Bound Together

Mar 1, 2019 | Southern Lit, Southern Verse

[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
image: Mat Reding”][/title]

Laurie has painted her living room the softest shade of pink. If you didn’t know, you would see only white, but that splash of pink puts her in the best light. She’s bought pink light bulbs as well. In this room, with its rosy glow, she feels as if she looks ten years younger. Maybe fifteen.

This project is the first thing she’s done in ten months that made her feel as if there might be a future. When the painter finished, she stood in front of the mirror by the entryway and practiced smiling. It made her face hurt. 

In twenty minutes, Laurie’s two best friends since elementary school, Pam and Tina, are due to arrive. Every March, they get together at one of their houses. It’s an all-day affair, with mimosas and later wine for lunch. With coffee all afternoon, and stories from their collective past.

Sometimes one of them ends up crying.

Tina has had a facelift, something Pam and Laurie make fun of behind her back. But as Laurie gets ready—she’s wearing a leopard-print sweater and black leggings—she puts her fingers on each side of her face and pulls her skin taut. The difference is enough to cause a tightness in her throat.

When the back door opens—these three never knock at each other’s houses—Laurie puts on her practiced smile. “Pam!” she says. “Tina!”

The two drop their handbags on the kitchen counter, and Pam says, answering a question that hasn’t been asked, “Leave your purse on the floor, and you’ll always be poor.”

They have a hundred sayings like this. Gathered over fiftysomething years.

Tina, who has the most money of them all, kisses Laurie’s cheek, slips a hundred-dollar bill in her hand. Laurie looks at the money, feels her cheeks burn, but she pockets it anyway. 

“Let’s go in the living room,” Laurie says. She wants to sit in her Queen Anne chair by the lamp that throws off the cotton-candy light. She wants Pam or Tina, or both of them if she’s being honest, to comment on her looks.

But Pam is already sitting at the kitchen table. “Wouldn’t it be better if we stayed here for a while? Had our mimosas.” She laughs. “I like to be close to the kitchen in case we need to make another batch!”

“Sure,” Laurie says and feels her heart crumble in a way that seems too big for this small disappointment.

By eleven, the three have discussed old boyfriends and the newest crop of presidential candidates. It’s election year, and Laurie can’t find anyone who seems qualified. When she asked Pam what she thought of last night’s debate, she said, “I felt like I was watching the U.S. Constitution burn.” And then Tina got riled up because she has a candidate she loves, though neither Laurie or Pam can figure out why. 

Now, they’re talking about their grown children, scattered here and there across the country. Tina says, “Chelsey, for instance, doesn’t think a twenty-four-year-old needs a 401K. She said, ‘Mom, I’m saving up for a trip to Santiago, Chile, and then the Patagonia Mountains. Who knows? I might not even live to retirement age. Think of the waste a 401K would be then.’”

Pam tut-tuts Tina. “Carpe the heck out of the Diem,” she says and stands to uncork the Moscato she pulls from her bag, even though lunch is an hour away. Pam has recently moved to a townhouse, leaving her husband of thirty-two years at their four-bedroom ranch. When Tina presses her on the arrangement, Pam shrugs and says, “It was either move or divorce, and you know I don’t believe in divorce.”

Pam’s wedding-ring finger is stunningly bare as she pours
the Moscato. 

Tina has had four mimosas in the three hours they’ve been together. She rarely has more than one. Still, she takes the wine glass from Pam and takes a sip. “Laurie would kill for a chance to live with Bill again; God rest his soul.”

Laurie has been dreading the topic of her dead husband. Guilt rushes her every time she throws away a pair of his ratty socks, every time she cuts up one of his now-useless credit cards. Today, she’d hoped for a break.

Last night, Laurie dreamt Bill was in heaven, perched on a boulder. He was in his Saturday wash-the-car clothes. Laurie wanted to make sure he was happy, so she said, “Must be paradise up there,” but Bill was sitting with one leg ankle crossed on his opposite knee. He was looking across the blue expanse. Bill sighed. “I’m not allowed to comment,” he said.

Laurie can’t breathe good when she thinks about it. She had always tried to make Bill happy. She imagines she was successful about sixty percent of the time.

“Of course I’d love to be with Bill again,” Laurie says. “But that doesn’t mean Pam has to live with Harrison.”

At this hour, the sun fills her kitchen, the light nearly lemon yellow. When her son and daughter were children, she’d lure them into the kitchen at this point in the day, watching the sun surround their fair hair, watching the light embrace them as if they were saints. Pam holds a glass of Moscato out to Laurie, and she takes it.

After lunch, the women finally make it to the living room. Tina claims the Queen Anne chair before Laurie can stop her, ruining her plans.

“Did you do something different to this room?” Tina says to Laurie, who’s now sitting on the couch next to Pam. “It looks different.”

“I had it painted,” Laurie says.

“That’s all?” Tina says. “It seems like a different room.”

Pam pats Laurie’s hand. “Remember our dorm room in college? That coffee table you made out of a tire we found on the side of the road! You were HGTV before HGTV had a clue.”

Tina looks royal sitting there in Laurie’s pink light. “Jack is on a business trip.” At business trip, Tina hooks her fingers in the air, making imaginary quote marks.

“Where do you really think he is?” Pam asks, but Tina just shakes her head.

It is the alcohol of course, but suddenly Laurie starts to laugh. “So Bill’s dead, Pam left Harrison, and Jack is who knows where with who knows who.”

Pam fidgets. Tina sits up straighter. Tina says, “I don’t see how any of this is funny.”

Laurie wipes her eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s not. It’s just that my therapist told me last week to picture someone who was having a harder go of it than I was. She said it would help me put my problems into perspective. I couldn’t think of one person! And yes, that seems self-involved of me but it’s true.

“I’ve been super jealous of you two since Bill died. Money is getting pretty tight, and I need to get a job, but most days just getting out of bed seems like full-time work. I doubt you two have to wonder if you’re going to have to sell your home or how you’re going to afford health insurance or who’s going to brush your hair when you’re too sick to do it for yourself.

“But now, I don’t know. You seem about as broken as I am.” Laurie swallows the next hysterical laugh and then says, “I think sleeping alone is making me crazy.” 

“Just because I don’t believe in divorce doesn’t mean Harrison doesn’t,” Pam says. “My whole world is on the brink if he decides to end the marriage.” 

Tina gets up and sits on the couch next to Pam. She puts her arm around her, says, “What happened to us?”

“Life,” Pam says, and Laurie adds, “And death.”

Then, because Laurie is suddenly sick of herself, she adds, “And mimosas and Moscato.”

Outside, the sun is shining. Beneath its rays, Pam and Laurie look every day of their age. Tina, behind sunglasses as wide as an envelope, touches her face as if she’s afraid it might suddenly start to sag. 

They have brought blankets with them, and they spread two atop each other on the newly greening grass. They lie down side by side, the way they used to sunbathe as teens, with baby oil mixed with iodine at their sides, the tanning lotion of their generation.

Today, though, it is too chilly to bare even their limbs. They pull another cover atop them. They lie still as the sun does its work, warming them until the fairy dust of sleep arrives. Laurie dreams of Bill in heaven, and this time he’s happy.

When they wake, dusk is falling. The neighbor across the street is standing by his mailbox with his arms crossed against his belly, a look of worry or disapproval across his wide face, who knows which. Behind him, the sky is streaked with purple.

Laurie is holding Pam’s hand, and Laurie realizes how much she’s missed the feel of a hand in hers. Tina is asleep on her side, her mouth slightly open, her sunglasses askew. 

Pam says, “I’ll brush your hair, Laurie, anytime you can’t.”

“Will you go back to Harrison now?”

“Maybe,” Pam says. She squeezes Laurie’s hand. “We’ll see.”

“What about Tina?” Laurie asks.

“It could be nothing.  Jack always looks at her like she’s the only girl in the room.”

“She could be wrong,” Laurie says.

“Anything’s possible.”

Laurie knows Pam has a scar on her right thumb from an icy Coke bottle that exploded after Pam took it out of the freezer one day the summer between their junior and senior year. She knows Pam sleeps with a hair tie around her wrist in case she wants to pull her hair back in the middle of the night.

But she doesn’t know what is wrong between Pam and Harrison. She doesn’t know when Tina’s trouble started with Jack. The two stopped telling her anything important after Bill got sick. She thinks about Bill, about the diagnosis he kept from her until he couldn’t hide his symptoms anymore.

The light above her reminds her of the lavender light of Paris. She has been there before with Tina and Pam. She has seen night fall across the steps of Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre on an anniversary trip with Bill. Laurie brings Pam’s hand to her lips and kisses it. Everything that’s lovely ends too soon. She looks again at Tina, who tries so hard to be perfect. She isn’t, of course.

But Laurie loves Tina and Bill and Pam perfectly. She tells herself she should be thinking that she loved Bill perfectly, past tense. Right now, though, time and space, heaven and earth, all seem exactly the same. She closes her eyes again. Yes, she decides, love is always in the here and now. 

Do South Magazine

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