I Have the Answer

by Kelly Fordon

  Home again.

  Then the loooonnnnnggggeesssssst hoooooooouuuuuurrrrrrrrsssssss: 4 to 7 p.m. The hours when the babies have made everyone cranky. Afternoons that make us feel like slugs crossing the desert.

  We pour our first glass of wine at 5 p.m.

  Year Six:

  Suddenly, Margery is obsessed with recycling. All the problems in the world stem from our disregard for waste. Don’t we know that we are polluting the planet and poisoning our children? We ought to be ashamed! We ought to be looking out for the welfare of our descendants. We ought to be protecting the world unto the seventh generation! Margery forms an environmental group, and soon she’s uncovered a cancer cluster. Babies born without limbs. The air is so noxious it would be folly to attempt a trip to the park.

  It is just the excuse we have been looking for.

  We all think some good sex would bring Margery back to earth, and Tina gets drunk enough to suggest Margery indulge her husband in his oak tree fantasy. That’s the last we see of them for three months. Ultimately, they come back to us, because what else do they have to do?

  Year Eight:

  Zane is drinking. A lot. Sometimes he staggers into the Dinner Club and sits mumbling on the couch in front of the fire. Occasionally someone will sit down beside him. Most often it’s Margery. She’s still trying to avoid frolicking in the trees with Steve. She thinks she’s uncovered the reason for all of the assorted ailments, the general malaise engulfing the neighborhood:

  “They used to spray the trees,” she says, “with a toxin.”

  “I never spray my trees,” Steve calls out, and Shelly, who happens to be passing with a tray of hors d’oeuvres, says, At least not with pesticide, and everyone bursts out laughing.

  Late at night, Zane puts in a Bob Dylan CD and mumbles, swaying in the corner. The rest of us are assembled around the fireplace on various couches and overstuffed chairs. Margery is kneeling next to the fireplace trying to light the fire. When she gets up, she staggers into Zane and he grabs her arm. Then he reaches out and pinches her rear end.

  “Oh, Zane! Stop!” she says. And it’s the way she says it that causes everyone to pause.

  Still, we aren’t sure exactly what we’re witnessing until Tina screams.

  Year Ten:

  The children are in school every morning. Margery sets up a small shop called Running Interference in the village. The store is chock-full of all-natural, nontoxic household products. People have started avoiding her on the street and in the grocery store because she’s always spouting dire predictions about our health and the environment. But we stand by her. We trek to Running Interference for aromatherapy lotions and soy candles. We have our homes inspected by Healthy Homes to the tune of $200. We have our asbestos remediated. But then the Myers girl, a first grader at Mellon Elementary, dies after what her mother thought was just a stomach flu. A rotavirus has taken her out.

  No way to run interference.

  For one brief sunlit week we are kissing and coddling and hugging our children. We tiptoe into the nursery at night and stroke our babies’ cheeks. Thank God for you! I don’t know what I’d do without you! Why have I been so blind? We trek to the park (we haven’t been there in a year), and for that brief, gleaming week when the Myers girl is buried and mourned and the world morphs into a shiftless, unpredictable place, we push the swing, loving every minute.

  Shelly and Bob have their fourth child. They have four small children under the age of ten. No one mentioned that when you decide to have four children—bam, bam, bam, bam—it will sound like a hammer in your head for years to come.

  Shelly hires a babysitter even though she and Bob are watching their pennies. Actually, Bob is watching their pennies. He’s inputting their expenditures into Quicken. Even toilet paper is categorized. Shelly starts hitting the “cash back” button when she’s checking out at the grocery store. She has to be able to pay for a babysitter without Bob running interference. The neighbor girl, Claudia, a young girl of sixteen, initially says she’s available from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., but when Shelly gets home on the first afternoon, Claudia tells her, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this ever again.” This validates and at the same time completely devastates Shelly, who knew this child-rearing thing was hard but not that hard. She would like to hit the girl, but instead she shrugs and watches Claudia flounce out the door in her miniskirt and combat boots.

  Just you wait, she thinks.

  Year Twelve:

  Life is getting easier because three of Shelly’s children are in school. The Dinner Club is not meeting on a monthly basis anymore but still manages to get together three or four times a year. Life is so busy! Sports, Cub Scouts, Brownies, business trips. Tina is trying to adjust to year-round hockey, which Zane has insisted on even though their two boys are so small they can barely hold themselves upright in their hockey gear. She doesn’t even seem to notice that Zane is falling apart. Last month, he passed out before dinner, then, later in the evening, when we were indulging in the apple crisp, he ambled into the dining room.

  “Well, that was delicious, Margery!” he said, before drifting out the front door and into the frigid night.

  No one says anything to Tina because Tina won’t respond. She’s talking nonstop at the other end of the table.

  “Mikey loves hockey. The parents are great. But seriously? All weekend, every weekend? I can’t keep up with it.”

  Right, right, right. She’ll talk so long and so rapidly that any hope of bringing up Zane’s drinking problem dies out like the candles on the table. Zane doesn’t come back. Luckily, he makes it home and into the house that night. He’s been found in the yard before—sometimes in the front yard and sometimes in the shed out back. That night, the Nygards pass him on their way home from the country club and they give him a lift.

  Margery and Steve are seeing a therapist. It doesn’t seem to be working.

  Year Thirteen:

  Margery confides that she’s looking for an apartment in the Village. Then one night, Bob and Steve attend a men’s ecumenical retreat at the stadium. Eight thousand men swaying and praising God. Bob is already religious. (His faith and a daily dose of Zoloft are how he’s dealing with his wife’s spending habits—and his attraction to Emit Hughes that seemed to pop up out of nowhere one day in the sauna when Emit shifted and his towel fell off.)

  Steve is not religious. But when they begin singing “Amazing Grace” and end with “Lord of the Dance,” Steve feels a bright white light like a laser beam pierce his forehead. He’s falling backward. When he comes to, all the jungle sex fantasies are gone, remediated.

  He’s been saved.

  One night, Shelly and Bob are sitting in the living room. He’s working on Quicken and she’s reading Oprah magazine.

  “Don’t you think it’s funny that none of us are divorced yet?” she asks. “You know, what about Tina and Zane? How can she put up with the drinking? Those poor kids! Margery and Steve? It’s like he doesn’t even exist. She’s so caught up with the environmental movement. I mean, can you see what—if anything—is holding them together?”

  Bob doesn’t hear her. The grocery budget is out of whack. “Why don’t you just buy generic?” he says.

  “Good idea,” Shelly says.

  Year Fourteen:

  Zane spends thirty days in rehab. And when he comes back, he signs on as manager of their middle son’s hockey team, which means traveling every other weekend to places like Lansing and Kalamazoo. Tina has gone back to school to become a dental hygienist. Nobody knows how or why she’s come up with this plan. It’s such a random choice, and she really doesn’t need the money.

  “I mean why not pet grooming or flower arranging or even working here?” Margery asks Shelly when they are sitting in Starbucks one morning.

  “I thought she was an English major,” Shelly says.

  “No, I was the English major,” Margery says. “She was something else.”

  When Margery goes to the bathroom, Shell
y sneaks a packet of Sweet’N Low into her coffee. Stirring the white powder makes her feel as devious as a teenager smoking dope behind the garage.

  “Did Tina ever work?” Shelly asks when Margery returns.

  Now that all the kids are in school, Shelly is helping out at Running Interference a couple of days a week and the two of them often take a power walk and then stop at Starbucks before opening the shop for the day. It’s getting hard to keep the weight off even though they barely eat anything.

  “I don’t know. . . . I don’t even know what you used to do. What did you do with that English major?”

  Margery shrugs. “Hard to remember that far back.”

  Year Fifteen:

  Steve and Margery pick up their son at TCBY after the eighth-grade mixer, and he’s drunk. At the Dinner Club we all shake our heads.

  “He threw up for four hours straight,” Margery says.

  “He’s just a baby,” Steve says. “He looked like a little wasted baby.”

  Margery tuts.

  Zane says, “It doesn’t mean he’s destined for a dissolute life. You know the people who have the worst problems are the ones who don’t get sick, who never get hungover. I mean, this will probably keep him off it . . . for a while at least.”

  Zane is back from a third round of rehab. Tina is cautiously optimistic.

  “I’ll be done with school in June,” she says. “And then I start three days a week at Dr. Biel’s office. I’ll take great care of you guys. I won’t gouge your gums, I promise.”

  “Good,” Margery says. “I hate it when they take the floss to your gums like a saw. I’m bleeding all over my bib by the time they’re done.”

  “I would never do that,” Tina says. “I actually heard about this woman who flossed so violently that bacteria seeped into all the cuts in her mouth and ate her brain.”

  “That’s crazy,” Shelly says.

  We decide to play charades, and since we’re at Shelly’s house, she invites her oldest three kids to join us. They are thirteen, eleven, and eight, and suddenly they seem to comprehend the rules. Their attention spans are longer now. They are kind of fun. It’s a revelation.

  On the way home, Tina and Zane and Margery and Steve all talk about the children and the possibility of including them at future dinner parties. They add something that’s been sucked out of the group over the years, and whatever it is, we all feel the sparkle, a hint of renewed enthusiasm.

  Year Sixteen:

  Zane falls off the wagon. He passes out in the tool shed in the backyard on a frigid night, which would have been de rigueur for him if it wasn’t twenty below.

  “Why rum?” we all ask later when we hear about the empty bottle of rum found beside him. Zane had always loved his manhattans.

  Perhaps there was an old bottle in the basement or maybe in the back of a kitchen cupboard. Perhaps it was hidden behind the flour and Tina forgot to pour it down the toilet. We won’t ask her. Not now. Not that she was ever capable of answering questions about Zane.

  Tina is surrounded by people.

  We drop off casseroles and coffee cakes.

  Tina asks Steve to speak at the funeral. Steve doesn’t want to; he didn’t even like Zane, not really, but how can he say no?

  Writing the eulogy, he conjures up some vague images of Zane swaying to Bob Dylan.

  He jots down music.

  There were a few quiet mornings together up north pheasant hunting.

  “Hunting,” he notes.

  They shared a modicum of respect for Richard Nixon’s foreign policy initiatives, but he’s not going to talk about that.

  “Hockey,” he writes. “Long-time hockey manager.”

  The kiss. He hasn’t thought about the kiss in years.

  “Pinched my wife,” he writes, then crosses it out.

  What can he say about Zane?

  “Zane was like that picture of Dorian Gray,” he writes. “Zane was that guy who lived high up on the hill. The one everyone was jealous of; the one no one knew. . . . What was the name of that story?”

  When the rest of us think about Zane, we see him swaying and mumbling along with Bob Dylan. We remember other evenings with the Dinner Club, but we can’t recall any insightful moments or any time when Zane revealed himself to us. In all these years, there has not been one aha moment when Zane really came alive for us.

  Steve is at his desk for hours—well into the night—trying to come up with something meaningful. Zane’s kids went to the private school and his went to public. Zane had two kids. Did he ever talk about them? Did Zane ever talk about his job? What did he do? Some sort of corporate lawyer.

  Successful. Wealthy.

  Steve makes a list of these attributes. It’s quite substantial.

  There’s nothing to be ashamed of here, he thinks. But it’s not a lot of insight for fifteen years of friendship.

  The church is full.

  “Who are all these people?” we ask each other at the funeral.

  Margery says some are from the office, some are from church.

  Shelly is filled with sadness. Not for Zane so much. For herself.

  If she died tomorrow, what would these people have to say about her? She looks over at Margery, who is weeping. She looks down at the little cloth-covered box in the aisle. All that is left of Zane.

  Margery hiccups softly. Shelly wonders what happened between them. Was that a lone pinch or was there more to it? How sad if that was just a smidgen of what had passed between them. The possibility exists, Shelly suddenly realizes, that Margery meant more to Zane than Tina did.

  The possibility exists that Margery was the love of his life. The possibility exists that Margery didn’t know Zane either. Maybe his wife didn’t know him. Or his kids. Maybe nobody in the entire church knew Zane. Shelly rubs Margery’s arm, and she hopes that someone—she doesn’t even care if it is Margery—knew him well enough to mourn him deeply.

  Otherwise, it’s all been such a waste of time.

  Margery unfurls her Kleenex and blows her nose. The music starts.

  There’s a flutist, and the music drifts toward us in the back row where we are sitting. We are hiding. We don’t want to talk to anyone. We tell ourselves that we want to be free to express our pain during the eulogy. We tell ourselves we are crying for Zane, but deep down we know the truth.

  Where’s the Baby?

  Sharon didn’t answer when she felt the first vibration in her jeweler’s apron, or even the second one, but when she pulled out the phone and saw it was her older sister, Evie, calling for the third time, she put her brass brush down on the table.

  “I’m teaching,” she whispered, trying not to put any inflection on the word teaching. She shouldn’t have to give a reason for ignoring her sister, who up until this illness had never offered any excuse herself.

  “Have you heard about the baby?” Evie asked. It sounded like she was crying.

  Sharon could hear a car going by in the background on the other end of the line. She had turned away from her class to take the call, so she turned back to smile at the seven middle-aged women in her jewelry making class. They were all in the final stages of creation, sanding off the sprues and brushing down the metal, and they appeared to be ignoring the phone call, though Plump Nora at table one had started humming, a sure sign she was listening.

  “Where are you?” Evie was not supposed to be driving. Sharon had hidden her keys in the cookie jar before she left for class.

  “The street signs say Broadmoor and Thrush? It’s spelled t-h-r-u-s-h.” Evie sounded it out like a child.

  “How did you find the keys?” Sharon said. Evie loved cookies. It had been a stupid idea to hide the keys in the cookie jar. “Can you make it home?” Sharon asked, although the answer seemed obvious.

  “I think so?”

  “OK. Stay put. I’ll be right there. Just wait for me.”

  “But what about the baby? There’s a dead baby here. Should I call someone?”

  “A de
ad baby?”

  Plump Nora stopped humming and looked up at Sharon. A couple of the other women also appeared startled. Sharon shook her head and put her hand over the phone.

  “Not a real baby.” She tapped the cell phone against her forehead. “My sister is not well.”

  Plump Nora nodded sympathetically, which for some reason irritated Sharon. She turned away from them again.

  They were the same seven women who always took her class—the same ones who never finished any of their projects. Every class, Plump Nora brought donuts, and every class, all her skinny, suburban classmates demurred and stared as Plump Nora devoured half the box. If her sister had been in the class, she would have made a snide comment about Nora being a Dunkin’ Donuts poster child.

  Sharon had often wondered whether Evie reserved her rude remarks for family members or if she had berated people all over the country when she was touring with her band. Evie was seventy-two, fifteen years older than Sharon, and Sharon had never spent more than a weekend with her before her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Sharon had no way of knowing for sure, but her guess was everyone who met Evie got a little dollop of mean. Joe, the drummer in Evie’s Double Time Jazz band, had almost dropped out after she’d called him a tone-deaf asshole. She’d been calling him an asshole for thirty years, but it was the tone-deaf part that’d pushed him over the edge.