The Light of Paris(38)

“Oh, my,” the saleswoman said, looking at me in my dream dress.

“That is a disaster,” my mother said. “Certainly we can do better,” she said to the saleswoman, who nodded and practically fled back out onto the floor to find some alternatives. When we were alone, my mother looked at me. “Don’t cry. We’ll find something suitable. Now take that off. Please,” she said, and her voice was almost pleading. We found a dress, of course, but it wasn’t the one. It wasn’t the one I had dreamed of. Nothing ever seemed to be the way I had dreamed it.

? ? ?

I spent my morning cleaning the kitchen while my mother flitted in and out, sitting down at my father’s desk to make phone calls (apparently this was Serious Business and needed to be conducted in the office, because every other phone call I’d ever known her to make had been in the kitchen or the living room), and then dashing out to a meeting or to sort donations for the Collegiate Women’s Society rummage sale. Next door at the restaurant, they served lunch and then dinner, and I heard the sounds of laughter from the back yard as I worked my grim way through the house. I had grown so used to the condo, to living on one level, that each trip up and down the stairs seemed exhausting. No wonder my mother wanted to sell that place; everything seemed to take ten minutes longer than it should have.

A little after eight, my mother out at another dinner that I had politely refused to attend, my cell phone finally rang. I had to rush madly for it, scrambling for my purse on the front table, as it trilled robotically at me once, twice, three times. The blossoms in the flower arrangement on the front table were fading, and a few petals had fallen onto my bag while it sat there. They fluttered to the floor while I finally pulled out the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” Phillip said.

My stomach sank a little, but why? A few days ago, hadn’t I been calling him, praying for him to answer, to tell me it was all a mistake?

“Hello,” I said again, because I wasn’t sure what to say next.

“I’m home from New York.”

I wasn’t sure what the appropriate response to that was. “Congratulations?” I said finally.

He didn’t laugh. “I was calling to check when your flight arrives on Saturday.” All business. Of course. He wasn’t calling because he missed me. It was as impersonal as scheduling a doctor’s appointment. And there was no forgiveness—and no apology.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to check.” There was a touch of defensiveness in my tone. Hadn’t I come here to wear a hairshirt, to wait for him to forgive me? But I hadn’t been doing that. I’d been imagining what it might be like to live here, what it might feel like to have Cassandra and Sharon and Henry as my friends, how I could forge a life that didn’t include the Chicago Women’s Club or the Magnolia Ladies Association, and I realized none of those thoughts had included him.

“There’s a dinner with one of the investors on Saturday night. You’ll be expected to be there.”

Another dinner. I thought of the last one, of Dimpy Stockton’s braying laugh, the conversations about the cost of vacations and jewelry that could have funded a charity for a month, the endless one-upmanship, and was flooded with the painful desire not to have to go to that dinner, not to have to go to a dinner like that ever again. “Look, I don’t know if I’ll be back on Saturday.” I tensed, waiting for his response.

“You have to. The dinner is on Saturday night,” Phillip repeated, but he didn’t sound angry, only irritated, as though I were keeping him from something he’d rather be doing.

“That’s the thing. Mother has decided to sell the house, and she needs help getting it ready.” I made myself sound busy, sound confident. He couldn’t be mad at me for helping my mother, right?

“Can’t someone else do it?” Phillip asked peevishly. I felt my own ire rising in response.

“Well, I’m an only child,” I said, explaining it as though he and I had never met, as though I hadn’t ever told him how I’d longed for a sibling, how disappointed I was that his sisters and I hadn’t grown close. “And yes, she can pay someone, but there are things to go through. Family things.”

“But the dinner is this Saturday. What do you expect me to tell them?” His voice was reedy and querulous. I could picture him standing in the living room, looking out over the lake. There would be takeout containers on the island in the kitchen (he had never learned to cook, and whenever I was away I came back to find a trash can full of plastic forks and Phillip complaining about the weight he’d put on in his stomach, as though it were my fault), and there would be a growing pile of dress shirts on my side of the bed because he thought he was too busy to go to the dry cleaner himself.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. It felt so far from being my problem.

“You’re not even close. When did you start caring about your mother?” he asked.

His words stung. How many times had I complained to him about my mother, wished aloud that we were more alike, that I wasn’t such a disappointment to her? How many times had I groaned and procrastinated about packing before going to visit her?

I knew what I should do. I should tell him that of course I was coming home. Getting him to forget about divorce, to realize he missed me had been the whole point—give him a little space, come back and smooth everything over. Except shouldn’t it have been different? Shouldn’t he have apologized? Shouldn’t he want me to come back?