Do Not Deny Me

by Jean Thompson

  “I thought I was allowed to complain,” said Anna, feeling something new and dangerous cresting in her. Skittish anger, a willingness to lash out. “Even lacking, as I do, the advantages of a longtime spouse, always available to be complained about.”

  “Funny,” said Lynn, making the mistake of not really paying attention. She was waiting for another van to finish pulling out and unclog the lane.

  “You think I’m, what, desperate? Running out of time?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Don’t be dismissive. ‘Poor old Anna. I mean after all, what does she expect?’”

  “What?” Now Lynn was paying attention. “You know very well I didn’t say any of that.”

  “And don’t use your mommy voice on me.”

  “My what?” Lynn spun the steering wheel and the van heaved toward, then away from, a line of shopping carts. The teenage grocery clerk pushing them didn’t register the danger until they’d passed him by. His mouth unhinged and he stared after them. “Are you flipping out on me?”

  “I’m past my prime. Stale-dated. Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.”

  “Right this minute? I’m feeling sorry for me. And what’s ‘modern Michigan matron,’ huh? You get off the train and start right in sniping at me, and then you say you don’t want sympathy when all I ever hear you talk about is how you’re lonely, you’re horny, you’re broke, you’re old and pitiful, you’re the one feeling sorry for you. I’m just supposed to keep you company.”

  “All right,” said Anna. “All right.”

  “Get over it. Please.”

  “Over it. Sorry.” Her anger flared out like a match and the next instant she had undermined herself, seen herself as Lynn must see her: her black coat, meant to be urban and sleek, was rubbed and discolored at the collar and hem, her boots were scuffed, her jeans drooped and bagged, and God knows what kind of face and hair would present themselves in a mirror. “A little holiday tantrum.”

  “Glad we got it out of the way,” said Lynn. But it didn’t feel as if they’d put anything out of the way, only demarcated the distance between them.

  They stood in line for the pies, and then stood in another line to get soup and salads, which they carried over to a corner table. Anna shouldn’t have been hungry, after all the upset, but she was, extremely, as if she were venturing into unknown territory where sustenance would be hard to come by.

  After awhile Lynn said, “I guess we’re having some weird competition. Who can be the most bitter.”

  “Yeah, well, usually I win in a walk.”

  “There’s some stuff going on with Jay.”

  “Ah,” said Anna, nodding. Stuff.

  “You can’t be married almost twenty years without hitting some rough patches. I still love Jay. I do. At the end of the day, he’s the father of my children. My long-term partner. But I need to not be the Great Mommy Satan. The reason for everything that’s lacking in his life.”

  “He’d be lost without you,” said Anna, wondering if this was true. She prided herself on having a store of empathy, of being able to figure people out, see them as if they were one of those clocks with transparent cases, the gears and cogs spinning and visible. But Lynn’s husband always stopped her cold. He might be one of those men who walked away from a wife and family without much distress, or even much thought.

  “Just as I guess he shouldn’t be entirely responsible for everything that’s lacking in my life. Like, for instance, sex.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “Maybe most married people don’t, after awhile. God knows there’s enough jokes about it.” She looked at Anna. Her turn.

  “It kind of came and went,” said Anna. “Alcohol helped.” She wasn’t inclined, just then, to detail her sexual failures, and besides, she couldn’t speak as to either children or marital longevity, both of them no doubt in play. She wondered why Lynn didn’t compare notes with some other mom. Maybe she did. Or maybe she didn’t want that kind of information loose out there in her world. The dinner guest, looking Jay over with knowing eyes. “But you love the guy, that’s the important thing,” Anna said, aiming for encouragement.

  “There’s all different kinds of love,” said Lynn, breaking crackers into her soup bowl.

  I know you think I’m out here getting by on roots and grubs and squirrel stew, but in fact I eat pretty well. I’ve got my basics—rice, flour, cornmeal—stowed away in critter-proof containers. I make the world’s best granola and I store that too. I’m good with anything in a can. Working on a root cellar for potatoes and onions, not having much luck, what with all the mud. Someday I’ll set up shop to do some smoking and pickling. Do you know why Johnny Appleseed planted apple trees up and down the frontier? Because you can ferment the juice and make vinegar. Applejack too, I guess.

  Anna hadn’t seen Lynn’s house, this new house, before. Lynn pulled in the driveway and Anna said, “Hey, this is nice. This is top of the line.” It always surprised her when people she knew owned real, actual houses with grown-up mortgages. “Is that Jay up there on the ladder?”

  “Yeah, he’s installing gutter guards.”

  “Oh,” said Anna, not knowing what a gutter guard was, and figuring she didn’t need to know. She waved at Jay, but he gave no sign of seeing her.

  The boys were out playing basketball, Lynn explained. The boys’ names were Tim and Dan. They were the complete monosyllabic family. Lynn took her through the house room by room, like a Realtor. She stood aside at doorways so that Anna could peer in, assess, compliment. “The boys’ rooms,” she said, indicating two nests of disordered bedding and strewn clothing. “You’ll have your own bathroom. Be thankful for that.”

  The backyard was a wonderland of bird feeders, birdbaths, and birdhouses. There were whirligigs and platforms, hoppers and Plexiglas tubes, bird condos decorated in Cape Cod and rustic styles. “These birds have it good,” said Anna, thinking it was all a little crazed, so much effort, like those folk artists who constructed homemade temples out of bicycle wheels and aluminum foil.

  “The best thing about birds is, they don’t ask for anything. You put the seed out, they show up. Forget to fill the feeders and they scram. Simple.”

  Back inside, Anna went upstairs to unpack and go through her remaining clothes, see if anything she’d brought held up to scrutiny. She was always doing this, packing with care, then discovering that everything was wrong. She liked the little guest bathroom with its blue tiles and soft towels. She didn’t dwell on her own untidy reflection, except to note that she was the only accessory out of place.

  In the bedroom she opened her suitcase and selected the good sweater she’d meant to reserve for Thanksgiving dinner. She was pulling it on when a sound close by startled her, made her panic with her head still stuck within the sweater’s inside-out

  complications. She flailed about, bra and bare stomach exposed, and finally freed herself. Jay was on his ladder outside the window, not five feet away, scraping and shoving at the gutters. He was wearing a baseball cap that shaded his face and Anna supposed it was possible he hadn’t seen her—the light outside was getting dim, the room was unlighted. But then, it seemed unlikely that he wouldn’t have seen her, at this distance. Maybe he was pretending not to, just to avoid embarrassing them both. Or, since Jay was so hard for her to figure, he might have positioned the ladder for the express purpose of leering in at her.

  Unnerved, she went back downstairs and found Lynn standing in the kitchen, absorbed in reading a piece of mail. She didn’t look up when Anna came in, and Anna was left to direct her guest’s hopeful smile at empty air. Scanning, she didn’t see any evidence of the next day’s Thanksgiving dinner, except for the pies in their bakery boxes. Nothing stewing or soaking or toasting. Her stomach snarled.

  Lynn tossed the mail aside. “Wine,” she said. “Cheese and crackers.”

  “Yes please,” said Anna, happy now that there would be something to do, sit and drink and feed, while domestic life churned around her.
“Red, if you have it.”

  Lynn poured them two oversized glasses and set them out on the counter. Anna claimed the stool in the corner, head wedged against a cabinet. Back to the wall, always safest. Jay came in at the kitchen door, making a lot of foot-scraping racket.

  “Hey Jay!” Anna greeted him with such apparent delight that he stopped short and gave her a startled, hooded look. Creep. She bet money he’d been spying on her.

  Then he rearranged his face into indifference. “Hi,” he said, not looking at her. Instead he sought out Lynn. “That silver maple? It’s leaned in and rotted half the shingles over the west dormer.”

  “You should probably cut it down, then,” said Lynn, nodding over her glass. “Bad tree.”

  “If you think it’s funny, the roofing bill’s going to be a real scream.”

  “Oh honey, I promise I’ll get all kinds of upset the day after tomorrow, but this is Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving Eve.”

  Jay went to the sink to wash his hands, and Lynn came up behind him, patted his back. “You hungry? Want some soup? Want me to brine the turkey or anything?”

  “I decided not to brine it.”

  “There’s chicken noodle, pepper pot, and tomato. We should probably save the tomato for Tim.”

  “If nothing else, that maple needs to be cut way the hell back.”

  “Or maybe they already ate at Connie’s. Pizza or something.”

  Anna drank more wine. It dulled her appetite (she was still unreasonably hungry), as well as giving her the appropriate off-center vantage point. She couldn’t decide if Lynn and Jay were any more discontented than any other married couple, if there was some baseline of low expectations that set in after a time. From her perch in the corner she noted that they were still a good-looking pair. That counted for something. Lynn was still recognizably the pretty blonde of their college days, minus the smile that had been her armor against the world: Don’t hurt me! I am a friendly, approachable girl! And Jay was still tall and straight and comely, even as his neck and chin had thickened, his profile taking on a florid, petulant aspect, the same progression seen over time on the coins depicting certain Roman emperors.

  “So, Jay,” Anna began, wanting to make some minimal polite social noise, “how are your classes?”

  “I don’t teach classes. I do research and I supervise the thesis and doctoral students.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.” Or not. She couldn’t detect any perceptible job satisfaction in him. She wondered if he was this arrogant and unforthcoming at work, or if he unbent, came alive there. Some men were like that, treating their home life like an annoying series of chores to be accomplished.

  There was the thundering noise of the garage door rolling up, then down. Tim and Dan (she could never remember which was which) filed in, dressed in their uniforms of sweatshirts and shorts and sneakers. Their bare legs were red with cold. They were tall, like their father, and there was something unsettling about the sheer amount of skin displayed. What must it be like to be a man, take up so much of the world’s volume and acreage? Lynn fussed over them, got them to agree to microwave chili for their supper. The older boy went straight to a cabinet and took out a box of cereal and began munching handfuls of it. The younger fixed himself a glass of chocolate milk. Thanksgiving, Anna could tell, was going to be a special occasion if only because everyone would be sitting down together instead of foraging for themselves.

  “You remember Anna, don’t you?” Lynn prodded, and the boys acknowledged her without changing their remote, fixed expressions. “She lives in Chicago. Tim’s always been nuts about Chicago. He’s thinking of applying to Northwestern. Well, that’s Evanston, but close.”

  So Tim was the older one. He gave Anna a brief, appraising glance. “What is it you do? In Chicago?”

  “I edit a newsletter for the building trades industry and another for a realty group.”

  The boy nodded. He’d been right all along. She was boring.

  Lynn said, “Anna wrote a humor column for the school paper. All kinds of wacky fun stuff.”

  “You had to be there,” said Anna. The humor threshold in this family seemed pretty high.

  The younger boy, Dan, said, “So, what was Mom like? In college?”

  “Some tales,” said Anna, “are best left untold.”

  “Oh, thanks.” Lynn got up to refill the wineglasses. “Thanks heaps. I was a perfectly nice, normal girl.”

  “No, really,” the boy persisted. “I bet she did all sorts of stuff she pretends she never heard of.”

  “They’re on to you,” Anna told Lynn. “Might as well deal out a few crisp facts, right here at the kitchen table.”

  Both boys were now regarding Anna with probational approval, as if she might offer some entertainment value after all. They were nearly identical, two imperfect copies of Jay, brown-eyed, taciturn, equipped with Adam’s apples and jutting wrist bones. Anna didn’t see much of Lynn’s leavening spirit in them, which might have been why they were so intent on hearing naughty stories about her. They wanted some other heritage. How grim it must be, to see your genetic destiny walking around in front of you on a daily basis.

  “How about just one little anecdote,” said Anna, enjoying herself now, thinking she just might win them over. She noted that Jay was paying close attention, even as he pretended to be engrossed in a cookbook. He and Lynn hadn’t met until after graduation. “The secret life of Mom.”

  “She’s going to make something up,” said Lynn.

  “How about the blind date story? They know that one?” Lynn groaned her martyr’s groan. The boys looked nearly jolly. “Okay. The dorm we lived in freshman year always had signs taped to the bathroom mirror: ‘5’8" boy from Scott Hall needs date’ ‘5’10" ATO needs date for mixer.’ That was always the big thing, not wanting to be taller than your date,” said Anna, turning to Tim and Dan. “You guys would have been like, kings.

  “Anyway, your mom, being such a shrimp, always ended up with the shorties. So when the 5’5" dude turns up, plus you figure these guys always added a couple of inches to their advertising, she gets the call.”

  “Why did they need somebody else finding them dates?” asked Dan, who seemed to be the more lively of the two, Prince Harry to his brother’s Prince William. “They couldn’t just hang out, go to parties?”

  Lynn said, “Oh honey, everybody was so terribly dumb about things, and I know we were older than you guys but we seemed so much younger, and here we were at this big new place and every minute we were excited and every other minute were desperate not to be left out, and there’d be some girl who had a boyfriend and the boyfriend would have friends And you’d set it up and the guy would call from downstairs and you’d go out and have a perfectly awkward time. That’s how we did it.”

  “So this really short guy,” prompted the relentless Dan.

  Lynn was drinking too much or too fast or both, Anna thought. She had a blurred, flushed look that meant sentiments of one sort or another were likely to be dredged up to the surface. “The short guy is your mom’s date, and I’m set up with his friend, who’s some normal height, and we’re all going to a dinner at this frat house.”

  “Dad? Were you in a fraternity?”

  “Hah,” said Jay, by way of a negative.

  “… and yes, the guy is seriously short. Like a hobbit. But not as cute. And with a yappy attitude.”

  “Short man’s syndrome,” Jay put in. She couldn’t stand the guy. Really.

  “My date just isn’t that into it, or not into me. They were pledges, they had to go to this awards dinner, they had to have dates, no matter how lame. Short guy made gross jokes about the spaghetti looking like worms. Sophisticated repartee. Afterward, we all go down to the make-out room—”

  “The what?” She had the boys’ complete attention.

  “Well that’s what it was, all the houses had them, though they called them things like the Pit or the Cave. See, unlike you lucky youth of today, we couldn’t have company of
the opposite sex in our dorm rooms.” Anna was immediately aware of a current of parental alarm or caution, as if these might not be suitable observations. She began to hurry her story. “Oh, it was just a big ol’ dark TV room, and we were all sitting there, waiting for something thrilling to happen, and I got up to find the bathroom, and when I came back, your mom and my date were in a lip-lock.”

  “Eww, Mom,” the boys chorused.

  “It was a youthful indiscretion,” said Lynn carelessly. She drained the last of her wine.

  “You were like, passion’s plaything.”

  “I guess I’m never, ever going to be allowed to live this down.”

  “Never,” said Anna cheerfully. Of course that was not the entire story. Left to themselves, Anna and the shorty had made the best of things by groping and mashing with each other. Once he was seated and not talking, he hadn’t been so bad. Lynn hadn’t even noticed. The room had been that dark. And Anna had never told her. A mean little secret.

  The microwave chimed. The boys loaded up their bowls of chili and took them upstairs. Lynn announced that she was going to lie down for awhile. Anna and Jay, abandoned, looked at each other, then away. Jay started opening cupboards, hauling out casseroles and flour bins. She decided against making any insincere offers of assistance, and instead filled a bowl with the remainder of the chili and retreated to the den. The backyard light was on, illuminating the patio. Lynn’s bird feeders, she noted, were almost out of seed. They cast elongated shadows that Anna tried not to think resembled something fanciful and inappropriate, like gallows.

  She was remembering Ted, back in the old days, back when she and Lynn had shared an apartment and Ted had been her boyfriend, or a certain kind of boyfriend, one who mostly hung around smoking your pot. She couldn’t remember any extravagant sentiments being exchanged, though Ted had extravagant opinions about all manner of things, books and politics and religion, and drugs as the door to perception, and the benefits of going off the grid. She guessed he would have been voted most likely to live in a tree. Just as Lynn was a sure bet to end up married and settled, and Anna herself . . . she didn’t like to think of her future as foretold. Not then, not now. She’d wanted to keep all her options open. Glamorous possibilities which still eluded her. Quirky individuality, fading over time into eccentricity. She crept upstairs as quietly as she could.