Somebody Else's Music(15)

3


Chris Inglerod had no intention of doing anything at all about the fact that Betsy Toliver was coming back to town today. In spite of at least three long phone calls with Emma, and one even longer one with Maris, she had her mind made up. As soon as she could, she filled her schedule book with the kind of Things To Do she had always loved best. It was Monday, so she had Literacy Volunteers of America first thing. She had to drive out to a tiny roadside restaurant on Route 47 and tutor a girl named Natalya in the rudiments of English, spoken as well as written. The restaurant smelled of all the food she had learned to despise in the years since high school. It served deep-fried pasties full of meat and beets and heavy soups made with sour cream. Natalya was not only slow and fat, but she wasn’t an American. Chris had imagined herself playing Enlightening Angel to one of Hollman’s own downtrodden poor—a member of one of the black families who lived in shacks near the edge of the river on the south side of town, or one of the waitresses at JayMar’s diner. Volunteering, Chris had learned, was much like anything else. You needed to do it if you wanted to be put on the kind of committees that really mattered to you—the invitation committee at the Club, for instance, or the ball committee at the American Heart Association chapter—but it wasn’t what everybody said it was, and it wasn’t fun. Still, Chris was nothing if she wasn’t somebody who played by the rules. If there was scut work to be done, she did it. She tutored Natalya in the same spirit she had once pushed the magazine tray around the hospital as a candy striper or picked up garbage from the side of the road as a pledge for Alpha Chi Omega. If she hated the work, she could always get it done by being determined to get it done. If she was determined to get it done, she could excel at it, and in her way, she excelled at tutoring Natalya. They’d been at it for six weeks, and Natalya could already read the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer without a hitch and explain what she’d read in English that was still halting, but no longer incomprehensible. If she was also much shyer, more frightened, and more depressed than when the lessons started, Chris didn’t notice it.

The tutoring lesson only lasted an hour. When it was over, Chris drove back to her own house by a side road, avoiding the center of town, and parked in her driveway, nonplussed. She had a date for tennis and lunch at the Club, but that wasn’t for hours yet. If she showed up this early, people would talk about it, and if they talked about it, they would probably make all the wrong inferences. At least one of the things Maris and Belinda had been saying was true: there had been a lot of ink spilled on the subject of poor Betsy Toliver’s terrible days in high school, persecuted by the evil witches of the Popular Crowd. It had become The Story whenever Betsy was mentioned in the popular press, and that was often, these days, now that she was connected to Jimmy Card. It didn’t help that the women Chris knew at the Club weren’t Hollman women, but transplants from other places whose husbands worked in research at one of the new tech companies with buildings on the interstate, or the kind of local girl Chris would never have known while she was growing up, because their parents had the money—and the sense—to send them away to boarding school. It sometimes seemed as if she had spent the whole of the last two weeks explaining herself, over and over and over again. She had the car’s radio turned to the classical music station. The only other automatic find on her scan function was for NPR, which she almost never listened to anymore, because Betsy was on it so much. She thought about getting out of the car and going into her house. She thought about picking up the phone to call Dan in the middle of the morning and being told by the receptionist that Dan was busy, or by Dan himself that it wasn’t Dan’s problem, not any of it, and she would have to fend for herself. If she hadn’t already had breakfast, she could go out somewhere and eat that. If it wasn’t so early, she could go out to the mall and shop—although she never shopped much at their local mall. It didn’t have the right kinds of stores. You had to go into Pittsburgh or Philadelphia for those, or buy from a catalogue.

She looked at the rings on her hands. She looked at the green grass on her broad front lawn. She looked at the peaks and gables on her house that let even strangers going past on the road know that several of the rooms inside had cathedral ceilings. She put the car into reverse and backed out onto the road again. Was it really possible she had lived in this place for fifteen years and not managed to make a single real friend? If she thought about it honestly, she would have to say she had never in her life made a single real friend. People were volatile commodities. One day they were good for you. The next day, they dragged you down.