“Where’s your keys?”
“It’s just that we had a few too many drinks—then we smoked that joint and I … What do you mean, ‘keys’?”
“House keys.”
“To my apartment? Why?”
“Where are they?”
“Why?”
“Tell me!”
“In my purse. In the kitchen. They’re in the outside pocket, I guess. Why?”
“Listen to me very carefully.” I whispered harshly to Beau, “And you need to overhear this, dumbass. I am going on my planned vacation. I will be staying at your place, Beth. But without you, understand? You are staying here. Sam has an appointment with Dr. Best tomorrow morning at Detroit Children’s. Beau has to work. And I want him to stay away from you while I am gone. Write down everything the doctor says. If—I mean when—Sam has a seizure, I’ve told you what to do. But there are instructions on the fridge and in the glove compartment. It is no big deal. Keep him off the gravel. He knows to stay on grass and carpet. When he starts to stare, or mumble, or pull at his clothes, that means one’s coming. Stay calm. There are towels in the trunk if it happens while you’re driving, just pull over, lie him down, and stuff a towel under his bum in case he wets himself. There’s extra undies and pants in the white plastic bag in the middle of the spare tire. Don’t hold him down. Very important. Do not stick anything in his mouth. Take his seat belt off and try to put him on his side. And don’t worry about Jake. He’s very used to it. Ask him to sing something. If you can time out the seizure, I’d appreciate it. We’re trying to keep track before the surgery.”
“Peach. Stop. I can’t. This is insane,” Beth said.
“Have coloring books for Jake. Sometimes they take a little while to pass. When Sam comes to, just say ‘Hello, welcome back, champ,’ something like that. Then carry on just as usual. Before you leave for Detroit, make a lunch for Beau. No meat. The fridge is broken at the shop. His thermos is in the dishwasher. Washer’s still broken. There’s four loads of laundry already separated in the basement. Throw them in the trunk. I find it’s faster to do it all at once when I have an excuse to go into town. The boys can play two games each on the pinball machine. I keep a bag of quarters in the coffee tin in the freezer. Grab a bunch. Don’t let the boys see you. Jesus, it sounds like my life sucks. It does, doesn’t it?”
“Peachy, I—”
“But don’t use the dryers there. Sam’s allergic to Bounce. Machines are polluted with it. Bring it back here to dry. Use the lines. Don’t leave it out past dark. June bugs are still around. Be sure to fold the T-shirts just before they’re completely dry, but not damp. Beau likes crisp lines. But make sure the jeans and towels are totally dry or they get moldy. You can use Lou’s line too if there’s too much.”
“Jesus, Peachy,” Beau said, running his hands through his hair.
“Get Sam to help you carry things, Beth. He’s strong enough and he likes to. Your show’s on tomorrow night, so make sure you tape it for Lou because he plays softball. He’ll pick up the boys. They eat hot dogs for dinner there. Beau meets them after work. But since you’re staying, make Beau’s supper tonight. For tomorrow, it’s Chinese, but pick up some iceberg lettuce at Silvano’s next to the laundromat. But don’t buy anything else there, it’s too expensive. Lou likes to make the dressing. While Beau eats, draw a bath for Jake. Make sure you get behind his ears. Sam takes showers. But if he’s in there more than fifteen minutes, knock. It’s rare for him to seize there, but you never know. Don’t let him think you’re checking. Just pretend you have to go. They can have dessert before bed. Nothing chocolate. And kudos to you if you can find the time to fuck my husband again in between all that.”
“Peachy, I can’t—”
“Yeah, I know. It’s hard. Hence our no-sex dilemma, which, I guess is just my dilemma, seeing’s he went and got himself some ass. So, I think that’s about it. Let the boys wait up for me Sunday.”
Beau was pacing like Jake had in the park.
“Peachy, I’m coming with you. We can talk in New York,” she pleaded.
“No. All done talking.”
“I’m at least coming up to the house.”
“Don’t. I’m late. Are you still drinking?”
“No. Jesus. Oh, Peach. I am so—”
“You should probably throw back some coffee. Days start early around here.”
“What are you going to do in New York? By yourself?”
“What do you think I’m going to do? Rest, do a little shopping, and then I’ll get ready for my date tomorrow night.”
Beth went quiet. Beau stopped gently banging his head on the kitchen table, his eyes looking straight ahead into the middle distance. I looked down at his confused and stupid face and let the luxurious weight of my threat settle over them both.
“Peachy,” she was calm and suddenly sober-sounding. “If … you … do … what I think you’re going to do, I’ll—”
I laughed hard and honestly at her. “Never forgive me? That is the funniest shit I ever heard you say, Beth Ann Archer. Well, it is up there anyway. Because you are a funny one. And don’t even think about emailing Marcus to cancel plans. I’ve got your keys and your address book. I’ll just call him, tell him I changed my mind again. I’ll tell him I’m just a woman who doesn’t know herself. I’ll tell him it runs in my family. Wish me luck!”
I hung up on her, walked over to the kitchen sink, and turned on the tap. I stuck a plug in the drain and let it fill up a few inches. Then I took the laptop off the roll-top desk and dunked it under the water.
“I’m so confused,” Beau said. His eyes were rimmed not just from the crying, but from pressing the heels of his hands deep into the sockets. “Who’s Marcus? Why’d you do that to the computer?”
“Sam’s on that damn thing way too much. Come to think of it, so am I.”
“What are you talking about, a date?”
“Ask Beth. I’m in a hurry. And I’ll have the cell, but only call if there’s an emergency, like if one of the boys is dying, or you decide to do yourself in.”
“Peachy, what’s going on? What the fuck are you doing? I swear, it didn’t mean anything.”
“Why do people say that? It means everything,” I said, walking out of the house and slamming the screen door behind me.
IT WASN’T FULLY light out when I started up Beth’s convertible, checking for the rental papers in the glove compartment. I kept the top down to let my hair whip some feeling back into my numb face. I was running a little early, so I took Old Tecumseh to Riverside. At the bend the pink horizon where the lake dumped into the Detroit River looked toxic, man-made, the cumulous issue of American riverside factories. Then the Renaissance Center came into view, all shiny with the new sun. Ever since they put the finishing touches on the towers in Detroit, Beth had been chomping at the bit to be American, her right and birthright. She was born there after all, while I was spat out on the farm, my mother burying her placenta (or was it mine?) under the willow. Before she died, Lou and Nell used to bring us down to the waterfront to watch the giant metal cranes knit the five towers skyward.
After high school, Beth was done with Canada, done with social welfare, boring TV, shitty exchange rates, and the feeling that she was on the outside looking in on a country that would appreciate someone like her coming home. She fixed New York on her horizon like a bobbing buoy, a place she’d have to swim toward or die. Lou was saddened. He had hoped his love affair with his adopted country would have worn off on his American-born daughter.
“No offense, Lou. You’re not dull, but your country is,” she said.
Driving toward the tunnel, the sky over Windsor did feel uncomfortably low. The early-summer heat gathered around my shoulders like an unnecessary shawl that I also wanted to throw off, thinking, So this is what it feels like to leave, to flee trouble, to ride a wild tornado out of town.
And then it happened. I finally started to cry like a child, the kind where your sobs make slow, choky c
onnections to hiccups, nose and mouth all kind of linked with spitty suspension bridges that you have to unstring with wet fists and fingers because you never have a tissue handy. And I was grateful for the first time in my life for these hateful post-9/11 passport line-ups, and for WLLZ, Motor City Rocks, which I cranked up to drown my sobs.
After I calmed down a little, I checked out my face in the rearview mirror. I looked flushed and splotchy, like a pale pink balloon had broken open across my face. I could see why despair was tricky, what its free rein could do to the body. But the cry gave me the sense that I was capable of poignancy, and I let that softness propel me. I wasn’t hoping for epiphanies or to ever hear the violins of heartfelt reunions; I hated my sister. My husband had punctured the force field around us with his ignorant dick. But for a moment there, I no longer felt as though my corner of the sky was a damp blue tarp, wackily pinning me beneath it.
“Purpose for your visit?”
I got one of the female border guards. They had a reputation for being meaner than the men.
“Going to the airport,” I said, offering my passport, squinting up into her face.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. No. I just caught my husband fucking my sister, but I’m okay.”
It came out almost by accident, the upper quarters of my lungs bursting with the crime. I needed to let it out so I could breathe better. Also, I knew I was sending news out into a world that from now on would have to pick sides. Me or Beth. This was how I was going to gather an army against her, one by one.
The border lady winced without looking at me, as though this was the kind of information she gathered every day in her kiosk.
“Yeesh. That’s rough. Where you going?”
“New York City.”
“What for?”
I told her I was visiting a friend, which was true.
“Take it easy,” she said, handing back my passport. “Don’t cry and drive.”
Both of us froze when my cell rang, flashing the number of the salon.
“Do me a favor,” she said. “Answer that call, but pull over there and shut the engine off.” She pointed to the parking lot where they direct smugglers and terrorists. “Answer it. If anyone bothers you, tell them I said it was alright. Pick up the phone.”
I did. It was Lou giving me the same instructions.
“Pull the car over, Peachy. I’m not going to tell you to come home. I just need to tell you something important and I want you to listen carefully. It’s my turn to speak.” He sounded angry, which made me even angrier.
“Daddy, I can’t talk right now.”
“Then listen.”
“She’s toxic and I want her gone from my life. For good.”
“That’s not going to be possible, Peachy. She’s my daughter too, and she needs a place to come home to, now more than ever. You may not understand this right now, but she’s at a point in her life where she’s ready to make some changes. You have to remember that she had a rough start, honey. She was born different than you. That’s why her life’s turned out different than yours.”
“Yeah. Must be rough to be so rich and successful. Oh, and to be skinny and beautiful too? Rough, rough, rough. So I can see why she’s so fucking miserable and has so few friends. My mother died too, Daddy. I was there that day too, and I was the one who found her, and did I turn into a fucking asshole? No. I didn’t take my sadness out on the whole fucking planet. And I don’t drink myself into oblivion over every little fucking thing that happens to me.”
“That’s right, Peachy. You don’t. You’re lucky. But because Beth does, we have to try to love her more.”
“I’m lucky! How dare you. How dare you take her side in this when you know what she’s done and what she’s capable of doing. I have put up with her for years, her dramas, her crazy bullshit, her stupid, stupid stunts, but I am through. Now I got a busted marriage and a broken boy and another one who’s not getting enough love. I have nothing left for Beth. You keep her for the weekend while I figure out what I’m going to do about Beau, and then you say goodbye to her, Daddy, because if I have anything to do with it, it’s the last time she’s ever going to see that fucking farm again.”
The guard walked around to the side of the convertible and made a shushing motion with her finger.
“Either keep it down or put the top up.”
“I can’t have this conversation right now, Dad. I might get arrested.”
“Just think back, Peachy. That’s all I’m saying. Try to go back, and when you do, go back a little more, before you condemn Beth. Frankly, I’m thinking things are going to improve, if we let them.”
“You are weird, old man.”
“I’m trying.”
“Listen. I know what you’re talking about. But lots of kids survive what we survived. So don’t blame me for Beth’s shitty choices. She did this. Not me. Now, promise me you’ll keep an eye on the boys, but make sure Beth takes Sam this morning to the doctor, okay? Not Beau. I want her to see a little of what real life’s all about. I want her to take a good look at what she destroyed, okay?”
“That’s the plan, Peach. No worries. And call me. Or I’ll call you. And another thing. Beth’s friend Kate’s gonna meet you at the airport. She’s told her everything, and Peachy, believe it or not, Beth’s worried about you alone in the city. So you let Kate take care of you.”
I told him I didn’t need any taking care of, though I relished disabusing Beth’s friends of any remaining notion that she might possess redeeming qualities.
“Well then, Peachy, try not to do anything stupid. You know how I feel about retaliation.”
“I won’t,” I said, lying.
“Don’t match hate with hatefulness.”
“Okay.”
“I love you a lot. But I love both my girls.”
“I love you too, but I could do without the last part.”
“Not me,” he said. “Not ever.”
We said goodbye and I started up the convertible. The border guard waved me out of the lot and gave me an aggressive thumbs-up, which felt corny and typical. I nodded. Until then, Americans had always killed me with those sentiments; their thumbs-up, their pats on the back, their way-to-gos, their you-can-do-its, their just-say-nos, a country of slogans to our footnotes.
chapter nine
BEYOND THE FANTASIES, beyond the daydreams and distractions, I’d thought of it, of leaving Beau and the boys, of never coming back. But where do you put those thoughts? Whom do you tell, I wondered, as the stewardess carefully pointed out all my new exits on the plane. Mothers meeting in parks don’t talk about that while their precious kids play a few feet away on the monkey bars. I’ve never completely admitted to Beth how tyrannical constant togetherness sometimes felt to me, in part because I thought there was something wrong with me. Also, my marriage and kids were the only things that truly separated me from Beth, made me different, and at times, better than her, I thought. And I’d never heard any woman admit that maybe it was all a big mistake, that the marriage and kid thing was highly overrated and that the idea of never being alone again, pretty much as long as you live, was too horrific to allow yourself to contemplate, even when you actually were alone. Especially then. But because I was leaving the boys and men behind, and planned to do some terrible things, I thought I should be more afraid. Feel more ashamed.
It had been a morning of radical firsts: my first adultery, my first airplane ride, my first time away from the boys, let alone Lou, Beau, and the farm. But it was also the first time in almost ten years that I found myself completely alone, and I hated to admit this to anyone, let alone myself, after that morning, but sitting there, getting strapped in and sucked back in my seat upon ascent, I felt a bit wonderful. I never thought I was built for anything like abandon. But my constant vigilance was born less of altruism than of selfishness. I’d never left my boys before because I couldn’t contemplate what would happen to them if I died. Sam’s illness had bred a selfish morb
idity in me; I pondered rueful, shocking thoughts. Who would take care of them? Naturally, Beau and Lou. But how would that go, all those men and all that testosterone under one roof? Jake and Sam were about the same age Beth and I were when Nell killed herself, so I’ve often fantasized about how much of me Jake would remember. Would it be as little as I remember of my mother? By virtue of being firstborn, Sam stored more of me in him as Beth had of our mother—something that had always made me envious. She and Nell had taken trips alone to the city. Nell taught Beth how to thread the sewing machine, how to roller-skate backward on the cement floor in the carport, and how to play “Merry Men” on the guitar. Beth got to have those memories even though I’d have appreciated them more. Yes, I was too young to learn these things, but I was left with so few memories of Nell mothering me, Nell loving me, that it was as though she had only ever existed in that brief watery home-movie reel that we had played and replayed.
As the plane hit its highest altitude and straightened up, I looked out the window at the checkerboard of farms stretching as far as I could see. Who knew there were still so many of us living so far apart from one another. Though we didn’t really count as farmers. Maybe we should have made a better go at growing things instead of shaving off bits and pieces of the farm to afford to live on a farm that was no longer a farm. The last few acres on the other side of the river were the next to go, the offer from the builders too lucrative, and Sam’s operation in Detroit too expensive, to turn down. Lou loathed the idea of having neighbors, but maybe they’d be good for us. Maybe being isolated and unaccountable was our problem. Maybe if there had been neighbors other than the Rosarios, I would have married someone else, one of the subdivision boys, and not Beau. Or had I stayed in school, maybe I wouldn’t have married at all. I would have fallen in love with my career.
Instead, at twenty-eight, I had developed deep canyons between my eyebrows from worrying about people I couldn’t love enough, especially Beau, a man I married, truly and honestly, because my sister didn’t. And as ludicrous as it is, I kept the baby, went ahead with the whole shebang because an abortion would have made me appear to be copying Beth. My decision expressed nothing political, or maternal. I was merely avoiding embarrassment, the way a cat quickly, shyly, rights itself, as though it meant to roll off a high shelf while sleeping. Then I sealed the decision with Jake, because, I mean, who had two by accident? Asshole, I know. And even after Jake, I could have gone back to school and finished my degree. But aside from the work of raising kids, my career bubble burst after my internship in special ed. The day I snuck a peek at that assessment by the doctoral students, then drove home in tears, was the day I found Beau’s legs poking out from under Lou’s Jeep.
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