“Oh, I might have done those dishes,” Gigi said.
“It’s all right.”
“But I don’t expect you to cook and clean.”
Mary Frances turned. Gigi was inspecting her nails. She stopped, and met Mary Frances’s stare. There was no point in pretending that either of them did anything around the other without making calculations anymore.
“I wish you hadn’t brought that up in front of Al,” Mary Frances said.
Gigi smiled a harmless smile; she had an amazing number of smiles at the ready, and Mary Frances had no idea how to defuse an anger so carefully played out, so costumed.
“We wouldn’t want to bother him,” Gigi said. “With our little bargains.”
“I don’t have any bargains with you. Or Tim.”
“Then I guess I have no idea what’s going on here. Because where I come from, that’s exactly how a girl gets a part.”
This moment will return to Mary Frances again and again. She’ll try to write it from distances near and years away, angles droll and poignant, but she’ll never get it to seem on paper the way it feels right now — the room filled with fuel, somebody’s fingers at the match.
Even when she sits some forty years later with her sister Norah at the round table in the kitchen of Last House, amongst the open notebooks and stapled drafts, the cartons of paper she’s made over the course of her career, she thinks to try it once again. There’s one more book here, if they can find it.
But she’s too old to start new work now; they’ll have to find it in what’s already been written. Her mind feels thinner, lacy; when her eyes get too bad to type, she reads. When they get too bad to read, she cooks. She is already thinking of the tomatoes ripening on her windowsill, how she’ll scoop them out and bake them with crumbs and anchovies and Parmesan cheese. She could eat tomatoes like that any time of day, and she would suggest lunch now, but Norah is determined to make progress. In the chair opposite, she holds her slender, knotted fingers in the spines of several books, flipping back and forth, her reading glasses low on her nose. Norah, always so steadfast.
The new book should be about places, they’ve decided: touchstones, lodestars, sanctuaries. Norah turns again to the story of Gigi’s kitchen, the Bakelite-handled comb, the sudden, frank address.
“There’s too much to explain,” she says, “about the three of you living there together. But it’s good writing, and familiar. It feels like something you would do.”
“It is something I would do. I did it.”
“But that’s what I mean, Dote. You’d hardly have to touch it.”
Mary Frances perches her chin on her folded hand. “Which version do you mean?”
Because in the notebooks, the drafts, she’s ended this evening several ways.
In her favorite version, she tells Gigi to fuck off. Conversationally, without a pause or second thought, in an even voice, she tells her to fuck off, and she leaves the soapy water in the sink, the dishes, whatever stew is still left in the tureen, brushing past Gigi’s shoulder in the doorway as she goes. She speaks that way now, in curt four-letter words she probably said only in private then. Oh, so useful — the fuck off.
Or in another, Al returns to the kitchen, the women still circling, their tempers flared as fans. Mary Frances looks at Gigi, finding a harmless smile of her own. “Tell him whatever you want,” she says, the bluff laid out to call.
Or she says nothing. She just walks out, leaves the house and all her things in it, this life already lost to her, a fact she should have known since the moment she set foot in Tim’s bedroom. She’s become someone else — two people, a thousand. She’s become every version of herself she’ll ever write about, all capital letters and abbreviations: MFK.
But in truth, this conversation never came to anything. Eventually, the silence in the kitchen grew too long to be supported. Gigi uncrossed her arms and turned back down the hall to her bedroom. Mary Frances looked toward the terrace. Al had been gone a long time for just taking out the trash.
She pulled out her notebook but couldn’t find a pen, not in her pocket or hooked to the neckline of her blouse, not on the countertop or in the drawer full of odds and ends. But in the foyer, beside the vase of chrysanthemums, there was Tim’s marbled Parker. She’d seen him with it a thousand times, the pen he used when he marked up her work.
It was heavy in her hand, the fine nib scratching at the page, formed to Tim’s script and now forced to hers. She tore the paper, tore it once again, and put her notebook down, finishing her thought on the palm of her hand, Tim’s blue ink across her skin now. Down the hall, she heard a door slam and her chest pounded suddenly, once, and then returned to its own tempo. What on earth was she doing here? What on earth had she done.
Anne fought with Edith. First, the letter came from Anne, how she was not a child or a wife any longer, how she wouldn’t listen to Edith at all but for the fact she and Sean needed her allowance to make their monthly bills. And then the letter from Norah, how Edith could hardly get out of bed she was so blurry, so low and upset. Anne was being a stubborn pill, but she always listened to Mary Frances, didn’t she, wouldn’t she? And then Norah wandered off into a long ramble about the trouble with studying Latin on an empty stomach. It seemed everyone expected intervention.
Mary Frances called out to the Ranch to try to soothe Edith’s nerves.
“Anne is proud of herself, Mother.”
Anne was living in a tiny apartment in the Russian Hill neighborhood, leaving Sean with a nurse during the day so she could take dictation for some president so-and-so, and this was not what Edith had raised her daughters to do. What was all that with the debut at the Hacienda Club, the weddings, college? Edith started crying. She was not a young woman anymore, and she was disappointed.
“Do you want me to come home?” Mary Frances said.
“I know you’re busy.”
“Not that busy. It’s all right, Mother.”
Al walked out of the kitchen and stood in the hall watching her. He let a handful of peanuts into his mouth. He did not try to hide the fact that he was listening.
“I could come home,” Mary Frances said. “Norah said you were a little blurry.”
Al shook his head, shut out the kitchen light, and headed down the hall to the bedroom. Mary Frances watched his shoulders disappear into the darkness.
* * *
A flurry of telegrams, and Al made plans to go north to Palo Alto on the weekend. His brother Herbert would meet him at the station, home from China on some kind of medical leave, dysentery, but maybe just another ploy to get out of trouble over there. Mary Frances folded white shirts into Al’s valise, knowing his mother would unpack them and notice how neat and how worn. The evening stretched long before his train, and she tried to stuff down her anxiety at being left behind.
“I will miss you,” she said.
“Really?” He turned to her, mildly surprised. “I thought you might be looking forward to some time alone.”
“An afternoon, perhaps. A trip to the Ranch. But much more than that, I start to lose my footing.”
“My dear,” Al said, squeezing her hand once. He turned back to his shaving kit, counting out enough spare blades for the time he’d be away.
In the living room, Gigi dealt a hand of solitaire.
“Gin?” Mary Frances asked.
“I’ll get it,” Al said, going to the bar.
The women looked at each other, and Mary Frances laughed. “I’ll deal,” she said, and held her hand out for the deck of cards.
She held a run and a set, but couldn’t remember which they were playing for. Some sort of violin whined from the radio; it had been too early for dinner, and now she just wanted to keep drinking. Even as their glasses were not empty, she asked if Gigi would like another.