by Delia Ephron
“Who?” says Lana.
“Me. Then.”
Sensing that Rita needs to leave the café right now, Lana checks the bill and lays the money on the table. Because she is worrying about Rita, it’s a moment before she notices Tracee’s terrified eyes and her fixation out the window.
On the sidewalk opposite, Tucker slouches along, head bowed. To Lana it seems that he’s ashamed for people to see him, although it could be some new cool way of walking. Yes, that’s it, she decides. Sometimes people decide to walk differently.
Tracee twists in her seat. She wants to escape but it’s a booth, Lana’s in the way, and Lana only stares as Tucker crosses right in the middle of the block, heading toward them.
“What wrong?” says Rita.
“Tucker,” says Lana.
“That police officer?”
“He’s not one anymore,” Lana reminds Tracee.
Tucker, reaching the sidewalk and sensing he’s a person of interest, looks up. The women could almost touch him were it not for a pane of glass between them.
Lana’s hand closes around Tracee’s.
Tucker summons a swagger, takes a step closer, and points his finger at them.
No one moves.
He walks in.
They suspect correctly that once inside he pauses to intimidate them again, although they don’t turn around for the face-off. They are also certain that he takes a seat right nearby, at the counter, because his voice seems quite close when he greets Cindy. “Hey, there.”
“How are you doing, sugar?”
Cindy calls everyone “sugar.” In fact, Lana, Tracee, and Rita have noticed that everyone calls everyone “sugar,” but in this case Cindy sounds genuinely concerned for his well-being. Lana assumes she knows his circumstances, the suspension. Does she know Lana’s role in it?
“I got screwed,” says Tucker. “But hey. It’s an opportunity.” Which makes him and Cindy laugh, like that’s true. “I’d like a coffee. Black.”
Lana detects a slur in his voice. Well, not precisely. What she detects is something she used to do herself—she enunciated especially clearly because she didn’t want anyone to think she’d been drinking, but the slur usually sneaked in anyway.
“Large glass of OJ too,” he says.
Lana speaks quietly in Tracee’s ear. “Stand up, take your purse, walk out, don’t squeak.”
They are in Tim’s car, on loan, driving to The Lion when Tracee finds her voice. “Did he point a gun at us?”
“It was a finger,” says Lana. “He pointed a finger.”
“It was a finger pretending to be a gun,” says Rita.
“Rita!” says Lana.
“Just saying. I’m sorry. I guess I’ve got Harry on the brain.”
32
After several days of hundred-degree-plus heat and humidity, a storm blows through, cooling the air, chasing the clouds away. Clayton opens up all the back doors. The sky is a clear, crisp cornflower blue. There’s a refreshing breeze that Rita knows Marcel is enjoying. He stands at the far end of his cage, looking out into the field, while Rita sits at a table doing Sudoku. It’s about five in the afternoon, an hour before they open.
Clayton, busying himself behind the bar, glances Rita’s way now and then. Finally he moseys over. When she looks up, he sits down. “I have to know why you don’t want me.”
The question throws her. She doesn’t want to explain, but he is looking at her intently and she can see he means to have an answer. “I’m not attracted to you,” she says.
“You’re not attracted to me? How is that possible?”
“I’m sorry, Clayton.”
He gets up and walks away.
“Clayton,” says Rita.
In a snap he’s back and in the chair, jamming it against hers. “You changed your mind?”
Before Rita can answer, Marcel roars, and the force of it blows the Sudoku book right off the table. “My goodness,” says Rita.
Clayton retrieves it. “Wasn’t that critter at the other end of the cage a second ago?”
“He can be quick,” says Rita. “And quiet. You know a lion’s paws have very soft padding.”
“I didn’t know.”
She laughs. “They don’t like competition.”
“Who?”
“Lions.”
“Oh.”
“In the pride the male lion provides protection.”
“Is that what he’s doing?”
“I couldn’t say.” She blows Marcel a kiss.
“Are you goofing on me?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Did you change your mind?”
Rita hesitates.
“What?” says Clayton.
“Remember that thing you said about how we were all dots? Just dots?”
“No.”
“That was a terrible thing to say.”
“Is that why you’re not attracted to me? Because if so, I take it back.”
“That’s not why.”
“Is there hope?”
“No.”
That night Clayton gets all his orders mixed up. He has to recruit Tim to help behind the bar, and Tim, sensing his distress, works like a demon. When Rita enters Marcel’s cage and touches his nose, an act of bravery and gentleness all mixed up together, Clayton knows his heart is broken.
Rita
Rita and Harry got engaged when she was a sophomore and he was a senior at Henderson, a small college in Virginia. They married that summer. Rita was twenty. Painfully shy, she was relieved to marry a man who seemed to have all the answers, and when he didn’t, he simply opened a Bible to find one. And there was a role waiting to be filled: the minister’s wife.
“And the Lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath.” Deuteronomy 28:13.
Harry quoted this when he proposed while they were walking home from the library one night. First he bent over—Rita thought he was picking up litter, because he often did, but instead of a candy wrapper, he plucked a daisy and presented it to her.
“And the Lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail.”
In the years after, when Rita considered everything, including that moment, she realized the meaning of that Bible quotation. “Thee” meant people as opposed to animals. People, mankind, human beings, Christians were the head and not the tail. But in Harry’s interpretation he was the head and she the tail, and therefore she should leave school and be his wife. Which to her was a relief. What would she do with a college degree? If she were a teacher, as she planned, would the students run wild? Could she even speak loud enough to be heard?
She was flattered and surprised that he wanted her.
Her mother, who had never expected her shrinking-violet only child to marry, cried when Rita phoned to say that Harry had proposed. “I hope you said yes,” said her father.
They first met when she was a freshman sitting alone at a table in the cafeteria eating some chicken and rice. She had noticed him because his voice had a penetrating quality. Not that it boomed, but it had a high timbre that pierced the din. He always sat with the same group of guys. From the Bibles next to their trays and the fact that they said grace before eating (uncommon but not rare at Henderson), she figured they were all studying for the ministry. Her table was on the route to the tray return and he stopped as he passed. He’d eaten everything except an apple. He asked if she was all right.
“Fine,” she said.
“You’re sitting alone.”
She wanted to say, “I like to,” but was too bashful.
When he left, having found out which dorm was hers and that she was an English major, he gave her his apple.
Harry wasn’t handsome, but Rita was too much of a mouse to expect or attract a good-looking man. His face was square, his chin broad as a shelf, his nose wide and a bit flat. His narrow eyes set in deep crevices had shadows around them. His smile, which did not light his face and in fact se
emed to exist separate from the rest of his features (always causing some confusion about whether he was smiling or not), revealed a set of small, identically sized teeth. One in the front was discolored gray. Harry wasn’t friendly-looking but he had presence. He walked erect, with a purposeful stride. Rita liked walking alongside him. It was as if she had a steel support pole to grab on to if necessary, although Harry disapproved of public demonstrations of affection. The support was therefore theoretical rather than real. He approved of her modesty, which was born of self-consciousness, Rita’s desire not to be noticed. “Vanity is a sin,” he told her by way of a compliment. Rita wore only a touch of pink lipstick and kept her long hair off her face with a white plastic headband.
The most romantic thing Harry did in their years together was, the first time he kissed her, he took her headband off.
They began meeting for coffee. He showed her his writings, his preliminary attempts at sermons. He expressed himself in the passive voice, and she changed his sentences to the active, teaching him how to write and speak more forcibly. (Later she kept all his sermons filed by subject and cross-filed, often misfiled by accident, by date.) They went to prayer breakfasts, which Harry sometimes led, and on Saturday nights to sing-alongs. He filled up her life. For her birthday, he gave her a record: Sister Mead singing “The Lord’s Prayer.” It had been a top-ten hit on the pop charts, and serious Christians like Harry saw the hand of God in that freak happening.
What Harry did have was dreams. He was going to be a missionary and save souls in Ghana. When he told her, his eyes were shining. Fantasies of the church he would build, the poverty he would cure, the souls he would save with the words of Lord Jesus Christ Our Savior poured out of him. Rita was captivated. She envisioned herself at his side, holding babies with their stomachs distended from malnutrition, comforting sick mothers, hiking through the jungle with monkeys hanging from branches above her. While he carried on, she listened, enraptured. She was his first worshiper. His first taste of what it would be like when he stood in the pulpit, where he would eventually confuse God’s words with his own and God with himself.
A month before they were supposed to leave, in the midst of getting shots to prevent at least seven horrible diseases, Harry was offered a position: pastor of a church in Ambrose, Virginia, population three thousand. It was permanent. Harry didn’t want to pass it up. “Closer to home but the challenges will be as great,” he told her.
Thus began a life in which wanting was a sin.
They settled in a modest house, a gift of the parish. The furniture, donated, was all secondhand: a wooden rocking chair, a denim-covered couch with buttons and plaid patches, a small round ottoman covered in brown velvet, a knotty pine table in the kitchen with six chairs. Upstairs consisted of two bedrooms, one for them and one for children, and a bathroom. A carpeted basement had shelves where Harry put his Bibles, books about Bibles and saints, and the complete works of C. S. Lewis. Rita’s poetry books and novels remained packed in a cardboard box and stored in the small coat closet.
“Three children,” Harry said. “No point in waiting.”
Dutifully she had them—three boys in three years. Three boys under the age of four and no help. It wasn’t right for the minister’s wife to hire help, he told her. No babysitters even. She nearly went mad.
Did he beat her?
No, but Rita could never confide the casual cruelties to someone as young and innocent as Tracee. She doesn’t want her to know. She’s ashamed that they hurt, and it hurts her to remember.
“Why’d you marry Rita?” a member of the congregation asked Harry, and the reason Rita knows this is that Harry told the story, holding forth to a group of parishioners at Sunday lunch several years after they were wed. “‘Why’d you marry Rita?’ the man troubled in his own marriage asked me,” said Harry. “‘It was an act of charity,’ I told him.”
Everyone laughed. It was the closest Harry came to telling a joke, and it wasn’t funny. Rita knew instantly that it was true. She finally understood. He’d married her because it made him a better Christian to marry a woman no other man wanted.
Of course, Harry wasn’t owning up to his own insecurities.
She longed for a friend, but Harry disapproved. Probably he worried that she might tell his secrets: that he sweated through two shirts when he addressed the congregation and got terrible stomachaches in anticipation the night before, that he bit his nails, although that was out there for anyone to see. Harry was human. It was a hard thing to conceal, but he tried.
Rita learned very early that he was a creature of habit. Instant oatmeal with sliced banana and brown sugar every morning for breakfast. Dinner at six. Sunday lunch after church—presliced Virginia ham, Parker House rolls, homemade potato salad, and a green salad with Wish-Bone dressing. Harry loved Wish-Bone dressing. Like a dog, nothing made him happier than the same thing at the same time. When life was good, tomorrow was never another day; it was the same day. He ate each meal with a large mug of milk. Every night he rolled over on her in bed, grunted while they made love, rolled off, and then got up and went into the bathroom to wipe himself off.
Evenings, after she put the boys to bed, he liked her to sit with him and rub his feet. “Come sit with me, I’m all alone,” he’d call. If she dawdled, she could hear panic in his voice. “Rita!”
She knew that the head was lost without the tail, even if the head didn’t know it.
She was expected to account for the money she spent. He gave her an allowance and kept a record in a small black notebook. On Sunday nights they would sit up in bed while she read off the receipts and he jotted them down. He enjoyed these moments, opportunities to lecture about saving money. “Don’t simply compare prices, compare per ounce.” “Is hand cream necessary?” “Painting your nails is self-worship”—not that Rita ever would. Lunches out were frowned on. He was a waste hunter. Inevitably she would lose receipts or forget to ask the cashier for one. The account rarely balanced, and Harry often suggested, patting her hand, that she pray for guidance in this area of her life.
Rita loved Sudoku. Discovered it in the weekly paper, where they ran a puzzle. Doing the puzzle was the high point of her week. “Strange,” said Harry, “you can fill in those boxes but you can’t keep track of your pennies.” Until Lana handed her that paperback unearthed in the men’s room locker, Rita had never held a book of Sudoku. A whole book. It would never pass the usefulness test. Or the more acid and higher bar of acceptability: “What’s it got to do with God?”
Harry didn’t like her to say anything negative, even things that were obvious to all, like “This food tastes terrible” or “That woman is mean.” They were uncharitable thoughts, she had no business even having them. In the beginning he tried to redirect her with the admonishment “Smile, be a princess.” As he grew more arrogant, a consequence of being leader of a flock, the arbiter of all things to do with his parish, consulted on crises of every kind, he began to shut her down bluntly. “No one wants to know what you think.”
She learned to keep her opinions to herself.
Rita’s secret shame was not that she did not love Harry. Once there were children and an entire parish that depended on him, love seemed beside the point. Her shame was that she didn’t enjoy being a mother. She wanted to. She had expected to, and did on occasion, reading to the boys in bed, cuddling them after a bath. But she was overwhelmed and exhausted almost all the time, trying to please Harry, worrying that the children would displease him, guilty that she didn’t know how to stop Peter from wetting his bed, certain that if she weren’t so hapless Luke would be better behaved, sure that Andrew’s being picked on was her fault because she was a wimp. She felt inadequate so much of the time. As far as Harry was concerned, it was her failure—it couldn’t possibly be his—and above all no one should know. “Our family is a building with no cracks,” he often said. The demand to appear in public as if nothing rattled her also took its toll.
Housework, cooking, washi
ng dishes, and laundry were her responsibility. If the good Lord wanted her to have help in the kitchen, Harry told her, he would have given her girls.
She wasn’t surprised to hear that. It was something her father would have said.
The boys loved their mother, but as they got older, they began to treat her as their father did, with condescension. They couldn’t help it, he was the role model.
One day, five years or so before Lana and Tracee picked her up on the highway, Rita read an article in the dentist’s waiting room. She told Harry about it (knowing she was talking about herself without speaking personally, which afforded some self-protection). The article had troubled her. She needed to discuss it. She waited until after she’d rubbed his feet.
“I read an article today.”
“Where?” said Harry.
Rita hesitated. “The Smithsonian.” She wasn’t sure that periodical was on his acceptable list, but apparently it was, because he only waited.
“Did you know that some immigrants forget their first language but never get fluent in their new language? No one can ever really be fluent in a second language the way they are in their first. They’re stuck with feelings and ideas they can’t express. So I was wondering, Do they eventually stop having feelings or thoughts, or simply the language to express them? Or both?”
“What’s it got to do with God?” said Harry.
There was that brick wall. She felt foolish for bringing it up. Even berated herself for her own stupidity. But her anxieties persisted. By never saying what she thought, by being prevented from speaking, silenced, was she losing the ability to observe, to articulate? Was she losing the very emotions and thoughts themselves? Could she lose herself? Would Rita be gone? Would there be a shell of a woman in her place? Had it already happened?
The fears grew worse.
She began to think about leaving. About escape. To save what was left of her.
She tried to quash the desire, forcing herself to consider people worse off—child brides in Afghanistan, people starving in Darfur. Besides, she had no options. Harry doled out the money. Her MasterCard had a two-hundred-dollar credit limit. How far would that take her?