One day, returning to the farmhouse from a doctor's appointment with an ultrasound picture in her purse, she walked through the front door and felt two disparate emotions tumble strongly, suddenly, over her: happiness and guilt. The happiness was for her and Tom and the baby, the guilt was for Christine and Guy. She owned this life and they did not. She must be grateful, she knew, for the circumstances that had allowed her to imagine a future and watch it come true. Something had been given to her and Tom that had been taken from them, and there was no reason behind this gift. It was all mystery.
Leaves dropped from trees; cold winds blew. Dark came early, and she and Tom often fell asleep on the couch by the fireplace, his hand on her lap. Some days she was tired and sick, but more often, as time went on, they lay in bed in the morning and Tom would run his hands over her body, its new contours; at these times she felt a strong, greedy pleasure that obliterated all other thoughts from her mind.
But it was a small town. Once, on a freezing, hail-pelted January day, she ran into Guy. She was dropping off some dry cleaning, and the shop doubled as a laundromat. Guy was sitting on an orange vinyl chair, bent over a copy of Ladies' Home Journal. Above his head, laundry she assumed was his squirmed in a foamy circle. She laid her dry cleaning on the counter and watched him across the room; he didn't look up. At a certain point he put his finger on a page of the magazine — much as he'd touched the photos in the album that day — to examine a picture or help himself read, she wasn't sure which. His pickup truck was parked outside. For a moment she could picture him and Christine exactly: driving around town in that faded green truck, stopping for a drink at the pub, maybe heading down to the river to hang out and watch the river and kiss, pretending they were still teenagers. His hands on her neck, her shoulders, her waist; his lips on hers; her glasses fogging, her fine hair tangling as they moved.
Penny left before he knew she was there.
A few months afterwards she saw Irene, too, at the grocery store. Their carts almost collided in the cereal aisle. It was early spring but still cold, and Irene was wearing a long padded jacket and white boots; her eyes widened as she took in the sight of Penny's pregnant belly, bulging through her unbuttoned coat. When Penny said her name, the landlady looked up at her.
“When are you due, dear?” she said.
“At the end of May.”
“Are you getting lots of rest? Rest is important, you know.”
“I'm doing fine,” Penny said. She put a hand on her stomach, a gesture that had grown quickly habitual with her, a means of instant comfort. Watching tension twist the muscles of Irene's face, she knew what must be going through her mind: all the advice, the recommendations and recipes, suggested names, tips on feeding and baby furniture, the knowledge of years. The older woman's face was almost pulsing with the longing to share it. Penny steeled herself to receive the onslaught, balancing her weight on both feet, knowing she might be standing there in the aisle for a while. But Irene just stood there, smiling thinly, fixed to the linoleum.
“How's Henry?” Penny finally asked.
“He's been fitted for a new aid,” Irene said. “But he won't hardly wear it. He says he's gotten used to the silence. He says he likes the peace and quiet. Well, good luck, dear.” And with a pivot of her grocery cart she turned around and walked away. Penny was left looking after her, then gazing up at the rows of cereals and granola bars. She'd forgotten what she came into this section to buy.
After this encounter, Irene did not call or visit. She must have thought about it, though. In fact she must've thought about it a great deal. Because in June, after the baby was born, she could not stay away. Penny was sitting by the window, enjoying the first warm breeze of summer while she nursed the baby, when a car pulled up in the driveway. She heard a door slam shut, and saw Irene coming up the driveway, carrying one of her baked goods, the sun reflecting brilliantly off the silver foil. Her shiny face was set in determination as she came to confront the unceasing wonders, the mysteries of sex and circumstance, that had brought her to the house again.
I Love to Dance at Weddings
Leda calls on a Saturday afternoon to announce she's getting married the following Thursday night. “Can you come?” she asks, her voice as innocent as milk.
Cordless in hand, Nathalie moves over to the garage, where Nick is thrashing away at a rocking chair with a piece of sandpaper. He refuses to use the electric sander because he says he can't really feel the wood. He's turning into the Michelangelo of home improvement. When he sees her come in, he raises his eyebrows and puts up his palm in the standard I'm-not-here gesture he uses whenever his mother's on the phone.
“We wouldn't miss it,” Nathalie says.
“We are very, very pleased,” Leda says, making this “we” sound royal. Nick, whacking at the chair, keeps almost missing the arm of it, threatening to take off a layer of his own skin instead. “Martin will be thrilled.”
“How is Martin?”
“A prouder bridegroom you never saw,” Leda says.
Nathalie smiles at this; she likes Martin. He's a retired medical instrument salesman who wears threadbare cardigans and tells old-fashioned, sexist jokes. The last one she heard involved three women together in a jail cell — a Navajo, an Arapaho and a “regular ho, from Dallas.” It's the “from Dallas” that makes her like him. Martin will be Leda's fourth husband, and coincidentally he was also her second. They were married on a whim, by a captain on a cruise ship, and divorced six months later after an argument at a party.
“Can we, you know, do anything?” Nathalie says.
“You're a dear,” Leda says, “but I'll go over this with my darling son. Could you put him on?” Nathalie holds the phone out to Nick, who shakes his head. They pantomine this back and forth — her holding, him shaking — until she hears Leda sigh pointedly on the other end. Then she drops the phone into Nick's dust-covered lap and goes back into the house.
Leda was married to Nick's father for twenty-seven years. Since he died, she's taken up marrying the way some women take up art classes or volunteer work. First it was Martin, then it was her ob-gyn — Rupert Thorne, whom everybody called by both names, including Leda, even after they were married — and now it's Martin again. For each of the weddings so far, Leda has gone whole hog, without regard for the fact that she is neither a first-time nor a youthful bride. (On the cruise ship she managed to rustle up a long white dress and a headdress made of orchids, which they apparently sold in the onboard boutique to people given to just such marital whims, and she'd browbeaten the ship's yoga instructor into serving as the maid of honor.) Each time, she says that when she was younger she didn't appreciate her wedding, and she might as well enjoy it now. This drives Nick insane. He says she's gone off the edge. Nathalie wonders, never out loud, if Nick's the best judge of the edge's location. He lost his consulting job a year ago and hasn't been able to find new work; for the past few months, instead of looking, he has been gutting their entire house and its contents. He's into stripping things down: walls, chairs, floors. He wants everything to be authentic and unadorned. Their house, he says, has a skeletal identity that has been wrongfully and deliberately obscured over the years of its inhabitation. At Home Depot, the clerks call him by name.
When he comes out of the garage his face is dark with annoyance. He sits down on the couch in their living room, which was once wallpapered and carpeted and now is fully exposed, down to a brick wall on one side and the bare pine boards beneath their feet. At least the upholstery's still on the furniture, though Nathalie doesn't count on it sticking around for long. She wouldn't be surprised to come home and find it all reduced to wire and string.