by Joni Rodgers
“Okay. Yes. Wonderful,” Kit nodded and agreed and nodded some more.
“And I want you to give me some of those business cards the moment you get them because I have so many people ask me about that armoire.”
“Oh, that would be just—just wonderful, Mrs. Lu. Thank you!” As she grasped the fine lady’s hand, Kit felt her bleak future suddenly opening up like a magnolia right in front of her. “Wonderful. And—and you have a real good day now.”
The door jingled with porcelain chimes as she went out, and Kit turned to Ander, who was still staring, slack-jawed at her abdomen, not aware or caring that she’d just stolen his customer.
“Ah Gott, Kit! My Gott” he stammered. “Is ... is ... ?”
Braced and emboldened by the lingering sting of Mrs. Lu’s diamond-ring handshake, Kit stuck out her hand with Dr. Poplin’s card in it.
“There’s only one way to find out,” she decided to be blunt. “You need to have this blood test so they can tell. Will you, Ander?”
He nodded.
“Right away? Tomorrow?”
He nodded again.
“Okay,” she said. “Good.”
“Ya,” he echoed, “Good. Right away tomorrow.” But he still didn’t take the card.
“Well, that’s all I needed ... so ... thank you.” Kit laid the card by the cash register and started to go, but Ander suddenly broke free of whatever force was holding him behind the counter.
“Kit! Kit, wait!” He bolted over the top and caught her elbow before she reached the door. “Ruda... She take the girls, she leave the boys. She is gone back to Kristianstäd.”
“Oh, no.”
“She say to me that she is wanting good reason to leave for very long time now. She say she never want to learn this English speaking, she never want her children to listen on this rap music. She only want to be back in her one home.” His blue eyes were reflecting, close to spilling over. “She is getting divorce with me.”
“Oh, no.”
“Ah Gott, Kit. I never am so alone in my life.”
“Ander, I’m so sorry.” Kit put her hand on his elbow.
“Don’t say you are to be sorry. Is my fault all completely.”
“If it makes you feel any better, Mel and I are... Well, actually, Mel. He left.”
“Why would this make me feel better?” Ander anguished. “You think I want for you this unhappiness I have?”
“No! No, of course not.” She put her arms around his big middle. “It’s just an expression.”
“You must believe I never want for you any unhappiness.”
When he hugged her, Kit’s eyes welled up. Partly because he felt so much like Mel, and partly because she realized how much she missed having Ander as her good friend, laughing with him, planning, dancing around to “Paul and His Chickens.”
“I miss you,” she said against his denim shirt.
“Ya. Ya, I also am missing you, Kit. Missing you very much.” He took her face between his broad, roughened palms. “Kit, if I am father of this baby, then you don’t worry. Nothing could make me so happy as to take care of you.”
“Ander ...” Kit pulled away from him. “I don’t want anybody to take care of me. I just need to know.” She picked up Dr. Poplin’s card and pressed it into his hand. “Okay?”
“Ya,” he nodded again. “Is okay.”
“Okay,” she repeated and stepped out into the sunlight.
Six weeks later, as Mrs. Lu’s teenage sons carried out the two small night tables and brought in two highboy dressers, Kit tucked the check into her shirt pocket and rolled out the sketches on the kitchen table.
But Mrs. Lu wasn’t even looking.
Her neck craned back, her eyes traveled the trailing vines that sprouted up from the wainscoting and tendrilled up and around the ceiling, draping above the cupboards, whose doors now windowed a French cafe. Twining past the ceiling fan, whose blades hung heavy with leaves, pears, glockenspiels, and lingonberries, the foliage wound round each switch plate and electrical outlet, whose corners ticked and popped with dots and dashes and curlicues, blossoming at the base of the bay window in a profusion of orchids, harmonicas, and day lilies, some of which burst up through the sill and painted their morning colors directly onto the glass.
“I am stunned,” Mrs. Lu said for the fourth time. “Absolutely stunned. My goodness, Kit, this is just... so... stunning.”
“I’ve had trouble sleeping the last couple months,” Kit said, because in her mind that explained it completely.
“I have truly never seen anything like it.” Mrs. Lu pressed her hands together and then held them wide apart. “Have you photographed it for your portfolio?”
Kit stood with her sketches in her hand. She’d never thought of herself as having a portfolio. Like an artist.
“Not yet. But soon.”
Mrs. Lu looked at the sketches, loved them, and left, just as Mel’s truck pulled into the driveway.
Kit was a little anxious when she saw him getting out instead of just dropping the kids off as he usually did, but knowing he’d eventually have to come inside the house again, she’d been bracing herself for his reaction.
“Holy shit!” He seemed to be as stunned as Mrs. Lu.
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” Kit sounded even smaller than she felt.
“It looks like a cuckoo clock exploded in here.”
“I was just going to do a little something on the pantry door, just to match the cupboards.”
She tried to stand in front of the lazy Susan where Gene Kelly lunched with George Gershwin, but Mel was already pointing at it, his speechless mouth opening and closing like a fish on dry ground.
“Then about two o’clock in the morning, see, I was listening to American in Paris, and it just started ... growing.”
Mel followed the wandering ivy to the doorway.
“Hey!” he startled and then bounded back to confront her. “What the hell? You tore the carpet out of the living room!”
“Well, see, the garage was still full of all that—you know... everything. And I need to work in the air-conditioning, anyway. It’s really too hot out there and—and the stuff doesn’t dry on account of the humidity, and I can’t hear the phone. And the carpet was old, Mel, it was practically worn out, anyway.”
But Mel was back in the living room, his voice echoing off the empty walls.
“Where’s the furniture? Where’s my chair? What have you done with my chair?” He wheeled on her, pointing his finger like Hercule Poirot, accusing, “You threw it out! You always hated that chair!”
“Calm down, Mel. It’s in the garage.”
He’d already discovered the sofa scrunched up against the wall in the dining room, but, “Hey—hey—hey! Where’s the TV?”
“Well, actually, I took it down to Cash America.”
“You took our television to a pawnshop?” he cried, as though it were one of their children. “You hocked it?”
“Well, right. Because I forgot to ask for a deposit on the first couple jobs, and so I needed the money for brushes and paint and a T-square and—and things.”
“Have you completely lost it, Kit? Are you ... are you ... You are! You’re crazy.” Mel circled the concrete floor as if the coffee table were still there. “You’ve completely lost your grip.”
“Mel, I’ve already made over six hundred dollars! See, Mrs. Lu, she has this friend whose sister owns this specialty shop down on Montrose—”
“What’s that in the hallway?”
“It’s ... primer.” Her small answer inflected upward like a question.
“Primer? What d’you mean, ‘primer’?”
“It’s a base coat for—”
“I know what primer is! Why is it splattered all over the hallway I just painted last winter?”
“Well, I haven’t decided exactly what that’s going to be yet. But now I have to do these dressers first, anyhow. And Mel,” she looked at him expectantly, the way Mitzi would o
ffer a beautiful bouquet of weeds, “I’m getting four hundred dollars for the dressers, Mel. Two hundred a piece! And all I have to do is a little ivy down the sides and a little bunch of violets on each drawer.”
“That’s great, Kit. That’s very nice. But how much do you think it’s gonna cost to repair all this?” He rubbed at a spatter of green paint on the woodwork. “Has it occurred to you that we might be trying to sell this house sometime soon?”
It hadn’t. And Kit didn’t even know how to respond to the idea, now that it had. She was wearing a pair of Mel’s old overalls she’d cut off for maternity clothes, and she pushed her hands into the deep pockets.
“Sell this house? I don’t want to sell this house.”
“Okay, okay.” Mel pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I don’t want to fight. You were upset. You just—you know, you always get a little wiggy when you’re pregnant, so you did this and that’s okay. We can fix it. I’m not mad. But don’t do anything else without asking me, okay?”
“Asking you?” she said. “You mean like ... permission?”
“No! I mean like—”
“Mel, I’m the one who’s always taken care of this house—”
“And I’m the one working his ass off to pay for it!”
“I’m trying to make something of my life so I can pay my own—”
“Fine!” Mel erupted. “Tear the goddamn place down! What difference does it make? You trashed our marriage, you trashed the car! Why the hell should it bother me if you destroy our home right along with it?”
“I didn’t destroy—”
“You did, Kit!” he bellowed. “You destroyed everything! And God damn you for it!”
“He already has!” Kit bellowed back at him. “Along with you and Mama and Good Housekeeping magazine! I guess you all would have been happier if I’d just gone on destroying myself!”
She let him absorb that while she pulled the drawers out of the highboys, stacking them where his recliner used to be.
“Well, I am so sorry, Kit. I had no idea your life was so fucking terrible.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said bitterly. “And God damn you for that.”
He stepped between her and the highboy.
“If we end up getting divorced, Kit, this house is gonna get sold.”
“It’s my house,” Kit faced him in his own pants. “I’ll sell it or stay in it as I please, and I’ll do it without your permission.”
“I don’t believe this!”
“Believe it, Mel,” she said unsympathetically and stacked another drawer against the wall.
“So, that’s it?” he said. “We’re over? We’re—we’re getting divorced?”
Kit stood still by the wall. “Isn’t that what you want?”
“No! I want—I want— I don’t know what I want. But it might be nice to see a little remorse on your part!”
“Remorse?” Kit almost laughed, “I have been hemorrhaging remorse for the last five months, and yes, it might be nice if you could see that.”
She stripped masking tape off a roll and started laying it on the edges of a dresser drawer.
“I realize it now, Mel. I was being just as blind and deaf as you were. You never did a thing to me that I didn’t do to myself first. But after a while, all I could see was my own misery, and then something horrible happened and everything just ... just ...” Kit spanned her hands in front of her, searching for words. “Everything shattered, and I couldn’t fix it no matter how hard I tried.”
Mel sat on a color-spattered kitchen chair and rested his forehead on his fists.
“Mel, I’ve torn myself up over it every night, all night, ever since you left. You think I’m glad things turned out this way? Think I’m proud of what I did? That it’s not tearing my heart up to see you drive away with my kids every weekend? You think it doesn’t hurt and humiliate me how—after everything we’ve been to each other for the last twelve years—how you won’t even speak to me, let alone look at me or—God forbid!— touch me? But that’s not enough for you. I’m supposed to sit here in sackcloth and ashes for the rest of my life.”
She set the drawer down and braced her hands on either side.
“Every time you come here, I beg and plead and apologize, and I’m done with it, Mel. Yes, I did wrong, and yes, I feel like shit about it, but I’m still entitled to a life. It didn’t erase everything good I ever did, and it shouldn’t drown out everything good that I am.”
Mel passed her another drawer. “I never said it did.”
It was like seeing a photograph of a long-forgotten friend. Her first thought was to be amazed at how much she missed him now; her second, to wonder how she could have missed him even more when he was living with her.
“I am sorry, Mel. I am so sorry I hurt you. Because I do love you. But can you understand? That’s what made it so hard? That first time—it was like—like being forced to drink poison. And with Ander...”
Kit turned back to taping the edges of the drawer.
“What? You love him?”
“Is that allowed?”
“You know it isn’t.”
“But what if I can’t help it?”
“I don’t know.” Mel shook his head as if it suddenly felt very heavy. “Christ, I can’t understand any of this.”
Kit took his hand, and she held onto it, even though he flinched.
“Me neither,” she said. “But I’m trying to get it sorted out.”
The Third Trimester
There ain’t no answer.
There ain’t gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
There’s the answer.
Gertrude Stein
Heat waves sweltered up from the patio and filled the air with rattlesnakes. Even above the sounds of the children running in the sprinkler, they buzzed and chickered, seeped through the voices of the book Kit was reading, permeated the sun and blood-red darkness when she closed her eyes.
It crossed her mind that she could get up off her low-slung canvas deck chair and step into the wild, cool spray, but the oppressive weight of the afternoon humidity drained her even of her will for water. As she lay listening, the heaviness of the day settled to her breasts, sagging them aside. The baby rolled over, pushing a foot into her diaphragm, forcing her to sigh a deep, involuntary sigh.
Hello there.
The foot moved to the bottom of her rib cage, and through the murky amniotic fluid, Kit could see the baby smiling in her sleep. She allowed herself the pleasure of it for a moment, sinking deeper into the deck chair, cradle in cradle.
“It’s that third one, you know.” A Cricket lighter chirped through the din of cicadas, and the smell of smoke invaded the summer scent of wet grass and cocoa butter. “Leaves your stomach looking like an empty kangaroo pouch.”
“Go away,” Kit said. “I hate you.”
“A so-called ‘healthy tan,’” Neeva commented, “actually represents an injury to the skin.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Do the two words ‘skin cancer’ mean anything to you?”
“Do the two words—”
“And how are you planning to turn over on your stomach? Drill a hole in the pavement?”
“ What? What do you want from me?”
“But I guess it’s easier than working.”
“I’m working!” Kit defended herself. “Just take a look at that beast in the living room!”
“Oh, yes. That’s quite a project,” Neeva said. “How much did you fleece that art lover for?”
“Mama?” Mitzi’s patty-cake-hand on her shoulder brought back the smell of cocoa butter. “Mama, wake up. I have to go potty.”
“Just go in and go,” Kit murmured without opening her eyes. “Be Mommy’s big girl.”
“Ma-maaaa,” Mitzi whined, pulling on her shoulder. “I can’t get my suit off when it’s wet. It gets all twisty!”
“Okay,” Kit sighed and rolled up off the chair.
“Next time,” she advised, “remember to go potty before you get wet. You’ll never get this thing on again.”
“Can I wear my purple one?”
“No, let’s dry off now. You’re starting to look a little pink on the cheeks.”
Kit was amazed when Mitzi went along with this without a tantrum, especially since Cooper and the rest of the neighborhood kids were still out there dancing and whooping like a war party around a bonfire of cold, hissing hose water.
“Knock knock,” Mitzi baited as Kit toweled her off.
“Who’s there?”
“Interrupting cats.”
“Interrupting cats wh—”
“Meow!”
For some reason, this struck both of them as about the most hilarious thing they’d ever heard.
“Oh, you’re funny,” Kit snuggled her close and pulled a T-shirt over her head. “But looks aren’t everything.”
Then she made a big raspberry on Mitzi’s tummy, and they were still giggling as Kit spread out paper and watercolors on the living room floor.
“Okay, Peanut, here’s your project,” she said, laying brushes and napkins nearby. “You work over here, and I’ll go over there so we don’t get in each other’s way, okay?”
Kit tried not to look at the enormous sideboard she was supposed to be doing for a new restaurant called Mon Petit Chou, focusing instead on the finishing touches to the cedar chest Mrs. Sheehy planned to present to her deb daughter on the night of her coming-out bash. She let her mind go with the strokes, responding mostly with monosyllables while Mitzi chattered on about... whatever that was she was chattering on about.
“But what are those puppies called?” Mitzi asked, swooping great washes of free-flowing blue and purple across her tablet.
“Hmm?” Kit drew her brush down to complete the trailing stem of an orchid.
“Those puppies? What are they called?”
“What puppies?”