by Heidi Pitlor
When she returned, she went to slip the bottle back into the bag as Joe opened his eyes. “Hi,” he mumbled.
“Hi.”
“You want to sit?”
“Actually, yes. Would you mind?” The bickering couple wouldn’t bother him so much.
“No, of course not,” he said, and shuffled around, pushing himself up and past her with a grunt and a sigh. She slid by the young woman, her bony knees lifted in front of her as a bookstand, her braided hair thin and straight like a doll’s.
The ferry ground forward. Ellen took the seat and gazed out the cloudy, stained window at the charcoal ocean. She tried to let it soothe her, for wasn’t that what the ocean was supposed to do, soothe one’s nerves? The young woman clicked her tongue as she read. Quietly but perceptibly, click, click, like a metronome, and Ellen closed her eyes and willed the medicine to quiet her mind. She imagined MacNeil was the one sitting next to her and that they were headed for a weekend on the island, just the two of them, to have long conversations and dinner and drink wine and go for walks afterward in the dark. In just five days, she would meet him at the Gardner. The concert was at seven-thirty, and he’d planned to pick her up and for them to have supper in the museum café beforehand. Joe would have poker that night, and anyway, he knew when she went out with MacNeil—Joe just didn’t know how often they went out alone, or about the sorts of conversations they had, of course, or the recent thoughts she’d had about him. She almost wanted to tell her husband. After all, she was used to telling him of the thoughts and feelings that most consumed her. She wanted to share it with someone, at least, but of course she could not. She absolutely could not. No matter, she thought. The concert would run until at least nine, she assumed, and by the time he got her home it’d be nine-thirty, maybe later. She ran a finger across the window next to her. She could ask him to take her for a ride, tell him she wasn’t ready to end the night just yet. I’m not quite tired enough for bed, she’d say. And then what? Would she just come out and ask him if he felt the same electricity between them? It had been so many years since she’d worried about what a man thought of her. What did one do? She supposed she wouldn’t press matters. She would merely establish a setup—she would direct him to the big parking lot by the Charles, the one near the community gardens and boat rentals. They would sit in his car at first, looking out at the glistening river, and she would tell him how much she loved this spot, how it was one of her favorites, and would he like to take a little walk, maybe? See the moon, the view of the city? Afterward, she would suggest that they drive to his house. And why not? At that point, the electricity would have inevitably risen to the surface, helped along by the sight of the Charles at night, the stars, the subtle nighttime chill. He would have taken her hand as he sometimes did. He would have stopped by the water and stood just behind her to keep her warm. By then it would have become clear that he wanted what she wanted, and they would drive back to his house in Lincoln, park the car, walk up his creaky front steps, turn on the hall light, head upstairs. In bed he would be definitive and confident, she suspected, strong and slow and responsive. She held her hands together in her lap and glanced at the girl beside her. If she only knew what this old woman was thinking. She wouldn’t sleep at MacNeil’s that night. She would stay awhile, a few hours maybe, but then she would ask him to drive her home, and she would tell Joe that the concert ran late, and that she and MacNeil and some friends he’d brought had gone out afterward for a drink and dessert, and then there was the strangest traffic jam in the city. She drew a nervous breath. It was a plan. She wouldn’t let herself think her way out of it.
The girl clicked her tongue and turned the page. The ferry pressed ahead. Ellen looked out the window and could see only water. She remembered that her last ferry trip to the island felt like traveling to another world, making a sort of passage between land and land. It was almost romantic, the people up on deck, wrapped in thick wool sweaters against the cool air. Looking ahead, waiting to see a sliver of land appear on the horizon. It was what she imagined her grandmothers saw when they first came to this country from Russia. A new beginning. Promise.
Soon she would be a grandmother herself. (What kind of example would she be setting, sneaking around with her dear friend’s husband? She shuddered. She put it out of her mind.) She would plan huge dinners for her grandchildren: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, baked beans. Food children would love. She would keep a drawer of paper and pens and glue and tape for them to make art projects with when they visited. She would take her grandchildren to Boston and ride the swan boats with them and take them to tea at the Ritz and to the Children’s Museum.
But she was not so young anymore. It wasn’t as easy to get around the city as it used to be—her legs inevitably cramped, her head always began to ache. Perhaps by the time they were old enough, she wouldn’t be able to do any of these things with them. If her children had had babies earlier, though, if they’d gotten their lives together earlier, settled down, just gone ahead and made their families. In a few years it might be too late. The thought wasn’t a frightening one—it just bothered her to think she might not be able to see her grandchildren become young people. It irritated her, her children’s disorganization. They had waited so long to even start trying. Jake had waited until he was thirty-five, Daniel until it was too late. And Hilary—who knew if she’d ever even have a long-term relationship, let alone children?
None of Ellen’s children had started their families naturally, the way people used to—a husband, a wife, a bed. The other evening, Ellen raised the subject with Joe over dinner. “Isn’t it strange, the unusual ways Liz and Brenda got pregnant?”
“I suppose.”
“I just hope that these new methods—the donor, the drugs—I hope they work out in the end. Do you think Jake and Liz’s problems might have come from us? Our genes or something?” She pushed a thumb into her palm and squeezed her hand. She guessed he wouldn’t have much to say about the matter, but her questions nagged at her tonight.
“Our genes? Don’t be silly. I, at least, am genetically perfect. You must know that by now. You, on the other hand—”
“I’m being serious here. What if it was our fault?”
“Oh, just try to focus on the positive—they’re having families. Families are good things. Remember how excited we were when we first started ours?”
“I suppose,” she said absently. “Do you think Hilary will ever settle down? What would a man Hilary married even be like, do you think? That Jesse Varnum?” In the time she took off between high school and college, Hilary had dated someone several years older than she, something that unnerved Ellen at first—she could see the lines on his face and gray hairs throughout his black beard. Hilary had only brought him home once (in the days when she used to come home more regularly than every few years). He was the only boyfriend of hers they’d ever met. The two behaved sheepishly with each other at first, but soon Hilary began to touch Jesse quite often, to play with his fingers and his hair at the dinner table, and Ellen noticed Jesse didn’t return her affection. She wanted to tell her daughter to pull back a bit, not to seem so eager, so hungry like that. No one wants to feel that indispensable when it comes right down to it. And despite his age, there was something about Jesse that Ellen liked. He was soft-spoken but pleasant, and he asked them questions and seemed genuinely interested in their lives. He was intelligent and had a kindness in his expressions that made Ellen see why her daughter was attracted to him. At one point Ellen took Hilary aside and told her she liked him. Hilary looked confused, perhaps even a little disappointed, and said, “He likes you guys too.” Unfortunately that was the first and last time Ellen met Jesse Varnum. A month or so later Hilary called to say they’d broken up, and when Ellen asked why, Hilary, oddly indifferent, said, “We just did.”
“I don’t know,” Joe said after a moment. “Maybe he’d be some rock star or something?”
“Come on,” Ellen said, scowling. “Really try to pictur
e the man Hilary would marry.”
“What’s the use?”
He had a point. What was the use of trying to imagine someone who might never exist? “You worry,” Joe said, and set his hand on her knee.
“It’s not worry so much, it’s more curiosity. I just wonder what Hilary’s life is like. Sometimes I wonder whether she’s ever been in love—maybe she’s been in love a hundred times. She certainly never talks about it. Do you think she’s ever been in love?”
“Sure.”
“What would it be like to be thirty-five and never have had a real relationship?” Ellen paused. The thought seemed full of loneliness. At thirty-five, she herself had had a marriage, a house, three kids, a job. She’d never known what it was like to eat dinner each night alone. But of course along with being single came a world of possibility. One could travel anywhere, work any job as long as it paid the bills. True love could always be just around the corner. Ellen’s own fate had been determined, she supposed, the day she met Joe. She’d never had the sense that anything could happen—she’d always possessed a more or less clear picture of her future. Until, of course, MacNeil.
“She was in love with Jesse. I’m sure she has been with others,” he said.
“Has she told you about it?”
He set his fork down. “She’s mentioned different people.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“I don’t think so,” Joe said. “You know, I want them all to be settled and happy in their lives too.”
“I know you do.” And he did. Their three kids had been his biggest dream, and his hope for their contentment was the continuation of this dream. He was a good person, a decent man, her husband.
The ferry grumbled. She looked out the window again, and saw that the sky was no longer blue at all but slate gray, and quickly darkening. Ellen looked at her watch. They would arrive soon.
—
Unfortunately, Jake’s whole family knew of his trials with infertility. He’d meant to keep it secret, as Liz didn’t want them to know. But in a weak moment, he’d told his mother over the phone, who’d gone and told his father and Daniel, who of course passed along the news to Hilary. Jake confronted his mother about it—“I was CONFIDING in you, Mom, did you not realize that?”—and asked her not to tell Liz that any of them knew, and to please pass this along to the rest of the family. Jake should have been smarter about it. His mother or his father or any of them, for that matter, had never been able to keep a secret, but for some reason he found himself confiding in them, especially his parents, again and again.
Liz had no such intimacy with her parents, though she was an only child. She never understood his telling his family about anything at all private. Her parents were real estate developers who lived part of the year in Hawaii and the other part in Texas. Liz grew up in Oregon, though, in a small town near Mount Hood where every other person farmed marijuana. Nothing about her mother and father indicated that they were parents. They threw enormous parties where people freely smoked pot; they cooked elaborate meals from vegetables grown in their tangled garden; they collected ancient drug paraphernalia. “The hookahs,” her mother once told Jake with utter seriousness, “are thought to have been the original pleasure-givers.” Liz had early on admitted to Jake that being raised by such parents had led her to adopt a rather rigid system of rules for herself. He imagined her as a child, cleaning their drawers, planning their meals, and in fact she had told him that she’d once even organized their hookah collection by their country of origin. It’d broken his heart.
He considered the fact that everyone in his family knew of their infertility as he shuffled through his underwear drawer—hopefully none of them would slip up and mention it this weekend, especially after they learned about the twins. He should never have told his mother. He wished desperately they didn’t all know—Liz would be even more exasperated with him right now if she found out.
He was about to lay eyes on partially clothed twin cheerleaders, the cover of the magazine at the top of the pile, when Liz walked in. He almost closed the drawer on his hand.
“Daniel called. They’re going to be late,” she said, and suggested they go down to the beach and relax there for a bit.
“First the weather, now this? What else can go wrong?” he groaned, and followed her through the house.
“Easy there,” she said over her shoulder.
He grabbed a folding chair on the back porch and walked behind her down the path and out to a flat patch of rocks. “Here, you should sit,” he said, and reached out his arm to help her.
She eased herself onto the chair and looked up at him. “I guess I should apologize about earlier, about your book and everything. You have to understand, though—I’m just not feeling exactly sexy these days.”
He took a step backward, down a decline. He moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth and said, “I think you’re sexy.” He smiled at how scripted the words sounded. “Sometimes I wish I could physically feel what you’re feeling, that I could go through some of it too, you know, actually experience some of this pregnancy for you. I wish I could take some of the burden away from you. I feel kind of useless, standing here on the sidelines. I feel like I’m just in the way.” He became aware of how many times he’d just said the word “feel.”
Liz smiled and nudged a mound of sand and rocks toward him. “You’re not useless. You’re working your tail off. You got us all packed up to come here, you cleaned up the place when we got here. You’ve done so much for me these past weeks.”
“Yes,” he said, and though he wished that all he’d done would compel her to want to give him something in return, to want him more, he did appreciate what she’d said. Still, he couldn’t shake a growing urge to do more for her, to make something better or simply to change something and get rid of the tight snarl of energy within his chest. He bent down, scooped up a handful of sand and pitched it toward the ocean, but it dispersed in the wind and some of it blew directly back into his face. He brushed his eyes. When he was a kid and his parents took them to the beach, Hilary always used to throw sand at him. She was a bratty kid and had grown into a bratty adult—he had no idea why she and Daniel were so close now. Daniel, though moody in his way, had a certain quiet dignity, a clear sense of responsibility. He was an adult now. Hilary, on the other hand, had gone through umpteen jobs in the last couple of years, she’d lived in umpteen apartments. He imagined she still drank too much, still smoked pot. He wondered whether she kept porn. He pictured a stack of Playgirls on a coffee table beside a full, dirty ashtray and a pile of caked dishes. This was one of the many differences between them: she displayed her weaknesses for everyone to see and Jake kept them hidden inside himself, where they should stay put.
Liz stood and headed back inside to get started on dinner. He looked at the house, the one light still on in the kitchen. She was so good about electricity. She always nagged him about his laziness with lights, how he left them on when the two of them went out even though he’d told her again and again that he’d felt uncomfortable leaving a house so dark when they weren’t there, as if they were abandoning it. “Why the strange empathy for something inanimate?” she’d said once, and he had no ready answer. What would she say if she found out about his box of rescued things?
After a while, Jake headed back inside too. He walked into their bedroom, collapsed on their bed and glanced up at a smallish, no, medium-sized crack by the light on the ceiling. He would have to examine all the ceilings in the house. What if he found more cracks? He’d need to have the roof redone. Again. It had been no small job redoing the original roof. The guy had charged double his estimate and the men had left muddy footprints all over the new floors. Not that it would matter, as God knows when he and Liz would be able to come to the island next, given his full roster of meetings this month. And the quarterly reports that were soon due, the revised budget, the taxes. When would he be able to spend any real time with her?
He felt his pul
se ticking and told himself to slow down, breathe, breathe. He’d read several books about reducing stress and had adopted various breathing methods that did, he thought, help. One, two, three, he breathed and closed his eyes, one, two, three.
Liz turned on and off the faucet and the house grew quiet.
One, two, three. He slid a hand down his shorts and rested his fingers on the warmth there. One, two, three. Slowly his fingers, as if independently from his brain, began to stroke himself, slowly, slowly, and the warmth gradually bled out, through his middle, and he began to move faster as he tried to recall the twin cheerleaders—their blond pigtails; their tan, full, round breasts; their long legs wide open—and he grew hotter and thicker, his heart beating, and soon he felt nothing but the warmth and the speed, and he continued, on and on, until he almost burst and opened his eyes to see his wife, at the end of the bed, several leaves of arugula in her hand.
“Jesus,” he said.
“I think I understand.” She smiled kindly.
He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow. “Can you leave me alone?” he said through the pillow.
“Feel better?”
He made a noise like a wounded cat, repeated it louder, and kicked his feet against the bed. In a moment he heard her walk out of the room and her footsteps grow quieter.
It was some time before he lifted his face from the pillow and turned over onto his back. He noticed the wooden box of odd things on top of the dresser. He rose, retrieved it and set it on the floor. He took the pacifier out of his pocket and placed it on top of an earring shaped like a heart. Here inside this box was dignity. Here was something good that he’d done. Let her find it and wonder what the hell it was. And in the end, let her think he was pathetic, a person made solely of desires lately. But she was too. Her desires and needs—rest, comfort, peace, support—overrode his by necessity of the situation, and soon there would be two other sets of needs and desires that would override both of theirs.