A Woman's Place

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Monday at two?” he asked.

  “Yes. Dr. Jenovitz, I really am worried about my children.”

  “So was the court, which was why they were placed with their father. Why don’t we talk about this on Monday. Do you know where my office is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’ll see you then.”

  I hadn’t gone through life second-guessing myself. I had simply done what had to be done and moved on to the next task. I might have done what had to be done and moved on this time, too, had I been back home with the kids. They kept me busy. With them around, I didn’t have time to brood.

  But they weren’t around now. I didn’t have chores to do for them, or for Dennis. I had plenty to do for WickerWise, but not here, not now. Here and now was the new home that was mine in name and deed and things, but still not mine. It was different at night, dark, silent, and in that dark silence, I second-guessed my talk with Jenovitz. I wondered if I had sounded too pushy or controlling, wondered if I had been humble enough, reasonable enough. First impressions were important. I agonized over the one I had made.

  I second-guessed my handling of the children—had I said too much or too little to Kikit, had I accepted Johnny’s refusal too easily? I assumed they were both asleep, wondered if they were dreaming and whether they would wake in the night. I had always been the one who handled nightmares, who got up and held little bodies, who climbed into little beds and sang sweet little songs. I wondered if Dennis would—and I second-guessed my handling of him, too. It was fine to stand up to him, but if he turned around and took it out on the kids, the effort had backfired.

  As I unpacked the last of my clothes, I tried to boost my morale by thinking back through the evening, but my talk with Connie held no solace. Nor did my talk with Rona. They saw me as their rock. It had always been that way, and I had never minded, but things were different now. I needed a rock of my own.

  There was only one person who understood that, and I wasn’t supposed to be with him.

  Desperate for a little pampering, I took a hot bath in the tub of my new home, dried myself with an oversized bath towel, wrapped myself in another, and uncorked the bottle of Chardonnay that Cynthia had left on the kitchen counter for me. I had no wine glasses, but I wasn’t fussy. A plastic cup did just fine.

  Wine in hand, I climbed the spiral stairs to the top of my tower, piled my pillows against my brand-new wicker headboard, and climbed into my brand-new bed.

  Then I began to hum. I didn’t pick any one song deliberately, just went with whatever came, but what came were things that Dennis and I had never sung, sad songs, soulful songs. On to the next I went, eyes closed, a sip of wine, a deeper snuggle. Hum became voice, soft and wispy, always with a beat, I loved a good beat, and the words were my heart’s cries.

  I sang a little Carole King, “You’ve Got a Friend,” “So Far Away,” and James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.” I sang to soothe myself, to lift my spirits, because music had always done that for me.

  This time was different. I didn’t finish the wine, didn’t even finish the song I was singing last, because emotion and my startling state of aloneness choked me up. First I cried, then I sniffled. Then, in the wee hours of the night, the beat of the ocean did what exhaustion couldn’t and rocked me to sleep.

  nine

  I’m not sure that anyone who hasn’t ever been granted “visitation rights” to his or her children can possibly understand what they mean. Visiting is the least of it, and there are precious few rights. I had to tell Dennis what time I was picking the children up, where we were going, and what time I would have them home, but that wasn’t the worst. The worst was being with them, loving them to pieces and prizing every second of my time with them but feeling an awkwardness, trying to pretend things were the same when we all knew they weren’t. The worst was feeling like a second-rate mother because the court said I was, and wondering if the children thought it. The worst was having to entrust their daily well-being to someone else. The very worst was having to drop them back with Dennis and return alone to my own place, which was deadly empty once the kids had been and gone.

  Predictably, they liked the lighthouse. Even Johnny was fascinated with it, though he started glancing anxiously at his watch as our time together neared an end. When I tried to get him to talk about what he was feeling, he gave me one-word answers and shrugs, and then Kikit was tugging at me with talk of her own. I needed time alone with him, but she wouldn’t leave my side. Given the paucity of our time together, I couldn’t ask her to.

  Dropping the children back at the house, I begged Dennis to let me pick Johnny up from school the next day and take him out alone for an hour to talk. He said we had to stick to the schedule.

  Carmen filed the Motion to Recuse late Thursday. So began another wait for a call from Selwey’s clerk.

  The lighthouse was shaping up well. The floors were done and, by week’s end, the walls were painted and the windows washed. The children had already picked their furniture from my warehouse—Kikit a pretty wicker set, Johnny one of the wood sets that we stocked—along with the bedding they wanted, but I did the rest. Carpets, lamps, window coverings, framed posters—their rooms looked precious when I was done.

  “So when can I sleep there?” Kikit asked when I updated her on the phone.

  “Soon,” I said. I was hoping for a reversal of the court order by the end of the following week, and if not then, during the week after that. Worst case scenario, if we had to wait until the GAL’s study was done, it would be Thanksgiving. I refused to think that I wouldn’t win at that point.

  In any case, I wanted the children to see the lighthouse as home. To that end, I felt justified in neglecting other things to finish the decorating.

  WickerWise was sturdy enough to bear the neglect without suffering much damage. I answered only the most urgent phone calls, dealt with only the most urgent problems. When the manufacturer of one of the major fabrics we used for cushions in our factory declared bankruptcy, I chose another company’s fabric and submitted the order. When the line we had been most successful with in our western stores was discontinued, I chose a replacement. I kept Furniture Today close at hand and read it when I could. The rest of the work I left for Brody.

  I saw him each day when I checked in at the office, talked with him about what had to be done, then left. He was leaving the following Monday for the West Coast, at which point I would be back in the office working. It was better this way, I told myself. Less tempting.

  But I missed him. I was going through the worst time of my life, and he was the one person who might have helped. He knew about visitation rights. He knew about being alone. He knew me and what made me tick.

  The court said we were having an affair. We weren’t. But something had changed between us. Whether it was the power of suggestion or the fact that I was now separated and theoretically available, or whether there had been an attraction all long, I didn’t know. All I knew was that our friendship wasn’t as innocent as it had once been. I definitely felt it—little looks, quick thoughts, an absent, innocent touch that brought a shock of awareness.

  He was right. Something did exist. But I couldn’t pursue it.

  That wasn’t to say I didn’t think of him often. I wanted to call him Thursday night to tell him how dismal Halloween had been. Dennis had opted for having his mother give out candy at the house while he took Kikit around the neighborhood, and though I trusted that he would go through every last bit of the candy she received and throw out anything with nuts, I would have rather been there than sitting alone in my lighthouse with a bag of candy and not one child ringing the bell.

  I wanted to call Brody Friday night after discouraging talks with my mother and sister. They wanted me in Cleveland, and while I couldn’t go, I couldn’t tell them why. I was frustrated when they pushed, then angry, then—again and always—riddled with guilt.

  I wanted to call him Saturday night, when I was feeling blue as blue could be,
cold turkey after a day with the kids. After Johnny’s game, I had taken them to lunch and a movie, then brought them to the lighthouse and sat with them in my tower overlooking the waves. Kikit had hogged my lap—not that I didn’t want her there, but I wanted Johnny to feel a little warmth, too. When I reached out to him, he eluded my grasp. “Talk to me,” I begged him, and he talked, but never about what needed to be said. When I broached the subject of the separation directly, he answered with headshakes and shrugs. The closest he came to making a statement was when Kikit asked me to sing and he suggested “No Man Is an Island.”

  “No Man Is an Island” had been the theme song of the group Dennis and I sang with. It had been the closer for our shows, sung at that point where the audience was dewy-eyed and mellow, caught up in the sense of community that characterized the times, swaying and singing along. The melody was strong and anthemlike, the harmony rich. Dennis and I had always sung it with a sense of nostalgia, and had had it played at our wedding. It was, in its way, the theme song of our marriage.

  It stood for much more though, I realized as I thought about it Saturday night after the children were gone. I had grown up in a joyless home. Singing had been my escape. I felt no oppression when I was singing, felt nothing pulling me down when I tapped my toe to the beat and heard the harmony click. I had met Dennis singing and had transferred to him those feelings of pleasure.

  It occurred to me, looking back, that Dennis had lost interest in singing, just as he had lost interest in taking pictures. Two sources of shared pleasure, both dried up. I should have seen it sooner. I surely saw it now.

  I wanted to tell Brody that and more. But I didn’t dare call. I didn’t trust myself that far.

  Sunday morning, he took things out of my hands. I had been up at dawn feeling lost, so I had driven to the office and set myself up in the workshop removing the rest of the broken weavers from the rocker I had started on the week before. I found the growing number of holes jarring, so I worked quickly. I wasn’t more than an hour into it when Brody showed up with brunch.

  I gave him a short hi, said something about having parked out of sight of the house where he wasn’t supposed to have seen the car, and went on with my work. I tried to pretend he was there on his own business, even tried to drum up anger or indifference, but neither came, and then he had warm bagels and veggie cheese and lox arranged on paper plates on the empty end of the worktable, and it was too much. I told myself I was hungry.

  Was I ever.

  How could I resist warm bagels—they were whole grain, my favorite, smart, smart Brody—and hot black coffee, chicory blend, my favorite, too. When my best friend said, “It’s been a shitty week for you, and you haven’t told me a thing, so, come on, I want to hear,” how could I not answer?

  It spilled out, all the frustration and the heartache, and, yes, the excitement of seeing the children, but that was a given. It was the other that was new, that I needed help with, the business of visitation rights. “Was it as hard for you with Joy?”

  We were on stools at the worktable with a token corner between us. I had my thighs crossed. Brody’s legs were sprawled. He was on his third bagel, though for the life of me I couldn’t see where the first two had gone.

  “Hard, yes,” he answered, “but in a different way. When it happened to me, I’d only been married for four years and a father for two, nothing like the length of your marriage or how long you’ve been a parent. Marriage and parenthood is a way of life for you, so changing it hurts more.” He paused to frown, then went on without pride. “Me, I was never into it that way. My marriage was shaky from the get-go. Joy was supposed to help.” He snorted. “Brilliant, huh? Boy, were we dumb.”

  “Young.”

  “That, too. I took all the away assignments, because Mary Anne and I got along best when we weren’t breathing down each other’s necks. So when it came to a split, it wasn’t like I was used to seeing Joy every day.”

  I had met Mary Anne when she and Brody were dating, when she was studying law and he business. Dennis and I had been at their wedding and seen them several times a year during their marriage. We guessed early on that things weren’t right, and had been neither surprised nor terribly disappointed when they split. Mary Anne prided herself on being an intellectual. She had been drawn to esoteric thinking and had surrounded herself with others of that mind. They had an air of superiority, off-putting for those of us not quite as gifted. I had always found her—them—boring. She went into teaching soon after Joy was born, and was still there. I hadn’t talked with her in years.

  Nor had I talked about her. It had seemed an invasion of Brody’s privacy during those early years, and later had been irrelevant. I had always assumed Brody felt the same way, either that, or that his loyalty to Mary Anne kept him quiet. Suddenly I wondered.

  “Go on,” I urged.

  He took a long drink of coffee—mostly cream and sugar, I didn’t know where those calories went, either—then smacked his lips, set down the cup, and said, “I was a lousy father.”

  “You’re a great father.”

  “Now, maybe. Not then. The divorce agreement gave me certain times with Joy, so I saw her then. I’m not sure I would have otherwise. She scared the hell out of me.”

  I smiled in disbelief. “Joy?”

  “She was two,” he said, embarrassed. “Diapers, bibs, braids—I didn’t know what to do with her. I’d never done any of it until Mary Anne and I split. Then it was like instant parenthood. I was nervous with her, which she sensed, so she clung to Mary Anne when I came for her and ran back to Mary Anne when I brought her back, which made me feel about as welcome as BO. She didn’t want to come near me. So I said, that’s okay, that’s great, I’ll spare her the pain. I canceled a visit here, a visit there, more than I care to recall.”

  I was trying to fit the Brody he was describing with the one I knew. “When did it change?”

  He didn’t answer, just sat there chewing on the second half of that third bagel.

  “Brody?”

  “When Johnny was born.”

  I didn’t make the connection. “Yes?”

  He finished the bagel, wiped his hand on his jeans, looked me in the eye, and said, “I was jealous. You guys were so happy to have this little thing. I sulked for a while—”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did. I’d go home after holding Johnny and feel sorry for myself that I didn’t have something like that. Then I realized I did.”

  “Joy would have been seven by then.”

  “Yup. Past diapers and bibs. She could take herself to the bathroom and braid her own hair. She didn’t scare me so much.”

  It occurred to me then. “That was when you took her to Disney World.”

  “Had to do something super to win her over. She barely knew me. Remember what I did? First came Disney World, then Hershey Park, then the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone. It was easier being together if we were busy. She was nine, Johnny’s age now, before I had the guts to have her here with me for more than a day or two at a stretch.”

  “Who’d’ve guessed it,” I said. “You were great with my kids right from the start. I recall your changing a diaper or two, even giving a few baths.”

  “It was different with your kids. No one expected me to do anything. No one even asked me to do anything. There was nothing of the power play that there always was between Mary Anne and me. With your kids, it was the kind of thing that if I didn’t just jump in, I’d miss out.” His voice lowered, eyes glinted. “I was tired of missing out. Having your kids was the next best thing to having you.”

  I choked on my coffee. It was a minute before I could catch my breath, another minute before I had my chin properly wiped. Then I wailed, “You aren’t supposed to say things like that.”

  He shrugged, but the light in his eyes didn’t dim.

  I lowered my own to my coffee, took one sip, then another. I brushed bagel crumbs into a pile with the side of my pinkie. I looked at the container
of veggie cheese, the plastic spreader, the discarded coffee cup lids—anywhere but at Brody.

  “Think Dennis knew?” he asked.

  “You never did anything improper.”

  “I keep thinking I caused this.”

  My eyes flew up. “You didn’t. Dennis has been dissatisfied with our marriage for a while.”

  “Have you?”

  I didn’t answer as quickly. I had only begun to soul-search on that score. Thinking aloud, I said, “Not consciously. I wanted my marriage to work, so I clung to the positives and glossed over the negatives. I should have been more honest, I guess. More realistic. But no marriage is perfect. So where’s the cut-off point? At what point is there more bad than good? At what point do you say ‘enough’? Dennis clearly reached it before me.”

  “Clearly,” Brody said. He shifted on the stool, reached into a back pocket, pulled out a piece of newsprint, and handed it over. It was folded in half, then again.

  I unfolded it and read the short caption beneath the picture. “Dennis Raphael and Phoebe Lowe, dancing at Friday night’s Bar Association Gala,” and having a wonderful time of it, to judge from their smiles.

  Dennis had a great smile. It made a woman feel like she was the light of his life. There had been a time when he had smiled at me just the way he was smiling at Phoebe.

  I studied the clipping a little longer. “Why am I not surprised?” Not surprised, but hurt. Very hurt.

  “That’s from Hillary’s column. It could mean anything.”

  I refolded the paper. The pain was muted that way. “I think they’re involved. I mean, seriously involved. When I threw it at him—I was being facetious—he didn’t deny it.”

  “And he accuses you?”

  “He says the rules change once you separate.”

  “He’s right, there,” Brody said in a pointed way that put us right back where we started.

  Looking at him then, I searched my conscience for germs of infidelity. His features were so very familiar—warm brown eyes behind those wire-rimmed glasses of his, the ghost of freckles across his nose that were visible only at skylit times like these, a jawline that was faintly squared and shadowed, full lower lip. I had never touched those features as a lover would, neither with my fingers nor my mouth. But there were different ways to love.