The Goodbye Summer

  “It’s a pretty house, isn’t it?” Caddie said.

  Thea pressed her thumb on the window button. “Does this—”

  “No, that’s as far down as it goes.” It wouldn’t go up, either. She needed a new car.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say it’s a pretty house. But I’ve always liked it.”

  “That’s what I mean. Actually, it’s kind of ugly. Thea…did you ever fall in love with somebody who turned out…not to be good?” When Thea only smiled, Caddie said, “Of course not. You’re too smart.”

  “Ho ho. My first marriage was a disaster.”

  “How come?”

  “I was looking for what I’d lost. A father, I guess. I should’ve been looking for what I needed.”

  “All right, but you weren’t a complete—fool, you didn’t go out and—”

  “You’re thirty-two years old, Caddie, old enough to know this disaster with Christopher doesn’t say anything terrible about you. That you’re not a good person.”

  “But I loved him. I thought. Maybe I just wanted to be in love with him, but that’s even worse.”

  “Maybe you would’ve loved him in time. If he’d deserved it. You were just starting.”

  “Yes, just starting.” She put her head back, tilted it to look out her window at the moon coming up behind the roofs across the way. “But I wanted it to go fast,” she said to the street, a car hissing by. “I wanted to have what everybody else has. I wanted to be normal. I feel so ashamed.”

  “Well, he is handsome. He has a beautiful voice, like somebody announcing the news on the radio. And nice hair.”

  “I loved his hair.” She looked at Thea shyly. “He was good in bed. Very…sensitive. I called him ‘Cristofori,’ for a joke—that’s who invented the pianoforte, Bartolomeo Cristofori. ‘Pianoforte’ means soft-loud, it was the first touch-sensitive keyboard…” She trailed off, pink-faced. Thea’s smile said there wasn’t any need to go on. “Anyway, he was really nice. I thought.”

  “He looks perfect. Anyone would be fooled.”

  “No, I should’ve realized. He’s good with dogs.” She gave in and started to cry. “Finney loves him” came out muffled through her fingers.

  Thea scooted over and put an arm around her shoulders. “You do know your dog is a complete moron.” She found a tissue in her pocketbook and handed it over, and after that they sat quietly for a time, watching the light at the corner turn from red to green, yellow to red.

  “Did you like getting stoned?” Caddie asked.

  “Yes and no. I’m glad I did it, but once is enough.”

  “Probably so.” She was thinking how grateful she was to Thea for not bringing it up, the main thing, the elephant in the room, when all of a sudden she blurted out herself, “I can’t have a baby! I can’t!”

  “Well, then, if you can’t, you can’t.”

  She blinked at Thea, stymied, feeling as if she’d walked into a wall she wasn’t expecting.

  “What?” Thea said. “You expect me to talk you out of getting rid of it? I wouldn’t. I’d go with you when you did it.”

  Caddie put her head in her hands.

  “And it would be the saddest day. The saddest day. I hope you won’t do that.”

  “But I might. I think I might have to.”

  “Well, then.” Thea reached over to smooth the hair back from Caddie’s cheek. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Believe it or not, everything’s going to look better in the morning. The trick is not to look at the whole of it, just one piece at a time.”

  “Right. Okay.”

  “Also, you’ll feel better as soon as you get mad.”

  “I will?”

  “I promise you will.” Thea kissed her, then slid out of the car. She leaned over to look in through the half-open window. “Don’t forget how many people love you.”

  The damn tears started again.

  “It’s true. Count ’em up, Caddie. You can start with me.” She blew another kiss and went up the steps to the walk slowly, holding on to the rail. She looked tired in the raw, blue-white glow of the streetlamp. Don’t get old, Caddie thought. Please don’t get old, I’ve just found you.

  At home, she turned off the porch light and sat in the dark on the bottom step while Finney snuffled around in the yard. She ought to put him on a lead, but it was late, the chances of anybody walking by were slim. He had a habit of lunging at pedestrians, scaring the daylights out of them. Nana’s fault; she used to secretly encourage him. “Get ’em,” Caddie had heard her whisper to the dog as some poor guy passed by on the sidewalk. “Go get ’em.” “Nana!” Caddie would say after the ruckus died down. “Why did you do that?” She would look tickled and chastened at the same time and not answer. Although one time she’d said, “Keeps ’em on their toes.”

  Christopher had an all-American family. He liked to tell about the time, a few Christmases ago, when they’d all gathered around the festive dining room table to wait for Mom, a woman Caddie always pictured in a bib apron over a shirtwaist dress, to bring in the Christmas bird. Time passed, and finally one of the sisters had gone to find out what was causing the delay. She’d come back red-faced, convulsed. “Shhh, I swore I wouldn’t tell—she dropped the turkey on the floor!” When Mrs. Fox came out, nobody said a word, everyone behaved perfectly, until the straight-faced jokes started. “The turkey’s really different this year, Mom,” one said. “It has kind of an earthy flavor,” and another one asked, “What kind of stuffing is this? It’s got a real crunch.”

  “We didn’t tell her till the end of the meal,” Christopher related. “She was so mad! And every Christmas since then when my dad says grace, he always adds in this deadpan voice, ‘Most of all, Lord, we thank you for letting the turkey make it to the table this year,’ and Mom pretends to bop him over the head with the serving fork. It’s a hoot.”

  Last Christmas, Nana put cheap ladies’ wigs on the statues in the outdoor creche at a Catholic church on Pine Street, to protest sexism in religion. She said her Nativity scene depicted the Blessed Virgin, her life partner, Josephine, the Three Wise Women, and Baby Christina.

  Caddie got up and went in the house. Nana used to keep her outdoor art tools on the front porch, but Caddie had stored them in the basement the day after she went to Wake House. She found them where she’d left them, between the furnace and the hot-water heater. She wasn’t interested in the trowels or the rake. She got the shovel and the spade and started for the steps, then turned around and went back for the pickax.

  The moon didn’t cast much light, but it rode high and the sky was clear and full of stars. She carried her tools over to Fecund Goddess, her personal least favorite, and took aim at its earthen, grass-sprouting center with the flat of the shovel.

  Whack!

  Her teeth clashed; the whole right side of her body went numb. When sensation returned, she saw that she hadn’t gotten anywhere because she’d aimed too low. The sculptures were so solid and they’d been here so long, attacking from the bottom was useless, like trying to topple a hill. She threw down the spade and got the pick.

  Whap!

  Much better. Whittle them down from the top a little at a time. Finney darted over to the porch in fright, rushed back to run around in circles under her feet. She demolished Fecund Goddess, reduced it to giant clumps of dirt and turf, and started on Passionate Ones United.

  It came down easier but made more noise. Mrs. Tourneau’s bedroom light blinked on. What was left of George Bush in Love proved tricky, because Nana had used construction adhesive to glue the cowboy boots together; the best Caddie could do was knock it down so at least its suggestive shape lay flat on the ground, not pointing up in the air. Next: Oppression.

  It took an hour and a half to destroy all Nana’s sculptures. Halfway through, she went inside and got a cold beer from the kitchen and brought it outside to drink on the porch. Mrs. Tourneau’s light was out now, but her blinds were open; she was still peering through them in her dark bedroom, Caddie was sure
. Nothing this good had happened since Nana hung the mayor in effigy. She lifted the bottle in a toast to Mrs. Tourneau and went back to work.

  Finney tired himself out and watched the rest from an anxious crouch on the grass, whining occasionally. But he went nuts again when the coffee cans she knocked off Crone went flying, ricocheting off more metal litter in the yard. After everything was down, she went from mound of rubble to mound of rubble, smacking at protrusions with her spade to lower the level of destruction. Like finishing off the wounded after a battle.

  She flopped on the ground and slung her arms across her knees, sweating and exhausted, too tired to climb the porch steps and go in the house. Her wrists were trembling; everything ached, especially her hands; she had blisters on her palms under every finger. But I killed them, she thought, surveying the carnage, waiting for triumph or elation, at least satisfaction. Finney sidled over. He put his chin on her knee and looked up at her with worried eyes.

  Whatever had made her do it, that cold rage like an icicle running down the middle of her, had melted about a half hour ago. She’d done the rest out of duty, or neatness, just to finish what she’d started. She didn’t feel better. It wasn’t as if she’d symbolically renounced one thing in order to embrace another thing. She hadn’t turned over a metaphorical new leaf or become a new, better person. She was still Caddie Winger, and Frances Winger was still her grandmother. She still taught piano and violin in her house, and she still had nothing in common with a man like Christopher Fox, and she never would. And she was still pregnant.

  16

  Everything hurt. She could hardly get out of bed, out of her nightgown. If only it were rainy and cold, she thought, if only it were winter and she had the flu. How pleasant to huddle under the covers in her hot, dim room, drifting up from a spacey doze to read a few pages of a novel or sip a little tea, then pass back out. But it was a perfect summer Sunday, the morning after, and she had no good excuse not to drag herself out of bed and face it.

  She kept getting stuck, though, deciding what to wear, making a cup of coffee, putting away last night’s dishes. She’d wake up and catch herself staring at nothing with an empty head, or almost empty: vague dread like a milky, low-lying fog lay at the bottom of every trivial thought. Being pregnant must be like living with a terminal illness. You tried to go on with what was left of your life, but you could never really forget. The dire nature of your condition lay on top of everything like a heavy, wet tarp.

  One way not to get depressed was just to say you weren’t going to get depressed, then obey yourself. Proactive self-therapy. She’d go outside and weed the garden. Fresh air and exercise, that was the ticket.

  But she should’ve picked something more brain-involving, like the Sunday crossword or a Mozart violin sonata, because digging in the clay soil around her tomato plants in the backyard was just a come-on to more dark, festering thoughts. Not only that, the smell of the tomato leaves made her feel nauseated. Oh, great. Was she going to be one of those pregnant women who threw up all the time?

  She’d have to tell Nana. Probably. Or maybe not. What good would it do? She’d just worry. She might even be angry. Another Winger bastard on the way, she might say. Thanks for carrying on the family tradition.

  I need a mother, Caddie thought, pulling crinkled yellow leaves off the plum tomatoes.

  Think how many people love you.

  A few weeks ago, she’d gone around the house singing. And speaking right up to strangers, laughing at nothing, feeling alive, a different person from the worrywart sleepwalker she’d been before Christopher. Now she wasn’t even back where she’d started, she was much further back. She had never really longed or yearned for a child the way she assumed most women did—but if Christopher had loved her, if she’d told him about the baby and he’d said, “Oh, darling, oh, my dearest,” like the man on Nana’s soap opera, she believed she would feel joyful. A baby. Oh, imagine it, a little person they’d made together—

  No no no no, she wasn’t going to think of it that way. Not until she decided what to do. She had about five and a half more weeks to make up her mind. If she thought of it as a baby, she’d be eliminating the easiest option of all. It was a fetus. Better yet, a problem. And she wasn’t a mother, she was a temporary host.

  What was that game—try not to think of a spotted giraffe, something like that, and then of course it was all you could think of. She picked out the clover and chickweed under a cucumber plant and imagined having a child, raising it. A little girl. She’d name her Frances, after Nana, and call her Frankie. She’d bring her up right here, in this house, on Early Street. Live frugally. Hand to mouth, and hope for no emergencies, ever.

  How criminally irresponsible. She didn’t even want a child—she felt like a child herself. Not only that, Winger women didn’t make the world’s best mothers. She’d have to start seeing Dr. Kardashian again when all kinds of things came up, a whole bog full of issues, her mother’s “abandonment behavior” on top, and she couldn’t face that again. Some things you weren’t meant to get over, it would be unseemly to get over them. No, no, no, from every angle she cared to look at it from, this baby was a mistake.

  Tiny slugs were infesting the lettuce. She picked them off and tossed them in the yard. That reminded her of Cornel, telling everybody in that silly game that she was the kind of person who caught bugs and let them go outside. Well, so what, sue her, it wasn’t a character flaw. A minute later, a red ant bit her on the ankle. “Ow!” She whacked it with her trowel over and over until it lay still, a crumpled corpse.

  Get mad, Thea advised. Dr. Kardashian had, too; that had practically been his mantra. But she’d gotten mad last night, she’d gone on a veritable rampage, and look what she had to show for it: sore muscles and a lot of explaining to do. Anger was overrated. She always felt worse, not better, afterward.

  The phone rang; she heard it through the open kitchen window. Bother. Let the machine pick up. No—it might be a student. She made a dash for the back door and got to the phone while her grandmother was in mid-message. “Hi,” she interrupted, breathless, “it’s me, I’m here.”

  “You’re there?”

  “I’m here. This is me. How are you?”

  “Do I have to start all over?”

  “Well, or I can listen to the tape, but—”

  “I’m having a terrible day. I thought you’d be here by now. When are you coming over?”

  “I’m sorry, Nan, I should’ve called. I don’t think I’m going to make it today. I’m not feeling too well.”

  “Hung over.”

  “Ha. No.”

  “Because you had such a good time last night with your friends.”

  She sank into a chair. Not inviting Nana to the fictitious “music recital” had hurt her feelings. But she disapproved of drugs, so Caddie could hardly have said, “It’s not a real recital, Nan, it’s just Thea wanting to get stoned.”

  It went further than hurt feelings, though. As silly as it sounded, she had an idea Nana might be jealous of Thea. Jealous because Caddie liked her.

  “We didn’t have all that good a time,” she said truthfully. “You didn’t miss much.”

  “You don’t sound good. Do you have a cold?”

  “Why are you having a terrible day?”

  “Oh, everything. The sun won’t behave. I’m doing a painting and the light’s wrong, I kept moving the easel and moving it, moving it, bang. Over it went, I hit it with my walker, but do you think anybody came to help when I pressed the thing, the button? No, ma’am. What if I had a heart attack? What if I fell in the tub?”

  “Nobody came?”

  “Finally Brenda came, but by then I could’ve been dead. Are you coming tomorrow?”

  “Yes. Definitely tomorrow.”

  “Bring me my acid dyes. All I need is the greens, but you might as well bring them all.”

  “Your acid what?”

  “Acid dyes, they’re in little tiny jars, powder in jars, you can’t miss ?
??em.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In a box, like a shoebox. In the storeroom.”

  “Oh, Nan.” The storeroom was a horrible pit of no return, it was so crammed with stuff that nothing new could fit, they went in it only for emergencies.

  “It’s an emergency. I have to have my dyes, they’re for my new project.”

  “Couldn’t we just buy new ones?”

  “No, these are special. Hard to find, you’d have to go on the whatchacallit. Internet.”

  “Do you have any idea where they are? What half of the room?”

  “They might be on the desk. Or in the desk, maybe. No. But maybe. Or in the shelf thing by the window. Or, hmm, one of those boxes in the closet? One of those boxes on the floor in the closet. Or else on top with those shirts I was going to tie-dye. Or, and I don’t think so, but it’s possible they’re in the basement.”

  Caddie leaned over and rested her cheek on the table. She held the phone with one hand and let the other go limp in her lap.

  “Or the closet in my room. No, why would they be there? I really think they’re in the storeroom. Somewhere.”

  Monday morning, she slouched, listless and exhausted, in the doorway of her mother’s old room, now the dreaded “storeroom.” “Why couldn’t you be a bloodhound?” she asked Finney, who was sniffing everything he could get to on his level. “You could save me a lot of time.”

  When she was little, she’d liked to come in this room and lie on the bed, try to get Mommy’s view of things when she was a girl. There were enormous dark posters on every wall, close-ups of a scary man’s face (Bob Dylan, she found out later), a beautiful but stern black-haired angel (Joan Baez), and other shaggy, grim-looking people holding guitars. Fascinating things crowded the shelves under the window—bongo drums, harmonicas, a dusty Silvertone guitar with strings missing. Her mother had a picture of a kind-faced man (John F. Kennedy) on her bedside table, and when she was very little Caddie used to imagine he was her father. But when she’d asked Nana, she’d said, “No, honey, that man’s gone to heaven. Your daddy’s just gone.”