[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]Chapter One
February
My Funny Valentine
We challenge you to find more soul-satisfying chocolates than
these, packed inside a red satin keepsake box (maybe to hide those
first lost teeth, after the Tooth Fairy comes?). That's for you
alone. Baby will snuggle in a white-and-red striped hooded
pullover, suitable to the season, and each of you will sport a
size-appropriate pair of seasonal socks, edged with golden arrows
for boys, and hearts and beads of pink and red (impossible for even
the most curious little fingers to remove) for girls. Romance
missing in your life since the advent of you-know-whom? Not after
you relax to this CD. "Bolero" is only the beginning.
A familiar place, when you have gained heft of life, can feel as
confining as a familiar pair of pants when you've put on weight.
True Dickinson has gained both, and her discomfort is as much the
pinch of regret as the bitterness she feels when she has to suck in
her gut to fasten her buttons.
As the crow flies, which is how people like to put it, True
Dickinson lives only a mile from Nantucket Sound. But recently, and
with regret, she has been unable to see the pewter of its winter
billowing with customary awe, just as she has stopped looking at
her friends with gratitude, at her success with pride, at her small
family with surprised contentment. Not since she came from her
birthplace in Amherst to the Cape, first as a sitter during college
summer breaks, then as a bride with her husband, a pilot for the
commuter airline, has she felt such unaccustomed restlessness.
Stray and strange thoughts of moving away sometimes escape her
purposeful days like loose strands that occasionally escape from
her tight and sensible French braid, which True is so accustomed to
plaiting every morning she could do it in the dark. She catches
herself thinking, I'll blow town, light out for the territories,
just my son and me, leave the Cape altogether for a someplace with
more oxygen and more sky.
Her consternation, of course, is misplaced.
It is situational, not locational.
For just as crows don't really fly straight -- they are so curious,
always swooping off on avian tangents to explore something shiny or
smelly, that it probably takes a crow longer to get anywhere than
it takes a human being in a car obeying the speed limit -- True
feels trapped not by the lack of space in the life around her but
by the profusion of empty space of life within her. She is lonely.
The ends of her life are working their way loose. Her son, whom she
is accustomed to thinking of as a little child, is nearly ten,
middle-aged, in kid years. Thus, True can no longer pretend she is
a "young widow." Her mother is growing older; her longtime
assistants speak of plans to relocate, to take on new
adventures.
She is beginning to see herself as the point from which other
things depart.
Would she describe herself in this way? Perhaps under
hypnosis.
True knows that she's suffering from seasonal lag. And 'tis the
season for that. February is no less lonely a month in a
resort community, where every view is a watercolor landscape, than
it is anywhere else, and may be more so. The closed lids of shops
shuttered until summer are depressing to those who pass them, even
to locals who rave about having their streets and churches all to
themselves. It's a common misconception that people who are
inclined to take their own lives do so at Christmas. The truth is
that fingers itch for a strong piece of rope or a stash of
sedatives starting in February, when the holidays have failed to
deliver on their promise, and when the unbearable renewal of life
brims just around the corner.
It is a particularly bad month for True. The month of her birth, it
is also the month of her husband's long-ago death. Peter Lemieux,
who flew eight-seater Cessnas through rowdy coastal weather for a
living, died ironically, struck by a motorist on an icy night very
much like this. Pete had stopped to help a woman whose car had
blown its radiator. A moving van had mowed him down. For years,
True has been unable to remember the sound of Pete's voice, and she
has no idea whether the image of him she can summon to her mind is
a mental snapshot of the wedding photo that she dusts along with
her lamp and her hand lotion, or a true memory of the way he
looked. True's mother, Kathleen, also widowed young, also by a car
accident, nods in solemn empathy when True keeps refusing to bring
out and watch the few videotapes she and Pete made during their son
Guy's babyhood. Kathleen periodically suggests watching the tapes
together, as if an erased life were something to be reveled in,
like a great exfoliating bath. True knows that, even after eight
years, the sight of Pete's platinum crewcut and square-cut face
with its pilot's crinkled tan, perpetually young, will shatter her
complacency, which she maintains by carefully separating before
from after.
But more than this, she reckons intuitively that what she really
cannot bear to see is the infant image of Guy, the only child she
likely will ever have -- miniature, mirthful and trustful, his
cheeks drooping, round as peach halves, wider than his forehead.
That velvety baby touch True can remember, and it grieves her to
think it will quite probably be a touch that, for the rest of her
life, she will only borrow.
She also knows that, while not quite the merry widow, she is not
like her mother, not like the other young widows at the group she
attended briefly, who had vied with each other to claim which limbs
and digits and months of life they would trade for an hour in the
arms of their husbands ...
Excerpted from TWELVE TIMES BLESSED © Copyright 2003 by
Jacquelyn Mitchard. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All
rights reserved.
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
Twelve Times Blessed