19

Love, Sally

While Aunty Mabel took Uncle Richard over to the hospital every day for a week, I ran what errands I could for her on foot: grocery shopping, bank, dry cleaning—kind of like I’d planned to do for Ma in New Haven before I got sicker. Suburban therapy. I trimmed the hedges in front of the house using giant power clippers borrowed from the pastel lady next door. Lally Escobar would have been proud. But my piece de resistance was the garage. I covered it with a fresh coat of Antique Blue and even did a little scallop design on the eaves in off-white.

Aunty Mabel was impressed. “Like professional!” She’d finally forgiven me for the greyhound expedition.

I contemplated quitting New York City and becoming a house painter. It wouldn’t be the worst of fates. I’d be a nice dumb girl with muscles.

Mornings, before the humidity got too mind-numbing, I went out into the backyard with my sketch pad, like I had on Woodside Drive as a teenager. Only now I was doing automatic drawing, something I’d learned way back at RISD and never appreciated until recently. A trick to plumb the depths, like stream-of-consciousness writing. I’d started keeping the pad on my nightstand in the hospital, and more mornings than not, as soon as I’d wake up I’d start to scribble. These drawings were completely abstract, full of floaty pieces and jagged, broken-off lines. I had no idea what they were about.

Later in the day I drew from life. The vegetation in Florida had a wildness to it, things would grow rampant the minute you turned your back.

In the house I drew my uncle asleep on the sofa under the violet and kelly green afghan, the black cat a ragged splotch at his feet, his wire-framed half glasses splayed on the teeming coffee table before him. I drew my aunt, a tall thin shadow with no features, standing out on the patio shading her eyes and gazing out onto the back lawn, which was already beginning to look unruly again.

One lazy afternoon after lunch I was out on the patio, having given up on the St. Pete Times and wondering what was up with Mel, since I hadn’t heard from him. My uncle’s tests were finally over and I could hear him in the house on the phone to his bookie while my aunt was out grocery shopping. A few minutes later the sliding doors scraped open.

“Hey, Niece!” Uncle Richard was carrying a tray. He had made us iced tea in plastic glasses with watermelons on them, and there were plum candies in a cereal bowl. “I know your aunt uses special dish, but I can’t find.” He set the tray down on the frosted glass tabletop and pulled up the second chaise alongside mine. “Look at us, the two invalids! Not such a bad life, eh?”

I plucked a candy and undid the waxy wrapping. Most of my American friends hated these. Who wanted salt and a hint of bitter when they expected sweet?

“I’ve only gained about ten pounds since I’ve been here,” I said.

“Good, good! Men don’t like too skinny, you know.”

“I’m not looking for a man, Uncle Richard.”

“Sometimes you don’t look, you find.” He sipped his tea and smacked his lips. “Lipton’s mix. You don’t tell your aunt. So what’s wrong with that husband of yours? Why you get divorce?”

“It was time, Uncle Richard. We both changed too much.”

Uncle Richard frowned. He knew this was bullshit.

The truth was, I’d run away.

Safety was what I was looking for, and safety was what I thought I’d found. Carey Acheson. The name had the comforting resonance of old money. Bourbon money, I found out later. We met at a lounge party at Brown when I was a freshman, dragged up the hill by a RISD roommate. My father had just died, I was listless in my classes, dreaming of I don’t know what. Carey was a junior, a gangly slow-talking molecular biologist from Cincinnati, prep school all the way. That he was even attracted to me was amazing, given my own boarding school experience, although that summer on the Cape Fran and I had perfected our slumming in local bars, flashing the IDs that proclaimed that we were newly eighteen and of drinking age. That was back when eighteen was the drinking age.

The first time we made love Carey whispered in my ear: “I want to be where you’ve been.” Goat’s Head Soup was blasting to cover up the noise from his apartment mate’s room next door, to cover up what we were about to do. I thought of Marty and Schuyler.

“You don’t know where I’ve been.”

Starfucker starfucker starfucker star.

He began unbuttoning my shirt.

Of course it was different from Monkey King. First, I knew what was going on. Mutual consent. And I liked it, a little. Although I wasn’t lying when I said it hurt, much more than I’d expected.

At one point Carey asked: “Are you sure you’re a virgin?”

I stared at the green light of the stereo. The music had gone off. “Of course I’m sure.”

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

It’s Carey, I told myself. A boy you know.

I shut my eyes and pretended I was my sister.

When it began to get light I put my clothes back on and I: walked back down the hill to my dorm. I was exhausted and I queasy, but I had done it, taken the first step to breaking the spell.

My mother looked Carey in the eye and loved him. We drove down from Providence one Saturday night to have dinner with her. It was just the three of us, since Marty was away for the weekend. Ma and I were in the kitchen clearing up while Carey, seated at my father’s place in the dining room, was smugly polishing off the Burgundy we’d brought. He knew he’d been a hit.

“It’s a good thing he’s scientist,” said Ma. Then she turned on the tap full force so I couldn’t say anything. It reminded me of when I was small and she’d be lecturing me about something in the car. Just as I was about to answer she’d say, “Not now, Sal-lee, I have to concentrate on this turn.”

But this time I continued covering bowls of leftovers with plastic wrap until she turned off the water, and then I asked, “What does that mean, it’s a good thing he’s a scientist?”

“You are a dreamy artist,” Ma said, pointing at me with a wet finger. She was wearing a navy-and-brown-checked dress for the occasion, and her cheeks were slightly flushed from the wine. I hadn’t seen her look so good since Daddy’s death. “Scientist is down-to-earth. This is a good match.”

It was true that on the outside Carey was perfect—intelligent, well-bred, and much more handsome than I deserved. He’d sung in the church choir when he was little, attended two boarding schools (he’d gotten kicked out of the first one for growing pot in his closet, but I didn’t tell Ma that). His parents were social register.

“Carey’s so dignified,” Ma told me. “I think your daddy would have liked him.”

True to character, Carey got into every grad program he’d applied to but decided on Columbia because it was in New York City. We’d been going out a little over a year, and I knew this was the best shot I’d ever have. It was I who proposed to him, over a late breakfast between classes at a greasy spoon on Thayer Street, although he’d first put the idea into my head by implying that I’d like sex better if we were married. When he asked me about my own plans for school I said I didn’t mind dropping out of RISD, I was sure I could get into Parsons.

“Well,” he said. He shook his head and smiled. “I guess I could picture us.” He put his fingertips on either side of my chin and brought my face close to his. “For the rest of my life, every morning waking up to this. Yes, I can see it.”