by Andre Dubus
In the kitchen, Ted stood with his cane, pouring coffee; he wore his blue double-breasted suit and a red tie with a pale blue shirt. He was flying to Baltimore to take a deposition and would stay there for the night. He had brought in the newspaper from the box at the end of their long driveway that curved downhill through trees. He put a spoon of sugar and some hot milk from a pot in her coffee, then handed it to her. He stood resting on his cane as she took her first sip; then with a finger he touched her knuckles at the handle of the cup, and bent down and gave her a quick kiss; his throat and his cheeks above his beard smelled of aftershave lotion, and she breathed that with the aroma of coffee and said: “You’re not bad, Ted Briggs.”
“Neither are you, Ms. Arceneaux.”
She went through the mudroom, where boots were on benches and coats hung on pegs, and stepped outside, and smelled snow in the air. The evergreens were still black and the sky was dark gray. She breathed deeply into her stomach and looked up at the sky and raised her arms. She went back into the light of the kitchen; upstairs the children’s steps were slow but steady, so she did not call to them. Ted was making sandwiches at the counter. She took three grapefruit from the refrigerator and stood beside him and sliced the grapefruit in halves, then cut their sections from the rind. She drank coffee and poured measuring cups of water into a pot. Until eighty-three days ago she had waked herself each morning for twenty-six years with coffee and cigarettes. Her flesh could not remember what it had felt, waking without wanting those. She stepped to the sink and poured out her coffee, then spread butter on eight slices of bread, and margarine on two. Ted’s cholesterol was high, and she obeyed the rules about that, and imposed them on him; she ate what she wanted to, and she did not give margarine to the children because she did not trust it, suspecting that decades from now it would attack them in ways no one had predicted. She sprinkled brown sugar on the bread, then cinnamon, and looked at Ted’s profile and said: “You could cheat tonight, you know. Have yourself a great dinner.”
“I plan to.”
She wondered if she had really been talking about food, then knew that she was, and it had reminded her of adultery. Once she had nearly cheated, and she had learned how simple and even negligible it could be, making love with someone else while loving your husband; and since then she had known it could happen to Ted, as easily as a tire blowing out, or a bluefish striking his hook. She had told none of this to him; she had told Marsha and had confessed to a priest that in her heart she had been unfaithful, though not with her body.
He sliced the sandwiches in triangular halves, wrapped them in waxed paper, and placed them in the three lunch boxes. They were red, blue, yellow. He wrapped cookies and put in each box an apple and a tangerine. She imagined him tonight eating pâté and duck, and herself in the living room, after the children were asleep, smoking cigarettes. She looked at the clock and was about to call the children, knowing her voice would be high and tense, but then she heard them on the stairs. They came into the dining room, Julia and Elizabeth murmuring, Sam gazing, seeing something in his mind that was nowhere in the room. She quietly marveled at these little people: they were dressed; they wore shoes; their hair was brushed. Probably their beds were made. She sat with them and Ted and ate grapefruit. Then she boiled the water in the pot, measured oatmeal into it, and watched it boil again, then lowered the flame. She slid the pan of cinnamon bread into the oven, left the door partially open, and turned on the broiler.
Her mind was eluding her: it was living the day ahead of her; it was in the aisle of the supermarket, it was bringing the groceries into the house and putting them away; it was driving to the gym for aerobics and weight training; it was home eating lunch, then taking clothes to the dry cleaners and getting the clothes that were there, and driving home before three-forty when the school bus brought the children to the driveway; it was lighting charcoal in the grill on the sundeck. Maybe snow would be falling then; she loved cooking in the snow. She had a housekeeper three days a week and she liked running the household. None of it absorbed her fully enough to imprison her mind, as some work in school and some at the publishing house had. So freedom was both her challenge and her vocation: she was free on most days and nights to concentrate fully on the moment at hand, and this was far more difficult than performing work she had been assigned as a student for sixteen years, and a worker for eleven. She had told Ted she must learn to be five again, before time began to mean what one could produce in its passing; or to be like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who knew so young that the essence of life was in the simplest of tasks, and in kindness to the people in your life. Watching the brown sugar bubbling in the light of the flames, smelling it and the cinnamon, and listening to her family talking about snow, she told herself that this toast and oatmeal were a sacrament, the physical form that love assumed in this moment, as last night’s lovemaking was, as most of her actions were. When she was able to remember this and concentrate on it, she knew the significance of what she was doing; as now, using a pot holder, she drew the pan from the oven, then spooned oatmeal into bowls her family came from the dining room to receive from her hands.
At seven forty-five the children put on parkas and gloves; Sam wore a ski cap, and the girls kept theirs in their pockets. They carried book bags and lunch boxes and LuAnn and Ted went outside with them, kissed them, and watched them walking down the dark asphalt drive, till it curved around pines and they were out of sight. She cleared the table and Ted rinsed things and put them in the dishwasher. He went upstairs, then came down wearing a dark blue overcoat, his cane in his right hand, his left holding a small suitcase and his briefcase. She took the briefcase and, without a coat, carried it out to his car in the garage and said: “Call me.”
“I will.”
“I hate airplanes.”
“It’ll be fine.”
Two images pierced her: Ted in a plane above the earth, and Julia, Elizabeth, and Sam disappearing in the gray light as they rounded the pine trees. She said: “There’s so much to fear.”
“I know. And we’ve been lucky.”
“I’ve been thanking God for fear.”
“You have?”
“This winter. One afternoon the bus was late with the children. My imagination was like a storm. I stood at the road, and I couldn’t get rid of all the terrible pictures. So I started thanking God for this fear, because it meant I love them so much. The sun was shining on the snow and pines, and I stood down there, thinking of what it would be like not to have that fear; not to love anyone so much that you couldn’t imagine living on the earth without them.” She shivered from the cold, and he held her; her lips were at his throat and she said: “I looked at all that beauty around me, and I was grateful. I was still afraid, but the worst of it went out of me.”
He was pressing her against his broad, firm chest. He cried easily and she knew tears were in his eyes now. She kissed him, then stood hugging herself for warmth as he got into the car and backed out of the garage, turning and heading downhill. Before the curve, he waved his arm out the window, and she raised hers; then he was gone.
She went inside, put an Ella Fitzgerald compact disc on in the living room, turned up the volume so she could hear it upstairs, where she looked at the children’s beds, smoothed their comforters, picked up socks and underpants on Elizabeth’s floor and a nightgown on Julia’s, put them in the laundry basket and carried it down to the basement, emptied it into the washing machine, and poured soap on the clothes. She looked out the window at her back lawn: patches of brown grass and old snow, poplars without leaves, and pines. She breathed deeply into her stomach, exhaled singing with Ella, turned on the washing machine, took clothes from the dryer and put them in the basket, and kept singing as she climbed with the basket up the basement and second-floor stairs, and was not winded. Standing at her bed she folded the clothes, then put them in drawers in the three bedrooms. She went downstairs into the music and took out the compact disc and was in the mudroom putting on her beig
e parka when the phone rang. She answered the one on the kitchen wall, and Marsha said: “Do you have time for lunch after the workout?”
LuAnn heard Marsha inhaling smoke, then blowing it out.
“That sounds wonderful.”
“Well, I didn’t mean elegant.”
“I meant your cigarette. I can have lunch.”
“Don’t start again. It’s not as good as it sounds.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“If I had half your will, you’d hear me breathing air. You wouldn’t even hear me. I’d be that calm.”
“Half my fear. I’m going out for groceries.”
“Get something sinful.”
The market was in a town on the bank of the river, near its mouth at the sea. From her house she drove three miles through wooded country with widely scattered homes. She rolled down her window and let the cold air rush on her face. She did this till her gloved hands were cold and, crossing a bridge over the wide gray river, she rolled up her window, then entered a road where cars moved in single lanes and houses were built close to one another. In the hands of women and men holding steering wheels she saw cigarettes, and she imagined herself very old and strong and alert, one of those gray and wrinkled widows with wonderful eyes. She turned into the shopping center.
In the warm and brightly lit store she slowly pushed a cart. When she was single, and living and working in Boston, she went quickly through stores like this one, snatching cereal and fruit, cookies, cheeses and sliced meat; for dinners she chose food she only had to pour from a can or heat in its package, and she brought home no more than she could carry, walking to her apartment. Often she did not shop till her refrigerator and cupboards were nearly empty. Her best meals were in restaurants with dates or women friends. Then she was married, and she wanted good dinners with Ted. He liked to cook, and on weekends they idly shopped together, and choosing and handling food with him was a new happiness: a flounder lying on ice was no longer a dead fish she must cook before it spoiled; it was part of the earth she and Ted would eat. Now that she was gathering food for Julia and Elizabeth and Sam, too, she saw it in the store as something that would become her children’s flesh. As a girl she had learned about the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, all of them but one administered by a priest; the woman and man gave each other the sacrament of matrimony. Being a mother had taught her that sacraments were her work, and their number was infinite.
As she filled the cart, she looked with compassion at women, the harried ones, some with a child or two, the women who did not have housekeepers and someone to care for their children, perhaps did not have husbands or did not have good ones, who were not going to the gym for a long workout to fulfill and relax them, who had to count the dollars they were spending, whose minds had not received the gifts that she had simply been born with, as she had been born with black hair and French blood; women who as teenagers had gone into the world as bodies and faces with personalities, and so acquired boyfriends, then men, then husbands, and children; they were the women whose work was never done because they could not pay someone else to do at least part of it. No wonder one’s voice rose angrily at her small girl riding in the cart, and another grabbed her son’s wrist as he reached for a cereal box, and jerked him away from the shelf. The boy’s face looked immune. It was not as simple as money, LuAnn knew; it was as complex as the soul. But so often the body ruled, and when it was tired, when it was overwhelmed, venom could spread through the soul. And with money, one could soothe the body, give it rest.
Work was beginning its clandestine assault on Ted’s body: he worked too hard and too long. She had liked going to work, had liked being with the people there, and more than the work itself she had liked being an educated woman with a profession; but she had loved none of it, and her happiest moment of the day had been when it ended and she could leave her desk and go out into the world she had felt for eight hours was waiting for her to join it. Ted loved his work, and did it with passion, and if it were taken from him, and if he tried to live as she did, his soul would wither, or implode. If he lost her and the children, his work would not save him. Grief would kill him. She shopped now for the children’s bones and teeth, muscles and eyes and skin, and for Ted’s arteries; and because he would not be with them tonight, she bought steaks to cook on the grill.
She pushed her full cart to the front of the store, stood in line behind three women at the cashier, and looked out the glass front at the parking lot and the dark sky. No one spoke. She could not hear a voice in the entire store, only the young woman at the register sliding food, and the beeping sound of the computer. Then in another line a child talked and a woman answered; in the aisles behind LuAnn were the voices of children and women, and to her left, among the fruit and vegetables, a man spoke. She leaned on her cart and it moved and she stopped it. She yawned, then looked at the cigarettes stacked in narrow shelves behind the cashier, those packages so soft and light to hold in your hand, so delightful to open and smell. She looked out at the sky, and at the covers of magazines in a rack near the line. She breathed deeply, and the computer beeped, and beeped. She could be alone anywhere without being bored, except in lines of people standing or people in cars, those imposed cessations of motion that drew on her energy more than the motion itself did. She let weight go into her hands on the handle of the cart; her shoulders sagged, and she watched the woman in front of her putting groceries on the counter. Then she glimpsed motion and looked up at the window: snow was falling. The flakes were small and blown at an angle, swirling down among the cars in the parking lot. Standing in electric light, she gazed at its beauty out there under the dark sky, and felt the old and faint dread that was always part of her thrill when she saw falling snow, as though her flesh were born or conceived with its ancestors’ knowledge that this windblown white silence could entrap and freeze and kill. On the counter packages slid, and the computer beeped; then it was LuAnn’s turn, and as she unloaded the cart, she looked at the young blond woman wearing the store’s blue apron and said: “It looks like a storm.”
“They say a nor’easter.”
“Really?”
“That’s what they say.”
She looked at the snow. She knew that her house faced northwest and the river flowed southeast, and the market was southeast of her house, and at night she could find the North Star. But how had she become a woman who rarely knew from which direction the wind blew? She said: “I didn’t hear the weather report.”
“Me neither.” The woman was looking down at her work. “They said it in the coffee room.”
In the woman’s apron pocket was the shape of a cigarette pack. LuAnn said: “Do they let you smoke?”
“We have to go outside.”
“I’ll turn on the car radio.”
The woman looked quizzically at her, and LuAnn smiled and said: “So I’ll know what I’m looking at with my own eyes.”
The woman smiled, and LuAnn pushed her cart through doors that opened for her, out to the sidewalk, where she looked up at the snow and it landed on her cheeks; when she lowered her face, she saw in her path two approaching young men, both with mustaches, one wearing only a red hooded sweatshirt with his jeans. He looked at her as though he were deciding whether to buy her, and she looked down and swerved the cart around them. They wore work boots. She went to the trunk of her car and put the groceries in it. She turned to push the cart back to the store, and saw the two men standing at its front, watching her. She did not move. Then they did, walking to the left, toward the parking lot. She was afraid, and angry, too, and ashamed of her fear; she pushed the cart to the sidewalk in front of the store, and did not look to her left, where the men had walked. In the car she turned on the windshield wipers and defroster, opened the window, and drove into snow, smelling it and watching it fall. When she crossed the bridge, she looked at the river and the trees on its banks, and two seagulls flying near the water, and snow angling down to the waves. She turned onto the wooded
road. It was not time yet for news on the radio; she would call the school or Marsha; if this were a storm, the school would send the children home before the roads got dangerous. A green car was perhaps a quarter of a mile behind her. If the children came home early, she and Marsha could not exercise and go someplace for lunch. At her driveway she turned and climbed the curve and drove into the garage. She opened the trunk and carried two of the bags up the steps and held them with one arm while she unlocked the door and pushed it open, crossed the mudroom, and opened the kitchen door; she put the bags on the counter, went to the answering machine in the dining room, pressed its play button, and listened to Marsha’s voice: “The snow is going to stop in early afternoon. There’s no snow day. See you at the gym. Let’s eat at the Harborside, and have a Manhattan. Remember when people had drinks at lunch?”
A Manhattan: she imagined the stemmed glass, the brown drink, the first good sip. No, not with pretty auburn-haired Marsha, not today. She would take a drag of Marsha’s cigarette, to taste and feel that with the whiskey; then she would smoke one. Marsha would protest but would give it to her anyway; then she would smoke another. No, at lunch she would drink water. She put her purse on the dining room table and thought of pushing the barbell up from her chest, exhaling as blood rushed to her muscles. She went into the kitchen, to go outside for more bags of groceries, and two men stepped out of the mudroom, through the open door: the one in the red hooded sweatshirt from the parking lot was in front; behind him was the other man, in a sky blue parka. Her mouth opened, and her body seemed to jump up and back, though her feet did not leave the floor. They had followed her all this way, half an hour from the market; they were doom walking out of the snow. The man in red stopped near the refrigerator, and the one in blue stood beside him; they were close enough to hand something to, if she stepped and reached. They stood between her and the two open doors; she saw falling snow beyond their shoulders and faces, as if it were snow in someone else’s life.