Loves Me, Loves Me Not Read online

  She groans. “Well, you know what I mean well. I want more, lots more. And what are you doing home so early, anyway?”

  I pour myself a glass of milk, then I take the phone out front and sit on the porch step. Trixie does her nuzzling routine again. “If you didn’t think I’d be home now, why’d you call?”

  “I was going to leave a message. Sam and I are going out for a drive so I was going to tell you we might stop by.”

  When you live in the country you become the destination of any acquaintance, coworker, family member or friend who wants to “take a drive.”

  “That’s great. Stop on by,” I say, and swig back the rest of the milk except for a few tablespoons. These I pour into a cracked dish by one of the porch posts for Trixie to lap up. “And as to Henry, there’s not much else to tell. Great sex. Great time. But he had to get into the office to do some work.”

  Amazing how easily one lies to protect one’s pride. The only work Henry had to do was done—get the scoop on the Gelman Agency.

  “When are you seeing him again?”

  “Not sure. I’m supposed to call him.” Yup, that’s Henry’s modus operandi—get the girls to call him. And I don’t want to flaunt the rules when I am so new to the game.

  “You don’t sound too enthusiastic. Are you sure everything is all right?”

  “Everything is fine!” I say with some exasperation in my voice. I have a hair trigger for that question. After the accident, I couldn’t go an hour without someone asking me if I was all right, and after two years, my patience has worn thin. “Henry and I had a terrific time and plan on having many more. In fact, he already told me he loves me and wants me to go meet his mother tomorrow, but I told him I couldn’t because I’m having dinner with mine.”

  Wendy brushes aside my sarcasm and tries to ply out of me things I do not know. Did I sense he’s looking for a relationship? Will the Orioles win the pennant?

  I inhale a deep, cleansing breath of country air. Pollen catches in my throat and I cough.

  “You okay?” Wendy interrupts her gushing to ask.

  “Yup. Just hay fever. When do you think you and Sam will be here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe noonish. One or so.”

  “Okay.” That means lunch. Trip to store. If I hurry I can get in some supplies before they show.

  The shopping takes me an hour, tidying up takes another hour, and making sure I look casual but presentable takes all of ten minutes. It’s just as well I’m busy with these tasks. It keeps me from thinking too hard about why I jumped into bed with Henry Castle.

  I didn’t even sleep with Rick on our first date. And I can’t remember now any unsettling feelings after making love to Rick for the first time. All I remember was the natural flow of our relationship from lover to fiancé. That’s the problem with steady relationships. You forget the unsteady parts and only remember the early hope and then the constancy. Now I’m left without a map.

  Don’t other women do this—jump into bed with a hunky guy just because he looks like he’d be a good lay? Isn’t this the new millennium when a gal goes after what she wants? I’m just getting with the program, right?

  By the time Wendy and Sam drive up in Sam’s red VW Beetle, I’m tired and cranky from too much thinking. I need a nap. I didn’t get much sleep last night.

  Wendy is a great friend—a shoulder to cry on, a cheerleader, a helper. Without her, I don’t know how long it would have taken me to start living again. One thing she can never do for me, though, is stay in the background. She is the sun and I am some dinky little shadow. She has a centerfold body, sultry face and perfect hair. And she’s smart, too.

  For many months after I announced my engagement, I wrestled with whether or not to invite Wendy to be part of the wedding party. I was too afraid the photographer would use up all his film snapping pix of her instead of me.

  Lucky for me I didn’t need to sort out that problem, huh?

  Sam is certainly no Frankenstein, but he’s no candidate for male-model school, either. Tall and skinny, he always reminds me of a self-confident Woody Allen. He tries to deflect attention from a fast-receding hairline by letting his hair grow to his shoulders, but it’s the kind of wispy brown hair you see on college professors, which is what he is. He teaches English at Johns Hopkins. Wendy met him when she got involved in a pro bono charity promotion. They’ve been together for a year and I keep expecting her to tell me they’ve been secretly married for the past few months but she didn’t want to share it with me for fear of churning up my own aborted-marriage memories. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for why he hasn’t popped the question to her yet.

  I mean, come on—where is this guy ever going to meet a Wendy Jackson again, a woman with brains and bod? He should start each day kowtowing in the direction of her apartment and repeating “I am not worthy” three times.

  “Welcome to my country manor!” I quip as they come inside. Sam carries a bag and hands it to me.

  “Sam got some strawberries at the market yesterday!” Wendy gushes. Wendy does a lot of gushing. It’s her favorite emotion.

  Inhaling the rich, decaying aroma of the strawberries, I place them on the counter next to the sink. Irony strikes me. I live in the country, but the best place to get fresh anything is in the city at Lexington Market. I begin to miss said city.

  Figuring Wendy brought the fruit to have with our lunch, I start to clean and hull the berries. Sam wanders to the back door and looks out over the barren field that leads to the main road. He’s never been here before, not that I haven’t invited him. He and Wendy always seem to have something else “on tap” whenever I extend an invitation. So her self-invite today is a kind of makeup for all those turndowns.

  “Wendy said you had a pool,” he remarks.

  “I said she is going to get a pool,” Wendy corrects him. She stands next to me and helps with the berries. Today, she wears white shorts and a black T, and her hair is pulled slickly back into a funky spiky thing on the top of her head.

  “You own this place?” Sam asks.

  “Nope. I’m just a serf.”

  “What? You surf?”

  Wendy stifles a laugh.

  “No. I said I’m a peasant, not the lord of this manor.” The strawberries are ready, so I place them on my tiny square of a table. “You know, we can eat outside. I’ll put some things on the table and we can take them with us.” This is my way of saying I’ll set up a buffet. But after the serf mix-up, I’m staying away from complicated concepts.

  “Sounds great!” Wendy helps me put out cutlery and plates, and the platter of cold cuts I’d bought at the store. Sam, however, has turned into a vegetarian since last we met, so he only takes lettuce, unripened tomatoes, cheese, bread and berries on his plate. I’m angry that he went vegetarian. It seems traitorous to his carnivore legacy, like being born Catholic and converting to atheism.

  I have no lawn chairs, so we drag out kitchen chairs and sit around like a bunch of hillbillies with a couch on their porch. It’s an awkward meal. Sam doesn’t talk much around me and I get the impression he doesn’t like me. I can’t figure out what I’ve ever done or said to warrant this disaffection, so the only conclusion I’m left with is a bad one for Wendy. He doesn’t like me because he knows I like Wendy and wouldn’t want to see her hurt, and he must be planning on some hurt somewhere down the road. The schmuck.

  Wendy, however, is oblivious to this sad state of affairs. She prattles on about how she and Sam are going to the Hopkins fair next week and Center Stage tonight and out to dinner tomorrow. She’s giving me the Litany of Love—all the reasons she should stay with Sam. Dating Sam is an act of defiance for Wendy. Not only did she leave her parent-approved doctor wannabe, she got involved with a beatnik college prof. Wendy’s a rebel. And Sam…Sam is shy. Shy of marriage, that is. Feeling particularly cruel after my night with Henry, I decide to strike to the bone.

  “So, Sam, what’s up with you?” I ask innocently, then jab
a piece of rare beef and stuff it in my mouth. Between chews, I try to start, “I mean, we never talk about your plans. Tenure on the table?”

  Talking about tenure actually perks Sam up. Turns out he is in line for tenure and his prospects are good, so he spends ten minutes graciously offering me a minilecture on how hard it is to get tenure in his field because it’s so “fucking competitive,” and how unusual it is for someone his age to be in line for it at a university of Hopkins’s prestige. When he’s finished, I go for the bull’s-eye.

  “That’s terrific. I guess that means you’ll be settling down since you don’t need to worry about looking for a job at another college.” After I say it, I get up to take my plate inside as if it’s the kind of comment one is used to hearing around young men. Maybe in 1950, but not today. I’m hoping the anachronism doesn’t penetrate.

  When I step back outside, Sam is standing, awkwardly holding out his plate as if he expects me to take it. I don’t. Instead, I position my hand above my eyes, shading them from the glaring sun. It’s getting warm.

  “I’ll be staying in Baltimore. Good city,” he mumbles.

  Wendy’s no slouch in the brains department, so I know she got the message. I just gave Sam the opportunity to say something really sweet, something like “Yup, now that my future’s settled, I’ll be able to make some plans,” at which point he should have looked at Wendy and winked, or at least winked at me.

  No wink, no sweet something. Sam’s a schmuck.

  Wendy stands and takes Sam’s plate. She’s not smiling and she looks a little defeated, and I feel like squeezing her hand and telling her it’ll be all right, just the way she did with me when I was in the hospital. But she recovers on her own, without my help. By the time she comes back outside, she’s plastered a smile on her face. Her hands in her pockets, she announces she’d like to take a walk.

  So we all tramp off down the road, talking about everything but the subject that’s on all our minds—why Sam is such a schmuck and won’t ask Wendy to marry him. We talk about the weather, we talk about Wendy’s job, we talk about whether I’ll go back into communications work or not. We work ourselves into a sweat, we’re trying so hard to avoid the Big Topic.

  Wendy’s smile is about to crack when we finally head back to the house, and she makes some remark about being awfully tired, wanting to take a nap before they go out. Sam picks up on the cue and says he’ll drive her home, then run some errands himself. He seems really good at picking up on the cues about the right time to leave a woman.

  I’m strangely disappointed. Although tired myself, I have a question I need to ask Wendy and I don’t want to ask it around Sam. I want to know how many times she went out with him before sex. Maybe I don’t understand the program. I need to know. I’m in the game now and I want to be sure I play by the rules. Looking at Sam, though, I realize he probably didn’t have any rules. And whereas Henry had asked me if I wasn’t rushing things, Sam probably insisted on doing so. Poor Wendy. Knowing her, she might have thought that kind of eagerness charming.

  On my porch when we return, I find a surprise. A big white box with fancy gold ribbon. Flowers!

  “Didn’t see the delivery truck go by,” I say as I open the card. “Must have come from York Road instead of the interstate.”

  “Who are they from?” Wendy asks, her natural cheer returning.

  “Henry.” The note reads, “Thanking you for a really incomparable night.” Laughing, I pull out the flowers. Not roses—he learned his lesson there. A lavender plant instead, its pungent fragrance igniting a smile. “Mmm…lovely. I can plant it.” The florist, I notice, is one in Towson and open on Sundays, and I wonder if Henry uses several floral shops with which to conduct his serial flower-sending.

  “So what does lavender mean?” Wendy asks, admiring the potted plant.

  Remembering, I redden.

  “Purity,” I lie. “Isn’t that funny?” But it’s not funny at all because one of lavender’s meanings is distrust, according to the Victorians. Either Henry didn’t bother to look it up, or he has a wicked sense of humor.

  Sam is eager to go now. Maybe it’s the flowers—is he afraid Wendy will expect him to send some? So I make a big to-do over bringing the plant into the house and looking for a clay pot in which to set the plastic container, and spritzing the leaves with water and reading the care instructions, even though I know already what they say. Take that, Sam. Get Wendy some flowers. It doesn’t take much and look at the reaction.

  Sam ignores these silent messages and says something about having to grade papers before going out this evening. He doesn’t even thank me for lunch, but Wendy does. With a bright smile that breaks my heart because I know Sam doesn’t appreciate it, she tells me she’ll “catch up” with me later, and gives me a wink.

  Sam and Wendy are gone soon in a flurry of road dust, and I am left with a sink of dirty dishes and a potted plant from Henry Castle. I sit the lavender on the table so that I can smell its melancholy scent while I wash up. No dishwashers in old farmhouses. One more reason why returning to the city might not be a bad idea. Even my old apartment with Rick had a small dishwasher.

  Henry is a devil, I decide. He knew I knew what his cards always say, so he adds the word “really” to imply our night was different from the other “incomparable” ones he’s racked up over the years. But he is thoughtful enough to send me, a florist, different flowers—not just different from the roses he usually sends, but different in general. A potted plant instead of cut blooms. He might be a devil, but at least he’s not Sam.

  Maybe lavender means something else in some other book of flowers, maybe it means “the past is over” or even “great days ahead.” Or maybe it just means, “Yes, Amy Sheldon, you’ll get an in-ground pool.”

  chapter 5

  Foxglove: Insincerity

  Twenty years ago Rick’s father suffered a heart attack. Although digitalis and diet forestalled any fresh problems, Rick had grown used to a quiet household, developing ways of hiding irritation at his parents’ home, of smiling when he was angry about something, or serenely staring into the distance when his mother was difficult. He was often silent when we left their home, and it quickly became clear that if I wanted to get my way with Mrs. Squires on wedding preparations, I’d have to meet with her privately, away from Rick and, most of all, away from Rick’s father.

  I’m getting my pool. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to enjoy it.

  Remember that hangup recorded on my voice mail? Turns out it was my landlord, Pete Swilton, calling to say he sold the house I live in without actually showing it to anyone because the new owner isn’t interested in the house but only in the property, and Pete had showed that to him one day when I was at work. The buyer got some sort of zoning break and is putting in a swimming and tennis club. My house will be razed to make way for the new place. In fact, I think my house is exactly where they’re situating the swimming pool. So much for being in the right place at the right time.

  As luck would have it, my lease is up at the end of the month. I could force Pete to let me have more time, but I figure I shouldn’t screw him over because he’s been a good landlord, letting me pay my rent late a couple of times when I was strapped for cash because of car repairs.

  Besides, Pete tells me that bulldozers will start moving earth around the property as soon as next week. Bulldozers and me—I just don’t see it.

  After Wendy and Sam leave, I spend the rest of Sunday afternoon eating microwaved popcorn, watching the Nazi Channel (all right, it’s really the History Channel, but they broadcast a suspiciously large amount of stuff about Hitler), and pretending I’m not waiting for Henry to call.

  Who does call is my sister, Gina. I tell her I went on a date. Major excitement. I tell her I have to move and she is practically hysterical with joy. She wants me to move back in with her and her husband. Then Mom calls about a half hour after this—probably because Gina’s called her—and Mom thinks I should move back home. But firs
t she thinks I should come over for Sunday dinner at five, and since I have to eat dinner anyway, I agree. Not caring if Sam is still there, I call Wendy after this to complain about my family and moan about my potential homelessness, but Wendy only halfheartedly offers me her couch, which I know is merely pro forma just so I can gratefully decline. Wendy doesn’t sound too happy, but I don’t pry. I suspect she and Sam had a spat on the way home related to my previous prying questions.

  When I trundle over to my folks’ house, Mom issues another invite to move back home. Every month, I try to have dinner at least once with my parents in their split level in Parkville, a homey little suburb in the northeast corner of the county that should have Simon and Garfunkel songs piped over a loudspeaker along the streets. The lyrics seem to just trip off the tongue at the sight of those asbestos-shingled ranchers and duplexes.

  You would think that coming of age in the sixties would have made my mother and father pretty cool folks with “tales of the revolution” that I could use to impress my friends. Instead, my Dad avoided the draft by going to college, then got a job with the phone company, and my mom worked for a bank after college, then stayed home when Gina and I were born.

  When I was ten, my father started spending a little too much time at the office. Eventually I was able to put two and two together and came up with three—mom, dad and whomever he was boinking at the time. Gina figured it out, too, but she and I didn’t actually talk about it until after she got married and I got engaged.

  My mother makes tuna-noodle casserole and meat loaf and roast chicken dinners. After a trip to Europe with my Dad, she also makes flans and pastry-encrusted chicken in cream sauce. Today, she makes pork roast, sweet potatoes and corn.

  “Your room is still like you left it,” she encourages me when I tell her I need to find a new place to stay.

  Just what I want—purple dust ruffles and photos of high school friends I never see anymore.