What You Call Winter Read online

  Marian smiled. They were the same age, but Vee’s gushing made Marian feel older — indulgent and, at times, cautioning. Vee was the one to suggest late lunches downtown, shopping sprees, grandiose plans for field trips and fund-raisers. It fell to Marian to remind Vee that the children would soon be home or that she couldn’t afford what Vee could.

  “I’m buying a carpet.” Vee’s face tightened briefly. “Maybe three or four carpets. I can ship, can’t I?”

  But Marian had been the one to propose this unlikely journey—Marian, who had gone to pick up Vee for a committee meeting and found her sobbing at the kitchen table three weeks after her husband had left her. “What will I do?” Vee asked again and again, until it sounded as if she were begging for something.

  Marian had not known what to say. After a moment she slid into the seat next to Vee and took her hand. All around them the kitchen gleamed, newly remodeled and sparkling white. It had been a point of envy for Marian, who had pored over tile samples and cabinet faces with her friend and tried not to think of the almond-colored refrigerator she herself still had to contend with, the oily carpet she longed to rip up. But now this: Vee in her silk blouse and a slip, bare-legged. A bowl of oranges on the table. Cody in his diaper, unnaturally silent. He stood in the doorway with his father’s Reds hat in his hand and stared dolefully at Marian.

  “Oh, that hat!” Vee cried. “For God’s sake, give me that fucking hat.”

  It was Marian who picked Cody up when he began to bawl. “It’s cold in here, Vee. Just let me put something on him.” She dressed the baby and put him in his playpen. He watched her, still holding the hat, as she called the school. “Mrs. Wallace”—she glanced at Vee as she used the name — “Mrs. Wallace and I have to cancel the meeting. Can you leave a message that we’ll reschedule? No, no, I’ll be there at three to pick up the kids.” She heated a kettle of water and gave Vee a mug of hot tea. “Drink this. You’ll feel better.” Vee in her slip, her long, pale legs. “Are you cold?”

  By now Vee had stopped crying, but the skin near her eyes was pink and strangely naked without makeup. “I’m fine. I’m fine now.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m fine.” She held the mug with two hands, the way Cody would. “We can still make it if we hurry. I just need—”

  “Vee.” Marian shook her head. “Maybe you need to get away. You could take the boys to Florida for a few days.”

  “Not Florida. Not my parents.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Somewhere else, then. Could your parents take the boys?”

  “You’ve traveled before. I never have. I don’t want to go alone.” Vee stared at Cody, naked-eyed. “He really loves that filthy hat, doesn’t he?”

  Marian peeled an orange, urged Vee to eat. “Where would you like to go?” she asked, and then suddenly, without thinking, “Why don’t you come home with me?”

  In the airport Vee bore no resemblance to the half-dressed woman eating sections of orange with her baby. “I bought a water filter,” she said happily. “And chocolates for the flight. And a silk robe for your mother. What do you think?”

  Marian’s own suitcases were battered and inelegant, strapped shut with cords. Her younger daughter, Tara, sat on them when it came time to latch them. Inside, folded among her blouses and tucked into her shoes, were packets of soup, cake mix, oatmeal, vitamins, a family-size jar of Metamucil, a touch-tone telephone, a shower curtain with plastic rings, a radio. “It’s 1983,” her husband, Daniel, said. “You can buy radios in Bombay.” He was what Marian called an American, although she too had a U.S. passport now. His family, which he called Irish, had not lived in Ireland for three generations, and he had never been there. He did not understand the boxes of pasta she brought home to her mother every other year, the Black & Decker iron, the dresses from Macy’s.

  “They’re cotton.” Daniel laughed. “They’re probably made in India.”

  “But they can’t buy this quality there, I’m telling you.”

  Flattened at the bottom of the case were packets of photographs and manila envelopes filled with report cards, Tara’s art projects, Nicole’s book reports. Both children had written letters at Marian’s insistence.

  “‘Dear Grandma and Grandpa …’ What should I say?” Tara had demanded. “‘School is fine. I am halfback on the soccer team.’ Do they know what halfbacks are?”

  Nicole sealed her letter without giving Marian a chance to look it over and added long strips of Scotch tape over the seam.

  “What did you say?” Marian tried to ask lightly.

  Nicole shrugged. “Why do you need to know?” She chewed her fingernail, and Marian fought the urge to brush her daughter’s hand from her mouth. But she could see Daniel staring at her pointedly. Their last night in a month, his raised brows told her. Don’t spoil it.

  Marian’s face tightened as she met his gaze. Why is it always my fault? she wanted to ask him. Instead she looked at her elder daughter, the narrow face, the hair hanging past her shoulders in long, thin sheets. Marian preferred her daughter to clip it back — “let us see you”—but Nicole wore it straight down over her ears, flat against her cheeks, like curtains drawing shut on a stage. She was twelve and suddenly tall, at sea on her own legs. She tripped up stairs and disliked wearing skirts.

  Nicole folded and refolded one corner of the sealed envelope, waiting, it seemed, for her mother to say the wrong thing.

  “I don’t need to know,” Marian told her, annoyed. “Here, put it in.”

  “I’m going to India,” Vee told the woman who took her boarding pass. She grabbed Marian’s arm and hung on, giggling. “What do you think of that? Just a couple of girlfriends, ditching their families, off to India!”

  Marian slipped out of Vee’s grasp. She felt strained, her smile wavering as it did when she waited for the snap of a shutter to release her from some uncomfortable pose. She never liked to contradict, but the trip Vee described was not the one on which Marian was embarking. On St. Hilary Road, in her parents’ house, her mother’s alarm clock would be set to go off in the middle of the night — a ritual her mother insisted on every time Marian came home. “I just say a quick prayer and go right back to sleep,” she promised. “What are your connection times?” Marian knew the alarm would ring for her departures from New York and Frankfurt too, and that for the last nine hours her mother would not sleep at all. She would pick at her food, too excited to eat, and fuss with a whisk broom, and nag her father into wearing his good pajamas. “Go to sleep, Frank. Otherwise you’ll be dozing off when they come — I know how you are.” She would keep the servant up late into the night. “Just make sure we’ve got the good cover on her bed, not the old one with the stain, the pretty one.” She would set the alarm for eleven o’clock but shoo Marian’s brother, Jude, out beforehand — “What if they’re early, these headwinds, tailwinds, what have you?” The shelves freshly dusted, the floors swabbed, the lights in every room blazing. The alarm would ring into her waiting hand—there, landed! —and then she would wait for her daughter to come home.

  Her father slept on a narrow bed he pulled to the front balcony: to escape all her mother’s ring-ring nonsense in the middle of the night, he explained brusquely to Marian every time she arrived. But she knew he slept where the sound of the car after midnight would rouse him, to be sure he was up by the time the gate was open.

  “Here we go!” Vee squeezed Marian’s hand as they moved into the jointed tunnel that led to the aircraft. “Honest to God, Marian, I feel like I’ve been waiting for this my whole life. You know what I mean. Just picking up and going someplace.”

  But for Marian, India was not an impulse of escape or delight; it was the clock set in the middle of the night, the pull from sleep, the prayer. She felt a tremor of loneliness, swift and unsettling — she was not fully seen, she was not understood. It happened sometimes with Vee, even with Daniel and the children. Some essential part of her was out of reach, turned away like the far
side of the moon no matter how they moved around each other. She wondered if Vee realized that. She suspected not and all at once was flooded with love and pity for this friend who did not yet know they were traveling alone.

  “Who is this girl you’re bringing?” Jude asked when they spoke on the phone. He had not been to visit Marian since they’d left Massachusetts and moved to Cincinnati six years ago; he had never met Vee.

  “Vee, she’s called. Virginia. Her older son is in Tara’s class. You know, I’ve mentioned her before.” She stopped, confused. Over the years she had learned to navigate between two worlds, but she still found it difficult to reveal one to another. “We’re both class mothers. We’re in the Junior League together.” But what did Jude know of Junior Leagues? Marian thought of the lunches and museums, the car pools and barbecues, the country club where Vee and Gordon were members and invited them to swim. Vee’s son, Mickey, led the girls to the snack bar all day long for cheeseburgers, ice creams, large Cokes that no one finished. Nicole and Tara ate their french fries, wide-eyed. Vee waved away the money Marian tried to give her. Later, when Vee had gone for a dip, Marian pressed some bills into Mickey’s hand and he looked up at her, amused and puzzled. “We just give them our name,” he told her. “We don’t use money.”

  Finally she thought of Vee’s face, the large, loose mouth, the generous features. Her eyes were round and blue, the lines at their corners barely visible beneath her makeup. Her blond hair done up in a twist or tied back with a scarf. Gold hoop earrings, large enough for a baby’s bangle. “She’s fair. Scandinavian-looking, very pretty. She towers over me.”

  “But what’s she like?”

  “Oh, friendly, very sweet. And now her husband’s treating her so badly—I don’t know, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, inviting her. I didn’t really think —”

  “What? You didn’t think she’d come?”

  “Well, no. But listen, she’s a lot of fun. Very sweet, really.”

  “You sound nervous.”

  “No, no, nothing like that. It’s only that she can seem a little loud before you get to know her. A little brash. You know, American. Of course Nicole adores her.” Marian meant it as an assurance, but aloud, the words seemed to sour. “Anyway, you’ll meet her for yourself.”

  “What will she think of it here?” Jude wondered. Marian could not begin to guess. “Tell me about your home,” Vee had demanded, again and again — another translation Marian did not know how to attempt.

  Once the mediators had given up on conventional methods, Vee and Gordon were told to meet at ten on a Tuesday morning in the house they had shared. Mickey was in school, Cody at a neighbor’s. Each party was encouraged to invite a friend or family member for support. Vee chose Marian; Gordon brought his brother, Stan. A mediator would oversee the proceedings; at two the lawyers would arrive to finalize the arrangements. This was two weeks before Christmas. The larger matters had been settled; convertible to Gordon, house to Vee. Every other weekend to Gordon, weekdays to Vee. Christmas to Gordon, Easter to Vee.

  Marian pulled into the driveway just as Gordon and Stan arrived, so she waited in her car, engine running, until they had gone inside. She thought of Nicole and Tara at the country club food counter, trading Gordon’s name for onion rings, and did not know what to say to him.

  They started in the living room. Gordon won the toss.

  “So he can take whatever he wants?” Vee asked, so loudly that Marian flinched.

  “He has the first pick, and then it’s your turn,” the mediator explained again with exaggerated calm.

  “Relax, honey. I’m taking my time,” Gordon told Vee. He spun slowly, a single finger extended, and finally pointed to the grandfather clock that had belonged to Vee’s grandmother. “That.”

  Vee took the portrait of the boys she had commissioned for Gordon’s birthday, the year Mickey was seven and Cody was one.

  Gordon chose the coffee table. “I can’t stand those fucking couches.”

  Vee tried to take both the couch and the love seat — “They’re a set!”—but the mediator gave her one and made her wait until her next turn for the other.

  They trailed through the rooms of the house. Gordon got the dining table and five chairs; Vee took the remaining three.

  “What will you do with three dining room chairs?” Marian whispered.

  “What will he do with five?”

  Floor lamps, end tables, chests of drawers. Vee picked the king-size bed.

  “Can I have the mattress?” Gordon wanted to know, but the mediator decided the bed and mattress were a single unit.

  “Take the stereo,” Stan advised.

  Marian stood slightly behind Vee, not saying a word, not wanting to look up. She felt she was involved in a strangely intimate ceremony and wondered why she had agreed to this.

  “You’re out of your mind,” Daniel had told her flatly the week before, when Vee first approached her.

  “But she’s asked me,” Marian said. “How can I say no?” She thought of mornings spent on her kitchen stool, television muted, watching Donohue running soundless up and down the aisles while she listened to Vee cry into the telephone. Standing up for her seemed a matter of loyalty, nothing more.

  “You don’t know what he’s put her through. He’s fighting over every little thing.”

  “Divorces can be ugly. That doesn’t mean you should get involved.”

  It astonished Marian that he couldn’t understand. “I’m not getting involved, I’m her friend. I’m going as her friend.”

  They had not quite argued over it. They were cleaning up after a dinner party, the children asleep, the dishwasher running. Daniel sorted the silver. Marian put serving dishes in the cupboards, one inside the other. The room smelled of hot, soapy water and frying oil laced with masala and onions, and they opened a window to the sharp, dark air. “You know it wasn’t easy for me to come here. It wasn’t easy to—” She broke off, shook her head. “Vee was my first friend.”

  Daniel stopped, turned to face Marian. He had put on weight since he quit smoking, had cut the sideburns that once made her laugh. His hair, so much lighter than hers, was beginning to gray. She tried to remember what it was like to look at him before she’d begun to imagine a life together, but all the choices that had led her here—choices that felt like accidents, choices that had once seemed impossible — now felt inevitable. He looked tired, she realized, and with a pang she thought of all that had not been easy for him either—the trips to India when there was no money to send her; the nights he had come home to see her crying over letters; the first year of their marriage, when her mother refused to acknowledge him. For a moment she tried to imagine her father helping her mother in the kitchen, and it came to her that Daniel did all he could with what was within his reach, that he tried every day to make what was hard easier. She wished she had found a gentler way to explain herself.

  He shrugged. “Just don’t expect this to be easy either. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I don’t,” she told him.

  But in her kitchen, her belongings so inextricably bound with Daniel’s, Marian had not known how to prepare herself for Gordon’s clock and Vee’s couches, for the commandeering of dining-room chairs or the moment the whole party paused outside a door with “C-O-D-Y” spelled in colored wooden letters. A plastic fireman’s helmet hung off the doorknob. The mediator glanced up. “This is the younger one, right?”

  “Just leave it,” Gordon said.

  Vee said nothing.

  “You both agree?”

  Yes. Yes.

  They stood in the hallway while the mediator consulted his list. There was still the study to go, the family room, the kitchen. Marian felt nauseous.

  “What about Gordon Junior? Anything in his room?”

  “We call him Mickey.”

  Marian could hear that Vee was close to tears, and she stepped forward to touch her arm.

  Gordon pushed his hands in his pockets, head down. />
  “Keep it together, buddy,” Stan told him. He slapped Gordon’s back twice before clapping his hands, a sharp call for action. “Let’s keep this show on the road. Gordy. What do you say? VCR?”

  Gordon toed the carpet beneath his feet — one that Marian had brought back for them from India—and suddenly raised his head. “Is it my turn?” He looked directly at Marian, eyes blazing, and she remembered the first night they’d met, at one of Vee’s parties. He wore a blazer with brass buttons, shoes without socks. His face was a dry baked red that reminded Marian of clay roads at home, but his hair was thick and sandy, falling over his forehead when he took a sip of vodka.

  “So you’re from somewhere—hang on, Vee told me—I’ll get it in a minute —”

  “Bombay,” Marian supplied quickly. She had no interest in becoming a party game. She wore dresses as a child in India, a uniform skirt to school every day, but now, in the States, she preferred Indian clothes for all but the most casual occasions. That night she had worn a long silk kameez with churidar pants.

  “Got something on your face there!” He waved a finger near the bindi on her forehead and laughed, a short bark of a laugh to go with the dog-shake of his hair. “So, India. Huh. How’d you end up here?”

  “I came first as a student and then I met Daniel.” She smiled to see Daniel, locked in conversation at the other end of the room.

  “Sure, sure.” He nodded vigorously, not looking at her, as though in tune to some song she couldn’t hear. “Well, that was a stroke of luck, right?”

  “To meet?”

  “To end up here. I hear India’s rough. All that poverty— and disease, am I right?”

  Marian began to think about a second glass of wine.

  A woman with large, pale eyes had cut in. “Oh, but India is known for its spirituality. I mean, of course there’s the poverty—I don’t know how you handle that, I never could. But there’s such intense spirituality too. Have you ever been on a pilgrimage?”