The Good Wife

by Stewart O'Nan

  “You taking orders?” Eileen asks, holding up her empty Genny Cream.

  “Don’t overdo it now,” their mother coaches—a sore spot, because Eileen defends herself: “It’s my second.”

  “She’s pacing herself,” Shannon says, handing her a cold one.

  “I’ll make a fool of myself later,” Eileen says, “I promise.”

  “I didn’t say that,” their mother says. “Did I say that?” and Patty thinks nothing has changed except her own situation. Shannon’s still the success, Eileen still the wild girl. Patty’s always been the quiet one. Now what is she?

  Pitied. A family embarrassment.

  It must be the old house that’s making her feel this way, the memory of her teenage misery and eagerness to leave, her belief that life had to be better away from their mother, and somewhere in there, hiding like a ghost, their father and the happy Thanksgivings of her childhood, the laughing black-and-white movies they’d play on the living room wall.

  She excuses herself to go to the bathroom and then sits on the cold ring of the seat with the door locked, her face buried in her hands.

  At the sink she splashes water on her face, pinches her cheeks, and still she looks like shit. She’s always been the least attractive of the three (a worry to her mother through high school), and her old insecurity returns, fresh as ever.

  In the living room Marshall’s talking to the players the same way Tommy does. On top of the TV leans the sepia, almost formal portrait of her father in the tooled gold frame, looking out at them like a kindly minister. It’s been there since Patty was fourteen, a never-changing shrine she’s always hated, as if her mother was using him as an excuse.

  Her mother sets out the chips and dip, and the kids magically reappear, making Marshall turn up the volume.

  “How many sodas is that for you?” he asks Randy.

  Shannon drifts in, then Eileen, taking a break. Her mother comes in without her apron, lifting a glass of wine.

  “Who’s winning?” she asks, as if it matters.

  For a few minutes they’re all together and Patty thinks she should use the opportunity to say something—to thank them—but the game has their attention. She’ll have another chance at dinner when they go around the table and everyone says what they’re thankful for.

  Halftime clears the room, all but Marshall, who seems bent on watching all six hours of football. Her mother finishes her wine and ties her apron on again. The stove is smoking more than the fan can handle; Eileen props open the back door so the cold pushes in. Patty wants to help but there’s nothing to do.

  “Go sit and relax,” her mother says.

  “How about setting the table?”

  “That’s the kids’ job.”

  The first game isn’t close; the second’s the Cowboys, who Tommy despises. Marshall swears at the set. In his gold frame, her father smiles, unconcerned.

  Outside, a front is moving in, darkening the room. Patty gives up on the game and stands at the picture window, warming her hands over the radiator, gazing at the vine-choked thicket of trees across the road, waiting for the first flakes. No one drives by; there’s no motion but a crow gliding down to inspect a dark blotch in the snow. From the kitchen comes the whir of a mixer and the creak of the oven door—someone whipping the potatoes and checking the turkey. They must be getting close.

  She’s surprised she’s made it this far. She’s tempted to slip upstairs and poke around their old room, but resists. Even in the best of times the view of the lone dogwood in the front yard is enough to send her into a tailspin.

  The easiest thing is to concentrate on tomorrow, when she’ll see him again. He’ll ask how her Thanksgiving was.

  It was all right, she’ll tell him. It was good.

  SELF-STORAGE

  SATURDAY PATTY MOVES—A PERFECT DAY, BRIGHT AND DRY, THE ditches sparkling with melt-off. The storage place opens at eight. All morning they drive back and forth in a convoy, Patty leading in her car, Eileen following in her Bronco, then Cy in his truck with the big stuff They do it room by room, moving from the rear of the house to the front, saving the garage for last. Patty can’t lift anything, and stands aside as Eileen backs Tommy’s old recliner through the door.

  She springs for lunch, ordering subs, thinking this may be the last call she makes from this number. They sit on the swept floor of the bedroom to eat, the sun warming the bare wood. Without furniture, the place looks the way it did when she and Tommy first saw it, excited to finally find something they could afford. Compared to his apartment, it was palatial—and no more roaches. They didn’t mind that it was in the middle of nowhere, or that the hill it perched on might be trouble in winter. They even liked Mr. McChesney in his overalls and his clunker of a van. It seems so long ago, Patty thinks; it’s only been three years.

  After lunch, the house empties out. The waterbed drains, a hose running to the tub. Cy slides the heavy lettuce crates full of records into the bed of his truck. Patty crams her trunk with odds and ends from the kitchen. When she sets the toaster oven on the passenger seat, it spills three years of crumbs.

  “I think we can get the rest in one load,” Cy says.

  “I think so,” Patty agrees. She thought it would take a lot longer, but all that’s left are some stray free weights and oil cans and Tommy’s softball gear; the old snowshoes and bamboo rods on the wall came with the place.

  They don’t even need Cy’s truck for the last load, and leave him to sweep out the garage.

  At the self-storage, she takes a last look before pulling the corrugated door shut. She’s twenty-seven, she thinks, and this is everything she owns.

  WISH LIST

  “SO, WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR CHRISTMAS?” TOMMY ASKS OVER THE phone.

  She laughs. “What, are you going to run out to the mall?”

  “Seriously. Pretend everything was normal. What would you be asking me for?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  Whatever it was, she can’t think of it.

  “Remember that little crib thing at Babyland?”

  “We don’t have the money for that.”

  “You still want it, right?”

  “I don’t want anything,” Patty says, and realizes how negative she sounds. “How would you get it anyway?”

  “Leave that to me,” he says.

  “Okay,” she plays along, “what do you want for Christmas?” and now it’s his turn to laugh at her.

  SHOPPING DAYS

  THEY HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE GRAND JURY—SIX WEEKS. THE LAWYER says it’s normal. Both sides need time to put their cases together, and they’re both waiting on the coroner’s report. If Mrs. Wagner had a heart attack, they’re looking at a whole different ballgame. He’s got someone checking her medical history. It helps that she lived in the county her entire life; all of her records are in one place.

  It seems cruel to Patty, wishing the woman a bad heart on top of everything else, but it opens up the possibility of manslaughter. The lawyer says they could plead and get away with six to ten, meaning—worst case—Tommy would serve three to four years. Patty can’t imagine three years without him, and wishes the lawyer would concentrate on proving that Tommy’s innocent.

  The next six weeks is the hardest part of the year, the start of deer season and then the hysterical countdown to Christmas as the days darken and give way to the long, tree-cracking nights. She sleeps in Eileen and Cy’s guest bedroom, no phone of her own, watched over by half-unpacked boxes. She’s so used to their waterbed that it’s like sleeping on a rock; in the morning she has to crack her spine and roll her shoulders. She’s not working, and some days she doesn’t get up until ten, wanders into the gray kitchen in Tommy’s sweats and hunting socks for cereal and Sanka and the handful of vitamins her doctor recommended. From the woods out back, she can hear the distant crackle of rifle fire.

  Every morning the sink is piled with dishes. She opens the dishwasher and puts th
e clean ones away. Eileen refuses to charge her rent, so this is a way of repaying her. Plus Patty can’t stand the mess. For years she’s listened to their mother complain about the way Eileen keeps house; now she’s experiencing it firsthand—scummy clots of hair dried to the side of the shower stall, the sink dotted with blue blobs of toothpaste.

  Her nemesis is the refrigerator, the sticky shelves stuffed to the edges with fuzzy jam jars and lumps of flesh wrapped in tinfoil. Since she’s been pregnant, Patty’s nose is extra sensitive, and she has to hold her breath when she opens the door. Though she knows better, she’ll go out and buy fresh burger rather than trust the stuff in the freezer.

  One thing she has now is time to cook. Some nights when she makes dinner for the three of them, the grease and heat turn her stomach and she ends up not eating. And still she’s growing. She’ll skip lunch and then drink glass after glass of milk with Ritz crackers and peanut butter, going through a whole sleeve before capping the jar and licking the knife clean. And then an hour later she finds herself digging through the cupboards, looking for something sweet.

  No wonder she feels fat—lolling on the couch like a walrus, reading Eileen’s TV Guide, trying to pick something mindless. Mornings it’s game shows, then soap operas after lunch. She stretches out, pulls the afghan up to her neck and nestles warm into the cushions. It’s like when she was a kid, missing school with the flu, time crawling in half-hour blocks, waiting for everyone else to come home.

  And then at night she’s tired, falling asleep beside Eileen and Cy during The Rockford Files or The Night Stalker, when they’re the ones who’ve been working all week—and snoring. Eileen elbows her, tells her to go to bed. Patty brushes her teeth and wipes the sink down with a wad of toilet paper, then quietly shuts the door to her room. She says good night to Tommy, kisses his pillowcase and closes her eyes.

  She visits Tommy every chance she gets and calls the lawyer so much she’s afraid she’s bothering him. They both tell her she just has to be patient. Meanwhile Casey turns inside her, urgent, a sudden kick leaving her breathless. They’re running out of money. She waits till the last possible day to send in the final bills from their old place, then replenishes their account with her paycheck, but she’s only postponing the inevitable. Mr. McChesney hasn’t coughed up their deposit, and the cops still have Tommy’s truck at the impound lot.

  She needs to buy Christmas presents for everybody. She’d bake them pies if she could get away with it. If she had another month she’d crochet them all scarves.

  “You don’t have to get me anything,” her mother insists, then asks if Patty wants to borrow some money.

  “Is two hundred enough?”

  Patty wants to laugh: how fast her mother wants to give her money when it’s Christmas that’s in trouble. She can hear, years from now, her mother hauling this act of charity out as evidence of her support, and though Patty’s almost broke, she needs to say no while she still has the ability.

  “Suit yourself,” her mother says. “The offer stands.”

  The house is a dirty cage she paces. She hasn’t been out all day, and she’s thinking she should just go to the mall and get it over with when she stops to look out at the birds weighting the mulberry tree in the side yard, her breath fogging the windowpane, and she realizes what she can make for them—ornaments.

  Not for Tommy or the kids, but everyone else. She remembers seeing some in Good Housekeeping, Styrofoam snowmen with changeable faces like Mr. Potato Head, a team of matchstick reindeer pulling a sleigh. There’s a craft store at the mall that would have magazines full of ideas.

  She gathers her ChapStick and her purse and takes off before the plan has time to cool. It’s only in the car, after miles of silence, that she doubts herself. She’d have to make them a dozen apiece, and who knows if they’d be any good, she’s never made them before. It’s too late to turn back, and soon she’s caught in mall traffic, a double line stretching up the exit ramp. At least there’s an Arby’s. When she and Tommy picked up their waterbed, they hit it for lunch on the way home, Patty steering for him while he unwrapped his second sandwich. That will be her reward—a Big Beef on an onion roll, sure to upset her stomach.

  The lot at the mall is ridiculous. No one would complain if she took a handicapped spot, but she cruises row to row like everyone else, following people with keys, signaling hopefully. She has to walk a long way (she hates the way she waddles), then rests inside, reading the directory.

  Upstairs, the lady in the Craft Barn who helps her find everything asks, “Boy or girl?” Patty chats with her, and coming down on the escalator she finds herself admiring the oversized tree and humming along with “Good King Wenceslas.” She drops some change in the Salvation Army pot outside—just enough to make her feel part of the pageantry around her. Walking to her car, she shakes her keys at an old guy searching for a spot, and he waves back.

  It’s the middle of the afternoon so there’s no line at the drive-thru.

  “You want Horsey sauce on that?” the woman on the speaker asks.

  “I better not,” Patty says, and when she pulls around, the woman sees her and understands.

  “Take care of yourself,” she says.

  The sandwich is salty and juicy, even better than usual. She hums as she chews, driving along with the sun flooding in the windows.

  The next morning she gets up as soon as she hears Eileen and Cy leave for work. While the water for her Sanka heats, she turns on all the lights in the kitchen, spreads the table with old PennySavers and lays out her materials. The house is quiet. She cuts green and red strips of felt and pins them to a Styrofoam ball with fancy upholstery tacks, then paints on lines of glue, sprinkles glitter over them until the design appears, and finally adds a green pipe cleaner to hang it with before setting it aside to dry. It’s not exactly how it looked in the magazine, but not bad for a first try.

  The next one turns out nicer. She puts on an Eagles album to keep her company and makes another three before switching to spangles. Her fingers are crusty; she has to palm the edge of the record to flip it. There’s a way to make an elephant with a pipe cleaner trunk, cutting the top and bottom of the ball off and using them for ears, but she doesn’t want to risk it yet. She does these easy patterns, getting faster with practice, recycling the spangles until she runs out in the middle of one.

  After the Eagles it’s Dylan, then Neil Young. The finished pile grows; by lunchtime she’s up to a dozen. Which one should she save for Tommy? It can’t have tacks in it—probably not a pipe cleaner either.

  She has to get him something, but they won’t tell her what’s allowed. She’s already tried to bring him a blanket.

  And she still has the kids to shop for.

  She’s hungry but knows there’s nothing in the fridge but baloney and leftovers. She’s out of spangles, and eventually she’s going to need more glue. It’s a flimsy excuse, but she’s been good this morning, getting up early, getting so much done. For once she’s not going to feel guilty for treating herself.

  Traffic is just as bad as yesterday, and parking. Linda—the woman at the Craft Barn—remembers her and asks how they turned out.

  “Good. 1 think I’m going to try the elephant.”

  “I’ll give you a tip,” Linda says. “Use toothpicks to keep the ears in place.”

  “Thanks,” Patty says, too grateful, as if she’s saved her.

  Downstairs she browses the windows, hoping to stumble across something for the kids. A telescope would be good, but it’s too much. Everything’s expensive. She ends up on a bench in a sunken jungle of plants and fountains, resting her feet, watching people to the music. She knows she should be at home, learning the elephant, but it’s nice just to sit and let the world turn around her. She can do the elephant anytime.

  Like yesterday, she sees couples shopping, guys tagging along from store to store, loaded down with bags. She recalls all the Saturdays she and Tommy came here, eating lunch at the Ground Round, the mugs
frosted so cold their beers turned into Slurpees and gave them brain freeze. And then the long Sundays fixing things and lounging around the house. It feels like she could go home right now and he’d be there.

  She said she wouldn’t feel guilty, but how can she escape it, walking around free while he’s locked up? By now it’s a familiar feeling, like being pregnant, a weight she’s used to carrying. Since it would be the same anywhere, it doesn’t ruin the mall, it just intrudes for a minute, bringing her back to reality. She sits a while longer as if to prove she can do it, listening to the voices milling, the water splashing, then rocks herself up off the bench.

  At Arby’s a kid in a Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt’s doing the drive-thru. Her Big Beef’s dry, in need of some Horsey sauce, but her curly fries are hot. She gobbles it down like a trucker and has to use her last napkin to wipe the grease off the steering wheel.

  It’s not even three when she gets home, the school bus stopped farther down the road, unloading. She parks alongside the house, by the garbage cans, where she always does. By the time Eileen and Cy pull in, it’ll be dark, her tiretracks dry, the only evidence against her. She buries the Arby’s bag deep in one can, goes inside and turns on the lights and sets to work again, as if she never left.

  Overnight it snows, at daybreak changes to rain, the trees candied. She spends the morning baking Christmas cookies, spooning on the bright icing. She takes a paper plate of them over to the jail, knowing they’ll never let her bring them in. They don’t, and even though it’s no surprise, she’s angry, and then, driving home, hurt.

  The next day she’s back at the mall, not at the Craft Barn but downstairs, window-shopping, wandering the halls. She sits by the North Pole and then in the food court, watching. It’s an addiction. The doors don’t open till ten, and by nine-thirty she’s antsy, dying to get out of the house. She’s got enough ornaments for everyone, and she can’t bring Tommy anything. The kids are her only excuse, and that won’t last. As soon as she finds something for them, she’ll have no reason to be here.