Tom Lake(78)

Where to begin?

Cat and I didn’t know each other long, but her help was immeasurable. I still sent her a Christmas card every year. For her part, she claimed her fantasy had always been that someone would knock on her door one day and volunteer to do the mending. For mending I had credentials. I knew how to tailor and cut patterns and replicate simple things without patterns, though I couldn’t do any of those things without standing. Mending, however, was work for sitting down. She made me a sewing basket on the spot, put in a beautiful pair of Fiskars like the ones my grandmother had. She gathered up the costumes in a laundry basket, put the sewing basket in the laundry basket, then put the laundry basket on my lap and wheeled me home.

“They put you in the cottage?” she said, looking around in wonder at just how nice it was.

“Just since this.” I nodded at my foot. “Uncle Wallace was here but they say he isn’t coming back.”

“I wouldn’t think so.” Cat, of course, had been there that night. She sat down on the little chintz sofa. I didn’t know how old she was, maybe my mother’s age, but at that time in life I thought every woman over thirty was my mother’s age. Cat had sad green eyes and hair that must have been blond when she was young. I won’t say she was pretty but she had a dreamy quality about her, something soft. “I’ve been here before,” she said, pulling a throw pillow needlepointed with violets into her lap. “A long time ago.”

“With Uncle Wallace?” I meant it to be funny but she nodded.

“He always stayed in the cottage. Nowhere else. The first couple of years he came to Tom Lake he’d invite me over sometimes, maybe once or twice a week. He always said he needed me to hem his pants. He called me his wardrobe mistress. He got such a kick out of that.”

I smiled because I wanted Cat to think I understood the ways of the world. One person’s endured lechery was another person’s cherished summer affair.

“He was a lovely man,” she said, as if he were already dead.

Every day I took a jumble of snags and tears and turned them back into clothes. I found the work extremely satisfying, as I imagine Rumpelstiltskin must have gotten a kick out of spinning all that straw into gold. Did actors destroy everything they touched? Cat brought a new basket over in the morning and by the afternoon I had finished. Sometimes when there was an extra minute she brought a couple of sandwiches and told me stories about Albert Long, nice stories about him being funny or thoughtful, never the things I didn’t want to know. She said she had wanted to visit him in the hospital after his esophageal disaster but she was afraid. After those first couple of years he never seemed to remember who she was, who she had been to him, even when she was on her knees pinning a hem in his trousers. I told her about meeting Elyse Adler and then she was glad she hadn’t gone. Elyse was the wife Uncle Wallace had been cheating on in those days.

I had Duke open all the curtains before he left in the morning. I loved to sew in the cottage, the light was so good. I could sit in bed with my foot up and my mountain of mending and manage to stave off panic for hours at a time, my mind settled by the work in my hands.

“When are you going to call Ripley back?” Duke asked before he left for rehearsal. He had shaved in the shower, the way he did. His hair was dripping on the edge of the bed where he perched, naked. Maybe I did love him.

“It’s impossible to get to a phone around here.”

“They have phones all over the place. He keeps leaving you messages at the office.”

I had made the mistake of telling Duke about Ripley calling me at the hospital. He saw the movie as the answer to everything: the loss of Emily, my one--footedness. “Why should I call him when he never listens to me?”

“If you’re saying something stupid he shouldn’t listen.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said.

“Welcome to the world. You’ve got a movie coming out. This isn’t the part where you start burning bridges.”

I touched his arm, the silky skin stretched over muscle. The round red scar where he had put out the cigarette still had the last vestige of a scab. “Would you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Do you think you could rig up some sort of ironing board over the bed?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want to iron the mending. That’s how you finish the job. But I can’t iron if I can’t stand up. If I had an ironing board that went over the bed, just a little one—-” I was thinking of the Veit ironing table with suction and blowing my grandmother and I used to dream about. What I was asking for was nothing like that. I had just finished sewing the sash on a muslin apron that I knew belonged to Mrs. Gibbs. I wanted to make it look nice.

He pushed my hair back from my forehead with the flat of his hand “You’re losing your mind, cricket.”

I looked at him, his crazy beauty. “Go,” I said kindly.

Duke was so happy now that Our Town was almost over, now that he was almost Eddie full--time, now that he was taking Pallace back to the room that had once been mine after they swam in the lake. I didn’t know the last part at the time but I understood that everything was shifting. Duke was on his way up and I was on my way out. Neither of us could have said those words but we knew.

Pallace came to see me but found the floor of the cottage to be blistering hot. Try as she might, she couldn’t stand on it for more than a minute. She arrived with a bottle of Orangina from the cafeteria, a bag of pretzels: small offerings to lay on her altar of guilt. Clearly, she was tortured, and I was foolish enough to think she felt bad about taking my part—-two parts! A low fog of tequila settled around her.