by Kristin Bair
When Orion winks at her, a Bear Grylls tweet flashes in her head: “Walk toward the dangerous and the difficult.”
Damn. The universe is conspiring.
* * *
Tap tap tippity-tap.
* * *
The next morning, Agatha creates an Instagram account: “Infidelity: A Still Life.” Her first post features a before-and-after mash-up of the shed. She writes, “Before I found my husband in the shed screwing a dog walker | After I found my husband in the shed screwing a dog walker. #infidelity #hatchet”
The use of the pronoun my before the word husband makes a faraway place in her middle ache and throb.
By noon, she has 739 followers and twice as many likes.
Chapter Five
At 4 PM Tuesday, Agatha flattens herself against the front window and waits there for Dax to arrive with the boys. How strange to be willing to stand against a window for well over two hours when there are so many things to be done: dinner to be cooked, dishes to be washed, sheets to be put on the boys’ beds, calls to be returned, the last bit of skunk stink to be scrubbed away, and, of course, the writing, always the writing. A few days ago she would have guffawed at the thought of supergluing herself to the pane; now she won’t leave the feeling of the cool glass or the view of the driveway for anything. Perhaps they will arrive early. When she says this to herself— perhaps they will arrive early—she feels as if she’s been dropped into a Virginia Woolf novel, To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway. This is a Woolfian line, perhaps they will arrive early, something only a true Woolf woman would say. It is the introduction to a complicated set of social complexities that will lead to a more complicated set of psychological complexities that, hopefully, will lead to a simple but satisfying resolution.
Agatha looks through the pane at the porch and acknowledges that while the glider out there would be considerably more comfortable with its puffy pillows and cushioned armrests, from that vantage point she would look directly at the remains of the shed. The broken sticks, splintered roof, scattered tools, busted doorframe, rake handles and shovel heads, swatches of muumuu-maxi, pieces of her heart. She’d done a number on that shed and everything in it, that’s for sure. A glance or walk-around now and again is fine, but two-and-a-half hours of gazing? That she cannot bear. Besides, there is comfort in discomfort.
Behind her on the living room wall, the Saturn-sized Roman numeraled clock ticks away the minutes.
4:10
tick
4:11
tock
4:12
tick
4:13
tock
Her swollen, splintered hands throb, and her big toe, poking over the edge of her flip-flop, resembles an overripe avocado.
4:57
tick
4:58
tock
The anthrax, she is sure, is snaking through her system, readying her for the final blow.
4:59
tick
5:00
tock
She rocks slightly with the rhythm of the passing minutes and fingers the crease on her cheek. Who designed such an audacious clock? Why has she never noticed this?
tick
tock
tick
tock
In a thousand years, when archaeologists dig up the ancient Wallingford society, they’ll discover a similar humongous clock in nearly every home. What of this? they will inquire, turning the timepieces over and over in their hands. With little more to go on, they will assume Wallingfordites had had an extraordinary relationship with time instead of the unfortunate truth. Zero sense of design.
5:05
tick
5:06
tock
At 5:15 Agatha pulls away from the window, yanks the bloody clock from the wall, wrestles the ticking-tocking beast to the basement door, opens it, and shoves the monstrosity down the steps. She slams the door and listens to the clock bumpety-bump its way to the landing halfway down.
5:17
tick
5:18
tock
5:19
tick
Good god. She can hear the clock through the closed door. She thinks about “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and, once again, rips herself away from the window.
tick
tock
tick
tock
ticktock
ticktock
ticktockticktockticktock
She opens the basement door, hobbles down the stairs, grabs the clock, and shuffles down the next set of stairs. “Fear sharpens us,” she whispers, squinting to avoid the ghosts, then carries the ticktocking beast to the far end of the cavernous basement. Eyes closed, she stuffs it behind the old coal furnace they’d never had removed. “This is where we’ll hide when the apocalypse comes,” Dax always joked. “They’ll never find us here.”
Back upstairs at the window, it is finally quiet.
6:01
6:02
6:03
When Dax pulls into the driveway at 6:30, Agatha bounds out like a wounded deer, limping and gallumping to the car. Her heart beats in her throat, knees, and toes, and when the boys tumble out, she smothers them with kisses and buries her face in their hair. Ah, her beautiful, sweaty boys.
“Mom, you stink like Susan Sontag!” Dustin says. “I can’t breathe.”
“If you couldn’t breathe, you wouldn’t be able to speak.” She squeezes harder. “I missed you.”
“We missed you, too,” Jason says. “And you only stink a little bit.” He’s younger and still expressing love without reservation. That will change, but not for a few years.
Agatha turns her back on Dax—she can’t look—and herds the boys into the house. Dax follows. “Agatha,” he says. His voice sounds strange and unfamiliar. “I need to get a few things.”
She waits until she hears the boys upstairs in their rooms, then she turns. Her throat constricts. “This is the first time you’ve seen me since you screwed that woman in our shed and all you’ve got to say is ‘I need to get a few things’? Not ‘I’m sorry’? Not ‘Are you all right?’? Not ‘I’m so sorry Susan Sontag sprayed you’? Not ‘Did you hurt yourself while chopping up our shed with a hatchet?’? Not even a mention of how the boys have responded? How they’re doing?”
Dax tugs at the hem of his purple pullover, a shirt she’s never seen before.
“You look like a plum in that thing,” she says. “Is GDOG your new fashion consultant, too?”
“Her name is Willow.”
Agatha looks directly at him for the first time. It is like looking directly into the sun. Black spots mar her vision. She squints. “Yes, you told me. In your text.”
“Her name is not GDOG,” he says, skating past the fact that he told his wife the name of his lover via text. “Her name is Willow.”
“Willow what?” Agatha says. She studies the long, scabbed scratch on his cheek.
Dax pauses.
“Willow what, Dax?” A flash of him diving from her grip in the shed pops into her mind. The hatchet grazing his cheek. She’d made that scratch.
Her husband winces, looks at the floor, and says quietly, “Bean. Willow Bean.”
Agatha freezes in front of the knife box on the kitchen counter. “Willow what?”
“Bean,” Dax says a little more confidently, though he’s still wincing.
“Bean? As in wax bean, green bean, baked bean, fava bean?”
“Yes.”
“As in lima bean, snap bean, pinto bean, navy bean?”
“Yes.”
“Bean as in the thing that scares me most in the whole world?”
“Yes.”
Agatha stares at the knife box and considers the cleaver. “Bean,” she says.
“Bean.”
“You’re joking?”
“I’m not joking.”
Agatha takes a deep breath. “Well, that’s just great,” she says. “Get what you need and get out.”
As Dax walks away
, vulnerable with his back to her, she has to reason herself out of driving the cleaver through his skull. Her rage is that big, that powerful. She has no idea how she and her husband—her husband—have moved from discussing their Red Sox season tickets to discussing the fact that his lover’s last name is Bean. Bean. Of all things, Bean. She has no idea how to reckon with a universe so cruel. So ironic. So merciless. If it weren’t for the boys, she might actually do it. Heave that cleaver from the box, take three baby steps, and crack that motherfucker through his skull. Then leave him to rot behind the abandoned coal furnace in the basement. I’ll give you an apocalypse, she thinks.
But.
But.
The boys.
She cannot kill her boys’ father. No matter how far Dax goes with this infidelity escapade, she cannot kill him. Patting her hand against her thigh to keep it from reaching for the cleaver, she notes that for the first time ever she is not afraid of what might be done to her in the world, but what she might do to the world.
“So go thy ways,” she quotes Moby Dick, “and I will mine.”
Chapter Six
Agatha hoists the recycling bins onto the wagon in the garage, then starts down the driveway with the mountain of tomato juice cans rattling and clanging behind her like cowbells. Halfway down, Kerry Sheridan pops out from behind the hydrangeas.
“Jesus Christ, Kerry! Do you have to do that?” Agatha yells, her heart pounding in her chest.
“Susan got you good, didn’t she?” Kerry says. She finds it hilarious that Agatha has names for the neighborhood skunks.
“There’s a first time for everything.”
Kerry sniffs the air and makes a face. “The juice didn’t work too well, did it?”
“Feel free to move away,” Agatha says. “Far away.” She hits the dip in the driveway a little too hard with the wagon, and three cans tumble out. One veers into the yard. The other two pick up speed and roll all the way down the driveway and across the street.
“Not to poke the hornet’s nest,” Kerry says, following closely, “but when are you going to get this mess cleaned up?” She gestures toward the remains of the shed with a dramatic sweep of her arm. Everything with Kerry involves a dramatic sweep.
“Bringing up the most horrible thing to ever happen to me is your definition of not poking a hornet’s nest?” Agatha says. She pauses, turns, and looks. Although Dax had cut the grass the morning before the incident, shorn it down to brownish nubs, it is already entering what Kerry calls “the shaggy phase.”
“Well, we do have to think about the neighborhood,” Kerry says.
“Screw the neighborhood.” Agatha continues on. She stops at the mailbox, unloads the bins, and arranges them in a row. Then she hobbles after the runaway cans.
“Come on, Agatha. You cannot leave this mess in your yard.”
Agatha picks up a can, tucks it under her arm, and goes after the second. A bit of tomato juice dribbles onto her shirt as she picks it up. “Watch me.”
Kerry yammers on about expectations and “where we live,” but Agatha pulls her phone from her pocket and gets distracted by an email from her agent. “How’s the thriller going?” it reads.
Crap.
Crap, crappity, crap.
She hasn’t yet told her agent that she hasn’t started writing the agreed-upon thriller. How do you tell your amazingly brave, adventurous agent that you’re a chickenshit? That you can’t even think about a scary story, let alone write one? That you can’t read scary books or watch scary movies? That you’re afraid of the dark? And strangers? And beans?
This is an agent who, according to publishing lore, once waded through a lake with six alligators just ten feet away on the shore, faced down ghosts for the sake of a client’s best seller about a haunted house, and climbed Everest without an oxygen tank.
The last may be a slight exaggeration, but still, Everest, with or without an oxygen tank.
How can Agatha admit to being a chickenshit?
She can’t.
Instead, she lies. Lies like a purple shag rug in the 1960s.
“Thriller is going great!” she writes back. “Deep in it now.” She props the two cans next to the bins, grabs the empty wagon, and heads back up the driveway. Her big toe is stinging.
“Agatha Arch, stop right there!” Kerry hollers. “What are you going to do about this mess? Don’t walk away from your neighborhood responsibilities.”
Agatha doesn’t turn.
“Agatha! Agatha! I’ll call Dax.”
Agatha laughs. “I seriously doubt that will have an impact,” she says. The farther she gets from the rhododendrons, the fainter Kerry’s voice becomes. Thank goodness.
* * *
“When monogamous relationships come to mind,” Agatha reads, “we
typically think of geese, swans, or humans. Rarely do we think of prairie voles.”
This may be the truest thing Agatha has ever read.
“If a member of either sex approaches the happy couple,” she reads, “they will chase him or her away.”
She takes a screen shot and saves it in her Hard Truths file.
It is Friday afternoon. Everything hurts. Hands, heart, big toe, all parts in between. She groans and thinks about the dog walker sashaying past their home, her Janie-grapefruit hips chugga-chugging this way and chugga-chugging that way. If she and Dax were voles, they would have chased that dog walker away, hollering “Begone! Begone!” in their squeaky vole-y voices. Then they would have hunkered down in their burrow and had beautiful vole-y sex. But Agatha and Dax are not voles. They are humans—flawed, flailing humans—and instead of chasing away the dog walker, Dax heard the beat of her beautiful Janie-grapefruit hips, fell into a trance, followed her to the park, and tumbled into a fling, an affair, and now, according to his latest text, an everlasting love.
My love’s name is Willow.
Agatha clicks away from the nature blog to her favorite photograph of what used to be her family—her, Dax, Dustin, and Jason. Taken last spring at the home opener—just five months before—the boys are decked from head to toe in Red Sox gear. The Green Monster looms in the background. Dustin is leaning his head on Agatha’s knee. Jason is on Dax’s back.
Before the dog walker fed strychnine to Agatha’s life, they’d been a Red Sox family. The four of them at Fenway on weekends, watching every game on TV until the very last up to bat, lucky Sox shirts holey with wear and love, and batting average bingo at breakfast in the morning. The boys are obsessed. Dustin has a Sox hat he’s outgrown but loves so much he now wears it clipped to his belt loop with a carabiner. It was a tradition in their house, when they still had an “our house,” when they still had an “our,” that whenever the boys wanted to use the expression “for god’s sake,” they always said “for Big Papi’s sake.” Mom’s rule. In the same vein, whenever Agatha wanted to say “motherfucking,” as in “motherfucking unbelievable” or “motherfucking amazing,” which was often because “motherfucking” was, and is, her favorite word, she had to say “fothermucking.” Boys’ rule.
Agatha wipes tears from her eyes and clicks over to the Moms Facebook page to peruse the usual litany … one Mom is desperate for a Bed Bath and Beyond coupon, another needs prayers for a sick cousin, Gem Lily’s senile black lab has wandered away again (please don’t chase!), another is collecting gently used toys for a local charity, three Moms need recommendations for orthodontists, seven more are seeking pediatrician recs, nine say they are “following” the pediatrician posts because even after years of being on Facebook they still don’t realize they can simply “turn on notifications for this post” without announcing their intention to every single member of the group, and so on. Good god, the inanity. But then the High Priestess posts about a beggar, and, just like that, the everyday litany has fangs.
Jane Poston:
“Hey, ladies, anyone else see the young woman at Apple54 holding a can and a sign about being unemployed and going through tough times? Is she legit? Sh
e’s looking a little rough.”
Of course, the High Priestess does what the best of the best Facebook Moms do. She posts a photo. It’s a terribly blurry photo taken through the window of her T-Rex Escalade, so it’s hard to get a read on the woman. Yes, she’s thin and unkempt with shaggy dyed-black ends on her dishwater hair. Familiar-looking in that down-and-out kind of way. But legitimately in need? Who can know for sure?
Three Moms report giving change to the woman. Each says she asked the obvious questions: Who are you? What’s your name? Where are you from? Where are you living? How long will you stay? Two say the answers were vague. I’m me. Don’t worry about my name. From over that way. Around. Don’t know. The third says the young woman’s voice was so raspy she couldn’t understand a word she said.
As Agatha reckons with this new development, fear wraps its octopussian tentacles around her neck and gives a familiar squeeze. While the three Moms may have asked the obvious questions, none asked the most important: What kind of trouble will you bring to our town?
If Dax had been present, still bound in their marriage, he would have done what he’d always done—picked up on the scent of Agatha’s fear, grabbed her hand, held it to his heart, and said, “No worries, Aggie-girl. I’ve got you.” And she would have relaxed. A little bit. Enough. Just enough. For all those years, since freshman year of college, since the day she swam with the rotting cow, Dax had been her buffer, her shield, her warrior, the protective barrier between Agatha and the world. Is it fair to ask someone to hold you aloft in moments you cannot do it yourself? Is it fair to put such weight upon another? Was the responsibility too much? Is that what drove Dax into the britches of the dog walker?
Agatha clears her throat. Here’s the thing. New people don’t come to Wallingford this way. They come via international job placements. From the Netherlands. From Germany. From Israel and India and China. They come for the excellent schools, the high standardized test scores, and the unheard-of percentage of high school graduates who continue on to college. They come for the mostly white community with mostly conservative values. They come for the “we honor diversity” pretense. They come for the mammoth New England homes. The lawns and the fences between them. They come for the organic grocer, the trendy chalkboard shop, the local brewery, and the oyster/steak combo with a jalapeño martini at Westfall’s. But beggars? Beggars don’t come to Wallingford. This is unprecedented.
