You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  Zee was a fast walker. Everything about Zee was quick, Maggie thought, the way she moved, the speedy way she spoke in a low, musical voice, the way her hands moved like birds flapping into flight.

  Her mother was almost sleepy in her movements, careful in the way she spoke, lost in her own slow-moving, meandering imagined world. She even seemed bewildered by the layout of her daily life, as if she didn’t know which way to go—to the kitchen, start dinner, upstairs to the studio, to the dining room, out back to clear out the garden. Everything delayed.

  It drove Maggie crazy.

  “You should ask your mother about your father. You’re almost twelve. It’s probably reasonable that you should know something,” Zee said, wiping her damp hands on her skirt.

  “I did ask my mother.”

  “And what did she tell you?”

  Maggie hesitated.

  “Never mind,” Zee said quickly, swinging Maggie’s arm way up in the air as if to punctuate the conversation. “Everyone has a reason to keep silent about things.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I want to know things,” Maggie said. “I want to know everything. Our family has too many secrets. You asked what my mom told me about my father? She said my father lives in New York City and that he’s married.”

  “Well . . .” Zee stepped aside, taking Maggie with her to make room for a group of cyclists coming down the shaded path in their direction.

  “Married!” Maggie said, leaning against the trunk of a large oak. “And I wondered how come this father of mine isn’t married to my mother but I didn’t ask that.”

  “Maybe,” Zee hesitated, clearing her throat, “he was already married to someone else.”

  “You mean before.”

  “Before you were born.”

  The cyclists had passed them and Maggie moved ahead, walking in front of Zee. Before had not occurred to Maggie. She assumed he hadn’t wanted to marry Lucy, that she wasn’t good enough for him, and nor was the baby Maggie good enough.

  Would it be better for him to have been married when he met Lucy or not? Maggie wasn’t clear about what she wanted of this father, but the thought of him married ruined her hope that he’d eventually materialize for her.

  With Lucy, he had only had sex, nothing like love or marriage or forever between them. And just sex was dirty, Maeve had told her.

  “I’m reading The Joy of Sex, I guess you know that book.” Maggie leaned into Zee’s shoulder. “It’s interesting.”

  “Very interesting,” Zee said.

  “Maeve and I talk about positions.”

  “I haven’t looked at the book so I don’t know about positions exactly.”

  “You’re married!” Maggie laughed.

  “You would be surprised how little some married people know,” Zee said.

  “I thought you knew everything. That’s how you seem.”

  They crossed the bridge over the creek and circled back to the boathouse along the railroad tracks no longer in use.

  “My mother . . .” Maggie began, stopping short of finishing.

  She was going to say Lucy Painter knows very little. She doesn’t even live in a world of real people, just her creepy invented animals, her colors which are like living people to her, her crazy little stories that Maggie used to love and now she hated.

  “I don’t think I should talk about my mother with you,” she said quietly.

  “Probably not,” Zee agreed.

  “The trouble is that it’s too easy to tell you the things I’ve never told anyone and you act as if what I say is perfectly normal. Even about sex and my mother and being married and all the time I’ve been thinking how different I’m getting to be from how I used to be. I don’t even know what to wear in the morning.”

  Maggie opened the front door of the van and climbed up in the passenger seat.

  “I think I love you,” she said.

  The heat of late morning and mossy dampness, heavy with the smell of mulberries, filled the inside of the van’s cab like smoke. Maggie leaned back in her seat, glancing at Zee’s profile as she arranged the rearview mirror.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I’ve told you that,” Maggie said.

  “I am so happy that you told me that,” Zee said.

  She turned on the engine, reached across and took Maggie’s hand.

  “I love you too,” she said. “Sometimes I even pretend that you are the daughter I never had.”

  LATER, UPSTAIRS IN her own house before the twins came home from camp, Zee locked the door to her bedroom, lay down on the end of the bed, putting a pillow over her eyes to keep out the afternoon sun. Gabriel might be coming back from the hospital at any moment and stop by to see her. Or Lane arriving home from her appointment with the oncologist would want to talk.

  Zee needed time to think.

  Driving home, Maggie had asked about guilt.

  “Guilt is a complicated word and I don’t have an answer for you,” Zee said.

  Guilt was Adam’s word. He applied it as a definition for his life—his time in Viet Nam, fighting the war when he should have been a conscientious objector but didn’t have the courage—the way he felt surviving the war when so many of the men he knew or didn’t know had died—the haunting looks on the faces of the Vietnamese children, his parents slipping into old age, his children. Waste. Especially waste. What had been wasted in the war, in his law practice which kept him from being with his sons, in his marriage which had splintered after the accident.

  The waste that came of their dishonesty.

  “What’s the matter with you for chrissake, Zelda?” he’d ask. “Why don’t you feel anything at all?”

  “What is—is,” she’d reply, steadily. “I go from there.”

  “And where is there?” he’d ask, the repeated melody of an old conversation.

  So far Zee had managed her life by plugging into electrical currents—all lights burning in her house, all things to all people. But something was happening as if she could not move fast enough to outrun herself any longer, as if for years she had counted on the long shadow repeated in front of her and that was beginning to disappear.

  She must do something. Doing was the solution.

  Robin was at home watching Miles on television when Zee called.

  “The group hasn’t seen August for days,” Zee said. “I thought we’d go tonight.”

  “But I thought we were supposed to come one at a time so he’s not overwhelmed,” Robin said.

  “I saw him this morning and he seemed okay. Much better. I could tell by his eyes.”

  “Will Gabriel be there?”

  “Tell Josie that I promise he won’t,” Zee said

  “You’ll ask Lucy to come too, right? I saw her today at the grocery,” Robin said.

  “Gabriel tells me she goes early in the morning almost every day. Alone, of course. You know Lucy!”

  “Just ask, that’s all,” Robin said.

  Zee sat up on the end of the bed holding the telephone in her lap, her legs folded under her.

  Was Robin suggesting that Zee didn’t like Lucy? She did like her but it was complicated. Just that week on the Mallorys’ front porch talking in the summer twilight, Josie and Lane and even Victoria were discussing Lucy Painter. Not unkindly exactly, but critically.

  Remote, they had called Lucy. Concealed. Distrustful.

  Had careless been the word Zee used about Lucy as a mother? Two children without a father? Who exactly was Lucy Painter, and how could you trust a woman like that?

  She dialed Lane, who was in her study looking up manic depression.

  “Listen to this,” Lane said, describing the manic phase of bipolar disorder from a book in Will’s study.

  “Definitely not me,” she said. “At least not the manic part.”

  “The manic part is me,” Zee laughed.

  “So I’ll be there at seven-thirty,” Lane said. “And the oncologist said so far so good.”
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  Josie’s secretary took the message.

  “No need for Josie to call me back,” Zee said. “Just be here at seven-thirty if she can.”

  She didn’t call Lucy.

  After all, what could Zee do about Maggie’s crush? Just a girl’s crush on an older woman, an almost twelve-year-old girl, ripe for crushes and low-level anger at her mother. Not Zee’s responsibility.

  By the time the twins came home, Zee was feeling herself again. She changed to a short blue skirt, shorter than she usually wore, checking in the mirror to see if her calves were too thin. A white T and sandals, bronze blush. She took her hair out of combs, letting it fall to her shoulders.

  Luke came home from camp with a bloody nose, blood dribbling off his chin onto his T-shirt.

  “Luke’s fault,” Daniel said, crossing the hallway where Zee sat on the steps with Luke, pinching the bridge of his nose to stop the bleeding. “He started a fight with Alex on the bus and Alex just hit him back.”

  On his way to the kitchen, Daniel kicked Blue as he headed through the hall, not hard, but the dog made a little yelp.

  “Do not kick an animal, Daniel,” Zee said. “Ever.”

  “Do not kick an animal, Daniel,” Daniel replied. “Ever.”

  “I didn’t hit Alex first,” Luke said, following his mother into the bathroom where she washed his face, stuffed his nostril with toilet paper to stop the bleeding. “Daniel hit him first but Alex is afraid of Daniel so he hit me instead.”

  “I’m so sorry, Lukie,” she said, kissing the top of his head. A troubled boy, Daniel, his father’s son. “Your brother can be mean.”

  “Like Dad.”

  “Not like your dad,” Zee said. “Sometimes brothers can just be mean, but he’ll outgrow it.”

  “I wish he weren’t my brother,” Luke said, a catch in his voice.

  “But he is and you love him.”

  Zee sat on the closed toilet seat, taking Luke in her lap.

  “I don’t, Mama. I don’t love him,” he said. “I love you best and then Dad and last Daniel. I wish I had a sister.”

  The weekend in April when Adam came home from Cavendish, he had been particularly depressed. He’d pulled up in the car late on Sunday afternoon, left his luggage in the trunk, come in the house and collapsed in front of the television screen.

  “I’m not going to Cavendish again without you,” he told her. “Miranda is our problem. Not mine.”

  Zee said nothing.

  Nothing to say, she thought, broiling lamb chops for dinner, the boys’ favorite.

  He slept alone on the couch that night, something he’d never done by choice, the television on mute casting its eerie light across his body and Zee crouched on the stairs watched him sleep.

  ROBIN ARRIVED AT the Mallorys’ early, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch with a glass of wine while Zee put the twins to bed.

  “Is everyone coming?” she asked when Zee came outside to join her.

  “I think they are,” Zee said, on the edge of temper and for no reason that she could name.

  “Before they come, I wanted to ask you about abortion.”

  “Have I had one?” Zee asked. “No. I haven’t.”

  “Would you have one?”

  “I don’t know,” Zee said. “I knew women who did before Roe v. Wade—and even one who died from an abortion when I was at Michigan—but since it was legalized this year, no one has brought up the subject.”

  Zee had her tubes tied when the twins were born, but now, had she the choice, she knew she wouldn’t have an abortion. She would never say that, certainly not to Robin, who had told them that she couldn’t handle another child beyond Sara.

  “I didn’t have my tubes tied because Miles was dead set against it.”

  “It was a loss when I had it done,” Zee said. “I didn’t think it would be but sometimes . . . you know.”

  This talk of abortion irritated her.

  Across the street, Lucy was passing her dining room window carrying Felix on the way to the kitchen, Maggie sitting on the railing of the porch staring into space.

  “I’ve just been wondering now that an abortion is possible, whether we will. Any of us good friends,” Robin was saying.

  “Are you pregnant, Robby?” Zee asked.

  “No, no. I have a friend . . .” she began. “Actually I don’t know anyone. I’ve just wondered what I would do if it happened. We’re not very careful, Miles and I, especially lately since the hearings began and he comes home so late and needs to blow off steam. He hates the look of himself on television.” She poured herself more wine. “Half a glass,” she said aloud. “Did you ask Lucy to come tonight?”

  “I called and she wasn’t home,” Zee said, waving to Josie walking up the street.

  There was no way for anyone to know she hadn’t called Lucy unless Lucy said she hadn’t received a call, but the subject wasn’t likely to come up.

  “Is anyone up to date on the Louds? ” Josie asked, heading up the steps, taking crackers from the tray of wine and cheese. “Or don’t you watch American Family. I’m getting a little sick of it.”

  “I’ve watched most episodes,” Robin said. “Last night Miles said that he thought it was telling to watch a real family like the Louds dissolving on television in front of our eyes and a real president on television doing the same thing.”

  “You think Nixon is done?” Josie asked.

  “Miles says he is. I’m not supposed to say this but there are tapes that the president crazily recorded implicating himself. So yes. He’s probably done.”

  “Cancer-free!” Lane called, walking gingerly up the steps. “So far.”

  She sat down on the arm of the rocker.

  “Robby. You look so pale.”

  “I’m spending the summer watching my husband on television so of course I’m pale.” She got up. “I’m also feeling a little drunk and I’ve got to pee so don’t go without me.”

  “Is Lucy coming?” Lane asked.

  “She has a message from me,” Zee said.

  “On the subject of Lucy,” Josie said, “I saw Mrs. Greene tonight when I came home and she called me over and asked me how well I knew Lucy Painter.”

  “How come?”

  “She didn’t say how come. Only that divorce was becoming epidemic in the country. She’d read it in the New York Times and wasn’t Lucy divorced.”

  “And you said no?” Zee asked.

  “Of course, and she said it was unfortunate for an educated white woman with advantages to have children out of wedlock when the pill is available and that she had lived in the neighborhood for thirty years and Lucy’s house had always drawn peculiar people like her.”

  “Time to vamoose, Mrs. Greene,” Zee said, passing the cheese and crackers. “She’s been here longer by double than anyone I know in the neighborhood.”

  “You know the trouble with Witchita Hills.” Lane took out a cigarette, stretched her legs, crossing them at the ankle. “We make up a story about ourselves to live in this outpost of Washington, D.C., so our lives have an acceptable order. But our lives don’t, which is why we won’t tell the truth. Not the real, unacceptable truth.”

  “Give me an example,” Josie asked.

  “If Will were having an affair, I wouldn’t tell you.” Lane stood up, stretching. “Or if there was a chance you already knew, I’d say oh yes—of course. We have an open marriage.”

  “That’s probably what I’d do,” Robin said.

  “Is it? But we’re very close friends,” Josie said. “What do you think, Zee?”

  “I think it’s time to go,” Zee said hurriedly. “Get in the van and we’ll head to the hospital.”

  She climbed into the driver’s seat and turned on the engine. She wasn’t feeling well at all. As if the heat of the day were crowding her, but it was evening and not that hot and she was suffocating.

  LUCY HAD SKIMMED most of August’s manuscript by the time she picked up Felix at play school, and then ther
e was lunch and laundry and grocery shopping to do, a call to Reuben, and one particular illustration for Vermillion. She was working on mixing the iridescent bronze shimmering on her hummingbird’s wing, holding up the pallette to the light—and then she painted Felix’s toenails bronze while he sat on the edge of her drafting table listening to The Hungry Caterpillar again and again on tape.

  She made waffles for dinner with sausage but Maggie wouldn’t eat. All afternoon since she got back from the ice cream shop, she had sat on the front porch staring into the middle distance, barely moving.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. “I’ll sit at the table but I won’t eat.”

  “That’s fine,” Lucy said.

  “Don’t you like waffles?” Felix asked.

  “Not enough to eat them.”

  “Don’t you like to eat?”

  “No, Felix, I don’t.”

  “Then you’ll die, I think,” he said.

  “Probably, I will.” She opened a copy of People she bought at the drugstsore, agitating for a response but Lucy said nothing.

  “Mama,” Felix said, “Maggie says—”

  “She will eat when she’s hungry, darling, and whatever else she might do, she is not going to die.”

  “Did you see the group on Zee’s porch tonight?” Maggie looked up from the magazine.

  “I did.”

  “Do you know what they’re doing?” Maggie asked.

  “They often have a glass of wine at night after dinner.”

  “How come you don’t go?”

  “You know I go, Maggie. Just not that often.”

  “Well they left to go to the hospital to see how August is and I guess they didn’t invite you.”

  “I don’t think a hospital visit is by invitation,” Lucy said. “Besides, I have already seen August today.”

  “Well, big deal.” Maggie sat in petulant silence concentrating on her magazine.

  After dinner, she went back to the porch, sitting on the railing as she had been, her legs extended, and when Lucy went out with the trash, her eyes were closed.

  She was not expecting Gabriel. Since he’d moved next door from Zee’s house, he liked to sit in August’s study and watch television until it went off the screen. But after Felix went to bed, she heard him downstairs calling to her.