Evening News

by Marly Swick

  A stricken look crossed his face and he said, “No, I’ll go.” He stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over. “I’m sorry. I just lost track of the time.”

  “It seems to me you’ve lost track of more than that,” she shot back at him as he hurried out to the car.

  When they had pulled into the driveway half an hour later, Teddy was holding a new toy, some gruesome-looking alien — one of those Skeletors or whatever they were called. And he seemed all recovered. But Giselle wasn’t. She was tired of pussyfooting around, hoping things would get better. She was tired of being afraid to rock the boat. The goddamned boat was sinking anyway.

  “What is all this shit?” she had shouted at Dan, throwing one of his stupid books against the wall. Just the sort of attack-mode opening that the therapist cautioned against. She could hear Hannah’s voice: Try to couch things in terms of what you’re feeling. “It’s like you’ve joined some crazy fan club.”

  “It’s not like that,” Dan said in his calm-and-rational voice. “People grieve in different ways. You and I are each coping, or attempting to cope, in our own way. If you’d take the time to read any of these books you’re so contemptuous of, you’d learn that.” He picked up a small paperback, flipped through it, and started to read, “In the early weeks following Christopher’s death, both Mairi and I saw that we were dealing with our tragedy very differently. For the —” Giselle slapped the book out of his hands.

  “I don’t give a fuck about Christopher,” she said. “I’m sorry. But I think this whole thing” — she gestured to the piles of books and envelopes sitting on the small desk in the corner — “is sick. Pathetic. Creepy.”

  He’d sat on the edge of their bed and held out his hand to her. Tears spilled down his face. She sighed and shook her head. She was tired of his tears. Sometimes she felt as if they had been allotted a finite pool of tears to get them through this tragedy, and he was using up her share as well as his own. She was tired of this public exhibition of grief, this national network of bleeding hearts. Maybe it was her Midwestern heritage, all those pioneer families who lost child after child, crop after crop, and endured — without support groups listed in the back of self-help books. Sure, maybe the neighbors brought them some home-baked bread or helped raise a barn, but that was different. She had seen the lists of organizations: the Compassionate Friends, Parents of Murdered Children, Inc., Candlelighters Foundation (for parents whose children had died of cancer), National SIDS Foundation. She didn’t want any part of them. Maybe she was being a bitch, but she didn’t care. She had her son’s feelings to consider; she didn’t have the luxury of publicly proclaiming and analyzing every little nuance of grief.

  She grabbed the letter he was writing and thrust it at him. “I suppose you’re telling everybody how hard it is to look at your stepson every day, alive and well, after he shot your daughter, your precious little girl.”

  He flinched. She knew she’d hit a bull’s-eye. “That’s part of it, of course,” he said, “but just a small part. There’s so much more to it than that.” He rested his head in his hands, as if he didn’t have the energy to explain. Or she was just too dense to understand. “Look, there’s a meeting of the Compassionate Friends next month. I thought I’d go, check it out. We could go together. Just once, just give it a try, that’s all I ask.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

  “Is it so much to ask?”

  “I don’t know. I guess not.” The anger had suddenly leaked out of her. She felt deflated and depressed. She felt as if some shrew had taken possession of her momentarily and then departed. “But I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Well, there we are.” He shrugged. “I don’t think I can not do it. So where does that leave us?”

  She didn’t like the sound of that — it sounded so final. An alarm rang in the back of her brain, signaling her to find a compromise. “I’m sorry I sounded like such a bitch,” she said. “I won’t blame you for doing what you have to do.” She sighed. “I mean, it’s not like I’m right and you’re wrong. I know that. There is no right and wrong here.”

  He put his arms around her, and they sat there holding each other for what seemed like a long, calm moment, as if all the angry words had finally cleared the air, and the storm had passed over them. She breathed a sigh of relief.

  ***

  The next weekend was a holiday. She had forgotten all about it. She was cleaning out the refrigerator on her hands and knees, removing rotted, smelly things from the vegetable bin. Her interest in housekeeping, never that keen, had dwindled to nothing since the accident. She waved a fuzzy, caved-in cucumber in Dan’s direction and wrinkled her nose. “I couldn’t take the smell anymore.” She tossed the mutated cucumber into the trash can, followed by some limp, dessicated scallions that resembled seaweed.

  “That was Joe and Martha,” he said, “on the phone.” As if maybe she’d think they had come and gone in person without her seeing them. She could tell from the tone of his voice that he was going to try to get her to do something she probably didn’t want to do. Which was pretty much everything these days. “They’re having this little get-together for Memorial Day — just a few people — and they want us to come. Tomorrow afternoon.” He took the garbage bag out of the can, tied it up, and put in a fresh one. “They said to bring Teddy. The kids will be swimming.” Joe was a former student of Dan’s, an ex-Marine who had become a high school English teacher. His wife was a returning student like Giselle. Dan set the full bag by the garage door. “What do you think? I told them I’d talk it over with you.” Gee, thanks, she thought, make me the heavy.

  “I take it, you want to go.” She sat on her heels and stretched her back. Her body felt tight and achy, like an old woman’s. She hadn’t exercised in weeks.

  “Well” — he shrugged — “it’s not like I’m really in the mood for small talk, but I suppose we can’t live like hermits forever. And we’ve always felt comfortable with Joe and Martha. And Teddy likes their kid, what’s-his-name.”

  “Marky.”

  “Right.” He reached past her and grabbed a Diet Coke. “It’s up to you. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either,” she sighed. “We’d probably just cast a pall over their party. They’d have to warn everybody in advance — like prep them — and either everyone would be saying how sorry they were or avoiding the topic, hoping nobody put their foot in their mouth.”

  Dan nodded his head as if she’d made a reasonable remark, but she could tell he thought they should go. At their last therapy session they had talked about the danger of becoming shut-ins. At least Dan and Hannah had discussed it. They always seemed to be on the same wavelength, some Stanford alumni vibe that made Giselle feel like a third wheel.

  “Well, we don’t have to decide right this minute,” he said. “You can think about it.” He shoved open the sticky garage door and picked up the garbage bag. “I thought I’d cut the grass.”

  She was impressed by how low-key he was being. Had he been pushier about it, she’d probably have dug in her heels, but his being so nice made her feel guilty about saying no. She supposed they had to go out sometime. Joe and Martha were about as relaxed and unpretentious as you could get. And Teddy would enjoy it. They had a pool with a slide. She walked out to the driveway, where Dan was bent over the old lawn mower, trying to coax some life into it, cursing to himself as he yanked on the cord over and over again, only to get a feeble whine that picked up steam and then sputtered right out. She tapped him on the shoulder. He was spending so much time on his book that he hadn’t been playing tennis lately; she noticed his tan was fading. “Okay,” she shouted as the motor abruptly roared to life. “We can go.” He smiled and gave her a thumbs-up sign.

  ***

  Sitting in the backseat, Teddy wasn’t saying much, but he seemed happy to be going to a barbecue at the Goodmans’. He had insisted upon wearing his hideous tarantula T-shirt over his red plaid swim trunks. Scrutinizing hi
m in the rearview mirror, Giselle saw that he needed a haircut. His hair was hanging in his eyes.

  The traffic was even worse than usual — holiday traffic. Except for the funeral, she hadn’t ventured more than five miles from home since the accident. A radius circumscribed by the supermarket, bank, post office, and Teddy’s school. The traffic scared her. She kept reaching for the dashboard to brace herself, telling Dan to watch out, even though she had never had any complaints about his driving before. She’d always felt perfectly safe with him at the wheel, unlike with Ed, who loved motorcycles and drove like a bat out of hell, as her mother used to say. Dan reached over and clasped her hand. He gave it a little squeeze, as if to say, Be brave.

  “The freeway’s so narrow over here,” she said. “It feels as if the cars are right on top of you.”

  “Look at that cool ’vette!” Teddy pointed to a flashy silver convertible up ahead.

  “It’s a ’69,” Dan said, sounding equally smitten.

  Giselle shook her head. It never ceased to amaze her that even the most un-guylike guy seemed to be up on cars. She thought about how different it was with a daughter. Even though Trina was only two, already they’d had this “gal thing” going. Trina loved to go clothes shopping with her. She would point to various items and say, “Pretty!” And whenever Giselle painted her toenails, Trina had insisted upon having hers painted, too. Giselle worried about the sexist stereotyping, but it all felt so companionable. And she made sure to instill some early feminist principles as the two of them stood in the dressing room at May Company. “It’s nice to look pretty,” she would tell Trina, “but it’s more important what’s in here.” She would reach over and tap Trina’s forehead and heart, and Trina would tap Mommy’s forehead and heart solemnly, to show that she understood. Then she would shake her head at the red dress — “No!” — and point to the black dress — “Yes!” Already she had good taste in clothes. And now that Trina was gone, Giselle wouldn’t have a daughter to do those mother-daughter things with, ever. Just a son with his ugly Power Rangers and Hot Wheels. She clenched her eyelids shut to dam the tears.

  “You doing okay?” Dan asked. “You’re awfully quiet.”

  She shrugged.

  He squeezed her hand again. He was looking a little shaky himself. “We don’t have to stay long,” he said.

  ***

  The moment she saw all the cars parked in front of the Goodmans’ house, edging both sides of the narrow tree-lined street, she felt like turning the car around and going home. If she had been alone, she would have driven right past the house and kept going, but Dan was already attempting to parallel park in a tight space bracketed by two jaunty red sports cars. She held her breath, waiting for the sound of scraped metal, smiling tensely at Teddy in the backseat, as Dan somehow managed to maneuver them into the space without mishap. “Is that an awesome feat of parking, or what?” he asked, clearly pleased with himself.

  “Too bad parallel parking isn’t an Olympic event,” she joked, trying to sound convivial and lighthearted, like someone on her way to a party.

  Dan put his arm around her as they walked up the flagstone steps to the house, a graceful old pink stucco two-story that Joe had bought with a six-figure settlement of a long, involved lawsuit from a motorcycle accident he’d been in years ago, before Dan had ever even met him. Teddy was trudging along in front of them, dragging his gaudy beach towel on the grass. As they followed the buzz of voices around back to the pool, Dan reached down and flipped the beach towel over Teddy’s head. “Hey!” Teddy protested, pretending to stumble around like a blind zombie. Dan laughed even though it wasn’t that funny. He seemed to be wired, in an aggressively upbeat mood, but she didn’t trust it. All it would take was someone with a toddler or even a familiar toy, and he’d fall apart. Earlier in the week he’d broken down in the post office parking lot watching a father bending into a Volvo station wagon to unstrap his child from her car seat.

  At the gate to the backyard she froze at the sight of twenty or thirty people milling around the pool or standing on the lawn by the barbecue grill, talking and laughing, drinks in hand, voices raised to be heard over the shrieks of the half a dozen kids splashing in the water. Even Teddy seemed to shrink back until Marky Goodman caught sight of him and hollered out his name, motioning for Teddy to jump in. As Teddy peeled off his T-shirt, Dan leaned over and whispered in Giselle’s ear, “How you doing?”

  “Okay,” she lied. Already she knew that this had been a terrible miscalculation on her part. She wasn’t ready. She couldn’t imagine what she could say to anyone. There was only one couple she recognized from another get-together. They were very nice, just recently transferred to the West Coast from Tulsa. Giselle remembered having a pleasant conversation with the wife about the Midwest and California public schools. She was trying to remember the woman’s name when Martha pushed through the screen door carrying a tray of condiments, which she set down on the picnic table before hurrying over to where they were standing.

  “Dan, Giselle!” She hugged them each hello. “I’m so glad you could make it.” Giselle saw her hesitate, no doubt debating whether to make a direct reference to Trina, and was relieved when Dan had the presence of mind to step in and ask where Joe was. Martha looked over at the grill and pretended to frown like an exasperated schoolmarm. “He was supposed to be cooking hamburgers, but he’s probably showing off his new pool table.” She pointed to the garage, and Dan took off. Giselle noticed he was holding a Dos Equis that she hadn’t seen him take from the ice chest. “You want a glass of wine?” Martha asked her. “A gin and tonic?”

  “A gin and tonic sounds good,” Giselle said. She followed Martha into the kitchen and tried to look relaxed as she leaned against the counter, waiting for her drink. Martha looked terrific, she thought. She had finally got her long, dark hippie hair cut to shoulder length. “I like your hair,” Giselle told her.

  “God, talk about trauma,” Martha laughed. “I think I’m still suffering phantom hair syndrome. I actually cried on the way home from the beauty parlor. I hadn’t had my hair cut more than an inch since tenth grade.” She sliced a lime into quarters and shook her new, bouncier hair. “Joe thought I was nuts. He didn’t see what the big deal was. But I swear I went through the five stages of grief.” A stricken look flitted across her face as she handed the drink to Giselle, who forced an oblivious smile as if the gaff had flown right past her.

  “I’m the same way about my hair,” Giselle said. “A complete coward.” She took a swig of gin and wandered back out to the pool area to see how Teddy and Dan were doing. She was afraid to drink too much. She didn’t want to end up making a tearful, boozy public spectacle of herself. But she knew that if she didn’t drink, she’d remain uptight and silent. There was some old acronym about the stages of drunkenness — something about jocose, bellicose, morose, lachrymose. She couldn’t remember the exact order. Teddy pounded the ball over the net and let out a whoop. They were playing water volleyball. He looked happy. She didn’t want the sight of her standing there like a wallflower to dampen his mood, so she edged over toward the fence, where the nice woman she’d recognized earlier was talking to a handsome older couple dressed in expensive-looking white tennis outfits and athletic shoes. She glanced at her watch, wishing she could go wait in the car, like a dog, until it was time to go home. But Dan was probably enjoying himself for a change. The husband of the nice woman from Tulsa walked up to Giselle and said hello. He was holding a half-eaten hot dog and kept dabbing self-consciously at a tiny spot of mustard on the front of his white shirt. He was pale and overdressed, obviously not yet socialized to California.

  “So, how are you all adjusting to the big move?” she asked him.

  “Well, I can’t say I missed the winter,” he said. “All those people who go on about the four seasons can have them.”

  Giselle nodded and smiled, almost relaxed. “I hate to admit it, but I love to watch footage of people shoveling snow on the news.” She’d had
this conversation a thousand times; she could hold up her end on automatic pilot. But then a little girl, about six or seven, ran up in her bathing suit and tugged on his hand. “Daddy,” she whined, dripping water on his canvas shoes, “Gavin pushed my head underwater and wouldn’t let go. He tried to drown me.” Her lip quivered indignantly as she wiped her runny nose with the back of her hand.

  “Excuse me a moment,” the man sighed, and rolled his eyes at Giselle. He took the little girl’s hand and let his daughter lead him away. Giselle took another swig of her drink and sidled over to the food table. She was munching a carrot stick, trying to look absorbed in the array of chips and dips, when Dan walked up to her, looking as if he’d been mugged.

  “You were right,” he said. “I’m not ready for this.” He gestured to a small knot of people talking and laughing.

  He looked at his watch. “This is my third beer and we’ve only been here fifteen minutes.” He took a final swig and tossed the bottle into a bin. “I’m ready to take off. How about you?”

  “What about Teddy?” she asked. They both looked over to the pool, where he was splashing around like a madman, obviously having a great time.

  “Yeah.” Dan heaved a sigh and bit into a minitaco. A woman standing by the grill in a spandex halter dress burst out laughing, snorting beer down the front of her dress, screeching, “Look what you made me do!” The guy she was talking with made a big show of patting her boobs with his napkin. Dan shook his head. “Who are these people? Were conversations always this stupid?”

  “Maybe we could go somewhere — a coffee shop or something — and pick up Teddy in an hour or so.” She felt torn. Dan looked so depressed, she wanted to get him out of there, but Teddy seemed to be having real fun for the first time since her parents had left. It seemed cruel to yank him away so soon.