THEY GET MARRIED ? You see them around town, getting older, little spinsters already, pedalling bicycles to their local jobs or walking up the hill by the rocks with books in their arms. Annie Langhorne, Betsey Clay, Damaris Wilcombe, Mary Jo Addison: we’ve known them all since they were two or three, and now they’ve reached their mid-twenties, back from college, back from Year Abroad, grown women but not going anywhere, not New York or San Francisco or even Boston, just hanging around here in this little town letting the seasons wash over them, walking the same streets where they grew up, hanging in the shadows of their safe old homes.
On the edge of a Wilcombe lawn party, their pale brushed heads like candles burning in the summer sunlight, a ribbon or a plastic barrette attached for the occasion—I can see them still, their sweet pastel party dresses and their feet bare in the grass, those slender little-girl feet, with bony tan toes, thatyou feel would leave rabbit tracks in the dew. Damaris and Annie, best friends then and now, had been coaxed into carrying hors d’oeuvres around; they carried the tray cockeyed, their wrists were so weak, the devilled eggs slipping, their big eyes with their pale-blue whites staring upward so solemnly at your grinning grown-up face as you took your devilled egg and smiled to be encouraging. We were in our late twenties then, young at being old—the best of times. The summer smells of bug spray on the lawn and fresh mint in the gin; the young wives healthy and brown in their sundresses, their skin glowing warm through the cotton; the children still small and making a flock in the uncut grass beyond the lawn, running and tumbling, their pastel dresses getting stained with green, their noise coming and going in the field as a kind of higher-pitched echo of ours, creating their own world underfoot as the liquor and the sunlight soaked in and the sky filled with love.
I can still see Betsey and my own daughter the night we first met the Clays. They had just moved to town. A cousin of Maureen’s had gone to school with my wife and sent us a note. We dropped by to give them the name of our dentist and doctor and happened to hit it off. April, it must have been, or May. Cocktails dragged on into dark and Maureen brought a pickup dinner out to the patio table. The two baby girls that had never met before—not much more than two years old, they must have been—were put to sleep in the same bed. Down they came into the dark, down into the cool air outdoors, hand in hand out of this house strange to the two of them, Betsey a white ghost in her nightie, her voice so eerie and thin but distinct. “See moon?” she said. Unable to sleep, they had seen the moon from the bed. The Clays had moved from the city, where maybe the moon was not so noticeable.“See moon?”: her voice thin and distinct as a distant owl’s call. And of course they were right, there the moon was, lopsided and sad-faced above the trees just beginning to blur into leaf. Time (at last) to go home.
Now Betsey works at the paint-and-linoleum store on Second Street and gives guitar lessons on the side. She fell in love with her elderly married music teacher at Smith and went about as far as she could go with classical guitar, even to Spain for a year. When the Episcopal church sponsored a refugee Cuban family last winter, they called in Betsey for her Spanish. She lives with her mother, in that same house where she saw the moon, a gloomy place now that Maureen has closed off half the rooms to save on heat. The Clays broke up it must be all of ten years ago. There were some lovely times had on that patio.
Betsey sings in the Congregational choir alongside Mary Jo Addison, who after that bad spell of anorexia in her teens has gotten quite plump again. She has those dark eyebrows of her mother’s, strange in a freckled fair face—shaped flat across and almost meeting in the middle. Both the Addisons have remarried and
On the edge of a Wilcombe lawn party, their pale brushed heads like candles burning in the summer sunlight, a ribbon or a plastic barrette attached for the occasion—I can see them still, their sweet pastel party dresses and their feet bare in the grass, those slender little-girl feet, with bony tan toes, thatyou feel would leave rabbit tracks in the dew. Damaris and Annie, best friends then and now, had been coaxed into carrying hors d’oeuvres around; they carried the tray cockeyed, their wrists were so weak, the devilled eggs slipping, their big eyes with their pale-blue whites staring upward so solemnly at your grinning grown-up face as you took your devilled egg and smiled to be encouraging. We were in our late twenties then, young at being old—the best of times. The summer smells of bug spray on the lawn and fresh mint in the gin; the young wives healthy and brown in their sundresses, their skin glowing warm through the cotton; the children still small and making a flock in the uncut grass beyond the lawn, running and tumbling, their pastel dresses getting stained with green, their noise coming and going in the field as a kind of higher-pitched echo of ours, creating their own world underfoot as the liquor and the sunlight soaked in and the sky filled with love.
I can still see Betsey and my own daughter the night we first met the Clays. They had just moved to town. A cousin of Maureen’s had gone to school with my wife and sent us a note. We dropped by to give them the name of our dentist and doctor and happened to hit it off. April, it must have been, or May. Cocktails dragged on into dark and Maureen brought a pickup dinner out to the patio table. The two baby girls that had never met before—not much more than two years old, they must have been—were put to sleep in the same bed. Down they came into the dark, down into the cool air outdoors, hand in hand out of this house strange to the two of them, Betsey a white ghost in her nightie, her voice so eerie and thin but distinct. “See moon?” she said. Unable to sleep, they had seen the moon from the bed. The Clays had moved from the city, where maybe the moon was not so noticeable.“See moon?”: her voice thin and distinct as a distant owl’s call. And of course they were right, there the moon was, lopsided and sad-faced above the trees just beginning to blur into leaf. Time (at last) to go home.
Now Betsey works at the paint-and-linoleum store on Second Street and gives guitar lessons on the side. She fell in love with her elderly married music teacher at Smith and went about as far as she could go with classical guitar, even to Spain for a year. When the Episcopal church sponsored a refugee Cuban family last winter, they called in Betsey for her Spanish. She lives with her mother, in that same house where she saw the moon, a gloomy place now that Maureen has closed off half the rooms to save on heat. The Clays broke up it must be all of ten years ago. There were some lovely times had on that patio.
Betsey sings in the Congregational choir alongside Mary Jo Addison, who after that bad spell of anorexia in her teens has gotten quite plump again. She has those dark eyebrows of her mother’s, strange in a freckled fair face—shaped flat across and almost meeting in the middle. Both the Addisons have remarried and
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