Saddlebags by Ted Corcoran
"Your mother's quite a pistol," he said.
Sadie nodded, rolling her eyes.
"You plan to recover at home--with her?"
"That's the plan," Sadie said.
"But he's not--?"
"Wil?" Sadie shook her head. "He's her boyfriend."
Dr. Nussbaum had crossed the personal information line and knew it. Now, he struggled
to conceal a blush of embarrassment and changed the subject. What did one do with
a degree in costume design from Northwestern: did Sadie merely design clothes or
actually work a sewing machine (both), did she favor today's styles over those of, say,
the 17th century (no preference, each period of fashion held its own treasures),
did she plan to work in theater or "go to LA" when she graduated (who knew?).
He smiled as Sadie explained her career choice, which people always found fascinating
at first, then worrisomely arcane. She sensed he was still thinking about her mother.
Angela could get under your skin that way. As she finished, he was smiling, fully recovered, and with a flourish he scheduled the procedure for the following Monday.
Everything was going to work out fine, he said, adding that it was going to be a
fine
fall weekend and he hoped Sadie got out and enjoyed it
Wil drove them back to Kilmarnock. In the passenger seat, Angela looked out at the
boutiques along Germantown Avenue. She blew her nose but kept sniffing. Sadie sat
in the back seat.
Wil caught Sadie's eye in the rear view mirror and winked. "Nussbaum, was it?" he
said. "If I'm not mistaken, that's nut tree
in German."
He chuckled, and Sadie smiled. Anyone who was still around after a year with her
mother had to know how to keep things light. The trouble was, Angela didn't get
jokes when there was a crisis (or didn't acknowledge them), and Sadie taking out
a loan to have a man suck fat from her thighs was a crisis.
"He can call it cosmetic, he can call it aesthetic, but I'll tell you what it is,
Sade," Angela said, finally. "It's tinkering. If you were giving up a kidney for
Abby or Maeve, that would be one thing. Or like me, having a dot of skin cancer
burnt off my cheek, or even like Christy Davidson, one of the women in the paddle tennis ladder,
who had arch surgery so she could walk again. Then, maybe."
In other words, operations should not be bought and sold; they should be undergone
. In Chicago, Sadie's sense of the pursuit-of-happiness had been stronger: "So loneliness
isn't enough, Mom?" she'd said into the phone, "You're saying I'm thirty and haven't met a decent male in two years
is too wimpy?" Now Sadie conceded Angela this point: aesthetic
surgery made liposuction sound like an art happening.
Wil said, "You know, if you were at D-Day, you had to pick up a little Deutsche
. In case the Gerries got you."
The women ignored him. Sadie was thinking how it wouldn't do to show weakness, doubt,
or second thoughts during this fine fall weekend. Angela would pounce. She had
given-in to her mother's pleading that she come home for the operation,but Sadie
still possessed a few secrets, things Angela didn't need to know--like the fact that it
was her Dad's new wife, Claire, who came forward with Dr. Nut Tree, and that she
actually had met a decent male. These secrets were power nodes, especially the very
idea of Patrick and how he had held her at O'Hare.
Wil set the blinker for the exit. He hummed something Sadie thought was from the
Forties, something from a musical-- was it Guys and Doll
s?
He had fought in The Good War, she realized.
"Nut Tree, Nussbaum," he said. "What's in a name, anyway?"
Dr. Nussbaum asked Angela and Wil to leave so he could speak with Sadie alone for
a moment. When they were out in the waiting room, he closed the door and sighed.
Sadie noticed his unlined forehead, his breath whistling in his nose. His office
was high in one of the new buildings off Germantown Avenue, closer to Philadelphia than Chestnut
Hill--a fact Angela had found meaningful. He bit his lip. During the examination,
Dr. Nussbaum told Sadie the stitching would be hidden in the folds of her buttocks,
that everyone had these folds. He never once used the word cosmetic
; instead, he referred to the procedure as "aesthetic" surgery (Angela asking him
to define his terms had rocked him).
Sadie watched these sorties, fascinated by the antlike industry and the inefficiency. Smoke billowed away at acute angles. Her mother's tortoise shell barrette glinted in the sun. She had gloves on over her big amethyst rings and old Tretorns on her feet (no socks). A fuschia sweater. Each time she bent over, her faded sweatpants stretched at the seams and the sweater rose up, exposing a flash of white torso.
What she was changing, Sadie reminded herself, was what she had the power to change.
"You've got saddlebags," Angela had told her. "Like your sisters. And me. But you know it comes from your father. Unfortunately, he can hide it in loose-fitting jeans. And height."
Her jump-cut logic did not always need a response. The shot at Dad was mild, comparatively. That his good fortune should mean injustice dovetailed with other theories Angela lumped under Chauvinism. Where liposuction was concerned, her work as an interior decorator, she said, "colored" her response. She could accept the procedure if it was like dyeing the drapes or taking up the rug--fine, as long as the light in the room was enhanced. What Angela feared most were changes that couldn't be undone.
"You know they cut you, Sadie."
"I know, I know, it's not environmentally correct," she said, combing through the rake. "But the neighbors won't say anything if I keep the fires small enough. Besides, they're kind of cute, don't you think?"
Sadie sipped her tea. The Pennsylvania air was crisp and autumnal, dry as the sycamore leaves. It was pleasant just to be able to move around freely. This time Monday, she would be bedridden. Dr. Nussbaum had described how they zipped you into a girdle with a slit where you could go to the bathroom. He'd said reassuring things but made it seem like if you breathed wrong you could tear the stitches. Sadie didn't know which was worse, her own imaginings or her mother's horror stories: nose jobs that had gone bad, collagen injected lips that blistered, Beezy Westmoreland's chin tuck that had produced a permanent Harlequin smirk.
"How are we feeling?" Angela asked, brushing back Sadie's hair, caressing her neck. "Are you hungry? It's almost lunchtime. Can I fix you a melted cheese sandwich?"
Sadie faked a smile. Her mother's melted cheese sandwiches (never grilled cheese ) featured Worcestershire sauce and dripped with Mayo. Everyone else in the family dipped them in ketchup. Sadie said she wasn't very hungry. (If she'd just gone ahead with the procedure in Chicago, everyone would have remarked on how slim she'd gotten. Now they would observe her like biologists; they would watch what she ate.)
"How about BLTs instead?" Angela asked. She shoved open the back door that led to the kitchen and removed her gloves. In the pantry, she searched the shelves. "Maybe you're hungry but just don't know it yet," she said. "What about soup? I've got a can of Pepper Pot somewhere."
Sadie eased herself into a chair at the kitchen table and stared out the bay window toward the stream where the ducks congregated. The new neighbors tossed bread crusts to them from the Somerset Road bridge. They fed the ducks like they were pets, coaxing them out of the stream onto their lawns.
When Sadie was growing up, Somerset Road hadn't even been a road but a driveway to the Somerset mansion. The house she and her sisters grew up in--the one in which her mother still lived-- was a cottage on the property. The rolling fields of fresh-cut timothy and thinned hardwood forest had made for an enchanted, if isolated, childhood. Sadie remembered thinking the Grimm's Fairy Tales and Winnie The Pooh stories her mother read to the girls at night were things that had happened just the other day, on the land that surrounded the cottage. By the time the Somerset heirs broke up the estate (they couldn't afford the taxes) she was old enough to know better. They sold the cottage to her father, who used it to bargain with Angela when their divorce was finally settled. The rest of the land went to developers. Along the old driveway now, and everywhere else on the estate, there were new homes. Each one ugly in its own way, Angela said, paraphrasing Tolstoy.
Unlike her sisters, who were away at college, Sadie watched this pattern repeat itself in Kilmarnock. One-by-one, the grand estates, the summer homes of Philadelphian society were scaled down and sold to developers. Sadie remembered thinking her parents' divorce was somehow tied up in this larger trend.
At the cutting board, Angela said, "The neighborhood got up a collection to clear out the stream bed for the ducks." She peeled a tomato and cut it up. "Of course that's where we dumped our leaves for years."
"Did you give anything?" Sadie asked.
"Yeah, more leaves," her mother smiled. "Just kidding."
You couldn't blame her fore hating the neighbors, her sister Maeve said. When you've raised a family on an estate, living alone in a subdivision is something of a comedown. Making a contribution to the neighborhood would mean condoning the neighborhood.
On the phone to each other, Sadie and her sisters wondered what their mother lived on. Was there as stash of money none of them knew about? Direct questions were deflected. Angela rotated her confidences among them; for months, Abby listened to bodily worries (a late-arriving mammogram report, various muscle aches that indicated Lyme disease), Maeve heard money woes (laced with Dad-acid), and Sadie got bulletins on loneliness at 60. In a month, there would be another rotation and much of the same stuff could be recycled. Thinking this way made Sadie feel guilty. She wasn't a cynical person by nature, and it wasn't as if her or her sisters' sympathy didn't flow homeward, but she wondered sometimes if there weren't other things a mother and daughter might talk about.
And now this fine fall weekend already seemed interminable, a stretch of time created simply to give doubt and second thoughts space to exist. Like those parental-consent abortion clauses, or hand gun waiting periods, time made you feel you were being bad.
On the phone, Maeve had cautiously brought up the feminist angle: that liposuction made Sadie a pawn of the Calvin Kleins of the world, those who created outrageous and impossible molds. She was subsidizing an industry that kept women insecure and down. "But I'm not being critical, believe me," Maeve said. Abby wondered what Sadie would be able to wear on the beach.
At Northwestern, Sadie still needed to finish-up her thesis. For a course called Sets and the Setting , she'd devised a theory about how things, in general (and fashions, in particular), became associated with their times. Although the public's semiotic associations were sometimes erroneous, they could be useful to setting the stage, creating the aura, i.e.: Bluegrass music in Bonnie and Clyde . The outlaws never heard anything like Foggy Mountain Breakdown , but putting them together in the movie had worked.
Home was a lab. Exploring the stone cottage, Sadie found a stack of Audubon magazines piled in a bay window. The covers had a timeless quality that bordered on cliché, an environmental tiredness that made her want to yawn: Impalas on the Serengeti, Wood Storks wading in a Florida wetland, Bison in silhouette on a barren Montana hillside. Sadie wondered if the preponderance of the color blue in the photos revealed a certain period of photographic history. Or, was it simply the way glossy paper faded? Whatever the answer, there was no mistaking her father's name at the bottom of each cover.
The Audubons were from 1978, the year Sadie's father took Angela on a walk in the woods surrounding the Somerset estate and told her he was leaving (he moved out in 1981). 1978 was her mother's last good year, the last year when things still opened outward for her. Ever since, in a kind of subconscious response to the closing-in of things, Angela had been collecting artifacts, creating a setting for this era. The Audubons were just one prop among many. The Phillipian, which lay unfolded, yellow, and brittle next tot he telephone in the kitchen, was from Maeve's years at Andover (1978-9). On the piano in the living room, family photos from c.1978--forty or so, of Sadie and her sisters-- were arranged in freestanding Lucite frames. In one, Abby smiled toothily from behind the wheel of the Civic wagon their father had bought second-hand; her dirty-blonde hair was lightened by lemon squeezings, the fad then. In another, a barefoot Maeve looked dreamy in a purple tapestry wrap, hair down her back-- a girl with faraway eyes. The cuffs of a charcoal v-neck (it belonged to a boy) were bunched in her fists. Her own images, Sadie hated. They confirmed the notion she first became convinced on back then: that all the petite features in the family gene pool went to Maeve and Abby, and that she'd been scraped together with the leftovers. The one photo of herself which she could stomach showed Sadie towering over a friend, giggling.
"I've got the floor plan around here somewhere. Ripley is very dark, very Chestnut Hill, but we're working on that--skylights and windows, pruning back the oaks, giant oaks, in the yard."
Angela talked about these clients as though they were cash cows, and Sadie guessed it was true: if she confined her clientele to people along Germantown Avenue, a decorator needed only one or two jobs a year to be doing well. But it had been a long drought.
"Lily said she wanted something to brighten up the dining room. Well, it had four walls and no windows, a ghastly chandelier hung too low, and ceiling woodwork stained dark mahogany. I told Heather Farquharson at the fabric store it was the kind of look you'd expect in a Skull and Bones mess hall, for God's sake. She laughed."
When her father moved out, Maeve and Abby begged Sadie for details from the home front. They were away at college by then. Sadie told them what she knew: that they'd heard he was living in his car; that a friend of Mom's got him a house to sublet ("Some friend," Angela had said.) Her mother's idea was that he would come home when he hit bottom, when he realized his alcoholism had ruined their lives, when he remembered who really cared for him. Be he hadn't come home, and it was ten years before the divorce was settled.
"I suggested to Lily sanding the floors and refinishing the wood, but Charlie vetoed that. Why, I don't know. Though they fear bright colors, men usually go for light wood grain. It was not a question of money, believe-you-me. Basically, I was left with the walls."
That Dad was sober now and bent on reclaiming his relationships with his daughters was something Sadie and her sisters thanked God for--they'd all given up hope so the change sometimes seemed miraculous (he was there! ). Angel was aware of his turnaround from secondhand sources. She made Sadie, Abby, and Maeve feel her envy. It was unfair, she told them, to be the beneficiary of a miracle and have the money to enjoy it.
"I got the painters to apply a kind of apricot wash with texture added to the paint. A very light wash, not orangy , but a warm apricot. Well, at first Lily hated it, but then Charlie took a look and said it did wonders for the room. Suddenly, Lily was all smiles, which worries me. Sometimes, you can succeed too well."
Sadie nodded. The point of the story was, watch out for women, especially your women friends. Even her mother's successes were tinged with a sense of victimhood. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Angela was either making an effort to not talk about the operation, or she had stopped fighting it. The ducks bobbed in the stream, circling each other. A cloud passed in front of the sun and the room darkened then brightened again.
"Wil has asked me to marry him," Angela said.
Sadie stirred her soup. She blinked, waiting.
"I didn't tell him anything."
An irritable quack-quacking came from the stream. A neighbor was tossing bread from the bridge.
Angela said, "I told him I needed some time to decide."
Sadie nodded She thought of how her sisters would receive the news; then she wondered if her mother even intended to tell them. (No , if the answer was no). She felt privileged to be confided in but also burdened with knowledge, as she had when she was the only daughter left home to watch her parents' disintegration. About Wil, her mother once said, "He has money enough, but not oodles," and they had spent the day at the shops in Chestnut Hill trying to pin down what she meant by oodles.
Sadie sensed her mother was taking her silence for disappointment, which wasn't exactly so, but she didn't feel the need to allay this feeling. She wanted what her mother wanted (happiness?) but wondered if Angela's price was too high. When she and her sisters were growing up, Angela was fond of mock-spoiling them, only half-facetiously intoning, "What you want, you must have! " Angela's price was romance, and if the way things stood with Patrick was any indication, Sadie knew what it meant to want that.
To Helen and Cressida, and the rest of the women, Sadie designed a Mod London-look, 1964: straightened red and blond hair with bags cut just above the eyes (some of the extras wore beehive wigs. Wrong era, possibly, but it worked). Their dresses were belted and sleeveless, hemline cut just above the knee-- with white Nancy Sinatra-style leather boots. Sadie wanted the men to embody the last warriors of American free enterprise, the women the last of the unadulterated objects. Everyone smoked cigarettes.
At one point, the director pulled Sadie aside. "Don't you think you're being a little too satiric?"
Her unclever response lacked the necessary production-stress cynicism: "No."
At show time, both Angela and Sadie's father called for tickets to the play. In different conversations, they both told her they "wouldn't miss you doing Shakespeare." Sadie asked them to pass on this one. Satiric or not, her interpretation risked a classic shock of recognition, the kind Sadie knew would not lead to enlightenment (never mind enjoyment) but would explode on impact. That her mother and father were smart enough to understand what she was getting at didn't mean they were going to like it.
What brought them together in the first place? Photos of her father in his Harvard years showed a man brimming with confidence, his face boyish and lean with intent, captain of the soccer team (curiously, his hair was not as short as other men). For her part, Angela relished telling Sadie and her sisters that even at Smith in the late 1950s, a woman did not attend college with the idea of finding a career.
"We were the last good girls," she said. "But they wanted the impossible--find a man to make a start with, but leave the place finished ."
Although there were still society cotillions and upscale balls, Angela described night-long bus trips to the all-male colleges, like Harvard and Yale.
"You bonded with the girls, but meet a nice young man.? Forget it. I would hope, for your sake, we've got better perspective now, but I tell you those trips were drunken grope-fests! We got off the bus like sorority cattle, while the men drooled. They had all the power and knew it, just like they do today."
As for the cotillions, Angela said the powder rooms were filled with "as much maneuvering and intrigue as a LeCarre novel." One had to be able to distinguish between one's friends and one's true friends. One's women friends, especially.
What Sadie found interesting (and sympathetic) was how strange it must have been fore her mother to be aware that the traditions of how college-educated men and women found each other were coming to an end--and yet still take part in those traditions. She didn't believe, like Maeve, that the phoniness of it all brought on a generation of divorce. It was the end of something, but you couldn't blame them for not being able to see it. They were lonely; they wanted to fit in--Sadie's own loneliness had given her insight denied her sisters. Secretly, she wished the old-time courtship traditions still existed, and not just for how people dressed up!
Among the female costume designers, the joke was that the theater had its own anachronisms --available men. As they stitched and sewed the Martha Washington poodles for a local production of "George Washington Slept Here," one of the newcomers was quick to catch on. "I get it," she said. "The straight guys get the straight starlets, and the gay guys get the gay starlets. And we get together ."
This kind of cynicism was not Sadie's style. With a what-the-hell, she'd contacted "Connections," the place with the biggest ad in the yellow pages. Patrick looked gorgeous in his photo, less so on video, and was slightly overweight in person. Sadie told her sisters about him. His bio said he was from Dekalb, and they all joked about him showing up at her door in a seed cap with a stalk of corn on the visor. But that had been so wrong, Sadie banished further preconceptions--and jokes. Patrick worked on the commodities exchange, one of those shouting me with slips of paper folded into their fists, but there was a cattle farm, which he planned to run when his father died. They had been dating, in a moderately old-fashioned way, for a month. If he was a bit dull, on the other hand, Patrick was conscientious--flowers arrived with warm notes, chocolates were sent from Marshall Fields (their Frango Mints were delicious relics from the 1940s)--and the aggregate effect of his low-key attention had worn down Sadie's reluctance. He was sweet, and her mother always said sweet could make up for so much.
"Cute ," Claire said, holding the photo up to the light. Claire was the woman her father had married. "Oh my God, Sadie."
Sadie looked for her saleswoman's raised eyebrow and listened for the sound of a voice pressing. If there was false enthusiasm, it was just a trace, not enough to resent. Patrick's face always touched people with its innocence. Doughboyish, his features were crowded toward the middle, his cheeks an elliptical frame. A face a caricaturist would love, Sadie had first thought. But as they had seen more of each other, the look of WWI innocence gave way to a kind of knowingness. He was confident.
Claire handed back the photo and picked up the phone.
"Jim, Claire. It's twelve fifty-five and I'm at 3675 Bobolink wondering if you told the Capertons one o'clock or noon? Maybe they had car trouble. Call me later about Mr. and Mrs. Potts; I think they may be willing to go a bit higher, like three forty five five . If I can get the Bernheims below three fifty, we just might have something."
It was Sunday afternoon. The kitchen they were standing in belonged to one of the new homes on the old Somerset estate, walking distance from Angela's cottage. To Sadie, it was ironic, strange and, in a weird way fitting that her step-mother made a living brokering deals on these new homes. Claire was ten years younger than Angela, which put her just barely over the line into a different generation. Earlier, as they waited for the Capertons, Claire explained what splitting the commission was all about. She was taller than Sadie, taller than most men. Claire was also a stick. Her dirty blond hair hung straight to the shoulder, but Sadie remembered a wild permanent she'd had in the 1970s, during her first marriage. She and her husband had lived in Kilmarnock then, too. They were members at the country club, just like Sadie's parents. Those were Sadie's own teenage years; she could remember her mother disparaging Claire to her, even then.
"Be careful around her," Angela had said.
Sadie still wasn't sure who had come up with the idea of liposuction, Claire or herself. She was aware that, even if it had been Claire's idea, it had been suggested in response to her own unhappiness, and that pains had been taken to make it seem like her own idea. In any case, it was Claire she went to for advice on the procedure. Unlike her mother, Claire told positive stories of people who had changed their lives by changing themselves. Sadie listened, trying to balance these stories with her mother's worry. It had been Claire who found Dr. Nussbaum in Chestnut Hill. Now, Sadie understood his confusion after the examination-- when he'd asked Angela and Wil to leave. He'd thought her mother was the one to thank for the referral.
"My friend Ruth went to Nussbaum for lines around her eyes," Claire said. "And I don't mean crows feet. She would point with her fingers and say, 'Look, twin Amazons!' The guy did a great job. She's seeing Freddie Houck, you remember him from the Christmas party last year? Big guy, funny."
Claire loved gossip as much as Angela. Sadie was always astonished at how much they were alike--though neither would admit it. That her father had a type seemed an outdated notion, but in keeping with his time, those late fifties years of male optimism. (And yet, at Connections, there were other videos besides Patrick's, men she'd looked at and thought, no, not my type. ) Growing up in Kilmarnock, Sadie had always been aware that the adults, especially those at the country club, talked about one another's affairs more than what was going on in the world. Nixon resigned with nary a peep. Until recently, Sadie thought this indicated how reckless adults were back then, how small and petty. Patrick may have had something to do with it--or maybe the feeling that she had somehow become an adult-- but her feelings had changed, coincidentally, with the realization that her own response to the wider world was an emotional one, that it didn't hinge on great events. Love made people do what they did. That's what gossip was about.
Claire was telling the story of a friend who'd had an affair with "a man of the cloth."
"We were in Princeton, he was the guest preacher at the local Episcopal church. After your Dad and I came off the tennis court, there he was; we said a few words, and I could tell he'd recognized me as Ginny's friend but was trying to glide over the situation. You know, Very nice to meet you. A week earlier, Sadie, the jerk had dumped her. He knew I knew. And he knew it wasn't good that I knew, seeing as he was doing a guest stint there at the local church. So, he faked it. And we had had drinks with him and Ginny on the Eldington's back deck two weeks before!"
The difference was that Claire was more mischievous about knowledge. She classified people as much as her mother, but in her rabbit warren you were either a shit (and, therefore, not any fun) or you were fair game. When Angela gossiped, she made rational appeals about people's character, she formed alliances and spoke in disbelief about the outrageous things that had been done to her and others. The world as a cotillion powder room, Sadie thought. Claire simply loved to dish.
"When Sunday came your Dad said we should skip church, but I went anyway. I had to say something to him. After the service, I went up and said, 'Ginny seems to be doing well, all things considered.' I had ahold of his hand, like this Sadie, and you should have seen his face. He was pleading! later on, I saw Ginny and told her, but she was sad. She wants out of her marriage. Don is kind of a lump, especially in bed, one of those guys who are just a sexual, you know what I mean? He's with Chippenham, Spellman. But they've got two lovely kids. I told her don't rush off--it's cold out there in singles-land. Believe me, I remember."
It took awhile for Sadie to realize Claire's stories were always about sex. Sex and power. Of course, so were Angela's. The difference was, in her mother's stories, women had no sex and no power. Claire liked to mention penises--sizes, abilities-- and Sadie had observed her watching how people responded. They squirmed and giggled; the details were always delicious and naughty and irresistible. Sadie understood that this was what her father loved about Claire, the way she animated the sexual side of life. He could be naughty with her.
Being around Claire made Sadie think thoughts she was usually uninterested in. Naughty thoughts. She and Patrick had made love three times, and each time he'd been extremely careful and considerate--maybe too careful. For the first time, she wondered if she were to blame. Sex wasn't that important to her; she was thinking it should be--but was it something you could control? Maeve was married with one child. Abby was married, too. Sadie wondered if either of her sisters enjoyed sex with the men they'd married. Really enjoyed it.
She told Claire about the last visit to Dr. Nussbaum, how he had marked her skin with a felt-tipped pen and then made a big issue of throwing the pen away in the name of sanitation. Sadie joked about the thousands of pens they probably went through and how her rear end looked tattooed. Claire laughed, and Sadie added that, kidding aside, Dr. Nussbaum seemed to really know his business: he had recommended that some of the fat be sucked from the back of her knees, so that her legs would be in proportion to her diminished hind quarters.
"Are you nervous?" Claire asked.
But the way she put the question was not meant to bring up dangers and potentialities. It was as if Sadie was getting married.
They walked through the house. The empty rooms echoed with their voices. Hardwood floors. Tall ceilings. It was harder to sell a house with no furnishings, Claire said. In the kitchen, she pointed out the dog tracks in the Mexican tile. Sometimes, in Guadalajara, dogs trotted through the area where tiles were laid out to bake in the sun. It was a selling point, Claire said, rolling her eyes.
"The bottom has really fallen out of the market," she added. "Five years ago this place sold for something in the six hundreds. These people will be lucky to get three."
Outside, the lawn was thick, the lines sharp at the edge of the sidewalk. There was not a leaf in sight, and Claire told Sadie that men vacuumed them up nowadays. Sadie realized she was looking at a place with no history behind it. She was looking at newness. The house itself was divided into three sections, each made with three different building materials: stone, clapboards, and stucco. This was true of most of the new homes; they also each had a single Palladian window facing the street. Sadie smiled. The aesthetic of her times seemed to be an amalgam of styles-- it was like the developers had gone out of their way to create a setting. But the neighborhood seemed made of the same stuff that stage hands took down with a few swift hammer blows when a play had reached the end of its run. Her mother's hording of her own setting seemed almost rational, suddenly. At least what she clung to was authentic.
Claire sighed, saying it sucked to get stood up on a Sunday afternoon. She asked Sadie if she was free for dinner, and Sadie said her mother had made plans for them to meet Wil at the Bluebell Inn.
"Even though Dr. Nut Tree said no food after eight, no water after midnight, on account of the anesthesia."
Claire asked what Nut Tree meant. Sadie told her about Wil.
Then she said, "He asked my mother to marry him."
Claire said nothing for a moment, and Sadie sensed she was chewing the tidbit, readying the digestive juices. Sadie swore her to secrecy and they said goodbye.
As she wandered back down the slope of the neighborhood to the cottage, the place seemed to rise from the stream bed hollow with each step. Paint peeled from the stone facade in page-sized flakes. Shingles that blew off the roof littered the yard. A stalk of wisteria had sprouted from the top of the chimney. Though the new homes that surrounded it were more than objectionable, Sadie did not find this sight romantic, either.
A stray thought: none of the new neighbors would object to her having liposuction. The procedure was extreme only to old-Philadelphia types, like her mother. Not much comfort there (who wanted to be like the new neighbors, paying six-figures for a stage set?), and Sadie felt less sure of what she was doing than she had all weekend. There was something else: how could she have betrayed her mother;s confidence so easily" And to Claire of all people, someone for whom the knowledge would be like gold. How could she? The telephone lines were probably already zinging.
She felt the stab of her mother's finger--Be careful around her. Then she shook it off. What she was changing was what she had the power to change. Sadie repeated this--it was not a phrase anyone had told her but something she'd come up with on her own before she left Chicago. A mantra for the weekend, she'd called it. What she was changing....
That night, while Angela got into her dress, Sadie slipped the Audubons into a plastic garbage bag. She tied a knot with the twisted ends and threw the bundle in the back seat of the car. On the way out to the Bluebell Inn, her mother stopped for gas. While she was inside paying, Sadie tossed the magazines in the dumpster.
Wil had a vodka on the rocks, Angela a glass of White Zinfandel. Sadie had seltzer with lime. Her mother was telling Wil about Lily, her client, this time with greater intimacy and worry in her voice. He had heard part of the story before--about the apricot wash. His hair was combed straight back, held in place with Vitals, which created a large M of a hairline. His forehead was mottled with freckles. He was a big man, long faced, with an upturned nose and a belly kept just trim enough, he said, to stay inside his golf swing. Since she only saw him once or twice a year, Sadie was always astonished by Wilts grace and quickness. He was older than Angela by ten years. It had been almost seven years since his wife had died of cancer. A year ago, at the Sunny brook Christmas ball, he and Sadie had danced, and Sadie felt something of the lightness and style that must have attracted her mother. He was in remarkable shape; he and Angela had jitterbugged, later on.
"Wil is that rare bird," Angela once said. "He can lead, follow, and stay out of the way!"
When Angela and Sadie's father were first separated, friends had fixed them up with mutual friends. Sadie remembered Maeve likening the situation to a soup stirring itself. Kilmarnock was self-contained, self-sustaining, like that (it took going away to college for Sadie to see it clearly). Back then, her mother was still very attractive, her face lined but not downturned, her personality still expanding, her body very nearly saddlebag-less. Though she was by no means "on the prowl," Angela said, she could see no reason in sitting home simply because "your father has lost control of himself."
Sadie watched. And she listened. the catch phrases her mother used before going out on a date were that she was "not doing any harm," that she was feeling "a bit cavalier," that she was feeling "good, really good , about herself." (These were statements Sadie now considered not just part of her own personal history, but part of the lexicon to the time--a complement to the setting Angela kept tending.)
The truth was, none of the men her mother saw during this period of her marital separation were at all attractive or similarly cavalier. Many of them had money and treated her to things her father had never been able (or willing) to afford. And though they treated Angela with respect, she told Sadie it as "a distant, male respect."
Once, Angela confessed a dream to Sadie, in which she walked along a cliff edge with a crashing sea below. Inland, just beyond her fingertips, one of these men walked along with her, stride for stride, saying nice things. In the dream, she was speaking also, but the things the two of them were saying did not make a dialog; they didn't match. Angela told Sadie she feared if she stopped talking, the ensuing silence would mean the man had moved away from the cliff, gaining his own purchase, while she was left with the waves pummeling below, unsure of her next step.
Sadie thought about this dream all the time. She thought of it when she'd been at the sewing machine ten hours straight and her fingers were raw from crinoline and there was nothing at her apartment in Evanston to go home to. Nothing and nobody. She could make herself an omelette. She could collapse on the couch. It didn't matter what she did, there was still nobody to fill-in the silences between television commercials. Sometimes, she would think up things a lover might do for her, paring them down to the smallest of offerings, convincing herself that her needs were not very great, her wishes within reach: a soothing word over an herbal tea, a caress, someone to get up and turn out the bathroom light after they'd got into bed, some one to lay next to her breathing.
Angela went on about her client, mentioning names Sadie did not know, and Wil nodded and said, "Yes," and "Mmm." Sadie felt a sudden warmth for him, for his capacity to listen--even to appear to listen. He might be a saint, she thought.
The food arrived. The waiter quickly set down Sadie's house salad, Wilts crabcakes, and Angela's Lobster Newburgh.
"Anything with sherry in it kills me," Angela said.
As they ate, Sadie was aware of conversations around them, voices full of wonder and delight, voices speaking carefully or through clenched teeth. She suddenly felt as though she were the center of attention--not that those around her were talking about her-- but that she was a character in a movie. She was an actress playing herself and at the same time a member of an audience watching to see what would happen next. She imagined a cameraman on a hydraulic lift swinging slowly up and around the table, focusing on the food, the drinks, the faces, while the talk swirled in the air. Maybe she would go to LA, after all. In the din, Sadie thought she heard her father's voice telling a joke, then Claire's, almost a whisper, something about percentages. Angela was talking to Wil about her.
"She says she's doing this for herself, and I hope you are. I'll just say this once, and it will be the last time I bring the subject up: if you're doing this for some boy--"
"Mom, don't--"
"I sympathize, completely, with your sense of powerlessness, but--"
"Mom--"
They didn't say anything for awhile. Then Wil winked and said, "I'm sure Sadie has her reasons."
Thank God for this man! Sadie thought.
Angela nudged a piece of lobster onto Sadie's plate. "Go on," she said. "The doctor didn't say you should eat nothing."
Sadie looked at Wil and said, "I'm already disobeying with this salad."
"Go on," her mother said, chewing. "Delicious."
Sadie closed her eyes and ate the lobster, a chunk of knuckle meat that dissolved fibrously in her mouth.
"Following the letter of the law can get you into trouble," Angela smirked. "Speaking of the law, I suppose you had to sign a bunch of forms. Absolving everyone."
"Yes, mother," Sadie quickly sat up straight. "I thought we said no more horror stories."
"We did. But this is my second glass of wine, and I just want to make sure you've considered every angle." She looked at Wil. "Worried-mother syndrome, can't seem to shake it, though my children are all growled up living far away. Is life so centrifugal, now?" She giggled.
Sadie pushed her chair out and knocked into a waiter, who carried a tray of drinks. Water and wine spilled into the table next to them; the couples lunged away too late. The men reached fore the broken glass, the women daubed themselves with seltzer water.
"I'm so sorry," Sadie said, horrified, well-aware of the cost in fabric alone.
"Not to worry, not to worry," her mother said, tugging at her arm.
Sadie shrugged her arm loose. "Mother, goddamn it!"
She excused herself through the maze of tables; people looked up and scooted quickly out of the way.
"Sorry Sade!" she heard. "I promise I'll stop!"
In the ladies room, Sadie sat down against the wall and lay her head against her knees.
Motionless beneath the covers, now, Sadie stared at them one by one, waiting to hear what they had to say. Her mother would not be marrying Wil, after all. The two of them would carry on as they had been, having dinner, dancing.
When they got home from the Bluebell Inn, Angela broke down, confessing to Sadie that she simply didn't love him the way you love someone you marry. They weren't intimate , she said. And she'd be damned if she married for comfort alone. Sadie didn't know what to say; she had no intention of defending Wil. But she did wonder about Patrick and about romance, sweetness, and consideration. Wil seemed replete with all of these qualities. By intimacy did her mother mean sex?
Angela didn't dwell on Wil. She spoke of the friends she'd lost due to the divorce. Friends always took sides, and the friends she and Sadie's father had made in Kilmarnock had sided with him. The place was a den of vipers, she said, everyone biting each other's tail.
"I have no life, Sadie, can you imagine what that is like?"
As they lay together on Angela's bed, Sadie listened to all her mother's secrets, her recriminations, her bitterness at how life had turned out. Are You Being Served? was on the TV. The canned British laughter was a strange background to the tears. Her mother blew her nose and threw balled-up tissues off the edge of the bed.
"Oh, God," Angela said, and turned fetally on her side. "I have no life."
Sadie snuggled in close and held her mother around the torso, her own nose running now, her hands shaking. She said soothing things which she knew Angela was only dimly hearing. She told her that her three girls had become successful, compassionate, sturdy women. They were a reflection on her.
"All of us love you and need your love," Sadie said. "Still."
Angela told her to have the operation, do whatever it takes to be the person she wanted to be. She said she just wanted the best for her daughters.
Now, Sadie noticed light coming from outside the windows. The room was brightening and the eyes of her stuffed animals receded, their bodies now visible. In the bathroom, her mother blew her nose, flushed the toilet, and moved back into her own room. Sadie heard the floorboards under her feet, then the whisk of her slippers in the hall and on the stairs. Soon, the smell of bacon would drift up from the kitchen and the rime on the windows would thaw.
The trunk of his car was clean. Patrick shut the door firmly.
He said, "I can't tell you how I've missed you."
"Go ahead," Sadie laughed. "I'm all ears."
When she left Philadelphia, it had been dusk, and now it was dusk again. Up in the air, Sadie felt the strange sensation that the plane was following the sun, actually gaining on it. People went west to escape, to find, she thought. Ahead, the buildings of Chicago seemed lonely, precariously balanced, and top-heavy. Sadie imagined the air between them as their only cushion against toppling over. Air as the ether was an outdated notion, she thought, but what did science know? Maybe everything cushioned everything--or didn't. Her own loneliness was something she'd always felt she was moving through. It was on her skin. Now, she shook herself. Air wasn't like that: there was nothing holding her! LA, New York, she could go anywhere she liked. The vastness of the world was suddenly terrifying. She shook herself again, took two deep breaths, and told Patrick how hungry she was. She wanted to eat right this minute! The cool air from the open window was in her nostrils and on the back of her throat, and she felt herself breathing, taking gulps of air.
...................... 
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