She returned to the porch. June, still in her chair, was stretching her legs forward; they seemed to have lengthened an inch since Sallyann left the room. Sallyann’s mother was still in her chair as well. Her right hand held the pad and pencil. The thin fingers of her left hand touched her own cheekbone, her ear. The wedding ring glowed. Her hair, once cinnamon like Sallyann’s, had darkened to nutmeg. She would probably marry again, Sallyann thought with mild revulsion; some women of forty-five did manage to marry. Perhaps she’d pull a husband’s name from a hat…Helen still occupied the glider, wearing her mask of serenity. Marcie under the lamp looked ready to be plucked and put into a buttonhole; or maybe devoured.
Sallyann gave her mother the upturned hat and her mother laid it on the floor between her sling-backed feet. Sallyann retreated to the doorway and lounged against its jamb.
“Helen, dear,” said Sallyann’s mother. “Name a potential husband.”
Helen said nothing. She would have liked to name Jim Fitzwilliam, who had never graduated from high school and now worked in his father’s auto-body shop. His uncle was in jail. His muscles were extraordinary.
“Biff Gray!” Marcie shouted.
What a waste, thought Sallyann. Handsome Biff Gray had recently graduated law school. He dated young women who had already finished college. The foursome on the porch were just kids to him.
“Biff Gray,” repeated Sallyann’s mother, her pencil working. She tore this first entry from the pad and folded it twice and dropped it into the hat. “Helen?” she said again.
And again Helen was silent. In addition to Jim Fitzwilliam she wanted to name Jorge Leibovich, an Argentinean Jew who owned a watch factory. In the summer he wore white suits and Panama hats and deep blue shirts that matched his eyes. He walked on the pads of his feet. He was at least fifty, and had four children and a wife.
“Maurice Armand,” offered Sallyann, hoping that June would draw his name. Maurice Armand was the son of émigrés and played several instruments.
Sallyann’s mother wrote, folded, tossed.
“Steve Folkster,” said June. Shy Steve Folkster, now the third name in the hat; how pleased he’d be if only he knew.
“Larry Reimer,” said Helen at last. He was her second cousin. His name went in, as did Larry Stubblefield’s, and Larry Mady’s, too. And a few more nice guys, non-Larrys.
“Anyone else?” asked Sallyann’s mother.
“I guess not,” Sallyann said. “I’ll mix them up.” She stepped forward and picked up the hat with its light burden of twice-folded papers. The brim felt warm. She moved the thing gently from side to side, hardly disturbing the prophecies within. Marcie leaped up and grabbed the hat from Sallyann and shook it vigorously. June shook it too. And Helen as well, still sitting.
“Ready?” Marcie said.
Sallyann’s mother stood. She picked up the fedora. Go home, darlings, she might say even now. Widows are notorious witches. “Sit down, girls” was what she did say, though Helen had never left the glider. Sallyann’s mother held the hat in her upturned palms and offered it to June. June’s hand dived in like a baby seal. It surfaced, a folded paper between thumb and two fingers.
Helen next.
Marcie.
Sallyann.
Then the four girls retreated to separate corners of the porch. Sallyann’s mother carried the hat out of the room. She followed her daughter’s earlier path from porch through living room to coat closet, its door now closed. She moved on to the kitchen. She placed the hat in the empty sink and lit a match and dropped it among the unclaimed bridegrooms. They burned quickly. She ran water into the hat before the little bonfire could do more than singe the silk lining.
When she returned to the porch she found Sallyann alone.
“They all thanked you, Mom.”
“Such sweethearts,” she said, her voice light, or perhaps trembling. Both went to bed.
Greedy Marcie had deftly lifted two tickets to happiness. The first bore the name of one of the Larrys, a tall, awkward boy. Sitting at her frilled dressing table, she looked up into the mirror. Larry would be dazzled if she turned her attention his way. But he would respond — there was a confidence within his clumsiness. In fact, she thought, now studying his name as if she were studying him — the thin chest, the mouth frequently marred by cold sores, the dreams, the ambition to become a doctor like his father — he had an excellent future. She considered him for several minutes. Then she looked again at the other paper. Biff Gray.
Biff. He had flirted with her at some graduation parties, and once at the beach. He had overlooked her at other times. Something more than merriment was needed to captivate him — some quality she had not yet achieved. She would make it her business to achieve it.
And so, the next time she ran into Biff, at the tennis courts, she nodded briefly and returned her full attention to the game she was playing with June. She played better than usual, and won. June, accustomed to beating Marcie, threw her racket into her bike basket and pedaled off — she said she had to babysit. Marcie bought a Coke and settled herself on one of the slatted chairs. After his game Biff sat down next to her. She gave him a smile — not her usual broad one, however. She did not show her teeth, perfect though they were; she kept her chin lowered; she concentrated on a storybook sequence of thoughts. The unusual blue-green of my eyes indicates that there is a cache of emeralds hidden somewhere in my father’s house. Some of them may have been distributed about my person. Only the brave deserve the fair. Concentrating, she said nothing, not even hi. He began to talk.
That was the way of their courtship — Biff talking, Marcie listening with her eyes. Her high spirits, her healthy optimism, her clever chatter — all were restrained in order to perfect the new talent. Once she had been a thoughtless tease. Now she was a seductress.
They were married two years later. At the end of the celebration Marcie turned her back to her bridesmaids and threw the bouquet over her buttermilk shoulder. It was a wide flattish nosegay, all yellow flowers, and it looked rather like a garden hat. Helen caught it.
Helen had drawn Steve Folkster’s name. She’d known him since third grade. He was a diligent student, a good athlete, an everyday sort of fellow. But in Sallyann’s mother’s graceful script he became someone fresh, a young man with interests to reveal — a yearning for the mountains, say, or a passion for bees.
Helen did something unusual for those times — she telephoned Steve and, without preliminary remarks, invited him to the movies.
“I didn’t know you liked me,” he said that night, wonder steaming his face.
“I always liked you,” she fibbed.
“I’ve always been crazy about you,” he said. That claim probably wasn’t true either, but no matter. She liked him now. He was crazy about her now. And it turned out that he was a passionate woodworker, and that he was devoted to his three young nephews, and that he was slow to anger, and that he was able to forgive her spurts of unkindness.
And so, when Helen caught Marcie’s bouquet, she left the other bridesmaids and carried the flowers to Steve. He drew her into the harbor of his embrace.
She was protected by his devotion for the next forty years, through all their woes: his job lost, twice; a malformed infant who lived a week; her brother’s intractable depression; the prolonged defiant adolescence of each of their surviving children. Even when she briefly left him, haring after a woman who had no long-term use for her but who liked to be tied up, liked to be taken from behind — he gravely withstood the desertion, gravely welcomed her back.
There was nothing written on Sallyann’s paper.
In the corner of the porch, she folded it again and then unfolded it, looked at both sides several times, took off and put on her glasses. She held the paper up to the moon.