Everybody tells you that you will grow up and realize your mother was right. Emily has the strong feeling that, as an adult, despite her mother’s lack of formal education and the constant stale smoke of her cigarettes (Nick is no better in the latter), she would actually enjoy her mother’s company now, more than she enjoys just about anyone else’s. She misses her mother, in yet another thing that could be filed under Irony, since she did nothing but try to distance herself and say snotty sanctimonious things to her mother when she was living, but now she misses her like a hole torn into the fabric of the universe: like the one thing that was honest in a whole inextricable system of lies. To her mother, Emily could finally have told the truth and her mother would have laughed, would have no doubt mocked her for getting off her high horse at last, but her mother would also have been relieved and agreed with her every word.
Your husband is a useless loser, her mother would have said. That accent doesn’t save him from anything. He cheats on you, you know. For that, he should at least have a real job.
You’re going to be saddled with that Jay for the rest of your life, her mother would have said. You’ll never be free of him, and he’ll suck you dry until you die. You should have had that amnio, and then you should have had an abortion. What were you trying to prove?
You couldn’t pay me to be pregnant again, her mother would have said. But since they are paying you, make sure you get your money’s worth. They’re rich men. Don’t let it stop at some one-time fee. Play it smart and you’ll get more. Use your head for once and think it through.
The bus stops several blocks from Emily’s house. She gets off and walks in the petering snow, hair flattening against her head, bile perpetually at her throat from the smell of the world: exhaust fumes, fast food chains, human sweat. Jay smells, sticky and sour, but Miles, despite his beauty, smells worse: all man pits and fouled gym socks and clandestine cigarettes, his things everywhere in Emily’s space, and when she shouts at him that he smells terrible and to do something about himself, Nick (who doesn’t even use deodorant, for Christ’s sake) says she’s being cruel and that she should listen to herself, and who talks to their kid that way?
Who talks to their kid that way?
Not a man who’s never had to work a real day in his life and has her taking care of everything for him, apparently.
The fetus inside her is already sucking her dry, making the world an even harder place, but she’ll be rid of it soon enough and maybe if her (dead) mother is right, the benefits of having done this can somehow extend. Emily isn’t sure she has anything resembling a solid plan, but she is working on it. She has another thirty-three weeks to figure this out. Planning has never been her strong suit, obviously, or she wouldn’t be living here in this bullshit life of hers, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? It is never too late for reinvention.
At approximately 6:00 p.m.—Nick having dropped Jay off after school but then disappeared again to wherever the hell he goes that Emily doesn’t really care about—she flicks the garbage disposal switch up, and the kitchen explodes. Black tar-water, with chunks of hostile goo like sewage, flies like a geyser from the adjacent bowl’s drain. Predictably, Jay screams. Emily darts out of the way, though not fast enough to prevent debris from splotching onto her clothes. Jay remains next to the sink as it bubbles and spurts, so that, by the time Emily regains her senses and lurches forward shouting, “Fucking fuck!” to herself, to flick off the disposal switch, her disabled son is covered in filth.
She stands, breathing hard. It is possible that, had Jay attempted to avoid the spray, he would have fallen. It is not that she wants her son to fall. Clearly—she exhales; she inhales—she does not want her son to fall. It is simply that it isn’t right for a person to just stand there, inert, while being defiled by toxic, flying liquid. Jay is conditioned to Nick jumping in immediately, scooping him up, removing him from every challenge. He has become passive, as though he doesn’t have legs, when he . . . has legs. He has to walk around at school, obviously; he is in a mainstream classroom, and if suddenly sewage water began flooding the classroom, Jay would get to his feet like every other kid and haul ass. But not here at home, no. Because Nick spoils him, babies him, caters to his every possible desire whenever, of course, Nick happens to be around, which is not that often, and then when he’s gone—like now—look at Jay, look at what Nick has created.
Jay says, “Mommy, you swore. You have to give money to the jar!”
This bullshit idea: another one of Nick’s. Nick, who cannot get through a full sentence without expletives when the children aren’t around—who has never used the term “make love” in his entire adult life and, every time he expects Emily to put out, has to say “fuck.” Nick suggested the Swear Jar, which of course he only did so as to be constantly penalized for the boys’ amusement, and then to have them end up with a bunch of cash at the end that they had not earned in any productive way other than listening to their father curse.
“I have to go down to the basement,” Emily tells Jay.
She says this because the last time the garbage disposal acted up, it turned out that it was . . . let’s see if she can even get this straight . . . not connected somehow to the main sewage line, and was, in actuality, just dumping the family’s disposal debris into a reservoir under their house. In that case, Emily did not learn about the problem via an explosion of filth, but because the festering liquid trash reservoir had become more or less a swimming pool for all the neighborhood rats, and some started coming up through the drains and strolling around her kitchen. She saw one—this must have been two years ago—just sauntering, fat and urban and slimy, out of Miles’s bedroom while Miles was sleeping, the rat meandering around her kitchen. They found three, in the end, living inside their house, before finally getting some plumber they could not remotely afford to come and eliminate the rat pond from the goddamn Deer Hunter from beneath their house. After which, Nick brought home two cats, as “protection” from any further vermin invasion. Now Emily has to take a Claritin every day—she has had to switch to Benadryl since this pregnancy because Claritin isn’t allowed, and the Benadryl makes her sleepy—for the sake of these two overweight cats, whose water bowl Nick has never changed in two years, having what seems to be an earnest belief that they can “drink out of the toilet like normal cats,” and, when Emily protests that this is positively disgusting, he has said, “There are four of us showering—all they have to do is go into the shower, it’s always wet as hell in there.” The conversations they have had about the cats’ water bowl have, clearly, been more time consuming than it would have been for Nick to change the bowl.
“Can I come to the basement?” Jay says, excited. Emily rarely goes into the basement. It’s like all of a sudden their house has become a scary movie. The basement!
“You should go wipe yourself off in the tub and change into some clean pajamas,” Emily tells him, trying to keep her voice smooth.
“Maybe the tub will do like the garbage disposal,” Jay says. “Maybe we shouldn’t run the water. I should come to the basement.”
It’s like he and Nick share the same brain: always churning, manipulative, with a warped idea of what constitutes “fun.”
“Whatever,” Emily says, “come to the basement, fine, I don’t care.”
Of course she shouldn’t have said it. It takes Jay about fifteen minutes to get down the stairs. He’s slight as a bird and normally she might get impatient and carry him, but she is pregnant now and he is covered in globular slime, so that is not going to happen.
In the basement, what did she expect: a floor-to-ceiling huddle of rats? It’s unclear. What she sees, however, is gray sludge all over the hallway, emanating from the furnace room and leaking out from the back of the washer.
Is this even related? Does the washer—does the furnace room for that matter—have anything to do with the kitchen sink and garbage disposal? How is Emily supposed to know this? People know such things—Nick knows them—bu
t it is unclear to her where they were when they acquired this type of knowledge, and why she was never at that place. How does Nick, whose parents were warring, adulterous actors in a small Irish town, possess a knowledge about the invisible workings of plumbing and electricity and how to fix a roof? By no description of his father would that man have known such things or, even if he had, imparted them to his son. He was the sort of man, if Nick’s stories are to be believed, who hired a hooker to devirginize his son on his sixteenth birthday, except of course that Nick was already not a virgin, and he also fancies himself a feminist, and so he spent his hour talking to the hooker, which, from what Emily knows of sixteen-year-old boys, must have been a fairly more significant chore for that poor whore than just screwing him—an act that would likely have taken three and a half minutes tops.
Where is Nick? With the kitchen looking like the setting for his insipid zombie play and the basement looking like the film set of The Blob—where is he? But who ever knows where Nick is? Nick sits around the house all day “writing” while the boys are in school, picks Jay up every day faithfully, but then takes off again once Miles gets home to watch his brother, gallivanting around with his writing group or his actors or whatever woman on whom he currently has a puppy dog crush, showing up an hour or two before Jay’s bedtime, just in time to turn on the charm and act like the perfect father and make both boys howl in laughter, after Emily has already done all the hard shit.
“I can’t handle this,” Emily says sharply to Jay, who is saying, “Woah!” “Let’s just go back upstairs. Clearly we have to call somebody.”
“Maybe I can fix it,” Jay says. He is seven. He means what he is saying because children are stupid, and nobody knows that better than the vice principal of an elementary school. Jay’s heart is enormous, Emily will give him that, but almost every single thing that comes out of his mouth is delusional and takes her energy to perpetually deflect in her Vice Principal Voice, without screaming in his face to shut up.
“You can’t fix it, Jay. It’s too complex, and the mess might be contaminated and bad for your health, and I need to go upstairs and clean up because I’m pregnant and I can’t swim around in Chernobyl water with Chad and Miguel’s fetus inside me. Let’s go.”
Jay, clearly, has no idea what Chernobyl is, but since nothing she says is as important to him as the fantasies inside his head, or as what his father says, he doesn’t ask.
Back upstairs, it’s a crapshoot. Dare Emily turn on the water in the shower? What will come out of there if she does? But what else are she and Jay supposed to do? They’re filthy. He still has homework. Dinner was mid-prep, but now splattered, too, with the blobs of disposal gunk. Miles is in his room with the door shut, listening to music on his headphones like he always does, and has no idea that any of this is even happening. His mother and Jay could be on fire, and until he smelled the smoke he wouldn’t have a clue. There is absolutely no point in calling for his assistance, because he is even more useless than his father, in that his father knows how to do shit but simply doesn’t do it, whereas Miles doesn’t know how to do anything except play on his iPhone.
Thank God the water from the shower is normal. She strips Jay’s repulsive little clothes off his skinny body and ushers him to his shower chair, into the steam, rushing his fouled attire to his laundry bin and then taking off her own clothes right there in his bedroom and adding them to the mix. Since Jay is in the shower and Miles is in his bedroom and Nick is nowhere to be found, she walks naked back to her bedroom and puts on a robe, the bottom of which parts a little already from the pregnancy, despite how early it is, necessitating that she put on some granny underwear lest she flash the boys. With Miles, she barely showed until the fifth month. With each pregnancy, you pop sooner, and plus of course she is old, and whereas she weighed 115 pounds when she got pregnant with Miles, she is now 152 pounds pre-pregnancy, and things just don’t work the same way they used to.
Her brain is on spin cycle, calculating costs. What if the basement isn’t related to the garbage disposal and they have to fix them both? Maybe Nick can fix the disposal himself. He can get down under the sink and open up the drain and do Boy Things that make the world operate normally again. He is missing and she wants to kill him, but he is in some ways still useful. He takes Jay—and even often Miles—to school early in the morning despite being a nocturnal creature who rarely falls asleep himself before 4:00 a.m. He does this without complaint, sparing the family the expense of hiring a nanny for Jay, since Emily needs to be at work too early for her to also take him to school. Combined over time since Miles was young, this has saved . . . a lot of money Emily cannot quite calculate, as math is not her strong suit, but given how broke they perpetually are, surely the expenditure of that money would have qualified as a Problem.
It has become this: she has to go over the ways in which Nick is useful, in order to act friendly toward him when he saunters in. He can take the car in to be serviced. He knows when it is time to get filters changed and what to do about “the gutters” on a house. It is important to stipulate that he is mostly inadequate at doing any of these things in a timely manner, i.e., never before they malfunction in some way, but again, his knowledge of how things function—whereas to Emily the world appears to work “as if by magic”—has no doubt saved astronomical sums of money over the past fifteen years.
He is emotionally proprietary with the boys, which sounds like it should be a con but in actuality means Emily has rarely had to engage in endlessly repetitive bedtime rituals, never had to read the Harry Potter books, and gets to do her own administrative work at night when Nick is entertaining Jay and attempting to have deep, meaningful talks with Miles. Emily ponders this, in her cheap terrycloth robe, trying for more positive Nick attributes. There was a time at which she could have made a list four miles long and rhapsodized about him until people’s eyes glazed. But everything that was once a wildly euphoric pro has now turned into a con, somehow. Everything has turned upside down, not suddenly, but over a slow, unstoppable landslide for years . . .
His looks, his accent—God, were those plusses at one time. What it felt like, to be the white-trash daughter of a neighborhood slut, walking around with such a pretty Irish lad on her arm, making her seem special. But it’s not fair, is it, what happens to men vs. women over time? Emily has had two children—the process of which began immediately at the onset of their marriage—and while she put on nearly forty pounds and watched her body and face go slack from working ten-hour days and bringing work home and taking care of the house and the boys and eating leftover Annie’s shells and cheese, Nick did what men . . . do . . . some men, that certain kind of man, and continued to grow in attractiveness so that an adorableness in him that was charming and endearing at twenty-four has blossomed into full-fledged (and calculated) sexual charisma that every woman they encounter, everywhere they go, notices. He is flirted with by waitresses, checkout girls, receptionists, even her friends, flagrantly, right in front of her face. And of course he fucking loves it. He can’t even pretend not to notice, to politely ignore it. He hams it up incorrigibly, like a politician kissing babies or Johnny Depp making a visit to a middle-aged suburban ladies’ book club.
Plus, what good does being hot even do when you’re not that great in bed? When their chemistry began radically fizzling out after Jay’s birth, Nick, being Nick, decided that they should “be real” about it and get the spark back by talking honestly about their fantasies with one another. They were drunk, which had been the case throughout most of their early dating, and when their happiness pitched a sharp downward spiral—if Emily thought too closely on this, it had happened, really, before she was even pregnant with Jay—for a while she and Nick tried to self-medicate back to bliss with copious evening cocktails, even though both had lost the zeal for it. Emily thought the divulge-your-innermost-fantasy stuff might be funny—might be fun. She was embarrassingly truthful, confessing that her earliest masturbatory forays had been to a) the fan
tasy that she was Marie Osmond and that she and Donnie were having an incestuous affair, and the Osmond family had implanted cameras in her closet to try to catch them, and b) fantasies of being seduced by Damien—the adult version, not the creepy tricycle-riding kid—from The Omen. Nick was the type of man to whom you could say such things without the fear that he would judge you, and Emily felt a kind of transcendent giddiness at first confessing these ridiculous—but in her youth truly powerful—fantasies that had informed, somehow in ways she couldn’t place, her adult sexuality.
Then it was Nick’s turn. And he said he had always fantasized about being forced to wear a floral apron and clean the house of a powerful woman, and lay her clothes out in the morning, and keep her house while she was out working, and then be her sexual slave at night, doing anything she might possibly desire for her pleasure. He mentioned something he called “male chastity” and this fantasy Powerful Woman—did he mean Emily?!—controlling when he was permitted to orgasm, while she could come as often as she liked, and of her “punishing him” with increased denial or maybe even humiliating tasks if he disobeyed and jerked off.
Oh my fucking God.
Okay . . . it wasn’t really true. Nick was pretty good in bed, as long as you didn’t allow yourself to think about any of the above. He had a reliably functional cock; he fucked for a normative period of time; he knew how to go down on a woman like nobody’s business, which she didn’t really like to dwell on since she knew he had obscene amounts of experience in this regard . . . he was an attentive lover, a good lover . . . except for the fact that, apparently, rather than pushing his dick into her vagina and creating the appropriate friction that made them both feel good, he would rather be . . . in an apron not being allowed to come and then getting “punished” (did he mean cleaning the kitchen floor with a toothbrush?) if he transgressed.
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