by MB Caschetta
Now here he was, holding her hand and pinning his midlife crisis on her. “Be happy for me and Georgia. We found each other. Be happy for someone.”
Violet stood up and left the dining room. The house seemed absurdly dark. She stood in the hallway for a long time, waiting to figure out where exactly she could go.
I should cut up his clothes. I should scratch the walls.
Eventually she lay down on the bed in the guest room, hearing Edward whisper and giggle into the phone, listening for her own name.
But she couldn’t make out any words.
For the next few months Violet noted Edward’s early morning disappearances and absent evenings—once he didn’t come home until nearly dawn. During his hushed phone conversations in other rooms or repeated trips to the mailbox, Violet graded papers, wrote student recommendations, and developed academic proposals for Montclair Community College. She was an adjunct, earning little except a bit of respect for her commitment and hard work. Edward composed poetry, drank red wine with his colleagues, conducted workshops for eager budding souls, mostly freshmen at Rutgers, whom he had over for parties in their living room. Violet came to think of their life as boot camp, a kind of kamikaze training of the heart.
If I can withstand this, I can withstand anything.
The new realizations came to her slowly. She’d line-edited hundreds of his poems, and yet he’d never once in all the years offered to read her scholarship on pedagogy. His adamant views on the Middle East and the direction of toilet paper rolls were no more valid than her own opinions about how the world worked.
It got to be that the thought of Edward in his pajamas, flossing his teeth, brushing thoroughly, then flossing again, made Violet’s skin go cold. She’d borne witness to this ritual morning and evening for twenty-two years. What did she have to show for it?
Edward hadn’t wanted children, so they’d had none. He suddenly stopped wanting commitment, so now they were divorcing.
Maybe it was as simple as it seemed: She’d found a way to stop loving him too.
This new situation reminded Violet of a former colleague, a temperamental Spanish history specialist named Marjorie Dennis. Violet could still conjure the woman’s ripe perfume and beautiful silk blouses, each with a coffee stain prominently visible.
A tall, bony woman with large blond waves that threatened to swallow her head, she had nervously appeared last fall in Violet’s doorway with a stack of student papers. “Someone else is going to have to grade these.”
Violet tried to size up the damage. “You have at least fifty papers there.”
Marjorie hugged the curling pages: “Three months’ worth.”
“You haven’t graded a single paper since September?”
“Nothing’s really wrong,” Marjorie said. “But everything is wrong, you know?”
Violet felt the light descend through the ceiling of the MCC language building and through the top of her head.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me, Violet. If only I could explain.”
Violet smiled sadly. “Dare I suggest that you simply hate the smell of ink?”
The semester was nearly done; the price of liberating someone from herself meant Violet’s workload would double.
“Ink.” Marjorie hugged Violet briefly. “That’s it!”
Violet marked the extra student assignments on her lunch break and on weekends, picking up the abandoned class using Marjorie’s syllabus. She skimmed the textbooks and lectured from old notes.
“Professor Dennis has taken a leave,” she told the students.
Violet would hatch her own escape, as soon as the last red letter grade was dry. She would leave New Jersey, state of her birth.
“Georgia can have you,” she told Edward at dinner. “I’m through with this part of my life.”
Right there at the dinner table came a strange new sensation. Freedom, Violet thought.
The “No Nukes” button hanging on the bulletin board over Jack Flannery’s perfectly shaped bald head made Violet wonder if she’d stumbled into some sort of hippie den.
“Welcome to Flannery Travel,” he said. “We aim to get you out of town as fast as you please.”
Violet laughed. “Fast is my goal.”
Flannery had a marvelous face, small and tightly drawn, with sparkling blue eyes to make a person feel warm and focused. He wore preppie clothes and had a squarish, nicely formed body, perhaps from weekend jogging, Violet thought. His smile was noncommittal, but genuine.
“Summer in Europe,” he echoed her request, “a very nice choice, if you don’t mind my saying.”
Violet felt relief, as if he’d been there all along waiting to help at this precise moment. “I want to go the moment school is out.”
“I might have taken you for a teacher,” said Flannery tentatively. “You’re so well-spoken.”
“College,” she said.
His manicured fingers tapped the keyboard efficiently as he talked about bookings, hotels, and bus tours. Violet studied his face while they waited for affordable fares to emerge on the screen.
“All this fuss over Y2K ruining our computers will probably come to nothing,” he said. He seemed so nice, she considered telling him about her situation. “Packaged tours in European countries are quite special.”
She’d only mentioned Georgia to Judith, who’d grown bitter from her own recent experience. Hard to believe: the two Stern girls, middle-aged and disappointed in love.
Jack Flannery regarded her with kind eyes that made him seem a bit too interested, needy maybe, Violet thought.
“I think Alta Vista Bus Tours will be just the thing for you, Mrs. Fields.”
She pressed her chest to the top corner of his gray metal desk. It was cold.
“Violet Fields,” he added. “What a lovely name.”
“It’s Stern,” she said abruptly. “I’m taking back my maiden name, and there’s nothing lovely about that.”
Flannery drew back. “I didn’t mean anything by it, I…”
The heat rushed to Violet’s cheeks. She looked toward the mall’s sparse crowd.
“I’d like to be gone Memorial Day until Labor Day, please.”
He typed a few more words onto the keyboard, then set his printer to printing.
Violet was silent until he handed her a kit, everything she would need to disappear.
“Thank you, Mr. Flannery,” she said.
When Violet pulled out of the mall’s dark parking lot, most of the customers had already gone home. Backing the car out, she caught herself in the rearview mirror as if for the first time.
She pointed the car toward the curb in front of the Walmart exit, a last-ditch effort to make herself clear. Her excitement turning to panic, she left the engine running and walked back to Flannery’s Travel.
The doors were locked.
“Mr. Flannery,” Violet called, knocking loudly on the glass until a security guard emerged from the dark. “Jack?”
“Flannery’s gone for the night.” The guard adjusted his uniform, feeling for his flashlight.
“But I need to speak to him,” Violet said, absurdly. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
The guard shrugged, then glanced over the few remaining parked cars in the lot and pointed past where Violet’s car sat puffing out white smoke, to a center aisle. “There he is. Row J7, maroon car. If you run, you can catch him.”
Violet tapped his shoulder, startling him. “Thank you very much.”
She ran in skirt and heels. “Mr. Flannery, wait!”
He turned, key in the door, his L.L. Bean parka too much for the unusually mild night. “Ms. Stern,” he said, surprised.
“Please,” she was out of breath, “Violet.”
“I can’t seem to get that right, can I?” He smiled.
“It’s me,” she said. “I’m really very sorry.”
He held his hand up. “No need to apologize.”
“I was rude.”
“Just
a little stressed, I imagine. Most of my customers are.”
Slightly stung by the comparison, she stood next to his Buick Century, running her hand along his windshield. She hugged herself then, feeling a tingle in her jaw. “I have something else to say.”
Jack Flannery leaned awkwardly on the car’s hood. “I’m all ears.”
“What was it again?” she said, laughing, embarrassed, concentrating on her headache.
“Change your mind about leaving?”
“No, not that.”
She’d moved into the guest bedroom permanently, she wanted to say. At first she couldn’t sleep all by herself that way, the first time in decades. Yet lying awake, she’d rediscovered the secret thrills of her body—thrills far better than sleeping with her husband. She wanted to tell Jack Flannery about the intensity of her orgasms. There was no vision, no warm wash of light, no forecast for the future; just a man and a woman standing in a parking lot.
“I’m afraid of what comes next,” Violet said finally. She watched his posture soften, wondering if she should have used his name. Jack.
The final lamplights went off above their heads, and the Walmart at the end of the complex went black.
“Next is a great vacation,” Jack Flannery said. They could barely see each other now. “And after that, you play it by ear—like the rest of us do.”
He took a step closer in the dark, reaching for her. “Where’d you go?” he said, holding her by the coat lapel.
The light from her skin was glowing. As her lips touched his, a million phosphorescent particles rose up, shimmering against the black night. She was only human, like everyone else, a woman, heartbroken and recovering.
She pulled Jack Flannery closer, as if she might otherwise evaporate; as if she needed simply a stranger who’d been kind, simply this.
“Amazing,” he said, as Violet lit up the dark.
Alice James’s
Cuban Garlic
I’m standing in the kitchen with Ma and Alice-James, talking about the plan.
“You kidding me?” Ma says. She shakes her head as if Bo weren’t lying just upstairs in the bed Alice-James borrowed from the county hospital. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you two.”
Ma exhales a stream of cigarette smoke, which hangs momentarily on her lip before curling into the predawn air.
“I don’t see why not,” says Alice-James. “It’s his body.”
Ma shoots her a look while I pour the coffee, reminding myself silently that it’s my kitchen, my coffee, my husband Bo. He got sick in 1997, Year of The Ox, according to the Chinese calendar, a year of health, but not for us.
Ma lights another cigarette. “C’mon, will you?”
“Well, why shouldn’t Bo go to the waddayacallit ceremony?” Alice-James says. “Commitment.”
Ma groans and throws up her hands, as if she’s throwing confetti into the air for an invisible parade.
“He’s got a right,” I say. “He’s still alive. Besides, he wants to.”
“He practically raised the kid, paying for all those schools when Daddy died. It makes sense he wants to go.” Alice-James smiles. “Maybe Bo could even be best man, or give a toast.”
“I think you’re both crazy,” Ma says. “How’s Bo supposed to last a four hour car ride? He can’t even sit up. By now, his cancer’s got cancer.”
The three of us lean in over a half-empty box of donuts, sipping our coffee from old stained mugs, pressing down so hard our elbows practically stick to the Formica tabletop. Our hands fidget with everything: packets of NutraSweet, unmatched spoons, a saltshaker, the plastic honey shape of a bear. It’s seven a.m. and still so dark that you can’t see past yourself in the window. So dark that you just have to trust the mountains are out there, springing up against a flat sky. Bo’s dogs, Henny and Penny, are scratching their morning routine under unseen trees that have all gone brown with crisp November.
At this blind hour, every second is a leap.
Ma turns to me. “What’re you supposed to do, load him up like a piece of luggage in the station wagon?”
“It’s Andy,” I say. “You know how much Andy means to him. Bo wants to say goodbye.”
When I was nine, Alice-James woke me out of a deep sleep and told me to carry our baby brother from his bed down the stairs. He was half dreaming in my arms in the kitchen when she commanded me to push him out the door onto the driveway.
It was freezing cold. I was too afraid to say no.
Alice-James, thirteen at the time, ran around locking all the doors.
Andy finally woke up all the way, crying at the top of his lungs. He jiggled one doorknob after another, frantic.
I begged her to let him in. “I’ll be your slave for a week.”
“You?” Alice-James laughed, looking right through me. “You’re nothing, Ginny Wojak. You can’t even think for yourself.”
By grade school, Andy would stare at himself in the mirror for hours, trying to see what provoked Alice-James and me to call him names: stupid, ugly, sissy. Evenings, when our father came home, we locked ourselves in the bathroom, leaving Andy to fend for himself. He was the perfect target, cowering in corners or dropping to the floor, refusing to defend himself. Sometimes Daddy would just flop down on the floor too, drunk, carrying on about his own father. He’d pull Andy into his lap, kissing him with sloppy, parted lips—an apology.
The dogs scratch to be let in, and Alice-James turns to see who’s there. I’m the one who gets up.
Outside, the first daylight glints through the mountains.
“You’re letting in the cold,” Ma says.
The dogs circle around, settling under the table to warm our ankles.
Each minute takes us that much closer to the hour Ma will go off to ladle turkey fricassee to hungry children at the elementary school and Alice-James will drive one town over to Procter & Gamble, where she heads up her own shift at the factory. She lives in the house where we grew up with Ma. Mornings, they drive the familiar roads from our old house to this one, the house where Bo and I live, where he grew up. After dinner, they drive the same roads back. It’s our routine since Daddy died and Bo got sick. Here for dinner. The next morning, here for breakfast.
“Dead body in the back seat’s got to be at least a felony.” Ma puts out a match between her fingers.
“Give it a rest, Ma,” says Alice-James. “It’s not for you to say.”
Ma shifts in her chair, looking tense in a long-sleeve shirt that says “Waynesboro Grammar School, Waynesboro, PA.” She looks at me from the corner of her eye.
“I’d just as soon he didn’t go,” I say. “But how can I say no?”
She taps her Newport Lights on the table like she’s answering my question in code.
Alice-James leans in. “You don’t make the decisions, Ma. I think you know that by now.”
In the quiet we can hear Bo’s raspy breathing upstairs and the creaking of the bed whenever he shifts his weight.
“Daddy would object.” Ma’s final words whenever she’s losing an argument, though Daddy’s been dead for years.
Before he finally got sober, Daddy drove a school bus for nearly forty years, picking up the retarded kids from their programs and delivering them safely home. On the afternoons he escaped with a bottle of Beefeater into the back woods, Ma would send Alice-James on his three-o’clock route. Sometimes she sent me along with Andy in tow to keep an eye out. The older kids hated it when our father wasn’t there, rolling and moaning like hedgehogs on the side of the road, some of them banging their helmets against the windows. They loved our father so much—his big welcoming grin, his easy girth that made you feel safe—we often had to hold some down so Alice-James could see out the rear view mirror.
Daddy started going to AA meetings after he was diagnosed with liver disease. Five weeks later he went into the hospital, fell into a coma, and refused to die. The doctors pressured Ma; the nurses gave her looks. No matter how hard Alice-James lobbied, though, Ma c
ouldn’t pull the plug. When his kidneys stopped working, he blew up like a water balloon, his skin nearly splitting at the creases.
Every morning she’d leave the house, determined, and every evening we’d arrive at the ICU and sit listening to the sound of Daddy’s machines. His urine bag filled up with coffee grounds—“That’s blood, Mrs. Wojak” the nurses told my mother. “Can’t imagine he’d want you to let this happen to him.”
After several weeks Daddy finally gave up and stopped breathing. He waited until four in the morning when everyone was home. The cause of death was listed as heart failure.
“Guess you wouldn’t put drunk on the death certificate,” said Alice-James.
After that Ma didn’t want to be responsible for any more decisions. Her heart was broken, she said. She didn’t care if we put him in his school bus and drove him into the river, long as we did it quickly.
Our first family vote was unanimous: cremation.
“Other families make decisions the normal way,” Andy said the next Saturday, the three of us in the house cleaning out Daddy’s things. (Back then we couldn’t turn around without someone calling a referendum to make a decision: life insurance, charities, whether to sell the truck.)
“We’re supposed to be swayed by your view of normal?” said Alice-James.
It had been delicate getting Ma out of the house, but Alice-James was determined. After a vote, Ma agreed to spend the day with Bo. He took her shopping in the afternoon, scrambled her eggs with hot sauce for an early supper in my kitchen and took her bowling with the League.
Armed with brooms and garbage bags, we worked in different parts of the house all morning, attacking from the basement on up, boxing everything we could, from clothes to tools to magazines. Alice-James could have found her way through blindfolded, but Andy roamed the hallways, lost, counting the days before he could leave us behind for college.
I was carrying a bag of old National Geographics to the garbage cans under the back stoop when I found him brooding, chin resting on his knees.
“Don’t listen to Alice-James,” I said. “You’re as normal as any of us.”