Bed & Breakfast Read online

  She wasn’t so much going toward something as running away, she thought as she stood under the shower, but leaving was better than sitting by the phone waiting for Sam to call, or sinking into a full-blown holiday depression. Stepping out of the shower, she caught her reflection in the full-length mirror. What had possessed her to buy a full-length mirror for the bathroom? Toweling herself, she examined her throat, arms, and breasts. Her breasts were still beautiful. “All the women in our family have pretty chests,” Mawmaw had told her when she was just sprouting. The birthright of a pretty chest had eluded Lila, but Lila had inherited—presumably from Bear’s side of the family, about which nothing was known—a pair of remarkable legs, whereas Cam’s legs had never been more than average. Only Evie, first runner-up in a Miss South Carolina contest, had both legs and chest, but that, Mawmaw said, believing that the Good Lord distributed assets with an eye toward equality, was only fair because Evie had “been born dumb and had a relapse.”

  She did a half-turn, looking over her shoulder and examining her legs and buttocks. Why did she still have these wild fluctuations of feeling about her body? Just a few weeks ago, after she and Sam had made love, she’d looked at herself in this same mirror and thought, “You’re holding up just fine, girl,” but now she noted the dimples in her thighs, the little pouches and sags, the tiny starburst of broken veins, the general softening. “Women are supposed to be soft,” Sam had said, but now soft disgusted her. Soft meant vulnerable. Soft equaled weak. And—she stepped closer to the mirror and examined her face—there was gray showing around her hairline. She’d have to do something about that. Patrick, her hairdresser, would probably squeeze her in for an appointment. She’d be damned if she’d not go home looking her best. Pulling on her underpants, hooking up her bra, she reminded herself to call Sabra, the car service, because in this weather she might not be able to get a taxi.

  Crawling up onto a chair to retrieve her suitcase from the top of the closet, she wondered if she shouldn’t call and tell Josie that she’d changed her mind. But she couldn’t do that. She remembered calling a friend of hers in the travel business, last night, who’d juggled a computer for over an hour to find her a flight. She was committed. “You ought to be committed,” she muttered to herself, “to an institution.”

  By 7:30, after stopping for more coffee and an Egg McMuffin, she hailed a gypsy cab and arrived at her office, where she talked her way past the new security guard. By 9:45, as the other women started to arrive, she’d cleared her desk of the most pressing work and was waiting for her boss, Elaine, so that she could ask her—or rather, tell her—that she’d be taking the week off.

  Elaine came in late, as usual, rushing through the outer office, tearing off her scarf and coat as though she were a beekeeper running from a swarm. “No calls, no interruptions,” she snapped, waving away a handful of messages Maria held out to her, “Just make a pot of coffee when you get the chance, please.” As soon as Elaine’s office door closed, Maria, whose talent for mimicry had helped Cam through many otherwise unfunny days, snapped her arm into a “Sieg Heil!” salute, then, imitating Elaine’s Bronx accent, “No interruptions. Unless it’s Gloria, Betty, or Hillary.” Cam couldn’t help but laugh. Elaine lectured about equality and sisterhood and the importance of destroying hierarchical structures, but she could name-drop with the best of them. “And make a pot of coffee,” Maria sputtered. “It’s just like working for a man. I mean, I’m on the team but I’m not going to be her PMS chew toy.”

  “I’ll make the coffee, Maria. Making coffee is a spiritual exercise for me. Besides, I want to talk to her.” Cam knew Elaine was fighting not only hot flashes but a terrible sense of failure. Elaine had founded Athena Press twenty-five years ago. She’d devoted her considerable intelligence and all her energies to it and it wasn’t going well. So if Elaine had to shore up her ego by mentioning her association with Gloria, or Betty, or other women who’d become more famous, not to mention more wealthy, while she was barely holding on to her business with the help of ever-smaller grants, then Cam felt, at least in her more generous moments, that she should cut her some slack.

  Fresh coffee in hand, Cam knocked on Elaine’s door, entered when she heard an impatient “Come,” took the chair in front of the desk, and studied a dying philodendron while Elaine, ear glued to the phone, grunted, “Uh-huh ... uh-huh ... okay, see you Friday,” then, with dripping sarcasm, “Well happy holidays to you, too.” She hung up and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “That was my daughter, Sheila, calling from Brown. She’s bringing her boyfriend—the one I told you is remarkably unremarkable—home for the holidays, and now she wants to bring her roommate, who is too depressed to go home to her parents, too. Sheila and the jerk will stay at my ex-husband’s apartment, but I get to babysit her depressed roommate. Oh, and I’m also supposed to pay the roommate’s bus fare down. I swear, it’s gimme a nickel, gimme a dime, write me a check, it’s Christmas time! Oh, thanks for the coffee.” She took a sip. “Hey, why don’t you come over on Christmas Eve? Have some mulled wine and help me entertain a suicidal sophomore?”

  “Oh, that sounds festive, but I can’t. Because I’ll be out of town. My mother called last night. A dear friend of hers has had a heart attack and she’s pretty wobbly, so I’m going home for Christmas.”

  “Who’s wobbly? Your mother or her friend?”

  “Both, I expect. I’d like to leave at lunchtime.”

  “But there’s—”

  “I know, but you don’t need me here for the staff meeting. You’ve already read my memo, and you know how I’d vote.” How she despised those interminable staff meetings, staged to create an illusion of democracy when all decisions were preordained. “I’m caught up on most of my work.”

  “You’ll never get a ticket at this late date.”

  “I have a friend who’s a travel agent. Called her last night, and she managed to get me something.”

  Elaine looked dubious. “I just wonder why you’re bothering. In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never ...”

  “I just feel I have to.”

  “Anything else the matter?” Cam shook her head. “But Cam, you’re the one who always said you can’t go home again.”

  “Actually, that was Thomas Wolfe.”

  “Yeah, and Garrison Keillor said the wonderful thing about Christmas is it’s compulsory. We all have to go through it—like a thunderstorm. Really, Cam, you know what it’ll be like,” Elaine persisted. “The first day you’ll feel all warm and runny, the second day you’ll resent having to be on your good behavior, and the third day, all the reasons you left in the first place will come crashing down and you’ll be climbing the walls to get out, but you’ll be stuck. Believe me, I know. That’s why I don’t go home to my mother’s.”

  “You’re probably right, but I’m going anyway. Hey, just stuff the turkey with Prozac and everything’ll be fine.”

  By two she came out of Patrick’s salon, her hair bright and smooth, the balance of her checkbook reduced by a whopping $150 ($105 for the foil and blow-dry, $20 for the tip because he’d squeezed her in at the last minute, and $25 because he’d hit her up for another AIDS benefit). By four she’d eaten two hot dogs, gone to the bank, had a manicure and pedicure at a walk-in nail salon, her pleasure at being pampered over-shadowed by her concern for the Korean girls who worked there for a pittance and a green card, ruining their health by breathing noxious fumes all day.

  She battled rush-hour crowds to get to Lord & Taylor to buy a gift for Josie. On the first floor she was jostled from counter to counter as she considered, then rejected, perfume, a leather handbag, a silver brooch in the shape of a frog. Feeling sweaty, encumbered with hat, coat, and purse, helpless as a piece of flotsam on a raging stream, she bounced along with the tide of shoppers surging toward the elevators and got off at the second floor, not with purpose but because the elevator made her feel claustrophobic. She looked at a gray wool sweater, was nudged aside while pricing a silk blouse, the
n drifted toward the escalator, bumped into someone, muttered a polite “excuse me” that was instantly rejected with a gelid stare. Had it been The Pumpkin Eater where Anne Bancroft had cracked up in a department store? In the lingerie department she watched an affluent, worried-looking man study a black-lace teddy, turned quickly when he caught her eye because she felt like a voyeur, and saw a mannequin dressed in a clingy rose-colored dressing gown with pleats running from embroidered shoulder pads to a cinched waist and a cut-on-the-bias full skirt. She remembered how pleased Josie had been when, years ago, she’d given her that jade satin dressing gown.

  Even as a child she’d had a precocious awareness of sexy women. She’d always wished that Josie, who she knew was pretty but who always dressed like, well, like a mother, would be more like the women she saw in movies and magazines and occasionally in real life. Like Peatsy Gibbs. She didn’t know if Peatsy had actually been sexy, but Peatsy had always been vain and in her child’s mind that had amounted to the same thing. Peatsy, in her heyday, had been the sort of woman men watched. She remembered watching Bear watching Peatsy, or Mrs. Gibbs, as she’d then called her, at some family function at the officers’ club and seeing an expression on his face that she’d never seen before.

  The slithery rose fabric invited touch and she ran her hand down the sleeve, surreptitiously feeling for the price tag, remembering how, when she was only twelve or thirteen, she’d saved babysitting money and bought Josie a black lace slip for Christmas. It had been that awful Christmas when Bear was supposed to come home but hadn’t, and when Josie had opened the package she’d said how much she loved the slip but she’d looked as though she would burst into tears. And the next morning, when Cam had refused to get up to go to church, Josie had slapped her, right across the face, with a stunning blow that had marked the beginning of hostilities that had raged, with occasional but ineffectual truces, ever since. And ever since, except for those times when she was so broke or so estranged as to ignore Christmas gifts, she’d bought Josie practical gifts. The exception being the jade green gown ... and that had been a fluke. She and Reba, reasonably flush at the time, were coming from an office party and slightly tipsy, and had ended up at Bergdorfs. She’d wanted to get Josie something but couldn’t think what, and Reba had said that if you couldn’t come up with a gift that reflected the recipient’s tastes, then the next best thing was to give something that you wanted to own yourself. She’d loved the green gown and, much to Cam’s surprise, Josie had been delighted with it.

  “Would you like to try it on?” a salesgirl who looked as angular and glassy-eyed as the mannequin asked.

  “No. It’s a gift. For my mother.” The girl’s eyebrows, already plucked and shaped to resemble half-moons, rose even higher. “If you have it in a, oh, I guess a size twelve, I’ll take it,” she said with a touch of defiance, because she understood that the girl thought the gown too seductive for an older, or, in her eyes, just “old” woman.

  “I’ll check,” the girl told her and sauntered off while Cam pulled out her wallet and realized that she hadn’t bothered to check the price because she was thinking not just about her mother’s age, but her own. In the last few years she’d found herself looking at older women with intense curiosity, mentally congratulating the few who could bring off a stylish look without making fools of themselves. Even Sam, notoriously indifferent to fashion, had noticed—but what man wouldn’t—that miniskirts were in again and had suggested she buy one. She’d said, “If you’re old enough to remember the first time, you’re too old to wear one now.”

  At what age did you give it up entirely, throw in the towel, so to speak? When did the desire for love, and sex, the need to be attractive, pride and vanity, begin to fade? Just asking the question meant that she was on the cusp, but aging was an intensely individual experience. She’d once asked Josie if she missed sex and Josie, her face on fire, had said only, “I miss dancing. I did love to dance.” Did her mother really miss dancing more than making love? She wondered what it would be like to have known only one man, and never to have experienced sex outside of marriage. Not an uncommon situation for women of her mother’s generation, though Aunt Edna, who’d joined the WACs during World War II, had hinted that she’d had a few flings before she’d settled down with Uncle Dozier. But Edna had always been the more adventurous sister; Josie, the house mouse. Maybe the older sister was automatically the dominant one. She remembered all those childhood years when she’d lorded it over Lila because Lila couldn’t tie her shoes, or read, or fix her own hair. Little Lila, who’d always begged to come into bed with her. Suddenly she wanted to see Lila so much that tears came to her eyes. She wanted to see Evie, and Uncle Dozier, Aunt Edna, and Mawmaw ... she wanted, needed, to see them all. But mostly she wanted to see her mother.

  She could remember coming home as a child. Some places she could remember with great clarity—that awful base housing in Camp Lejeune when she’d been in the second (or was it the third?) grade—the place that had always smelled of mold and the pine-scented cleaner Josie had used to try to get rid of the mold. It had patchy linoleum, rickety front stairs, an oven that had to be lit with a match, and a yard with dirt so poor and hard-packed that Josie hadn’t been able to get it to yield a single carrot or geranium.

  But they’d been transferred so often. Trying to remember all the places they’d lived was like trying to remember local subway stations when you were on the express train. Coming home had never meant any particular place. Coming home had always been Mama, fresh from the afternoon bath she took even when Daddy wasn’t around because she liked to look pretty for her children, Mama in a cotton housedress, smelling of the White Shoulders dusting powder she had Mawmaw send her, Mama with her hair pinned up and her lipstick on, working in the yard or, more likely, peeling vegetables for supper—Mama wiping her hands on her apron, taking Cam’s face in her hands and asking, “How’s my angel today? Were you a good girl at school?”

  “We do have that in a size twelve, miss,” the salesgirl told her. “Do you want it?”

  “How much ... ?” she began, then shook her head and blotted a tear that was running down the side of her nose. “I mean yes. Yes, I’ll take it.”

  The buzzer sounded and she hurried to the intercom. An accented voice said, “Sabra Car Service.” She swallowed the last of her coffee, felt as though she might heave it up, and put the mug in the sink. She went into the bathroom, checked her face in the mirror, started to zip up her cosmetics bag, then reached for the box of tampons on the toilet top. Mustn’t forget those. She was bound to start in mid-flight. She was already several days late. She stopped dead. How many? Four? Okay. She hadn’t been regular for months. Stress. Or maybe she was starting to go through the change. Reba had started over a year ago and she’d told her all the symptoms. But ... she’d been eating like a hog. And what about this crying jag? Well, who wouldn’t cry? Christmas. Her job. Sam.

  The buzzer sounded again.

  “All right! I’m the one who has to catch the damn plane. just wait,” she bellowed before she punched the SPEAK button, then, barely audible, “Please, wait. I’ll be right down.”

  She shoved the box of Tampax into her cosmetics bag, went to the couch to pick up the carry-on she’d decided to take instead of a suitcase, and stood perfectly still. If she held herself very still and remained quiet—the way she had years ago after that accident, when she’d been thrown from the car and had lain on the icy road, dazed but knowing that if she had a concussion, it would be better not to move—if she remained very still she’d be all right.

  She couldn’t be pregnant. All those years, all those affairs—sure, she’d been vigilant about birth control—but she’d had friends who’d been careful and not one of them had escaped without being caught. She’d even thought she might be sterile.

  A bleating horn startled her and caused her to look out the window. A truck was backed up behind her hired car, its driver leaning out the window, middle finger raised. Her driver,
a Sikh wearing a turban and a red windbreaker, shrugged and gestured toward her window with his cigarette. She slung her travel bag over her shoulder, sagged with its weight, picked up her purse and keys, went to the front door, saying, “Checked the gas, checked the lights ... It’s not true. It can’t be.”