The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  Jesse was easier. I knew what was troubling him it was Eluisa’s taste in movies, it was the alien bursting out of the spaceman’s chest. That didn’t mean I could stop him sleepwalking, or worrying about the contents of the radiator. No matter how many times I told him the alien wasn’t real, I couldn’t get through to the boy. Of course the alien wasn’t real, he would tell me. It was UNreal.

  And because it was UNreal, he couldn’t afford to let me out of his sight for a second. This put a strain on my patience. There was a moment half-way through the first week, when I went into the bathroom to take a piss, and both children came in with me – Jesse to make sure I didn’t get attacked by the alien and Maria to watch me drop my pants – when I despaired of ever erasing Eluisa’s influence.

  Then, in six short weeks, I turned them around. Didn’t I?

  I remember looking at them at breakfast on that Sunday before school began and saying to myself, who would have known even a month ago that I would have them sitting here with their hair so neat, their faces so clean, their eyes so bright? Saying please when they asked for more cereal, thank you when I gave it to them. Asking intelligent questions. Laughing at each other’s knock-knock jokes. Trusting me to return if I darted into the kitchen for milk or another cup of coffee. No longer asking me to check behind the door/under the table/behind the couch for aliens, no longer attributing supernatural powers to the pictures on the walls, no more mumbled prayers in Spanish … I looked at them and said, I did this. What does it matter if I am the only one to give myself credit?

  Because the truth is, a little praise from you would have gone a long way. The better the children did, the more I yearned for it. And yet… there was something to be said for virtue going unremarked and unrewarded, for you being the thoughtless, selfish one, and me the martyr.

  No matter how callously you behaved, I was determined not to sink to your level. Had you neglected to thank us for the birthday cards we had made for you? Had you gone off to work without them? Were the children devastated? Did I tell you? No, I bit my tongue, reminded myself you had a job to do. A lousy job, granted. A job for which you were grossly overqualified. But before you could realize this, you had to regain your confidence. I was determined to do everything in my power to help that process along.

  And so I did. Didn’t I? I remember taking you in your breakfast on that ill-fated Sunday before school began, and watching you emerge from the shower and saying to myself, could this flushed and vibrant woman be timid, frail, insecure Laura? Could this be the woman who couldn’t walk up two flights of stairs without gasping, or take three words of criticism without bursting into tears, who would drive fifty miles out of her way to avoid an expressway, go without water, electricity, heat or even food if getting any of these things involved talking on the phone to a stranger?

  I took full credit. If you were thinner and healthier, it was because of the food I cooked for you. If you were fit, it was thanks to the health club I had found for you. If you were rested, it was because I let you sleep in on weekends. It was because I brought you breakfast in bed.

  Of course I couldn’t tell you how much I was doing for you. It would have undermined your confidence. But it is hard to go on making sacrifices, day in day out, if no one even realizes you are making them. If the person you are devoting your life to becomes cold and distant, and never asks you how your day has been, and never even touches you, not even in bed, having lost all apparent interest in sex, you begin to wonder. You begin to nurture resentments, especially in the middle of the night, when you have just been rejected sexually. Certainly this was the case for me.

  It was when I was suffering from blueballs that the doubts raised by your housekeeping would surface most dramatically.

  I don’t know if you remember now, but at the beginning of that August I reorganized the apartment. In the process, I made some very disturbing discoveries.

  Here, for example, is what I found in the kitchen cabinets, behind a deceptive façade of china canisters:

  a. A mason jar full of kidney beans that had little green shoots growing out of them.

  b. Four half-spilled packages of spaghetti, one of which had spilled all over, and another of which was infested with weird-looking bugs I thought were termites.

  c. A half-used jar of mayonnaise.

  d. A box of cereal – open – that we bought before Jesse was born.

  e. A piece of petrified chocolate cake from Maria’s first birthday, with a fork from our good set sticking out of it.

  f. A swollen can of Texas-style chilli. It obviously contained botulism. My first thought when I saw it was: What if Eluisa had served it to the children? What if she had eaten it herself? What would we have done if an illegal alien had expired on our kitchen floor? As the owner of a law degree, do you have any idea of the ramifications?

  As for the bookshelves – I mean, do you remember what condition they were in? How could you claim to have an organized mind, how could you expect me not to entertain severe doubts about you, if you were in the habit of cramming Asterix upside down next to Tacitus? Leaving half-eaten cookies on top of Proust? Putting all of John Coltrane’s albums into one sleeve? I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many irreplaceable LPs I had to throw away. I could fill a book with a list of broken, incomplete, and dangerous toys I found behind their chest of drawers, and ten volumes with what I found under their beds. How were you ever going to organize your day at work if this was your attitude to detail?

  I was also disturbed by the photo albums. They stopped at Jesse’s second birthday. They contained no pictures of Maria. Going through the mountain of unsorted photographs, I found twenty-nine pictures of ceiling corners and brake pedals. They were held together by a rubber band and shoved to the back of the cabinet. This indicated to me that you had forgotten, at least twenty-nine times, that the zero setting on our camera was actually the first frame on the roll, and also that you did not want me to know you had forgotten. In other words, you were not just sloppy, but devious.

  Our August VISA bill confirmed my suspicions.

  I’ll tell you the truth. I didn’t think much of these clothes you’d been buying. They were too young, and too suggestive, and bound to give people the wrong impression. But since you assured me they were as cheap as they looked, I said to myself, what the hell. Let her find herself.

  Naturally, my attitude changed when I found out what those clingy little dresses and pointy little witch shoes really cost.

  I felt I had to impress upon you the fact that your salary did not come close to supporting us.

  Although you took my lecture quietly, you must have been raging underneath. You must have gone out that same day and bought that number that made you look like an off-duty jello wrestler. Did you think I was going to be fooled just because you hid it in the linen closet for a week before daring to wear it? As I remember saying to you, if you expect to sneak something past me, it has got to be something subtler than neon pink.

  Your response alarmed me. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. I’m a working woman now. Don’t I have the right to a little privacy?’

  Privacy for what? I asked myself.

  It was at this point that I began to take an interest in your diaphragm. To see it sitting in our bathroom drawer on nights when you were held up at work was, I must admit, a comfort to me. That is why I was so unnerved by what happened after the Lifestyle Christening.

  27

  Before I go any further, I feel I must point out that I do not approve of double baptisms. Nobody can be Catholic and Protestant at the same time.

  And nobody should make their friends and relatives go to two churches in one morning, as they made us do on that Sunday before school began.

  With specific regard to the Protestant christening – what hole did they dig that minister out of? Or rather, what closet? The guy had not been near a church in years. I know that the rest of you thought his irreverent little jokes were hilarious. But if he didn’t know the service, and
if he was of two minds about the Episcopalian church, why then was he doing it at all? Why were we watching him?

  Don’t tell me it was for the sake of the grandparents. Remember: I am one of the few people who actually talked to Mitchell’s parents. And his father isn’t even Protestant. He’s Jewish. While his mother, who is a Protestant, is not an Episcopalian. She’s a Methodist.

  What about Becky’s mother? She really is religious. What did the poor woman make of the show you and your friends put on for us at the Catholic church? The idea of having two sets of godparents – who thought that one up? I liked it even less for the fact that you were one of the godmothers. As for the misunderstanding over the communion! The sight of all six of you saying no thanks to the bowl of communion wafers and passing it down the row like a dip at a cocktail party – that was bad. And I mean real bad.

  You should have seen yourselves: six grown people collapsing into giggles in the front aisle, while that poor mother of Becky’s stood behind you trying to keep what was left of her dignity. How could you collude in such a thing? I remember looking at you at the reception afterwards, or rather I remember looking at your new loud make-up and geometric haircut and your scoopnecked clinging neon pink excuse for a dress and your pointy black witch shoes and suddenly being overcome by a wave of fear. Who was the woman? Perhaps I was too much under the children’s influence – this was my first time in adult company since getting out of the hospital – but you looked UNreal to me.

  The feeling was mutual. You made no secret of wanting to have zero to do with me. This made things worse, as it allowed my paranoia to expand to the other guests at the reception and eventually, as I will explain, the house.

  I am sure, looking back, that you had no designs on that braying restaurant radical you talked to for more than an hour. It must have been embarrassing, therefore, to have me hovering on the edge of the conversation, too far away to join in, but close enough to impose the full weight of my disapproval. Likewise, I can see now that you were just being polite when you laughed at the Santa Rosa plumber’s jokes. There was no need for me to insult him.

  I also had no right to ask you why you were taking down that balding lawyer’s number. But please try and understand. This was the first time I had been out with you in public since my return from Greece. It was one thing to congratulate myself at home on the strides you were making. It was quite another to see where these strides had taken you.

  As I think back on that disastrous afternoon, I have a picture in my mind of you and your friends standing together in front of the plate glass window that looked out from the kitchen into the back yard. You and Becky were leaning against the glass: she had a green neon number that matched your pink neon number. Ophelia was looking unusually Cuban, with a loud flowery shirt and white tight pants and gold chains everywhere, while Charlotte was wearing a tired posthippy floral print. Behind you in the garden, Lara and Paloma were going wild in the sprinkler and trying to coax our two to join, while Seb looked on dubiously and Dottie wailed. You didn’t pay them any attention. You were all laughing about some book idea Becky had about treating husbands like babies. You were thinking up chapter headings: Breast is Best, From Walking to Crawling, His First Day at Work. I did not think it was very funny.

  Who’s been looking after YOUR kids all afternoon? I wanted to ask them. Who was it kept the girls from shovelling sand on to the newly christened baby’s face? Who kept the boys from trying to fly like Superman out of the kitchen window? It was me, both times. Hadn’t they noticed? If they had, then why did Becky keep coming up to me and asking if I was completely a hundred per cent sure I had everything I needed for school the next day? Why did Ophelia interrogate me about how I planned to get the children to and fro without a car? Why did Charlotte keep blabbing about the dangers of isolation and the importance of support systems? Why did she keep dragging me over to the barbecue to talk to her gruesome husband?

  ‘Remember,’ she told me, ‘he was once a stay-at-home himself. Try and get him to open up.’

  Thanks but no thanks, I felt like telling her. I would rather die. He didn’t want to have anything to do with me either. Whenever I happened to bump into him by accident (next to the beer cooler, usually) he acted like I was some kind of insect he had spent his entire summer trying to eliminate from his garden.

  Kiki was not much better. If I happened to stray near whatever group of people he happened to be boring, he would stop talking, break out in a slow, not particularly friendly grin, point his finger at me like a gun and say, ‘OK now. You’ve got five seconds. George Brett’s batting average in the ’81 World Series.’ Or, ‘Who’s the Tex-Mex guy who plays for the Dodgers?’ When I wouldn’t answer he would go, ‘Pow. You’re dead. Better luck next life.’ And then turn his back.

  This is how Mitchell introduced me to his brother: ‘This is Mike – my frontwoman’s househusband. We used to be partners. Now Mike spends all day fooling around with au pairs on the playground while his wife and I do the work.’

  ‘Jesus, Mitchell! When are you going to learn some goddamn tact?’

  At which point he threw up his arms and said, ‘OK, Mom, no offence, Mom! I didn’t mean it, honest.’ For the rest of the afternoon, whenever he came near me, he addressed me as Mom. I can’t tell you how close I came to popping him.

  It is humiliating when people you have always looked down on begin to make fun of you. It is even more humiliating, though, when you get stuck in the corner talking to stultifyingly dull strangers and see that they are the ones who are desperately searching for an excuse to break away. I thought I knew why, too: it was because I had had the courage to change my life and put my beliefs to the test. Was this what I had to pay, though, for my integrity? Was social leprosy my reward?

  I tried these ideas out on a dental hygienist who claimed to be a distant relation of Becky’s. I found a sympathetic listener in her, but this only sent me further in the wrong direction. Just as the restaurateur and the plumber had borne the brunt of my fears about losing you to the outside world, now all the guests who wouldn’t talk to me came to stand for California. Look at these people, I said to this poor, well-meaning dental hygienist. Just about every faction of the middle-class was represented. We disagreed vehemently about almost everything – except for the importance of false cheer at social gatherings. How did we create this false cheer? By deliberately making ourselves shallow. I told her we needed to come out of hiding, and fight our differences out, and that was when I lost her.

  Then some poor unsuspecting corporate lawyer struck up a conversation with me. He began by asking me point blank who I was. I told him I was an alien from outer space and then asked him a number of questions about his planet. Were all humans hypocrites? Did they all use religious rituals like interchangeable floorshows? Did they all like to fill the cracks and contradictions of their lives with conspicuous consumption? How long had he known Mitchell and Becky? One couch long? Two couches long? Three? Four?

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, shrinking away.

  ‘I have never seen the same couch in this living-room twice.’

  ‘Maybe the other ones are upstairs somewhere,’ he suggested.

  ‘I’ll bet you a hundred bucks they are not.’

  ‘I don’t like bets,’ the lawyer said.

  ‘I’ll go up and prove it to you anyway.’ I then proceeded to do so. I couldn’t find a single thing that could be older than six months – or anything that didn’t have a duplicate. In the new baby’s room were two Aprica strollers, two bassinets, two changing tables, two two two. I went down to find the corporate lawyer so that I could show him this disgusting waste. He was talking to the dental hygienist. They both looked through me.

  I went into the kitchen. There you were on the window ledge with Becky, two Dayglo spectaculars. Both of you were looking right through me with squints in your eyes, as if I were a pane of glass and there was a shape right behind me that you couldn’t quite make out. I didn’t intend
to eavesdrop, but then I heard Becky say to you, ‘Well, thank goodness it was a false alarm.’

  Then Becky asked you, ‘Does he suspect anything?’

  I watched in disbelief as you shook your head and said, ‘On some level he must. Even though I’ve always been extremely careful. We only ever meet at lunch.’

  ‘They always sense it, though,’ Becky said.

  ‘I know,’ you said. ‘Because every time, every time I’m about to leave, he calls up.’

  ‘The famous male intuition,’ Becky said.

  You laughed and mumbled something about the missing chromosome. This made both of you laugh. Still stunned, but made ambulatory by the force of your contempt, I headed back for the stairs, coming to a stop on the first landing. Gazing into what I took to be a mirror, because what I saw was a room identical to the one behind me, I tried to stop your words from reverberating in my head.

  Who was ‘he’? What did I sense but not know? Who had you been meeting secretly for lunch?

  Had you been lying to me about Gabe? Was he back from Mexico? Had he never gone? Had you been screwing him at lunchtime, when I thought you were safe at work?

  No, you could not have been screwing him, I said to myself as I gazed at the glass table, the oriental carpet, the parquet floor and blue walls in what I took to be a mirror. You could not have been screwing him if your diaphragm was safe at home with me. Thank God I had been checking up on it. Or had there been days when I hadn’t?

  Hoping to rid myself of the spectre of the diaphragm, I stared into the room in the mirror.

  It was at this point that I noticed there was something wrong with the image.

  I wasn’t in it.

  At any other time, it would have taken me two seconds to figure out that I was looking into the next house. I might even have remembered you telling me about the computer people who lived there, who were so unsure of their own taste that they actually did copy what they saw in Becky and Mitchell’s house. Normally I would have seen the funny side about mistaking a window for a mirror. But today it was the confirmation of my worst fears. The forces of California had turned against me. I had been erased.