Alice Hoffman - Here On Earth

Although she should get home and start dinner, Louise goes over to the bakery table. She’s always had a soft spot for March Murray, that motherless child, that very foolish girl. Of course Louise has heard about March and Hollis renewing their relationship-it’s all over town that they left the Lyon together on Founder’s Day-but she certainly wouldn’t want Harriet Laughton to be apprised that their reunion is anything more than gossip. For her part, Louise knows more about Hollis than she cares to. She was one of those people who thought Henry Murray was crazy to bring him home in the first place, since she’d been informed, via the Judge, that by the age of thirteen Hollis had been at Juvenile Hall over twenty times. His own family couldn’t handle him, so what did Henry expect? Perhaps Louise’s attitude concerning Hollis was a narrow one, but she still thinks she was right. No. She is certain that she was right. They should have left Hollis up in Boston, where he belonged.

“I guess you’re not going to worry about calories today,” Louise says as she comes up to March.

March has bought two of the tarts Harriet Laughton insists are baked with lard, and a bag of chocolate chip cookies. When she sees it’s Louise beside her, March puts down her purchases so she can embrace her.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” March laughs. “I had an urge for all this.” She looks beautiful in the thin sunlight; her skin is so fresh and she has that sweet, dizzy expression that women with secrets often possess.

Louise waits for March to pay for the baked goods, and that’s when she sees the ring.

“Do you like it?” March has noticed Louise staring and now she holds up her hand. “It was Judith Dale’s.”

“Yes. I recognized it.”

They are heading toward the parking lot now, and Louise simply ignores the pain in her side.

“What an incredible day,” March says, staring up at the blue sky.

“Susie says you’re staying longer than you’d originally planned,” Louise says, tactfully, she hopes.

“There’s so much to go through in that house. It’s like sifting through the past.”

March has always liked Louise, but now she wishes they hadn’t run into each other. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. She doesn’t want to think. She’s going to have to tell Richard, and yet she can’t. In the evenings, the phone rings and rings, but she doesn’t answer. Instead, she calls his office at odd hours, when she knows he won’t be there and she can leave cheerful messages. Well-meaning little reports which contain absolutely no personal information.

“That’s what Susie says, there’s a lot to be done.” Louise will leave it at that. She doesn’t need to have it all spelled out for her; she can tell what’s going on from the look on March’s face. She used to notice the same thing with the Judge sometimes, that identical dazed expression, half puzzled, half delirious, like a man who’d been struck by lightning and was somehow glad of it.

“Gwen has been getting her homework sent to her, but now she’s after me to let her register for school here, and the craziest thing is, I’m seriously wondering if we should try it for a while.”

Louise nods, although, actually, she feels like crying. She considers March to be a young woman, and she considers all young women to be fools. At twenty you’re convinced you know everything, but forty is even worse; that’s when you’ve realized no one can know everything, and yet when it comes to certain situations, you still believe yourself to be an absolute expert. When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure. That’s what you learn at sixty, and, as it turns out, no one is ever surprised by this bit of news.

They’ve reached an ancient, battered Toyota parked in the last row. Louise waits while March throws open the hatchback and places her purchases inside.

“Ken Helm lent this to me. An old aunt of his used to drive it.”

“Lucy Helm.” Louise nods. Lucy Helm was known to be one of the worst drivers in town. People swore the old lady fell asleep at red lights.

“May be I’ll stay around a little while longer,” March says as she closes the hatchback. “If Gwen really wants to.”

Poor girl, Louise thinks. The excuses one can make for love; the lies one tells.

“Well, if you need anything while you’re here, all you have to do is call,” Louise says.

“You’re a doll.”

March feels a surge of affection for Louise; she hugs her, but when March gets into the borrowed Toyota, she’s shaking. She knows she’s a liar. She’s well aware that Gwen’s infatuation with an old horse and with-according to Susie, who definitely has her sources-a boy who happens to be her first cousin is not what keeps March in Jenkintown. If anything, such variables should be driving her away. If March were her usual self, she’d be shocked at the possibility of Gwen dating a cousin. Instead, she’s convinced herself it’s puppy love, if that, and will quickly pass if left unchallenged.

She has to lie about what’s really holding her here, even to herself. Only this morning, she lied her head off over waffles and coffee at the Bluebird’s lunch counter. She actually kept a straight face while she told Susie she was trying to decide what to do next. Maybe a separation would be good for her and Richard’s relationship, and although she’d been talking to Hollis on the phone, accepting that ride home from him hadn’t led to anything. Why, she might even allow Gwen to sign up at the high school and finish out the semester.

Susie had sat there the entire time with her mouth puckered, as though she’d been eating lemons. For one thing, Susie had already run into Millie Hartwig, who works at the high school cafeteria, and Millie had informed Susie that March Murray’s daughter had registered for classes. For another, Susie couldn’t help but notice there were love bites all up and down March’s neck, which March herself didn’t realize until she went out to her borrowed car to drive home and caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror. After that, March got out a turtleneck sweater to wear, but even dressed in all that insulating wool she gets the chills just thinking about Hollis. She’s like some foolish teenager; she can’t seem to get him out of her mind no matter how hard she tries. Sometimes, he phones her at the exact moment when she’s thinking of him; she carries the phone into the pantry, for privacy, and they talk for hours. Every word he says is interesting to her; she’s never the first to hang up, not even when Gwen knocks on the pantry door and asks what’s going on.

Liar that she’s become, March doesn’t tell Gwen who’s on the phone, just as she doesn’t admit the truth about her destination when she goes out at night. She has to stop at the pharmacy, she needs to walk for the sake of exercise, she and Susie are going to a movie, into Boston, shopping at Laughton’s, to a lecture at the library. She meets him at the end of the driveway, where he’s waiting in his truck, or now that she has Ken Helm’s old car, she drives herself to the old Highway Motel where Route 22 meets up with the Interstate.

She is crazy for him, exactly as she used to be. More so, because back then she was a girl who didn’t know any better; she wasn’t somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, a grown woman who should, by this time in her life, understand the value of caution. A few nights ago, they were on the phone at two in the morning, whispering about what they’d like to be doing to each other, when Hollis suddenly decided he was coming over. March asked him not to-Gwen was asleep in the sewing room, the dog was in the hallway, stretched out by the door-but he had already hung up on her.