“She’s really putting you through it,” Diana murmured. Daisy had, of course, confided in her new friend about Beatrice’s expulsion. She kept talking, her words coming faster and faster, like someone had pulled out a stopper and released a torrent of frustration.
“You know, I was so happy when I found out I was having a girl. I thought we’d go to high tea, and the ballet, and get manicures together and go shopping. And she put up with that, for a while. But Beatrice…” Daisy thought of her daughter, sitting tranquilly in her rocking chair, knitting needles clicking. “Well, she’s just always been exactly who she is.” Somehow, there was another drink in front of her. She hadn’t remembered ordering it, but she lifted it and sipped from it gratefully. Diana was waiting, looking at her, but Daisy couldn’t tell her that she and Hal had agreed that they’d have two children. They’d tried for years. Daisy had had two miscarriages, one the year after Beatrice’s birth, just days after she’d found out she was pregnant, the other when Daisy was twenty-five, after she’d passed the twelve-week mark, which had been painful and messy and had left her sad for months. Then Hal had gotten a vasectomy. Daisy had argued against it. We can keep trying, she’d told him. My mom had me when she was thirty-eight! When you’re thirty-eight, I’ll be over fifty, Hal had said, his voice distant. That’s too old for diapers, and waking up in the middle of the night.
“Sometimes I feel like a failure,” Daisy said quietly.
“You’re not a failure,” Diana said. She reached across the table and took Daisy’s hand, and her voice was so warm, and her expression so sincere, and maybe it was the drink, the room, the music; maybe it was being in the company of men in suits and ties and women in expensive shoes, or the smell of perfume and the flowers on the bar, but Daisy felt a sob catch in her throat. How long had it been since she’d had someone’s complete attention this way, for this long? How long since she’d felt like she was with someone who could see her, and could see how hard she was trying? At least since Hannah’s death, and that had been nine months ago.
“Thank you,” she said, and thought of something Hannah had told her once, long ago, about how, for old married ladies like them, making a new friend was the closest they could get to falling in love.
5
Diana
Leave, Diana told herself, in a voice that rang through her head like a bell. Get out of here. Pay the bill, leave the table, get out of this ridiculous bar full of ridiculous rich people, where they have the nerve to charge twenty dollars for a drink. Don’t ask her any more questions. Stop talking to her. Stop falling for her. It was a ridiculous thing to think, that she was falling for Daisy, that she was like some giddy, innocent teenager with her first crush, but there it was, the awful truth: she liked this woman. Daisy Shoemaker, with her earnest face and her carefully done hair and her I-got-dressed-up-for-the-big-city necklace, was very easy to like; she was nothing like the rich, brittle, Main Line trophy wife Diana had been expecting. She was sweet, and forthcoming, and, my God, she was so young! There was barely a wrinkle on her round, full-cheeked face, and her mouth seemed to relax naturally into a smile. She was friendly and funny and cute when she got tipsy, hiccupping and trying to describe the terrible watercolors she and Hal had purchased from his classmate. Diana liked her, and it was almost impossible to think about causing her pain.
“So what about you?” Daisy was asking. From the way she was wriggling in her seat, either she needed the bathroom or she’d lost a shoe. “Where’d you grow up?” Diana gave her pieces of the truth: that she’d grown up near Boston, that she’d spent time on Cape Cod. Daisy’s face had lit up at the mention of the Cape. Us, too! she’d said, pleased as punch. We go there, too!
Diana told Daisy that she’d never been married, but that she was in a long-term relationship. She couldn’t say that she was single. It felt like betraying Michael, and she couldn’t do that. She said that she had two sisters, three nieces and two nephews. She struggled to remind herself that this woman was not a new acquaintance, or a potential friend; she tried, as subtly as she could, to keep the drinks coming and keep the conversation focused on gleaning information about Daisy, and her life, her family. Her brother and her husband.
She learned Hal had quit drinking not long before he met Daisy, that he’d paid for their wedding, brought Daisy to Pennsylvania, and given her a credit card and carte blanche to decorate his house.