by Joni Rodgers
“That means,” Wayne explained to her as if she were Chloe, “how you’re a white girl and good ol’ homey there is a goddamn—”
“I know what it means, Wayne!”
The attorney didn’t even bother gesturing. He was focused, closing in on his favorite outcome to his favorite game.
“It could be argued that this entire situation has already caused lasting emotional harm to the children.”
“We are not having a sexual affair, Wayne. I have never been with any man but you. Not in my whole life!”
“Mrs. Daubert, the photos would seem to indicate that you are lying.”
“Well, yes, it—they seem— But that’s all! We never—”
“If you insist, Mrs. Daubert.” The lawyer brushed her denials aside and snapped his briefcase closed on Vivica’s end table. “Your attorney can certainly contest this order, but the children would most likely be placed in foster care while that decision is being made. And that can take a long time, Mrs. Daubert. A very long time. But your attorney can best advise you on that.”
Kiki’s attorney had answered the phone when she responded to an ad that read “Divorce $80!” in the Penny-Wize Shopper classifieds. He wore a bad toupee and spoke with some sort of clicking, glottal speech impediment.
“Mrs. Daubert?” prompted the attorney.
“Sir,” her voice quavered, “I am a good mother.”
“Then act like it, Mrs. Daubert. Your husband is being very generous here. He’s willing to overlook this indiscretion. He’s merely asking you to return home and serve the best interest of the children.” He took both her hands in his and smiled with a sudden Machiavellian fatherliness. “Kalene, I know y’all two have your differences. But Wayne here is prepared to go to counseling and work those differences out. Now, don’t you think it’ll be best for everyone if you come on home with your little ones to Houston and resume your place in a happy, Christian home? And then y’all can just forget that any of this unpleasantness ever took place.”
Kiki knew there was nothing else for her to do. Daddy Daubert had paid out a significant amount of money to fly this man down here and finance the private investigation firm that followed her to Tampa Bay and took those pictures. He kept a tight grip on his money; when he spent it, he expected results. And he got them. Because he wouldn’t stop until he did.
Kiki wished now she’d listened to her mother and used an attorney Vivica dated occasionally: a slashingly well-dressed man who wore suits as gray and sleek as shark’s skin and whose TV commercials portrayed a self-professed “legal hammer.” She wished she’d cashed out the cards before Wayne had a chance to cancel them. And gone somewhere Wayne wouldn’t have thought to look. She wished she was back on the bus with Xylo and Zeke and the rest of the Euphonious Brethren.
She wished Xylo had been willing to make love to her, as long as she was getting blamed for it now, anyway. But he wouldn’t do it. He said it was too soon. That she was still married. He said that he wanted to know her better, wanted to know how to spell her middle name, and who her first-grade teacher was. He wanted to see each one of her scars and hear how she got it. He wanted to know what she looked like sleeping and what she felt like inside, but he would wait, he said, until she was free of all the negative energy Wayne was exerting over her, and then he would celebrate the essence and beauty of her in a proper and conducive setting, not on the dirty backstage floor of the Azure Club.
Kiki wished he hadn’t said that. She would have preferred having Xylo once on a dirty floor to never having him at all, but as she stared at the manila envelope, he sank back into his invisible world, taken on the tide of Albert’s disconsolate clarinet.
The Second Trimester
Biology is her destiny.
Anatomy is her fate.
Mary Hugh Scott
The pressure of the takeoff made Chloe scream because of her swimmer’s ear, and she cried, on and off, until they reached Houston, but there were little video game screens built into the backs of the airplane seats, so the flight couldn’t have lasted long enough for Oscar.
When they stepped into the jetway, the heat and humidity enveloped Kiki, intensifying the forces of gravity and leaving her feeling even more earthbound. They walked wordlessly to the long-term parking lot where Wayne had left the station wagon. He unlocked the doors and loaded the luggage.
“I’ve got a surprise for you.” Wayne reached over and squeezed her knee as they came down the circular ramp of the parking tower.
Kiki nodded slightly, and they drove on in silence until they came to the gravel drive outside the double-wide. Wayne pulled the car into the translucent green shelter of the carport, but they all sat silent, even after he’d shut off the engine.
“Oscar!” Kiki said suddenly. “You know what you should do?”
He looked up, startled, and their eyes met in her visor mirror.
“You should call Cooper. You should call Coo and tell him all about those little video game screens, you know? You know how Coo loves video games?”
“Could I, Dad?” Oscar asked. “Just to tell him about the games?”
Wayne put the car in park and rested his palms on the steering wheel.
“Maybe next week,” he said quietly. He turned to Kiki, and his face was full of regrets and pleading. “Next week, Peaches, okay? Please?”
Kiki dropped her eyes guiltily.
“Give me a chance, Kiki. Give me a chance to show you I can make you happy again.”
She nodded, and he broke into a grin.
“Come and see your surprise.”
He leapt out and dashed around the car to open Kiki’s door for her, pointing out the freshly mown lawn and tidy flowerbeds that gave her that odd coming-home feeling of never having been gone.
He led her by the hand all through the house, excited as a child. He’d had someone come and clean. He’d made window boxes and installed them outside the living room and kitchen. There was a new entertainment center with a new game system for Oscar and Kiki’s karaoke machine installed alongside a big-screen TV. A pretty porcelain doll that looked like Shirley Temple had been added to Chloe’s collection.
“Okay now,” Wayne delighted, “no peeking.”
He stepped behind Kiki and placed his cool hands over her eyes, guiding her, his body against her back, toward the back door.
“Surprise!” he said, and she found herself standing in the middle of the patio, facing the hanging bougainvillea.
“Oh!” she exclaimed softly when she glimpsed the soft brown back of the mother dove. “They’re still here!”
But as she carefully approached the basket, the dragging gravity she’d felt in the jetway began to take hold of her again.
“Stuey and Dad both said it’s some of the best work I ever did,” Wayne told her, too modest to say he thought so himself. “They said it was as good as anything in the natural history museum.”
“Oh...”Kiki said again.
“It’s the perfect little family.” He led her closer with a gentle hand at her elbow, tenderly adding, “You were my inspiration, Kalene.”
The mother dove arced gracefully over the babies, holding a small bread crust above their open mouths. The eager young ones craned toward the morsel, downy necks extended, delicate wings slightly open, as the daddy dove perched on the edge of the basket, looking proudly on. They didn’t look frozen; they were still the same brushed brown and alabaster, not iced white or tinged blue. They didn’t even look dead, really; the still life was dynamic with the asymmetry of artistic motion.
The scene was one of such serenity. There was no echo of screeching or fear or frantic flapping; no memory of the moment when all their terror became this perfect peace. It took Kiki a long moment to realize there was no life there, except the uninterrupted blossoming of the bougainvillea.
Kit had become the perfect wife.
Mel’s favorite dishes hit the dinner table every evening at six, and the leftovers traveled to work with him in n
eat Tupperware containers. He came home each morning to a clean house. His underwear was being folded for the first time in his life, and Kit voiced no complaints about his Dorito-munching, night-off TV habits.
She was waiting tables at Chef Carleone’s, making more in tips than she’d ever earned at Ander’s shop. She came home after her midday shifts to drill Coo on his multiplication tables and stayed up late, sewing summer jumpers for Mitzi to wear in Orlando.
Though it hadn’t worked exactly the way Kit planned, Miz Pistonpumper and her ilk had burst a dam of unspoken fetishes and untapped libido that Mel had apparently been hoarding for Lord knows how long. He’d come home in the morning and shoo the kids out to the swing set, coaxing Kit upstairs, suggesting things she’d never even read about.
He began bringing home a blue movie every Saturday night, and costumed in satin, lace, or the altogether, Kit sat beside him as the same cheap synthesizer wheezed out equally cheesy sound tracks, bow-ba-dit-dow buppa-dippa-dit, orchestrating the same condemned-to-repeat-itself scenario that played out over and over in slightly different lingerie.
Delivering the same breathy dialogue from varying shades of red lipstick, the interchangeable women filled stereotypical roles: Candy the Mechanic, Nancy the Nurse, Stacy the Secretary. With a sad, sleazy sense of kinship toward them, Kitty the Housewife imitated their strained sounds and practiced facial expressions, their orgasmic toe-pointing and teeth-gnashing, as deftly as she used to imitate a watercolor fruit bowl. That was her art now.
“Show time,” she’d sigh inwardly, poking through the laundry basket for her scant, lacy getup.
The poor production values didn’t bother Mel. The absence of character and story line was immaterial. After a while, his response became so autonomic, Kit suspected he’d get a hard-on watching Wilbur kiss his wife in front of Mr. Ed, and she sadly realized that instead of reopening a clear channel to his heart, she’d tapped into an electric undercurrent that enabled her to flip his erection up like a toggle switch. Instead of rediscovering the Mel of the yellow Mustang, she found herself alone in a phony blue Falcon, where she was obligated to play Miz Pistonpumper, pleasuring herself on his gearshift.
In the casting and waning shadows of the television’s glow, Mel’s features became flat and two dimensional, like the women who lay prone and panting on the screen, like the audiences she and Kiki used to pretend were only paper dolls, knowing she and Kiki were only paper dolls to them. As Kit’s cargo of guilt dragged more and more heavily, she tried to think how she might atone for this dehumanization of him but couldn’t think of anything except to giggle and coo and give him what he seemed to want.
Mercifully, they rarely had to sit through the entire feature. She was usually able to hit REWIND, gather their hastily discarded underwear off the floor, and trudge up to bed twenty or thirty minutes into it. Once, they didn’t even make it through the previews, cleverly slated as “Coming Attractions.”
Now, Kit wasn’t sure if she should pack the silky under-things for Orlando, or if she could call it intermission and wear comfy cotton briefs. She put in two pairs of each and punched the redial button on the phone for the third time.
“Kiki,” she said when the answering machine kicked in again, “I know you’re home. Kiki, pick up! Oscar told Coo you weren’t allowed to talk on the phone. That’s craziness, honey, that is not normal. Kiki? Kalene Smithers, you pick up that phone right—”
“Kitty, stop!” Kiki rattled onto the line. “You gotta stop calling me!”
“Kiki! Thank God. What on earth—”
“You’re getting me in trouble. You’re making Wayne mad at me. He checks to see if this line is busy, and when it is—Well, it just better not be.”
“I don’t understand this, Kiki. How can you let him boss you around like that? He treats you like one of the kids.”
“No! He’s—he doesn’t treat the kids like that,” she said, meaning it to be in his defense. “And anyway, just wait a couple weeks, and everything will settle down. Everything will get back to normal, and we’ll get together and have lunch and stuff like always. Just leave it alone for a week or two, okay?”
“Kiki, listen to what you’re saying! What is the matter with you?” Kit stopped folding and packing and took hold of the phone with both hands. “Sweetie, Mama and I are worried about you. She says she’s left a million messages, and you haven’t called her back. You’ve been home for ten days, and I haven’t even seen you.” There was a long, empty moment. “Kiki? Are you still there?”
“I’m not sure,” she sounded very far off.
“What?” Now Kit was really worried. “Sweetie, what does that mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Kiki, let me come over there and pick you up.”
“No! No, don’t do that. It’s all right, Kitty. Really. Things are a little awkward right now, but we’re getting marriage counseling from the pastor over to the Church of Christ, and it’s all gonna be fine. It was even Wayne’s idea to go there, and he’s trying real hard, Kit. And he’s real nice, the pastor is. Everybody calls him ‘Reverend Doo’ for a nickname.”
“Well, what is he saying about all this?”
“He says I’ve been struggling against the will of God all my life, Kit, and that’s why things have been so hard for me. And I think he’s right. If I could just—if I wasn’t so— You know, I think Wayne wouldn’t get so mad at me if I was a better wife to him.”
“Kiki, that is such a load of crap,” Kit said bluntly.
“It’s true, Kit! It says in the Bible for women to obey their husbands.”
“What? It does not either!”
“Oh, it does, Kit. It does so. Right there in First Corinthians, chapter seven, verse four.” Kiki recited it like a Sunday school lesson. “‘The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband.’ And Ephesians 5:22—’Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.’ And Colossians chapter—”
“Oh, well, that is just so very convenient, isn’t it? Now Wayne is a born-again Christian when it suits him? Or has he got so good at what he does, he can even stuff and mount Almighty God in whatever pose he likes best?”
“Kit! It’s the Bible! You can’t argue with the Holy Bible! It’s the inspired word dictated by God!”
“Well, it might have been dictated by God, but it was written down by men,” Kit said, resisting the urge to check over her shoulder for lightning bolts. “Gee, what motive do you suppose a man might have for saying his wife ought to obey him like he’s the Lord?”
“I just wanna do the right thing, Kit.”
“Did you tell Reverend Doodoo-head that Wayne won’t let you call our mama on the phone? That he won’t even let you come and meet me for a lousy little lunch at the Taco Cabana?”
“He says Wayne’s insecure on account of I’ve been—the way I’ve been. And if I can rebuild his trust in me—”
“Well, he’s wrong,” Kit said flatly. “Wayne is never gonna be anything but what he is, a lying, rotten—”
“Stop!” Kiki cried. “You don’t say that about him!”
“It’s the truth, Kiki, and you know it!”
“He’s been good to me since I came back, Kit. He’s been trying real hard. And I have to believe that this is gonna work and everything’s gonna be okay because—because if I leave again, I can’t take Oscar and Chloe with me, or I’ll get arrested and go to jail for kidnapping and have my baby in prison alongside malefactors and murderers and prostitutes, so that means I can’t leave.” Kiki’s voice cracked and gave way to crying. “Do you understand, Kit? I cannot leave here. I have to stay and make it be okay, and you are not helping when you keep on making the phone line busy and saying bad things about my husband and blaspheming against God!”
“Okay, okay. Shhh,” Kit hushed her. “Don’t cry.”
Kiki cried anyway.
“I’m coming over there,” Kit said. “Right now. I’m on my way.”
“No! No, don’t do
that or he might—”
“He might what?”
“Just don’t, Kitty, please.”
“Why not?”
“Because! He’ll—he’ll—”
“What?” Kit pushed. “What will he do?”
Kiki took a jagged breath and said very softly, “He’ll hit me.”
“Oh, God!” Kit anguished, crumpling forward as if she’d been struck in the stomach, and they both breathed a moment, recognizing the vast uncharted sea between spoken and unspoken.
“That bastard,” Kit finally said. “That rotten, lousy, goddang—I knew it! I tried to tell Mama, and she said I was just—damn him! Damn him and his stupid truck and his stupid little stuffed piece-of-shit deer heads!”
It didn’t make Kiki feel particularly good to hear Kit as she went on cussing and deploring him, but there was a sudden openness in her lungs, as if the act of confiding in her sister had lifted a physical restraint from her chest. She felt calm now. She was sad, but she saw very clearly where she was, and she was not entirely alone. Kit’s voice was like a keyhole of light in a locked door.
“I am coming over there, Kiki,” she concluded the tirade. “I’m coming over right now, and you’re coming home with me, and we’re gonna call Mama and ask her what she thinks you should do.”
“I told you, Kit, I can’t leave. And Mama understands. She knows that having Oscar and Chloe—that’s worth anything.”
“You can’t stay there. You can’t let that rotten—”
“I don’t let him, Kit. He just does it,” Kiki said, and even that small measure of self-defense felt good to her. “But it’s like I said. He’s been okay since I came home. And what with the counseling and all... Maybe he really is ... I really think it’s all gonna work out okay. So right now, I just want to keep things normal and not make any trouble, and it’s okay, Kitty.”