by Julia Slavin
“You know,” Tom says, “he has been featured in so many films. He is our finest living actor, and each of his films has slipped my mind.”
“A lot of Roman movies?” I ask.
“Yes, quite a few,” Tom says, and then he starts talking about a man of that caliber this and a man of that caliber that and he’ll be wanting the New York strip and he’ll want it rare.
Mary brings the order. He wants a cheeseburger medium. The French chick wants salad but she doesn’t want to go through the line, so Mary puts something together for her.
The girl’s looking over here. She moves her lips, trying to say something. I look here and there to see if she’s looking at somebody else. Alfred’s making the actor’s cheeseburger. She’s not looking at him. I point to myself. “Me?” I say, no sound coming out.
She mouths something again.
“Me?” I say again. She walks over. I’m seeing spots like I’m about to pass out. She leans over the salad bar.
“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The actor. He was in that movie.” Her eyes are a little crossed, and I’m trying to figure out which one to look in.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s it, Alfred, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”
“What?” Alfred couldn’t care less.
“Hey, what’s your name?” It’s not me asking, it’s a ghost that looks like me.
“Elizabeth,” she says.
“Well …,” I can’t say the name; it won’t go past my lips. “Make yourself at home.” I don’t know why I said that.
“Thanks,” she says, and starts to leave with her friend.
“Hey,” I say. She turns around. “Have a good one.”
“Thanks,” she says. “You too.”
I can feel my chest pounding again, but it’s not a bad feeling anymore. It’s just my heart saying, Yeah, I was happy to see her too.
“Corky.” Ellen again. “Howard wants to know where Jim is.”
I’m heading out the front when I remember Mac’s Coke. He probably doesn’t want it anymore. Jim’s in the back seat of a maroon Duster. A guy with long wet hair is sitting in the driver’s seat wearing a tan jean jacket. I get in the front and Jim introduces Keeko. Keeko calls Jim Jimbo.
“Jim, you’re shit-canned at Arthur’s. And you know How-Weird’s going to tell Sunrise.” Jim lights a Marlboro and looks out the window. Keeko starts the car. “Where we going?” I ask. Keeko’s heading for the Pike. “We got to get back to Sunrise by five.”
“It’s four now,” Jim says.
“I know,” I say. “I just want to make sure we get back by five.”
“We’re just going downtown, Corky,” Jim says.
“This ain’t the way downtown,” I say. Keeko takes the Beltway ramp toward Frederick. “And we got to get to Sunrise by five.”
Keeko makes his voice high and squeaky like a girl and imitates me. “We got to get to Sunrise by five.”
Just relax into it. On 270, Keeko’s flooring it but so’s everybody else, trying to get home, away from wherever they were. I’m feeling kind of hurt. All this time I’ve known Jim and never knew he went by Jimbo or ever heard about Keeko. Nobody’s saying anything. I look at Keeko’s face. He looks like he’s seen his share of windshields too. I can see how these two are friends. They can hang together all day with their messed-up faces and never say anything. Nobody will want to look at them, and nobody will want to talk to them. Jim puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes it a little.
On 70 the road narrows and you can see farms with cows and some horses. The sun is low and huge because it’s winter and I’m looking at the shadows from the trees. We shoot under the Appalachian Trail Bridge and come to the top of the hill where you first see the mountains over the Middletown valley. It’s out here that I’m finally able to say it, let it go past my lips, even if it’s just a whisper now: “Elizabeth, Elizabeth.”
Pudding
I made it from scratch. I melted the chocolate, beat in the egg, and stirred over low heat with a wooden spoon until it thickened, just how my mother would make it. What a lovely idea, I thought, homemade pudding for my family.
“It’s got scum on the top,” our son Phin says.
“I’ll peel it off for you.”
“It tastes a little weird, hon,” my husband Dan says quietly.
Phin leaves the table, slouching defiantly over a frame that seems too small to hold up his newly developed man’s shoulders.
“Why can’t we have a normal dessert?” our daughter Miranda asks. “Like Pepperidge Farm cookies.”
I tell her Pepperidge Farm cookies are expensive. And they get eaten too quickly.
“That’s what cookies are for,” Miranda says. “They’re for eating.”
“What about you, Anastasia?” I ask. “Do you like the pudding?”
Anastasia is three, with an advanced sense of empathy. She is as concerned with not hurting anyone’s feelings as she is with not taking sides, and now I’ve put her on the spot. She holds her spoon tightly in her fist. Her eyebrows pucker. Her breathing quickens.
“Well? Do you?”
“I don’t like pudding,” Dan says, as we’re cleaning up the kitchen. “Instant or regular. I never have.” He wraps leftover tacos, one at a time, for the kids’ lunches. I deposit the plates in the dishwasher and decant the pudding into a clear storage bowl. “What have I done that’s so wrong?” he asks.
I take over making the lunches, polishing apples and dropping packs of raisins in each bag. Miranda will forget to take hers and have to borrow money, and Phin won’t be seen carrying a lunch bag.
“It’s a bowl of chocolate pudding, for Chrissakes.” Dan is unable to get off the subject. “Who gives a good goddamn?”
We crash into each other in the narrow part of the kitchen and I drop the bowl. The pudding hits the floor with a slap. We watch the viscid mixture quiver on the white linoleum. The bowl is still rattling under the center island as I leave the kitchen.
“Who’s going to clean up the pudding?” Dan calls after me. “If you think it’s me, the answer’s like hell I am.” I head up the stairs. “Well?” I won’t answer. “Fine, let it grow legs and walk out on its own.”
I close the door of the study. Dan goes out on the deck to smoke.
Pulling up to our house, an expanded Cape Cod in Edge-moor, fills me with deep satisfaction. Especially now while it’s still light when I come home from work. Dan’s left the Caravan in the driveway instead of pulling into the garage, so I park the Volvo on the street and sit and take in our yard for a little while. The tulips we planted in October are up—the Lilac Perfections, the Burgundy Lace—and Anastasia’s paper whites are doing well by the boxwood.
I hear someone playing the piano as I stroll up the front walk. Through the kitchen window I see the table set for dinner with the Bennington pottery, and Dan is cooking. He is an excellent cook. I can handle everyday fare: spaghetti sauce, omelets, tacos, possibly stir-fry. But Dan is as good as any chef. He never follows a recipe and everything is always beautifully presented. He once made red snapper in a thin potato blanket with a Grand Marnier glaze and orange-peel rosettes. Of course, the kids wouldn’t touch it.
On the porch, I pull a tiny weed from the oak barrel in which I planted daisies and creeping phlox. “A weed is anything you didn’t plant,” my mother used to say. The phlox has finally begun to spill over the sides and the daisies are a brilliant white.
It’s Miranda who’s banging on the piano. She plays everything pesante—this time “Für Elise”—even though her teacher penciled Lightly! across the top of the piece. Miranda practices constantly. She plods through scales and pounds out pieces, one hand at a time, for days before she puts them together. I admire the diligence, but she will never be the virtuoso she wants to be or the virtuoso that Phin is. Phin went from lesson to lesson without practicing until he quit last year, but he intuitively understands music. Miranda stomps through Schubert like a storm
trooper.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I say.
“Shh.” She pushes back the skinny braid that hangs down the middle of her forehead to her chin and unconsciously fiddles with the ring in her pierced lower lip.
In the family room, Anastasia is rolling out homemade pink play dough and cutting stars and trees with cookie cutters. She presses down on a cutter with two hands, carefully peels the stars and trees off the table, and holds them up to the light to admire. Red food coloring from the mixture is speckled all the way up her arms and around her mouth.
“Anastasia, honey,” I say. “Don’t eat the dough.” I get a diet ginger ale from the fridge, leaning over the pudding on the floor which, after the month it’s been there, has dried and settled into the shape of Bosnia.
I see Dan’s spreading canned mushrooms and black olives over a frozen pizza. “It’s fine,” he says, though I’ve said nothing. “They like it and it’s balanced and I just got home myself.”
The piano playing stops and we hear the loud thump of a head being pushed into the wall. Dan and I race for the living room to find out who’s assaulting whom.
“You stupid ugly bitch!” Phin yells at Miranda.
“Dammit,” Dan says. “Can’t you two ever work things out reasonably?”
“She shoved my head into the fucking wall,” Phin says.
Dan tells Phin to watch his language and I tell Miranda not to push people’s heads into walls. Miranda screams at me for siding with Phin all the time and not even bothering to ask what happened and then says she pushed Phin’s head into the wall because he punched her in the back. Phin says he punched her in the back because she karate-chopped him on the neck for flicking her lip ring with his finger. I tell Phin not to touch that lip ring because of the risk of infection, and then I tell Miranda we don’t work things out with violence, we negotiate and solve disputes with words. I then suggest Phin and Miranda sit down at the piano and play a nice duet while we’re waiting for dinner.
As I leave to change out of my suit, Phin has said or done something to make Miranda angry again and she slaps him.
“Miranda,” I say.
“He molested me!” she hollers.
“You wish,” Phin says calmly, and flops on the couch with The New Republic.
“He sexually harassed me!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Phin says. “Make her shut the fuck up,” Phin calls to me.
“No means no!” she cries. “No means no!”
“A little bit of peace. Please!” I yell from the stairs, and flatten my hands against my ears.
“What did you say to me?” Miranda threatens her brother, who is eighteen months younger than she. Phin has the gift of words. Well read for a boy his age, he tackled Kafka at eleven, the Russians at thirteen, and he’s now struggling on his own with Pynchon. Miranda races up the stairs, crying, and slams the door to her room.
“Let her miss dinner,” Dan says, when I return to the kitchen. “She doesn’t want to come to the table, she doesn’t eat.”
“Dinner is family time.” I ask Anastasia to please wash up. There’s red food coloring smudged all over the table and down the front of her T-shirt. I go upstairs to Miranda’s room. “Miranda, honey.” I tap on the door. “Please come down for dinner.”
“Not with him there!” she yells. “And not with you defending him.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Dan asks Phin from the front door. Phin’s halfway down the lawn already. His girlfriend, who is sixteen, gum-snapping, and futureless, is waiting in her Firebird.
“We were supposed to eat at six,” Phin says. “It is now seven. I have plans.”
“On a school night?” Dan knows this won’t fly with Phin, who has a 3.9 in the gifted program at the Lowery School. “What the hell do those two do every night?” Dan asks, as Phin and Sheryl or Charmin or whatever the girl’s name is screech off down our street.
“You don’t think she lets him drive, do you?” I ask. Dan looks at me like I’ve slept through the entire century.
“The leasing company wants to change the loss payee, whatever the hell that is, or something.” Dan is slicing pizza with a round cutter.
“I’ll call them.” I’m trying to hurry Anastasia along at the sink. She’s on her footstool holding her hands under the tap.
“I’ve got to fly to Columbus for a workshop, and the Caravan needs to go for inspection,” Dan says.
“I’ll drive it to work. I’ll get it inspected on the way.”
“I’d do it if I could.” Dan’s voice tightens. “I have to make this workshop.”
“I said I’d do it.”
“It was the way you said you’d do it,” he mutters.
“How did I say I’d do it?” I am aware of the turn this discussion has taken but unable to stop it.
“You know how you can be,” Dan says.
“No, I only know how you can get.” I pour Ivory Liquid on Anastasia’s hands. She lets out an earsplitting scream and starts to cry. To my horror, I see I’ve poured soap into a multitude of little cuts all over her hands. Dan rushes over to the table where Anastasia was making cookies.
“The cookie cutters,” he says, horrified. She’d been slicing up her hands on the sharp edges.
I pull open the drawer by the sink and take out two old cloth diapers, wrap one around each of her hands, and tie off the ends. Dan examines the edges of the cookie cutters for rust. When I return to the kitchen with Neosporin, Anastasia’s exactly how I left her, standing on her stool, holding up her hands wrapped in big diaper gloves like a miniature boxer.
“No rust,” Dan says. “When was her last tetanus?”
“February. It’s a kitchen accident. She wouldn’t need a tetanus.”
Miranda appears at the kitchen door, her eyes and nose puffy and red. “What happened?” Her voice is muddy with mucus from crying.
“Daddy let Anastasia play with dangerous cookie cutters.” I bandage Anastasia’s pinky with gauze.
Dan slips two pieces of pizza off the center island cutting board and storms down to the rec room to watch Jim Lehrer, mozzarella flapping like streamers from his plate. Miranda serves herself some salad, no dressing, and retreats to her room.
“Anastasia,” I whisper, eating salad over the sink. “No, no, no, no, no.” I shake my finger. She’s crouched down, feeling the hard surface of the pudding that’s formed. It’s difficult to blame her. The top of the pudding is smooth and cool like marble, something children love to touch.
Sometimes when I’m lying in bed, kept awake by Dan’s difficult breathing (a deviated septum from breaking his nose in a pickup football game), I wonder if he’s ever been unfaithful to me. Whenever I wonder if Dan has made love to another woman, I comfort myself by remembering the belly-button incident, the time Dan couldn’t find the navel on a beautiful girl in our infant-and-child first-aid course at the Red Cross. And then I think of Scott, the young man who found mine.
“Find the belly button, people, and place your fist above like so and push in and up like so.” Our instructor, Donna, explained the Heimlich maneuver, then grunted like she was being rolfed.
We broke into twos. Dan was paired with a nursing student whose sparkly pink lipstick matched her sweater and socks. I was assigned to Scott, a thirty-year-old broker at Merrill Lynch whose wife was expecting but was on bed rest for toxemia. I played the victim.
“Okay, victims.” Donna clapped her hands. “Start coughing. Now choke. Choke! Rescuers, what do you say?”
“Are you all right? Are you all right?” The rescuers asked in unison. “I can help.”
Scott moved behind me, placed a hand on my waist, and slid his other hand around, finding my navel with his finger. Then he formed a fist, wrapped his other hand around it, and gently pulled me back. I leaned into him, surprised to feel blood fill my legs, my breasts, rising in my face, blood that had been freeze-dried into a block somewhere behind my navel.
“There’s that chicken bone,” he w
hispered in my ear.
“You saved me,” I said. While we waited for the teacher to review our work, he rested his chin on my shoulder and kept holding me as I strained to pull my stomach in. He smelled like fresh laundry.
“Excellent work,” the instructor commended Scott, and the class applauded. Scott bowed and deferred to me and we sat with the rest of the class, everyone but Dan and the nursing student. The girl was flushed as pink as her lipstick and giggling as Dan fumbled and prodded and missed again and again. Too low or too high, Dan couldn’t find the girl’s navel. He was so low on one try she had to move his hand away from her crotch. The class howled. Dan was laughing too at this point, shaking his head at himself, looking at the ceiling wondering why a man his age couldn’t find the belly button on a beautiful girl. Finally the instructor guided his hand. Then he made a fist and squeezed the girl so hard she yelped like a squeaky toy.
“Hey, you were really good,” Scott said, as we left the building and crossed the parking lot.
I tried to think of something smart to say, something like “Choking is my specialty,” but tensed as I always do and could only come up with “Thanks, you were good too.”
He raised one side of his mouth and cocked his head. “Not really. I just did what the teacher said.” He slid his hands into his pockets and squeezed his arms together to wrap his oversized wool coat more tightly around him. “I guess the true test is what you’ll do in a real emergency, isn’t it? I worry about that. Whether I’ll be able to remember what we learned.”
“Of course you’re worried.” I suddenly relaxed with this young man who left his soap smell on my blouse. “But you’d be surprised at what you remember. It’ll be second nature for you.” Our walking slowed. Dan had to stop every few yards to wait for us.
“It’s a dangerous game, having children,” Scott said quietly. We faced each other. He looked at the ground and drew in the gravel with his toe, close to my feet. Dan leaned against our car and lit a cigarette.
“I’m surprised you know that already,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” he said modestly, and looked at me. “You did really good.”