“Did you get lost?” Steffie asks kindly.
“A bit,” I admit. “I always get turned around in malls.”
“Oh, me, too,” she lies companionably. She is perfect, as Steffie is always perfect. She wears a perky little outfit that reminds me of tennis whites, made dressy by her earrings and the slender bracelet on her graceful wrist. She dresses to go shopping with more care than I dressed for my wedding. Her skin is golden tan; her huge eyes are brown; if I were a man I would kneel at her feet.
In the silence that follows, Steffie takes a long sip of her drink. I cannot help but feel it is a thing she has been taught to do, that at some point in her adolescence Mother Maurie sat her down at the kitchen table and taught her just the way to sip discreetly from a tall glass of iced tea. She does it too well for it to be an accident of nature. I watch her as the naked brown savages must have watched Magellan claim their lands. The same awe and incomprehension. She glances at Mother Maurie and then back to me. Then she clears her throat, having selected a suitable topic for conversation with me. What, I wonder, were they discussing before I arrived? And why are they so painstakingly kind to me, when I obviously do not belong to their world?
“Did you decide to buy that green dress you were trying on? We didn’t mean to hurry you, but I was simply dying of thirst. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, not at all,” I lie, half a lie. What I would have minded even more was if they had waited for me outside the dressing room, chirping helpful comments. Sometimes they do that. I suspect they believe that if they had enough time and money, they could fix me. Like detailing a used car for resale. Cut my long unruly mane into something cute and perky, dress me in cunning outfits that disguise my unshapely legs and flat chest. Transform me into a wife worthy of Tom Potter. The idea terrifies me. It makes me talk too much, too fast. “I didn’t get the dress. At the last minute, I decided it was just too young for me. And I always feel naked somehow in a sleeveless dress.”
“You make yourself sound like an old lady,” Mother Maurie chides smilingly. Her smile seems a bit stiff. Suddenly I realize that my remarks have not been exactly tactful. The dress I have rejected is cut very similarly to the one Mother Maurie is now wearing. But on her its youthfulness looks appropriate. Mother Maurie is a tiny, delicate woman, a ceramic doll with large blue eyes, and Steffie is a long-legged golden blonde, a beach-party Barbie. It strikes me that they are the two ends of the spectrum for American femininity, and that I do not fall anywhere between them. Off the bell curve, that’s me.
“What are you having, Mother?” It is Steffie, considering a red-and-gilt menu. “Shall we have just a bite, or dinner?”
“Let’s go ahead and eat dinner. The boys will be ravenous when they get here, and it will save us the trouble of cooking and dishes at home.”
I smile and nod, pushing my tangle of brown hair back a little from my eyes. The boys, I think as I peruse the menu, the boys. And we are the girls, at least Maurie and Steffie are. The boys are her husband, my husband, her brother, her son, and my son. And yet there are only three of them. Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy, and Bess, the old nursery riddle-rhyme rushes unbidden into my mind. Five names for three men. Or boys, I mean. All boys, forever boys. And we are the girls forever. Even when Steffie gets around to getting married and settling down, she will still be a girl. And probably a virgin, as near as I can make out. All the women in their family are virgins, except when they are “in a family way.” Then Grandpa Potter’s teasing is vigorous and crude beyond my belief or endurance, as if they were children caught in a dirty game.
I order and eat mindlessly, finishing while they are still dividing sandwiches into dainty triangles, still nibbling small forkfuls of cottage cheese. I drink coffee to pass the time, adding more sugar and creamer each time the waitress refills my bottomless cup. I roll the empty sugar packets and the foil-lined creamer packages into tiny tubes, and make stars and hexagons and parallelograms on the tabletop. Infinitely amusing. Only boring people get bored, my mother used to tell me. “… any other errands for you, Evelyn?” I jump, and sit up straight in my chair. Both Steffie and Mother Maurie are staring at me, polite inquiry in their eyes. Sleeping in school again.
“I, uh, I want to stop at the music store and look at the tapes.” Suddenly it seems like a very juvenile errand. As well to say I was stopping by the candy store, to get red and green suckers and a handful of Double Bubble. I am embarrassed, and they know it.
“You and your music!” Mother Maurie gives a condescending snort of laughter. “All right, but you’ll have to do it while we’re in the drugstore picking up Tommy’s prescription. Did you remember to bring it?”
She goes right on talking as I dig through my purse, finally coming up with the small empty pill bottle for Tom’s allergy medication in my coat pocket. It is sticky, Teddy must have played with it, and I surreptitiously wipe it on my napkin before I hand it over. I try to find the threads of the conversation again, only to realize no one is talking, they are all waiting expectantly.
The men are here, and I don’t know how or when they’ve arrived. Grandpa Potter, stooped but daunting still, rests his big hands on the edge of our table. His eyes scan the table, feasting on his wife and perfect daughter. He is given to saying things like “The Potter men have always been proud to say that their women dressed well, no matter how bad the harvest has been. We take care of our women.” His eyes skid over me, roll briefly toward heaven. He is a strange old man, I think, proud of his wife’s and daughter’s gentility and polish, but equally proud of his own rough edges and crude ways. He never minces words, never worries about giving offense. Of all Tom’s family, Grandpa is the one who never bothers to hide that he does not understand me, does not believe I will ever quite fit. He scares me, and I wish I could hide that from him. Right now, I want to sink under the table to escape that sharp stare. But suddenly Tom pushes into the seat beside me, his thigh warming against mine, and instantly all is well, no price is too great to pay for possessing him. Tall and golden he is, blond hair, brown eyes, big hands, and one big hand surreptitiously strokes my thigh before coming to settle demurely on the tabletop. He smells of Old Spice tinged with diesel oil, the mechanic’s smell that never quite leaves his skin. The hostess has followed them to the table, and I feel her eyes move from Tom to me and back again. She does not understand it any more than I do, why does this man who looks like a cigarette billboard cowboy, this gorgeous perfect man, sit down beside a woman like me? I move closer to him, and set my hand atop his on the table. The hostess looks away, moves away. I take a breath. I am safe now. My Tom is with me.
My Teddy is with him, clinging to his grandpa’s hand, his small head looking defenseless, his hair newly shorn and slicked. I don’t like it, and for a moment my anger flares, who does that old man think he is, always carrying out his compulsion to “keep those boys looking like boys” upon my little son? No one asked me if he needed a haircut. I love his dandelion tuft of fine hair, I don’t care if it covers the tops of his small pink ears. But Teddy is looking at me, his brown eyes big and round. He has been brave this time, not flinching when the buzzing razor nibbled down the back of his unprotected neck. I smile at him and try to put my approval in it, try not to remember how, when we first arrived in Washington, Grandpa took him to the barber, without my knowledge or consent, and brought him back, red-eyed and disgraced. “Momma’s little tit cried when the barber tried to shave the back of his neck and over his ears. Well, no grandson of mine is going to run around looking like a goddamned hippie. You wanna be like that, you stay with your mommy, baby boy. I’ll tell you, no son of mine ever behaved like that in public! Five years old, and he acts like a goddamned baby.”
And I had watched Teddy shrink with each contemptuous statement, and had foolishly made it worse by putting my arm around my little son, hoping to shield him from his grandfather’s disgust. And Teddy, my Teddy, had flung my arm aside and pushed me away, run out of the little house and into the fields to cry, newly ashamed of being afraid of something unfamiliar, newly ashamed of letting his mother hold and comfort him. And that wicked old man had glared at me and said, “You coddle that boy too much. Gonna ruin him. Time he was with men more often, instead of hanging around your skirts like Momma’s little tit.”
And I, too cold