“Everyone puts their feet on the dash. I don’t know how that is news to him,” said Gwen.
“I thought he was going to leave you by the side of the road. His ears turned purple.”
“It was a spectacular freak-out.” Gwen swept one hand wide in front of her as if gesturing to the word “freak-out” spelled in glittering lights.
“Dude, he was about to turn green and burst out of his clothes. Unless he’s now selling plutonium instead of media strategies, something’s up.”
“Maybe he’s selling plutonium strategies.”
“See, you are totally ready to be a parent. You’re thinking outside the box.” Danny patted her shoulder.
Not getting any younger. My youth is closing, she thought, and that great expanse of middle age is opening its door. She saw an illustrious theater with gilded chairs and red plush curtains, filled with the quiet rustling of programs and the adjusting of jackets and purses. The wink of opera glasses being opened and lights that seem perpetually dimming, something always about to start, but never does. This was what Gwen saw through those doors, this stuffy world, this interminable waiting.
“I’m not going to spend my life sitting in a carpool line.” Always waiting, always keeping up appearances. “No fucking way.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than that,” said Danny.
“You’re right. It’s a fabulous parade of bodily fluids and sleep deprivation.”
“You know, if you spew this much negativity the kid is going to grow a tail or hooves. All I’m saying is keeping secrets is a bad idea; that’s how people get tumors. You’ll end up with a Minotaur baby.”
“I thought about telling her, it’s just . . .”
Four weeks ago, three days before Libby left for the house, Gwen and Libby had had dinner at Gwen’s place in Cambridge. Gwen had wanted to tell her then.
“Your doorbell isn’t working,” Libby had said as she peeked around the corner of Gwen’s house to find Gwen watering the garden dressed in a half-slip, bra, and wellies. “Christ, you’re gonna give Mr. Ciccone a heart attack.”
Gwen’s outfit was partly for practical purposes and partly because this was what summer looked like to her. For the last eight years she had lived in the same first-floor apartment of a triple-decker. She usually paid Mr. Ciccone her rent on time, though she had bounced two checks, only because he cashed the checks too soon, too enamored of her to suppose she might not have the funds to cover it. He made those checks their private joke, happy to have something to share with her, since he couldn’t rib her in any other capacity. He didn’t care about the shavings of paper glued to the herringbone floors, or the charcoal fingerprints all over the front door. He spontaneously upgraded her appliances and fixed dripping faucets. The last time she came to Maine she returned to find he’d retiled her bathroom.
“If you aren’t careful, he’s going to break in and mosaic your name into the kitchen floor, or maybe he’ll just slip between the sheets and wait for you,” said Libby. “Betcha he’s a rose man.” She pantomimed clenching a flower between her teeth. Here was Gwen’s chance: “I’m pregnant with his baby, ha-ha, just kidding, about Mr. Ciccone, not the baby.” But she just overwatered the peonies instead.
“Men are pathetically dependent on flowers,” said Libby, “and women, on letters.”
Gwen thought of a letter she had sent nine years earlier; she had drawn doors all over the envelope, all shut with dark, gaping keyholes. But one small door, in the lower right corner on the back, was open just a crack. There had been no reply. Maybe I would’ve had more luck with flowers. Maybe I shouldn’t have left in the first place.
Gwen pointed a dirt-rimmed finger at a bottle of white wine and an empty glass on the porch.
“Where’s yours?” Libby asked.
“I’m working,” said Gwen.
Libby was quickly distracted, and they moved inside, dishing out dinner in the kitchen.
The two of them ate on the porch, plates balanced on their knees. Gwen complained about the ivy creeping over the neighbor’s fence, about the morning glories that looked so sad and deflated in the shade of the cedar tree. All spring she had wanted to attack the garden, restore and revitalize it as a way to thank Mr. Ciccone, as a way to show him he would never get anything else from her.
“We could move the morning glories to the south side, over there past the fall of the shadow.” Libby pointed with her fork to the far corner of the garden. “Or you could chuck them completely and put herbs there, and maybe ferns under the cedar here.”
Gwen put down her plate and went and stood in the bramble of flowers and weeds, demonstrating the sun’s daily path with a sweep of her arms. Between the main course and dessert they managed to rip out half the garden. They stood in the turned soil, detached roots worming sadly toward the sky, discussing the risks of moving peonies and the life span of the skeletal rhododendron. Back on the porch they worked up hasty, dirt-smeared sketches while they ate cold, store-bought pie. They envisioned the woolly yard as a garden of wildflowers and herbs, with cascades and falls and sprays and mountains of hairy blossoms, of petalled eyes, of spiny-leafed monsters. It would have the look of an abandoned English garden, the yard of some doddering vicar. They had done the same thing to Libby’s dining room eight years before (her drop ceiling dismantled during dinner), when Gwen couldn’t manage to tell Libby she was getting a divorce.
Even though this house was full of projects to use as diversions, it would be hard to hide from Libby for a week.
“Libby is going to kill you if you keep it from her much longer. Better tell her before el bebe starts to show,” said Danny, poking her belly. She knew Danny was confused as to the pace of things.
Just then in Danny’s face she saw their father, whose smirk she knew was in all of them. Would her child smirk? Was this her only chance of having a child who would see this house, who would run barefoot down the steps, hold sparklers on the dock, eat lobster and emphatically state that, when pouring the liquid off, “Ewww gross, it’s throwing up,” as Libby had? What did you do with jars of murky watercolor rinse? With palette knives and tubs of glue? How were you supposed to wear a papoose when on your hands and knees uprooting ivy leaping over your neighbor’s fence? Her house was a beautiful poisonous garden, something from the illustrated conservatory of Charles Addams, flowers made of razor blades and giant insecticide pumps full of aerosol glue, beautifully illustrated seed packages full of toxic pigments. Contents under pressure. Combustible. Maybe she could raise a dismembered hand, but that was it, nothing whole.