Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

Anne brushed past them, tugging off the fingers of her gloves. “Sean?” she called. And then, “Good travels, Dote. I’ll see you both next week.”

Al reached out for Mary Frances’s shopping bag.

“I have to see my father,” she said. “I have to say good-bye.”

“Fine, Mary Frances. Whatever you need to do.”

“Thank you.”

Rex was back in his study with his typewriter and a cup of coffee, the closed-up room rich with man and dust and book leather. Edith was forever trying to shove the cleaning woman through there, but Rex protected his schedule. His hours at home were few. He sat with his feet propped up on the desk, his glasses slipped down his nose and his arms thrown back as though he might solve whatever problem you presented, but that was just how he relaxed.

“Do you ever think,” he said, “if we’d not had those Sundays in Laguna? The ocean, Dote, such a magnificent balm. Without it, we’d have shot each other.”

Mary Frances went to him and pressed her lips against his head, his great big brilliant head. Sudden tears leaped to her eyes. She did not want to leave him, ever.

“I went to the house a few weeks ago,” she said.

“Oh? You didn’t say.”

“It was a secret mission.”

“Mary Frances Kennedy.” He put his feet back to the floor and looked at her. He seemed about to say something else but took her hand instead, pressing a fold of bills into her palm.

“For your missions,” he said. “Or whatever else arises.”

“Daddy. You embarrass me.”

“Then you, my dear, need a thicker skin. That there is mostly enough for a night on the town. A girl needs a night on the town, a new frock. These things don’t stop because you get too old to take money from your dad.”

“Al’s waiting,” she said.

“He’s been waiting since he got here, by the looks of it.”

Mary Frances tried to laugh.

“It’s all right, Dote.” Her father patted her hand where it rested on his shoulder. He could always read her deeper currents.

“I don’t think it is.” She shook her head. “It’s not.”

“We were all young once, dear. If it were so difficult to survive, we wouldn’t be here now.”

And she knew Rex meant to sound glib and cheery, but she found herself wondering what he’d given up or turned away, what inexorable choices he’d made beyond Edith and his children. Rex was barely fifty; how far was this life from the one he once imagined?

In the driveway, Al shook Rex’s hand, kissed Edith, opened Mary Frances’s door. In the flurry of remembrances for the holiday — Mary Frances would bring the Baltimore relish she had put up at the end of the summer, and Edith needed plenty of help with the goose — she said good-bye and fell silent.

She tried to remember if Al had always been this impatient with her, or if he only seemed so now because she knew he had the right to be. Her anger in return also seemed convenient. She thought of Anne in the dressing room of the shop, the willowy unhappiness she flounced like so much veil. Anne had done the thing that was supposed to make it better, she had left her husband, and yet she had not been able to quit the display of wanting to leave that had sustained her for so long. Her freedom seemed to leave her with nothing to push against. Her freedom, it seemed, had made things worse.

Mary Frances knew she would do anything not to end up like Anne. Even now she felt herself dividing, some false bottom giving way, making room for some other kind of life: there would be the truth of what she’d done, and she would keep that to herself, for herself. Then there would be the things she would do to keep it, and that could make a marriage. Couldn’t it?

She slipped across the seat. Her hand fit neatly in the pocket of Al’s trousers.

“Oh,” he said. “Would you look at this?”

She could feel his thigh clutch as she pressed her palm against him. She tried to say something with that pressure, but he kept his own hands on the steering wheel, and she couldn’t think of what to do next.

When he stopped the car in front of their house, the sun was low in the sky and terribly gold beneath the brow of clouds: Al looked handsome, and she told him so. She took his arm to walk inside. She led him to the sofa and sat on the edge of the tufted seat before him, her legs crossed primly, looking up. She imagined all his schoolgirls, their smooth young faces upturned, who must find him so handsome every morning at the lectern, their notebooks open and ready, pens in hand.

“Read me your poem, Mr. Fisher,” she said.

He laughed, but not as if she were funny. “Mary Frances.”

“Please.”

She stretched back and let her arms go long overhead, closed her eyes, and now the delicious sound of all that fabric upon itself, the catch and glide of her stockings to her skirt, her blouse pulling free at her waist. What was it the schoolgirls wore these days? She pushed one knee loose from the other and imagined Al standing between, the balance tilting her way, and god, she had hope. She imagined they were people who would do this, who would ravish each other come an early evening at home. Maybe if they were fast enough, they could sneak past all of it, wind up on the other side of these days, sweaty, spent, and somehow knit back together. It seemed possible. It seemed as if it were going to happen, and Mary Frances whispered, just once, his name, Al .

Nothing.

She opened her eyes, and she was alone. The room seemed suddenly bright with sunset. She pushed herself up, smoothing the back of her hair, her blouse. She heard the cupboards in the kitchen open and close, then Al with a sandwich in the doorway, three huge bites already gone.

She felt herself smile at him, surprised at how easily the pleasantness came to her. It closed many of the conversations of the day.

Later, she woke hungry, and slipped from her covers for the kitchen. On the counter was the crate of avocados they’d brought from the Ranch. She split one along the pit and took the saltcellar and a spoon, stood in her nightdress in the window’s blue light, scraping the flesh from its skin and sprinkling it with salt. She ate two avocados that way, and in the icebox, there was cold milk, and in the pantry, a big wedge of Edith’s cake, enough to fill her up, to send her back to bed. But it wasn’t so much about being hungry as it was about being alone.

She thought of that winter in France when it was so horribly cold, she’d never left their rooms, the long days waiting for Al to return from the university. She’d discovered tangerines. They could not be peeled too carefully, each velvety string stripped away, the bright sections left to dry atop the radiator on yesterday’s newspaper while she took her bath and brushed her hair. The tangerines filled the room with their perfume, and when they were tight to bursting in their skins, she opened the window and nestled them into the snow piled on the sill to eat when they were cold, changed somehow for all the care she’d spent on them. And not to serve or share, but care she’d spent for herself. Alone.

She found her notebook on the table and wrote this down.

She wondered if Tim had gotten to Delaware, and how long he would stay. She hoped, suddenly, for him to stay forever, just slip off the other side of the country where he came from. But then she remembered the flare of his match as he touched it to a cigarette, his quick draw of breath beside her in the darkness. She turned to him, the smooth hammered skin of his chest (she could not remember his bare chest, but her mind rose up to make it for her now), and she put her mouth down, his smoke still languishing in the air, in his hand, they would do anything not to talk, moving against each other again, the sheet tangled in her feet, and she wondered how much more of this night she had to remember and reinvent and relive until it would at last be over.