Chapter One
Annie pulls up outside Michaud’s Quik-Basket. She’s too near the hydrant, but for once she doesn’t care. She turns off the engine and tries to slow her breathing. She pictures the all-too-cheerful and all-too-serene yoga instructor in the video Sam gave her at Christmas. “Made for type As,” he explained. She watched only half. She’s lousy at relaxing. The harder she tries to breathe from her diaphragm, the faster and more shallow her breathing becomes. So what, she thinks, and opens the car door. Nothing matters now. She leaves the key in the ignition; she leaves the door unlocked; she climbs over the ice bank rather than mincing her way along the skimpily shoveled path. To hell with everything. Let her slip, splayed like a snow angel on the filthy sidewalk. Perfect simile.
Raoul, the father, and not the son, Ralphie, who sat behind her in high school social studies, is in front of the cash register—her first stroke of luck. Ralphie would want to yak about their classmates, analyze hockey scores, ask about her mother. Not that it matters either. But today, of all days, she does not want to talk about Ursula.
Mr. Michaud is watching the weather report. It’s February first. Will Punxsutawney Phil come out of his hole tomorrow? wonders the grinning, lumber-jacketed, suspiciously orange-skinned weatherman. His teeth are five degrees whiter than fresh snow, shaming the dirty brown-and-yellow mounds polka-dotting her hometown. “Whatja think, Annie?” asks Raoul, his Canadian vowels harsh against the weatherman’s broadcasting-school diction.
“Don’t know,” she says. Don’t care either. Six more weeks of winter or an early spring means nothing to her now. Annie points to the racks behind the dusty cash register, its fading photos of Ralphie and his sister Marie in their confirmation clothes, twenty years out of date, Scotch-taped to it. “A pack of Marlboros, please.” She reconsiders. “Actually, a carton.”
If Mr. Michaud disapproves, she can’t tell. His face is turned to the TV. She pays. He counts out the change. “You want a bag with that?” he asks.
“Don’t bother,” she says. Let the whole town see evidence of her vice. Her public relapse.
But the sidewalk holds no witnesses when she exits. No one to ask how she’s doing, whether she’ll be at the city council meeting tomorrow night, if the new pickle suppliers for the Paul Bunyans are up to snuff, and what about that enchanting mother of hers? There’d be a pause, then a glance at the carton, followed by “Is everything okay?” Lucky for her, not a single car passes along the street to see her leaning against the steering wheel as she lights up. Oh, happy day. Hunky-dory day!
Of course, the lighter is broken. Of course, she doesn’t have a match. With the car still running, she gets out and goes back inside. “Matches?” she asks.
He doesn’t look up. “Over there.” He points to a Whitman’s Sampler filled with matchboxes from Gus’s Gas across the road. “Have a good one,” he says.
She drives around the block to the high school. She turns into the last row of the parking lot, territory once claimed by the tough guys who used to smoke their unfiltered Camels and rolled their joints over by the pine trees. It’s the exact spot, too, where the fast girls unhooked their bras, where she and Sam used to make out—how quaint—in his father’s old Chevy when they were teenagers and the movie had ended. By nine, the whole town closed down. At that hour, when glowing living room televisions dimmed one by one along Grove Street, you could almost hear the words “Good night, John Boy. Good night, Jim Bob” from The Waltons reruns she used to watch as a kid.
Nobody’s around. Hardly surprising, since teenagers have birth control and the comfort of their own beds for overnights. “Better at home than in the back of the car or some cheap motel, since they’re going to do it anyway,” explained her best friend, Rachel, whose daughter had a boyfriend with weekly sleepover privileges. Not that Annie has that problem.
But the problem she does have is a big one. The biggest. The central theme of literature and music and philosophy—not cigarettes and teenage sex and municipal taxes. Or narcissistic mothers or bland pickles. It’s the major enigma-slash-obsession of all time.
She pulls a pack from the carton and begins to tear it open, still wearing the ruffled purple gloves Ursula sent her. The leather is so fine, a second skin, the cashmere lining so fitted to its outer layer that she manages to extract a cigarette even though her hands are trembling. She hasn’t smoked since her first pregnancy, except for one or two during Ursula’s high-stress visits. But never through the other doing-everything-right pregnancies, four of which ended in miscarriage. And the last, a daughter, stillborn—the never-again. After that, she lost the taste for it.
Is this why? The smoking? Something to keep her hands occupied when she felt shy at a party, a country bumpkin’s glaze of sophistication. A no-cal substitute when she looked through the drugstore window and spied one of her friends demolishing a hot-fudge sundae at the soda fountain. This despite so many hard-won tobacco-free years? Despite all those meetings of Smokers Anonymous in dark church basements and shabby cafeterias? Add to that a childhood swathed in secondhand smoke erupting from Mt. Ursula and a teenaged bout of pneumonia, which, according to the doctor, might have compromised her lungs and led to problems in adulthood.
“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Buckley said, clasping her hand in both of his, squeezing back tears.
Of course, she thought. Her just desserts. Not only from her original sin and a child’s sense of invincibility, but let’s face it: too much wine, too little broccoli. Dropping out of exercise class the first week. Her yoga aversion. The extra ten pounds she blames on the Paul Bunyan special—that nutritionally challenged continual source of income and marital harmony and local fame.
“Just bad luck. Just life,” Dr. Buckley added.
“Screw life,” she says now. She’s only thirty-seven, dammit. Not that her mother would appreciate the only. “Darling,” Ursula demanded when Annie turned thirty, “let’s keep your age entre nous,” in the same voice she’d used to insist that her toddler daughter address her as Ursula, more sororial than the maternity-revealing Mama.
Annie strikes the match, lights the cigarette, holds it between the second and third fingers of her still-gloved hand. The cigarette nestles right in, as if she’s just restored a missing digit.
Annie inhales, coughs, and feels awful—dizzy, like her twelve-year-old pudgy self when her mother first offered her a Parliament, promising a trim waist. Her mother was right. Annie kept at it. The cough—at least then—disappeared; the pounds fell off. “What a pretty little thing,” people cooed. Flaunting the cigarette, she felt worldly, Parisian. Not that that was a quality the boys in her high school seemed to value. Their ideal was less urbane and more juvenile delinquent, a better match for bad boys like Ralphie Michaud, with their nose rings, their moussed-back hair—a single lock bisecting their forehead, a couple of heavy-metal tattoos.
Sam wasn’t one of those guys. And she wasn’t one of those girls who glued themselves to the side of such boys like an extra rib. She and Sam had gone through Benjamin Franklin Elementary School together, in the same class, their birthdays three days apart. In second grade, he gave her a heart-shaped box of fudge for Valentine’s Day. In fourth, he was her Secret Santa. By junior high, he had become so handsome she couldn’t stop staring at him. Shy, diffident, a little absent-minded, he never realized how good-looking he was. (And still doesn’t seem to, no matter the second glances and flirty compliments.)