I settled back against the bench, the wooden slats more giving than I expected. “Maybe she lives in that falling-down mansion,” I offered.
Linda, with a see-I-didn't-scare-her glance at Kath—a glance clearly meant to include me—turned away from the swings to consider the old wreck of a place. For a moment I thought she had in mind to march right up to the front door and demand someone give the poor house a new coat of paint.
Maggie, waiting for her swing to defy all those crazy rules about objects at rest staying at rest, shouted for me. I called, “Pump your legs, for goodness sakes, Mags!” which drew Brett's attention. She said something to Maggie and gave her a little push, all the while smiling toward me.
“She slit her wrists in the old mansion,” Linda said, still facing the mansion, her back to Brett, as was Kath's.
Shhh, I thought. She'll hear us.
“And she lay in the bathtub bleeding all over the place until her handsome neighbor, wondering why it was so quiet—”
“Came over and whacked that ol' door down with a wood ax to get in!” Kath said just as Brett pushed her daughter all the way through so the little girl was swinging delightfully high beside my Maggie, and Brett herself emerged on our side of the swings, just a few yards away. She ran a gloved hand through her short red hair, leaving it unkempt, then glanced back—her daughter wasn't swinging too wildly—and took a tentative step toward us.
I was avoiding eye contact with her, saying, “Linda,” meaning to hush her, when Kath said, “You look at her sometimes when she thinks nobody's looking at her. I'll bet she slit her wrists!” and Linda said, “What?”
“Kath,” I said, but Kath was already saying, “You know, like ‘I'll bet he killed a man’?”
“From The Great Gatsby,” Brett said.
Even Linda—who is usually so cool—turned and stared open-mouthed at Brett, no doubt thinking, Shoot, how much has she overheard?
I adjusted my glasses, trying to think of something to say.
“Are you partial to the book?” Kath asked—which sounded ridiculous, like a bad pickup line at a Rush Street bar, but Brett just replied that it was an evocative line, wasn't it: “ ‘I'll bet he killed a man.’”
Kath said, for my benefit in case I hadn't read the book, that the line was from a cocktail-party scene where the host wasn't even at his own party. She'd just read Gatsby—or reread it for the fourth time, actually. She's not like Brett. She can't spout lines from novels at will.
It was one of Kath's favorite novels, The Great Gatsby. We all loved it, for different reasons. Linda wanted to be the golfer, Jordan Baker, while Brett wanted to be Gatsby—she's never said so, but believe me, she did. I guess I must have identified with Nick Carraway, watching the world from the fringes. And Kath grew up imagining she was Daisy and all the men in the world adored her. Yes, Daisy. She even admitted it, years later. “Of course I wanted to be Daisy. She's what I was raised to aspire to be, a nice girl married to a filthy rich man.” To which Linda said, “A nice, vacuous girl,” and Kath said, “Right,” and Linda said, “Whose husband kept a mistress, Kath,” and Kath, to her credit, said “Right” again. But as I said, that was years later.
That Wednesday, Brett gathered Sarah from her swing and settled her with Davy and his trucks, she and Kath already gossiping about old F. Scott like he was a neighbor. We talked about books that whole morning, hiding behind our favorite fictions, revealing ourselves slowly as the children ran on the playground or slept in their buggies or squirmed in our arms.
Kath loved anything by Jane Austen, which Linda said was fine “if you could stand all that happy-wedding-ending nonsense.” To which Kath said, without the least hesitation, that she was a happy-ending kind of gal and even Linda couldn't shame her into being anything else.
Linda was decidedly not a happy-ending gal. Her favorite book was The Bell Jar. “By Victoria Lucas, which everyone knows is a pseudonym for Sylvia Plath,” she said.
“Well I guess I'm just a li'l ol' nobody, then,” Kath said, “because I surely didn't know.” And Brett and I both admitted we'd never even heard of the novel, though we both loved Plath's poetry.
“‘First, are you our sort of a person?’” Brett said. “‘Do you wear—’”
“The novel hasn't been published here yet,” Linda explained. It wasn't, it turns out, supposed to be available in the U.S. even under a pseudonym until after Plath's mother died. “But I found a British copy at a bookstore near my brother's apartment in New York. It's about this girl who's trying to be a writer but her mother and her fiancé just assume it's a dalliance she'll give up when her real life—marriage and babies—begins.”