Deadly Beloved(9)

I should have been smarter about it, she thought now. I should have stayed in that bathroom and reduced my wedding dress to rags. I should have refused to go through with it.

It was a strange thing though, Molly thought. Men—both strong men like her father and weak ones like her husband—always made her feel the same thing. They made her feel that she couldn’t ever, ever, ever say no.





4.


BY NINE FORTY-FIVE THAT morning, Sarah Lockwood had counted up the numbers seven times, and each time she had come to the same small set of conclusions. In the first place, the debt they owed on credit cards now totaled $115,646.28. In the second place, the monthly bills for those credit cards came to $3550. If she added that to the mortgage on the house ($4500 a month) and the payment on the car ($580 a month) and the utilities ($640 a month) and the association fee for Fox Run Hill ($900 a month), their monthly payments came to $10,170—and that didn’t include food or club dues or eating out or any of the other things Sarah considered essential. It didn’t include new clothes or gas for the car. It didn’t include printing for Kevin’s résumés or postage for sending them out. It was the kind of debt that made people disappear into the night and take assumed names in distant states. Sarah imagined them blowing into town in some two-bit burg just outside Cleveland, getting jobs at the local diner, renting a mobile home on the edge of a swamp. Sarah had absolutely no idea how people lived when they didn’t have money. Just the little things took her breath away. Cooking every night, no matter how tired you were or how much you wanted Chinese food or how sick you felt with the flu. Waiting three years to buy a new living room couch, even though the old one was fraying. Driving used cars. Sarah kept thinking of Matilda, who had maided for them until they could no longer pay her. Matilda had come every morning in sprigged-print dresses so thin they seemed to wear out as you looked at them. She had walked in thick-soled black leather shoes that always seemed to have holes in the toes. She had put her hair up in gold bobby pins that shone in the sun and came apart whenever she bent over to pick something up from the floor. There was something else Sarah’s calculations hadn’t accounted for: twice-weekly visits to the hair salon and the dues at the Fox Run Hill Health Club. If you didn’t take good care of yourself, things happened to you. Your hair got gray. Your face got creased with lines. Your body got thick and lumpy. You got old.

Out in the kitchen, Kevin was washing dishes. Sarah could hear the clink-clink of glassware going into the wire rack. Ever since Kevin had lost his job, he had been crazy about doing the dishes. He hated seeing dirty dishes sitting in the sink. Sarah couldn’t count the number of glasses he had broken already, throwing things around out there. Lalique crystal. Steuben. Royal Doulton bone china. Sarah could still see herself, going from store to store in downtown Philadelphia, pulling out her gold MasterCard and her gold Visa card and all the rest of them. For a few years there she had been very well known to the people who ran the better jewelry stores and glassware specialty shops in Philadelphia. She had imagined herself to be the kind of woman she had imagined her great-grandmother to be. Known everywhere. Exacting in her standards. Meticulous about detail. A real grande dame of the real Main Line.

Actually, Sarah thought now, she knew exactly how people lived when they didn’t have any money. She had grown up in a family without any money—just that big house in Bryn Mawr with the portraits on the walls; just the yearly invitation to the Philadelphia Assemblies and the obligatory listing in the Philadelphia Blue Book. In the end, they’d had a listing in the Social Register too. When you don’t have two dimes to rub together, you can’t afford to be a snob—although, God only knew, people on the Main Line were snobs about the Social Register. Sarah remembered nights sitting at the long table in the formal dining room in her father’s house, eating bread and gravy off all that Royal Doulton, because the food money had been spent on horseback-riding lessons for herself and her sister. She remembered sitting in the dark on the second floor in the middle of a heavy snowfall, wishing she had enough light to read—because the money that should have gone to pay the electric bill had gone instead to pay her subscription fees to Philadelphia’s most prestigious junior dance. She was only eleven years old that year and she had already figured out what was important. She understood that nothing else mattered as long as you were able to live richly among rich people.

Now she was fifty—fifty—and she no longer lived richly among rich people. She lived here, where people had just enough to feel important but not enough to really understand what kind of mess she was in. People from Fox Run Hill saw her at the country club or the health club, a tall woman with ash-blond hair and a deep tan and the kind of body Anglo-Saxons get when they do too much exercise—and they made instant evaluations. Sarah Lockwood the debutante. Sarah Lockwood the Main Line Society lady. If I were a Main Line Society lady, Sarah thought, I would be living on the Main Line and moving in Society. Instead, I am living here, moving among nobodies, a failure. Any minute now I am going to be an even bigger failure. I am going to be a bankrupt.