by Marian Thurm
It was so retro, Stacy knew, but she had willingly allowed her beloved children to transform her into someone whose universe did not extend much beyond the borders of motherhood. If her friends had told her, when she was an undergraduate studying literature and feminist theory, that she would, a decade and a half later, be a stay-at-home mother, she would have said, “Yeah, hysterical. You guys really crack me up!”
But it wasn’t funny. Being a mother, she’d discovered, was serious business. You were on call twenty-four/seven and had to protect those kids of yours from myriad dangers—the full bathtub they might tumble into, the open bottle of wild cherry-flavored milk of magnesia they might find all too alluring, the playmate at the park who might just feel a sudden urge to rip out a small fistful of your daughter’s hair.
You would do anything to protect those kids of yours; you couldn’t, and wouldn’t, take your eyes off them even for a moment.
S
Olivia approaches Roger poolside now, wanting to play Scrabble Junior while Stacy and Will are fooling around in the shallow end, splashing each other and shrieking happily.
Roger doesn’t want to play Scrabble Junior, Scrabble Senior, Scrabble Deluxe Edition, doesn’t want to do anything at all, but he agrees to play nevertheless, keeping his sunglasses on as Olivia, in her tie-dyed bikini, arranges the Scrabble board on the chaise longue. She already knows how to spell “candy” and “sun,” “tiger” and “water,” but just wait, she says, until she’s in first grade next year and will be able to spell hard words like “arithmetic” and “science” and “apartment.”
Just wait until next year! his beautiful daughter says excitedly.
S
It occurs to Stacy that maybe a few sessions of couple’s counseling might be helpful. She knows that Jefrie and Honey began seeing a therapist when Tyler was three or four months old and Jefrie was suffering from some sort of low-level postpartum depression that made her nearly impossible to live with, according to Honey. Not that Roger is impossible to live with; it’s just, Stacy’s thinking now as she washes her already perfectly clean hair in the shower, that here in Fort Lauderdale being around him pretty much all day, every day, has sharpened her awareness of what feels like his perpetually bleak moods, his face creased with desolation and worry and something else—maybe it’s an uneasiness about the future, a fear that nothing will ever get better, only worse. What’s wrong, sweetie? she’s heard herself ask him again and again. But he’s not much of a talker when he’s like this, not when his mood darkens and he can’t stop thinking about his sister and his mother and the downward spiral of his business, the tailspin that’s so rudely cast their family two blocks east onto what Roger considers the déclassé shores of Third Avenue. Where, honestly, Stacy sees no reason why they can’t be happy. But she senses that Roger just can’t envision that happiness, that he can only see that their finances have taken a nosedive, can only believe that the shame he feels won’t ever go away, but will, in fact, only deepen . . . Maybe Dr. Avalon can recommend someone when they return to New York, a marriage counselor who will get Roger to look Stacy straight in the eye as he unburdens himself of all the crap that, she finally acknowledges, is threatening their happiness, their marriage, their life together.
In the shower, she turns off the faucet, uses the rubber blade of the squeegee to clear the water from the glass door. But she hasn’t done a very good job of it; there are streaks left behind on the translucent glass and she can’t figure out how to make it right. Maybe it’s the squeegee blade that needs to be replaced; maybe it’s just that she doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing anymore. It hits her that now and then over the past few months she’s been all-too-willfully and stubbornly detached from Roger’s worries, which makes her either a selfish idiot or a coward, she tells herself. Or maybe a selfish, cowardly idiot who sometimes refuses to look head-on into the pitch-black darkness of her husband’s despair. Just thinking about that darkness is dizzying, and she has to reach for the edge of the bathroom sink to steady herself.
S
On another one of those nights when sleep is impossible, he tortures himself imagining Stacy rummaging around for something or other in the front seat of the Toyota and finding the paper bag with the Glock stuffed inside it.
“What the hell is THIS doing here?” he hears her say. Stacy lays the gun in the palm of one hand, and grasps the paper bag with the other, as they sit up front in the car waiting, as usual—before they go upstairs to his mother’s condo—for their dozing kids seat-belted in the back to awaken.
“Oh, sorry, I—” he begins.
“Sorry? Are you kidding me, you’re keeping a gun in the car? Seriously? What’s wrong with you? Seriously, what’s WRONG with you, huh?”
“Of course I’m not keeping a gun in the car, what would I be doing with a gun?” he says, and knows, with all certainty, that she will believe—as she always has— whatever he tells her. “It’s a rented car, babe, the person who had it before us obviously left the gun in here by accident when he turned the car in,” he explains, carefully taking first the Glock and then the paper bag from her.
The relief on her face is plainly visible, and she slaps her right hand over her heart as she says, “I KNEW it couldn’t have been yours, I mean, that would make no sense at all, right? I mean, come on, what would someone like you be doing with a gun?”
“Don’t look at me,” he says, smiling now. He slides the Glock into the paper bag and returns it to the glove compartment. “I’ll bring it back to Hertz tomorrow morning and let them deal with it, okay?”
“Promise?”
He pictures the gun safely out of sight again, pictures himself leaning across the seat of the Toyota and stroking a long silky strand of Stacy’s dark hair.
In the darkness of the bedroom now, his sleeping wife folded beside him, he mouths the words, “I promise.”
~ 20 ~
Stacy’s fortieth birthday had come and gone uneventfully six months ago, and as a gift, she’d treated herself to a writing class at the New School; with all the time she spent with her children, she’d recently begun to feel an urgent need to jump ship once a week and do something slightly more intellectually stimulating than reading The Runaway Bunny over and over and over again. (An undeniably beautiful book, she thought, but reading it aloud to Will three and four times a day was just too much.) Or else she’d have to shoot herself, she teased Roger.
She was, by far, the oldest of the dozen people in the class; even her teacher, Professor Sarno—a thirty-two-year-old guy who wore the same pair of worn-out khakis and silly long-sleeved black T-shirt imprinted with the words “Hyperbole is the BEST!” to nearly every class—was years younger than she was. He was the author of a single published book of what he called, mysteriously, “speculative fiction,” a book that hadn’t, he confessed on the very first day of class, gotten much attention in the literary world—the ruefulness of his voice as he spoke of this disappointment instantly calling up Stacy’s sympathy. The rest of the class, mostly people in their midtwenties, it seemed, regarded Stacy with a kind of respectful curiosity, especially the girls, who wanted to know what it was like to have been pregnant and given birth, and to be responsible for two young children, all of which seemed unimaginable to them. The class met within walking distance of Union Square from six to eight on Tuesday nights, and Stacy looked forward to it perhaps more than she should have, she realized. She had a bit of a crush on Professor Sarno, who, though pale and unshaven and dressed in that dopey T-shirt, was a good-looking guy in that heroin-chic way she normally didn’t go for. He played in a band in Brooklyn, and had recently invited the class to come to their show in a club in Williamsburg.
Stacy arrived tonight with a Tupperware container of cookies she’d made for the class (not from scratch, she admitted, just the ones you sliced from refrigerated dough and baked for nine minutes at 350 degrees), and tried, as usual, not to monopolize the workshop discussion. Though tonight, as so often happene
d, it seemed as if it were only Stacy and Professor Sarno lobbing comments back and forth across the beat-up plastic seminar table while the rest of the class sneaked looks at their cell phones—which of course were supposed to be turned off but which sometimes rang jarringly, their owners muttering “Fuck!” and pretending embarrassment as they fumbled to silence them. For a few months now Stacy had been working on what she thought might be a novel; its protagonist was a young homeless woman from a WASPy family, and she had revised the first couple of chapters again and again. In truth she had nearly given up hope of ever getting them right, but Professor Sarno and some of her fellow students strongly encouraged her to keep at it, a few of them going so far as to promise to read her newest revisions even after the course had ended.
It was almost eight o’clock now, and Professor Sarno was reminding them about the show his band would be playing on Friday night. He described their music as off-kilter post-punk, and laughingly warned Stacy—the oldest person in the room—that earplugs were a must. Stacy, who was a big fan of James Taylor, John Lennon’s solo albums, and the Lemonheads, knew that Professor Sarno’s band would not, in all likelihood, appeal to her, but, even so, she had the urge to hear them play. As the other members of the class made their way out the door, most of them already talking on their cell phones or checking their text messages, she approached Professor Sarno and asked him to repeat the address of the club where his band would be playing.
He was standing at one end of the seminar table, the sole of one sneakered foot raised onto the seat of a rather flimsy plastic chair. He took her by the wrist, gently swiveled her hand around, and wrote the address on her palm in blue ballpoint ink.
“Okay, thanks,” Stacy said, and feeling that first flush of embarrassment that she knew would, in the next moment, heat her everywhere, she withdrew her hand. Though why was she embarrassed? She had, after all, done nothing but ask a simple question.
“You know, it blows my mind that you’ve got two kids,” Professor Sarno said. His first name was David, and even though he’d told the students on the opening day of class that they should feel free to call him “Dave,” surprisingly, no one ever did. (Surprisingly, too, his doctorate was in sociology, which he taught at the New School as well—a fact Stacy had discovered when she Googled him.)
“Really? Why?” Stacy said. Her phone, jammed in the back pocket of her jeans, was vibrating now. “Excuse me, Professor,” she said, and saw that there was a text from Roger, asking her to please pick up a sesame bagel for him on her way home. “2nd choice cinn raisin xox.”
“I dunno,” Professor Sarno said. “Maybe it’s that you’re way too cool to be anyone’s mother.”
Stacy laughed. “I’m not so cool,” she said. “Actually, I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”
Leaning toward her, he fingered the tip of one of her long peacock feather earrings, which, these days, she never wore anywhere except to class.
“I’m not confused at all,” he said. “And what the fuck do I have to do to get you to call me ‘Dave’?”
S
She tried to convince Roger to come with her to hear Dave’s band, but he let her know that he had no interest whatsoever in standing around a noisy, crowded club filled with stoned and drunken kids grooving to set after set of deafening music.
“Okay,” Stacy told him, “you made your point.” Jesus, she said under her breath. A simple “no” would have sufficed, she thought. But later she was grateful to him for staying home and babysitting so she and Jefrie could go to the show together.
Olivia had a meltdown just as Stacy was walking out the door to meet Jefrie, and she had to go back inside the apartment to soothe her, promising her three-year-old that she would be right there when Olivia woke up the next morning. But that wasn’t enough for Olivia; what she wanted was for Stacy to stay with her now, until she fell asleep. Or else to take Olivia with her to the show. Those were Stacy’s choices, Olivia explained, her arms folded against her Strawberry Shortcake pajama top, her pale lashes already darkened with tears as she kicked the heels of her bare feet against the glossy living room floor. Stacy imagined a time when, years from now, Olivia would be laughing her head off, saying, “I wouldn’t let you leave the apartment without me? How funny is that?”
Roger, who was always reliable in situations like this, whisked Olivia from the floor, and carried her off, tickling her under the ruffles of her pajama top, and gesturing to Stacy that she should bolt.
He really was an uncommonly good father, she told Jefrie later as they had the inside of their forearms stamped in dark ink at the entrance to the club, so that they could come and go as they pleased without having to pay again. Jefrie had been complaining about her partner, Honey, who, she claimed, was never around when you needed her.
“Seriously,” Jefrie continued, “I could count on one hand the number of hours she’s spent with me and Tyler this week. She’s a surgeon, for Christ’s sake, not the president of the United States! I mean, come on, why bother to have a family if you’re not going to be there at all the right times? I can’t tell you how many meals Tyler and I have eaten alone, how shitty it was to go to back-to-school night all alone, or even to take him to the pediatrician by myself when he fell off the kitchen counter and got that huge bump on his head.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Stacy told her, feeling her gratitude to Roger intensifying as Jefrie griped about Honey. “Maybe you need to talk to her about all this.”
“Been there, done that,” said Jefrie. “We’ve talked the subject to death.”
As they made their way through the bar into the back room where the band was already playing, they crossed paths with someone dressed as a fuzzy white bowling pin in a costume that, Stacy estimated, was close to nine feet tall.
“So tell me, are you animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Jefrie asked, laughing, as the bowling pin bowed to them.
Stacy had forgotten to bring earplugs with her, but the music wasn’t as loud as she’d been warned. She and Jefrie were all the way in the rear of the crowded, overheated, dimly lit room, and it was hard to see Dave, who played lead guitar and was backed by a drummer and two other guitarists. Leaving Jefrie behind, Stacy managed to get closer to the small stage, and immediately saw that Dave wasn’t wearing his “Hyperbole” T-shirt; in fact, he had no shirt at all, and the chest that he’d bared was pretty damn scrawny. But she also noted the nipple ring glinting in the spotlight, and it was a turn-on, though she had no idea why, only that it was.
As she and Jefrie danced side by side now, rockin’ to the rhythm of the raucous music whose lyrics she struggled to make out, it came to her that without Roger here, she was free to savor—just for the evening in that dark, sultry room— the sight of a silver ring suspended from Dave’s endearingly scrawny chest.
S
FOURTH DRAFT
To my dear family and friends—
I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I’m begging you, please PLEASE believe me: There. Is. No. Way. Out.
IT’S BEST FOR ALL OF US THIS WAY.
~ 21 ~
Another busy year had passed; it was late summer now, and Roger was on a business trip in Boston, driving in congested traffic along Mass Ave near the Prudential Center, when Clare called him on his hands-free cell.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, and Roger could hear Marshall’s voice in the background saying, “Not if he’s driving, for God’s sake!”
Roger’s stomach was already churning, and his hands tightened around the beautiful mahogany steering wheel he’d installed himself in his Porsche.
“What’s wrong?” he asked Clare. He had a lunch meeting with a contractor he owed money to, and had taken a Xanax just before he left the hotel a little while ago. It was an old prescription, and he’d forgotten to check the expiration date; for all he knew, the pill he’d swallowed was totally worthless.
“Roger?” Clare said. “I think Marshall’s probably right, that I sh
ouldn’t have called while you’re in the car. Maybe you should just call me later, when you’re back at the hotel.”
He assumed this was all about his mother, whom they’d moved into assisted-living several months ago, and whose Alzheimer’s diagnosis had been no big surprise.
“What’s wrong with Mom?” he said.
Clare paused. “It’s not her . . . it’s me.”
Roger hated the wireless Bluetooth that amplified his sister’s voice so that it filled the car. He heard her say she and Marshall were going to fly up to Boston next week to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for a second opinion, and that they’d been lucky enough to score an appointment with an oncologist there who specialized in solid tumors, the type of tumor that was coiled around the base of Clare’s spine. Her lower back had been bothering her for months, Roger knew, but not one of the half-dozen doctors she’d seen had been able to determine why.
But now they knew, Clare was saying, her voice oddly clinical, and not at all tremulous; perhaps, Roger thought, she was still in a state of disbelief. As he was.
Reflecting on the words “oncologist” “tumor” and “Cancer Institute,” he fell victim to an attack of hiccups. He needed water, he thought, and also to pull the car over somewhere so that he wouldn’t jump the curb and mow down some poor pedestrian in downtown Boston, someone out on his lunch hour innocently looking for a decent place to pick up a tuna wrap and fries to go.
He wasn’t one of those people who, upon hearing bad news about someone else’s life, would nod his head and say, Whoa, that’s a shame, dude, and go back to eating his dinner. Even if the news was about a friend of a friend of a friend, a person he’d never met, he wouldn’t have an easy time letting go of it—he would ask questions, always wanting to know more, and sometimes even pressing too hard for information he wasn’t entitled to. Like Stacy, he secretly thought, he was a wellspring of empathy. And of course this was his beloved sister, his only sibling, and this news of hers had taken his breath away; the hiccups were coming faster and faster now.