by Rica Keenum
I give Sym coffee in the morning and send him to school with Mountain Dew, which the school nurse keeps in her medicine cabinet next to little glass bottles of insulin for the diabetic students. The caffeine takes him down a few notches. He stops whirling in his chair with his shirt pulled over his head, yelling, “I hate this. I HATE this,” while the rest of the class pushes pencils on their math tests. He stops shredding papers and storming off to the playground. I want to believe it’s not a placebo, but either way it’s working.
At a restaurant, KJ gets chocolate milk with a twisty straw while I tell the waitress to pour Sym a cup of regular coffee please — cream and sugar. Her eyebrows arch and I see the questions on her face but I don’t explain. I’m tired of explaining. I simply slide the ceramic mug across the table and say, “Thank you.”
When the snow melts into soggy chunks and bits, I decide to go for a run. I stomp my way around the park on the cement path that loops around a swing set, a jungle gym and a set of wood-slat benches. With my headphones on, I circle the boys as they flitter like happy birds on the dewy grass. I veer to the right as a woman walks by with a labrador. The dog casts his nose in my direction, a fishing line reeling in my scent. I smile then make a few more laps before returning to the boys. They’ve mounted the swings again and there is one empty seat. I take it, yank the music from my ears and listen to the swing chains creak as we propel ourselves into the air. High. Higher. Highest. The wind opens up like a hand and lifts us to a new dimension, a weightless bliss where we float together, heads thrown back, tasting the cool of the day. We let our feet dangle, our heads go dizzy. We are dazzled. We eye each other, then pump our legs in a frenzy. High. Higher. Highest, giggling. We are letting go and going nowhere — falling apart in the very best way.
Chapter 8
The Adulterer’s Special
I can’t find my ex-husband. It’s after nine and I’m waiting in the health center parking lot, radio humming, heater firing. The boys are groggy in the backseat, bundled in their bubble coats and knit caps, the tails of their fuzzy scarves trailing. This is our usual spot and I am in my scrubs, ready for my night shift with just a few minutes to spare. I’m getting impatient, tapping my hands on my thighs and sighing as I try to recall our last conversation. “He does know I work tonight, right?” I say to the silent car. Of course he knows. I told him, I swear I told him. Didn’t I?
All I can think to do is drive to the house we used to share, the house he now occupies alone. I turn the key, check my mirrors, skid across the icy lot. The snow crunches under the tires; the heat sputters through the vents, and my little boys should be in bed.
I pull up and see his Dodge Stratus, apple red and gleaming against the dingy curb snow. I climb the cement steps to the porch where the boys used to crash their toy cars. I hear the ghosts of their summer play, their sandals on the wood planks. When I knock, the porch light beams on and I am standing in a yellow stripe of light, shifting from foot to foot as if I could flick off the cold. I see a shadow in the glass pane, but I can’t make it out.
The doorknob turns and I watch the gap widen, revealing a leg, an arm, a face. I don’t know this face. It’s a woman, twenty-something, tall-ish. Her hair is so red it surprises me. A firetruck thundering from nowhere. I realize my mouth is gaping, nose is dripping. I am a stunned, leaky mom-child.
Sometimes truth crashes down like a dead tree. A splintered, rotted thing, and when you see the enormous carcass, you think, How did I miss the cracked trunk, all the clues that lay like fallen branches?
This woman is the culmination of nights my husband worked late in which he was not really working late. She is the secret catalyst for every argument he hurled at me— every cutting glance, the jarring punch of each door slam, the dinners left untouched, congealed, cold and flat. At the core of his restlessness, resistance, growing disdain for our marriage was this redhead in a wrinkled T-shirt. I’ve known about her, but only in theory. She’s the lie I couldn’t confirm and was therefore forced to deny. She is good news and bad news — proof I’m not the crazy, overly suspicious woman I’ve been made to believe I am, proof that J was not merely unhappy with me, but he was happy with her. Happy with this redhead who wears the flannel boxer shorts I bought him. Time slows to a drag while I stand there and swallow hard, understanding for the first time what I have not understood for years: I have been a fool. A blind fool.
A memory floats in. We are in court and the judge has called my husband to the stand. No one expected this, least of all his lawyer. He shoots his attorney a look and she replies with an I-don’t-know shrug, then taps her expensive heels on the marble to punctuate the gesture. He makes his way to the hot seat, looking smaller than I’ve ever seen him look.
“The grass isn’t greener on the other side,” the judge says as he leans in toward my husband. “Is there someone else?” he asks, stone-faced. I squeeze the tear-soaked tissue in my hand as the room stiffens around me.
“No, sir,” my husband says, after a pause that tells us otherwise.
The memory recedes and I stand on the porch, feeling the heat from the house that used to be my house reaching out like fingers to taunt me. The redhead leans against the door so that I can only see a wedge of the dining room, the built-in China cabinet and the polished hardwood floors on which my boys laid on their bellies with fists full of army men, making fighting sounds. All I can think is – ‘The man I loved did this and everyone knew it but me’. Their faces march into my mind — the roll call of my humiliation. My marriage was a joke of nine years and I have just heard the two-letter punchline: Me.
“He’s not home yet,” she says. “But I can take the boys so you won’t be late for work.”
She’s hard to read, and at this moment I don’t trust my instincts anyway. I can’t tell if she’s mocking me or trying to be helpful. I know for certain I don’t want to be friends with this woman, and there’s no way in hell I am leaving my children with her. I turn around to check on them — drowsy in the car under the glow of the lamp post. I swing back to face her, the surprise character in the soap opera of my life.
I ask to use her phone and she steps away then comes back and hands me a cell. I dial my work number and wait while they page the head nurse. Fixing my gaze on the prongs of ice dripping from the railings, I discover her feet. She is wearing the same suede slippers J bought me last Christmas. They came with a matching winter jacket, fur-lined — the color of warm sand. I wonder if she has the jacket too. Does she know we’ve been dressed alike? Did he get a two-for-one-deal, the adulterer’s special?
***
I’m in bed but I can’t sleep. Hot tears slide across my face and pool into my ears. It’s hard to breathe but I do my best to sob in silence, to mom-cry as I alternately listen for the boys. They exhale in their tiny bedroom next to mine, the long throaty sleep-thrusts of collapsed bundles of energy. They slept through the whole ordeal. J had pulled up to find me on the porch with the mistress and the cell phone. He’d rolled down his window, a dragon roaring breath-smoke in the winter air.
“What the hell are you doing here? I left you three messages. I said I’d be a little late. I told you to meet me outside your work. Why are you here?”
His gloved hands went up inside the car to show he’d given up. I’m impossible, an idiot. This infuriated me. I bounded down the cement stairs, slipping on the icy patches and grabbing the metal rail to jolt my body back upright. I stood beside his car.
“How dare you? How daaare you!” I drew out the dare so it became one long, audacious word. I leaned so close, I feared I might get sucked into the quicksand of his anger or the swampy black holes of his eyes. He kept shouting, but I was deaf to the sound. Adrenaline pumped in my ears. I saw his tongue moving wildly in his mouth and it scared me to think how that same snake-flesh roamed my body, caressed my skin. It was like watching a movie, seeing things that were so foreign to me they didn’t feel real. And his car: identical to hers. There they were now, side by side
in front of the house they shared. The house I’d chosen for us, for my family. How cute is that? I thought about the day he brought the car home and parked it out front without a word. I’d heard him pull up and watched him approach the door, not knowing where he’d been; not knowing that he’d been out test-driving new options.
I’m in bed now, missing work and processing all this. After the shitshow I drove home, hands fixed on the wheel like it could hold me up in the world. But now I am sinking through my mattress into a dark abyss. There is nothing — no past or future for me, at least not the way I imagined it. I have woken up in a world I don’t recognize and now I must navigate in unfamiliar terrain.
***
Betrayal is a physical assault. The pain rips into me with unrelenting force. It swims in my veins and swells beneath my skin like a bruise that has broken every capillary. It colors me deep purple. I am a full-body bruise.
I wonder everything about her — J’s mistress. What does she call him: babe, baby, honey, sweetie, boo? I never used pet names. I was an introverted wife. The girl who changed clothes in the closet, who gave hugs sparingly, who spent every effort on housekeeping, mothering, stretching the dollars we earned. I had leaped from girlhood to motherhood and was working to assimilate my womanhood.
I find her on social media and learn she’s a sports fan like him. A meat and potatoes kind of girl — her words, not mine. I don’t like football, basketball, baseball, crowded arenas or hot dogs from sweaty street vendors. I like my son in his martial arts uniform, and if this is a sport, it’s the only one I have ever grown to love. When I think about J’s mistress, I wonder if my lack of interest in sports has anything to do with the death of our marriage. If I’d made an effort to cheer for his team, to understand the plays, to roar, “Come on, defense,” what might have been different for us?
I wonder if she bakes, reads, cleans, takes bubble baths before bed like I do. I wonder if she wears makeup, sundresses, pajamas with pretty lace hems. Does she make the bed or leave the blankets in a heap on the mattress? Does she grumble when she finds the coils of his beard hairs sprinkled all over the sink? Is she a cuddler, a hold-me-at-night kind of woman? These thoughts make me cringe, but I can’t stop imagining their union, their attraction, their evenings at home together. I need to know why I was so bad and she was so good, if that’s what drove this affair. In my broken mind, I think maybe if I can learn about her, I can learn about me, about all the things I couldn’t understand when I was married to an unhappy man. I am crazy for answers. She’s a textbook I need to read: Men Are from Mars, and So Are Their Lovers.
***
Just before I met and married J, a friend invited me out on Halloween. I wore tight jeans and a Lycra top, red lipstick and loads of hair gel. Not an actual costume, but a typical date-me ensemble. The friend pulled up in her black Maxima, beeped in my driveway. I got in the car, thrift-store boots crunching on empty fast-food takeout bags. With ‘90s jams shaking the windows and the eye of her Newport cigarette blazing in the dark, we sped off. She drove us to the south side of Milwaukee and we pulled up in front of a house, beeped the horn and waited, wailing along with Janet Jackson.
“Cute bracelets,” I said as she tapped out a beat on the steering wheel. Without a word, she poked her half-smoked menthol into her mouth and squinted behind a curl of smoke. I watched her pull off three of the six beaded bangles on her wrist and hand them to me.
Two songs later, a thin blonde emerged from the brick two-story, dressed like a prisoner in a striped jail suit.
“Ha!” I said aloud then followed it up with an actual laugh as the girl squeezed in the backseat. “Great costume.” She smiled and told me her name was Jessica and that she was sorry it took her so long.
“I have twin boys,” she explained, rolling her eyes.
Inside, the bar was an ashtray, stale and thick with smoke. The tables were wobbly and round with ripped leather stools all around. Wide-eyed, middle-aged men looked up from their beers, their eyes fondling our curves. I followed my friends to a table where a mustached man in a cowboy hat brought us drinks. No one questioned our ages. Seedy bars were hot spots for underagers like us. But secretly, I preferred house parties with teens who stuffed family photos in drawers and let their dogs lick remnants of Cheetos off the carpet.
We danced a little and I watched the red lights bloom like poppies all over the dance floor. Breathless and woozy, we returned to a table where random men with stubble and deep voices came over to flash their teeth and try out their lines. I relied on my jukebox savvy — turning away from the men who made my skin bristle to follow the beats, belt out choruses and take off suddenly with a friend’s hand in mine, carried by a song.
At some point, my friends motioned me outside where Cowboy Hat led us into the lobby of an apartment complex next door. The door shut behind him and we stood there in the tiny room, the staircase behind us. I leaned up against a brick wall and listened to the music thud from the bar. The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny glass bottle. Cocaine. He held it up in the low light and I turned my head as my friends huddled closer to take their hits. I must have looked disgusted because no one prodded me to indulge. Drinks were enough for me. I watched Jessica’s feet, her legs, the prisoner stripes as she leaned in to snort a line. I saw my hand go up to stop her, to pull her away from the poison but my fingers froze at my side. I thought about her twin boys at home, waiting up for Mommy. I thought about what it means to want a mother who wants her own life. Her very own life.
I never saw those friends again, but I think about them often, and the things I left behind. I traded up, I thought — dank bars and bad company for a guy who never drank or partied but would drive me clear to Chicago for good pizza. And then we’d drive some more with the windows down and no destination, the sky like a velvet curtain. Five dollars in the console and dreams that couldn’t fail. You couldn’t tell me I wasn’t lucky.
“I can see us married,” he’d said after just a month. And when I closed my eyes, I saw it too. Three months later, we were. Now we’re divorced and I’m lying here like roadkill, only I’m not dead.
***
“Oh what a tangled web we weave
when first we practice to deceive.”
~ Walter Scott
I don’t know how she heard the news, whether it came by a phone call or a visit from a stone-faced stranger, but someone told my mother this: Your husband is molesting your children. Perhaps she rolled it over in her head, like a chef with a hunk of dough, pounding out the lumps. At some point, she decided to make it a lie.
Later, we sat in a room. Our eyes were oceans apart, adrift on separate islands. A woman put a doll on my lap, a strange and faceless doll that was really a prop.
“Show us,” she prodded. “Show us where he touched you.”
I did what she asked, although I was heavy with shame and my hands were concrete in my lap.
“Did he insert…” she started to say, then paused to observe me before beginning again. “Do you know the meaning of insert?” I did. And for a moment, I was proud. I wanted to tell her all the words I knew and that I was a champion speller. I wanted to talk about the books I read and the characters in my head. I wanted to tell her how I lived inside those books, like a caterpillar. They were my cocoon. But we didn’t talk about that. We talked instead about ugly things, things that made me shift in my chair, stare at the rug and wish it would all go away. It didn’t matter what I said because after counseling sessions and visits from curious people who clutched their files and clipboards, my mother found her own cocoon. She spun new stories and invented a set of characters we could become. When it was time to return home, I slipped into my old bed, bleary-eyed and confused. Alone in the dark, I wondered if he would come again. I never stopped wondering.
When he filled my bicycle tires with air or greased its rusty chain, she said, “Look what your dad did!” And though he was not my father and my real dad was long gone, I pretended. I play
ed the character she created, the girl she could love. When he eyed me from the sofa, opened his bathrobe and flashed his anatomy, I sat beside my mother who watched her favorite show. I let those moments curl away like black smoke in my memory as I listened to the Tracy Ullman theme song. And the years passed as my mother reminded us all: This is a happy home.
***
After discovering J’s mistress, I think about my mother, about the cobwebs she spun in her memory, her net of self-protection, her shelter from the truth. I think about the lies I chose because reality was too much to bear. My husband is a sports fan and he likes to watch games at the sports bars after work, I’d convinced my inner doubts. We sleep in separate beds because we work opposite shifts. It’s easier this way. Besides, who has time for romance? When a friend said he spotted him at the mall with another woman, I told him it must have been someone else, a man who looks like my husband. No, he’s not a great mate, but he’s a pretty good dad. A diaper-changing, cartoon-watching dad. His moods? They are murky but manageable. Nobody’s perfect, and forgiveness is good for the soul. We are a happy family, and this is a happy home.