"We cannot just sit here," Marcus was saying. "Move. Your. Fat. Butt."
"Where are we going to go?" Zach answered, rolling off the bulk. They'd dropped the futon on the sidewalk and now a parade of ants was mostly circumnavigating it, though a few had strayed onto the brilliant white canvas surface. Zach watched as they meandered along. His brother snuffled, and Zach resisted the temptation to remind him of what their father had said about letting tears come out, about how dangerous it was to hold back crying when you felt like crying. He claimed you could get a sickness from letting sadness stay inside. Zach imagined his grandfather sneering at this theory, naming the tears of boys baby behavior. In the year since his grandfather's death, Zach had not once missed him; had, in fact, been quite delighted to celebrate his tenth birthday without the old man's vulturelike presence at the festive dining room table. His grandfather had put out his cigarettes in his piece of cake.
Marcus threw himself onto the futon beside Zach and said "Ow," rubbing his elbow and pretending to have hurt himself. This was so he could gracefully explain his crying. Zach knew all about it. He would have liked to tell his brother he didn't think any less of him for crying. He really didn't, but Marcus had a suspicious nature and wouldn't have believed him. In fact, Marcus would most likely have tried to hurt Zach for suggesting such a pathetic deception. They waited quietly in the heat.
Soon Paddy Limbach, their father's baffling new best friend, emerged from the building behind them with a load of books.
"Keys," Marcus said to him with disgust.
"Right," said Paddy. "Good job with the futron, boys."
"Futon," said Marcus, rising from the mattress. "Futon, not futron."
"You hurt yourself, son?" asked Paddy, lifting his mirrored sunglasses to peer into Marcus's teary eyes.
"No, I did not hurt myself," exclaimed Marcus, spinning away from Paddy. "Just my elbow," he muttered. Zach shrugged when Paddy looked to him.
"Well, let's load this honey up." Paddy unlocked his Bronco. "Whooee, she's hot," he said.
"Whooee," echoed Marcus unkindly. "Move your—"
"Fat butt," Zach finished for him. "I know, I'm moving it."
***
Rachel spent moving day at her friend Zoë's house. Zoë lived in Evanston and had a yard, unlike Rachel, who felt the need for a big sky full of fresh air, even though it was blistering hot and nasty with mosquitoes. All up and down Zoë's suburban block the window units hummed.
"I can't stay in the sun anymore," Zoë declared, leaving Rachel on the parched piece of grass, banging the aluminum screen door when she went inside, her own air-conditioner compressor hissing in the back window. She shared a two-flat she could afford only because it was located down the incline from the train tracks; above her odd-shaped yard the commuter line clattered by, an overwhelming noise made worse by the shrill whistle its conductor liked to pull in residential areas.
Rachel wore a straw hat and an old maternity dress; in the reflection in the kitchen window she looked middle-aged, like her own mother, shapeless and swaybacked. She held the garden hose like a whip, her free hand slapping the irksome mosquitoes, which were attracted to the water. It felt good to pour water into the ground; she'd been doing it for a long time. Zoë had baked popovers and made iced coffee, but Rachel felt restless in the house. Outside, they'd sat on the stoop for a while, but even that hadn't been quite right. She'd volunteered to kill dandelions but ended up with the hose in her hand, the cool water pulsing through. Beneath her feet, the neglected grass had grown squishy.
"Don't overreact," her husband had warned her five nights earlier, "but I'm feeling the need to be alone for a while. Really alone, living alone." He wore the look of bad news, of having reached the end of his rope.
Rachel was paying bills, swearing at the children's solar calculator as she held it under a light bulb. "Living alone?" she'd said. "What does that mean, living alone?"
"An apartment, another place, just for a while. I know you've noticed I'm not happy." He'd sat down delicately across the table from her, as if either he or the chair were newly fragile, and removed his glasses, which had the effect of making him seem vulnerable and frank, when in fact it allowed him to lose a clear focus on the person to whom he was speaking. In other words, it was cowardly, not forthright, for him to take off his glasses.
"Why aren't you happy, Ev? What does that mean, you're not happy? Put your glasses back on, so we can talk." Rachel's shock had made her continue drawing with her pen on the checkbook, a loop all over the page designed to record entries. "Goddamnit," she declared, seeing the mess. She was impatient with Ev's ennui; she wanted to tell him to snap out of it.
"Goddamnit," she repeated on Zoë's pathetic lawn. She pressed her thumb over the hose end and let a big iridescent arc land on the sunflowers, which were grotesquely huge, like something from the Wizard of Oz set, their blooms larger than a human face. Rachel aimed the spray right at their noses until they bent.
"You guys don't deserve my anger," Ev had said.
"Oh, please," Rachel had responded. "You think we deserve your desertion?" For the rest of the night they had done nothing but talk and cry, argue and weep. In the morning Rachel's face looked bee-stung; Ev left for the office without shaving, simply dipping his head in a sinkful of water and shaking like a dog. They'd embraced in the tired, resigned manner of people who've survived an emergency, whose emotions have been so thoroughly wrenched there seems to be nothing left to feel—big bland potatoes. It occurred to Rachel that it was this state that Ev had been trying to describe to her all night.
In this mode—tired, tubers—they had survived the week. Perhaps this explained Rachel's urge for sunlight.
She was startled to feel someone tapping her. Zoë handed her a sweating can of orange soda. "You like this stuff, right?" Rachel did indeed like orange soda. And Zoë knew she couldn't keep it stocked at home, as Ev didn't want the boys drinking it. Rachel was grateful for Zoë, grateful to have a place to run to where orange soda sat in the fridge awaiting her, grateful for a friend whose particular dramatic pitch was neither too high nor too low, whose own eccentricities dovetailed nicely with her own.
"I should have married you," she said. "You wouldn't abandon us."
"I wouldn't abandon you or Zach, but that Marcus..." Zoë raised her eyebrows. In fact, she didn't particularly like either one of the boys, but her skepticism was supposed to be a joke, so Rachel pretended it was. "Ev'll be back," Zoë said. "This is a midlife crisis. It isn't even a crisis, it's just a minor situation, a little pickle." Zoë had never been married herself. All of her relationships with men ended after less than a year, a fact that made her slightly limited in being helpful to Rachel concerning Ev and her long marriage. Zoë had never considered a man her best friend; she had the charming ability to see men as incomplete and mostly interchangeable beings, like household appliances. Her own solution to breakup was to go looking for the replacement.
Rachel could have called her married friends, possibly her brother, but she could not bear the thought of the spreading news of Ev's departure, the way the speculation would run, the way she and her life would become the subject of analysis, all of it erroneously facile. Or, maybe worse, all of it excruciatingly insightful. Everyone enjoyed other people's troubles.
"And you know who called me this morning?" Rachel said, outraged afresh at the leak she did know existed.
"Who?"
"Didi Limbach."
"Do I know her?"
Rachel explained. Didi had invited Rachel to her home, but Rachel had of course declined. "Can you imagine?" she asked Zoë as she flipped water over the dry birdbath. "I'd rather help haul Ev's junk in the heat than talk to that woman."
"She was being neighborly," said Zoë wryly.
"She was gloating. Either gloating or nosy."
"Oh, nobody gloats or noses the way we do," Zoë said. "I think you're projecting."
Rachel smiled. It was true, and she was relieved to be stand
ing in Zoë's yard admitting it. Together, they were as immature as teenagers—and Rachel had always felt she deserved such a friendship, that she'd been denied the small-minded intimacy of those years while she'd been deep into her tragic, sophisticated, peerless phase. The other girls had been busy scratching and hissing, and she'd missed all the catty pettiness.
Zoë was Rachel's friend from law school, forty-two years old and still single, no longer the beauty she'd been but now something more exotic. She'd grown into a different personality as her body aged, her hair becoming aggressively gray and frizzy, her hips heedlessly wide, her jolly sexiness candid and amiable. Rachel frequently yearned for her friend's life, the serene little flat like a harem of scarves, the artfully arranged satin clutter of Zoë's possessions, the address book teeming with international entries, the leftover income that Zoë used to travel the world. Zoë had made herself a promise to see as many countries as possible; so far, she'd been to thirty-five of them, occasionally during wars or plagues, droughts or floods, tromping intrepidly through her wayfaring life. She brought back currency and stamps and flags, wall hangings and garments and ceramics, slides and sunburns and strange rashes, frightening tales of parasites and hitchhiking and ancient two-seater aircraft and titillating one-night stands. Rachel's friendship with her seemed based in part on their vicarious use of each other's lives. Neither truly envied the other, but rather, each pretended to envy the unlived life. In this way, each shored up faith in her own path, Zoë in her wide global fraternity, Rachel in her deep domestic union.
For a second, Rachel wondered if her life was falling apart, if now she would inhabit neither a comforting family nor an intriguing solo existence but the disappointing hybrid, the life of the martyred single parent, the harried, single-minded frump. Soon Zoë would lose interest and abandon her, too.
The hose drained on her own foot. She had the potential to become pathetic.
"There's nothing to do but let time pass," Zoë counseled. "Nothing will make it pass more quickly, although I could recommend some videos, if you like, all with Arnold Schwarzenegger."
"Ugh."
Zoë's obnoxious cat sneaked through the privet hedge. Had Rachel been alone, she would have soaked him with the hose; usually be was soaking something of hers, purse or coat. "What's that on William?" she asked of the white tape he sported today midway down his thick orange tail.
"An infection burst. Want to hear about it?"
Rachel admitted that she didn't; Zoë watched her cat and absently asked Rachel, for the fourth or fifth time, why Ev was moving out. It was so simple, Rachel thought, to be a good friend: you just had to ask the same question all day long, like a refrain. Ask it, and then just shut up and listen.
"He's going crazy," she said, trying on a new answer, glad to leave the petulant William and his wound and Zoë's wasted maternal concern about it behind. Rachel found herself selfishly eager to discuss her husband—a real problem—and to reveal something besides the imperturbability everyone seemed to expect of her. Her sons had looked at her with identical open-eyed blank expressions when Ev had told them he was moving out, as if it were up to Rachel to supply the appropriate response. "He'll be back," she'd said to them, so that they could look mollified. To Zoë, she said, "He wants to be alone, he says—he says he's having a kind of breakdown."
"Has he seen anybody?"
Rachel scoffed. The last time Ev had been in therapy had been during his doctoral research, since his mistrust of and disdain for his therapist peers, coupled with his arrogance, ruled out counseling. "He doesn't think anyone can help him. He doesn't talk to anyone about his problems." Rachel wondered if this was true. "Except maybe this goof he's started hanging around with, this guy he met when his dad died, the husband of the woman who called this morning."
"And he's not having an affair?"
"No." Rachel paused. Honestly, it was hard to imagine anyone being tuned specifically enough to Ev's personality to tolerate him. He was picky and cynical, his sense of humor black, his aesthetic monastic. Surely only Rachel herself could live with him, especially now, all these formative years into his disposition.
"Do you think he's having an affair?" she demanded of Zoë, who, because she had them herself, might know something Rachel didn't.
Zoë made her gestures of retreat, the shrug and the wagging hands, as if to erase what had gone before. "Surely not," she said, taking the empty orange soda can from Rachel and throwing it in the direction of the alley. "Surely not."
"But in another way, it might be easier to understand if another woman was involved—then I'd know what the quandary was, what I was up against, how old she was and what she looked like. I could go on a diet or something. It's this angst I can't get a handle on, this melancholy. He's so listless."
"Like poor William's tail," said Zoë. "He's got no feeling in the back half, it just hangs around like a rag, poor thing." William was skirting the yard, warily attempting to reach the back door without getting wet.
"Could you water the zinnias again?" Zoë pointed and Rachel pivoted, still thinking of Evan, of finding him asleep in Marcus's room the week before, lying curled on the wood floor as if avoiding Rachel and their marriage bed. In his hand he'd held his eyeglasses by the fragile stem. Marcus was curled in the bed above him in precisely the same pose. Could she be angry at someone so obviously needy? She wondered if Paddy Limbach had recommended that Ev leave her.
"This friend," she told Zoë, "that country bumpkin, that lunk, that Paddy Limbach, Laddy Pimbach, the roofer."
"The roofer?"
"Yes, the roofer. The tarred" said Rachel. "A roller, a shingler, an asphalter. The ass fault."
"Well, maybe he talks to the roofer goof," said Zoë.
"Maybe he does."
Ev had said, "I have to feel like I'm choosing my life." To which Rachel had responded, "Now you're a fucking greeting card? If I love you, I'm supposed to set you free and see if you come flying back? Well, to hell with that, Evan, to hell with that."
She'd left the bills and the solar calculator by then. Instead, she trailed Ev as he wandered around the apartment, moving into rooms and striking stances, then leaving them as if to block the scene more successfully. It was four in the morning and theirs were the only lights still lit in the building. Rachel was aware of their neighbors on all sides, up, down, south, and north, and kept her voice low. What confused her was the response she was entitled to; if he didn't let her know his reasons, how could she know how to feel?
To Zoë, Rachel said, "Sometimes talking with Ev is not unlike being on acid."
"Oh, acid," Zoë said nostalgically.
"No, not in a good way, in a bad way, when everything turns itself inside out and isn't what it is. When each mundane comment signifies something enormous, when everything is a microcosm, or a symbol for another thing. Do you know what I mean? I'm sure you don't." Zoë rarely said much when she was around Evan; she studied him, she claimed to like him, but she had little to say to him.
"You guys always seemed mated for life," she said. "Like cranes or wolves. I can't imagine either of you with anyone else."
"That's flattering," Rachel said. It did flatter her, though it also made her feel dull, reliable, and without sufficient imagination. "Really, you can't see him leaving me?"
Zoë shook her head. "And you certainly don't have flings," she said. "You just fall in love. I can have flings, but you'd just get hurt. You'd think you were having a fling, it might look like a fling, someone else would call it a fling, but all of a sudden you'd be in love. That's just who you are."
"A stick-in-the-mud, a wife."
"It's not such a bad thing." Of course, Zoë didn't believe this. She believed it was a terribly unsatisfactory thing. She herself thrived on flings, on relationships coming and going like comets, like fashions, like annuals. But Rachel liked her own solid perennial affections. She was fond of herself in regard to love, in which she fell rarely and like an anvil.
"Come to Tur
key with me," Zoë offered cheerfully, without any hope of Rachel's agreeing. "It's almost the off-season. We'll buy fat pants and eat baklava."
"I'm allergic to pistachios and I don't have a passport," said Rachel. "I don't even know how to get one. I'm afraid of flying, afraid of leaving the boys, afraid of foreigners, afraid of public restrooms—those women's toilets? with the extra spout? One stupid phobia after another. I can't go to Turkey. International travel is like flings: I don't do it."
"Oh, a phobia of flings," Zoë said. "Isn't that interesting?"
"Yes. You know, sometimes I think it's just fear that keeps Ev and me from having affairs, not loyalty but fear. I think you're brave to sleep with so many men, to go after your passions, to honor them. Even the ones who are married."
Zoë laughed. She knew Rachel didn't really believe this, but it was something she'd become proud of in herself, despite suffering some modicum of guilt over her affairs. "Yes, that's what I think as we're humping away—'Aren't I a brave girl? So brave and honorable? Won't Rachel be proud?' He'll be back," Zoë added suddenly, when she saw the wet gloss on her friend's eyes. She reached past the pouring hose to put her hand on Rachel's. Zoë's fingers were wide, freckled, and tapered, ending with smooth bullets of chocolate-colored nail. They were comforting, friendly hands. "He hasn't gone for good," she said.
"I know," Rachel answered, deciding not to cry. Even though she was angry with Evan, she felt she'd betrayed him, discussing his problems.
At one point in the long night, she had persuaded him to come lie down with her, in their bed, in the dark. Talking there comforted her usually. On occasion they'd lain awake for hours, after sex or before, chatting, playing. On other nights one of them would wake, possessed by the dreaded nighttime anxieties—insufficient money, mortal illness, a harmed child—and the other would reach out to reassure. Rachel had felt as if they were in the middle of such an attack, and said so.
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