golf at what the patient’s mother called “that fabulous, famous course,” while the wives attended “golfing clinics.” “Clinics,” thought the patient, as if the women were ill and in need of rehabilitation while their husbands braved the brisk air of the Monterey Peninsula.
They promised us a suite with a fireplace, her mother rattled on. A view of the ocean. On Saturday night, a formal gala. I shall finally get to wear that midnight-blue gown that has been hanging in my closet all this time, waiting for my life to catch up to its glamour, she said, laughing at her own little quip.
The patient’s heart began to thump irregularly. It was the pressure of all that she could not say, she told her therapist, the avoidance, the pretense.
Surely you didn’t call to invite me to a gala, the patient said to her mother.
Of course not, dear! What would you do at a gala? In any case, we don’t have an invitation for you. But I was thinking: You’ll come down here for lunch. It will be lovely. You will enjoy it.
The patient laughed to herself. You will enjoy it!
Then she thought: I probably should lie about prior plans. Or say I have to work.
I knew that if I went, she said to Dr. Schussler, I would have to tell her about finding Michal. And suddenly I wanted to tell her—bash her with it.
Bash her? asked the doctor.
Yes. Fling it in her face.
The drive down to the Peninsula took just a little over an hour and a half. By eleven a.m. Saturday, the patient was taking the turnoff from Route 101 for Pacific Grove.
But here things went awry. The low-hanging marine layer obscured the narrow, curving roads. The wind-stricken cypress trees, black in the fog, seemed coiled up, ready to spring upon any car whose driver was not paying exquisite attention. And the signs were demonic; they seemed designed to keep her circling forever in the shrouded lanes. She followed the turns for the Lodge at Pebble Beach, where her parents were staying, but somehow always found herself at the Inn at Spanish Bay. Three times she made the circuit, and three times the sign for “Spanish Bay” came looming out of the mist like some inescapable fate. She retraced her turns, and decided to go left at what had been a right, where the signs pointed to the “Scenic 17 Mile Drive.” The direction seemed wrong, vectoring away from the Lodge. And yet, inexplicably, not five minutes later, there was the correct driveway and the valets taking keys from the arriving guests.
She pulled into the long driveway in her 1966, much-dented Volvo, her squashed bug of a car lining up behind Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals, bargelike Buicks and Pontiacs, a few BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes, and some modest rented Fords and Chevrolets. Finally she reached the entrance. The valet tried to put her car into reverse, and failed.
You have to double-clutch it for reverse, she told him.
His face was blank. She took the keys and parked it herself.
A concierge in the lobby directed her to the area reserved for the ladies’ golfing clinics, and she followed his directions to a foggy hillside where fifteen ladies were, variously, practicing chip shots, putting, and driving. At the far end, whacking a ball off a tee, was her mother.
She seemed to glow out of the fog. She was wearing beige slacks with a slightly golden hue and a cashmere sweater in a soft salmon color. She was only a little less bejeweled than she would be for a gala: two rings, a heavy gold necklace, teardrop-shaped pearls dancing on diamond-encrusted wires—earrings so familiar that the patient could recognize them at a distance. The only concessions her mother seemed to have made to the sporting nature of the occasion were the shoes, spiked golf shoes, and an old madras-print bandana around her head, to prevent her teased and sprayed hair from blowing about in the wind.
The patient tried to keep herself standing there, watching her mother, hoping to see that woman there in the salmon sweater as a separate person, someone she could examine and evaluate as if she were a stranger. Her mother was not a bad golfer, she saw. Her stance was good; she kept her head down and addressed the ball; her swing was balanced. Her drives sailed high into the fog then arched down far across the narrow little valley below; and the patient could see the pleasure that the woman—there, the