It was Isa who had done the splitting, finding some man in a painting class that David, ironically, had pestered her to sign up for because he thought she was getting depressed, and David was livid, absolutely went to pieces. There were times he came to the Smalls’ house and just wept, and Shelly had a hard time seeing that, to be honest. It was probably very old-fashioned of her, but she did not like to see a grown man cry. Richard was good—it irritated him, he found it tiresome, but he took it in stride, as any good friend would do.
And then after a couple of years of different women that David brought around, oh, Shelly wasn’t going to go into them because they weren’t the point. The point was Annie. Annie Appleby. Here Shelly sat up straighter, bent slightly toward Dottie, and said, “She was really special.”
Dottie did not find it hard to listen to this.
“The thing about Annie—well, first you must realize she is very tall. About six feet, and she’s thin, so she seems really tall, and she has long, dark, wavy, almost corkscrew hair—honestly I often wondered if there wasn’t something else mixed in there, you know, maybe something else, along with some North American Indian. She comes from Maine. Her face was lovely, lovely, the finest features and blue eyes, and—oh, how can I say this? She just made you happy. She loved everything. And when David first brought her around—”
Dottie asked how they had met.
Shelly’s cheeks flushed red. “Richard would kill me for telling you, but she was a patient of David’s. Well, he could have lost his license, but he did it the right way. He said he couldn’t be her psychiatrist anymore— Look, the point is this happens sometimes, and it happened with them, and he brought her around—though it had to be a real secret, of course, how they met, they made up a story that her mother had known him in college, which was absolute nonsense. Annie was from a potato farm in Maine, for heaven’s sake. But she’d been an actress since she was sixteen, just left home, apparently no one cared, and even if she was twenty-seven years younger than David, it didn’t seem to make a bit of difference, they were happy. You just loved being around them.”
Shelly paused and chewed on her lip. Her hair, which was the pale strawberry blond of someone who had once been a redhead, was thinning the way older women’s hair is apt to do, and she had it cut—“appropriately” is the word that came into Dottie’s mind—right above her chin; there was probably nothing very daring about Shelly, there probably never had been.
“You know,” she said, “Richard was not sure he wanted to move to the lake.”
Dottie raised her eyebrows, although she did think that Easterners tended to go on without the need of encouragement; this would not be the case with anyone from the Midwest. Incontinence was not valued in the Midwest.
“But that’s a different story,” Shelly said. “Well, sort of,” she said.
—
For no reason she could think of, and it may have been nothing more than the way the sun was slanting right then across the hardwood floor, Dottie was suddenly visited by the memory of one summer of her childhood when she was sent to Hannibal, Missouri, to spend a number of weeks with an ancient and unfamiliar relative. She went alone—her beloved older brother, Abel, had secured a job in the local theater as an usher and therefore stayed at home—and Dottie was terrified; in the way of some children who are accustomed to deprivation, she understood little and did as she was told. Why her decent Aunt Edna could not take her, as she had done before, to this day Dottie did not know. The only memory she brought back was that of an article she read in a Reader’s Digest stacked among meaningless magazines on a dusty windowsill, offering up the tale of a woman whose husband had served in Korea. At home with small children at the time, this wife—the woman who wrote the article—lived in the United States somewhere and raised the children and waited for each letter from her husband. He finally returned and there was much rejoicing. And then one day, about a year later, while her husband was at work and the children were at school, a knock came at the door. A small Korean woman stood there with a baby in her arms. Dottie was just at the age when she read this that her heart, so naïve in spite of what she had already learned about life, or rather what she had already absorbed about life, because people absorb first and learn later, if they learn at all, Dottie had been, at the time she read this article, at the age where her heart almost came through her throat as she imagined the woman who opened the door. The husband confessed: He was very sorry for all the disturbance, and it was decided he would divorce his steadfast wife and marry the Korean woman and raise the baby with her, and the steadfast wife, while brokenhearted, helped out, meaning, she allowed her children to visit her husband’s new home, and she gave advice to the young woman, got her into an English class, and when the husband suddenly died, the first wife took in the young woman and her child and helped them get onto their feet until they could move somewhere else and get settled, and even then, at the time she was writing the article, she was helping to put the child through college, a truly Christian story if there ever was one. All this had made a rather significant impact on Dottie. She wept silently and fulsomely, young girl tears rolling down her cheeks, dropping onto the pages; the woman, betrayed and largehearted, became a heroine to Dottie. The woman forgave everybody.
When it came time for Dottie’s own knock on the door, she naturally remembered this story. She came to understand that people had to decide, really, how they were going to live.
Shelly Small sat in the armchair looking at the floor with an expression of misery, and Dottie said, “Where is the house, Shelly?”
“On a lake in New Hampshire.” Shelly sat up straighter, revived. “We bought it years ago as a small cottage, a darling little place, and we’d go up there weekends and in the summer for most of August if we could, and I loved it. I loved watching the water change with the sky, and in April there would be flowering laurel trees, just beautiful. I wanted us to retire there.”
“And why not?” Dottie said.
“I’ll tell you why not. Richard was not for it. And as time went on”—Shelly leaned forward in her chair—“as time went on, you see— Well, I’ll just say this, being a doctor’s wife is not a bowl of cherries. Doctors think they’re terribly important, honestly. And I raised the children and he would tell me I wasn’t doing it right, but was he there when the school called to say that Charlotte had just been caught defacing the girls’ room in the most disgusting way? No, of course not.” She suddenly laughed. “Well, finally for the first time in our marriage I put my foot down and I said, If you are not going to join me in rebuilding this cottage into a retirement home for us, then you are not the man I thought you were and not the man for me.” She waved a thin arm. “That’s all water under the bridge. I designed a lovely house, all that was required by the zoning laws was to keep the original footprint of the house, you know, just do that, keep the original footprint, and I brought in some architects from Boston and it took almost two years, but there it is, a lovely house, we were able to build it up high—it’s four floors, you know—and also down, by digging out a bit of the ground, so really it’s four and a half stories, it’s a lovely house. And we have friends come up on weekends, and we’ll retire there. Very soon. Richard’s tired of the way things are going. No one can really make a living in medicine anymore.”
“Get back to the Annie girl,” Dottie said.
Shelly’s face took on a quickness of expression. “She was hardly a girl. But she did seem it. She did seem like a girl.” And Shelly talked on quietly and steadily. It was getting dark by the time the door opened and her husband came in, and Dottie could see immediately how dismissive he was of his wife and the B&B proprietor sitting in the living room chatting over cold undrunk cups of tea. He spoke briefly, then went straight to their room, and Shelly, with a rather furtive and quick smile toward Dottie, gathered her things and followed.
Annie Appleby was much as Shelly had described her: Dottie found interviews and reviews and blogs and of cou
rse photographs, and the girl was really exceptional. She did not have that open-faced shiny thing that actresses so often had, as though they wanted to beam their way right out of the photo and into your lap. Very childlike, Dottie thought actors were, from what she saw on TV when they had their silly interviews, and on the Web too, but Annie didn’t look like that. She looked like you could stare at her forever and not know something you wanted to know that she was not going to let you know. It was a very attractive quality; Dottie could see a psychiatrist having trouble with the likes of her each week staring at him across the room, or lying down, or whatever it was a patient going to a psychiatrist did. Annie seemed to have stopped being an actress for quite a while, though. Dottie couldn’t find anything about what she was up to now.
Shelly had said that she and Annie had walked around the lake the last time Annie and David had visited, which was the first time Annie and David had seen the new house. The new house had a visitors’ suite downstairs where Annie and David had right away taken their bags, and Annie had said, Oh, how beautiful, Shelly, what an amazing job you’ve done! So then they had taken a walk around the lake, the men walking ahead of the women, and Shelly told Annie things. Of course Dottie wondered: What things? And of course Shelly told her without being asked. “What I told Annie was that I was older now, and it made life different. I mean,” Shelly said, straightening the top of her trousers, “Annie had this quality that made you feel you could really talk to her, and so that last day, that last time they were at the lake, I told her how I remembered years ago, when I was a young girl, a man passed me in the concert hall and said, Well, you’re a pretty thing, and I told Annie this. And I said, No one will ever tell me I’m pretty again.”
Dottie had to allow a minute for this to sink in. “And what did she say?” Dottie asked.
Shelly cocked her head. “I don’t really remember. She had the gift of not saying much, just listening, and you thought it was all going to be okay.”
Dottie thought that Shelly had put Annie in quite a tight spot that day, saying no one would ever again tell her she was pretty. Shelly Small did not have the remnants of pretty on her. Perhaps she had once had the remnants of pretty, but Dottie could not see it.
“And I told her other things,” Shelly said. “I told her how worried I was about my children’s marriages. My younger daughter, well, she’d become quite…overweight, and I really didn’t understand it. And just the weekend before they had been at the lake and I’d watched while her husband encouraged her to eat more. I told Annie all about it. I said, Why would he do that? And Annie said she didn’t know. And I told her how my other daughter was just desperate for a different job— Well, I told her private things.”
“Yes, I see,” said Dottie.
“But here’s the thing—” Shelly pressed her legs together and leaned forward, her hands held together in her thin lap. “After Annie and David broke up, I called Annie and said she could come to the lake herself, we’d be happy to have her anytime, I left a message, and she never called back. Never called me back. And so when David arrived in one of his weeping states—just weeping away, like he did after Isa left him—I told him this, that Annie had never called me back, and he said, ‘Of course she didn’t call you back, Shelly. Annie thought you were pathetic! She thought you were an idiot!’ ”
She didn’t think that, Shelly had answered, and even Richard told David to go easy. “She did,” said David. So Shelly, of course shaken, said, Oh, David, the whole thing was a little unrealistic anyway, you know. Just with the age difference alone. And David said, staring out at the water, “The age difference. Here’s what I have learned about the age difference. People think girls like older men because they want a father. Classic theory. But girls want older men so they can boss them around. They’re wearing the pants, I can tell you that. She was nothing but a whore.”
This made Shelly very uncomfortable, and she told the men she was going to start dinner, and then she hesitated and said, David, I put your stuff downstairs in the guest suite, but maybe you don’t want to stay there because, you know—that’s where—
“That’s where nothing,” David said. “That’s where Annie recoiled from me and said she hated this huge new house. She said, ‘This house is Shelly’s penis.’ That’s what she said.”
Here Shelly stopped telling the story. Unmistakably, tears popped into her eyes.
Dottie wanted to laugh out loud. Oh, she really did. Dottie thought it was one of the funniest things she’d heard in a very long time. And then she glanced up at Shelly and saw that in spite of what Dottie always thought was a placid front that she—Dottie—presented to the world, Shelly Small had felt Dottie’s desire to laugh, and she was furious. Well, she would be furious, Dottie understood. After all, the point of the woman’s story was that Annie had humiliated her. Humiliation is not to be laughed at; Dottie knew that well.
Still.
Dottie arranged the crocheted doily that covered the armrest of the chair she sat in. She was aware within herself of some contest of feeling. She felt for Shelly. And yet Dottie could tell by the light that had passed through the room that Shelly must have been talking for almost two hours. About herself. Oh, about Annie and David and her daughters, but really she was talking about herself. Had Dottie talked about herself for so long, she’d have felt that she had wet herself. This was a matter of different cultures, Dottie knew that, although she felt it had taken her many years to learn this. She thought that this matter of different cultures was a fact that got lost in the country these days. And culture included class, which of course nobody ever talked about in this country, because it wasn’t polite, but Dottie also thought people didn’t talk about class because they didn’t really understand what it was. For example, had people known that Dottie and her brother had eaten from dumpsters when they were children, what would they make of it? Her brother for years now had lived in a huge expensive house outside of Chicago and ran an air-conditioning company, and Dottie was trim and neat, and really quite caught up on world events, and ran this B&B very effectively, so what would people say? That she and her brother, Abel, were the American Dream, and that the rest who still ate from dumpsters deserved to do so? A lot of people would secretly feel this way. Shelly Small with her big husband and thinning hair might very well feel this way.
Shelly Small had been raised to speak about herself as though she was the most interesting thing in the world. Listening to her, Dottie almost admired this. Because even having—perhaps—caught Dottie’s desire to laugh, Shelly could not be stopped. She was speaking now of the people in this town where their lake house was, how these people had been pleasant and welcoming before the renovation. Now neighbors drove by without even waving. One had stopped, rolled down his window, and accused her of spoiling the lakefront with a McMansion. “Oh, honestly,” Shelly said. “Imagine such foolishness. We kept the original footprint!”
Dottie stood up and walked to her desk, pretending that something there required her attention, all this to avoid having Shelly see her face. “Sorry, but if I don’t put this bill on the top of my papers it won’t get paid.” Dottie rustled some papers and added, “I don’t believe Annie said any of those things about you. She doesn’t sound like a person who would say that—at all.”
“But of course she said it!” Shelly wailed from her chair in the living room.
“That your house was your penis?” Dottie didn’t often say the word “penis,” and she enjoyed it. She came back around from behind her desk and returned to sit near Shelly again. “Does that really sound like what this Annie would say? ‘David, this house is Shelly’s penis.’ ”
Shelly Small’s cheeks were quite red. “I don’t know.”
“Well, true enough,” Dottie agreed. “You don’t. But I think—if you really think about it—well, isn’t saying that the house was your penis something a psychiatrist would say? Think about it, Mrs. Small. Who thinks in those terms? Why, my friends and I might say things
about other people we know, but we don’t go around saying their house is their penis. Look at this house. This is my house. Would you say to Mr. Small—would you say to Dr. Small tonight, this house, this bed-and-breakfast, is that woman’s penis?”
And right then the door opened and Dr. Small walked in with all the breezes of an Illinois autumn surrounding him. “How are you, ladies?” he asked, unbuttoning his coat. “Shelly?” As though the poor wife should not sit and chat with a B&B proprietor. And off she followed him to their room.
What Dottie had not understood until the Smalls came to stay was that there were different experiences she attended to in this business that made her feel either connected to or used by other people. For example, there had been the dear, dear man who came in one night about dinnertime—a man almost but not quite her age—and took his room and then decided he’d rather watch television, and she’d sat with him watching one of those British comedies—oh, Dottie thought they were funny, and she tried not to laugh out loud since this man was not laughing—when she became aware that he was in serious distress. He began to make a noise that she had never heard before; it was not entirely unsexual in its sound, but it was a sound of terrible pain. Unspeakable pain, she often thought later. He mimed to her, as she quietly asked questions, and Dottie found it remarkable how much they were able to understand each other. First thing, she’d asked if he needed a doctor, and he shook his head and waved a hand in a way that indicated this was nothing a doctor could help with. Tears began slipping sloppily down the man’s deeply creased face; oh, bless his poor soul, she always thought, remembering him. Okay, she had said, and she sat on the couch next to him, and he looked at her so searchingly, so deeply, she had never been looked at by any man so deeply, she thought, or looked at a man that deeply herself, and he was positively mute, even though earlier, asking for a room and then permission to watch television, he had most certainly been able to use words. She stayed calm and made statements he could either agree with by nodding or disagree with by a dismal shake of his head. For example, she said: “I’m going to stay right here to make sure you’re all right.” And he nodded, those poor tired eyes searching hers. She said: “Something seems to have happened to you, but you will be okay, I think.” She said: “I’m not frightened by this, just so you know.” And that caused a sudden extra burst of effluvia from his eyes, and he squeezed her hand hard enough to almost break it. Then he held up the same hand in what Dottie took to be a gesture of apology. She said: “No worries, I know you meant no harm.” He shook his head sadly in agreement. Dottie could no longer recall every part of this, but the two of them did, it seemed to her, communicate quite well, all things considered—and apparently there were many things to consider!—and she was able, by asking, to find out that at midnight he could take a pill and sleep for five hours. “All righty,” she said. “But not too many pills, am I correct?” He had nodded. And in this way—really, it was a remarkable event—they had spent the evening together while he seemed to wash out his very soul in front of her. At midnight she brought him water and walked him to his room and told him where her room was should he need her, and then she had raised an index finger and said, “Not an invitation, which I’m sure you understand, but I always feel it’s best to be clear about things,” and he had almost laughed, with real mirth, she could see his eyes relax, and they had this sort of not-out-loud but quite riotous laughter about what she had said. He left at seven in the morning: a tall man, and not altogether bad-looking now that his face was washed by rest, and he had said “I thank you very much” with embarrassment and sincerity. She did not ask if he needed breakfast, she understood the awkwardness of his being served eggs and toast by a woman who had seen something she had not been meant to see, that no one had been meant to see.