Greer looked so terrible, all shiny and messy and horrified. A good friend would say yes, yes, I forgive you, and the two women could embrace in the way that women did. Women, who could be so easy with each other. Women, who were physical and loved each other, even when they were not lovers and never would be. There had always been an agreement, unsaid but binding, that the two friends would look out for each other. On the stupid reality TV show that Zee and Noelle sometimes watched—the one where the rich women from different gated communities spent a year living together in a Conestoga wagon—whenever the women weren’t fighting and clawing at one another, they said to one another, “I’ve got your back.” Even those women, those ludicrous women pumped with collagen and money, had one another’s backs, but Greer didn’t have hers.
Zee moved away to the far end of the couch, experiencing her own small trauma. “When Faith showed more interest in you in the ladies’ room, I felt a pang,” Zee said. “I did! Because I’d been this little activist before college, and you were basically home reading books and having sex with your boyfriend. Which is fine; it’s just different. But I wanted to help you. You’d had this bad experience at that frat party. And you were shy. But the meek shall inherit the earth, right? For someone who was always so shy, Greer, and who couldn’t ask for what she needed, in fact you’ve asked for everything you needed. You basically went in and got what you wanted, and made yourself known. You raised your hand that night in the Ryland Chapel. You raised it faster than me, and you got your question answered. And then you called Faith on the phone, and finally got a job with her. And you even gave her a frying pan. That took chutzpah. And, of course, you kept my letter from her. These are not classic shy-person actions, Greer, I’m just saying. They’re something else. Sneaky, maybe.” Coldly, Zee added, “You really know how to act in the face of power. I’ve never put that together before, but it’s true.” She stopped and looked straight at Greer. “You know, I didn’t need to work at your foundation,” she said. “I found what I like to do. You went to work for Faith Frank, the role model, the feminist, and I didn’t. But you know what? I think there are two kinds of feminists. The famous ones, and everyone else. Everyone else, all the people who just quietly go and do what they’re supposed to do, and don’t get a lot of credit for it, and don’t have someone out there every day telling them they’re doing an awesome job.
“I don’t have a mentor, Greer, and I’ve never had one. But I’ve had different women in my life who I like to be around, and who seem to like me. I don’t need their approval. I don’t need their permission. Maybe I should’ve had a little more of this; it might have helped. But I didn’t, and well, okay, fine, you’re right, I’m sure I would’ve hated it there, and I don’t think I would have stayed very long. But I would’ve liked the chance to find out.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Greer.
“You want to know how often I think about the fact that I didn’t get to work for Faith Frank? Almost never.”
“Really?” Greer seemed impossibly grateful to hear this.
“Yes.”
“Will you forgive me?” Greer asked.
“I need time,” Zee said.
ELEVEN
She wasn’t sure why she decided to call home late that night while waiting for the plane in Chicago. But it was just too lonely to sit there in O’Hare with CNN blabbing overhead, waiting another long hour for the flight. Her mother answered. “Are you all right?” Laurel said after the flat swap of hellos.
“Why are you asking?”
“Something in your voice.”
“Actually, not really,” Greer said. “I’m in the airport in Chicago. I was supposed to stay over with Zee but I’m not. I’m flying to New York tonight, but then I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Her voice split.
“Come home,” her mother said.
* * *
? ? ?
The Macopee Public Library was quiet, and though a library was supposed to be quiet, this one had the feel of a failing restaurant that would soon go out of business. It was dim there in the light of day, and a high school girl drowsed at the checkout desk, her services not really needed. But in the back was a room called the Emmanuel Gilland Children’s Room—whoever Emmanuel Gilland had been. It was the place where Greer had found A Wrinkle in Time as a girl, and had sat at a blond-wood table absorbed in its fully realized world. Scattered nearby were a couple of vinyl beanbag chairs leaking synthetic beans. On this day when Greer, lost and uprooted, entered the room behind her mother, who was in full clown regalia—the nose and wig and dotted outfit and size 90 shoes—she could hear sounds of children and parents who were already there waiting for the show.
Greer had been in breath-holding mode; her mother had asked her there today because the show happened to be right in town. And Greer, who didn’t even understand why she’d said okay when her mother told her to come home for a few days of recovery—home to the place that had been such a lousy home much of the time—had also said okay, agreeing to sit and watch Laurel perform as a library clown. But she felt uneasy about it, worrying that her mother would look failed.
The children arrayed themselves on the carpet and Greer sat in the corner on one of the beanbag chairs, which held her insecurely. In the dancing-mote light from the tall windows, Laurel jumped into place before her audience and said, “Good afternoon, ladies and germs.” Greer looked away as quickly as she could, letting the cornball joke roll past in the air, just another tumbling dust mote. But amazingly, there was laughter.
“You said germs, clown!” cried a boy no older than four. “Didn’t you mean gentlemen?”
“That’s what I said!” cried Laurel. “Ladies and germs!”
“YOU SAID IT AGAIN!” the boy screamed, and now others piped in too, all of them shouting at Greer’s clown mother, who wore an innocent expression, and who was rising to the occasion in a way that was unfamiliar to Greer.
But it wasn’t just that Laurel was apparently a good performer. After the show ended—a well-paced hour that used water squirts and expanding wands and deliberately ham-handed juggling and even a pratfall on the carpet, and then, finally, a “reading” from a wordless picture book called The Farmer and the Clown—the children stayed to meet the library clown. Greer watched as her mother took a boy and girl on her lap at the same time.
“I would like to be a clown when I grow up,” said the girl.
“I would too,” said the boy dreamily, throwing his head back and closing his eyes. “I’ll be called . . . Clowny the Clown.”
How was it, really, that Greer had never known that children liked her mother’s act? That they looked up to the library clown, and that she meant something to them? Greer felt only remorse now; it choked and overtook her.
“Mom, you were great,” she said when they got back into the car on the street outside. “I had no idea what your act was like.”
“Well, now you do,” her mother said cautiously, putting the key in the ignition and starting the car. “No harm, no foul.”
“No, but really, it was excellent,” Greer said. Plaintively, in the gray afternoon, she asked, “Why didn’t I know that?”
“What, that I could juggle? Or use a squirt bottle?”
“No, not that.” And then, feeling brutally sorry for herself, she asked, “How come you never did your act for me when I was little?”
Her mother turned off the engine. Her nose and wig and outfit were stuffed in a bag on the backseat; only the collar remained, half in view under the top of her coat. “I didn’t think you’d like it,” she finally said. “You were quiet but so serious.” She stopped.
“Go on,” Greer said.
“Dad and I always felt we should stand back and let you do what you did. And that was even more true when you got together with Cory.” His name was shocking spoken here without warning. “I used to think of you as twin rocket ships,” Laurel said. “Remember that?”
Greer did. She didn’t want to talk about Cory with her mother. So she said, “Why didn’t you and Dad ever find something you really wanted to do? Something you could throw yourselves into?”