“Between the Shadow and the Soul”
FictionBy Lauren GroffDecember 8, 2024Photograph by Xuebing Du for The New YorkerThey had lived together for twenty-five years in the old stone house on a bend in the river. They were young when they first saw the place, wildly in love, and so poor they could afford only one of two dwellings in the valley: a battered trailer huddled against the cold wind, and the antique house in foreclosure, a breath from letting the weeds muscle it back into the earth. Willie had wanted the trailer; when you flicked on the lights there, no shower of sparks fell from knob-and-tube wiring. But Eliza had vision. We’ll be happy in this house, she said, watching the green river slide through the willows. So they spent the first spring, summer, and fall living in a tent in the largest bedroom, cooking with a propane camper stove, and bathing in the river, and they taught themselves how to shingle the roof, to wire and plumb, to plaster and paint and scrape and refinish. Nearly every penny they made went straight into the house; nearly every spare hour was spent on house projects or finding antiques at yard sales and in thrift stores and bringing them back to life.Read an interview with the author for the story behind the story.Time passed. Willie became a high-school history teacher, his students’ perennial favorite. And one day Eliza realized that she’d been at the village post office for twenty-five years, she was fifty years old, and eligible for early retirement. Willie had had too much wine the night she announced she wanted to retire, and he said, recklessly, hopefully, Maybe now we have a kid? This sent an electric zap through her because the question of a kid had not been posed since they had agreed decades ago that they didn’t want one. Besides, she was fifty, and did Willie, at forty-three, not understand how women’s bodies worked? He saw her face and hastened to say, Oh, obviously adopt, but she was speechless, and his question lingered and began to curdle between them until Willie laughed it off, and said that of course they, just by themselves, were more than enough.Now he was in the great gnarled apple tree, stringing up fairy lights which were already plugged in and shining on his face and arms. It was the very end of summer, and across the river the maples were touched at the edges with gold.Eliza pulled four cherry pies from the oven and set them to cool. She could hear friends coming up the gravel drive and went into the parlor and watched them through the wavy glass, their hands full of flowers, wine, presents. She had not wanted a party, but Willie had insisted. You only retire once, he said, and the house is finally finished—let’s show it off. Plus, the new school year would begin on Tuesday, and he wanted a little something festive to mark the end of the summer.Willie sprang down lightly out of the tree. Thanks to his running and cycling, he was still as lithe as the teen-ager she’d first loved, even as she had undergone a bit of a midlife spread. Eliza toed the dog away from the screen door and came out with the cheese board in time to overhear her husband saying ruefully, running his hand over his freshly shaved head, Yeah, Eliza told me, oh so delicately, Your golden hair made a promise your scalp could not keep.The friends laughed—that line always got a big laugh, though it was he, not Eliza, who had said it—then they saw her and cheered. She smiled, kissed them, accepted their praise for the house. It’s like cottagecore porn, her new yoga-instructor friend Nikki said. Jesus Christ, it’s straight out of a fairy tale. They placed their tributes in her arms. She accepted the homemade rhubarb butter, the hand-quilted pot holders, the voucher for a master gardening class, although all she really wanted was to crawl into the clean white expanse of her bed.Music started and beat on into the twilight; the shadows stretched from the roots of the trees. She brought out the giant poached salmon and mayonnaise, the tender green salad from their garden, the barley salad, the focaccia she’d made that morning. People arrived and kept arriving. A rowdy game of badminton began, and the shuttlecocks got lost among the bats fleeting through the dark sky above. The pies were ravaged. Dancing began, oh, God, none of their friends had rhythm, it was astonishing, only Willie danced well, her sprite, her beam of sunshine. He moved her around, and if she danced well also it was simply because she danced with him. When she had to catch her breath, he grabbed any woman close at hand; they were all happy to be spun by him. Under the tables, the dog laid his broad blond head on people’s knees and gazed adoringly upward, the slut. Friends kept shouting in Eliza’s ear, asking what she was going to do with her days now, and she kept shouting back, Nothing, glorious nothing!Yes, she coveted it—letting the tea go cold on the kitchen table, the stacks of books, the lazy expanse of days. She had worked every single day since she was sma
They had lived together for twenty-five years in the old stone house on a bend in the river. They were young when they first saw the place, wildly in love, and so poor they could afford only one of two dwellings in the valley: a battered trailer huddled against the cold wind, and the antique house in foreclosure, a breath from letting the weeds muscle it back into the earth. Willie had wanted the trailer; when you flicked on the lights there, no shower of sparks fell from knob-and-tube wiring. But Eliza had vision. We’ll be happy in this house, she said, watching the green river slide through the willows. So they spent the first spring, summer, and fall living in a tent in the largest bedroom, cooking with a propane camper stove, and bathing in the river, and they taught themselves how to shingle the roof, to wire and plumb, to plaster and paint and scrape and refinish. Nearly every penny they made went straight into the house; nearly every spare hour was spent on house projects or finding antiques at yard sales and in thrift stores and bringing them back to life.
Time passed. Willie became a high-school history teacher, his students’ perennial favorite. And one day Eliza realized that she’d been at the village post office for twenty-five years, she was fifty years old, and eligible for early retirement. Willie had had too much wine the night she announced she wanted to retire, and he said, recklessly, hopefully, Maybe now we have a kid? This sent an electric zap through her because the question of a kid had not been posed since they had agreed decades ago that they didn’t want one. Besides, she was fifty, and did Willie, at forty-three, not understand how women’s bodies worked? He saw her face and hastened to say, Oh, obviously adopt, but she was speechless, and his question lingered and began to curdle between them until Willie laughed it off, and said that of course they, just by themselves, were more than enough.
Now he was in the great gnarled apple tree, stringing up fairy lights which were already plugged in and shining on his face and arms. It was the very end of summer, and across the river the maples were touched at the edges with gold.
Eliza pulled four cherry pies from the oven and set them to cool. She could hear friends coming up the gravel drive and went into the parlor and watched them through the wavy glass, their hands full of flowers, wine, presents. She had not wanted a party, but Willie had insisted. You only retire once, he said, and the house is finally finished—let’s show it off. Plus, the new school year would begin on Tuesday, and he wanted a little something festive to mark the end of the summer.
Willie sprang down lightly out of the tree. Thanks to his running and cycling, he was still as lithe as the teen-ager she’d first loved, even as she had undergone a bit of a midlife spread. Eliza toed the dog away from the screen door and came out with the cheese board in time to overhear her husband saying ruefully, running his hand over his freshly shaved head, Yeah, Eliza told me, oh so delicately, Your golden hair made a promise your scalp could not keep.
The friends laughed—that line always got a big laugh, though it was he, not Eliza, who had said it—then they saw her and cheered. She smiled, kissed them, accepted their praise for the house. It’s like cottagecore porn, her new yoga-instructor friend Nikki said. Jesus Christ, it’s straight out of a fairy tale. They placed their tributes in her arms. She accepted the homemade rhubarb butter, the hand-quilted pot holders, the voucher for a master gardening class, although all she really wanted was to crawl into the clean white expanse of her bed.
Music started and beat on into the twilight; the shadows stretched from the roots of the trees. She brought out the giant poached salmon and mayonnaise, the tender green salad from their garden, the barley salad, the focaccia she’d made that morning. People arrived and kept arriving. A rowdy game of badminton began, and the shuttlecocks got lost among the bats fleeting through the dark sky above. The pies were ravaged. Dancing began, oh, God, none of their friends had rhythm, it was astonishing, only Willie danced well, her sprite, her beam of sunshine. He moved her around, and if she danced well also it was simply because she danced with him. When she had to catch her breath, he grabbed any woman close at hand; they were all happy to be spun by him. Under the tables, the dog laid his broad blond head on people’s knees and gazed adoringly upward, the slut. Friends kept shouting in Eliza’s ear, asking what she was going to do with her days now, and she kept shouting back, Nothing, glorious nothing!
Yes, she coveted it—letting the tea go cold on the kitchen table, the stacks of books, the lazy expanse of days. She had worked every single day since she was small: the flower farm her parents owned had run on the muscle of their three children; away at college, in California, she’d worked in a cafeteria dish room; when she dropped out only a month before graduation it was to take care of her mother who’d had a debilitating stroke; after her mother died, she worked at the post office; she’d worked on the house weekends and evenings, and she had never in her life had a day of rest.
And as she watched her husband, flushed, so beautiful, so shiny-bald, she understood with a stroke of clarity that she had worked so hard in her adult life in part because that was the way she burned off her shame. When she fell in love with Willie, he was sixteen and she was twenty-three, despondent to be back in rural New York changing her mother’s diapers, working part time as a receptionist at the real-estate agent’s on the corner of Main and Chestnut. She had been so pretty then that they had placed her desk in the window, as if to lure people in. Willie hadn’t even got his driver’s license yet; he was riding his bike to school when he saw her. He dropped the bike and stood staring at her until she shook her head severely at him, mouthing, Go away. Of course she knew who he was. The village was tiny, and there was only one family with a giant Victorian up on the hill and four blond boys in stiff polo shirts; she had gone to high school with his eldest brother, who was now a stockbroker down in the city, like their father. For the next two months, she found little nosegays, chocolates, notes on her desk until she capitulated and drove him an hour away to a diner for a date. Oh, she hated herself for starting things up with him, he was only a child, but, in her defense, who wouldn’t fall in love with Willie? So bright, so funny, so kind, so handsome. Two years later, he refused to apply to any of the élite schools he could have been accepted to, and went to the state school half an hour away, so that he could move into her mother’s house to help her. It caused a great scandal in the village. Some people still had not forgiven her; they would come into the post office, and, if she was the only one working, they’d leave without sending their mail.
Podcast: The Writer’s Voice
Listen to Lauren Groff read “Plaster.”
Someone put on a slow song, and Willie took her hand. His shirt was soaked, and his skin was hot. He kissed her neck. Happy retirement, love, he said. She closed her eyes, pressed her body against his, and her clothes were soon wet with his sweat. Then the music shifted back to Motown, and he shimmied away from her.
Later, when the moon had risen and some of the friends were so drunk that they were resting their heads on the table or lying heaped together in the hammock, she couldn’t find Willie. She wandered to the vegetable garden, then down the path brushed by thick dark ferns, to the riverbank. The river always seemed to be speaking in many different voices in a pitch just under her hearing. She stood listening, near the small boathouse she and Willie had built together, until she heard, over the sound of the river, the rhythm, the small grunts, the gasping breaths.
Of course, she thought with a strange calm. She’d known he was too good for her for almost thirty years. And now she was lumpy, spent. It made sense that he would look elsewhere. She stood under the tent of willow branches and listened to the fucking, and her body warmed to it, she became overwhelmed with heat, until the rhythm accelerated and all at once the noises stopped. The sound of hushed laughter. The boathouse door opened. In the shadow of the tree, Eliza pressed her cheek to the bark. She saw svelte, flexible Nikki hurry up the path, flinging her cashmere shawl around her shoulders. After a minute or so, in the door, there loomed a dark shape, a man, but, wait, wait, no, he was too tall, too broad, and as he came by her, passing only a foot away, she saw in the moonlight that it was their friend Richard, who owned the hardware store in the village. Happily married, father of three small children. A complicated situation. But not Willie.
She let a few minutes dissolve in the dark, then went slowly up the path and into the house. She immediately heard her husband in the dining room, telling a story about the stone house’s ghost, which had not been happy when the dog had come to them as a puppy. Willie saw her across the room, and she raised her eyes toward their bedroom and went upstairs. He had hired some of their friends’ older children to drive any drunk guests home, and car headlights pulsed on the walls in the beautiful pale solitude of their room. She stripped her clothes off and went into the shower. A minute later, Willie slid in with her. Did you like your party? he said. Oh, yes, she said, and reached for him, but he’d had too much to drink and he was not able. Still, he sank to his knees on the tile; she shielded his face from the downpour of hot water with her hand. She bit a washcloth to keep from crying out. They went to bed and held each other even as the music played outside, and the voices shouted and then the music stopped, and their friends either went home or crashed on the couches and floors throughout the house.
Willie fell asleep instantly, but Eliza stayed awake into the silent hours, watching the shimmer of moonbright river on the wall and the ceiling.
Something had started tonight. A pool of darkness had begun to well in her. Long ago, she had lain next to Willie as he slept angelically and she, wracked with misery, had sobbed as quietly as she could. Then, too, she knew she was being absurd. They were in Paris. For two years, they’d saved up money for a honeymoon week there; they’d taken out every book about the city in the village library to prepare; they’d listened to French-language CDs; Willie had taught himself all of Satie’s “Gymnopédies” and “Gnossiennes”; Eliza had cooked her way through three Cordon Bleu cookbooks. Their trip was one of radical economy. They stayed in a medieval tower not far from Shakespeare & Co., in a dirty room barely large enough for its single mattress. They had viennoiseries and coffee for breakfast and supermarket picnics for lunch and allowed themselves one hedonistic meal at night, after which they stumbled back drunk over the cobblestones. Sleep like paupers, eat like kings! Willie had said. Paris filled him with manic zest. She would wait in agony all day until he was asleep, and only then would she let herself cry. For her, the glory of the honeymoon had been in the planning, the dreaming, the building up in her mind; what a letdown to find that Paris was just a place, that some days were full of chill gray drizzle, that the dull, thick bodies of other tourists blocked her from full joy. Paris had been a gorgeous dream she had embroidered in her mind—shining, empty, existing for them alone.
Tonight, she was desolate in her bed once more, fifty years old, freshly retired; there would be no children, and the house was at last finished. What she wouldn’t give to be in a tight crawl space, sprinkled with squirrel turds, running wire. The profound pleasure of figuring things out, then doing them. All she had to look forward to from now on was rest. One could not build elaborate castles in one’s mind out of rest; it was like drawing negative space. Ungrateful, she knew herself to be. But, still, she felt the darkness in her grow.
The trees turned to bronze and copper, then stripped themselves skeletal; the cold somehow entered Eliza.
Enough! Willie cried out in January, on the third night in a row that he had come home from musical rehearsals at school to find Eliza sitting in the dark at the kitchen table, in the same place where he’d left her, with the same knitting barely touched on her lap. She blinked under the assault of the electric light. My God, Willie said, did you even move? What did you do all day? She shrugged. I watched the meadow, she said. So many tiny changes.
The meadow was a miracle, in fact, the dew frost on the dead brown stalks in the morning, the deer tiptoeing delicately through, the snow flurry that stayed for an hour before the sun burned it off, the birds that seemed to fall down into the grass and burst out of it in sudden sprays, the gorgeous slant of shadows in late afternoon. No purpose in explaining; Willie wouldn’t understand. He let the dog out into the twilight to relieve himself. Even when she’d worked all day at the post office, she’d always had a beautiful hot dinner waiting for Willie’s return, and now, with oceans of time, she did not. Well, he was capable, he could fend for himself, she thought.
He took off his sports coat, rolled up his sleeves, set to making linguine aglio e olio, and at last put huge plates before each of them, finishing them with Parmesan and pepper. But she could not fathom being hungry. The times she could bear to look at herself in the bathroom mirror, she felt she had gone greige, and now she was the bad kind of thin. She got dizzy going up the stairs to the bedroom.
Baby, he said, blinking fast, I think we have one of two options. Either I take you somewhere to get help, or we find a way to make you start living again.
I am living, she said, winding a fork into her pasta, but it defeated her. She set it down.
Also, he said sternly, you have to bathe every day. You’re smelly.
Oh, sorry, she said, and looked down at herself; it was true, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn anything but Willie’s old pajamas.
He launched himself at the problem with his huge energy, and it was clear he’d stayed up for much of the night when he woke her early the next morning with a cup of coffee and a plan. He had gone through the stack of gift cards the friends had given her at the party, months ago, and signed her up for the pottery class, the fibre-arts class, the master gardening class—which had already started, he said, but he had sent a pleading e-mail last night and the instructor had let her in. Also, he’d bought them both gym memberships at the fancy new place half an hour away—they couldn’t afford it, especially now that she wasn’t working, but oh, well, and he’d be going with her every single day before school and on the weekends, too. We have Pilates at six today, he said. We’ve got fifteen minutes before we leave, so drink your coffee. I made overnight oats for the car.
It was easier to submit than to resist. In an hour, she found herself with her face pressed against a blue rubber mat, her whole body shaking with the strain, as the Pilates instructor said, Very good, Willie!, and her husband, on his own mat, winked at Eliza.
The pottery class felt like an old friend, met again after years apart—she had always been good with her hands. The fibre-arts class was artier than anything she’d ever engaged in—she had taught herself how to knit, to crochet, to quilt, even to spin thread from wool—but the instructor showed them images of medieval unicorn tapestries and Gee’s Bend quilts and Sheila Hicks’s waterfalls and piles of textiles. She encouraged them to think of fibre as a uniquely feminine form of art. Art! What did Eliza, a village postmaster, have to do with art? And she was deeply uncomfortable the first day of the gardening class, held at the university extension, because from the chatter everyone already seemed to know one another. She sat, hunched in her overlarge sweater, angry with Willie. Why in the world did he think this was a good idea? She’d grown up working every single day on a flower farm, for God’s sake. What more could she possibly have to learn about plants?
Then the door opened, and in came some kind of young person, tall and heron-thin, in a jumpsuit dirty at the knees, wearing a buzz cut that shone golden under the fluorescents and a gender that was not immediately legible. They crouched beside Eliza and offered a rough hand for her to shake. Bet Dahl, they said and there was an accent there, intriguing. A scent of dirt and body odor, but not in a bad way. Here’s last week’s handouts, the instructor said, read them at your leisure at home, and gave Eliza a toothy smile that turned the austere face suddenly soft and dimpled.
Eliza was knocked out of her composure. Bet stood at the front of the class and said, Compost! Today we learn how to make it. On Thursday, in the greenhouses, we will put into practice what we have learned. Tell me what you already know. The group clamored to answer, and Eliza counted her breaths until she could hear what was being said.
Bet, it turned out, was short for Betina. She was a Ph.D. student writing a dissertation on native gardening in the North American Northeast. Originally from Utrecht. On the drive home through the dark that night, Eliza saw in her mind’s eye thick rows of tulips in color blocks stretching to the horizon, like a modern painting, a bony figure on a bicycle cutting through them, a windmill in the distance. She wondered if Bet had turned to native plants in reaction against the artificial beauty of Dutch tulips. A revolt against order. She imagined Bet in her apartment in the small university town thirty miles from her stone house: the place would have clean white walls, lots of light, plants in every window, a mattress on the floor. Bet would not care about aesthetics. She would not see the old linoleum in the kitchen. She would own only what was needed. No decades accumulated in the drawers. A life kept fresh.
At home when Eliza came in, Willie looked at her hopefully over the stir-fry spitting in the wok, and she said, keeping her voice neutral, Yes, I think I’ll like the gardening class.
On Tuesdays they had in-class learning in the extension rooms; on Thursdays they had their practicums at the university greenhouses and fields. Eliza had always been strong—she’d had to be to fix up their house, to sling packages all day at the post office—but she’d let her muscles turn to goop since she had retired. She was a weak little slug now. She nearly cried in the greenhouse when she went to slide a forty-gallon citrus tree and a classmate, Don, a strangely handsome orthodontist, had to step in to help her. At the gym, in the morning, even though her whole body protested, she started staying for the session that followed Pilates, no matter what it was, HIIT or barbells or spin, pushing through her dizziness and nausea, averting her eyes from the mirrors when she changed in the locker room.
In each of her classes, by the second week, the mass of participants had separated into individuals. In pottery, there was a couple who owned the café in town; in fibre arts, she hit it off with a grave, soft-cheeked new mother. In the gardening class, there were orthodontist Don, retired librarians Norma and David, goofy young Eagle Scout Mikey, and a grandmother, mother, and daughter named Linda, Janet, and Julia. In the frozen months, they were each to plan a native garden; in March, they would plant; in June, there would be a field trip to visit all of their projects. Eliza wanted to use a space at the top of the stone house’s meadow, south-facing, for her garden. She decided that her patch would be all edible native plants, as carefully designed as an ornamental garden; she would grow groundnuts on trellises, hibiscus like roses, jewelweed with the little green pods that explode, dooryard violet as ground cover. What joy it was to be dreaming in pictures, to be deep in research.
In the greenhouse one Thursday in late February, as she was transferring the cuttings and poking in the seeds, the soil in the pots looked so rich that she couldn’t control herself, she thrust her fingers deep into it. Warm and soft. She laughed to herself. A voice in her ear, Bet, behind her, said, Irresistible, yes, sometimes I am compelled to do that also. Eliza went so hot in the face that she had to step outside into the blustery evening to cool off. When she came back in, she avoided Bet’s eye. That time of life, eh, murmured Linda, the grandmother of the trio of women. Nobody ever tells you it’s hell.
No! Eliza wanted to protest; she was too young. But that was not the truth, was it? Yet another thing about her body to be ashamed of, she thought, and she felt tenderly for her poor aging self.
That weekend, at the grocery store, Eliza hovered near the cosmetics wall and, almost without looking, tossed in mascara, concealer, lip gloss, and sped to the checkout, feeling furtive. In the parking lot, she ran into Nikki, who threw her arms into the air and shouted, Jesus Christ! You’ve lost, like, forty pounds!, and kissed the air beside Eliza’s ears, then hurried off somewhere, probably to seduce a married man. In the car on the way home, the day surprisingly mild, Eliza opened the windows and sang along to the radio, scaring the neighbor’s sheep into a trot as she wailed by.
In March, after the practicum in the greenhouse, Don suggested they all go for a drink after class, and everyone but young Mikey squeezed into a booth in a tavern up the road. Eliza’s leg was up against Bet’s wiry thigh. Every time Bet reached for her beer, Eliza felt it in her shoulder. She laughed too wildly at Norma and David’s shtick, and she drank too quickly. When she overcame her shyness enough to tell a joke, Bet squeezed her knee under the table while everyone laughed, and her body responded in a rush, and afterward, for minutes at a time, she could not hear the conversation as it moved on without her. Her hand shook when she lifted her wine to her mouth. At midnight, the dark road swerved in the windshield on the way home. When she climbed out of the car, she didn’t want to go into the house, past the dog groaning on his bed in the kitchen, through the dark parlor, up the stairs, into the bedroom where Willie was sleeping. Instead, she stood for a long while out in the clear, cold air, smelling all the new green in the world, feeling the sap rising, the trees awakening, the tender grass just now showing itself in the fields. Her old friend the river spoke loudly, swollen with snowmelt and spring rain.
She stood there for such a long time, exultant, that she began to shiver, and the dog whined at the door for her to just come in already. And she was up before Willie in the morning, so overflowing with energy that she made them fried-egg sandwiches for the ride to the gym, and the dog followed her, his forehead furrowed, as she paced from room to room, until it was time to wake her husband.
Then it was April, and when Bet gave the class her cell number so that they could call her when they were preparing and planting their native plots, Eliza put it into her phone as Florist, without explaining to herself what she was doing. As if Willie would care! Besides, she had done nothing wrong. And he had his own preoccupations, so busy with the school musical, his voice raspy from calling out corrections to the actors on the stage. The refrigerator full of takeout boxes because neither of them came home before 9 p.m. most nights. The dog bore a look of patient despondency.
One Sunday in late April, she was out in the morning mist, kneeling in the earth in her plot, when Willie knelt beside her and took up a spade and began to dig. She was startled out of her reverie—a strange erotic daydream, flesh without body, warmth without a face. Willie couldn’t see inside her head, she told herself; besides, daydreaming hurt nobody. She watched his strong square hands with the golden hairs on his knuckles as he dug one giant hole for a hibiscus plant, then another. Are you all right? he said at last, chopping through a fibrous root. You’ve seemed so far away from me.
She rose up on her knees, brushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. Look at me, she said. I look and feel better than I have in decades.
He peered at her over his shoulder, You do, he said, but sadly.
What? she said, and waited, and her irritation with his slowness grew, and was just about to tip into anger, when at last he said, You’ll tell me when you’re ready.
She felt cold then, and she wondered if he had seen her texts with Bet. But there was nothing there to alarm him other than the sheer volume—it was just a lot of jokes and photos of plants, a thrilled flurry yesterday when, on a hike with the dog in the forest, Eliza found a cluster of chanterelles.
Wasn’t this what he had wanted? Her, bursting with life?
Willie, she said, you told me to live, I’m living—I don’t know what to say.
He in his turn said nothing more, just left the spade embedded to the handle in the ground and went back to the house, and the dog abandoned her to run off behind him.
At the tavern after gardening class now, Eliza stayed beyond the slow trickle of people going home, so that most nights it was her and Bet and Julia, the plain, sarcastic twentysomething daughter of the grandmother-mother-daughter trio, who remained until the bartender dipped the lights and began stacking the chairs. One night, Eliza and Julia stood in the parking lot, watching Bet stride off to her apartment up the street, until Julia sighed and flicked her cigarette so the sparks tumbled redly across the asphalt, and when Eliza turned away the girl said in a contemptuous voice, Don’t get a D.U.I. on your way home.
Excuse me? Eliza said, and the girl said, You’re excused, and vanished into her car before Eliza could tell her to grow up. Julia apologized to Eliza the next Tuesday with a cannister of peanut-butter cookies that Eliza shared with the class. I was just frustrated, Julia said, but with what Eliza chose not to ask. All class, she watched the girl out of the corner of her eye, but Bet didn’t flirt with her more than she flirted with anybody, including young Mikey and the married librarians; certainly less than she flirted with Eliza.
May was upon them too soon. The leaves were vivid, the sky clear, the cherry trees so frilly they could break your heart.
For her final project in fibre arts, Eliza had decided to go overlarge, cheeky, knitting a postal-service mailbag out of hot-pink yarn and overstuffing it with junk mail until it nearly burst. Was this art? What was art, anyway? But the instructor seemed pleased and solemn and, in the end-of-class show, hung the work where one saw it first thing. Of all her pottery creations, Eliza took home only a single large vase and a bowl; everything else seemed imperfect to her. When she left, the rest of the class was dividing up the cups and bowls and vases she didn’t want. Take the advanced class in the fall? the teacher said quietly, holding the door open for her, and Eliza said, Maybe. In truth, she thought of very little these days but her plants pushing up out of the ground, the heat and steam of the greenhouse, Bet and her rain of photos of joe-pye weed and Queen Anne’s lace, her affectionate touches of Eliza’s waist, her arm, her back. One night in the tavern, Bet pressed unnecessarily close as she was going into the bathroom and Eliza was going out. The wicked grin, the earthy smell. Then the door closed and Eliza was alone in the hallway, lightning coursing through her.
The final class would be on the first Saturday morning of June, the class had decided. They would visit each plot of land to see how the gardens were coming along and finish at Don’s house for lunch. Potluck? Janet said, and Don said, No, no, it’d be my honor to feed you, don’t worry. They started at the greenhouses because Mikey, Linda, Janet, and Julie didn’t have space at home for a garden. Only Linda’s was interesting, Eliza thought, with its intentional clashes of color; the rest were a random scattering of droopy, unloved plants. Norma and David had converted the median strip beyond their sidewalk into a native-plant repository—Christmas fern, aster, monarda, bergamot. It was smart. It would be beautiful by August. Eliza was nervous as she led everyone over the country roads to the stone house. Willie was out on a long bike ride, she knew; she had timed it carefully. When they arrived, Norma and David were in ecstasies, young Julia had a pinched expression on her face, and Bet looked at Eliza and smiled. I could live forever in a place like this, she said.
Eliza led them up to the meadow. Her native garden hadn’t grown as much as she’d hoped, but it was still quite lovely, with arching trellises she’d built and paths mowed through the design. She brought up a pitcher of homemade lavender lemonade, and people drank and exclaimed, and the dog darted around, and they lingered until Don said, at last, I’m almost reluctant to tear us away, but my wife is texting madly that lunch awaits us.
When they came down from the meadow, Willie was back from his ride and showered and standing barefoot on the slate walk. So this is the famous group, he said, and his eyes darted from face to face, coming to rest on Don’s. The more the merrier, Don said, come along with us to lunch.
Oh, Eliza started to say, Willie’s got plenty to do, but he said, With pleasure!, and slipped on his shoes and put himself into the car.
Don’s place was only ten minutes away. Eliza didn’t know what she was expecting but certainly not a vast iron gate, a drive up through poplars, a house so massive it could have been a château. Teeth bought this? Eliza said, and Willie said thoughtfully, His name is Don Fisher? I bet he’s a Fisher from the family that used to own hundreds of thousands of acres up here. So not teeth. This is generational wealth. He looked grim.
Don’s wife was on the drive to meet them. She was tiny and blond, and her face was frozen stiff when she smiled. She wore a whole equestrienne outfit, down to the boots.
Don’t know about you, but I’m starving, Don said, and led them through the great mirrored hallway into a very large dining room with a buffet of soups and salads and sandwiches on the sideboard. I didn’t know what people liked, Don’s wife said, so I had the cook make everything!
They sat, and, before they started eating, Don stood and gave a long and impassioned speech about the class, the camaraderie he had found there, about the brilliance of Bet, who had just successfully defended her Ph.D. Then Don handed around flutes of champagne, and they raised a glass to the teacher. On one side of Eliza, Willie put his hand on hers, and on the other, under the table, Bet’s knee pressed against her knee. She had to close her eyes and breathe. They ate, and the cook darted behind them and filled glasses with white or red wine, even for Mikey, who drank his down in two gulps before anyone could stop him.
They were all tipsy when they went into the soft gray day to the garden. Willie walked ahead of Eliza, and Bet hip-checked her, and they laughed. Don’s gardens were frankly astonishing: he had his own greenhouse full of orchids, and he had two gardeners standing there, grinning. His native-plant plot was more elaborate than Eliza’s but not, she was happy to discover, more beautiful. The garden was so large that the class soon fragmented, the trio of women going over to the rose garden in full blush, the librarian couple going to the potager with its espaliered pears, Mikey heading down to a pond where a swan glided between reeds. Eliza crouched to look at a blue lobelia, and when she looked up Willie was not beside her. She could see nobody but the librarians in the distance.
She stood, a dark feeling spreading in her. She thought of Willie, where he would go, and hurried back to the greenhouse. She came in softly. Yes: there was his voice. She stood in the doorway, listening.
I thought it was Don, Willie was saying. All afternoon. But it’s not. It’s you.
Me what? Bet’s voice said, sharply. They were hidden from Eliza by a palm made gaudy with orchids.
Oh, please, Willie said.
Bet said, It is always like this. But nothing happened. It’s a big nothing. I flirted, yes, but I flirt with everyone. I flirt with Mikey, I flirt with Linda, who’s maybe eighty. But she is so timid, your Eliza, I waited, and she flirted back, but she made no move. And, even if something did happen, what’s it to you? You don’t own her.
We’ve been together forever, Willie said. We’re married.
There was a long pause, and Bet’s voice changed. O.K., she said. You are suffering. I am not cruel. So I say now that I am not interested in Eliza. These old wives, they’re fun for a month, then they get clingy and crazy. I promise . . .
But Eliza didn’t stay to hear what Bet promised. She hurried up the path and back into the house. She ran cold water on her wrists in the bathroom, and then she came back to the dining room, where a giant glossy cake bedecked in real flowers waited on the table. She saw the champagne bottles in their frosty buckets and took a full one with her to the window seat and sat behind the velvet curtain. She gulped, letting the champagne spill onto her chin and neck. She replaced the drained bottle with a full one, and hunched over her knees behind the curtain until the others came back inside, and there was another speech by Don and the clinking of forks on plates, then voices saying goodbye. The windows darkened. She felt slightly better in the shadows. She heard Willie calling for her but did not care to respond. At last, the pale mask of Don’s wife peeked around the curtain, and she called out in a voice made high-pitched with fear and relief, She’s here.
Hey, Willie said, sitting next to her. He took the mostly empty bottle from her hand. Ready to go home? Everyone left a while ago.
And he helped her to stand, and said a very cheery thank-you to Don and his wife, who nodded graciously, and Willie put Eliza into the car and buckled her in and pulled back through the great gates.
She found that her face was extremely hot, but it didn’t have to be shame; it could have been a hot flash. The landscape undulated by. They went across the bridge toward their house, shining in the twilight, and as they passed a boat launch she said urgently, Pull over, stop.
She got out of the car and tripped running down to the launch and skinned her hands, but she was up again before Willie could come around to help her. At the river, she stripped off all her clothes, not caring who could see her nakedness from the bridge. She jumped in.
The current was muscular, the water delicious, dark blue. Willie came in after her. She floated on her back, and Willie joined her, taking her hand, until the current swept them past the bridge. They slowly breaststroked back in silence, and dressed, shivering, and rode with the windows down until the stone house appeared glowing down the drive.
The dog danced his happiness to see them. Willie bent to greet him. Eliza escaped upstairs, took off her wet clothes, and lay naked, splayed, grotesque on top of the covers. She didn’t bother to wipe the hot tears away, and they ran into her ears.
In time, she became aware that Willie had come up to the room and was sitting in the armchair in the corner, watching her. She’d found the antique chair on the side of the road and had upholstered and refinished it herself. Everything in this house she’d touched and made her own. She hated it all. She saw herself as her husband must see her now, sloppy, spilling over the bed, old, no longer as coltishly beautiful as she’d once been; well, her legs had made a promise her genes couldn’t keep. She stole a look at his face. She’d seen that expression before. Oh, yes, it had been the first time she’d become aware of Willie as a person. She’d been eleven, he’d been four or thereabouts, and her parents were having their annual Fourth of July party at the flower farm. The beer ball was submerged in ice, the table was full of other families’ Tupperware, her father was not dead yet, he was presiding over the grill, making countless hot dogs and hamburgers. She was sitting on the dock of the swimming hole, so thick with thrashing children that she felt indignant; it was her water, her pond. Through the gate walked his family, his father with that swoop of blond hair, his bone-thin mother in her long skirt and cardigan on this hot day, the four little boys in matching yellow polo shirts. Willie was the youngest. The three older boys had gone to the table and were quietly wolfing down as much as they could fit in their mouths; they were wealthy, but their mother had a strange relationship with food, and there was never enough in the house. Willie had gone to the dock. He had slipped off a moccasin and stood next to Eliza, dipping a toe in the water.
His father had gravitated to the grill and was holding a pair of tongs in his hand, and now he called out in a stern voice, William, I said no swimming. Conversation lulled; the music seemed louder. Willie bit his lower lip, and then took off his other shoe.
William, his father said in a very loud voice now, and started across the grass. Just before his father reached him, Willie tipped sideways and into the pond, fully clothed.
His father reached over and yanked him out by the arm and everyone heard the crack, but the boy didn’t scream, and his father carried him by the arm for ten feet, tossed aside the tongs he was still holding, put Willie down, pushed him in the middle of the back, and said in a curt voice, We’re going. The mother picked Willie up, still dripping, the boy’s arm doing a funny thing, his face buried in her neck. The three older sons shoved food into their pockets and ran after their parents.
Things happened in Willie’s house, and the whole town knew, but nobody ever did anything about it. Those things pulsed there at the center of her husband, deep-rooted, the source of his willful goodness, what he’d wanted to avoid when he’d taken her hand early on and gently said that he was sorry, he would never have children, he would understand if this was a deal-breaker.
Just before the four-year-old Willie had let himself fall into the dark water, he had looked at Eliza, and she’d seen on his face what she saw there forty years later—sorrow, and rage, and a kind of mad, obstinate joy.
She was a fool. She could not leave this man. Who would take care of him then. Oh, but she hadn’t wanted to leave him, not really, had she. She had just wanted to know what it was like to brush up against the dazzling future again. She felt the part of her that the lush spring had stirred to life go dormant, deep in her, once more. She knew that it would not awaken again in her lifetime. She opened her arms to her husband and waited. He took his time, but at last he came to her, as she knew he would. He put his head under her chin, and his breath was warm on her neck, and, like this, she held him until he slept. ♦
