Love in Mid Air (27 page)

“What’s wrong?”

I glance toward the car. It seems pointless to show her the broken pottery now, but she has followed my gaze and is heading
toward the driveway, rewrapping the robe as she stomps. He talks to her like this all the time, I realize. She’s used to it.
Otherwise she wouldn’t have grabbed his robe to come outside—she would have taken the time to find her own. The only thing
different about this morning is that I overheard it, and she’s embarrassed, and maybe, on second thought, the best thing I
can do right now is show her something that’s going shitty in my own life.

I pull the box, which is surprisingly heavy, across the backseat and lift the lid. At first Kelly is confused and doesn’t
even realize she’s looking at pots, and then she asks me if I was in a wreck and broke them—a question that makes no sense.
The men have begun to unload large flat stones from the back of the truck and carry them around the side of the house. They
stop for Kelly to inspect one and she nods. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s definitely a rock.”

“What was going on up there?” I ask.

“Mark got ticked when he saw the bill for the retaining wall.”

“Wasn’t that his idea?”

“He wants me to bring in money, you know, to contribute something. He says he doesn’t know why I’m tired all the time when
I don’t do anything.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I say. An unfortunate choice of words but it’s already out of my mouth.

She shrugs, raising her arms and dropping them with an elaborate, almost European nonchalance. “He pointed out that you have
a job.”

“I bet he said, ‘Even goddamn Elyse has a job.’ ”

“That’s exactly what he said.”

There have been plenty of times when I wondered why she doesn’t work, but the fact that Mark has suggested this fills me with
fury. Mark, who’ll tell anyone who will listen about his stock options and 401(k), Mark who has built this exhausting and
time-draining empire of linen suits and forced bulbs and wine cellars and retaining walls. Mark who likes having a younger,
thinner, well-buffed wife to squire around at the golf course dinners, and yet he can’t see what Kelly does. Before she arrived
this was a queenless empire, just a pile of sad money. Men don’t understand how much energy it takes to pump life into everything,
how women live in a state of eternal lactation, a sort of lactation of the soul. She doesn’t do anything? She lights his fucking
world.

“Well,” I say, rocking from one foot to another. The ground is soft beneath our feet and it takes some effort to extricate
my heel from the sod. “Goddamn Elyse isn’t going to have a job for long unless she figures out what to do about these pots.”

“Call the lady in Charleston and tell her you’re going to need more time.”

“That’s not an option.”

“Why not?”

I don’t know why not. It just doesn’t feel like an option.

I push the box back across the seat, listening to the clank of the broken pieces. “You don’t have to do this,” I say, pretending
to fuss with the lid so that I don’t meet her eyes.

“I told you I wanted it,” she says. “I still do. More than anyone.”

“You can come to my house.”

“Why?”

“You don’t think he would ever—”

She shakes her head, gives a little laugh, as if she’s surprised by even the suggestion. “Oh God, no. No. He’s just weird
about money, that’s all. Everybody’s got something. Here. Stand on the driveway. You’re sinking.”

“Why’s the ground wet?”

“We have a lot of… you know. What’s the word?”

“Sprinklers?”

The man waiting to back up in the truck looks at me expectantly and I give Kelly a hug, still taking care not to meet her
eyes. “I’ll call you later,” I say.

“You don’t understand,” Kelly says. “You can’t. Phil never loses his temper.”

I
’m sure our friends think, if they think about it at all, that I’m the one who dragged Kelly into the church and into the
suburbs and into her stone-covered house with its sinking lawn. But the truth of the matter is she’s quite right—as illogical
as it seems, Kelly wanted this life more than anyone. I found that out years ago, on a December afternoon back when Tory was
a toddler. That’s the day that Kelly and I had our first fight.

T
he women of the church were having a cookie swap and I had agreed to bring twelve dozen cookies. Twelve dozen cookies that
had to be baked, cooled, decorated, bagged, and tied with a festive bow.

I’ve never been much of a baker but I tried to get in the mood. I built a fire, plugged in the tree, and cranked up the Kenny
G Christmas CD. I had been so excited to move out of our cramped little apartment that I’d gotten overambitious on the Christmas
tree. It was so enormous that when Phil and I had finally managed to drag it through the front door we’d been unable to get
it upright in the stand. Phil eventually resorted to lassoing the top of the tree and tying it to one of the exposed beams
in the ceiling. It leaned a little, and if you knew where to look you could see the rope, two facts that bothered me, although
everyone else seemed to think the tree was magnificent. I’d had to go to Target twice for more lights and ornaments.

It was four in the afternoon. The music was playing, the tree was lit, the cookies were strewn all across the countertops,
Tory was teetering around underfoot, and I was exhausted to the point of tears. I had dropped a whole bag of sugar somewhere
between Batch 3 and Batch 4 (why hadn’t I thought to pick up extra cookie sheets when I was in Target getting the lights and
balls?) and the heat in the room felt like it was topping out at 90. The spilled sugar had melted and turned my whole kitchen
floor into a sticky mess and the sink was full of cookies with burned bottoms, the result of the time, somewhere between Batch
7 and Batch 8, when Tory’s diaper had turned out to reveal such a major stinky that I’d had to bathe her and had returned
to the kitchen to find black smoke rolling from the oven. My jaunty green bows were not jaunty—I have never had the knack
for tying bows—and two of the allegedly completed bags were probably unusable. I had bagged Batches 1 and 2 prematurely, before
they were completely cooled, and the cookies had permabonded into one lumpy ball, tied with a droopy little knot. I knew I
should redo them but I was running out of walnuts and I couldn’t see dressing myself and Tory and driving out to the grocery
in the pounding rain.

I was debating whether it would be better to show up with (a) twelve bags of pretty cookies, two of them with no walnuts,
(b) twelve bags of walnutty cookies, two of which looked like crap, or (c) ten bags of pretty walnutty cookies when I’d promised
them twelve. Just when I’d decided the smart thing to do would be to (d) open up all the bags and take out two cookies from
each, Tory came toddling proudly into the kitchen with her hands full of nametags that she had pulled off all the presents
under the tree and Kelly walked through the door in her Missoni suit.

“Oy vey,” she said, “such a day I’ve had.” Kelly was dating a Jewish guy at the time and she was always doing a bad Barbra
Streisand imitation.

“I can’t stay long,” she added, rumpling Tory’s hair and picking her way across the sticky floor to rummage in my drawer for
a corkscrew. “You wouldn’t believe how jet-lagged I am. Todd and I didn’t get back from Maui last night until eleven but I
went into work anyway and we have this party tonight. I think it’s at the Duke Mansion but he never tells me anything. It
might be all the way up at the lake. It’s not even like I know where we’re going half the time, he just sends the car and
I get in. My God, look at you. What are you doing?”

“Making cookies.”

“For what? This looks like about a hundred cookies.”

“Actually it’s about 144 cookies and they’re for a cookie swap.” Kelly took off her jacket and draped it over the back of
one of my kitchen chairs. She frowned and rubbed the back of her neck. “A cookie swap,” I explained. “It’s a Christmas tradition.
I make a dozen dozen of one kind of cookie and so does everybody else and then we get together and—”

“Swap them?”

“Right.”

“So you make 144 cookies and at the end you have 144 cookies.”

“Right. Only you make 144 of the same kind of cookie and at the end you have twelve of twelve different kinds of cookies.”
I looked around my kitchen, a bubble of hysteria forming in my throat. “It’s supposed to save you time.”

Kelly was still frowning, still scratching her neck. “There’s only three of you living here. I don’t understand why you need
144 cookies, no matter what kind they are.”

I leaned against the counter. I felt vaguely sick. “You make an excellent point. What’s wrong with your neck?”

“I burned it in Maui. You wouldn’t believe what a miserable day I’ve had. I wear this suit because it’s a knit, you know,
like the softest thing I have that will work in this godawful weather but it’s still rubbed against my sunburn all day long.
I tell you, Elyse, I’ve just about had it. The party starts in two hours and I don’t even know if I’ve got the strength to
go get my hair blown out.”

“Jesus.”

She poured the wine into first one glass and then the other. “What?”

“Nothing. Christmas just gets me a little wacky.”

She glanced around the room. “It looks to me like you’ve got it all covered. Do you know I haven’t even bought a gift yet?
I’ll probably just go online to Crate & Barrel or something and end up paying them a fortune to have it shipped at the last
minute. Todd… he doesn’t get Christmas. I mean, of course he doesn’t, why should he? But it makes me kind of sad that he doesn’t
get it. I know, I know, I never even bother to put up a tree, I just come over here and get drunk and look at yours. I mean,
he’s trying, he really is. He took me to Hawaii and he did leave me a gift, I mean I guess he did, there’s a Tiffany box on
my kitchen counter and I don’t know how else it would have gotten there. But you know what bugs me? It’s in the same plain
old blue and white wrapping they always use. They don’t do anything special to make it look like a Christmas gift.”

In unison, both of us looked toward my tree. There were probably twenty-five gifts wrapped under it, and I hoped I could remember
what was in what box because I was going to have to replace all the nametags the minute Kelly left. It didn’t help that they
were every one wrapped in the same paper, an eighty-foot bolt of green and red plaid I’d gotten on sale. Shopping the last
minute and having everything shipped was out of the question for me. Phil had sixty-two patients. We counted them. We knew
them all by name. When Mr. Ziegler died of old age, we grieved him and we grieved the fact he’d no longer need his biannual
cleaning. We worried that we had bought the house prematurely, that we should have stayed in the apartment another year. I
read the want ads, periodically and halfheartedly, because I really didn’t want to put Tory in day care. I was selling pots
for twenty-five dollars by that time, when I sold them at all, and I’d been buying Christmas gifts slowly, one at a time,
since the summer, when we had stopped at the outlet malls on our way to Savannah. Bought them carefully, stored them in the
closet, and then hauled them out just before Christmas and wrapped them in cheap Target paper.

“Well,” said Kelly. “You’re busy. I’m busy. I guess I need to go.” She hadn’t touched her wine. I’d probably knock off the
whole bottle when she left.

She stood up, slipped on her Missoni jacket, and kissed the air over my head. I watched her leave, then pushed myself to my
feet and headed toward the cookies. If I took a couple of them from each bag I’d have enough to finish the last two without
any extra baking and I didn’t really think any of the women would count the cookies and figure out I’d cheated. Of course,
with Nancy you could never be sure.

The door creaked. I turned. Kelly was standing in the doorframe, her hair wet with rain.

“I just wanted to thank you,” she said, in a thin reedy voice, “for making me feel like my whole world is shit.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your life, Elyse, does it have to be so fucking perfect? The tree and the cookies and the presents and the fire in the fireplace
and the Christmas music… does your life have to have a fucking soundtrack? I probably could have gritted my teeth and stood
it… I mean, I could have stood the fact that this whole house smells like cinnamon… I smelled it before I was even in the
door but I probably could have stood that and the fire and your gigantic fucking tree if you hadn’t been playing fucking ‘Silver
Bells’ in the background. Did you know that was my daddy’s favorite Christmas carol? What are you trying to make me do, feel
like the most alone person in the world? Like I’m some kind of hooker in the middle of a Hallmark movie? And does your baby
have to be so cute? You and Phil both have dark hair… Why is Tory blond? Have you ever wondered about that? Where did she
get that blond hair? Did you order her from the perfect-baby catalog or something?”