Smiling, Jackie sat down on a chair slipcovered in a cotton print of flowers and paisley ferns. As she sipped her tea, she looked at her friend. They were the same age, both thirty-eight, but no one would have guessed it from looking at them. After they’d graduated from high school, Jackie had taken off to spend her life in every corner of the world, but Terri had married her boyfriend the day after graduation. She had produced three children within as many years, kids who were now big, hulking boys of nineteen, eighteen, and seventeen. With each child Terri had gained weight and had never lost it, and somewhere along the way she had decided she was old. When Jackie chided her for not taking care of herself, Terri would say, “The kids and Ralph only care what I put on the table, not what I’m wearing when I do it. I could look like Harlow and they wouldn’t notice.”
“Come on, tell me,” Terri urged; then, her eyes widening, she gasped. “You’ve met a man! That’s it, isn’t it? We women are such fools. Even marriage can’t cure us of falling in love, and if marriage can’t cure a person, nothing can. So what’s he like? Where did you meet him?”
Jackie wanted to tell Terri about William, but she didn’t want to look like a fool. What if William hadn’t been as affected by their night together as she had? What if he thought it was an ordinary encounter? Maybe he’d forgotten about her by now, forgotten about their partnership. Charley would have. Charley often got drunk and met people and made them feel he was their best friend. He made plans to do things together, got them enthusiastic, but twenty-four hours later, when the people sought him out, ready to act on the plans, he could hardly remember them. Of course it was left to Jackie to smooth ruffled feathers and get Charley off the hook once again.
“Actually, it isn’t a man,” Jackie lied as smoothly as she could. “Well, it is, but not in the way you mean. You remember when my plane went down a couple of nights ago?”
Terri shook her head in disbelief. After being in an airplane crash, anyone else would have been in a hospital getting medical care and flowers, but Jackie was absolutely nonchalant about the mishap. She spoke of her plane crashing the way one might speak of going to the beauty parlor. “Yes, I remember,” Terri said, marveling at her friend’s bravery.
“There was a man there and—”
“What? You met a man in the middle of nowhere? What’s his name? Where does he come from? Did he try anything?”
Jackie laughed. When they were in high school, she and Terri had barely known each other. Terri had had a normal family while Jackie’s had been strange and eccentric. It was after Jackie left Chandler that they got to know each other. When they were both twenty years old, Terri had sent Jackie a letter of congratulations on winning her first race, saying that she understood Jackie’s life because her own life was quite exciting as well. On the day Jackie had won the race, Terri’s son had caught a wasp in his mouth, where it managed to sting his tongue before he swallowed it, her husband had dropped a crate on his foot and would be out of work for a month, and she had found out she was pregnant with her third child. “Now all I need is a plague of locusts and my life will be complete,” she’d written. “Please tell me about your boring life; I need something to counteract the thrill and exhilaration of mine.”
The letter had appealed to Jackie. She had received a lot of letters from people who had known her in the past, but many of those letters made her feel guilty, since the writers usually said that they doubted if she remembered them now that she was so famous. It was as though they thought that winning a race that was reported in the newspapers had instantly wiped out her memory. Or that every celebrity she met replaced an “insignificant” person from her past.
Happily, Jackie had written Terri all about the race, about the people she had met, about what it was like to soar high above the crowd at air shows. At first, she wrote of the applause, but as the years passed, she began to write of the defeats and the heartaches. She wrote of people whom she’d seen die in fiery crashes, of men and women who passed in and out of her life. She wrote of Charley and how sometimes his irresponsibility nearly drove her mad. She told Terri that she envied her her quiet, peaceful life, envied her her husband, who was always there for her, who was interested in their home and the kids.
Terri tried never to let on to Jackie how much their correspondence meant to her. The letters they exchanged were, at times, the best part of Terri’s life. She used all her creativity to make her letters to Jackie interesting and fun and, above all, light. It was wonderful to have a glamorous and exciting woman like Jackie write to her with such intimacy and such trust. Jackie began to see Terri as wise beyond her years, someone who had had a chance to go off and see the world, but who had wisely decided to stay at home and settle
down and raise children.
Terri never wrote anything to disabuse her friend of this notion. Oh, she was sarcastic at times, always making wisecracks about Ralph and the boys, but somehow Terri presented a picture of a life that was so good, so splendid, that she had to make jokes about it. If she told the truth she’d be able to do nothing but brag.
The real truth was that Terri had married the first man who asked her because she was terrified of ending up an old maid. Although he wanted to wait to have children, she was so afraid Ralph would leave her that she got pregnant on their wedding night—or maybe a week or so before, she was never sure. She never wrote Jackie the truth about her life—that her husband spent most of his time with his men friends drinking beer and that when he was home he held a newspaper in front of his face and slept. Instead she wrote Jackie of a life that sounded as though it had come out of a book written by Betty Crocker. She told of the garden she and her husband planted so they would have fresh vegetables and herbs for the boys. The truth was that her husband had lost his fourth job in as many years and her father had planted a small garden in her back yard to help feed her family. Of course the boys were just like their father and wouldn’t touch a vegetable, so Terri had spent long hours canning produce to trade to a bachelor hog farmer for the meat the men loved. Terri wrote Jackie that Ralph always spent Sundays with his family; actually, he was sleeping off Saturday night. She told Jackie how quietly rewarding it was having a family. She painted a glorious picture of tiny loving hands bringing her flowers, of little mouths eating her delicious food. Terri poured every bit of her imagination into her narrations of an ideal existence.
It was writing those letters, and planning what she was going to write, that got Terri through some of the roughest times of her life. While one big, sturdy boy was terrorizing the little girl next door and the second one was throwing his food against the kitchen wall, while Terri was in the bathroom throwing up because she was carrying the third one, she thought of how she’d present her life in letters to Jackie.
When the boys grew older and as big as their father, she couldn’t control them, and the letters she exchanged with Jackie became even more important in her life. Her husband’s attitude toward child rearing was that the meaner the boys were, the more masculine they were. The more often they got into trouble in school, the prouder he was of them. Terri tried to talk to him, to tell him that he was encouraging their delinquent behavior, but his reasoning was that this was the way he had been raised and he’d turned out all right. Terri knew better than to point out that he’d never been able to keep a job for longer than eight months because he got into fights with his bosses. His sons were turning out just like him, arguing with teachers and principals and store owners and anyone who happened to get in their way.
Terri’s real life and the life she wrote Jackie about bore little relation to each other. Now that her big, awkward sons were nearly grown and were rarely at home, the brightest point in her life was these visits to the old ghost town to spend time with Jackie. She had no idea if Jackie knew the truth about her life. It wouldn’t have been too difficult for her to find out, as everyone in Chandler knew everyone else’s business, but somehow Terri doubted Jackie did. To the folks of Chandler, Jackie was a celebrity, and she didn’t think people would be rushing to tell her about Nobody Terri Pelman’s boring life.
So, as often as possible, Terri visited Jackie, and the two of them kept up the façade of Terri’s splendid golden life in which she had everything: the steady love of a good man, three beautiful children who had turned into fine, upstanding young men, and a lovely, gracious home.
“It wasn’t like that,” Jackie said, laughing. “It wasn’t a romantic encounter. I mean, he did kiss me but—”
“You crash a plane, a gorgeous man comes out of the night, rescues you”—she raised her eyebrows—“and kisses you, and you say, ‘It wasn’t like that.’ So, Jackie, what was it like?”
“Terri, you are incorrigible. I don’t think you’ll be happy until you get me married and pregnant.”
“And why shouldn’t you be as miserable as the rest of us?”
“Sometimes I almost think you mean what you say. If I didn’t know the truth about how much you love that family of yours I’d—”
“Tell me!”
“Really, there isn’t much to tell.” Actually, Jackie thought, that was the truth. What had passed between her and William could have been one-sided. She didn’t want to tell Terri what she was feeling and then end up looking as though she’d made a fool of herself over some man. And most definitely she did not want to tell Terri that this man was one of Jace and Nellie Montgomery’s sons. For some odd reason, Terri seemed to believe that every man in Chandler was worthless. Maybe she thought she’d gotten the only good one, or maybe it was just that familiarity breeds contempt. She’d known all the men of Chandler for so long that she considered them incapable of inspiring passion or even love. Terri had her own idea of a perfect man: the more exotic the better. She once asked Jackie how she could have been to France and not fallen in love with a Frenchman. “Or an Egyptian,” Jackie had said, laughing. “They’re the best-looking men on earth.”
“This is really a business arrangement. I mentioned my wanting to start a freight business, and he said he was looking for something to do, so it just happened. He’s gone to Denver to buy a couple of planes.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s all there is to it.”
Terri didn’t say anything, but put her teacup down, leaned back in her chair, and stared at her friend. “I’m not leaving here until you tell me everything. I can call Ralph and have him send my clothes here. If the boys get lonely for their mother I hope you won’t mind if they come to stay with us. They’ll be no bother at all.”
At that threat Jackie almost shuddered but caught herself in time. Terri was a perfect example of the saying that love is blind, for those huge, semiliterate, lecherous sons of hers were no pleasure to anyone except her. The last time one of them had driven to Eternity to pick Terri up, he had cornered Jackie in the kitchen and started telling her how a woman like her must be “dyin’ for a man” and he’d be “willin’ to scratch her itch.” Jackie had brought her foot down hard on his instep while “accidentally” dropping a skillet on his left hand. Since then Jackie had volunteered to drive Terri home whenever her friend was unable to borrow a car.