The Wanting Life

by Mark Rader

  Ella asked them what colors they wanted to be, then handed out mallets and balls, trying to be useful too. Youngest to oldest. To the other side and back would be a game. In a single turn, Evan moved all the way to the other side, so it was playing catch-up from there. But on the return trip, he faltered. The terrain along the far left was bumpy and unpredictable. His ball seemed on line at first but veered past the outer edge of a wicket at the last second. When it happened again, the same way, on his next turn, he pounded his mallet into the ground, hard, four times.

  “This ground fucking sucks!”

  “Hey!” Maura said. “Language!”

  “It’s all bumpy!” Evan said. “It’s messing up my shots!”

  “You’re the one who set up the course,” Harden said, his mallet wedged between his crossed arms.

  “I didn’t set up the ground!” Evan said.

  So, here it is, Maura thought, as she watched the tendons in Evan’s neck grow taut. A return to reality. The bubble had burst. It was actually a relief.

  “Just calm down,” Harden said. “We’re all going to have the same problems with it.”

  “You calm down!” he said.

  “I am being calm, actually,” Harden said calmly.

  “No, you’re not!” screamed Evan.

  For a moment, the two males sized each other up, one wild, one not. Since the night he’d come to her as she sobbed in the aftermath of her confession to Harden, Evan had been testier with Harden because he believed his dad was to blame for their moneyrelated disagreement more than she was; as a rule, he tended to take her side. She’d tried her best to disabuse him of this. But because she stayed so vague, he presumed she was protecting Harden and believed what he wanted to believe.

  “Seriously,” Harden said. “If the ground sucks for you, it sucks for all of us.”

  “Except maybe you won’t hit it the same place I do!” Evan said. Harden sighed, then bugged his eyes out at her, beseechingly. This was a look they’d shared so many times, in the grip of an Evan meltdown, for many years. A way to touch base.

  “Evan,” she said, “we have a choice here. Either we can play like this, or you can stop playing and we’ll play without you. But none of us wants you to stop playing.”

  “If nobody else has problems, then the game doesn’t count,” Evan said.

  “Let’s just play and worry about that later,” said Harden.

  All of them endured an awkward limbo state for a second, waiting for him to go with the flow. She thought of her painting series—the Edward Hopper sadness in a moment of what was supposed to be fun. Maybe next would be Wonder Woman playing croquet, wielding a striped and starred mallet like a sword, her children flipping out around her.

  “Mom,” Ella said, “I think you’re up next.”

  Whatever charm the idea of family croquet had once held by now had evaporated; at this point it was whimsical punishment. Games like this were fun only with a lively running commentary—the kind of teasing and encouragement her uncle, Father Paul, always brought to the occasion when he played croquet with her and Shade on visits. Give it a nice little whack, he’d say. That a girl! You better watch it, kiddo, I’m hot on your tail! Her sweet, supportive uncle, whom she hadn’t seen in years, who was dying. Whom she still hadn’t even bothered to call.

  She’d resolved to call ten times but hadn’t followed through. She was afraid to: it was that simple. He wouldn’t be unkind to her, but he might tell her things she didn’t want to hear. Ask her questions she didn’t have good answers for. She wasn’t prepared enough yet for a reckoning, even if the reckoning was mild. Though maybe, she thought now, watching Ella line up her shot, once she’d made her announcement, that would change. The whirling in her head and stomach would stop, and she’d know exactly what to say.

  Now, though, there was this game to endure. After every one of Evan’s frustrating shots, Maura bit her tongue, because no matter what she said, he’d lash out. Her ooh, not quites after Ella’s shots were so feeble they’d have been better left unsaid. And then Harden knocked her ball with his.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Look at what we have here.”

  The rule about hitting someone else’s ball, of course, was that you could, as a reward, whack their ball off course or take two extra strokes. Hitter’s choice. When Paul would knock their balls away, he’d just tap them, a harmless little bonk. But Harden wasn’t in the mood to be merciful. He scanned the yard until his eyes fell on the woods. Then he crowded the ball in that direction. Whether it was Evan’s anger or the beers catching up with him, she didn’t know, but his face was swollen with anger again.

  “Do you really have to?” she said lamely. “It’ll just make the game take longer.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “That’s not how it works.” Right foot securing his own ball, he went into a full golfer’s wind-up. And with a bold, fast pock! her ball barreled eagerly over the grass and into the woods, where a bush swallowed it whole.

  I deserve this, she thought. For David, for being a bad daughter and niece, for what I’ll do tomorrow. At the bush, she moved to her knees, reached in, face turned away so as not to get jammed in the eye. Blindly, she found the ball with her fingers and dropped it back in play. With her first swing, she only topped the ball: it went a foot. Frustrated, she swung again, this time chunking the ground six inches in front of the ball, sending it nowhere.

  “Hey!” Evan yelled. “That’s cheating! You can only swing once per turn.”

  This was true, but she couldn’t help herself, she needed the satisfaction of a decent strike. Which her next one was—a great hit, actually. Even so, it stopped ten feet away from the nearest wicket: that’s how far away she’d been.

  “Mo-om!” Evan’s voice sounded mournful. “You can’t do that!”

  “Fine, Evan,” she said, hating herself. “Then I guess I’ll just lose.”

  But he wasn’t having that. Like a demented gym teacher, he stomped over, grabbed her ball, walked with purpose toward the woods, and dropped it where it belonged.

  “There,” he said. “Now do it right this time.”

  Back inside, after Evan had won to the relief of everyone involved, Maura got the kids ready for bed. As Harden watched ESPN from the couch, she gave Evan melatonin to help him wind down, then read them Bartholomew and the Oobleck, a recent favorite, and Frog and Toad. She stood watch as they brushed teeth, turned on the white noise machine as they slipped under the covers of the beds pressed side by side in the room they’d been sharing all week, and then squatted beside their beds and kissed her fingers and pressed them to their foreheads, her nightly blessing. Before she left, Harden showed up to say a quick good night, and then she said good night too and closed their door until it was almost shut. Evan liked at least a two-inch gap to remind him he wasn’t alone.

  Finally, it was adult time—just she and Harden left to their own devices. She might need to invite him out to the deck for the conversation, she realized; he might stay on the couch watching TV until he felt tired enough to tuck in. Wanting the courage, she found her empty wineglass on the kitchen counter and refilled it, almost to the top.

  Beside the sofa, she watched the baseball highlights Harden was watching, the usual parade of macho wit. Harden looked over at her, acknowledging her, then turned back to the screen, so much smaller here than their giant TV at home.

  “Wanna come join me on the porch?” she said.

  He turned back to her, skeptical. “I don’t know. Do I?” No one could accuse him of being dumb.

  “I think it might be good for us to talk,” she said.

  The owners of this house had strung two strands of Christmas lights along the perimeter of the enclosed porch, and for the past few nights they’d plugged them in. The lights gave the space an intimate Mexican cantina vibe, but tonight Maura realized such cheeriness would seem discordant, so she left them off. She sat in one of the big, supremely comfortable chairs and waited. When Harden finally did appear, he
was backlit at the entrance and then engulfed by the dimness as he sat on the other side of the big square coffee table between them.

  “So,” he said, looking at her coldly, “what is it you have to tell me?”

  He already sensed it. The refrigerator droned in the next room. A half-moon, not visible from this angle, was casting its silver dust over the bumpy, impossible lawn. The children hopefully were asleep.

  “I think I want a divorce,” she said.

  The word was profane, after the day they’d had. For a moment he was quiet. Then he cleared his throat. “You think you want a divorce,” he said. “Okay. Well, you’ve said that before. Are you saying you want it or not?”

  She took a big, shaky breath. “I guess what I’m saying is that, yes, I want one. I want a divorce.”

  Harden nodded and stiffly took a pull from his beer, and for a moment she was afraid he’d stand up and throw it against the mesh wall.

  “So,” he said, “you don’t even want to try to make this work. You’re just done, and that’s it.”

  She couldn’t look at him. “I just think, at this point, with the way I feel, I’d just be wasting our time.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “A waste of time. Seventeen years. Big fucking waste.”

  He leaned forward, like he was experiencing stomach pain, then turned his head toward her and looked at her, like a predator.

  “You realize this will screw up the kids,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  “I know it’ll be hard. Divorces are always hard.”

  “But I guess you’re okay with that. Because you’re not going to be around for it.”

  “That’s not true. I will be around for it. Just the same as you.” She paused. “I’d get an apartment somewhere, maybe in Brighton. This is something that people do.”

  “How progressive of you.”

  “Harden,” she said.

  “We have a son who freaks out about normal things every day. And now you’re going to add this to his plate? It’s selfish. It’s beyond selfish.”

  “I know it is,” she said. “Of course it is. But I’m sick of being unhappy.”

  “Yeah, well, welcome to the club.”

  He shook his head at her ever so slightly.

  “So,” he said after a while, “what am I supposed to do now? Get a lawyer? Is that the next step?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You planning on telling the kids about this?”

  “I thought I’d do it tomorrow morning.”

  “No,” he snapped. “Fuck that. Let them enjoy their last morning here, at least. Tell them back home or something. But not here. No fucking way.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll wait until we get back then.”

  “I want to be there when you tell them,” he said—and here he choked up. She saw his lips retract, his eyes close. “I want them to know I’ll be there.”

  “Both of us will be there,” she said. But it took everything in her not to cry.

  What a horrible person I am, she thought. But they were just words; she didn’t really believe it, not right now. For a while, they just sat there together, looking out at the lawn. The bass line to “Brown Eyed Girl” thumped faintly in the distance. A woman whooped with joy. Someone a few houses down, probably outside having a campfire. What it made her remember in the dark here, faint sounds around them, just the two of them, was camping. The trip they took about five miles north of here, the year after they’d graduated from Boston College, their second year together. The plastic tarp of the tent had smelled like canned mushrooms. A sweet evangelical couple staying at the lot over came by offering them peanut butter cookies, and with their innocence in mind, every night but the first, when they’d been too tired, they’d fucked as quietly as possible, so as not to make it weird for them. Which had only made it more exciting, every tiny peep the equivalent of a moan. How was it possible that that young couple had been them?

  Harden cleared his throat, twice. His gaze moved from outside to the floor beyond his feet. “Do you remember that conference I went to a few years ago? In New Orleans?”

  “Sure.”

  “There was a woman I met there who basically asked me to her room one night.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. She was hot too. Dirty-blond hair, big boobs. Tall Amazon type. We got pretty drunk. She’d just dumped her husband and was hot to trot. Sandra. That was her name.”

  “Okay,” Maura said, not sure what else to say. If he was trying to dredge up some jealousy in her…he’d succeeded. She shouldn’t have felt anything, but she did. It was something physiological, it seemed. Beyond her control. “Did you do it?” She hoped he’d say yes. Then he’d have sinned too.

  “I thought about it, I’ll be honest,” he said. “I mean, nobody would have ever known. But then I reminded myself that I was married and went back to my room. And rubbed one out instead.”

  This was funny, but it wouldn’t be right to laugh. He wasn’t smiling.

  “You’re a really good person,” she said. “I mean that.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “A lot of good it’s done me.”

  Again, they fell silent. Maura felt the impulse to crack a joke, to maybe tell him about the camping trip she’d just thought of. But that was a cop-out. That was just her trying to slip out of the grip of Harden’s pain, fool herself into thinking, because he wasn’t crying or screaming, he was going to be fine.

  This would be her penance too. To force herself to sit with those she wounded. To watch the bleeding.

  “If it doesn’t work out with him,” he said, “I’m not going to take you back. You think I would. But I wouldn’t. I just want you to know that.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to,” she lied. She’d imagined he would.

  “Guy like that,” he continued, “never married, no kids, might get sick of always having to share you. He might decide it’s not worth the hassle, dealing with a kid like Evan. And then what? What’s to stop him from finding another person to moon over at his next little retreat. Stuff like this happens. Every single day.”

  This Harden was more familiar to her: the one who considered all the angles, like everything was a business deal. But about David he was wrong.

  “It’s not like that,” she said. “I wouldn’t do this if it was.”

  “Well,” he said, “I hope you’re right.”

  A few moments later, Harden pushed himself up to standing.

  “Anyway,” he said bitterly. “Good talk.”

  She looked at him.

  “I’m going to go inside now.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I might stay out here awhile longer.”

  “I figured.”

  I love you, Maura almost said. Because it was true. In a dusty, nostalgic way that didn’t matter anymore, she did. But that would be rubbing salt in the wound.

  “Good night,” she said instead, and Harden nodded and left her sitting with her empty wineglass in the dark.

  Now the difficult thing was done. Well, one of them. The least difficult of the two. She didn’t feel relief or joy, but, instead, a cool richness to the passing of the seconds that reminded her, very oddly, of the first time she’d held Evan in her arms, the doctors finally gone, Harden hunched forward in a chair beside her hospital bed. Fifteen stories up in their hospital downtown. He’s finally here, she’d thought—my baby’s here! Yet you didn’t start cheering or high-fiving, even though you’d waited nine months for this moment to come; immediately, immediately, you sensed the immensity of the task ahead, not as a burden but as a welcome call to grow up. This wasn’t a joyful moment, of course. But it was important. No doubt about that. A step had been taken she wasn’t sure she could take.

  Maura wanted to go inside and refill her glass, but from the kitchen came the sound of the refrigerator opening and closing, so she waited. Let Harden get his beer and retreat to their room. Give him space out of respect.

  When it sounded as though he
was gone, she went inside and filled her glass to the top and took a sip. The kitchen here was old but cute—part Design*Sponge, part old maid. White cabinets with midcentury black handles, white-veined blue Formica countertops made to look like marble. One of those Elvis clocks where his hips rock back and forth, measuring time. How odd that this giant moment in her life would happen here of all places. The owners would never know.

  One thing she could do was go back to her chair, turn on the Christmas lights, and text David to tell him she’d done it. But that seemed crass to her, something a teenaged girl would do, not a woman dumping a Pandora’s box of hurt onto her family. Tomorrow, after they got home, she could go out for a walk and debrief him. Though it wouldn’t be real, she knew, until she told the kids.

  The porch held nothing for her anymore. It was spoiled.

  Nor did she want to sit in the living room or go to bed.

  But if she wanted, it occurred to her, her mind listing now slowly to David—the reason for all this drama, lover of boats, his lake—she could slip on sandals and walk down to the beach. Take her wine with her.

  Within a few minutes she was out of the house, walking under the night sky. As she passed the second house on the way to the steep stairs, the sounds of the nearby party flared louder; behind a house she glimpsed a smear of fire and laughing people in demonic chiaroscuro. She walked on the gravel along the edges of the road, the grit shifting with every step, just the tiniest give. Already she was regretting bringing a wineglass—it was a thing she had to worry about now, to hold and keep track of, so to remove its power over her she downed it all and then carried it, lazily, by the bulb. The head rush was nice. It matched the velvety air.

  The view of the beach was obstructed by trees until there was a clearing. Then: an orange wedge of moon, a dim halo effect around its curved side. She couldn’t see the tide from here, only the dark plain stretching to a horizon, but she could hear its hypnotic sound. The sky was clear, and as she descended the stairs, using the light on her phone to navigate, she snuck glimpses of the stars embedded in it. There was a Jack Gilbert poem David once texted her that she’d loved, that she’d come to hold close as a guiding light in the conversation she constantly had about leaving. Not since she was a girl in Mrs. Morneau’s English class had she memorized a poem. Her favorite part was the beginning: