Every Day

by Elizabeth Richards

  I burst out laughing. I can’t help it. We have to get through this meal. I stare at Simon, try to find him somewhere in his rage, beg him with my eyes: couldn’t we just try to communicate on this horrific subject, and in the meantime put in an appearance as parents even if one of us stinks as a mother and a wife and a citizen?

  A smile flickers over his square face, then he sets his jaw again.

  “It’s not funny, Mom,” Jane informs me.

  “Yes, it is,” I manage to get out. “It’s funny the way you said it, even if you didn’t mean it to be.”

  “Yes,” Simon admits. “The notion: people without bones.” He glares at me.

  “I’m outta here,” Isaac says, his spaghetti gone. He can’t take tension between me and Simon. He whirls out of our sight until the storm he sees coming has passed over. This time, he hides out in his room. I can hear him above us, deciding on a place to sit.

  I serve myself a healthy portion even though I have no interest in eating, haven’t since I saw Fowler. The others are enjoying theirs; even Simon isn’t having trouble with his appetite.

  I ask Jane to tell us about her first day at camp.

  “Oh God, Mom,” she says, putting down her fork and spoon, wiping her face with a napkin, gearing up. “They have so much stuff to do there. It’s unbelievable. Tracy and Alison are going there too, and they chose tennis and swimming like I did. It was really great, I’m telling you. I’m so tired, though. I’m going to bed early, after I call Tracy and Alison, if that’s okay.”

  “What about our golfing trip?” Simon asks her.

  “Oh, no! Daddy! I completely forgot! Can we go another time? I want to stay home with Mom and Daisy.”

  “You forgot?” Simons asks. “In fifteen minutes you forgot?”

  That she knew I wouldn’t be going along, would not be welcome, astounds me. Simon looks crestfallen, as if Jane’s sudden allegiance to me is the final straw, not my infidelity.

  “That’s okay, baby,” he says. “You do what you want.”

  I take some bites of my dinner, a few sips of wine, this amounting to more than I’ve ingested at a sitting since before Saturday. It’s all I can manage. I gather Daisy, out of the eating phase and into the throwing one, from her chair and take her into the kitchen to clean her up. Before I find a rag I sit her on the counter to behold her messy face, to test my love for her because I trust myself so little.

  “You’re my sweet bird,” I say.

  “Mom-may,” she says.

  I take time with this cleaning effort, wiping her face so gently, as if I might tear skin were I to rub any harder. In the next room, Jane is chatting up her father, coaxing him out of fury for a few seconds. Soon he and I will have to face each other. I cannot leave another hour of this to my children to fix.

  We go back out to an empty dining room, all having fled for the upstairs. I set Daisy down on the living room rug and drag over her bag of oversized Legos. I try to focus on building with Daisy, but it’s no use. I’m waiting, to quote my son, for the shit to hit the fan.

  Simon appears on the landing rattling change and keys and summons Isaac to miniature golf. Isaac appears, having combed his hair down with water.

  “Have fun,” I say.

  I can’t wait for them to leave.

  “Check ya later,” Isaac says, and vanishes.

  Simon comes slowly down the last few stairs, every step an effort. He looks all around him before speaking.

  “I expect to be back by ten o’clock,” he says. “At that time I’d appreciate an explanation, or whatever you think might pass for one, for Saturday afternoon.” His voice shakes, and I can hear him near tears. “In a million years, Leigh, I never thought I’d be saying these words.”

  He won’t wait for me to respond, just leaves quietly. I shift closer to Daisy at her work. “Da,” she says definitely.

  “Daddy,” I remind her.

  “Da.”

  • • •

  They called her la palatine because she came from a region that was called the Palatinate, which is part of modern-day Germany. She married, sight unseen, the brother of Louis XIV, and her letters reveal not only the depth of this mistake but the strength she possessed to endure it. She is frank on the subjects of his infidelity, his homosexuality, his excesses. In an era of excess, she kept her head while the rest of the court indulged. She is worlds from me, but I envy her endurance, her ease with going on record, with being the record. As for his side of the story, it seems he didn’t deserve to have one, and it strikes me as lucky that he died young.

  I am ravenous for gossip, poring over these letters. I wait for her to confide any infraction against matrimonial law, but she doesn’t. My daughters are sleeping. My son and husband are out whacking golf balls over a cartoon landscape. I don’t want absolution, just company. I want to talk to Fowler.

  I want so much more than that.

  Liselotte, my seventeenth-century focus, doesn’t yearn for much except the company of her aunt and one or two close friends. She is not distressed, is instead relieved, that she has no sexual inclination toward her philandering husband. I have always found Simon attractive, although I’ll admit that while I sat at dinner with him tonight, no part of me filled with a yearning for sex. In fact, it wouldn’t be dishonest of me to say that I rarely think about having sex with Simon, and when I do the impulse is easily thwarted by circumstance. Perhaps it is high time that I worried about this.

  With Fowler, I like the whispering, the cajoling, the occasional cruel remark that requires emending. I like feeling flush in a new setting. Simon and I went to Club Med once, and I momentarily retrieved that business. But it’s been years since I felt at the mercy of whatever current is loose and looking for a conduit. Fowler’s postcard was all I needed to get plugged in. But I’m being ruthless now. I mustn’t compare them. Simon is devoted. Fowler left me in New York City when I was eighteen years old with an infant and no income. I couldn’t be sicker if I chose to run to Fowler over my husband.

  Liselotte would say that the choice is not an issue, that one must be plain-speaking, true to oneself, not to others. Kirsten would shrug. “Tell me something I don’t know.” Gillette would say, “Fuck them all,” which she does.

  I have become tame to the deadening point. It can’t be good for any of us.

  Liselotte is under growing scrutiny for her outspokenness, for her noisy reservations about the Edict of Nantes. She has figured something out about her era and she’s up a creek because of it. I look up from the thick book. Headlights stream into the driveway. Doomed, I think, because she can’t handle what’s been handed her—socially, I mean. What do we know about marriage before we enter into it? That it’s difficult, admirable, treacherous, and not for the weak of heart. We hear these things and believe none of them and only learn as we go along, bucking the confines and wanting them at the same time. The weak of heart. This is where I put myself tonight, in a country with the weak of heart, although mine fills at the thought of nearly everyone I know.

  Isaac’s triumphs abound. He was under par for every hole, the only one in the crowd. “We’re going for the real thing,” he says, breathless. “This weekend. Simon’s going to rent clubs.”

  “That sounds good,” I say. I hear Simon in the kitchen, getting something to drink.

  “I’m goin’ up,” my son says. “I’m really beat.”

  “Sleep well.”

  I had hoped for a few more minutes of him, of safety.

  Simon gets a coaster for his soda can, chooses a chair, and sits, elbows on knees. “So?”

  I still have the book in my lap. I close it, put it and my notebook and pen aside. This is what I summon from the miserable depths:

  “On Saturday, Fowler called me. As you know, I’d had some warning of this. I met him in town. We had drinks, no food. He told me he has a year to live.”

  “Why doesn’t that move me,” my husband says evenly.

  “I don’t expect it to,” I say
, in the same tone. “I’m telling you what you’ve asked to hear.” He can’t be the only strong one here.

  “Go on.”

  “We went to his apartment.”

  “Even better.” He gets up, walks to the fireplace, puts a hand briefly on the mantelpiece. “I hope you’ll spare me the description of the apartment. Is there any particular reason you’ve done this? You still haven’t made a stab at an explanation.”

  What comes to me now isn’t remorse, shame, or a desire to be someone else, in some other century. What comes to me instead is rage, rage at marriage, at what our love has done to us, at how people who begin as lovers become friends who can be enemies at the same time. What I’ve done seems predictable, reasonable, given what little attention we’ve been able to give to ourselves, each other, while we’ve devoted every breathing moment to the children.

  “I don’t know,” I say shakily. Then, with more steam, “I guess I wanted to.”

  We wait.

  “What are your plans?” he asks. Like a bullet out of nowhere.

  I thought I would have to narrate the sex. I thought he’d want to know, in that way people want to know the most gruesome details of murders.

  “I haven’t made any.”

  “You should.”

  He rips a sheet of paper out of my spiral notebook, takes a pen to it, and scribbles. He holds it out to me, clenching it.

  “This is where I’ll be for the remainder of the week, in case the children want to call. By the weekend I’ll expect some notice from you as to what arrangements you’ve made. I cannot live with a liar.”

  He goes upstairs and is back, prepacked overnight bag in hand, before I’ve read the scrawl. He pockets wallet and keys and is gone. I hear the healthy igniting of our decent car, and listen to it until I can’t hear it anymore over the softer noises of night.

  Essex House, the paper says. Where we went for two nights after we were married. Both of us had to work the week following the ceremony. We had our honeymoon there. Salt in the wound I’ve brought on our house.

  I have railed in my heart against his foresight, his belief that all can be at the ready. And now I’ve punished him for it. And he’s punished me for that. Still, scores cannot be settled. I go in search of food. I eat cold noodles, on the kitchen floor, with my hands. They’re wonderful, pasty and filling. I need them. I can’t get enough of them. Even when I hear my son’s heavy tred, sense his approach, feel him standing above me, I eat. Endlessly, it seems, I eat.

  “Mom,” he says, his cracking voice my home, “what are you doing?”

  I douse him with assurance that I’m all right, that Simon’s all right, that sometimes people just need some space so they go somewhere for a while or they get incredibly hungry so they eat like pigs, which is what has happened to the two of us, respectively.

  “It’s not something with Grandma Jean, is it?” Isaac hedges.

  I almost laugh, his concern is so darling, so unearned. Jean is a horse. She blares into our life twice a year from Florida and once weekly by phone. She’s always “up to her ears” in something, visitors, bills, classes, game plans for vacations, hers and ours. She’s the least absent absentee member of our family. The idea of anything taking her before she’d good and ready is totally absurd.

  “No, duck. It’s nothing like that.”

  “Okay. Good. I’ll see you in the morning. Wake me up, okay?”

  “Of course.” I breathe. I won’t be able to put this off. Tomorrow morning I’ll have to say something.

  I go up and run myself yet another bath. I think about fucking. Fucking isn’t even interesting enough to be a goal, I think. Not even a means to an end. Fucking is just something one does when one can, if one feels like it. Fucking Simon. Fucking Fowler. Fucking anyone. It’s unreasonable to think of it as meaningful. Fucking makes so little difference, except when it leads to pregnancy. Adequate descriptions of fucking do exist, mind you, but they don’t differ much, one to the next. If memory serves, marriages don’t fail because of fucking or nonfucking. They fail because something else gets lost. Simon and I have lost something along our busy way. A tenderness, time to devote to each other that doesn’t feel like duty. It isn’t our fault. In this loss, we’re blameless, just like everybody else.

  “Mom?” Isaac again, whispering from the hall this time.

  I jump, a roar of water threatening tub’s rim.

  “Are you sure everything’s okay?”

  It terrifies, how much they need me, how much they depend on the structure I’ve set up and lost faith in.

  “Yes, lovey. Get your rest. You’ll need it for another day of monster control.”

  “You got it,” he says, not sounding at all gratified, just faint, at the end of something.

  • • •

  The next morning, I get out Froot Loops for the lot of them, and our oversize Portuguese bowls. I’ll give them what they want to eat while I tell them what they won’t accept. By seven-thirty they’re assembled, perched, hungry, cheerful from a good night’s sleep. This is what I tell them:

  “Dad has business in Brooklyn the rest of the week and the hours are strenuous, so he’s staying in the city instead of driving two hours home. He’ll call us each night to speak to everyone and he’ll be back on Friday.” I bring my face up in a smile of sorts, the kind Fowler’s specialist might have displayed after relating the desperate news. What I’ve related is a partial truth, i.e., a lie. Having related same, I fulfill my role as the liar Simon accused me of being.

  This is what they tell me:

  Isaac: “Good deal.”

  Jane: “God, Mom, why do you have to be so serious? It’s to cringe.”

  Daisy: “Da. Da-eee.”

  We pass on to other matters, the pickup arrangements, postcamp entertainments, the dinner issue. Then last-minute gatherings and into the car to camp.

  It’s a brilliant day, not hot, just clear and breezy. My husband has left me, I’m sure of it. I’m afraid. We travel crisp suburban roads to the parkway, get on, fly. There’s so much cheer in our car. Even Jane’s incisive summing up of Isaac’s faults and his sleepy dismissal of her as subhuman are refreshing.

  “You probably like that gay guy. All your friends have dirty hair.”

  “Dog meat.”

  “Moose breath.”

  “At least people can see my teeth.”

  This last Jane doesn’t need. The day her braces were put on, the world ended. After a night of roaming the house, looking out for the dawn, and drinking more wine than is good for anyone, I come to Jane’s rescue and tell Isaac, “When you’re not ripping your sister to pieces with them.”

  • • •

  When I let them off, Jane doesn’t even ask me to walk her to her group’s meeting place in front of the high school cafeteria.

  “You should take a nap when Daisy takes a nap, Mom,” she decides. “You look really tired.”

  “Thank you, muffin,” I tell her. “I like it when you look out for me.”

  Isaac sighs good-bye, taps the door after he shuts it. “I’ll get a ride home,” he says.

  “No you won’t,” I say, my mind on Garland.

  “You’re still a kid,” Jane taunts. “Even if you’re nine feet tall.” And she’s off, head down, all determination and purpose.

  Isaac looks to the treetops in despair. “Later.”

  Daisy wails for a while after this, over the sudden absence of her siblings, but I coax her into a stretch of calm with the song about the Beluga whale. She kicks her feet, pounding the car seat with her bare heels.

  On the parkway I pass right by our exit and take us all the way into Manhattan, by which time Daisy is fast asleep. I park at a meter on Broadway and 70th Street, take out the collapsible stroller, put Daisy in it, and wheel down to Tower on 65th Street. They’re my last hope before Fowler as a source for Jules and Jim.

  Of course they have it, three copies, all in, and it’s no trouble to join, only a dollar for membership. So
metimes I could kick myself for having moved to the suburbs. I stick the treasure in the diaper bag and head back to the car to feed the meter, to extend my escape and take advantage of Daisy’s timely exhaustion. The car will put Daisy out if there are no other distractions, no matter what the time of day. I don’t tell this to other mothers of one-year-olds. I don’t say, “Daisy’s a dream baby. You hardly know she’s there.” It just gets said to me.

  I mull over visible diner opportunities, choosing 3 Guys, the cheapest. I get myself a Times and a window seat. Heaven. For now. I order one of the specials with eggs and try to pick out adulteresses from the passersby. I cannot tell who is one and who is not.

  Nothing in the newspaper interests me. And how much coffee can one person drink, in the end?

  How will we live? Who will stay and who will go? Other than the fact of his imminent death, Fowler is safe. He has only one mirror, and it doesn’t accuse. He has no one to answer to, no one but himself to disappoint. It has been said that there is nothing more treacherous than a family. I’ve been wrong to scoff at such profundity.

  I eat my breakfast, wishing I could love Simon, could love Fowler, in the easy way I love eating this meal, knowing they’re good for me and are happy investments. I have loved Simon in this way, but I’m not so certain anymore. I leave the diner with my sleeping baby, the envy of several retirees who seem to have no place to go to after the morning meal, frightened out of my wits: I don’t know if I can call what I know of myself with men “love.” I don’t know if I have any basis for knowing what that is.

  • • •

  At home, I note that Catherine, of the film, hasn’t got a clue either, but she’s not stymied by this fact. She plows ahead, steering herself between Jules and Jim without remorse. “Catch me,” she tells Jim, to whom she isn’t married.

  “She is a vision,” they each say.

  “The three lunatics,” the villagers say.

  “La femme est naturelle, donc abominable,” says Baudelaire.

  I watch instead of sleeping. Simon called tonight, sounding ragged. All force and certainty he was, on leaving Monday night. Now, like me, he sees where all that gets you. We miss our routine. I dare say we miss each other. I haven’t heard word one from Fowler, but that didn’t come up in our conversation. He spoke to each child, then asked me about each child. He needed to hear me talk about them. And I needed to tell him about them.