“Nice to meet you, too,” the women said in unison, as they tilted their bodies away. Joanna took faster steps than normal back to her house, suddenly painfully aware of how cold it was outside. Goose bumps rose on her arms and her whole body shook with shivers. There was a peal of laughter behind her, followed by a gasp. She whipped around to see one of the children turning a crank of a sandbox toy.
She shut the screen door quietly and placed her palms flat on the cluttered kitchen table. The house was judgmentally quiet. She longed for the noise of the city—traffic screeches and subway rumblings and buzzing chaos to drown out what had just happened. She snatched her cell phone from the island and pressed the speed dial for Charles’s office. When he answered, she let out a whimper.
“What is it?” he gasped.
“I just tried to meet the neighbors,” she blurted out in a scratchy whisper. “The ones I told you about? With the shared sandbox? The ones that just stand there and talk all day?”
There was a three-or four-second pause. “Okay …”
“They were so … cold. I felt like I was the new girl at school not wearing the right clothes.”
There were voices in the background, someone else’s phone extension ringing. “I’m sure they’re very nice, Joanna.”
“Oh.” She sat down on the couch, not anticipating this answer.
“I don’t remember you being this way about people in the city.”
“I wasn’t. It didn’t matter.”
“Why does it matter now?”
She stared up at the ceiling. “I don’t know,” she whispered. There was something about these people peering out from their identical houses that made her want to conform and belong. Sadly, it reminded her of her mother sitting on that Adirondack chair at the country club, in the right place but so, so wrong. Joanna had always assumed it would be so much easier for her.
“Is that all?” Charles asked.
She swallowed, now almost in tears. “Are you okay?” she blurted out.
“Me? Yeah. Why?”
“You’ve been … quiet.”
“No I haven’t.”
She squeezed the red throw pillow on the couch. Give me something, she thought. Anything. “Are you and your mother worried about Scott? Is there anything I can do?”
He paused for a long time. Let me in, she willed, staring at her reflection in the blank television screen. You have to know I heard you two talking.
Charles sighed. “Joanna, I’m actually in the middle of something. Can I call you later?”
The receiver was limp in her hands. She tugged on her sweater sleeve so suddenly and with such force that she heard a seam rip. “Don’t bother,” she snapped.
And then he hung up. Joanna sat upright on the couch, her back pressed into the cushions, her calves at right angles to her thighs, waiting for him to call back, but he didn’t. She felt silly for wasting his time. To Charles, she was the one at fault, she was the one who’d broken some kind of social contract and was now being whiny and impatient. Where was the sympathy for her? Again she thought of Bronwyn and tried to imagine what Charles was referring to two nights ago, but it was like trying to bake a cake without any of the ingredients.
She stared blankly at the mantel across the room. The only thing they’d put up there so far was a framed photo from their wedding, Joanna in her long and simple strapless gown and Charles holding her waist just as the photographer ordered. They stood in Roderick’s garden, where the wedding had taken place, grinning at one another. Joanna squinted at the photo until their faces blurred.
On the day of their wedding, Catherine had arrived at Roderick in a long red dress that dragged on the floor, almost like a wedding train. Her posture was very poised and upright; Joanna could tell she was trying very, very hard to act as though she’d visited Roderick many times. But whenever Catherine thought no one was looking, she stole long glances at the stained glass on the second floor, or at the labyrinth and wading fountain over at the other side of the grounds, or at the opulent yellow diamond Sylvie had recently begun wearing. It was early fall, the air growing crisp, and some of the guests wore furs. Catherine gaped at those, too.
“A garden wedding,” Catherine had sighed romantically. She spied a man with a camera over her shoulder and gripped Joanna’s arm. “Who do you think he is?” she whispered. Her breath already smelled like gin; she’d been making good use of the open bar, probably due to nerves. “Maybe from the Inquirer? Or the Main Line Times? This is just the kind of thing that would make it into that.”
“He’s just the wedding photographer,” Joanna said, shrugging.