“Mirabelle’s mom couldn’t take us to dinner.”
“What did you and your brother do for food?” Lena asks.
“Ordered pizza.”
“Good thinking.” She revels in her daughter’s gorgeous mass of curly, dark hair.
“Don’t sound so surprised. I’m not an infant.”
“I know that.”
“I wonder,” Rosie turns and strides back into her room.
“She hates me,” she whispers half to herself.
“For now,” Zack says.
“Easy for you to say, it’s not you she sasses.”
“Lena, she’s a cookie-cutter version of you.”
“That’s crap.”
Zack grins and opens the bedroom door.
Though tired, she’s wide awake. Zack’s eyes are closed. He can sleep at will. Not a worrier, he’s a man who refuses to anticipate problems. At times it annoys her, but it was that same laid-back, affectionate nature that drew her to him twenty years ago. An only child of parents who rarely touched each other, she grew up in a household where no one spoke unless absolutely necessary. Her parents slept in twin beds pushed as far apart as their small room would permit. She often wanted to ask her mother what happened, but it felt too dangerous.
In the never-complete darkness, her head propped high on pillows, she stares at the wall hanging they bought in Mexico on their honeymoon. That first night, right before dawn, the hotel began to shake, the ground an angry ocean. Grabbing whatever they could, they joined the others being shepherded outside. The quake, more exciting than scary, was proof that the unexpected happens.
She slips out of bed, tiptoes to the window, and opens the blinds on the small backyard, where a card table, several folding chairs, Casey’s bike, and an outdoor grill fill the shadowy space. Growing up, no one they knew owned property. Everyone crowded inside project apartments stacked on top of each other, windows facing other windows or dirty brick walls. Now, they own a house. Still, is this all?
“Lena,” he stage whispers. “Come back to bed.”
His voice startles her. “In a minute.”
“I think the food disagreed with me.”
“Can I get you something?”
“Your body.” They’d made love earlier that morning, but he’s tireless when it comes to sex.
She says nothing, doesn’t turn around.
“My body needs yours to heal.”
She continues to gaze at the navy-blue, sequined sky, defiance and compliance warring inside her.
“Lena? I can’t fall asleep without you.”
She snaps the blinds shut and gets back into bed. His arm wraps around her, his skin warm against hers, his mouth close to her ear.
“I watched you at the window receiving holy messages. I was jealous.”
She doesn’t move. When his breathing slows, she slides up to sitting. In a darkness even more open to her now, she can just make out the velvet knitting bag from her childhood. A neighbor taught her how to knit when she was eight or nine. Told her to be careful. A ball of yarn can get away from you and quickly unravel.
3.
From the window Dory watches as Stu’s car backs out of the garage. She doesn’t want him to go. They’ve just come home. He pleaded his need for that last drink, the one he didn’t have at the club, the one that wouldn’t taste as good in the living room, though he didn’t quite say that.
The house is too big to be empty, too empty to be alone in. Only when Stu’s at home does she take pleasure in the careful décor of each room. Swallowing two aspirin for the headache that’s insisted on itself all evening, she pads across the pale-blue carpeted floor to the den and stretches out on the couch. He should’ve told her about the new job. He’s good at avoiding conflict and knew she wouldn’t make a fuss at the club. The other night when she mentioned how preoccupied he seemed, a perfect moment to tell her about his work situation, he said nothing. He’d been drinking but wasn’t drunk. He rested his head against hers, the smell of whisky evident, and whispered, “Life is difficult, we always need more money, my back hurts.” Then kissed her cheek and went to bed. Long marriages ebb and flow. She knows that. Relationships change. Of course they do. At work she hears stories about marriages that make her wonder how people survive their lives.
The spell of dizziness and urge to retch strike suddenly. A virus or food poisoning, she has no idea which. One hand over her mouth, using the wall for balance she makes it to the bathroom, but there’s nothing in the medicine cabinet that would help. She needs something to stop the vomiting before she dehydrates. The dizziness is profound. She can’t black out.
In the bar mirror, between whiskey bottles hang the faces of his late-night companions, not one of whom he cares to engage with. He’s heard enough about lost jobs and unemployment to last past his lifetime. It’s what the guys at the plant chew on day after day.
What’s done is done. He’s made his move without a nickel more in his pay. Six welders on his team let go so he could stay, which isn’t going to win him any friends on Monday. He’d love to give the owners the finger and walk out, but then what? Then where?
Get in the car, Stu, that’s where. Find a bar with better faces, that’s what. He drops a bill on the counter and takes off.
Where he’s driving will be the next surprise, and he likes surprises. They remind him there are forces out there stirring the shit. Where he’s not heading is home. He’s on Boston Post Road, the old Route 1 that wobbles through the Bronx. There are bars somewhere along here. It would be kind to call Dory, let her know he’s alive and on his way to oblivion, except she wouldn’t be happy to hear that, now, would she? Anyway she’s probably asleep, fine woman that she is, a woman who truly demands respect, who loves him without question, a woman he lately can’t breathe around.
He switches on the radio loud enough to turn other drivers’ heads, if there were any around to turn, but everyone’s home with loved ones, cuddling ass to ass or belly to ass, or however couples find comfort in the dark. He and Dory share a king-sized space. He finds it restful not having to inhale her sweet-smelling hair that doesn’t turn him on anymore.
Okay, he’s thinking like a drunk. Stop thinking. Fortunately, he spies a familiar neon sign in a window and speeds toward it, and the place is open, son of a gun. His car is only the third in the small lot.
He remembers to drop the car keys in his pocket—see, Dory, not that drunk—and hurries inside through the cold. Music comes from an old jukebox in the rear, where a hunched-over sack of a man sits. A woman on a barstool spins around to look at him. He returns her smile, surprised to see her slip off the stool and walk behind the wooden counter. Place could fit in his living room. He’s come up in the world.
“Wild Turkey on the rocks, and how are you this night?”
“I’m good.”
Amazing. Spitting image of Lena: dark hair, pale skin, wide black eyes. No, wait, Lena’s eyes … greenish-brown, at least when he’s sober. She doesn’t have Lena’s never-wavering small, square chin either. And what color are Dory’s eyes? Gray. Okay, passed the good husband test. Good husbands comment favorably when their wives return from the beauty salon or cook special meals for them. By normal standards he’s a good husband. Except he’s not normal in the normal way, is he? Two swigs and the glass empties. He taps it on the counter for another.
“So how late are you kept busy by this place?” he asks her, wanting to see if maybe she sounds like Lena as well.
“Another half hour and I shut it down.” She refills his glass.
No, she’s a smoker, the gravelly, hoarse voice nothing like Lena’s.
He sips at the drink. He’s a bit spacey now, a feeling he likes. It removes hard surfaces, doesn’t levitate him exactly but provides a more cloud-like stillness. He remembers the hash pipe he and his buddies passed back and forth in the sandy tents once upon a time, not a promising memory for him to revisit right now.
“So can I buy you a drink?” he h
ears himself ask.
“Nah. It’ll keep me awake,” she says.
“Lots to do when you’re awake.”
She stares at him, considering, then turns away. A brushoff, thank god. He takes down the rest of the drink. “Have a nice tomorrow,” he says, laying a twenty on the counter. Big shot.
The prickly, burning numbness in his arm enters his consciousness. It’s wedged under his head. He lets the cold piece of flesh drop to his side then squeezes the fingers open and shut. His legs sprawl across the seat. Whatever cramped position he collapsed in has left its marks. He hoists himself to sitting. A cold wind blows through the open window. Daylight.
Drunk and asleep in a car. Not a good sign. He scrambles out, jumps up and down a few times to get the blood flowing and suddenly realizes he’s not wearing a jacket. Did he leave it in the bar? Crap. A quick search and he finds it on the floor by the rear seat. How the hell did it get there? It reeks of whiskey. Did he spill on himself? Has he really become that kind of drunk? His father always smelled of booze even after a shower, which was weird. He slips his not quite thawed arm into the warmth of his jacket, slides behind the steering wheel and turns up the heat. The bar’s neon sign is dead. His is the only car in the lot.
He stares at the few leafless trees in the center island that divides the boulevard. He knows which side will take him home, though not necessarily where he wants to go. Zack tells him he needs a vacation from marriage, not a separation from Dory. Then again, Zack would never leave Lena. He listens to her prattle on without batting an eye. A few too many sentences from Dory and his insides clutch. He takes a deep breath.
Dory, I have to get away from marriage for a while. Don’t know why. Don’t know where. Don’t know how long. I’ll call you as soon as I figure things out. Can he handle saying that? After twenty years? Maybe.
Questions will surely arise. Why now? Is it something I’ve done? Are you sick? What’s changed? Could he say, “I’ve always felt this way?” But is that true? It would be so much easier if she’d just get fucking out-of-her-head raging mad and chase him out. Instead, she’ll stand there, with brimming eyes in her quiet, disappointed, pretty little face, and the thing is, he’s dying, sort of.
The flickering green digits on the dashboard read 6:35. The old TV news query plays in his head: “Do you know where your children are?” Except they don’t have any, and if they did, would it have changed anything?
He pats his jacket pockets. Phone, where are you? Leans his head back on the seat as if that would jog his memory. Where did he use it last? The first bar? The second bar? Did he even have it to begin with?
He’ll go home, tell her the truth: I got drunk and fell asleep in the car. Will he add that he’s thinking of leaving her? He’ll run it by Zack first to hear how it sounds. Or maybe he just needs to try harder to feel what he doesn’t feel anymore.
The car rolls slowly toward the corner where the journey home begins.
4.
Inklings of daylight disrupt the cold pewter sky as the taxi from the ER reaches her house. She checks the garage. Stu’s car still not there. It isn’t the first night he’s stayed out. She used to worry crazily. Not so much anymore. There’s a pattern. He drinks, then falls asleep in the car, which is better than driving drunk.
What a nightmare the past hours, though they dealt with her pronto, feeding her some thick syrupy stuff she could barely swallow. She was alone in a cubicle with a bucket, waiting for a doctor when the retching stopped. It took a while longer for the dizziness to vanish, but it did, thank everyone. The ER doctor gave her a prescription to settle her stomach and said the onset troubled him. His eyes were intent and made her nervous. What was he seeing? He wanted to schedule a brain test just to rule out … he doesn’t quite say what.
Run her head and neck through a magnetic tunnel? No way. She’s seen it a million times with her charges. Enough tests and they’re bound to find something, a congenital anomaly, an aberration, who knows, except no doubt it’s something she could live with for the next fifty years. Hospitals always want to test, especially if the patient has insurance. It’s part of the institutional DNA. She knows; she works in one. She plans to file away the night’s events and not access them again. A strong will can do wonders.
After taking the longest shower of her life, she mists her hands and body with perfumed spray and slips into a silky Japanese lounger that belonged to her mother. Her father brought it back from Korea, a time he refused to talk about. A subway conductor, he was a man who believed the streets offered the best education. She would stand with him at the front window of the train, peering into a darkness that would light up for a few seconds, offering glimpses of mysterious rooms, doors, strange-shaped corners. At the end of his shift, they’d hit the diner for a banana split or whatever her heart desired. When he died of a coronary at fifty-five she was only fourteen. She still misses him. He’d love to know that the job she began at eighteen, doing menial tasks at the nursing home, developed into a supervisory position.
Not a bad achievement, she assures her too-thin face in the dresser mirror, then ties back her long hair. Squeezing a dollop of cream into her palm, she rubs her hands together, massaging her neck and chest. She glances at the old photo of Lena’s kids, Rosie and Casey, in the wooden frame. Eight-year-old Rosie, ever the actress, her chin tilted upward, arms reaching for the sky, even then the child’s need to challenge invisibility. Casey, not yet three, and already in her shadow. He doesn’t seem to mind. Lena has high hopes for the girl’s future. Rosie would be the first of them all to go to college.
From the living room window, a glass of Chardonnay in hand, Dory sees not a soul. Dirty clouds wander the sky. Rain, no doubt. Stu would be amused to see her drinking this early. Anything she does that’s even slightly unexpected produces that loopy half-smile, proof she’s not perfect. Of course she’s not. Would perfect accept him as he is? But it’s the him she grew up with, the him who owns her secrets, who carried her to her honeymoon bed in Montauk. They left the hotel only for short walks, laughing at having traveled so far for a bed. It’s the him who held her night after night after her mother died, who worked his ass off countless extra hours to get them this house, and who has never resented their not having children, though he didn’t want to adopt. It seemed like such an expensive proposition at a time when they were saving like robins to buy a place of their own. It’s that him she adores. Ah crap!
The phone rings and she grabs it. “Hello.”
“Dory, I know it’s only seven but …”
“Lena?” She’s relieved … it’s not the police reporting Stu in an accident. “What’s up?”
“How are you?
“Fine, why?”
“Last night’s revelation … Stu’s job?”
“Oh, it’s okay. He hates conflict. He was trying to save himself from the million questions he knew I wouldn’t ask in company.”
“Is he still asleep?”
“Didn’t get home yet. Went out drinking after our outing. Don’t be shocked. It’s happened before. I know the drill.”
“But Dory …”
“What?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“No, say it.”
“I don’t know … I suppose it’s your business … except if it were Zack you’d be peppering me with questions and advice.”
“It’s not Zack, and I’ve got this covered.”
“If you say so.”
“Put your mother instinct to better use.”
Lena laughs. “Okay, you win, I think.”
“Stu just pulled into the garage,” she lies. “Talk to you later.” Still, it won’t be long before he returns, and she’s got to throw all the soiled towels and bedding into the washing machine, then scour the den, floor, and bathroom sink, erase every remnant before he gets back.
5.
Zack pays the cashier, who looks younger than Rosie. The cold wind whistles past his ears as he strides toward the car. Lena
refused to go out for breakfast. Rosie went shoe shopping. Casey was, as always, glued to his computer.
Eating alone doesn’t suit him. A lot of guys would turn somersaults for time away from family or to be with other guys. Not him. He doesn’t enjoy the push-and-shove of testosterone-fueled talk. Except for Stu. Maybe that’s because Stu’s one dissatisfied man who makes him feel great about his life. Not a nice thought. Nor does he like being alone at home without Lena and the kids. Alone, his mind dwells too long on the negative, like now.
At the site, the head guy’s pissed at him for turning down last week’s extra hours. First, the assholes fire a bunch of guys, then they want overtime from him. The honcho, a burly man in his fifties, regards anyone who refuses extra money in a downsizing job force as a dimwit. Worse yet, Zack didn’t offer acceptable excuses. No doubt the union will get an earful of Zack’s stupidity, laziness, lack of concern for his fellow workers, or all of the above.
In the car last night he wanted to tell Lena about the overtime snafu, but she would’ve thought him a fool. She wants him to succeed, whatever the fuck that means. It’s simpler to keep the complicated work situations to himself. That way he can avoid the look of disapproval that always flits across her gorgeous face because, really, the only thing he ever wants to do is please her. He finds the phone deep in his pocket, calls home. It happens sometimes, that sudden need to make sure she’s where she says she’ll be. It’s not jealousy, it’s fear. Before she picks up he notices a text from Stu.
Stu circles the neighborhood, looking for a parking space. Even after he got home, showered, had breakfast, and apologized for being out all night, he was too antsy to stay still. He offered Dory afternoon drinks at the bar of her choice. She wasn’t up for it. Actually, she seemed distracted. Did he probe? Of course not. Was he unhappy? Not that he would notice.
He pulls into a space in front of the Bronx Zoo. Years ago, dead of night, high on hash, he and Zack had sneaked in to serenade the inhabitants of the monkey house. Then nearly died laughing when the monkeys began screeching. Man, that was another time. Young, filled with the heat of forward movement, ready for something, for anything, please just point the way. In those days, he exhaled hope, not alcohol fumes. No guarantees about anything anymore, except maybe worry. No one at the plant dares make plans even for the next day, let alone the next week, month, or year. He’s a bastard for what he did to the guys on his team, no argument there, but someone was going to stay. Why not him? For which he has no answer. At work he’ll remain mute. Anything he might say will and should be held against him. He’ll just shove around that acetylene torch like a fucking johnson and do his best to maintain some cool.
Every Body has a Story Page 2
