by Sarah Dunn
“And it’s not just that they’re not splitting up,” said Sunny Bang. “They’re staying happily, committedly, romantically married.”
“I don’t get it,” said Claire. “Is Arlen becoming a lesbian?”
“I think we’ve entered the zone beyond labels, Claire,” said Sunny Bang.
“This is the weirdest part of this whole thing,” said Lucy. “I mean, can you imagine? What would you do if Jake came home and told you he wanted to become a woman?”
“It’s more likely that I’d tell him I wanted to become a man,” said Sunny Bang. “That’s the more probable scenario.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever, Sunny,” said Claire. Sunny Bang never missed an opportunity to shock. “What would Jake do if you told him you wanted to become a man?”
“Honestly?” said Sunny Bang. She looked up in the air and appeared to give the question some serious thought. “I think he’d have a pretty major problem with it.”
“Exactly.”
“But who knows what goes on between people. Love is a strange thing.”
* * *
Arlen and Eric Lowell’s house did not look out on the pond where Arlen’s sister’s body was found.
The pond in question was behind the house next door, a fact that had been more or less lost by the town gossips over the years. The pond was down in a little hollow, and it was impossible to see it from the Lowell property, especially now that the underbrush in the woods between the houses hadn’t been properly cut back in decades.
Arlen was seven years old when Rose disappeared. After a frantic search that brought out the entire township of Beekman, Rose was discovered in the murky pond behind their next-door neighbor’s house. She could have wandered into the pond, of course, although Rose was not known to wander off. Not known to wander off, Arlen could imagine the police writing in their little notebooks. There was a rock wall that separated the two properties, one of those ancient walls that was really nothing more than a row of loose stones heaped there by the farmers who had cleared the land sometime in the 1800s. How did she get over the wall? But there were two places where the stones had tumbled, two places where a three-year-old could conceivably have passed through, although she hadn’t left any traces. Not a trace near the rough rock wall, not a hair, not a scrape. Still, it was at least a possibility. Rose was only three, she couldn’t swim, and that particular pond had a way of sucking hard at one’s feet. And a person can drown in two inches of water. But still: It’s always the parents, right?
Both of Arlen’s parents lived under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of their lives, and yet they chose to remain in Beekman. Theories abounded—the crazy mother did it, the drunken father did it, they did it together, the father did it and the mother helped him cover it up, although this last theory was hardest to believe, because by the time Rose died, Arlen’s parents weren’t even attempting to hide their contempt for each other. In the end, nothing was proven, no evidence was found, and no charges were ever filed.
The result was that the good people of Beekman had been feeling sorry for Arlen her entire life. They bought her presents at Christmas, they remembered her birthday, they gave her hand-me-downs, they checked up on her. They were thrilled when her father died of cirrhosis at forty-seven and positively gleeful when her mother was institutionalized in the late 1970s, although she was let out later, back when releasing the crazies was the popular thing to do.
Arlen never went to college. It just wasn’t in the cards. She married Eric when she was twenty, and they had had two kids, a boy and a girl. Once her kids got to junior high, Arlen took a job at a shelter for women who were victims of domestic abuse. Over the years, she’d done just about everything at that place that you could imagine, from cleaning the toilets to hauling sheets to the Laundromat to offering unofficial life-coaching sessions to the women and scrounging up books and craft supplies for the kids. Man, the things she’d seen.
The things she’d seen! So much pain and suffering. Those beautiful women, heartbroken and lost and scared, often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, afraid for themselves, terrified for their kids. And the little kids! They broke your heart. One time she walked in with a small stuffed owl she’d gotten for opening a checking account, and a little girl had looked up at her and said, “Is that for me?” Working at the shelter had, more than anything else, shaped the philosophy of Arlen’s adult life, which was, in a nutshell: If this is my biggest problem…
It was Christmas Eve two years earlier. Arlen’s mother had refused to come home for the holidays, nearly breaking the burly nursing-home attendant’s jaw when he tried to force her into Arlen’s car. The Lowells’ daughter couldn’t travel because she was on probation, and their son was going skiing with a girlfriend in Nevada, so Christmas was going to be just Arlen and Eric. Which was nice, really. Arlen liked to spend time alone with her husband, which was more than most women at her stage of life could say. She liked to sit across the kitchen table from him and tell him stories about the women in the shelter and pick his brain for advice. Arlen started a lot of conversations at the shelter with her trademark phrase “Now, I don’t mean to should on you, but I’m gonna go ahead and do it if you’ll let me,” and she got a lot of her best suggestions from Eric. “Where the mind goes, the behind follows” is what she said when she talked to a woman who seemed to be thinking too often or too fondly about her ex. Arlen liked a good folksy saying. She collected them like cats.
Arlen was doing the dishes, looking out the window to her backyard, reminding herself to fill the bird feeders and put out a Christmas bonus for the mailman. Eric had strung the lights on the juniper tree like he did every year, even though the tree kept getting taller, and Arlen knew the day would come when it wouldn’t be safe for him to string the lights on it anymore, and the thought made her suddenly sad. Enjoy the lights right now, she told herself. Don’t worry about somedays and might-happens.
Eric cleared his throat and said her name. Arlen turned around.
He was wearing a red dress. Heels, wig, and makeup. Fake eyelashes, even, it looked like to Arlen, though she was standing at the sink a good fifteen feet away from him. My husband is wearing fake eyelashes. For some reason, the eyelashes were what told her that this wasn’t a joke. The eyelashes told her this was very serious indeed.
Eric stood there, silently, looking at Arlen’s face, a million thoughts in each one’s head, not a word spoken, the weight of the moment and the years of their lives running together in a blur, and then he started to cry.
Arlen looked at him and thought: If this is my biggest problem…
* * *
“Hi,” said Lucy. “I’m, uh, Lucy.”
“And I’m Ben. Come on in.”
Sunny was right, Lucy thought. He wasn’t classically good-looking, but he had something. A quality.
“What a great place,” Lucy said.
“Thank you,” said Ben. “I don’t own it. I wish I did.”
“This is a cool neighborhood,” said Lucy.
“Yeah,” said Ben. “Although an old lady got shot on the corner last week. We’re at that tipping point, half artisanal coffee bars, half stray bullets. A good time to buy.”
“The perfect time to buy,” said Lucy.
He walked over to the bookshelf and turned on some music. He was wearing 501s and a waffle-weave shirt that clung to him just enough that you could tell what was underneath. His stomach was perfectly flat. It just went straight down into his jeans at a 180-degree angle. I’m treating him like a piece of meat, Lucy thought. Well, that’s what this was supposed to be, right? Lucy and her piece of meat.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Ben asked. “I’ve got some wine.”
“Wine is good.”
“Sunny said white. Is that right?”
“It is. Thank you.”
He went to work opening the wine while Lucy tried to think of something to say.
“So, your sister went to college with Sunny
Bang?”
“She did. Sunny used to come to our house for Thanksgiving every year because it was too far for her to fly home.”
“I can’t even imagine Sunny Bang in college.”
“That’s funny,” he said. “You call her Sunny Bang?”
“Yeah. We all do. I don’t know why,” said Lucy. “If she’s not in the room, she’s always Sunny Bang.”
Ben handed her a glass of wine. She took a big sip.
“So,” said Lucy.
“So,” said Ben.
Lucy took another sip of wine. “Um, this is nice. This wine. I like it.”
“Good.”
He leaned in and started with her neck. Not kissing it, exactly. More like smelling it. Really softly. Really, really nicely.
Lucy put her wineglass down.
“That was…” Lucy said.
“That was what?”
“That was really, really”—Lucy searched her brain for a better word but only one would fit, and so she said it—“weird.”
Ben started to laugh.
“The sex was, I mean, new, and good, but mostly it’s just incredibly weird to be here, doing this. With you.”
“I was married for thirteen years. I think I understand.”
“Can I ask you something? How is it that I could just walk into your apartment and drink three sips of wine and then you had sex with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“It was like being in a porn movie. Is this what people do now? Is this how people behave?”
“I got the sense, in the kitchen, that too much talking was going to freak you out. And we both seemed pretty clear on why you were here. So I rolled the dice.”
Lucy looked at him. “I bet you have a lot of sex.”
Ben just smiled a self-deprecating smile.
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Nope. Not at the moment,” said Ben. “I date a lot, I guess. People fix me up.”
“You get around,” said Lucy.
He smiled. “I get around.”
“Well, um,” Lucy said. “Thanks?”
Ben just laughed at that.
“I kind of feel like I should shake your hand,” said Lucy. “Or leave some money on the nightstand.”
“So, what do you think?” he said. “You want to try this again sometime?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably,” Lucy said. And then she blushed and said, “Yes.”
“No more playdates with Blake,” Owen announced the moment Lucy walked through the front door.
Owen was reading a thick paperback in the red chair when Lucy got home from her day in the city. Her sex day. He had a bottle of wine by his side and looked a little bedraggled from his time with Wyatt and Blake.
“Why, what happened?” Lucy asked.
“Well, apparently his house is bigger than ours,” Owen said. “And his parents’ cars are nicer. And he has three cars and we only have two. And why do we only have two cars? And why are they so messy?”
“He always says that,” said Lucy.
Lucy went to grab a wineglass.
“Blake also is very concerned about how clean our house is,” Owen called.
“Tell him to join the club.”
“Apparently his mother puts the laundry away right when it comes out of the dryer. She folds it as she takes it out of the dryer so nothing gets wrinkled, and then she puts it into everyone’s drawers. And she vacuums the entire house every day, which is why he has to put away all of his toys right after he plays with them. And he also helps her with the laundry, because he likes to put his clothes away into his drawers neatly.”
“None of this is news to me,” said Lucy. “Blake has told me all this before.”
“And then every five minutes, he walked up to me and said, ‘Um, excuse me, Mr. McIntire? I found another Cheerio on your couch.’ And then he’d hand it to me. And stand there, with his hands on his hips, judging me. After the third one, I just started popping them in my mouth. I’d say, ‘Thank you, Blake, I’m very hungry.’ ‘Why, thank you, Blake, this is a tasty snack.’”
Lucy laughed. “Why does Claire vacuum their entire house every day?” she asked. “That’s what I want to know. Half the women who live up here are wasting their whole lives on complete bullshit.”
“Their house does sound very clean and nice,” said Owen.
“Well, I’m not standing between you and the vacuum,” said Lucy.
“He’s obsessed with his EpiPen. I took him outside and he started screaming, ‘Where is my EpiPen! I need my EpiPen!’ I’m like, ‘What happened? Did something happen?’ And no, he just really, really wanted his EpiPen.”
“Claire told me if Blake gets stung by a bee, he could drop dead in thirty seconds.”
“That’s not possible. Nobody dies from bee stings like that.”
“Something happened when he was a baby,” said Lucy. “He got stung and ended up in the ICU at Mount Sinai for over a month.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s horrible,” said Owen. “I hereby retract the neurotic EpiPen obsession from my list of complaints about Blake. But the rest still stands.”
Owen snuggled up to her. “I’m starting to understand why you’ve been losing your mind,” Owen said. He put his arm around her waist and kissed her on the neck. “How was the city?”
“It was good,” said Lucy. “I had a nice day.”
“I’m glad.”
Owen slid his hand onto Lucy’s hip.
“Did you close the chickens in?” she asked.
“I forgot. I’ll do it.”
“No, no,” said Lucy. “I’ll go.”
One of the only times Lucy noticed the stars these days was when she went out to close the door to the chicken coop. Which was one reason they’d lost so many chickens—a chicken door should be shut tight long before it’s dark enough to see the stars; the predators prowled around at dusk, and a chicken coop with a dozen chickens nestled side by side up on their roost was like a drive-through fast-food joint to them. One time, Owen went in to lock up the chickens and a possum was up on the roost with its teeth buried in the neck of a buff Polish chicken named Cacciatore. Owen battled the possum with a metal snow shovel for about ten minutes until it finally sauntered out of the chicken coop and slunk back into the woods. Lucy drove Cacciatore to the friendly local veterinarian’s house, and, two hundred and fifty dollars later, she was fine.
The inside of the chicken coop smelled much better than you’d think. It was a nice earthy smell, and not at all like chicken poop, believe it or not. Lucy went inside and counted the chickens. Eleven, still. She stroked each chicken along the back as she counted it. Kiev, Nugget, Curry, Marsala, Fat White, Fat Black, Ugly Chicken, Crazy Chicken, Cacciatore, Tikka, and Gluten-Free Patty. She had raised them all inside the basement from the time they were two days old and she had violated the most basic rule of chicken-raising. Don’t name them, everyone said. Don’t do it. You’ll regret it if you do.
Lucy had named them. And she didn’t regret it.
Eight
If you’re content not having sex with your partner, that’s fine. But you might want to consider the following fact. Most people are having sex with somebody.
—Constance Waverly
The Waverly Report
Four years earlier, when the twins finally made the jump from half-day preschool to full-day kindergarten, just after baby Charlotte turned one, Susan Howard realized she and her husband, Rowan, were no longer having sex.
It was their anniversary. They went out to sushi for dinner, stopped by the country club for dessert and more drinks, and yet they still made it back home by eleven. They usually got home late from nights out, around one or even two, but those were nights out with other couples, dinner parties and party-parties, Beekman parties where the good red wine never stopped flowing. But Rowan, when forced to pay the restaurant’s markup for a bottle of wine and twelve dollars for each drink
, drank less than usual. And the two of them, without the distraction of the twins or baby Charlotte or the buzz of a party whirling around them, didn’t have that much to say to each other. It was difficult for Susan to sit across the table from Rowan and keep herself from reminding him of things he needed to do—get the minivan inspected, pour the fifty-pound bag of salt crystals into the water purifier, stick the tall orange reflector sticks into the driveway before the ground froze. But she didn’t. She kept her mouth shut. She smiled and tried to be interesting and engaging and entertaining and fun. She scrounged around inside her brain to come up with things to talk about that weren’t about the twins, that weren’t about baby Charlotte, that weren’t mommy nonsense.
When they got into bed, Susan realized her heart was pounding. She could feel it in her fingertips, the blood pulsing. She wasn’t drunk enough to pretend it wasn’t happening, she wasn’t sleepy enough to fall asleep. It’s our anniversary, she thought. You have to have sex on your anniversary, right? Something is really, really wrong if you don’t.
We’ve stopped having sex. When did we stop having sex?
For a long time, Susan had welcomed the reprieve from any sexual demands. She was exhausted. She was overwhelmed. She had other things to worry about. Sex was like the can of baking powder she kept on a high shelf in her pantry, something she didn’t need right now but that she knew she could get her hands on without too much trouble. “Marriage isn’t about sex,” Susan’s mother had told her when she was growing up. “Passion fades,” her mother had said. That, and “Men don’t like to have fat wives.”
So Susan did not let herself get fat, and she didn’t worry about fading passion, and she channeled her energy into her volunteer work and into breastfeeding her kids longer than most women considered either necessary or normal. But once the sex thing became an issue in her head, it was just about all she could think about. After trying to initiate sex a bunch of times—bona fide humiliations, every last one of them—she more or less forced Rowan to go see a therapist, Dr. Weinberg, who specialized, according to his website, in sex.