The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  That was when it hit me that I wasn’t the man of the house any more but a pathetic drunk driver who was here at your sufferance.

  Where did that leave thé children? Who was going to protect them from this new evangelist nightmare?

  You may remember I voiced some weak objections. Why had you hired someone without consulting me? What if I wanted to look after them myself?

  It was now that you made first use of your new assertive voice. You said, ‘You’re trying to tell me I was supposed to consult you when you were in a coma? Or on a beach in Greece?’ You also said, ‘I mean, what was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to know what you wanted to do this week, or, for that matter, any week? Or that I would even necessarily trust you to look after them? Last time I talked to you, you …

  ‘I mean,’ you said, ‘when was the last time we talked?’ I suggested that we sit down right then and there and make up for lost time, but you said you had to go. ‘Just relax,’ I remember you saying. (Hah!) ‘We have plenty of time to discuss all this. First you have to get better.’

  But already, as I paced, or rather, limped, in front of the baseball game, my mind was racing. It was the third inning: I had until the ninth to come up with a plan of action.

  I looked at my watch.

  21

  What time is it?

  I imagine that it is … going on four in the afternoon. All over the city, hundreds of thousands of sets are tuned in to this same game. Hundreds of thousands of neon green baseball diamonds, hundreds of thousands of tiny video pitchers and batters and outfielders all doing the same thing.

  Trey (who has had a slow start today – he hasn’t even made his first coffee) is watching the game on two sets simultaneously. The one in the den has the better picture, but he can’t afford to sit down in there until he has the coffee machine under control. So he has his new (and disappointingly indistinct) mini transistor TV set up over the message machine. This means he can watch the game and descale the coffee machine at the same time (and just run into the den for replays).

  He puts his glasses on. They’re still fogged up. He takes them off, wipes them, and at the exact same millisecond both TV sets start howling. He looks up at the transistor TV, and wow, amazing, even though he’s standing at the other end of the kitchen, he can see everything! Which means that it is his eyes that are defective, and not his new purchase.

  As for the house, it is better blurry. There are more crayon marks on the walls this afternoon than he remembers being there yesterday. The den looks like someone had taken all the toy trays and upended them. There is a trail of Lego on the stairs – he nearly crippled himself on his way down from his study by stepping on what turned out to be the support stem for a Lego satellite dish. He had almost not been able to open the door into the kitchen for all the piles of laundry on the floor – when his glasses are off they resemble the Sierra Madre Mountain Range.

  As he picks his way across the Sierra Madres to pour the rinse water into the coffee machine, he remembers – that’s strange – wasn’t he supposed to have been looking after the children this afternoon? Well, he thinks, Charlotte must have changed her plans. Funny she didn’t leave him a note. He picks up a part of the paper – it, too, is strewn all over the floor – reaches into his shirt pocket, puts on his glasses, and that is when he sees them.

  First he sees the Post-it on the pressure cooker: ‘Wash AND put away.’ Then he sees the one on the message machine: ‘Before erasing other people’s messages, see to it that ALL relevant details, INCLUDING TIME OF DAY, have been notated on the pad on the lower right-hand corner of the bulletin board.’ Looking at the pad on the bulletin board, he sees a Post-it that says: ‘Where is the pen that used to be in this holder?’ and an arrow pointing to the empty holder. He can tell from the handwriting that she has written this note in a fury.

  About what? He reviews the events of the previous day but can find no clues. Things had been tense, yes, but then when weren’t they? They had spent most of the day avoiding one another, but again, what was new in that? They had gone through the motions of a family Saturday: in the evening, they had even watched Being There together. So what is she upset about? The laundry?

  Because the pile of clothes on the kitchen floor seems to be trying to tell him something. It doesn’t have a Post-it on it, but everything about it says ‘Do me.’ So well, fine, he thinks. He is happy to help her. What he minds is the way she has decided to ask. There was no need to throw the clothes all over the floor so that he couldn’t even get to the coffee maker without tripping over them. He doesn’t mind doing laundry. He is a reasonable guy. All she had to do was leave him a note.

  Then he sees that she has. It is on the lid of the washing machine. It says: ‘This time, when you add the bleach, why don’t you make sure you’re not pouring it directly on to a valuable garment, for example, the thing you ruined last week, id est the dress that cost me eighty dollars at a SALE at Betsy Johnson’s.’

  Oh for crying out loud, he thinks. There was no need to take that tone. All week long she has been taking that tone with him, and what irks him most was that it wasn’t his fault.

  I, Mike, was the culprit. It was the fact that I, Mike, was once again getting away with murder that he, Trey, was in the dog house.

  So you, Laura, had not heeded Charlotte’s warnings. You had taken your unilateral-plan-making, drunk-driving husband back into your home when you would have been fully justified in never letting him back through the door again. So what does it have to do with him?

  God, Trey hates the way his wife extrapolates generalities from other people’s weaknesses. The fact that you are a pushover does not mean that all men are sneaks and ruthless manipulators does not mean that Trey ruthlessly manipulates Charlotte’s weaknesses and then serves his own selfish interests behind closed doors.

  God, how he wishes sometimes that someone had run over Simone de Beauvoir in a truck in 1953. It is all her fault. Or so he thinks until he takes his (very scaly-tasting) coffee up to his office.

  Oh no! He left the computer on from last night! There is Donkey Kong, still on the screen. Also on the screen is another yellow Post-it: ‘Is this what you fucking call building a fucking accounting business from the home????’

  Strewn all over the desk are the other discs, for Autochess, Scrabble, Dungeons and Dragons, you name it. She even found Pacman, which means that she has been through the filing cabinet, which means there is a fair chance she has been through his correspondence. He feels a hot flush rising as he walks back down the stairs. Well, he says to himself upon returning to the kitchen, that explains the laundry! Not to mention the tone of the note! What does she have planned for him next?

  He can see her standing over him, cataloguing not only her towering accomplishments but also the sacrifices she has had to make in order to find the time to do them, ‘while YOU sat in that room up there and played Donkey Kong’. And then the inevitable gender aspersions, ‘God, I don’t know what it is with you men, I really don’t.’

  The thing is, he doesn’t either.

  He takes the note off the washing machine, picks up the Betsy Johnson dress lying next to it, looks at the bleach marks, and again, yes, she is right.

  He sees himself standing outside his house, watching suitcases come flying through the windows, wondering if he dares take the car, wondering if transient hotels take credit cards.

  It is useful, when you are standing in the middle of your kitchen saying: What am I going to do? What am I going to do? over and over in your head, to have a lot of Post-its all around you answering that very question. He feels just that bit better after he has washed the pressure cooker and found the pen for the bulletin board and put all the spice jars back on to the designated lazy susan and unloaded the dishwasher before adding his coffee mug. But some instructions are easier to follow than others.

  For example, the Post-it on the window: ‘Does this look clean to you?’ (Did she mean the window? The ledge? The yard?)
And the one in the middle of the table: ‘All markers without tops must go.’ (Which ones? Where?) And the two on the refrigerator, one of which says: ‘Do NOT touch the marinade.’ (Which marinade?) And the other of which says: ‘I am not going to call you up for once and remind you. I’m expecting you to remember to feed them lunch.’ (Feed whom lunch? The birds?) It is this note more than any other that makes him aware of the fact that he was not dealing with a rational woman.

  It is while he is putting the first load of laundry (the whites) into the dryer that he notices that somehow he has gotten toothpaste on his feet, that in fact he has left little white marks all over the tile floor. Then he notices that there is a trail of toothpaste going all along the bottom edge of the washing machine, in fact all along the counter standing next to it, not to mention the skirting boards. Now he notices that the trail leads to the door to the garage, and that that door is in fact open, and that when he stands in the doorway he can hear a car running in the garage.

  His car running? Hurling himself down the back stars, kicking open the garage door, he finds it is. There is his son in the driver’s seat. There is his daughter sitting next to him wearing her mother’s hat.

  His first thought is: Why didn’t she leave him a note?

  For a moment he just stands there, staring at the car, while over the hill, in the Richmond, Mitchell does the same thing.

  22

  Mitchell is watching his wife pack Lara and Paloma into the back seat of the station wagon. How sweet they look in their Sunday best. So what if they turned out to be Catholics, did he really think he had something better to give them? He feels strangely proud of their yellow ribbons, their shiny, neatly cut chestnut hair, their black patent-leather shoes and their matching white dresses with the daisy belts he doesn’t know how their mother managed to make for them. In her own way, she’s a genius.

  She closes the stationwagon door with her foot. Then she looks up at Mitchell, quizzically, as if she’s still in shock from his offer to stay at home with Baby Roo. He likes the shape of her face when it’s upturned like that – the sharpness of the chin, the fullness of the pouting lips. And her eyes, how large they look. You’d never know she had a six-month-old baby to look at those legs.

  He tells himself, as her eyes slip upwards, that he really doesn’t deserve this look of adoration that has come over her face, until he realizes she’s not looking at him but at Baby Roo, who is on his back in the African shawl. She calls up something. He can’t hear so he opens the window – not an easy feat when you have a six month old in what seems to him to be an awfully loose-fitting carrier. (How does she do it?) He feels Baby Roo shifting dangerously, has to compensate abruptly so that she doesn’t go flying out the window.

  ‘Do you remember how to take it off?’ she asks.

  ‘EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OK!’

  She gives him the thumbs up, then jumps into the car. She does her usual kamikaze backing-up job, misses a motorcycle by that much – although her vision may have been blocked. There were a lot of things he can see that she can’t see at street level.

  When she’s gone, he turns around (slowly, to avoid swinging Baby Roo), and surveys his office, which (as usual) doesn’t look like one: there is material draped on every single table, stack of papers and machine. Becky has been on a sewing binge this summer, and not just for herself and the girls. The material that’s actually under the sewing machine needle – that blue plaid flannel – that’s for a shirt for him.

  It’s not the pattern he would have chosen. As he looks at it hanging so trustingly from the edge of his desk, he imagines Becky agonizing over fabrics, trying to choose the one that will make him happiest, tragically selecting the wrong one, bringing it home and hiding it, staying up late to get it done, straining her eyes over buttonholes, while he …

  His mind goes into panic mode as he reviews the new commitments he has crashlanded into – that new building, those new partners, the shaky loan, that shady banker (like hell he was Kiki’s cousin’s ex-brother-in-law). There is only one word that describes his behaviour since I left the business, and that word is spree. He has committed himself up to his eyeballs, and now, unless he did some very fancy footwork …

  What the hell is he going to do with you, Laura, when you turn up in the office tomorrow? What misguided Samaritan impulse prompted him to hire you? How is he going to be able to use you productively if he has to hide the truth from you? What if you find out anyway? What if you feel obligated to tell not just your husband but your good friend Becky?

  What will Becky do if she discovers that the paper he had her sign last week makes her the guarantor of every last shaky loan he’s put his name to?

  The thing that kills him is, she’s been so nice to him lately. Take last night. He woke up at 3 a.m. to a strange chirping noise. His first thought was that it was a burglar, his second that it was a bird, his third that it was a bird underneath their bed. And so he had looked, but the only thing he could see down there was a blue, low-heeled sandal. He had waited to hear for the chirp to repeat itself. Typically, it didn’t until he was back in bed and drifting off.

  It was at this point that he began to wonder if the chirping noise was coming from inside his head. He had spent the next hour or so trying but not quite succeeding to face this possibility. Every time he heard it, he marvelled despairingly at its authenticity. He found himself thinking of his freshman room-mate, who had also heard voices during those months before they had to commit him. Was this how real they had sounded to the poor guy?

  It was past four when Mitchell went downstairs to roll a joint and just happened to pass underneath the smoke detector at the same time it chirped. Oh, his relief when he realized its batteries were running low!

  But the anxiety had taken its toll. He had almost broken his neck while putting the new ones in. The hastily set up stepladder wobbled dangerously when he was standing on the top step – if he had not compensated for it abruptly, it would have sent him flying over the banister. Sleep was out of the question after this. So he had gone downstairs and rolled that joint and turned on the TV and tried to mellow out but as luck would have it the only thing he could find in English was a talk show about credit card abusers. Their grim faces would have depressed him at the best of times: combined with his already stressed state of mind and sensemilla it sent him tumbling into an extreme attack of earthquake phobia.

  It went along classic lines. First he thought the house was shaking. Then he went down to the cellar to check to see if the foundations were still anchored. They were. Then he went back into the kitchen and sat down and looked at the pots and pans hanging on the rack over the sink and wondered what would become of them in a 4.9, a 6.7, a 30 second 8.2. If it happened now, where would he go? Under the table, upstairs to the girls’ room? Would there be a fire, did they have emergency supplies on hand as detailed in the front of the phone book? If it happened when he was at work, how would he make contact with his family? What if his kids were in their nursery school in the Marina and the landfill liquified? What if he was under a high-rise when the plate glass started popping out? What if Becky was driving across a bridge?

  More to the point, what would have become of him if Becky hadn’t come downstairs when she did? His hands were so shaky by then that he couldn’t even turn the TV off – which was lucky, because it was the TV that had woken her up. Not that she was at all annoyed – and that was what killed him, the fact that she didn’t have a single thought for herself as she sat there next to him holding his hand. Why was she so easy to fool? He had almost broken down and confessed, but praise the gods! he had held himself back.

  Now, as he abandons the office cum sewing room for the kitchen with Baby Roo on his back, he tells himself he still has a chance.

  Successful people are people who take setbacks and complications and turn them into advantages. Maybe he’ll be able to find some way to turn this new building around fast enough to pay back that loan fast enough to make t
he balloon payment on the house fast enough to make sure Becky never finds out he conned her into signing a very serious and binding document without explaining to her what it meant.

  He conjures up her trusting, concerned face. As he aims the remote control at the TV, he vows to become worthy of it.

  He finds the baseball game. He sits down on the couch and remembers at the last moment that he can’t sit back because if he did it would mean squashing Baby Roo, who is – how could he have forgotten? – hanging off his back in that flimsy African shawl. And so he sits forward to give her room to breathe, but she doesn’t really like it even if he sits forward, in fact, she whimpers and squirms and digs her little feet into his kidneys. So he gets up, and tries to watch the game while pacing the floor, but then she starts crying so loud he can’t even hear the commentary. He decides she must be thirsty. He goes over to the counter where Becky has left a bottle of breast milk. It is only half defrosted. Ugh.

  He is ashamed of his disgust for its appearance. Especially when Baby Roo begins to wail again. That is why his thoughts become muddled, that is why he puts the bottle into the microwave without checking first to see if the bottle is microwave-safe.

  Oh no! He braces himself for an explosion that doesn’t happen. He takes the bottle out with shaking hands and tries to pass it to Baby Roo first over his shoulder, then under his arm. He drops it, then picks it up with great difficulty, and then tries passing it over his shoulder right into Baby’s hand, except that this time it falls into the shawl.

  A wetness starts spreading. By now Baby Roo is hysterical, her little fists pummelling at his back. He has to get her out of there, but how? If he unties her here in the kitchen, she’ll just fall to the floor. He can’t risk that, so he runs – too fast, sending her into even more frantic wailing – up to the bedroom, where he tries to untie the shawl while lying sideways, except that he can’t undo the knot with one hand. The next thing he tries is to encourage Baby Roo to climb out of the shawl of her own accord while he is lying on the bed on his stomach.