by Miriam Cohen
Henry pretended to misunderstand on her behalf. “The end of the semester is always a thing to behold. You should hear the horror stories.”
Cynthia Lawless squinted, as though there were sun, seeping impossibly into the scaffolding.
“My students are ready for the summer,” Karin said. She couldn’t think of anything else, so she added, “The girls’ skirts are very short.”
And this, of course, was the worst thing she might have said, because it clearly pleased Cynthia Lawless to think of young girls in very short skirts as the days lengthened and the sun’s heat became oppressive. It might have turned Henry on, for all Karin knew. There was quite a bit, it seemed, she didn’t know.
“I have a great deal of respect for you for teaching,” said Cynthia Lawless. “It’s a noble profession. One of the oldest.”
“You’re thinking of prostitutes,” Karin said.
Henry put his hand on her shoulder. The hand felt the same as it always had. But the body’s memory wasn’t one to be trusted.
“That’s why they call her Doctor,” he said.
“Stat,” said Cynthia Lawless. It was supposed to be a joke, Karin could tell. It was, actually, Henry’s joke. He would say, Dr. Miller, we need a doctor of philosophy, stat, and she would say, Get a life, and he would say, You’re looking at it. It appeared he had told this joke, which was mostly at her expense, to Cynthia Lawless.
Henry didn’t catch her eye. He just stood there, smiling, as if Cynthia Lawless hadn’t revealed something private. Karin could imagine them in bed, Henry saying to Cynthia Lawless, who was smoking a slightly-smashed cigarette, “My wife and I have this joke.” And Cynthia listening. Smoking her cigarette and listening, blowing smoke out her nostrils like a damaged little dragon.
“What a funny joke,” Karin said. She looked at Henry, who wouldn’t catch her eye.
Karin gave the children their baths, the three together in the tub she really should take a picture, next time—and while she did, she composed an email to Cynthia Lawless’ husband in her mind. Dear Frank, she’d write. Our spouses, it seems, are fucking. But she didn’t have proof they were fucking, actually. So: our spouses are kissing. Kissing! It sounded ridiculous, gossip of the sort her high school students might savor and pass along, lighting up their devices, their—what would it be?—their platforms with the news. High drama indeed. But here she was, very much an adult, suds up to her elbows, arguing with, begging, her child. Please let me pour water over your head. It’s not that bad. I promise. You can’t go on forever with shampoo in your hair—you realize this, don’t you? Her son, the oldest, who should be more mature, able to handle, for god’s sake, a bath, was crying. “I don’t care,” he said. “The shampoo can stay.” He had the longest lashes, and tears glinted, caught among them. Her daughter, slick and slippery beside him, shouted, “I can’t hear you! My ears are underwater! I can’t hear!” Shouting and giggling, kicking her feet, just missing the proud snail of her brother’s penis. And the baby crying now.
Karin sent the email. I saw them kissing, she wrote. I thought you might like to know.
He wrote back almost immediately: Thanks. I’ll be talking to Cynthia tonight. Hope things work out okay for you.
That was it. As if it were a minor inconvenience. As if he were sorry, but not for himself.
She wrote back: Do you think you and I could maybe meet to discuss? NP, he replied, like a kid. No problem.
They met at a diner where Frank said he liked to write. The diner served the best French fries, he told her. He also warned her that he took his French fries the European way, which entailed mayonnaise.
She tried to smile.
“It sucks, the situation,” he said.
She agreed. But she seemed to have run out of steam. It happened all at once: poof. “We have three kids,” she said. “You can’t divorce kids,” said Frank.
Divorce hadn’t even occurred to her. But now here it was, some grand ship tied to a dock, waiting for her to board. “Have you ever thought about divorce?” she said.
“I think she has the right to explore,” Frank said. “I have a girlfriend myself.”
Frank’s girlfriend was named Gina, he told Karin. She was one of his students at the college where he taught night classes.
“Does Cynthia know?” she asked.
He ran a French fry through a blob of mayonnaise.
“It’s not something that’s come up,” he said.
“You’ll tell her?” Karin had tried for casual, but there it was, shrill as a whistle.
He asked her if she was familiar with Nabokov. “Humbert Humbert. Would you just write him off as a pedophile?”
He had won an argument, but she wasn’t sure which one.
She kept her face empty. “How young is your Gina?”
“She’s thirty-two.” He waved his hands. “I meant just as a topic change.”
“I wouldn’t want him for a babysitter,” she said. And then, ruining it even more: “For my children, I mean.”
“That’s tonight’s lecture,” he said. “If they come to school at night, you’ve got to make it worth it.”
“But will you tell her?” Karin felt like she was begging.
“Gina?”
“Cynthia. You know I meant Cynthia.”
He laughed. He told her he did know. And, yes, sure, he’d tell her. If it came up, he’d tell her. She had as much of a right as anyone to know, after all.
Outside the diner, she smoked the cigarette he offered. She was getting away from herself, and it was kind of nice. She left lipstick on the cigarette like a filthy whore. She blew out smoke like a true, furious dragon at the height of its powers, scaled wings beating wide enough to block the horizon.
She tried to forget about it at school. All of it: her husband, Cynthia, Cynthia’s husband, Gina. But it proved difficult. There had been a recent outbreak of tragedies in the school, and those were where her mind was meant to be. But the tragedies—cancer and cancer—seemed frivolous, overly dramatic. It felt—though she knew, of course, it wasn’t—like getting bent out of shape about student council elections.
Because it felt a lot like a student campaign. The student council had printed up t-shirts for the girl with leukemia in tenth grade: Go Gail! in pink and yellow. And now there were purple armbands for the boy, a Senior. He had brain cancer. He was dying. No one would make t-shirts for a dying boy. How awkward those shirts would be, rumpled at the bottoms of drawers, to be found and pressed to faces in the spring, or maybe the summer, if the boy were very lucky. (Lucky: this was how he was spoken of in the teacher’s lounge, in faculty meetings in the rush for cookies and coffee before the head of school began to drone on about what ought to be done in the event of a school shooting, or a student’s cheating. The boy could be—and was, really, already—lucky. He had lived to get into college. He wouldn’t have to lose his hair. It wasn’t like he was a young child. It wasn’t like he was married, or had a young child. All these things.)
So, armbands, which could be easily thrown away.
Of course it was awful. Out loud, it was awful. But it didn’t feel quite real. Not nearly as real, certainly, as her life. Her life. How long it had been since she’d felt herself to have one. But here it was, undeniably: she was a spouse being cheated on. And this was awful (Not as awful as cancer!), but it was also sordid. It was hers. She would hold on to the facts of it, turn them over and over in her mind until she found the sharpest edge, and she would use that edge to cut off her husband’s dick. And he would look at her, dick-less, and with wonder. I didn’t know what you could do, he would say.
Karin didn’t often go to book launches, but she made an exception for Cynthia’s. She was a big supporter of Cynthia’s, she explained to Henry.
“Great,” he said, looking her right in the eyes, a man with nothing to hide.
His lying embarrassed her. She had underestimated him. It was as if he’d suddenly revealed himself to be—after all this time of cl
umsiness, of tripping over shoelaces and non-existent cracks in the sidewalk—a trapeze artist.
“It’ll be like a date night,” Karin said.
“Of course, I’ll be working,” said Henry. “It’s part of the job.”
Henry put on his shoes. She’d bought him these shoes as a gift, sort of. He had picked them out. She’d had them wrapped. She paid from their joint checking account.
“Of course,” she said.
The book launch took place in Cynthia’s parents’ house, which was probably better described as an estate. There were actual waiters in bowties passing around platters of hors d’oeuvres that Cynthia kept telling everyone to eat. For her part, Cynthia was carrying around a glass of water, from which she occasionally, delicately, sipped.
She put a bony hand on Karin’s shoulder. “I imagine still breastfeeding—the baby is how old?—must make you hungry. Hold out your hand.”
Karin didn’t know what else to do, so she did. Cynthia placed a miniature quiche in the very center of Karin’s palm, closed Karin’s fingers around it. “There you go,” she said. “There are plenty more. Beauty standards these days are unrealistic.”
And then she turned, gliding on to her next victim.
Karin knew she’d just failed some kind of test. But she figured she might as well eat the mini quiche, which was quickly oiling her fingertips. She ate it in one bite and came a little close to choking.
The reading took place in a room Cynthia called “the study.” Karin would have called it “my whole goddam apartment.” Chairs were arranged in rows, as in a theater, with a podium set up in the center. There were even steps leading up to it.
“I’ve got to sit next to Cynthia,” Henry explained. “Work, you know.”
Yes, she told him, she did know. She found Frank and sat next to him. “Where’s Gina?” she said.
He laughed, patted her on the top of the head as if to tell her what a good dog she was being. “That’s not something let’s talk about.”
She felt as though the quiche actually had gone down the wrong way, after all, and was now stuck some place it shouldn’t have been. “She doesn’t know?”
“All right,” said Frank. “I think this conversation is done.” He stood and moved to the back row.
She felt like crying. Where were all the signs she kept missing? Where were all the betweens she was supposed to be reading? It was so much less evolved, so much more mundane than she’d imagined. Of course Frank would prefer, for as long as possible—and then, even a little longer than that—to pretend. Of course there would never be a conversation with Cynthia in which Gina, if there even was a Gina, would come up.
Cynthia stepped up to the podium. “Bad Hair,” she began, in a breathy, little girl voice. “I’m going to read from a passage in the middle of the book.” She licked the tip of her finger and turned some pages. The dry rustle was the only sound in the room. Henry cracked a knuckle, an awful habit Karin really should talk to him about.
“Karin hated her hair,” Cynthia read.
(After the reading, Cynthia would explain, during the hasty Q&A begun by Henry, that Karin of the bad hair was actually a modernized, but creatively veiled Anna Karenina. Karin as in Karenina. It was bullshit, of course, but Karin would find herself impressed with Cynthia’s attempt at discretion.)
“Her hair was frizzy and flat.” Cynthia stopped, used two fingers to push her too-large glasses higher up on her nose. “This included her pubic hair. She was married to a man who didn’t see her.”
Cynthia read until the new, better lover was introduced, and then she stopped, bit her lip. Twirled a strand of hair around her finger. She stood very still inside her tent of a baby-doll dress. She stood there until Henry started clapping and everyone else took the cue. Then she kept standing, even after the applause had stopped, long enough for it to pick up again, this time halfheartedly, grudgingly.
And Karin found herself, sort of, almost, understanding why taking care of Cynthia, why fucking Cynthia, might be appealing. How nice to tell someone who really needed to hear it, I like you! You’re great! I think you’re special!
She didn’t confront him—there were the children. There was her new understanding. There was teaching. Or, rather, there was the tenth grade classroom where Karin was at that moment not teaching, because Gail (of “Go Gail!” fame), her terrible wig curled into ringlets, was seated at Karin’s desk. A heap of armbands for the cancer boy were spread out in front of her.
“These things really actually matter,” Gail explained, gesturing at the armband on her own thin wrist. “They show our support, which in the end does make a difference.”
They cost ten dollars apiece, and it was unclear to Karin where, exactly, the money was going. She really hated to think it, but her strong suspicion was that it was being used to fund even more armbands.
The other students made wincing faces to show they understood and cared.
Sally O’Malley, beloved in the teacher’s lounge for her rhyming first and last names and voice like helium, waved a twenty in the air. “Can I have two more?”
Karin froze for a moment. “Two more”: she’d heard “tumor.”
Her star student, Alex, raised his hand. Even though it seemed Gail had successfully hijacked the class (who could reprimand a recent cancer patient?) Alex had his notebook open already, his highlighter ready, pen in hand, at attention.
“When Ophelia drowns with all her flowers,” he said, “maybe she’s deflowering herself.”
Sally O’Malley nodded thoughtfully. “I like tulips,” she said, and then they were all lost to Karin in a stampede of laughter and sex jokes—Tulips: two lips! That open! Sally, hiding her face between her hands, blushed delightedly at her lucky, unintended win. And then the jokes became less inspired, but no less thrilling to her students, devolving into the usual references to cherries and bananas.
Sex! Wasn’t it a gas.
Alex stayed after class. “But what do you think of that idea?” he wanted to know.
She loved it, she told him. The idea would make a truly wonderful essay.
He beamed, reminding her of her youngest son, so proud of himself now that he was beginning to walk, belly thrust forward, pattering feet unsteady, his smile dazzling. Karin realized her opportunity had arrived. The classroom had emptied out, and it was just the two of them, Alex skinny and eager, pimpled at the neck like a raw chicken, dandruff dusting his very starched collar. It might be, even, her last chance. She could reach over right now and touch that perfectly starched collar of his shirt. She could remove his glasses. She could let him have her on the desk. She could get him to rip her shirt open, buttons be damned. (Though there were her potentially-leaking breasts to consider.)
But she wasn’t going to fuck her student. She wasn’t going to be a filthy whore. It was a terrible thing to realize, that she actually was what everyone took her for: wife, mother, schoolteacher. A vanilla cookie of a person, trustworthy and safe and invisible. Something no one minded, but that no one actually wanted. A woman, betrayed, who wished she had not been.
Guns Are Safer for Children
Than Laundry Detergent
He had a gun. There was a gun in the house. A gun a gun a gun.
Yael told herself to stop it. Boaz was Tamar’s husband. Tamar was her sister. Half sister. Anyway, he could have a gun if he wanted a gun.
The gun was resting in some kind of gun holder attached to his belt. “You can hold it,” Boaz said. He was cheerful to the point almost of whistling.
“It might be better if I didn’t,” Yael said. “Who knows what I’d do with a gun.”
“Guns are safer for children than laundry detergent,” Tamar said.
“I bet,” said Yael. “Kids, right?” She had no idea of what she was saying. She just wanted to be agreeable, but the words’ meanings were slipping away from her. It was also the way she felt after too many sleeping pills.
“You look beautiful, by the way,” Yael said. “
I can’t believe there was just a baby inside you.”
“Oh, stop it,” Tamar said, but she was smiling.
Yael had come to Dallas (a Jewish community on the rise! Tamar had explained on the phone, sounding disconcertingly middle-aged) for the bris. His ritual circumcision, Yael’d had to translate for her non-Jewish friends. You know how it goes, on the baby’s eighth day of being alive, we just put him on a pillow, chop some skin off his penis and chant joyously. Everything normal in Hebrew was terrible in English. Or maybe it was that everything normal in Judaism was terrible.
But Tamar was Yael’s favorite of her half-siblings—the others mostly ignored her. When Tamar had called to invite Yael to Dallas for the bris, which coincided so nicely with the Thanksgiving long weekend, all Yael could think of saying was of course. She’d love to. Tamar’s son. Yael remembered when she used to babysit for Tamar, idly stuffing graham cracker after graham cracker into her mouth, occasionally doing homework, while Tamar lined up de-frocked baby dolls, their scribbled-on bald heads gleaming. Be good, Tamar used to tell the line of baby dolls. Listen and behave. Now Tamar had a real one. It was only too bad that the real husband she’d found to go with it had to have a gun.
“You’d better hurry it up if you want one of your own,” Boaz said.
It took her a second to realize he didn’t mean a gun.
“Boaz,” Tamar said.
“What?” he said. “We’re all friends here.”
Yael made herself laugh, a wheezy in and out that sounded like a donkey’s dying breath.
“See?” Boaz said. “Yael knows what I mean. So you’ve got to get on it. You and what’s his name, your…friend?”
Her “friend.” He just couldn’t bring himself to say “boyfriend” or, better yet, “the man you’ve lived with longer than I’ve even known my wife.” Instead, he had to behave as though the thought of a man and a woman cohabitating was so far from his frame of reference it was simply unfathomable.