“If we’re lucky and find Mr. Right, seventy or eighty percent is there from the beginning. The other twenty you have to create yourself. This is a lot more than twenty percent, Miranda. But if you have to do it, then do. Just make sure to put on a helmet and learn to recognize the sound of incoming shells when they start dropping. Because they will, in clusters!”
A letter came from Hugh:
I had a dream last night and have no idea what it means. But I wanted to tell you because I think it has to do with us.
I’m in Los Angeles and need a car, so I go to a used car lot and buy an Oldsmobile 88 from the 1960s. It’s canary yellow and in good shape, especially the radio. But what’s really extraordinary is, the engine is a large potato! Someone replaced the original with this giant spud. For some wonderful reason, it works perfectly. I’m driving around L.A. in my old new car with a potato engine and feeling great. I have the only automobile in the world whose engine you could cook and eat if you were hungry.
One day I stop at a light and the engine stalls. That worries me, especially because the thing has well over a hundred thousand miles on it. So I pull into a gas station and tell the mechanic what happened. He opens the hood and isn’t surprised at what he sees. He tells me to drive it into the garage. He and another guy winch the potato out of the car and throw it on the ground. It breaks in half. I’m horrified.
Inside, like any normal tired out engine, it’s glutted with thick black oil and gunk. I ask how much it’ll cost to replace it. They say they can only put in a new, normal motor but it’s not expensive—a few hundred dollars. Right before I wake up, I can’t decide what to do. I keep thinking, Why can’t they put another potato in there. I don’t want a regular engine. What does this mean, Miranda?
“How do I know what it means, Miranda?” Frances Hatch said. “I’m not Carl Jung!
“Your boyfriend had a dream about potatoes and you’re asking me to interpret it? I’m just old. Being old doesn’t mean you know more; it means you ate enough fiber. Most of my life, people didn’t have psychiatry to rely on. If you had a bad dream, it was either something you ate last night or a vivid imagination.
“I don’t believe in interpreting dreams. You should avoid it too. Don’t worry about what Hugh’s dream says; worry about what he says when his eyes are open. If he’s not anxiety-ridden about his wife and kids, don’t you be! Are you his conscience or his lover? I think it’s great he’ll throw everything over for you. That’s the way romance should be!
“It’s arrogant to think you know what’s right. Morality is only cowardice most of the time. We don’t avoid misbehaving because it’s not proper; what we’re really afraid of is how far down it looks to the bottom. It is far, and you may get killed when you hit. But sometimes you survive the jump, and down there the world is a million times better than where you’re living now.”
When I called to say I wanted to see him, Hugh asked what had changed my mind. I said the days were dead without him and I couldn’t stand it anymore.
We met on neutral ground—a favorite restaurant—but we were out of there and back in my bed within an hour.
If I’d had any fears he would leave, they disappeared quickly. He moved into my apartment within two weeks. He brought so little with him that I worried he might be thinking of the move as a test drive: since all of his belongings were still at his place, he could always go back to them if we failed.
But one Saturday when he was at his office, the doorbell downstairs rang. A furniture store was there to deliver a big cushy chair I hadn’t ordered. When they said a Hugh Oakley had, I clapped my hands. Hugh loved reading at night but said it could only be done in a perfect chair. Now he had bought one for his new home.
Charlotte refused to let me meet their children. She was convinced I was only a blip on the screen of her husband’s Midlife Crisis. Consequently, when he came to his senses, they would reconcile and I’d be yesterday’s news. Why expose their children to further confusion?
Hugh didn’t care what she felt and was adamant about my spending time with them. I said no. They lived in a parallel universe I was not yet part of. There would be time in the future. Secretly I was petrified of what would happen when we did meet. I imagined two children glaring with fiery eyes that would melt me before I had a chance to say I would do anything to be their friend.
He missed his kids terribly, so I encouraged him to see them whenever he could. I knew in certain ways he missed Charlotte too. I was sure there were conversations and meetings going on between them that he never told me about. His emotions tacked back and forth like a sailboat in a gale.
What could I do to help? Be his friend. Let him know how much I loved and appreciated him. Hold my tongue when necessary; try to be considerate when the first instinct was to snap at anything I didn’t understand or that threatened me. For all of my adult life, Hugh Oakley had lived in marriage, a foreign country I had never known. It was easy to imagine what the place was like, but imagining was like reading a brochure at the travel agency. You could never really know the place itself till you got there.
“Have you ever heard of Crane’s View?” Frances was smiling and her eyes were closed. She was sitting by a window in her red-carpeted living room, her face lit by the morning sun. A few minutes before, when I’d come in and kissed her cheek, it was almost hot.
We were drinking gunpowder tea and eating English muffins, her favorite breakfast.
“What’s Crane’s View?”
“A town on the Hudson about an hour away. I discovered it thirty years ago and bought a house there. It’s a small place, but it has a spectacular view of the river. That’s why I bought it.”
“I didn’t know you owned a house, Frances. Do you ever go there?”
“Not anymore. It makes me sad. I had two good love affairs and a nice dog in that house. Spent most of a year there once when I was angry with New York and was boycotting it. Anyway, I was thinking about it last week. Houses shouldn’t be empty. They should either be lived in or sold. Would you like to have it?”
I shook my head and put down the cup. “You can’t just give away a house. Are you crazy?”
She opened her eyes and slowly brought the muffin to her mouth. A blob of marmalade started a slow slide off the edge. Very carefully she caught it with her thumb and shoved it back onto the top. She looked at me coldly but didn’t say anything until she had finished chewing. “Excuse me, I can do whatever I want. Don’t be obnoxious and treat me like an old nitwit. If I want to give you my house, I’ll give you my house. You don’t have to take it, but that’s your choice.”
“But—”
“Miranda, you’ve said at least four times how you and Hugh would like to move. Your apartment is too small and you need someplace where you can start a new life together from scratch. I agree. I don’t know if you’d like Crane’s View. It’s a small town. There’s not much to do there. But both of you could commute to the city. It’s only an hour on the train and the ride is pretty—right alongside the river the whole way. At least go have a look. What do you have to lose?”
The next Sunday we rented a car, picked up Frances, and drove to Crane’s View. It was the first time she had left her apartment in months. She was both thrilled and scared to be out in the world again. Most of the day she wouldn’t let go of my arm but was so excited she didn’t stop talking for a minute.
From their first meeting, Frances and Hugh liked each other very much. Her life and the people she’d known fascinated him. Her greatest pleasure was talking about her experiences to someone who cared. They also argued all the time, but Frances loved a good fight. Despite her great age, there was still a big fire in her that longed to be fed. Hugh sensed this immediately and to my dismay started an argument with her the first time they met. The look on her face was pure joy. In the middle of the battle, Frances slapped a hand down on her birdie knee and proclaimed, “If you hadn’t said that, someone else would have. That’s the difference between the clever and the great,” Hugh hooted and said he was going to pray to Saint Gildas, who protected people from dog bites.