by Kim Wright
“He’s called me several times.”
“You talk to Phil? On the phone?”
She glances over. “Well, not about anything important. We talk about you. He asks me stuff like what you’d like for your birthday or holidays, things like that.”
“So the grill and the Italian tapes were your idea?”
She smiles. “No, even I know that Phil is the one who cooks out, and you already speak Italian. But the cappuccino machine, that was me. He said it took you a week to get it out of the box.”
I don’t say anything. We both stare straight ahead at the traffic light.
“He wants to please you,” she says. “That’s why he asks me what you want.”
“Why doesn’t he ask me what I want?”
“Men don’t think like that.” The light is still red. I exhale. I didn’t think I did it loudly but Nancy exhales too. “Why are you going to Boston?”
“I’m taking a class.”
“Oh.” She doesn’t pursue it. Lately I’ve been glad my friends take so little interest in my work.
“It’s creepy that he calls you. Between counseling with Jeff and you and Phil chatting it up behind my back, you guys know way too much about us.”
“It’s not like that. He wanted to surprise you. We thought… we both thought you’d like it. The cappuccino machine, I mean.”
The light turns. Finally. “Tell me something,” I say. “Tell me something bad about you and Jeff.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not fair. You know everything about my marriage and I know nothing about yours. Tell me something bad. Come on. Pull that marriage inside out and show me the seams.”
“He didn’t get me anything for my last birthday.”
“Not anything?”
“So see? Has Jeff ever called you? Has he ever asked you to give him ideas about what I’d want?” She pulls into Belinda’s driveway, cuts off the ignition. “Didn’t think so. Phil tries a lot more than you give him credit for, Elyse, that’s all I’m saying. What do you think it does to a man when he gives a woman a gift and she won’t even take it out of the box?”
Nancy opens the driver’s side door but I can’t seem to move.
“What would you have wanted for your birthday?”
She laughs. It comes out more like a bark.
“A cappuccino machine.”
Chapter Thirty-four
There is a ceremony for the goodbye. We’ve spent two days in his town, where there’s always a chance—slight but real—that someone will recognize him as he sits across from me at the café or as we idle at a stoplight. But specifically here at the airport, when he is dropping me off for the flight home. We have agreed in the car that we will not kiss goodbye, so, as we walk toward the broad glass doors which obediently slide open, I am surprised to feel his hand on the small of my back. It presses into me with a hint of possessiveness as we pause at the kiosk, wait for it to spit out my boarding pass. Our eyes drag past each other, and then he is gone.
I go through security. I buy snacks, a Red Sox T-shirt for Tory, and some sort of mindless magazine, the kind I’d never buy at home. I find my gate. I check my phone for messages. There are none, which is a good sign. Phil does not expect me to call when I’m away and he only phones when there’s a problem. I used to resent this, the fact that just seeing his number on my caller ID would make my chest go tight with fear, but now it strikes me as a logical and considerate position for a husband to take. I sit here at the gate with my magazine in my lap and a bottled water in my hand, and gaze out at the plane that will soon take me to my—for lack of a better term—real life. Tory has a field trip tomorrow. She will need to take a bagged lunch and there probably is nothing in the refrigerator to pack. Maybe I should swing by the grocery on the way home from the airport. Or maybe it would make more sense to run by the house first and check the kitchen, because we’re undoubtedly low on something else too. The third batch of pots is ready to be packed and shipped and my mother’s birthday is coming up. I mailed a card before I left but I must remember to run by tomorrow with flowers, and it’s a ragged shift, this transition from the horizontal world of the mistress to the vertical world of the wife. Make it too quickly and you can find yourself dizzy, so I need this time in airports, these useless hours I spend in the company of addicts and movie stars.
I flip to my favorite column, the one near the back where comedians say mean but funny things about badly dressed celebrities. What Was She Thinking? What indeed. Nobody ever knows what anybody else is thinking. I rip open a bag of potato chips. It’s easier to go the other way, you know. On the mornings when I’m flying to meet him I get out my good perfume, the Issey Miyake, and my best underwear. I stand in the tub and shave all the way up. In the car I listen to Ella and Frank and in the airport bar I drink one glass of the best wine they have and I drink it very slowly. I carry Jane Austen with me and I breathe and I tell myself to open.
That’s easier. Of course it is. Easier to slow down and open up, easier to move into these smooth egg-shaped days I spend with Gerry. But this, this part here, this flying away—it requires a different sort of ritual, somewhat like closing up a beach house at the end of the summer. I cram a potato chip into my mouth, look at the stars in their drooping ruffles and leopardskin prints. Yeah, that’s it. Good girl. This is what you do. This is how you leave. You flip your magazine, eat your salt, inventory the contents of your refrigerator in your mind. Wash off your perfume in the chipped sink of the airport bathroom. Take care not to invade the space of the person in the seat beside you. Tomorrow the phone will ring and people will come and go and you will be all right, but for now you must open the second bag of potato chips and grieve the fact that Nicole’s marriage is in crisis. Not her old one to crazy Tom but her new one, to that sweet-faced cowboy. Damn. She goes to all that trouble to switch men and uproot her kids and set up dual housekeeping in Nashville and Australia—God knows that couldn’t have been easy—and now the second one is going badly too. It’s almost more than you can bear to contemplate. You should have gotten three bags of potato chips.
Perhaps Nicole is sitting somewhere just as you are now, at some departure gate in some unfamiliar city, for airports are the great equalizers, aren’t they? The beautiful and the strong, the disheveled and the frightened, they are all sitting with magazines and bottled water, waiting. You turn to the story of the rock star’s daughter who drunkenly rode her motorcycle onto the patio of a Santa Monica restaurant. She hit a woman who later claimed to be her father’s greatest fan, and finally, yes, it’s starting at last, that sweet numbness that slips over you in airports, that sense of being neither here nor there. You need these pockets of time and you feel for Nicole and the woman who was hit in Santa Monica and even for the model who sources say got pregnant just to avoid doing jail time. She assaulted a photographer who snapped her in an airport. They say she kicked him, flew at him in a rage. She screamed profanities and the contents of her purse went flying. But you know how she felt. There are times when a woman doesn’t want to be seen.
Chapter Thirty-five
Winter turns into spring. Tory’s softball team plays a few exhibition games. Her third time at bat she surprises everybody by knocking one to the fence. “That’d be a triple if we were playing,” her coach shouts up at us and then he says to Tory, “Sugar, hittin’ it is one thing, but now you gotta run.” She takes off toward first base and he walks a couple of steps up the bleachers and says, “Your girl’s gonna be a big stick by the end of the summer, just you wait and see.”
When her team’s not at bat, she catches. This doesn’t go as well at first—in fact, whenever the other team has a runner at third the coach yells, “Back,” and she obediently stands up, pulls off her caged mask, and moves to the side, so that the pitcher can run in to cover any throws to home. “Can’t he tell she’s blinded by that damn mask?” Phil says.
But by the end of the exhibition month, something begins to change. To
ry graduates from lying in the red clay dust to kneeling, from kneeling to squatting, and she begins to catch more of the balls, even the bad throws. A couple of times she manages to reach up and snag the ball from mid air and toss it back to the pitcher without standing. “Atta girl,” the coach yells. “They’re gonna know what you are before this is over.”
Phil never mentions the handcuffs or asks where they went. Kelly and Mark go on a cruise through the Panama Canal. Lynn and I finish the junior high rooms and move on to the teenager wing. The Friendship Tray van finally gives up the ghost and the church plans a fund-raiser to get a new one—a barbecue and yard sale over Easter weekend. I browbeat the book club into reading Madame Bovary.
And I work on my pots. It turns out there are many ways to break things. You can do it fast, with a single, wrenching snap, or carefully, with a hammer and chisel in hand. You can do it wildly, like a piñata, or methodically, like tapping an egg against the side of the bowl. Or—and this turns out to be the most effective way of all—you can just hold the pot over your head and drop it. Throughout the winter and into the spring I watch as the pieces fly across my concrete floor.
Spring
Chapter Thirty-six
Wake up,” Phil says. “I think the cat’s dead.”
I stumble behind him out to the deck, where a long smear of blood ends in the slumped shape of Pascal. He has been ripped open from his chest to his belly, a ragged uneven wound.
“Oh Jesus,” I say.
Phil has a towel in his hands that he drops over the cat. “I guess he finally tangled with something bigger than him,” he says. “We’ve got to get him off the deck before Tory wakes up.”
“I’ll do it.” I bend over and scoop up the soft, yielding, still warm shape of the cat. He pulls away from the deck with a small sticky pop and I feel something shift in my arms. I turn him over so that he is swaddled like a baby and see that his breath is still in him, more of a shudder than an exhalation.
“He’s alive.”
Phil shakes his head. “The abdominal wall is ripped though. Just wrap him up and put him in the grass. He’ll be dead soon.”
Pascal still hasn’t made a sound but I can feel him tremble. I’m lightheaded. There is blood all over the porch, as if something much bigger than a cat has been killed.
“Leave it in the corner of the yard,” Phil repeats, his voice level and firm like it is when he’s correcting Tory. “I’ll take care of it when I get home.”
I turn and carry Pascal through the kitchen and I’m reaching for my car keys, digging in my purse with one hand.
“Calm down,” Phil says, reaching out to stop me, and it seems that this is all he has ever said to me over the last ten years. It is the command of our marriage, the endless echo that circles the walls of this house, even when neither one of us is here. I push past his arm and I am surprised at the effort it takes, surprised at how much he flexes his muscle against me. But I twist my hip and break loose and then I’m out in the garage and walking toward the driveway.
“What are you doing?” Phil calls from the door. “It’s pointless to take him to the vet. If the abdominal wall is ripped, you’re not going to save him.”
I don’t answer. I can’t answer. I’m in the car still holding the cat in the crook of my left arm. I back up awkwardly, trying to steer with one hand, trying to hook my seatbelt. My neighborhood looks bizarre and unrecognizable to me as I roll through it and I am talking to the cat, making promises about how I’ll fry eggs for him when we get back from the doctor. Fried eggs with cheese like I do sometimes on the weekend. They’re his favorites. He is rumbling, making a noise that is disturbingly like a purr. The morning commute has already started and traffic is bad. I inch down Providence Road and am at a stoplight within a couple of blocks of the vet’s office when Pascal’s paw suddenly breaks free from the towel and makes a single straight jab into the air.
When I got Pascal and Garcia from the Humane Society they were just kittens. I put them in a deep cardboard box for the short drive home and it was Pascal who fought his way out first. It was Pascal who somehow figured out how to climb the slippery sides until his small head butted through the flaps of the cardboard. Tory had squealed with excitement, the funny and unexpected sight of the kitten, neck straining as he blinked in the unaccustomed light. At the time I had pushed him back down. “Bad boy,” I’d said, and I laughed. From that moment on he was my favorite.
But this movement is not a gesture of exploration, it is a final spasm. I open the towel. The cat is still, his eyes partially closed, his mouth locked in a grimace. His gums are showing. The car behind me beeps. For a moment I feel as if my ribs are exploding in my chest one by one, but I give the car gas, jerking forward, still going toward the vet. I can’t think of anywhere else to go.
The receptionist is unlocking the door as I pull up. The doctor isn’t here yet but this young girl, who is sweet and country as so many veterinary assistants seem to be, sees me struggling my way out of the car cradling the bloody towel in my arms and she says, “Oh, Mrs. Bearden, this doesn’t look good.”
She takes Pascal from me, ascertains the situation at a glance, and pushes through the door. She heads straight back to one of the offices and she must have put him down on an examination table for she is back immediately. I raise my eyebrows in question and she nods. Gone, yes, completely gone, and then she asks if I want them to cremate him and I nod, still speechless. Even though a sign on the counter says PAYMENT DUE AT TIME OF SERVICE, she insists that they will bill me.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, and she sounds like she means it, although they must deal with this kind of thing every day. “Do you want your towel back?” I can’t seem to understand her question. It’s as if she’s speaking French. I shake my head. She says something about how maybe I should come into the back and lie down, maybe I should call someone to drive me home. I suspect that I am very pale. I feel pale. I shake my head again, and she lets me go. She even holds the door open. Of course she’d like to get me out of the lobby as soon as possible, before the regular customers start showing up in their business suits and workout gear, come to drop off Max or Ridley for their vaccinations. I am standing here at the front desk in my nightgown with my breasts and arms crusted in blood, looking like some sort of early-rising angel of death.
She keeps the towel. I go home.
Phil has evidently gotten Tory up and dressed and off to school. An open milk carton stands on the counter. I walk in and drop my purse on the hardwood floor. I pick up the remote and cut off the TV.
I look around the house. I can see that it is a nice house. I see the mantel above the fireplace, obviously custom built, and the collection of pots clustered beneath it on the hearth. Someone has taken a lot of time with the aesthetics of their arrangement. The smallest one is artfully balanced on its side as if something were spilling out. There is a wicker basket by the TV holding video games and DVDs. A child lives here, most likely a girl, based on the preponderance of princess stories represented. There are books stacked beside a leather chair. A man who reads… a man who reads history… a man whose particular interest is the American Revolution. There are some dishes in the sink, a newspaper scattered on the counter, a pile of tennis shoes beside the back door. A little messiness, but no real dirt. Someone cleans this house on a regular basis.
I push against the walls as I walk down the hall, half expecting them to give way beneath my palms, half expecting them to collapse and drop with the pressure of my touch like walls in a movie set. But the house stands firm. I go out into the yard to call for Garcia but I don’t see her anywhere and I wonder if whatever killed Pascal has gotten her too.
Finally I climb back up to the deck, unroll the hose, and begin to wash away the evidence of the monumental effort it took Pascal to die on his own doorstep. The bloody pawprints near the back gate are quite beautiful, like flowers, but they soon give way to the violent red smear that grows wider and wider, ending in front of the F
rench doors. I let the hose run until the entire deck is dripping and then I strip off my nightgown, throw it into the trash can, and climb into the shower.
Afterwards, with my hair still wet, I go to the bank. They know me here. They know that I am not ordinarily mute. I slide a note across the counter to the teller, as if this were a stickup, informing her that I want to rent a new safety deposit box and open a new checking account. She takes me into the vault and I use the oversized keys to open first the box that Phil and I share and then the second one, which is smaller and empty. I move a few things into the second box—the savings bonds my aunts have sent Tory over the years, my passport, the gold coins from South Africa my dad gave me when I graduated college, the utility stock that’s still in my maiden name.
Phil has never seen the safety deposit box. He works across town and he works all day so I’m always the one who removes and returns documents. Opening the checking account feels riskier. I transfer two thousand from our money market into the new account, and as I do this I watch the teller carefully. Is she the same helpful woman who called Phil when I opened the money market, who explained why it would be so much more logical and cost-efficient for me to never have anything of my own?
But I’m just being paranoid. The teller isn’t interested in me, or what I’m doing. She and the woman beside her are discussing where they will go for lunch. That new Mexican place on the corner, they may as well try it. There’s nothing strange about any of this, is there? A woman moves money from a joint account to a single account but her name is on both of them, right? It’s just a little juggling of funds, some financial housekeeping. Maybe she’s hiding the cost of her shoes. The teller only seems upset that I pick the plain blue checks and points out to me that for the same price I can have checks with kittens or lighthouses or my initials entwined in Old English script. It all costs the same, she tells me, whispering as if we are in some great conspiracy together, but I point at my watch to show her I’ve got places to be. Just the blue ones.