Chapter 15
Winnie came down in her pink quilted bathrobe. She hadn’t brushed her hair and she had a rag-doll look to her.
“Oh, good, Jane. You found the hot cross buns. I love the way they smell. She poured herself a mug of coffee, opened the refrigerator, and added a generous quantity of cream to her cup.
“Max Wellman seems to like our girls,” Winnie said. My head was pounding and my eyelids felt scratchy.
“What’s not to like?” I kept my voice even. I didn’t really want Max Wellman to like “our girls.” Winnie looked up at me.
“God, Jane, you look just awful.”
“Thanks.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen you get that drunk for years. Maybe I never have.”
“I don’t know what happened,” I lied.
“Charlie’s sisters are nice girls, but they are no geniuses,” Winnie said.
This was true. They were silly and young, but Winnie was hardly a genius herself, and it didn’t keep her from getting married to a perfectly nice man, maybe not an exceptional man, but a perfectly nice one.
When Charlie came downstairs, he was already dressed for work in a version of what he’d been wearing last night—khakis and a sweater.
“What time are we leaving tonight?” Winnie asked. She stayed seated on the bench at the kitchen island, so I got up to get Charlie a cup of coffee. The important thing about being a single woman in another person’s house is to anticipate the needs of others so your presence is constantly equated with positive feelings.
“What?” he asked. He was already looking at his PDA and poking at it with a stylus.
“For the disco. What time are we going?”
“We aren’t going,” he said, still poking at the PDA. “The papers come?”
I had already retrieved them from the front walk. Charlie took them from the chair where I had left them, pulled up a stool, and started to leaf through each one with great efficiency.
“Of course we’re going. Do you want to get old before our time? It’s not fair that we never get to have any fun.”
“We do have fun,” Charlie said, barely looking up. “Anyway, who would watch the boys?”
“Your mother will, I’m sure.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he said.
I took the buns out of the oven, lined one of the array of baskets I found on top of the refrigerator with a linen napkin, and filled it up.
“Well, I got Ariel to watch them today so Jane and I could go shopping, but I don’t think Ariel can stay into the wee hours, and if we don’t get to the club until ten, then we won’t be home until late and the boys should really stay over at your mother’s.”
“So Ariel will take the boys all day and my mother will take them all night. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Exactly.” Maybe this was Winnie’s modus operandi. If she pretended she didn’t understand what Charlie was saying, she could get her own way without making a fuss. “Winnie, they’re at my mother’s now,” Charlie said. “You and Jane can go out tonight. I’ll watch the boys.”
“I have a better idea,” I said. “I’ll take care of the boys and you two go.”
“Marion won’t mind,” Winnie said.
“I’d rather watch the boys. You know I hate clubs,” I said.
“Right, you are more the lecture type than the disco type,” Winnie said. I didn’t know if I liked that description of myself. It seemed so spinsterly. It
Charlie looked at me.
“I don’t think it’s right,” he said.
“Jane doesn’t mind,” Winnie said.
Mind? Hardly. If I couldn’t extricate myself from their disco plan, I’d have to fake an illness which might not be too difficult considering the state of my hangover.
Charlie finished his coffee while whipping through two newspapers, then left for the office. I was very conscious of what he would be doing that day—driving Max all over suburban Boston to look for the perfect farmhouse in which he could settle with some nubile young thing.
Ariel arrived at ten and by ten-thirty Winnie and I were off to the mall in Winnie’s Volvo. The parking situation was so bad it took us nearly twenty minutes to find a spot. I was feeling frayed even before we stepped out of the car, but Winnie, usually so lethargic, became a different person. The crowds didn’t bother her. Once inside, she opened her purse and looked at a list. She was on a mission.
Malls make me dizzy. It could be the lighting. I think it is designed to make people crazy so that they lose control of their mental faculties and buy things they neither need nor want. There was a man on the first floor playing Christmas carols on a grand piano. I followed Winnie from store to store. It wasn’t long before Winnie could see that I had lost whatever small amount of enthusiasm I had to begin with. The clue was when I sat on something I thought was a bench and it turned out to be a sculpture.
Winnie came out of a store called Scissors and Knives wielding a bag.
“You are sitting on a head,” she said.
“A what?”
“A head. I’m afraid you’ve mistaken this decorative piece of art for a bench. You are sitting on a head, a child’s head, as a matter of fact.”
I stood up and looked around to see if anyone else had seen me park myself on a bronze head. I thought I was pretty good at recognizing art, but perhaps mall art wasn’t my specialty. As a piece of art, the bronze wasn’t much, but it wasn’t much of a bench either. I might just as well have sat in a flowerpot. There were people looking.
“You were never much of a shopper,” Winnie said. “You never understood the health benefits.”
“Health benefits?” My head was pounding from the fluorescent lights and my feet hurt from the tiled floor.
“Certainly. You walk, for one thing, briskly in a pleasant environment. You get to express yourself with each and every purchase. Everything I buy is an expression of me. It’s one of the most creative acts there is. Come on,” she said. I thought maybe she was going to take me into a special room where they indoctrinated you into the cult of shopping. Instead, she took me to the hair salon on the top floor of Filene’s.
“I’m going to leave you here,” she said. I didn’t care where she left me so long as she left me somewhere. Winnie approached the counter. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Marco,” she said.
“He’s with a customer,” the girl said. Her hairstyle made her look like she’d recently been electrocuted. Perhaps a case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes.
“Tell him it’s Winnie Maple,” Winnie announced in a loud voice. The girl disappeared behind a partition and it wasn’t a moment before Mr. Marco himself came out. Mr. Marco was about five feet tall and bald on top, but he sported a black ponytail, pulled from the hair on the sides of his head.
“Winnie, my love, what are you doing to me? You are not here without an appointment, are you?”
“It isn’t me, Mr. Marco. It’s my sister,” she said.
“Me?” I turned toward Winnie.
“I suddenly had an absolutely marvelous idea.” I noticed that my sister could take on the persona of the person to whom she was speaking. She never tried it with me (maybe my personality wasn’t strong enough to mimic), but it worked like a charm on Mr. Marco. “Look at her,” she said. “Just look at her.” She lifted one of the limp locks that had escaped my ponytail. “My sister is a beautiful woman, but she doesn’t do a thing about it. And you know, Mr. Marco”—she bent her head toward him conspiratorially—“when you reach a certain age it’s incumbent upon you to bring your best qualities to the fore. Don’t you agree?”
“Completely,” he said.
