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  “Hi, Ms. Sparrow,” I managed to say, finally.

  “Hello,” she said, still smiling, but her face quizzical. “Do you…?” She didn’t finish the thought.

  “You used to tell me…” I swallowed. “You used to tell me to call you Mush. But I never could.”

  “Mush.” She scowled then, in a thoughtful way, not unfriendly. “Oh my Lord, that goes back…how many years?”

  “Thirty,” I answered, without hesitation.

  She looked at me again. Through the screen she appeared ghostlike, unreal.

  “I’m Frances,” I said at last.

  I could see it didn’t register with her.

  “Frances. Frances Pastan…Lucy’s friend.”

  There are moments which seem to miraculously stretch in time. To expand. It felt as if my entire life were on display, as if I were being judged, as if nothing had mattered for decades but this, that this woman should acknowledge me, recognize me, know me. I watched her studying me for what seemed a very long while, but which couldn’t have been more than a second or two. “Frances,” she said uncertainly.

  I cleared my throat. “Franny-Fran.”

  Her mouth opened.

  “Frances,” she said finally, exhaling hugely. “Oh my Lord, Frances!” She pushed the door open and wrapped me in an enormous bear hug. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Oh my Lord, oh my Lord, Frances, I can’t believe it!”

  I couldn’t speak. My throat was clogged with something thick and sour. I just shut my eyes, hugged her tightly, felt her warm arms around me. Finally we backed away and looked at each other, Ms. Sparrow’s eyes full of tears. She laughed as she wiped them away.

  “What are you…? How did you find me?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “The Internet. It wasn’t hard. I typed in your name and your B & B came up right away. I had no idea you were still—”

  “Alive?”

  I laughed. “I was going to say ‘in the area.’”

  “Well, sometimes I’m surprised that I’m still alive, you know?”

  We laughed together. My anxiety seemed to melt away as I stood there. She was a striking woman, almost magisterial with her swooping hair, her beads and bangles. And yet behind the glasses I saw, a bit faded now yet still piercing, still attractive, her familiar silver-gray eyes.

  “Frances, come in, for God’s sake come in,” she said, opening the door for me.

  “Am I interrupting anything? Do you have guests?”

  She shook her head. “Last ones checked out this morning. Not expecting any more until tonight. Come in, come in!”

  I stepped over the threshold. The interior of the house was as beautiful as the outside. Polished wood everywhere, a fireplace in the main room, comfortable old chairs: opulent but relaxing, friendly. I’d stayed in bed & breakfast inns like this from time to time. Donald and I had enjoyed them in the early years of our marriage, a thousand years ago.

  “I’m just floored that you found me,” she said, leading me into the dining room. “Would you like coffee? Tea? Please sit down!”

  “Coffee would be great, if you have some,” I said, seating myself in a handsome oak chair. “But you don’t have to bother—”

  “I have some already made,” she said. “I’ll just be a second.” She scurried through a door which appeared to lead to the kitchen. A moment later she came back out not only with two cups of coffee on a tray, but with a huge piece of cake.

  “Oh my gosh,” I said. “Ms. Sparrow, I’m not sure I can eat all that.”

  “Try. It’s strawberry.” She smiled as she set it before me. Placing the tray on a side table, she sat beside me.

  I did. “This is delicious,” I said, honestly. She smiled again. “But you know, I don’t remember you as a cook.”

  “Back then?” She laughed. “No, I couldn’t cook a thing back then. That was a long time ago.”

  “Yes, it was.” The coffee was excellent, too.

  “Good Lord, Frances, how are you?” she asked, patting the back of my hand.

  I smiled at her, my mouth full of cake. “I’m all right,” I said, swallowing. “I was in the area.”

  “What do you do?”

  I went through the basics of my life for her: graduate school in Arizona, children’s books, Donald, Jess. I admitted the divorce but didn’t mention that I never saw my daughter.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said, referring to Donald, “but other than that, you’ve made quite a success of yourself, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Other than that.” Other than the fact, I thought, that I drink too much, that I take antidepressants to get through the day. Other than the fact that I can only see my daughter in the presence of her father. Other than the fact that every morning I reach for someone and no one’s there.

  “But how about all this?” I said, gesturing vaguely around the room. “What a success you are. This is an amazing house.”

  She nodded. “It took a long time. It wasn’t like this when we bought it, I can tell you.”

  “We?”

  “Jack and I,” she said. “My husband.”

  “You’re married.”

  “Twenty-six years, yes. I never changed my name, though.”

  “Twenty-six years,” I pondered. I hesitated to ask the obvious question, but she answered it for me.

  “We have three children,” she said. “Two sons and a daughter. And a grandson.” She grinned.

  “Really.”

  She told me their names and what each of her children did for a living, but the information skated past my mind. I was thinking: Two sons. A daughter. A grandchild.

  “Frances, why didn’t you call ahead?” she asked me. “I could have given you something better than yesterday’s cake.”

  “Oh, gee, Ms. Sparrow”—I could hardly believe I’d just said gee, but inevitably I felt like a child next to her—“this is great. Anyway, I—well, you know.”

  “Hm?”

  “I—” I avoided her eyes. “Well, I—I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me.”

  She looked at me and said quietly, “Of course I want to see you, Frances. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well—”

  We left it. When I finished the cake and coffee she led me on an extended tour of the house, showing off all the gorgeous restoration work, the antiques, the furnishings. Like all people whose lives are centered on such things, she delighted in talking about how they found a certain piece or what condition a particular banister or wall or floor had been in when they’d bought the place. I didn’t listen to the specifics but I loved the sound of her voice—hearing it again. It was a bit huskier than I’d remembered, but I would have known it anywhere. Lucy had sounded a lot like her, I realized, but it was hard to think of Lucy here, in this shining well-scrubbed home, with this vibrant older woman next to me. In the sitting room I saw a framed photo of the family: Ms. Sparrow, her husband, the three adult children, all smiling in suits and formal dresses. The young woman in the photo held a baby in her arms. Nowhere in the house did I see a picture of Lucy.

  “You know, I wouldn’t have recognized you,” Ms. Sparrow said as we sat down on a comfortably overstuffed sofa in the glowing, sunlit parlor. “How old were you back then?”

  “Twelve,” I smiled.

  “You were such a serious little girl,” she said. “I remember you in your very formal skirts. You wore bangs. And you hardly ever looked up from the floor.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. You never made eye contact. You were very shy.”

  I certainly wasn’t shy with Lucy, I thought; but with the rest of the world, that was probably true.

  “And you had—troubles, yes? At home.”

  I nodded.

  “I remember Louise and Frank,” she said, looking vaguely at some spot near the ceiling. “I can see Frank mowing the lawn on Sundays in his suspenders, with a cigar hanging out of his mouth. No shirt.”

  I chuckled, though I didn’t know why.
“That was Uncle Frank, all right.” What I didn’t say was: They hated you. They thought you were trash.

  “Do you hear from them, Frances? Are they living?”

  “No, I—I don’t know. I never had any communication with them after the day I left Quiet. They don’t live there anymore—I just visited the house earlier today. Different people are there now. Aunt Louise and Uncle Frank are probably dead.” I tried to keep from sounding as cold about it as I felt.

  “And your parents?” she asked. “I seem to remember…”

  “They’re dead,” I said, quickly closing the subject. “A long time ago.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  We were silent for a moment. The light through the chintz curtains seemed to grow a darker gold, nearly the color of brass, as we sat there in the deepening afternoon.

  “I still miss her,” I ventured finally.

  She looked away. “Do you?”

  “She was my best friend.”

  “Yes.” She began to pick at a spot on the sofa’s arm where the thread was loose.

  “I hadn’t thought of her in years,” I admitted. “My brain just…buried it. All of it. From that time. Everything. They took me away so suddenly at the end…You know, there was a lot of chaos in my life. My parents. Foster homes. Craziness.” I shook my head impatiently. “I don’t even remember a lot of it. There are years and years which are just blank to me.”

  “I’m sure,” she said quietly, listening.

  “But then I had this book thing—I told you about it—in Santa Barbara, and I realized I wouldn’t be all that far from Quiet. And I knew I had to come back. It’s the first time I’ve been in California at all since I was eighteen. I had to come back and just—I don’t know. See. Remember. Something.”

  She nodded.

  “And now it’s been flooding back,” I said. “I seem to recall everything now. Things I haven’t thought of in thirty years. About my parents, about Frank and Louise, that little school…about Lucy.”

  She was silent, picking absently at the sofa.

  “I’m sorry,” I said at last. “Should I leave?”

  “What?” She looked at me suddenly, as if coming out of a trance. “Why on earth would I want you to leave, Frances?”

  “Maybe you don’t want to talk about…”

  “Oh my Lord.” She smiled, shook her head, patted my hand. “Sometimes there’s nothing I’d rather talk about.”

  We were silent again.

  “It’s nice,” she said, “to see someone again who knew her. There’s no one, now. No one that I know, anyway. I’m the only person I know who actually remembers her. Who has memories of her.”

  “Well,” I said, taking her hand and squeezing it softly, “you know me. Now. Again.”

  She smiled and nodded. She looked very old, suddenly, in the yellow light.

  “But you got past it,” I said, gesturing around the room. “You moved on. That’s good.”

  “I moved on,” she agreed. “But Frances, no. I never got past it.”

  I waited.

  “You don’t,” she said, “get past something like that.”

  She looked toward the sun-filled windows.

  “You still—you still think about her a lot, then,” I said.

  “I never stop thinking about her. In thirty years I’ve never stopped thinking about her. Not for one single day.” She looked around the room. “I put everything away years ago,” she said. “All the pictures, school assignments, the Mother’s Day cards, all of it. I couldn’t stand it. Neither could Jack. He said it was like living in a cemetery. This was back when we were first married. But,” she said, glancing at me again, “the family’s wonderful. Jack’s wonderful. He understands. So do all my kids.”

  “They know about it?” For some reason this surprised me.

  “Oh, of course,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to hide something like that. She’s their half-sister, you know.”

  I nodded. The thought was strange.

  “I wasn’t a good mother,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was too young, too inexperienced. Too immature. And I was gone too much.”

  “Well, you worked a lot, I remember.”

  “Yes, well…I was neglectful. Didn’t pay attention. It came from having a child at the age I did. And I’ve got to live with that. Later on, after…after what happened, I realized that I had to—I had to fix my life.” She smiled, sadly.

  We sat silently for a moment.

  “She’s buried near here,” she said. There was a long silence. Then she asked: “Would you like to go and visit her?”

  —Six—

  SOAMES ELEMENTARY WAS abuzz with talk of Lucy Sparrow’s friendship with the new girl—me. None of the talk was nice. From that very first day I’d isolated myself, cut myself adrift from my new peers by becoming pals with a girl who, I increasingly came to understand, was considered beyond the pale. The other girls made fun of her behind her back (she was fat, stupid, lumpy, dirty, except that she wasn’t), and sometimes even within her hearing. Soon enough, inevitably, I was included as well. In English class, first thing in the morning, Lucy sat two rows in front of me, while Miriam Doyle and Company sat two rows behind; as a result, I could clearly hear their sotto voce whispers, designed to carry both to me and to Lucy.

  “Lucy’s here today,” one of them would say. “I mean Lezzie.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll bet she wants to kiss a girl.”

  “I’ll bet she wants to kiss that new girl. What’s her name? Bitchy-britches.”

  “Frances,” one of them said mincingly.

  “She looks like she lives in a concentration camp!”

  Muted giggles from behind me.

  “The fat girl and the skinny girl. They’re like Laurel and Hardy.”

  “Nuh-uh. Laurel and Hardy were funny. They’re just gross. I hate lezzies.”

  “Why doesn’t Lezzie wash her face, anyway?”

  “Or her hair?”

  “Or her armpits?”

  “Frances could wash them for her. She’s clean.”

  Giggles.

  My cheeks would burn with rage and humiliation at such times. I would have fantasies of whirling on them, screaming at them to Shut up! and knocking their pretty little heads together hard enough to cause a resounding thwack. Although society tends to concern itself much more with issues surrounding high school, for many girls elementary school is much worse; the judgments there are swift, severe, and final, unleavened by any concept of empathy or pity and unredeemed by the tendency boys have to hash out their differences in sports competition or fighting. If it’s true that, as Sartre puts it, L’enfer, c’est les autres—“Hell is other people”—then it might be that, at least for some girls, Hell closely resembles the hallways and playgrounds of a typical elementary school.

  Outside of class these girls were even ruder, and I quickly learned to be at Lucy’s side virtually every moment. For however cruelly they teased her, the abuse had its limits, because they were also afraid of her. She was much bigger than any other girl in the school, partly because, as I soon learned, she had actually been held back one year (“Fifth grade wasn’t too great,” she told me), but mostly it was just how she was built. Actual fights, common among boys, were a rarity among the girls, but nobody wanted to risk tussling with Lucy Sparrow. She was not only large, but intensely physical: in the first days of our friendship I’d never done such running, such jumping and throwing and catching. Lucy would quickly become restless if I suggested we simply sit under a tree at lunch. She would always urge me to join her for tetherball or tennis (she wasn’t that much better than I was on the tennis court, but she hit the ball hard). It didn’t matter what we did as long as we moved—the faster the better.

  Still, the bitchy behavior never stopped. Once or twice the girls happened to catch me without Lucy, and away from adult supervision: this happened one afternoon in the girls’ bathroom, when I realized on walking through the door that all three of them wer
e standing there in a huddle near the sink. The smell of a cigarette filled the room. Melissa Deaver was the first one to see me, and for a moment she said nothing, until she saw that Lucy wasn’t following me in. Then all three of them moved in for the kill.

  “Well, if it isn’t Concentration Camp,” Melissa said, brushing her gorgeous locks out of her eyes and moving toward me. I didn’t realize until too late that Susan Roselli had slipped in behind me, so that when I tried to turn to leave I was blocked.

  “Let me go,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Miriam said. She was the one holding the cigarette. She took a long drag on it and blew the smoke in my face. “Nobody’s holding you here.”

  “Fine.”

  But when I turned, I bumped into Susan again.

  “I want to go,” I insisted.

  “To the toilet?” Miriam asked. “Go ahead. Leave the door open. We’ll watch. I know you’ll like that. You watch your lezzie friend go, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t lie,” she said, pushing me lightly on the shoulder. “Tell us how you watch your lezzie friend pee and then you can go.”

  “I don’t watch her pee.”

  “Do you lick her pussy?”

  “Shut up,” I said. They crowded in toward me, pushing me, not hard.

  “You like to lick pussy, don’t you, Frances?” This was Melissa.

  “Sure she does. Yum-yum.” Miriam.

  “Why don’t you lick Miriam’s pussy, Frances?” Susan said. “At least she’s pretty.”

  “No.”

  Susan’s line convulsed them in laughter, and I took their moment’s inattention to burst through them and out the door. From then on, I never went to the bathroom at Soames unless Lucy was with me.

  But the fact is, Lucy was with me almost all the time, my personal bodyguard, and so most days at Soames featured these girls only as vague background noise. The teasing we were subjected to together was relatively mild, and Lucy once turned it to our advantage when we heard them chanting across the playground, “FRAN-ces and LEZ-zie sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” She studied the girls for a moment, sneered, and then grabbed me, kissed me hard full on the lips. I started to giggle uncontrollably—the sensation, not erotic in the least, was like being tickled—and when she stopped we both looked over and saw that the girls’ expressions were filled with stupefied horror. We had completely silenced them.