you know that Einstein did not or could not speak until he was nine years old?”
“How in the flipping world is that relevant?”
“Maybe I’m a late bloomer like him.”
Chloe smiled. He was being so cute. “Maybe. But the thing that’s actually relevant about Van Gogh is that he painted the Red Vineyard not while standing at the window looking out at it, but solely from his memory and imagination. Take that away and mull it, Einstein.”
Blake took it. He mulled it. “Maybe The Blue Suitcase will be my Red Vineyard,” he said, his own voice deep with longing.
“Or you could try writing something like Breath by Samuel Beckett,” Chloe said, straight-faced. “It’s one of his lesser known plays. It lasts thirty seconds and has no actors and no dialogue.” Her eyes twinkled.
And Blake, bless him, laughed, as Chloe had hoped he might. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “It’s called an intermission.”
And Chloe laughed.
The proctor shushed them. “Mr. Haul, I’ll thank you to keep your voice down.”
“What if I’m a writer?” Blake said to her, lower and leaning in. “I could be a writer, no?”
It must have grated on him that Chloe didn’t think he could do it. And she didn’t
even think that. Well, all right, she did. She did think that. But so what? What did it matter what she thought? God.
“Figure out what’s in your suitcase,” she said, “and you will be a writer.”
Blake sat contemplating her. His face was inscrutable.
“What?” She became discomfited. She hated not knowing what people wanted from her. She didn’t like to disappoint.
“What do you think should be in it?”
“It’s your story.”
“But if it was your story.”
Chloe shrugged. “This one lady I deliver Meals on Wheels to, all the way in Jackson, lives in a yellow shed. I’m not kidding, it’s a shed off the main property, which is huge, but the shed is tiny, and it’s painted yellow, and she sits in a chair outside this canary box all day and watches the road, the cars, the walkers. She’s right past the covered bridge to Jackson. She’s ninety-two. She tells me that she prays to Jesus every day that today will not be the day she dies because she wants to be buried with all the jewelry her husband had given her, but she’s afraid her kids will never go for it once she’s dead. She tells me she’s trying to figure out how to get buried alive so she can decide what goes with her. She’d probably put her jewelry into this vanished case.”
“What’s her name?”
“Lupe.”
“I need to meet her ASAP,” Blake said. “Are you and Hannah doing Wheels tomorrow? Mason and I will go with you.”
Chloe didn’t know what to say.
He was so excited, he skipped right over her lying silence. Then it was time to go.
They ran for the late bus, heaved on, said hi to Freddy the thoroughly vetted and tested union driver. Chloe sat next to the window, Blake next to her, their backpacks squeezed between their legs. Freddy waited another minute for stragglers. Chloe spotted Mason still in his baseball uniform, walking down the path from the fields, with a team of catchers and cheer girls flanking him with their pom poms and their camaraderie. He saw the bus, waved to Freddy, yelled something facing the girls while running backward, then turned and sprinted with his gear and school books to the blue bus. In the twenty seconds it took Mason to jump on, Blake had gotten up and moved over one seat. Mason took the vacant spot next to Chloe. Blake sat with his back to the windows, his feet stretched out. He nearly tripped Mason with his sticking-out black Converse hi-tops.
A panting, sweating Mason kissed Chloe. “Sorry I’m all gross,” he said, wiping his face with the sleeve of his jersey.
“No, I like it.” It was nice to feel an exerting Mason wet on her skin. It was only after sports that she felt it.
“Mase, we’re going with the girls tomorrow,” Blake announced. “Meals on Wheels. To get awesome deets for our story.”
Holding Chloe’s hand, Mason shook his head. “No can do, bro. End-of-year varsity barbecue tomorrow. Sorry. But the three of you go. Have a blast.”
Twisting her mouth this way and that, Chloe looked out the window. How does she tell Blake that Hannah hasn’t gone to Meals on Wheels with her in months?
10
Lupe
HANNAH’S WHEREABOUTS ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS WAS explained by none other than Hannah herself who, as soon as they came pounding on her door to tell her about tomorrow, said, Chloe, what are you talking about, I haven’t been doing Wheels with you in months. You know I’ve been working the lunch shift at China Chef, trying to save up for our trip.
Blake’s kinetic gaze slowed down to take in Hannah, and then Chloe for a puzzled moment longer. “Why wouldn’t you just tell me that?” he asked.
“I haven’t done it for a while myself, I forgot,” stammered Chloe, throwing Hannah a rebuke dagger with her eyes.
“What’s the matter with you?” Hannah whispered, dragging her inside the house. “You know I’ve been working most Saturdays.”
“Do I?” Chloe said, pulling her arm away from Hannah and walking back outside. “I thought you were working on Tuesdays too. Shows you what I know.”
At nine the next morning, Blake knocked on her door.
“Good morning, Mrs. Devine. Good morning, Chief.”
“Good morning, Blake,” Jimmy said from the breakfast table, hands around a coffee cup. “How have you been? Looking forward to graduation?”
“Oh, absolutely, sir. Thank you. Very exciting. Yes.” Blake always talked to her father as if about to be arrested.
“Listen, I have a tree by the water that’s rotting, a willow.”
“Say no more. I’ll take it down for you. Do you have power out there?”
“By the lake? No.”
“I’ll bring my axe and my gas-powered chainsaw. Today after I bring Chloe home?”
“Anytime you can, Blake. It’s a big tree, though. If you help me knock it down, you can keep half the wood.”
“Thank you very much. My dad would like that. He gets cold cramps at night.”
“How’s he been?”
“Not too bad. Back keeps bothering him, you know.”
“I know,” Jimmy said, staring into his coffee cup.
“Yeah, well, um. Is Chloe ready?”
Chloe was ready.
Lang pulled her into the vestibule, that is, the very same short hall Blake had taken over with his broad flannel-clad frame. “You two have fun,” Lang said, “but come back before six.”
“Okay,” Chloe drew out. “Wheels is from eleven to one, and you know that, so.” She broke off. “That’s well before six. What’s up?”
“Moody is coming tonight for dinner,” Lang said reverentially, as if announcing the arrival of Queen Victoria. Moody was Chloe’s terrifying grandmother. “I hope you don’t have any prior engagements.”
Why would she? It was only Memorial Day weekend, when the kids from six towns would be gathering for the fireworks in North Conway, staying out, hanging around by the outlet shops, miniature golfing, eating ices, listening to the free bands in the old town square, making out, maybe other things. “Prior engagements? Who talks like that, Mom?” was all Chloe said. Moody was coming to dinner! Blake pretended to study the picture of Castlecomer on the wall.
“I just want to make sure you’ll be home.”
“So you talk like Edith Wharton? Why do I need to be home? Why is she coming?”
“She wants you to drive her to the cemetery to visit Uncle Kenny.”
“Ugh, no!”
“Yes. Plus she wants to talk to you.”
There it was. Chloe’s teeth set against each other as if in battle. Her antennae shot up, spring-loaded. “About what?”
“Am I Moody? How do I know?”
“I can tell you know.”
“Go. Just be back.”
“Mom! Is it about Barcelona?”
“Go!”
This was a futile conversation, and the fact that Lang allowed it as long as she did only spoke to Lang’s own anxiety about her mother-in-law’s upcoming visit. It was the first time in three years Chloe’s grandmother would be coming to their house. Chloe glanced over at her dad, to gauge his reaction to his mother’s arrival, but he was head down, buried in the newspaper.
“Blake, ready?” Chloe wanted to storm out of the house.
“It was nice to see you, Mrs. Devine. Have a great day. Chief, I’ll be by later to help you with that tree. I’ll bring some rope too.”
“Wait,” Jimmy said and got up. He handed Blake the keys to the Durango. “Take my truck. It’s easier to get in and out of than the Subaru.”
“Yes, it is, thank you very much, sir.”
“Dad, you’re giving Blake your truck?”
“Hardly giving.”
“You don’t lend it to Mason!”
“When Mason takes you to deliver food to the infirm instead of parking with you behind Subway, he can have my truck.”
“Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down in that regard, or any other.”
“I know, son.”
“One quick thing—where do you keep the siren lights? Somewhere in th
e truck?”
“Get out of here, Blake, before I change my mind.”
“Yes, sir.”
Six cold meals and six hot meals were delivered to St. Elizabeth’s on Main Street, the Devines’ parish church, by Petey, the Meals on Wheels delivery boy, who did not like to be kept waiting. Wheels didn’t usually deliver on Saturdays, but a dozen homes depended on Chloe, and that was the only day she could work.
“I’m surprised you still want to go,” Chloe said to Blake as he opened the Durango door for her. She was in a dismal mood. Moody was coming!
“I told you I would. I must meet this Lupe.”
“I don’t even know if she’s on the schedule today. Petey gives me a list. We should hurry. Sometimes she cancels. She doesn’t want me to go all the way out there just for her. Blake, what are you doing, what are you looking for?”
Blake was searching through Jimmy’s truck. “Looking for those damn siren lights. I want to slap them on top of the truck when we get on the highway. You said we should hurry. Turn the suckers on. Scare the shit out of the cars in front of us.”
“No! You can’t use them, Dad will throw you in jail for sure.”
“It’ll be worth it.”
On the way to the church, Chloe wanted to tell Blake she was happy for his company but didn’t know how to phrase it without sounding like an idiot, so she didn’t. She liked it when Hannah used to come with her. Chloe drove, Hannah navigated, though she was awful with directions, but they had some laughs getting lost. And the old people enjoyed seeing the girls. Chloe got dressed up a little, wore jeans without holes.
But today Blake was driving her. It was better. Until he said, “So why didn’t you tell me Hannah doesn’t come with you anymore?”
Chloe fake-studied the map. “You know, you should teach Hannah how to drive.”
“You should teach Hannah how to drive. I tried.”
“So did I.”
The two of them chuckled. “Let’s just agree she’s a reluctant learner,” Blake said. “But it’s in your best interest to teach her, not mine.”
“It’s in your best interest to teach her, not mine.”