The Lost Family

by Jenna Blum

  He came up beside her, pinching a ball up between foot and racquet and slipping it into June’s hopper. “You’re doing really well, Ms. R,” he said. “This is your first lesson?” and when June nodded and smiled up at him—it was a rare man she had to tip her head back to see—Gregg said, “Let me guess, you were an athlete in college.”

  “No college,” said June, “but I was a model.”

  She wondered if he’d recognize her, if he might have seen some of her covers; even today, people sometimes stopped June in the playground, at the supermarket: Hey, aren’t you somebody? Patti Hansen—Cheryl Tiegs? But of course this guy would have been in diapers when June’s career was at its zenith.

  He was nodding, though. He said, “I should have known; your form’s fantastic. A model, huh?”

  “For a while,” June said modestly.

  “Sure thing, I can see it,” he said, peering at her through his big glasses. “An older model now, but still a good one.”

  And just like that, all the pleasure went out of the day. The sun seemed to dim as though a cloud were passing over it. June wanted to hit the pro with her racquet, to swing it at him and feel it connect. Instead she released the hopper, so her balls went all over the Har-Tru. “Excuse me,” she said, “I think I have sunstroke,” and she turned and walked off the court.

  * * *

  That evening June decided to rearrange the furniture. She had promised Peter she would try to stop; he hated it when he came home late from the Claremont and barked his shins or fell over a chair that hadn’t been there that morning. But it was what June did when she felt restless; it soothed her to consider how the perspective could be changed just by moving a couch from one side of a room to another. It made everything look different, if only for a little while.

  Tonight she was working on the master bedroom. It was hot—they hadn’t gotten around to putting air conditioners in all the rooms in the old house, which had been built in 1910 as a summer retreat for wealthy New Yorkers fleeing the steam and stink of the city. Only the kitchen, so far, had a window unit—Peter had said he needed it for when he was testing recipes, although that made no sense because, aside from cooking lessons with Elsbeth, he did most of his trial runs at the restaurant. June was more of a TV-dinner chef herself, and there was no reason why the kitchen should be comfortable while they sweltered and suffered every night in the bedroom; if June had been able to lift the huge air conditioner, she would have moved it up here and installed it herself. The whole upstairs was about a thousand degrees and equally humid and smelled like hot carpet and old wood, like an attic.

  June had taken all the drawers out of the highboy Ruth had given her when the younger Rashkins moved to New Jersey, when Elsbeth was two. The dresser was solid mahogany, with bow-front drawers and scrolled handles, something that belonged in a house where George Washington might once have slept. It wasn’t June’s style at all, but she had transformed it with three coats of high-gloss white paint, replacing the handles with Lucite knobs. “My mamele’s dresser,” Ruth had cried when she saw it; “I barely recognize it!” That’s the point, thought June. “I’m sorry, Ruth,” she’d said. Now the highboy was extracting revenge on Ruth’s behalf; it might have been made of iron for how much it weighed.

  June lit a fortifying cigarette, then began pushing the highboy, which lurched grudgingly over the tired maroon carpet. June had thought they’d replace it, but it had turned out that starting a new restaurant, even in the suburbs, was much more expensive than she had known. Most people were house-poor; the Rashkins were Claremont-poor. June strained and shoved and braced her feet, grunting, her goal to position the highboy across from the fireplace, and all the while she was replaying a conversation she’d had that morning with Helen, when Helen found June by the pool after the tennis lesson. “How’s the heatstroke?” Helen asked, and June said, “I’m okay, I just needed to get off that court,” and Helen said, “Cramps? Do you need a Kotex?” and June said, “No, I don’t have my period. I think I have the thirty-five blues.” “Oh,” said Helen. “Hang on.” She left and returned with two Tabs from the snack bar, then sat on the chaise next to June and kicked off her Tretorns and little-balled socks. They drank deeply from the sweating cans. The sun was a blister in a white sky; the kids shouted in the pool, and the sprinklers whirred.

  “Helen,” June said presently. “Do you ever feel like you’re in the wrong life?” Helen had squinted at her beneath her sun visor. “What d’you mean?” she said. June looked out across the blue chlorinated water. “I don’t know exactly how to put it, but this isn’t what I signed up for. When I left Minnesota, it wasn’t to be a wife and mother. I could’ve stayed there and done that. I was supposed to do something different.” “Like what?” said Helen. June shrugged. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I always knew modeling wouldn’t last forever, so that’s not it. Nor travel the world—I’d already done that, for work. Just—something bigger. Something more.” Helen had wrinkled her nose at June. “You sound like one of those women’s libbers,” she said. “Well, maybe I am,” said June, “though I certainly don’t want to burn my bras. I’m thirty-five. I need them.” Both women laughed, then sighed. “But don’t you just think it’s so boring?” June burst out. “I love Pete and Elsbeth, don’t get me wrong. But every day’s the same: you get up, make the bed, cook breakfast, play Candyland, put away the toys, do laundry, go grocery shopping, plan dinner—and none of it matters because you just have to do it all over again the next day. And nobody ever notices. What’s the point?” “Unless you don’t do it,” said Helen. “Then things fall apart pretty fast.” “True,” said June. Helen sipped the last of her Tab, which rattled in her straw. “I get it,” she said. “It’s not exactly what I expected, being married to Marvin the Carpet King, having sex once a month—and did you know he never takes his socks off in bed?” “No,” said June. She thought: Once a month? Helen nodded. “He has cold feet. Poor circulation. And I sure didn’t mean to have three kids in four years. But I’m not like you,” she said shyly. “I don’t look like you, June. Nobody around here does. If I did, I might have expected my life to be different too. But I’m doing pretty much what I thought I’d do.” She’d reached over for the cigarette June had lit, and June handed it to her. They watched smoke float off across the pool.

  June had maneuvered the highboy into place and was straining to push the bed into the vacated space when Peter said, “Knock knock,” from the doorway. June looked up, strands of damp hair falling out of her bandanna and into her eyes. “What’s going on in here?” Peter said, looking at the drawers on the floor, his undershirts and June’s scarves spilling out. “It looks like a bomb went off.”

  “Ha ha,” said June, “very funny. Here, help me with this, would you?”

  Peter took off his suit jacket and hung it on the doorknob, since his route to the closet was blocked; then he joined June and they pushed in tandem. June could smell the Claremont on her husband’s shirt and skin: Thousand Island dressing, pastry, stale cool air—of course the restaurant was fully air-conditioned.

  Everything was much easier with two, and soon the bed was in place against the wall. June put her hands on her hips and surveyed the room; now she only needed something to go beneath the windows, and she was done. The wicker chaise from the sun porch, maybe? No—the rocking chair!

  “June,” said Peter, stepping over the clothes on the floor. “I thought we weren’t moving the furniture anymore.”

  “Sorry,” said June. “I just thought with the bed catty-corner from the window, we’d get more of a breeze.”

  “You may be right,” Peter admitted. He removed his trousers and tucked them in the hamper. “It is rather stuffy in here.”

  “Can we get another air conditioner?” said June. “During Fourth of July sales?”

  “We’ll see,” said Peter. “It depends on this month’s figures.”

  He took off his top shirt as well, then stood in his briefs and undershirt. June kne
w what he was waiting for: for her to leave the room so he could finish undressing in peace. As if she hadn’t seen his scars so many times over the past decade, while Peter was sleeping, glimpses in the shower: the horrible raised white ropes that could still, after so many years, make tears of outrage come to June’s eyes.

  “Pete,” she said, taking her cigarettes from her overalls pocket and lighting one.

  “June,” he said, coughing and waving at the smoke. “Please, not in the bedroom.”

  “Sorry,” she said and dropped the Marlboro in her Tab can, where it sizzled as it died. “But I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something: I want to go back to work.”

  Peter sat on the side of the bed to remove his socks. He was still very handsome—at fifty-five, Peter was among the older husbands in their circle of friends, but on him age was distinguished rather than diminishing. His hairline was higher than when June had met him, the waves more silver than gold—except at his temples, where there were wings of pure white. He was slender still, and whenever he wasn’t in a chef’s jacket and checks, he wore suits, charcoal in winter and fall, light gray in summer. If not for his hands, with their encyclopedia of burns and scars—missing fourth fingertip, the deep whorl on the back of the left whose origin June had never learned—he could be mistaken for a diplomat or captain of industry.

  “May we have this discussion in the morning?” he said. “It has been a long day.”

  “Sure,” said June, but then, because she knew he’d be gone by five, and she was excited, she continued: “I’m too old for modeling, except maybe catalogs. But I thought maybe a design firm?”

  “Design?”

  “Home decorating. You know I’m good at it. You’ve said it yourself—many times.”

  Peter sighed and rubbed his eyes. “You do have a knack. You’ve done a beautiful job with this place, on a shoestring, and you transformed the Claremont. But June, we cannot afford it.”

  June laughed. “That doesn’t make sense. If I’m working, I’ll bring in money.”

  “And who will take care of Elsbeth?”

  “I’ll hire a sitter for her.”

  Peter raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Pete, it doesn’t have to be Mary Poppins. There’re plenty of teenage girls around here who need pocket money.”

  “And this is whom you would have raise our daughter, some teenybopper?”

  “Not raise her,” said June. “Just watch her. A couple of days a week.” She was losing ground. “I meant only part-time,” she said. “To start.”

  “June,” said Peter, “I don’t mean to sound dictatorial. Actually, I think it is rather a good idea. But wait until Elsbeth is in school full-time. Then we can reconsider it.”

  “But that won’t be until next year,” said June.

  “Is that so long?” Peter asked. “Why this rush, this impatience now?”

  “Because—,” said June, then bit down on the words just in time. She’d been about to say, Because I’m dying here, Pete. It was a common enough turn of phrase; June heard it every day: I’m dying of heat, I’m dying of hunger. But it was one she could never say to her husband. Not after what he’d been through. Nor could she use the word so many women’s magazines did, unfulfilled, since to complain about being a wife and mother to a man who’d lost a wife and daughters—it was unthinkable.

  “I just want to do something more,” she said. “I told you this before we were married.”

  “I thought you’d grow out of it,” Peter said.

  June flinched. “And I thought you believed in women working,” she snapped. “Masha did, didn’t she?”

  Peter looked down at his feet—knobby, with yellowing nails.

  “Yes,” he said evenly. “She did.” The subtext being: until she was murdered.

  “I’m sorry,” said June. “That was below the belt.”

  Silence thickened in the room. Peter removed his watch, looking around for the little change dish June had given him for their seventh anniversary, the one symbolized by copper and dissatisfaction. Since it was across the room on the bedside table June had not yet moved, he settled for laying the watch on the carpet beside the bed.

  “I am very tired,” he said.

  “Pete—”

  “I need to sleep.”

  He straightened the sheets June’s furniture-rearranging had rumpled, then slid in on his side—even with the bed in the new place, Peter stayed on the right. He closed his eyes. After a minute, June left the room, switching off the overhead light.

  * * *

  She went downstairs first to get a cold Tab and secure the house for the night: turning off lamps, making sure windows were closed and doors locked. Ever since the oil crisis and the recession, crime had been spreading up from Newark; muggings and burglaries were rampant, even in Glenwood. Just last week Linda Apple had come home to find a thief running down the sidewalk with one of her best pillowcases filled with silver, jewelry, and a frozen chicken. June checked on Elsbeth next, easing open the door Elsbeth had plastered with rainbow stickers. Her daughter slept on her back as always, hands on her chest like a sarcophagus, the solid little mound of her stomach peeking out from between the top and bottom of her Holly Hobbie pajamas. June made sure Elsbeth was breathing, then set her stuffed animals—Pooh, Piglet, Snoopy, Woodstock, Henry, and EekAMouse!—back in the mysterious order only Elsbeth understood, so Elsbeth would not scream if she woke and found them disarrayed. She was so like Peter in this way, in her neatness and order—and in every way, so much so that if it had been medically possible, June would have thought her child had sprung from her husband’s brow without June’s aid, like Athena from Zeus. Elsbeth had June’s stubborn chin, but otherwise everything about her, from her springy curls to her temper and prodigious appetite—surely these had all come, if not from Peter, then from ancestors on his side of the family, long-dead, nameless, and perhaps murdered but nonetheless responsible for all the traits in her daughter June could not understand.

  June kissed Elsbeth, who frowned—even in sleep she preferred her father to her mother, an inclination she’d shown from the first moment she was placed in June’s arms in the maternity ward, when Elsbeth had arced her back and screamed so violently June had feared she was having a seizure and thrust her at Peter, in whose embrace she instantly quieted. If June had not miscarried the first child she and Peter had conceived, would that one have been more like her? June backed out, making sure Elsbeth’s rainbow nightlight was on and the door open a precise half-inch.

  She went down the hall to the bathroom and showered, afterward assessing her face and body for wear as if they were items of clothing. June was lucky, she knew; although she no longer met cover-girl standards, she had no jowls or eyelid sag, only the start of crow’s-feet. Her stomach was flat, and her breasts, despite her joke to Helen, needed no support—they’d always been pretty much nonexistent anyway. But there was June’s cesarean scar, which looked like a shark bite, and motherhood’s graffiti of stretch marks and varicose veins; her thighs, elbows, and upper arms were crepey. June put on a baby-doll nightgown, the coolest she owned, that came just to her crotch, and made a face as she went to the bedroom. Crotch, such a crude word, like something that giant Gregg would say. Why had June used it?

  She got into bed next to Peter, who was either asleep or playing possum. Like his daughter, Peter was a quiet sleeper—except for occasional and galvanic nightmares. Tonight his chest barely rose and fell. June turned from him, then back. The room was so hot. The silvery light from the window fell across the bed in a way she wasn’t used to; normally this would have pleased her, but now it seemed too bright. Her leg brushed Peter’s, and June snuggled closer to him despite the heat. Peter didn’t move. June rested her lips on his shoulder—he still smelled like restaurant—and reached down to cup him through his briefs, a soft mass in a cotton hammock.

  June slipped her hand under Peter’s elastic waistband and squeezed once, twice. Peter murmured
and tried to shift away, but his cock responded to her, pulsing happily. June kept squeezing, rhythmically, and when he hardened she slid her hand up and down as well. Peter’s body still liked her—it was his head that was the problem. So many times June had wished she could just unscrew it from his shoulders and set it aside. He was leaping in her hand now, his breathing changing—he could no longer pretend he was asleep. Suddenly he rose, flipped June onto her back, pushed up the baby-doll hem, and entered her. He hadn’t checked to see if she was ready—but she was. Readiness had also never been June’s problem.

  She kept her eyes closed to let the sensations mount—but it was as though she’d had novocaine; she knew she wasn’t going to get there tonight. She also knew from Cosmo and Mademoiselle that she was within her rights to demand her satisfaction from Peter, but that wasn’t what June wanted, at least not now. What did she want? She felt so sad, detached from Peter even while he was inside her—there was no lonelier feeling in the world. “Open your eyes,” she whispered, “look at me,” but Peter didn’t hear—he was reaching his own climax. One, two, three more thrusts and he was there; he exclaimed something June couldn’t make out, relaxed on top of her for a moment, then kissed her cheek and rolled off. Another minute and he was, if June believed his breathing, asleep again. June didn’t, but it didn’t matter; what did was that she couldn’t remember the last time Peter had looked at her when they made love. The early days of their courtship? The first year of their marriage? Maybe June was being overly suspicious; maybe Peter wasn’t really thinking of his former wife while making love to his current one. Maybe he was wandering through some interior landscape of his own. But if June knew one thing for sure, it was that she would never access it. There was a door closed in Peter that June could never open, as much as she’d tried; it was in all the things she couldn’t say and he couldn’t talk about; in memories of atrocity and tenderness June could never comprehend. And somewhere behind that door, they were still trapped too: his poor little girls. And their mother, Masha.