The Clairvoyants(38)

“She wouldn’t get in the car,” my mother said. “She wanted to know where you were.”

My hands and face were numb from standing outside. “You told me it was better if you went alone.”

“How could I know?” she said. Her eyes were angry and sad at once. I followed her onto the porch and she tore off her gloves. “It’s probably for the best.”

Inside the kitchen my grandmother sat at the scarred farm table, her arms covered in flour. Leanne crimped the pastry crust. “A chore for a three-year-old,” Del might have said. I knew that as long as I was separated from Del, I would channel her dry observations.

Yesterday, on the phone, as my mother put together her green bean dish, I’d paced my small apartment. Del hadn’t mentioned going home for Thanksgiving—she hadn’t acknowledged the holiday at all. Perhaps she knew her absence had become part of our family’s holiday ritual, and Leanne, this year’s Thanksgiving hostess, wouldn’t have wanted to change that. Del often knew more than I gave her credit for.

“Don’t worry about us,” I’d said. “And don’t worry about Christmas, either. We’re fine here. We have a lot of friends to make plans with.”

Appropriating Del’s new life seemed perfectly acceptable. I’d had no plans to mention William to my mother, who had attempted a protest before I’d hung up the phone. Still, I’d worried. Should I have convinced Del to go home? Even if we would have arrived at the big, empty house, and headed upstairs to our old bedroom as if we were visitors to some roped-off scene from our childhood—we belonged there more than at Anne’s. I felt in some ways like a fugitive.





16




After the meal, Anne sat in the living room on her green velvet couch with a glass of sherry. She wore a red head scarf, a white sweater, and white wool pants, and she looked beautiful, if drained. Alice was there, along with Lucie, and Kitty, another girl, whose parents owned a farm in Cortland. Kitty’s mother sold Mary Kay cosmetics, and Kitty wore lipstick I was certain came from her mother’s product samples—tuscan rose or sienne brulee. I greeted them all in a friendly way, but they were cool toward me. They’d been so open the night I met them. I could only surmise that it had something to do with Del.

Anne patted the couch next to her, and I sat down, and all of the girls but Alice got up and disappeared down the hallway to the kitchen. Anne took a sip of her drink and set it down on the coffee table next to a small wooden box painted to look like a miniature bookcase. I asked Anne what it was, and she told me to push the button on the front. When I did, a mechanism lifted a panel at the top, and a black dog holding a cigarette in his paws emerged to the tinny sound of “Smoke Gets in My Eyes.”

“It was my mother’s,” she told me. “Isn’t it funny?”

I told her I liked it, and she grew serious.

“It’s yours then,” she said. “When I die.”

Although I tried to object, she pushed the button again, and the melody played and the dog’s head appeared. Anne took the cigarette and handed it to me. I couldn’t say I didn’t smoke.

“It was going to be Mary Rae’s, but now it will be yours.”

I accepted the light she gave me, and then I held the cigarette between my two fingers like an actress playing a part. Alice sat on a pillow in the corner of the room, braiding the pillow’s fringe. I knew she had to have been listening.

“Maybe one of the others might like it,” I said.

The girl stood, unfolding like an agile bird, and left the room to report to everyone in the other kitchen, I assumed.

“They have their little tchotchkes picked out.” Anne set her cigarette in an ashtray, a black ceramic cat’s head, its mouth yawning open, its painted eyes bright and shrewd. Smoke spiraled out of two holes in the ashtray cat’s nose, and I wondered who had claimed this memento.

All the girls wore their dark hair long, and it was often difficult to distinguish among them, especially after a few glasses of wine. Alice’s hair was heavier, a reddish mane that she often played with—her fingers lithe and slender and always moving. She had a sprinkling of freckles, and that afternoon wore a plaid wool skirt and tights, like a school uniform. Lucie was so tiny she seemed like a child, and whenever Joseph came into the room she rushed up and grabbed him and pulled him down with her onto the couch. Kitty was the rudest to me. She was tall and dark-eyed, her lipstick bright, and when I would catch her watching me she’d continue to stare for a beat before she looked away. There was another girl, Jeanette, who came in late, letting in the smell of snow. She caught sight of me and quickly pretended I was invisible.

The music on the stereo was Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Geoff played host, making rounds with the wine bottle, refilling glasses, so I didn’t know how many I’d had to drink. The more I drank, the less I monitored Del, who shouldn’t have been drinking at all. She was often nestled on the couch between two of the girls, or with Randy, who was surprisingly handsome, fair, and chiseled, and who wore a pair of cowboy boots he must have owned since high school—the toes misshapen, the heels worn down. Joseph wore, like William, a stretched-out sweater and corduroys with a hole in the knee. His hair was longish and stringy, and he became boisterous when he drank too much. The empties littered the floor around the chair where he sat, sometimes with Lucie on his lap. It was clear to me that William was older than everyone there, save Anne and Geoff, and I wondered about his connection to all of them.