Kitabı oku: «Catch 26: A Novel»

CHAPTER 1

Standing at her closet, still naked from her shower and wondering what to wear to lunch, Frannie heard Stanley’s key scratch at the front door lock. A draught of biting winter air sliced through their bedroom. Frannie hurried to close the door.

“It’s pretty cold,” she thought she heard him say. “May snow.”

But he managed to catch the bedroom door before it fully closed and he caught her standing there. Oh, God. She tried to cover herself with her hands and arms. He shouldn’t see her like this.

Her husband barely glanced at her as he pushed past to retrieve his glasses from the top of the chest of drawers.

“Why bother?” he said mildly, dropping the glasses into his breast pocket and closing the door behind him.

Moving away from the chill left in the air, Frannie moved slowly towards the bathroom’s full-length mirror. Arms at her sides, she stood. And looked. To see what Stanley had seen.

Her mottled, freckled chest, he’d seen. But they hadn’t known about sun back then, so it was something of a surprise, although she’d never expected these pancaked breasts, either, nor the small mushroom farms growing beneath their awkward, sloppy, weight. And what about the puffy hill of her pale, defenseless stomach that ended in a scraggly patch of pubic hair – some of which was gray, she saw now. How had she not known that pubic hair turns gray? In fact, when Arlene had mentioned it the other morning, she’d been stunned. Although it made a certain sense, she thought. The hair on her head was mostly gray (beneath the dye). Her eyebrows – what was left of them – were gray. She touched them up, but they were gray. Yet how, at sixty-six, could there still have been something so basic she didn’t know? Age was supposed to bring wisdom.

She ran damp palms down her thickened body. No waist, wide hips, fat thighs. When she got to those lumpy thighs, she folded her hands into fists, and her reluctant gaze slid past hairless shins to her sad, bunioned feet with their overlong second toes.

It couldn’t have been many years ago when she’d been slim and supple as a whippet, her hipbones like paired knives and a stomach, not just flat, but absurdly concave. Her skin had been satin back then; her breasts … alright, they’d been unexceptional. Not perky not plush, just a nothing-to-brag-about B cup. But these days – these leftover days – she was into – and even a little out of – a DD. But at twenty, there’d been none of these flesh-colored moles, had there? No veinous freeways, no pinkly larval skin tags. (Who thought up words like “skin-tags” anyway?) With an involuntary groan, Frannie turned toward the window and the late-winter treeline beyond.

Why had she looked?

She sat heavily on the bed and reached for the remote, but it wasn’t there. She felt around the floor, and finding it under one of Stanley’s socks, pushed herself up to one elbow and clicked.

Elizabeth Taylor. There she was.

Frannie leaned gratefully back on the pillows. They smelled of his hair.

Oh yes, there was Elizabeth. Elizabeth, with her perfect, provocative, perfect and large, perfect and movie-star breasts. Elizabeth in Suddenly Last Summer yet again.

The enviable Elizabeth Taylor, dressed in the beautifully fitting couture shift that the madhouse she was confined to apparently issued to inmates.

“I am disturbed,” Liz was saying. “Don’t you think I have every reason to be?”

For sure, Frannie thought. With seven husbands, if anyone does, you do.

I do too.

Planting a fist on either side, Frannie heaved herself up off the bed and walked once again to the window. Was it going to snow? Not today, she entreated the weather gods. She didn’t need snow.

Why had she looked? She leaned her forehead against the glass again.

Turning at last to her dresser, she distractedly plucked up some underwear, and without looking down, stepped into her underpants, ran a thumb around the elastic, shook herself into her bra, then tiptoed into the chilly hall to peer around the living-room door. Stanley had gone out again. For the paper, she thought with relief as she circled the room in her underwear, straightening up and carefully baring the half-full glass of his last night’s cranberry juice to the kitchen. If she were lucky, he wouldn’t be back before she left for lunch with Arlene.

Because Frannie was so looking forward to their lunch today. They were trying out this new Italian place at the Golden Arch Mall. If Stanley got home before she went, though, he’d want to know who she was going out with, what she’d left him to eat, and especially – most vexingly – what time she thought she’d be back.

So peculiar, she thought, this belated desire for her company. She’d actually been a little flattered by it when he’d first retired, and she almost wondered if, somehow, he cared for her again. But six years had passed, and she finally understood: retired men depended on their wives like children. Even when they had computery gadgets to play with and golf magazines to read and sports channels to click through, even when they merely dozed through the long afternoons at home, they still always wanted to know where Mommy had gone. More importantly, when Mommy was coming home.

She might not be right about the children thing, though. She’d never had any.

She had strapped a pillow to herself once, just to get the sense of how it might feel to be pregnant. And she’d bought a baby doll once and hid it away.

She hated to remember that now.

But Stanley would be home any minute. Better hurry up, she thought, opening the closet door.

Too late. He was coming through the front door with the paper.

“I’m hungry. Anything in the fridge?” He limped a little, crossing the living room. He’d pulled a hamstring on the golf course last July. They didn’t kiss.

“Hold on, I’ll take a look.”

Hurrying ahead of him into the kitchen and opening the icebox door (oh God, she still called it an icebox – like her mother did) her back stitched up. She straightened too fast and felt suddenly dizzy.

“Just some of last night’s chicken,” she called back, leaning on the counter for support.

“That’ll be good.”

Stanley had had a heart scare the August before he’d retired. The surgeons had inserted two stents, and now he ate only broccoli and poached chicken. And pills.

“I’ll have that. With some toast. And remember to burn the toast a little, will you? Yesterday you forgot.”

“It’s only 11:10, Stanley. Don’t you want to wait for lunch? You’ll spoil your appetite.”

Readying her smile, Frannie waited in the living room doorway in her robe while he busied himself with throwing open her blue moiré curtains and hooking one of them over the back of her nice French chair. It would wrinkle now, she thought peevishly as she watched her husband, paper in hand, drop into his leather recliner and search, for some moments, for the sweet spot there. She watched as he perched the paper on his paunch and, with both his palms, smoothed the crimped remnants of silvery hair flat against his scalp. His scalp, she saw, silently moving behind him to fix the curtain now, his scalp was even more freckled than her chest. His hands and arms were unpleasantly mottled, too. Golf, she supposed. And no sunscreen. With the light behind his head like this, she could just make out the feathery hairs sprouting from his ears.

Of course, if Stanley looked at her, which he wasn’t doing now and seldom did – he’d have noticed her, well … whiskers. Frannie’s hand moved reflexively to the stubble of her weeks-old chin wax. She’d never mentioned the waxing to him. He’d accuse her of being vain, and he hated vain women. It wasn’t vanity to Frannie, though. It was … maintenance.

And anyhow, she said defensively to the Stanley in her head, she’d never been old before. She was trying to adjust because it felt so foreign. Like adolescence maybe. With wrinkles.

“You still dressing?” he called from behind his paper.

She scurried out of the room and reached for a blouse – any blouse – in the bedroom closet.

“Yes.”

Of course, he hated being old himself. He especially hated his cardiologist, who had pointedly told him he had “to watch.” No salt, no fat, and no Viagra.

Not that Stanley had asked for Viagra.

“No, I won’t,” he belatedly replied. “I won’t ‘spoil my appetite’ – whatever that means – for the thousandth time. I’ll eat again at 1:30 or so. Anyway,” he added triumphantly, “you know Dr. Dietz said several small meals a day.”

Rummaging now for shoes, Frannie heard the self-satisfied rustle-and-snap of his newspaper. Who could argue with the medical establishment, she thought? Not an aging dentist’s wife. But what did “spoiling your appetite” matter anyway in the long run?

And why was she still saying that?

Straightening more slowly this time, she called back, “All right. I’ll give you some chicken for now and make another plate for later. I’m having lunch with Arlene.”

“Oh, you are?” His tenor inched up a notch, edging towards the place where his little-boy whine lived and lay in wait. She imagined him padding toward the bedroom door like Sparky used to do.

Sparky, she hadn’t thought of him in years – what was her problem today?

“What time will you be home?’ he asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe 2:30 or so. Maybe we’ll drop by the St. James’ sale afterward. Pick up something for Deb Barkley. She’s in the hospital, you know.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s the matter?” The swish of the financial section put paid to Deb Barkley. “Well, don’t be too late.”

For her own thousandth time, Frannie wondered why he always said that. He’d be asleep in his chair no matter when she got home, his head against its back, the newspaper fallen to the floor, his mouth open to end-of-day dust motes.

She smoothed the blouse into the tightish waistband of her tweed skirt and ducked back into the kitchen, hurriedly arranging two plates of pale chicken, some steamed broccoli (no butter, no salt) and a piece of blackened Wonder Bread on her nice blue pottery plates, covering it all with clear plastic wrap. She stepped back and admired her work. It looked almost tasty like that. She left one plate on the counter, the other, at the front of the refrigerator, where he couldn’t possibly miss it. She could hear Elizabeth Taylor again, complaining about her spectacularly skintight white bathing suit.

“Ah cain’t weah that.” Elizabeth fake-laughed, all coy and all jingly and all Southern-belle. “It’s a scandal to the jaybirds!”

“Neither can I, Liz,” she thought, unbuttoning the top button of her skirt.

She clicked the TV off, dabbed a little powder on her forehead, buttoned her gray jacket and grabbed her next-to-best purse, calling as she hurried past his chair, “I’m leaving now, Stanley. Do you mind if I take the Ford?”

“Unhhh. He cleared his throat.

Had she made the bed?

She would check when she got home.

Arlene, her fold-up reading glasses set neatly beside her plate, took a careful mouthful of hot, fried lasagna and turned to look around.

“Lots of business women here,” she said.

And that was when Frannie registered her hair.

“You’ve got a new haircut, Ar! And it’s a different color, too, isn’t it? Let me see!

Almost shyly, Arlene turned her head.

“It’s wonderful! What did you do?”

“Do you really like it?”

“Like it? I can’t believe it!”

Years ago, when they’d been girls, they’d sworn to let careless Nature take her course. It had eventually become a running joke between them, that they’d go cold-turkey together. Live a natural, even organic old age.

But now, here was Arlene with this … fine new hair: all lustrous and silky and waved: all fawn-colored, pineapply fluff, and Frannie felt obscurely that her best friend was cheating. Cheating successfully, too, because something about this haircut – or was it the color? – seemed so perfectly suited to her coloring, her eyes, her neck. Her neck. Her hand flew to her own as she flashed on this morning.

And now here was Arlene, looking so … young.

“Who did you go to?” she asked.

Arlene leaned in, dropping her voice.

“I’ve found this new hairdresser. Linda Thorpe told me about her. She flies into St. Louis from New York a couple of times a month, I think. She’s at The Hair House on Clayton. It’s new.”

A few tables away, a man with a mid-winter tan had turned and seemed to smile their way. At Arlene? At her? Frannie swept her glasses off her nose.

Pathetic, she thought.

“Tell me her name?” she asked offhandedly. “Maybe I’ll try her out.”

“Who?”

“That genie who did your hair. Unless it was a man?”

“Not a Jeannie, you dope. A Randi.” Frannie snorted and rolled her eyes. She was used to Arlene’s sense of humor. “And she’s a woman.”

“‘Randi?’” she mused. “That’s an odd name for a girl. Does she spell it with an ‘I’ or a ‘y’?”

“I think with an ‘I’.”

“Maybe her parents weren’t aware of the double entendre,” she added.

They chuckled together uncertainly. Arlene realigned her silverware.

“Maybe it’s short for Miranda,” Frannie suggested, pleased at having sucked some useful morsel from the usual vacuum of her mind.

“Yes, I’ll bet that’s it. You always know things like that, Fran. Words like that.”

Arlene cupped the bottom-most waves of her hairdo in her palm and fluffed up them the tiniest bit. (Frannie might be smart, the gesture implied, but Arlene had prettier hair.) “Anyway, I wouldn’t count on getting an appointment. She only comes here one day of every month or so, and I know she’s really busy when she’s here.”

Was Arlene a little prickly or was it her own, very peculiar, mood?

“I don’t mind waiting for a month or two, Ar. After all,” she lifted a hank of tired, dark hair. “It’s not as though I haven’t lived with this for years.” She made a face. Arlene smiled.

“Well, don’t tell anyone else on the planet or neither one of us will ever get an appointment again, Fran. And I should tell you that she’s only at The Hair House a few days a year, though I hear she does lots of famous people in New York: Victoria’s Secret models. Sometimes Barbara Walters!”

“Really?” Frannie was impressed.

“She told me that it’s a worldwide franchise and she owns two. Ours, here in St. Louis, and one in New York.”

“Really?” Frannie was doubly impressed. New York!

Arlene seemed mollified. She leaned back in her chair.

“Ready for dessert?”

On her return, Frannie found Stanley asleep in his chair with his “second lunch” still in its transparent wrap in the icebox. She hung up her coat, tiptoed to the bedroom and perched on the edge of the crisply made bed. (Good, she’d remembered.)

Opening her handbag and fingering through her worn brown wallet, she found it: the beauty shop’s number on the back of a Nordstrom’s receipt. She could, of course, wait a month or six weeks if she wanted to. She’d just had color, after all. Still …

She reached for the phone.

“Hair House.” The nasal voice of a twelve-year-old bored receptionist.

“This is Mrs. Stanley Turner. I’m calling for an appointment with Randi. Arlene Mann gave me her name?”

“Hold on a minute. I’ll check the book.”

A longish pause, during which Frannie heard the dull whirring of … blow driers?

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Frannie Turner. I’m friend of Arlene Mann’s.”

Muffled conversation.

“Hold on a minute, would you? I have to check something.”

“Fine.”

It was a full twelve minutes by the nightstand clock, in fact, during which Frannie cleaned scraps of dog-eared papers and receipts out of her wallet and counted her change in her lap and, after that, wandered over to the closet wall to gaze, possibly for the thousandth time, at her cherished print of “Primavera”.

She’d bought it in college, just before her last art history finals. It was a superb reproduction. It had been expensive, too, but she’d treated herself – not just because the image was head-spinningly beautiful, but because the owner of the store had taken the time to point out that Botticelli’s original painting actually represented love, marriage, and fertility.

Love. Marriage. Fertility. She and Stanley had gotten married before she’d had time to do anything with her precious art degree and, of course, married women didn’t work back then. She regretted not having used her education now, she’d enjoyed those classes so. But this print still gave her visceral pleasure, and reminded her every day that art and beauty were the truest joys in a disappointing world. More than once, “Primavera” had saved her.

The phone in her hand sizzled to life.

“Well, you’re really lucky, Mrs. Lerner.”

“It’s Turner.”

“Awesome. Really awesome! Randi says she can fit you in tomorrow at 2:00!”

“Tomorrow! Oh, I am lucky. Thanks so much! So I’ll see you then. Oh, wait.” She was an idiot. “Where are you?”

“We’re on Clayton Road, about a mile past the Starbucks in the Arch shopping strip. Right next to the Schnucks there.”

“Okay. I’ll be there. Thanks!”

For the second time today, she stood before the bathroom mirror. This time, she was grinning foolishly at – she wasn’t sure what. She tugged at some strands of lifeless hair. Bangs? Blonde, like Arlene? Tomorrow she’d be a new Frannie Turner, maybe. Maybe she’d treat herself to a new hairbrush. Or a lipstick.

She returned to the bedroom.

Nothing would really make a difference, though. Not a haircut. Not a color change or a new hairdresser. She’d been here before.

And yet – Frannie made a mental effort. She smoothed the lank brown strands of hair behind her ears, sat on her own side of the bed and, opening her night-table drawer, cupped a well-worn deck of cards in her hand and dealt them out on the bedspread.

Some women ironed clothes to quiet their minds. Some worked crossword puzzles. Frannie preferred her cards: sometimes Chinese Patience, sometimes Solitaire.

She cheated a little at both.

When Stanley coughed himself awake at 5:30, it was dark outside and she was winning.

She swept up the deck, slipped it back in the drawer, and went to the kitchen.

Just a night like every other, she thought. Early dinner – this morning’s chicken and broccoli for Stanley, some frozen thing for her, the dishes in the dishwasher, TV, bed. And the silent phone.

She sometimes imagined her son.

If she’d been a good mother – and of course she would have been –they’d have played trucks on the linoleum kitchen floor when he was small and gone Halloweening on chilly, moonlit nights. She’d have helped him with the hard spelling words and with his art and music (science and math would have been Stanley’s responsibility). And because she’d been that good mother, he’d have grown up to drop by for dinner on nights like tonight. She’d have cooked his favorite food: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, lima beans. (He would have loved lima beans.) And afterwards, he’d have given her a hand with the dishes and while she washed and he dried, maybe, they’d have laughed as he described how her granddaughters were the best spellers in school. A family tradition, he’d say, smiling down at her. And maybe they’d talk together about the time she taught him walk-the-dog with his yoyo and took him to the St. Louis Museum of Art. Which he’d hated.

He’d call, now and then, too, just to see how she was.

Because, in the entry hall lately, Frannie had been smelling something. Something like bad breath and stale clothes. Like unwashed hair. Like mothballs.

The scent of people growing old.

But tomorrow. Tomorrow smelled like hope.