by Juliette Fay
“Bring it into the kitchen, and I’ll talk you through it while I load the dishwasher.”
“It’s English. You have to read it and pay attention.”
Dana sighed. Even when Kenneth still lived there, Morgan wanted Dana near—not necessarily to spend time with, however. Morgan spent a good portion of her evenings texting her friends or watching shows like America’s Next Top Model. For reasons that neither of them fully understood, Morgan just wanted Dana in the building.
“I’ll load the dishwasher,” said Alder.
“That’s so nice of you, sweetie,” said Dana, “but you don’t have to.”
“I don’t mind,” said Alder. “Besides, Meatball Man here will help me, right, G?”
“What?” Grady was horrified. “I can’t load the dishwasher.”
“Just bring the dishes in from the table. I’ll load them.” No one said anything for a moment. It was as if Alder had suggested they build a wide-body jet in the backyard and fly to Greenland.
“Don’t I need a bath or something?” Grady asked desperately.
“Jeez,” muttered Morgan. “Somebody mark this day on the calendar.”
Alder stood, picked up her plate and utensils, and waited for Grady to do the same. He blew a huff of resignation and followed her. Morgan excused herself to go to the bathroom, and Dana met her in her room. The English homework was not that hard, but Morgan was fidgety and irritable, sucking loudly on a LifeSaver and moaning that she didn’t have a wordy brain. It was not cozy mother-daughter time. When they finished, Morgan murmured, “How long will you be gone?”
“Not that long, honey. And Alder’s here if you need something.”
Morgan narrowed her eyes. “Does Alder being here mean you’re going out more?”
“No.” But did it? Dana hadn’t considered that Alder might be a benefit to the household. And yet her presence had so far had a positive effect. She’d gotten Grady to eat meat—a minor miracle (unless you counted hot dogs). And she’d gotten him to help clean up.
“She’s not you, Mom,” said Morgan.
“I know, sweetie. Don’t worry.”
Dana shucked off the wrinkled jeans and the long-sleeved T-shirt that was now speckled with tomato sauce on one sleeve. She had already planned to wear her boot-cut jeans to Polly’s, but with what? What shirt would be flattering but comfortable—nice enough but not so nice as to make her look like she was trying too hard? What magical shirt would give off that elusive scent of happy-busy-smart-fun while masking the fact that she was still a bit stunned by her single status even after almost a year, that she worried about her children, particularly Morgan, and that she sometimes cried for no reason she could name? Where could she buy that perfect shirt, and what would it cost if she found it? She would pay any amount for a shirt like that. She would give her right arm.
As Dana adjusted her jewelry in the hall mirror, she caught sight of Alder sitting on the TV-room rug holding a paperback book, her gaze unfocused.
“I won’t be gone too long. And I’m just up the street.”
“Okay,” said Alder without looking up. “Nice shirt.”
Dana let herself in Polly’s side door as she always did. When she walked into the living room holding a bottle of merlot, no one noticed her at first, and in that moment she was unsure. Polly was her closest friend in Cotters Rock. Of course she had other friends—college roommates, women from her old job whom she still had lunch with occasionally. These women had known her longer. But now Polly knew her best.
And possibly that made Polly her best friend, though Dana was hesitant to assign such a designation. After all, Polly, with her fiery personality and unfathomable talent for not caring what people think—Polly had loads of friends in Cotters Rock. Many were right here in this room. And not one of them happened to notice Dana as she stood in the doorway, wearing a sage linen blouse, the best shirt she could come up with for the occasion.
“There you are!” said Polly, skirting around a taller woman. She hugged Dana tightly and kissed her on the cheek. Dana handed her the merlot, and Polly grinned. “Thank God!” she whispered. “You know how I hate that crappy chardonnay they all bring.”
Conversation among the women ran from politics (whether that narrow-minded member of the Board of Education could finally be voted off) to books (mostly fiction set in foreign countries governed by misogynistic regimes) to the latest bad behavior of the town’s teenagers. The story that had them buzzing was that of an eighth-grade girl who’d been caught half clothed and performing oral sex on a nineteen-year-old she’d met at the Buckland Hills Mall. They were discovered in his car in the dirt parking lot at Nehantic Woods, empty bottles of hard lemonade rolling around the car floor.
The girl was known to have a somewhat troubled home life. She lived with her chain-smoking, battered-Camaro-driving mother. No father was known to be in the picture. This was immeasurably comforting to the women gathered at Polly’s. This mother was not like them. They didn’t smoke. They didn’t drive rusty sports cars, and their children had on-site fathers, or at least fathers who took custody of them every other weekend.
And yet . . . their daughters certainly loved to spend time at the mall and were newly driven to seek out male attention of even the most appalling variety. The Internet drew them into ever-widening circles of friends of friends. They were technologically sophisticated yet naïve as slender blades of grass, oblivious to the predatory growl of the lawn mower.
“And what’s with the blow job?” Jeannette with the off-kilter nose and satiny red lipstick wanted to know. “It’s not enough to make out and feel each other up anymore? They have to get so . . . personal?”
“At least they can’t get pregnant,” said Polly.
“Yes, but it’s just so . . . intimate,” persisted Jeannette. “Way more than sex is. Sex you can just . . . you know . . . do. But putting your mouth down there . . .” Dana wondered briefly how Jeannette’s marriage was doing. But she did have a point—what was normal these days? Were you supposed to read those articles in Cosmopolitan with titles like “The Sixteen Sex Acts That Will Make Him Thank God He’s a Man” and actually follow the recipes? How hot was hot enough, and at what point did it just get weird?
The conversation about the drunken middle-schooler was winding down, but the women weren’t quite ready to bury the juicy bone of scandal. Dana had had enough. She slipped off to the bathroom. Away from the relentless patter of opinions and exclamations, she leaned against the sink counter and hugged her arms across her chest.
It’ll be all right, she told herself. Morgan would weather the storms of adolescence just as she herself had. Morgan might be immature at times, but she wasn’t stupid. She couldn’t possibly wander so far from what Dana had tried to give her, a list of which might take up several typed pages but basically boiled down to . . . a sense of herself . . . the knowledge that she existed, and that this was a good thing, and that she should make all reasonable attempts to continue doing so. It was the basis of motherhood, after all, to keep one’s offspring from ceasing to exist.
Dana checked her mascara and found herself thinking for the millionth time since her own adolescence that if her vaguely hazel eyes had some actual color—a definitive brown or green or blue—maybe that would distract from what was wrong with her. Which was nothing, really. Her nose was straight, her skin was clear. Yet she couldn’t seem to forgive herself the colorlessness of her eyes, the pallidness of her hair, or her no-longer-teenage figure.
And there had always been some small, irrational sense she had of waiting. That if she were patient and good and responsible, someday she would wake up and everything wrong with her would have been replaced—with real colors or more delicate proportions. Dana sometimes had to remind herself that no different corporeal form would magically emerge some day . . . This was it.
When the last guests left, Dana helped Polly tidy up. “Denise finally fired that horrible nanny,” Polly reported, gathering damp cocktail napki
ns and sticky dessert plates. “Don’t know why it took her so long.”
“It’s hard to fire people. Whenever I had to, I nearly had a nervous breakdown.”
“Let me guess. It was usually some secretary who was . . . oh, like embezzling from the petty-cash box, right?” Polly smirked. “You’re so nice it’d have to be something that bad or worse!”
“I’m not that nice,” Dana said defensively, knowing that Polly generally used the word to mean nice-boring, or nice-pushover, or nice-but-not-too-smart.
“Right. Can you take this bag of trash out to the garage? Be careful, I think it’s leaking.”
Dana held out her hand for the trash. Polly laughed and let the bag drop back into the can. “See what I’m talking about?”
And maybe Polly was right. Maybe if Dana’s best friend in Cotters Rock asked her to handle a leaking garbage bag, Dana should say, Carry your own damn trash. But she loved Polly, and she felt that Polly loved her. And what was a little garbage between friends?
When the cleanup was finished, Polly reached up to give her a hug. Polly’s hugs were tight and serious, and Dana had the sensation of being claimed for Polly’s tribe, a ritual of belonging that was both comforting and a bit alarming in its finality.
“Thanks for staying,” Polly said. “I guess this is what it’s like having a sister.” Then she laughed and released her arms. “Well, maybe not your sister . . . but the kind I always wished I had.” Polly was like that. She could go from who-cares to I-love-you in the flutter of an eyelash. Dana let the sweetness of the comment fill her and keep her warm for the brisk walk home.
CHAPTER 5
DANA HAD LEARNED TO SLEEP ALONE LONG BEfore her divorce. Kenneth had frequent sales trips, and early in their marriage she worried that something would happen to him. On his occasional overseas trips, she wouldn’t sleep a wink, imagining his plane crashing into the ocean, his broken body floating facedown in the darkened waves. The nightmares about her father were always worse then. But Kenneth invariably returned, and over time Dana learned to relax.
She could almost pinpoint when the affair had begun—two years ago the sales trips had gotten longer. Before then, he’d made a much bigger deal of how good it was to be home, sleeping in his own bed, with his wife and his favorite pillow. He had a thing for that pillow. Dana had been able to overlook most of Kenneth’s idiosyncrasies—his intense aversion to amusement parks, for instance.
But the bliss that settled the features of his face as he laid his travel-weary head on that pillow . . . it got under Dana’s skin in the strangest way. As if he were happier to see it than her. She tossed it in the closet when he traveled but always had it back on the bed when he came home. Stupid pillow. Stupid her for wasting energy hating an inanimate object.
That pillow was long gone. It had left with the first carload of Kenneth’s things when he moved out. Dana was happy for that at least. She’d been having some sugar-free lemonade when that pillow went out the door, tucked under her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s arm. She raised her glass to it, and for a moment she actually smiled to herself, enjoying the pointless victory as she lost the war.
Dana was awakened by motion in the house. There was no actual sound, but the air seemed to flow in the wrong direction under her bedroom door. Then the doorknob turned and a faint glow from the little plastic night-light in the hallway spilled around the shape of a figure. Too large to be a child but too short for an adult.
Morgan. She slid under the covers on her father’s former side. “Dreams?” murmured Dana.
“Haven’t slept yet.”
“Oh, honey,” Dana sighed. Why couldn’t Morgan just lay herself down, let her body rest, and descend into blankness? No one needed blankness more than Morgan these days and no one was getting less of it than her.
“Do you ever miss Dad?” asked Morgan.
Miss Dad? What was the right answer to this preteen riddle? “You don’t need to worry about that, sweetie.”
“I just wondered,” Morgan whispered.
“Well . . .” Dana stalled. She’d had two glasses of wine at Polly’s. Couldn’t she take this particular pop quiz in the morning?
“Well, do you?”
“Um . . . in a way.”
“What way?”
“I guess I miss having a husband.” This was true. Better to stick with the truth, or a close cousin thereof. Morgan got irritable when Dana gave what she called “Tooth Fairy answers.”
“What do you miss exactly?”
Yes, what exactly? Help with the kids, an extra hand with the house and yard work, having an escort to dinners and parties. Sex. Someone to talk to. More things than she liked to admit.
“It was nice having his help. It’s harder to do it all myself.”
“You don’t feel lonely?”
Lonely. Dana didn’t even like to think of the word. Despite the fact that she rarely had a moment alone, she often felt she’d been sentenced to solitary confinement.
“Well, do you?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“Do you think you’ll ever get married again?”
Dana could barely see Morgan in the dark. It was as if her own mind were questioning her. “Maybe someday. But I don’t think about it very much.”
“Why not?”
Because the chances weren’t good. Men her age were going for younger women. A forty-five-year-old—even without kids—was a hard sell these days. And now that she did have children, her standards were higher. Not for herself but for Morgan and Grady. What she said was, “Just too busy, I guess.”
“Is Polly your best friend?”
“She’s a very dear friend . . .”
“Is she your best, though?”
“I guess maybe she is. She’s very good to me.” What was Morgan getting at? Why all this concern with her mother’s social life?
“Do you think she’d ever, like, turn on you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know . . . I don’t think Darby and me are friends anymore,” Morgan’s voice was lower and more strained now. “She doesn’t even, like, answer when I say hi.”
“Are you sure she hears you?”
Morgan gave a derisive little snort. “Everyone hears everything, Mom. It’s middle school. We pay attention to stuff like that.”
“Well, then maybe she’s not a very good friend, and you’re better off without her.”
A soft hiss of resignation sifted over the pillow. “You don’t get it.”
“Explain it to me, then.”
“Everyone’s like that. Everyone’s ignoring someone. If I’m better off without Darby, I’m better off with no friends at all.” And there it was. The loneliness dilemma. Some things could be overlooked, and some things could be forgiven. And then there were the things that had to be forgiven no matter how bad they were, because otherwise the choice was solitary confinement. Hard enough at forty-five. Impossible at twelve.
“It’s like Bubble Wrap,” said Morgan. “We’re all like pieces of Bubble Wrap. And every day a few more bubbles get popped. If you’re lucky, it’s only one or two. But if it’s bad, and everyone ignores you and talks about you behind your back, it’s like hundreds. Then what’ve you got?”
“What?”
“Just a piece of useless plastic. Might as well throw it away.”
Lying there in the darkened bedroom, Dana reached out to stroke Morgan’s fine, silky hair. And she could think of no rebuttal to the girl’s contention, because there was none. She was right. And the stakes seemed higher than in years past, the pressure more intense than ever to be that perfect, precisely casual girl. To be above reproach. But the mountains of societal reproach had risen so high, how could anyone manage to surmount them?
“I love you, Morgan,” was all Dana could think of to say. “Daddy and I love you so much.”
“I know,” Morgan sighed, curled in the comforting obscurity of her mother’s bed. “Thanks.”
When Dana woke the
next morning, Morgan was gone. Dana had a moment of panic imagining that she’d slipped away and done herself some unspecified harm. She knew it wasn’t true, but she slid quickly from beneath the covers and got up all the same. Better to be standing when thoughts like that came. Lying down, you were just too vulnerable to their fungal spread.
She padded quickly down the hall and peeked past the half-open door of the bathroom. Morgan was there, already dressed. She was studying herself in the mirror, pressing a finger into the tiny speed bump of tummy that had sprouted up about six months ago. Dana had noticed it, too, and had started offering apple slices and carrots with low-fat dip instead of Morgan’s usual toast with butter and honey after school. Morgan maintained the silence Dana had initiated on the subject and nibbled penitently at the vegetation.
Dana watched Morgan now poke at the benign layer of flesh as if it did not belong to her, as if it were some alien life-form or pale-toned leech sucking something out of her that she needed. It was the way Dana herself jabbed at her own thighs when she sat on the edge of the tub to draw a bath for Grady and noticed her legs spreading on the cold white porcelain.
Morgan poked her stomach again, and a look of hopelessness passed across her face.
Bubble Wrap, thought Dana. Popping before her very eyes.
CHAPTER 6
“DID I HEAR COACH RO CALLING YOU STELLY?” Dana asked Grady that afternoon.
“Yeah,” he said, chewing on a dried apricot. It was the only way to get him to eat fruit.
“Do you like that? I’ve never heard you called that before.”
“Kinda yes and kinda no,” Grady picked a piece of apricot out of his teeth. “It’s fun to have a nickname . . . but Stelly sounds like Stella. Kinda like a girl’s name.”
“If you don’t want him to call you that, you can ask him politely to use your real name.”
Grady shrugged. “I don’t care that much. Not enough to act like a baby about it anyway.”