The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [49]
I want to move to Paris.
She turns on the car radio, hoping to drown out her own thoughts. “Those Were the Days.” An oldie, at least a decade past its prime. Clem clearly drove her car at some point in the past few days.
What Tally actually wants is a do-over, to move to Paris at age eighteen, to return to a time when she had such choices. The problem is, she is forever destined to make the same choice, because the facts never change: she was eighteen, accepted at Wellesley, having a wonderfully secret affair with a thirty-two-year-old man, her father’s colleague and her uncle’s best friend.
And she believed she was pregnant, although she never told Clem that. If she had to get married—and she thought she did—at least the groom could believe it was pure love. Besides, she wasn’t an artist then, she wouldn’t have dreamed of Paris, or even New York. She thought her choices were Clem or Wellesley. If she had found a way to get rid of the baby, it just would have been Wellesley and then another, possibly lesser, version of Clem four years later. Girls of her time and class were not programmed to bring home the bacon. Her dilemma—the eternal human dilemma—is that she wants a chance to revisit her choices with full knowledge of the future. But there’s a reason that there’s no game show where they throw a car, a washer-dryer, and a goat onstage and ask you to select forthrightly among them. Where’s the drama in that? Where’s the suspense? The only possible surprise would be the one-in-a-million person who picks the goat, on the grounds that he doesn’t drive and already has a serviceable washer-dryer.
If Tally ever had three wishes, she expended them long ago, on the most mundane things. Everyone has wishes—and everyone squanders them. The fairy tales got that right. Magic exists only to screw with you. Eggs, for example. She wished for eggs not five minutes ago, and while most people think a wish should produce the desired thing at that instant, in a puff of smoke, who’s to say that her wish isn’t being granted as she drives to the store, money in her purse? Somewhere on the planet, in this very city perhaps, a person is wishing for eggs right now and can’t have them. So Tally wishes for Paris and somewhere else right now—in Logan Airport, the airport of her youth—a beautiful young woman is waiting to board an Air France flight, a rucksack at her feet, her future wider and broader than the ocean she’s about to cross. Whatever you want at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for. In the time it takes her to work this out, Tally has driven the mile to the store, parked, gone in, and grabbed a carton of eggs, checking the expiration date. She can’t begin to list all the stale, expired, past-their-sell-date items she has brought home from this store.
And now she is waiting in an interminable line because the store is, of course, perpetually understaffed. She tries to hold on to the serene, wise persona she discovered in the car, focusing on the back of the head in front of her. Be in the moment. Breathe. Live. That’s the secret to happiness. Notice the pink-and-blue flowery scarf, over pink curlers, which are twisted around pinky-red hair, the material of the scarf thin enough so one can see how sparse and dull the hair is. Sad. Ugliness is sad.
The woman turns, as if she knows she’s being judged.
“Oh.” Tally tries to cover the rudeness of her shock, tries to make the exhalation sound more what-a-pleasant-surprise than fuck-you-look-awful. “Hi, Doris.”
“Hello, Tally.” Doris Halloran holds up her box of Hamburger Helper, as if Tally is a higher authority to whom she must report her nutritional decisions. “It’s what they want.”
“Gwen loves it, too. I guess I’m meaner than you because I never let her have it.”
“That girl gets