Evening News

by Marly Swick

  “How are you doing?” Giselle asked.

  “It’s a relief, to tell you the truth.” Lois offered her some Bain de Soleil, which Giselle declined.

  “Really?”

  “Really. I feel as if I’ve spent the past ten years trying to postpone the inevitable.”

  Behind the fence Ninja’s whine escalated into a shrill yelp as he dug frantically, trying to tunnel his way into the neighboring yard. “Stop that!” Lois barked at the dog. “I wish to God that Bill could take the damn dog. No pets allowed in his new apartment complex, naturally.” She sighed. “But I suppose Eric would miss him. Especially now.”

  Giselle nodded. The cordless phone rang. She was 99 percent sure it was her parents, but for some reason she felt compelled to pick it up anyway.

  “Hello, dear,” her mother chirped. “How’s the weather there?” Her mother had adopted this relentlessly upbeat voice ever since the accident.

  “Fine, nice. I’m sitting in the sun, in fact. How’s Dad?”

  “He’s fine. Chipping away at the putting green. I can see him from here. How are you doing?”

  “Okay. Nothing much new. Todd and I had dinner last night. He seems like he’s doing great. Did he tell you he met Steven Spielberg?”

  “We heard all about it. How about your sister? Have you heard from her lately?”

  “No,” Giselle lied. Vonnie had called a couple of nights ago, but Giselle didn’t want to get into it. Her sister still refused to speak to their parents. “Look, Mom, Lois just stopped by. Could I call you back later?”

  “Lois.” She heard the undertone of disapproval and thought her mother might be about to offer some advice or criticism, but then her Pollyanna voice kicked in again. “Well, could I talk to Teddy for just a second?”

  “He’s at soccer.”

  “Oh. I thought he had soccer on Saturday.”

  “They switched it,” Giselle improvised. She hadn’t told her parents about the sleeping pills incident and didn’t intend to. She knew her mother, who had a mind like a steel trap when it came to dates, knew that school wasn’t out yet; if Giselle told her that Teddy was in Nebraska, she would wonder why he had left before school ended. “We’ll give you a call when he gets back from soccer. Okay?” She’d just have to think of something later, some excuse. “Give my love to Daddy,” she added hurriedly, before her mother could say anything, and hung up. Exhausted.

  During the brief phone call Lois had run next door and returned with two Michelob Lights. Giselle accepted one gratefully.

  “Parents,” Lois said. “I dread telling my mother about Bill’s moving out. She’ll blame me. She thinks everything’s my fault. The Great White Pilot can do no wrong.” She took a swig. “I thought parents were supposed to be on your side. Especially mothers.”

  Giselle had met Lois’s mother — a brittle, blue-haired widow whose favorite expression was “I don’t like to complain but . . .”

  “How’s Eric taking his father’s move?” she asked.

  “I think he’s relieved, too. All that tension.” Lois let out a huge breath. “I think all that macho father-son stuff just made Eric nervous. Maybe when he’s older, but not now.”

  Giselle let out a soft, yeasty burp. “Excuse me.” She waited for a second burp to pass before saying, “Teddy’s in Nebraska. Ed’s taking him fishing today, speaking of father-son stuff. He left yesterday.”

  “Oh,” Lois said. “I didn’t realize he was leaving so soon.”

  Giselle could see the look of surprise on Lois’s face and appreciated that she didn’t ask. If Lois had asked, Giselle probably would have lied. But suddenly she found herself telling Lois about the sleeping pills.

  “Oh, my God” was all Lois said, shaking her head speechlessly, when Giselle was through. Something that Giselle also appreciated. What could you say? In general people tried to say too much: words of comfort, advice, sympathy. A big, unappetizing casserole of words.

  Trina had just been learning to talk. A handful of new words every day. Juice! Ice cream! Music! All commands or exclamations. By now she would have been forming her first complete thought. Giselle would have written it in the baby book under baby’s first sentence. Teddy’s first sentence had become a family joke: “Give me more noodles!” She had a feeling that Trina’s first sentence would have been something more feminine and eloquent, something about flowers or clouds.

  The sympathy cards were the worst. They were still receiving a belated trickle from distant friends and relatives who had just heard the news. She couldn’t imagine who they got to write those verses. Imagine being paid to compose such earnest, empty doggerel. Years ago, on their trip to KU, her father had pointed out the Hallmark headquarters just outside of Lawrence, Kansas. She could just picture them sitting at their computers, reading the verses aloud, snickering. A room full of cynical advertising majors whose résumés weren’t impressive enough to land them a job in New York. Twentysomethings who wouldn’t know a coffin from a tanning bed.

  “I’m getting thirsty,” Lois said after a while. “How ’bout another beer?”

  “Sure.” In the hot sun she felt drunk already.

  Five minutes later Lois reappeared with a small cooler and a bag of tortilla chips. Giselle passed on the chips but accepted a beer.

  “Look how thin you are,” Lois said. “I’m jealous.”

  “I’m on the Steady Misery Diet,” Giselle shot back, annoyed that even now Lois was worrying about her weight, as if it mattered.

  “When I’m miserable, I eat even more.” Lois crunched on a handful of chips. “You should put on some lotion, you’re getting burned. Here.” Lois squirted some lotion into the palm of her hand and squatted down beside Giselle, massaging the sun-warmed Bain de Soleil across her chest and stomach, then down her arms and legs, grunting a bit as she stretched to reach the extremities.

  It felt soothing to be touched. Giselle was sorry when it was over. “Thanks,” she said quietly.

  Lois settled back in her chaise and closed her eyes. “I wonder how Eric’s doing. Mostly he seemed thrilled to death that there’s a pool at the complex. I don’t think the whole thing’s really sunk in yet.” She sighed and looked over at Giselle, as if waiting for her to say something. As if it were her turn. Giselle knew that Lois must be wondering about Dan, his conspicuous absence, but she didn’t ask and Giselle didn’t volunteer anything. She flashed on Dan moving his things out. Dan and his faithful friend Harvey carrying armloads of clothes, boxes of books, out to a U-Haul, and her heart seemed to sink in her chest. No matter what he’d done, Dan was Trina’s father. If they split up, it would be like losing some last vestige of her daughter.

  “Of course, Bill was away so much anyway,” Lois said. “Sometimes I wonder if he was ever really here.”

  Every so often Giselle sneaked a glance at her watch.

  ***

  By four o’clock the creeping shadows stole the last remaining patch of sunlight. Giselle gave up and went inside the house. Lois had left about an hour earlier to do some grocery shopping. She had invited Giselle over for supper, but Giselle had declined without bothering to give an excuse. When Lois looked rebuffed, Giselle had relented enough to say, “Dan and I are going out to dinner.” She didn’t want Lois to think she was saying no because of the accident. Although it would have been the first time she set foot inside the Beemers’ house since that day. And she wasn’t, in fact, quite sure how she felt about it.

  Three and a half hours until seven-thirty. And Dan was always late, a manifestation of his Latin heritage. She showered and put on her kimono. Then, even though it was too early to dress, she sat on the edge of the bed, staring into the open closet. Dan’s few clothes hung neatly on one end, hers crowded together at the other. The garments looked familiar, but she felt no emotional attachment. She recognized them only from snapshots: the red sheath she had worn on the first night of their honeymoon in Lahaina, the embroidered turquoise blouse she had bought in Rosarita Beach one weekend
when they drove across the border for a cheap lobster dinner. The next morning she had woken up sick, thinking she had food poisoning, but it had turned out to be morning sickness. Even the nice things she had worn only once or twice looked tawdry and unappealing, as if she were browsing through a rack of clothes at a Salvation Army store. She looked at the clock on the night table. Four-thirty. There was still time to drive to the mall. It was as good a way to kill time as any.

  In the dressing room at Contempo Casuals, stripped down to her dingy white bra and panties, she examined her reflection in the three-way mirror, surprised by how good she looked. She hadn’t been this thin since her freshman year in college. She remembered crowding into the dressing room at Miller & Paine with Laura, trying on clothes for college in the fall. They were both going to the University of Missouri at Columbia, which was known for its journalism program. They had it all planned. After college they would get jobs as reporters at some major metropolitan newspaper — they hadn’t decided whether it would be the East or West Coast yet, but definitely not the Midwest — and lead lives straight out of some stirring commencement speech, with a touch of Danielle Steele thrown in for good measure. Laura’s life had pretty much gone according to plan, except that she was working for a paper in Providence, Rhode Island, waiting for the chance to move to the Boston Globe or Washington Post. They still talked a few times a year but had drifted apart after Giselle punked out at the last minute by deciding to stay in Lincoln and go to UNL to be near Ed.

  The first dress she tried on was too big. Giselle had to ask the clerk to bring her a size 6. The clerk, who was grossly overweight, snatched the size 8 away as if Giselle had deliberately insulted her, and then seemed to take a certain satisfaction in informing Giselle that they didn’t have the dress in a size 6. Giselle mumbled a meek thank-you. Laura would have managed to put the girl in her place, subtly but firmly.

  Stuck in Nebraska, Giselle hadn’t really wanted to talk to Laura; the contrast between their lives had been too stark. But once Giselle had mustered the gumption to leave — to move to California — she’d turned to her old friend for moral support. When she felt lonely and scared in her tiny, tacky apartment after Teddy was asleep, she would call Laura long-distance so that Laura could assure her she’d done the right thing in leaving Ed, in moving to California. And Laura, knowing that Giselle couldn’t afford big phone bills, would always pretend to have something on the stove or someone at the door. “I’ll call you back in five minutes,” she’d say, saving Giselle’s pride.

  Laura had been skeptical about Dan, cautioning Giselle not to get hurt, as if she thought a professor couldn’t possibly be seriously interested in a college dropout with a kid. Even though she thought the same thing herself, Giselle had felt insulted, and the phone calls had tapered off. Plus, she wasn’t so lonely anymore. When Dan asked her to marry him, the first person Giselle had called was Laura — like a kid saying, “Nah-nah, see? You were wrong.”

  But maybe she wasn’t. One of the maddening things about Laura was that she was almost never wrong about anything. Including clothes. Giselle was having trouble deciding between the peach linen shift and the violet flowered sundress. Laura wouldn’t have had an instant’s doubt. “That one,” she’d say, “definitely.”

  But who could have predicted something like this? They were doing fine before the accident. A happy family. Or at least as happy as families get these days. Ozzie and Harriet didn’t need two incomes to buy a house. They didn’t live across the street from drug dealers. They didn’t need to worry about drive-by shootings and paroled sex offenders. They had never even heard of radon or attention deficit disorder. Of course, as Ed frequently pointed out, it was still like that in Nebraska. You could still live The Good Life, as the state welcome sign proclaimed.

  She just couldn’t make up her mind. Even though they were broke, what the hell, she decided to take both dresses. It seemed like a luxury to feel guilty about something as trivial as money.

  ***

  Dan arrived at seven-thirty sharp. She didn’t know whether this was a good sign or a bad sign, whether he was eager to see her or eager to get it over with. Although he had been gone less than a week, there was an awkwardness to his arrival. She noted how he knocked on the front door as he opened it and called her name. “Wow, your hair,” he said, “you look so different.” He didn’t like it, she could tell.

  At the mall she had picked up some wine, cheese, and crackers. But he seemed anxious to get going. “Nice dress,” he said. “Sexy.” Instead of feeling complimented, she felt embarrassed. She knew that he must realize she had bought it specially, as if this were a first date and she wanted to make a good impression. She felt awkward and vulnerable and wished she had worn jeans, like him, fresh from racquetball, his dark hair still damp, shiny as patent leather. He was growing out his beard. It always grew fast. After only a couple of days he was already looking romantically swarthy, like Antonio Banderas in Desperado. Despite Lois’s best attempts with the suntan lotion, Giselle’s skin radiated a Day-Glo pink. It hurt. She had flinched when he hugged her hello.

  His matching Honda Civic was parked at the curb. She waited as he moved a pile of books into the backseat. In the car he said, “Arturo’s?” It was a restaurant they had eaten at often, although not so much in the past two years. With two kids, one in a high chair, it was easier to eat at home. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time they had gone out to eat like this, just the two of them. She thought the fact he’d suggested Arturo’s was a good sign. They had gone there for an early supper, to celebrate, after the ultrasound that had revealed to them the baby’s sex. Dan had been jubilant at the news; he had been hoping for a girl. They had ordered a pitcher of tequilaless margaritas and debated girls’ names, working their way through the alphabet: Amelia, Amanda, Aviva, Bianca, Bonita, Catrina.

  The restaurant was a good fifteen-minute drive. They didn’t say much. The weather, the traffic. Always the good discussion leader, he brought up something in the news, something President Clinton had said about the future of education in America, and they discussed it as long as they possibly could, discussed the hell out of it, relieved to be talking about something three thousand miles away that didn’t concern them personally. She wished that she had a cigarette. She had been a sporadic smoker but had given it up when she got pregnant with Trina and hadn’t started up again because she knew that Dan didn’t like it. Back in Nebraska all her friends smoked cigarettes. There wasn’t that much else to do. Dan reached over and punched the cassette player, then rested his hand on the edge of her thigh. Self-consciously, she cupped her hand over his. Some tape she didn’t recognize started up at loud volume. He slid his hand out from under hers to adjust the volume and then put it back on the steering wheel.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  He looked startled, as if he didn’t understand the question for an instant, and then smiled. She had forgotten how white his teeth looked against his beard. “One of my students recommended her. You like it?”

  She shrugged. They had never shared the same taste in music, hers being the more pedestrian — although she in fact had a slight edge in classical music, thanks to her mother’s insistence on piano lessons. She had no discernible talent, but at least she’d learned something about music theory and history. Vonnie, on the other hand, was clearly gifted. She had majored in music at Wisconsin before switching to women’s studies; she now played keyboard in a lesbian rock band called Shebang.

  Giselle spotted the empty CD case and examined it. The clock on the dashboard said 7:46. Nine forty-six in Nebraska. Teddy would be in bed. She wondered if he was grinding his teeth. The fact that he was in a different time zone made her miss him more. She hated the thought of their daily lives being out of sync. The CD cover was a psychedelic swirl of sensual colors. Deep purples and blues. For some reason it brought to mind the note she had seen on Dan’s desk at school. Lunch today? J. Written in swirling lavender ink. Usually Dan listened
to cool jazz or old sixties rock.

  At the restaurant, seated in a booth, they sipped their margaritas and commented on how everything was just the same — the sombreros on the walls, slick bright oil-cloths on the tables, fake cacti sculptures, Mexican blankets tacked to the ceiling. The same greasy menus with the same typos. Chilli. Tortila. Burritoes. They used to joke about Buried Toes — the house special — a plate of toes smothered with bloody salsa and melted cheese. Even the same waiter, who recognized them and spoke to Dan in Spanish. Giselle had learned just enough from her one semester of Spanish to get the general drift. The waiter said it had been a long time. He asked Dan how they were. Dan nodded and smiled. “Bueno, bueno.” Giselle marveled at how convincing he sounded, how normal. Seeing them sitting here drinking their margaritas, no one would guess what they had been through. As soon as the waiter left with their order, Dan leaned forward and caught her hands, which were fidgeting with the silverware. He looked into her eyes. It was the first time they had made direct eye contact all evening. She felt a disturbance in the pit of her stomach, as if she had swallowed a hot chili pepper.

  “This all seems so unreal,” he said. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t believe any of it.” He sighed. He was squeezing her fingers so hard that it hurt, but she didn’t want to pull away. “Then other times . . . I don’t know —”

  “I know,” she said. “I know what you mean.” And she did. Sitting there across from him, she felt the unreality of it — or maybe it was a sort of heightened reality that felt like unreality. She was listening so intently, with such focus, that she could almost see the words coming out of their mouths. She noted each gesture, like stage directions: He bites his lip and turns his head away from her. But the tears come anyway. He unfolds his napkin and blows his nose. It gave her the creeps. She gulped her drink down quickly. Maybe if she were a little drunker, it would go away. His touch felt so good, she just wanted to lie down next to him somewhere quiet, to hold each other. She thought if they could do that — take a time out — it was possible that everything would somehow realign itself and they could be back on track again, the same track. Maybe now that Teddy was gone for a month, they could start over, ease their way into a new routine; and when he returned from Nebraska, it would be all right.