Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

by Lorna Landvik

  I shuddered at the mention of that awful night.

  “I just thought you would have seen Dad in a vision or something.”

  “Oh, Bryan, I hardly ever see visions anymore.” (Actually, I was surprised and somewhat disappointed that I hadn’t an inkling of Paul’s death.) “I think the last time I absolutely knew something before it happened was when I guessed my Secret Santa present was going to be a five-pound box of chocolates and it was.”

  Bryan allowed himself a little laugh before the gears shifted and he let out a gasp.

  “How did it happen, Mom? How did my dad die?” The years dropped away; by the sound of his voice, my son was no longer thirty-three, but eight.

  “His heart,” I said. “On the golf course this morning. Cynthia said he’d just bogeyed the second hole when he sank to his knees as if he’d decided to pray.”

  “Aw, Ma,” said Bryan, his voice choked.

  That’s when I lost it too. I had been stunned when Cynthia called to tell me the news, and remained stunned when I called my other sons, but now the novocaine was wearing off and the nerve was exposed. There was something so lost in Bryan’s voice that I felt lost too, and I always cry when I’m lost.

  I managed to compose myself enough to give him the funeral details, and after hanging up the phone, I immediately went to my place of comfort and refuge: the kitchen, and in particular, the refrigerator.

  I’m not proud of my reliance on food during times of crisis. I’m a minister, for Christ’s sake (that pun is intended)—why does ice cream always come before prayer?

  Sitting at the kitchen table excavating rocky road with a wooden spoon, I allowed myself the luxury of pouting over my eating. Why could my spiritual hunger (surely the hardest hunger to assuage) be abated, and yet my physical hunger was rarely satisfied? I was way beyond voluptuous now; my hips looked as if I was wearing a hoop skirt (an especially attractive look in jeans), and my butt—why, it was my own private subcontinent. It could have its own flag and constitution.

  I try to avoid rear views of my body at all costs. The last time I looked I was especially saddened that even my shoulders had gotten fat. They were padded and puffy, and my bra straps cut little ravines through them.

  I could have gone on and on (like my thighs, ha-ha), but then my mind flashed on Paul and the smile he’d worn as I did a little strip tease for him on our wedding night.

  “All mine,” he had said, his grin as crooked as his bow tie. “I can’t believe you’re all mine.”

  He actually rubbed his palms together the way my grandfather would when dinner was set on the table.

  Paul. He was so big and strong, so manly. My mind swirled with memories: of him yanking up his swim trunks after he climbed atop the dock we’d been diving off and then, making sure no one was looking, pulling them down and back up in one fast, furious move, flashing me. I pulled up my bikini top then, but I was caught by another swimmer, a teenage boy whose eyes were as big and buggy as fried eggs, and Paul laughed so hard he fell off the dock. I remembered the first time I cut his hair and how I liked to run my hand up the back of his slightly flat head, his short (Paul always kept his hair short, even in the shaggy sixties) thick hair standing up between my fingers like dark brown grass. I recalled ironing a white dress shirt for Paul and watching him shrug it over his shoulders, and how delicious the smell of starch and aftershave was to me. I thought about how one time I’d looked out the back window to watch him having a sword fight with Dave, using the plastic swords they’d gotten at the Renaissance Fair. And the sex . . . I’d thought the sex was the foundation of our marriage, but obviously that was destined to crumble, seeing as Paul was building foundations all over the place.

  It took a while, but after the divorce we’d become friends. We weren’t great friends; he was sort of a second-tier friend, like an old high school pal you’d occasionally skipped class with or copied homework from, the kind who always brought back pleasant memories.

  Poor Paul. Poor Cynthia—I think her love made him a better man than he had been. Poor Dave and Bryan and Michael; they are, as Michael said, half orphans now.

  I dressed—I had an appointment with a pregnant teenager in a half hour at the church—and went outside looking for a shoulder I could have a quick cry on, feeling comforted that there were so many shoulders, all within walking distance, that I could cry on.

  Grant’s were the first I saw. He was standing in his front yard watering his rhododendron bush.

  His back was to me, and I stood on my steps for a while, watching him. He wore shorts imprinted with smiley faces and a broad-brimmed straw hat, and he was drawing figure eights in the air with the water from the hose.

  I don’t recall moving, but Grant sensed my presence and turned around.

  “Audrey!” he shouted, and I realized I was crying.

  “Paul died,” I said as we both ran toward the short hedge that divided our property. “He had a heart attack this morning.”

  Grant jumped over the hedge, and the shoulder that I had so badly needed was mine for the taking.

  “Poor Paul—he was only fifty-eight,” I said, my cheek pressed against the ridge that was Grant’s clavicle. “He used to tell me he was going to live to be a hundred, and I always believed him—he was so big and strong.”

  I stood there in the shelter of Grant’s thin arms, crying for my ex-husband who, like so many men, wasn’t so big and strong after all. Their hearts couldn’t keep up with all that was asked of them and were crushed by all that gristle and muscle and testosterone and type-A blood pressure.

  “Come on inside, sweetheart,” said Grant, “and I’ll make you a cocktail.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’ve got to go to work.” I inhaled a deep breath and took a half step backward. “How do I look?”

  “Thank heaven for waterproof mascara,” said Grant, pressing a thumb under my eye. “There. Nothing less than stunning.”

  “That’s my motto,” I said gamely, and after accepting one more quick hug, I got in my car to see what help I could offer a teenager who was with child and desperately wished she wasn’t.

  “I WOULD HAVE HAD AN ABORTION, but I didn’t even know I was pregnant until I was almost six months,” said the fifteen-year-old, who swiveled back and forth in the suede chair, her arms crossed over the basketball-shaped mound her sleeveless Mickey Mouse T-shirt stretched across.

  Dumb kid, I thought, very unpastorly, but you’d be surprised at the unpastorly thoughts that found purchase inside a pastor’s head—at least this pastor’s head.

  “So how far along are you now?” I asked with what I hoped was a concerned yet gentle smile.

  Her head tilted, Cara looked up at me, contempt and pity hardening her pretty, country-girl features. You could tell she didn’t believe that there are no stupid questions, and that I had just asked one.

  “Far enough to know I still don’t want it.”

  I knew Cara’s aunt Diane; she was a regular parishioner and the reason Cara was seeing me. The girl had been sent from her home in Wisconsin to live with Diane, who asked (or, more than likely, forced) Cara to come to me for counseling. This was our first meeting.

  “So your aunt tells me you’re giving it to a couple to adopt?”

  “No, I’m going to sell her to the circus.”

  I leveled my gaze at this little smart-ass. “To whom? The acrobats? Tightrope walkers? The elephant trainers?”

  She picked up the pace of her swiveling, irritated that I had horned in on her little joke. “Whatever.”

  The word whatever is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. It’s not witty, it’s not clever, it’s smug and lazy, and this morning I had no patience for it. I turned in my own swivel chair and stared at the window for a few moments, my back toward the surly young girl.

  I had opened it earlier but kept the blinds drawn, and they shuddered as a breeze rippled through. I knew it was totally unprofessional, totally noncompassionate to turn away from her like that,
but I just needed to look at something other than a teenager’s sneer (the worst kind, I think).

  Cara was wily; when I turned around, I was surprised to see she was out of her chair and heading toward the door.

  “Hey, wait a second,” I said. “Where are you going?”

  “What do you care?” she asked.

  “I do care,” I said, ashamed of myself and my childish behavior. “I care a lot, but I certainly understand why you would think I don’t. That was very rude of me to turn away from you like that. I’m sorry.” The girl was at the door, her hand reaching for the doorknob. “Please!” I said, nearly shouting. “I’ve had a rough morning. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

  The girl hesitated for a moment. With her back turned toward me, you couldn’t see her pregnancy at all, and she looked like a teenager whose biggest worry was passing her driver’s permit test. Then she slowly turned around, her big belly preceding the rest of her by nearly a foot.

  Walking toward me, she kept her eyes on the toes of her heavy Doc Marten boots, as if they were headlights and the journey from the door to the chair was a long, dark one.

  She sat down on the chair, her eyes still downcast, and asked, “Did you ever think maybe I had a rough morning, too? Did you ever think that lately every single fucking morning is a rough one?”

  “I didn’t,” I said, sincere apology in my voice. “I didn’t and I’m sorry.”

  A piece of blond hair had slipped out of its little bow barrette, and Cara tucked it behind her ears. “Aren’t you going to yell at me for swearing?”

  I shook my head. “There are a lot of things I yell at people for, but swearing’s not one of them.”

  “What is?”

  I inspected the ceiling tile for a moment as I thought. “Well, when my sons were home, I used to yell at them all the time for finishing the ice cream. I used to hide the ice cream, and when they found it and ate it, I yelled.”

  “I don’t like ice cream,” said Cara.

  “You don’t like ice cream? Is there something the matter with you?”

  A tiny smile played on the young girl’s face, and a little dimple puckered her cheek.

  “I don’t like chocolate either. Anytime I got any—like in my Easter basket or in my Christmas stocking—I gave it to my little brother.”

  “That must have made you pretty popular with him.”

  The girl nodded, and for the first time I saw a glint of tears in her eyes.

  “How old is your brother?”

  “Fourteen. He’s only eleven months younger than I am. His name is Sam. He’s a skateboarder. And really into hip hop. He’s like the coolest kid in Eau Claire.”

  “Sounds like you think a lot of him.”

  Cara nodded. “I do. I miss him a lot, even though he’s mad at me now. Almost as mad as my parents for, you know, getting p.g.”

  I shifted my weight in my chair and folded my hands. I could tell that she wanted to talk now, and I wasn’t about to get in the way of that by opening up my own big yap.

  “Like I wanted to get pregnant! Like that was my goal or something! Get a job at the Dairy Queen, try out for cheerleading, and oh yeah, get pregnant the first time you have sex!”

  “It was your first time?” I asked, ignoring my own advice to keep quiet.

  “First and only time,” said Cara. Her chin quivered, and I could see the determined effort she made to stop a chain reaction. “I had liked him, like, all year, and finally he notices that I actually do exist and we went out a few times—he drives—and then one night his parents weren’t home and he invited me over and made me dinner! It was like pizza and a salad, but still, he had candles and everything and I felt so cool, so grown-up, you know? And then we started making out and he was telling me how much he loved me and how beautiful I was, and the next thing I know, he’s got his thing in me.”

  Her voice shuddered. Her eyes were full of a betrayal and pain a fifteen-year-old shouldn’t have to feel.

  “I was so scared, but I pretended I liked it, you know? I didn’t want him not to like me, stupid idiot that I am. So now I’m going to have a baby and he’s going to Michigan State.”

  “He’s not taking any responsibility for the baby? Because you can force him, you know. You can take him to court.”

  Bitterness colored her laugh until it really wasn’t a laugh anymore. “I don’t want to have anything to do with him. I hate him. I hate this baby because it’s part of him, even though I know it’s not the baby’s fault.”

  “Your parents, did they—”

  “My parents didn’t do anything but throw me out of the house when I started to show—when I started to be an embarrassment to them! I mean, my dad’s like Mr. Big Shot Businessman—Mr. I Own the Hardware Hank and the Ben Franklin Store. He couldn’t have his pregnant, slutty daughter scaring away customers!”

  The dam broke then and she leaned forward, cupping her face in her hands with the bitten nails and crying the way a scared and pregnant teenager has every right to cry. I went to put my arms around her, and the way she welcomed them made me sorry I hadn’t offered a hug a long time ago. She was starving for contact, for consolation, for her back to be patted and her hair smoothed.

  “You didn’t say anything about God,” she said after she had depleted my Kleenex box. She rubbed her swollen eyes with her fingers. “I didn’t want to come here because I thought all you’d talk about was God and how I had sinned.”

  “I’m kind of a funny minister,” I said. “I don’t talk a lot about sin. I think it’s more important to talk about what comes after—how we can make things better. And you already are making things better—you’re giving a baby to a couple who can’t have one of their own! That’s such a huge gift, Cara. That’s more than making lemonade from lemons—that’s making a lemon meringue pie, or even a bakery full of lemon meringue pies!”

  The girl laughed. It was a wan little laugh, but still, I was glad to have given her at least a few seconds of cheer.

  “As far as the God part comes in, I want you to know that I’m here for you whenever you need to talk, and if you feel God in these talks, that’s great. My main goal is to help you, Cara.”

  “I could use help,” she said, her voice trembling.

  “Good,” I said, smiling at this lovely, brave girl with the little-girl barrettes in her hair. “Could you use some lunch too? I’m starving.”

  The smile that broke out on her tearstained face was quickly extinguished when she looked at her watch. “I’d love to,” she said, “only my aunt’s picking me up at noon. We’re going to a Lamaze class.”

  “We’ll do it another time, then,” I promised. “I’m always up for lunch.”

  Cara stood, locking her fingers together and stretching her arms out in front of her in a classic pose of bashfulness. “Thanks a lot . . .”

  “Audrey. Call me Audrey.”

  “I’ve never called a pastor by their first name before.”

  “Whenever anyone calls me Pastor Forrest I never know who they’re talking to.”

  Cara smiled. She had beautiful white teeth—homecoming queen teeth and I wondered if that title had been forever forfeited.

  “Well . . . should I come here next week, then?”

  “Please do,” I said. “I look forward to seeing you again.”

  The girl flushed. “Thanks . . . me too.” With sort of a shrug, she turned toward the door, then back toward me again.

  “Pastor—um, Audrey, when I first came in here, remember we were talking about rough mornings? And you said you had one? What happened?”

  My heart suddenly doubled its weight. “Oh. Well . . . my ex-husband died. The father of my children.”

  Cara bit her lip. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  And then she reached out and hugged me, and I hugged her back, feeling how, except for that basketball pressing against me, she was so small and delicate. But I knew inside that small and delicate frame there was a strong, willful girl who had
the grace to ask about my rough morning in the midst of all of hers, and I thanked God silently for being in the room, and I thanked him again for following me home, for when I drove the car up the driveway, all the Angry Housewives, probably alerted by Grant, were there to offer their condolences, their hugs, and a pitcher of margaritas that Grant had whipped up.

  January 1998

  Dear Mama,

  Wade just passed by my office on his way to the bathroom (he goes to the bathroom a lot lately) and asked, “Are you coming to bed soon?” I said, “As soon as I write to Mama,” and he stood there in his underwear and then, nodding, said softly, “Tell her hey from me.” So hey from Wade, who understands my need to write to a woman he’s never met, a woman who’s been dead for over thirty-five years.

  Snow is falling fast and furious. It’s like the angels have gotten restless and are throwing a wild pillow fight. I’m up here writing by cozy lamplight, the old cashmere afghan Wade gave me eons ago spread over my lap.

  Beau said that he thinks I’m more a northerner now than a southerner, and I think he’s right. When I say “home” now, I think of here, this place of windchill factors and rowdy angel pillow fights.

  I’m blathering on and on about the weather and such because I’m afraid to tell you the big news. I’m afraid because whatever I write down makes it more real, and . . . oh, Mama, I’ve got a sister! Well, a half sister, of course, but there’s someone on earth who has the same daddy I do! Or did! (Excuse me, I thought I was cried out, but here come the waterworks again.)

  Okay, here’s one of the biggest stories of my life.

  Back in New Orleans, when I finally came clean to him about my past, particularly my past with you, Mama, Beau got the idea to go looking for my father.

  “I didn’t tell you, Mama,” he said, “because I didn’t want you to say no, and even if you didn’t say no, I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”