Laura Lippman - Hardly Knew Her

She used part of his money to buy a padlock for her bedroom door, a fancy one with a key. She used the balance to buy a lava lamp from Spencer’s at East Point Mall. At night, her homework done, she watched the reddish-orange blobs break apart and rearrange themselves. Even within that narrow glass, there seemed to be no limit to the forms they could take. Her father stewed and steamed about the lock, saying she had no right to lock a room in his house. He also criticized the lava lamp, saying it proved she was on drugs because what sober, right-minded person could be entertained by such a thing.

But for all he complained, he never tried to breach the lock, although it would have been a simple thing to pry it off with a hammer, not much harder than slicing through a set of guitar strings. He was scared of her now, just a little, and incapable of concealing that fear no matter how he might try.

It was a new sensation, having someone scared of her. Sofia liked it.

This is true: there comes a time in the life of a beautiful woman, or even an attractive one with an abundance of charm, when she realizes that she can no longer rely on her looks. If she is unusually, exceedingly self-aware, the realization is a timely one. But, more typically, it lags the physical reality by several years, like a thunderclap when a lightning storm is passing by. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand…boom. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand. Boom. The lightning is moving out, away, which is a good thing in nature, but not in the life of a beautiful woman.

That’s how it happened for Mona. A gorgeous woman at twenty, a stunning woman at thirty, a striking woman at forty, a handsome woman at fifty, she was pretty much done by sixty-but only if one knew what she had been, once upon a time, and at this point that knowledge belonged to Mona alone. A sixty-eight-year-old widow when she moved into LeisureWorld, she was thought shy and retiring by her neighbors in the Creekside Condos, Phase II. She was actually an incurious snob who had no interest in the people around her. People were overrated, in Mona’s opinion, unless they were men and they might be persuaded to marry you. This is not my life, she thought, walking the trails that wound through the pseudo-city in suburban Maryland. This is not what I anticipated.

Mona had expected…well, she hadn’t thought to expect. To the extent that she had been able to imagine her old age at all, she had thought her sunset years might be something along the lines of Eloise at the Plaza-a posh place in a city center, with twenty-four-hour room service and a concierge. Such things were available-but not to those with her resources, explained the earnest young accountant who reviewed the various funds left by Mona’s husband, her fourth, although Hal Wickham had believed himself to be her second.

“Mr. Wickham has left you with a conservative, diversified portfolio that will cover your costs at a comfortable level-but it’s not going to allow you to live in a hotel,” the accountant had said a little huffily, almost as if he were one of Hal’s children, who had taken the same tone when they realized how much of their father’s estate was to go to Mona. But she was his wife, after all, and not some fly-by-night spouse. They had been married fifteen years, her personal best.

“But there’s over two million, and the smaller units in that hotel are going for less than a million,” she said, crossing her legs at the knee and letting her skirt ride up, just a bit. Her legs were still quite shapely, but the accountant’s eyes slid away from them. A shy one. These bookish types killed her.

“If you cash out half of the investments, you earn half as much on the remaining principal, which isn’t enough to cover your living expenses, not with the maintenance fees involved. Don’t you see?”

“I’d be paying cash,” she said, leaning forward, so her breasts rested on her elbows. They were still quite impressive. Bras were one wardrobe item that had improved in Mona’s lifetime. Bras were amazing now, what they did with so little fabric.

“Yes, theoretically. But there would be taxes to pay on the capital gains of the stocks acquired in your name, and your costs would outpace your earnings. You’d have to dip into your principal, and at that rate, you’d be broke in”-he did a quick calculation on his computer-“seven years. You’re only sixty-eight now-”

“Sixty-one,” she lied reflexively.

“All the more reason to be careful,” he said. “You’re going to live a long, long time.”

But to Mona, now ensconced in Creekside Condos, Phase II, it seemed only that it would feel that way. She didn’t golf, so she had no use for the two courses at LeisureWorld. She had never learned to cook, preferring to dine out, but she loathed eating out alone and the delivery cuisine available in the area was not to her liking. She watched television, took long walks, and spent an hour a day doing vigorous isometric exercises that she had learned in the late sixties. This was before Jane Fonda and aerobics, when there wasn’t so much emphasis on sweating. The exercises were the closest thing that Mona had to a religion and they had been more rewarding than most religions, delivering exactly what they promised-and in this lifetime, too. Plus, all her husbands, even the ones she didn’t count, had benefited from the final set of repetitions, a series of pelvic thrusts done in concert with vigorous yogic breathing.

One late fall day, lying on her back, thrusting her pelvis in counterpoint to her in-and-out breaths, it occurred to Mona that her life would not be much different in the posh, downtown hotel condo she had so coveted. It’s not as if she would go to the theaters or museums; she had only pretended interest in those things because other people seemed to expect it. Museums bored her and theater baffled her-all those people talking so loudly, in such artificial sentences. Better restaurants wouldn’t make her like eating out alone, and room service was never as hot as it should be. Her surroundings would be a considerable improvement, with truly top-of-the-line fixtures, but all that would have meant is that she would be lying on a better-quality carpet right now. Mona was not meant to be alone and if she had known that Hal was going to die only fifteen years in, she might have chosen differently. Finding a husband at the age of sixty-eight, even when one claimed to be sixty-one, had to be harder than finding a job at that age. With Hal, Mona had consciously settled. She wondered if he knew that. She wondered if he had died just to spite her.

There was a Starbucks in LeisureWorld plaza and she sometimes ended her afternoon walks there, curious to see what the fuss was about. She found the chairs abominable-had anyone over fifty ever tried to rise from these low-slung traps?-but she liked what a younger person might call the vibe. (Mona didn’t actually know any young people and had been secretly glad that Hal’s children loathed her so, as it gave her an excuse to have nothing to do with them or the grandchildren.) She treated herself to sweet drinks, chocolate drinks, drinks with whipped cream. Mona had been on a perpetual diet since she was thirty-five, and while the discipline, along with her exercises, had kept her body hard, it had made her face harder still. The coffee drinks and pastries added weight, but no more than five or six pounds, and it was better than Botox, plumping and smoothing Mona’s cheeks. She sipped her drink, stared into space, and listened to the curious non-music on the sound system. It wasn’t odd to be alone in Starbucks, quite the opposite. When parties of two or three came in, full of conversation and private jokes, they were the ones who seemed out of place. The regulars all relaxed a little when those interlopers finally left.