The Actor and the Housewife

by Shannon Hale

  They bought a secondhand bedroom set and painted it deep purple. The walls they redid in lime green, Sam and Polly lending a hand. Alice got one of her theater friends who painted sets to create a forest scene on one wall. Alice made a quilt and shams in garish colors. The new bed was a double, the king gone, leaving room for a love seat, chair, and coffee table. They ripped out the old, dark curtains and put in new light-permeating blinds. The room was brighter, inviting, felt more public than private, and Becky kept magazines on the coffee table and little bowls full of candy to lure in kids and visitors.

  It became a ritual to gather in Becky’s room before bed. Sometimes it was just Sam and Polly, who were still a little more tender and apt to weep, a little more eager for their mother’s embrace and voice. Sometimes Hyrum joined them for family prayer, followed by snacks and chats in the love seat.

  “Better?” Alice asked, inspecting the room one clear winter morning.

  “Yeah . . .”

  Alice put an arm around Becky and pulled her into her soft chest. “Tell me.”

  “I miss him.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “And . . . I don’t know how to be a mother anymore. I thought I was good at it. But so much of the parenting was really Mike—we talked about everything, and his surety gave me confidence. Now I feel like a fraud.”

  Alice kissed her daughter’s head several times. “It’ll come back. Your confidence. You’ll find it again.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “You’re a good mother, honey lamb. I know it, and so do your kids. Just promise me when that confidence comes knocking, you’ll let it in.”

  Becky gave in to the spiritual proddings poking soft fingers at her heart, began to pray more, and allowed herself to feel the comfort that she was accustomed to feeling after her prayers. She dreamed of Mike nearly every night. Dreaming of him helped her believe that Becky and Mike hadn’t ended that day in the hospital, that they would go on forever. He didn’t carry important messages from beyond. He was just there, they were together, and the feeling of it would linger with her in the morning, the way the smell of cookies baking hangs in the air even after they’re all eaten.

  And there was something else. A quiet buzzing of anticipation whenever she thought of Felix helped drone out the pain of loss, just a little. It helped give her something to wonder about instead of the constant questions: Will my kids survive the loss of a father? Will my heart hurt this much for the rest of my life? Will we ever be okay?

  Right about two years after Mike’s death, the extended family began to talk to Becky about “moving on.” It was a sudden attack from all sides, like those ants that crawl up your leg then send out a chemical signal to all bite at once.

  “One of my co-workers, Paul, he’s a really great guy, a widower himself . . .” her brother Jerry said as they cleared the table from Sunday dinner.

  “Time to get that meat back on the market,” her brother John said, slapping her backside. He was always the tactful one.

  “It wouldn’t mean you love Mike any less,” her sister, Diana, said as they planted bulbs in the backyard, five of their combined twelve children chasing each other with worms.

  Becky buried her face in her dirty hands. “Shut up,” she said, because that was a forbidden phrase growing up in their mother’s house, two words that would send them to bed without supper. And Becky was feeling like a cornered animal and wanted nothing more than to lash back as if for her life.

  “Becky . . .”

  “Are you telling me that if Steve died, a couple of years later you’d be over it and out dating again?”

  “Let’s be honest—I have eight children. Any man who would have me would be insane, and I couldn’t marry an insane man. But yes, personally, I would be ready. I could get married again.”

  Becky nearly called her a liar, but she supposed that Diana and Steve had always had one of those professional partnerships, where both knew their responsibilities and kept the family running. They didn’t seem to laugh together. And when Steve was out of town, Diana didn’t speak as if she missed him. Not like Becky and Mike. There was that fl are of pain in her general heart region again.

  “Diana, some animals mate for life. You don’t tell a goose that lost her mate, ‘It’s time to move on.’ No moving on for a goose. In fact, a goose doesn’t even appreciate the insinuation. Try to be all cute and helpful with a goose and just hint at the moving on advice, and that goose will up and bite you on the tush.”

  Diana knocked the dirt off her shovel. “How about we just pretend I didn’t bring this up?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  At least one Jack was open to new love. Polly had a boyfriend named Theo, a pale, sad-eyed, fl oppy-haired ghost of a boy who was never without his black trench coat, a beaten-up paperback of Sartre’s Nausea peeking out the front pocket.

  For weeks he’d wandered the Jacks’ front yard or sat on his bike staring at Polly’s window before Polly ever invited him in. Becky wasn’t sure how they had any relationship, both just sitting in silence, sometimes listening to music, sometimes not. They would lounge in Polly’s room (with the door open—house rule), studying together. When Becky passed by, Polly’s eyes would be on her book and Theo’s eyes would be on Polly. Eerie? Still, the girl seemed happier than she’d been in two years.

  Good for her, Becky thought, and better her than me.

  While Diana had backed off the Move On harassment, her brothers and parents kept the parade going. Becky didn’t tell Felix about it. They spoke a few times a week, but she couldn’t even consider leaving her kids to visit him, and Felix was busy, having started a production company.

  But he did come for Christmas—two years, three months, and five days since Mike died. Felix had arranged a hotel, but the first night he and Becky stayed up so late talking that he ended up sleeping on the sofa. The next day he brought his bags from the hotel and took over Fiona’s room. Fiona was in Los Angeles, having finished a one-year program at a design school in New York and was now fulfilling an internship Celeste had helped set up. When she arrived on December 23, she insisted she wanted to bunk with Polly, leaving the basement room to Felix.

  Becky couldn’t find The Little Mermaid comforter in their storage room, but she did dig out the matching shams and put them on his pillows.

  Felix jumped right into the Jack Family Christmas Week Extravaganza, which included caroling, attending a production of The Nutcracker and The Christmas Carol, a Messiah sing-along, strolling the Christmas lights at Temple Square, wrapping presents, and baking herds and herds of reindeer cookies for neighbors. And he was introduced to Loki, the family’s hairless cat.

  “The kids wanted another pet,” Becky explained as Felix stared in horror at the creature beside him. “But with Polly’s allergies . . .”

  “You are lying to me. You borrowed this creature from a zoo to play a prank on me. This isn’t even really a cat, is it? This is some sort of rat and opossum hybrid. This is a lifelike Japanese robot that can dance to disco music.”

  “Funny. They’re called sphinx cats. Come on, feel her skin. Like peach fuzz, right? Isn’t she sweet? Give her a good rub. She’s very affectionate.”

  “Ah-ha, yes, isn’t that just . . . er, what is coating my hands?”

  “It’s . . . it’s like a body wax. I should’ve bathed her before you came. The hairless cats, they ooze this waxy stuff to protect their skin. ’Cause they don’t have hair. To protect them. So the waxy ooze helps. You see.”

  Felix stared at her for several seconds, his hands held up like a doctor about to perform surgery.

  “I’m going to wash my hands now. And I’m going to try very hard not to run out of this house screaming.”

  Besides that, there was no drama during his visit, unless you count a minor (and mostly pleasant) fuddle when they took the three kids to the movies.

  “I’ll pay the admission,” Becky insisted.

  “Fine, as long as I
can buy the concessions.”

  That seemed fair until Felix, Hyrum, and Sam came back from the concession stand loaded with five jumbo popcorns, bucket-sized sodas, and a heap of enormous candy bars.

  “Look what he bought us, Mom!” Sam said.

  “Felix, are you planning to supply the Russian army?”

  He schlepped his provisions up the stairs to their seats, spilling popcorn in his wake. “Er, the boys assured me it was the typical fare for a family movie night.”

  “I bet they did. Now at last we have inventory to open that concession stand of our dreams.” She sighed. “Better set aside half that candy for later, ’cause that’ll be the last movie treat you boys get for a year.”

  “Mom!” they both whined.

  “I’m kidding. It’s Felix’s treat, so I can’t complain. Go ahead and make yourselves sick.”

  “Sweet,” Sam said. Out of his ten-year-old mouth, that word sounded so cute Becky just had to kiss his cheeks.

  “Oh,” Polly said sadly. “Everything has chocolate.”

  “Boys, I’m surprised,” Becky said in a so-not-surprised tone. “You know Polly’s allergic to chocolate, and usually your snack food motivations are purely selfless.”

  Felix gave Hyrum a bill and asked him to be a gentleman and go buy Polly some licorice, then sat next to Becky. “Since we’re on the subject, how are you managing? I mean, financially?”

  “Are we on the subject?”

  “We are now. So, how are—”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “If you don’t, I might get rough.”

  “Do and it’ll be Momma’s smack-down time.”

  He picked her up, right there in the movie theater, gripped her around her waist and turned her upside-down. “Tell me or it’s the dirt nap, baby.”

  “Put me down, show-off !”

  He really was a shameless show-off , though even upside down, Becky thought to be impressed that he was so strong, especially as he was only a couple of years from fifty.

  “Promise.”

  “Okay, fine. I’ll talk, I’ll spill the beans, I’ll crow, what ever you want!”

  Upright again, she straightened her sweater, turning to explain to the gaping spectators behind her, “I had a coin stuck in my pocket and he was trying to shake it out.”

  The couple behind them smiled politely. Polly and Sam were laughing when Hyrum returned with the licorice.

  “Felix picked up Mom,” Sam said.

  “Upside down!” Polly said.

  Hyrum scowled. “Crap, I miss everything.”

  “Tell me,” Felix asked again in a quiet voice.

  Becky whispered back so her kids wouldn’t hear. “The life insurance paid off the mortgage, and thanks to the movie windfall we have the kids’ college money put away. We had some retirement savings, but I’d rather not dip into that for another twenty years. So, it’s just a matter of paying the day-to-day stuff . . .”

  “And can you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Becky,” he said like a warning.

  She sighed. “I have a degree in early-childhood development, and I haven’t worked outside the home in nineteen years. I don’t have a career. I’ve tried to sell a couple of other screenplays I’d been writing, a family comedy and a teen comedy, but Karen passed, and Larry looked them over and didn’t think he could make them fly. I’ve made a little money doing technical writing by contract, but it’s not quite enough, so I’ve started working on my real estate license.”

  He looked at her a long time. Her look back was defiant.

  “Let me—”

  “No.”

  “Just—”

  “No.”

  “Sod it, you stubborn, stubborn woman!”

  “Shh . . .” said the couple behind them. The previews had started.

  “Yeah, shh,” Becky whispered. “I swear, sometimes you can be so inconsiderate. I mean, talking in movies and offering to pay a widow’s bills—geez, some people.”

  “Please,” he said, a little ache in his voice.

  “No.”

  He pushed his fist against his mouth to still a smile.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You are. I can’t think why I love you. Eleven years I’ve been wondering and I’m no closer to—”

  “Shh . . .” said the couple behind them.

  “Yeah, shh,” said Hyrum. “You guys are worse than little kids, I swear.”

  “How old is he again?” Felix whispered.

  “Fifteen. Which makes him only slightly more mature than you.”

  “Oh really? Is he mature enough to pull off the yawn-stretch maneuver?”

  Felix yawned, stretched, and settled his arm around Becky’s shoulder.

  There they were, she realized, watching a movie, eating popcorn and sipping sodas, his arm around her shoulder. Mike wasn’t there. Celeste wasn’t there. She hadn’t meant to ask the question aloud, but during the opening action sequence, she found herself whispering, “Are we on a date?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “What?” she said, surprised by the response.

  He turned to look at her, and his eyes assured her he meant exactly what he said. “Yes, we are.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a plunging sensation in her middle.

  Behind them, a cell phone rang, chiming the theme to The Godfather.

  The guy answered it in full voice. “Hello?”

  Felix turned very slowly, looked at the guy, and raised one eyebrow.

  Becky laughed, a piece of popcorn flying out of her mouth and hurtling over the seats before her.

  Christmas Eve, Becky decided to stay home and keep it simple. Since Mike, she’d taken every opportunity to drown holidays in family and noise so the kids wouldn’t notice who wasn’t there. But this year, Becky wanted candles and music, dinner at home, kids in pajamas playing games, hot cocoa and cookies, photo albums and popcorn. Felix had made a reservation at some bed-and-breakfast up a canyon, saying he didn’t want to interfere with the family and that Christmas meant nothing to him. But then the heavens opened, and snow filled the earth. The streets were white, the air was white, the tree branches balanced inches of fat flakes. So Felix sat down to the ham dinner and just stayed. And stayed and stayed.

  He played Boggle with Polly and Fiona, who let him get away with British spellings until he claimed b-a-u-g-x was the way all English children were taught to spell “box.” He put new logs on the fire and read Christmas books with Sam, doing accents for all the characters. And after the kids had gone to bed, Becky grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into her bedroom. She locked the door behind them, giggling.

  “Usually in such circumstances,” he said, “I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next, but right now, Mrs. Jack, I am stumped.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Get your mind out of the gutter. I just want you to help me play Santa Claus.”

  She pulled bags of goodies out of the closet and instructed him in the fine art of stocking stuffing. Then they tiptoed with excruciating quietness to the family room. The filled stockings were too heavy to hang back up, so they placed them on chairs and on the sofa, arranging the larger gifts around them.

  “Don’t they all know by now . . .” Felix whispered, “you know, who is putting out the gifts?”

  “Of course they do.”

  “So why the secrecy?”

  “Because what if . . . what if they were wrong? I mean, what if they thought there was no Santa, but there really was? They’ve never actually seen me or Mike put out the gifts, so there will always be that tiny hope, that little piece of the child in them that believes there is some magic, and Christmas morning will make all their fantasies real.”

  “What a load of rubbish. The truth is, you just have fun doing it.”

  Becky giggled some more.

  Felix said, “Shh.” And he arranged Sam’s new sled at a
different angle.

  They crept back upstairs, shut the door to her room with an almost silent click, looked at each other and sighed relief.

  “Made it. One more year.”

  Felix dropped into a chair as if he’d just run a race. He wore a goofy grin. “Can we do that again?”

  She sat on the floor and pulled her knees to her chest, still feeling bouncy and charmed from the family room adventure. “When is the last time you had a good family Christmas?”

  Felix shut his eyes. “Mmm . . . nineteen seventy-one.”

  “What?”

  “Every Christmas after Mum and I had our own little celebration, I would go to a mate’s house—Mark Taggart. Mark’s mum was fond of me, a real blaze of life, reminds me of another woman I know. And she loved a good holiday. The phrase ‘deck the halls’ can’t describe the state of that house. Five children, a mother and a father, loads of food and gifts and music, candles and fire blazing, tree and holly and mistletoe. It was . . . perfect.” He shook his head. “I ran over every Christmas Day, happy as anything. By the time I got back to our bleak, empty little house, I felt whittled down to the core. The Taggarts moved house when I was thirteen, and I was honestly relieved to have them gone. It wasn’t pleasant having that comparison.”

  “And you haven’t celebrated Christmas since.”

  “Not so much.”

  “Felix . . .”

  “Hey now, this is not a tragic night. You showed up the Taggarts, didn’t you?”

  “You better believe it. I doubt the Taggarts supplied you with Little Mermaid shams.”

  Felix shuddered. “Now is an appropriate time to apply the word tragic.”

  “It is, actually . . .” Becky felt weariness wash over her, as if all of a sudden her body realized the late hour. She laid her head on the love seat. “You know in the real story, the non-Disney one, the prince marries someone else, the Little Mermaid dies and is doomed to turn into sea foam but instead becomes a daughter of the air.”