by Bill Clegg
Even now, there are places Alice brushes up against—the bench where Mo would lace his running shoes, their favorite seats at the back of the movie theater in town—where she feels him, his sweet soul, and she weeps as if he’d died that day. He wasn’t too good to be true in the way that Christopher had been—he was truly the self he presented—but the life they had together, for the fourteen years that they had it, was beyond her greediest imagining. Would she have erased the whispered comments about his ethnicity? For Mo, yes, she would have spared him any discomfort. When this sort of ugliness occurred in the years when they were dating, before they lived together, Alice was furious. She would rise to confront the gas station attendant, the passerby at the mall, the teenager sitting next to them in a restaurant and Mo would calmly take her hand and shake his head. Where I come from people died and continue to die because of retaliation. Don’t retaliate now. Just love them and show them what love looks like. Maybe they’ve never seen it before.
He showed Alice. Not just what love looked like, this she’d known from her family and from Lee and from Hap, but what strength and humility and commitment looked like. What a good man looked like. She missed him every hour of every day and she missed him now. The song did not last long enough.
Part Three
Jackie
With her back against the foyer floor, Jackie lies still and watches dust motes rise in slow motion around and above her. She’d drifted to sleep after falling, but has no idea for how long. By the angle of light beaming from the kitchen window, she figures it must be early afternoon.
She’d been awake for only a few minutes before Amy’s knocking ended the silence. At first she thought Dana had come back, and reflexively, before she could manage her reaction, felt a mix of alarm and relief. She pictured her old friend standing on the other side of the door, restless in fitted suede pants, polished leather boots; her ringless fingers raking her short hair. But the more vividly she imagined the woman who had marched away from the house earlier and fled in her car, the less likely it seemed she’d changed course and returned.
And then she heard Amy’s voice. Her rendition of Mom—an inextricable knot of scold and worry. When Rick was a little boy he would beg his mother to tell his sister to leave him alone. From the time he could talk he complained and cried and sometimes threw violent fits when, as he put it, Amy bossed on him. She’s bossing on me, Mommy! She won’t stop bossing on me! His face would often be splattered with tears as he pleaded to be understood. She won’t stop telling me what to do, he’d say with as much desperation as he could muster.
Jackie finally understands what her son endured. She, too, has come to dread her daughter’s voice which arrives in doubting tones over the phone, asking if Jackie has taken her pills, checked the thermostat, gone to the doctor’s appointments she’d scheduled for her, called the insurance company to authorize her to follow up on her claims. These calls are almost as awful as her unannounced visits which began last summer and coincided with her complaining that the kid Jackie had hired to take care of the lawn was doing a shoddy job and taking advantage. From there her inventory of grievances could go anywhere—the shampoo Jackie used, the toxic fabric softener she bought, the window she left open, the gutters she’s reminded her countless times to get cleaned, the type of milk in the refrigerator. I thought we talked about this, her most frequent refrain as she roots through the dresser drawers, closets, and medicine cabinets, throwing things out without asking. It’s the same with the cupboards and freezer shelves she ransacks, weeding out unnecessary or unauthorized items that don’t pass muster. The last time Amy was in the house she threw out a frozen pizza Jackie had bought at the grocery store. It’s not that it looked especially good, but it seemed easy to make and something she could eat half of for dinner and the other half the next day for lunch. I can’t believe you’d buy this! Do you know what they put in these things? The salt alone will spike your blood pressure! I thought we talked about this.
After Jackie retired from working as a secretary in the principal’s office at Wells Center School, Amy became relentless. Jackie’s first response was to stand her ground and let her daughter know that she could manage on her own, as she had since Floyd died. But Amy responded to any sign of resistance by overwhelming her with statistics and articles and anecdotal evidence. Didn’t she know that by not complying she was only ensuring more work for Amy, who, with her own daughter moving home, her nursing job at the hospital, and second husband commuting to Danbury every day, was at the breaking point? I’m just going to have to deal with it all later, she snapped recently. Jackie was stunned at first not just by her daughter’s insensitivity, but by her miscalculation. She was only sixty-eight, not ninety, she’d started to say, but then realized that ninety was only twenty-two years away, eighty only twelve, seventy, just two. After a while, Jackie’s most frequent response to her daughter was silence. In less than two years, Amy had gained access to or had taken complete control of her bank accounts, medical information, retirement plans, insurance, everything; and in that time she managed to change it all. New bank, new leased car, new cable TV plan, new telephone provider, new primary care physician. New lawyer, too, to grant her power of attorney over everything medical and financial. Rick will only make it worse, she’d warned, when Jackie suggested they involve him. Without Sandy doing the books at the restaurant, he’d have been out of business by the end of the first year. He’s a mess.
There was, at first, a part of Amy’s bossiness that Jackie welcomed. She’d never minded the monthly onslaught of paperwork required to keep her family and her house going, but when Amy began meddling, Jackie thought it couldn’t hurt to have another set of eyes on the bills. She regrets now that she failed to remember that when it came to helping, Amy only had two modes: not involved or complete control. And now it was too late and too complicated to undo. Buying groceries and dealing with the tradesmen and boys she hired to keep the house sound and presentable were Jackie’s last remaining areas of autonomy, and these she would not surrender. Holding on, however, came with the high price of Amy’s shock-and-awe tactics of relentless fault-finding, discrediting, and shaming of Jackie’s choices and decisions. Amy was inexhaustible, despite the breaking point she often cited. Lately, Jackie flinched whenever she heard her daughter’s voice.
Mom? Mom! What’s going on? Why is the door bolted in the middle of the day and why are you not answering me?
Jackie wriggles her fingers and toes. Cautiously, she rolls to her side and maneuvers to a seated position. She’s relieved to confirm again that nothing is broken or mangled.
I’m calling Rick and then I’m calling the cops and between us we will get this door down. Mom!
Amy is shouting at full volume. Jackie can’t resist a smirk as her daughter sputters with rage. She knew withholding the key to the bolt lock on the front door had been a good decision. It just took a few years to appreciate exactly how good. In witnessing Amy’s upset at having absolutely no control over the situation, she experiences a cool satisfaction, a welcome, if fleeting, justice. Still, she does not want her son or the cops summoned.
Calm down, Amy, she says. I’m right here.
You’re WHAT? Excuse me? HELLO?
Here, Jackie repeats, but more softly now. Holding onto the doorknob for balance, she stands. Upright but still wobbly, she frees the bolt.
Hi dear, what’s the matter? Jackie’s limbs and back are stiff from lying on the floor and she holds onto the doorframe to steady herself.
You tell me, Amy says, irate, incredulous, yanking the door open the rest of the way. How about we start with who Dana is. And then we can move on to why she left this at the door you refused to open.
Propped against Amy’s narrow hip and under her beige-fleeced arm, she is holding a brown leather briefcase. In her other hand, held high at the end of a stiff, straight arm, a scrap of torn paper—a page torn from a book, it seems, with a note scribbled in familiar handwriting:
Dea
r Jackie,
I’m sorry it’s come to this. But I can no longer control what I never could. But I tried. I did try. Wrong as I might have been, it was for you. I was young. You were my friend.
I’ll be at the house until tomorrow. It’s time we talk.
Dana
* * *
Before she responds, Jackie grabs the briefcase and letter from her daughter’s hands, and without breaking eye contact swings both behind her and lets them crash and flutter to the floor. And then she yells. It had been a long time—not since Rick was a boy knee-deep in mischief that left sofa cushions stained with red pen, or an entire peony bed a mess of petals, stems and upended bulbs. Yelling at Amy now feels good. Like a steaming hot shower blasting away layers of filth built up over years. Amy has never experienced her mother this way and in her shock she sits down on the stoop and listens.
Who are you to stand in front of my house and scold me? You are not the one in charge here. Go home and don’t call me for a few days. And don’t turn up here unannounced again! Jackie delivers these last words as she’s turning away, and before Amy has an opportunity to respond, she slaps the door shut.
* * *
Jackie never yelled at Floyd. She only ever went silent the few times she might have, because she knew that nothing she said, no matter how forcefully, could return what she’d lost or change the past she would eventually make peace with. And if it wasn’t exactly peace she’d made, it was a slow acceptance, arrived at over years.
Amy was only seven months old when Jackie kicked Floyd out of the house. His parents let him come home and sleep in his old bedroom. In the first few months, when he or his sister or their mother came by, Jackie refused to let any of them in. When bills piled up she’d put them in an envelope and tape them to the door and write F L O Y D in black ink across the front. She never picked up the phone and since these were the years before she worked, so recently out of high school, she didn’t yet have adult friends who called to check-in. Her mother came most mornings with groceries and helped her clean. Jackie ate toast and drank tea, dirtied few dishes, but her mother maintained that a house could never be too clean for a young child, so she wiped the counters and light switches and walls with Lysol and washed and washed again the baby’s linens and clothes. When she was not cleaning and washing, she boiled glass jars and scrubbed and cut cucumbers, cauliflower, and beets from her garden and pickled them for winter. Since she was a kid, Jackie had never liked her mother’s pickled vegetables, but Floyd loved them. Jar after jar, her mother filled the shelves in the hallway and in the closets next to the kitchen. Jackie understood she was not only expressing hope, but communicating clearly what she believed should happen next. This was as close as she came to giving her daughter advice on her marriage.
What Jackie never shared with her mother was that she had begun to seriously question whether or not her husband was even still necessary. That he might not be was a radical, perverse idea to her at first, but in the initial weeks after locking Floyd out of the house, she began to understand, with energizing clarity, that she in fact had everything she needed. Floyd had initially satisfied her girlhood aspirations to have a boyfriend and to be part of a couple. Once that had happened, he’d solved her curiosity and excitement about sex. In their first month together, she’d restricted their physical contact to kissing and light petting, but by October of her senior year she’d made it clear that he need not be so restrained. Soon they were having sex whenever they could, and by spring, she was pregnant. She’d only pretended to be surprised. Floyd was careless in general, even in this, and he never had rubbers. Jackie never made a fuss because without a plan for college and no real desire to work, she saw a baby as a way to speed up what she was impatient to have happen. A doctor in Torrington confirmed what was by late April clear to her. After they told their parents, a wedding was rushed, a house found, and Amy was born. Jackie spent no time contemplating any of it. What was there to think about? She was getting everything she wanted, only sooner than she’d planned.
So soon after marrying Floyd, it surprised her to recognize that life without him, or at least without his physical presence, could work. She’d need his financial support, but Jackie knew he wouldn’t abandon his responsibilities. Floyd would never leave Wells, and with everyone in town watching, she knew he’d do what was expected. She figured he could pay bills from his parents’ house, or wherever he ended up. She tried not to care where that might be, but she did, and so her task each day was not to act on or reveal the storm of contradictory feelings that raged behind the mask of her anger. Initially, her solution was not to engage with him at all. Doing so would only give Floyd an opportunity to explain himself, which meant he would either lie or expose the details of his betrayal, neither of which were bearable. And it might force an occasion where she would have to explain the severity of her reaction, something she was determined not to do. Of the available solutions, the one she wanted to avoid most was the truth.
Floyd was not allowed in the house for Amy’s birthday or Christmas Eve. Jackie went home to her parents’ and on Christmas morning he turned up with a box of poorly wrapped gifts and left them at the door. He didn’t bother knocking. Her father described how he’d pulled his brown truck into the short driveway and walked the box to the stoop, turned around, and drove off. His gifts were arranged under the tree with the others and distributed by her father, one by one, after breakfast had been served and cleaned up, which had been her family’s tradition. Here was the hardest moment so far—being handed her husband’s gifts to her on Christmas morning by her father. She unwrapped each one—a navy blue scarf, a fruitcake made by his mother, and a Hummel figurine of an angel in a red robe with golden stars, holding a candle, singing—and was unable to stop the tears she’d held back since July.
After New Year’s Day, she allowed him back in the house but insisted he sleep on a cot in the spare bedroom where they kept tools and Jackie’s new sewing machine. Eventually, he bought a twin bed and dresser from a tag sale on the town green and for a while this was how they lived. Civil, in close proximity to each other, but no more intimate than respectful roommates might be. At first, Jackie refused to cook for or eat with him. She made sure she’d eaten a sandwich or a bowl of canned soup for dinner each night before Floyd came home. He never complained, simply grabbed a fork from the utensil drawer and opened a jar of pickled beets or cucumbers. Defensively, she imagined that in his choice of meal he was, night after night, sending her a message: If you won’t feed me, your mother will. After five weeks, she began leaving him a plate of food—a sandwich and salad, mainly—between a folded napkin and silverware on the kitchen table. By summer that year, she would join him and make meals from recipes she’d clipped from magazines when they were first married—chicken à la king, orange and onion salad, chili casserole.
And then, almost a year after she’d changed the locks, Jackie was watering plants in the living room and through the bay window she noticed Floyd washing her car in the driveway. It was a hot June day and Amy sat a few feet away from him next to the bucket of suds and a big pink sponge. Floyd’s white v-neck T-Shirt was soaked through and clung to his chest and back. Work on the farm and now painting houses and helping out on construction sites had kept him in the same shape he was in when they were in high school. Jackie watched his biceps flare as he moved the bucket to the front of the car and bent down to show Amy how to scrub the fender. He wasn’t pressing very hard but she could see his back muscles tense and bunch through the thin, wet fabric. Jackie hadn’t watched Floyd like this since before they were married. She tried to remember the last time they had made love. It was last June. The length of time shocked her. She didn’t hate him anymore, but she also hadn’t expected to feel anything more than tolerance and occasionally kindness toward him. Certainly not desire. Still, they rarely argued and, if they did, never in front of Amy. Without ever discussing it, they’d formed a kind of partnership in conveying to their daughter and other
family members a perfectly normal marriage. And the truth was that separate bedrooms and the absence of sex became, for them, normal.
After Floyd moved back into the house, there were a few times, usually when he came home after a few beers with his buddies at the volunteer fire department, when he would let his hand linger on her shoulder or drop to her thigh. Jackie never made a fuss, she simply moved away and made it clear nothing had changed. And here they were. He’d stayed, acted as if he were a happily married man, made enough money to keep the lights on, food in the fridge and gas in two cars; and for her part, she kept a clean house, organized the shopping and the meals, and took care of their daughter. They were a team. And on a hot day in June, Floyd washed her car, made Amy laugh, and got his T-shirt wet. When he came into the house to take a shower, Jackie was waiting. That night he slept in her bedroom and never again on the twin bed in the room that less than a year later would become their son Rick’s.
There were times when Jackie came close to telling Floyd about everything she went through the year before, the afternoon of July Fourth, and the long night after, but her instinct not to include him was strong, and once she was pregnant with Rick it felt like the universe correcting a terrible mistake, one that was best left concealed. Later, once Rick and Amy were in school full time, and she and Floyd had relaxed back into their marriage, she decided that when the right moment presented itself—despite the fury and grief the memory of that night still dusted up, even after so many years—she would talk to him about it, tell him what he did not know. But Amy and Rick graduated from high school, moved out, got married, had kids, and then, one after the other, moved back home. First it was Rick, at nineteen, with his pregnant wife, Sandy. They stayed until their son Liam was two. Less than two years later, Amy got divorced and turned up with her three-year-old daughter, Emily. They stayed for four years. When Amy and Emily moved in, Jackie was forty-eight years old; Floyd was forty-nine. They were middle-aged grandparents with a full house. The right moment never arrived.