Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (25 page)

From afar, she could hear measured footsteps: Miss Abigail was approaching at last.

“Do you think”—Peggy kept her voice low—“that I like this loving couple act any more than you do? Do you think I enjoy duping
your great-aunt, and your friends, and my parents? Do you think I don’t wish every day this were over?”

“Good morning, Abby,” Luke said.

Peggy let go of his sleeve. Miss Abigail stood in her shabby cloth coat that couldn’t possibly keep her warm enough, if it
was as cold today as it had been yesterday. The old woman glanced from Peggy to Luke and back again. “Good morning,” Peggy
said, frozen in Miss Abigail’s searching eyes.

“It’s time for church, Peggy,” Miss Abigail said at last. “I trust you both slept well?”

Later that afternoon, Peggy bundled up against the weather as well as her wardrobe would allow and was outside loading her
bags into the car, shivering, when Luke came around from the back garden. He carried a cache of reflective stakes over his
shoulder, like arrows; Peggy knew the stakes were to mark off the edges of the driveway to help guide the snowplow once winter
finally arrived. He handed her half of the bundle, saying, “We should have done this weeks ago when the ground was still soft—it’s
probably near frozen already, after yesterday.”

Peggy sighed to herself and spent the next half hour helping Luke plant the stakes. When they were through, instead of thanking
her, he said, “Let’s go to the roof. There’s a leak I’ve been meaning to investigate.”

“I can’t. I have to get back to the city.”

“I see.” He was not happy. She could tell. He put his hands in his pockets. Across Main Street, a green Volkswagen Beetle
slowed as it passed by, as if it could sense an interesting skirmish developing on the Sedgwick House lawn.

“What’s the matter with you?” Peggy couldn’t understand it. They’d gotten along so beautifully yesterday. What had changed?
He’d seemed so annoyed that she’d been on the phone last night. So she’d ruined his beauty sleep. Why couldn’t he let it go?

“Nothing’s the matter,” Luke said.

The green car made a U-turn at the traffic light and started slowly up their side of Main Street. “Good, then.” Peggy walked
toward her own car. “I’ll see you late Wednesday night. I’ll come up for Thanksgiving, but I have to go back to the city right
after dinner.” She was about to explain that she couldn’t abandon Bex at the shop on the day after Thanksgiving—“Black Friday”
in the retail world, the busiest shopping day of the year—when she saw Luke was no longer listening. The Volkswagen had turned
into the Sedgwick House driveway.

Peggy watched it, too. Were Luke and Miss Abigail expecting a visitor?

But the driver didn’t get out of the car. She leaned out her window, a woman with long red hair and a smoking cigarette. Peggy
knew in a flash who this was.

“Hello there.” The redhead disregarded Peggy entirely, turning her face to Luke. “I hope you got to sleep last night.” She
flashed Luke a seductive smile, pulled her head back into the car, and drove away.

Heading back to the city, Peggy clutched the steering wheel and punched the accelerator aggressively, but nothing could get
the sight of that woman out of her mind. It was one thing for Luke to have a girlfriend, another thing entirely to rub said
girlfriend in Peggy’s face. It was humiliating. It didn’t matter that the marriage wasn’t real; she’d still ended up with
a husband who was cheating on her.
Welcome to WASPville.

“Thoroughly uncalled for,” Bex agreed when Peggy got home. “At least
you
keep your extracurricular affairs to yourself.”

Peggy was not consoled. How liberating it would be to call off this deal with Luke, to tell her parents the invitation to
Christmas had been a big mistake, to no longer have to care whether Luke was seeing that floozy or not.

“How were things at the store?” Peggy asked, perusing her closet. She was due to meet Jeremy in an hour.

“Not good. We had maybe three people all afternoon. I sent Padma home early.”

So much for calling off her fake marriage. “People are probably just staying home because it’s cold,” Peggy said, heavy-hearted.

“I have two other pieces of news. Ready? Guess what competing chain store is moving in across the street? Bath.”

Bath was the bath-and-body chain based in Ohio. Peggy felt as if she’d been hit with a two-by-four.

“They might as well name it Put ACME Out of Business,” Bex continued.

“Bloodbath,” Peggy suggested, and laughed, though it wasn’t funny. She couldn’t imagine what the second piece of news was.
How much worse could it get? “What was the other thing?” she asked.

Bex’s smile lit up her whole face.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“You smell delicious.” Jeremy’s breathed words were steamy in her ear. “What are you wearing?”

“Nothing.” Peggy fumbled with her key and unlocked the apartment building door, and the two stumbled, attached at the lips,
into the building’s day-bright hallway with its institutional white walls and pitched staircase. “I mean”—she felt the need
to clarify—“I don’t wear perfume. Obviously I’m not wearing nothing, as in no clothes.”
Peggy, shut up.
“What did you think of the movie?”

“It was okay.” Jeremy kissed the side of her neck.

She made a split-second decision. “Would you like to come up?”

“God, yes,” he said, and she led him up the stairs, hoping she didn’t have panty lines, that her skirt didn’t make her appear
too broad in back, that he wouldn’t be turned off by the view.
He’d
better not be ambivalent about what was about to happen, even if she was. No—she wasn’t ambivalent. Not since her twenties,
before she’d met Brock, had she gone so long without sex. She felt as if she were about to lose her virginity for a second
time. It would be good for her. She could move on from Brock and get over what seemed to be a growing obsession with Luke.
And Jeremy was a nice person. And they had so much in common.

They were both out of breath when they reached the fifth floor. Peggy applauded herself for making a rational choice in love
for the first time in her life and opened the door.

“How’d it go?” Josh called, his eyes on the television screen.

“Come watch with us,” Bex added. “It’s
The Philadelphia Story
. You’ve seen it, right? Katharine Hepburn has to choose between three men…” She turned around. “Oh! Hi!” She elbowed Josh,
who finally took his eyes from the movie. The two got to their feet and shook Jeremy’s hand. Peggy felt as if she’d been ambushed
by her parents.

She led Jeremy back out into the corridor.

“They’re never awake this late. They don’t even sleep here, usually.” Peggy felt sheepish. “But Bex got good news today and—”

The blinking gadget on Jeremy’s belt emitted a piercing beep. Peggy held her breath, sensing an uncontrollable fit of church
giggles coming on.

“I have an idea.” Jeremy absently checked the gadget. “If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right. Let’s go away for a weekend.
This coming Saturday.”

“But this weekend is Thanksgiving,” Peggy said, and cleared her throat to cover up the last vestige of giggle.

Jeremy touched her arm. “Then the weekend after. I read about this great country inn, totally hidden away. Let’s go there.”

It was the holy grail of dating: a man who wanted to whisk her off on a romantic rendezvous. In all her years with Brock,
his schedule had allowed them perhaps two weekends away together. And this would be a weekend off from Luke.

“It’s a date.” She smiled at Jeremy. And kept on smiling, out of real pleasure or of habit she wasn’t sure, as he kissed her
good night and left in a cloud of his cedar-lime aftershave.

Monday at the store brought browsers but few buyers and a new batch of flowers from Brock—a raft of speckled orchids that
left Peggy depressed. On the card he’d invited her to dinner the Saturday after Thanksgiving weekend. She was glad to get
Brock’s voice mail when she called and left a terse message that she couldn’t see him the Saturday after next because she’d
be out of town. Peggy wished already she hadn’t agreed to the weekend away. Her heart wasn’t in it, and now, alone at the
shop, she understood why. Each time she thought about it, she pictured not Jeremy but Luke—Luke sharing a romantic dinner,
kissing her in front of a roaring fire, leading her to bed, and undressing her slowly, sensually, as if unwrapping a gift…

“I assume you’ll take this back.”

Peggy hadn’t heard the customer enter. The woman was perhaps a decade older than Peggy, carrying a handbag with a yapping
dog inside. She held out a half-used bar of blue soap in a hand Peggy couldn’t help but notice lacked a wedding ring.

“It was bright cobalt when it was bigger. As you can see, it’s faded to azure, and it clashes with my powder room. I had a
dinner party last night and was humiliated to notice, minutes before my guests arrived, that my soap was off.”

Peggy refunded the woman’s money grimly.
This is me in ten years,
she thought.
Single, with a purse-dog and a soap obsession.
It occurred to her that after ten years, she might be tired of peddling bath-and-body products to uppity New Yorkers.

She had to stop this mooning over Luke, too. From now on she’d be polite to him, nothing more.

She decided she’d better give Jeremy a chance.

His desk had gotten out of hand. It was overrun with paper, weeks’ worth of orphan lines of poetry. On Wednesday, Luke rummaged
through opened envelopes, bill stubs, Seymour’s Hardware receipts, torn bits of yellow legal paper. His eyes lit on the flyer
he’d politely accepted at some point from one of the picketers on the town green—was this it?—and flipped it over to read:

The soggiest grand smear of autumn leaves,

rain-polished, dank, wind-streaked across my path,

can brighten in an instant. I believe

in fortune changing too, the fates’ pure wrath

gone soft without warning. Success at last!

Irritation with himself burned like bile in his throat. The repetitiousness of “rain-polished” followed by “dank” perturbed
him; the end of line five, which he’d liked at first, was hackneyed—a corny greeting card sentiment written two weeks ago
in a fit of foolish optimism. He slipped the flyer, poem-side down, into his wastebasket and kept searching his desk, stumbling
onto a photo Nicki had given him back in the spring, taken in her loft. They’d argued that day; Luke couldn’t recall why.
He studied Nicki’s sexy, strong-featured face, testing himself, and found no attraction to it. He put the photo into a drawer
and continued his excavation until he uncovered the shard he was searching for:

An aphrodisiac will disappear,

delusional, like permanence or wealth

a shimmering, as if love were a ghost

As he’d hoped, it had held up well. He added a fourth line:

and yet my passion for you seethes and sears

And reread the words until they blurred together. He’d written the first three lines the day Peggy had arrived at the house.
Her appearance in his life had coincided with the most productive writing bout he’d had in years. It figured. Maybe she was
his muse, and here she was telling another man “I love you” on the telephone in the middle of the night.

Luke wondered if he was writing this poem for Peggy.

For the rest of the afternoon, he walked up and down the ballroom, unable to concentrate. He was glad for his poker game that
night; by the time he arrived home to find Peggy’s rental car in the driveway, he knew she had long since gone to sleep.

He stayed upstairs as long as he could on Thanksgiving morning and came down to find Peggy and his great-aunt in the midst
of dinner preparations.

“Would you like anything in the stuffing other than celery?” Peggy, in one of Abby’s old aprons, dumped a bag of stuffing
mix into a bowl. “I like to put water chestnuts and mandarin oranges in it. It’s really good.”

Abby, looking only as nonplussed as propriety would allow, slid an intact cylinder of canned cranberry sauce into a crystal
dish. “Celery will do, dear. We’ve always made it that way.”

He kept catching himself watching Peggy—in the kitchen, as she sprinkled French fried onions onto the green bean casserole;
over dinner, where she spoke little and ate less; as the three of them washed dishes together afterward and Abby chattered
about how pleased she was Peggy’s parents were coming for Christmas. Luke had assumed there would be an opportunity to take
Peggy aside and tell her he was sorry for the way he’d behaved on Sunday. But she wouldn’t meet his gaze. And if she had,
and if he had been able to confess he’d been jealous, plain and simple—then what? She was with another man who was clearly
not going away.

Peggy left for the city as soon as the kitchen was clean and Abby had gone to bed, and returned again two days later, late
Saturday night. Luke was up in the study listening for her car in the gravel driveway; when she drove up, his heart seemed
to catch, then resume beating at double speed. He rushed downstairs to meet her.

She was hauling her bag out of the car.

“Let me help you,” he said.

“I’ve got it. Thanks. You can go back inside.”

“It’s dark. I’ll walk you to the door.”

“No need. This is New Nineveh, remember?”

He accompanied her in silence back to the house.

On Sunday, it was as if she were going out of her way to stay busy and keep Abby close at hand. When it was time for her to
leave again Sunday evening, he followed her to the front door, helpless, as she carried her own suitcase. He stepped aside
to let her out and said to her back, “I’ll see you next weekend.”

She stopped and turned around. “Actually, I thought I’d skip next weekend.”

“What do you mean, skip it?”

“I thought we could use some time apart. If that’s all right with you.”

Luke could see her mind was made up already, that whether he approved the decision or not was immaterial. So he assured her,
WASPily, that he couldn’t agree with her more and ushered her out the imposing front door into the frosty, star-spangled darkness.