“Is that what scares you, Hope?” Julie asked.
I traced the pattern in Mom’s bedspread, where Julie’s fingers had just been. “I don’t know.” I stood and poked at the fire Julie had built to warm me, then I sat beside her again. “Noah loves you, too, you know,” I said.
“But I don’t love him!” She tipped her head, stared up at the ceiling. “I don’t love him. That was the thing I realized when I was breathing in the anesthesia before my mastectomy.”
“You left Noah when …” I swallowed against the idea of her leaving her husband when she’d just had her breasts removed, when she must have wondered if she’d ever feel sexy again. “That must have taken courage.”
Julie leaned back and closed her eyes. “It was just desperation, Hope. I was thinking that I might die and Jamie might die, both of us. I was thinking that she at least had love; she had a whole family. I was thinking that I’d never really loved Noah, that I’d only married him because … because I’d been seeing him for so long, because I was supposed to love him, everyone wanted me to love him. Because Jamie was going to marry Isaac, and I didn’t want to have the second wedding, the afterthought.”
“Jamie and Isaac weren’t even engaged when you and Noah—”
“They were going to be. He was so head over heels for her.”
At the end of the bed, the circle of darkness in my mother’s bathtub was all that was left of my bath.
Where was the line between desperation and courage, or might they be the same thing? Julie was just like Jamie: The same long fingers, except that Jamie had worn only a simple wedding band while Julie covered hers with all that silver. The same breasts, except Jamie’s had killed her and perhaps, in doing so, saved Julie. The same faces and hair and hands. Thigh muscles. Elbows. The same taste for Brussels sprouts, red shoes, men who told goofy jokes, or at least appreciated theirs.
“I never told Jamie about Oliver’s soccer game,” she said, tears welling in her eyes again.
“I know,” I said soothingly. “You didn’t want to—”
“That I was going to the game,” she said. “That I was wearing her things.”
She started weeping in earnest then, like I’d expected her to in the days after Jamie died. I wondered if I would weep like that eventually, too, if a whole year without Mom would be harder to endure than the first few weeks, if I could bear letting go of the loss and carry on with life.
“I made that all up,” she said. “All this time I’ve lied about it even to you. I didn’t tell Jamie I would do it. She fell asleep, and I did it. She never would have forgiven me if she knew.”
“She might have—”
“But she wouldn’t, and I knew that. She wanted me to be there for them after she was gone, but she would never forgive me for trying to replace her in Oliver’s heart before she died, even for that moment.”
I intertwined my fingers in hers, her silver rings cold against my skin, remembering the way Mom had taken Anna Page’s hand that night she couldn’t save Mrs. Memorable. Not Isaac but Oliver.
I reached across her and pulled two tissues from the box. One for her, one for me. “Jamie would forgive you anything.”
“I wouldn’t have forgiven her,” she said, blowing her nose again, wiping her tears with her like-Jamie fingers. “If Oliver were my son and she’d tried to claim him, I never would have forgiven her for that.”
“You would have been glad Oliver has that memory of his mom being witness to his triumph,” I said. “You would have seen that your wanting to be there—the best you could manage—would be for him a memory of his mother already lost. You would have been thankful that your sister, who loved your son as surely as you did, made possible what you wanted him to have but couldn’t give him yourself.”
We sat for a long time, watching the riddled coals. In the quiet of the evening coming up, I wondered how Julie had kept that secret for all this long, impossible year. But it’s a hard thing, to share our shames, or what we think are our shames, even with our closest friends. We fear that admitting them will cost us the love of those whose love we most need. We forget that’s why they love us: not for our perfection but for our humanity.
“It was impossible for Oliver after the holiday party,” Julie said quietly, “and it was impossible for Isaac and for me. I used to go over, and we would just sit on the porch and have a drink together late at night, with Oliver asleep inside.”
In the few words, I could see how it must have started. A warm evening, days or weeks or months after Jamie had died. A drink together, then a second. Cocktails, or a bottle of wine in Jamie’s favorite wineglasses, the crystal ones she and Isaac registered for when they got engaged, to which she’d remained loyal when the rest of us turned to stemless or oversize, one shape for Chianti and another for cabernet.
A drink together and a little remembering. The conversation about nothing intimate, only that bit about Jamie’s loyalty to the wineglasses, how she used to drink everything out of them. Orange juice in the morning. A Coke or water with lime, always without ice.
The two of you perhaps drinking cocktails from the wineglasses, because even a whole bottle of wine wouldn’t have been enough. Cocktails and conversation about things that weren’t Jamie. World events. Politics. Then a hint of Jamie creeping in. That night at dinner when Isaac had called Anna Page’s latest date an “undiagnosed libertarian.” How you all laughed at the phrase. It didn’t matter what the guy’s politics were. Had anyone ever seen him again?
A cocktail and a second one, and politics and that dinner memory rolling into Jamie hating ice in her drinks, Isaac laughing at the memory of how, if you put ice in her water, she would dump it out and start over. The two of you laughing.
A cocktail and a second one, then a third. You saying, “Wait a minute, why is not liking ice so funny? The water is filtered and ice isn’t, so the ice ruins the taste.”
Same genes, same taste buds. Same inadequate sphincter muscles, you might even have thought as you crossed your legs, laughing the way you do sometimes when grief and alcohol meet.
You can laugh together, or you can cry, and you’ve cried enough, haven’t you?
Glasses empty again. Maybe refilled, or maybe not. Maybe in the laughter, you turn to each other, Isaac stifling his laugh in your hair so you won’t wake Oliver. Your hair that smells like your sister’s always did, that feels the same, too. Not thinking that consciously, but there it is.
Stifled laughter and closed eyes. A drunken kiss. Maybe a pause to consider before you kiss again, maybe not.
The kissing and the touching, hungry and frantic, overrun by need. Isaac’s hands on your breasts that are the one part of you that was ever different from your sister, that and your feet, which are not quite on solid ground anymore, and maybe you know that but probably you don’t want to know it, probably you are letting the alcohol wash away what you ought to know.
The touching, hungry and frantic. Breasts that are not so different, that are still the same B-cup you always shared, the same scars. Hurried sex right there in the darkness of the porch in the middle of the night, up against the railing at the far corner, screened from the neighbors by the overgrown camellia. His boxers and khakis, your jeans and panties, all still wrapped around your grief.
“What a mercy that was not a pike!”
—FROM The Tale of Jeremy Fisher BY BEATRIX POTTER
ANNA PAGE SLIPPED OUT OF HER BED IN HER PRIVATE ROOM AT AINSLEY’S End sometime late that night and donned her rain jacket. Outside, she ran a finger through the calm lower pond of the fountain, the cherub still holding his platter. In the herb garden, she pinched some rosemary, which was damp from the misty air, and put it to her face. She would not have said she was looking for Graham. She would not have said she was looking for anything. She rarely admitted to looking, to wanting—not even when she was a kid dragging Jamie and Julie out into the night, the twins answering the pebbles plinked at their window. She’d never even admitted standing o
utside their bedroom, watching them share secrets together before they turned off the light and she tossed the stones.
She wandered along the bare paths of the rose garden, all cut back for the winter, and out to the kitchen garden, where a single pumpkin clung to a nearly dead vine. It was all so much less inviting than she’d expected that she turned back toward the towering house. She was heading down a lane of trees to a side entrance when she saw someone sitting under the cover of an arbor. He was completely alone, not even Napoleon with him. He had a sketch pad in his lap, a small reading light clipped to it illuminating the page. I suppose it’s what I do when I’m grieving, isn’t it?
She watched him, watched his head bent over the pad, his fingers moving as easily as hers did in the OR.
Ablution, is that the word? Catherine had been right about that, about what a sacred place the operating room became, if you let it.
Anna Page watched for a long time, thinking Graham might notice her, and thinking he might not. Thinking she rarely noticed anything extraneous in the OR. It was the one place in her life where she felt perfectly safe, despite everything that could go wrong. It was the one place she felt purified, and whole, and good.
She wondered sometimes if love was like that. Jamie used to say it was, and Anna Page used to believe her. Watching Jamie and Isaac together, especially with Oliver, it was easy to believe in love. Was that why she’d been so angry at Julie? So unforgiving of her, without questioning Isaac’s role in the affair. Just like she’d always blamed her mother without ever questioning her father. But not just like it. Anna Page had slept with total strangers in the wake of Jamie’s death, and found no more comfort than she imagined Julie and Isaac did. She supposed the truth was Julie and Isaac did find some comfort in each other that she never had found.
She circled around behind Graham, moving silently toward his un-partnered loneliness, thinking that it was only circumstance that had kept her from crossing the line Julie had crossed. She peeked through the slats of the arbor, peering into the splash of light. She stood there for the longest time, watching for what might take shape under his hand, on the clean white page.
What do Creeds matter, what possible difference does it make to anyone today whether the doctrine of the resurrection is correct or incorrect, or the miracles, they don’t happen nowadays, but very queer things do that concern us much more. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for the good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.
—BEATRIX POTTER, IN A SEPTEMBER 30, 1884, JOURNAL ENTRY
I SAT ON THE DAMP PIER WITH THE MOSS GROWING BETWEEN THE SLATS, holding tight to Anna Page’s phone and watching the sky and the water move through the colors of morning, from solid steel to a salmon edging the clouds and reflected on the lake. The day was waking even more quietly than it had faded that first night. No dip of oars. No geese. No clap of cars over trestles on the far shore. Only the beep of the phone interrupting the silence as I dialed home, starting the conversation I had to have.
“Hope, God, I’m glad you called.” It was late at home, but Kevin didn’t sound like I’d woken him. “I need a way to reach you,” he said. “Isn’t there a way I can reach you?”
“I think—”
“Never mind. Don’t think anything yet, Hope. Just listen.”
“Did you sleep with a lot of women before we met, Kev?” Thinking about the tailgate party and the bike ride, the Potter quoting. How had he known to quote Potter, if not from Anna Page?
“Did I what? Hope, we both had lives before we met. We were thirty-three, for God’s sake. You’ve always said that doesn’t matter, that you don’t want to know. And now you want to do this over the phone, six years into our relationship and thousands of miles apart?”
The first of the sun showed at the base of the lake, or so it seemed, with the light reflecting up this side of the water the way it always reflects from wherever you are. We’d both had lives before we met, except I hadn’t. That’s why I hadn’t wanted to know who he’d slept with: because I hadn’t wanted him to know that no man had ever wanted me.
“Listen,” he said. “Please. Just listen. I want to apologize. I’ve been thinking about what you said, about my parents. You’re right, Hope. You’re right. I didn’t know I wasn’t telling them about you, but I … I guess I realized on some level that my parents might balk, that they might need to meet you at the same time they met with the fact that you’re part Indian. Maybe that was wrong. Maybe I could have handled it better. But no one who meets you doesn’t love you.”
In the water under the pier, brown and yellow oak leaves floated in a lumpy mass with yellow and red maples, and something small and green that was more alive and yet uglier than the brownest, deadest leaf.
“God, I spent a lot of unnecessarily lonely school lunchtimes if—”
“Don’t,” he interrupted. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, you know, you don’t always celebrate the fact that you’re mixed. Sometimes you hold it like a shield. The way you say it. ‘My dad is from India and my mom is white. I grew up in California.’ ”
“Those are the facts, Kev. What am I supposed to say when someone asks me what I am? What I am, like I’m not as human as they are.”
“The way you say it, Hope, it comes across with a gratuitous ‘And fuck you for asking.’ ”
I fingered the rope around the base of the post, anchoring the tire bumper that hung halfway in the water. He hadn’t wanted me to be saying “fuck you” to his parents. He’d stepped in and said it before I could, because they never would have forgiven me for offending them, or never forgotten it, while they would forgive their son anything.
“You don’t have everyone who ever meets you trying to categorize you,” I said.
“I’m expected. I’m obvious. People don’t have to ask me anything to categorize me. I’m white male, common Irish northern Midwestern Catholic altar boy variety.”
I dug with a nail at a strip of moss between the slats. “Except you’re atheist now.”
“People don’t see that. It doesn’t occur to anyone that I might be interesting. People ask you. People notice you.”
“Is that why you married me, Kev? Because God knows everyone notices us.”
“That’s not why I married you. You know that. The question is, why did you marry me?”
In the silence, I studied the reflection of the boathouse in the morning lake.
“If you felt this way,” Kevin said, “if you knew you felt this way before the wedding, why didn’t you call it off?”
In the wavy water, a small yellow rectangle, a reflection of a sign on the boathouse that read “Private” that I hadn’t noticed, although it had clearly been there for years.
“Okay, you don’t want to say it, so I will,” Kevin said. “Because it was too late. Because the invitations had already gone out. Because your parents would have been so disappointed.”
I closed my eyes against the memory of those conversations with Mom, her refusal to listen when I tried to tell her it wasn’t working out between Kevin and me. Would it have been easier to tell her before we’d married? Then what? The only other time I’d met a boy’s parents—Rajiv’s—they hadn’t been any more pleased to see a girl who wasn’t all Indian than Kevin’s had been to see a girl they thought was.
“We can’t help who our parents are,” Kevin said. “We can’t help that we love them—I can’t and you can’t and we shouldn’t, even when we hate what they do. But we aren’t them.”
“You never even showed them a picture of me.”
“Because on some level, I knew that if I did, they would set up against you without realizing they were. On some level, I knew that if they met you first, it would be easier. Not easy, but easier. My parents were prejudiced, Hope. Don’t visit the sins of the father on the son.”
“Sayeth my atheist husband.”
An early-morning sailor passed midlake, the wind snapping the sail as he tacked, i
nterrupting the silence. The waves picked up, making a small lapping sound against the wood posts and the boathouse and the tires. I hunched against the cold air, glad of my corduroy slacks and cranberry turtleneck, my bright blue cashmere sweater and purple vest that clashed dreadfully. The raincoat to cut the wind.
“You didn’t say anything about all this before we married,” Kevin said, “for the same reason I didn’t let my parents know you were part Indian before they met you. It was one part wanting them to be happy, and one part knowing that we love each other, that one way or another it would all work out. They’re all gone now, Hope. How sad would they all be to imagine they were the cause of us breaking up? How sad would it be for us to break up because of the prejudices of people who are no longer alive to disapprove?”
[H]e is very nice with old people and anxious to be friendly & useful.… He is 42 (I am 47) very quiet—dreadfully shy, but I’m sure he will be more comfortable married.
—BEATRIX POTTER, WRITING ABOUT HER FIANCÉ, WILLIAM HEELIS, IN AN OCTOBER 9, 1913, LETTER TO FANNY COOPER
JULIE WAS READING BY THE FIRE IN THE AINSLEY’S END LIBRARY THAT morning, sitting in a chair beside Graham’s mother’s Indian-language books, when Anna Page interrupted her. Interrupted, that was the way Julie thought of it. The quiet of the house had been complete for an hour or more, not even a sign of Napoleon. It was the quiet of the library where she worked before the other staff members arrived—Julie’s favorite part of the day, although she hadn’t realized it until that morning. Just her and the shelves and shelves of books, the catalogs from publishers, the covers and brief descriptions and blurbs of works by the next Austen or Eliot, McDermott or McEwan or Morrison. Until Aunt Kath and Graham and I had left while Anna Page remained lollygagging in bed, Julie hadn’t realized how much she’d been missing this solitude that put her life in order each morning, lingering in the world of words.