Muriel and Lillian
They walk slowly, arm in arm, along the downtown street. They lean toward each other for strength, for support, to keep from falling to the sidewalk should one of them stumble.
They also stay close to hear each other, their words otherwise lost under the throb of the endlessly passing cars and the occasional rumble of the elevated train overhead. It’s one thing to be in Orchestra Hall, with every instrument pointed in your direction, all playing together, the melody and harmony and rhythm as one, and your senses are fully focused. Nothing like the chaos of the city streets between the Hall and the train station, with cars and trains and bicycles and pedestrians all going in different directions, each making their own sound and ignoring the rest. Muriel and Lillian lean in close as they walk, to be heard and understood.
As they move ahead, the station still many blocks away, their tote bags—both from a public radio fundraiser—hang from their bent elbows and tap gently against their thighs. The bags are full of everything they thought they might need for their excursion: small clutches (“No need for the big purse,” Muriel had said), rain ponchos, extra hearing-aid batteries (only in Lillian’s bag; Muriel still denies that she needs her hearing-aid, other than on rare occasions), sunscreen and hand lotion, plus a few items purchased at the Orchestra Hall gift shop. A Gershwin CD for Muriel, a Brahms cassette for Lillian, a symphony t-shirt for Muriel’s artsy (her word) granddaughter.
As Muriel talks, her eyes are cast down toward the sidewalk, as if summoning her thoughts and the words to convey them, while Lillian looks ahead to keep an eye on where they are going. Lillian sees oncoming people part before them, almost respectfully, giving them a wide berth, and also notices how others swing past the two of them from behind, perhaps hindered by their slow pace and relieved to finally pass their meager obstruction. She wonders what the others think of them as they pass—Muriel taller, slim and still elegant; Lillian squat, curvy and plain—or whether they think anything at all. If they even notice the two old women beyond the brief moment when they pass by. She wonders if the others imagine the lives she and Muriel have lead, friends for fifty years, as wives and now widows, mothers and grandmothers. Or if the others are so preoccupied with their own lives that they never give Muriel and Lillian a second thought.
The station is still three blocks away, with plenty of time to catch the 4:30 train back to Elmhurst, and Muriel is talking, gushing about the glories of the Beethoven symphony they had just heard, the thrills of the faster sections, the deep, brooding emotion of the slower.
“Harold never appreciated the Orchestra. He always came along, but only because I nagged him to, and he spent the whole time either reading the program by that little aisle light, or taking a nap.” She laughs. “He always denied he had been asleep, and would be awake with the final applause, but I could see the cobwebs in his eyes when the house lights came up.”
They pause at a red light, Muriel with eyes downward and still intent on her narrative, Lillian looking ahead for the walk light to change.
“Nothing like your Donald,” Muriel continues. “He loved classical, didn’t he?”
Lillian says yes, briefly, to keep Muriel going while Lillian drifted into herself. Yes, he was my Donald, wasn’t he? she thinks, with a bitterness that was mild but had not diminished over the years. He was my Donald, and you had your Harold, but that wasn’t enough for you.
She wonders what it was like during their fling, one of many that Muriel had collected with Donald and other men; Muriel told her all about them, except for the one with him. She wonders which classical piece must have been playing on Muriel’s stereo while they did it, during those long afternoons when Lillian could never reach Harold at his office and Muriel didn’t answer her phone. Something powerful played, she guesses, something passionate, as they went at it—the phrase Muriel always used, describing the other men—after which Donald came home, saying he was out with clients all afternoon, even as he smelled like Muriel’s perfume, the Chanel No. 5 that Lillian knew so well from their many years together as friends.
Friends. They are best of friends, then and now. And even just good friends should overlook their friends’ shortcomings. But this is so much more than a shortcoming; this, Lillian would have to forgive, not just to overlook. Yet to forgive, Lillian would have first needed some sort of apology from Muriel, who had never done such a thing, and probably sees no reason to apologize. Donald was just one of many.
Muriel never asked for forgiveness, Lillian thinks, as they cross the bridge, move through the revolving doors and take the escalator downward. On the train they sit together on a bench seat, facing forward, and Muriel at last turns her attention to Lillian.
“Care to come over tonight?”
“I don’t think so. I’m pretty tired after today. I’ll be in bed early.”
“Not me. I’ll be up late, like I always am. But tomorrow, then. You can come over for lunch. We’ll listen to the Gershwin, and I’ll see if George and Nancy want to play bridge.”
“Well, I don’t know.” After their long day downtown, she knows she would still be tired even after going to bed early, and she longed for the quiet of home the next day. But she held back her thoughts.
“Oh, that George. He’s such a sweetheart.”
Lillian turns in the seat, sharply, and stares at Muriel. “George? Good Lord, not him, too?” she exclaims, her thoughts at last becoming words.
“George? Oh heavens, no. I didn’t even know him back then.”
As if you only did that in the past, Lillian thinks, and never fool around these days. She had heard things, hints, even from Muriel herself.
“So you’ll come tomorrow?” Muriel says, as if confirming the acceptance that Lillian hadn’t given.
Lillian begins to object, but then hears something pleading, almost plaintive, in Muriel’s voice. She turns again and catches Muriel’s eye, seeing a sadness there she only remembers noticing a few times before.
“Yes, of course I will,” Lillian says, her voice warmer. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. Lunch, and hopefully bridge.”
Her quiet day at home no longer seems as important as the sadness she saw in Muriel’s eyes, the pleading she heard in her voice. At once Lillian realizes that, for all of her garrulous gushing and all of her men, deep down Muriel is a lonely woman, one who needs as good a friend as Lillian.
“Of course I will.”
It had always been this way with them, Lillian thinks. Lillian wishing for one thing, Muriel insisting on another, Lillian quietly going along.