The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  “But you have to go somewhere.”

  “Too bad I can’t come with you for your au pair job, hunh?”

  “Yeah. If only you’d taken French, I could have argued for a one-to-one kid-nanny ratio.” Jessica stubbed out her cigarette and stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get us more beer. Maybe four beers is the happiness number.”

  Don’t leave me, Ingrid wanted to say, though of course Jessica would be gone only a minute. But once she’d disappeared down the hill toward the keg, Ingrid had the urge to roll over into the crushed grass where Jessica had just been sitting, breathe in the smoky air of her exhalations before it dispersed. Which was ridiculous; she knew perfectly well that the dispersion of air molecules is such that soon the air from Jessica’s lungs would be everywhere forever. That every time she breathed in, she was inhaling air that had been breathed by everyone who had ever lived. Einstein, for example. Hitler, Amelia Earhart, Jesus. Her mother.

  But it didn’t feel like that. The air she breathed in felt lonely.

  Ingrid stopped kicking her heels and stared up at the sky.

  I’m alone here, Mister. 1:27 a.m. and I’m all alone.

  3.

  Why tonight, Evelyn said aloud. She was sitting in the car in the Star Market parking lot, the dial on the dashboard reading a green-lit 1:30. She switched off the engine and rested her head against the steering wheel. She knew the answer, of course: Why not tonight?

  It had to happen sometime, that she would snap and screw up completely, and tonight was as good as any other. She’d been dreading the party since Ray first suggested it—insisted, really: We have to have people over, it’s so far beyond our turn it’s laughable, we’ve been over to the Yeagers’ more times than I can count. And the worst of all: Don’t worry, Evelyn, sweetheart, I’ll do everything.

  He’d meant to be kind, to relieve her of the dread and inadequacy these events dumped over her like a tub of ice water. Since her marriage to Ray a year ago it had been a constant struggle to catch up: she didn’t know what prosciutto was, or how to make stuffed mushrooms for twenty, or choose wine, or play hostess in the manner to which his friends were accustomed. And Ray’s reassurances that he would handle it had the unintended effect of highlighting all her shortcomings. The morning of the party, she woke up drenched in sweat. Flop sweat, her sister would have said. As in, the performance you’re about to give is going to flop.

  It was true—things were going badly even before noon. First, Ray didn’t take the afternoon off as promised; a mistake had been found in a set of drawings, and he’d stayed late to fix them. In his absence, Evelyn had ruined the vichyssoise by puréeing the cooked potatoes in the blender until they were the consistency of glue. No matter how much milk she added to try to fix it, the soup was like library paste. Don’t freak out, she lectured herself. Don’t even start—just do it over, you have enough potatoes.

  The second batch of soup was better. Ray came home, tasted and pronounced it perfect, unaware of its predecessor now gurgling through the sewer pipes below the toilet. Evelyn started in on the salad while Ray went down to the basement to choose wine. She wasn’t sure about the green pepper—should it be diced, or cut in circles? Well, she would do the tomato first; anyone could do tomatoes, without even thinking.

  But without thinking, she brought the knife down on her thumb. Ray always kept the knives well sharpened and the cut was deep. She knew it should probably have stitches, but by then it was five-thirty and time was running out. If she went to the emergency room, she was liable to be there for hours, and there was still too much to do. She bandaged her thumb herself, wrapping it in layers of gauze and surgical tape, and only then called Ray to come finish the salad. She just nicked her thumb, she said when he noticed, and no, it wasn’t too bad.

  “Poor baby.” Ray kissed her cheek, then began kissing her neck, her hair. “You’re beautiful, you know that?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Ray put his arms around her waist. “Come upstairs.”

  She half-wanted to; she was so tense, it would be good to be forced to stop thinking, forced to give herself over to her body. But it was almost six, and they were way behind schedule.

  “I have to vacuum,” she said.

  “There’s time. The smell of your skin is burning me up.”

  “You mean I smell like sweat. Then I have to shower, too.”

  He let her go, and then she wished she had given in. Instead she vacuumed while Ray maneuvered expertly among spices and shallots, making a salad dressing so good she felt again the sting of her own inadequacy. Her cut thumb throbbed.

  After her shower Evelyn sat at the dressing table and tried to relax. After all, there was no sign that anything was wrong. She could hear Ray downstairs whistling some classical thing—he couldn’t be happier, so why was she so worried? She brushed her hair, checked to see if among the bright red any gray had appeared, put on foundation to hide her freckles, chose a lipstick.

  As always, leaning into a mirror to do her makeup reminded her of how, as a child, she’d watched others perform the transformation: she used to peek around the canvas alley to watch the men get in makeup. Crouched on stools, close to the long mirrors so they could see in the bad light, their hands flew over their faces, transforming them with daubs of greasepaint from men into clowns. Evelyn considered the lipstick in her hand. If she made the line of her lips a good inch wider all the way around, she could be a clown too, and in one stroke of color return to where she had come from: down in the dirt with the clowns and the roustabouts, squinting up into the high reaches of the big top at three glittering blurs walking gracefully into the air—father, mother, sister. She put the lipstick away.

  By seven-thirty, the Shepards’ living room had filled with people. Evelyn tried to stay close to Ray, but guests kept sweeping him away from her. Where was he now? In crowds Ray was unremarkable, neither tall nor loud. You might not notice him unless you met his eyes, which held a lightness of movement more suggestive of boyhood than a man approaching middle age. He looked his best in company: alone, his habitual expression was that of someone attempting to solve a crossword puzzle. But even then, if interrupted, he would look up, more startled than annoyed at the intrusion, and he would smile.

  He looked up now, as if he’d felt her searching for him. He was standing with his back against the carved oak mantelpiece—cornered, it appeared, by a tall woman in a brown cardigan and a necklace that looked like it was made out of blobs of clay.

  “Evelyn,” said Ray as she came up beside them, “this is Liz Luce, from Newell Academy.”

  Newell Academy, Evelyn had been told several times, was on the National Register of Historic Places, and the dining hall Ray had designed for them had just been written up in some magazine Evelyn couldn’t remember the name of, though she’d cut out the newspaper clipping and saved it.

  “So pleased to meet you,” Liz Luce said, extending her hand.

  “Ray’s dining hall has made all our other buildings look absolutely ramshackle by comparison.”

  “Actually,” said Ray, “your campus buildings are a wonderful example of the Federal style. Take the roof lines for example—”

  Evelyn felt a prickle of irritation. When Ray got going on architecture it was impossible to shut him up. Liz Luce must have felt the same way: she interrupted.

  “Honestly, Ray, I’ve been so burdened with adolescent crises this week, I don’t think I could even tell you what color my own kitchen’s painted. Thank God this year is almost over.” She turned to Evelyn. “I was on the phone with parents until eleven o’clock last night dealing with one thing and another, and now I have a girl we’ve suspended but can’t send home because her folks have disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Evelyn echoed, startled.

  “Oh, not literally disappeared, not foul-play disappeared.” Liz smiled, not unkindly, but Evelyn blushed. “I mean, we can’t get hold of them. Some parents thin
k boarding school is a sort of glorified babysitting service—just dump your progeny and go off globe-trotting.”

  “There were a few boys with families like that when I was at Andover,” Ray said. “Never any place to go for the holidays. Poor kids.”

  Liz looked at Evelyn. “Such a soft-hearted husband you have. That’s my problem too. Well, unless you know anyone who’d like to take a sixteen-year-old girl with purple hair for the summer, I’ve got a long day tomorrow. Thank God school ends on Wednesday.”

  As Liz Luce moved off, Alex Yeager came up to them. Alex was Ray’s best friend at the firm. Tall and blonde and tanned—the only suntanned architect you’ll ever see, Ray had said once. Evelyn thought Alex looked like an aging Ken doll.

  “Sorry about that,” he said to Ray, picking up an earlier conversation, “Now look, all you have to do is forget about this Victorian architecture book thing you’re writing and knuckle down on the Goldstein job. Tell Dunlap you’ll keep it under budget this time, and don’t go sneaking in things like copper downspouts.” He turned to Evelyn. “The prize-winning architect here is having a slight difference of opinion with our boss—”

  “Who is standing not ten feet away,” said Ray. “Jesus, Alex, this is a party. Forget that, let me get you another drink.”

  “I’ll do it,” Evelyn said, grateful for an excuse to avoid being stuck in a conversation with Alex Yeager. She took his empty glass and escaped to the table of bottles at the other end of the room.

  On and on it went. Eight o’clock, nine. She circled the room with a tray of stuffed mushrooms Ray had made, a shield against conversation, until she was cornered by Gillian Dunlap, Ray’s boss’s wife.

  “Everyone’s talking about how wonderful the new dining hall is,” Gillian said. “You must be so proud of Ray.”

  “So proud of him,” Evelyn repeated. I’m like a trained parrot, she thought. She looked at Mrs. Dunlap for a sign as to where the conversation should go next. Gillian Dunlap was probably twice her own age, maybe sixty, but she carried herself with the quiet confidence of a woman who knows she is beautiful. Evelyn noted the waved silver hair, the small ears with their tiny pearl earrings, and felt the impropriety of her own red hair, and her ears, whose piercings were off-center because she had done them herself at sixteen using a sewing needle and a piece of potato.

  She tried to smile. “Would you like some salad?”

  “Thank you dear,” said Mrs. Dunlap, and put a very small amount of salad on her plate. And then, “Good heavens, you’ve cut yourself.”

  Evelyn glanced at the bandage around her thumb. “I was cutting a tomato,” she said.

  “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Dunlap. “Hadn’t you better change the dressing?”

  Evelyn looked at the decanter of vinaigrette beside the salad bowl and back at Mrs. Dunlap’s concerned face.

  “Ray made the dressing,” she said. Thinking, I didn’t bleed in it, bitch.

  “Pardon?”

  Oh Jesus—Mrs. Dunlap meant the Band-Aid. Evelyn turned her hand and saw that blood had seeped through; a thin line of blood had collected on the edge of the bandage and was threatening to spill down her knuckle.

  Idiot, idiot, idiot. “Excuse me,” she managed, and grabbing her thumb in her other fist, she turned from the buffet table and made her way through the people who suddenly seemed intent on blocking her path to the bathroom.

  She re-bandaged her finger, then sat on the lid of the toilet and leaned against the wall. Ray made the dressing—Had she actually said that to Gillian Dunlap? She wanted to run out of the house in shame. There were, she knew, a dozen other fauxs pas she had already made that evening without even knowing it. Faux pas, she had learned, meant false step. In the family she had grown up in, a false step could kill you: the high wire was set thirty feet in the air, the act performed without nets.

  If only she could just stay here in the bathroom until the party was over. During the last awful year of living with her first husband, Evelyn had spent quite a bit of time in bathrooms, in the tiny bathroom of their Airstream trailer, to be exact, while Joe raged on the other side of the door. This bathroom, with its huge old bathtub and pedestal sink, was a thousand times nicer. It wouldn’t be bad to pass a couple of hours in here. She could even take a bath.

  There was a knock on the door, a polite tap-tapping, and then a woman’s voice like one of the announcers on Public Radio: “Is anybody in there?”

  It was Marseille Yeager, a psychiatrist married to Alex, the aging Ken doll.

  “Evelyn, is that you?”

  “Just a minute,” Evelyn called in what she hoped was a neutral tone, wondering how Marseille knew it was her. She flushed the toilet to buy herself time and looked in the mirror. Her mascara had smeared only a little; you couldn’t really tell she’d cried. She licked her finger and wiped beneath her eyelids, then ran a hand beneath the sleeves of her blouse to check that the rubber bands concealed under the turned-up cuffs were solidly in place. Sooner or later someone was bound to find out about the tattoos, but so far she’d been lucky and Ray hadn’t told anyone. She took a deep breath and opened the bathroom door.

  “Hello, darling, it’s been ages!” Marseille held out her arms and Evelyn allowed herself to be embraced. Something metal and spiky dug into her chest. When the hug ended Evelyn saw that what had gouged her was a silver brooch with sea urchin points sticking out of it, the sort of abstract design Marseille favored. Marseille with the M.D. after her name, the Ann Taylor suit over a black leotard, the dangerous jewelry—Marseille terrified her.

  “I’ve been thinking about you, Evelyn,” Marseille said. Marseille always spoke in a tone of voice that made what she said mean several things at once. “How are you?”

  Evelyn, knowing that what Marseille meant was Tell me what’s wrong, replied, “Fine, thanks.”

  Marseille laid her hand on Evelyn’s arm and smiled the smile Evelyn imagined she offered to her psychiatric patients. “Evelyn, I want you to know that if you ever want to talk about anything, I’m here. As a friend.”

  “Marseille, have you seen Ray around?” Evelyn knew she was being rude; she didn’t care.

  “He’s in the living room—” Marseille let a pause settle—“with the rest of the guests. Let’s go join them, shall we?”

  Feeling like a child caught playing hooky, Evelyn allowed herself to be led along her own hallway. Marseille kept her hand on Evelyn’s arm, as if Evelyn were standing on the ledge of a building, threatening to jump. Evelyn’s tattoos, hidden by the thinnest of cotton blouses, threatened to burst into flame beneath Marseille’s cool palm.

  11:00, 11:30, and at last the crowd in the living room thinned. Wine glasses were abandoned, and Ray went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee for the few remaining guests. Evelyn followed, thinking this was something the hostess ought to do, not the host.

  Ray looked up from the fridge. “Where’s the cream?”

  It was gone, and there was no milk, either: Evelyn had used them both up in the second batch of vichyssoise.

  “We’re out,” she said, “I’m sorry.” Her face was flushing, her throat tightened. It was not the verge of tears, it was something worse than that, something ballooning inside her, threatening to break open.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Ray, oblivious, “just get me a lemon, will you, and we’ll do an Italian espresso thing with lemon peel instead.”

  It was too much: he was good at everything; she was good at nothing.

  “I’m such an idiot,” she said, aloud this time.

  “Just pass me a lemon, would you?”

  If she moved from the kitchen stool, she would scream.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Ray asked, clearly annoyed now and getting the lemon himself.

  She shook her head and watched him shave off yellow curls of peel, arrange them on the coffee tray with the cups and take it all out through the swinging door, leaving her sitting in the kitchen.

  And then, finally, the last good–bye
. She and Ray side by side at the entryway, waving, her hand going side-to-side like some kind of mechanical doll. Finally, it was over.

  “An utter success,” Ray said. He plucked a last clump of lettuce from the salad bowl and popped it into his mouth. He smiled at his wife. “See? You had nothing to worry about.”

  And just like that, as if he’d stuck a pin in her, she felt a balloon pop inside her, and what it contained, what was exploding all over her guts, was the full force of the shame and fury that had been building all night. Nothing to worry about? How dare he—he had no idea what she’d had to worry about tonight. Her face was burning, her chest was burning. It was the same feeling she used to get when Joe, stinking of beer, plunked himself down beside her on the Airstream’s tiny sofette and gave her a certain mean grin: if she didn’t get outside, get away from him that instant, something terrible would happen.

  She took a step backward. “I’m going out to get more milk,” she said.

  As soon as she said it, this seemed like the only thing that would save her: get out of the house, get in the car. Drive to a place where everything was lined up neatly on the shelves with prices on it. Where you could see exactly what you were getting and how much it would cost you.

  “You don’t mean now,” Ray said. “It’s almost midnight.”

  “I’ll go to the Star; they’re open all night.” There was no way she could explain. Ray, who tried so hard to be understanding, would not understand this at all.

  “That’s so far away. Sweetheart, that’s crazy. Get the milk in the morning.”

  “I’m not tired, and I want a glass of milk now,” she said. If she could undo just one of her mistakes this evening, she felt she would be all right.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he called as she headed for the door.