Today Will Be Different(40)
It was the early death of her mother that had taught Eleanor to shut herself off. Deep down Eleanor knew she must have been born a warmer soul. She wasn’t meant to be so self-reliant. One day, Matty had forgotten to pick up the girls at day camp and they’d had to walk the five miles from the T-Lazy-7 Ranch. Matty came home after the bars closed and realized what he’d done. He crawled into Eleanor’s twin bed and cried. “I’m weak,” he said. “You’re so much better than I can ever be.” The snow from Matty’s hiking boots melted dirt on Eleanor’s Life Savers sheets.
“You okay?” Joe took Eleanor’s hand as they settled into chairs to share memories of Matty.
“I’m crazy about you, Joe,” Eleanor whispered.
A woman with a weathered face and a Tyrolean sweater launched into a story. “Of course there was the time Matty brought that goat into the Jerome Bar!”
Amid the appreciative chuckles, Ivy muttered ominously, “He was a useless bastard.”
Eleanor had heard it, but the woman hadn’t. She continued. “I think he won it off Jim Salter.”
“Jim Salter had a pony, not a goat!” former mayor Bill Stirling said, laughing. “But I’ll tell you who did have a goat—”
“He was a drunk and a bookie,” Ivy growled. “He left us alone for weeks at a time to fend for ourselves.”
The attention now turned to Ivy, but her unfocused eyes rested on a tuft of grass a foot from the tin of ashes. She held a tippy champagne glass. On the dirt at her side, her own personal bottle.
Ivy raised her head and addressed the dumbfounded gray-haired woman. “We ate food off drugstore shelves.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“He didn’t know what grade I was in,” Ivy said, leaning forward. “My teeth were loose in my head from lack of nutrition. He let me become pen pals with prisoners from the back of Rolling Stone magazine. I’m sorry if I don’t see what’s so hilarious about bringing a goat into the Jerome Bar.”
Eleanor touched Ivy’s arm, but she kept going, now addressing the group.
“And because your beloved Matty paid no attention to me, I had to go marry a guy who controls my every move. Now look at me.” Ivy stood up, her chair flipping back into the fine dirt with a poof. “Know why I look like this?”
Eleanor and Joe had wondered. Ivy had arrived dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and an ankle-length silk skirt, her hip bones pointing through like headlights. Her hair was an unflattering red that picked up her rashy complexion.
“Hair dye has toxins that will hurt the fetus if I ever get pregnant again, so Bucky makes me use henna. He thinks I throw myself at every man I come across the way I did at him the night we met. And at you too, Joe, the day of my wedding. Now I can only go out if I’m covered from ankle to wrist like an Orthodox Jew!”
Even this group, desensitized to tales of shocking behavior, shifted in their chairs at the grace note of anti-Semitism.
“My whole life,” Ivy said, now beginning to cry, “no matter how gutter-bad things got, at least I was better off than Matty.”
Eleanor stood up. Ivy moved away. “But look at me!” Ivy yanked her arm back, even though no one had reached for it. “Like father, like daughter, second-class citizens, there at the whim of the people in the big house!”
“I know, Ivy.” Eleanor moved toward her sister, but Ivy ran off and shouted the rest from twenty feet away, like a hostage taker.
“If I leave, Bucky will get full custody of John-Tyler! Bucky’s drooling at the prospect of a court battle. His family owns every judge in New Orleans. He claims he was sold a bill of defective goods. He says you and Joe pulled a fast one by dumping your trash on his rich family, like I’m the crazy lady in the attic.”
Joe came up from behind and took Ivy by the upper arms. The strength of his grip made her go limp. He hustled her into a Jeep, borrowed the keys from the driver, and told Eleanor he’d meet her back at the hotel.
As Joe drove, Ivy kept her face turned away. Her only movement was to grip the roll bar tightly anytime the Jeep tipped down a steep switchback. When they got off the mountain and onto the pavement of Maroon Creek Road, Ivy finally spoke.
“I’m sure you’re wondering what’s happened to me,” she said without looking over. “I am too.”
Joe drove to the campus of the ritzy Aspen Institute with its Buckminster Fuller dome and sculptures by Herbert Bayer and Andy Goldsworthy. Joe parked the Jeep. He and Ivy walked along a path leading to the music tent. They passed manicured emerald mounds, some ten feet high. A woman in a down vest stood at the top of one, playing King of the Mountain with her Westie. At the edge of the lawn, cut through the sagebrush, a hidden path known only to locals. It led to an arc of benches tucked inside an aspen grove. This was where Eleanor and Ivy would go as children. This was their favorite spot.
Ivy sat down, home again.
“I’m validating everything you said,” Joe said. “We’ll figure this out the same way we’ve figured everything else out.”
“You were crying up there,” Ivy said.
“Mortality and nature,” Joe said. “It gets me every time. You try your best, or you don’t try your best. The mountains don’t care.”
“Gee,” Ivy said.