by Delia Ephron
One evening, lounging on the couch, I became nearly paralyzed with anxiety. Hoots and caws, whistling, rustlings outside the window—were these sounds animal or human? I forced myself to take a soothing bath, then rushed the soap from one end of my body to the other. I didn’t like being naked. Too vulnerable. I left my bedroom TV on all night, and considered wearing my cross-trainers to sleep.
All deer business was postponed until the mayor recovered. Coral Williams had been booked for assault, but the charges were dropped at Dorley’s insistence. “I forgive her,” he had proclaimed from his hospital bed. I had been there to witness it, and Art heralded the mayor’s words in a banner headline. “This town has pity,” my editor pointed out, and advised me to write a column on the subject. I may, if I’m alive.
He assigned me to cover the town’s annual Oktoberfest. I agreed before realizing that this was Sam’s weekend to spend at his father’s. I should have trumped up an excuse to visit Manhattan. Instead I would be stuck here alone.
On Saturday, after another choppy, fitful night of sleep, I arose early to cart my son to the Islip airport, forty minutes away, for the eight-o’clock flight to Boston. He set off the alarm at the security check. They made him strip off his black boots with silver studs, as well as his gift from Deidre, a metal necklace resembling a chain-link fence.
On the way to the festival that afternoon, I stopped to see Jane. She’d come down with the flu, caused, in my opinion, by a crushing depression.
Jonathan answered the door. It was odd to feel a queasy trepidation, then to have him appear so ordinary. “Hi, Lily,” he said cheerfully. He looked out into the day. “Chilly.”
“A bit.” I bounded up the stairs. “I know the way.”
Jane lay flat in bed, all covered up, seemingly disembodied. Only her sad face was making an appearance. She sneaked a finger out from under the covers to point to the door, indicating that I should close it.
Jane needed me to stroke her head, push her unwashed hair off her face, hold her hand. But I am shy, uncomfortable expressing physical affection. Sam is the only person I have ever cuddled and hugged with abandon. All I could manage was to bring my chair close so we could whisper, and to give her a little present, a selection of herb teas. I offered to brew some, but she declined.
“Where is he?” Her voice was hoarse.
“Downstairs, I think, in his study.”
“He hasn’t been going anywhere,” she whispered.
“Maybe his whatever, affair, is over.”
“Or she’s off somewhere waiting for him.”
“Is he being nice?”
“Sort of. I guess. But you know how … at least I’ve read that when a person is about to commit suicide, he can seem all pulled together and content. Everyone in the family thinks he’s fine, but really he isn’t fine. He’s just decided once and for all to do it. That’s what Jonathan’s like. He’s decided once and for all to split.” Jane began coughing uncontrollably. She sat up and I patted her back. When she was finished, I held out a Mynten.
“What’s that?”
“An orange-mint thing.” I untwisted the paper and handed her the treat.
She sucked a minute and her voice became less scratchy. “I’ve seen these in the drugstore, they’re good.”
“So you think that’s what it is. He’s around, he’s nice, because he’s ready to abscond?”
“Yes.”
A sudden roar. I jumped up.
“What’s wrong?” asked Jane.
“Nothing. That noise—what is it?”
“The leaf blower. Aren’t they loathsome? I’ve told Mr. Poltry—the lawn man—I’ve told him, they’re loud, disruptive machines.”
“Terrifying.”
“Yes,” said Jane dully, then tried to muster some enthusiasm. “So what’s new?”
I was bursting to tell her. I needed to get into bed beside her and confide my own chaos and madness. Instead I told her about Deidre. I made it a funny story, about going to the ladies’ room at exactly the wrong moment during the deer meeting and then being forced to get my facts from a Klingon. I was almost talking about McKee, near, in the vicinity of, and I kept thinking that at any moment I would nudge the conversation there or it would somehow nudge itself, and before I knew it—bam—but this did not happen. I controlled myself. I did get Jane to smile, even to laugh once, but she was a tough audience.
“I have big bags under my eyes.” Jane poked her fingers into her cheeks and pulled the skin toward her ears. “Better, huh?”
“You always look beautiful.”
“I’m so tired at night, but I can’t sleep.”
“Of course, you’re upset.”
“I want to suffocate him.”
“What?”
“Last night he was sleeping soundly and I was wide awake, and I was thinking I could press a pillow over his face and end my agony.”
“Jane, that doesn’t make sense. You’re terrified Jonathan’s going to leave you, so you fantasize knocking him off? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t?” She picked up an emery board and began brisk, intense filing. I watched her work her way across three fingers, moving with the speed of a buzz saw, before she threw the emery board down.
“Jane, honey?”
“What?”
“I think you’re wrong. I think he made a bad investment and blew your savings out the window and that’s it, that’s the whole awful story. You’d find out if you would just ask.” Jonathan’s black-framed specs had been splotchy this morning, and no one but a wife could stand a man with lenses resembling a bug-spattered windshield. “And he’s not been paying attention to you lately because he’s preoccupied with the disaster. Wait a minute, how come he’s sleeping so well?”
“Tylenol PM. He’s taken it for years.”
“You should take it, too. In fact, I’m going to take it.”
“So you think that’s all it is, a money screwup?” She sounded hopeful.
“Yes. Absolutely.” My confidence was a stretch, a white lie. Still, Jane’s suspicions could be unfounded. I had noticed that sometimes we see our mates as desirable to others, because it justifies our choices. I had projected that numerous women were hot for Allan—hostesses in restaurants, a cute clerk in a video store. Also, this “he’s cheating” business could be Jane’s subconscious wish that someone would run away with Jonathan and take him off her hands. I didn’t get into any of that, though, because the phone rang. It was Jane’s daughter, Carrie, from college. As they chatted, I signaled that I was leaving. Jonathan held the front door open for me. He smiled in his usual tentative way.
“Thanks, Lily.”
“For what?”
He responded as if the answer were self-evident. “For cheering up my wife.”
By the time I arrived at the fair, around one-thirty, I was worn out, thanks to five nights of spotty sleep, that early drive to Islip, and my visit with Jane. Once I’d taken Demerol for a medical test, and this feeling was similar: a sense of sweet oblivion. I was making my dazed way past a giant corn roaster when I spied McKee at the barbecue.
He was spearing chicken and sausages with a large fork, serving lines of people five deep. To keep him in my line of vision, I had to keep shifting, which was difficult in my groggy state.
“Why didn’t you return my call?” I demanded loudly across people calling out orders. Exhaustion had a freeing effect. I might say anything that came into my soft head.
“I got back last night from a police convention in Atlantic City. White or dark, Winston?” he asked the next customer.
“White. Are we going to fire this principal, too?” the man asked.
McKee laughed, and they discussed how disruptive it was to have three principals in three years. A woman named Sarah interrupted to inquire whether Tom would please have a talk with her neighbor, because he was siphoning her water supply. McKee promised to take care of it the next day.
Someone bumped my should
er. A woman in a baseball cap. She tapped her brim by way of a hello. I nodded and moved away, out to the crowd’s periphery. “I’d like to interview you,” I shouted to McKee, knowing he would go along with the ruse.
“By the big pumpkin. In an hour. What can I get for you, Mrs. Whitley?”
He continued serving, didn’t miss a friendly beat, and I wandered off to do my job, among the makeshift plywood stands decorated with crepe paper. McKee’s wife could be volunteering in one of them. I meandered past the ring toss, the win-a-goldfish booth, and the fortune-teller. Teenagers knocked into me, hurrying by in noisy clusters. A terrible country-rock group wailed from a portable stage. I drank a Coke, pumping in sugar and caffeine to spark the energy to collect some quotes, carefully selecting people who did not turn away when I made eye contact: kids happy to show off their newly won fish or stuffed animals; small children tugging their parents along to spin-art or the makeup booth; fairgoers with lips dyed red from cherry Sno-Kones, and wisps of cotton candy stuck in their hair. I enjoyed it. I always enjoy collecting data. Only one mother rejected me, hoisting her toddler and brushing past with a curt, “We’re late.” The hour did not pass quickly. Twice that woman in a baseball cap turned up where I was. First she was hanging around the hook-and-ladder truck. It had been backed from the street onto the Little League field, and four- and five-year-olds were scrambling all over it. She showed up again at the booth where kids knocked down wooden pins with a Softball. Was I being tailed, I wondered, then kicked myself for having such a ridiculously paranoid thought. Across the park, where the green grass evanesced into woods, two does, munching rhododendrons, basked in what might be their last protected days on earth.
Eventually I drifted over to the enormous misshapen pumpkin, a sideshow specimen on which these words were painted: GUESS MY WEIGHT. People paid a quarter to drop their answers into a huge fish bowl in hopes of winning an eighteen-speed bike.
McKee was no longer barbecuing. I surveyed the area, expecting to locate him easily in the throng because his charm and vitality would pop. Sure enough, I picked him out—his hands on the shoulders of a young girl, steering her forward. It was impossible not to recognize that this was his daughter, from the trust with which she allowed him to navigate her. They stopped at a snack stand, she confided her preference, and he relayed it. As they continued on, she bounced along, alternately licking her blue Popsicle and throwing a torrent of words and energy back at him. He glanced at his watch. From a distance, I understood the whole interchange. As he fixed her barrette, pulling her hair to the side and pinning it off her face, he said something, something like he had business to attend to. She drooped before rebounding, yelling and waving to friends, two giggling girls who were trying to lean on each other as they walked. As Alicia tore up, one of the girls shook a paper skeleton at her. They all shrieked and sprinted off.
When I couldn’t see them anymore, and assumed he couldn’t, either, McKee walked rapidly in my direction, greeting a few people along the way. He picked up a popcorn box and a soda can, and tossed them in the garbage, just as the woman in the baseball cap was entering the Guess My Weight competition.
“Hello,” I said to him, sounding breathless, even though there was no reason for it.
“Are you hungry? Can I get you something?”
“No, thanks. Let’s sit over there.” I pointed to the bleachers.
We started across the Little League field, leaving the crowds and carnival behind. The earth was damp from a drizzling rain the night before, and I kept my eyes down, watching my shoes sink into the damp ground as we trekked across the diamond. The fair’s lovely,” I said in a bright, ordinary voice, then hissing like a ventriloquist, added, “Why am I in danger? You have to tell me.”
He halted, puzzled. “Who said you were in danger?”
“You.”
“Me?” I could see this struck him as nothing short of incredible.
He resumed his pace. “We were in the tower,” I reminded him, “and you—”
“Lily, hold it, slow down.”
I followed him docilely to the risers. He waited for me to sit and then climbed one bench higher, so I had to swing around and straddle the bench.
“I said that I wished you’d never come here,” he noted slowly. “You asked if you were in danger.”
“Oh,” I was thinking back. Was that correct? I asked? I assumed? But hadn’t he agreed?
“What danger could you be in?” he inquired.
“The naked woman. I wrote about it. What I saw. I threatened to figure it out.”
“My God, you really are a madwoman.” This broke the ice, his appreciation of my lunacy. Furthermore, I could see that he found me irresistible, because he smiled in a most affectionate way.
“So I’m not in any danger?”
“Only from me.”
“Oh.” I heard myself swallow. So that guess had been the correct one.
He moved down next to me. “We’d better discuss the mess we can’t get into.”
“Okay.”
“We’re not going to be friends,” he said.
“No?”
“We’re not even going to be friends because it’s not possible.”
I flipped open my notebook. “Not friends,” I wrote, and showed it to him. “I paraphrased, but that’s the gist, right?”
He nodded.
I looked out across left field. Beyond it, the pint-sized Ferris wheel circled ’round and ’round, legs dangling from every seat. “I got so crazy with worry, so freaked out, I almost wore my big fat rubber-soled cross-trainers to sleep,” I told Tom.
“You go at things full tilt,” he said with admiration.
“How was Atlantic City?”
“I loved it. Had a great time. Played two-hand blackjack. Have you ever done that, played two hands at once?” He took a Mynten from his shirt pocket.
“God, no, I’m terrible at math. I could never keep two hands straight.”
He laughed. “I’d like to see your crazy brain playing cards.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“I would. I stunk at math, too. Hated it. But I’m a devil at poker and blackjack. Deal the cards and I—”
“What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” He put the Mynten back in his pocket.
I jumped in to be the first to say it. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
“Absolutely.” He stood up. “Bye, Lily.”
I jabbed a spunky fist into the air. “Have fun, Tom.”
Before he was halfway across the baseball field, I succumbed to exhaustion. I lay on my back, my narrow body balanced on the narrower strip of board, and let the warmth of the sun swaddle me. I had been in danger, but only from him. I wouldn’t have to spend my life looking over my shoulder, sleeping in sneakers, maybe taking baths in them, my feet bobbing like buoys. I was relieved to be safe, happy to have been desired, even in such an unsatisfactory manner. I fell asleep.
I opened my eyes to the sight of the baseball cap bending over me. I scrambled to sit up, and the woman moved back so that she no longer loomed, a specter. “What is it?” I said.
“Lily Davis?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
She lifted her cap.
CHAPTER 10
THE PROBLEM was that I wanted to tell Tom. He would enjoy hearing my blow-by-blow, the saga of my interrupted siesta. This was the moment when I understood that our aborted relationship would not be so easy to dismiss. The kiss and whisking of bangs had faded, but the pleasure of talk was fresh. Being appreciated and appreciating is such a basic need, like protein. I hadn’t experienced that with my ex-husband. Allan’s mind was as interesting as the dollars in his wallet that he arranged according to denomination in ascending order. He had corrected my every exaggeration. “We were driving around sixty,” I would dive in, relating an adventure. “Forty-five,” he would interject. He was a teacher with a switch, flicking my wrist when I spoke out of line. Here’s one very handy thing about
having an ex-husband: It’s a place to dump all your anger. I should mention this advantage to Jane. It might give her something to look forward to.
“You go at things full tilt,” Tom had said. I could love him for that alone.
I wasn’t allowed to write about what happened, either. The woman in the baseball cap had insisted that our encounter be off the record. For the time being, it had to remain secret.
It felt like a luxury to return home and not have to search every closet before sitting down to a cup of tea. I blasted a CD. Sam was not here to groan at Van Morrison, but once a certain amount of dancing and singing along was accomplished, I deflated anyway. I was thirty-seven and would probably be single forever. The “single forever” fear—almost as upsetting as worrying about, say, death. Oh, right, what an overstatement. Yes, but it is comparable only because the thought causes an identical reaction: a sudden clamping, a cold hand squeezing the heart. Whenever “single forever” plagued me, I would take action, find an activity so that I could move quickly and leave the fear in my wake. Tonight I would go to the movies.
I didn’t check the backseat of my car before getting into the front, nor did I scour the road via rearview and side mirrors. No outrageous fantasies, like being garroted from behind, plagued me while I watched the film. And on the way home I had enough peace of mind to miss the action of the city. In-betweens—walking, riding the bus or subway—often yielded great sights, chance encounters, vicarious thrills. Life in New York tended to be continuous rather than intermittent, I was thinking. I barely heard the sirens. Four police vehicles, one more than had visited Claire’s Collectibles to rescue Baby, screamed past. I followed the answer to my prayers, something exciting that would delay my having to be lonely in my bed. Perhaps a resident had keeled over from drinking too many martinis (that had been in the log last week), or maybe the police had nabbed the woman in a headscarf who had lifted a hand-tooled belt from Strictly Suede (also a log item). Mr. DePosta might have engineered a roundup of naughty teenagers, yanking them out of a Saturday-night party. Fortunately, Sam was away, not that he would have been invited. The swiveling lights on police car roofs threw reflections onto the trees. I could follow the sirens and flashes of red more easily than I could the black-and-whites. They sped far ahead.