Silver Girl (11 page)

Ha! All this in response to the cute power-washing guy. Meredith was going to die laughing.

Connie went upstairs to close the second-floor windows. Dan had started working. The noise was incredible; it sounded like the house was being attacked by fighter jets. Connie hurried to shut all the windows. She could see Dan Flynn bracing the hose against his hip, shooting a stream of water at the house that was moving so fast, it looked solid. Dan’s body was shaking like he was operating a jackhammer; all the muscles in his arms were popping. The whole thing was rather phallic.

“Meredith,” Connie said. “Come here, you have to see this.”

There was no response. Connie was pretty sure the paint was coming off. There were green puddles in the yard now, the color of radioactive waste.

“Meredith?” Connie called.

Connie finished with the windows facing the front of the house and, just to be safe, she shut the windows on either side of the house, even though those rooms would get murderously hot. The house had central air-conditioning—but, like the alarm system, Connie never turned it on.

She moved into the hallway. The door to Meredith’s room was shut. Connie remembered the blank look on her face as she sat at the table, and the way she recited the names of the investors. (She had committed nearly three thousand of the names to memory, she said, as a kind of penance. It was how she’d filled her days in the New York apartment after Freddy had been taken away.)

Connie had a bad feeling. She knocked on the door.

“Meredith?” she said. No answer. She could have been sleeping. Connie really wanted to respect Meredith’s privacy, just as she wanted her own privacy respected—it was the only way it was going to work with them living in the house together—but Connie was worried that Meredith would take pills or hang herself or slash her wrists with one of the disposable razors that Connie knew were under the sink in the bathroom.

“Meredith?” Connie said. No answer. Nothing. Just the percussive drone of the power washer.

She opened the door and gasped. Meredith was sitting on her bed, facing the door, wearing that same zombie-like expression. Her Louis Vuitton duffel bag was next to her on the bed.

“Jesus!” Connie said. “You scared me. What are you doing?”

She looked at Connie. “I have to leave.”

“No!” Connie said.

“Yes,” Meredith said. She stood up, grabbing her bag.

“You are
not
leaving,” Connie said. She tried to wrest the leather handles from Meredith, but Meredith held fast. She was small, but she was tough; Connie remembered her on the hockey field, gripping her stick, biting down ferociously on her mouth guard.

“I’m leaving,” Meredith said. “Your beautiful house was wrecked because of me!”

“It’s not wrecked,” Connie said. “Come see—this man named Dan Flynn is outside fixing it. The paint’s coming off. We’ll never even be able to tell it was there.”

“But it
was
there,” Meredith said. “
CROOK
. They think I’m him. They think I was in on it. They think I’m the one who stole their money. And I did in a way, didn’t I? Because I had four houses, a yacht, a jet, seven cars, jewelry, clothes, antiques—and where did the money for all that come from? Well, technically, I stole it, didn’t I?” She blinked, and Connie thought that this might be the thing that made Meredith cry, but behind her glasses, her eyes were dry. “But I had no idea.
No idea.
I thought Freddy was a genius. I thought he was beating the market, again and again and again. I was so…”

“Meredith—”

“Stupid! So blind! And no one believes me, and why should anyone believe me? I’m a smart woman with an Ivy League education. How could I not see something illegal was going on?” She glared at Connie. “Even you tried to tell me.”

That was correct; Connie had tried to tell her. But Connie was in too generous a frame of mind to revisit that. “You were blinded,” Connie said. “Blinded by love.”

“Is that an excuse?” Meredith said. “Is that going to get me off the hook with the
FBI
, Connie?
Love?
”

Connie didn’t know what to say.

“Do
you
believe I’m innocent?” Meredith said.

“Yes, Meredith. I believe you’re innocent.”

“And why is that? Why are you the
only person in the whole country
who believes I’m innocent?”

“Because I know you.”

“I knew Freddy,” Meredith said. “I thought I knew Freddy.” She raised her head. “I should never have called you to come get me. I’ve put you in danger. Look what happened to your house. I’m drowning, Connie, but I’m drowning alone. I won’t take you with me.”

“Meredith!” Connie said. She had to shout to be heard above the din of the power washer. “YOU’RE
STAYING
. I
WANT
YOU
TO
STAY
. I’M
NOT
WILLING
TO
LET
YOU
GO.” She didn’t say,
You have nowhere else to go,
because it wasn’t about that. “I need you to stay for me, okay, not for you. I need a friend. I need companionship. And it has to be you. We’re going to put what happened behind us; we’re going to forget the things we said to each other. We need time for that. And we need to figure out how to prove you’re innocent. We need the world to see you as I see you.”

Meredith didn’t move or speak for what seemed like a long time, but then, Connie watched her exhale. She relaxed her grip on the duffel bag and let Connie take it from her. Connie said, “I want you to come see what Dan the power-washer guy looks like.” And she led Meredith to the window.

Connie came home from the hospital thrift shop a few days later with a dark wig for Meredith, styled in two long pigtails. When Meredith tried it on, she looked like Mary Ann from
Gilligan’s Island.

“It’s awful,” Meredith said.

“Awful,” Connie agreed. “But that’s a good thing. We want mousy, and we want anonymous. And we need to do something about your glasses.”

“I love my glasses,” Meredith protested. “I’ve had my glasses since the eighth grade.”

“I know,” Connie said. “I remember the day you got them. But now, they have to go. We aren’t going to stay inside all summer, and we aren’t going to have you accosted by haters, and so you need to travel incognito. The glasses are a dead giveaway. When women dress up as Meredith Delinn for Halloween, they’ll be wearing those glasses.”

“Are women going to dress up as me for Halloween?” Meredith said.

Connie smiled sadly. “The glasses have to go.”

Connie took Meredith’s glasses to Nantucket Eye Center and had a new pair made. While Connie was gone with her glasses, Meredith was left helplessly blind. She desperately wanted to go outside and sit on the deck, but she was terrified to do so without Connie around. She lay upstairs on her bed, but she couldn’t read without her glasses. She stared at the blurry surrounds of the pink guest room.

She was still back on the Main Line in the 1970s with her father and Toby.

Meredith’s parents had been stunned when she told them about her date with Toby. For Chick Martin, the surprise had been mixed with something else. Jealousy? Possessiveness? Meredith feared her father would react the same way that Connie had. But he rose above whatever qualms he had about Meredith’s burgeoning womanhood and acted the role of protective father. When Toby arrived on that first evening to pick Meredith up, Chick asked, “Do you have a clean driving record?”

“Yes, sir,” Toby said.

“You will have Meredith home by eleven, please.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Martin,” Toby said.

It took Chick a few months to adjust to Meredith’s new persona. Meredith was the same on the outside—studious, obedient, loving toward both her parents, respectful of their rules, grateful for all they did for her—but something had changed. To her father, she supposed, it seemed like she was now focused on Toby. But really, she was focused on herself—her body, her emotions, her sexuality, her capacity to love someone other than her parents.

Whoa!
Meredith couldn’t remember ever feeling as alive as she had that summer she turned sixteen, when her romance with Toby raged in her like a fire. She was hot for him—that had been the popular turn of phrase at the time. Many times they skipped the movies and drove to Valley Forge Park and made out in the car. They touched each other through their clothes, and then the clothes started coming off in stages. And then arrived a night when Meredith was naked and Toby had his jeans at his knees and Meredith straddled him and… he stopped her. It was too soon, she was young, it wasn’t time yet. Meredith had cried—partly out of sexual frustration, partly out of anger and jealousy. Toby had had sex with Divinity Michaels and Ravi from Bryn Mawr and probably also the French teacher, Mademoiselle Esme (though Meredith had never been brave enough to ask him)—so why not her?

“This is different,” he said. “This is special. I want to take it slow. I want it to last.”

“Plus,” he said, “I’m afraid of your father.”

“Afraid of my
father?
” Meredith wailed.

“He spoke to me,” Toby said. “He asked me to respect you. He told me to be a gentleman.”

“A gentleman?” Meredith said. She huddled, shivering, against the passenger-side door. The vinyl seats of the Nova were cold. She hunted for her underwear. She didn’t want a gentleman. She wanted Toby.

Meredith went on a campaign to keep her father and Toby away from each other. But then Chick invited Toby over to help burn the piles of leaves in the yard, then go inside and watch Notre Dame trounce Boston College, and eat pigs in a blanket that Meredith’s mother served along with a dish of spicy brown mustard. At the holidays, Toby was invited to the Martins’ annual Christmas party, which was so crowded with reveling adults that Meredith was certain there would be an opportunity to sneak to her bedroom. But Toby would not be coerced upstairs.

Toby was also invited over on New Year’s eve, a night that Meredith had traditionally spent alone with her parents. They always ate dinner at the General Wayne Inn and always saw a movie at the cinemas in Frazer, then they always returned home for a bottle of Tattinger champagne (Meredith had been given her first sip at age thirteen) and chocolate truffles while watching Dick Clark in Times Square on TV. Toby came along for all of it—the dinner, the movie, the champagne, the chocolates, and the ball dropping at midnight. At twelve fifteen, Chick shook Toby’s hand and said, “I want you out of this house in one hour. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m not coming back down, so I’ll need your word.”

“You have my word, sir.”

“Very good,” Chick said. “Please tell your parents we say ‘happy New Year.’ ” And he closed the door to the library with a click.

Meredith remembered sitting still as a statue on the library sofa, holding her breath, believing that it was some kind of trick. But then she heard her parents’ footsteps on the stairs and their footsteps treading down the second floor hall above them. They were going to bed, leaving Toby and Meredith in the plush comfort of the library for a whole hour.

Toby approached the sofa cautiously. Meredith pulled him down on top of her.

Toby said, “Meredith, stop.”

Meredith said, “He basically gave you his
permission.
” She would not be deterred. It was a new year, and she was going to lose her virginity—not in the front seat of Toby’s ’69 Nova, and not in the grass of Valley Forge Park—but right here in her own house by the library fire.

Quietly.

In the spring, Toby graduated, but because he had underperformed on his SATs, he took a year off to boost his prospects for college. During the summer, he and Meredith went to the O’Briens’ summer house in Cape May, where they sailed every day and hung out on the boardwalk at night eating chili dogs and kettle corn. They had their picture taken in a photo booth and kept the strips in the back pockets of their jeans. They bought matching white rope bracelets.

In the fall, Toby took two classes at Delaware County Community College and worked as a waiter at Minella’s Diner. He was around for everything Meredith’s senior year, and although Meredith’s parents grew concerned—was it a good idea for Meredith to be so serious about someone in high school?—they had no grounds for complaint. Meredith was at the top of her class at Merion Mercy, and she was placing first and second in all her diving competitions. She was a National Merit finalist, and everything else besides.

Because he worked at Minella’s, Toby was sometimes the one who delivered the subs to the Martin house for Chick’s monthly poker games, and one night, Chick invited Toby to come back after his shift and join the game. This night fostered a new bond between Chick and Toby; Meredith figured her father either liked Toby, or he was embracing the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em philosophy. Chick invited Toby down to his law offices, and the two of them went out for lunch at the City Tavern. He took Toby and Meredith to Sixers games. He and Deidre and Toby and Meredith went to see the lights at Longwood Gardens at Christmastime, they went to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Academy of Music, they went out to dinner at Bookbinders and to brunch at the Green Room in the Hotel du Pont.

“You do all this old-people stuff,” Connie said. “How do you stand it?”

“We like it,” Meredith said. She refrained from telling Connie that what she wanted most in the world was to marry Toby. She pictured the two of them having kids and settling down on the Main Line, in a life not so different from that of her own parents.

To this day, Meredith couldn’t explain how the whole thing fell apart, but fall apart it did.

Toby broke up with Meredith on the night of her high-school graduation. The O’Briens threw a huge party for Connie; the party was tented and catered and there was free-flowing alcohol for the adults, which inevitably trickled down to the teenagers. Toby was drinking Coke and Wild Turkey, but because Meredith’s parents were in attendance, she was sipping lukewarm Tab. Connie was drinking gin and tonics like her mother. She had given up on her romance with Matt Klein and was now dating the star of the Radnor lacrosse team, Drew Van Dyke, who was headed to Johns Hopkins in the fall. Connie and Drew disappeared from the party at ten o’clock, and Toby wanted to ditch, too—he suggested skinny-dipping in the pool at Aronimink, then making love on the rolling hill behind the ninth tee. But this was too dangerous for Meredith; Chick was the president of the board at Aronimink, and if Meredith and Toby got caught, her father would be humiliated, which wasn’t something Meredith was willing to risk. She told Toby she wanted to stay and dance to the band.