The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [31]
Chapter 10
Perhaps it was inevitable that Tess Monaghan’s favorite girlhood book was Harriet the Spy. As a grown-up Harriet, she had not been able to avail herself of many of Harriet’s techniques—there were few dumbwaiters in Baltimore into which she could crawl, and a utility belt simply called too much attention to the wearer—but it was Harriet who taught her to love black-and-white composition books. And she had liked Harriet’s practice of trying to figure out what people looked like based on simply hearing their voices. After speaking to Ethel Zimmerman on the phone, she decided the wispy-voiced lady would be quite frail, perhaps dependent on a walker, and given to an old-fashioned sense of propriety in dress. A hat, even gloves.
Ah, well—not even Harriet batted 1.000 in this particular game. Ethel Zimmerman, a very peppy seventy-something, all but bounded into Tess’s sickroom, arrayed in a bright blue tracksuit and white Pumas. She was wearing a hat of sorts—a powder-blue visor stamped with the name of an Atlantic City casino.
“Do you gamble?” Tess asked this vision in peacock blue, stalling while she tried to find her mental footing. She had prepared for a meeting with someone who would need to be coddled. This woman looked like she could arm wrestle Tess and win, even back in her pre-pregnancy days.
“Do I . . . ?” She touched the brim of her visor. “Oh, no. Yard sale. Fifty cents. They wanted a dollar.” She plucked the sleeve of her tracksuit. “This still had the tags on it. Fifty-five dollars, if you can believe it. I got it for seven on eBay.”
“And the shoes?”
“Shoes are tough,” Mrs. Zimmerman admitted in her thin whisper. “I go to DSW, places like that. I won’t wear used shoes. Or underwear. I’m fussy that way.”
She said this with pride, as if this principle made her unusual, even finicky.
“Is there something wrong?” Mrs. Zimmerman asked.
“Oh, no, it’s just that—you’re so much . . . bouncier than I expected. On the phone you sounded . . .” There was simply no euphemism for old and frail, so Tess let the sentence go.
“Cancer of the larynx,” she said with amazing cheer. “My husband left while I was still in the hospital. Best thing that ever happened to me, that partial laryngectomy, because otherwise I might not have had a Ralphectomy, and that’s what needed cut out of my life.”
Wow, Tess thought. And people think oversharing is a phenomenon limited to the young.
“So you knew Carole,” Ethel said, drawing up a chair. “And she asked you to get in touch with me?”
“Sort of,” Tess said. “It’s complicated. First—if you don’t mind—could you tell me how well you knew her, if you kept in touch with her through the years?”
“I’ve known her all her life. Her sister, too. Our neighborhood may not be a fancy one, but it was stable. Her older sister was good friends with my sons. Carole was younger, one of those change-of-life babies, we called them then, back when people didn’t wait, and start trying to have babies at forty.” She gave Tess’s belly a significant look.
“I’m thirty-five,” Tess said faintly, wondering if she should add: And it was an accident! My boyfriend has super sperm! It defeated a diaphragm and spermicide. This is a zygote of destiny.
“Carole’s sister, she was like a daughter to me, and my sons felt the same way about the Massingers. They wore a path between the two houses, coming and going. Carole was so much younger, she was more like a grandchild. We all doted on her, but it only made her sweeter. In fact, she was the best behaved of the lot. People talk about spoiling children as if they are plants that get overwatered and rot at the root. It’s actually hard to pay too much attention to a child. A lot of what people call spoiling is ignoring, substituting things for time. These Game Boys, these iPods, all these computers and gadgets—they let the parents off the hook, don’t they? There’s a difference between buying a child everything under the sun and spending time with them.