Split-Level

by Sande Boritz Berger

  I think of lunging forward to claw his pretty face. The level of my fury shocks me as our chairs scrape against the floor. I must shimmy back from him.

  “We knew it couldn’t last, but we’ve learned a great deal from this.” Donny cocks his head sideways, hoping to draw out my response. “Alex?”

  “Leave me the fuck alone, Donny!” I bang my fist on the table so hard that the vase vibrates and the rose petals drop away, leaving only the stamen—the center of what was once so whole, so lovely. I stand and move to the sink, my tears finally released.

  “Sure, whatever you say, but remember, I’m all you’ve got now.”

  A week of Swanson’s TV dinners crawls up from my stomach into my esophagus. “Oh, but you’re wrong about that. I’ve got quite a bit more. I have my children, my work, and me! Whatever the hell I decide to do with this life.” I lean down and sip water straight from the faucet. Donny moves alongside me, his mouth at my ear.

  “He no longer wants you, Alex.”

  “And I guess she doesn’t want you.” I tug my arm away; my aching hand has made a fist, all on its own. “If she did, we’d be together right now. Tell me, was it the money? Yup, I bet that was it.”

  “Wrong.”

  “You know what, Donny? She used you.”

  “Hmm, how’s that?” “Nobody paid attention to her until you, and you were a perfect mother’s helper to her kids.”

  Purple rage flashes across Donny’s face, but I don’t flinch. I look at him squarely. He will have to turn from me. Walk away once and for all.

  “I’m going upstairs,” he finally says, banging a cabinet door so hard that he shatters two wineglasses inside.

  On Monday morning, after the camp bus pulls out of the driveway, I shut the door, rinse two bowls of soggy Sugar Snaps, and climb the stairs to our bedroom. I waver between a hot shower and the softness of tousled linens. The bed wins. The August sun streaks across our double dresser and finds my face. I pull the top sheet over my head and lie there wondering what it feels like to be dead. I had a lousy night’s sleep, tossing and turning next to Donny, hearing him snore while propped on pillows like a prince. I thought of leaving the room and slipping into bed with Becky or Lana, but I didn’t want to scare them out of their sweet, peaceful sleep.

  Lying here now, I have the distinct feeling there are weird things crawling inside me. They move up and down my legs and arms like armies of ants. I’m almost sure that I’m shrinking away, disappearing through a perforation in the mattress into the floorboards below. The smaller I get, the louder the voices outside: lawn mowers, trucks, planes—all about to crash through the roof. Years ago, there were lots of plane crashes in New Jersey. I was young then and that’s all my parents talked about, that and the bomb. Here today, gone tomorrow was their mantra.

  “Alex, are you there?” I hear a voice interspersed with chimes from someone pressing our doorbell. I leap from the cobwebs of a dream, and part the curtains to see Charlie pacing the front lawn. He’s squinting up, looking for signs of life in our house. Afraid he will leave, I bang my already bruised fist on the window until he sees me. I struggle to open the window, thinking of Rapunzel, Becky’s favorite heroine.

  “I’ll be right down,” I yell, breathless with excitement.

  I run a brush through my tangled hair, chew a broken Life Saver from Donny’s dresser, and take the steps two at a time. Charlie walks through the door impeccably dressed, wearing a navy blue suit and red striped tie. Coming closer, I notice the smoky circles fringing his eyes.

  “I’m taking a later flight so I could stop by to see you,” he says, pressing his forehead against mine. Across the street, Norman and Sue are getting into their car, looking toward my house. I slam the front door, leaving us in the darkened hallway.

  “Can I hold you?” he asks. His lips gently brush my neck, and my body starts to tremble. I sense this is a final goodbye, and though I know I should tell him to leave, right now, I want him to touch me—one more time. I am that pathetically lonely. If I were my own best friend, I’d smack me hard.

  Behind the shaky voice and mistiness in his eyes, I see a warrior on his way to do battle. And who am I, but the unfinished business muddling Charlie’s concentration? “Coffee?” I ask, sounding ridiculous. Charlie shakes his head no and glances at his watch, and we walk into the living room and sit down.

  “I’ve got a few minutes,” he says, “and here’s what I want to say to you.” He hesitates, taking his time, and I get to see glimpses of the lawyer, as if looking to settle, but he is clearly struggling through his words. Has Charlie Bell lost his silver tongue? I’ve been conditioned by men who kept all emotions on simmer, never fully boiled.

  “I’m not sure what the next few weeks will be like, for any of us, but I don’t want you to go through this alone.” He looks frustrated, as if he’s given this a great deal of thought.

  “So, you and Paula are okay?”

  “We’re civil and reporting, mostly. But there’s something else now.”

  “Yes, I know, a baby who’s fifty-fifty yours.”

  “And you, a constant reminder of what it feels like to connect to someone, to know real happiness. There’s a cloud hanging over us,” he says, “and resentment we can’t seem to shake. It’s hard, but I imagine, with time, you and Donny will work things out.”

  “Work things out?” My maniacal laugh makes Charlie bristle—this is his former lover staring at him, wild-eyed in a dye-stained bathrobe. “Oh, so that would eradicate your guilt, if we were to Krazy Glue my little family back together again?”

  “I think about leaving all the time. But I can’t. I promised myself I’d never jeopardize my family.”

  “What we did, each of us, was jam-packed with jeopardy. Did you think it was just a hop and skip around a game board? Shop and Swap by Parker Brothers. Please … leave now and spare me your patronizing guilt.”

  He grins anyway, then tilts my chin to force me to look at him. I see yearning, but something new—suffering.

  “I came here to say I’m here for you no matter what.”

  “Please, no more,” I say, standing and tying my robe so tight I can hardly breathe.

  Charlie follows me to the steps and wraps his arms around me. He leans his warm smooth face into mine and kisses me lightly so that a tiny spark springs from our lips. A first kiss, a last kiss, a moment to remember when I’m old.

  “Would you mind locking the screen door when you leave?” I start up the stairs, knowing he won’t follow me, knowing he can’t. He has a plane to catch and so many people who depend on him.

  Once upstairs, sitting at the edge of my bed, I comb my fingers through my hair. I glimpse myself in the dresser mirror; a wild woman with cheeks tomato red. Outside, a car engine starts up, stops and starts before rolling past our house. I reach in my robe pocket for a tissue, and my fingers graze something smooth and metallic and cold. Dangling at the end of a long silver chain is Charlie’s swimming medal he had won in high school. I’d asked about it just once, curious why he wore it after so many years.

  “As a reminder,” he told me—of how hard he’d practiced for that particular competition. In winning, he said he’d learned that anything in life was attainable, but you had to want it so fiercely that it took up every frame of space in your dreams.

  The next morning, I force myself out of bed, and slip on denim cutoffs and my rose design T-shirt. I scribble a list of simple chores: buy cookie mix to surprise the girls, clip a few inches off my hair, check on my pushke account at our local bank. When I pull in to the local shopping center, I notice how most of the stores are decorated, blasphemously, hawking back-to-school specials. What is the rush? It’s warm and officially still summertime.

  I’m at the checkout counter at the A&P, waiting my turn, when I notice the young woman in front of me paying the cashier. She has the most exquisite body I’ve ever seen, topped with long, lush red hair pulled up in a tortoiseshell barrette. From her profile, revealing a t
iny turned-up nose, I quickly recognize her. She is our former babysitter, Colleen. Her pale, freckled arm reaches, cautiously, over me to select a Seventeen magazine from a metal rack. Yes, she is finally seventeen.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” she utters, so politely, that my knees nearly buckle. She hasn’t looked at me at all. She looks busy and purposeful, not to mention … beautiful. I am so curious to watch her, to breathe in all her apparent freedom. She’s placed her keys on the counter, and I have the impulse to call out, “Don’t forget them, Colleen,” but I can’t find my voice. There’s a pink rabbit foot attached to her key ring, and I imagine the teenager had finally conquered her fear of driving—the fear Donny said he’d witnessed.

  The cashier hands Colleen her change, and peering down, she says: “Oh, what a delicious baby!”

  That’s when I notice that Colleen has been leaning against a stroller parked in front of her; it is tiny, the style that would safely cradle an infant. My arms and legs turn rubbery; my mouth becomes sandpaper. Had Colleen Byrnes learned to drive and had a baby in the same year? The year my marriage turned to crap. I tabulate the approximate dates. Of course, it is possible, of course. Trembling, I abandon my groceries in the shopping cart and follow her out of the store and into the noisy parking lot. Colleen heads toward an old Chevy station wagon. A woman who looks very much like Colleen, except a very tired version, reaches out her arms.

  “Oh, sweet pea, come to your mama,” this woman says, completely confusing me.

  She said, Mama, not Grammy! I give myself a quick lesson in the branches in a family tree right here in the A&P parking lot while cars honk and doors slam around me.

  “You want to give your sister a big juicy kiss, don’t you angel-pie?” she says, as she lifts the bundle of pink from the stroller and holds her against Colleen’s ebullient face. I watch, crouched between a dented pickup and shiny black Plymouth. I catch myself smiling, though what I really want is to lie down on the gravel and have a good cry.

  I envy the woman holding her baby daughter, her joy so fresh and apparent. She looks no more than five or six years older than me. I stare as she climbs into the back seat with her baby girl. Colleen, her lovely teenage girl, is the driver. Within seconds her head begins bobbing to the hurried beat of some unfamiliar rock song. She puckers, checking her lips in the rearview mirror. She is nearly perfect, as she pulls away, squinting briefly in my direction.

  I stand in the parking lot, losing all track of time. Cool breezes alternate with a steady pulse of midday heat, making me shiver. I am certain I hear Rona’s melodious voice. How did she find me?

  “Al-lux?” She is dressed in a sleeveless white jumpsuit, as groomed as a French poodle. Strange, how I find this comforting as my arms open in a conciliatory gesture.

  “Are you okay, you’ve got goose bumps?” Her eyes roll over me as if she’s flattening a lump of dough. Tears spring to my eyes. “Let’s get out of here, quick, the coffee shop,” Rona says, as if my emotional state needs to be interiorly contained—out of the light of day.

  Minutes later we are sitting in a booth at the rear, straining to hear above the sweaty cook as he calls out orders to the chronically glum waitress.

  Taking a deep breath, Rona begins. “I just knew something weird was going on. You’ve avoided me at times, Alex, but never for this long.” Rona takes a sip of her iced coffee, and I am fascinated by the iridescent orange ring imprinted around the straw. I can feel her staring at me under the hood of her thick mascara.

  “So, I might as well tell you that Hy heard people talking on the train. Apparently, one of your lovely neighbors on Daisy Lane has been spying on you.”

  Now Rona has my complete attention. Norman and Sue? What could they have seen but cars parked at strange hours, unless, of course, they had a telescope fixed on our bedroom, or a camera, hidden in my garage.

  “The truth is I’m beyond caring about my neighbors, and what they think they see. I’m just glad to be sitting with you now. It feels so normal. Oh, but I forgot, you’re angry with me.”

  “Angry, no, but do I wish you shared more with me instead of pretending you discovered this fabulous new best friend? That’s a different story. You’re not the only one with feelings, Alex.”

  “Rona, I never meant to snub you. Things happened so quickly, and then …”

  “Don’t say it—you fell head over heels in love?”

  “Skydived is more like it.”

  “Whew,” Rona says, fanning her face with a napkin. “That might have been a whole lot safer.”

  I can hardly expect consolation from Rona, but I can’t be alone now. I need to be reminded of something—something ordinary, which was the way my life used to be before I screwed it all up.

  “I don’t plan to ask you a ton of questions. But I will listen to whatever you want to tell me,” Rona says, pausing her missile-like lipstick tube midair. Her eyes are more hazel today, tinted with envy. When I notice the envy, something weird happens. I feel powerful again. Could I possibly have something Rona wants? I enjoy this revelation, though it’s paired with an inability to trust her completely, why I had tried to escape.

  Before long I begin inventing a pristine account of the last three months, a story unrecognizable, even to me. I make up a version of the love square, rich with images of candle burning and spirituality—how we came to depend on each of our “inner souls.” I’m not even sure I possess an inner soul. Here I lose Rona’s attention immediately. Still, I keep talking, bombarding her with a catalogue of sordid details: fantastic pot, a romantic country getaway, and triple-A sex. I omit all the miserable nights spent in the Bells’ dank and dingy basement.

  “You know, Rona, it’s been said that everyone has only one true soul mate.”

  She stares at me for a second, then takes a pad and starts jotting down her grocery list. Is it possible I might have scared her to death? I squeeze out the clincher, like a great poker hand—a test to see if she’s listening. “And so,” I hesitate, taking in one deep, diaphragmatic breath.

  “So?” Rona finishes right on cue.

  “I have no choice. I’ve decided to … split.”

  “But how will you ever manage?” Rona gnaws the eraser at the end of her pencil. I bet she can’t wait to get to a phone booth and call Hy, her mother, the entire county.

  “The same way I’ve managed before: by working a whole lot harder and finding a good, reliable job.”

  “What about you and Charlie?”

  I gaze out the window where there’s a world of women who already know what they’re serving tonight for dinner, what they’ll wear tomorrow, who they’ll be seeing on Saturday night—simple things, which keep the pendulum of life in a smooth, manageable swing.

  “Alex, I asked about Charlie. What do you think?”

  “Charlie has a budding career, not to mention, a growing family. I’m not about to wait for him to make up his mind about what he wants. I haven’t yet figured that out for myself.”

  I’m surprised Rona hasn’t asked about the chain around my neck, the smooth medal tucked between my cleavage. I wore a medal just like this in elementary school—an ID tag in case of imminent disaster. And here I am, again, twenty years later, bejeweled in case of an accident. I can’t help but wonder: Who, if anyone, would step up to identify me?

  “In the meantime, Alex, it wouldn’t hurt for you to put on a few pounds. Your ribs are sticking out of your shirt. Waiter!” Rona calls, her delicate hand brushing away the remnants of our conversation as if it were an accumulation of dust. “My friend here will have a tuna sandwich on rye, no lettuce, and a large slice of apple pie. Food, the great healer of all problems, big and small,” Rona says, winking her butterfly lashes.

  The tables turn, and once again I envy her for the distinct tidiness of her existence.

  Hours later, Donny and I sit quietly, he in our den, me in the kitchen. My head is about to explode, even though I have already swallowed two aspirins. I look up from my magazine, k
nowing I can’t concentrate.

  “I need to talk to you,” I whisper loudly across the room. The girls are upstairs, reading in their beds.

  Donny either doesn’t hear or totally ignores me while he thumbs, vigorously, through Sunday’s Times. The strangeness of my voice forces him to glance over at me a couple of times. His expression changes from mild curiosity into annoyance.

  I try but can’t get the words out. I want a d-i-v-o-r-c-e. They seem so unreal. So grand a declaration. Besides, I don’t want to ask Donny for anything. I’m scared to death; I don’t know one divorced couple. None except movie stars and a woman from our old apartment building in Queens who jumped from her terrace on the day her ex-husband remarried. Had she still loved him or was she so lonely she couldn’t bear it anymore? For now, I try to focus on distinct realities, and facts that require small actions to change the way we live.

  “Donny, can you please put down the paper for a few minutes?”

  “Shoot.” But he’s still turning the pages, scanning, testing me.

  “I spoke to Dr. Carner and he gave me the name of a child psychologist. I’ve already called to ask how we should tell Becky and Lana about us.”

  “Tell them what?” Donny asks, finally tossing the paper on the cocktail table.

  “Come on, Donny, please cooperate here. We have to tell them we won’t be living together anymore. That you’ll be leaving. We should do it soon, before they get any more confused or upset.”

  “And who decided that?”

  “You know we can’t go on pretending everything’s normal. It’s as if a live wire has landed inside our home.”

  Donny stands and gathers the strewn newspapers, a thoughtful gesture for someone who despises me. He walks up the two slate steps into the kitchen and leans against a chair. “You’re as much responsible for everything that’s happened here. What’s more, you haven’t been so attentive to your daughters lately. Truthfully, I think you should leave. I’m the one who’s willing to stay and save our marriage.”