by Rita Ciresi
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Or better. Although my butt stung as I slowly took the stairs to remeet Cynthia, the headache that had plagued me for days now melted away. I felt restored to my old self. I was a reasonable human being. A man who knew his limits. A man with business to conduct.
Eben Strauss placed his large, manly hand upon the swinging door and strode into the kitchen, where his lovely real-estate agent was sitting cross-legged on the clean counter.
“Oh!” said she. “You startled me!”
As she slid down from the counter, her boots hit the tile, and Eben looked at the floor—as if it already were his floor—to see if her heels had nicked it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
LISA
Something in that ménage à trois sushi must have disagreed with me, because my stomach lurched all the way home on the train. I couldn’t wait to get onto the platform and gulp some fresh air. As I gingerly walked across the icy parking lot to my car, I tried not to think about what a fiasco my lunch with Aye-Aye had been. I had let him hold my hand. Ugh. And call me sweetie and babe. Double ugh. And convince me—sort of—that Simon should jump the bones of the beautiful Maria. Ugh three times. Ugh a million! I unlocked my car and climbed into the cold driver’s seat. What did Aye-Aye—a bachelor!—know about marriage? It made my pulse race faster and faster, until all four chambers of my heart felt like they would implode with rage, to think that he had dared to criticize my version of that flawed yet venerable institution. I gripped the chilly steering wheel of my car and muttered to myself what I should have told Aye-Aye in the restaurant: “Just because two people are having a couple of bad moments in their marriage doesn’t mean the whole thing has to fall apart!”
My words sounded wise and wonderful. I glanced in the rearview mirror to smile in agreement with my sage old married self. And that’s when I noticed the huge piece of glistening brown seaweed lodged between my canine and my incisor. I’d been talking to Aye-Aye—probably for the vast majority of our sophisticated little lunch—with half the ocean’s flora stuck in my teeth.
I wanted to die. You idiot, I scolded myself as I rubbed a Kleenex between my teeth—which only lodged the seaweed farther into the crack. You moron! You loser! Now you’ll really have to rewrite your novel. You’ll have to rename it I’m Sorry This Is My Sushi. And before you pose for your author photograph, you’ll have to take a sharp toothpick to all the marine algae flourishing in your foolish mouth.
I burped—not once, but twice—and then I pushed my gloved hand against the base of my throat. Oh, the pain. The agony. The sheer heartburn of being a Real Author—who had to write not what she wanted to write but whatever the market demanded. But I wouldn’t! I couldn’t! I simply could not stomach the idea of creating in my novel an unhappy ending!
I started the car and backed out over a large clump of ice that momentarily made the back tires swerve. I couldn’t wait to get home. I couldn’t wait to let Ebb read I’m Sorry, so he could assure me that Norwegians had notoriously loose morals and that their literary opinions weren’t worth the price of a tin of smoked salmon.
Don’t change a word, Ebb would say. Don’t even change a space between the words. Simon never would dare lay a lusty finger on Maria.
I would nod—vigorously—as I said, That’s right.
Simon is too good a man.
Exactly.
He has never seen the humor in that Borscht Belt joke, “Take my wife . . . please.”
Precisely.
He sees the face of his child in the face of his wife and remembers his duties and responsibilities.
Totally.
Your ending is the only feasible ending.
Usually the dialogue I concocted in my head required copious editing. But as I pulled out of the train-station parking lot and reviewed Ebb’s lines, I thought, Hmm, with the exception of the word feasible, I couldn’t have said it better myself.
When I got to Montessori House, Glorious Gloria opened the door with a robust “Welcome, Mother!” I stepped into the overheated front hall. Two boys sat on the wooden bench, bundled up in identical cobalt-blue Lands’ End ski jackets. The boy on the left—who turned out to be Danny—curled his mittens into fists and told me, “Mommy, you are late.”
Gloria immediately tut-tutted. “Now, Danny, remember our lesson about using hurtful words.” She turned to me. “Today we learned about mature communication techniques. Instead of making accusations such as ‘You’re a dope!’ or ‘You’re a jerk!’ we’re practicing how to say, ‘When you . . . I feel . . .’ ”
Gloria nodded encouragingly at Danny.
Danny gave me a sour look. “Mommy, when you pick me up late from school, I feel like Zachary.”
“Which Zachary?” I asked.
Danny pointed to the despondent boy sitting next to him. “On Mondays, Zachary’s dad always forgets to pick him up.”
The fucker, I thought. I reached for Danny’s hand and turned toward Gloria. “Thanks for telling me about that communication method,” I said. “I’ll have to try it on my husband next time he starts acting like a—”
Danny pulled me out the door before I could say dope or jerk.
On the ride home, Danny said, “Daddy called school today.”
My esophagus started to burn again. “What for?”
“He wanted to know if you had dropped me off.”
Oh Lord in heaven, I thought. “What’d you tell him?”
“I was pooping in the bathroom. Where’d you go today, anyway?”
“Nowhere.”
“You’re all dressed up.”
“I went to . . . the doctor’s,” I said, and let rip a wet, fishy belch.
Danny giggled. “Gross, Mommy!”
“I couldn’t help it,” I said.
“You’re not very ladylike.”
“So who wants to be?” I burped again, then swallowed down the foul taste in my mouth. “Oh, yuck, I feel like I’m going to—”
Danny looked up at me with great interest. My stomach clutched together. But then the barfy feeling passed. I rode the rest of the way home in grateful silence. As we turned into our half-shoveled driveway, Danny reported, “Zachary’s mom threw up and went to the doctor and now she’s going to have another baby.”
I clenched my teeth. If I had to hear that yet another woman I knew—and not me—had gotten pregnant, I really would vomit. I should have stayed home today, I thought. I should have paged Ebb and told him to come home on his lunch hour. I should have performed my wifely duties and made love with my husband. Instead, I had run away to the big bad city to eat eels. Yes, I was sure I had eaten eels or squid or some other slick, gelatinous half-alive sea creature that right now was writhing in my stomach.
I cut the engine and got out of the car. I felt queasier than ever as I turned toward the for-sale sign and watched Law and Order’s dented face swaying back and forth in the wind. I trudged through the snow to the mailbox, which was stuffed with junk mail. The stiff white envelope on top convinced me that Ebb’s secretary had added us to some Christian mailing list. SOMEONE AT THIS ADDRESS, the envelope claimed, DESPERATELY NEEDS GOD’S HELP.
Tell me something I don’t already know, I thought as I made my way back up the icy driveway and remembered—way too late—that I was supposed to have called Cynthia. Ebb would be furious that I hadn’t called her. And now we probably had lost our last chance for happiness—that stern, upright, and yet so forgiving house.
“We got a package!” Danny hollered, running up to the front porch and grabbing what looked to me like a long white florist’s box. He inspected the label. “But it came to the wrong address. It’s for . . .” He concentrated as he put together the letters. “E-liz-a-beth Die-oh-det-to.”
My heart thudded. Surely the flowers—if they were addressed to Ms. Diodetto—could have come from only one man: Aye-Aye. And surely the card inside read something like this: My dear Ms. D., please accept my humble apologies for trying to turn your words—w
hich are indeed golden!—into mere silver.
“Elizabeth Diodetto,” I told Danny, “is me.”
“But, Mommy. You’re the Lisar-lady.”
“I lead a double life,” I said. “And then some.” I carried the mail up to the porch and gestured with my head. “Step aside, Big Boy.”
The front-door lock felt dry and unforgiving when I slipped in the key. I gritted my teeth and twisted the key to the left. The lock clicked and Danny cheered as the door opened.
The answering machine was blinking wildly when we trooped into the kitchen. But Danny insisted that I open the florists’ box (“Open it, open it!”) before I played the messages. I dumped the mail on the counter, drew a scissors from the junk drawer, and cut the twine. Beneath layers of green tissue lay a dozen now-drooping pink tulips that looked as bedraggled as a boxer in the ninth round.
“These must have been beautiful,” I said. “Once upon a time.”
I pulled down a vase from the cabinet and started to fill it with water.
Danny grabbed the white envelope from the box, pulled out the card, and read aloud a phonetic version of the message: “Eye hee-ard you need a plumb-ber.”
I almost dropped the vase into the sink. “Let me see that.”
Danny held out the card. “I said it right.”
I set the vase down on the counter and looked over his shoulder at the neat handwriting on the card. “Plumber has a silent B.”
“How come nobody signed it?”
“I guess I have a secret admirer.”
Danny’s lower lip quivered.
I reached down and rubbed his cold, red cheek with the back of my knuckle. “My admirer is Daddy.”
“Daddy wouldn’t call you by your wrong name.”
“But that isn’t my wrong name,” I said. “It’s my maiden name, the name I had before I married Daddy.”
“Why would Daddy want to call you that?”
“He was fooling around,” I said.
Danny looked up at me, and I braced myself to hear the inevitable: Zachary’s dad fooled around—with a lady who wasn’t his wife. But then Danny gazed down at the message again. “What does it mean?”
Little did I know how difficult this question would be to answer. I picked up the scissors and started hacking off the ends of the tulip stems. What had Ebb meant to tell me with those simple six words—Let’s get together tonight? I’m coming home at noon? I wouldn’t mind trying something different? I know we need to fix things between us? I wouldn’t have married anyone else?
I dropped an aspirin into the vase to keep the flowers fresh—and then, because the tulips looked as sick as I myself felt, I also dropped in two tablets of Alka-Seltzer. As the tablets fizzed away—and Danny giggled at the sound—I put the tulips one by one into the water and watched each stem and flower droop over the lip of the vase. It hardly mattered what Ebb had meant to say—did it?—if I hadn’t been here to get the message. I hadn’t stayed home on the one day I should have been here. I’d been too busy trying to make myself into someone else. And now I just felt like a nobody, all over again.
I put the last tulip into the vase, and the petals shattered all over the counter.
Danny tugged on my sleeve. “Why are you crying, Mommy?”
I wiped my wet cheek with the back of my hand. “Because I think Daddy meant to say—”
I was going to tell Danny, I love you. But then my lunch abruptly backed up into my throat. My stomach buckled and I ran into the half-bathroom, where I fell to my knees and gushed my churned-up sushi into the less-than-pristine toilet. It was a real hurl. I hadn’t gotten sick with such spectacular fury since that morning so long ago when I had stood up from my desk at the office and thought to myself, I can’t be pregnant. I must be pregnant. I can’t get married. I must get married. Maybe there’ll be moments when I actually like being a mother and a wife. But, oh God, the moments when I don’t . . .
Ebb came home early, just before six o’clock. I heard his car door slam as I lay shivering in my sweatsuit in bed, and I imagined him walking in to the front hall, puzzled that the kitchen stood dim and gave off no warm, comforting smell of chicken or pasta or vegetables simmering on the stove. I was sure Ebb figured out that something was amiss when he found Danny parked in front of the blue light of the TV, watching the end of Life and Death on the Veldt.
“Where’s Mommy?” Ebb asked Danny as the narrator of the video stated in clipped British tones, “A zebra stallion must fight for his right to mate with an entire harem of mares. . . .”
“She got sick,” Danny said as the narrator told us, “The loser usually chooses to join a herd of bachelors. . . .”
Ebb must have hit the MUTE on the remote, because the video went silent. “How did Mommy get sick?”
“She threw up,” Danny said. “A lot. She said she went to the doctor’s and—hey, look at those zebras, Daddy. Doesn’t that hurt?”
Ebb cleared his throat. “Maybe not for the participants—”
Participants?
“—but for the observers . . . well, I agree, it certainly seems painful to watch.”
I sensed more than actually heard Ebb toss his coat over the back of the couch. As he came up the stairs, his footsteps sounded slow—and even his shadow, which appeared in the darkened doorway of our bedroom, seemed tired.
“Lisar,” he said. “Are you awake?”
I brought the blankets up to my chin and shivered. “I wish I weren’t.”
“What’s the matter?”
“First I’m hot and then I’m cold,” I said. “And I keep throwing up. I haven’t thrown up so much since—”
“Are you? But you can’t be.”
“I didn’t say I was.”
I sat up, clutching the blanket against my stomach. Ebb quickly stepped aside as I bolted from the bed and beelined for the bathroom, where I knelt once again in front of the toilet. Ebb stayed in the hall until the worst had passed. Although it felt terrible to be so alone when I was sick—I just wanted someone to hold my hand!—I knew it would feel even more awful to have Ebb witness my disgusting misery.
After I stopped heaving, Ebb came to the doorway. I reached up and pulled too hard on the toilet handle. Then I wiped my lips with a wad of toilet paper and tossed it into the still-gurgling toilet.
“Thanks for the tulips,” I whispered in a dry voice. “And the card.”
“The message was kind of—”
“Touching,” I said, at the same time as Ebb said, “Ill-conceived. I should have thought before I sent it.”
“Thought about what? You can be spontaneous every once in a while.”
“But afterward. When you didn’t call me. I thought I had offended you.”
I reached out blindly for another wad of toilet paper. “You know me better than that.”
“Were you in bed all day?” Ebb said. “I was worried about you. I was trying to reach you all morning.”
“I was . . .” A part of me wanted to be honest. But then another part of me knew how often honesty got me into trouble with Ebb. So I said, “I got really wrapped up. Rethinking the end of my novel. I was trying to decide if Simon should just . . . you know, go home to his wife.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“Staying at the office and fucking Take-A-Letter-Maria into a frenzy.”
Ebb cleared his throat. “Well. The frenzy certainly sounds more dramatic. Yet going home . . .”
“Oh, I already know where your vote will lie.”
“You’re too quick to make assumptions, Lisar.”
“I’m positive you’ll vote for home,” I said.
“But I haven’t read your novel—so how do you know I wouldn’t choose the frenzy?”
I bit my lip. Ebb wouldn’t choose the frenzy. He couldn’t choose the frenzy. Because I simply couldn’t change my finale. How would I ever summon up the stamina to go through a divorce (albeit not my own)? How could I ever make Simon and Robin Stern say—without gagging
on my own words—bad lines like My lawyer will talk to your lawyer?
“Oh,” I groaned, “I’ve never felt so lousy in my life—”
“What did the doctor say?” Ebb asked.
“Which doctor?”
“Danny said you went to the—”
“Oh, right. Dr. Goode asked me if I had eaten any—” I lifted my head and another gush of vomit hit the water. My voice cold-echoed into the depths of the toilet bowl as I said, “Su-she-she-she-she.”
“Sushi!” Ebb said. “But, Lisar. You hate Japanese food. Besides, didn’t Goode specifically tell you not to touch raw fish? Because it causes worms?”
I reached up, again, and flushed the toilet.
“Just to be safe, you’d better call your GP tomorrow,” Ebb said. “And get your stools checked.”
I put my hand on my hot forehead. “I can’t believe I married a man who uses the word stools.”
“There are plenty of husbands, Lisar, who do much worse than that.”
“Don’t I know it,” I said.
“Don’t you know it?” Ebb said. “How do you know it?”
I meant to tell Ebb: I knew it (vicariously) because I had spent more than half of our marriage spinning a long, drawn-out tale about a husband who almost strayed. I also knew it (vicariously) because I had spent the past month listening to Cynthia complain about the wandering Angus.
But Ebb took my words personally. “I’ve told you, Lisar—on more than one uncomfortable occasion—that I have never.”
“I know you never,” I said.
“Well, then what have I ever done to hurt you? What have I ever said?”
“You didn’t do—You didn’t say—” I hesitated, then remembered how hurt I had felt when I had caught Ebb dreaming about another woman, how wounded I had felt when he told me I wasn’t the fair sex, how ugly I had felt when he told me that Cynthia looked better than I did because she didn’t have children, and how devastated I’d felt when he failed—on Valentine’s Day—to put punctuation between I’m sorry and This is my wife.