Rosemary Harris: Dead Head

This was a far cry from Babe’s previous life twenty or so years earlier when she was a backup singer traveling with a band and the dear departed Pete number one. Late in the day when there were no kids around, she would let slip one of her more outrageous anecdotes, and she never failed to gather a crowd at the diner’s counter, leaving most of her listeners feeling Walter Mittyish for living vicariously through her adventures instead of getting off their butts and having some of their own. Once in a while a story sounded suspiciously like something I’d seen in a movie or read in a novel, but if she was embellishing, who cared? Who didn’t relive the past and burnish some stories to make herself seem smarter, hipper, and funnier? And she told the stories well, with enough brio and detail to make you feel as if you’d been there with her, partying with rock stars and dancing on yachts.

“I miss it sometimes,” she’d said, “traveling with the Jimmy Collins Band. A different city every week. Hell, sometimes every night. That was a lifetime ago. I have no complaints. Somebody once told me there are only two stories: a man goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. The first half of my life, I went on the journey. Now I’m here and the people who come to the diner are the ones who come to town.” A bittersweet smile had crossed her face when she said it, and I wondered if she was thinking about Pete number one and how they had come to this town so many years ago.

Babe brushed her hands on her tight black jeans, held the diner’s screen door open, and shooed me inside. “C’mon, Linnaeus,” she said. Babe was a quick study.

“Town” was Springfield, Connecticut, somewhere between Boston and New York and light-years from both. I had come to Springfield from New York City years earlier as a summer renter, thinking everything was so much smaller and simpler than my life in New York. People said hello. After only two trips to the diner I was asked if I was having “the usual.”

Arrogantly, I found everything quaint. Then a few years back I lost my job and my boyfriend in one sixty-day period. I came here to lick my wounds and I never left. Small and simple was just what I needed.

“Speaking of a man going on a journey, have you heard from Neil?” I asked casually, sliding onto a counter stool and positioning my backpack on the one next to it. I peeled off my garden gloves, shoved them into a back pocket, and checked out the day’s specials on the blackboard. I made an extra effort to appear to be studying the menu in case the subject of her relationship with Neil was off-limits.

Babe’s face softened. Neil was her sweet young thing. He had gone home to Scotland because his mother was ill and wound up staying longer than any of them had expected. “He’s supposed to be back in two weeks, according to the last round of electronic missives.”

Neil had been e-mailing and Twittering lists of movies, foods, and recreational activities he expected to indulge in once he got home. They were sweet, like two teenagers separated during summer vacation. Babe smacked her lips as if Neil were one of Pete number two’s architectural, Food Network desserts. “His mom is out of the woods medically, but it sounds like she didn’t change a lightbulb or hang a picture in the seven years he’s been in this country. You’d think no one else in Scotland knew how to use a spanner. That’s a wrench…or a hammer. I forget which.”

“C’mon, isn’t it just the mom thing? Don’t you have it have with your kids?”

“My kids? They’ve been independent from a very early age.”

That’s right. I recalled one of Babe’s late-night storytelling sessions. She told us how one night her sons, Dylan and Daltry, had borrowed a friend’s car to catch Hootie & the Blowfish at a club called Emerald City, more than a hundred miles away. They almost made it, when a couple of bored staties pulled them over on the Jersey Turnpike for driving with a broken taillight. Her sons were eleven and thirteen at the time and the only thing that bothered Babe was that they’d done it all to see Hootie and not some edgier, hipper band. Independent was an understatement. So independent that I’d never met them and neither had anyone at the diner. They hadn’t been back east since their father had died. That was a subject I didn’t touch. People were funny when it came to their kids.

I placed my order-red, white, and blueberry waffles, probably the reason for my extra four pounds-and went to wash my hands. When I got back, Babe was peering out the window through the miniblinds.

“What have we here?” she said under her breath. “If it’s Tuesday it must be…what, horseback riding or lacrosse? Convoy of Main Street Moms arriving, Pete. Crank up the cappuccino machine.” Which was a joke, since she didn’t own a cappuccino machine, although Pete was lobbying hard for one, as well as a copper milk steamer he’d seen on QVC.

I half stood in my seat to see what was holding her attention for so long. A flotilla of sleek cars had arrived and pulled into the angled parking spots adjacent to the entrance as if they were a team of synchronized swimmers or trained seals. Just as gracefully, out the drivers came, first one smooth fair head, then the next.

All the moms wore slightly different permutations of the same early fall outfit-turtlenecks, leather vests, quilted jackets, quilted vests, leather jackets, with well-coordinated gloves, scarves, and bags that were like the colors on creamy decorator paint chips. Pricey paint.

Four or five kids who could have belonged to any of the women piled out of the back of the largest SUV. Towheaded angels, a cross between the psycho kids from Village of the Damned and those from the latest Ralph Lauren ad campaign whose little duds probably cost more than my first car, although that wasn’t saying much. Something about the mothers suggested they had just parked Thoroughbred horses, like their cars, on similar angles, and left them in the nearby Mossdale Stables.

Caroline Sturgis was the last to dismount from a silver, or maybe it was a Paul Revere pewter Land Rover. Caroline was one of my first customers in Springfield. We’d met at a local thrift shop-I was buying, she was donating. Despite the differences in our ages and socioeconomic groups, she seemed to gravitate toward me. As a newcomer with a business, I needed all the contacts I could get, so I responded.

This would be the third year I’d looked after Caroline’s property, weaning her from the pedestrian triumvirate of impatiens, marigold, and red salvia and steering her toward more adventurous plantings, or at least my notion of them. But I’d kept my distance for the last month or so because making a house call inevitably involved a pitcher of something alcoholic. I’d succumbed in the past and it resulted in my losing a day’s work and once, a dozen flats of pansies that had sat wilting in the sun for hours while Caroline and I got very happy on a bottle of Mouton Rothschild. Getting loaded early in the day was something a rich suburban matron might be able to do, but it was a no-no for a woman of modest means who was struggling to keep her small business afloat.

It was just cool enough to turn up your collar without looking too affected, so Caroline and the Moms settled in at a table outside-one farthest from the road, mostly out of the sun, and at an appropriate distance from another table of women whom they acknowledged but didn’t join. Their kids commandeered a picnic table nearby.

These were the well-heeled ladies of Springfield and its neighboring towns. They traveled in packs to book groups and charity events, prep school fund-raisers and the occasional local art show or dramatic performance. They were attractive, polite, and just standoffish enough to make you feel justified in not feeling all warm and fuzzy toward them. If there was a Junior League in Connecticut I wasn’t aware of it, but I imagined that the Main Street Moms-as Babe had christened them-were the unofficial New England equivalent. I had a love-hate relationship with them. Two or three more on my client list and I could stop worrying about the rising cost of mulch and start packing for the Virgin Islands, but with a last shred of independence, self-respect, or city slicker stupidity-I didn’t know which-I couldn’t bring myself to suck up to them the way any other small businesswoman would have.