I nodded, for his sake. But I was a grown woman and knew any grown woman was crammed full of secrets — you couldn’t open her like a medicine cabinet and read the indications.
“She would have,” he said. “She wouldn’t have let me talk her out of it, but she would have told me. She believed in putting all her eggs in one basket. I was her basket.” He rested his chin in one hand. “That’s one thing I used to be.”
We heard somebody coming up the gravel path.
“Hello,” Caroline called. Then she knocked. Then she said, “Hello?”
“Yes?” said James.
She stuck her head in. “I’ve run away,” she said. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” said James. “You didn’t run away far.”
“Actually, Uncle Oscar’s giving Alice her bath. Then it’s dinnertime. Peggy, you’re more than welcome.”
“No thank you,” I said. I was fairly dizzy with the afternoon’s conversation, wanted to get home, lie down, think about it.
Caroline sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. Her skirt draped between her knees, a flowered V. “Don’t let me interrupt you. Go ahead with whatever you were talking about.”
“I was just practicing card tricks on Peggy,” said James.
“Oh,” said Caroline. “That’s all?”
“That’s it,” said James.
“Were you fooled, Peggy?”
“Utterly.”
It was clear that Caroline wanted us to talk more. Clear, too, that Caroline was somebody that James would keep secrets from — that he would, in fact, withhold things that would not ordinarily be secrets, just for the pleasure of withholding them. This was because Caroline so desperately wanted to hear them. You never tell your secrets to people who want to know, I understood that much.
“Nice afternoon?” Caroline asked me.
“Yes,” I said. Impossible not to follow James’s terse lead.
Caroline let her head fall back to the stucco wall and stamped one foot. “You are the two most reserved people I ever met.”
“Reserved?” James said.
“Like a book,” I said. “A best seller waiting for the people who have asked for it.”
“Like a table in a restaurant,” said James.
“Like a sauce.”
“A sauce?”
“Yes,” I said. “When you cook, sometimes you have to reserve some of the sauce for the end of the recipe.”
“No,” said Caroline. “Not like any of that. Reserved. And I don’t think it’s such a great thing, if you want to know the truth.”
“Reserved,” I said. “Like the best table in the restaurant.”
Caroline didn’t think that was funny. “But the table is reserved by somebody, for somebody. The sauce is reserved by the cook, for the meat. The book is reserved by Peggy, for someone she knows wants to read it. The table doesn’t reserve itself, just in case the party of its dreams comes in, right? You guys, you’re holding on to yourselves, for — well, who for?”
“Who for what?” James said quietly.
“Who are you saving yourselves for?”
“Myself,” said James.
“Well, that’s about as ridiculous as the book holding on to itself for itself. What’s the point? Here’s what I think: you can’t save yourself. Somebody has to do it for you. I don’t mean rescue, I mean: hold on. I mean: reserve. What if you save yourself for marriage—”
James laughed and looked down.
“—yeah, save yourself in all the different ways, you don’t tell anybody your secrets and you don’t sleep with anybody, and then you don’t get married. What happens then?”
“Not everybody has to get married,” I said.
“Of course not!” said Caroline. “You’re not listening! If you save yourself for marriage, and then you don’t get married, then what you saved isn’t worth anything. It’s like Confederate money. You’re bankrupt, you have nowhere to spend it.”
“Someone,” said James. We waited for the rest of the sentence, but that was it. Finally, he elaborated. “I’m saving myself for Someone.”
“But who?” said Caroline.
James didn’t answer.
Caroline was right, and she was wrong. People are not tables in a nightclub up by the entertainment. Tables empty, they start fresh several times a night, seven nights a week, a clean cloth snapped across and fresh candles stuck in holders. If only one party could be seated at a table for years and years, well, the maître d’ might have different thoughts. He might keep that best table, reset it every day, waiting for Greta Garbo, the president, his future unmet undreamed-of inlaws.
And me? Now I understood. I was saving myself for James. Myself meant only my secrets. Any other commodities (my youth, my virginity, any brand of innocence or hope) I’d years ago lost, a gambler who didn’t understand the game. My secrets were all I’d saved, all these years, the only thing I hadn’t and wouldn’t cash in on just anyone. If you poured out yourself to anyone who might for a moment listen, on just a usual day — it struck me as cheap, the way some girls’ mothers used the word. I was saving what was left of myself for James.
That summer, Mrs. Sweatt died all over again, to nobody’s surprise. She’d died in January and stayed in limbo through Easter, into June, but still, death and resurrection didn’t seem so farfetched. Not that Mrs. Sweatt rose from the dead. She didn’t. Her death was just brand-new in a way it never had been. I thought of James and his theories of Heaven. Mrs. Sweatt, who died twice, was born again, converted again into the religion of the dead.
Dying seemed a shame. Still, if we’d picked a time for her to die, we’d done a good job. The town was never so alive as in late June, early July, when summer and tourists still seemed like a pretty good idea, what with more money, fair weather, new faces — it wasn’t till August that you wondered what sort of blockhead had dreamed summer up. Years hence, when James thought of his mother — those annual remembrances when mourning and regret become what you do for the day, out of loving habit — the weather would be sweet, the shop windows in bloom, the breeze off the bay full of kind meaning.
Suddenly, after having gone underground, to Iowa, to New Hampshire, wherever it was we thought she’d gone, Mrs. Sweatt was back. She was everywhere. Not just in stories, though there were plenty of those. Waltzing at her wedding with all the guests, because her new husband, after six cocktails, insisted on doing the Alley Cat using only his a priori knowledge of the dance, angling on the dance floor peppy or slow depending on the music, while Mrs. Sweatt wanted to be hospitable; besides, she’d taken lessons. Reading her True Love magazines and crying at those unfortunate women, more unfortunate than her because now the whole country knew their heartaches. Cooking her midwestern cuisine, which meant opening a can of something and pouring it over something else: meat cooked in Coca-Cola, cake mix sweetened with half a can of frozen lemonade, apples poached in red soda pop. “Use cherry, not strawberry,” she’d advised Caroline. “Strawberry is too bright.”
She showed up in photographs, too, mined from albums and boxes and envelopes, now set on the mantelpiece and tucked into mirror frames. It didn’t seem like she’d ever shied away from the camera. Her high school graduation portrait as Caroline’s bridesmaid, six years old on the boulevard at some Western amusement park. And in James’s pictures, too, where she was prettiest. You could tell which ones he’d taken; in them she was smiling at her son, not the camera, and the fond reproach on her face was unmistakable.