Poor woman. I’ve only met her a few times, usually at school functions or while dropping the children off at each other’s house, and the few times I talk to her she usually comes off as something of a Hallmark bitch. But I can’t imagine my husband, wicked as he is, up and leaving one day with our children. Leading them into the car with the congenial nonchalance of a shepherd’s flock never to see me again. Not even my Frank would dream of doing something like that.
Once the horns of his bed-slept hair descend out of view, I continue to the last bedroom at the end of the hall. The door is open so I go in and sit on the bed. It is neatly made, which I hear is a rare thing for boys of his age. The shower is hissing from his bathroom and a serpent’s back of steam slithers off the tiles and melts into the carpet. The shower shuts off and a moment later he comes out with a towel wrapped around his waist, unabashed. I can’t believe something so handsome and well-built could come from such a shoddy, scab-backed wildebeest as Frank. Emery’s entire body is lean, firm and well-toned. Hairless. The truth is that something this handsome and well-built might very well not have come from Frank at all, but in his macho narcissism he has never really questioned the resemblance.
He smiles and says, “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I say. I try to smile back, but lately all I give him are doleful half-smirks topped with sad and wistful eyes. “How’d you sleep? How’s the new mattress?”
“It’s pretty good. I’ve been sleeping way better than I was before.”
He goes to his closet and lets the towel drop with his back to me. I shy my eyes down to my unclothed feet out of respect. He is a good boy, smarter than he will ever give himself credit for and so he uses his sports and his weight training to try and compensate for what he thinks he doesn’t have. Since he’s started high school I’ve noticed my own friends, the teachers and other children’s mothers, toss inappropriate hidden glances at him. I don’t blame them for it. He doesn’t belong in this town. I only wish that the place he chose to go to—
“Good,” I say. “You were due for a new one.” A neatly ironed pair of dull gray, almost cloud-blue, slacks is slung over the chair at his desk. I can’t help myself from flicking my eyes at it. For a moment I remember there are worse people in this world than my Frank. “Well, you know it’ll always be here for you. For when you get back.”
“I know, Mom,” he says as he pulls his shirt on over his head. It clings to the muscles of his shoulders before wiping down his back.
I know you know. I’m saying it for myself.
He leans down and kisses me on the cheek. “I have to get to school early. I’ll see you when I get home.”
“Please don’t be late.”
“I won’t, Mom. Love you.” He rushes out, grabs the schoolbag by the door. I sit there for a little while, staring at those pants. Hanging in his closet I can see its companion piece amidst a rainbow of other, less foreboding shirts and jackets. Three days earlier, when Mrs. Hesse came into the hospital for her hand, this all felt like a decade away. Slipped, she said. Like anyone would believe that story after what had happened to her. Like anyone would blame her. Personally, I’d’ve killed myself twice over by now if Frank stole my children out from under me in the middle of the day. And the nerve of her to rub this in my face, while I am plucking the glass from her veins, no less. A bitch, no way around it, a bitch. But, perhaps nine days from now, I’ll find myself stitching up some other woman with the same luck as us and I’ll do the same thing to her. Spite is a grease of human machineries.
Ingot runs into the room and grabs me by the hand. “Come on, Mommy, I made us breakfast!”
“Okay, honey, I’m coming.” I stand up. Goddammit I’m getting old. My back aches just pulling myself up. “Is Daddy still here?” I ask as we approach the staircase.
“No, he already went to work.”
Good, I think, Find a brick wall on your way and kiss it with your car. “Oh, too bad he won’t be able to share breakfast! What did you make, honey?”
“Peanut butter jelly pancakes!” she chirps. And sure enough, they are there on the table. Pre-frozen pancakes not yet microwaved, draped in thick hunks of peanut butter and grape jelly. “But tell you what, baby, why don’t I cook us up some hot fresh ones, just like you like? Some bacon too?”
She is all too ecstatic about that and I slide the frozen disks into the trash. Poor girl probably doesn’t even realize what tonight actually means to us all.
After breakfast, I walk her to the corner to wait with her and the other children. There are two less than there should be and nobody seems to have quite gotten used to it yet. Off by the dunes I can just make out the Hesse’s house. It’s been dark lately. At the end of the block, parked just around the corner, is Sheriff Barilla. Since the kidnappings, he’s had someone stationed at every school bus stop in the morning and the afternoon. He may be an ass, but the man’s smart and he’s got his priorities right. The children are quiet. They stand about like a system of Gaelic totems in early sunlight, casting long dismal shadows behind them in neatly spaced lines.
The bus pulls up just as city hall tolls eight. Ingot climbs the steps last, holding onto my hand until everyone else is already disappeared into its darkened interior. She says goodbye and I lean down to give her a kiss. After the bus pulls away, I give a quick wave to Sheriff Barilla. He returns a somber nod and then he drives away. I check my watch and hurry back home. Once I’m there I lock the front door and check my watch again. I have forty minutes to get ready. I pull my scrubs off over my head and shimmy out of the loose blue linen pants; leave them in a pile of shriveled skin by the front door. I prepare a pitcher of mimosa and take a sip right out of it, and then I set it on the coffee table along with two crystal flutes. I recline like a goddess with one arm over my forehead and the other draped off the sofa and on the floor, and my spirit defuses upon contact with the coolness of the fabric and the shade.
I once made love to a man in the shade of a maple tree at the edge of a forest on the frontier of a cool summer. The heat of a sun had seemed impossible. If our warmth could come from the moon, that was the warmth it would have been. And this is how that felt.
The tap comes not fifteen minutes later. In the rare peace I have almost fallen asleep, but it shakes me back to consciousness. I keep my eyes closed but an eager grin rises on my face. I hear the door open and whisper shut and I feel the vibrations of soft, heavy footsteps come across the floor until they are standing at the base of the sofa. I imagine him staring down at me with faceless eyes.
I open my eyes. He is a blank silhouette masked by the dim lighting and the windows at his back. The specter of Dionysus come to claim me. As though simply opening my eyes has manifested my fantasy into a physical reality before me. I close my eyes again and arch my back. Moments later I hear the hushing of clothes being shed, and then my skin begins lifting away from my bones inch by inch as he glides his lips up my body. I feel as though I am being reassembled tissue by tissue, plucked away and then let to fall back in place though transformed, different, better. I feel the weight of a powerful mass compress me into the cushions. I smell the musk of apples and sweat and I feel the wetness of rivers flowing around me. I become a river in spate myself under its persuasion, eddying and flowing outwards until I am nothing left but an empty withered skin, panting and trying to regain some physical form.
He sits up next to me and pours a smooth tide of mimosa into one of the flutes. He leans back, naked, prideful, replete, and takes a slow sip. I curl up, myself naked, at his side, with my knees up to my chest and my head tucked into the crook of his shoulder and neck. He puts an arm around me and holds me there. The rare times Frank does such a thing, he never holds me in place. He simply lets his arm lay upon me indiscriminately.
The sadness comes over me like the early sunset of a winter night. I regain a physical form and I resent myself for it. “Oh—” I coo to him, exhaling the final remnants of the pleasure, of the easi
ness of it. “I can’t keep doing this, Benjamin.”
He stares at the ripples of his drink and then takes a longer sip. He sighs. The strength, the solidness of his arm suddenly becomes rigidity without him moving it. “Is this because of Emery?”
He feels the shift of my head on his skin indicating that yes, it is because of Emery. “He’s leaving, Benjamin.”
“I know that, Margot, I just don’t understand what that has to do with me.”
I think for a long time about how I should say it. “It has nothing to do with you. That’s the point, I think.” I want to tell him, don’t leave. I want to tell him, his presence is the only thing keeping me from total misery. I want to tell him that I love him and wish things were different. But if I say those things, he will never leave. And, in the end, he has to. He is my circle of silver-foiled cardboard, he is my bristle-less brush, and he sits upon this genuine mahogany countertop assembled from a family tree.
“Margot, I really don’t think—”
I shake my head to cut him off. I know what he is going to say and there’s no point in him saying it. Before he moves I can feel his body shrinking away, his eyes shifting toward his pile of clothes he has left on the floor. Benjamin, the warmth of him, the softness of him, the hardness of him, had been a way station. I have vacationed for too long. When Emery tells me the decision he has made, it immediately occurs to me that the failing of our family is as much my own fault as it is Frank’s. He has opened a great rift, but in my blaming him for the end of the world, I have failed to see that the end of the world has not yet come. Now, when I step outside, it is all I can see, and I wonder, in the long meantime between then and now, have I done anything to avert it?
“If that’s what you really want, Margot, then I’ll go.”
Against all the force of gravity, I nod.
“Okay, then.” He takes my soft face in his weather-hewn hands and kisses my forehead. I keep my eyes focused on his chin. My world is his chin. The cleft becomes mountains, the sweat is oceans. The short stubble is the vegetation off of which I could thrive for ages. The small mole he keeps tucked under the sharp ridge of his jawbone is the source of life itself. I have descended to the surface of this planet, and slowly, inhumanly, I find myself ascending further from it once again until it is a distant speck floating amongst the slowly sifting dust and then, it falls into the black hole of a doorway and is gone, lost to another plane of existence I no longer have any contact with.
I pick myself up and fall slowly into the sockets and tunnels of my work clothes. It is a metamorphic regression, a butterfly shying defeatedly back into its chrysalis. I check my watch. I need to leave in fifteen minutes if I’m to get to work as scheduled. I go upstairs and into our bedroom. I shake off the crumpled down comforter of our bed and lay it flat down over the mattress. I plump the pillows and take Frank’s to the bathroom where I dust off another night’s worth of lost hair. At least he is suffering some consequence of his own actions. It gives me a haughty lift of spirits. I begin picking up the clothes that are lying around the floor; I pour Frank’s into his hamper and mine into mine.
Falling out of the back pocket of one of his suit pants is a loose slip of ruffled pink fabric. I pluck it out. Another one of hers. That great wet bubble of disgust rises up inside of me again. I want to throw it but it won’t shatter anything, so I just tuck it back into the pocket and drop the pants into the hamper. I remember the first time I find her scent hovering around our house. It is two years after Ingot is born. I’ve grown soft and fat with mothering her and haven’t quite motivated myself yet to return to work at the hospital. A stronger woman, a weaker woman, than I would leave him immediately on finding the little slip of paper fallen out of his address book, the one with her phone number on it and a lewd little message of ingratiation. Since then I have thoroughly documented the affair with a disinterested panache, keeping a mental catalogue of his inconsistencies, his overt lies, the little novelties and mementos he leaves behind in his absentmindedness. There are times when I wonder if he can really be so stupid or if he is trying to flaunt the affair to me. I understand for just a second how it can be so plausible, so feasible, for a woman to slip and catch her hand on a mug. If I didn’t need my hands for work I would tile my kitchen with banana peels.
Goddammit, I think, I am running late. I stand up from the bed where I have been staring at the hamper, at the little flash of pink thread showing through the wicker mesh. I hurry down and outside, it is only as an afterthought that I wonder if I’ve locked the door or not, but it all seems irrelevant. Nevertheless, I will have to call Mr. Henrik next door to check for me once I get to the hospital. I’ve never actually seen the man, other than from great distances in public, or through curtained windows, he tends to stay shut in. But he is an old, retired pervert who spends his days trying to find new ways to peer into our house. More than once I’ve caught him staring out of his window into our master bedroom or bathroom. I never tell Frank, partly because it thrills me, makes me feel younger to be the object of such distant attraction, and partly because it seems like another soft stab in his fat hairy back. As long as he keeps away from my Ingot, I don’t mind if, considering the door might be unlocked, he helps himself to a pair or two of my underpants. Just because we all know who has taken the Hesse children doesn’t mean it hasn’t shaken us all about the safety of our own. Even Sheriff Barilla, with his adopted little girl from Vietnam, is overly anxious about the fact that two children have simply disappeared.
* * *
This town is as desolate and sterile as the hospital in which I work. The only real difference is a matter of hue. The streets are coated with the desert dust and sand blown in on the sea breeze. The walls are tiled thick with it. At one point this place was clean-swept and colorful. Now you can’t tell the aluminum siding from the brick, you can’t tell the yellows from the reds from the blues. The edge of the forest is dead from the dry heat, as though someone has asked for a buffer between us and the rich wet vegetation that leads the way to the coast. Even the people seem to wear clothes blander than they used to, likely because shortly after moving here one gains an innate understanding that anything elegant worn outside the house will soon have its every gap and synapse, every space between every thread stuffed with the thick granules of the wandering desert.
The halls of the hospital are just as lifeless, though white rather than the mahogany brown of the city. There is not much business to be had here anymore, not even in the wards where the destitute and the malaise used to gather in droves. In the silence, the hum of the fluorescent tubes becomes a voice of accompaniment. It is rebuttal to the thoughts of helplessness, it is concordance to the rambling queries of pleasantry, it is a sounding board for hypotheses. When I enter, as I do every morning, the receptionist, a cute young girl from the high school who always has half a dozen textbooks spread out on the desk around her, welcomes me in. I acknowledge her, though in my mind it is that clean white light that has addressed me, and it is the hum to which I have returned the greeting.
I work at that desk when I am in high school and my mother works on the second floor in Advanced Diagnostics and Radiology. There is a time when I manage to pull myself away from the siren’s comfort of home. Though, far from anyone I know and uninterested in anything I find myself studying, I revert to nursing, and four years later find myself graduated to working in the same hospital, in the first floor clinic. It seems, particularly after marrying Frank, who at the time is a rather charming though unswervingly flirtatious accountant, that all of the noteworthy events of my life will take place in that building. I am birthed on the third floor, as are both Ingot and Emery. I spend my youth and now my rapidly vanishing middle age here on the ground floor. I am destined to spend my old age on the second floor in radiology where I am a legacy, making silent bets with the fluorescent lights as to which of the desiccates I will outlive and which will outlive me. And in the end, I will be shuffled away into some drawer
in the basement and forgotten like so many buttons and pins.
I take my clipboard from Missy, the teenaged receptionist with an unfair bosom Emery has most likely already had the pleasure of acquainting himself with, and head for Mrs. Engel’s room. I step aside as a swarm of faceless doctors and nurses like flitting moths pass by as the last night shift comes to its end. I can hardly imagine that so many people still live in this town, stuffed into what low-rise apartment buildings and homes have been left un-condemned as time continues whittling itself away into something purportedly more useful.
They pass, are picked up by a gust of dry wind as the front doors open and they float off to some other cloud for the time being. My clipboard tells me the same thing it tells me every morning: charged with seven hours of clinic duty, split through its thorax with a complimentary lunch half-hour in the cafeteria, and keep special attention on Mrs. Engel, the lonely old widow who is still keeping herself alive somehow, none of us can quite discern how. I decide to stop in to see her first. The night shift tends to be careless. No telling how many mornings I show up here with vials of siphoned blood sitting, curdling, uncapped, on carts themselves left to sit in the halls, lab reports left unfilled or, worse yet, half-filled so that nobody can quite tell which medications have been administered and which still need to be, patients left unfed, unbathed, uncleaned.
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