“Margaret and Lulabelle”

Lulabelle’s slender, strong hands were slightly wrinkled, a veiny terrain faintly rippling as she bounced her tea bag in her mug, pulling up and down on the string; letting it sink; letting it breathe. She balanced the frail thread with her cigarette – the only act I’ve ever mastered, she said often, much to her ex-husband’s dismay.

Margaret always thought Lulabelle had a breezy sort of elegance — one that didn’t indicate a satisfaction with glamorous circumstances because instead it reflected her fixed disposition as one that offers a chuckle when faced with exhaustion, which seems to be always. Hers, a deep, biting chuckle, but not a forced one; a chuckle without the targeted effort.

She chuckled when Margaret asked her if she likes visiting Boston. But you’re from Berlin, right? Margaret said.

She chuckled when Margaret said she was glad Richard suggested that we pick up the food together, she was glad because she always liked Lulabelle and wanted the chance to get to know her better. Margaret chuckled, too, when she said this, out of embarrassment for her own unhidden desperation.

She did not chuckle when the waiter told them that he had no prior knowledge of their order.

This is fifty people, we’re talking about, here. Fifty people in mourning and you didn’t know about the order?

Lulabelle said it calmly, without disdain or grief. She said it like she was reporting the news.

They didn’t know, they said. They let her smoke inside while she waited.

Her answers to Margaret’s questions maintained a rhythm that dodged rudeness but still settled into refusal. That’s it! Margaret thought; how does she – her detachment evades offense; blame could never be laid on her; how does she do it? Not everyone was susceptible to Lulabelle, this Margaret knew, since her own father nailed his sister-in-law as nothing more than an off-putting pretentious facade, while Margaret figured Lulabelle a mystery of which Lulabelle herself wasn’t even fully aware.

The Boston diner’s stained doilies and shiny plastic tablecloth ostracized Lulabelle’s subtle glamor in a way that made Margaret feel as though she were not sitting next to her step-aunt but in a screening of a Pre-Code film, the restaurant’s mechanical ticking clock like a hum of the projector. Lulabelle, so alive in her decisiveness, didn’t fade into black and white, but emerged – fossilized – right in front of Margaret, with the flick of her right wrist as she lit another cigarette and put out the match.

Lulabelle always smoked like she knew everything and didn’t care. She didn’t care, especially that everyone, besides Richard, thought that she couldn’t love anyone.

But Margaret – staring at Lulabelle as she thumbed through her niece’s copy of The Voyage Out without asking to, stopping only where annotations have been made – did see that Lulabelle loves. She loves beyond. Everyone knows, whenever, whatever room she’s in, that the object of her love is not there, wouldn’t be, couldn’t be – not among them, not among us. But Margaret knows, maybe because a certain ray of Boston’s sunlight pricked the truth, that Lulabelle’s love is beyond, it’s different, it wouldn’t and couldn’t be found here, among us. But not because she’s got an air of arrogance; she has an air of removal and detachment that dangerously borders the untethered.

I want –

Lulabelle looked as if a stranger called her name from across the street.

There are things I want to ask you about, things about you that I’m curious about, Margaret said. Margaret wished Lulabelle would squash that youthful eagerness in the ashtray. But her silence, instead, left Margaret’s pathetic despair to rot, dwindling in the atmosphere,dancing among the cigarette smoke in anticipation of acknowledgement.

You want to ask me questions, Lulabelle muttered into her coffee cup, to nobody in particular.

Yes.

You’re 23?

Yes.

Lulabelle gave her ex-niece a cigarette and lit herself a new one.

I didn’t know what I was doing when I got married at twenty-two, or the time after that,

or the time after that.

Margaret ashed her cigarette. Lulabelle too.

But, I guess, I mean – I think that you can’t blame yourself. You were young and in love, said Margaret.

I was not in love, Lulabelle said, looking into an absence – an absence that seemed to be erected by her gaze entirely. The absence wouldn’t exist in this diner, Margaret thought, if Lulabelle hadn’t looked it into existence. It was in this diner that Margaret saw her, saw her clearly, saw that she loves beyond, saw that she doesn’t love Richard. I was not in love might as well have been I am not in love, never have been – at least with any of my husbands, anyway.

I’m not in love either, Margaret said.

But you are passionate, no? Lulabelle replied.

What do you mean?

With a dramatic sigh, Lulabelle clarified herself. I am a very passionate person. I’m passionate in a way that would... that has made people uncomfortable, I think.

I’m not uncomfortable, Margaret stated, as if she were declaring her belief in God. The waiter, with bags of food in hand, waved Margaret over to the counter, but she ignored him.

It’s unbecoming, some people think.

I’m a passionate person, declared Margaret.

I know.

Margaret’s eyes tried to lasso Lulabelle’s, which were set on the fraying tablecloth, her manicure massaging its split ends. A sharpness had pierced the gauze, the hazy amorphous atmosphere that accumulates whenever Lulabelle enters a room. But Lulabelle didn’t look up. The shadowy, indeterminate veil, like the sunset’s unwanted gray clouds, fell back over her, and with Margaret no longer wielding a knife to cut through the deadness, she teared up, in gratitude, for seeing through and being seen through. Margaret smiled for no more than a second and waved the smoke out of her face.