Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel

IN THE KITCHEN, JONI IS MASSAGING CHICKEN BREASTS. SHE USES a big heavy mallet but she doesn’t pound; she moves the smooth side of the tool across the meat like she’s ironing it. Her hair, that explosion of long golden curls, is corralled by a green-and-white bandanna.

“Chicken schnitzel,” Joni tells me, before I can ask.

“Still no letter,” I say, sliding into the booth.

“Maybe he’s taking his time, thinking of what to say.” Then, looking up, her blue eyes bright, she says, “You don’t think he’s on the way here, do you? You sent him that postcard with your new address, right? What if he just shows up?”

It’s not impossible that he would spontaneously appear, but I doubt it, and I tell her this.

“He might also be really busy with something,” she says. “Don’t take it personally.”

“Oh well,” I say, sounding more dejected than I mean to.

“Why don’t you go there and surprise him?”

“You know, I was just thinking of that. I want to take a road trip, anyway. And then I could sort of drop in on him. I’m really curious to see what he’s like now!”

Joni reaches for two eggs, cracks them at the same time, then starts beating them. “It’s so powerful, old flames. I once found a treasure trove of letters from a guy who was one of my boyfriends in high school, letters he’d written to me the first year I was in college. They were in a suitcase I kept doll clothes in when I was a little girl. I found it in the basement one day and brought it up, thinking I’d clean it out and give it to my daughter for her dolls. But when I opened it up, there were all these letters. I’d forgotten I’d put them in there.

“I brought them into the bedroom and sat on the bed to read a couple, and I ended up reading all of them. I remember it was a rainy day, lots of thunder, and I had the bedside light on and I was wearing a lilac-colored cardigan that had a hole in one elbow and I had an apron on over that—I’d just finished braiding egg bread and I was letting it rise—but I read those letters and time just fell away. I was back there with Pete Massotti, state wrestling champ. I was at Guffy’s Drive-in, sharing French fries with him; lying in the backseat of his car and making out with him; getting all dressed up to go to the prom with him and wondering if I should go all the way that night—which I did not—and, sweet boy that he was, he didn’t pressure me. When Erin came home from school, when the front door banged open, I looked up from one of those letters and it was like I was coming out from under anesthesia.

“I came downstairs, and Erin, she was seven then, said, ‘What happened?’ And I … I just didn’t know what to say. She stood there, staring at me. I must have looked like some kind of zombie. She asked if she could go next door and I said yes and then I went to check on the bread and it had over-risen but I put it in the oven anyway and then I went back upstairs and gathered up all those letters that were spread out on the bed and I … Oh God, I threw them away. Isn’t that awful? I threw them away. I wish I hadn’t done that. But they were so powerful, they scared me. I loved my husband, I was so happy with him, but I swear, if Pete had shown up right after I read those letters, I might have run away with him. In my apron and my sweater with a hole in it.”

She rolls a lemon on the counter to soften it, cradles it in her hand to sniff it, rolls it some more. I love watching Joni in the kitchen. For her, cooking is a practical sacrament. At work, she makes things whose names I can’t pronounce and wouldn’t know even if I could pronounce them. She showed me Ultramarine’s menu for the season and I told her it should come with a glossary. But here at home she makes simpler food, healthy comfort food, and it’s always delicious.

“Don’t you wish you could see him again?” I ask.

“Who? Pete?”

“Yeah.”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe. But I think maybe it was just one of those times when a memory picks you up and carries you off like dandelion fluff. I’ll tell you what I would like to do. I’d like to go on that road trip with you. That would be fun; I love road trips.”

“Come with me!”

She laughs. “I can’t leave work. I can never leave work! I’ll probably die at work. But you should go, definitely. Look, he contacted you first!”

“True. Do you want some help cooking? Got anything easy I could do?”

“You want to frost the cake?”

“We’re having cake?”

“Yeah, chocolate cake and cream cheese frosting. It’s a healthier version: whole wheat pastry flour, buttermilk, canola oil, brown sugar. The frosting isn’t so healthy, but it’s a birthday cake; you have to let up a little when it’s a birthday cake.”

“Whose birthday?”

“I picked this day to be Renie’s birthday. You have to surprise her; she says she doesn’t like you to make a fuss over her birthday, but she kind of does like it. So what we do is pick a random day every year, and voilà.”

“I didn’t know; I didn’t get her anything.”

“She doesn’t like presents. She really doesn’t, that part’s true. One of us always gets her a joke present, though; Lise is doing it this time. We do sing the birthday song and light the candles. You’ve got to sing the birthday song and light the candles, no matter what age you are. On my dad’s last birthday, we put eighty candles on the cake, and it melted all the frosting!” She dips a chicken breast into the flour, then into the egg, tenderly. It looks like a mother bathing her newborn.

“So where is the cake?”

“On the back porch, cooling. It should be ready to frost by now.”

I go outside to get it, put it on the kitchen table. It’s beautiful, nearly black, and it smells so good. “Where’s the frosting?”

“Not made yet. You can make it. Stick of butter, cake of cream cheese, a little salt, a little vanilla, powdered sugar; nothing to it.”

“How much vanilla? And salt? And powdered sugar?”

She stares at me, her hands on her hips. Then she says, “Okay, I’ll make it; you frost it.”

“Good idea.” I sit at the table and watch as Joni finishes preparing the chicken breasts.

“Did you always like to cook?” I ask.

“Oh, yeah. Always. My mom was really great about letting me help. I think part of the reason is that she really didn’t like cooking; it was a relief for her to hand it off. So as soon as I was able, I began making dinner for the family. I loved it. I really did. I still remember the first meal I ever made: tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches.

“Every day, I would come home from school and put on my yellow apron and forget all about April Hastings and Beverly Whitman. They were awful. They made my my life hell all four years of high school. One day they sat behind me on the bus and put gum in my hair, and it took my mom forever to get it out.

“But anyway, I found cooking to be relaxing. I still do, at least when I cook here. The restaurant is another thing.” She looks up from unwrapping the cake of cream cheese. “Honestly? I’ve never said this out loud, but sometimes I wonder how much longer I can take it.”

“Maybe we should ask the cards.”

She smiles. “Maybe we should.”


AT DINNER, I ANNOUNCE that I’m going to take a road trip. To see Dennis Halsinger. And that I’m pretty nervous about it.

“How did you meet him, anyway?” Joni asks.

I laugh. “You know how I met him? I met him because of a loaf of bread.”

“That’s a pretty good first line for a how-I-met-him story,” Renie says.

“I guess it is.”

“So … what about the bread?” Lise asks.

“You want to hear the story?” I ask, and they all three nod.

“Well, I was nineteen and living in my first apartment. It was this tiny studio apartment at the back of a house near the university, and the act of buying a whole loaf of bread seemed like a minor miracle.”

“I remember that feeling,” Joni says. “I used to get excited that I could pick out whatever Kleenex box I wanted. And that I could eat the same thing three nights in a row if I wanted.”

“You cooked in your first apartment?” Renie asks.

“Of course. Didn’t you?”

“No. What was in my refrigerator in my first apartment was cheap beer. And I kept my underwear in there, when it was hot out.”

“But what about the bread?” Joni says.

“Okay, so I’d been to the little grocery store not far from me, and I was walking past Dennis’s house when he came out the door and smiled at me. I stopped dead in my tracks and said, ‘You want some bread?’ ”

“Why?” Lise says.

“Why did I ask him that?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll bet he was handsome,” Joni says.

“He was really handsome. He was tall and well built and he had long blond hair and these blue eyes with a kind of far calm like a lot of hippies did back then. He was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a white cable-knit sweater and he just … he just …”

“Oh my God, you jumped his bones, right?” Renie says. “You were all about free love in those days, right?”

“We were, but I was still a virgin. I didn’t really want to be. I think if he’d asked me that day, I would have gone right to bed with him.”

“Different times,” Lise says.

“Different times,” I agree. “But anyway, when I offered him the bread, he said sure and he invited me into his house and we sat at his table and ate it. And you’ll appreciate this, Joni: he had homemade apple butter that we put on it.”

“He made apple butter?”

“No, his mother did. And it had the prettiest handmade label, a trio of apple trees, done in watercolors. I told him how much I liked the apple butter and he went to the cupboard and got a full jar and put it in my grocery bag. And then he said he had to run some errands, did I want a ride home, and I told him no, that I lived really close by and I told him where. Then he went outside and he climbed into his powder-blue Chevy stepside, and I—”

“I love those trucks!” Renie says.

“Well, I do, too, and when I saw that he drove one—”

“But when did you sleep with him?” Joni asks.

“Oh. Well. That was later. But something else really wonderful happened first. The morning after I met him, I came outside, and Dennis was standing in my backyard. He asked if I wanted to go with him to the March on Washington. And I said no.”

“You said no?” Renie asks, incredulous. “To the March on Washington? The ’sixty-nine moratorium to end the war in Vietnam?”

“I said no.”

“Over two hundred and fifty thousand people went to that march!” Renie says. “It was the largest antiwar protest in history!”

“I know,” I say.

I’m still embarrassed about not having gone. I had no good reason not to. If I’d gone, I would have earned an internal merit badge. I would have felt something, understood something, committed far earlier than I eventually did to my antiwar stance. I would have taken my part as a citizen of the world, I would have seen that I was a citizen of the world, a small part of an organic whole. But a vital part.

I might as well make a full confession. “Guess what else I said no to. Woodstock.”

“No!” Renie says.

“I would have said no to Woodstock, too,” Lise says.

“Not me,” Joni says. “I remember wanting to go, but I was too young. I asked my parents and they said no and then for a whole day I made plans with my friend Betsy Schuler to hitchhike there but we got too scared to do it. But why didn’t you go?”

I smile. “You know why? When some friends came to get me for a last-minute pilgrimage they were making, I said, ‘Isn’t it raining there?’ ”

The women laugh, but then it’s quiet, and I’d guess we’re all thinking about lost opportunities, great regrets.

“But Dennis …” Lise says.

“Oh. Right. So I said no to the march, where he was going the next day. But that evening, I came back from having seen a movie and I found a note on the table. Dennis had been there earlier; my roommate had let him in before she went off to spend the night with her boyfriend. The note said just three words: Cecilia. Tonight. Dennis.”

“Oh, I love it,” Joni says.

“Why?” Renie says, indignant. “It’s so presumptuous!”

“It’s romantic,” the rest of us say, in unison.

Lise’s cell rings and she holds up a hand. “Let me make sure it’s not the answering service—I’m on call.” She looks at the number, and her face hardens. “Not the service,” she says. “Go ahead.”

Her daughter? I think. But I go on with the story. “Okay. So … I read the note and I got ready. I bathed, put on clean clothes, brushed my hair. I waited a long time, and he didn’t come. Finally I gave up and went to bed, but fully clothed, just in case he did show up. I remember I put a record called ‘One Stormy Night’ on the stereo to fall asleep to, even though it was redundant; it was raining.

“I woke up to a knocking at the door. I answered and there was Dennis, and the night looked so big behind him. I had no idea what time it was. I opened the door for him to come in. But he gestured for me to come out, so I followed him around to the front of the house. He had a motorcycle with him; I was surprised I hadn’t heard it when he pulled up outside, but I hadn’t. I got on the back and we went riding. It had stopped raining, but the streets were still wet. Dennis dipped really low from side to side, and it wasn’t scary; it was like dancing. I rested my chin on his shoulder and looked at all the things we passed by and I watched his face in the side-view mirror and I kept thinking, He is so handsome.

“When he brought me home, I made us peppermint tea. We brought our mugs out to the back steps to watch the sun come up. The sky was all rose and apricot colors, and then it started turning blue, and the birds began to call. It felt like a privilege to be up at that hour. It was like church. We went inside and he lay in my bed next to me. Neither of us spoke. For a long time, we were still, letting ourselves get warm. Then he rose up on his elbow and looked down at me, and he gently stroked the hair off my forehead, then back from my temples. He kissed me once, a long, deep, and perfect kiss. And that was all we did. He lay down beside me and we didn’t say another word until he had to go. That kept it like a dream. Joan Baez has a line in a song: Speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there. Whenever I hear it, I think of that time with Dennis.”

I stop talking, realize I’ve told this latter part of the story without really being here; I’ve been elsewhere, lost in the reverie.

I look around the table, a little embarrassed.

Joni practically whispers, “But you didn’t have sex that time?”

“You know, when I told my best friend, Penny, that story I just told you, she said, ‘That was your first time.’ And I said no, that came later. And she said, ‘No, that was your first time.’ And she was right. Dennis and I made an unalterable connection that night. It was the first time I’d met someone so fully in the middle. For me, it was a transcendent moment, something that superseded anything physical.”

Joni says, “Whew! It’s a good thing you decided to go and see him. Because otherwise I would have had to take you. And I don’t have time to take you.”

“He’s your one,” Lise says, quietly.

And I nod, thinking I know exactly what she means. What I felt for Dennis right from the start was a pull like gravitation, a feeling that I already knew him in my bones, and that thus far in my life I had only been piddling around, waiting to find him. I know how this sounds. But it’s true as blue, as Dennis himself might say. Or would have, in those days.

“Your first,” Lise says. “There’s something so evocative about those words: the first.” She sits there for a minute, thinking, and then she says, “Where are you going, again?”

“Well, Dennis is in Cleveland, so I’m going there. But it’s a road trip, so I’m perfectly willing to roam around and go almost anywhere else, too.”

“Des Moines?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, I might come, then. I just might.”

“Who are you going to see?” Joni asks.

“If I go, I’ll tell you,” Lise says. Then, “So, Renie. What came in at work today?” Clearly she wants to change the subject.

Renie thinks for a moment, then says, “One from a woman whose son doesn’t like her boyfriend. One from yet another Bridezilla … Oh, and one from someone whining that the person who gives her massages keeps doing it wrong.”

Joni frowns. “Are you kidding?”

“I wish I were.”

“So what are you going to tell her?”

“I haven’t decided yet. But it will probably have something to do with suggesting she try hard manual labor rather than get massages.”

“What will you tell the woman whose son doesn’t like the boyfriend?”

“That’s a hard one. The boyfriend is why she got divorced. So how can she expect the kid to like him?”

“The mother has a right to her life,” Lise says.

“The kid has rights, too,” Renie fires back.

Joni has left the table, but now she comes in carrying the birthday cake, candles ablaze. “Guess what, Renie?”

“Oh, is it my birthday today?”

Joni starts singing the birthday song, and the rest of us join in.

“I want a huge piece of cake,” Renie says. “Do we have ice cream?”

“Frozen yogurt,” Joni says. “I’ll get it as soon as you open your gift.”

Renie rolls her eyes and accepts the large, gaily wrapped present. She opens it and says, “Oh thank God, it’s just what I needed.” She holds up a makeup kit, something obviously designed for little girls, all pink rhinestoned pots and brushes and tiny lipstick tubes. “ ‘Just Like Mommy,’ ” she reads. She stares at it, then drops it. She puts her elbows on the table, her face in her hands, and begins to cry.

“Renie?” Joni says, and Lise, seated next to her, puts her arm around her.

“What’s wrong?” Lise asks, gently, and Renie waves her hand: not now. After a moment, she puts her hands into her lap and says, “I have a daughter. Somewhere. When I was nineteen years old, I gave up a newborn baby. She’s twenty now. She was born in Winona on May first at four-nineteen in the morning. Seven pounds, twelve ounces. Twenty and one-half inches. Very dark, thick hair that already was over the tops of her ears. Mouth like a tiny little rosebud. One dimple in the left cheek, just one.

“When I was in labor, I refused painkillers because I wanted to feel everything. That was all I could give her, was to be fully present at the time of her birth. It hurt a lot. I held her for seven minutes after they stitched me up and then I never saw her again. I named her Camille. It was a secret—I knew her adoptive parents had named her Haley, but I named her Camille. That’s who I’d like to see. So. Let’s have that cake.”


THAT NIGHT, I TAKE RILEY out for a walk. He sniffs at the base of every tree trunk we pass and at various spots on the ground here and there for what seem to me to be unreasonable lengths of time, one paw held up high against his chest as though to lessen any possible contamination of the site with his own smell. Or perhaps it’s the dog equivalent of a person reflexively putting her hand to her chest, which often happens when people see something particularly interesting: witness visitors at museums, leaning forward to look at a thousand-year-old artifact in a glass case.

We walk three blocks, then four. It’s a nice temperature, the stars are out, and I want a little time to think. I wonder why I haven’t felt any regret about stopping work. Did it mean so little to me?

There is a lot of satisfaction, a lot of joy, that can come from doing something you love and that you’re good at, and I was good at my job. And yet it was nothing I ever expected to do.

In my late twenties, I took a job helping to care for a dying woman who was married to an extremely rich and powerful insurance magnate named Clement Burke. Every evening, he used to come and sit by his wife, and after she fell asleep for the night, he would talk to me until eleven o’clock, when it was time for me to go home. I was between jobs, casting about and beginning to feel a little desperate, looking for something that would stick. He was a man who had built his fortune on believing in things like Positive Mental Attitude, a man who, even in the face of his wife’s incurable illness, would tell her every night, Every day, in every way, you are getting better and better. At first I thought it was cruel, but it seemed to comfort her; and finally I decided that getting better didn’t necessarily mean getting cured, at least not to them. There was something that happened between the two of them when they said those words together, she lying pale in her blue nightie and holding on to his freckled hands, he with his face so close to hers and so full of love. There was something that happened that was beyond me, but that I understood anyway. It’s like the way you can read scientific principles that may be beyond you intellectually, but that your poet’s soul embraces.

After his wife died, Clem (as he asked me to call him) told me that he had very much appreciated the way I’d been able to rally his wife where others had failed. I got her to eat a bit, to get out of bed and sit by the window and look at the view, to allow a brief visit from this grandchild or that. Whenever she smiled, I felt a quick uptick inside myself: it felt good to provide her with whatever small pleasures I could.

Clem suggested that I become a motivational speaker, and that in fact he would be willing to hire me himself to do inspirational retreats with his sales force. At first it seemed a bizarre suggestion, but then the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea—why not try to help others be their best selves, why not turn what seemed to be a natural proclivity into a good-paying profession? I’d get to travel a lot, too, which I’d never been able to do before; those retreats were held in beautiful and interesting places. One time it might be a secluded abbey surrounded by layers of lush green, where you could hear the Divine Office chanted at specified hours throughout the day. The next time might be at the Arizona Biltmore or in some pink towering structure in Miami so close to the beach the ocean seemed to be in your room with you. The job took me to Alaska and Hawaii, and more than once to luxury hotels abroad: London, Paris, Rome, Madrid. After I had worked for Clem for ten years, he died, and I didn’t care to work for his son, who lacked the qualities that made me so admire his father. Using all I had learned about the tenderness and fragility and vagaries of the human spirit, the needs and frustrations that we all share, I started writing self-help books. Then I began doing speaking gigs as well, based on those books.

I worked because I needed to, of course, but I also worked because it was the way I communicated best. I had always had a shy love of people; they broke my heart a million times a day. But from the time I was a little kid, I was a loner. I never liked recess. My favorite teacher in elementary school let me stay in from it; I always wanted to stay in. It’s not that I’m antisocial; it’s that I care too much, and so I have a lot of fears. It takes a lot for me to really get close to someone in an honest and undefended way.

A couple of years ago, there was a day when I had a lot of work to do. But I ignored it and took the whole day off. I loved that day, the ease and deliberateness of it, the way it put me in touch with my species in a way that was not virtual. Instead of talking to an imaginary reader, I talked over the fence with my next-door neighbor about gardening. Later, I sat in the backyard and listened to the birds, watched the movement of the clouds and the progression of the line of shade that moved across the back deck. I put a CD on the stereo and listened to it the way I used to listen to music: eyes closed, attentive to the nuances in a song, the way that a tiny shift in volume or diction or timing or chord structure could enlarge the feeling, the meaning.

I went to a bookstore and browsed. I ended up buying Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, because I’d never read it. I went to a coffee shop and sat at a little table with my latte and read for an hour and then I closed the book and engaged in conversation with anyone who wanted to talk: a young woman with hair to her waist and wide brown eyes who had just moved here; a man in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank who made you forget his disability in the space of one minute; a four-year-old boy who climbed up in the chair opposite me and told me all about his toy truck while his grateful mother talked to her girlfriend. Stepping away from my routine for just that one day made me feel as if I’d taken a vacation to some idyllic place. But that “place” was in me: a kind of rare peace and a deepened appreciation for other people; the small kindnesses I witnessed, the way I remembered—because we do forget—that we’re all in this together.

But you know what usually happens when you take a vacation to a place that galvanizes you and makes you feel like you’re going to change your life. You come home and get right back into your old habits. Meanwhile, a slow fire burns.

A man comes down the sidewalk and for one breathless moment, I think it’s Dennis. It’s not; the man passes and I see that in fact he looks nothing at all like Dennis, or at least nothing like Dennis used to look. Who knows what he looks like now? Is it possible he’s bald, with a paunch?

Anyway. Here I am. Free from my job, and not living alone anymore. Thus far, the only disadvantage I’ve found to living with others is that you can’t mandate noise levels. No one in the house is abusive with noise, but even the television turned on to a reasonable level can interfere when you’re thinking. It’s a small price to pay; I’m happy with my decision.

Last night I sat on the floor of Joni’s bedroom with her, fancy cookbooks piled all over, helping her look for interesting appetizers she could adapt for use at Ultramarine. Those new cookbooks are all well and good, but the cookbooks she really likes are those from long ago. She buys them in antiques stores and at garage sales. She likes the notes the owners wrote in small, often perfect cursive: Doug loved! or Used for Mary’s 16th birthday or Add lemon jce—a bit too sweet. Many of those old recipes she uses when she cooks for us. One we all love is the red cabbage with cloves and apple in it.

I like being in Joni’s bedroom. It’s messy but comfortable. She has an antique bed with an off-white wrought-iron frame, and I gave her one of my quilts to put on it, a double wedding ring in dusty roses and pale greens and ivory. There’s a chandelier she bought on a trip to London, all curling leaves and flowers. She has a dresser that belonged to her grandmother, and on it are framed pictures of friends, relatives, and food: a blue plastic crate full of lemons, a platter piled high with pasta, a lattice-top pie nestled into a red-and-white-checked dish towel.

There is also a glass tray full of old perfume bottles, all empty; Joni doesn’t wear perfume because it interferes with her tasting things, but she likes the evocative shapes of the bottles. I’ve already decided that for her birthday, which I know is the fourth of July, I’m going to get her the most elegant atomizer I can find.

Lise’s room is as neat as Joni’s is messy. Clean lines, colors of black and white and gray, no froufrou, just the way she dresses—I’ve never seen any jewelry but pearl studs on Lise. She has miniblinds, halogen lamps, that sort of thing.

I’ve yet to be invited into Renie’s room. I have had a quick glance every now and then; she’s got one wall full of books and CDs, and she has some Asian influence going on in there: black lacquer furniture, an orange-red silk duvet cover. And my old chaise lounge, which is neutral enough not to look out of place.

I turn around and start for home. I think we were all greatly surprised at what Renie revealed at dinner. She wouldn’t say anything more about it then, but I want very much to talk to her, if she’s willing. There’s a story I could tell her.

When I get back to the house, I stand for a while on the sidewalk in front of it. Lights are on, the windows are deep yellow squares. I see Lise moving about inside. I know how the house will smell when I come in, I know where to hang Riley’s leash and that I should check his water dish. I know that if my roommates are talking about something, they’ll catch me up on whatever it is. I am comfortable here, I belong, I am home. When I was a little girl, I used to make a basket of my hands to hold a feeling of joy that came upon me, then flatten my hands against my chest, as if to make it part of me. Not understanding that it already was.


“WHERE’S RENIE?” I ASK, when I come into the living room.

Joni, watching something on television with Lise, points to the upstairs. I head up there, thinking I’ll knock on Renie’s door with a Penelope Lively novel that she saw me with and expressed interest in reading after I was done.

I get the book from my bedroom, knock on her door. “Renie?” I say softly, into the crack. I suppose it’s possible that she’s sleeping, early as it is.

But no. I hear, “What.”

“I’ve got that book you wanted to read.”

“Okay. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

“Do you mind if I come in?”

Nothing.

But then the door opens, and Renie says, “What do you want?”

“Would you like to talk?”

“About …?”

“About what you said at dinner. About your daughter. I’d like to tell you something.”

She sighs, puts a hand on her hip. Then she opens the door wider and I go in.

She’s been working. Her laptop is on, the cursor flashing. She puts the lid down on it and gestures toward the chaise lounge. The walls are painted the most interesting color; it’s nothing I could put a name to. Green? Gray? A strange shade of blue? There’s a bedside lamp made with rice paper, a black lacquer bowl holding tiny scrolls of paper tied with red ribbon. I can sense Renie’s nervousness as I look around, and so I sit down, push a pillow made from a Japanese fabric in colors of green, orange, and cream up against my middle. Thus defended, I start my story.

“When I was in college, I had a friend named Patty, who got pregnant by some guy who wanted nothing more to do with her when he found out she was carrying his child. He told her to get an abortion but not to expect him to pay for it.”

If a nod can be bitter, Renie’s is.

“She didn’t want to get an abortion. She was pro-choice, and her choice was to go ahead and have the child and give it up for adoption. So she stayed in school and finished out the year, and then that summer she gave birth.

“We didn’t care, her friends and I. I mean, we cared about her, but the idea of having a baby was so foreign to our lives at the time, we just … We didn’t care. We felt bad for her that she got pregnant and had to go through all that, but what we figured was that she’d deliver the baby, give it up, and that would be that. Clean slate.

“I remember going to her apartment with another friend to see her, about two weeks after she delivered. And she was okay, she didn’t seem particularly devastated, as we’d feared she might—look what had happened to her body!—but all she wanted to talk about was that baby, about having the baby, what it felt like to have that child in her arms. We didn’t care. I think we both thought, What’s the big deal? That baby is out of your life. Move on. Come on out with us tonight, we’re going to the Triangle Bar to hear some music, come on.

“We lost touch with her soon afterward. Not because we stopped trying to see her, but because she didn’t want to see us. It took a little growing up for me to understand why, but by then it was too late. I’m still haunted by the memory of her standing in her kitchen, trying to tell us what had happened to her, what she’d had and what she’d lost. Trying to tell us that it was not over for her, it would never be over.”

Renie is staring into her lap; I can’t tell what her expression is.

“So … I don’t know. I just wanted to tell you that. I don’t have children, I haven’t been pregnant, but I think I understand, at least a lot more than I used to, what it might be like for you to have had to carry this. And I don’t know if you were serious about trying to see her, but maybe you should.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

“I’ll bet you could find her.”

“Yeah, maybe.” She looks up. “I have some work to do.”

I stand. “Okay.”

“But thanks, Cece. Really.”

“Sure.”

I go back downstairs and sit on the sofa. A commercial comes on, and Joni gets up. “I’m getting more water. Anyone want anything?” Then, quietly, “Is she okay?”

I nod. Then I sit down and watch the black-and-white movie, where a man is pinning a corsage onto a woman wearing a dress that looks like it’s made of crushed stars. After he does, the couple look deeply into each other’s eyes.

Joni sighs loudly.

“I agree,” Lise says. “All the blatant sex these days isn’t sexy at all. Give me a guy pinning a corsage onto my shoulder just above my breast, and then lingering there just for a moment.”

“Give me a guy brushing my hand,” I say.

Joni says, “Give me a guy who lights two cigarettes and hands me one.” She thinks for a minute, then says, “Wait. Never mind. That would make me burst out laughing. Plus I don’t smoke.”


I’M SOUND ASLEEP when I’m awakened by a kind of bumping at my bedroom door. I open it, expecting to find Riley, feeling a little smug that he now sometimes wants to spend his nights with me rather than Lise, but it’s Renie, standing there. “Sorry to wake you up. Can I come in?”

“Of course,” I say and step aside. She comes in and does a slow turn around, taking in the Friendship quilt on the bed, the huge desk, the pillows I’ve put on the window seat, the blue velvet club chairs sitting on either side of a round table. I point to one of the chairs, and she sits down. I sit opposite her.

“Your room turned out nice,” she says, speaking quietly, nearly whispering.

“Thanks,” I whisper back.

“It’s really late.”

“That’s okay.”

Renie takes in a breath, clasps her hands together. “So, I just wanted to tell you something about … about Camille, how she happened.”

I nod.

“Did you ever read Stendhal? Memoirs of an Egotist?”

I must look puzzled, because she adds, “French writer, someone more interested in people’s insides than in their outsides; you’d probably love him. He said, It only needs a small quantity of hope to beget love. And he is said to have made an ass of himself in love. He was apparently besotted by a woman who was really beautiful and charismatic. She was also some general’s wife. Stendhal followed her all over the place, sometimes wearing disguises. He’d try to get invited to parties where she was going to be. You’d think she’d have had him arrested or at least told him to shove off, but no. She let him come and see her, but only twice a month. He would come and sit in her parlor and die of longing. That anguish is said to have contributed to his art.

“My story is I also fell in love with a woman who was pretty much unobtainable. Her name was Sharon Hart. She let me hang around her, though, she let me hang around her a lot, she asked me to hang around with her. I felt like she was gay but not quite out. She dated so many guys, she went through them like Kleenex, but she flirted with me big-time. She’d touch my hand, or my hair, she’d lean in overly close to tell me something in a noisy place. Once she brushed a crumb off my face, and she took way too long to do it.

“There was a time when we went camping together, and a thunderstorm came late at night. We were in our tent, side by side in sleeping bags, and there was this really loud crack of thunder. She let out a little yelp and grabbed me. I thought it was an excuse, you know, and I … Well, I tried to kiss her. But she pushed me away, and then she apologized. And rather than giving up on her, I thought the fact that she apologized meant she just wasn’t ready. So I continued to hang out with her, I continued to love her and hope that soon she’d be able to admit to a sexual orientation that seemed obvious to me.

“But then she began dating this jock, Ed Michaels, big football jock. She began spending more and more time with him and it just drove me nuts. Ed liked me. We were in Introduction to Sociology together, and he thought I was really funny and smart. He didn’t know I was gay, and I didn’t tell him, I let him flirt with me. But then when Sharon started getting closer to him, I thought, Okay. Watch this, and I went over to Ed’s apartment one night and got drunk with him and then went to bed with him. It wasn’t easy for me to do that. He was the only man I’d ever been with and the feel of his body was just abhorrent to me, especially his …”

We both smile.

“Anyway, I wanted to show her that he was no prize; that he would betray her, just like that. She got the message and she broke up with him. And I got pregnant. What need had I for birth control? Ed said he’d pull out and he did, but …

“Anyway. Not only did Sharon break up with Ed but she broke up with me. I lost her. Then I lost the baby, I gave her up, and I never wanted to think about that kid again. Never wanted to think about any of it. Only … I do think about it. A lot. Especially in May.”

She looks up at me. “You know, I have an eight-year-old niece named Madeline who likes to write stories. She wrote one about herself and her friend Lucy and how they were offered a ride in ‘Mr. Excellent’s Flying Machine.’ Lucy was afraid to get in but Madeline did, and she got to fly to the moon. She ends the story by saying, ‘I got in and Lucy didn’t and now little birds are pecking at her heart.’ Ever since I gave my baby up, little birds have pecked at my heart. So when I got that dumb makeup kit for a birthday present …”

She sighs. “I never told anyone the whole story.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

“I don’t know if I am or not. But as long as I’m at it, you want to know something else?”

“Sure.”

“I know where she is.”

“Who?”

“Camille. Haley.”

I lean forward in my chair. “Where?”

Renie smiles. “Winona, Minnesota. She never left. I found her current address. I Googled the place where she lives. It’s an apartment building right near Winona State. I would guess she’s a student there.”

“So … do you think you should contact her?”

“When you came to my room, I was writing her a letter.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know if I’ll send it. I just wanted to get some things off my chest. But maybe I will finish writing it.” She stands. “Thanks for listening.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

“Don’t tell the others I found her.”

“I won’t.”

“For now, I’ll just say I’m going on the trip with you. Then we’ll see what happens.”

“What’s her last name?” I ask.

“Redmund. Haley Redmund.”

Hearing Haley’s name makes her suddenly so much realer to me. I see her as a long-haired, straight-mouthed girl, cautious in her dealings with strangers. I go over to Renie and hug her. She’s stiff as an ironing board, but she stands still and takes it.

“Good night,” she says, pulling away.

“Good night.”

She closes my door softly, and I go back to bed, but I can’t sleep. In the refrigerator is that cake. I put on my robe, tiptoe down the hall. As I pass Renie’s door, she opens it. “I forgot to get the Lively book from you,” she whispers. And then, “Where are you going?”

“Cake.”

“Right behind you,” she says.