by Kim Wright
“Right,” says Kelly. “Right. She’s great about stuff like that.”
“She’s great about a lot of things,” Belinda says. “I don’t think either one of you know how much she volunteers. It’s not just the Friendship Trays. She does Habitat and Hospice…”
“She’s a saint,” says Kelly. “What does this have to do with Jeff wanting to climb Elyse?”
“Elyse was there, we all were, everybody was there, and Nancy and I were sitting on the lounge chair with her shirt kind of half over both of our shoulders and we’re looking across the pool area and we see them talking, Elyse and Jeff on a lounge chair too. I mean, nothing was wrong with it, everybody was there and they were just talking, or maybe it was more like they were fighting. It looked like they were having an argument.”
I remember that night.
“And Nancy just sits there looking across the pool and she says that Jeff likes to fight with Elyse. He follows her around at every party or whatever and gets her in a fight because he likes it, and then Nancy’s voice got kind of funny and she said, ‘He told me he wants to climb her,’ which is a weird thing to say, and later I started thinking that must be why Nancy doesn’t like Elyse. Although that thing about the faux glazing was pretty mean too.”
Kelly looks at me. “Did you know any of this?”
He does follow me around. I’ve noticed that much. He wants to talk politics, he wants to talk religion, he wants to talk books.
I shake my head. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Why?” says Kelly. “He’s a minister, he’s not dead.”
“Among about a million other reasons, Jeff is Phil’s best friend.”
“So what? I’m not suggesting he’d ever really hit on you. We’re talking about what people think about doing, not what people actually do.”
I shake my head again. “That’s not what he meant by climbing. You know how Jeff is—he just blurts stuff out and he doesn’t stop to think how it sounds. All he meant is he likes talking to me. Jeff’s really kind of innocent, you know? He acts tough and he wears that silly zip-up jacket…”
“Oh yeah, he’s the regular James Dean of the pulpit,” Kelly says, sliding the plate of brownies toward us and refilling our coffee. “You’re saying that’s fake?”
“The night Belinda was talking about, we were arguing about The Canterbury Tales…”
“Come off it, Elyse, nobody goes to the swimming pool and argues about The Canterbury Tales.”
“It’s just that Jeff used to be a history major all those years ago and he likes debating obscure stuff. It juices him, and let’s face it, nobody else around here will argue with him. You all stand back from him like, ‘Whoa, he’s the minister so his opinion has to matter more,’ and sure, there’s a part of him that gets off on that, but there’s another part of him…”
“A part that wants to climb you,” Kelly says, and her mouth twitches a little.
“A part that wants me to tell him when he’s full of shit.”
Belinda looks up from her brownie. “Oh, I see what you’re saying. He thinks you’re smarter than Nancy.”
The door pops open and Nancy walks back in. We’d been so preoccupied I didn’t even hear the car drive back up. “Sorry,” she says. “Sorry.”
“No,” I say. “I was completely out of line.” We smile at each other.
“It sucks,” she says. “I was halfway down the block and so pissed off that my mouth had gone dry when I started thinking that the kids are bathed and they’ve done their homework and Jeff got home early to keep them so, come hell or high water, I’m out for the night.” She throws her car keys on the counter, drops her purse on the kitchen chair. “Okay, Elyse, tell the truth. What did you think about the book?” Everybody laughs.
“All right,” says Kelly, “whatever. I’m just glad you’re all staying. I thought I was going to have to drive Belinda home and eat a plate of cream cheese brownies all by myself. I don’t care what we read, I just want everybody to get along. Next month we’ll do David Copperhead.”
“Copperfield.” I can’t seem to help myself.
“Is it sad?” Belinda asks. “Because even though I didn’t get to the end of this one, I could tell it was going to be sad.”
“You can’t expect everything to be some old-fashioned romance,” says Kelly, picking up the plate of brownies and walking into the den. “It’s supposed to be a realistic treatment of an affair.”
“What do you mean?” Belinda asks, following her. “That things have to be sad to be realistic?”
“What she means,” Nancy says patiently, as patient as a saint, “is that in novels women run off with their lovers. In real life, women stay.”
Chapter Four
In my dream, he seems to have the power of flight. Or at least of hovering. He is above me, like a hummingbird. He moves from one part of my body to another and I can feel the rapid flap of wings against my skin. He lowers his head, over and over, as if to drink.
I can’t seem to move. I don’t want to move. A phone is in my hand. He drops his head to my breast and I see the wings growing out from his shoulder blades and the strong taut tendons running from his back into the rippling white feathers and then I am up, off the ground and trembling beneath him, seemingly held by nothing but his mouth.
The phone rings.
No, it’s the alarm. I hear the sound of Phil’s hand slapping the clock, I hear the bed creak as he rises. I wait until he is in the bathroom and has the shower going before I get up too. Wrap his robe around me and shuffle into the kitchen.
“He moved over me like a hummingbird,” I tell Pascal, who is sitting on the counter. He raises a leg and languidly begins to clean himself.
Phil emerges from the bedroom a few minutes later. He seems surprised that I am making omelets. Swiss cheese and spinach and a crumpled piece of deli ham. I found a counselor, I tell him. A woman. He does remember, doesn’t he? He remembers that he promised? Of course he remembers, he says, and the omelets are a nice surprise. It’s a shame he doesn’t have more time. He eats standing up at the counter.
In real life, women stay. Women stay better than they do anything else.
It’s Track and Field Day at the elementary school. Kelly, Nancy, and I are sitting on folding chairs at the edge of the playground, watching the kids go through the events. Kelly has brought a gift bag for Tory, with a purple-and-orange rugby shirt inside.
“She’ll love it,” I say, and she will. It’s very much like the Gap Kids shirt that I bought her, but this one is a gift from Kelly so Tory will happily wear it, just as she happily wears everything that Kelly brings her. She may even insist on sleeping in it.
“Very cute,” Nancy says. She’s wanted to ask Kelly for years why she doesn’t have kids and she never believes me when I say that I don’t know either. It’s obvious Kelly wanted them. Is Mark too old? He has adult children from a previous marriage so there isn’t anything wrong with him physically. Is she the one with the problem or did they just make some sort of deal before marriage that he wouldn’t have to go through that again?
Sometimes I think that Nancy looks like the heroine of a Victorian novel, and never more so than on a day like this when she has swathed herself in a thin, long-sleeved white blouse and a loose cream-colored muslin skirt. She has a floppy straw hat on her head and she takes great care to tuck her feet under her skirt. She is telling us about her mother’s best friend’s daughter. I don’t know why she is telling us this story, since neither Kelly nor I know the woman in question, but Nancy is full of stories.
Anyway, this particular woman had an uncommunicative husband. Her marriage was in trouble. I guess she’s secretly talking about me, or maybe even Belinda. I glance at Kelly. Mark never speaks. Hell, it could be any one of us.
“He was a little like Phil,” Nancy finally says. Okay, great, we’re talking about me. She tells us how this girl followed her husband from room to room, trying to get him to have a conversation. When he would s
hut the bathroom door she would lie down and put her cheek on the carpet and talk to him beneath the crack. I wince with recognition. In the middle of the night this woman would sit up in bed and cut on the lights and shake her husband’s shoulder and say, “Wake up, we have to talk.”
“She made him talk to her,” says Nancy, “and they’ve been together twenty years.” She says this last line with triumph, as if it were the last line of a joke. Apparently this is what it takes to stay together for twenty years. You have to want a marriage so badly that you’re willing to wrestle it out of a man while he sleeps.
“Some people find a way to make anything work,” Kelly says, in that sanguine sort of voice that I never can quite read. She’s either being very agreeable or very sarcastic. Her ball cap is pulled down low over her face. “You’re always hearing about people who don’t start with much but somehow they make it work.”
“Look at Megan,” Nancy says, referring to the choir director at church. “Her husband was so jealous he’d follow her to work and sit in the handicapped space until he was sure she’d gotten into the building.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t have given you two cents for Megan’s chances when she first married that whack job,” says Kelly. “But they’re still together, aren’t they?”
“They’re knocking out the whole back of their den and adding on a sunroom,” Nancy says, her voice rising with enthusiasm. She picks up a stick and begins drawing the new floor plan of Megan’s house in the dust. “It’s going to double the size of the first floor.”
“Amazing,” says Kelly. “Double the size.”
“She hung in there,” Nancy says. “Time helps everything. You’ve got to be willing to fight it out, talk it out, pretty much build your marriage brick by brick.”
I don’t seem to have anything particular to contribute to this conversation.
“Have you considered counseling?” Nancy asks, abruptly turning toward me. “Because Jeff might be the perfect person for you to talk to. I know he likes you, Elyse. He’s always trying to get you into some discussion about politics or religion. Have you noticed that, Kelly?”
“He corners her at every party,” Kelly says, pulling out binoculars and turning them toward Tory. “What was it y’all were talking about at that swim club cookout? The two of you sat over there by yourselves on a lounge chair for an hour.”
“I recited him the prologue to The Canterbury Tales,” I say. “In Middle English.”
“That’s exactly what I figured you were doing,” says Kelly.
“Jeff was a history major back a hundred years ago before divinity school,” Nancy says.
“Yeah,” I say. “He told me.”
“He likes you,” Nancy says, her voice a little flat. “He says he’s intrigued by the intricacies of your mind.”
Kelly makes a sound, somewhere between a cough and a snort.
“We’re seeing someone at ten on Monday,” I say. “A woman. We thought about Jeff, of course, but then we decided it would be easier to talk to someone we didn’t know.” This is a small lie. It had taken a lot of pushing to get Phil to agree to meet with anyone at all and we’d never discussed seeing Jeff. Even I can’t imagine us talking to a man who is (a) Phil’s best friend, (b) Nancy’s husband, (c) our minister, and (d) intrigued by the intricacies of my mind.
“I guess I can see that,” says Nancy, so slowly that it’s clear she can’t. “The important thing is that you’re working on the marriage.”
There’s a sudden scream from the field and we all sit up straight. It isn’t one of our kids but Nancy still stands and walks toward the fence.
“I’ve got ice if you need it,” she calls, and the teacher bending over the wailing child waves and nods. Nancy always brings ice in a cooler and ziplock bags to any even vaguely athletic event, whether it’s our daily walks at the track or the volleyball games at church. We tease her about it, but she says that if life has taught her anything, it’s that sooner or later somebody’s going to get hurt.
The teacher pulls the little girl to her feet and gives us a thumbs-up. We settle back into our chairs. It’s a beautiful day, the sort of Indian summer Carolina is known for, and we sit for a moment in companionable silence. The field is crowded with kids and the school has rented one of those big inflatable castles for them to jump in. There’s a machine that makes funnel cakes and a clown twisting balloons into shapes. Kelly is humming, a sound so low that it almost sounds as if she’s purring. I stretch my legs out, half close my eyes.
One of the fathers comes by, a guy I recognize from the athletic association. He tells me he’s starting a girls’ coach-pitch team and he sure would like to see Tory at the conditioning camp. She’s fast, he says. He just watched her run the 440 and thought to himself, “That little Bearden girl is fast.”
I must have slept funny last night because when I look up it feels like my whole head is getting ready to snap off. I shift in my seat and tell him I’m confused. Isn’t softball in the spring? But he says if the girls want to be competitive they need to start getting ready now, and then he says something about Tory’s “athletic career,” which makes me want to laugh. She’s too young for coach-pitch at all, but it seems pointless to argue. This is the sort of thing that appeals to Phil’s ego. If he gets wind of the fact that a coach is trying to recruit his daughter, he’ll drop anything to get her to those practices, even if it means canceling every appointment in his books.
“Okay,” I say, “I’ll tell her daddy.” The coach makes a little tipping motion with his sun visor and walks away.
“Did you hear that?” I say, when he’s out of earshot. “He’s talking about a seven-year-old having an athletic career. These people are crazy.”
“She really is fast,” Kelly says. “Sometimes I wonder if you even see it.”
“Just remember, Jeff wants to help,” Nancy says. “He blames himself for what happened between Lynn and Andy.”
“No one could have seen that coming,” Kelly says.
“That’s what I tell him,” Nancy says, sighing. “But now he feels like he has to…” She doesn’t need to finish the thought. We all know that Jeff hired Lynn because she needed a job where she could get health benefits and still be able to meet the bus when her kids get home from school. There wasn’t even a staff position called Director of Grounds and Maintenance until he proposed it, and I doubt that anyone, including Jeff and Lynn, could tell you exactly what her duties are. But the session agreed to fund the job and hired her on the spot. Feeling sorry for Lynn has been our collective smugness since the day her husband walked out. I suspect that in the bag where Kelly has the rugby shirt for Tory there are two more shirts for Lynn’s boys, whom she hardly knows. Their mother can’t come to Track and Field Day, so Kelly will bring them a gift.
“I’m sure Jeff’s a great counselor,” I say. “I just don’t want to talk to someone we know socially.”
“Yeah,” said Kelly. “In case the trouble turns out to be in the bedroom.” I’m glad I can’t see her eyes beneath the ball cap. It’s all I can do to keep from bursting out laughing.
“Have you considered making it more… interesting?” Nancy scoots her chair a couple of inches closer to mine. “Because sometimes you have to do that.”
“Phil doesn’t like it when things are interesting. Phil’s perfectly content with the way things are right now, you know that as well as I do. The problem is me.”
“You could have an affair,” Kelly says.
My body jerks. I pretend to brush away a bug. Gerry’s business card has been in my purse for three weeks, in the side pocket where I keep my keys, so that I see it and touch it several times a day. Sometimes I take it out and stare at it, run my finger over the raised lettering. I’ve memorized the number, even though this is a number I’ll never call. I’m Working on My Marriage. My husband I have an appointment with a counselor this Monday. Women who are Working on Their Marriages have no business daydreaming about strangers they meet on airplanes.
“Why do you think people add on sunrooms whenever somebody’s having an affair?” Kelly asks.
Nancy twists around to look at her. “You think Megan’s husband is having an affair?”
“No.”
“Well, Megan certainly isn’t.”
“You’re probably right. It’s just, why do you think people who have been sitting in the dark all these years suddenly get this urge to knock out a wall?”
Nancy finally figures out that Kelly’s just jerking her chain and she sits back, relaxing. “If remodeling means you’re having an affair then I must be the whore of Babylon.”
“No, I’m just thinking maybe Elyse should have an affair.”
“Oh God,” I say. “With who? The only men I know are your husbands, and your husbands are worse than mine.” Kelly and Nancy both laugh.
I’ve gotten as far as dialing nine of the ten digits in his phone number before hanging up.
“Well, the coach-pitch coach certainly seems interested,” Kelly says.
“Men like Elyse,” Nancy says idly. “I’ve always wondered why that is.” She squints at me. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Are you kidding?” says Kelly. “It’s because she’s a sprayer. Always has been, always will be. Men can smell it a mile away. I’ve spent my whole life groping my way through this mist of sex she sprays everywhere going, ‘Elyse? Elyse? You in there anywhere, baby?’ ”