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  She stared at me for another moment and then said, “Get in the car.”

  “Livvy—”

  “I’m not moving till you get in this car,” she said, with the iron of old Massachusetts money in her voice. The chorus of horns swelled. I got into the car and slammed the door and she screeched away up Peachtree Street.

  We did not speak again until she swerved into the fake fifties diner that newly occupied an old car wash and stopped.

  “Where’s your car?” she said. “Where have you been? What’s the matter with you? You’ve got red blotches all over your neck and chest.”

  “I’ve been to the doctor,” I said in my grandmother Bell’s dreadful, sunny voice. “I’ve got some kind of allergy; it’s nothing. Charlie Davies gave me some stuff for it. My car…my car…” I looked down at my blossoming chest; my backside was indeed colonizing new flesh. I smiled at Livvy. Even I knew it was what Tee calls a shit-eating grin; I could taste it on my mouth.

  “I guess I left my car in the parking lot at Charlie’s.”

  “Uh-huh. And you were going where?”

  A little lick of annoyance managed to penetrate the smog of Bell denial.

  “Who are you, Joseph Mengele? ‘Vee haff ways to make you talk.’ I was going home, of course; where do you think I was going?”

  She just looked at me. My face flamed and my chest burst into a Flanders Field of red; I could feel it. I lived in Ansley Park, in the opposite direction of the way I had been walking, and had for nearly twenty years. I had been making for my parents’ old home, the one I had grown up in, on Peachtree Hills Avenue. They had not lived there for the past five years, but in a condominium behind St. Philips Episcopal Cathedral in Buckhead.

  I knew that Livvy knew that. I put my face in my hands and began to cry.

  “Tee is having an affair,” I sobbed. “I just found out. I don’t know what to do about the family.”

  Livvy and Caleb live in a sprawling brick house in Brookwood Hills, a leafy old family enclave across from Piedmont Hospital and its attendant doctors’ buildings. I have always loved that neighborhood. I wanted to look there when we were finally able to leave the Collier Hills starter house, but Tee felt Ansley Park had a more international feeling to it, and that was the direction Coke was going in. Many of the new transferees were buying and gentrifying the old town houses there, and besides, you could walk to the Piedmont Driving Club. Tee’s family had always belonged. Mine had never even been to a wedding reception there. So we found and remodeled our own tall town house with a tiny walled garden. I liked it, and had sunk a few roots and had raised my children there, but it never felt like Atlanta to me. “You can’t just walk down the street on a spring evening in Ansley Park,” I told Livvy once. “You have to have the right kind of suit. A jogging suit, or a cycling suit, or a Rollerblading suit, or a dog-walking suit…and the right kind of dog, of course. Lazarus definitely does not cut it in AP. I’m thinking of renting a dalmatian just to walk it.”

  “I’d be thinking of moving,” Livvy snapped. “A dalmatian would be laughed out of Brookwood Hills.”

  We skidded through traffic and she hung a heart-stopping left across two lanes; we were in her sunny kitchen with cups of coffee before I could stop the treacherous sobs. I could not even remember the last time I had cried.

  “Tell,” she said, handing me a hot washcloth, and I mopped my face and told.

  When I stopped talking, she snorted and said, “That’s just shit, Molly. Tee’s not having any affair. In the first place, you-all are joined at the hip. In the second place, when would he? Caleb’s out with him when he’s traveling; don’t you think I’d know if Tee wasn’t where…he said he was? Some doctor you’ve got. Some friend, too.”

  “Charlie saw him, Livvy—”

  “Excuse me, pet, but how does Charlie know it was Tee? Every man in Atlanta in a certain class and age group looks just like Tee. Most of them work for Coke.”

  I had to smile, even through the thready galloping of my heart, because she was right, or partly. There is a type of wellborn Atlanta man who looks enough like Tee to be his kin, and may be: tall, lanky, blond-going-gray, hands jammed in pockets, with the shambling gait of the college athlete most of them were. Tee was the starting forward on UGA’s basketball team the year we graduated and the team won the SEC championship; he still had the loose-jointed, pigeon-toed lope that went with the position. His hair was short now and gilded with gray, and fell over his forehead, and there were fine wrinkles at the corners of his blue eyes, but he was still snub-nosed and thin to the point of boniness, and his grin still charmed and warmed. We had been a stunning couple in college, a study in opposites but of nearly matched height, and we had known it then. I had long since forgotten. I wondered if Tee had.

  “Charlie was Tee’s roommate for four years,” I said. “He’d know him if he saw him. He thought the girl—the woman—was Caroline. So she must be tall and dark and very young. And pretty, of course. Caroline is a very pretty girl.”

  “Crap. If the guy was hidden behind a palm tree, how could this wonderful Charlie be sure? It’s not like you to jump to this kind of silly conclusion, Molly. You’ve never had any reason to doubt Tee’s faithfulness…have you?”

  “No,” I said, and knew that it was true, knew it with the same baseless interior certainty with which I had known the truth of Charlie’s words this morning. Tee had not strayed before this.

  “If he was going to, don’t you think he’d pick a better time?” Livvy said. “He’s traveling with a team of nine people. He’s almost never in the same city two nights in a row. He’s in meetings from breakfast until midnight. Unless she’s a stewardess with a key to the rest room, Tee’s not banging anybody but you. And he’s sure not doing it in those particular condos. Half of Coke lives there.”

  “But I’ve had this breaking out since Christmas, and that’s when he started traveling…it’s gotten really bad. It’s like my body knew something that my head didn’t, yet. I feel so damned sure, Livvy…and Charlie said stress could do that to you.”

  “So can poison ivy. So can whatever you wash your underwear in. I think you’ve slipped a cog. What could Tee possibly want that you don’t give him?”

  “I’ve gained a lot of weight,” I said in a low voice. “I don’t think about it much, but I know I have. I don’t take the pains with myself that I used to. You should have seen me in college, Liv. I was homecoming queen my junior year. Tee and I…we were something to see together.”

  “You still are,” she said. “Don’t you know people turn around on the street to look at you? You look glorious. You look like an Amazon princess, or like…like…”

  “If you say Moonbeam McSwine, I’ll throttle you,” I said, beginning to grin in spite of myself. Some of the cold weight had lifted off my chest. The fire in my fanny and neck was cooling.

  “That, too,” Livvy said, and reached over and put her hands over mine. Hers were warm. I realized only then that despite the day’s sullen heat, I was as cold as ice, as death.

  “Listen,” she said. “I don’t for a minute think you’ve got anything to worry about, and if you look at it rationally, you’ll see that I’m right. But Moll…what if, just what if, there was somebody else? What would it mean to you, what would you do?”

  I stared at her. What would it mean? Why…the end of everything. The end of the family. God, the family…why didn’t she see?

  “What do you think it would mean?” I said. “What would it mean to you? If it was Caleb, I mean?”

  She shrugged. “Depends. On whether it was serious or a fling or some kind of silly midlife thing. Depends on how sorry he was.”

  She smiled. Her long Back Bay teeth were the color of rich old ivory. No anxious cosmetic bonding or bleaching for Olivia Carrington Bowen; even loving Carrie Davies, who knew how close I was to Livvy, had said once that Livvy looked like a horse.

  “But the thoroughest of thoroughbreds,” I’d rejoined shortly. Carrie ha
d snorted, sounding herself like a horse. I knew that she did not approve of Livvy’s and my friendship.

  “She’s not like us, Moll,” Carrie had said. “She won’t ever be. She doesn’t even try.”

  “And that’s why I like her,” I snapped, hoping to put an end to the subject. And I had. My old crowd did not espouse Livvy Bowen, but in my presence they no longer denigrated her, either.

  “And what would you do?”

  “I’d snatch him baldheaded, and then her,” Livvy said. “I’d give him two hours to wind it up quietly, and if he didn’t, I’d tell Coke he couldn’t keep it zipped, and tell her he had a penile implant. And if he still wouldn’t, I’d throw his stuff out the door and change the locks and hire the meanest lawyer this side of the Mississippi River.”

  She looked at me with only a half smile. I thought that she was not altogether kidding.

  “What about Dana and Elizabeth?” I said, thinking of Livvy and Caleb’s two daughters, both in college in the East. “What about the family?”

  “Dana and Elizabeth are neither one coming back home after school,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve always known that. Much as I love them, they aren’t going to be a big factor in my future. They’d have to make their own separate peaces with it. Molly, that’s the third time you’ve said ‘the family.’ Not ‘my family,’ but ‘the family.’ What is it with you and ‘the family’? It’s like you mean some kind of idea, instead of your own people…”

  The family. The family…

  When my mother married my father, she was twenty-one years old and an actress and dancer, or at least aspiring to be one. She was, he said once, as lovely as a silver minnow in a creek. Her name was Mary Belinda Fallon, but she called herself Belle Fallon professionally. She had had unpaid parts in a number of local theatrical productions and one badly paid part in the chorus of a touring company of Lilli at Chastain Amphitheatre in Buckhead, and was scheduled for a far better speaking and dancing role in the next year’s touring production of West Side Story. Her blue-black hair and milky skin had caught the eye of more than one regional producer; she had reason to think she could go as far as her lithe legs and low, purring voice could take her. But then she met and married Timothy Bell, and since she could not be billed as Belle Bell, took the fatuous stage name Tinker Bell. It was Dad’s nickname for her; he’d called her Tinker from the day he’d met her. She was as erratic and glinting and shining and ethereal as the frail, jealous sprite in Peter Pan, and she might well have gone on to make a name for herself on the stage, for she had, in addition to her looks and a middling talent, enormous presence. Even at home she had it, even at rest. I really think she was born with it.

  But she was pregnant when she married Daddy, and by the time I was born, a giant of a baby according to her—a wrecker of pelvises and stomach muscles—her trajectory was broken, and she climbed into no more rarefied air than that of local theatrical productions and later, acting and dancing lessons. My poor mother: the heart of a gypsy, the soul of a prowling tiger, forever trapped in local productions of Showboat and Auntie Mame, and once, with notable success, Hedda Gabler. It was a bitter loss to her, and perhaps worse for the rest of us. It was catastrophic for me. She never ceased blaming me for it.

  Oh, she never would admit that she did that, and in all fairness, probably did not know it. I certainly did not. I knew only that something about my size, my very person, was unseemly and worse: damaging. Dangerous. I can remember trying to fold myself into a smaller shape when I was no more than four, and slouching like a little old osteoporosis victim when my real spurt of growth started, at nine or ten. By twelve I was five feet eleven inches, within a hair of what I am now, and felt as unclean as a leper. Of us all in the smallish house on Peachtree Hills Avenue—my mother, my father, my granny Bell, my brother, Kevin, and me—only my father seemed to know what Tinker Bell was about with her little jeweled barbs flung gracefully at me, her fastidious little shudders and drawings aside when I blundered too close to her. At those times he would hold out his arms to me, or make a dry, small joke at my mother’s expense, or sometimes simply say, in his quiet voice, “Tink…”

  My mother would run at me then, and fold me into her arms and smother me with kisses that she had to stand on tiptoe to deliver, and say, in her lovely lilt, “As if it were your fault, my darling! As if you asked to be such a nice big armful!”

  And, encircled in her warm, sweet, reaching flesh, I would feel the full, ponderous weight and height of my nice big armful, and her arms would feel as cold and alien to me as marble.

  It would have been impossible not to see that Kevin, my younger brother and nearly the twin of my mother, fit with every slender, quicksilver inch of him into her arms. Flesh of her flesh might have been written for my mother and my brother.

  Many years later, after a near killing loss, I found myself doubled over on my bed, arms folded across my stomach, rocking to and fro and weeping, in a kind of mindless mantra, “I want my mother! I want my mother!”

  And knowing, in a terrible epiphany, that even though she was only ten or so blocks away, I had never had her, and could not now. There has never been anything in my life like that moment for sheer, monstrous aloneness. Never, not anything. I don’t think there ever will be again.

  It seems odd to me now that it was for her that I wept that day when, from the first moment of remembered awareness, it was to my father that I ran for comfort. But perhaps it is not so strange, after all. Any child knows, with a cell-deep certainty, when he has been given only half. Later, when that half has proved strong enough to sustain and propel, he may not miss the unproffered other half of sustenance so much, may not even remember a time when its absence starved and terrified. But the void, the abyss of its absence, is with the child always, and when great loss comes, as it so often does in the middle years, much of the attendant anguish is for that earliest loss. And so, on that hot day in a much later spring, I wailed for my mother and then got up and called my father. As he always had been, he was there, and as it always had, pain and fear shrank back. I have never been unaware as to whom I owed my life.

  It used to make me wild when he would refuse to do battle with my mother, to avenge my hurt.

  “I don’t think ballet, darling,” she said when I was six and wanted to join the magical classes she taught in our remodeled garage, where willowy little girls wore soft leather slippers and tied their hair high in severe buns and moved like wildflowers in the wind of her presence. A wall of scummed mirrors gave back their images, and a long bamboo bar was a trellis for them. It was the loveliest thing I had ever seen, and she was the mistress. If I were one of them, I would be one with her.

  “Why?”

  Even I could hear the whine in my voice.

  “Because you are already far too big,” she said coolly. She hated whining. I stopped doing it early. Now I hate it, too.

  “I’ll stop growing.”

  “You’ve only started growing. You’ll reach the moon. You would look terribly out of place in a corps, and of course you could never hope to solo. You will be a giant, heroic woman; you must be the one who holds the ropes, not the acrobat. Whatever would the world do without its rope holders?”

  “Swim,” my father said when the tears overflowed my bottom lashes. “You’ve got just the streamlined build for it. You’ll look like a mermaid in the water. I’ll teach you.”

  And he did and signed me up for lessons at the Chastain Park pool, and cheered me on when the prowess he had predicted propelled me to victory after victory in the free stroke and relay. He took double shifts at the post office during my teenaged years to pay for my tuition at Westminster, and was always there to cheer me on when I brought home medals and cups for the school, even when Mother had a night class and could not attend. I was never popular at Westminster, not with the petite Buckhead girls whose cliques I aspired to, but I was known and applauded, and that gave me impetus enough to live with some equanimity until, in my last year of
middle school, I suddenly began to come into my looks. It seemed to happen overnight; it almost drowned me at first. I was forever looking warily at the vivid image in mirrors and store windows. Who was that? Soon sidelong glances and a scattering of dates, usually with older (and taller) boys, followed. Miniskirts stopped looking, as my mother said, like tutus on a Clydesdale and started to showcase enough long, tanned, smooth-muscled leg to occasion whistles and calls from downtown construction crews. I began to stand to my height, and to stride instead of shuffle. I learned to smile openly and fully.

  My father gave me all that.

  And, when I wanted to try out for the varsity basketball team at the start of my junior year and my mother raised her silky black brows and said, “Do you really want to go lumbering around a gymnasium sweating like a draft horse with girls who have mustaches?,” my father said, “You could model. There’s a guy at the post office whose daughter is signed up with some model agency or something. She does fashion shows and even TV commercials. I’ll find out about it.”

  And he did, and I signed with Peachtree Models and Talent that summer, and finished putting myself through Westminster and much of the University of Georgia on runways and in production studios. I learned to move and be comfortable with stillness, and to engage a camera with my eyes, even to lower my Amazonian bray to the clear, throaty voice I still have. Mother was proud of all that, though she could not resist giving me stilted instructions on moving and walking and stretching my neck, which had to be tossed out before the camera. And she began to shop for clothes with me, and even though she was wont to say things like, “Smocking and Twiggy baby dresses on someone your height are ludicrous, Molly. I don’t even think they make them in your size,” still, she steered me away from the kittenish excesses of mid-sixties dress that would have made me look ludicrous, indeed.

  I could and did thank my father for all that, too.

  But I could not make him defend me verbally to her, and that drove me early to rages of protest against the unfairness of her exquisite little sorties against me. Unfairness is the earliest and most irremedial of the world’s wounds that a child encounters. It is never forgiven.