That Time I Loved You

by That Time I Loved You- Stories (retail) (epub)

  When there were spells when Janine didn’t call on her because things were well at home with Anthony and the kids, Francesca missed her visits.

  It was Janine who insisted that Francesca attend the morning gab sessions with the other stay-at-home moms. “What? You have anything better to do or something? Don’t shut yourself up in your house, waiting for your man all day.” Francesca looked around her at the perfectly polished dining table, the stupid stain beneath the coffee table that would never come out no matter what newfangled carpet cleaner she bought, and realized that Janine had a point.

  So, she began having coffee with the stay-at-home moms, surrounded by babies and dirty laundry. They were a nice group, variations of the same theme. “Mangia-cakes,” as Nick would call them. They talked about their children, the price of bananas and their neighbours. If there were dirty dishes in the sink, Francesca automatically rolled up her sleeves. If there were baskets of clean laundry nearby, she would fold the children’s clothes into neat stacks. Her neighbours teased her for her Italian housewife ways. She would smile and change the subject to the unreasonable price of ground beef.

  Shortly before Janine’s death, the women had all been talking about the two suicides and Mr. Lems’s death a week earlier. Janine had been there like she always was. She’d even had her own theory. “Bunch of losers. All of them. That’s what they had in common. Losers who made such shit of their lives that they had no choice but to do themselves in. Finley was a major A-hole, whose wife and kid probably hated him. Mrs. Da Silva let herself go mental. Lems? Alcoholic fuck-up. Their families are better off without them. Everybody is better off without these losers in the world taking up sidewalk space. They should be thanked for self-selecting to exit this planet.”

  Janine was no shy violet, but she had never spoken like that before. The room was silent, the other women taken aback by Janine’s vitriol. While they were not immune to being mean about their neighbours at opportune moments, there was something about speaking of these specific tragedies that left the air thick after Janine’s speech. Janine, perhaps sensing this, shifted tone.

  “What they needed,” she said, leaning back with her arms over her ample chest, “was a good lay to screw their heads back on right.”

  The other women all had a raucous laugh over that, relieved. They revelled in the brand of humour that was familiar, crossing back into a cruelty that felt acceptable. After all, those who had died had been the outliers, the neighbours who were hard to love, difficult to know: Mrs. Da Silva had never been quite right in the head, and Lems, whether it was a suicide or not, was a fall-down drunk. And Finley was wound so tight, it seemed a no-brainer, someone said, which caused the women to fall into paroxysms of laughter so hard it turned to tears and they used up half a box of tissues. But then a week after this conversation, Janine Bevis was dead. She’d been one of them. She’d been normal.

  This latest suicide settled on Francesca like a spider in her stomach. She played Janine’s conversations about her abortion in her head and felt the weight of this knowing heavy on her. She became watchful of the others around her, wondering what they felt, what they also hid and who could be next. The stay-at-home moms, who during the school year were each other’s lifelines, ceased all gossip and avoided each other’s eyes on the street, murmuring a quick hello before hurrying away. Janine’s husband and children moved away shortly after her death, and it was as if Janine Bevis never happened.

  Francesca wracked her brain for answers. What were the warning signs? What could she have done to help Janine? Could it happen to people like her? Or Nick? All along, this had felt like other people’s problems, but now she began to feel as if she could catch suicide like a virus. As if invisible germs could invade and take control of her mind and body.

  She tried to talk to Nick. “Babe, don’t worry about it. We don’t know what happens behind closed doors. We need to be thankful that we’re so happy.” He also said suicide was a sin. That it was between Janine and God. Nick didn’t cite God too often even though both of them had grown up in the Church. If Nick knew it was two sins and not just one that Janine committed, she didn’t know what he would say. He patted her knee like she was a child. She looked at his big, heavy hands and felt the urge to slap them.

  The day after Janine Bevis’s death, after Nick left for work, Francesca went into the bathroom, sat on the toilet and chewed on a corner of toilet paper. The small spider inside her was growing, gaining traction. This felt different from the usual pressure of the shakes. The shakes would arrive quickly, sweeping her along. This time, the dread grew slowly, stealthily, and could not be relieved with eating the paper. What was happening to her? She had a good life, a wonderful life. She stood up quickly. Trembling, she gripped the banister as she went down the stairs. She rushed out of the house before she could pause to consider why what she was about to do was a bad idea.

  She went to Paul’s door and peered through the screen. He wasn’t in the living room, so she knocked. “Oh, it’s you, Frankie,” he said as he opened the door. He sounded unsurprised, as if he’d been expecting her. He was unshaven, looked like he hadn’t slept, and smelled like he’d rolled in spilled coffee and ashtrays. “C’mon in.”

  She froze when she saw his face, thinking she shouldn’t be there. She wanted to tell him what she wanted, needed, but there was so much and she didn’t have the words to explain them all. She stuttered, “I . . . I . . . I . . . I need . . . I need a measuring cup. I . . .” She felt herself go damp with sweat and realized she was shaking from the effort of uttering words. If he were to ask what she was going to make, she’d have no idea. The small lie already felt huge. He waved her in. “Sure, sure,” he said, and turned to lead her down the hall. She took three sharp breaths to try to get the air back into her lungs before following him into the house.

  Their house was in disarray, and as they walked through, she instinctively started to pick some toys off the floor, but she didn’t know where to put them.

  “Leave that. Come have some coffee. The baby’s asleep, so we have to be quiet.” He disappeared into the kitchen, and she followed, settling the toys quietly back on the floor. She was still trembling and held her hands together for fear of him seeing.

  “Sorry, Frankie. It was a rough night. Cheryl and I had a shitstorm of a fight. Didn’t sleep at all.”

  She sat down at the kitchen table covered in ashtrays, newspapers, bills and magazines. The jumble was unsettling. She had always imagined their home to be spilling with sunshine, scented with the smell of wood polish and lemons, filled with art and books. Instead, she found dust clouding in the air and piles of paper threatening to tumble onto the floor. The chaos hanging in precarious balance put her more on edge. She desperately wanted to straighten the debris, throw the cigarette butts into the trash and fill the sink with hot suds. Instead, she sat on her hands to try to keep them still. If only Paul would hold her, she thought, he would be able to stop her tremors.

  In the corner of the kitchen, the radio was playing a Billy Joel song. Paul swept aside some of the mess on the table and placed a coffee in front of her. She sipped. A bit of milk, no sugar. She felt warm toward him that he’d assumed how she’d take it. “Are you okay?” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “Yes. No. Hell, I don’t know anymore.” He pulled his fingers through his hair, and she wished she could smooth the locks back or stroke the dark shadows under his eyes. “Cigarette?”

  She didn’t smoke but she nodded. He took two out from his pack and lit one with his lighter. She heard the flame crackle as it rose to meet the tobacco. He inhaled and handed it to her before lighting his own. She took it with her shaking hand, but he didn’t seem to notice. She held it awkwardly between her fingers.

  “She should have said no before all this happened.” He slammed his hand on the table.

  “All what?”

  “All this bloody mess. The house, the kid.” He took a long drag, holding the smoke in his lungs for a lo
ng time before letting it explode from his lips. “She said we would travel right after university. We were going to go to Central America. Ride the chicken buses until we found a place we liked. Leave all this superficial shit.”

  Central America. Where was that? She hadn’t ever heard of anyone wanting to go there, let alone on a chicken bus.

  “Then she got pregnant, and God, I love Megan. You know I love my baby, right?”

  Francesca nodded. Of course he did.

  “But at the time, we were still hooked into our dreams. I asked if she wanted to keep the baby. And she went crazy. For all her pro-choice marches, she went ballistic when I mentioned it was even an option. So we had Megan, but then Cheryl’s ultra-conservative parents wanted us married, and Cheryl said we should, that it would make them happy and us a family, and so we did. Then they bought this house for us and gave us her grandparents’ heirloom furniture, and it was fucking crazy how easily it all slipped in.”

  He still looked bewildered as he gazed around at the stacks of dirty dishes, the butter dish with flies swooping around it, the disarray. Francesca thought about her own parents’ house, the hours that her father had put in laying concrete long after his body should have given up enduring such work, and her mother, paid by the piece, sewing the heaps of formal gowns that she would never wear in order to save money for the house her daughter would buy some day. Her parents had wanted it more than anything they’d ever wanted, this life. Stability, safety, family. And they worked and worked to make sure Francesca would have it.

  Now what? Francesca felt her guilt rise. She heard Janine’s voice that day with the stay-at-home moms as a warning. People fucked up their lives and there were no returns. Was this what was happening? Was she digging her own hole of no return? Yet why did she not want to get up and leave this house?

  “But I said that I would write. That was the deal, and she agreed. She said she would work. Our lives here would be like fodder for fiction or a great exposé of the middle class. It would be a performance. The more we talked about it, the more fun it sounded.”

  Francesca held the lukewarm coffee and wondered about Cheryl in her grown-up white blouses and blazers. Francesca envied her for her briefcase, for her husband and child kissing her on the driveway every morning before she drove off. She seemed like one of Charlie’s Angels.

  “Only it turns out that it’s not fun, and it’s not okay anymore that she’s stuck in the rat race. She wants out, and she wants me to get a job so she can stay home with Megan. It’s her turn, apparently. She told me to act like a real man . . . I don’t know anymore, Frankie.” He stubbed out his cigarette harder than he had to on a plate already full of butts. “I’m so close to finishing the novel!” His head snapped up, and he looked at her as if he’d just noticed her. “You understand, Frankie. Right?”

  She couldn’t turn away from his eyes and felt her own brimming with tears. As if in a trance, Francesca stood up slowly, took his hands in hers and pulled him to his feet. He rose, his eyebrows arched in an expression of surprise. The linoleum felt cold on her soles, a sharp contrast to the heat coming off the rest of her body. She pulled him close until her T-shirt brushed his hard chest.

  “Frankie, are you sure about this?”

  She didn’t answer. The song “Me and Mrs. Jones” was playing, and he swayed, one hand holding hers and the other encircling her waist. Francesca realized that she was holding her breath. Her feet lifted slightly, one at a time, and she let herself press her face to his shoulder. His smell was different up close, Sunlight laundry detergent layered over sweat.

  Her despair rose to the surface then, sharp and cutting. Here was what she wanted: a heated, churning, messy life held inside a kitchen that was an exact replica of her own but completely different. She wanted to keep this surge that lifted from her heart to her skin, the tingle through her muscles. She thought of these things as he danced with her, handling her like she was fragile. The space that she now knew would never be filled by her own life opened up like a hole at her feet. They danced, and she turned her face to his warm neck, aching to feel the pulse of his vein beneath her lips.

  He took her right in the kitchen, leaning her against the table. He lifted her skirt and pulled down her underpants, his lips locked on hers. She felt like water under his hands. Before thinking, before words could form in her brain, he was already entering her. He wasn’t gentle anymore, and she welcomed his roughness, his taking. She raised her body to his and pushed against him equally hard. They were purely their biology, their instinct, and for once, she didn’t wonder at the strangeness of this act. She heard the sounds she made, and they were not calculated moans but sounds that escaped from the tight, dark place of her being as it opened. She didn’t know what feeling was rising inside of her, but then she exploded, her voice loud, calling.

  He told her to open her eyes and look at him. When she did, she met his eyes. He looked at her unlike anybody had ever looked at her before. He was hungry. She reached for him again to make him return to her, harder now. Behind half-open lids, with her head on the table and hair in the ashtray, she also saw behind him and through the glass sliding doors of the kitchen. She saw the side of her house, the lace curtains of their kitchen window, above the sink. She had sewn those curtains herself, picking the material carefully from Fabricland. She had loved washing the dishes and gazing out the window through that pretty lace. But more than the brick of the house and the lace framing the window, she saw the green wire fence separating here from there, and she squeezed her eyes closed again and felt Paul inside her, jerking her body back and forth, and she wanted it.

  After a long string of music, the radio announcer cut in with a commercial, and in that one second, he let her go. She didn’t know if he’d finished, but he was suddenly zipping himself into his pants. A baby’s low wail was coming through the wall. She got off the table and stumbled backwards, knocking over a chair. She pulled her underwear up from around her feet. Her heart was racing, and she felt everything was slow and fast at the same time.

  Paul did a little hop as he did up his button. She scrambled, trying to regain her footing, but felt herself unable to quite get up.

  “Isn’t this what you wanted? You’ve been looking at me for months, Frankie.” His voice was neither kind nor cruel.

  Her face burned with heat. Yes, she did want it. She wanted it again. She resisted getting up and pulling him back into her. She wanted to taste him this time. Francesca wanted him to fill her. She wanted all these things even as it disgusted her. She finally lifted her eyes toward him. She thought his eyes showed pity and maybe regret. She stumbled to her feet then and bolted to the door, racing down the paved walkway and running into her own house. She dashed into the bathroom, slammed the door shut and locked it. She grabbed the toilet paper, turned and sank to the cold tile floor, ripping at the paper and putting the pieces into her mouth as her nose ran and mixed with her tears. She ate through several sheets, then turned and vomited the white mass into the toilet. She waited for her breath to steady, went into her bedroom and fell onto her perfectly made bed.

  That was how Nick found her when he returned from work. She felt a hand on her cheek and woke to see him above her, the room dark.

  “Shhhh. It’s okay. Sleep.”

  In her haze, she wondered why he was handling her with such compassion before she slipped back into sleep. She smelled of cigarettes and another man. When she finally awoke, the clock on her bedside table read one a.m. She felt next to her and the bed was empty. She stood up and realized she was still in her clothes. She went to the bathroom to rinse her face. Horrified, she saw the shreds of toilet paper on the floor. Did Nick see? She hastily grabbed them all with her wet hands and wadded them into a ball, throwing them in the garbage can. She plucked off the pieces of paper from between her fingers and went downstairs.

  Francesca found her husband sitting in the dining room with paperwork spread across the table. He looked up when he heard her come down
the stairs.

  “Hey, sleepyhead.”

  “What are you doing up, Nick?” She held back.

  “I brought home some work. The boss said he would pay me extra if I took on a bit of the accounting. It’s not hard, just tedious. But I thought if I did this, we could have something extra to take a trip somewhere. You said you wanted to go to Florida maybe, right?”

  She nodded and stared at him for several long seconds. He smiled up at her from his chair. His face looked tired. But it was right there, in his eyes. He loved her. Francesca took quick steps to him and wrapped her arms tightly around his neck from behind. He caressed her arm and bent his head to kiss her hand. He would keep her safe forever if she let him. In exchange, she would keep him safe too. This was her marriage and her vow.

  She would seal her secrets in a tight box and never open it again. This was what everybody did, she now understood. Her mother, Janine, Mrs. Da Silva, Paul, Cheryl, maybe even Nick. Every day presented choices to be made, who to love, who to be. Every day was a collective staring down into a deep hole of one’s own making and imagining. Having come close to the edge, Francesca decided she would pull herself away. From now on, she would only live on the flat surface where the light caught everything, reaching even the corners.

  Treasure

  Marilyn was a thief. This was as true as her hair was auburn (now striped with grey) and she was tall. When she was younger, she would take this aspect of herself and hold it to the light like a marble, and turn it over to examine it. She used to wonder why she was a thief, and when no answer seemed forthcoming, she stopped wondering.