Bill Clegg: Did You Ever Have A Family

They arrive before she knows they are there. She has no idea when exactly they settled in at the table by the window, two down from the one where she sits nursing her cold cup of coffee, but it’s long enough ago that they have ordered soups and salads and been served their cups of tea. They are behind her, she cannot see them, but by their polite laughter she knows it’s tea they are sipping, not coffee; soups and salads they have ordered, not hamburgers and fries, or the meat loaf. She doesn’t know these particular women, these mothers and daughters and wives, but she knows them. She has cleaned their houses, ferried their children to train stations and sleepovers, and yanked the weeds from their sidewalks for most of her life. She has heard them fret about global warming, mercury levels in tuna, and pesticides choking the life out of the lettuce they stab with their forks but barely eat. She has witnessed up close their girlish and convincing surprise at the arrival of each relentless windfall and victory. A husband’s unexpected bonus at the end of the year, the new station wagon in the driveway strung up with birthday or Christmas or Mother’s Day ribbons. What she finds the most difficult to bear is hearing them brag about their children — the early acceptances to impossible-to-get-into schools, the job offers from prestigious law firms, the promotions and awards, the engagements to attractive people from happy families; their weddings.

It is a wedding they are talking about now. The loud one, the one that begins every sentence with Now. Now, you’ll never believe. Now, Carol, listen to this. Now, I never. Now, can you imagine . NOW HEAR THIS, she seems to be commanding each time she speaks. As if her voice, two or three decibel levels above the clank and chatter of the restaurant, didn’t already demand your attention. She has a daughter getting married in Nantucket. From the shimmy in her voice Lydia can tell it is this woman’s favorite thing to talk about. Thank God for the wedding planner, bossy like you wouldn’t believe, but a genius with the details. She even helped organize the honeymoon, a gift from the groom’s parents. A month in Asia. To be honest, I think it’s too much — the whole thing waiting like a giant game-show prize on the other side of what we expect to be a perfectly nice but by no means over-the-top weddin g. They’re from New Jersey, she explains. Big Italian family, she adds, and just in case anyone missed the point: They don’t know any better.

She keeps going . The trip is endless. Her voice is a furrowed brow, bragging. India, Vietnam, Thailand, each country’s name rolling off her tongue like the brand names of pricey clothing Lydia sees ads for in the thick beauty magazines these women drop on the bathroom floor like just-once-used towels.

As she continues on about the groom’s family — the limousine service they’ve owned since the 1950s, their accents, their Catholicism — Lydia looks out the window to the only motel in town, the Betsy. The sign is large and wooden and covered in white paint that has been cracked and peeling for as long as she’s lived here, which is always. The sign has a large pediment on top as if announcing a grand colonial inn and not the twenty-one-room, one-story, white-brick motel that sits out of sight, beyond the tree line, at the end of the drive. Nothing is grand about the Betsy except maybe the room numbers painted in robin’s-egg blue with gold borders on the small oval plaques hanging from each door. The owner’s mother fancied herself a folk artist, and they were a gift to her son Tommy when he opened the motel in the late sixties. He told Lydia the story one night at the Tap, a few years after he sold the place. Lydia had cleaned the rooms there for six or seven years before the new owners came in and hired Mexicans, who arrive on foot each morning from across the state line in Amenia or Millerton. She’d never said much to Tommy when she worked for him, nor he to her, but since time had passed and they were both bellied up to the same bar, he got chatty. I hated that color blue, he spat, many drinks in and looking like a sixty-five-year-old teenager — gray hair, liver spots, cracking voice, bright blue eyes, lost. Wearing the same white, button-down shirt and khaki pants she remembered him wearing in church when she was a kid. She covered everything in that blue and insisted I put her silly paintings in the rooms. She even painted flowers on some of the beds. I named the place after her thinking it would open her purse a bit more, but it didn’t. I was supposed to live off the earnings but there never were any. No one comes to Wells to stay in a motel.

Everyone in town knew Betsy Ball had, long ago, married the heir to a liquor fortune who died young and left her everything. Tommy lived with his mother most of his life, sleeping in the same bedroom he slept in as a child, in the house he still lived in. Lydia wondered if he ever left that room, ever moved to another one in a different part of that big brick house on South Main Street after his mother died. Except for four years in Pennsylvania for college, and a few years after in the city, Tommy Ball never really left town. Never dated anyone that anyone can remember and never married. Betsy Ball saw Tommy every day and he hated her, Lydia thought. Her son hated her but she was not alone. Even when the town library, to which she eventually left a good deal of money, threw her a party for her one hundredth birthday, her son arrived and left with her. She was widowed and deaf, probably wearing diapers and not knowing her own name, but she did not go home alone that night.

Alone and home is where Lydia has been the most during the last six months since Luke died. She walks to the coffee shop after lunch most days to get a break from the television, which has become like a full-time job. If the morning talk shows start without her, she feels like she’s dropping the ball, as if she’s failed in the one measly duty she has each day. There aren’t as many of the old-time Phil Donahue — type shows anymore, the kind with regular people with extraordinary problems. Now the shows are more specific: medical, food-focused, or exclusively dedicated to celebrities, who at times feel like family — like cousins you hear about in Christmas letters doing this and that, who you catch glimpses of at graduation parties, christenings, or weddings. It comforts Lydia to see the same people pop up on the same couches and guest chairs through the years. They age, she ages, the talk-show hosts age. For a little while it seems like they are all in it together.

Now, did you know the caterer never got paid? At first, she thinks the loud one is still talking about her daughter’s wedding in Nantucket, but she’s moved on to the past tense, another subject, a different wedding. It is soon clear which one.

Lydia scans the place for the waitress, the pregnant blonde named Amy, who she’s pretty sure used to work at the grocery store. She sees her each day and keeps meaning to ask, but after she orders her coffee she can’t ever seem to find the words. Lately, Amy just brings the coffee, which excuses both of them from speaking.

The lunch crowd has mostly left. Lydia pivots back, slightly, careful not to turn all the way around and be seen by the loud one or any of the women with her. She still doesn’t know quite who they are, but given what they are now talking about, she doesn’t want to be recognized. She wants to leave as quickly and quietly as possible. She looks again toward the kitchen, hoping to see Amy and signal for the check, but there is no one. She’s stuck and there is nothing she can do to keep from hearing this woman, who seems to not take even the shortest breath between her words.