office location, a modest brick building downtown, precisely because it wasn’t so upscale that they’d price out women less affluent than the Mrs Joseph McKinneys of the world. Or the Mrs Carson McKays, for that matter, she thought, wondering if pregnancy explained his short-notice announcement. Their wealthy patients came to them because they were good doctors, not because their offices looked like a luxury spa.
‘I just don’t see why you’d choose not to take advantage of an opportunity when it’s practically dropped in your lap,’ Brian said, standing up. ‘You’re savvier than that.’
His criticism, delivered beningly, still stung. ‘What does “savvy” have to do with anything? Just because I don’t feel like I need to earn more money, I’m not “savvy”?’
Brian pushed his hands into his shorts pockets, relaxed and confident in his opinions. ‘Look, ever since I’ve known you, whenever you’ve been faced with an opportunity to better yourself or improve your status, you’ve taken it. I don’t see why you’d stop now.’
He was right, and yet his assessment missed seeing her clearly, as though time had made his memory as farsighted as his eyes. Had he forgotten that her first opportunity was one he’d constructed so carefully that there was no way she could turn him down? Once he’d set the wheel in motion, then yes, she’d tried in every way to better herself. She was practical. There were limits, though, to her ambition. Maybe he didn’t want to believe this about her, or maybe he hadn’t noticed. He loved to tell people what a terrific pair they made, how alike they were in temperament and taste, how accomplished she’d become; he had constructed the reality he wanted in their marriage the same way he’d done for his business.
He had her all wrong.
She was not the woman of his tales, would never be that woman, but was there any value in arguing the point? In part, he didn’t know who she really was because she kept pieces of herself hidden from him. Money couldn’t buy everything.
Before she could frame any sort of response, Brian picked up his gym bag, said, ‘I have to make a couple calls,’ and left the room. She let him go.
He didn’t know, either, that she’d thought of leaving him many times, the way a blond woman might think about coloring her hair black: interested in the possibilities but unwilling to take such a drastic step. What if black hair looked awful? Was black an advantage, or was it just different? If she were the ambitious woman he saw, she would have divorced him as soon as she was earning enough to pay back her parents’ mortgage. She’d have moved ‘onward and upward’, as was Brian’s refrain. But no, she had already blasted apart the one bridge she’d want to travel again, and so because she wanted to keep Savannah’s life stable and she and Brian were as compatible as she needed them to be, she stayed.
Standing, she reached down for the notebooks and felt her left knee begin to buckle. She caught herself with one hand on the sofa’s arm. ‘Getting old, girl,’ she said, shaking her head.
Brian’s voice, persuasive and firm as he talked on the phone, resounded as she passed the kitchen. He was fixing a snack while he talked – warming up brownies, from the smell of it. He’d add vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, which illustrated why she’d had to take his suits in for alteration despite his playing some twenty hours of golf a week. That was the other curse of middle age: a slowing metabolism. Keeping in shape was harder all the time – and she’d skipped her workouts more than she wanted to admit, these months since her mother’s death. There never seemed to be time for exercise; the number of hours in her day had shriveled like an unpicked orange, and she was just too tired to wedge in anything she could excuse as nonessential.
In the master bathroom, she set down the note-books and turned on the shower. While it warmed, she rifled through a drawer for the pair of tiny scissors she used to trim her pubic hair. Brian preferred her trimmed, almost hairless, except for the hair on her head, which he liked long, and the coppery down of her arms. How long since she’d bothered to trim herself up? She didn’t even shave her legs weekly anymore. They hadn’t made love in … what was this? April? Two months. Not since Valentine’s Day, and even then it had been more of an expected gesture, a guilty ought-to rather than an anticipated finally, which, honestly, hadn’t occurred even in the first months – for her, anyway. As steam drifted around her like unsettled ghosts, she took the scissors and cut the notebooks’ binding string, expecting that when she cracked open the first of them, she’d find blank pages filled with nothing more than pale blue preprinted lines.
What she found instead came as such a surprise that she reached into the shower and turned the water off.
A quick perusal showed that each book was filled with neat pages of her mother’s calculations and observations on the status of the farm, the weather, the horses’ health – interspersed, it seemed, with similar comments about Meg and her sisters and father, all done in fine blue or black felt-tip ink. Seeing the curves and loops made by her mother’s hand weakened Meg; she sank to the thick cotton rug and spread the books around her.
Had her father known he’d given her these? These twelve diaries, as in essence they were, spanned close to two decades, ending the day before he woke on a Sunday morning last September and found his wife had slipped away in the night, leaving behind her stilled body … and these words. Of gossip? Of wisdom?
If she had known ahead of time that the notebooks were diaries, she never would have opened a single cover. Why invite pain? Now, she didn’t know what she would do with them. She didn’t want to read them. She didn’t want not to.
A knock on the door startled her. ‘What?’
‘Mom, I need you to sign a thing so I can do the end-of-year field trip.’
‘Can’t Dad do it?’
‘He’s on the phone.’
Meg piled up the notebooks and stashed them in the vanity cabinet. ‘I’ll be right out.’
Meg sat in the kitchen Saturday morning, coffee in hand, notebooks stacked on the table before her. Brian had gone for his usual Saturday breakfast with his cronies, first dropping Savannah at Rachel’s so they could go … someplace; Savannah had told her, but Meg, distracted by the diaries and her ambivalence about reading them, had passed Savannah off to Brian and thought no more about her plans.
The house was peaceful now, which made it easier to decide to try reading an entry or two. Just to prove to herself that they were frivolous, that she could throw the whole lot away without regret.
She paged through, sampling the entries, surprisingly compelled to turn the pages. Even the shortest of her mother’s comments revealed pieces of her past – their past – she hadn’t seen before.
June 8, 1985
Meggie’s been hired on at the bank. We need her here, but we need her there, too. Or somewhere that pays good. The Lord knows the money will be useful! We had to let our health insurance lapse, so I just pray none of us takes sick. Blessed Mother, watch over us all.
So they’d gone without insurance; the very thought of it was frightening, even long after the fact. She remembered her mother’s pinched face from back then, the worry lines ringing her mouth and wrinkling her forehead. It hadn’t mattered how early Meg got up in the morning, her mother was always up before her. No matter how late she stayed up, her mother was still up too. Little wonder her mother’s blood pressure was high.
‘June eighth …’ she said. The day she met Brian.
Her first day of work at Hamilton Savings and Loan. Her training was set to begin at ten, but first she was required to meet her boss – Brian, who was the owner’s son, only six years older than herself. Belinda Cordero, head teller, led her to his office doorway and disappeared, leaving her feeling self-conscious and somehow wrong for this moment in time,