Leaving Lucy Pear(37)



Bea had finished the book last week and had not stopped thinking about it but she did not think that understanding—the way Rose meant it—was its point. She understood that Mrs. Ramsay was her mother and that she, Bea, was “the sudden silent trout” pinned against the glass (if she read again she would see they were not pinned but “hanging,” but that was the difference between this kind of understanding and Rose’s), and Bea understood that the book as a whole was about her own life and that other people probably understood it to be about theirs. But her understanding in this way was vague—the book had stayed with her through the week like a glowing, invisible pet she could not risk touching. “I think it’s about memory,” she said. “And about how the present is always becoming the past, both in our consciousness of it and in reality. And about the confusion, or maybe the elision, between the two, and also between reality and a person’s vision of reality. Very little happens but a lot is happening. A character can stand with a foot on a threshold and her whole world shifts.” Bea had not known how good it would feel to talk about the book. The only educated women she spoke with on a regular basis—club women she courted at benefits or after her speeches—talked about Virginia Woolf like Lillian and her friends fawned over Parisian silk. “Also, it’s about women and men,” Bea concluded, starting to worry that she was making little sense. “And whether or not the children will get to the lighthouse.”

Rose smiled. “You’re so sweet, Bea-Bea. I hope we’ll be better friends, don’t you?” She raised her glass and Bea raised hers, though she felt less exultant and more simply awake, and glowing, as if the glow had now entered her. She clinked before Rose even began her toast: “To Albert’s visit. To marriage. To Independence Day!”





Sixteen




In her father’s attic, sweat soaking her dress, Susannah Story knelt beside a ceramic lighthouse her father had bought for her in Maine. The lighthouse was white, with a wide black stripe around the middle and a black turret on top. At night when she was a child and they weren’t traveling, her father would light a candle and place it through the lighthouse’s door and the thin walls would glow in a way that reminded her of skin, as if a person or animal had been emptied out and lit from within. The candle was meant to help her fall asleep, but Susannah didn’t need help with that—it was her brothers in the next room who were afraid, her older brothers who remembered their mother well and called out sometimes in the night like babies. Susannah had been four when she died and remembered little of her. The lighthouse scared her more than the dark did. She would carry it into her brothers’ room and in the morning they would put it back in hers. In this way Caleb didn’t have to know and everyone slept.

Susannah squinted into the corners of the attic. She was looking for the box of tiny American flags, to plant around the lawn for her father’s party tomorrow. Her plan was to take them out of the box and carry them down in little bunches. She was not supposed to carry anything at all, not supposed to swim or walk too fast or ride in a car. She probably wasn’t supposed to climb the drop-down ladder to the attic, either, or scavenge in a sweltering attic. Even the dust motes looked lethargic, tumbling through the steamy air.

Turn a corner, bump into another rule, another shaking head, another set of hands, cold metal—this was the path to motherhood, as far as Susannah could tell. It was Susannah’s path at least. But she couldn’t bear to listen to the doctors anymore, to stay in bed, have tea brought to her, read a novel, nap. It made her feel like an old woman, made her feel sick. Susannah could not believe her barrenness was a sickness, or even that she was barren—she was pregnant, after all! She had several friends who had borne children—“friends” perhaps a stretch, though she liked these women and they seemed to like her, the wives of Josiah’s business cohorts, who were not exactly his friends either; his friends were back on Mason Street, where he rarely had time to go. The point was none of those women had spent their days in bed. They were educated, like Susannah, if not at college then by tutors. Their ambitions ranged, however rangily, beyond their children, a hazy, appetizing swirl of benefit dances and easels and bagging trousers. They were too busy to lie in bed. Susannah wanted to be busy, too. She was happiest busy: swimming, shopping, visiting the quarry, advising Josiah. She missed the men standing from their benches to greet her, missed the smell of dynamite and dust. Her legs bounced when she sat, twitched when she lay down. Besides, she had stayed in bed last time, and what difference had it made?

She found the box of flags on top of a steamer trunk. Her sweat was monumental now, stinging her eyes, dripping from her fingers and nose, slicking the floor. She breathed deeply. It felt good. It would have felt even better if she could dive into the ocean afterward. The tide was high. Maybe she would. Maybe she would dive off the dock—or, a fair concession, jump—and be instantly cleansed, one salt replaced with another, her mood remade. Ten minutes would be enough, even five. Then she would go home, take a bath, get in bed, and wait for Josiah to come home. She would pretend to have lain in bed all day like a good patient and ask Josiah questions about the quarry without betraying her longing for it. If he asked about tomorrow’s party she would tell him the long table linens were pressed and that her father had fetched the flags, the minor lie a precaution in case she miscarried again, for no matter how gentle Josiah was about her losses, she knew he—like her doctors—must blame her in some way. Then they would share a nice supper and go to sleep holding each other’s hand (his left, her right) and though at some point in the night he might leave the bed for a few hours, in the morning he would be there, his rumpled face against her hair.

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