Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

so close that you can see the wheels retracting into their bellies, drowning out sounds of life in the narrow streets where sycamore trees are cropped into knobs like arthritic hands, and small houses with pointed tile roofs stand behind meager fences in gardens the width of hallway carpets. Gus’s wrought-iron gate is enameled a flaking tan, and has an annoying long French key that must turn four times before the gate opens with a metallic groan. She has given me the key because I am staying with her since I walked out on my Parisian boyfriend after a summer of love and literature at the Sorbonne.

We stand in the kitchen, where Gus is fixing lunch. She mixes hunks of day-old bread with grated Gruyère and slices of a cabbage we bought at the outdoor market this morning. Before putting it in the oven, she sluices it with homemade onion soup. Her hands have a deftness that seems a bit show-off. This is a peasant dish, she tells me. Her husband ate it when he was a boy in a hilltop village half destroyed by German bombs. She has spent two scorching summers there, mainly in a kitchen plucking fowl and pickling cucumbers among female in-laws dressed like lay sisters in black.

Her kitchen is small and dark like all the other rooms in the house. In the living room hang a few watercolors of Maine islands. The kitchen looks out on rain and a wall covered with a vine whose leaves are turning the shiny yellow of children’s slickers. In a tiny driveway sits a battered but jaunty red MG. This car belongs to Gus’s husband, and she is not allowed to drive it when he is off leading tours. He is often away on long trips to Brazil, Yemen, Australia. Sometimes he flies with his mistress, who is a flight attendant he knew before he met Gus. Sometimes this woman, who has black hair and an ungenerous nature, parks outside their house in the middle of the night and screams insults.

There is a hard jauntiness in Gus’s voice as she speaks of her troubles that makes me feel almost as young and insignificant as I did when she was a debutante. We’re not exactly friends, not like Edie and me; yet a nameless bond has grown between us. She is six months pregnant and, except for her swollen belly, impossibly thin. Her skin and hair look almost phosphorescent in the Parisian autumn gloom. One afternoon when we go mushroom hunting in a nearby wood, I look at her sharp profile and pipestem wrists and for some reason remember the French trick rhyme I was reading at the party when she laughed at my tights: Un petit d’un petit s’étonne aux Halles. On a hillside dotted with cowpats, she holds up the basket of mushrooms—cèpes and pieds de moutons—and we bend over to smell them. There is no real fragrance, just a breath of moisture and decay.

Three years later when I’m living in Rome, she comes to visit me for a weekend. By then I have a cushy job at the United States Information Service. I live on Via Giulia and have a terrace in crumbling buff-colored stone and am quite the girl about town, with an Italian boyfriend and a Siamese cat. I’ve learned how to dress, where chic Roman women buy their underwear and shoes. Gus arrives with her second daughter on her back. The first little girl is rusticating with her grandparents in the Vercors. This baby is a round-headed blond cherub of eleven months who sucks with Rabelaisian vigor at her mother’s huge pearly breast. Gus has pink cheeks now, and talks about nettle teas and herbal ointments for eczemas, and mothers in Africa who nurse children until they are five or six. She has let her hair grow out into limp fair wisps that cling to her head in an unbecoming way that makes me think of feathers on ducklings, and she wears an embroidered Afghan shirt, out of style in Rome right now. My boyfriend teases me about “the hippie mamma,” and I feel vaguely insulted that he is not falling in love with her.

But that evening when we drive down Via Veneto in my little convertible, I see that Italians in nearby cars are turning to stare at us. Why is it that they are looking, that some wave, and somebody even honks? I turn around and see that Gus, like a woman casually shrugging on a wrap, has reassumed her old glamour. She and the gorgeous baby, both sitting tall and wearing big broad grins, are parading through the Roman night like a Hollywood Madonna and child.

We meet in Maine, after a space of several years. We are on an island in the Penobscot, a place ringed with granite boulders, where the locals speak in accents out of Sarah Orne Jewett, and the smell of woodsmoke carries for miles through the pines. There is a cove with three farmhouses that belong to Edie and Gus’s family, the same ancestral cove where in the long-ago film Gus and her cousin fed each other stones in perfect bliss. I am staying in the oldest farmhouse with my husband of one year. Speaking of bliss, we are at the accomplished stage in love when the sense of miracles has become triumphantly quotidian. There are the usual sea urchins and blueberries and gray mornings that become incandescent noons and hordes of freckled children in dinghies; and across the way is Edie with a dull husband, and somewhere around the edges is Gus, alone, in a cloud of rumor about the Frenchman. My husband wins a Fourth of July swimming race across the cove, and in the midst of the cheers and my own delirious pride, as he emerges from the icy water like a blue-lipped god, I glimpse Gus and note with surprise that she like everyone else is a small unimportant figure in