The first one lifted me with gloved hands from where I stood barefoot, then two of them moved into the room and stood over the spill like it was a Superfund site, debating The Cleanup. The third called Poison Control on his radio, and learned mercury can’t be absorbed by humans through touch, and can’t become airborne unless it’s at very high temperatures.
After that things settled down. Defcon #1 and Defcon #2 debated the best way to clean up, but the mercury kept splitting into tinier balls and rolling between the cracks of the wood floor. They started to sweat, took off their helmets, then stripped off their elbow-length gloves, scratched their heads. What about Scotch tape? I said, half joking.
So that’s how we cleaned up the toxic spill that commanded the entire hazmat squad of Southbrook, Connecticut. With Scotch tape, like lifting lint from a suit. They were there for two hours, and Jonah slept the whole time.
Wednesday, April 10, 1996
Told playgroup this morning about the mercury thermometer incident. Mostly expecting to get a good laugh, but also hoping they’d reassure me that Jonah isn’t going to grow up neurologically stunted, unable to say his own name. But after I told the story they were silent. Literally, no one said a word. Five seconds passed. Then Leslie said, “Oh my God.” And Regan said, “Did you take him to the pediatrician?” (No.) Then another silence, and Petra said, “I’d never keep a mercury thermometer in the house. It’s just not worth the risk.” And everyone murmured yes, yes.
Without trying to seem defensive, I offered that my pediatrician had told me that mercury thermometers were the most accurate. And then Brittain started talking about how she’d chosen her pediatrician and checked out his credentials, making sure there’d never been a malpractice suit against him, etc.
Cyanide tablets in the coffee. Blow darts tipped in anthrax. These were the things I wished I had at my disposal.
I smiled, and I’m going to keep smiling. I am not going to deprive Jonah of little playmates to roll around on the floor with, dress up in baby costumes with on Halloween. But it’s going to take a real effort not to give them mercury thermometers in the trick-or-treat bags.
Friday, April 12, 1996
The boss lady said the agency wouldn’t agree to part-time. I can’t believe it. I really thought they would. So we’re setting up a freelance contract, and I’ll work part-time from home. Trust me, Victoria said. I’ll make it work.
Dave finished in the upper 30 percent. He’s never been so high on the leaderboard before. Saw him interviewed on ESPN, a good balance of enthusiastic and professional and modest, but the smile of a six-year-old sneaked in there too. He can’t help it.
Friday, April 19, 1996
I’m interviewing part-time nannies on Monday. We finally put an ad in the paper after I talked Dave into feeling okay about three afternoons a week, especially since I’ll be working right upstairs. Victoria has been great about feeding me work, as much as I can handle. It’s crazy, but I’m enjoying it more than I ever have. She tossed me a client that no one else is very excited about, a Japanese sake manufacturer, and last night I absolutely lost track of time working up ideas for the label. Came up with a cutout silhouette-style concept that looks like kirigami, wispy fronds of rice blowing in a field. Finally stopped at 2:30 a.m. when Jonah woke up for a feeding. Of course I’m cursing myself today, can hardly see straight I’m so tired.
It’s pathetic how much it means to me, but it feels like it’s something all my own, a part of me that isn’t given over to nursing or laundry or checking ESPN all the time to see how Dave’s doing. It’s the one tiny vestige of myself in a day where everything feels like it’s about someone else. Having that time away, I enjoy the time with Jonah more. But I’m learning that sneaking an hour here or there when he’s napping is beyond frustrating. Getting a rhythm, then being interrupted just when I’m thoroughly engrossed, is worse than not starting at all. I need to get a regular sitter. That will make all the difference.
Elizabeth and Dave didn’t like any of the sitters they interviewed. No spark, no twinkle in the eye of a single one of them that suggested a genuine enjoyment of babies, merely bland competence. Elizabeth was discouraged, but suspected Dave was relieved. How much work do you really have to do? he asked. It’s not like we’re desperate for it or anything. “It” being money. She decided to carve out work time around the edges of Jonah’s naps, plus some nights and weekends, to fulfill her freelance contract.
Kate put down the notebook and looked at the windowsill, the smiling photograph of Elizabeth framed by darkness. It was painful to imagine her friend with this intensity Kate had never seen. It was as if in addition to the woman she’d known, there had been a second lost friend, and she was hit with fresh grief.
Beside her on the chaise, her cell phone rang. Out of Area appeared in the caller ID window. She took a breath, wiped at her eyes.
“Hello?”
“Hey, hon, oh good, I finally got a connection. The cell service here is the worst.”
“Chris.” She breathed his name like a statement. “Where are you?”
“Jakarta. I just got to the airport and I’m getting a decent signal for just a second.”
“Are you just getting to Jakarta, or leaving there?” Leaving. Let him say leaving.
“Just getting here. I think it’s just a one-night thing, and then a quickie to Bali. You wouldn’t believe these hotels for sale. They’re crazy, all this insane luxury falling apart. Some are beyond help, but I think we can do something with at least one other. Especially if it means getting the Angkor Wat one. It’s a gem.”
She struggled to put herself in the mind-set of Indonesian real estate. “So it’s working out? You’re going to buy them?”
“Looks that way, if we can get a decent price. This would be a total coup for us, Kate. I know this is a pain for me to be off-island for so long, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime deal.” The word coup rang in her ears. “How are the kids?”
“Fine. Great. We’re doing all the regular stuff. They miss you though.”
“Good. Hey, I’m having trouble hearing what—” There was crackling alternating with silence.
“Chris, you there? How are … things there? Does it feel safe?” Silence. “Chris?”
Their voices overlapped, and his disappeared. A small static of background noise came and went, the sound of connections made and broken.
“Chris?”
“I’m here. I just asked how the journals were coming. Any revelations?”
“Not really.”
She said it in part because it was the last thing she wanted to talk about on an international call with a poor connection, the unsettling mixture of empathy, irritation, and loss. But it wasn’t the only reason. When she and Chris had last discussed the journals that afternoon on the beach, she’d told him she was keeping an open mind about whether or not Elizabeth had been having an affair. But even as she spoke, she knew it wasn’t altogether true. She now read as if she were following bread crumbs, looking for wisdom about what makes two people fall out of sync and then imperceptibly apart, perhaps without one of them even knowing.
“Kate? I can hardly hear you,” he said. “I think I’m—I’ll call you from—tell the kids—” Suddenly the static was gone, and so was Chris.
Kate looked at the phone, and saw a sequence of the things that might cause it to suddenly disconnect. She clicked it shut, and placed it on the counter with a shaky hand.
TWENTY-ONE
THERE WAS AN ENTIRE SECTION of pages torn out. Kate pulled the binding wide and saw there were fifteen, possibly twenty pages missing. The last entry was dated in April 1996. The next section of writing began in November 1996.
Kate ran her thumb across the ripped edges. She thought back to Elizabeth’s angry writing after her mother had destroyed an early journal, her reaction to having been censored. This time, it appeared she had done it to herself.
Monday, November 18, 1996
I’ve turned the corner
. I no longer get out of bed in the morning counting the hours until I tuck him back in. The one thing I will give myself credit for is that throughout, I’ve been providing Jonah with a smiling face and a stable home. I will say this for myself: every decision I’ve made that’s led to this place, I made out of optimism. At each choice I did the gut check and decided I can do this, or that I wanted to be a person who could. Enough said. No one wants to hear a mother talk this way.
Thanksgiving is coming, and I’m hosting everyone: Dave’s whole family, including Zack and the kids, even my father, his third time visiting me from L.A. Dave finished the tour season the highest he ever has, and will definitely be on tour again next year.…
The writing continued, a litany of plans for the holidays and Dave’s progress on tour. It read like training-wheels writing, someone moving shakily to acquire a new skill, or outlook. As Kate skimmed the workmanlike entries, her thoughts drifted to what might have been in the missing pages. Postpartum depression was her guess, but she wondered if there’d been something more, if this was where the man who invited Elizabeth to Joshua Tree had made his appearance.
Gradually, Elizabeth’s old voice returned. Whatever edginess that had been critical of others was now turned on herself. She became increasingly attentive to the playgroup and neighborhood.
Wednesday, December 11, 1996
There’s a new woman in playgroup, Kate. She just moved here from New York. She lives a few streets over, and I remember seeing her when she moved in, saw her telling off a cable guy outside. It was hilarious. “I’ll tell you what,” she was saying in the driveway with a baby on her hip. “How about we make a date for ME to come to YOUR house tomorrow afternoon. And you can sit there for four hours waiting for me even though you have a million other things to do, and then I’ll come two hours late and tell you, ‘Oops, I don’t have the right stuff, gotta come back tomorrow.’ How would that work for you?”
I was walking by with the stroller and laughed out loud. She turned to me, “Am I wrong?” It’ll be nice to have some fresh blood in the nabe.
Moving to Southbrook should have felt like the most natural thing in the world once Kate decided not to return to work. If you are going to stay home with a baby, she’d reasoned, at least surround yourself with others who are doing the same thing and talk to one another across their driveways.
Except that no one came into their driveways. They pulled out of them in their large SUVs, straight out of the garages and then back into them, so that for the first week Kate knew what her neighbors’ bumpers looked like but not the neighbors themselves. She invented reasons to be outside several times a day—never mind that it was midwinter in Connecticut—and bundled newborn James in so many layers that only his eyes were exposed, peering from the stroller. But no matter how many times she went walking, no one stopped to talk. Until Elizabeth.
As Christmas neared, Elizabeth was consumed with juggling holiday shopping and the demands of freelance work. The playgroup had become a cohesive unit, a bona fide group of if not close friends, at least very good acquaintances, and Elizabeth felt part of a group for the first time in years. The women came together for playdates every Wednesday morning and helped in a pinch, watching one another’s children for cumbersome errands and doctor’s appointments.
Once when she was up against a design deadline and had no luck with sitters, Elizabeth asked Brittain to watch Jonah. Brittain hesitated before saying yes. “Oh, for work,” she said kind of coolly. I don’t know if it was that she forgot that I worked, or if being asked for work made her feel like a nanny, but I should have known better. The few times I’ve brought up my job it’s been a conversation killer, and I end up feeling it’s something that sets me apart.
At the end of the month the playgroup had a gift exchange, a Yankee swap of inexpensive presents given and regifted. It was intended as a gag, but Elizabeth found the playgroup women were in earnest. At the end, Kate was stuck with the schmaltziest gift, a cloisonné “I Love Mom” necklace Leslie brought—though Leslie probably liked it, she’s that kind of precious. Kate put it on and struck a princessy pose and you could see it dawn on Leslie that she was being made fun of. And I thought Oh man here it comes, there’s gonna be no way to stitch up that yawning hurt. But Kate noticed in time thank God, and said we should all get them, they’ll be like the friendship bracelets of the playgroup. I like Kate, but she skates a little close to the edge. She’s only been here a few weeks and I wish there were some way I could give her a silent signal. Careful (ear tug), that won’t fly here.
Kate’s face went hot. Elizabeth was right; she was never as aware as she should be of the way her comments were taken. She thought of the letter she’d received years ago from the viewer critical of her flippancy on the cable show. All these years, it was still jammed in the back of her top drawer at home. Give her a few toddlers underfoot and see if she can “make it happen” then. Not everything is as simple as it seems. Chiding and ominous, a voice from the future. There were difficulties that went unseen, and it was dangerous to make assumptions.
Jonah’s first birthday came and went. Elizabeth brought him to the aquarium in the morning and Dave flew home that night just in time for cake. Jonah mashed icing in his face and hair, screaming with glee, and fell asleep in a hiccuppy tantrum of too much sugar and too much attention.
March 21, 1997
Kate watched Jonah so I could get to the dentist for a cavity. Chris is in Europe for some hotel thing and Dave doesn’t get back until Monday, so she invited me to stay for dinner. She whipped up these crusty little homemade pot pies and poured us wine, and we had a civilized meal while Jonah and James screamed and pitched their bottles on the floor.
She has something to say about everything, an encyclopedia of current events. It’s like she’s doing a monologue, all worked up about the future of cloned animals in the food supply while she’s standing at the counter prepping the little pie pans. “James and Jonah could be drinking milk from cloned cows in five years”—her hair swings under her chin while she rolls the dough—“and all that genetically screwed-up milk could send them into puberty at age eight or something.” CNN was on in the background on her kitchen TV and none of it was news to her, from the terrorism in Tel Aviv to the discovery that much of the art in French museums had been stolen by Nazis. She had some choice words for the French and the international art establishment, and I drooled Pinot Noir through novocaine lips and tried to sound smart. She groused about Chris’s travel, mentioned some of the cool places she’d been able to go “back in the day.” Ko Samui. Goa. I’ve never even heard of Goa. I nodded and wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to commiserate about husbands traveling or chime in about cool places we’d been. I told her that while we were dating, Dave surprised me with tickets to one of his tournaments in Hawaii. That’s nice, she said, and looked at me like I’d said Gary, Indiana.
I’m between projects for the agency so I’ve started painting Jonah’s room, a jungle theme. Moved him into our room so I can work on it at night. When I bring him in each morning to see the new animals he points with such force—this! that!—that his finger goes double-jointed.
Round two at Bay Hill today, and Dave came in just behind Payne Stewart, about two-thirds of the way up in the pack. Called a few minutes ago: “At this rate we’ll be able to redo the kitchen this summer.”
July 3, 1997
My kitchen renovation has become the topic of choice at playgroup. We talk about refrigerators and ranges and tile backsplashes, and I am so bored I could scream. They’d be horrified if they knew I didn’t care. So would Dave, who thought it was the birthday present of the century when he presented the brochures tied in a bow. It isn’t that I don’t care about the kitchen. I care about having it DONE so I don’t have to talk about it anymore. Oddly, the fact that Dave “gave” me a renovation—and that we’re looking at luxury ranges and other appliance ridiculousness—seems to have elevated us in social status. When his golf ranking w
asn’t as high, his work was treated like a trade compared to the corporate husbands, as if he might be able to repair their toilets in a pinch. But the other day Brittain referred to him as a “professional athlete.” I almost choked on my coffee.
Then Leslie brought up the Stamford town-house fire, which was probably the only thing worse than talking about my kitchen. Everyone who hadn’t seen the news last night had to hear about the mother home alone with her kids, the baby dropped out the window who fell short of being caught, the interview with the poor husband who’d been at work, all in awful detail. I was a wreck watching it last night—pregnancy hormones make me react all out of proportion. Dave climbed into bed with me and to cheer me up put on the wedding video his golf buddies made. It used to make me too sad to watch; by the end of the night gravity was working against me in the tight dress and I couldn’t quite pass as the virginal bride. Who knows when we actually lost the baby; during the honeymoon? Maybe even that night. But watching the video this time I felt sad instead for the person I was, no idea what was coming, thinking I’d gotten all my ducks in a row. Believing that such a thing was possible.
Then Brittain had to go for the coup de grâce. “Yes yes, so terrible, those poor people, the mother found curled around her two-year-old in the closet.” Kate was sitting near the window and didn’t seem to be listening, but when I caught a look at her face I saw that she was crying and working very hard not to show it. She scooped James up and mumbled something about Regan’s cat and her damn allergies, and apologized that she had to leave, and then she was gone.
September 4, 1997
A man came to the door this afternoon wearing a black suit and white button-down shirt and blue tie. When he flashed a badge, I opened the door. He said he was with the FBI and was doing security clearance on one of my neighbors who would be doing high-level government casework, and he was asking background questions of all the neighbors. Could he come in and ask me some questions?
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Page 18