All Adults Here(22)
Chapter 11
Secondhand News
The weekend before school started, Porter took Cecelia shopping. Starting eighth grade at a new school in a new town was less than ideal but it did offer a certain unanticipated chance at reinvention, and where better to start than with one’s clothes? Porter thought about all the women she could have been if given the opportunity to have a drastic change in her life even once a decade—a shaved head, a semester in a country where she didn’t speak a word. Porter knew so many people, both men and women, who lived as if their parents were just faraway ghosts, with no gravitational pull, no say over their behavior. That sounded like a lovely way to live, and Porter was sure she’d enjoy it, if she someday moved to Mars. (Though, in truth, if Porter figured out how to get to Mars, Astrid would be waiting in her spacesuit on the other end, picking her up in a sensible Rover, having already found the only place one should buy astronaut ice cream.)
The store Porter liked most, Secondhand News, was up the block from the Clapham train station. Unlike Boutique Etc? and the other stores for women who had reached the chenille-tunic stage of life, Secondhand News was cool. It was small but packed, in an old Victorian house, with furniture and housewares on the first floor and clothing—faded T-shirts and gunnysack dresses and polyester disco gowns and vintage Levi’s—on the second. The real reason that Porter wanted to take Cecelia, though, was that she was friends with John and Ruth Sullivan, the best-dressed couple in town, and she knew that their son was also going into the eighth grade at Clapham Junior High. Maybe “friends” was a stretch—John had been in Elliot’s class in school, though they hadn’t been friends, and when John turned into an interesting adult man, with an even more interesting wife, Porter found she didn’t always know what to say, but they always smiled and greeted each other warmly and sometimes that was enough. Everyone in town wanted to be friends with John and Ruth.
Porter pushed Cecelia through the creaky door of the shop and heard the little bell tinkle, announcing their arrival. She had emailed to say they were coming—it was her first attempt at a setup, and she wanted to make sure August would be there. It was funny, to think about people roughly her age having teenage children. Nicky had been so young when Cecelia was born, and it had happened so completely by accident, as if he and Juliette had no clue how human reproduction worked. They hadn’t thought about how fully it would transform their lives, and then somehow it hadn’t—yes, they’d had a baby strapped to their body at all times, but they’d taken her everywhere, to dance performances and museums, to parties and restaurants. By the time she was three, Cecelia had slept in more bars than a lifelong alcoholic. If Porter had had a baby when she was young, it wouldn’t have been like that. She would have been measuring ounces of milk and counting diapers and calling the pediatrician every time the baby sneezed, full of anxiety, the way God intended. That was the part that Porter was ready for now, even if it meant saying goodbye to the freedom she’d enjoyed her adult life thus far—she had five months left. Not that it was death row, but still—it was a line that she was going to cross, and once she was on the other side, there was no coming back. Porter looked at Cecelia’s pink cheeks and remembered how it felt to feel simultaneously embarrassed and taken care of by someone else.
“Hello?” Porter called out. The store smelled musty and sweet, and even though the shades were all open, the house was perched in such a way that it was still cool and dark inside.
“Hey, be right there,” John called from somewhere invisible.
Cecelia wandered toward a lone rack of dresses in the center of the room, and Porter lingered nearby. Everything about how a woman approached clothing came directly from her mother—if she loved it, if she hated it, if she knew how to iron pleats or tie scarves. Astrid was functional and sartorially conservative and so Porter was functional and ridiculous—she wore nubby fleece zip-ups and corduroy pants, socks with cartoon characters on them. She dressed like a preschooler, really, much to Astrid’s chagrin. Juliette shopped like a French person—though she’d never had money, she always looked like she did. Because her body was the same as it had been when she was a teenager, her clothing lasted forever, while Porter’s closet was littered with mountains of things she no longer could wear, the way a snake’s shed skin littered the bottom of its cage. Porter watched Cecelia pull dresses out to look at them, and then push them back in. She wasn’t a magpie like so many little girls, just drawn to shiny things. Juliette’s maternal influence was still there, inside.
There was a clump-thump-clump cascade of steps on the stairs, and then John was in the room. He was wearing glasses that Porter thought he didn’t need. It seemed like a professional hazard. In addition to running the store with him, John’s wife, Ruth, volunteered for the Clapham Chamber of Commerce, planning the village’s various festivities and fairs. Ruth and Porter worked together every year on the Clapham event where all the summer people came back for a crowded weekend full of apple picking and cider donuts, and where Porter would set up a booth for Clap Happy to give away samples of all her varieties, on Costco Triscuits and tiny bamboo spoons.
“Hi, John, yay,” Porter said. “This is my niece, Cecelia, remember? She’s starting at CJHS. I thought August might be around?”
“Sweetheart!” John kissed Porter on the cheek and then hollered in the direction of the stairs. “Come say hi!”