by Rita Ciresi
“The cans made it to the curb.”
I smelled something funny in the passive construction of that sentence. But now wasn’t the time to pursue it. I headed for my car. “All right. I’m freezing. Adiós, everybody.”
“Drive carefully,” Ebb said.
“I will,” I said—because Ebb’s backseat driving really annoyed me.
“It’s supposed to get slick, so take it slow—”
“I know.”
“But not so slow you get pushed off the road when you’re merging—”
I smiled, got into my car, and fought back the urge to give Ebb the finger. As I slipped my key into the ignition and started my engine, I wondered why I had led Cynthia to believe that Ebb was perfect. I mean, the guy didn’t even know rule number one of maintaining a good marriage: Let the driver drive!
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EBEN
Big puffs of exhaust belched from the tailpipe of Lisa’s Camry as we followed her onto Darling Lane. Lisa was driving far too slowly; Cynthia obviously was trying not to stay on her bumper.
“Honk at her,” I told Cynthia.
“Didn’t you tell her to drive carefully?” Cynthia asked.
“That’s exactly why she’s driving like a snail,” I said. “To tick me off.”
Cynthia smiled. “Which one of you will teach Danny to drive?”
“That’s a long way off.” I calculated forward. I would be fifty-two when Danny got his learner’s permit. I could begin tapping into my 401(k)—without penalty—when he was just a senior in college. Which meant I probably would be ready to check into a rest home when my next child (if we ever had one) started packing her bags for Harvard.
I looked out the window at the barren trees. “A little bird—named Lisa—told me you have a good friend. Who takes care of wildlife problems.”
“That’s right. Why do you ask?”
I had no idea. My throat went dry as I fabricated an answer. “This friend of mine suspects he has squirrels in his walls.”
“I’ll have Rob call him,” Cynthia said. She nodded at the glove compartment. “There’s a pen and a memo pad in there—write down your friend’s name and number.”
I reluctantly reached forward and took the pen and paper out of Cynthia’s glove box. I almost wrote down Josh Silber, until I remembered that Cynthia and Josh already were acquainted.
“Actually,” I said as I carelessly scribbled down another name, “I don’t remember Simon’s phone number.”
“I’ll have Rob call you, then, at the office.”
“Fine,” I said, shoving the pen and memo pad back into the glove compartment. I looked away from the road again, imagining the woodchucks and raccoons and other masked intruders lurking in the forest. “I expect your friend does good business. Out in these parts.”
“Phenomenal. He’s looking to expand.”
“We should have dinner sometime,” I said. “The four of us, that is.”
“Sounds like fun,” Cynthia said.
She reached over and switched on the radio. The mellifluous voice of the classical deejay announced, “And now let us enjoy the overture to Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.” At the end of Darling Lane, Lisa honked and turned her Camry to the right; Cynthia turned her wheel to the left. I watched Lisa’s car recede in the passenger-side rearview that warned: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.
“So we’ll stay in touch about the house,” Cynthia said as she pulled into our driveway.
“If we have any questions,” I said, disengaging my seat belt with a snap, “we’ll call you tomorrow.”
Cynthia paused. “I won’t be available tomorrow.”
“Monday, then.” I opened the car door and let in a blast of cold air.
To my surprise, Cynthia reached out and touched my sleeve. “Wait. If you’re serious about this house, I’ll turn on my pager tomorrow.”
I was serious. But I didn’t want Cynthia to think we were too willing to overspend on this one property, so I said, “Monday will be fine. Thanks for the lift.”
She nodded, and let go of my sleeve. “My pleasure.”
I got out, closed the car door, and watched Cynthia back her Lexus out of the driveway. I wondered what grand plans she had for tomorrow that would cause her to disconnect her pager. Maybe I was letting my imagination get the best of me, but the way she had murmured “my pleasure” reminded me of a time when I used to hustle a younger, more carefree version of Lisa up this very walk, close the front door without locking it, and take Lisa down onto the living-room carpet—so that afterward she said, “Mmm, thank you,” and I said, “Mmm, my pleasure.”
Now, what did Lisa and I say to each other after we made love?
I about plotzed.
Me too.
Such romantic language. I cast a sad look at the two silent sentinels watching over our house, Snow Man (who had been stripped of his tie) and Snow Woman (who had defiantly dropped both her broom and her mop). I kicked a dead leaf off the black rubber mat that lay on our front porch. My key scraped, once again, in the lock. I threw open the door and punched in the security code with my gloves still on, causing me to hit two buttons at once. The display pad flashed ERROR ERROR.
I bolted for the bathroom. A bad line from Lisa’s novel Real Men! had read: Magnus groaned with pleasure as his piss hit the bowl in a forceful, urgent stream. My marginal comment—Overwrought for a mere pee—had been written before I was old enough to experience a certain slackness in my own bladder. I knew I should have used the facilities at the colonial house. But I couldn’t stand to hear Lisa’s objections. Even though she always tested the plumbing in the houses we visited, Lisa claimed it was a violation of the owners’ rights to actually take a whiz—and positively verboten to lower your butt onto the throne. She had established this sacred rule one Saturday afternoon after we returned home and discovered that a prospective buyer (or Mrs. Order herself) had taken a colossal dump in our upstairs toilet—without double flushing.
“Eeew, somebody really went in here,” Lisa had said, flicking on the bathroom fan. “How disgusting.”
“It probably was an urgent situation,” I said.
Lisa grunted as she cracked open the window. “Our personal space has been invaded. In the most gruesome of ways! I swear, this is worse than Charles Manson coming in and scrawling graffiti all over the mirror with my twelve-dollar lipstick.”
“You pay twelve dollars for a lipstick?” I asked.
“Sometimes thirteen.”
Lisa flushed the toilet, grabbed a bottle of Vanish, and squirted into the bowl a long stream of blue liquid. As she scrubbed the toilet with a brush, Lisa expressed optimism about a sale. “Pooping a big plotz in somebody else’s house is the equivalent of trying on a bikini bottom without your underwear. You simply have a moral obligation to buy it.”
“I doubt this pooper,” I said, “shares your scruples.”
Lisa sniffed. “I doubt he’s of the appropriate sex to wear a bikini.”
“What makes you so sure it was a he?”
“It just seems like a man,” Lisa said. “Who so rudely intruded! A woman would have flushed twice. And if that didn’t do the trick, then she would have reached for the toilet brush—which is sitting right here next to the bowl—and done whatever she had to do to clean up the mess.”
Ever since that episode, I’d been squeamish about even pissing in someone else’s toilet, as if Lisa were waiting in the wings to reprimand me for my poor bathroom habits.
I flushed, washed my hands, grabbed Lisa’s handwritten directions to the birthday boy’s house (inexplicably labeled FOX BIRTHDAY), reactivated the security alarm—and then remembered the trash cans. My nose wrinkled as I stepped into the malodorous garage. I really didn’t want to hear Lisa’s commentary on how incompetently I performed certain household tasks. I unlocked the trunk of my Audi, removed the lids from the trash cans, and piled the smelly garbage bags inside. On the way to pick up Danny, I would stop and wing th
e bags into the Dumpster behind the Price Chopper.
My Audi sounded gruff when I started it. On the road, wind from passing minivans shook the car. A freezing drizzle—that probably would turn to sheer ice by that night—began to cloud the windshield. The defroster was a blast of cold, stale air; the wipers made a sick, gritty complaint. The gas gauge had dipped to E; I’d have to stop and fill up.
When I got out at the pump at the Mobil station, freezing rain swept beneath the overhang and pelted down on my head. I finished gassing up the car and dashed inside to pay, then drove around to the back. The Dumpster was labeled FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES ONLY; ALL OTHER USE SUBJECT TO FINES. I decided not to flirt with danger. I’d try the grocery store. But then I realized the Price Chopper was back in the opposite direction and that I didn’t have another minute to waste.
I already was running late to pick up Danny. I tried not to drive too fast. But I felt like I was in a nightmare where I kept running down an ever-longer terminal to catch a plane—a dream not unlike the reality of O’Hare Airport. Car after car passed by me, doing fifty miles an hour to my thirty. I had gotten trapped behind a square white Wise potato chip truck, which kept sending swoosh after swoosh of rain back onto my windshield. For two or three miles I watched the blurry picture of the stout, ruffled owl on the back of the truck who held up a finger—or was that a claw?—and commanded me, MAKE THE WISE CHOICE.
In the birthday boy’s section of town, one subdivision followed another, and I couldn’t find the right gate. After another hasty glance at the directions Lisa had provided, I turned into the village marked Buckingham and peered at the street signs—Chippendale, Spencer, Hepplewhite, and, finally, Regency.
At 1502 Regency—a Tudor home positively baronial in stature—a cluster of shriveled, drooping balloons was tethered to the mailbox. The winding driveway was empty. I clearly was the last parent to walk up the slippery, lit porch steps. The black railing felt slick and thick as a Popsicle beneath my hand. The massive front door opened before I even had a chance to ring the lit bell, and a disembodied woman’s hand beckoned me into the dimly lit marble foyer, where a grandfather clock, chiding me for my tardiness, tolled the half hour.
The birthday boy’s mother, dressed in some sort of silky pantsuit outfit, shut the door behind me with a sharp thud. “I’m June Fox.”
“Eben Strauss.” I shook her cold, outstretched hand. “How was the party?”
“I’ll get your son,” she said, and disappeared.
The case of the grandfather clock was made of glass. At the end of the pendulum hung a gold disk big as a china plate; I watched it swing back and forth until a fashionably unshaven man in chinos and a maroon polo came out of the shadows at the back of the house. The minute he opened his mouth and a series of foul vowel sounds came out, I could tell he hailed from Boston.
“Your son said fuck at the pot-ty.”
I tried not to laugh. But pot-ty really got to me.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said.
“Choon—that’s my wife—Choon put him in time-out.”
“That’s fine.”
“But when your son came out of time-out, he gave all the rest of these he-yuh kids a completely screwy working definition of the word.”
I wondered exactly how wrong Danny had gotten it. I could just hear him chirping, And then the man sticks his wienie in the lady’s rear end. But I’m not sure my dad knows how to do it right, because once I saw him . . .
June Fox, followed by her own darling son, ushered in Danny.
I clapped my gloves together and the smack loudly resounded in the foyer, which had a vaulted ceiling. “Okay, Danny,” I said, “zip up your coat and let’s get going before it starts snowing.”
“I wanna stay,” Danny said.
“I think you’ve already worn out your welcome,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you can ask Zachary over to our house sometime,” I said.
“Why can’t I ask Noah?”
“Who the hell is Noah?” I asked.
Choon Fox gasped at my language. Danny pointed to the pale, overly sugared birthday boy, who was hopping on one foot on the marble tile, as if attempting to squash a large insect. “You want to come to dinner, Noah?”
“Not tonight,” I said. “Some other time. Come on. Where are your shoes?”
“Right there!” Danny pointed to a pair of Reeboks pushed to the side of the stairs.
“Well, put them on.”
Danny sat down on the tile. To my great chagrin, he started to put his left sneaker on his right foot.
“You know better than that,” I said. “Right goes with right.”
Danny slipped on the right sneaker and then looked down at the laces with dismay. Noah snickered—the little shit!—and I got down on my knees and tied the right laces, letting Danny fashion a bastardized bow on the left.
“Okay,” I said. “Mittens on. Zip up. Say thank you to your hosts.”
“Thank you!” Danny said, and smiled so hard that saliva squeezed out the gap of his missing tooth. I leaned over to pull the drawstrings of his hood. “Ow, Daddy, you’re choking me. I enjoyed myself a lot!”
To the Foxes I said, “Sorry for the misbehavior.”
Mr. Fox nodded. In a voice that hardly seemed to convey good wishes, June Fox said, “Best of luck with your new baby.”
What new baby? I almost asked. Then I looked down, once again, at the one child I did have, sunk my fingers into Danny’s fleecy hood, and practically pulled him out the door.
Whoever said that parenting comes naturally failed to acknowledge that frustration does too. After we slipped our way down the walk to the driveway, I wanted to chide Danny for his bad manners. I wanted to tell him to concentrate less on his parents’ sex life and more on learning how to tie his own damn sneakers. Instead, I opened the passenger-side door and gestured for him to climb in.
Danny sat on the True Value Hardware bag. “Ow! What’s that?”
“A lock.”
“What for?” Danny asked.
“If you can’t remember what you did wrong this morning,” I said, “then your memory is even worse than mine.” I eased the bag out from under Danny. “Why did you say fuck in Noah’s house?”
“You and Mommy do it all the time.”
“We do not do it all the time,” I said. “We don’t even say it all the time! And why did you tell Noah’s parents that Mommy is going to have a baby?”
“Isn’t she?”
I gazed into Danny’s liquidy black eyes. Danny looked so puzzled—so trusting—that I momentarily considered making this into some lesson on the difference between trying and succeeding and the wide gap that often existed between what you wanted and what you wound up getting.
Finally I resorted to a word that Danny only understood about two-thirds of the time. “No,” I said. “She isn’t.”
Danny accepted this statement as blithely as if I had pointed out that his left shoe wasn’t tied correctly. “Noah had a chocolate ice-cream cake,” he said. “But his mother is crabby. She put me in time-out.”
“You and I are going to talk about that later.”
“I didn’t mean to, Daddy.”
I leaned into the open car door. “Mean to doesn’t matter. What matters is what you did.”
“Don’t tell Mommy.”
“No, I will tell Mommy. You did something wrong and now you have to take the consequences.”
I shut the passenger door so hard the antenna quivered.
When I tossed the True Value Hardware bag into the backseat, the smell of the garbage in the trunk wafted toward me. I got in, started the car, and backed up. As we looped around Regency Drive, the windshield wipers swooshing back and forth in regular rhythm, I said, “I don’t understand why you’re acting up so much lately.”
Danny slumped down in his seat. “Noah acts up too.”
“Noah is not my son,” I said. “So I don’t care about his beh
avior.”
“But he cheats, Daddy. He looked through the blindfold when we were playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. And at school he picks his nose and pretends the snots are sunflower seeds, then he puts them in the granola.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said. “Tell the teacher.”
“I do. And she puts Noah in time-out. But then when he comes out of time-out, he sneaks his snots back in again.” Danny scrunched up his nose. “What’s that smell?”
“I forgot to take out the garbage this morning, so I put it in the trunk.” I looked down at Danny. “Don’t tell Mommy.”
He gave me an evil smile. “I won’t tell Mommy about the garbage,” he said, “if you don’t tell Mommy about me saying fuck at Noah’s party.”
Such blackmail seemed morally reprehensible. Nevertheless, I told Danny, “We have a deal.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LISA
I was leaning against a mound of pillows on our unmade bed, bemoaning my lousy haircut, when Ebb and Danny got home. They must have been surprised to find the entire first floor dark, because I heard them calling out in alternating high and low voices, “Mommy?” “Lisar?” “Mommy?” “Lisar?” until I thought I’d shout back, I refuse to be either one.
Yet the moment they appeared in the bedroom doorway, I blew Ebb a kiss and then opened my arms so Danny could lunge right into them.
“Take off your shoes,” Ebb told Danny—a bit too sharply, “before you climb into Mommy and Daddy’s bed.”
Danny pulled off his sneakers and dropped them to the floor, then proceeded to give me more kisses than Ebb probably had given me since the turn of the year. I received each smack with the appropriate coo of pleasure and tried not to sound peevish when I spoke to Ebb.
“Law and Order brought by a prospective buyer,” I said. “But she almost didn’t get in the front door because you forgot to oil the lock again.” I sighed. “Well, at least you remembered to take out the garbage. Even if you left your dirty lunch dishes in the sink.”
“Mrs. O. told me he was a bachelor,” Ebb said, “and wouldn’t notice.”
“The guy was totally gay. He noticed everything.” I sank my head against the pillow. “God. I have the worst headache. And this haircut.”