Dogs With Bagels

by Maria Elena Sandovici

  She runs herself a hot bath. All she wants to do is soak. She pours some lavender oil into the water. She unwraps her dress, and looks at her naked body in the mirror, hoping to find it more beautiful than she remembers. But here it is, the same old body. Less firm, more puffy than she’d like it to be, and very pale. She wonders what Victor thought of it, as he undressed her.

  She notices two big bruises on her thighs. She tries hard not to recall exactly how they happened. She remembers knocking over something, a shattered sound, and neither her nor Victor stopping to look at the damage. There was broken glass on the floor, and she carefully stepped around it earlier this morning. She blushes again at the thought that they behaved like animals. Exhausted, she sinks into the bath. She wishes she could just wash the previous night away.

  20

  A Different Point of View

  Halfway between sleep and waking, Victor can feel the intoxicating scent of Maria’s skin. He longs for the warmth of her body. He reaches for her, though even half asleep, he’s afraid of her pushing him away. He opens his eyes looking for her, and finds that the bed is empty. The crumpled sheets smell like her, but she’s gone.

  He hopes she’s on the balcony, or in the kitchen, making coffee. He reaches for a sheet to wrap himself in, and goes in search of her. He feels a sudden pain, and realizes he’s stepped on something sharp. It’s a piece of glass, part of the lamp they knocked over the night before.

  There’s nobody in the living room, nor in the kitchen, on the balcony, or in the bathroom. She left. She snuck out like a thief in the middle of the night. The front door is unlocked. All her stuff is gone. There is no coffee.

  His foot is bleeding onto the hardwood floor. He rummages through the bathroom, trying to find something to bandage it with, and realizing that he simply doesn’t care, he wraps it in a towel. He puts the coffee on and lights a cigarette, which, contrary to his habit, he smokes in the living room.

  Why the fuck did she leave?

  He felt relieved, the night before, to realize she wanted him too. When he decided to take her to his place, he assumed she would protest, ask him to pull over, get out slamming the door. He would not have insisted. He would have driven her to her apartment. But she didn’t say anything. She followed him, like a little lamb. Did she maybe not want him after all? She was extremely nervous. He wanted to make some kind of comforting gesture, but he was afraid to show he still cared for her. All he could bring himself to do was offer her a drink. And then he was not even able to wait for her to finish drinking it. He did not even ask her to sit down, did not extend any of the small courtesies one would towards a guest. He did nothing to make her feel at ease.

  But then again, did she not pull him close herself? Did she not kiss him back? Did she not give more than enough signs that she was thoroughly enjoying it? These sound like the excuses invoked by date rapists. Did he, in fact, rape his wife?

  Why is he even thinking such a thing? He’s not a violent man. He would never do such a thing. Still, what if she thought of it that way? What if, in the light of day, she woke up to find herself a victim? If anybody can undergo such a transformation, it’s Maria. She’s capable of blaming him for things he didn’t do, for thoughts he didn’t think. She’s capable of blaming him even for the thoughts coursing through her own head.

  Did she, in the light of day, reconsider, and take offense? But what exactly is there to be offended by? She’s a grown woman. She went home with him of her own free will. They had sex. She enjoyed it.

  It’s true that he did not make love to her the way he used to when they were still together. He fucked her. And she liked it. A lot. Would she be hypocritical enough to be offended by the fucking, after enjoying it so much?

  He pours himself a cup of coffee, lights another cigarette. He decides to call her, and ask her why she left. As he’s waiting for her phone to ring, he realizes he’s nervous. Her answering machine picks up on the fifth ring. “Is Maria, leave a message.” Her voice on the recording is abrupt, impatient. The way he heard it many times before. He hangs up.

  When he calls again, a few hours later, the phone goes straight to voicemail. She must have turned it off. He calls her house phone, that antiquated contraption she keeps in her bedroom. There’s no answering machine attached to that thing, so he cannot tell if she’s unplugged it, or if she’s sitting there, refusing to answer.

  A new wave of hatred towards Maria rises in him. As he walks aimlessly around the apartment, his foot still hurting from that damn piece of glass, he hates her once more for all the mean and hateful things she’s done over the years. He’s already taken a long, hot shower, trying to scrub her scent off his skin. But it lingers in the apartment in spite of the open windows. Her scent mixed with the cold of the late November day, with the sounds and filth of the city.

  He doesn’t know what he hates her for most. Is it her small acts of bitterness, her early frustration, her hysterics, or is it the big stuff she did? Is it the day when she announced coldly that he should sleep in Alex’ room from now on? Is it the day she asked him to leave the apartment?

  He remembers that morning so well. He was coming home after spending the night with another woman. It was a meaningless fling. He cannot even remember her name or her face. He should not have spent the night with her. But it was in his days of driving a cab, and he sometimes drove night shifts. He knew that’s what Maria would tell the children if he didn’t show up, and it eased his conscience. He shared a bottle of wine with that other woman, smoked a few cigarettes, joked around. She was easy to be with. He let her talk him into spending the night. It was the promise of a lazy, relaxed evening that made him stay.

  At that point, being home was completely unpleasant. His wife barely spoke to him, and when she did, her comments were meant to hurt. He felt like he was performing a balancing act, trying to avoid her sharp daggers, and at the same time trying to avoid his children seeing him get ripped to pieces. He was tired. Driving a New York City cab was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. He needed to come home and relax. Instead he came home to a place where you could cut the tension with a knife.

  The night he spent with that other woman was fun. He even managed to sleep through most of it. In the morning she made coffee, and offered to cook breakfast, but he had to leave. He wanted to get out in his cab early enough to make a full day’s worth of tips.

  Around lunchtime he happened to drop off a customer in his own neighborhood, so he decided to stop by the house for a quick bite. Even in her days of intense unpleasantness, Maria would leave meals out for him, meticulously arranged on the table, ready for him to eat.

  He didn’t expect her to be home. She was supposed to be at work. But there she was, sitting at the kitchen table, in her cheap nightgown and frayed pink bathrobe, holding a half empty cup of coffee, staring into space. She looked like she’d been up all night, and she looked like she’d been crying.

  She shot him a poisonous look. He thought that she would hit him. He was preparing to counter her blows, something he did poorly, because he was always afraid of hurting her. She could hit hard for a small woman. She had sharp little knuckles that could do a lot of damage.

  But she did not hit him. Instead, she looked straight into his eyes and spat out:

  “I want you out of this house! I want you to take your things and leave!”

  He was shocked.

  “I want you gone!” she yelled.

  He had never seriously considered leaving her. As horrible as their life together had become, he felt responsible for her, and didn’t want to abandon her in the foreign country where he had taken her, where she was unhappy and didn’t fit in. He had especially not wanted to leave the children. Although, whenever he thought about it, he realized it was probably better for them not to see their parents fight all the time.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll leave. Do you really think I like living with you?”

  She looked down. Just for a second he thought
she was sorry. But as he was walking out the door, without his lunch, she shouted after him:

  “Locksmith is coming today! To change locks! I stay home to wait for him!”

  Victor brews another pot of coffee, lights another cigarette. He’s smoking in the house, something he never does. In a way he’s performing an exorcism. He’d rather have his home smell of cigarettes than of his wife.

  Of all the evil things she’s done, there is one that he can hardly bring himself to think of. It’s something he’s never discussed with anyone, one of the secrets of their marriage. This one makes all her other hateful acts pale in comparison. However, it’s not something he can easily think of, because it doesn’t just fill him with hate, it actually makes him feel guilty.

  It’s the memory of the day she left him.

  It started off like any other day. He came home tired, after having driven the cab all night. He intended to take a long nap. The children would be at school, and Maria would be at Josephine’s. She left breakfast out for him when he worked nights. It was usually a skillet with an omelet in it, covered with a plate, something she knew he enjoyed even cold. Other days there were hard-boiled eggs, peeled carefully, next to a few slices of cheese and cold cuts, maybe a few olives, all covered with a napkin. She left his food out on the table so it would be room temperature, not cold. There was always a pot of coffee on, toast on a plate, and sometimes even a glass of fresh squeezed juice. Thinking of the breakfasts she left for him, he usually feels guilty, sometimes even nostalgic.

  That day there was no breakfast. It struck him as odd, because she made his breakfast even when she was mad, even when she refused to talk to him. He paced around the kitchen, confused. He opened the fridge, looked at a carton of eggs, and thought it was too much trouble to cook them.

  Coffee was on, but the pot was half empty. He poured himself a cup, and bit into a piece of bread, which, not toasted, tasted pretty bland. He thought of Maria’s complaints about American bread not having the crunchy crust she liked, and he rolled his eyes. Tasty or not, it was a piece of bread, and it was fine by him.

  When he walked into the bedroom he saw the clothes thrown on their bed. By that time he had actually managed to buy a bed and a few other pieces of furniture for the apartment. He had hoped his wife would be pleased, but she had insisted that she disliked it, and that it was too expensive. She had thrown a horrible fit when he had explained to her that he had bought all of it on credit.

  At first he couldn’t figure out why things were on the bed.

  Whenever something dreadful happens, there’s always that elusive moment, when things have already happened, but one has yet to find out. That is the moment people wish they could go back to. The moment before disaster sinks in and begins to truly exist, the moment before their world is wrecked. For Victor, it was seeing the clothes on the bed, yet not realizing why they were there. It seemed a bit strange, yet to his knowledge, nothing was wrong yet. He didn’t know yet that his wife was gone. Then he saw the closet doors askew, the dresser drawers hanging open, and most of her things missing. One of the suitcases they had brought with them from Romania had disappeared from its place under the bed. He quickly checked the shoebox where they held their savings. Half of the money was gone. It was only a few hundred dollars. He wondered how far she’d get with it. The thought that she had left like this, taking their money, not telling him anything, not warning him, made him sick to his stomach.

  He went and knocked on Josephine’s door. He could hear the children inside. An unknown woman opened. She said she didn’t know where Maria was.

  His wife was gone. Without a trace. Just like that. He couldn’t believe it.

  He felt a surge of terror at the thought that she might have taken Alex and Lili with her. But all of their things were in their room. And where would she go, with two children?

  Still, the thought of her leaving them was more shocking than the thought of her taking them with her. How could she leave her children? In spite of what other people said about her, he knew she loved them. How could she abandon them? Had she been that desperate to leave? Had she been that miserable? How could she not have warned him? Or had she? He thought of all her little acts of desperation, her scenes, her crying, her outbursts of anger. Had all those been signs he had chosen to ignore? Would he have been able to stop her, had he paid more attention, had he tried to understand her?

  He briefly considered the idea that she had gone away with a man. But he quickly dismissed it. She hardly knew anyone. Where would she have met this man? At the store, at the laundry, at Josephine’s house? Besides, Maria was not the cheating kind. But how well did he know her, after all? He never thought she was the leaving kind either.

  He was relieved when Lili and Alex came home from school. Although he’d been almost certain she hadn’t taken them, he’d still been worried. Their arrival was the best thing that happened all day.

  Lili immediately wanted to go to Josephine’s to see her mother. Alex wanted to watch TV. He asked them both to sit down, and explained, in a voice he tried to render as natural as possible, that their mother had gone on a short vacation. He told them that she had not wanted them to be sad, so she’d kept it a secret, but that overall Mami had been working very hard, and was very tired, and that he’d sent her somewhere nice to get some rest and a breath of fresh air. Upstate. A little cabin in the woods. He had to stop himself. When people lie, they tend to provide too much detail. He could almost picture her at a little cabin in the woods. He only wished it were true, he wished it had occurred to him to send her somewhere to rest, instead of ignoring how miserable she was.

  “How come we don’t get to go with her?” was Lili’s question.

  “How come you never get tired?” was Alex’.

  As it got time for dinner, he became discouraged. He made an omelet for the children. Lili and Alex took a few bites, then pushed their plates away, asking him to order pizza.

  He couldn’t sleep while she was gone. Lying in bed alone, for the first time in his life prey to insomnia, he wondered and he worried. Where had she gone? Would she come back? Would they ever hear from her again? Had she disappeared forever from their lives? What would he tell the children if she really never came back? How much longer could he still fool them with the vacation story? To his disbelief they had bought it, and though Lili said she missed her Mami, they seemed to be doing ok, and not asking too many questions. But he could not go on lying to them forever.

  There were practical concerns too. How long could he go on driving the cab only while the children were at school? He was making less money, and he was more exhausted than before. How long could he afford to order pizza every night? He was already getting sick of it, and the children would too, eventually.

  Mostly, however, the questions that haunted him revolved around his wife: Where was she? What was she doing at this exact same moment? Was she able to sleep, or was she lying awake like him, thinking about them? Was she worried about what their lives would be like without her? Did she miss them? Did she at least miss her children?

  If he dozed off, even for a few moments, he woke in terror. What if something bad had happened to her, something really bad? What if she was dead?

  Then finally, on her fourth evening of being gone, just as he was getting ready to order pizza, the phone rang. It was her.

  “Victor?” Her voice was hesitant. He could tell she was crying.

  “Where are you?” The curtness in his own voice surprised him. For days, he had been planning what to say, and how to say it, if she called. He had decided to be kind and understanding. But now that she was actually on the phone, he couldn’t.

  “I’m at… the train station.”

  She spoke is a small voice, sobbing so hard her words were hard to understand.

  “Which train station?”

  “The big one, in Manhattan.”

  “Penn Station or Grand Central?”

  “Penn Station.”

  Pause.


  “I… Can I come back?”

  “Stay where you are. I will come get you.”

  They agreed for him to pick her up across the street from the station. He insisted that she not leave, that she wait for him there. He told her it would take a long time for him to get through traffic. And it did.

  The whole way there, he worried that she’d change her mind, that she’d disappear again before he could get to her. But when he pulled up in the cab, she was sitting there, on her small, battered suitcase. The laces of her cheap sneakers were untied, her hair was a mess, her eyes red and swollen. She wore faded jeans and a hooded grey sweatshirt. She did not look like his beautiful wife. She looked like a juvenile delinquent.

  He stopped the cab, but he didn’t get out to open the door for her, or to help with her suitcase. He just popped the trunk and waited for her to get in. He was still breathless from the drive over, from the fear that he’d be too late, that she’d be gone again. But here she was, in the flesh, and quite a sorry sight.

  She sat in the back of the cab, like a customer, placing the little suitcase on the seat next to her. He realized she was embarrassed to face him. But her choice to sit in the back irritated him.

  “I opened the trunk. You need to close it.”

  She got out, closed the trunk, came back in. She just sat there, looking down at her hands. For blocks and blocks of slow city traffic, that was all she did. He lit a cigarette. He did not talk to her. He turned the radio on, listened to NPR. They were halfway across the Queensboro Bridge when he realized that in the back of the cab, she was crying softly, trying to stifle her sobs, wiping her eyes and her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.