A Long Thaw (3 page)

The guys come down the hallway, chuckling at the tail end of a conversation. Jasmine hops down from the counter and hugs Ryan.

‘Good to see you,’ he tells Jasmine, and then he nods a hello to Abby.

‘So where are you guys off to?’ Abby asks, not sure if she’s supposed to. She doesn’t know the etiquette for situations like this.

‘We’re going to hang out in Harvard Square,’ Jasmine says. ‘Drink coffee. People-watch.’

It amuses Abby to think of Jasmine people-watching. Jasmine is exactly the kind of person other people watch.

‘Well, have fun. I have a lot of work to do myself.’ Abby knows she’s responding to an invitation that was never given.

The four of them stand awkwardly in the kitchen for a moment.

‘Well, let’s hit it,’ Jasmine suggests at last, getting her coat from the couch. ‘Call me later in the week. We’ll go shopping,’ she says to Abby, over her shoulder.

‘Sure,’ Abby says, as they file out of the door. ‘Have fun,’ she says again, sounding, at least to herself, pathetic.

Abby sits on the couch long after they have left, wondering how she has let this happen. She has become one of those girls whose life revolves around a boyfriend. She and Ryan were a
couple
for so long that that’s how everyone knows her.
Abby and Ryan, Abby and Ryan, let’s call Abby and Ryan.
As she skims the pages of her address book, she can’t find a single name of someone who knows her on her own.

Well, there is one name.

It wasn’t hard to find her grandmother’s number: it hadn’t changed in forty years, still listed in the
Yellow Pages
under her husband’s name. Juliet had carried it around for years, unable to bring herself to use it. She wasn’t ready for the chain of events she knew it would bring about. She still wasn’t, but since finishing college she’d run out of excuses that didn’t sound like cowardice. The week before, when Juliet finally spoke to her grandmother on the phone, it became clear that her father was keeping secrets. Without meaning to, she found herself protecting them, saying nothing to challenge Nana’s vision of her son.

It has been a decade since Juliet walked up the front steps of her grandmother’s house. She used to take them two at a time, leaping the distance towards her grandmother’s open arms. Nana would hunch down and wrap her up, kissing the top of her head and telling her she’d got taller.

Juliet’s grandfather had built the house himself and put the pool in the backyard when his children were teenagers, only a year or so before he died. The story was that he drank cans of beer as he dug the hole and everyone swore that if the pool was ever pulled up the aluminium cans would be found. He’d had only one summer to enjoy the result of his labour, doing belly flops and back floats, before he’d got sick.

Juliet has rented a car for the drive. Her grandmother lives just twenty minutes outside the city, and there’s a T stop even closer, but Juliet doesn’t want to have to ask for a ride. She’s a nervous driver because she does it so infrequently and is feeling clammy by the time she gets out of the city, with its confusing maze of narrow, oneway streets, across the new Zakim Bridge over the Charles River. Once on the highway, she frets about missing her exit. It isn’t until she pulls into the familiar tree-lined shade of her grandmother’s neighbourhood that she’s able to feel nervous for the moment at hand. If she were running early, she could pull down a side-street and catch her breath. But she isn’t early.

‘Juliet!’ Nana swings open the screen door and steps out. She holds Juliet away for a moment, looking her over and smiling. ‘You’re so beautiful. I would have known you anywhere.’

Juliet hugs her grandmother, understanding that although it seems she has become smaller, it’s actually Juliet who has grown. There are more wrinkles on Nana’s face, but Juliet feels sure that she would have known her anywhere, too.

The house is different – a wash of pastels instead of the mossy greens and greys she recalls. It smells different as well. Juliet had always associated her grandmother’s house with the smell of chlorine. Anytime she caught a whiff of a neighbour’s pool, it took her back to those summers from her childhood. Abby and Juliet had played together in the shallow end, tiptoeing along the bottom of the pool, pretending to swim. When they were really small, they were only allowed in the deep end if they wore their bright orange water wings. If they’d got any sun, their arms would be too sore to withstand all the tugging. Instead the girls had spent hours in the shallow end, holding their breath and hosting pretend tea parties on the bottom of the pool, guessing what secrets were spoken under water, getting pruny. Now the house smells faintly of potpourri and, she thinks, Ivory soap.

Nana offers Juliet a drink, a snack, listing virtually everything edible in the house. Juliet isn’t really hungry, but it seems so important.

‘I have some chocolate-chip cookies,’ Nana says, opening one cabinet and then the next.

‘I’m fine,’ Juliet says, wandering into the attached living area. The soft chenille couch against the wall has been replaced by something in white with brightly coloured flowers and seems to require exceptionally good posture.

‘How about some vanilla ice cream?’

Juliet shakes her head. ‘No, really. Thanks, but—’

‘A bowl of cereal? I could cut up some bananas.’ Nana’s eyes brighten: she seems so sure that she has hit on the perfect offering.

Juliet doesn’t have the heart to refuse. She sits down at the kitchen table as her grandmother stands over her, slicing perfect banana circles onto her Rice Krispies. They sip ginger ale. The glasses are small and need to be refilled every three or four sips.

‘A sight for sore eyes.’ Nana smiles at Juliet and shakes her head. ‘I can’t believe how long it’s been.’

‘I know.’

‘How are Hannah and Lilly?’

‘I spoke to them on the phone last night, actually. Lilly is a little chatterbox. Her school is having a science fair and she was talking non-stop about her project on the solar system.’

‘Well, isn’t she something? And Hannah?’

‘She’s a bit quieter. She just started high school this fall and I’m afraid she’s hitting that period of adolescent angst.’ Juliet notices her grandmother scowl. ‘Her grades are terrific, though, so quiet isn’t bad.’

Nana’s face softens. ‘Sounds like she’s just more of a thinker.’

Juliet nods.

‘Your father was that way as a young man. Always brooding.’

‘Oh?’ Juliet takes a spoonful of cereal.

‘He always had such a serious expression on his face. We used to tell him it might get stuck like that. Come to think of it—’ Nana chuckles as she leans forward and covers Juliet’s hand with her own.

Juliet smiles, pretending to understand. Her memory of her father is spotty and doesn’t include facial expressions. She remembers that he could hold his breath forever – that’s what they teach you in the Navy. He swam four laps under water with his eyes open. He used to say the chlorine didn’t bother him, but his eyes were always red by the end of the day.

‘So how do you like being back in New England?’

‘I’m liking it a lot.’

‘You’ll need to get a decent winter coat soon. A lot different from California.’

‘I remember.’ Nana’s under the impression that Juliet moved to Boston from California just this month. She has no idea Juliet has been in Massachusetts for five years and already has a winter coat. Juliet looks out of the window.
Leaving out the truth is the same as lying
, she thinks. Her gaze takes in the back yard, a smooth expanse of brown grass. She draws her breath in sharply. ‘The pool!’

Nana frowns. ‘Ah, the pool has been gone for years,’ she says.

‘Why?’ Juliet asks.

‘It just got to be too much to keep up. And you girls went off to California. And Abby got older and busier. After a while, hardly anyone went swimming any more.’

‘What about you?’

Nana used to sit on the edge of the pool in her bathing dress and a white cap, dangling her veined legs into the water. She inched in slowly, pushing the water out of her way as she trod back and forth, back and forth.

‘For me, the fun of it was always you girls.’ Nana refills their glasses. ‘Abby’s living in the city too, you know.’

‘Really?’ Juliet finally turns from the window and looks back across the table.

‘Yes! Isn’t that funny? I had your aunt Rachel give her your number.’

Juliet has ‘ants’ on the west coast, ‘aunts’ on the east.

‘How is Abby?’

Abby would sit her on her father’s shoulders as he pulled her under the water, blowing huge air bubbles out of his nose. She held her own nose between her thumb and first knuckle and when her lungs ran out of air, she used her other hand to pull on his right earlobe and he would bring her back to the surface.

‘She’s great. She’s working for a magazine now. It’s called . . .’ Nana scowls, flaps her hand at Juliet. ‘Oh, you know. Whatchamacallit. The one with . . .’ She stands and starts across the room. ‘I have one here.’ She rifles through a magazine rack beside her armchair and returns to the table, triumphant.

‘Wow.’ Juliet nods at the familiar title on the cover.

Nana flips past the first several glossy pages to the space that lists editing assistants, associates and researchers. Juliet isn’t sure of the distinctions, but there’s Abby’s name.

She nods. ‘That’s impressive.’

Nana sits again, smoothing the magazine’s pages. ‘I hope the two of you can reconnect now that you’re both in the city.’

‘Me too.’ It’s only after she’s said this that she wonders if it’s true. The fondness she feels for her cousin is just a memory. It’s tied to the ignorant bliss of her childhood, a time when things were so simple.

‘You two girls. Always getting into mischief together.’

‘Were we really so bad?’

‘Oh, no.’ Nana winks across the table. ‘Not so bad.’

In those days, she used to refer to them as ‘our pride and joy’. She still spoke in the plural although her husband had died before either of them was born. All Juliet knew of him were the stories, the ones the grown-ups told in the evenings to amuse each other. They told them over and over – the way that he took naps in the hammock, insisting to anyone who caught him that he was just resting his eyes; his response when Nana attempted a romantic, candle-lit dinner – ‘I can’t even see the food I’m eating!’; his favourite joke about the goat with no nose – ‘How did it smell? Awful!’; his expression for anything particularly disgusting – ‘It could gag a maggot.’

Juliet’s favourite story was about her grandfather’s years working on the train that travelled through Lowell. Whenever money got tight in their house, he would bring home a few sacks of potatoes, a box of powdered milk. He always said these things had ‘fallen off the train’; they were damaged and couldn’t be sold. Nana didn’t ask questions, content to see her children filling their plates and their bellies. One evening, he came home with an armchair. It was dark blue and sat in the corner of the living room for three days. On Saturday he went to church to make confession, and the chair was donated to charity on Monday morning.

Juliet looks at the yard as if it’s a gravesite, the pool buried beneath all that dirt and grass. She thinks about her grandfather’s beer cans but doesn’t ask.

The couch that Jesse sleeps on is covered with orange dust from Doritos. He and his cousin pass a cloudy purple bong back and forth, laughing at something Juliet can’t hear over the music and she doesn’t care. She wonders why she bothered coming over.

Jesse holds the bong out to her and she shakes her head. She doesn’t like the way it makes her feel. A dull headache and loss of control that she already gets enough of just being with Jesse.

Sometimes she thinks she picked him because he was someone she could live without, but that doesn’t explain why she stays.

The music is so loud that she almost doesn’t hear her cell phone ringing in her purse. The first few rings dissolve into the beat pounding out of the speaker closest to her. It’s a number she doesn’t recognize, but she stands up and says, ‘I’ve got to take this.’ She slips out of the door, grateful for the excuse. ‘Hello?’

‘Juliet?’

There’s something familiar about the voice but Juliet can’t place it. ‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s Abby.’

There is a warm feeling in Juliet’s chest. ‘Abby!’ She opens the door to the stairwell and sits on the top step. ‘How are you?’

‘Um, good. Yeah.’ She seems unsure. ‘You?’

‘I’m great!’ Juliet thinks this is a bit of an overstatement. A couple is coming up the stairs and she shimmies to one side, hugging the railing.

‘My mom gave me your number. I hope that’s okay.’

‘Of course it is!’ She’s not sure why she keeps speaking in exclamation points. She tries to take it down a notch. ‘Nana told me you were living in Boston.’

‘Yeah. I can’t believe you’re back.’

‘I know.’ Juliet feels the slight queasiness of the almost-lie.

‘I was hoping we could get together for coffee some time.’

‘Definitely.’ It’s been so long. Juliet wonders what they will have to talk about.

‘What’s your schedule like?’

Juliet thinks of Jesse on the other side of the brick wall, his blurry lines and oblivious laughter. ‘What are you doing right now?’

Allen is raking along the edge of the driveway. Mary cringes as the tines scrape against the pavement and wonders at how he doesn’t seem to notice. She zips up the jacket of her jogging set and steps into the yard.

‘Well, what a help you are,’ she says.

He turns and hands her the rake, bending to tie off the black plastic bag. ‘No problem, Ma,’ he says. He carries the bag to the end of the driveway and sets it by the other two.

‘Can I make you some dinner?’

‘I can’t stay,’ he says, running his hand through his hair and offering no more information.

Probably a date
, Mary thinks. ‘Well, I won’t keep you, then.’

Allen leans towards her and hugs her with one arm. He takes the rake from her and walks it back to the shed.

‘How’s Juliet?’ Mary asks, as he sets the rake inside and pushes the shed door closed.