The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [36]
Beth, Liz, and May arrived exactly on time. Lloyd, bless him, was late as usual. Way to impress your mothers-in-law, Tess thought. May, bracketed by her mothers, met his eyes only briefly, then returned to staring at her lap. She was an undeniably beautiful girl, with straight hair that hung halfway down her back and a willowy frame. She was quiet, at least in Tess’s presence, and it had been hard to imagine how she managed as a tutor, especially with someone as obdurate and contrary as Lloyd. At least, it was difficult to imagine until one saw the way Lloyd looked at her.
After some awkward and superficial conversation about Crow’s food—How could blueberry macadamia nut muffins be low-fat?—Beth finally got down to cases.
“Lloyd, we’re not going to forbid you to see May, because I think that would be counterproductive,” she said. “But the idea of being engaged at your age is simply ridiculous.”
Tess worried that Lloyd would get angry, revert to the posturing swagger he had used when she first knew him. But Lloyd was remarkably composed.
“Why?” he asked.
The question seemed to catch Beth off-guard, perhaps because she considered the reasons so obvious. Tess had, too—until Lloyd asked that they be enumerated. Why shouldn’t people get engaged at eighteen? They were too young. It wouldn’t work out. They might compromise their futures. They couldn’t possibly know what they wanted. What was the rush? Tess knew all these things were true, yet they sounded a little hollow, racing through her head. Her parents hadn’t been that much older.
“You’re too young,” Beth began.
“Romeo and Juliet were teenagers,” Lloyd said.
“Yes—in a play,” Beth said. “A play about people whose life expectancy was about half yours, in an era where people made early marriages, in part, because—” She broke off, clearly not wanting to finish her thought. Tess wondered if she had caught herself before suggesting that people used to get married in order to have sex. Funny, how they continued to tiptoe around that topic.
“Would you and Liz get married, if you could?” Lloyd asked.
“That’s not relevant to this discussion,” Beth said, even as Liz said, “We might, if some people would consider going to California.”
“I’m not spending the money to go all the way to California to go through some patriarchal ceremony that doesn’t, in the end, mean anything.”
“It would mean something to me,” Liz said.
May sat between them, eyes downcast. Tess tried to imagine the world as this girl saw it. Did she remember the orphanage where she had lived until she was almost three? Did she dream about the parents who had abandoned her, wonder about a world where the mere fact of gender could make a child unwanted? What had she thought about going from no mother to two? When had it registered that her life was not like most children’s? What had drawn her to Lloyd? Did they talk about their lives, their childhoods? Did she feel luckier by contrast, knowing that Lloyd’s biological mother had essentially abandoned him at his stepfather’s request?
“What about you, May?” Tess asked.
“I love Lloyd,” she said. “Beth and Liz say I can’t know that. But I do.”
“Actually, I was wondering where you stood on their marriage?”
Beth flushed, angry. Tess knew she had overstepped, but she didn’t care.
“I want them to be happy,” May said.
“We are happy,” Beth and Liz chorused.
“You were,” their daughter said. “Before this summer, when Liz started to talk about getting married. Then you started to fight. A lot.”
“But we’re not fighting about our commitment to one another,” Beth said. “We’re fighting about a principle. To me, marriage is an institution from which I was barred for most of my adult life. Like . . . a country club that didn’t take blacks or Jews. Sorry, Lloyd.”
“No problem,” he said. “I know I’m black.”
That sparked