Clock Dance Page 19

  “It’s great,” Sean told her.

  In spite of herself, Willa recalled that Peter had a special contempt for the phrase “to your liking.”

  “Well, let me know if there’s anything more you need,” the waitress said. She left.

  Clinking of forks, rattling of ice cubes. Elissa was eating now, dabbing her lips daintily with her napkin after each bite. Sean had finished his crab fluff and was starting on his french fries. He had proceeded that way since childhood—tackling his meal systematically, one food at a time.

  Willa said, “Now, have you two known each other long?”

  The question was carefully worded. (She couldn’t ask how they had met, because they must realize Denise would have told her.) There was a moment of silence before Elissa answered for the two of them. “Oh,” she said, “a year or so, I guess. But I mean, not dating a year or so. We didn’t start dating till…a little while ago.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m not a bad person, you know.”

  This was so unexpected that Willa took a second to react. Then she said, “Oh! Of course not.”

  “I had every intention of sticking it out with my husband, believe me. It’s just that, well, then Sean came along.”

  This made sense to Willa. Sean was infinitely superior to Hal, if she did say so herself.

  “I kept seeing Sean in the gym I joined after we moved to Dorcas Road,” Elissa was saying. “For a while I had no idea he lived on my block. And Denise never went to the gym. Or Hal, either. It was only me and Sean, side by side on the treadmills.”

  Now Willa remembered what a boon these young women could be: offering privileged glimpses into her sons’ private lives. She nodded brightly; she was trying not to say anything that would cause Elissa to stop talking. But Sean no doubt wished she would stop talking, because he said, “At any rate—”

  “For instance,” Elissa told Willa. “I bet you didn’t realize I still go to my in-laws’ for supper every Sunday evening.”

  She must be returning to the topic of how she was not a bad person. Willa said, “No, I didn’t realize that.”

  “I do it as a kindness to Hal. He doesn’t want them to know.”

  “To know…?”

  “His parents think we’re still together. His mother says to me, ‘Tell me, dear, do you ever use that tablecloth I gave you?’ and I say, ‘Oh, I use it all the time. I used it just the other evening when we invited my boss and his wife.’ I’m not sure what I’ll do at Thanksgiving. Up till now Hal’s folks have always come to our house for Thanksgiving.”

  “Well, by then you’ll have broken the news,” Sean told her.

  “Why should I have to break the news? They’re Hal’s parents.”

  “Yes, but you’re the one who walked out,” Sean reminded her.

  “I didn’t walk out!” She told Willa, “We were originally going to announce it to Hal and Denise together, over dinner. Denise invited us to dinner, see, and I said to Sean, ‘This is when we should tell them, jointly. Calm and civilized.’ But then Denise burned the beef bourguignon.”

  Willa nodded again, encouragingly.

  “All the chunks of beef were glommed to the bottom of the pan. She was trying to dish them out for us but they wouldn’t come. She had to wedge the serving spoon under them and hit the handle of the spoon with her fist, and then a chunk would give way finally and fly clear out of the pan sometimes, or the pan would even skid a few inches across the table. And Denise’s face was getting red and she was saying ‘Goddammit…’ and even when we got the beef on our plates it was just hard black shreddy bricks, you know, nothing we could stick a fork into, so I gave Sean a nudge with my foot and frowned at him because we couldn’t tell her then. It would have been adding insult to injury. It would be, first the main dish is a flop and then her husband abandons her, all in the same evening. Right?”

  “Wrong,” Sean told her. He told Willa, “The one thing had nothing to do with the other. I did get why Elissa was nudging me—kicking me, is more like it. I knew what she was trying to say. So I held my tongue, but honestly? It just meant putting it off, is all. It just meant I had to get up the next morning and tell Denise, ‘Don’t fix any breakfast for me; I’m moving out,’ and then go over to Elissa’s house and the two of us tell Hal.”

  “Oh, my,” Willa said.

  She couldn’t help picturing this scene from Denise’s perspective. Or even from Hal’s, unappealing though Hal was.

  “I suppose I could go ahead with Thanksgiving as usual,” Elissa was saying reflectively. “Give Hal the grocery list early in the week; get over there at crack of dawn Thanksgiving day—”

  “Oh, Elissa, just pick up the phone and call your damn in-laws,” Sean said.

  Elissa gave him a tremulous look and started twisting her napkin.

  “Well, so, tell me,” Willa said hastily. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going to ask; she just felt a pinch of anxiety when she saw Elissa’s expression. “Are you two, um, do you two live in a house now, or an apartment?”

  “Apartment,” Sean said. “Out Loch Raven a ways.” Which meant nothing to Willa, of course. “It’s really nice,” he said. “Got a balcony, separate dining alcove, study we can use as a guest room—”

  “Ian is going to be our first overnight guest, we think,” Elissa piped up.

  “Ian!”

  Sean said, “Yeah, I think I’ve about persuaded him to come visit in September.”

  “Come visit…here?”

  “He’s got a week off then, he mentioned.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Willa said.

  “Yeah, well, he says if he doesn’t use some of his vacation time soon, he’s going to lose it.”

  “I see,” Willa said.

  * * *

  —

  She had planned to pick up the check, but when it arrived (Sean and Elissa having declined dessert as well as coffee, to Willa’s disappointment), Sean said, “I’ll get this.”

  “Oh, no, I want to do it,” Willa said.

  “Well, it doesn’t seem right that Peter should have to pay for a meal he’s not even here for.”

  “Peter?” she asked, bewildered. “It’s me who’s paying, not Peter.”

  “What: you’re not using his rich-guy hoity-toity uranium or whatever credit card?”

  “No, I am not,” she snapped. Now she was annoyed. “I do have my own money, you know. I’ve held a job for a whole lot more years than you have, by a long shot.”

  Sean held up both hands. “Sorry!” he said. “Geez.”

  So Willa paid, extravagantly overtipping as a kind of declaration of independence even though Sean wouldn’t know about it.

  When the three of them stepped out onto the sidewalk, it still wasn’t dusk. Willa asked Sean, “What are you driving these days?” merely as a delaying tactic. It was a question that men seemed to find important, she’d noticed, but Sean didn’t treat it seriously. He shrugged and said, “Oh, same old thing.”

  Whatever that was.

  “Well, I am parked around the corner,” she said.

  “We’re back here,” he said, gesturing in the opposite direction. “Okay, Mom, good to see you,” and he bent to kiss her cheek. Then Elissa moved forward to shake her hand, but Willa gave her a kiss instead, because that was the formula, after all. How many of Sean’s girlfriends had she kissed goodbye? And a few of Ian’s, too. “Take care,” Elissa told her.

  Peter would have said, “Take care of what?”

  Sean and Elissa walked off to the left, and Willa walked off to the right.

  Most people would automatically know how to drive back to the place they’d started out from, but Willa wasn’t one of them. She’d written all the turns in reverse on the other side of her instruction sheet, and now she went over them in detail befo
re she started the car.

  In the rearview mirror she saw that new wrinkles had developed around her eyes and her foundation had dried in her pores. She had fallen into particles over the course of a single evening.

  She headed back through the commercial section, back through the residential section and the jumble of small shops. She turned onto Northern Parkway and traveled east, unhampered now by the traffic she had dealt with earlier. The houses grew smaller and humbler. The landscape grew familiar.

  Ian was going to visit Sean?

  He could have come to see Willa and Peter!

  He and Sean weren’t even all that close.

  Why, one time long ago, when the boys were still in their teens, Willa was leading them down a street when she realized they were no longer with her. She had turned to see Ian lying flat on the sidewalk in nothing but his underpants and Sean standing over him, triumphantly waving a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Yet no more than three minutes had passed since she had last looked back!

  Willa had been furious at the time, but now the corners of her mouth twitched and then she smiled outright.

  Well, never mind. Think about where she was driving to; think about Dorcas Road. Soon she’d be home playing Scrabble. Maybe she’d even try a slice of that pizza if any was left.

  9

  On Wednesday, Denise managed to make her way upstairs by sitting on the bottom step and scooting backward to the top. “My own bed again!” she crowed. So Willa and Cheryl carried her belongings up to her room, which instantly fell into its former state of chaos. Her hairbrush and cosmetic bottles reappeared on her vanity, pieces of cast-off clothing littered the floor, and a stack of celebrity magazines slithered across her bed—all of this before she had spent a single night there.

  That afternoon she said that now that she was more mobile, she thought she might try going in to work for a couple of hours. “You and Cheryl could drive me over to the school,” she told Willa, “and drop me off and then pick me up later.”

  “Just as long as you give me directions,” Willa said.

  Getting Denise to the car turned out to be the hard part, though. First she teetered out to the porch on her crutches; then she laid the crutches aside and, leaning heavily on Cheryl and Willa for support, lowered herself to a sitting position at the top of the porch steps. After she’d plopped step by step to the bottom, Willa grabbed her by both hands to haul her upright again and Cheryl gave her back her crutches and she staggered toward the curb. It wasn’t a great distance (Willa had owned rugs bigger than Denise’s front yard), but it took her forever, and by the time she reached the car they had collected a small crowd of onlookers, all hovering uselessly and offering advice and encouragement—Erland and Mrs. Minton and Dave Raeburn and a tiny, dainty old lady who’d been heading toward Ben’s office. “Where is Sir Joe when we need him?” Mrs. Minton wondered aloud, but it was two o’clock on a weekday afternoon and Sir Joe was off with his truck. “I am here,” Dave said, looking offended. Dave had the build of a half-deflated balloon, though, so no one stood aside to let him hoist Denise into his arms.

  Then, once she was settled in the car—the back seat again, so that she could stretch her leg out—she remembered she’d left her purse in the house and Cheryl was sent to fetch it. Willa and Denise waited in a comfortable silence, the only sound Denise’s breathing as she recovered from her efforts. In the rearview mirror, Willa watched the old lady inching down Ben’s side path. She must have arrived by city bus; there was no sign of a car. Or else she had walked from someplace nearby. This neighborhood had a whole collection of halting, faltering old folks.

  “Peter claimed I could drive one-footed,” Denise spoke up from the rear, “but I bet that’s one of those things that look easy till you try it. I don’t think one foot is enough. You have to kind of brace yourself with the other when you’re pushing the pedals.”

  “Oh, well, what does Peter know?” Willa said.

  She had spoken to him just once since he left, and it was she who had placed the call. After waiting all Monday to hear from him she had phoned him late Tuesday afternoon, avoiding the morning hours completely in case he was sleeping late. “Hello?” he’d answered in a questioning tone, although of course he would have seen who it was, and she had said, “Hi, honey! How was your trip?”

  “Abysmal,” he said hollowly.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “You know I had to do the first leg of it in steerage.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Rona couldn’t get me an upgrade. On top of that, I had a middle seat. The guy by the window slept the whole way and snored like a Mack truck, that stop-and-go kind of snoring where there’s a blessed silence and then a sudden huge snort that gives everybody a heart attack. And the woman on the aisle weighed two hundred pounds at the very least and the minute she got settled she dug into this giant tote that was crowding my feet and brought out a foot-long salami sub with enough onions to kill a horse—”

  “That sounds awful,” Willa said.

  “—and twice before they turned the seat-belt sign off she pressed her call button to ask when drinks were going to be served, and when finally the cart showed up she ordered two Bloody Marys—this was before most people’s breakfast time, mind—and an extra pack of snack mix. Snack mix! Ha. Which was no food known to nature, believe me; some kind of crackerish objects coated with sidewalk salt. After the sub she dug out a slice of Boston cream pie wrapped in a sheet of wax paper that kept blowing off her tray into my lap because of course she had her overhead fan on, and then around Kansas or someplace she ordered a lunch box with the most mysterious kind of salad in it; I swear there wasn’t a single piece of greenery, just gloppy white dressing and croutons and so-called bacon bits. When we were getting near the mountains she unwrapped a—”

  “Did you have anything to eat yourself?” Willa asked.

  “Oh, God, no.”

  Then he said he had to go because he had a golf game. He didn’t ask about anyone in Baltimore; he didn’t ask about her evening with Sean.

  Nor had Denise asked about Sean; she’d still had company, after all, when Willa came back from dinner, and for the whole next day her one reference was, “So you got to meet Elissa, I guess.”

  All Willa had said was “Mm-hmm” before changing the subject.

  Now, though, just as Cheryl came bounding out onto the porch with her mother’s purse slung over her shoulder, Denise said, “I don’t suppose Sean and Elissa said anything about inviting you to their place, did they?”

  “No,” Willa said, “they didn’t.”

  “Would you believe the whole time I knew her, that woman never once had me inside her house?”

  “Goodness,” Willa said.

  Then Cheryl yanked the passenger door open and piled into the car, and no more was said on the subject.

  As it turned out, the school was fairly simple to get to. First Denise instructed Willa to drive three blocks south on Dorcas Road, past the stuffed rabbit still asking “Did You Lose Me?” and the sign for “The Bicycle Guy,” and then to turn left at the baseball diamond worn into the weeds on a vacant lot. A couple of blocks later they dead-ended at one of those faceless brick school buildings that dated from the 1940s. A new-looking white wooden sign reading “Linchpin Elementary” very nearly covered the older letters etched in the granite above the front door, and some of the windows featured posters and children’s paintings that had faded over the summer. Willa parked as close as she could get. She had barely maneuvered Denise out of the back seat before two young women rushed out to help—the two whom Willa had met in the hospital, in fact. “Easy, now!” “Don’t rush her!” “I’ve got her,” they said, fluttering and wringing their hands and getting in each other’s way. Willa stepped back and let them take over; Cheryl followed behind with Denise’s crutches. When they reached the front door it
magically opened and Mrs. Anderson stepped out, crying, “Careful, ladies! Give her some room!”

  She was the one who took the crutches from Cheryl, while the other two made a huge fuss about getting Denise up the front steps and through the door. “Hey there, hon,” Mrs. Anderson told Cheryl. “Hey, Grandma.”

  “Hi,” Willa said.

  “Still here, are you.”

  “Yes…for a while.”

  “School starts in just five weeks, you know. You going to be around that long?”

  “Yes!” Cheryl said, wheeling toward Willa, but Willa smiled and said, “I’m afraid not,” and once again Mrs. Anderson lost all interest in her. “Now, Ginny,” she told one of the women, “you go get Lawrence from the boiler room and let him know Denise is here. Lawrence says he can carry you to my office,” she told Denise.

  “I don’t need carrying,” Denise said. “Just find me a typist’s chair.” Then she turned to Willa and asked, “You want I should phone you when it’s time to come pick me up?”

  “Yes, whenever you like,” Willa said.

  “You sure you know how to get back, now.”

  “I’ll be with her!” Cheryl said indignantly.

  “Oh, right.”

  She vanished into the building, surrounded by her attendants.

  “School’s going to start in five weeks,” Cheryl said to Willa as they returned to the car. She spoke in a wheedling, enticing tone, like someone promising a treat.

  Willa said, “Yes, summer always seems to fly, doesn’t it?”

  But evidently she’d missed the point, because Cheryl looked crestfallen and gave a kick to the right front tire before she got back in the car.

  * * *

  —

  Peter called while Erland was sitting in the kitchen. Erland had come over to see if Willa might need help bringing Denise home again—a trumped-up excuse if she’d ever heard one. (Could Erland maybe have a crush on Denise?) As she glanced down at her phone screen he asked cheekily, “Who dat?” She didn’t bother answering him. She felt a weight lift from her chest when she saw Peter’s name, and she punched her phone and said, “Hi, honey!”