Split-Level

by Sande Boritz Berger

  I am watching the fireflies compete with the dancing sparks, trying to memorize the sight. I’ve set the redwood table, and as we casually dine outside, I’m aware of a balmy stillness, like the calm before a raging hurricane.

  Becky and Lana are with my in-laws who, weeks ago, stopped inquiring about our weekend plans. Now when they take the girls, they practically inspect them, scrutinizing their little faces. For what? Abandonment? Neglect? Louise has begun chain-smoking Virginia Slims, causing frightening coughing fits, while Ben’s reactions to us are less subtle. He comments on my apparent weight loss and has threatened to fire Donny for his habitual lateness. Paula has recently made it a point to monitor Donny’s work ethic. She seems more focused on both our families’ finances.

  Donny and Paula look up from their plates as Charlie slices a juicy piece of steak, puts it on his fork, and offers me a taste. He watches me intently, as if I was his infant tasting strained peaches for the very first time.

  “Huh, huh, do I know? Just the way you like it, eh, kiddo?” I like when he calls me kiddo, just like my father. I nod yes, chewing carefully, aware of revelation mixed with annoyance on our respective spouses’ faces. The food is piled like a beehive on Paula’s plate. She picks, her shoulders hunched toward the checkered cloth. Exasperated, Donny returns to the grill, needing a bit more fire on his meat.

  Charlie nudges me under the table with his knee, and my hand slips down to find his for a squeeze. We are both aware of something intense brewing between Paula and Donny. We work at not shoving any affection for one another in their faces, but it seems difficult for them to look at us or even be in the same room at the same time. We’ve become marionettes controlled by the unpredictable whims of our spouses—they keep altering the rules, making the time we spend together briefer and less private.

  On a recent get-together Paula sat thumbing through my House and Garden magazine while Donny read the Times seated at the kitchen table. Charlie and I heard them moving about the kitchen around ten. We listened, while cuddled on the loveseat in the living room. Several times their voices raised in what appeared to be an eruption of a quarrel. Any second, I expected either Donny or Paula to say, “Okay, you guys, the jig is up.”

  Paula presses the napkin to her lips, blinks her eyes, and pushes herself from the table. Nearly plunging through the sliding screen, she rushes into our powder room and slams the door. We get up and follow her into the house, leaving our dinners to the hovering mosquitoes. Over the sound of faucets gushing full blast, we hear Paula’s retching. She hardly ate a thing, so there’s not much to toss. Waiting at the landing between the kitchen and my den, we try to avoid one another’s curious glances. After several minutes, Paula opens the bathroom door. Sheet white and covered in sweat, she plops down on the slate steps next to a pair of Lana’s Raggedy Ann sneakers.

  “Are you feeling all right?” I ask. “Can I get you something? Paula?”

  She doesn’t have to speak or utter a single word. A hammering silence bangs out my answer. How in the world could I have missed this? Just looking at Charlie and how he tucks his neck like a turtle to hide from me, how Donny’s expression turns to one of deep, parental concern—I know.

  Donny moves to the couch and sinks into the pillows. Charlie’s face looks worn, his forehead etched like stone. “What? What?” I ask. I am still holding a dish filled with greasy blood and soy marinade. It is one of my many well-and-tree platters, this one embossed with the Hebrew blessing: L’Chaim, which means To Life. Charlie tries to say something but has trouble forming the words, words that stomp in all of our heads:

  No, please, not this.

  SEVENTEEN

  A decision needs to be made and fast, but only one makes sense, if anything makes sense at all. How can Paula, or anyone for that matter, have a baby when she doesn’t know, for certain, who the father is?

  In the past few days there’s a type of square dance going on. I observe mouth open, while Donny and Charlie sashay and dosey doe around Paula, primed and ready to lift her the moment she falls. Utterly invisible, I am standing on the sidelines, a thirty-year-old wallflower. Where, I wonder, can I unload this sharp sensation of fear coupled with slow-burning wrath?

  On a stinking hot Saturday afternoon, we gather for an emergency visit with the Pearls. Normal families are at the beach or splashing happily in the community pool. But Donny, without asking any of us, has enlightened the senior Pearls of this latest dilemma. I question the sanity of the person I’ve become, having refused to attend this gathering and then changing my mind at the last moment.

  Ben shepherds us through the Pearls’ House of Reason into the newly decorated kitchen. I am distracted by Charlie’s intense expression, his dark, stormy eyes. I wait a few seconds before sitting down. Louise circles the table once, then pauses behind Ben’s chair. She hasn’t glanced at me, not once.

  “Well, it looks as if this has gone much too far,” Ben says, his hands folded, his knuckles bright red. He might as well have said, “I told you so.”

  Feet shuffle; a chair scrapes the floor, followed by winded sighs. Paula’s cheeks are tinted rose; she looks radiant, as innocent as Botticelli’s Mary. I blot my lipstick with a paper napkin, then begin shredding it into long pieces.

  Will someone please take goddamn responsibility, I want to shout. An icy draft blows down upon my neck from the air-conditioning ducts. When I stand to get a drink from the fridge, Louise comes over and blocks me. She looks offended that I’d take such liberties with her new GE appliances. Reality punches me in the nose. Am I bleeding? There’s a sudden urge to flee the room.

  “I’ll get it,” she says. “What is it you want?”

  “Never mind,” I answer, hurt by her tone.

  Donny announces he has something important to say. I wonder if it’s an offering: some sacrifice he’s willing to make in order for him and me to go forward, for each of us to return to our neat little culde-sac lives. If he does, I might vomit all over this sparkling new terra cotta tile.

  “It is highly unlikely for this to be my child,” he says, with starched confidence. His statement falls just short of bragging. To stuff down a scream, I envision a pool of Donny’s sperm swimming breaststrokes inside Paula before changing their squiggly minds, reversing and swimming away. “We haven’t been together in a long time.”

  Paula purses her lips to catch one trickling tear, while Charlie steadies his gaze on a bowl of overripe bananas.

  “Charlie, guess that leaves you,” I say, tapping both feet rapidly under the table like Lana. My nerves have traveled to my bladder, but I can’t leave the room. Because I stopped having sex with Donny when I first made love to Charlie, I knew it didn’t necessarily mean he’d curtailed all relations with Paula. What I can’t bear imagining is if I was only an aphrodisiac for their own marital sex. Even if they were just going through the motions, it would feel like betrayal. With Donny, I was as faithful as a faithless spouse could be.

  “It is a possibility,” Charlie murmurs, looking only at me. I detect a dollop of pride, as if he needs to believe this could only be his child. I manage a sardonic smile, while my guts tumble like rocks down a mountainside.

  “What now, Donny?” I say. “Where’s your guide? The what-to-do-if-you-knock-up-your-own-wife chapter.”

  “Be grateful, this didn’t happen to you,” Louise snaps back. With a clenched fist, I push my belly and feel the hollow sac made mush by Becky and Lana. Why am I the one on display? Paula’s pregnant, but now I’m the tawdry one—me, a woman who slept with only two men in thirty years. Me? Not exactly Jezebel.

  “I think we’ve all learned a lesson here,” Donny says, ignoring my outburst. “Anyway, I hope we can support Paula through this ordeal and remain great friends.”

  What is he talking about? I don’t want new friends. I scrape my chair and head for the nearest bathroom, wondering if it’s okay, or if I should leave a dollar in the bread basket on Louise’s table.

  I return to find
Louise serving coffee and apricot Danish. Motherly, as always, I hear her direct new concern toward Paula: “Please dear, eat a little something.” Paula and I have little to say, while the men seamlessly change the subject to golf, reporting their handicaps. I sit and stare, hearing everything and, as if underwater, absolutely nothing. There’s a high frequency buzzing in my ears, like the sawing of an old, sturdy tree. No one yells Timber!

  The clinic changes Paula’s appointment from Saturday morning to this Wednesday. Charlie had originally planned to be there, but now, because of an emergency settlement talk, he can’t get away. Donny offers to take Paula for the procedure, so it won’t have to be put off another week. She says she can’t remember if she’s three or five weeks late, which starts me wondering about where we were, what we did, when, and with whom.

  After picking up some groceries, I wait for the girls’ camp bus, then rush over to Paula’s to relieve her babysitter of Ricki and Ross. I try desperately to keep myself busy. I rearrange Paula’s cabinets, vacuum her living room, and downstairs, in the musty laundry room, I fold a huge wash that’s been neglected in the dryer. While smoothing out one of Charlie’s wrinkled shirts with my hands, my knees buckle to the floor. I begin crying and can’t seem to stop. Tossed in a large plastic basket are Paula’s lacy bras and panties twisted around her kids’ socks and pajamas—a multitude of fabrics stained by a past and waiting to be worn in the future. The future terrifies me. All is about to change and that can’t mean a return to normal. Normal no longer exists. Kneeling among these formless clothes, clothes of another family, a sharp pain spikes my jaw. I feel like I no longer have a family. I blow my nose on one of Charlie’s crumpled handkerchiefs. Maybe I’ll dye their laundry blue, or pink, thinking about the baby again.

  The banging of chairs and bickering above my head reminds me I’m supposed to be on duty. I am the woman watching her lover’s children, while his wife is comforted by her husband, as she undergoes an abortion for the child that no one knows is whose.

  Upstairs, on Paula’s kitchen table, the Oreo package has been ripped wide open. Becky and Lana, in a shocking display of servitude, are separating the cookies for Ricki and Ross, who lick the sugary filling before handing them back to them. The black ring around Lana’s mouth tells me this has gone on too long.

  “Hand the bag over, right now!” I throw the entire package in the garbage. Have they learned about servitude from me? I imagine them as teenage concubines popping grapes in their boyfriends’ mouths. I send the children to the basement and pace the kitchen—filling in for the expectant father. The phone rings. It’s Charlie. I’d nearly forgotten—this is his house. I’m startled, angered, thrilled to hear his voice.

  “They’re not back yet, Charlie. Call later. I’m watching the kids, you remember me: sturdy, reliable Alex.”

  “I called to speak to you. I knew you’d be there.”

  All I want him to say is somehow this mess will disappear. And one day, a hundred years from now, life will be normal and terribly boring. I’d settle for boring.

  “Alex, I’ve gone over this in my head, and yes, I slept with Paula, but we were together only—”

  “Listen, you were making love to her and me at the same time, maybe on the same night. Charlie, I know I’m hopelessly naïve, but picturing this scenario makes me ill. My voice falters, but I refuse to cry. There is an amoeba of pride left inside me, struggling, though alive.

  “It was something we did, I did, in order to juggle, to keep both relationships going. You and Donny might have done the same exact thing, but you chose not to.”

  “Right, and now Donny’s punishing me.”

  “Are you saying it’s over?”

  I’m startled by my own cynical laughter. “Is what over, Charlie? Or maybe I should say who?” I tabulate the days, weeks, and months like scoring a round in Scrabble. “In case you didn’t know, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, the game has been forfeited.”

  “We can’t just walk away,” Charlie whispers, which sounds like a lyric from a bittersweet Cole Porter tune. I see us projected on a movie screen, two aging profiles on the telephone, a scratchy silver image split down the middle. “Paula and Donny aren’t blind, Alex. At some point, I think they got scared, thinking they might lose us.”

  “Well, now there’s nothing to fear.”

  “Really? No, I think we’re all pretty terrified.”

  “Sorry, I have to go.” I hear the rattle of the automatic garage door, the children running up the stairs, tripping, climbing, tripping some more. “Call back later if you want to speak to your wife.”

  I drag the phone cord to the front door and watch Donny and Paula walking up the path. Donny bends down to pick up the newspaper and Paula squints, lifting her flushed face toward me. She seems rejuvenated by the ordeal, not as I imagined she’d look—drained and forlorn.

  “You okay?” I ask, holding the door for Paula. She brushes past me and heads for her kids, who are with mine in the kitchen.

  “Just a headache,” Paula answers. A headache? Why isn’t she doubled over in cramps? Her hand waves in front of my face, as if to say: dismissed. She is erasing me like a drawing on an Etch A Sketch.

  Donny and I lock eyes. “So, how did it go?” I ask.

  “I guess she didn’t tell you,” he says, peering into the dark hallway. “She’s decided to have her baby.” What? He might as well have said, while examining her, they discovered she has a penis.

  When I step back from Donny, I nearly stumble over Paula’s handbag tossed on the floor.

  “But she can’t have a baby! Especially, this baby. I thought it was talked out and—”

  “She’s changed her mind. Alex, sorry, you have no say here. This is her decision. It turns out, Paula is anti-abortion. It’s a very big deal to her.”

  “And what about Charlie? When was she planning to tell him?”

  I look down at the receiver in my hand. The loud dial tone hums in the air. “Who was that on the phone?” Donny asks.

  “What? Sorry, but that’s none of your business. I am no longer your business.”

  Donny shrugs, walks past me, and surveys the living room. “I guess we should hang out until after dinner to see how she feels. It’s been a rough day.”

  “Hey, know what? You stay, Donny. You don’t need me here. I’ll take the girls home with me, where they belong. Becky, Lana, come on, we’re leaving!”

  “Have it your way,” Donny says, with a laser-like glare.

  “If only that were possible.”

  Hands trembling, I dig my car keys from a collapsing pile of dusty magazines near the door. A scary Richard Nixon stares at me from last August’s cover of Time magazine. He looks like a liar who’s been defeated, downtrodden, and terribly old.

  Too exhausted at bath time, I bring Becky and Lana into the shower with me for the very first time. For some reason, Lana can’t take her eyes off my vagina. She crouches down to look at her sister for comparison. Then she begins clowning around, slipping and sliding on purpose, and banging heads with Becky, who pinches Lana on her butt to make her stop. Next comes this ferocious hair pulling, a scene out of Saturday night wrestling. I grab them by their wrists and dry them off before sending them to their rooms. Tired, I choose not to probe for what might be brewing in their heads.

  I hear their muffled whimpers but wait until they fall asleep before I go cover them. Sometimes I’m resigned to let things happen, to watch our lives unfold as if I were roosting under a tree, shielded from the harsh glare of sunlight. Now though, I’m stuffed with remorse, thinking I’ve damaged us all in some irreparable way. Just yesterday my grandmother visited me in the middle of the night. But instead of the usual smile and warmth when she entered my dream, I felt an icy draft rush through the room—then a painful sting, instead of her tender kiss stamped upon my cheek.

  Two nights later, I’m at the counter making bologna and cheese sandwiches for camp. I keep checking the clock, wondering what C
harlie is doing now. Is he bathing his kids or lovingly tending to Paula? Perhaps they are looking through catalogues, picking out lead-free furniture for the new nursery. My suggestion is they move Ricki and Ross down to the dungeon, far from the new baby.

  Donny goes about his business, meticulously dusting his opera collection with a flannel cloth. We have not spent this much time in the same room in months. In the past, we were adept at filling most silences with talk about the factory, the usual complaints, or sweet stories about Lana and Becky—a clever line, or some remarkable plateau in their growth. Now, without a plan for Saturday night, we have very little to say.

  Occasionally, Donny rises from his recliner to shout warnings to the girls, who keep sneaking out of their beds. Maybe they are listening at the top of the stairs for something to pierce the bloated silence. I secretly love the sound of their tiny feet scampering above our heads, causing the brass fixture to sway, leaving dust on the kitchen table.

  Donny can’t get through the evening without making a call to the Bells. “Let’s see how things are going,” he announces. Of course I don’t stop him, not because I share his concern, but because I know Charlie will be on the other end. I bang around our kitchen, brooding. I fantasize jumping in my car and driving to the Howard Johnson’s down the road. Why not call Charlie and ask him to meet me there? But it’s not sex I want, no, not at all. Show them how you feel about me, I want to shout, but Donny’s already hung up the phone. I sink into a chair and pluck the petals from a wilted yellow rose. Donny sits cowboy-style, his face inches in front of mine, his mouth taut. “Everything sounds under control over there. What do you suppose we should do?”

  I wince, surprisingly revolted at feeling wedged in and close to him.

  “You want me to direct you? You must be kidding.” As I attempt to rise, Donny grabs my wrist. I stare at his scarlet knuckles digging into me. “Let go.”

  “Forget him. Forget all of it. It’s over,” Donny says, sounding pleased.