‘What does that mean?’
I sighed. Every time I went along with Claire to the diner, Claire looked at me with pitying, questioning eyes. Are you having a good time? Are you having a good time? It was pathetic, how willingly she gave me the benefit of the doubt. All I thought of was how she’d told me my mother had resigned from her position at Mandrake & Hester. How plaintively she’d said, Maybe we could help one another. It felt like she continued to say it, inside, every time we were around each other.
‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled. ‘We’ve grown apart. We’re into different things.’
‘My husband was my best friend when we were growing up,’ Stella said. ‘But back in thirty-nine or forty-the twelfth grade, I guess-we went through a period of hating each other, too. He thought I was too coarse for him. He liked girls who were quiet, who didn’t swear. A year later, when we were nineteen, we fell in love again.’ She stubbed the cigarette out on a large, lopsided pea-green ashtray. ‘I guess you never met my husband before he passed, huh?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I answered. ‘I mean, unless it was when I was really young.’
‘His name was Skip. We got married six weeks after we re-met. He was a crane operator in a rock quarry.’
‘Like Fred Flintstone?’ I blurted.
‘Exactly!’ Stella grinned. ‘Only, working in the quarry didn’t make you much money. I had to take on all sorts of jobs to make ends meet. I was an assistant to a lawyer downtown-now that was a good job, but then he died. So I became a hair-washer at a beauty salon. It was my idea, you see, and, as far as I knew, no one else was doing it. There should be a girl who does the hair, and a girl who washes it. Now, everyone does it.’
‘That’s true,’ I said slowly. ‘The last time I had my hair cut, there was a girl who washed my hair.’
Stella shook her head. ‘I should’ve patented that idea. My life could’ve been so different. Anyway, I worked there until it closed. Then, I had a friend who was getting into the Jane Fonda workouts. She got me into them, too, and got me teaching aerobics at the Y.’ She leaned back into the couch. ‘I had a pink leotard and leg warmers and everything. That’s back when I was in better shape.’
‘What did my grandmother say about that?’
‘Oh, you know.’ Stella’s expression shifted. ‘She never came to any of the workouts or anything.’
‘But didn’t you live here? In this same town?’
She shrugged, ignoring me. ‘So anyway, Skip was from a couple towns away. First time we met, we were in ice-skating lessons together. Our mothers couldn’t pry us apart. But he thought I was too coarse for him. He liked girls who wore twinsets, who didn’t swear. We were friends until twelfth grade, when he started going steady with Muriel Johnson. I hated her-she was a twinset girl. And you know what her yearbook motto was? She is pretty to walk with and witty to talk with.’ Stella snorted and shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t speak to Skip when he was with her. Then there was that accident.’
‘Accident?’ It couldn’t have been the same accident my father was in. She had to be talking about a different era.
Stella nodded. ‘Muriel went out on the Doyle boys’ pond that November, because she’d bought a new ice-skating skirt that would twirl around when she spun-of course she knew how to spin, Muriel. So she was out there, wearing a twinset and that skirt, spinning, and everyone was watching her and saying how pretty she was, and then the ice cracked.’ Stella clucked her tongue. ‘Muriel knew just as well as the rest of us that the Doyles’ pond takes a while to freeze all the way through. But she just couldn’t wait to start the skating season.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh, she fell through.’ Stella waved her hand. ‘One minute she was spinning, that gray skirt all twirly, the next she was under the water. The boys made a human chain to get her, but by the time they got out to the middle, it was too late. They had to wait to get her body out until the ice thawed-months, really. That skirt didn’t look quite so pretty, all soggy and covered in frost.’
I gaped. ‘They waited until spring? They didn’t drain the pond and get her out that day?’
Stella blinked rapidly, as if I’d awakened her from a dream. ‘Oh. Well. I don’t know, really. It was so long ago. Anyway, I consoled Skip at Muriel’s funeral, and the rest is history.’ She coaxed another cigarette from the pack. ‘We weren’t apart until he died.’
The room was starting to fill with blue smoke. In Stella’s stories, a story about a girl plummeting through thin ice to her death was on an emotional par with, say, someone waiting in a line at the DMV. I swallowed hard. ‘My dad was in an accident a long time ago, right? A car accident?’
‘That’s right.’ Stella turned her neck toward the kitchen, as if she’d heard a noise.