Fellowship point, p.45
Fellowship Point, page 45
She steps into the snowy driveway and looks up at the sky, smiling. She’s wearing the old wool cape of yours I gave her, and the sheepskin-lined snow boots she found at the church thrift shop. Her hair stops at her scarf, red against green, like a Christmas ornanment. She’s marching to the door. Later, gator! I’m going down.
Elspeth, I am back. I am at last alone in my bedroom again, after what has felt like a decade of a day. Nan is in your old room with Star, both under a pile of quilts. Hawkweed is with me, sitting at the end of the bed, purring off and on in a pattern I can’t entirely parse. It is a peaceful tableaux, one that has become the norm here, for which I am boundlessly grateful. But for once I half wish Nan weren’t in the house and that I could be alone to pace and make whatever noise I want or need without inhibition. A noise that expresses that I am ridiculous. Absurd. I made a complete fool of myself, and have no one to blame but me. Who did I think I was, Elspeth?
I am completely embarrassed, even though no one knows. Well—Virgil knows.
I hardly identify with my pathetic, happy pages from this morning, when I was yearning but free. Here, I continue on, into a sober future. I am going to tell it as it happened, without hindsight. It has to be recorded plainly, for me to have as a referent in case I am ever tempted to reinterpret the events. I must never fool myself again.
I went down to find Karen bubbling, so much so that I giggled without knowing why. Even Mrs. C. was smiling. Star barked happily and Karen picked him up and hugged him and let him lick her face.
“Karen! Hand me your cape!”
“No, Agnes, you come out! Put on your coat and come with me over to see Virgil.”
“But we can’t interrupt him! I’m sure he’s working.”
“Not today. He’s expecting us.”
“He is? How do you know?” I was confused.
“Because we made a plan.” She grabbed my arm in both her hands and tugged.
“You and Virgil made a plan?”
She laughed. “Put on your coat and boots.”
“What about soup? I can bring lunch.”
“Virgil is making lunch for us,” she said.
“He is?” I kept repeating that. He is? He is? It pricked that she was bringing me the invitation rather than the other way around.
“Yes, he’s making lunch, all by himself. He’s going to be our host. You can’t pass up the opportunity to see that, can you?”
Her excitement was infectious.
“I just need a few minutes to get ready,” I said.
She giggled. “Oh, I’m sure you’d do a hundred chores before you put on your coat. But I’m not going to allow it. Come now, right now! You too, Star!”
“The snow isn’t too deep for her yet?”
“If it is, we’ll take turns carrying her. She’ll have fun.”
I patted Hawkweed and we stepped outside. For a moment it was warm. I had the same old thought I always have had in those circumstances—it’s not cold out after all, why are we so bundled up? Then after a few steps I walked into the wall of cold. The day was low and close, the air tinged with the scent of woodsmoke and snow. Though the flakes looked light, they covered the branches in heavy sleeves. The trees creaked. Automatically I craned around to look at the graves halfway across the field. I’d had all the stones removed after the accident, so the meadow ran unbroken down to the Sank. I thought as I always do how unfathomable it is that you are there, lying in the ground. Beyond the land the slate water looked like a hole.
Karen spoke about the Christmas just past, how fun it had been to watch Nan open her presents. I said I wished I could have been there, but I got to hold Lydia. Were we competing? Hard to tell in that weather. The snow pulled the day close around us, and made our footsteps and voices loud to our ears. I picked up Star and he snapped at the flakes from the luxurious throne of my arms. I remarked that I felt like a Russian struggling over the steppes. Karen smiled. She looked almost pretty.
At the Chalet Virgil opened the door for us and we stomped our boots and went in. The table had been cleared of papers and surrounded with three chairs. The settings were spotty, but Karen rounded them out swiftly with items she pulled from a satchel, including a loaf of bread and butter wrapped in foil. I kept smiling, but I was perplexed. How had they made a plan without my knowing? Did they speak privately? Sometimes Virgil walked Karen outside to her car after dinner, but I could think of no other time they were together, and Nan was usually with them then. It was all very odd.
Three places were laid, humbly but with a stark glamor. I noticed a pot sitting on top of the woodstove, vapor climbing up its sides. Scent of onion and carrot. My mouth watered.
Virgil poured us glasses of wine. “Scandalous, in the day!” I teased. I was relaxing into the situation.
“Here’s to friends,” he said.
We drank. I followed the rule of meeting eyes over a toast, but neither of them seemed to know of it, and only looked down shyly into the maroon liquid.
He’d decorated the room with fresh green tree boughs. A bowl of acorns adorned with sprigs of holly acted as a centerpiece. He’d thought this through, and gone to trouble.
“This is such a treat,” I said, my manners compelling me to shape the moment. “Are you planning to start entertaining now?”
“Maybe I’ll oversee the Point Party this summer.”
How I loved teasing with him! His height, his scent, his arms even under his sweater—all were so dear to me.
“You’re going to need a lot of practice. I think we’ll have to eat here a lot, don’t you, Karen?” I continued.
They looked at each other. More than just a look—a conversation passed between them, a swift back-and-forth that I saw very clearly; but it was an exchange in a foreign language, and I didn’t know what it meant. I watched and waited, bewildered. I felt like a child.
Finally—or it seemed like finally, but was probably a second later—he nodded.
Karen came close to me and took both my hands. Her plain face glowed. The walk in the cold had brightened her skin and loosened her hair, and the dim light in the room softened her features.
“Agnes, dear Agnes, we have something very happy to tell you.”
The look on her face—I’d never seen it before. Yet instinctively I understood it to be a threat. My whole body tingled with wariness. “Oh?”
“Yes! We are engaged! Isn’t it wonderful?”
She beamed. Virgil stepped forward and put his arm around her shoulders. A log in the woodstove, as if on cue, cracked and burst. A roar of fire shot up through my torso, a great flame shooting and huffing and threatening to immolate me from the inside. My arms ached, and I wanted so badly to do something with them, to hit or squeeze. My legs tensed in a desire to run.
Instead, I nodded, jerking up and down. I didn’t dare look at Virgil.
Karen held out her hand to show a piece of string around her finger. “A placeholder,” she said. “Virgil has asked me to marry him! And I have agreed.”
“I’ll get something soon,” he said to her, as pleased as if he already had.
I thought of all Grace’s rings, sitting in a safe deposit box in Philadelphia, useless. But I made no offer.
“So what do you think?” she asked. “We have been wanting to tell you for so long.”
“How long?” I asked.
“Oh, we can tell you while we eat. I’m starved! Let’s get the food on the table.”
“What about college?”
“I still want her to go,” Virgil said.
They exchanged a gaze that encompassed their burgeoning domesticity and all its quiet pleasures. I saw it as if it were a shelf full of photo albums. I saw it all ahead. Their life. Would she go? Or have babies instead? I felt as betrayed by this possibility as I did by Virgil not warning me this was coming. As if reading my thoughts, he looked at me sheepishly.
He got a towel and wrapped his hands with it to lift the hot pot. The wind whistled outside and they murmured in appreciation. “I feel a draft, don’t you?” Karen asked him in a beseeching feminine manner I’d never seen her employ before.
He nodded as if this were of no concern. He ladled out the soup and passed the bowls while Karen cut the bread. As we ate, they told me their love story. It began last fall… or earlier, depending, though they weren’t aware… hadn’t said… hadn’t spoken to each other. The first thing that was said was in, again depending, October, but the signal had been missed, or had there been one? There were glances, and moments, but neither was certain of the other. Didn’t I remember when she’d asked if Virgil would be there for dinner that time? So on and so forth tumbling over each other, excited and thrilled to have an audience, what love doesn’t want one, what is better than having love witnessed? The worst irony: I was making them happier by the moment, and sealing them tight.
I smiled. I congratulated. I died.
I died.
October. I’d been so sure his whole mind was on me. I wondered if he’d ever thought about me again after that night under the sky. All along I’d believed that aspect of our love would return. What a fool.
We washed the plates and sat back, feeling safe and fortunate, or they did.
“Have you told Nan?”
Virgil looked at Karen, and Karen touched my arm. I’d never known her to be affectionate, but it seemed that in love her body had gone beyond its bounds and didn’t want to stop. “We wanted to tell you first, Agnes. This is all thanks to you. You are the greatest friend of us and our future, you are our true family, and we want you always as a beloved aunt, welcome with us at all times.”
Beloved aunt. Ant.
“We plan to tell her tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
“And—” She removed her hand and laid it with the other in her lap. Demure. “We have a favor to ask.”
I was so uneasy, so miserable, that my mind was growing dim. I wanted to be alone with him, to ask him if all this was really true or if he was under some kind of strange spell, and I wanted to go home. I did the closest I could. I picked up Star and held him in my lap, in spite of my prohibition against animals at the table.
“We’d like to ask if Nan could stay with you tonight.”
The look on her face—hunger, tension, pressure, pleading—what could I do or say? I was trapped. How many dozens of nights had Nan stayed at my house? More than I could count, she did so all the time. She was always welcome. To call this a favor! To me! Who was essentially her mother! Or had been.
I dared not look at Virgil. What if I saw that he’d forgotten everything?
“Yes, that’s fine,” I managed to say. Star tipped his head and stared longingly at the bread, so I gave him a piece.
“Thank you so much, Agnes. You have no idea how grateful we are to you. All right, on to the show!” Karen stood and raised her arms, indicating that all of life could start up now. “Agnes, I’m going to ask you to stand up for a moment.” What was this about? What show? The two bounced around the tiny room, moving furniture so we were no longer in a dining room setting, but in a classroom or a theater. Two chairs were placed to face the desk, with the third behind it. Karen continued to touch this and that, not that there was much to touch, but she placed the candlesticks in the corners of the desk closest to the seats and made other similar small adjustments. It’s amazing how much difference a quarter of an inch here or there makes to the feeling of placidity in a room. It’s like beauty, or identical twins—the fraction of difference in the width of an eye, the lift at the corner of a mouth, the one with pleasing proportions owns the world while the other with a variation indiscernible except in the total effect, the other blends into the crowd of the norm. Karen swiftly made the room more attractive than I’d ever seen it. I had never interfered, thinking that was the more appealing way to be.
“You sit here, Agnes,” Karen showed me to a chair, “and I’ll be just beside you. Are you ready?” she asked him.
He pulled a sheaf of papers from a shelf and walked behind the table, so it stood between him and us.
“Pretend it’s a podium,” Karen instructed me.
I went along with all of this with no sense of what was happening, or being too dull-witted to want to try. I settled next to Karen and she squeezed my hand quickly. The scent of woodsmoke came off her clothes. I pulled Star up into my lap again.
“Ready?” she said to Virgil.
He nodded.
“I am going to read something new. It’s something like the story behind the story of writing Scalene.”
Karen clapped, and I took her cue. For the next forty-five minutes he read. I heard a story about a man and his young child who move into a cabin on a point of land in Maine. There they meet the most wonderful woman who lives in the big house nearby. She takes them under her wing, nurses the child through an accident, helps the man with his writing. Pure horror. I died and died and died again. Then the stupid woman introduces the man to the town librarian and they fall in love. No, that wasn’t what he’d written. It was in my exploding head.
The shadows and the fire’s warmth changed him into a wholly tender man—or love did. So very beautiful. But not for you, I reminded myself, not for you. He will never kiss you again. He will never make you feel beautiful. He’ll never speak to you in the dark, nor will you ever watch him as he sleeps. You won’t make plans with him. You won’t be the person sitting in the front row when his work is performed to great crowds. You won’t see Paris through his eyes, or hold him when he is in tears. You won’t live with him any more than you do now. You’ll never again get dressed in the morning in hopes of pleasing him, nor will you hear his expressions of gratitude as a form of lovemaking. There’s as much distance between you now as there was before you knew him. You don’t know him; he kept a secret from you. A lie of omission. Now you know. He’s capable of lying to you. Now you know. Now you know. What of Nan? She’ll learn to love Karen more. Karen will have children, and Nan will be part of a happy family. You’ll be a visitor.
He finished and bowed. We clapped again.
Karen turned to me, her cheeks pink with excitement. “How did you like our surprise?”
“Oh—” I fumbled.
“The piece was for you,” she said.
“Was it?” I felt weak, defeated. What I would have given if the piece were really for me.
“Your kindness to him. To us.”
“Oh.” Kindness. Terrible word! Kindness equals nothingness in this context. “Thank you.” I stood. If I didn’t get out of there, I’d begin screaming. “Thank you so much for the lunch and the reading. I must get back to work.”
There was no protest. They wanted to be alone. “I’ll just get Nan’s things,” I said. “From her room.”
I rushed across the cabin. I didn’t need anything, I had a whole room of things for Nan, but I rattled the drawers anyway and took out a shirt and underwear. The window was partly open, clearly the source of the draft we’d felt, so I shut it.
Virgil walked the few steps with me to the door, with Karen behind. I turned to him. This couldn’t be helped. Somehow I turned straight into his arms—I think he was ready to embrace me? I don’t want to make anything up, not anymore.
When I pulled back I saw he was weeping. He made no sound doing so. But his cheeks were wet and droplets of water fell onto his shirt. On another day I would have felt exalted being in the presence of so much feeling, and I’d have gloried in my effect on him, but not today. He was happy, and not because of me. An instrument can be pleasing and appreciated, but it doesn’t arouse happiness. I was an instrument, the rake that had flushed the snake from the grass. The net that had pulled the frozen man from the sea. It was time for me to be shut up in a supply closet.
Karen swooped in and squeezed me goodbye. “Thank you, dear benefactor,” she said.
I cannot even describe what these words did to me. I don’t think I can ever look at the two of them again. Please, Lord, let me hate them as I should.
Star and I dragged home. The snow still came in thick, fat flakes, wet and heavy, and we had to plow our legs ahead. For once I couldn’t enjoy the dog being so oblivious to everything but the present, I was beyond enjoyment of anything.
I sat in my room in a daze until Nan came in. Then I dragged myself out of my stupor and made hot chocolate for her and Robert and piled a plate of cookies high. Their eyes widened at the bounty, and they exchanged glances that warned each other not to mention my mistake. We settled in the glass room, a perfect fishbowl in the purple afternoon.
“Is Fur coming for dinner?” Nan asked. She had the whole plate of cookies on her lap. I left it; what difference did it make?
“No. You’re going to stay here, with me.”
“But I want to see him.”
“You will, tomorrow.”
“Where is Karen?” Robert asked.
Was he reading my distress? I had no doubt he could. “Why do you ask?”
“Her car is in the driveway.”
Of course. “She’s visiting Virgil.”
Nan shifted the plate to the table and moved to the edge of her seat. “Let’s go see them.”
“No!” I saw an image of what they might be doing, a brief flash. “No, we can’t. They’re busy.”
She tipped her head, just the way her father did. “Doing what?” She picked up another cookie and bit it, curious, not suspicious.
“They’re working on a project.”
“What is it?” Robert asked.
“If you must know, they’re planning a surprise for you, Nan.”
It was the only thing I could think to say. She instantly displayed a huge smile and clapped her hands. “When can we see it?”
