When he was at home, she was focused on the children. When he was away on assignment in another country, well, he was far away. Then back again, then far away. When the children were young, they did not talk to him, but instead grabbed indiscriminately at his face with their tiny hands when he tried to hold them. They had smells that he didn’t recognize. They were needy in ways he didn’t understand.
He looks down at Phoenix, who is standing at his feet, still. “It’s hard to have more than one needy person in a marriage,” he tells the dog. And she lowers herself to a down position, ears pricked, head cocked, as though giving up, but still ready for a morsel of food to drop. When he begins to unpack the food, she flattens her ears against the sides of her head and rests her cheek on her outstretched paws. This is not the time he usually tosses food. “Even worse with two needy kids and one needy husband. It doesn’t work. Maybe she didn’t have it in her to pay attention to all of us.”
He knows that Linda rarely even took care of herself back then. By the time their second daughter arrived, she could not be bothered to do her hair or put on nice clothes. He was away for months at a time, and perhaps she expected him to help with the children more when he came back, so that maybe then she could get her hair done or go shopping. But she never seemed to want him to help.
“Maybe Jesus will take care of her now,” he says out loud, watching to see if Phoenix will move her ears at the word “Jesus.” But she does not.
Jesus and the younger man, Phil thinks to himself.
Phil is not sure if Linda has slept with this guy. She doesn’t really like sex—which doesn’t make any sense to him—so the chances are they haven’t slept together. Phil is a man who has never in his life had any difficulty turning the head of a woman, married or not. Now Linda has dropped him for this younger, doughy, plainly dressed and less attractive man who will pray with her. Phil bit his lower lip over the humiliation.
His daughter is not home yet. His wife is not home yet.
In the kitchen Phil forms patties out of the hamburger meat. He slices the tomatoes and onions and arranges them neatly on a plate and puts them into the refrigerator. He fills the sink with soapy water to soak the dishes, wipes the counter, and drinks his beer.
He opens up his laptop and goes to Facebook, where he discovers a message for him from an old high school friend. “Remember me?” Messages like this have been appearing regularly because his thirtieth high school reunion is happening over the summer. It isn’t something he had been planning to attend, and many of the email messages he’s received are from people he doesn’t recognize. But this particular message is from a name he does vaguely remember, and the face, small as it is in the profile picture, is interesting, attractive even. She looks young for their age. He wonders if the picture is current, and what the rest of her looks like. He is intrigued but cannot form an image of her from when they were eighteen.
As though she is trying to catch him in an act of infidelity, Linda sends him a text. “At church with Albert,” she says. So, she isn’t prying to see if he is cheating. She is throwing her own infidelity in his face. Standing in the hallway near the front door, he looks into the mirror over the small table where he had put down his phone. He curls his lip. He has not realized, until now, what his face looks like when he feels such humiliation, and the reflection horrifies him. Why is she telling him that she is with Albert?
Phil is no longer preparing the family meal. Instead he cooks two of the hamburger patties in a frying pan on the stove. One of them he lays on a bun with onions, lettuce and tomatoes. The other he puts in a glass bowl and places on the floor for Phoenix, who is not used to such delicacies. Together the two of them eat in silence
Back at his computer, he rereads the message from the girl he used to know. “I’m married and live in Evanston.”
He looks at Phoenix, who is at his feet as he types on his laptop, sitting at the kitchen island. After the luxurious meal, she has spread her body out on its side and is fast asleep. He begins to write and write. After forty-five minutes, he looks up to see that it is dark outside. He can only sense the hum of the air conditioner as it turns on and off, and the buzz of the refrigerator, sounds he once found comforting. He has excerpted part of his story, why he left the marines to live where he could raise his daughters, how he bought a business and now lives in a small town west of Chicago, about an hour and a half from where she lives. And then the hook, that he, too, has a border collie. Writing about himself is an exhausting effort.
After pressing send, he puts his beer bottle in the recycling bin, washes the dishes, and lies down on the couch to flip channels on the television. Within ten minutes he is asleep and dreaming. He is back on the football field in high school and the girl he has made contact with is sitting in the bleachers watching him. He remains on the couch all night. Later his wife and his younger daughter enter the house and take themselves to bed without waking him.
3
THE SOUND OF hammering has become unbearable for Kaye. She has finished her second Macallan’s and is sucking on the scotch-coated ice cubes. Sitting on the back steps, playing with the ice in her mouth, she watches over the newly mowed lawn to the garage where her husband, Eric, and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Clara, are building a boat. Boat-building is something they do easily without her. Kaye grew up far from water, in landlocked East Central Illinois. She knows nothing about boats.
How many times have Eleanor and her other friends told her that teenagers fight the most with the parent of the same sex? Does this make the fuck-you-moms feel any better? Clara abandons her mother at every possible interaction, which Kaye feels is unwarranted. Frequently, Clara will run out to the garage, refusing to speak, or to help in the house. Kaye does not understand Clara. Clara’s personality is one hundred and eighty degrees different from what Kaye’s was at that age.
Clara has a busy and full life that Kaye envies. She has boyfriends. She loves junk food, pop music, and fashion. She starves herself to fit into tight jeans. She sings in the shower.
Kaye sips the melted ice from her highball glass. She watches as the empty tire swing that hangs from the cottonwood tree sways with the wind. Once, Clara and her friends spent a lot of time on this swing. Now, they hide in Clara’s room, or they leave the house and wander the neighborhood.
Clara goes to her father for advice. He is less questioning, less judgmental. And he laughs. Sometimes Kaye can hear his booming laugh from the garage across the back lawn. Clara can work alongside her dad without persecution, without questions about whom she is with and what she does in her spare time.
Eric had said, “Could you please stop doing that?” when Kaye reminded him of the exam Clara needed to study for, and her math homework, and the chores she was supposed to do.
And Kaye had said, “She needs to take care of herself and be responsible.”
“And learning to work power tools isn’t learning to take care of yourself?”
Kaye couldn’t tell if he was being serious. “She has homework.”
“Which she can do later.”
Kaye turned away. “I just want her to empty the fucking dishwasher and put her clothes away before she goes to have fun! Is that too much to ask?” But by this point, Eric had entered the garage, turned on the table saw, and was unable to hear his wife.
Kaye takes the last whisky-coated ice cube between her fingers and puts it in her mouth. The sweetness quickly fades.
Today, the temperature outside was warm, but now Kaye can feel the cool coming in from Lake Michigan, a mile-and-a-half away. Usually it floats in a traveling mist, the cold air mixing with the warm, which hovers near the street. As evening progresses and the light in the sky wanes, the garage windows begin to glow steadily and grey shadows move behind the frosted glass. Kaye thinks of the spiders and the mice that live in the corners and cracks of the garage floor. She involuntarily twitches as she moves through the double doors at the back of the house, into the family room. She pads
quietly through the dark hallway into the kitchen.
There, she thinks about preparing dinner, though it’s late. She remembers dating Eric in graduate school, then following him to Scotland, to a suburb of Edinburgh to meet his parents. She’d had more energy then. They had taken a standby flight to London, and then transferred to a high-speed train north for another five hours. It had been a dank summer. Her feet were always cold and it was always raining. Eric’s parents set them up in his boyhood bedroom and they shared his single bed. Eric was an adventure. He was fast-talking, loud, and enthusiastic. Now he is bossy. Now he spends all of his spare time building a boat.
In the beginning, Eric had impressed her with his ability to absorb everything around him. At some point in their courtship he revealed his love of Viking culture. This in turn manifested in a liking for Scandinavian cuisine. Eric and Kaye and five more graduate students would work all night then pile into an old Honda Civic and drive to Andersonville, for Swedish pancakes and cinnamon rolls, crowding around a table at a place that offered large portions at a cheap price. At these times Eric made Kaye laugh so hard that she forgot her fatigue.
Now, years later, Eric keeps himself busy and separated from his wife, a Scandinavian cooking class one summer, a kayak trip another summer. Kaye now experiences his gregariousness as overwhelming, where once she thought it a useful quality to balance out her own shyness. It was entertaining. Now she knows all of his jokes. In the garage with Clara, he can talk all he wants. Kaye doubts Clara listens. But, maybe she does.
Kaye draws a corkscrew from the utility drawer and takes an unopened bottle of white wine from the refrigerator. Thank God, she tells herself, for the small mercy of wine. She drinks a glass while chopping garlic, squeezing limes, and pouring olive oil into a large plastic container with the chicken breasts. Alcohol takes the bitterness from her life, helps her to speak out where once she was shy. She places the chicken container in the fridge and takes out a tomato and some lettuce to make a salad. Sometimes she feels she can perform these tasks in her sleep.
WHEN KAYE OPENS the garage door and asks her husband and daughter when they will be ready for dinner, they say they don’t know. So, she closes the door and walks silently away. In the light of the patio, she cooks the chicken on the gas grill. She pours another glass of wine from the bottle she has brought outside.
The chicken and salad are good. Kaye knows she is a good cook. In the years of her marriage she has moved far beyond frying ground beef and adding canned soup and frozen vegetables. She sits on the couch in the family room with her dinner plate and her wine.
She wakes up at the hint of dawn, at least she thinks it’s dawn. As she comes to, she realizes that it is her neighbor’s backyard floodlights. Someone has covered her in an old quilt that had belonged to her grandmother. The quilt is soft from years of giving comfort. Kaye keeps it in the back of the coat closet and she doesn’t remember how it came to cover her. Her mouth is dry, furry, and she tries to hack a cough to relieve it, unsuccessfully. Vaguely, she begins to put together the scenario of the night, the lights on in the garage, her late dinner alone, finishing the bottle of wine and falling asleep on the couch. In the kitchen she finds that her dishes have been cleaned and that the remains of the grilled chicken are in a container in the refrigerator. Had Eric and Clara eaten? She assumes so but she is too tired to check inside the container. Her head throbs and her legs are stiff as she climbs the stairs to the bedroom she shares with Eric. His body forms a mound under the comforter. She lies far away from him, on top of the blanket, in her clothes. She drifts back to sleep, not touching him. She is far away.
4
ELEANOR HAS A recurring dream. She is living single in an apartment with no children, and she hasn’t had a date in ten years. In the dream, all of this is normal.
She has this dream in the very early hours of the morning, after an evening when her oldest son said to her, “All I want out of life is to have a day when you don’t talk to me.” This was after Eleanor had asked, “How was your day?”
She always asks this in the friendliest way that she can, half knowing that she is baiting Eugene, and half wanting to set a positive mood. Last night, Liam, his younger brother, said to him from the back seat of the car, “What do you want, to live alone the rest of your life?” Which seemed like a genuine question, not something to annoy his brother.
“Yes, that’s what I want,” Eugene answered.
“It’s tough living alone, Eugene,” Liam told him.
Eleanor supposed that for Eugene, living alone would mean that you did not have anyone to clean your room, to shop for your food, or to cook your meals. It meant, in essence, that life with home help was over. But Eleanor chose not to insert her opinions into this conversation. She suspected that Eugene would have a smart-ass answer to anything she said.
On the next evening, while putting out place settings at the kitchen island and taking dinner out of the oven, she muses that she never will have the life of her single-woman fantasy. She only has to look around to realize this.
Over homemade macaroni and cheese, Liam asks, “Is there anything else?”
Eleanor is standing on the opposite side of the island, which produces an unfortunate diner waitress effect. Frank, from the customer side, says generously to Liam, “Check the freezer for chicken nuggets.” Chicken nuggets are never on Eleanor’s shopping list. They are something Frank buys when he occasionally goes to the supermarket, on a weekend to help out, when he comes home with only processed frozen foods and fizzy drinks.
Eleanor breathes in deeply and counts to three. “No,” she says to Liam. “They aren’t on the menu tonight. You will eat what I’ve made for everyone.” She knows that homemade macaroni and cheese is Eugene’s favorite, and not Liam’s. And that when Frank allows Liam to eat something else, there are leftovers that no one will want for lunch the next day, but not enough for a family meal. Frank always wants meat for lunch and the boys want peanut butter.
“Why?” Frank asks. “He has to eat something.”
It’s too much for Eleanor to explain her thoughts to him.
“I am not a short-order cook,” she says, an irony from where she is standing, on the service side of the island. She puts down the spoon she has been holding and wipes her hands on her jeans before moving to the end of the island where her place is set. She is angry but trying to hold on to a calm mien in front of the boys.
Still, Frank continues as though he does not suspect the depth of his wife’s anger. “Yogurt. Bagels. Scramble yourself some eggs.” And then to Eleanor, “He won’t ask you to make it for him. He’ll do it for himself.” Liam watches his father, then his mother, and says nothing. Eugene serves himself a second helping. Eleanor feels relieved that the leftover situation won’t be as bad as she thought.
“That’s not the point,” she says to Frank. No. There was the extra trip to the supermarket, the effort put into making the dish and being there so that it comes out of the oven on time. She will clean the encrusted pan afterward, when the boys have scattered to do homework and Frank is nowhere to be found. She could have made it from a box, but she doesn’t do that sort of thing. It is, however, the sort of thing Frank would do without a thought. She struggles to think of how to make her sons appreciate the difference.
Liam gets up from his chair before she can explain her point to him, before she can stop him, or convince his father more explicitly not to undermine her authority. Eleanor feels her defeat in the sound of the eggs Liam cracks with alarming skill. She feels left behind.
“It’s not dinner, it’s breakfast.” He shrugs. “But I can take care of myself.”
WHEN SHE LOOKS at her sons, Eleanor believes that she has only a small window into the workings of the male mind. As a young, dating woman, she imagined that she would eventually understand the behavior of men.
Later that evening, she is wakened by a knock at the bedroom door. A bird tweets as Eugene opens the door and creeps toward the bed.
Eleanor swims toward full consciousness as Frank makes noises and rolls his back toward Eleanor and Eugene.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to get to sleep,” Eugene says.
“What time is it?” Eleanor asks, even though, by the birds, she knows.
“Four o’clock.”
“Just try.”
“Do you have any better advice?” Eugene asks. “My girlfriend just broke up with me.”
“I say you should go back to sleep,” Frank says. “You will feel better tomorrow.”
“She says there are warring factions in her brain.”
Frank lets out a loud breath that must have begun from his gut and burst forth through his nose and mouth simultaneously. He sits up and puts on his glasses. “What are you talking about?”
Eugene picks up on Frank’s harsh tone. “I’m not going to be able to sleep at all now. I’m sorry I woke you, Dad.”
“What warring factions?” Frank asks.
“It’s too long to explain,” Eugene says. “Go back to sleep.”
Frank turns to the digital clock radio at his side of the bed. “Have you been on the phone until now?”
“Sort of.”
“And when did you begin this conversation?”
“A couple of hours ago.”
“Jesus, Eugene, it’s a school night.” Frank emits another long-winded breath. “And before that?”
“We were texting.”
Eleanor senses by the shadows in the dark that Eugene is shrugging his shoulders. She wants to hug him, but her body is so tired, and she doesn’t think that a hug is what he wants. He is a talker. He wants someone to tell him what to do.
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