Angels All Over Town by Luanne Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

Liverpool-Genoa-Tangier, flocks of gulls chasing schools of blues, trawlers with their nets out, couples kissing on the rocks, scrubby pines, stone ruins, sheep, Canada geese. The houses were huge, but wonderful, unlike the gross castles on Bellevue Avenue. One looked like a retreat in Normandy, another like a haunted house with sixteen chimneys. One was a saltwater farm, and every Christmas the owners would hand out eggs, milk, and lamb to the poor of Newport.
    Lily, Margo, and I drove along it whenever we had free time. That day we shared a six-pack of beer. We had the car radio turned up. It felt like all the times we had driven together in years past when we had lived in the same house, when our parents had been distracted by their own troubles and left us to our own devices. I didn’t know that day that Lily had already started receding from me, and that it would be our last drive in the front seat of that Volvo—the last drive together in any car for a long, long time.
    I remember that we didn’t talk much that day. We all watched the scenes pass and thought privately. Occasionally Margo would change the radio station. We were preparing to part. It had been our first August together in—how long? I tried to figure it out. Five years? Six? We were grownups. We paid rent for our own apartments, even though Lily and Margo shared theirs. Our father, our patriarch, was dead. We fell in and out of love with men, and we shared advice on birth control. Margo and I favored diaphragms (the safest method), while Lily used the Pill (more convenient, less likely to interrupt the spontaneity). Looking back at that entire summer in Newport, it seemed that all three of us had regressed. Each of us had chucked the real world and woven a cocoon around ourselves in Newport, the raciest port in New England. We found security in promiscuity, in the transience of sailors, in the Here Today, Gone Tomorrow school of love. If you knew what to expect, you could not be hurt. You could go happily to sleep at night in the arms of a man you knew would be gone by September. There was no mystery about it. You said goodbye on schedule, at a predetermined place. You didn’t have to say “so long” because of revelation about one man’s sexuality; you didn’t have to conjure up a vision of your father’s ghost in order to say a civilized farewell, to replace the one you had said to his comatose body. You only had to lower your expectations.
    But it could not last. We had been raised by parents whose Catholic beliefs had not stopped until our father was ravaged by cancer, and parents with Catholic beliefs raise daughters with Catholic consciences. So what if we Believed Not? The guilt was there. You didn’t dally without love for long before guilt snuck up on you. It hulked overhead, waiting until you were at your weakest, and then it sent hallucinations that looked like your father to yell at you, shame you, tell you to pull yourself together. Cruising blithely along Ocean Drive, the September wind blowing warm whiffs of salt air, pine, and Margo’s cigarette smoke through the car, we didn’t speak, but we were all thinking the same thing. Our thought was a fourth person, sitting in the back seat. Una, Lily, and Margaret Cavan were past twenty-four. Time was moving on, pressing on, passing by. We had to get it together, pick up the pieces, fish or cut bait.
It was time to get married
.

Chapter 3
    D ance class. Fourth floor of a converted factory building on Tenth Avenue in New York. Enormous black windows along two walls holding sepia-toned reflections of thirteen stretching bodies. Liver-colored linoleum floor. Garish fluorescent light illuminating the cavernous room. I look around, and I see: our instructor, a woman last seen on stage dancing the role of the Sylph; four women who have taken time off from avant-garde companies like the Lulie McLeod Ballet, Nancy Kramer Dancefest, and STRUT ! to have babies; eight men and women, actors and