Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  When had Marge been Lucy? James could hardly imagine it now: Marge as a very young woman, new to life’s rough parts, bumbling through them with her marijuana and her line drawings. He missed her. He missed every version of her, though technically all the versions were still inside of her somewhere, and she was right here in the house with him, just within his reach.

  And yet she was so far. Lucy was gone now and Marge was so far.

  And then Marge was moving. Because if she were still, even for one second, the falling apart would start. She was boiling a pot of water and cooking a box of pasta. She was carrying the boy to the table, sitting him atop a large couch pillow, forking small bits of food for him. She was making up a bed on the couch—right next to James, and yet so far away from James!—with the softest blankets she could find, ones that her mother had brought from Connecticut that they had never used, James favoring the ratty, heavy quilts over the plush, frivolously fleecy blankets—tucking their edges lovingly into the cracks. Did the boy need anything? Did he want to watch the television? He could watch only one show, if so. The boy didn’t answer, possibly not understanding her or possibly too terrified to talk, but she went on asking him questions, setting him up. How could she be doing all this now? James himself was paralyzed, his hands glued to his sides. But then again here was the difference between him and Marge: Marge was the glue and his hands were glued to his sides. Marge did things. He sat in one place, merely thinking them.

  Before she went upstairs to bed, Marge said to James with her eyes: You’re staying down here. And: I’m staying for the boy.

  In the middle of the night, Julian peed. James felt the hot liquid move under his leg. He jolted, bringing his fists to his eyes with nocturnal instinct. He flicked on the light to see the wet blanket, Julian’s wet eyes. “Ohhhh no. Julian? What happened, kiddo? Did we have an accident?” This was what adults said to kids, right? They said “we”? And they said “accident”?

  James had a sudden and distinct memory of being four or five years old himself, being so scared to ask his father to take him to the bathroom during church that he had wet himself. The fear of his father was greater than the fear of warm liquid on his leg. He had had the feeling that he was stuck in a body that wasn’t his, needing things he didn’t want it to need, and that he was all alone in the world.

  Was this how Julian felt now, looking up at him with his big, guilty, fearful eyes? Had he simply been too frightened to wake James up to ask him to use the bathroom? Or was this just something little kids did, something normal? Either way, James desperately wanted him to feel okay. But how did one make a child feel okay? Especially if the child could not understand him?

  “Don’t worry, kiddo,” he said. He pulled Julian up by the armpits. He walked him to the bathroom, flicked on the light with his elbow, set him down on the tile, and inched off his little pants. “One leg out,” he said, trying to say something that sounded like something Marge would say. “Okay, two legs out.” The pants were miniature little chinos, khaki in color and now half dark with pee. James put them in a pile in the corner, along with Julian’s underwear, which had green frogs on them. “Okay, arms up,” James said. Julian’s arms went up. He pulled off his little striped shirt. His little arms were cold and thin, and James didn’t know exactly how to handle him.

  Should he go get Marge? No way. This wasn’t a hard thing. And he couldn’t ask her for anything, not now.

  “We’d better get this water running,” he said, as if narrating his every move would somehow make the boy more open to it. “We’ll make it the perfect temperature. Not too hot, okay? Here, Julian, you stay right here for just one more second, I’ll get the water going, and we’ll have a nice hot bath, okay?”

  Julian’s face looked as if it might crack into tears at any moment, but he held his lips tight and his face tight and he nodded. He was shivering, and James realized simultaneously how tiny and vulnerable he was and how much he looked like Raul.

  When the water got warm enough James plugged the drain and lifted Julian into the bath. He felt nervous and awkward, like someone on the first day of a job. Trying to go through motions he had never gone through before with some sort of gracefulness or knowledge that he did not have. He imagined Marge watching him, like a boss, assessing his every move.

  “Here we go,” he said. He scrubbed Julian’s body. He told him to close his eyes when he did the shampoo. He remembered how much it stung to get soap in your eyes. He remembered being at a friend’s house when he was small and taking a bath and having the friend’s mother tell him to close his eyes. He had never been told by anyone to close his eyes before. His mother had never told him to close his eyes. He had simply let his eyes sting, then rubbed them with his fists. He gently washed Julian’s soft flop of dark hair with Marge’s lavender shampoo.

  James had always wondered, especially when Marge was pregnant, if he would be able to comfort a child in the way he had always wanted to be comforted. He wondered about his ability for selflessness, and he wondered about the feeling of his own touch. Would he be able to touch someone small with care and lightness? Would he be able to kiss a child’s head? Would he be able to conjure these actions out of nowhere, having never received them from his own parents? Would he be able to develop the language of loving a child? Was it something you could learn?

  James pulled the plug from the cooling bath, pulled Julian out by the armpits, wrapped him in a towel that Marge had just washed. In the doorway between the bedroom and the bathroom, in the little stream of light that came through the stained glass window at the door, Julian’s head tilted into the little space between his shoulder and his neck, the space where Marge’s head always went when they lay in bed. The spot was like a little portal for affection, a way into intimacy. It was the space on the body that best held the head of another human. He and Marge had even talked about it: I love putting my head in your nook, she had said when they were younger. When had she stopped saying that? Would she ever say it again? James pulled the wet sheets from the couch and covered it with a fresh towel, and they lay back down, this time with Julian’s head resting on James’s thigh. They were warm from the steam of the bath, and the boy was asleep almost instantly. James’s eyes, in contrast, remained open, glued to the painting whose colors had shattered his life.

  Marge woke at six thirty on the dot, like she did. James’s eyes, which had finally closed at some ungodly hour of the morning, shot open when he heard her feet on the stairs. Look at her. Wafts of kind brown bangs. Had he not noticed this before, these bangs? Had he been so blinded by Lucy that he had not noticed that his wife’s hair had changed?

  He pulled Julian’s head up off his leg and got up to meet Marge in the kitchen. She ignored him, went about her aggressive business of making breakfast, packing herself a lunch, then setting up Tupperware full of things for Julian to eat. James watched her carefulness carefully. Should he say something? Should he go to her?

  “Did he sleep?” Marge said. Her back to him.

  “Yes.”

  She opened a cupboard, closed it again.

  “Did you sleep?” she said.

  “Not much,” he said.

  “Good,” she said.

  “He went to the bathroom,” James said, feeling a wave of shame pass through him.

  “What do you mean?” Marge said. She was cutting the plastic off a pack of breakfast sausages; her knife paused like a backslash in the air.

  “I mean he peed. In his pants. I put a towel on the couch.”

  Suddenly Marge let out a spurt of a laugh. It almost frightened James, it was so unexpected. The spurt became a throaty howl. Her face flew backward as the laugh grew in volume and size, a genuine, deep, hearty laugh.

  “What?” James said defensively. But he saw that she was not going to stop her laughing, that she was going to keep going until her stomach hurt, and this was when he loved her most, when she was laughing until her stomach hurt, saying, Stop making me laugh, seriously, stop maki
ng me laugh! It was infectious, and James began to feel it, too, the hilarity of the situation, of life, and of putting towels on couches. He wanted to make sure Marge would keep laughing, that they would keep laughing together, but just when he thought he might say something else funny, he saw that Marge was collapsing over the sink, and that her laughter was no longer laughter. Marge had gone straight from laughing to crying, and now her body was heaving, her hands covering her face.

  James went up to her and put his hands on her back. He willed them to be the hands Marge used to know and love, hands that could heal her, she used to say, but she shrugged him off.

  “Why’d you do it, James?”

  James just looked at her, shook his head. He was only mildly aware that his mouth was open, his lips wagging.

  “No,” she said. “I already know why. I know just how this goes. The woman gets older, uglier, gets pregnant and loses the baby, still has the stretch marks from it, and my hair is getting limp, James! My boobs are limp! And I’m a nag! Oh, fuck.”

  James was still shaking his head, harder now. “No, Marge. That’s not it. None of that is it. Not at all.”

  She looked up at him, her gray, wet eyes as hard and shiny as marbles.

  “Why do you get to be the genius?” she said.

  “What?” he asked, incredulous.

  “You get to live on some other genius planet,” she said. “You get to operate in this completely other world. While I’m stuck here in this one, with this fucking . . . sausage! In its fucking plastic!” She waggled the Styrofoam tray she was holding; it splattered a bit.

  He tried to touch her arm but again she rejected him, snapping her shoulder away from his hand.

  “I’m right here with you,” James tried to say. “I am. I’m here. Just like this, and always, remember?”

  “You haven’t been here for years,” Marge said. “Even before this. Before that . . . girl. You were off looking at art while I was working in a cubicle. The place where I work? Where I am about to go right now to make money to pay our rent? It has foam walls. Did you know that? Did you know that the place where I work has foam walls? And I use things called Post-its? And there is carpet? No, because you’ve never been there. You’ve never had to go there. And I am happy and I am okay and I keep going every day because that’s how it is, James. That’s how we’ve worked this out. You write when the inspiration strikes you. You fuck a girl when the inspiration strikes you. And I go back to the foam walls and swallow it.”

  She began to cry with gusto now, her nose running and the back of her wrist wiping at the snot.

  “You know what the real kicker is?” she said, the knife in her hand bouncing. “I gave up all the things you loved about me to keep us together—my art, my sense of adventure, all of it. I thought I could pick up all the slack, that I could save you, that I could save us. And where has it gotten me? It got me to you not loving me anymore.”

  “I never asked you to give up anything, Marge, and you haven’t lost me, I’m right here . . .”

  “But you did! You did ask me. You asked me with every painting you bought. You asked me with every bill you didn’t pay. You boxed me out, James. There wasn’t room for two of us to follow every one of our fucking whims.”

  “Marge, no. I still love you. I never stopped and I never will stop. You’re the very best person I know.” He was crying now, too. He wanted to hug her so tightly that all of the sadness would come into him, but he knew she wouldn’t let him.

  Then, like she was so good at doing, she pulled herself together with a few quick strokes. She pulled her hair out of its band and pulled it back up again. She pulled in her breath. She pulled down her sweater. And then she pointed to the living room with her knife.

  “That boy is all alone,” she said crisply.

  “I know,” James said.

  “We can’t keep him here,” she said.

  “We have to,” he said.

  “When did you get so sure?” Marge said, shaking her head.

  “Just until Engales is out,” James said.

  “You have never been sure of anything in your entire life,” Marge said, her teeth clenching. And with desperate suddenness, she turned away from him, toward her sausages. She cut the skins that bound their feet together and they landed, sighing out into the pan.

  PART FIVE

  FUCK SUNSETS

  Lupa Consuelo walks out of the Rising Sun just before sunset. She doesn’t look back at the building; she shouldn’t. She crosses the street, crosses herself. She thinks about Tia Consuelo and Baby Consuelo and Mama Consuelo: all the people who shape her life outside of that place, the people—the women—who make her life a living and breathing thing that means anything at all. She’s on her way to buy soup supplies, then to the Laundromat to pick up Baby C from Tia C, then back home to cook for all of them. It’s one of God’s little gifts, she thinks, that tonight is her night to make soup: something to set her sights on. Something outside the Rising Sun. God’s gift, or else Mama Consuelo’s blessed order.

  Lupa feels bad about it, she does. She feels bad for everybody she’s leaving behind, all the sorry souls who landed themselves in that place—God help them—a place she’d never have to set foot in again but where the patients have to stay, in twin beds that she happens to know are as hard as rocks. And though it was her final straw—or what did they call it, her Achilles’ heel?—she feels especially bad for what had happened with Raul Engales.

  Sure, she could have seen it coming. With that too-smart-for-his-own-good Bennett and that poor crippled soul, Raul, who hadn’t wanted any visitors anyway. She shouldn’t have allowed it, let alone encouraged it. These were the things they taught you to watch out for, to stop before they started. But what was it that they said? Hindsight twenty-twenty? Yes, hindsight twenty-twenty. How could she have stopped it before it started? Even if she had been on duty like she should have been, instead of sneaking a cigarette in the stairwell, where she always sneaked cigarettes, three a day, max, how could she have prevented the incident? The incident that caused her supervisor, Mary Spinoza, to do what Mary Spinoza did best: fire dedicated employees of the Rising Sun—she had already canned four since she came on as manager in January—like a shotgun going off, BAM! Just like that and Lupa didn’t have a job. BAM! Baby C didn’t have a new school uniform. BAM! Raul Engales would be stuck there for another month and moved to the Floor for the Potentially Violent, where Lupa happened to know one of the patients had killed another patient with a ballpoint pen, back in ’78. If anyone would have listened, Lupa could have told them that Raul Engales was as clean as a bar of soap, as violent as a fucking hummingbird, and that it was James Bennett’s fault—she had liked James Bennett, she had, but from the information she had gotten from Darcy Phillips afterward, she knew it was James’s fault: James had worn the wrong suit on the wrong day and messed with the wrong man.

  Sometimes you wore the wrong suit on the wrong day. Sometimes you smoked your cigarette in the stairway at the wrong time. Sometimes it’s fate, and whatever happens happens, and God looks down on you and smiles and says: Lupa C? You’re going to be as fine as a sunny day.

  Lupa disobeys herself at the last second, looks back at the easternmost window on the third floor. She thinks she sees Engales’s crippled shadow, but she can’t be sure. She had taken a liking to Raul Engales. She had liked his meanness mixed with his vulnerability. She had wanted to help him. She feels a tinge of guilt that she had not been able to. But she also feels free, freer than she can remember feeling in a very long time. She pulls one of her cigarettes out, crosses herself again. Forgive me, God, I shouldn’t smoke. Thank you, God, for saving me from that place full of lost souls. Thank you for soup, and for Tia Consuelo and Baby Consuelo and Mama Consuelo. Thank you, James Bennett, for wearing that God-awful—forgive me, God—white suit.

  Marge leaves work fifteen minutes early, just before sunset, though she knows Evan Aarons, the boss who tried to put his hand down her shirt at an a
fternoon cocktail hour last Christmas, and whom she’s been simultaneously pandering to and avoiding since, doesn’t like it when she leaves early. She feels guilty. She always feels guilty. But Evan Aarons—shouldn’t it be Aaron Evans, anyway?—can fuck himself. Evan Aarons can shove the fifteen minutes up his ass. Evan Aarons can fire her if he wants. In fact, Evan Aarons, please do. She’s got more important shit to worry about at the very moment.

  She is anxious to get home to see what happened re: Julian (re: an office word, meant for memos, that she’s embarrassingly started to use in conversation), if he’s had an okay day with Delilah, Marge’s friend she’s asked to watch him for her first day back at work; she’d taken the previous week off to be with the boy herself. Now she is anxious to get back to him, and to get everything on her mental list checked off: Gristedes for dinner stuff—whatever looks good—plus kids’ toothpaste for Julian because he refused to brush his teeth with theirs, plus toilet paper, plus tampons because there’s no fucking way she’s pregnant this month, plus wine from the wine shop, because she needs it tonight like she’s been needing it all week: the bottle at the side of the bed where she’s been sleeping alone; and who is she kidding, she hasn’t been brushing her own teeth, either.

  She walks hurriedly and with purpose. The weather’s changed and it has officially become fall and she’s got tights on and she hates tights. They dig into the parts of her that she doesn’t want to be reminded of. She was wearing tights—maternity tights, with extra give in the waistband—this past New Year’s. She avoids thinking about this past New Year’s at all costs. She thinks about it now, because of the tights. Fuck tights. She manages to avoid the thoughts that generally follow: what her life would have been like now, if it weren’t for last New Year’s, etc., etc. She allows herself one happy specific: she would have lost all the baby weight by now.