Thank you again.
Betsy
No, she couldn’t make up her mind about much these days. Should she eat two cookies or stop at one? Should she glance at tabloid covers in the supermarket or look away? Should she sneak into Nick’s room at night and sleep in his bed? Should she suggest that her parents sleep there? Should she ever turn on her TV again? Should she write a letter to that comedian? Should she write an editorial, or something? She could call it “Please Leave Us Alone” or “People Make Mistakes” or “This Is Not Funny” or “My Parents Love Each Other, Really They Do, I Swear.”
But the worst were those moments when she couldn’t make up her mind about the one thing she used to be certain about: Did her parents really love each other? They seemed to love each other; she wanted to believe that they did. But was love about feeling or action? If you felt love for someone but did not act so, could you really say that you loved that person? Or was true love when you acted loving toward someone even when you did not feel it—and who felt it all the time anyway? Or could you love someone—maybe this was what she believed—but act beneath that love? And if you acted beneath that love often enough, very far beneath it, could you kill it?
When she got home from school, her mother was sleeping and her father had closed himself up in his office down the hall. She went to her own room, and so they were all alone together.
MARCH 15, 1992
One Sunday morning, a month after the story broke, cold enough to remind Betsy that winter wasn’t over but sunny enough and with enough birdsong to remind her that spring was a week away, she believed that everything would be okay. Maybe her father did too. Her mother’s cancer was neither spreading nor remitting, the press wasn’t feeding on them with quite the same frenzy, the nomination process had carried on without her father, and Betsy hoped they’d be okay.
The night before, for the first time in a month, her parents had slept in the same bed. Her father got up early, like when she and Nick were kids, to make pancakes. Betsy smelled them in her sleep and woke convinced that she was a child again and Nick was in his room down the hall.
She found her father in plaid pajamas, pouring batter. With his back to her he could have been a younger man, but when he turned and smiled, she could see how much the campaign and the past month had aged him. There were more lines around his eyes, and his hair had more gray.
Her mother came down and made coffee. Betsy thought she was seeing things when her mother pressed her face into her father’s back and wrapped her arms around him. He closed his eyes. The batter in the pan started to bubble, but she didn’t want her parents to move. As quietly as possible she took the spatula from her father’s hand and flipped the pancake.
After breakfast she had the idea that they might drive to Valley Forge and walk the trails as they’d done almost every Sunday when she and Nick were kids. Even though her mother wasn’t strong enough to walk nearly as far as they used to, she loved the idea, and of course her father did. They didn’t bother to clean up their mess—the kitchen counter was splattered with batter and syrup—and within ten minutes they were dressed and in the car.
Her father opened the window and wind blew his hair wild, and this made her mother laugh. He hadn’t shaved in a week. He’d gotten dressed in such a rush, almost as if Betsy’s mother might change her mind, that he’d put on two different socks, one black and one gray. He was just some absentminded dad driving his family to the park, Betsy thought, and the rest of it—speeches and fundraisers and press conferences and debates—was over. None of it had ever happened. Except Nick, that is. Nothing could change that the other side of the back seat was empty.
The realization that Nick was still gone was the first blip in Betsy’s blissful morning. The second was the sudden change in her mother’s demeanor. At first she seemed to be wincing from cancer pain—that sometimes happened—but then Betsy saw that her mother was mumbling to herself—something angry. Her father looked at her mother, then turned back to face the road.
Her mother was getting louder. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No. No. No,” she said, as if trying to make some truth go away. Then, as they drove through the park, her mother opened the car door and tried to jump out.
Her father grabbed her mother’s shoulder. From behind, Betsy pulled her mother’s coat to hold her back. But she fought like a wounded, trapped animal and pushed herself out of the car just as it came to a stop.
Her mother fell but got up, then ran across the road and into a vast field. She paused only to take off her coat and sweater and let them fall to the grass. She kept running. Whitetail deer feeding on the tips of bush branches hopped away to the farthest borders of the field, where they stopped and turned to stare.
They ran after her, the car idling in the road. The farther her mother ran into the field, the taller the grass. Her legs must have been too tired to keep going. She fell.
They couldn’t see her, but found her by her sobs.
Her father sat on the ground beside her mother, then lay upon her. Betsy’s mother made herself small and pulled at the neckline of her blouse as if it were choking her, and her father held her mother and covered her until all Betsy could see was him. He seemed to be the one sobbing, but her mother was crying beneath him, and Betsy had never loved her parents more, had never been more frightened and hopeful, or felt as sorry for all of them as she did now.
They helped her mother back to the car. She sat in the back seat with Betsy, where Nick used to sit.
When they arrived home, her father got into bed with her mother. He didn’t bother to take off his boots. Betsy wanted to stay there and watch them. She wanted the story to end there. But there was still the mess to clean up. So she went to the kitchen and scrubbed the breakfast plates. She wiped batter from the stove. She soaked the pan, then washed and dried it.
Only later, toward dusk, did she notice the butter and milk, which she’d left out. It was too late. The butter had melted. The milk had gone bad. Her parents didn’t get up for dinner. At some point during the night, frightened, Betsy got into bed with them.
Early the next morning, the phone rang and rang, but they didn’t answer.
PART FOUR
Concede
2010
MARCH 15, 2010
“I think you have a crush on Ford,” Peter Swann says.
“Better than yours on Dukakis,” Avery says.
“I’ve always dreamed of riding in a tank.”
This was Peter’s idea: to pretend that their Presidential Politics paper is due tomorrow when really it’s due the day after tomorrow. He pulls all-nighters to write papers, but always a night early. He suggested to Avery that they might work better together, run ideas by each other, keep each other awake, whatever, and this sounded good to Avery, not the no-sleep part—she rarely stays up past midnight—but the part about hanging out with Peter, sharing ideas, and especially whatever. In the month since they practice-kissed on Valentine’s Day, they have for-real kissed, and engaged in some minor whatever, mostly standing up. When she’s barefoot, her lips line up with his chin; when she rises up on her toes, it’s just right. So far, tonight, they’ve worked, Avery at her desk, Peter at her roommate’s desk. Avery’s roommate, a first-year who doesn’t know that her relationship with her high school boyfriend, to whom she’s secretly engaged, is doomed—as are almost all relationships that predate college—is visiting him again at Bucknell. She’s gone so often that Avery practically has a single.
Peter abandons his desk and lies across Avery’s bed widthwise, his feet touching the floor.
“Ford’s real name, you know, was Leslie Lynch King Jr.”
“No wonder he changed it,” Peter says.
“Doesn’t roll off the tongue like Peter Swann.”
“Or Avery Modern.”
“We’d make a great ticket—at least in name. Swann Modern.”
“Modern Swann,” Peter says. “You can be on top.”
Avery close
s her laptop and lies next to Peter, her feet beside his on the floor. “So we’ve moved on to the flirtation stage of the all-nighter.”
“Politics and flirtation,” Peter says. “They go hand in hand.”
Avery rolls onto her side, puts one leg between Peter’s; he turns to face her.
“Read my lips,” Peter says, and then he kisses Avery. His glasses are in the way, so she takes them off and tosses them behind her on the bed. She likes the feel of his stubble, likes to put her hands in his hair, which is dark and loosely curled. He touches her lips with his thumb, and they pull back to look at each other. Without his glasses he could be a different person: his eyes seem bluer, his eyelashes longer.
“Who knew,” he says. “Gerald Ford as aphrodisiac.”
“Actually,” she says, “you need to see the photo of him all muscular and handsome in his Michigan football uniform.”
“You really do have a crush on President Bumbler.”
“You see, that’s just it,” she says. “You think of Ford, you see him stumbling down the steps coming off Air Force One or trying to eat a shuck-wrapped tamale.”
“That’s not what cost him the ’76 election.”
“In this country,” Avery says, “it might have.”
“Never should have pardoned Nixon.”
“So people should never be pardoned?”
“Are you a closeted Republican?”
“Seriously,” Avery says, “this guy’s father—his biological father—threatened to kill him and his mother with a butcher knife. His parents separated when he was only two weeks old. He didn’t even know about his father until he was seventeen. He won two national football championships at Michigan, passed up contract offers from the Lions and Packers to coach boxing—boxing—at Yale, where he eventually got his law degree. He enlisted in the navy after Pearl Harbor. And all anyone thinks of when they think of Gerald Ford is Chevy Chase blowing his nose into his tie, pouring a glass of water into his ear, and falling on his head.”
Peter says, “I think you just wrote your paper.”
“And listen—I bet you don’t know this, no one ever talks about this—two assassination attempts—two—seventeen days apart, both by women.”
“You’re blowing my mind,” Peter says. “And kind of turning me on.”
“He was a fucking Eagle Scout, man.”
Peter laughs. “Okay, now you’re making shit up.”
“Don’t get me started on Kennedy.”
“Was he an Eagle Scout too?”
“Shit no,” Avery says. “And that’s the point of my paper. The image of Kennedy was this GQ-Polo-Ivy-preppy-athletic guy on his sailboat, but really his spine was so messed up he could hardly walk. Meanwhile Ford was probably the most athletic president ever, and yet the image of him is Chevy fucking Chase.”
“So I take it you’re not a fan of Caddyshack.”
“Never seen it,” Avery says.
“I may need a new running mate,” Peter says. “Who vetted you?”
“At least I’m not defending a guy in a helmet who rode around in a tank with a stupid grin on his face.”
“I’m not defending him,” Peter says. “The assignment was to analyze—objectively analyze—an image from presidential politics.”
“Okay, but is there any heart in your paper?”
“I’m calling it ‘Tanked.’”
“No heart.”
“Should there be?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe you heart Ford more than I heart Dukakis.”
Peter rolls on top of Avery and kisses her. With one hand she touches his face and with the other she reaches around him and grabs the back of his belt, pulls his weight down onto her.
*
What it feels like, Betsy decides, is popcorn popping in her stomach. She hates popcorn, the smell when Cal pops it, the unpopped kernels at the bottom of the blue bowl he always uses. She’s warm in bed and doesn’t want to get up, but she’s going to be sick, just the thought of popcorn is enough, worse to imagine kernels popping in her belly. She tries to take deep breaths. Lately she’s found herself needing deep breaths. Sometimes this works, sometimes it makes her feel worse. Her breathing’s now quick and shallow, and she starts to hyperventilate, a wonky light-headed feeling that makes her lips tingle. The covers are too heavy; she throws them off. She closes her eyes in the dark and her hands and feet are tingling too and soon she will float away. That wouldn’t be so bad, she thinks.
Eight weeks and she isn’t showing. She knows soon that will change. On their wedding day in September she’ll be eight months pregnant.
Cal wakes. He used to be a deep sleeper, but now, even asleep, he can detect her slightest discomfort.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you think I’m lying?”
“I’m just asking.”
Betsy turns away from him and stares at the bedroom window. She tries to follow a drop of rain rolling down the glass. Then another.
Cal rubs her back. She’s mad at him for not being mad at her; he should be.
“Maybe we should move.”
“Bets, we just moved here four months ago.”
“Forget it.”
“You do that a lot, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Say something, then say forget it.”
“Okay, let’s try again,” she says. “Maybe we should move.”
“You wanted to move back home.”
“You agreed it was a good idea.”
“Because it was what you wanted,” he says. “I wouldn’t have chosen to leave my clients, move here, and find new ones.”
“Forget it.”
“You just did it again.”
“You’re always asking what’s wrong.”
“Would you like me to stop asking?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
“Forget it—you can keep asking.”
“You just—”
“I did it again, I know.”
“I’m not even awake,” Cal says.
“Sorry I woke you.”
“Stop saying you’re sorry.”
“Stop asking what’s wrong.”
“I already said I would.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Betsy says.
“Okay, nothing’s wrong.”
“I want you to believe me.”
“You want me to believe you.”
“Stop repeating what I say.”
“I’m just validating your feelings.”
“I’m not one of your patients.”
“Clients.”
“Let’s try one more time,” Betsy says. “Maybe we should move.”
“Where?”
“Back to New York.”
“You wanted to leave New York.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“You needed a break.”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re ready to go back.”
“Maybe we should move to the middle of nowhere.”
Cal sighs. “Is this about your father?”
“Yes, Dr. Westfall. How astute of you.”
“We’re engaged. I’m allowed to ask a fucking question.”
There—finally. Some anger.
“I’m sorry,” Betsy says.
“Me too.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Well, I’m sorry anyway.”
“Let me be sorry.”
“Apology accepted.”
Cal puts his arm around her, lays his hand on her belly. She moves his hand up, presses it against her chest.
Her breathing changes, her body relaxes.
She pulls the covers over them.
*
She leans over David, this woman he almost recognizes. Maybe she’s my wife, he thinks. Someone he’s in a relationship with. Sleeping with. Her name he remembers: Tiffany. A name that makes him thin
k of things airy, fragile. She smells like her name. She turns on the lamp beside his bed and he sees her body more clearly: pear-shaped, thick legs. The kind of curvy body he’s always secretly liked. Full lips, the delicate hands of a smaller woman. Short blonde hair.
But if she’s my wife, David thinks, why then did she just walk into my room from some other room? Why is she wearing light blue scrubs? Why the urge to ask her for help? Why the faint memory of having asked her for help many times? Help tying my shoelaces, pulling up my socks, buttoning my shirt, buckling my belt, getting in and out of bed. Why is a wheelchair at the foot of the bed?
She sets the chair’s brake, sits David up, pulls him to the edge of the bed. Hugging David, her face against his chest, she lifts him into the chair. She releases the brake and pushes the chair to the bathroom. She parks the chair beside the toilet, sets the brake, pulls down his pajama bottoms. Bending at the knees, her arms around him, in one fluid motion she jerks his body up out of the chair and onto the toilet.
His bladder empties in starts and stops, and then Tiffany does everything she just did, but in reverse—lifts him from the toilet onto the chair, wheels him back to bed, lifts him from the chair onto the mattress.
He stares up into her face. “I’m sorry for asking,” he whispers, “but are you my wife?”
“My name is Tiffany,” she says.
“I know,” he says, “but are you my wife?”
She points to a framed photograph on the dresser. “That was your wife.”
The young man in the photo must be me, he thinks. With him and his wife are a boy, maybe in high school, and a younger girl.
“Are those my children?”
“Yes,” she says.
“I’m happy to have children,” he says, “but don’t let them see me this way.”
“I’m sure they’d want to see you, Mr. Christie.”
“Don’t let them, please,” he says. “Not until I’m on my feet again.”
*
Avery wakes in predawn darkness, her body heavy against the mattress, wind blowing rain against her window. She extends her arms and legs as if making a snow angel, a heavenly stretch, and realizes, with disappointment, that she’s alone. She tries to slow down last night in her memory, but it returns to her in dreamlike flashes.
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