The night I held her on my lap, Ash had called from a pay phone in a bar in Tennessee, to say that the rattlesnake killed in his friend Michael’s garden was so big that the skin had stretched to cover Michael’s fiddle case. Those were the kind of stories she wanted to hear: stories that justified her not going to Tennessee. She had a baby, Peter, who lived with her ex-husband in Boston, and a psychiatrist in Vermont: she did not want to interrupt her therapy. She had a pottery business, with her friends Andrea and Percy Green and Roger Billington, that was just starting to make a little money, and summer was the best time for selling it in the shop they had set up in Percy Green’s big garage. I was visiting her for a month and a half. She knew I loved Vermont and thought I wouldn’t go as far as Tennessee to visit. I think I would have. I think I would have done almost anything for her. I offered her my savings to fight her fat, villainous lawyer husband for Peter; in the winter, I drove to Vermont four weeks running to sit through group-therapy sessions, because everyone was supposed to bring someone from the family, and she had no family but her brother, in Nebraska, and an aunt in an old-age home.
I’m not the kind of woman who greets other women with little bird pecks on the cheek, and unlike Holly, I’m not used to embracing people; but when she came out to the porch, so sad from hearing Ash’s voice, and shook her head and kissed me goodnight on the forehead, I put out my arms and she climbed into my lap. “He didn’t talk long,” she said. “He said he wrote me a letter that I haven’t gotten yet.” We must have rocked for hours, before the static on the kitchen radio got too much to put up with. Then some sort of embarrassment caught up with her: when she came back to the porch she was smiling an embarrassed smile. The angel jacket was zipped over her nightgown, and she said quietly: “Thanks, Jane. Now I can go to sleep.” The lacy angel wings disappeared into the kitchen. I heard her turn on the water and knew she was doing what I’d hoped my rocking would soothe her out of, taking the nightly combination that I was convinced was deadly: two vitamin B6 pills, and half a pill each of Dalmane and Valium, taken one at a time, because in spite of all the medicine she had taken in her life, she still believed that she would choke to death when swallowing a pill. One thing we all liked about Ash was that he tried to talk her out of them. He tried to get her to take a long, tiring walk with him, or to smoke a joint. He’d pull her to the old carrousel mirror in the kitchen and make her look at her guilty expression as she swallowed the pills. Lamely, she told him that two vitamin B6s couldn’t hurt. Some nights he’d reason with her so that she only took half a Valium. If he ever rocked her on his lap, I don’t know about it.
People often mistake us for sisters. It didn’t happen at Smith, where people had watched us make friends, but later, when we went into New York to shop or to take dance classes. We were both lonely and self-sufficient — I was an only child, and her parents died when she was ten — and once we got over our jealousy because people were always comparing our looks, we realized that we were soul mates. I curled my hair to look like hers; she began to wear long, floating skirts like mine. When she got married I made the bouquet, and she threw it to me. The morning of the wedding I had wrapped thick satin ribbon around the layers of foil that held the stems together, knowing that she was marrying the wrong person, but for once too reticent to say what I thought. Fixing the flowers, I thought of the custom of binding women’s feet in China: having any part of this was wrong.
She stayed married for nine years, all through her husband’s time in the Army and in law school, years of living in a fourth-floor walk-up in New Haven, above a restaurant. They had a big, rusty car that she was always sanding and painting.
She said nothing about the dreary apartment but that the fan of stained glass above the front door was beautiful. When he became a lawyer, the house in the suburbs they moved to wasn’t her taste, either, but she planted nicotiana plants that bloom at night — the most wonderful-smelling flowers I have ever known.
Peter was a breech birth, delivered, finally, by Caesarean. I sat in the waiting room with her husband, thinking: things aren’t working out, and they won’t even let us hear her crying. I had been spending a weekend in the country with my lover when Holly called to say she was going to the hospital. It was almost a month early — they were visiting friends in New York. I remember sitting in the waiting room, smelling of turpentine. Jason, the man I was in love with, had taken me to his house in East Hampton. A few hours before Holly called, I had been asleep in the sun, at the end of his dock, and because he thought it would be funny, because he couldn’t resist, he had dipped into the bucket of gray paint — he was painting the dock — and stroked the wide brush full of cold, smooth paint over both knees as I slept. It didn’t wash off in the water, and I had to use turpentine, wiping it again and again across my knees with his wife’s torn blouse, more amused than I let on that he had done it, wondering how I could love a man who had a wife whose discarded blouses were from Saks. When the phone rang, a few hours before we were going to drive back to the city, Holly said: “I’m going to Lenox Hill. I’m saving myself some time.” Then all at once Jason was dabbing at my knees with turpentine, telling me that I did too have time to dive off the dock, that it didn’t matter if my hair was wet, that if I swam, I wouldn’t have to shower. “Take it easy,” he said. “You’re not having the baby.” No — time would pass, and then I wouldn’t even have Jason. He’d reconcile with his wife, and her mysterious arthritis would disappear, and she’d be back playing the violin. But that day it seemed impossible. It was easy enough to sleep in the sun when back in the city I didn’t even sleep late at night, in my dark apartment. Jason had been enough in love to pull pranks. In his house, I pulled on my jeans, no underwear underneath, borrowed a T-shirt from him, rushed out of the house never suspecting that it was one of the last times I’d ever see it. The very last time would be in winter, when I sat in the car and he went in to see that a pipe that had frozen had been repaired correctly. He was going back to his wife. I didn’t want to see the presents I’d given him that were still inside: the moose cookie jar, the poster of a brigade of roaches: “Con más poder de atrapar para matar bien muertas las cucarachas fuertes.” Percy Green’s drawing of a foot with a hugely elongated big toe, captioned “Stretching the Mind.”
The day Holly went into labor we had taken a fast ride back to the city, the top down on his big, white Ford, wet hair flapping against my head like dog’s ears. No: I wasn’t having this baby. The next spring, I would have an abortion. I would go to a restaurant with a surreally beautiful garden, and Jason would sit next to me, under the umbrella, before I went to the hospital. Pink flowers would fall into our hair, our laps, our food. I couldn’t eat anything. I couldn’t even tell him why. I dropped raw shrimp under the table, praying for the cat that didn’t exist. Sipped a mimosa and spit the liquor back into the glass. My hand on top of his, his other hand sliding up my leg, under the big napkin — a ghastly foreshadowing of the white sheet they’d spread across me an hour later. “Eat,” Jason said. “You have to eat something.” Smiling. Touching. Hiding my food like a child, letting the pink flowers cover what they could.