You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  “How sweet, Zee,” Lane said. “I think it’s a lovely idea.”

  “I’d hoped you would,” Zee said, aware that it wasn’t a lovely idea at all but a quiet way of insinuating herself into Lucy and Maggie’s life.

  Zee pulled the spread tight on the bed where Adam had been sitting, hurried downstairs, slipped into her coat, wrapped her scarf around her neck, and headed to the car for a meeting at school about the twins and then to the Library of Congress to research in the wake of Watergate what she could of President Nixon’s Quaker childhood for an article she was writing.

  But first she would cross the street and introduce herself to Lucy Painter.

  Four

  LUCY STOOD ON the front porch assembling herself as she was in the habit of doing when she gathered her paints and pencils and sketch pads to begin a new picture, hoping, as she spread out her tools, that the shadowy image surfacing in her mind’s eye would resolve itself when she began to draw.

  The first thing she did after arriving on Witchita Avenue, even before she walked around the house to see how the colors she had chosen looked, was to check if the telephone she’d ordered had been installed in the kitchen.

  It was eight-thirty. Reuben would be walking Nell to school now, stopping afterwards by Sally’s Café for a bagel and coffee where most days she and Felix would meet him after dropping Maggie off at her school and they’d stand outside the shop as long as they could until his train, Reuben with Felix on his shoulders holding Felix’s legs with one hand and Lucy’s hand with the other—his fingers like breath on her palm. They seldom talked then. Reuben waited until the last minute, they kissed and he hurried down the steps to the uptown subway.

  “I’ll call as soon as I get to the office,” he said, the same every time he left her.

  She would need another telephone in her bedroom, one in the studio. The telephone, as she saw it, would take on a life of its own.

  She walked through the house room by room, the first and second floors, the studio renovated for light according to sketches she had made—a large front window facing the street, skylights in the eaves, the light bright because the house was situated high, though soft-shadowed on this cloudy February morning.

  Standing in the living room, she felt a sudden rush of happiness.

  Her house now, as if she were seeing it for the first time.

  Only the long mossy brick steps were familiar, which she had descended on boneless legs that early afternoon of June 11, 1951, her arms around her father’s work boots which for some inexplicable reason she had picked up, walking down the steps with great care so she wouldn’t trip or faint or die on the way back to the car where her mother was waiting impatiently in the front seat.

  Qu’est-ce qui s’este passé? her mother had asked in her gravelly cigarette voice, gripping the steering wheel, as she did, even in repose.

  But her mother must have already guessed what was the matter.

  WHEN ZEE MALLORY flew into Lucy’s house without knocking, Lucy was in the kitchen wiping out the cabinets, listening to Maggie babbling to Felix. Zee rushed into the room, bright-cheeked, bursting with excitement as if there were something specific to delight her in the arrival of this new family.

  “Your door was open,” she said, coming into the kitchen. “So I came to meet you and to see the house.”

  “Of course,” Lucy said, unnerved.

  “Such extraordinary colors,” Zee went on, zipping through the house, running up the steps ahead of Lucy. “Which bedroom is yours?” Even before Lucy had a chance to point out her bedroom, Zee was saying, “Oh my god, I love the tawny brick color, so incredibly rich and vibrant. My whole house is white, white, white because I can never choose which color to use out of all those spectacular colors at the paint store. You’ll have to help me.”

  Lucy found herself hurrying down the steps after Zee had completed her tour and stopped in the hall to ruffle Felix’s hair, to lay her hand on Maggie’s cheek.

  Lucy felt a twinge of fear or was it jealousy or hurt tightening the muscles in her shoulders.

  “Be good,” Zee said to Maggie as she headed to the front door. “Not too good.”

  Lucy slipped her arm around Maggie, who was standing beside her in a baseball cap with the bill pulled down over her eyes.

  “Later, Lucy,” Zee called. “The movers are on the way upstairs with your bed.”

  She watched Zee leave through the glass front door, take the long steps two at a time, a splash of pink from her wool scarf blowing behind her as she jumped the last three steps to the pavement.

  The old twig bed Lucy had salvaged came through the front door and passed her in the hall as the movers struggled to carry it up the stairs.

  “The big bedroom,” she said to the movers. “The orange room at the top of the stairs.”

  She pushed her hands down in the deep pockets of her jeans.

  “Be careful of the paint,” she added.

  “I hate that bed,” Maggie said, racing upstairs after the movers heading to her new room.

  Lucy’s bed. The bed she had rescued before she even met Reuben.

  Battered and hastily put together, a bed from a stage set of Sleeping Beauy performed at Provincetown Players years before when she was at RISD. She should have tossed it.

  The movers finished unloading and Lucy paid them, paid them extra to return the truck she had rented, and took the children to Café Moxie.

  “I love that woman, Zee, don’t you, Mama?” Maggie asked while they waited for blueberry pancakes.

  Maggie’s spirits seemed to have soared since Zee Mallory planted herself in their lives.

  “I’ve only just met her,” Lucy said. “But she seems nice.”

  She didn’t like Zee Mallory. Not her compliments, nor insinuations as if she had already decided to appropriate their lives.

  And something else which had to do with Maggie.

  “Maybe you’ll get to be friends since you don’t have friends in Washington, D.C.,” Maggie said.

  “Not yet,” Lucy said. “But I will.”

  “She says she’s going to give us a big party, didn’t she, Felix? And she said there’s a girl my age right across the street called Maeve but there’s no child in her group exactly the right age for Felix. She promised to find one for him, pronto because she knows everybody.”

  “What group?”

  “She calls it her group.”

  “I don’t like groups,” Lucy said, the words fell quietly to her lap.

  “Zee,zee,zee,zee,zee,” Felix said happily, slathering butter on his pancakes. “Zee is for zebra.”

  “Zee is for Zelda, she told me,” Maggie said. “Zee/Zelda, she sometimes calls herself.”

  Something familiar and sweet in Maggie, a reminder of the months before she took out against Lucy, the way daughters will do, Reuben had said to her. I’m sure it will happen with Nell.

  They got groceries and cleaning supplies at the Safeway, $150, a budget now that Lucy was on her own, the fate of children’s books up and down, her last picture book a flop, no surprise subsidies from Reuben as there had been in the years he dropped by regularly with tacos or Chinese, a bottle of wine, staying for a few hours or the night or even a weekend. She’d refused support although he had offered.

  “The children are my responsibility,” she’d said.

  “ZEE’S COMING OVER tonight with some of the neighbors to welcome us to Witchita Hills, ” Maggie said as they unloaded the bags of groceries in the kitchen.

  “So fun!” Felix said.

  “Not so fun for me,” Lucy said, putting the milk in the fridge. “I’m not ready to be welcomed here. I only left New York last night.”

  “They’re just being nice, Mama. Don’t be ungrateful.”

  “I am a little ungrateful,” Lucy said.

  But it wasn’t a question of gratitude although she did feel diminished by the kindness of others.

  She didn’t want the neighborhood to see her house un
til it was entirely done.

  The look of things mattered to Lucy. In New York City, she’d arranged the living room at angles, slate gray covers on the chairs and sofa, bright Indian cloth pillows she had made herself, rag rugs from Vermont, her favorite among her own illustrations hanging on the walls, also filled with photographs of people she knew, her children, Reuben, the mothers and fathers of strangers, photographs she’d picked up in the secondhand stores where she shopped, a woman who looked as if she could have been Lucy’s grandmother as a young girl but was identified on the back of the photograph as Dorothea, Butte, Alabama. 1906. She had even bought an old spinning wheel and laced it with yarn to create the illusion of a family with a long history.

  This belonged to my grandmother, she’d say even to her own children.

  “I need help since people are coming to meet us tonight,” she said to Maggie, sprawled out on the floor playing with Felix.

  “I’ll help,” Maggie said.

  “Me too.” Felix pushed his dump truck into the corner of the hall.

  From room to room, they opened up boxes, put away clothes and dishes and pots and pans, moved the couch, the kitchen table, Felix’s bed so it wasn’t under the window in case of lightning. They stood together examining the living room, Maggie leaning into her mother the way she used to do only months ago when they’d been one another’s shadow.

  “What about curtains?” Maggie asked.

  “We never had curtains in New York,” Lucy replied, surprised that Maggie should even have noticed.

  “Our apartment was high,” Maggie said. “No one could see us.”

  “Except from Sullivan Street.”

  “No one looked up from Sullivan Street.”

  Something about curtains was making Maggie irritable.

  Lucy sat on the couch with her legs crossed, perspiration trickling down her face.

  “It’s so hot in here,” she said, sidestepping the conversation, wiping her face with the sleeve of her shirt. “I need to learn about the furnace.”

  “I feel naked with no curtains.” Maggie plopped down on the couch beside Lucy.

  It was as if open windows had hit a nerve but Lucy didn’t know what nerve.

  Ashamed of me? was the thought that passed quickly through Lucy’s mind like cold air on the back of her neck. Of us?

  “Curtains block the light,” she said.

  “I like the dark.”

  “Then we’ll get curtains for your room.”

  “And for the living room?” Maggie asked, crossing her legs, folding her arms across her chest. “It doesn’t look like it did in New York. Do you think it will seem like us after we live here for a while?”

  “I hope so,” Lucy said.

  “Maybe we should buy a new couch,” Maggie said.

  “Maybe we will,” Lucy said.

  “And white curtains with ruffles like Rebecca’s apartment had.”

  In the kitchen, Lucy hung the favorites of her own illustrations—the picture of Belly sailing earthward and one of Fervid—a flashy red mole, his paws covering his eyes, sleeping next to a Chinese war god from her book Fervid P. Drainpipe Lost in the Chinese Museum of Art.

  One Christmas, Ruben had given her an original illustration from Pierre by Maurice Sendak and one of Caleb, the dog, from Caleb & Kate by William Steig that Lucy particularly loved and had kept in her bedroom in New York.

  She and Maggie worked side by side filling the bookcases, the chests of drawers, the closets, making the beds, hanging photographs and Maggie’s artwork from school, Felix’s scribbles, finding a place for the few treasures she had kept from her life, an unframed photograph of her father in law school, one of her mother in a long white summer dress, her hair full around her small, elegant face holding Lucy, maybe six months old, who sat upright and serious in her lap like a nineteenth-century portrait of a child. Caroline Framboise Baldwin and her Daughter, Lucia, her mother had written on the back as if she expected to die without a trace except this record of her life as a mother.

  FELIX SAT ON the twig bed playing with his firehouse Playmobil, mumbling a narrative under his breath, a low buzz except for an occasional outburst. FIRE. SOMEBODY BURNING TO DEATH, he’d shout.

  And then the fire engines—CLANG, CLANG, CLANG. Crash. SPLAT!

  It was nearly four in the afternoon—Felix had fallen asleep among his plastic firemen, Maggie was in her bedroom choosing what to wear for the neighbors. The disappearing sun blanketed the living room with a wide gray band across the new floor.

  Lucy unpacked her favorite picture of Reuben leaning against the Brooklyn Bridge, the skyline of Manhattan in the background. He was dark and thin, with an angular face, in jeans, a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms stretched out resting on the railing, his feet crossed at the ankle.

  She hung the photograph just inside the front door.

  Perhaps they would be curious about her—a single mother. No man evident in her life. Especially the women would want to know more.

  “Reuben Frank,” she would say in her absentminded way, as if they should know of him, someone mildly famous, and guess he was significant to her.

  “Uncle Reuben,” Maggie would say, and when they asked “Uncle?” Lucy would shrug.

  She was refined in the keeping of silence.

  THE LAST TENANT of 3706 Witchita had left a full-length mirror on the back of the closet door . Maggie stood in front of it, examining the outfit which she had chosen for the party. In New York, Maggie had worn turtlenecks, usually black, boys’ jeans, lace-up boondocker boots. For Washington, she chose a flowered skirt her mother had made, mid-calf with tights and clogs. In her mother’s makeup bag which Lucy seldom used, she found loose powder and tried to powder off the freckles sprinkled across her nose and cheeks.

  Zelda was glamorous, unlike the other mothers Maggie had known, including her own who wore clothes she made herself or full skirts she bought in the children’s department. No makeup, a mass of unruly black curls, bare feet except in winter when she wore striped tights and heavy boots.

  Maggie was growing intolerant of Lucy’s eccentricities.

  She put away the powder, checked her face in the full-length mirror, and turned off the light in her bedroom so she could see outside.

  It was dark and the streetlights formed a string of circles up the street. In one a group of women and children were gathered carrying presents.

  “For us,” Maggie said to Felix, who had come into her bedroom and was leaning against her legs.

  There were no men in the group. No fathers.

  She had never spoken of her father among her friends in the Village. She had never felt the need to bring the subject up. Her family was in place. She had a little brother, an Uncle Reuben, and many friends, including the dry cleaner and the pharmacist and the policeman who took care of their neighborhood—everyone in the Village, even strangers, especially strangers, felt like friends.

  “Uncle Reuben is not my uncle by blood,” she told her friends. “He’s my uncle by choice.”

  HER FATHER COULD if he wished to materialize in Maggie’s life but he was married to somebody else. Married. Such a possibility had never entered Maggie’s mind, just as his physical appearance had never taken shape.

  He was above imagining, a figure who might one day float into her orbit and lay claim to his daughter.

  And why, she wondered, zipping up her flowered skirt, slipping into her clogs, if he was married to someone, wasn’t it her mother he had chosen?

  She took hold of Felix’s hand and hurried downstairs as the neighbors spilled into the hall.

  Lucy was standing in the kitchen next to the sink with the flowers she’d picked up at Safeway, a mixed bunch of long-stemmed tulips wilting in her arms.

  She had forgotten to put them in water.

  Zee carried an iced angel food cake with pink letters, Welcome to Witchita. Her twin sons dragged their feet behind her. She hurried to the kitchen, setting the cake on the count
er, a way she had of walking on her toes, as if she had been blown forward and couldn’t stop moving.

  “We’ve bought champagne,” she said to Lucy, gesturing to the women following her into the kitchen in their black coats dusted with powdery snow, bright-colored scarves wrapped around their necks, carrying wineglasses. “Lane Sewall,” she said, introducing them one by one. “And Robin Robinson and Josie Lerner. And Maeve and Teddy and Sara and Rufus. Victoria, who’s a sort of happiness therapist, couldn’t come.”

  Lane Sewall glided into the room, reedy and tall, pale with a cap of wheat-colored hair, just off pretty, a bottle of champagne stuffed into the deep pocket of her coat.

  “Here,” Zee said, taking the flowers from Lucy.

  “I have a vase,” Lucy said, her voice thin as if the wind had been knocked out of her by the neighbors whipping through her kitchen, Zee putting things in place as if Lucy were incompetent in her own house.

  “Never mind, Mama,” Maggie said in a stage whisper. “The glass works fine for a vase.”

  Lane had wandered over to the illustration of Pierre.

  “Sendak?” she asked, talking with Josie.

  “Josie and the beanstalk,” Zee called Josie, who was more wafer-thin than slender and awkward, with olive skin and long flyaway hair which she wore straight.

  “It looks like Sendak,” Josie said. “Real?” she asked Lucy, who was leaning against the sink, a slow-creeping anxiety rising in her throat.

  “Where can we put the presents?” A wiry blond boy, maybe seven or eight, stuck out his hand holding a red book.

  “I’m Rufus,” the boy said, handing the book to Maggie.

  “I’m Daniel,” the taller twin said, “and that’s Luke.” And “I’m Maeve, and this is my little brother Teddy.” And “I’m Sara.”

  And then they were silent, standing quietly, staring at nothing across the room, not even talking to each other.

  Nothing like the chatty New York children Lucy knew in the Village. She wondered if their silence had to do with her or her house or her children and whether she would grow to like them better than she did now, these perfectly attractive children. She wanted them to go home.