Betts

AFTER WE’VE CHANGED our clothes Mia and Laney and I wait forever just outside the Sissies’ Square. Mercifully, neither of them mentions the Supreme Court or the press. We stare through the small room’s door to windowless walls and built-in-side-rail beds meant to keep toddlers from falls small and large. The bed rails remind me of the ones Matka helped me install in Isabelle’s room in Ann Arbor after I’d taken a job teaching back at Michigan Law. I still remember how fraudulent I’d felt standing to lecture in the same room I’d taken exams in just a few years before. But teaching seemed the job best suited to my daughter’s needs. We try so hard to make our children safe. But we never know where the dangers lie.

Yet you have to wonder who tried to take care of whom at Chawterley. Sissies’ Square and Baby’s Room and the Nursery are all here on the guest side of the house. Far from the family wing from which Ginger emerges, finally.

She’s dressed in khakis and a white oxford shirt like her mother wore everywhere. Her feet are bare. The wide expanse of her manicured toes presses against the dark wood floor.

“Well,” she says. “Food? And then maybe a game of Scrabble?” Scrabble: a game Ginger used to play to the death.

The front doorbell rings. The same can-the-press-have-found-us-already surprise registers on each of our faces. Ginger slinks barefooted toward the back stairs. Mia, Laney, and I slip off our shoes and skulk along behind her. We cross the sheathed-furniture Sun Room. The kitchen. The serving pantry. The outside end of the Dining Hall.

The damask drapes of the Front Parlor are drawn. Ginger peeks through the center gap. “Shit!” she says in a tone that renders obvious the absence of reporter-wolves at our door.

She hurries to the front foyer. Throws open the door. Calls loudly, “Max!”

An electric car slips soundlessly onto the one-lane road. A red fireball of setting sun takes its place at the end of the drive.

Three tan reusable grocery sacks with a tree-and-mountain logo sit outside the door. A substantial pile of firewood is topped with a note that there is more outside Faith’s Library. I choke up as I realize this is the way the new library will be forever known. Faith’s Library.

I wonder if any of us ever imagined that Hamlet actually slept at some little boy’s feet. That he was a puppy. A young dog. An old and faithful companion. An emptiness at the end of a bed.

I think of Matka as we watch the sun set. I still sometimes pick up the phone to call her about some song I’ve worked out on the zhaleika. I imagine Izzy hunched over a casebook at Yale. As sure of herself as Faith ever was.

The last blink of sunlight sinks into the water. A rainbow swirl of color graces the horizon.

“Diem perdidi,” Laney says. “I have lost the day.”

“ ‘And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?’ ” Ginger’s wide mouth registers a hint of self-satisfaction as she picks up a grocery sack. Does she think she’s just one-upped Laney? Like that night in the hot tub when she’d answered Laney’s Latin with the Dracula quote. Latin that was literary, too. I see this so often with my students: the need to be the smartest. But I’ve always imagined Laney and Ginger are closer than that. I thought after they both failed to make law review they’d settled into a more intimate friendship. Left the competition to Mia and me. For years I’ve envied a closeness that perhaps never was.

Laney and I lift the two other sacks as Mia stares out the door with her hopeful-toddler look. Eyes the brown of a paper bag but not so plain. Surely Max reminds Mia of Andy. He seems so like Mia’s ex to me. Like the kind of guy who might understand her weird mix of confidence and insecurity. Her fear that anyone she loves will leave the way her mother left her father again and again. Without ever letting him go.

Mia wants to follow Max. But she just stands there. She watches in the rearview mirror as everything she wants slips away.

There is no room for romance this weekend anyway. We’re in a tight spot. And Mia is the one who more often than not leads us out of tight spots.

Back in the kitchen, Ginger flips on the lights. Opens the refrigerator. Stares, pale-eyed and taken aback. The refrigerator is spotless inside. Completely empty. If Ginger didn’t do this then who came in to wash the bourbon glass Faith drank from the night she died? Who threw away the half carton of milk and the tin of coffee? The brie. The last few eggs. Whatever else Faith might have eaten if she’d wakened that morning three months ago. All those things Isabelle helped me do after Matka died.

Ginger fingers the clip that holds back her still-windblown-from-sailing hair before she starts unpacking the Sierra Club bags. She pulls out a half loaf of bread. Hummus and bananas. Goat cheese. Green onions. Butter. Whole wheat fettuccine. There are nine brown eggs in a cardboard carton. Three slots empty. Locally farmed.

“Have you ever met anyone sweeter than Max?” she says. “Too bad he’s vegetarian. I sure could use a hamburger.” She means this to temper Mia’s attraction to Max. Mia likes her meat pretty much just short of a moo.

Ginger disappears into the Sun Room. Flips on a light. Van Morrison sounds at high volume. Her hips swing as she returns. But the courage she’s marshaled is leaking out from under her mom’s khaki slacks and white shirt. She thinks she’s fooling us.

She’s all wide mouth and straight bleached teeth as she resumes unpacking groceries. “Ah, here we go! Sipping tequila. Thank you, Max!” She looks at Mia. “You can see why even his own kids adore him. The man doesn’t miss a thing.”

Mia is unwilling to risk making a fool of herself by voicing the question: Max is married?

Ginger hands the bottle to Mia, saying, “Pour.”

Mia finds four small jelly glasses. Spills a generous shot into each. We lift them. There’s an awkward pause. What the hell is there to toast?

“Ad fundum!” Laney says.

Mia and Ginger and I smack our glasses down on the counter. Thrust finger crucifixes at Laney. Shout, “In manners, too, dominate!”

In manners, too, dominate. A phrase no one but a Ms. Bradwell would laugh at. But ever since that night in the hot tub it’s been the way we laugh together at ourselves: at Laney for relying on Latin to make her seem smart; at Ginger for forever needing to one-up us; at Mia and me both for steadfastly rejecting the possibility that someone else might know something worth knowing that we still need to learn.

It feels so good to laugh.

The first sip hits sharp on my tongue. I let it sit in my mouth. Savor it for a moment. It burns its way down my throat as “Crazy Love” gives way to “Caravan.”

How different that spring break would have been if we’d scraped together the money and gone to Cancún. If we’d settled on the white sand of a Mexican beach where there was no one to share any tequila we might have bought. So much depends on which turn you take. And you never know which one is best until the reasonable, responsible path leads you to places you spent your whole life avoiding. Without even realizing you had.

Van encourages us to turn up the radio. Ginger turns the knob on the stove and sets a cast-iron skillet on the burner. Tosses Laney the green onions. “Chop.”

Laney takes a sip of tequila. Pulls knives from the block on the counter. Finds just the right one.

Ginger tosses the half loaf of bread to me. “You’re toast.”

“Any senator in that room today could tell you that,” I say. They all stare at me for a second. Then burst out laughing. What else are we going to do?

“Who wants to be a judge, anyway?” I say. I launch into a riff on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? “I’d like to phone a friend, Meredith,” I say. I do my best phone ring, the old-fashioned kind that was all we had in the days before cellphones and ring tones. Bbbrrrring. Bbbrrrring. “Mia! Thank God you’re … where are you? How did they find you? Well, never mind. There’s no time for that. So here’s the situation. This woman, Lilly Ledbetter, discovers as she’s retiring that the Goodyear Tire Company has been paying her less than the men she’s worked beside for nineteen years. She sues. Her victory is appealed to my Supreme Court. Will we (1) Decline to reconsider the case, leaving a very sensible decision to grant Ms. Ledbetter actual and punitive damages intact? (2) Uphold the decision, giving it authority as Supreme Court precedent? (3) Throw out the punitive damages but leave Ms. Ledbetter with nineteen years of back pay? or (4)—”

“Or (4)”—Mia grins—“Make the improbable and ill-considered decision that Congress—which can’t agree to delete a comma without a month of deliberation and a compromise that makes no sense—meant to give Ms. Ledbetter the right to sue for discrimination but intended to limit her damages to six measly months of back pay so the good people at Goodyear will know discrimination is fine for as long as you can get away with it?!”

I do miss Mia. Most of the time.

In my best Mia rhythm and Chicago O I say, “So let me get this straight, Betts.” I add the ccccckkkkkcccc of an overseas line. “You’re calling me in Madagascar? Madagascar, Betts. That’s off the coast of Africa, you know that, right? To hold your hand while you answer a question there isn’t a shred of doubt you know the answer to?”

And we all laugh. Humor is a much more effective way to get your point across than rage. One of the many things Faith taught us all.

Mia lifts her glass of tequila. “You know what I was doing that day you called me in Madagascar, Betts? I traveled halfway around the world to drive forever in a bumpy jeep to hear the song of an endangered Indri lemur, a furry little animal that sings for maybe three minutes. This is my life?”

Laney puts an arm around her. I’m not sure exactly why.

“Spill, Mia,” she says.

“It’s actually two Indri calling together, they sing together. They sing more during mating season, too. And they mate for life. I know all this because I’m a good journalist,” Mia says with a tiny crack in her voice. “Because I do my research before I go.”

I’m thinking I see where this is going. This is about the fact that Mia can’t seem to find anyone to take Andy’s place. To be honest this particular record has gotten a little old. Could she stop to think of Ginger for a moment? Could she stop to think about the direct hit I just took? Or the glancing blow Laney will take in her campaign?

“You could write such an amazing poem about the Indri, Ginge,” she says. “The name of the reserve—the Analamazoatra—is a poem all by itself.”

Leaving me embarrassed at my quiet indignation. She is thinking of Ginger.

“Spill, Mia,” Ginger says. “Spill.”

Mia protests: there isn’t anything to spill. She starts telling us some myth about two Indri brothers who live together in the forest until one of them decides to leave and cultivate the land. He becomes the first human, while the other sends out this mourning cry for his brother who went astray.

“Don’t read my piece this weekend,” she says. “It’s too heavy-handed. As if the reader can’t figure out himself that the human brother from the myth is now destroying the rain forests the lemur brother lives in, destroying his kin. God, my writing sucks.”

We all just look at her.

She shrugs. “Who wants to be a journalist, anyway? I’d like to ask the audience, Meredith. Is the only way to keep your job: (1) to sleep with an editor who has the worst beer gut in the city; (2) to cover Hollywood gossip instead of women’s rights or the envir—”

“You didn’t tell us you were cut, Mi!” Even I can hear the irritation in my voice. As if her unwillingness to trust us is worse than losing her job. But isn’t it?

“Canned,” Mia says. “I preferred ‘canned’ to ‘cut.’ It sounds so much more … in the tin!”

“In the soup?” Ginger says.

“It sounds less bloody,” Mia says.

“Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei,” Laney says. “For this is the chalice of my blood.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Mia says. “Just budget cuts.”

“You could start a blog,” Ginger suggests. “You can make a fortune blogging these days.”

“You can start with, say, a scandal involving your ex-roommate Supreme Court nominee!” I suggest. Recalling Jonathan’s words over the phone: How does the senator have the nerve to try to derail a Supreme Court nomination on the basis of an anonymous post?

“Mia didn’t want to spoil your moment,” Laney says to me. Her tone says, hush. Her tone says, why are you being so nasty to Mia?

I bury my uneasiness in a chirpy voice. “And such a moment it’s turned out to be! You and me, Mia. We can be mates for life. Who else would want us with our luck?”

“I would,” Ginger says.

Laney says, “I would, too.” She raises her glass and says, “To friendship.”

“To friendship,” we all say.

We clink our glasses and we throw back whatever is left. Mia opens the bottle again. Refills us all. I think I shouldn’t. I should keep my wits about me. But I’ve just been through a week of Senate hearings ending in disaster. I have no wits left to keep.

“Shoot, I need to call Izzy,” I say. “Can I use the phone, Ginge? I get no cell reception here.”

Ginger folds one empty Sierra Club bag before she answers, “I left a message for Annie not to come to New York. I asked her to call Iz and let her know.”

“But I’d still like to—”

“I had the phone disconnected.” Ginger reaches into another Sierra Club grocery bag, ignoring the now hot cast-iron pan. “Frank and Beau gave me endless shit for it: the family would still come here, we still needed to have a phone. But …” She sets aside a can of black bean chili. “But I couldn’t bear dialing this number and having someone who wasn’t Mother answer, any more than I could bear the phone ringing and ringing without answer in the silence of this goddamned house.” She blinks back tears. Pulls a head of lettuce from the bag. “Shit,” she says, “who’d’ve guessed I’d be as able to wallow in my own feelings at fifty-one as I was at twenty?”

“Fifty-two, Ginge,” I say. I don’t know why I know this will make her laugh, but it does.

Ginger pitches the head of lettuce good-naturedly at Mia, saying, “Still, I’ll always be younger than all of you!”

Mia groans as she catches the lettuce. She has always hated making the salad. And we all laugh. This is such familiar territory, making a meal together. You can almost see the tension begin to seep away.

In a few minutes we have a green onion and goat cheese omelet. Toast with blueberry jam Ginger found in the cupboard. We grab the Scrabble board and tiles from the Captain’s Library. Set the game and the food up in the Sun Room. Pull sheets off the furniture before Ginger says, “Let’s do the library instead.” Without explanation, she turns the music and the lights off. A small nod to Max’s efforts for a greener world. She leads us through the Music Room, the Tea Parlor, the Ballroom Salon. We’re headed the back way to that funky hidden door from the Ballroom into the Captain’s Library. A door hidden behind a bookshelf on the library side and behind a large painting on the Ballroom side.

But she goes instead to a door I’m pretty sure used to be a window. Stares at the brass knob. The wood floor. The door into Faith’s Library. A room hidden in the trees outside. It will be considerably harder for anyone approaching Chawterley to see us in the new library than in the brightly lit Sun Room.

Laney touches her elbow. “Those lines you were saying at the front door, Ginge, about the folded sunset, did you write them?”

Ginger grasps the handle finally. Stares at the door as if meaning to bring it down with her look and nothing else. “Elizabeth Bishop,” she says. “From ‘Questions of Travel.’ ‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?’ ”