She wanted everything: chocolate chip cookies, coffee cake with crumbly, buttery topping, lamb chops with crisp, crinkled fat around their bones. She shook her head and slid two apples into a plastic bag. Then she snatched a half-dozen fat sweet potatoes from the neighboring bin and had them bagged and in the cart almost before she could stop herself. She grabbed onions and garlic and celery, staples she recognized from Ceil’s kitchen, and then, wheeling her cart to the meat case, she pointed first to a rib roast and then to a turkey big enough to feed a small village. “Fuck it,” she muttered under her breath, before noticing the pair of young women with tight bodies and tighter faces staring at her. She hoped it was because of the cursing and not because they knew who she was. In the glimpse she’d gotten of herself in the rearview mirror, with her hair loose, in a sweater and flats instead of a suit and heels, with no makeup, she hoped she wasn’t immediately identifiable as the latest woman scorned; that maybe the news hadn’t trailed her to Connecticut.
But that was silly. What did she have to be ashamed of, anyhow, she thought, pushing her cart faster and faster. She was the one who’d been sinned against. She wasn’t the sinner. She looked up, reading the sign of the aisle she’d stopped at: Baking Needs. “Yes,” she murmured, “I have a Baking Need.” Into the cart went chocolate chips and coconut flakes, brown and white sugar, two bags of flour, corn syrup and molasses and a large tin of Crisco. If your grandmother wouldn’t recognize it, don’t eat it, her nutritionist had said. Well, too bad, nutritionist, because Selma’s grandma would have recognized Crisco just fine. She’d used it in her pie crusts. She’d fried chicken in melted Crisco.
Fried chicken, Sylvie thought. She remembered her grandmother marinating chicken overnight, in a green ceramic bowl filled with buttermilk seasoned with salt and cayenne pepper. She went back to the meat aisle for chicken. Then there was bacon (she’d loved bacon, and hadn’t tasted the stuff in all the years she’d been placing slices on Richard’s breakfast plates). And hot dogs (hot dogs! Sizzling on the grill as the sun went down and the Red Sox game played on the radio!). Of course, if you had hot dogs, you needed hamburgers, too. That was practically a law. Sylvie added a container of burgers and one of plump white bratwurst.
She steered the cart back to the bread aisle, past a mother bribing a toddler into silence with a bagel, grabbing buns and English muffins and pita pockets. Then she turned to Dressing and Condiments. Into the cart went salad dressing and bottles of ketchup and mustard and relish. She added barbecue and sour-cream-and-onion-flavored potato chips, then reached past an elderly gentleman hovering indecisively in front of the seltzer to pick up a two-liter bottle of Coke. Not New Coke, not Diet Coke, just plain old-fashioned Coke, one of her favorites during those teenage summers, when she’d allow herself a single bottle each afternoon. Back to the snack-food aisle for pretzels and cheese puffs and crackers, and, because it was only civilized to offer guests cheese with their crackers, she tracked down a wedge of Stilton, a chunk of Jarlsberg, a half-wheel of triple-crème Brie.
She went to the deli for sliced ham and cheese and turkey, fresh garlicky pickles that she scooped from a brine-filled barrel, and a pound of dill-flecked potato salad before heading back to Produce. More potatoes, white ones this time. She lifted a can of chicken noodle soup before setting it down. Why have canned soup when she could make soup from scratch? She had time. For the first time in as long as she could remember, Sylvie Serfer Woodruff had nothing but time.
Back to the meat aisle for another whole chicken, and then a box of egg noodles. Over to the bakery for corn muffins and cinnamon rolls—not as good as Ceil’s, but they looked okay, and an okay corn muffin was still good. Wasn’t that what men said about sex, or was it pizza? That even bad pizza’s still good? Bad pizza. Probably that was what she was to Richard, the cheap, freezer-burned stuff you’d pull out from the back of the shelf when you were ravenous and desperate enough not to care. Maybe that girl, that Joelle, had been fresh-baked, right out of the oven, the cheese hot and stretchy, the dough soft and yielding. Sylvie grabbed a long loaf of French bread and a small round loaf of raisin challah, and had put on her glasses to peer at a price tag when she noticed that a young woman in a Nike visor and fancy running shoes on her feet was staring at her.
Sylvie dropped her eyes. She thought she might start crying. Then she raised her chin, her jaw set defiantly. “Can I help you?”
“Excuse me,” she began. “I was wondering—”
Sylvie cut her off. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. I am.”
The woman stared. Sylvie decided that some amplification was necessary.
“I’m Sylvie Woodruff. Richard Woodruff’s wife. And no, I didn’t know he was sleeping with that girl, and no, I haven’t decided if I’m divorcing him yet. And in case you were wondering, we still had what I considered to be a perfectly acceptable sex life, and we loved each other …” Her eyes were filling with tears. She blinked them away. “We have two beautiful girls, Diana and Lizzie. Diana’s a doctor, she’s married, she’s got a little boy, and Lizzie, well, Lizzie had some problems but I think she’s doing better now, unless this completely derails her, which I worry about. I do. I worry about it a lot. And I’m furious at my husband, for jeopardizing her …” She swallowed the word recovery, squeezed the challah under her arm, and swiped at her cheek with her sleeve. “I guess what I have to figure out is, can I ever forgive him? Can I ever trust him again? Can we be a family? And I don’t know. After something like this, I just don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman whispered.
Sylvie held her round challah tightly, the way she’d held her daughters when they were babies. “Sorry,” she repeated. “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry that I didn’t see it coming. I thought I had a happy marriage. I thought that. I did. We said ‘I love you’ every night. We never went to sleep angry. But you don’t know … it’s like it could happen to anyone. Like getting struck by lightning. It could happen to anyone.” Her voice was hoarse, and loud, and she could feel herself sweating as her fingertips sank through the plastic and into the bread. “Nobody likes to think it, but it could happen to anyone.” This was not technically true—she supposed it happened more frequently with powerful men who had ample opportunity—but at that moment, with her heart thundering in her ears and sweat rolling down her back, it felt true. Like a natural disaster, an earthquake, a tsunami, and her only mistake was that she’d been in the way. “Anyone,” she repeated.
The woman finally opened her mouth. “I just … I wanted to ask … I parked next to a Camry with its lights on, and I wondered if that was your car.”
Oh. “Well, that could happen to anyone, too,” Sylvie said, feeling her face burn as the woman backed away.
“I’m sorry for your troubles,” the woman whispered. “Can I help you at all? Get someone for you, or … ?”
“Oh, no,” said Sylvie, her old social graces taking over, her knack, honed over the years, of putting others at ease. “No, I … I’m not myself right now.” She tried to give a my-isn’t-this-an-amusing-misunderstanding laugh, but it sounded like a sob instead. “Really, I’m fine.” The woman nodded, managed a weak smile, then fled in the direction of Ethnic Foods. Sylvie stood for a minute, her hands resting on the shopping cart. That hadn’t gone well.
Leaving her two brimming carts behind, she went out into the parking lot, which had filled up with minivans and SUVs, young mothers on their way to meet the buses or pick up little kids at nursery school. Just do what you can, she told herself. Breathe. Finish shopping. Go home. Unpack the groceries. Eat some lunch. Take a bath. Take a nap. Keep breathing.
She dug her keys out of her purse, unlocked the Camry, and turned off the lights. She thought, for a moment, of just getting behind the wheel and driving back home, leaving the groceries sitting in the carts … but she couldn’t. She imagined the frozen foods thawing, the milk and meat going bad, and how long it would take for someone to put it all back. She’d never been the kind
of person to make work for others, and she wasn’t going to turn into that kind of person now.
Sylvie plodded back through the parking lot, head down, eyes on her shoes. Her brimming carts had been moved to one of the conveyor belts, and there was a man with gray hair and a white shirt and a tie standing behind them, obviously waiting for her.
“Are these yours?” he asked. Sylvie stifled a groan, but she made herself nod and answer the man pleasantly.
“They’re mine. I’m having a party. I just moved up here, and I’m stocking the house. I stepped out for a moment because I’d left my lights on.” Sylvie closed her mouth. She lifted the poor mangled loaf of challah out of the cart and set it on the conveyor belt, then began unloading the rest: the chickens and potatoes, the cold cuts, the olives and the stuff from Baking Needs.
When she looked up, she saw that the man—he had a rectangular plastic nametag clipped to the side of his shirt—was staring at her. Here we go again, she thought. Was this how it was going to be, every place she went, where every time someone looked at her she’d worry that they knew about Richard, and that they were thinking the worst?
The man was still staring, his gray eyes cool and somehow amused. “Sylvie?” he asked. “Sylvie Serfer?”
She stared at him, startled at hearing her old name, her maiden name. For so long, she’d been Sylvie Woodruff, Mrs. Senator Woodruff, wife of. The tag on the man’s shirt read TIM SIMMONS, MANAGER. “Tim Simmons,” she said, and finally it clicked. He’d been Timmy when she’d known him, when she was a kid and then a teenager. His hair had been emphatically red then, and one Labor Day, at a bonfire on the beach when she was sixteen, he’d said, Come with me, and walked her through the sharp-edged sea grass and into the dunes. The sand had been damp and cool beneath her bare feet, and his lips had been warm. “Timmy?”
“Sylvie! My God!” He took a step forward, as if he meant to hug her or take her hands, then stepped backward—remembering, Sylvie bet herself, who she was now. “I haven’t seen you in … my God, how long has it been?”
“Years.”
“So what have you been up to? You went to Barnard, right?”
She studied him and thought, or imagined, that she could see the ghost of the boy she remembered hiding behind the gray hair and the wrinkles. Was he teasing her, or did he honestly not know?
“I live in New York City,” she said. If he’d heard about the scandal, Tim would be too polite to say so. He’d always been polite, he’d held the door for Sylvie, and stood whenever Selma entered the room, much to her mother’s amusement. “I went to law school after college.”
“Barnard,” he said again, and she nodded.
“Barnard, then Yale.”
His eyebrows lifted, and he pursed his lips in a silent whistle of admiration, which she waved away, embarrassed.
“But I only practiced for a few years. I had two daughters—Diana’s a doctor in Philadelphia. She’s married, with a little boy, and Lizzie’s a student.” This was not exactly true, but maybe Lizzie would go back to school someday. For now, she was a student of life. “And …” Here was the problem, the blank she would have to fill in, the years where she’d done nothing but tend to Richard and watch every morsel she put in her mouth. “Well. Maybe you’ve heard the news.” Her hands wanted to tremble, to gesture wildly, to find the challah, now safely in a plastic Simmons shopping bag, and start squeezing it again. She bent over the second cart and started unloading. “And now I’m here. How about you?”
The corners of Tim’s eyes crinkled. His reddish hair had thinned, and there were furrows in his forehead, but she could still see him at sixteen. That night on the dunes, his mouth had tasted of beer and cigarettes and, touchingly, of the spearmint gum he’d chewed and then, she supposed, spit out before he’d kissed her. “I went to Cornell for hotel administration. Ran restaurants in upstate New York,” Tim was saying. “Then my dad got sick, and I came back down eight years ago, and …” He gestured down the wide, well-lit aisle. “We’ve expanded. As you can see.”
“I noticed. The organic section! It’s very …”
“Impressive?” He took the rib roast out of her hands and gave it to the checker. “Bag this separately, okay?”
The girl behind the register nodded. Was Tim flirting with her? Was that even possible? Or did he treat anyone who’d buy two carts’ worth of groceries that way?
“I was going to say ‘confusing,’ ” Sylvie confessed. “I don’t know what half those things are. Gluten-free beer?” she said, and borrowed a phrase she’d heard Lizzie say. “What’s that about?”
He shrugged, still smiling. His hair was much more gray than red, and he seemed a little subdued. But maybe that was just because she was used to Richard, whose every movement, every gesture, had been larger than life. “It’s about fourteen dollars for a six-pack, so it’s good business.”
She glanced at his left hand, hardly believing she was doing it. No ring. But that might not mean anything. Lots of men didn’t wear them, men who worked with their hands. Did Tim work with his hands? His nametag said MANAGER, but what did that mean? She pictured him running a sponge over the gleaming edges of the meat slicer, pushing a mop over the floors at the end of the day.
“Do you have children?” she ventured.
He nodded. “Three boys. All grown. Frankie’s in New York, actually. He’s a banker. Ollie’s in grad school in Boston, and Tim Junior, my oldest, he and his wife have a baby girl, but he’s all the way in Seattle. My ex-wife moved out there. She helps with the baby.”
She nodded again, registering the ex in front of wife even as she made sympathetic noises about the distance to the West Coast. “Would you like to come to dinner? Help me eat some of this?” she blurted, gesturing toward the mountain of groceries. Heat rose in her cheeks as she realized what she’d done—had she just asked a man on a date? Not even three weeks after leaving her husband?
“Sure,” said Tim. He stuck his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels. “I think I remember the way.”
They agreed that they would meet at seven, that he could pick up a bottle of wine. Together, they unloaded the second cart. “Take care of Sylvie,” Tim said to the girl behind the cash register, and patted Sylvie, once, on her shoulder. “She’s a friend.”
It took Sylvie almost an hour to haul everything out of her car and put the food away. She worked carefully, using her legs, not her back, carrying the bags in one at a time, thinking all the while about what had happened in the grocery store—her challah-squeezing breakdown, her reunion with Tim. Once the food was crammed into the refrigerator or loaded onto the shelves, she peeled sweaty strands of hair off her cheeks and realized that she had absolutely no idea what to make Tim for dinner, or how to cook the majority of the things she’d purchased. Worse—much worse—she was going to be alone with a man who was not her husband or a relative, alone with a man she’d once kissed, for the first time in more years, more decades, than she cared to consider.
She stared at the rib roast, which was big as a baby under its white cap of fat, glistening and somehow reproachful, on the countertop. Scowling, Sylvie thought how much easier this would have been if she’d been a different kind of woman, a different kind of wife. There had been men, over the years, with whom she could have spent a few discreet hours or evenings while Richard was away. She’d had opportunities. Oh yes she had. There’d been a friend of Larry’s, an architect in town for a conference on sustainable design who’d was separated from his wife and stayed with Larry and Ceil. He’d told charming stories over Ceil’s veal and then taken her hand in the kitchen (she’d been washing, he’d been drying) and kissed her almost before she knew what was happening. Please, she’d said quietly, so as not to alarm Ceil, setting her wet hands on his chest and pushing him away. He’d given her a sheepish shrug and said, Can’t blame a guy for trying. Then, once, at a fund-raiser in their apartment, she’d found herself talking with a man about her age. He wore a beautifully cut suit (aft
er years of picking out Richard’s clothes, she had learned to recognize and appreciate the weight and drape of certain fabrics and even the work of certain designers) and an expression, as he gazed around the room, that looked a lot like contempt.
“I’m with her,” the man had said, tilting his chin toward his wife. Elizabeth Cunningham, known professionally as Bitsy, was a spectacularly groomed woman with a narrow, horsey face, a prominent nose, and a braying voice. Bitsy wore a patterned wrap dress, black tights and high black leather boots. Her hair was elaborately streaked with copper and gold, the kind of hair that announced to the world that Bitsy could afford to spend four hours and five hundred dollars in a high-end salon every four weeks. Her fingers were freighted with rings, diamonds twinkled in her earlobes, and she was, of course, enviably thin, with hip bones that protruded through the jersey and a sternum as articulated as an anatomy chart, but none of it added up to beauty, thanks to Bitsy Cunningham’s perpetually sour expression. She looked, Ceil thought, like the kind of woman who’d as soon bite you as say hello.
Sylvie knew her story, which had been retold in more than one of the women’s magazines, and in the Wall Street Journal as well. Bitsy, married and bored, with round-the-clock nannies caring for the twins she’d paid a surrogate to carry, had made her fortune designing hundred-dollar hand-embroidered bibs and burp cloths that sold, Sylvie assumed, to women who had no idea what it was like to try to get spit-up stains out of Irish linen … or, more likely, to young mothers who, like Sylvie, had nannies and cleaning ladies to do it for them. Bitsy’s Bibs had spawned a successful line of children’s clothing, everything from miniature tutus to teeny tiny tuxedos that were now sold in fine department stores around the world. Bitsy probably earned ten times what her high-powered husband made at his investment firm each year. She collected politicians like other women collected handbags, or porcelain figurines. As Sylvie watched, Bitsy tilted her face and honked her laugh at Richard, who smiled back so warmly you’d never know he’d told Sylvie that they should put out a bowl of sugar cubes and maybe a carrot or two along with the rest of the appetizers. (“Don’t be mean,” Sylvie had said, swatting him.)
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