The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Read online

  “Yeah,” I say, because she is too drunk to hear anything I say. “Yeah, right.”

  I don’t sleep much. Although Gerard is doing whatever Gerard does a thousand miles from here, I wake up edgy and pissed off, prowling the living room, fingering priceless small objects in the eighteenth-century cupboard in the little dining ell in my mother’s house. I can open her desk and discover all her secrets if I want to, or dance naked in the lavish bathroom, studying my profile in her mirrored walls, and Lydia won’t know. She’s never up before noon. Something in the narrow, depressing kitchen smells so bad that I wonder: what does this woman eat? All I find are stale water biscuits, left over from some party. A can of smoked oysters. A banana too old to peel. While I wasn’t looking, my aggressively young mother turned into one of those people who, you’re afraid to look into their fridge. It yields a bottle of Cuervo and two glasses in the freezer, rimmed in rock salt and on the shelves below, nothing but a half-bottle of olives, some shriveled carrots, and forgotten clamshells filled with dried-out leftovers from dinners out—nothing a person could eat.

  Because everything in the nice new town where my mother is staging her nice new life is much too close to everything else, I take my laptop out for coffee as soon as it gets light.

  It’s easy enough to find the abbey. The place is famous, perhaps because it and the local writers’ colony are symbiotically linked. People whose names you’d recognize have gone to the abbey to detox, finish that book, retreat from life long enough to regroup. No wonder the rising starlet came here at the height of her career. No wonder she stayed. Climbing the hill, I wonder. Is Gerard here to detox or because he’s trying to write a book?

  Then I think it doesn’t matter whether, or which. I need to suss out the woman Lydia is girding herself to confront.

  It’s easier than you’d think.

  There’s a nun in the kitchen garden that runs along either side of the drive, tying up tomato plants and raking between rows. She’s wearing the flowing medieval habit that old nuns cling to like the past, but with the sleeves rolled back and the skirts tucked up. Instead of the starched wimple and flowing veil I expected, the white headband and perfunctory veil look like something you’d clamp on a little girl out trick-or-treating as a nun.

  “Um, Sister?”

  “Hi.”

  “I’m looking for Mother Therese? I’m here about.”

  “Gerard.” Oh, how fast her face changes! “Tell me you’re not one of his.”

  Don’t finish! “No. But my mother is.”

  “Oh, Gerard. Gerard.” Her expression tells me everything. “We’re all very fond of Gerard, but you might as well know. I’m losing patience with him.”

  Monday, and Lydia is girding herself for the encounter. Don’t ask me why I stayed the extra night when I expected to escape right after Sunday lunch. Don’t ask me what it was like.

  Lydia stands in the mirrored bathroom, contemplating the image she’s chosen to present when she confronts Mother Therese. Skin-tight leather jeans over her oldest riding boots because they make her feel brave. Missoni cashmere cut on a tricky diagonal. In the Moschino jacket with its braid and brass buttons, she looks like the brave little drummer boy. Oh, Lydia, what do you think you can accomplish at the abbey, even with a thousand dollars on your back?

  “Well,” she says, “what do you think?”

  I pretend she said, How do I look? “Terrific.”

  If I’m still here in my mother’s glossy rural showcase on a Monday when I should be back in the city, safe at work, I guess I’m feeling adult and protective. I should be, knowing what I know, but I move aside so she can open the front door. She stands on the stone step with her sleek little French sports car in the background, waiting for me to admire. I should, but she throws that silk scarf around her glossy salon-cut hair to complete the picture, which is what this is. So I am back in that taxi on the day I broke her compact and she made me cry. Shall I tell her? Will I?

  Poised, my mother says, in a spasm of uncertainty, “Wish me luck.”

  I should pick up my bag and escape. I should slam the door hard and never come back. I should hit the mark and run if I have to, and flag the outgoing bus, but here I am. I wander my mother’s kitschy-chic and empty, empty house with my hands floating up, like an astronaut in zero gravity. By three, Lydia’s had time to drive to the abbey and back a dozen times and she still isn’t back. It makes me anxious and guilty. Whatever the abbess tells her, and I know what she’ll tell her, Lydia will be furious. She’ll come home changed by the encounter, maybe even for the better. I need to see; I need to make sure that I’ve relieved her of the slick, lying bastard she wants but never needed.

  Gerard doesn’t bother to tap on the window. He just walks in on me, affronted. “What are you doing here?”

  I’m not that little girl any more. I have an MBA. I strike back. “I thought you were in Minnesota.”

  “I thought you were gone.”

  “You’re here to see my mother.” Take that!

  Nice, the second in which the eyebrows lift—Gerard didn’t know. He covers smoothly enough. “I came back early, just for her.”

  “You know where she went, right?”

  “You know we’re in love, right? Or did she not tell you?” Gerard has no interest in my answer. He’s fooling with her coffee machine, so I can’t see his face. I have to wait while coffee brews and wait for him to wash out two cups and wait for him to pour before he speaks again. Handing me one with a sweet, guileless smile, he sits down on that sofa and starts.

  “Growing up in a convent is like nothing you can imagine. There are the sisters’ expectations, their selfless, blind generosity. The love. I was their puppy, theirs to love and train up in the way of the Lord,” he says and for a French Canadian from Minnesota, he lays it on with a surprisingly Irish lilt. “The way of the Lord is a lonely way.” I wait for the sigh. He says, “You can take the boy out of the religion, but. You know the rest. But you. You’ve never married?”

  As though I will fall into his hands. “Don’t start.”

  He doesn’t have to.

  She comes in white-knuckled and blazing, eyeliner smudged and clothes askew as though she’s been rending her garments.

  Like guilty lovers, we both spring to our feet.

  Now, I think, without even a flicker of regret. Now you’ll get it, Gerard. Now she’ll tear you a new one and kick you out for good. In my heart I knew she wouldn’t believe anything I said to her just because I said it, and she’s never trusted me. I did the right thing, letting her walk into that confrontation. She’d have to hear it from the abbess firsthand, in her own words, before she got mad enough to destroy the man, and now she has. Lydia and I will never be friends but when this is over she’ll thank me for letting her hear the truth, and from the source.

  Gerard holds his arms out with moist eyes and a squashy smile, expecting her to rush into them, but she rushes past as though he isn’t even in the room.

  “You,” she shouts, raging. “You went behind my back.”

  “I did,” I tell her, and I am not sorry.

  “Do you know what that woman said to me? Do you have any idea what she said?”

  “Yes. No.” I don’t want her to tell me. By this time I’ve written all their dialog inside my head.

  “The terrible things she said about Gerard. She’s trying to come between us!”

  I keep my voice low, for emphasis, “She’s trying to help you,” but it’s as if I haven’t spoken.

  “Stupid bitch with all her sacred, holy orders. I thought we were fighting for his soul, but she flat-out lied to me. She tried to get rid of Lydia Grayson with the thinnest, stupidest tissue of goddamn lies! Does she know who I am?”

  Guess not. But I try. “She didn’t tell you about the other …”

  “He finds love for the first time in his life and that woman says … You wouldn’t believe what she said to me. I sure as hell don’t believe it.”

  I
have to try, so I finish, “ … women?”

  Lydia is too angry to hear. “Do you want to know what I believe? She doesn’t want to save Gerard’s soul, Marie. She wants to save him for herself!”

  “Mother …”

  “Don’t.”

  “Mother, about the other …”

  She swings and misses—anything to stop my mouth. She is something outside and beyond her vain, selfish self. “And you,” she finishes when she can speak. “You flounced up there to the abbey talking trash to her, like that would break us up!”

  In its own way, her anger is splendid. Gerard moves in and gently takes the hand to stop her from swinging again.

  “Then you deliberately shoved me into that den of lies. What did you tell her, anyway? Is your life so boring that you have to break us up?” She steps back into him, rubbing against his flank like an ingratiating cat. “As if anything could ever break us up.”

  “I didn’t say anything, Lydia. She told me, but nobody can tell you anything. You had to see!”

  “What, that my life is over? That Gerard and I are doomed? Get out. Just go. Go out there and wait for the goddamn bus.”

  I want to. I can’t. “The bus is gone.”

  Before she can say the next angry, Lydia-centric thing, Gerard steps in with an expression I don’t want to parse. I know what he wants and I will not have this, but I can’t be here, so I let him pick up my bag. I have to escape! The Irish lilt kicks in as he opens the door. “It’s all right, darlin’, I’ll drive you to the train.”

  —The Yale Review, 2012

  Precautions

  “Don’t touch that,” Mother said, and I didn’t. “Don’t go near that. You don’t know what’s going around.”

  Well, we all knew, or we sort of did. Terrible things. Staph infections that science can’t touch, plus Mother said everybody knows you catch cancer off another person, and nobody wants to do that; “AIDS,” she said, “don’t even say it or you’ll get sick.”

  She sounded so scared that Billy and me clung to her legs and bawled until she promised to keep us safe. The world is a hotbed. You’ve seen the TV. Everybody who’s still out there is getting sick. Smallpox is back, to say nothing of bubonic plague. Tuberculosis creeps up on your best friend without you knowing; smile at them wrong and the next thing you know, you’ve got it too. Quarantine! Triple locked doors, nurses in masks, they take out one lung and you get it in the other.

  “I love you,” Mother said to us. “I’d rather see you dead.”

  Pestilence is loose in the land, one day you’re fine; run into the wrong person and the next, you are Infected.

  “And you can’t tell who’s sick! They may look like you or me,” Mother told us, “but they don’t do like we do.” That was the day she cut her friends off except for phone time, even though Margaret and Etta are clean as anybody and her best friends in the world, the world being where Father went that I am not allowed to go.

  You could catch It!

  “What, Mother? Catch what?”

  “Better safe than sorry,” Mother said. She loved her friends but she wiped off the mouthpiece every time they talked.

  Then Margaret got necrotizing fasciitis and they had to cut off her arm. Mother quit picking up the phone. “Germs,” she said, and for a while she was OK with talking on the speaker. “You can get them before you even know.” And poor Etta, she was nice to a stranger and caught herpes, so that was that. When Mother left off phoning, Etta and Margaret wrote letters, but you can’t be too careful. When you’re scared of germs after a while you start getting scared of everything that might have been near germs. You’re scared of germs coming off of people and you’re scared of germs getting on things like envelope glue, even though the mail person has strict instructions to put your snail mail in the De-con box outside the front door.

  We count on De-con to keep us safe. That plus the airlock.

  The first De-con box cost us a bundle, Mother ordered it off the web after Uncle Seymour died of strep, he was the first, and the improved De-con Enhanced Support cost a heap of Father’s insurance money, but it is a fantastic service that allows us to go on living the way God meant us to, Uncontaminated. Safe.

  That and the care Mother took, starting the first day the bad wind blew in from somewhere else and changed the world.

  “Flu,” Father said when he got in from work that day. “Everybody in the office is sick.”

  “Daddy, Daddy.” Billy and me clamored around his legs.

  Mother yelled, “Don’t touch him!” and yanked us away.

  Father said to her, “What are you doing?”

  “Stand back! The whole world is a contagious ward.”

  “Don’t worry,” Father said. “I’m fine.”

  “Don’t try and kid me,” Mother said. “There was a special report on TV, this is the worst flu ever. Plus, side effects! And you were just out in it.”

  “I didn’t go anywhere, just to the office.”

  “On the bus. That’s another hotbed. All those people, breathing on you. Who knows what you picked up? And the office! Out of the hotbed and into the incubator. The workplace. The TV says the workplace is the worst.” She handed Father his walking papers and shoved him out the door, which she locked and bolted.

  He cried on the front lawn until Mother rolled a pup tent and a week’s worth of food off the roof. For days he camped outside our front window, calling. “Day four, and I’m not even sneezing. Day five, and I’m fine. Day six … “

  “Not yet,” our mother said. “We have to be sure.”

  Then on the seventh morning, we heard him sneeze. “I didn’t mean it,” he cried. “It was an acci—achoo!”

  “That does it!” Mother screamed, and took the Glock Daddy kept under his pillow to protect us from burglars and started firing from the roof. “I love you, but go,” she yelled, being careful to hit the ground behind him as he ran. “And don’t come back until you’re clean.” She fired again, herding him into the street.

  We heard a screech. He got hit by a truck.

  Of course we cried, but when it’s a matter of your own health and safety, you shut up fast. After all, I mean, first things first. Mother pulled herself together. “I’ll keep you safe,” she vowed. “No matter what it takes.”

  “OK,” Billy said, “Me and Dolly are going out to play.”

  “Outside!” Mother grabbed him. “Not on your life! Something terrible could happen to you and you wouldn’t even know.”

  “But I want to go out and play.” Billy always was rebellious. He looked ready to hit and yell.

  “Not now,” Mother said. “You neither, Doll,” she said to me. She shuttered the windows. Through De-con she ordered and mounted a defense missile on the front porch roof, in case, and showed us how to use it. She sealed us in. “You’ll thank me later. This is for your own good.”

  “When?” I was scared and excited. Less excited than scared.

  “Soon, I promise, just as soon as they get all these sick people put away.”

  It was a little song she sang to keep us safe. AS SOON AS THEY GET ALL THESE SICK PEOPLE PUT AWAY. And every night we had a little party, cookies and ginger ale. We put on costumes and made jokes. Once a month we tested the defenses. Ready. Aim. Everything but fire. If one of Them tries to get in … She made paper hats for us. “Aren’t we having fun,” Mother said. She was laughing and laughing. “Aren’t we having fun!”

  So Billy and me, we stayed in, and I can tell you we were damn glad. We saw the ravages on TV. “Just as soon as they get all these sick people put away.” Truth? There was a whole world out there that we weren’t using, and I could hardly wait.

  But here’s the trick of it. You can’t get people put away when you don’t know which ones they are.

  Mother said we wouldn’t be in here long, but she worked on our armaments while we slept. It’s been a while, but at least I’m safe.

  So we have Mother to thank. And De-con. We never touch anything any
sick person touched.

  We order from Web-TV, no problem, De-con guarantees that no germs get into your food and none come in on the clothes you ordered off the Web or from the Shopping Channel and what if it’s maybe a little lonely you can count on emailing eBay or Amazon.com and they’ll mail you back, you might get a computer virus but at least you are safe. Or, and this is great! With the Shopping Channel, you can phone in and sometimes they put your phone call on TV. Imagine. You can tune in and hear yourself talking to the shopping host right there on the air! Plus, you get safe, germ-free delivery of anything you want, from your Albanian Aardvark to a Jivaro shrunken head. Who needs to go out? Our lives were full!

  I guess.

  It’s interesting, sitting there in front of the TV-puter most of the day. You’re, like, CONNECTED to all the billions of others for as long as you stay logged on but you can’t touch them, and this is weird. I was sitting in here protecting all my senses from contamination and all I wanted was to be touched.

  I guess Billy did too. He said, “I want to go out and meet some people I’m not related to.”

  Mother smacked him. “No way.”

  Oh, but we were safe. So safe! See, hear, feel, taste, touch, HAVE anything you want. Get excited ordering it and then get excited waiting for it to come. Well, anything that got delivered to the De-con box and made it through the double-sealed de-germified airlock in our front hall. But what’s the point of the perfect dress if nobody sees you in it except your brother and your mom? Billy and I would have had friends, I would have had cute guys to go out with, except Mother wouldn’t let us go to school.

  And I will tell you this about it. Mother did it because she loves us but home education is the pits. The whole world going on outside, we saw it on TV and on the web, and Billy and me stuck in Father’s den, which she had converted to the schoolroom, us and Mother. Sitting too close and breathing the same stale air.

  “What do you think, class?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think, Mom?”

  It got old. Billy was the first to crack. He got big and started ogling all these women on TV.