‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ I said, forcing myself to stop sobbing.
‘Sure you are. And Dad’s fine too. And we all love each other. And everything is just great. And, by the way, I’m skipping dinner.’
‘But your father’s prepared a wonderful meatloaf.’
‘Since when was meatloaf ever “wonderful”? Anyway, just got a call from Brad. His parents have decided to eat at Solo Bistro down in Bath tonight and asked if I wanted to come along.’
‘It’s a little late for that,’ Dan said.
‘And why?’ Sally asked.
‘Because your dinner is in the oven.’
‘I’ll eat the leftovers tomorrow.’
‘Sorry,’ Dan said, ‘but I’m not allowing it.’
‘That’s unfair,’ Sally said.
‘Too bad you think that.’
‘Come on, Dad — Solo Bistro is a great restaurant. ’
‘Can’t say I’ve ever eaten there.’
‘That’s because you’ve been out of work and miserable for the last year and a half.’
‘Sally. ’ I said.
‘Well, it’s the truth — and you know it, Mom.’
Silence.
Dan slowly bent down and put the potatoes back in the oven. Then, standing up again, he turned away from his daughter as he said:
‘You want to eat with those people, off you go.’
Sally looked at me for confirmation. I nodded and she ran off out the door.
I heard a car pull up outside — and glanced out the window to see Sally heading towards Brad’s silver Mini convertible. He got out to greet her and give her a very full kiss right on the lips. She didn’t hold back either. At that moment I was absolutely certain that they were sleeping together. Not that this had come as a shock, as I was pretty sure this had been going on for a year. Just as I also knew that she had asked for an appointment with my gynecologist six months ago and just said it was ‘routine stuff’. Did that mean my daughter was on the pill or had been fitted for a diaphragm? Either way I suppose it was better than getting pregnant. Gazing at Brad — so tall, so lean, so deeply preppy in a town where preppy wasn’t a common look — all I could think was: He is going to break her heart.
I watched the car zoom away, and saw Sally put her arm around Brad as they headed off into the actual sunset. Immediately I thought back to the time when I was seventeen, on the cusp of everything, so determined to succeed. I reached for the wine bottle and splashed a little more in my glass. In the wake of Sally driving off Dan had stepped outside and lit up another cigarette. The joylessness in his eyes was palpable. Seeing him staring out at the world beyond I felt a desperate stab of empathy for him, for us. Coupled with the realization: He is now a stranger to me.
I set the table. I took out the meatloaf and the potatoes. I ladled sour cream into a bowl. I rapped on the glass of the kitchen window. When Dan swivelled his head I motioned for him to come inside. Once back in the kitchen he looked at the dinner ready to be eaten and said:
‘You should have let me do all that. I was making dinner. I didn’t want you to have to do anything tonight.’
‘It was no trouble at all. Anyway, I thought you might need a little time out.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He came over and put his arms around me. As he buried his head in my shoulder I felt a momentary shudder come over him and thought he was about to cry. But he kept himself in check, while simultaneously holding me tightly. I returned the embrace, then took his face in my hands and said:
‘You know I am on your side, Dan.’
His body stiffened. Had I said the wrong thing again — even though I meant the comment to be reassuring, loving? Could I ever say the right thing anymore?
We sat down to eat. For a few moments silence reigned. I finally broke it.
‘This is wonderful meatloaf.’
‘Thank you,’ Dan said tonelessly.
And the silence enveloped us again.
‘For me, it really is one of the great modern novels about loneliness,’ Lucy said, motioning to the waitress that she should bring us two more glasses of chardonnay. ‘And what I loved about the novel was how it so brilliantly captured forty years of American life in such an economic way. I mean, I couldn’t get over the fact that the novel’s only two hundred and fifty pages long. ’
‘That really intrigued me as well,’ I said. ‘How he was able to say so much about these two sisters and the times they passed through in such a compressed way, and with such descriptive precision.’
‘This is one of those rare instances when you can actually say there’s not a wasted word in the novel, along with this absolute clear sightedness about the way people talk themselves into lives they so don’t want.’
‘And by the end, we really feel we know these two women so desperately well. Because their lives and choices are a reflection of so many of our own wrong choices, and the way despair and disappointment color all our lives.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Lucy said as our two glasses of wine arrived.
Lucy and I were sitting in a booth in the Newcastle Publick House — a rather decent local tavern, where the din was never so overwhelming that you couldn’t have a conversation — engaged in our weekly book talk. Actually ‘book talk’ makes this weekly get-together sound formal, rule-bound. The truth is, though we have been having this Thursday get-together for over a year, the only principle that we follow is that the first part of the conversation is all about the novel we have agreed to read that week. That’s right — we try to read a different novel every week, though when we tackled The Brothers Karamazov a few months ago we gave ourselves a month to work through that mammoth enterprise. The only other rule we have is that we take turns choosing the book under discussion and never raise objections if it is out of what Lucy once dubbed ‘our respective literary comfort zones’. The truth is, we both share a similar sensibility when it comes to novels. No fantasy. No science fiction (though we did, at my suggestion, read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles — which we both agreed had more to do with things mid-century American than actual extraterrestrial matters). And no treacly romantic stuff. Having discovered early on that we both read to find windows into our own dilemmas, our choices (outside of The Brothers Karamazov — my idea — and Gravity’s Rainbow — Lucy’s suggestion, and a book which we spent four evenings trying to understand) have largely centered around books which reflect the difficulties inherent in day-to-day life. So we’ve veered towards novels about family complexities (Dombey and Son), money complexities (The Way We Live Now), state-of-the-nation complexities (An American Tragedy, Babbitt), and (no surprise here) marital complexities (The War Between the Tates, Couples, Madame Bovary). We always spend around ninety minutes each week talking animatedly about the novel under discussion — though these Thursday rendezvous (which inevitably stretch to three hours) are also an opportunity for us to catch up with what Lucy once elegantly called ‘our ongoing weather systems’; the stuff that has seemed to constantly circle around our respective lives.
Lucy is a year my senior. She is about the smartest person I know. She went to Smith, joined the Peace Corps, taught in difficult places like The Gambia and Burkina Faso (I had to check out a map to see where that was), then traveled the world for a year. Upon returning to her native Boston she promptly fell in love with a PhD candidate at Harvard named Harry Ricks. Harry landed a job teaching American history at Colby just after he got his doctorate. Lucy retrained in library science and also found a job at the college. Then she lost two pregnancies back to back — the first at three months, the second (even more heartbreakingly) at eight months. Then her newly tenured husband ran off with a colleague (a dance instructor). Then she was badly advised legally and came away from the marriage with virtually nothing. Then she decided that staying at Colby was emotionally impossible — for all sorts of obvious reasons. So she packed up her decade-old Toyota with her worldly goods and headed down to Damariscotta after landing a job at the local high school, running their library.