After the game was over, I’d put away our badminton racquets and doled out the kids’ Popsicles. I was leaning on the counter in the kitchen, flipping through a J.Crew catalog and sucking on a Popsicle of my own, when Regina came up alongside me, so quietly that when I heard her voice, I jumped.
“I like watching you play with the children,” she said, in that oddly flat, whispery voice of hers. “I like seeing them having a good time with someone. Even if the person isn’t me. Which it never is.”
“I’m not very good at badminton,” I told her. “I never played it before.”
“But you know how to play,” she said. “I’m not talking about a particular game. You know how toplayis all. You know how to be playful. I have no clue.”
I might have refuted this to make her feel better. But she was right, of course. I’d seen what happened the one time Jilly tried to get her mother to engage in one of those inane scenarios with her American Girl doll—tea parties, discussions of boys or kittens. When she told Regina “you be Molly,” Regina went mute.
“I don’t know how to talk like a doll,” she’d told Jilly. “I don’t know what dolls are supposed to say.”
“My husband, on the other hand,” Regina continued, “there’s someone who’s a master at playing. Playing may actually be the onlything Forrest knows how to do. To Forrest, everything’s a game. The man’s got a unique talent for having a good time. That’s probably why everyone loves him so much.”
I was still standing there, leaning against the counter, licking my Popsicle. I was studying a pair of J.Crew pants I’d never be able to afford.
“It’s true about me, isn’t it?” she asked me. “I’m just not much fun, am I?”
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say.
“Everybody loves Forrest,” she told me again. “But nobody understands him the way I do. I know everything.”
I had finished my Popsicle. Now Regina did a strange thing. (Regina did many strange things, but this was stranger than most of them.) She reached out and took the Popsicle stick out of my hand. She considered it for a second. Then she drew the stick across her neck as if it were a dagger. As if she were slitting her own throat.
“Let me tell you something, Frances,” she said. “It’s not a gift to be envied, knowing everything. There’s such a thing as knowing way ... too ... much.”
Sometime in the middle of that night, I thought I heard noises in the bedroom below mine, where Forrest slept. I was half asleep. At first I thought there must be some kind of animal in the house, making some kind of high-pitched wailing. Maybe the animal had been injured, and snuck in a window.
I took a minute to realize it wasn’t that.
It was Regina, crying out. And a second voice, deep and low. This voice I knew. It belonged to Forrest. This must be what he sounded like when he was making love.
She’s trying to hold on to him,I thought.
Then came another thought:But he’s already drifting away. And there’s probably nothing she can do to stop it.
26
The Heartbreak of Jacqueline du Pré
For the Fourth of July party coming up at the club, everyone was supposed to wear something red, white, and blue. Nothing I had with me went with the dress code.
“I’m taking you shopping,” Regina said. I might have been wrong, but I got the feeling she needed to distract herself. In all the time I’d been living with the Emersons that summer—a month now—this was the first time I’d seen Regina take the steering wheel of their Jeep Wagoneer. She drove slowly, with both hands on the wheel, and stared straight ahead, sitting up perfectly straight, her back not touching the seat. She checked the rearview mirror regularly.
We didn’t go to a mall, or the outlet stores along the highway. She brought me to a place that looked as if it had been in business since before my parents were born. They had a display in the window of women’s suits that looked like the kind of thing Nancy Reagan would wear, only cheaper.
“We’re looking for a party dress,” Regina told the salesperson. “Patriotic theme.” The woman took out a dress with cap sleeves, royal blue, with white piping around the neck.
“Our young friend could wear this with a simple red cardigan,” the saleslady said, addressing Regina. “Or red accessories. A flag pin, maybe.”
Regina accompanied me to the dressing room. Not anticipating this, I’d worn my undershirt, not the training bra, which I’d washed that morning in the sink of my upstairs bathroom so Prudence wouldn’t see it in the family laundry. My jeans already on the floor, I pulled my shirt over my head, leaving me in my cotton undershirt and underpants. Regina studied my body the way a visitor at an art museum might consider an abstract painting she didn’t understand or care for.
“You haven’t hit puberty, I see.” Regina sat on a stool in the dressing room, assessing my body. No visible breast development still, and I was holding my stomach in.
“You don’t need to do that,” she said. Regina missed nothing. “You’re going to have a nice body. Just wait. I know it seems uncomfortable now, but things are going to get better for you.”
Did they get better for you?I wanted to ask her. I probably knew the answer.
I studied my reflection. The dress the salesperson had selected for me was not the kind I’d pick out for myself, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to make Regina happy. I also knew, as her husband did, that this was impossible.
