I loved having him home, and I loved that all the things that had been bothering me for months were finally being taken care of, but it wasn’t paying the bills. Finally, after an unpleasant conversation with our credit-card company, Frank and I decided that I should take a job at the new Target that had opened up in Plymouth Meeting, not too far away.
I made sure Spencer, who was four months old, would drink from a bottle, then squeezed myself into a skirt and went to fill out an application. I got hired the same day I went in, and I liked Target fine. The work itself was nothing special — stocking shelves and sweeping floors, cleaning the bathrooms and telling shoppers where to find things — but I liked the people, the jokes we had, how we got to know one another’s stories, sharing soda and microwave popcorn in a breakroom with red-and-white tiled floors and scuffed-up walls and metal lockers for our things. Most of the other employees were women like me, helping out while our men were home, laid off or furloughed or looking for work, but a few of them were college kids home for the summer, and one of them was this guy — really, a boy — named Gabriel. Gabriel was working his way through Penn State. He was tall and pale and lanky, with a narrow face and glasses and long, thick brown hair that he was always flipping off his forehead or shoving behind his ears.
I figured the college kids would keep to themselves and act like the job was beneath them, rolling their eyes at the mothers asking where to find the toilet paper or the mousetraps or the wrapping paper, and it was true that most of them were like that. Cliquey. They’d sit at their own table in the breakroom, just as if we were all still in high school, and bring things like sushi from Whole Foods for dinner, with chopsticks and little packets of soy sauce, but Gabe was always polite. That was the second thing I noticed about him. The first thing was his food. Most of us had regular stuff, sandwiches or leftover casserole or lasagna, but Gabe had interesting things: a tin of oily sardines that he’d pop into his mouth one by one, a chunk of crusty bread, wedges of cheese so stinky that they made everyone wince and crack jokes about smelly feet, sticky dates in a plastic tub, a square of black-flecked brown goo that he told me was truffled pâté and that he ate on a heel of bread, with fig jam smeared on top. “My grandma’s French,” he said. “We always had weird stuff around the house. I’d bring friends home from school, and instead of having, you know, Oreos and milk or whatever, she’d give us herring.”
“Herring’s French?” I’d never had French food, except for the one time Frank and I had gone to a fondue restaurant, where for your main course you dipped bread and vegetables into bubbling melted cheese, and then dipped fruit into chocolate for dessert.
He’d shrugged. “Not especially, but my grandma loved herring. I do, too.” He’d smiled then, offering me a bite of chicken marinated, he told me, in lemon peel and crushed garlic, which tasted like no chicken I’d ever had before.
Sometimes Gabe sat with the college kids and sometimes he sat with us. He carried lollipops in his pockets and would give them to kids fussing in the shopping carts after asking the moms if it was okay. “That’s nice,” I said, the first time I saw him do it, and he shrugged, looking a little embarrassed with his hair flopping into his eyes. “I’ve got two little brothers,” he said. “I understand the value of candy.”
Gabe always had a book in his pocket and I usually had one tucked into my purse, and at break time we’d slip into the corners to read. After I’d been there for a week, he wandered over, casually, and asked me about my book — a Nora Roberts — and told me about what he was reading, the story of a Russian rapper in New York. “But really,” he said, sitting down in the molded plastic chair beside me, “it’s about what it means to be an American.”
“Huh.” I wondered what my book was “really” about — about love, I thought, but I could have been wrong. Maybe if I’d been to college the real story of the book would reveal itself to me, like one of those Magic Eye puzzles where if you stare at it long enough a hidden picture appears. I’d never liked school: all those things like the square of the hypotenuse and the principal exports of Uruguay would, I correctly suspected, have nothing to do with my life after graduation, my life as a wife and a mother. I did all right in my English classes, and I’d always liked to read, but just for the story’s sake, for the chance books gave me to visit another world, where everyone was beautiful, where the sex was always amazing, and where, when the telephone rang, it was sometimes a handsome stranger and not the heroine’s mortgage company inquiring as to when they could expect that month’s check.
“You can read it when I’m done,” he said, offering me the book. I shook my head, smiling. “I think I’ll stick with Nora.” But two days later I found the book in my locker, next to the snapshots of my family that I’d taped to the inside of the door. When I tried to thank him Gabe just shrugged. “You don’t have to read it,” he said. “No pressure.” He held up his hands like a gunfighter showing they were empty, then tucked into his lunch, which was a salad with rice and raw tuna and a dressing he’d made of soy sauce and sesame seeds. Poké salad, he’d told me, and I’d looked it up later online.
I made my way slowly through his book, which was funny in places and slow in others, with long, twisting sentences and sex scenes that were funny and gross at the same time, and I started talking more with Gabe during our breaks. He told me he’d worked at Target ever since he was sixteen. He told me about college, how he planned on taking six years to graduate, then going for a master’s degree in hospitality and maybe, someday, opening a restaurant of his own. I told him about my boys, about Frank Junior in particular, how he was smart but a handful, and how his teacher had said, at the parent-teacher conference, that he was an exhausting child. “She wants us to ask his doctor about medication before he starts kindergarten,” I said. Gabe’s narrow face darkened.
“Don’t do that,” he told me, raking his fingers through his thick hair, then hitching up his pants. He was so skinny I wasn’t quite sure how his jeans managed to stay up at all, and his Target pinny, the one he’d had since he was in high school, was starting to come unraveled. Threads hung all along its seams. I wondered if anyone in his house sewed, if he had a mother or sister who could fix it for him.
“Why not?” I’d already decided on my own that I didn’t want Frank Junior taking pills. I’d read some articles online, on websites where mothers debated the pros and cons, and I thought that there was nothing wrong with my son except that he was a little boy with a lot of energy who hadn’t learned that he didn’t need to say, or shout, every thought that came into his head — but I wanted to hear Gabe’s opinion.
Gabe rocked back on the heels of his high-tops and gave me a speech about the dangers of doping little kids, how the purpose of the American educational system wasn’t learning but conformity.
“What do you mean?”
He paused, flipping his hair around. “Well, ‘conformity’ is making everyone act and think like everyone else.”
I nodded, even though I knew what the word meant. He went on, talking about how the drugs were designed to make it easier for teachers, not better for the children. Then he stopped, midsentence, looking embarrassed. “But what do I know?” he asked. “Like I’ve got kids.”
“No,” I told him. “This is good.” I imagined what he must have looked like when he was Frank Junior’s age. Probably his mother had kept his hair cut short, but I suspected that he’d dressed about the same way he did now, in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt, only without the Target pinny on top.
Gabe had been surprised to learn that I was only twenty-two. “I thought you were older,” he said, then quickly added, “Not that you look old.”
“Don’t worry,” I told him. The truth was I felt older than my years, like I’d been a wife and a mother forever.
Most days I drove to work, but one night Frank dropped me off, keeping the car so he could take the boys to the free concert downtown that night. At the end of my shift I went outside to wait for the bus, and Ga
be, driving by in his car, spotted me.
“You need a ride?”
“Oh, no. I’m going to take the bus.”
“I’ll wait with you.”
He parked the car and jogged through the lot, back to me.
“You don’t have to do this. I’m fine.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “I could use the fresh air.” We looked at each other, both of us knowing that the air in the parking lot wasn’t particularly fresh. It had been in the nineties for three days straight. The bus stop smelled like baking tar and car exhaust, and the cigarettes the workers at Target and Marshalls and the Pancake Barn around the corner would sneak out the back doors to smoke. A humid breeze lifted my hair off my neck. Thunder rumbled in the distance; heat lightning crackled in the sky. I hoped it wouldn’t rain — the last time there was a storm, Frank and I had woken up to puddles in the basement and blistered paint on the ceilings, and I’d spent all morning running around the house with empty plastic containers, putting them under the leaks so the floors wouldn’t be ruined, too.
“Did you ever think about going to college?” Gabe asked.
I shook my head, glad that he couldn’t see me blushing in the dark. It was like asking “Did you ever think about going to the moon?” I hadn’t been a great student, and, by the time high school was over, I’d been so in love that the only thing I’d wanted to be was Frank’s wife. That was what the women I knew did — they got married and got jobs you didn’t need a degree to have, and they worked in between children, or when their husbands couldn’t, or didn’t. The only reason my sister had been any different was that she’d been too fat and too unpleasant for any boy to want her.
“You should think about it,” Gabe said. “You’re smart. And there’s online classes.”
This was something I’d considered. I couldn’t imagine going to college: getting dressed, driving my car to the city, sitting in a lecture hall with all those young girls and boys — but I could do things online. I did things online already: shopping, reading the news and gossip websites, playing games on Facebook, downloading coupons, and, lately, looking things up, articles Gabe had mentioned or reviews of the books he’d given me or words he’d used that I didn’t know. He’d always tell me a definition, but it embarrassed him, so I’d started to just pretend that I knew what all his big words meant, and write them down so I could look them up later: Modified. Discordant. Ethereal.
“How do you take a class online?” I asked, and he started to tell me. He had a book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in one hand and was gesturing with the other, his face excited beneath the glow of the streetlamp. He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, a receipt from the soda and three slices of pizza he’d bought at the snack bar for lunch, and was writing down the address of Temple’s website. That was when Frank pulled up to the curb. His mother had stopped by after Bible study, and he’d gotten her to stay with the kids so he could come take me home.
I don’t know what he saw, or what he thought he saw. Gabe and I weren’t doing anything but talking, me in old jeans and sneakers and a no-color cotton top with my pinny balled up in my purse, not touching at all. . but I could tell from the way Frank’s jaw bunched up that he must have imagined seeing something.
He didn’t say a word after I climbed into the passenger’s seat, but his hands were tight on the wheel and his back was perfectly straight, not even touching the seat. I remembered after the first time we’d had sex, lying with my head against his chest, breathing in the smell of his skin, feeling completely content. He’d looked at me from under his long lashes, and I thought he’d tell me that he loved me. Instead, he’d said, in a casual, almost neutral voice, “You weren’t a virgin.”
I’d set one hand on his chest and pushed myself up. “What?” I asked him. “Why do you ask? Is it. . do you think that’s bad?” He’d waited a moment before answering, “It is what it is.” That was all the discussion we’d ever had on the matter, but I thought I could hear what he hadn’t said: that I’d had other boys while he’d been a virgin; that I’d been the one who’d unzipped his pants and I’d been the one with the condoms.
That night, with the Target parking lot getting smaller in the truck’s rearview mirror and Frank’s eyes fixed on the road, I knew better than to try to explain myself. Anything I said would only make me sound guilty, and I had nothing to be guilty about. I pressed my lips together, biting back the angry words I imagined: Yes! Yes! It’s exactly what you think! Probably what you’ve been thinking all along!
Frank never said a word about it, not on the ride home, not that night or after. At work the next day, Gabe was friendly, like always, but I was careful not to borrow any more of his books or taste any more of his food, and to make sure that the next time I went to the bus stop, I went alone. I didn’t know whether he’d meant anything more than just friendliness, whether he liked me that way. It hardly seemed possible. He was a college boy, soon to be a graduate student, and I was married and a mother of two. In my jeans and work sneakers, with my hair in a careless ponytail, with not a lick of makeup on my face, heavier than I wanted to be after the babies and years of nibbling chicken nuggets and goldfish crackers off Frank Junior’s plate, I was hardly what the kids called a MILF. But maybe, I thought, remembering the way his face came alive when he was talking about a book he liked, the way his eyes lit up and his hands moved in the air. Maybe Gabe really did think of me that way. Maybe, in another world, we could have been boyfriend and girlfriend.
I got my paycheck on Tuesday, five days after Frank had seen Gabe and I waiting together at the bus stop. That night Frank said, “I think we’ll be okay for the rest of the summer.” I told him that that would be fine, and gave my notice over the phone the next morning. “We’re sorry to lose you,” my supervisor said, and sounded like she meant it. . and that was that. Why go looking for trouble, with a little boy and a new baby at home, and a husband who loved me?
I heard the music that told me Sesame Street was ending, and I turned away from my computer, looking at Spencer, still cross-legged on the floor, one hand lifting pretzels into his crumb-ringed mouth, his eyes wide, gazing at the screen. The couch cushions were shiny in their centers, the curtains dingy in the sunlight, the screen of the TV set streaked with fingerprints, even though I’d Windexed it the night before. Please, God, I thought. Please, let some woman pick me. Then I got up, lifted my little boy in my arms, and carried him to the kitchen, where he could play with the pots and pans while I cleaned, and dreamed.
BETTINA
When I thought of the words private investigator, a certain image came to mind — a rumpled, world-weary man in a suit and a fedora, feet on a scarred wooden desk, in an office wreathed in cigarette smoke. I pictured a name in gold leaf on a frosted-glass door, a heavy glass ashtray, a man who’d identify women—dames—exclusively by their hair color: The brunette. The redhead. The blonde.
My detective was different. I’d found her by Googling Manhattan private detectives who specialized in what they called “marital matters,” reading online reviews. It made me feel like I was taking a baby step out of my dutiful life — the tasteful, classic clothes, the art history degree, the job as a junior appraiser at Kohler’s, an auction house that was less well known (and, its loyalists boasted, even more exclusive) than Christie’s or Sotheby’s. My life had been long on ease and comfort, filled with fancy vacations, many of them spent at Caribbean resorts while my father paced the beach, barking into his cell phone and looking for the best reception.
When my appointment finally arrived, I was, perhaps, more excited than I should have been, even though the private investigator’s office was on the thirtieth floor of a featureless highrise in midtown, which put my dreams of gold leaf and pebbled glass to rest. The office had a small NO SMOKING plaque by the front door and just two last names — KLEIN and SEGAL, in sans serif capital letters — beside it. The waiting room could have belonged to any dentist or doctor or therapist, with pale-brow
n couches and beige carpet, a glass-and-iron coffee table stacked with magazines—Newsweek and Time, along with the week’s tabloids — and a water cooler that let out the occasional burble in the corner. I gave the receptionist my name, sat down on the couch, my legs, in sheer hose, crossed at the ankle, and pinched the pleats of my skirt between my thumb and forefinger, making sure each one was smooth.
Church lady! a guy in college had called me one night when I’d allowed my roommates to coax me out of the room and to a party in a neighboring dorm. It was true that I dressed far more conservatively than most of my classmates: after a lifetime in the kilts and knee socks of my Upper East Side all-girls’ school, I’d never felt like myself in pants. Besides, I had narrow shoulders and tended to carry my weight in my hips and thighs, so jeans gave me the appearance of a bowling pin. . and after seeing my mother traipsing around in belly-baring yoga pants and lowwaisted double-dyed skinny jeans, I’d only wanted to cling to my skirts even more tightly. The summer before my senior year of high school, when I’d been choosing colleges, I’d actually checked to see if there was such a thing as a non-military school that had uniforms. If I could have found such a place, I would have happily attended.
“It’ll be fun!” my roommate, Vanessa, had told me, slipping into her own tight low-riding jeans and the inevitable silk tank top, with a down coat on top, because it was January and freezing. I let her drag me along, in my skirt and tights, my sweater set and my loafers, even though I truly didn’t see the point of parties. If I wanted to be hot and uncomfortable in the presence of drunk people yelling at one another, it would be easy enough to arrange those conditions, but why would I ever want to?
Then Came You Page 7