Still Life with Husband

by Lauren Fox

  The pumpkin pie makes no sense. The pumpkin pie is like a drag queen at a charity ball, high heels at a bowling alley. There is no reason for me to be assembling this pie from scratch: my mother is purchasing absolutely everything for Thanksgiving dinner fully prepared and loaded with preservatives from her local grocery store, including the turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, corn bread, two kinds of sweet potatoes, and two pies: one apple and one pumpkin. What I am doing is redundant and excessive, and, although the store-bought turkey will be tasteless and dry and the yams will be cloyingly sweet, the pies, I know from experience, will actually be quite tasty. This pumpkin pie is a waste of my time, which is exactly why I’m making it.

  I came here, to my parents’ house, last week. I left Sugar’s Shoes and drove halfway to Madison just to clear my mind. I sped down I-94. My arms and legs felt like blocks of ice, but inside I felt hot, as if I were metabolizing my own organs. The fetus was a dream I couldn’t quite remember, nudging and bumping at the corners of my brain. I missed David: the thought of him was a phantom limb, a ruthless ache where something important had once been. And I missed Kevin. I missed Kevin with actual, physical impact; I missed him with a sour, acid mix of guilt and canyonsized loss. David and Kevin swirled around in my head, and after a while, I could no longer outline the borders of my pain. When I almost got sideswiped by a merging truck, I realized that driving wasn’t going to accomplish anything good. So I turned around and headed here.

  Heather met me at the door. The lights blazed in the hallway, and she looked flushed and warm. The house I grew up in seemed to me a bright sanctuary, and I exhaled, for what felt like the first time all day. “Did we have plans?” Heather asked sleepily, scratching her head and squinting at me.

  “Did you just get up?” I asked her. It was almost 7:00 p.m.

  “You know how Mom and Dad keep the house so warm,” she said. “I fall asleep like nine times a day.” She smiled and rubbed her eyes.

  All of a sudden I felt hungry and not-hungry at the same time. “We didn’t have plans,” I said, gently moving her aside and setting my overnight bag on the floor. “Do you think Babs and Len would mind if I stayed here for a while?” I was still numb and not ready to explain things. I didn’t know what I was going to say.

  Heather grabbed my elbow. “Did you and Kevin have a fight?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “Yeah. We did.”

  “What happened?” She practically bared her teeth at me, she was so eager to gobble up this tasty morsel.

  I thought fast. “You know how he’s always cleaning up after me, and how I’m always begging him not to, in case he throws away something important?” Heather nodded. “Well, he threw away my journal.”

  She yelped sympathetically and clapped her hand over her mouth. “Your diary?” she exclaimed, from behind her hand. We were still standing in the blindingly bright entryway.

  “Yep.”

  “Where is it? Did you get it out of the garbage can? Was it already in the dumpster?”

  “Worse,” I said sadly. “The garbage had already been collected.”

  “So you left!” She was relishing this. I felt guilty, making Kevin the bad guy. But the truth would out.

  “I left.” I slipped my coat off and hung it on the hall closet doorknob. We went and found my parents; Len was watching TV in the den, and Barbara was in the living room poring over the current issue of Home Decor and casting ruthless, appraising glances at her furniture. When I told them this concocted story, they acted appropriately sympathetic and concerned. My mom hugged me and asked if I wanted her to talk to Kevin (“Oh, God, no!” I barked, surprising us both), and my dad went out and got doughnuts. They both reassured me, told me that marriages survived such things, that I would cool off and forgive Kevin and be back home tomorrow or the next day. “Stay here as long as you need to,” Barbara said, “but don’t let it go too long. Kevin loves you. He made a mistake.” He made a mistake! Kevin’s only mistake was to love me, to trust me. Barbara’s words were like hands closing around my neck. I was a fraud for allowing my family to believe my lie and, what’s more, letting them dote on me because of it, but I had decided that Thanksgiving was my deadline for telling everyone what had really happened, and so I accepted their ministrations; I let their love prop me up. Heather just stuck close to me, the way she used to when we were little. Her hands fluttered near me, trying to help. She watched as I unpacked my bag and she successfully restrained herself from commenting on the bizarre contents of my suitcase. She even followed me into the bathroom and stood next to me at the sink as I washed my face. She rested her head on my shoulder and fiddled with my hair. It felt good to stare at our similar reflections in the mirror; it felt reassuring. We all played Monopoly at the kitchen table that night, the first time the four of us had sat together and played a game in fifteen years. The light above the table cast a bright glow over my family. They let me win.

  “Mom,” I say now, wiping flour on my jeans. “Do you have any Crisco? Does anybody even buy Crisco anymore?”

  Barbara is sitting at the kitchen table while I make this pie, sizing up me and her cupboards with equal concern. It’s been almost a week, and I haven’t gone back to Kevin, haven’t even spoken to Kevin, which of course my parents don’t understand since I haven’t told them the truth; they think I’m being a drama queen, and as much as they’re trying to stay sympathetic, their impatience is starting to show. But today is Thanksgiving. “I still don’t understand why you’re making the crust from scratch,” Barbara says, as if I’ve just informed her that I will no longer be bathing. “Also, I believe I’ve changed my mind about the cabinets. I no longer think that light wood will coordinate with my granite countertops.” She clicks her tongue. “I’m afraid that combination would be gauche.”

  Heather hands me a tub of Crisco that looks like it was purchased in 1977, and may have been. She’s trying to help me—I was the manager of a bakery, she insisted, and I decided not to remind her that she was fired. She keeps bumping into me.

  There will be seven of us tonight, but we’re setting the table for eight: Rolf Larsen is driving in from Minneapolis this evening, Meg and Steve are coming over, and my parents, Heather, and I make seven, but everybody still thinks Kevin will show up, too. They’ve been talking about it so much, I’m beginning to believe them.

  “Okay, sous-chef. Don’t use your grubby hands to mix this.” I hand the bowl to Heather. “It says here that the heat from your hands will melt the shortening, causing the crust to come out heavy, not light and flaky.” As I read these instructions, I realize how very much I want this crust to be light and flaky. “I mean it,” I say, as I see Heather removing her engagement ring.

  “Batter matters,” Heather says, then smiles goofily and jams a wooden spoon into the mixture.

  “Crust is a must!” I say, opening the cupboard.

  “Just buy the pie!” my mother pipes up. She sighs dramatically, then stands. “Dears,” she announces. She places her magazine carefully on top of a pile of other decorating magazines that crowd the countertop, which doesn’t matter since this countertop is so rarely used for cooking. “I’m going to go pick up our dinner.” She bustles around, looking for her coat and purse. “It’s just lovely to have you both here.” She kisses Heather on the top of her curly head, then me.

  I pull the ginger and cinnamon from my mom’s spice rack, sugar and vanilla and evaporated milk from the pantry. I have to call Meg this afternoon, before she and Steve come over. We’ve spoken a few times since I left her house last week. I’ve tried to follow her lead about the miscarriage: I always ask her how she’s doing, but most of the time she doesn’t want to talk about it, so I blather on about other things. She’s been solicitous to me, curious about what I’m going to do next, and helpful but not pushy with her advice. She’s offered to accompany me on my apartment search, which I think is my next step. But Meg’s sadness, this time around, is slowing her down, pulling her under. Once in a while, in t
he middle of a conversation, she just drifts away. “Sorry,” she murmurs after a minute or two. “What were you saying?” Sometimes she starts crying, but she says she doesn’t want to hang up, so I wait, quietly, listening to her sob. I haven’t told her that I’m pregnant. I need to, I’ve tried to, but the thought of how she’ll feel when she hears the words stops me in my tracks. But I have to tell Meg before I announce it to my family. (Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! I’m pregnant and unsure just exactly who the father is.) Tonight’s the night: we’ll all be together, celebrating, and hopefully a little bit drunk, and maybe, just maybe, on this glad evening, they’ll find it in their hearts to be happy for me. In any case, Meg needs to be forewarned.

  “Now what?” Heather asks.

  “I know,” I say, nodding. Now what?

  “Huh?” Heather pushes the mixing bowl toward me. “It’s all mixed. What do you want me to do now?”

  “Oh. Here.” I dump three tablespoons of ice water into the dough. “Mix it with a fork and then mush it into a ball and then flatten it. Can you do that?”

  Heather scowls at me. “I don’t know. I’ve never used a fork before.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “Then we’ll cover it and stick it in the refrigerator.” I hand her the plastic wrap. “You know what? I’m going to leave the piecrust in your capable care. I have to go make a call.” I leave Heather in the kitchen, happily balling up a mound of dough.

  I close the door to my old room, sit down on the edge of the bed, and dial Meg’s number. She answers after seven rings, just as I’m about to hang up. “Hello?” She sounds like she’s underwater.

  “It’s me.”

  “Hi, me.”

  “What’re you doing?” I ask.

  “Watching…um…a tennis match.” Meg hates sports.

  “Where’s Steve?”

  “He’s actually out buying flowers for your mother.”

  “You know my mother’s not cooking anything, right?”

  “Still, she’s the hostess.”

  “I’m making a pumpkin pie,” I say. “Those flowers should be for me.”

  “You can have one of the daisies,” Meg says. She sounds a little bit perkier. “We’ll pull one out of the bouquet especially for you. Or maybe a lily.” She knows I don’t like lilies.

  “I’m making it from scratch,” I say. “Isn’t that weird?”

  “Yeah, Betty Crocker.” Meg agrees. “Didn’t you fail seventh-grade home ec?”

  “I got a C. And it, like, so totally wasn’t my fault. That sewing machine had a mind of its own! Anyway, my mom is appalled that I’m not just going to the bakery counter at the grocery store and picking up a nice pie,” I say.

  “Sure, and we’d all be just as happy with frozen turkey dinners tonight.” Meg has been a guest at my parents’ house many times; she’s been served everything from take-out Chinese to Alfredo’s pizza to single-serving TV dinners. Meg knows that a frozen entrée for Thanksgiving is not entirely beyond the pale.

  “Wouldn’t that be funny?” I say. “Lean Cuisine turkey and mashed potatoes? Only three hundred calories.”

  “I’ll tell Steve to buy a bouquet of plastic flowers instead.”

  “They do last longer.”

  Meg laughs. “Yeah.”

  My leg has begun to shake; I steady it with the hand that’s not clutching the phone. I could just end the conversation here. I could make a few more frozen dinner jokes and then say, “Gotta get back to my pie now! There’s pumpkin filling to be made!” I dig my bare toes into the purple pile of the carpeting. “So, Megabyte, I have to tell you something,” I say finally. Then I’m silent, because the words absolutely will not come.

  “Okay,” Meg says, and I still don’t say anything, and it’s starting to feel cruel, like I’m playing a trick on her, making her wait for this. I straighten my back and uncurl my toes.

  “I’m pregnant,” I say finally. There is a certain incongruity about making this announcement in my cotton-candy-colored childhood room. My fingers dance on the polka dots of my old bedspread. The other end of the line is quiet. I can hear the pop of a tennis ball hitting a racket and the polite, muffled cheering of the crowd. “Meg?” Still nothing.

  Meg’s voice, when she finally speaks, is tiny and constricted, as if her larynx has squeezed shut. “You’re what?” I hear a deep, ragged breath, and the TV goes silent.

  “Pregnant. I found out last week. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  For a long time, Meg is quiet. I think briefly that she’s hung up, but I know, whatever her response, it won’t be that. So I wait. Will she tell me that she no longer wants to come over for dinner? That she no longer wants to have anything to do with me? Will she cry?

  “Is this…good news?” she asks faintly.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Another pause. “It is good news,” she says. “Trust me, it is.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s okay, Emily,” Meg says. I don’t know what she means: it’s okay that I’m suddenly single and pregnant and somehow this will all work out, or it’s okay that she’s just had her second miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy and I’ve just found out that I’m carelessly, haphazardly, unjustly knocked up? “Um,” she continues, in a more recognizable facsimile of her own voice, “you know, I hate to ask this, but who’s…”

  “I don’t know!” I say too loudly, cutting her off.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Meg says. “Oh, Emily.” She inhales with a gasp, and I realize with a start that she’s laughing. “Did you skip your adolescent rebellion or what?”

  “I know.” I wiggle my toes in the soft carpeting. “I should have smoked a lot of pot when I was sixteen instead.”

  “Oh! Oh, boy!” she yelps, then catches her breath audibly and descends into more laughter, but somehow, from Meg, this hooting is not unsympathetic.

  “Hey,” I say, relieved. “Hey, now. It’s not nice to make fun of someone else’s catastrophically bad judgment.”

  “Em,” she says after another minute, suddenly serious. “I promise you, you’ll survive this. And you know, I’m always, always here for you.”

  The choices I make about men may be apocalyptic, but my taste in best friends is impeccable.

  Late in the afternoon, during the post-preparation, pre-celebration lull, the doorbell rings. It’s too early to be any of our guests, my mom is napping, and Heather and my dad are playing gin rummy in the den. “Did somebody order a pizza?” I holler, and then pad, still barefoot, to the front door. I’ve been sitting in my bedroom as the afternoon has begun to sink into early evening, trying to figure out a way to tell Kevin and David that I’m pregnant. And although I’ve been having imaginary conversations with him for the past two hours, I’m unprepared for the thin, familiar figure standing in the late-autumn shadows of my parents’ front porch.

  “Hi,” Kevin says.

  “Hey!” I say happily, in the moment before I remember that I’ve destroyed our marriage and that he hates me. He’s wearing the dark blue coat that his parents sent him for his birthday last year. I want to hug him. A rush of cold air blows in through the open door. “Will you come in?” I ask.

  “Just for a second,” he says evenly. He waits for me to take a few steps back into the hallway, careful to leave plenty of space between us.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” It pops out of my mouth, and I’m immediately sorry, afraid of alienating him, of scaring him away, as if he were an injured bunny who’s shown up at the door. “Oh, I didn’t mean,” I say, flustered. “I mean—”

  “It’s fine,” he says. His voice is neutral, almost—but not quite—friendly, definitely not laced with the icy bitterness I would have expected. “I’m on my way to Doug and Wendy’s.” I briefly consider what the Pretzels must be saying about me, and I wonder whether they’ve invited any single women to their Thanksgiving dinner. This is the new psychological scenery of my post-affair life. Kevin takes a deep breath and glances past me at the expanse of my parent
s’ front hallway. “I wanted to tell you something.” It’s been a week since we’ve seen each other, a week since we’ve spoken. I have the urge to pull him into the living room for a game of gin with Heather and my dad, to drag him into my bedroom, sit him down, and regale him with stories of the last week spent with my family. I feel like my best friend has returned to me after a summer away.

  “Okay,” I say, tucking my hands behind my back to keep from reaching out to Kevin.

  “I want to give up the lease on the apartment,” he says, and I am reminded of the time Kevin and I were walking near his parents’ house and I stumbled across an electrical fence and, without thinking, touched it. I should have known better, then, but I didn’t, and the painful shock of it made me leap back with a yelp.

  I take a wobbly, involuntary step to the side now, steady myself against the wall. “Okay,” I say again, trying to keep my voice under control, but it comes out shaky. Of course we should get rid of the apartment.

  “I can’t live there, you understand.”

  “I do,” I say, and then I look down, because one of the phrases you should not say to your husband when you’ve cheated on him and he’s telling you that he’s going to make a new life for himself is “I do.” “I get it,” I say to the tiled floor.

  “I’m going to stay with Doug and Wendy for a while,” he continues.

  “And then?” I lift my head to meet Kevin’s eyes. They ought to be cold, piercing; by all rights, he should be looking at me with blunt rage or grim anger, but he’s not; he’s just looking at me, openly, intently. He stretches his hand out and touches my face, and I understand, as his cool fingertips brush my cheek, that this gesture is the most generous gift anybody has ever given me.

  “And then I’ll keep looking for a house,” he says, as if there could be no other answer. He drops his hand back to his side and shrugs. “I’m thinking, actually, that I might see what’s available in the city. Expand my options.”