Page 27
Story: The Briar Club
Fliss’s Strawberry Fool
3 cups hulled and chopped fresh strawberries, plus whole strawberries for garnish 6 tablespoons sugar 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice 2 cups heavy cream
Place the chopped strawberries and sugar in a small pot and cook over medium-low heat, stirring frequently. Remove from the heat when the berries have softened and thickened, about 5minutes. Stir in lemon juice, then chill the mixture completely.
In a medium bowl using a hand mixer, beat the cream until soft peaks form. Spoon the whipped cream into bowls or decorative glasses and gently fold in the chilled strawberry mixture, adding more cream to make decorative layers. Garnish each serving with a whole strawberry.
Eat with a fussy baby, while listening to “(It’s No) Sin”
by Eddy Howard and His Orchestra, without fear of making a mess, because at least the baby is eating.
“Telephone for you, Mrs.Orton.”
Fliss nearly groaned as Mrs.Nilsson popped up like a jack-in-the-box in front of the pram. She was going to be late to the train station; Angela had screamed her lungs out when Fliss stuffed her into the blue romper rather than the lavender one, Fliss’s last pair of stockings had snagged, and her cloisonné earrings had gone missing. Angela was still grizzling, that fretful whiny sound she could keep up effortlessly for hours, and Fliss looked down at her with a bracing internal reminder: Even when you’re being horrid, I would still die for you. She’d been clinging to that thought rather hard since hearing Grace say it.
And now here was Mrs.Nilsson, brandishing the telephone receiver. Fliss was definitely going to be late for her train.
“Yes, hello?”
Wedging herself between the wall and the pram as Claire and Arlene flew down the corridor on their way to work, sniping about who had hogged the bathroom that morning. “This is Mrs.Orton,”
Fliss said impatiently, hoping whoever it was wouldn’t take too long. She barely managed not to overturn the vase of yellow daisies Grace had set out on the hall table.
There was a crackle of static, and then a tinny voice swam into her ear from what sounded like the end of a very long tunnel. “—hear me, honey?”
Suddenly every muscle in her body pulled taut, singing. “ Dan? ”
More crackling. “—goddamn line,”
he said. “—hear me, Fliss?”
“I can hear you. I can hear you—”
Fliss was half shouting; Mrs.Nilsson frowned but she didn’t care a jot. “Keep talking, please!”
“—can’t talk long, honey, I only got the phone for two minutes because I said it was an emergency—”
“An emergency ?”
Fliss’s pulse spiked. “Are you hurt, or—”
“No, no.”
His voice, that dear voice. She hadn’t heard that voice in nearly a year; he could so rarely phone all the way from Japan. Her vision blurred as he went on. “I got your letter, Fliss. I was worried.”
The strength went out of Fliss’s legs all at once; she sat down in the middle of the corridor, pale blue skirts and layers of crinoline sinking around her. “My letter?”
The one she’d written what felt like forever ago, after a three a.m. dinner of strawberry fool and whiskey. I don’t know how to say this to you, Dan, so I’m just going to say it. You talk about Orton Baby Number 2, but I don’t want another baby. I just don’t. Everything is so hard, and the thought of making it any harder makes me want to die.
She shouldn’t have mailed it. She should never have mailed it...
“I didn’t know you were feeling so bad. Your letters are always—”
More crackling; his voice disappeared for a moment and then came back shockingly close, right in her ear as though his cheek was pressed against hers. “—so cheerful, I felt bad if I sounded low. I didn’t want to bring you down.”
His voice wobbled. “Jesus, it’s been hard, Fliss. I miss you so much.”
“I miss you too,”
she whispered. Tears pouring, not the absent slipping drops that started and stopped on their own accord, but a hot violent flood.
“And the baby thing, Fliss, don’t worry. I just want my two girls back; that’s all I need. You don’t want another little Angela, that’s fine.”
Fliss put her hand over the receiver, cried two hard, gulping sobs that he couldn’t hear, then took her hand away. “Dan, nobody would want another little Angela,”
she managed with a shaky laugh. “She’s a terror. There’s only one of her, but she still has me outnumbered and surrounded.”
“Then we’d better not give her any allies, or we’re sunk.”
A beat. “Honey, tell me if things are hard. Just... tell me. Okay? You don’t have to be cheerful for—”
He cut off for a moment. “Goddammit, we’re almost out of time. I love you—”
“I love you. I love you—”
“—a thousand times—”
They managed a few more half-shouted phrases through the crackling, and then the line went dead and he was gone. Fliss gripped the receiver and wept into it, shoulders heaving, not caring that Mrs.Nilsson was goggling.
“Hey there, let’s get you up.”
Bea came limping in from the breakfast room, bending down to boost Fliss up with a surprisingly strong grip. Fliss went on crying into her shoulder, and Bea patted her back. “Beat it, Nosy Parker,”
Bea said to their landlady, who sniffed and went off to begin hoovering ostentatiously down the hall. Fliss went on crying, but it felt more like relief than sadness. The baby thing, Fliss, don’t worry.
Don’t worry. Don’t worry!
“I thought you were catching a train?”
Bea asked when Fliss finally stopped crying and wiped at her eyes. “Or are you calling a rainout on that?”
“Oh, I’m going.”
Fliss felt her smile break, not the smile that locked behind her molars, but a huge, watery beam. “I’m taking a friend to see my uncle in Boston—I’ll be back tonight.”
She picked up her handbag, almost knocking over the vase of yellow daisies again—how beautiful they were, a shock of color that nearly dazzled her eyes. Mrs. Nilsson didn’t approve of flowers, but Grace had somehow gotten around her, just like she’d done with the sunny yellow curtains at the window, and now this hallway that had been so drab and cheerless looked like one big splash of sunshine. Fliss plucked a daisy out of the vase and threaded it through her own buttonhole.
“Sure you want to lug the little rookie here all the way to Massachusetts?”
Bea cast a look into the pram, where Angela was still voicing her general displeasure at the state of the world. “I can watch her today if you need it.”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly—”
Fliss started to say, then stopped. The Briar Club aren’t family, she’d spent so much time telling herself, so you don’t have any right to lean on them.
But hadn’t things changed since the days when she’d first moved in and no one said anything to her but the occasional indifferent hello in line for the loo? Hadn’t a lot of things changed?
“Actually, I could use the help,”
she said now, feeling the sheer relief of saying it. “Are you sure you don’t mind watching Ange until tonight?”
“I like the occasional bout of babysitting,”
Bea said cheerfully. “Reminds me why I don’t want any little rookies of my own, and I need reminders because my mother, good lord, she wants grandchildren and she could wear down a stone.”
Fliss burst out laughing. An unsteady laugh, but a laugh. “Then my little goblin’s all yours. My advice is to take her to the park and let her run until she falls over unconscious.”
“Anytime,”
Bea said casually—casually! Like it was nothing!—as she popped the pram back on two wheels. “Come on, kid, let’s run some drills...”
“Bless you.”
Fliss flew for the door, but not before stopping to throw her arms around lumpish little Lina, who had just trudged out of the kitchen with a mixing bowl. “Lina, want to help me make real English shortbread tonight?”
Three ingredients; even Lina couldn’t muck that up.
“Really?”
Lina gave a tentative smile. Goodness, that lazy eye of hers was getting worse; Fliss thought she’d better talk to Grace and see if they could cook up a scheme to get Lina those corrective glasses her mother refused to pay for.
“Really,”
Fliss promised and dashed out the door to hail a taxi. Bea was already heading the other way, toward the park with Angela. Recipes and smiles and assistance with the baby... could she have had more help all this time from the ladies of the Briar Club? Had she just not been letting herself ask ? Angela stood up in the pram to wave at her mother, showing every one of her gapped and pearly teeth, and Fliss’s heart squeezed all at once.
“Mrs.Sutherland, I’m so sorry,”
Fliss said breathlessly, skidding to a halt on the platform at Union Station. “I didn’t mean to be late.”
“Not at all.”
The senator’s daughter-in-law looked a picture of serenity in her pale green traveling suit, her ivory lace blouse, her pillbox hat with its wisp of veiling, but she was twisting her gloves between her hands as if trying to throttle them.
After the two women had settled into a private compartment on the train—nothing but the best for a Sutherland, of course—Mrs. Sutherland said in a low voice, “Your uncle... He won’t tell anyone about...”
“He is a noted fertility specialist and he will fully examine you for fertility issues during your appointment,”
Fliss said, taking her seat. Her pale blue skirts were crumpled, and she found she didn’t care a jot. “It’s just that he will take the opportunity, during your appointment, to measure you for a contraceptive device as well. Which is no one’s business but yours.”
The young Mrs.Sutherland exhaled shakily. “That was a very good idea you had.”
Fliss rather thought it was. “Do you think you might be able to come back and forth to Boston, in the future? Late this year or early next?”
“Will I need to? I thought the fitting was just a onetime—”
“It is, but my uncle told me about some patient trials for a new pill...”
Explaining it all out as the train rocked smoothly into motion, pulling away from Union Station. “He’ll need patient volunteers.”
“I couldn’t be part of a birth control study.”
The other woman dropped her voice, strangling her gloves again. “My husband—”
“It won’t be a birth control study, it will be a fertility study.”
Which Fliss thought was sheer genius, when Uncle John explained how they were sliding it past Massachusetts state law banning all forms of contraception.
“It’s just quantifying the effects of progesterone on fertility. As far as your husband or anybody else knows, the study examines chances of conception. Which side of conception, for or against—well, that’s a detail nobody needs.”
Mrs.Sutherland’s dark eyes went positively molten. “No, they don’t.”
“I’ll have my uncle talk to you about the trials, then.”
And maybe she’d help with those trials, Fliss thought, leaning back in her seat as the suburbs of Washington, D.C., rolled past.
Maybe she could go back to work at the clinic. She didn’t think Dan would mind. And Angela wouldn’t, either—she was so young;
was she really going to remember if her mother was by her side every single moment of her babyhood?
Fliss lost some time then in another slate-wipe of weariness, but only about five minutes, and that wasn’t so bad.
She was still exhausted, and her eyes were verging on tears again, but Fliss found herself giving a small, shaky smile.
Table of Contents
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- Page 26
- Page 27 (Reading here)
- Page 28
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