The Truth According to Maples
Lambertville had interested me more than the rest of the guests. The slower pace, the white clapboard church with the tall spire, a sober, stone-faced bank like a fortress right in the middle of town, and the charming mix of tavern, furniture store, public library and old-time barber shop across from a busy hardware and lumberyard. The grocery, an old one that had been a Piggly-Wiggly back in the day, started a street that ended with a sweet diner that was three sides of wide, glass windows.
In the evening when I walked the dog at twilight, the diner customers in the booths and seated at the ice cream bar looked like an Edward Hopper painting. The owner was the main chef and looked the part with a white apron covering a big belly; he also wore a battered, old-time straw fedora with a striped ribbon around the crown. The usual waitress wore her curly, red hair in a high ponytail and favored jeans over the expected blue and white uniform that the daytime staff wore. The picture they made talking with customers cheered me when I was most alone during the first few months.
The town eased out to little neighborhoods of varying style: one newer section shaped like a pocket from the 1970s with cabin-like multi-levels; another was a post-war grid of tidy brick and mortar cottages; a few larger homes were tucked into shady lawns with spreading trees; and as a side note like a spur, a small dilapidated area with old houses cut into multiple apartments.
When I moved to Lambertville during the early spring that followed the complete evisceration of my former life, I found a small apartment on the second floor of a house in that little fringe of the spur-like neighborhood. The first floor was inhabited by a noisy family with two cats and an old hound dog. The teenage boy sometimes played his music a little loudly, and the smell of fried food sometimes engulfed the stairwell, but the resident busyness of their lives kept me from total isolation. I often visited Sarah and Walt at their home on Lilac Hill, walked the town twice a day and decided to get a job instead of coasting like I had been doing in Boston.
Walking the dog Sarah gave me in a fit of concern and affection, I felt myself settling into motion that I hoped was slightly forward instead of the stasis that had captured me at home in the cold north. I imagined myself back to the girl who visited nearly four years ago that November who’d been bold, shiny and new. I still looked like her, but inside I was overturned, cracked and slowly falling to pieces. After I met Jason Lambert for the first time, I understood that I had been deceiving myself about slipping back into that happy, unaffected girl again. She was gone; Georgiana Ensky was a new, fractured person who walked in that other girl’s place.
The old Georgiana Ensky would never have sneered at a man like Jason Lambert. My old self would have been respectful and just a bit awed by the beautiful mansion, the good antiques, museum-quality artwork in every room, even the rich, tapestry-like gold and blue drapes in the large, formal sitting room where Sarah deposited me to wait for my luncheon appointment with the president of the firm. The meal would double as an employment interview. I saw my reflection in the dark glass of a bookcase a few feet from my perch on a couch facing a dainty table set with a tea service, plates of cake, sandwiches and fruit. The woman in the glass frowned at me and hunched her shoulders as she tugged her skirt to a reasonable length.
And then he arrived. The air that Jason Lambert brought into the room with him was dank and slightly moldy. Sarah had told me that the research company dealt with government contracts and that Lambert specialized in biology. She’d said nothing about mold or dust—she left that out entirely. In fact, as my nose twitched trying to ferret out the source of the base note that made my eyes water, I was reminded of the cloying odor of myrrh in churches during the funerals or Lenten services. I shivered and rocked the china with my knees which made him frown.
I regret now, after months have elapsed, the moment I looked up and stood to greet him; my face was probably screwed into that moment you squash the urge to say, “Phew! What a smell!” like a child. I was extending my hand for his to shake and quickly dropped it back to my side. Jason Lambert might have been wearing a Halloween mask with scars tunneling over half of his face and melting into burn scars across his cheek, down his neck into his lab coat collar then stretching over one misshapen ear and into lava-like skin where hair once grew. He was holding a sheet of paper in one hand and a tablet computer in the other. I blinked with mouth open, as his eyes boldly flashed over me.
“Close your mouth, Miss Ensky. I expected something different, also. How well do you know Sarah?” He was close to walking out and chasing Sarah down for an interrogation; I could see his irritation boiling into anger.
At that moment, the new person I’d become in the months since I last walked Lambertville emerged from her painful cocoon. I shut my mouth, plopped myself back onto the couch and poured two cups from the silver pot at the center of the server and gestured at him to sit down like I was a duchess. The slight growl that escaped his throat made me wince. The scent of coffee covered the dusky odor of incense for a moment and allowed me to grimace into a smile, “At least have your coffee and some of this meal Sarah prepared before you run back to whatever,” again my nostrils quivered, “poisonous spore you’re developing that smells like something out of an ancient ruin.”
He sat down with huffed laugh and took the cup and saucer with the same tremble in his hands that wracked mine. We looked like accident victims palsied by shock. He wore his scars on the outside, and mine ate me from within. He repeated his request with a censorious snarl, “You’d hardly travel in the same social circles; how did you originally meet Sarah Monroe?” As I passed him the milk and sugar, I noted his preferences out of long habit with strangers I might need to please. The urge to soothe him was kneejerk and nauseating when I caught myself wanting to excuse his rude behavior.
He took a half sandwich, and so did I. I watched his mouth open and close over one corner and then I spoke, “Sarah and I met in an art class. I was the professor’s assistant, and she was finishing pre-requisites. Everything she drew or painted related to food or a picturesque farm with a lovely mountain in the background. She catered one of our faculty parties and then a party at my home . . . my parents’ home . . .” my throat closed up thinking about the engagement party. I looked back up to find him distracted by the screen of the tablet. “We became friends when I took a job coordinating events at Chez la Mer.” I glanced at my reflection in the glass doors of the bookcase again; the woman in the dark glass had red hair, white arms and a stained mouth. At one time, I had been told she was very beautiful.
The scarred man allowed silence to envelop us. I took a branch of red grapes and examined their color against the plate. Rose, green and deep violet mottled their tight, damp surfaces; they would be too noisy to pop into my mouth and explode with my teeth, so I studied them instead of looking back up at him. I heard him shift in his chair and stare at my pretended reverie.
“Sarah says that you have, unbelievably, an accounting and fine arts degree.” I nodded and shrugged. He was much calmer; the silence had soothed us both. He continued, “Is this a new direction in higher education? Sarah has an advanced degree in accounting, she is a CPA, yet she graduated from a culinary institute and cooks for us here at the mansion. You are probably friends due to some virulent eccentricity sweeping New England universities.” He was trying to be urbane though he smelled like an old church, green moss and wet stone.
I let myself smile; barely letting my lips peek past confusion. “We aren’t best friends, but I like her, oddness and all.” I let my eyes retrace the scars, the old path that fire had left and the blue of his large, narrowed eyes. Half of his face and scalp were untouched—whole and unblemished, framed by close-cropped jet black hair. His lips and chin were perfectly angular and bent into a frown. “Sarah says your accountant embezzled from your contracts and nearly ruined you. She says that she won’t have time to do your books with the baby and her other business.”
Jason Lambert nodded, “Both are growing. However, I don’t know if I want some spoiled debutante who’s hiding in the hills of West Virginia from family responsibility to keep my books. After all this upheaval, I do not need some flighty, rich girl to leave in the middle of an audit. I might be better off with the embezzler.” He’d cocked an eyebrow high which had probably cost him a bit of pain to do. He glanced back to the tablet. There were pictures and articles about the Ensky fortunes and foibles.
My blood boiled and fizzed; he was reviewing my resume in one hand, and all the articles featuring my family and surrounding my fall from grace a few months ago on the other hand. The fall had broken me in a profound way invisible to the eye. Just as the twilight allowed the autumn leaves to gobble up every stray molecule of color, the pain of my fall had stolen sensation from my daily life.
Under Jason Lambert’s critical perusal, the sensate world returned instantaneously. I began to pop the grapes into my mouth and slice their fragile spheres with my sharp teeth. They were cool and clean, but just barely sweet. I closed my eyes to absorb the pleasure and the sharp pain of their tartness. They were the best food I’d eaten in my life. I swallowed and glared at Jason Lambert, “If you want a good accountant, Sarah knows how to contact me.”
I snatched the resume out of his hand and crumpled it up to toss it into the trash. All my references were too far away. There was no need for the degree or the positions I’d rather not use. I would never live in my childhood home again or seek shelter with my parents. I had lived on the fringe of survival in a dulled state. Thanks to meeting Jason Lambert, I was painfully aware of my thinly-stretched patience. I stood up and straightened my skirt before I picked up my satchel and exited the beautiful room.
In the evening when I walked the dog at twilight, the diner customers in the booths and seated at the ice cream bar looked like an Edward Hopper painting. The owner was the main chef and looked the part with a white apron covering a big belly; he also wore a battered, old-time straw fedora with a striped ribbon around the crown. The usual waitress wore her curly, red hair in a high ponytail and favored jeans over the expected blue and white uniform that the daytime staff wore. The picture they made talking with customers cheered me when I was most alone during the first few months.
The town eased out to little neighborhoods of varying style: one newer section shaped like a pocket from the 1970s with cabin-like multi-levels; another was a post-war grid of tidy brick and mortar cottages; a few larger homes were tucked into shady lawns with spreading trees; and as a side note like a spur, a small dilapidated area with old houses cut into multiple apartments.
When I moved to Lambertville during the early spring that followed the complete evisceration of my former life, I found a small apartment on the second floor of a house in that little fringe of the spur-like neighborhood. The first floor was inhabited by a noisy family with two cats and an old hound dog. The teenage boy sometimes played his music a little loudly, and the smell of fried food sometimes engulfed the stairwell, but the resident busyness of their lives kept me from total isolation. I often visited Sarah and Walt at their home on Lilac Hill, walked the town twice a day and decided to get a job instead of coasting like I had been doing in Boston.
Walking the dog Sarah gave me in a fit of concern and affection, I felt myself settling into motion that I hoped was slightly forward instead of the stasis that had captured me at home in the cold north. I imagined myself back to the girl who visited nearly four years ago that November who’d been bold, shiny and new. I still looked like her, but inside I was overturned, cracked and slowly falling to pieces. After I met Jason Lambert for the first time, I understood that I had been deceiving myself about slipping back into that happy, unaffected girl again. She was gone; Georgiana Ensky was a new, fractured person who walked in that other girl’s place.
The old Georgiana Ensky would never have sneered at a man like Jason Lambert. My old self would have been respectful and just a bit awed by the beautiful mansion, the good antiques, museum-quality artwork in every room, even the rich, tapestry-like gold and blue drapes in the large, formal sitting room where Sarah deposited me to wait for my luncheon appointment with the president of the firm. The meal would double as an employment interview. I saw my reflection in the dark glass of a bookcase a few feet from my perch on a couch facing a dainty table set with a tea service, plates of cake, sandwiches and fruit. The woman in the glass frowned at me and hunched her shoulders as she tugged her skirt to a reasonable length.
And then he arrived. The air that Jason Lambert brought into the room with him was dank and slightly moldy. Sarah had told me that the research company dealt with government contracts and that Lambert specialized in biology. She’d said nothing about mold or dust—she left that out entirely. In fact, as my nose twitched trying to ferret out the source of the base note that made my eyes water, I was reminded of the cloying odor of myrrh in churches during the funerals or Lenten services. I shivered and rocked the china with my knees which made him frown.
I regret now, after months have elapsed, the moment I looked up and stood to greet him; my face was probably screwed into that moment you squash the urge to say, “Phew! What a smell!” like a child. I was extending my hand for his to shake and quickly dropped it back to my side. Jason Lambert might have been wearing a Halloween mask with scars tunneling over half of his face and melting into burn scars across his cheek, down his neck into his lab coat collar then stretching over one misshapen ear and into lava-like skin where hair once grew. He was holding a sheet of paper in one hand and a tablet computer in the other. I blinked with mouth open, as his eyes boldly flashed over me.
“Close your mouth, Miss Ensky. I expected something different, also. How well do you know Sarah?” He was close to walking out and chasing Sarah down for an interrogation; I could see his irritation boiling into anger.
At that moment, the new person I’d become in the months since I last walked Lambertville emerged from her painful cocoon. I shut my mouth, plopped myself back onto the couch and poured two cups from the silver pot at the center of the server and gestured at him to sit down like I was a duchess. The slight growl that escaped his throat made me wince. The scent of coffee covered the dusky odor of incense for a moment and allowed me to grimace into a smile, “At least have your coffee and some of this meal Sarah prepared before you run back to whatever,” again my nostrils quivered, “poisonous spore you’re developing that smells like something out of an ancient ruin.”
He sat down with huffed laugh and took the cup and saucer with the same tremble in his hands that wracked mine. We looked like accident victims palsied by shock. He wore his scars on the outside, and mine ate me from within. He repeated his request with a censorious snarl, “You’d hardly travel in the same social circles; how did you originally meet Sarah Monroe?” As I passed him the milk and sugar, I noted his preferences out of long habit with strangers I might need to please. The urge to soothe him was kneejerk and nauseating when I caught myself wanting to excuse his rude behavior.
He took a half sandwich, and so did I. I watched his mouth open and close over one corner and then I spoke, “Sarah and I met in an art class. I was the professor’s assistant, and she was finishing pre-requisites. Everything she drew or painted related to food or a picturesque farm with a lovely mountain in the background. She catered one of our faculty parties and then a party at my home . . . my parents’ home . . .” my throat closed up thinking about the engagement party. I looked back up to find him distracted by the screen of the tablet. “We became friends when I took a job coordinating events at Chez la Mer.” I glanced at my reflection in the glass doors of the bookcase again; the woman in the dark glass had red hair, white arms and a stained mouth. At one time, I had been told she was very beautiful.
The scarred man allowed silence to envelop us. I took a branch of red grapes and examined their color against the plate. Rose, green and deep violet mottled their tight, damp surfaces; they would be too noisy to pop into my mouth and explode with my teeth, so I studied them instead of looking back up at him. I heard him shift in his chair and stare at my pretended reverie.
“Sarah says that you have, unbelievably, an accounting and fine arts degree.” I nodded and shrugged. He was much calmer; the silence had soothed us both. He continued, “Is this a new direction in higher education? Sarah has an advanced degree in accounting, she is a CPA, yet she graduated from a culinary institute and cooks for us here at the mansion. You are probably friends due to some virulent eccentricity sweeping New England universities.” He was trying to be urbane though he smelled like an old church, green moss and wet stone.
I let myself smile; barely letting my lips peek past confusion. “We aren’t best friends, but I like her, oddness and all.” I let my eyes retrace the scars, the old path that fire had left and the blue of his large, narrowed eyes. Half of his face and scalp were untouched—whole and unblemished, framed by close-cropped jet black hair. His lips and chin were perfectly angular and bent into a frown. “Sarah says your accountant embezzled from your contracts and nearly ruined you. She says that she won’t have time to do your books with the baby and her other business.”
Jason Lambert nodded, “Both are growing. However, I don’t know if I want some spoiled debutante who’s hiding in the hills of West Virginia from family responsibility to keep my books. After all this upheaval, I do not need some flighty, rich girl to leave in the middle of an audit. I might be better off with the embezzler.” He’d cocked an eyebrow high which had probably cost him a bit of pain to do. He glanced back to the tablet. There were pictures and articles about the Ensky fortunes and foibles.
My blood boiled and fizzed; he was reviewing my resume in one hand, and all the articles featuring my family and surrounding my fall from grace a few months ago on the other hand. The fall had broken me in a profound way invisible to the eye. Just as the twilight allowed the autumn leaves to gobble up every stray molecule of color, the pain of my fall had stolen sensation from my daily life.
Under Jason Lambert’s critical perusal, the sensate world returned instantaneously. I began to pop the grapes into my mouth and slice their fragile spheres with my sharp teeth. They were cool and clean, but just barely sweet. I closed my eyes to absorb the pleasure and the sharp pain of their tartness. They were the best food I’d eaten in my life. I swallowed and glared at Jason Lambert, “If you want a good accountant, Sarah knows how to contact me.”
I snatched the resume out of his hand and crumpled it up to toss it into the trash. All my references were too far away. There was no need for the degree or the positions I’d rather not use. I would never live in my childhood home again or seek shelter with my parents. I had lived on the fringe of survival in a dulled state. Thanks to meeting Jason Lambert, I was painfully aware of my thinly-stretched patience. I stood up and straightened my skirt before I picked up my satchel and exited the beautiful room.