The Arrivals: A Novel Page 3

  “You must have a fast metabolism.”

  “Really? Is that a thing?”

  “I heard it once. I don’t know if it’s true.”

  Lillian watched as Jane covered her bare arms with the spray. “You’re carrying really well,” she said.

  “Ugh. I feel enormous.”

  “Well, you don’t look it. You look fantastic.” Lillian paused. “I’m sorry about all that, back there.” She gestured toward the house. “I don’t blame you for walking out, frankly. I’d have done the same thing in your situation.”

  “Really?” said Jane. “Well, I’m embarrassed. That isn’t my typical behavior. I just can’t seem to keep my emotions in line anymore. And my BlackBerry is fine, by the way. A lot of fuss over nothing.”

  “Perfectly normal,” said Lillian. “Me too, with the nursing. I’m all over the place. Really, it takes almost nothing to set me off. And my mother—well, I can see why the two of you might rub each other the wrong way.” She couldn’t see Jane’s face clearly, but she sensed a shift in her posture. That had come out the wrong way, probably, what she’d just said.

  After a moment Jane said, “How are you with Tom’s parents?”

  Lillian slapped a mosquito in the air, and Jane slid the spray bottle back over to her. “We don’t see them much. They retired in Florida and took up golf. They come up twice a year, and they keep talking, ominously, about how we’ll have to take a trip to Disney World together sometime soon. But really they’re very low maintenance. Freakishly tanned, but low maintenance.”

  “Your mother and my mother are complete opposites,” said Jane. “They couldn’t be more different. It confuses me.”

  “Your mother is… what? A doctor or something, right?”

  “A therapist. Hard-driving, works a million hours a day, wouldn’t have it any other way. The phone used to ring at two, three in the morning all the time. That was normal. That’s what I grew up around. I think I can count the meals she cooked me on one hand.”

  “That’s funny,” said Lillian. “When I was young, in junior high school, I used to be so jealous of my friend Heather, because her mother worked, so she came home to an empty house. She got to do whatever she wanted until six o’ clock, when her parents got home. God, I envied her! It wasn’t until I had my own kids, really, that I appreciated what a blessing it was, having my mother around.”

  They sat there for a few moments and Lillian drank in the silence. Olivia had gone up with William to have her bath and Philip was taking his evening catnap. From a distance, low and musical, the sounds of a cricket came to her. She remembered how strange it seemed when she was a child, that one cricket could sound like thousands.

  “Well, don’t let it get to you,” she continued. “She wants everyone to be happy, that’s all. She just wants things to be happy and simple.”

  “I guess so,” said Jane. “As if that’s possible.”

  Lillian rose. “I think I should go in. Olivia is up way past her bedtime. She’s teetering. I should be there when she loses it.” Then, as she was about to push open the screen door, she said, “Tom cheated on me.”

  “What?”

  “That’s why I’m here. I left him. I ran away.”

  “You did?”

  She sat back down. “I don’t know why I just told you that. I wasn’t going to tell anyone. That was my plan, don’t tell anyone.” She felt a thud in her stomach.

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Jane. “I can keep a secret like nobody you’ve ever met.”

  “I don’t want my parents to know.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “Or Stephen. Not even Stephen.”

  “Cross my heart,” said Jane, and Lillian could see that she was actually doing it, was actually crossing her heart as if she were a second grader. Lillian liked that. She made a move to rise from the chair, but she paused and said, “What would you have done? In the same situation?”

  She expected some equivocation. She expected Jane to ask for the circumstances, the details. But Jane rose too, and it seemed like the cricket’s call became stronger and nearer as she stepped closer to Lillian and said, “I would do the exact same thing. I would leave, and I wouldn’t look back.”

  Sunday morning: church. Ginny knocked softly on Lillian’s door. From inside she heard a faint rustling. “Lillian?” she said. “Lillian? There’s church in forty-five minutes.”

  Nothing.

  “There’s a new priest. Father Colin. Visiting from Boston. Father Michael is in the hospital—”

  Lillian opened the door. Her eyes looked pink. There were smudges of purple underneath them; she hadn’t slept. She emerged from the room and closed the door behind her. “Father Michael?” she said. “He’s still alive?” Father Michael had given her First Communion. He had been ancient then. He had confirmed her; he had heard her first confession; then, seven years ago, on a September day with the sky positively wiped clean of clouds, he had married her and Tom. Thinking about that, her throat caught. She felt embarrassed for herself the way you feel embarrassed for a child who falls down while she’s running toward a playground. So much optimism, dashed.

  “Alive, yes. But ailing. This new priest, though, you’d like him. He’s young—oh, Lillian. You look positively ragged.”

  “Mom! Jesus, what do you expect? The baby was up four times last night—” She crossed her arms over her pajama top.

  “Oh,” said Ginny. “Well, I am sorry about that. But why don’t you get dressed? Come to church with us. You’ll feel better.”

  “I doubt it.” Lillian examined a fingernail. Her feet were bare, the toenails painted red. “Is Stephen going? Is Jane?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ginny. “I haven’t asked them yet. I asked you first. And Jane isn’t Catholic, so I doubt it.”

  “Well,” said Lillian. “I’m not going. Take Olivia, if you want.”

  From downstairs Olivia called, “Take me where?”

  “To church,” called Ginny. “Let’s get you dressed.”

  Lillian stood firm. “I am not going.” She opened the door to the bedroom and closed it softly behind her.

  In church, with Olivia sitting between her and William, Ginny experienced a feeling of serenity and optimism. Olivia was coloring resolutely on the children’s bulletin with a crayon the lady behind them had given her. Father Colin, in the pulpit, was giving the sermon, and though Ginny knew she should have been paying attention she really wasn’t; she was admiring his young, handsome face, and the way the light came in through the high square windows of the church, and the familiar faces of the congregation around her.

  But the feeling dissipated quickly when they got home. Lillian was pacing the den with Philip, who was crying. She was wearing the same pajamas she’d been wearing when they left. Stephen and Jane were reading the New York Times at the kitchen table. They must have been out to buy the paper, and its presence at the table made Ginny feel inferior, made all of Vermont, indeed, feel inferior. The kitchen, with pieces of Lillian’s breast pump scattered around it, seemed small and cluttered.

  Later that day Ginny escaped to the basement: laundry. The washer and dryer were new, front loading, cranberry red; an indulgence Ginny had allowed herself a few months ago when the old washing machine had sputtered, sighed, and succumbed finally and dramatically to old age.

  “My God,” Lillian had said the day before, coming down with a pile of Philip’s damp and sour-smelling onesies (he was a champion spitter). “Flashy, aren’t they?”

  And Ginny, having no patience for what, long ago, when Lillian was in high school, with a row of glittering studs in each ear and blue mascara turning her lovely eyelashes into something bright and ghastly, she had privately termed her oldest child’s superior attitude, had pressed her lips together, saying nothing.

  The washing machine and dryer were supremely efficient, with Energy Star labels to prove it; they had the incredible ability to figure out how large a load was without Ginn
y’s having to tell them a thing; they fit together handsomely in a way that the old washing machine and dryer, purchased long ago but at different times and from different manufacturers, never had done. They made her happy, and they turned laundry from a dreaded chore into a rather pleasurable task, and she was not—she was not— going to let Lillian take away that pleasure from her.

  Ginny moved a mass of damp towels into the dryer. She had a load of whites ready to fold. William’s whites, as it happened, had become rather gray; surely, she told him, it wouldn’t put them under financially to invest in a few new T-shirts or a couple of nice short-sleeved knits, the kind with collars and a logo of some sort over the pocket. But William was not much of a shopper and didn’t see the point in spending money on something that he only planned to dirty.

  And dirty them he would, to be sure. Since selling his landscaping company and moving into semiretirement William had begun to spend much of his time in their garden, which, over the decades, had been often neglected to allow William to focus on other people’s gardens and yards.

  “You know what they say!” he’d said cheerfully for much of their early married life, pulling at a weed in the bed of salvia that was crying out for a pruning. “The cobbler’s children have no shoes. Or is it the tailor’s children have no clothes?”

  And Ginny, grimly chopping carrots or mopping up spilled juice, had not answered.

  Ginny peeled off a dryer sheet from the stack and tossed it into the dryer, then for good measure another one. There had been a time in her life when laundry had been her greatest source of stress and anxiety, when she felt that she could have reduced her sleeping time to three hours a night and still would not get everything in the various hampers throughout the house sorted, carted to the basement, washed, folded, and put away before they all filled up again. Since the children had cleared out—really that was only five years ago, if you counted the postcollege stints when Rachel took over Lillian’s old room, preferring it, always, then and now, to her own, smaller room just down the hall—her attitude toward the task had changed considerably.

  Now Ginny found laundry to be calming and satisfying; she took care with stains and hand-washables; she carried the stacks of folded clothes up the stairs with a sense of vigor and purpose and put them away immediately.

  Yesterday, soon after Jane and Stephen arrived, and before the disastrous dinner, Jane had produced a small bag of laundry from her smart black rolling overnight bag and asked Ginny if she minded if she washed it while they were there.

  “Of course not,” said Ginny.

  “I hope that’s all right. The machine in our building—”

  “Broken again,” interjected Stephen. “It’s always broken.”

  “I don’t know how you people live that way, sharing a machine with strangers,” said Ginny, holding out her hand for the bag.

  “Oh, well. We don’t,” said Jane. “We usually send it out. To the wash and fold. But I didn’t know we were coming”—here Ginny looked pointedly at Stephen—“and I need a few things for the week, and there won’t be time when we get back.”

  “The wash and fold! Even worse,” said Ginny. “Other people touching your underwear. That doesn’t bother you?”

  “They don’t care, Mom,” said Stephen. He rubbed his hand in a circle on Jane’s back. “It’s New York City. Everything is anonymous.”

  “Anonymous,” said Ginny. She thought of Rachel, shacking up with that man who had broken her heart, poor Rachel with her career anxiety and her expensive, impractical shoes and handbags and her enormous rent. “Even so, I shouldn’t think I’d want anyone else washing my underwear.” She realized after she’d spoken how sharp her voice sounded; she’d meant her comments mostly as an entrée into conversation but found that suddenly she was committed to a point of view and felt she had to press on, arguing a topic on which she truly had no strong feelings. She did not, at the end of the day, care what Jane and Stephen did with their laundry.

  She kept her hand out insistently until finally Jane said, “Oh, heavens. I didn’t mean for you to do it! I was only asking if I could use your machine.”

  “Of course I knew what you meant,” said Ginny briskly, mildly irritated (she hadn’t, after all, been sure). “But I’ve got some going in tomorrow anyway. I’ll add yours to it.”

  This, precisely, was the effect that Jane had on Ginny, that she’d always had on her, from the sticky Friday evening in July eight years ago when Ginny, who had been canning tomatoes in the kitchen, and who was splattered with red tomato guts and little bits of seeds, had opened the door to find her only son standing on the porch, holding the hand of a woman with small sharp features and a simple, elegant haircut that even to Ginny’s untrained eye looked expensive and said, in an uncharacteristically giddy voice, “Mom? I’d like you to meet the girl I’m going to marry.”

  Jane set Ginny off balance, that day and for all days that followed.

  They said, didn’t they, that you never really lost your sons, as a mother. You lost your daughters, because they became absorbed into another man’s house, into a family of their own, but your sons always remained loyal to you. They said that every woman should have at least one son for precisely that reason.

  Now here was Jane, with her gold wristwatch, with her business degree and her lucrative career, with Stephen’s baby taking shape inside that bulging stomach on the tiny frame—here was Jane, making Ginny feel as though she’d broken one of the most important rules of motherhood, making her feel as though, despite all her precautions, despite her careful attempts at loving and granting privacy, she’d lost her son.

  She tried to call up the sensation of peace and harmony she’d felt during Mass. During Communion, Father Colin bent down to Olivia and had laid his hands on her head to bless her. Ginny could tell, from the startled way Olivia looked at the priest, that this was not a common occurrence. Most likely the child hadn’t been in a church since she’d been baptized, and here was Philip, three months old, and no sign of a baptism being planned for him.

  Now, in the basement, Ginny realized that she had forgotten to mix Jane’s laundry in with theirs; she’d have to put in a separate load after all. Perhaps she would have been better off letting Jane handle it herself. She opened the bag and unloaded its contents into a basket. Jane’s underwear wasn’t in there, that was true, but a few pairs of Stephen’s boxer shorts were. One pair was covered with little yellow ducks, and another had mocha-colored coffee cups scattered across it.

  Ducks! For a man of thirty-four. This was an absurdity. Surely Jane had bought those for Stephen. Ginny couldn’t imagine Stephen going to any sort of trouble to choose decorations for his boxer shorts. As a child, and later as a teenager, he had been the sort of boy to care very little what clothes he put on or how his hair was cut or combed; even in high school, when he had begun to attract the attention of a series of girls—all of them, it seemed to Ginny, similarly sprayed and glossed and poured into tight jeans with zippers at the ankle—he had done so despite (or maybe because of) his complete lack of fussiness or awareness of his appearance.

  With the machine comfortably chugging away she was free to go upstairs, but she didn’t want to. Stephen and Jane had retreated to the den with the rest of the paper. Lillian was upstairs nursing the baby—Lillian was always, it seemed, upstairs nursing the baby—and Olivia was out in the yard with William, playing an elaborate game involving a pink rubber ball and three princess dolls leaning against the pines. Occasionally Ginny could see two white sparkly-sneakered feet run past the rectangular basement window; she could also, in the pauses between the washing machine gurgles, make out William’s voice and Olivia’s high giggle.

  Really, William’s patience with his granddaughter was endless, commendable, even, Ginny sometimes admitted privately, enviable.

  She didn’t feel like joining them. She felt like sitting. So she sat for a moment in an old black rocker that had once lived, by turns, in each of the children’s rooms.
It was this chair in which she had read Goodnight Moon to each of them, in which she had comforted them and rocked each of them to sleep. Sitting there she could almost feel Rachel’s head nuzzle into her neck; she could smell the baby shampoo in Lillian’s soft duckling hair.

  Most of the basement was cluttered and chaotic, a microcosm of their family life, all its histories and warts and honors. There, for example, was the trophy Stephen had won in the state cross-country championships his senior year in high school, in which he took third. There was the cardboard box of jelly jars, some with lids and some without, that Ginny had begun saving for some sort of school project for Rachel and then, out of habit, had continued saving. There was the disorderly stack of mismatched curtains removed from numerous rooms in the house during assorted painting undertakings. Surely they would never be hung again; they were variously dirty or torn or hopelessly out of fashion—but still they remained.

  Now she let her eyes roam past the washing area to the shadows of the rest of the basement. It was appalling to her, when she really stopped to look around, how much stuff they had accumulated since they’d moved into the house thirty-five years prior, when she was pregnant with Stephen and Lillian was just a toddler. There was the elderly ten-speed, yellowy brown, that Lillian had taken to riding back and forth to friends’ houses the summer she was thirteen. There was the jumble of metal and cords with which William had once aspired to build a reading lamp for the den. There was the heap of paintings Rachel had created one humid August, shutting herself in an empty bay of the garage with an easel and canvases and white tubes of oil paint on which the names of the colors were written in a deep and foreboding black: burnt sienna, cobalt teal, Portland gray deep.

  Suddenly she felt a thrust of nostalgia so powerful it was like a pain: nostalgia for Rachel’s intensity that August; for Stephen’s running singlets, draped over the back of the chair in his room; for the sight of Lillian’s hair blowing out behind her as she careened into the driveway on her bike.

  She knew, of course, that she could appreciate these details, the textures of her children’s childhoods, only in hindsight. She remembered how annoying it had been to peel the singlets from the chair; she remembered how the damp from the sweat of them had warped the wood and how cross she’d been about that, throwing them all in an angry heap in the middle of Stephen’s room. She remembered how often Lillian, out on the bike, had been late for dinner that summer, and she remembered the frustration she had felt trying to remove oil paint from the fabric of one of the dining room chairs.