of a Mount Pleasant music center, and folding chairs had been provided but not set up—Charlie and Forrest had done that while Barbara supervised the ticket table in the hall. (This is how Charlie knows about Barbara’s nerve damage or whatever the hell it is that prevents her from lifting anything.) During the concert, Charlie and Forrest had sat in the back row and whispered to each other, wondering whether the string quartet was playing so solemnly because that was their style or because they were afraid of their chairs toppling off the stage, which was on the small side. Afterward, Charlie and Forrest took much longer than necessary taking down the chairs—Charlie’s love for Forrest would always be inextricably linked with pain in her lower back—and she could remember standing next to him as they stacked the last chairs on the metal racks. Not even their shoulders were touching but she had felt as though their bodies were pressed together. Then she had glanced toward the hallway and realized that Barbara was watching them from behind the door, one eye visible, like a disapproving cyclops.
Barbara lives way out in Falls Church, and it takes them forty minutes to get there. Charlie wishes it took longer. She drives as slowly as possible up the long, curving street to Barbara’s home at the top of the hill.
The house is a white elephant, in the figurative, financial sense—you wouldn’t believe the mortgage, let alone the heating bills—and it looks like a white elephant, too, all sprawling white clapboard with gray flagstone paths winding across the big lawn. It has always seemed to Charlie like the caricature of a doctor’s suburban home—Forrest is an orthopedic surgeon, somewhat ironically given that this is his second knee replacement—and she thinks it’s too showy and old-fashioned. (Forrest and Charlie live in a modern brick house in Georgetown; second place must try harder, or whatever that expression is.)
They park in front, right by the path so Forrest can get out easily. Charlie sees that an orange-and-white U-Haul trailer has been backed into the long driveway. She helps Forrest out of the car and they walk up to the large front porch and ring the doorbell.
Barbara answers right away. “Hello, Forrest,” she says. “Hello, 561.”
Believe it or not, she’s speaking to Charlie. At the suicide hotline, the volunteers were known by number so that no caller could startle a volunteer into revealing another’s name. (Such a thing had happened. A caller had tracked down a volunteer named Bonnie and run his hands through her hair at a bus stop. It was very upsetting for everyone. Also, a caller named Rose had ferreted out the address of the call center and sent them all a box of homemade éclairs.)
Charlie’s number had been 561 and Barbara still calls her that, possibly as a way to indicate that Charlie was merely the 561st in the long string of Forrest’s meaningless dalliances. (“I wish,” Forrest had said wistfully, when Charlie shared this theory with him.) Charlie puts up with being called 561 because there are certain concessions you make when you run off with someone’s husband.
“Hello, Barbara,” she says.
There is a long moment when Charlie and Barbara size each other up, and Charlie worries that Barbara is thinking the eye-candy isn’t as sweet as it used to be, now that Charlie is in her forties. (Although even in her twenties, Charlie wasn’t what you’d call eye-candy: her looks had always been sharp-edged and intense, more like eye-tequila.) On all of her own moving days, Charlie has worn tennis shoes, sweatpants and a baseball cap, but today she has on a clingy beige turtleneck and jeans tucked into brown Frye riding boots. Over this, she wears a buff-colored suede trench coat with a shearling collar as soft and creamy as bubble bath, and brown kidskin gloves. Her eyeshadow could make a teenage girl sigh with longing, and her short blonde hair is carefully tousled because—because—well, there’s payback for that 561 thing. Don’t go thinking otherwise.
Barbara looks pretty much the same as always. Her thick ebony-colored hair is still on loan from Cleopatra, though surely it must be dyed by now—nobody’s hair is that black in their sixties. The pageboy cut is no longer as flattering as it once was: the short heavy bangs show too much of her eyebrows and her face is too wide for chin-length hair now. But she’s wearing a turquoise-colored velour warm-up suit and chunky turquoise jewelry, and she looks short and curvy and ripe, which were always her strengths, in Charlie’s opinion.
“Come in,” Barbara says at last, standing aside, and Forrest shuffles in, followed by Charlie.
There are many things Charlie dislikes about this house but she especially dislikes how oversized it is. Does anyone really need rooms bigger than playgrounds and ceilings higher than silos and floorboards wider than pizza boxes? (No, they don’t, Charlie thinks.) The house also has an uncomfortable amount of dead, furniture-less space—like, right now, are they standing in a foyer or on the salt flats in Bolivia? At least hotel lobbies have chairs.
Barbara leads them down the hall toward the dining room. “How’s the knee?” she says to Forrest, over her shoulder.
“Not bad,” Forrest says. “I can get around now.”
“Did Scotty Brannon do the surgery?” Barbara says.
Charlie assumes that this is Barbara’s way of pointing out that she had been close to Forrest’s colleagues, so she says quickly, “No, it was Joel Wiggins,” to establish that times have moved on.
(Between certain pairs of people, no conversational exchanges are ever neutral.)
Now they are all standing in the living room. Charlie has been in this house officially—meaning when Barbara was present—on only a handful of occasions, but unofficially, during her affair with Forrest, she was here dozens of times. Barbara probably thinks Charlie had only ever seen the hall and the living room, the bathroom and a glimpse of the kitchen, when in reality she has been upstairs, has had sex with Forrest in nearly every room, had actually lived there for sixteen days with Forrest while Barbara was off tagging sea turtles in the Galapagos. (Charlie has always felt obscurely guilty that it was a turtle-tagging trip and not something less redeeming, like a knitting convention.)
“Now, Forrest, you sit right here at the dining-room table and help me pack,” Barbara says. On the table there is a brand-new box of bubble wrap, two full rolls of sealing tape, and two sets of shiny-bright scissors. Where are the scissors with the nicked blades and worn handles, the broken tape dispenser? Barbara’s life has always seemed artificial to Charlie, like props and scenery on a stage set. She has never been able to quite believe it goes on when no one is there to witness it.
“Now, you come with me,” Barbara says to her, and leads her toward the back of the house. “The U-Haul man backed the trailer in last night, so if you could just carry these boxes out and put them in there.”
She says this as though there are a couple of boxes, a few boxes, maybe four or five boxes, a limited number of boxes, but when Charlie comes around the corner and sees the mountain of boxes stacked outside the kitchen (in another of those dead zones with no furniture), she is appalled. Not only are there dozens upon dozens of boxes, they are all small, about the size of shoeboxes, and wrapped with layers and layers of slick carton tape. A person could carry only one, perhaps two, without dropping them. Of all the times for Barbara to give up her stage-like presentation! These are a real person’s boxes: soft, bendy, grubby cardboard.
“I’ll be in the dining room if you have any questions,” Barbara says brightly, and goes back along the hall.
Charlie pulls a soft ribbed hat with a fake-fur pompom from her coat pocket and puts it on.
She carries the first box out of the back door and realizes that the thing she hates most about this house is not how oversized it is: the thing she hates most is the back porch stairs. The steps are too steep, the
