by Marly Swick
She rolled back over to her side of the bed and lay there for a moment with her eyes closed. Then she got up and went into the bathroom to hunt for some over-the-counter sleeping pills she had bought ages ago. They were in the back of the medicine chest. She swallowed two pills. They had never worked very well, but she supposed they were better than nothing. As she passed by Teddy’s room, she heard an odd noise and stepped inside. He was grinding his teeth in his sleep, something he hadn’t done for a couple of years now.
Those first weeks in California, when she was plagued by anxiety attacks in the night, she used to crawl in bed next to Teddy, who slept on a flip-out futon. When he ground his teeth, she used to slip her finger between his baby teeth and he would suck on it like a pacifier. Then she tried using her relaxation tapes on Teddy. They seemed to help. Together, they would drift off to sleep listening to soothing bells and rippling surf. She walked over to Teddy’s toy chest and rummaged around until she found a couple of the old tapes. The Walkman Dan had given him for Christmas was lying on the dresser. She snapped a tape in and slipped the earphones over Teddy’s head. Then turned the tape on. Himalayan bells. He sighed as a ripple of peace washed across his face.
In the morning his mother does not get out of bed. She says she doesn’t feel well, he’ll have to take the school bus. She tells him to call the Walshes and say he wants to go to the zoo with them after school.
“But I don’t want to go,” he protests. The last time he went to the zoo was with Dan and Trina while his mother was writing a term paper. When they passed the gorilla cage, Trina shouted and pointed, “Koko!” Every time they tried to move on to see some other animals, his sister threw a fit. They must have stood by the gorilla cage for an hour. Teddy wanted to go to the reptile building, but Dan wouldn’t let him wander out of his sight. “Your mother would kill me if anything happened to you,” he said. He gave him a five-dollar bill and told him to go over to the concession stand, only a few yards away, and bring back three soft ice cream cones. Teddy had tripped on his shoelace and dropped one of the cones on the way back, but Dan hadn’t yelled at him. Just handed him his own cone, saying he wasn’t really hungry.
“Why not?” his mother asks, exasperated. “You’ll just be bored here.”
He shrugs. She picks up the receiver off the nightstand and dials the number and hands the phone to him. When Ellen answers, he says, “This is Teddy. My mom wants me to go to the zoo with you.” His mother glares at him as he slams down the phone.
“You better get dressed,” she tells him. “And eat some breakfast.”
“We’re out of cereal,” he informs her. “I told you.”
“Then have some cookies.” She rolls over and covers her head with the pillow.
He can’t believe she actually told him to eat cookies for breakfast. They are out of milk, too. He eats three Oreos and drinks a Diet Coke.
On the ride to the zoo Ellen asks him how his mother and father are doing.
“My mom’s sick in bed,” he says. “Dan’s camping in Big Sur.”
“Really?” Ellen says and exchanges a look with her husband. Dr. Walsh shakes his head and tugs at his dark beard.
“When’s he coming back?” Ellen asks, frowning at Zack, who is kicking his feet against the front seat, until he stops it.
“Probably tonight,” Teddy says. “Maybe.”
Zack says, “Now you’re an only child. Like me.” He sounds as if Teddy should be glad about this.
Ellen sighs and rubs her forehead as if she has a headache. “What’s your favorite animal?” Zack’s father asks Teddy.
“Komodo dragon,” Teddy says.
Zack’s father nods and turns on the radio.
At the zoo Teddy is bored. Zack’s father stops and reads every sign aloud to them — all the vital statistics about emus and eagles — determined to make it a real educational experience. There is a big wooden statue of bald eagle wings with inches marked off, and kids are supposed to stand in front of it with their arms outspread to compare their arm spans with that of the bald eagle’s wingspan. Zack’s father makes them do it, and Ellen snaps a picture. She snaps two of Zack and one of Teddy. He knows they don’t really want a picture of him, but they don’t want to make him feel left out. When Dr. Walsh takes Zack to the men’s room, Ellen sits down beside Teddy on a stone bench and says, “You look so sad, Teddy. Is there anything I can do?”
“I’d like to go to the reptile building,” he says.
She nods, and when the others come back, she tells them that she and Teddy are going to the reptile house; they’ll meet at the front gate in half an hour. Zack whines that he wants to see the Kimono dragon, too. “Komodo,” Teddy mutters under his breath. Ellen pats Zack on the head and tells him to stay with his father. Dr. Walsh drops his large hairy hand, like a bear paw, onto Zack’s shoulder and gives him a fatherly squeeze. Zack pouts as they walk off.
At the reptile house he is surprised when Ellen goes inside. His own mother is afraid of snakes and always waits outside for him. He makes his way over to the iguanas and Komodo dragons and presses his face against the glass. He wishes he could crawl in there with them, camouflage himself under a nice big rock. When he and his mother were living alone in the apartment, when they first moved to California, his mother had bought him two anoles in a Plexiglas cage. He missed their dog in Nebraska, and you weren’t allowed to have real pets in their apartment complex. The only good thing about the place was a swimming pool in the center, but since he was only four years old, he wasn’t allowed in it unless his mother was holding him, even though he knew how to swim. At first they bought just one anole. He set it in a patch of sunlight in his room and decorated the cage with sticks for it to climb on. Twice a day he spritzed it with his mom’s plant mister and fed it live crickets from a Baggie. After a couple of days he complained that the anole, which he’d named Rocky, never did anything. It just clung to the side of the cage and never bothered to climb on the twigs. Teddy’s mother thought that maybe it was depressed, being all alone in there. So they went back to the pet shop and bought a second anole, which he named Stoney. Stoney seemed a little peppier than Rocky. There was more activity to watch. But two mornings later Teddy woke up to find Rocky gone. He searched the whole cage until he found part of Rocky’s tail. Stoney had eaten him. His mother was so outraged that she flushed Stoney down the toilet. “I refuse to have that monster in my house,” she said.
Teddy pounds his fist on the glass until the Komodo dragon looks up at him, puffing out his chest. They stare, eye to eye, not blinking. A guard walks over and warns him not to touch the glass. The guard has a holster strapped to his hip.
“What are you going to do? Shoot me?” Teddy says.
Ellen apologizes for him, making it clear that Teddy is not her son.
After Teddy left for school, Giselle just lay in bed feeling simultaneously leaden and jittery. She hadn’t heard a word from Dan since he’d been gone — three days — and he’d said they would be back sometime on Tuesday. Today. The thought made her stomach cramp. What if nothing had changed, if he still felt the same way about Teddy? She threw off the covers and ran to the bathroom. As she was flushing the toilet, she heard the phone ring. The answering machine picked up, but she couldn’t hear who it was. She hurried into the kitchen and played the message: “Hi. We’re back to civilization. If you can call the IHOP civilization. Be back by suppertime, maybe sooner. I miss you.” His voice sounded surprisingly normal. Almost like his old self.
Her Daily Planner was lying open on the kitchen counter next to the answering machine. Feeling a removed sense of curiosity, she flipped through the past few days to see what she had missed, back in her old life, which already seemed like some vivid dream in fast-forward: rushing here, rushing there. She saw that she had missed, completely forgotten about, the first meeting of her women’s investment group, which Heidi, a fellow soccer mom, had asked her to join. Giselle had hesitated at first, thinking she was too busy and too ign
orant about stocks — didn’t know Dow Jones from Dow oven cleaner — but then realized that was the point, wasn’t it? Heidi worked in a bank but assured Giselle that the other five women had no background in finance. They were just going to read, study, consult with some so-called experts, and start up investment portfolios. When Giselle had told Dan about the women’s group, he said it sounded like a great idea. He was even vaguer about money matters than she was. When they got married, he had handed over all that to her. “You’ll be great at it,” he’d said when she sounded doubtful about the group. “God knows, I’m never going to make us rich, so I guess it’s up to you.” And suddenly she had been full of resolve. At the grocery store that afternoon she had spotted a Money magazine sandwiched in a rack between Family Circle and Bon Appétit and tossed it into the cart. She realized that money was another area, like childbirth, where she could be the expert. You didn’t need to know Shakespeare to make a killing on the stock market. In fact, it was probably a liability. She had read the magazine cover to cover and taken copious notes. She had always been a straight-A student. Only instead of making a 4.0, she would make piles of money. Enough for a new car — make that two new cars, her tuition, and a trip to Europe.
According to the Daily Planner, she had also missed an appointment with a financial aid officer at UCLA. The thick catalog of courses, bigger than the Lincoln phone book, was sitting on the kitchen table along with her letter of acceptance. Dan had not been all that keen on her transferring, concerned about the longer commute and more complicated day care routine. But she had insisted, arguing that it would help her get into a decent law school. And once she was admitted for the fall, Dan had seemed to accept it with good grace. Giselle had even overheard him telling his mother that it wouldn’t be the end of the world; they would manage just fine. “Don’t worry about it,” he had said into the phone. “You know Giselle. The efficiency experts could learn something from her.” The remark had surprised her. She had never thought of herself as particularly efficient. Or known that others thought of her that way. Mostly she just felt overwhelmed. Spread too thin. Not that it mattered now. That Giselle was gone for good. And in her place was this paralyzed slug who couldn’t even muster the motivation to take out the smelly garbage. Or wash the dishes.
She flipped the Daily Planner shut and replayed Dan’s message, feeling more hopeful than she had been feeling about the prospect of his return, but this time his upbeat voice struck her as manic. As if he were being held hostage and forced to read a message to prove that he was still alive. She wished he had left a longer message. Still, the main thing was, he was coming back. She could tell by the relief she felt that part of her had been afraid he would just take off, disappear, like Wakefield, a character in a Hawthorne story they had just read in her American lit course, who — for no apparent reason — decides to hide from his wife for a few days, which turn into twenty years. And it’s not as if Dan didn’t have a good reason to want to disappear.
For the first time in the three days since he’d been gone, she washed all the dishes in the sink and threw out the trash. The trash cans were in the side yard next to the Beemers’ house. As she dumped the plastic bag in the can, she heard loud music, Marvin Gaye, and knew that Lois was at it again, working out to keep her husband from playing around. Giselle hurried back inside and stood in the laundry room, a tiny utility nook off the kitchen, staring at the overflowing basket of dirty clothes. She knew that Trina’s clothes were mixed in with the others: little sunsuits and dresses and nighties she had worn just a few days ago. It wasn’t so much washing them that Giselle dreaded. She could just dump the whole basket into the washer, set the dial, and walk away. It was what to do with them once they came out of the dryer, warm and fragrant. She would fold them — and then what? Put them back in her drawer? Donate them to the Salvation Army? What if someday she saw a little girl at the playground or grocery store dressed in Trina’s clothes? When Dan’s father died, Dan had tried to persuade Luisa to let the doctor take out his pacemaker and send it to some Third World country where people who needed pacemakers couldn’t afford them. He had read about the program in the newspaper. But his mother had balked. Dan, who carried an organ donor card in his wallet, thought her refusal was irrational. But Giselle had stuck up for Luisa. She had understood her mother-in-law’s resistance.
It occurred to her that maybe the ancient Egyptians had the right idea, burying everything alongside the body. But not so much to preserve it as to get it out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind.
After dumping the clothes in the washing machine, she went and stood in the doorway to Trina’s room. She felt a sharp surge of energy and could see herself stripping the room bare and boxing up everything. The only problem would be disassembling the crib. She even fantasized about slapping a coat of blue paint over the pink and lavender, restoring the room to its original state, leaving not a trace of evidence that it had ever been a little girl’s room. The fresh paint would overpower the scent of baby powder and wet diapers. But Giselle was afraid of Dan’s reaction. Once when she had, on the spur of the moment, rearranged their bedroom furniture, Dan had objected to her making what he referred to as “a unilateral decision.” She had been surprised that he cared; Ed had never noticed when she made decorative changes around the house. She used to have to point them out to him and ask him what he thought, and he would invariably say they were fine with him. Sometimes, although she appreciated Dan’s more refined aesthetic sensibility, she missed the autonomy. But she knew that clearing out Trina’s room went far beyond interior decoration. It had to do with rearranging their internal furniture, reupholstering their minds and hearts, remodeling their vital organs. She shut the door, took a set of fresh sheets from the linen closet, and stripped the old sheets off their king-size bed. Dan always liked crisp, clean sheets. He said they reminded him of being a child, safe and coddled. When he was growing up, they had a housekeeper who used to wash and iron the sheets every other day.
As she was changing the sheets, it occurred to her that things might go more smoothly if Teddy weren’t there when Dan first got home. They could have a couple of hours alone together, to get off on the right foot, just the two of them, before having to complicate the equation. The past few days she had felt as if they were all in suspended animation. When she thought of Dan’s return, she yo-yoed between cautious optimism and despair. In more hopeful moments she imagined Dan’s anger smoldering itself out, reduced to ash along with the campfire, leaving only a pure, unadulterated grief. The grief, she thought, they could handle. They could share. It was the other stuff that would tear them apart. And in her hopeless moments, she imagined Dan raging through the house like a wounded, enraged bear, swatting her aside as he lumbered down the hall to Teddy’s room.
She glanced at her watch. She hated to ask Ellen for another favor, but Ellen had told her not to hesitate. What are friends for? she had said. People want to help. Giselle picked up the phone and dialed Ellen’s number. She knew that if their positions were reversed, and something had happened to Zack, Giselle would be eager to help out. Still, she hated having to take advantage of people’s sympathy. Their pity. Their relief that it had not, in fact, happened to them. Ellen answered right away and said that it would be no problem to keep Teddy through suppertime. “Are you sure?” Giselle asked. “Really?” When she hung up, she felt almost light-headed with relief. Then she felt bad when it hit her just how relieved she was to get Teddy out of the way. After all, he was part of the family. She couldn’t keep Dan and Teddy apart forever. But just for a couple of hours, she told herself. What’s wrong with that? Discretion was the better part of valor. It couldn’t hurt to have a little time alone together. She headed for the shower. For the first time in days she was going to wash her hair. Afterward, maybe she would even venture to the market for some steaks and a bottle of wine.
***
At five o’clock she was watering the plants — the spindly brown-edged ferns and anemic spider pl
ants — when she heard Dan’s car pull into the garage. Her hand shook; she splashed water onto the top of the bookcase and quickly blotted it with the hem of her dress. She tried to strike a normal pose, but she didn’t know what felt normal under the circumstances.
Dan called out her name as he walked through the kitchen into the living room. He was still wearing his dark glasses. When he saw her, he took them off and set them on the coffee table. She set the watering can down beside them. He held his arms open. He hadn’t shaved in days; his face scratched against her cheek as they kissed.
“I should take a shower,” he said. “I stink. The drive back was long and hot.” He raised his arms above his head and stretched his back. “I thought we’d never get here.”
“You want some iced tea?” she asked politely, as if he were a guest.
“Okay.” He followed her into the kitchen. She took the pitcher out of the refrigerator and poured him a glass. She had thrown out the last of the Juicy Juice boxes that morning even though Teddy would have drunk them.
“Thanks.” He took a long sip. “Where’s Teddy?”
“At Ellen’s.” She shut the refrigerator door, then opened it again and grabbed a Dos Equis she’d bought at the store earlier in the day. “He’ll be back after supper.” She watched him carefully, looking for signs of relief or disappointment, but his expression remained neutral.
“How’s he been?”
She shrugged.
“I did a lot of thinking,” he said. “Up there.”
She didn’t say anything. He reached out and placed his palm flat against her chest. “Breathe!” he commanded. “You’re not breathing.” Obediently, as if he were a doctor, she took a deep breath. “That’s better.” He took his hand away and scratched at his stubble.
“Are you growing your beard again?” she asked. He’d had a beard as long as she’d known him, then suddenly shaved it off one weekend a couple of months ago. She was shocked when he emerged from the bathroom; she had wanted to protest this unilateral decision but could tell that he was feeling self-conscious and vulnerable, so she had assured him it looked good, even though the skin underneath looked like overcooked pasta. Less of a diplomat, Trina had cried when she climbed onto his lap and touched his bare chin. She liked to nestle her fingers in his beard.