A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  “Yes you can. As far as my clients are concerned, they’ll be paying you. You and the minority family interests. Whatever you do with your share after is your business. If the deal goes through, I want ten percent off the top. Ten percent of what they pay you.”

  “I’ve gotta talk to Frank.”

  “There’s no time, Leon. If it’s all about to blow up in your face, I’ve got to get started. Have you got a fax there?”

  “Where? Here at home?”

  “You do, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll have a document for you in half an hour. I’ll make it very simple. All you do is sign and return it.”

  “But wait a minute! How do I know what you’re going to do?”

  “You don’t, Leon. Believe me, you’re better off not knowing.”

  “But ten points is still fucking millions! How do I know you’re not conning me? Suppose you do shit and it all works out?”

  “Would you rather I told my clients not to come next week? After all, that’s almost my obligation, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “We’re friends, Leon. Come on. Let’s keep it that way. Everyone has got his price. Just give me your fax number.”

  “This is Robert Smith Enterprises. There’s no one in the office right now. Please leave a message at the tone.”

  “Hello, Mr. Smith, and Happy New Year. By the way, I enjoyed your message—‘no one in the office right now.’ I’ve just got off the phone with a mutual friend of ours, who’s very distraught. He thinks you’ve abandoned him, and as an attorney, I must say I think he’s right. It appears to me that things have gotten a little out of hand for you, Cousin. I assume you are now trying to set them right—rather desperately, it would seem—but in view of certain matters of mutual interest, I think it would be beneficial for us to talk soonest. Please call me. You’ll find this same message elsewhere.”

  Rebecea Anne Dalton

  4 January

  “Hi,” I say sleepily, opening one eye to Danny. “What’s up, Doc?”

  He’s kneeling on the bed next to me, bouncing. My bones ache. What day of the week is it?

  Friday.

  “It ’nowing,” Danny says.

  “Snowing?” I correct.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Shit. We’ve been lucky with the weather so far. It’s been plenty cold, but the roads have stayed clear.

  I’ve made it a rule, ever since Christmas, that we move every day. All part of the quest, I tell Danny when he bitches. But snow is something else, and I feel like garbage. Plus we don’t have the right clothes, which means spending money, and what are we going to do about food if we get snowed in?

  I get up reluctantly and realize my period has started.

  “Stay where you are,” I tell him, “I’ll be right back.”

  In the tiny bathroom, I discover I only have two Tampax. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I’m not pregnant after all.

  Thank God for small favors.

  Back in the bedroom, I peer out through the venetian blinds. Thin icy flakes are slanting in descending sheets, and the trunk and rear window of the Tempo are already covered. I can barely make out the far side of the parking lot. For the minute, we’re stuck.

  The motel, I noticed yesterday, has a state package store attached to it plus some kind of café. At least we won’t starve. The posted check-out time is twelve noon, but maybe I can talk them into letting us stay free, at least until the snow stops.

  Danny’s nose is running, and he starts whining even before his morning cartoons are over. I make us cheese and white bread sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off, but he refuses his. I think maybe he’s coming down with something—we’ve been lucky on that score too—but when I feel his forehead, he doesn’t seem to have a fever.

  All he wants, it turns out, is to go outside and play in the snow.

  “We can’t,” I say. “It’s much too cold, too wet. Plus we don’t have the right boots. We don’t even have waterproof gloves.”

  “Me don’t care,” he wails back. “Me don’t need boots. Don’t need gubbies.”

  “Oh no? Your hands would be frozen stiff inside of five minutes.”

  “No, they won’t!”

  “Oh yes they would!”

  “No, they won’t!”

  “Take a chill, Phil!”

  But his whining gives way, all of a sudden, to real tears. I try teasing him out of it, but he tugs at my sweatpants, screaming now, jabbing at the front door. I push him away angrily. He slams back into me, flailing with his little fists.

  “Look,” I say, holding his forearms firmly, “I’m not feeling so hot today. I feel lousy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t want to go outside.”

  “Me don’t care.” Twisting and kicking out. “Me go by my ’elp.”

  “My-self,” I say. “You know you can’t do that. We’ve got to stick together. Suppose you ran into a witch? What would happen then?”

  “Me don’t want a ’itch! Me don’t want a quest!”

  At least that’s what I think he said, because suddenly he isn’t just protesting. It’s escalated into something else, a total tantrum. I’ve never had that with him before. He lashes out at me, his face an ugly beet-red, and he scratches, hits, yanks, stomps his feet in frustration, and it takes all my strength to grab him and hold on.

  “Danny! Danny Dalton, stop it for God’s sake! Stop it now!”

  I lift him off the ground. I pin his arms, clutch him to my shoulder. That does no good. I start to sing to him. No good either. He’s beyond consoling. I hold him away from me, shake him. I sit in the one stuffed chair, pull him into me, rock back and forth, rock hard.

  “For God’s sakes, sweetie! It’s me, Becca! Please stop it!”

  But he can’t.

  “Take deep breaths,” I tell him. “Slow, deep breaths.”

  Finally he tries. Then he hyperventilates some more, short staccato pants, and squinches his eyes against a new rush of stingers. He coughs, hiccups. He sneezes all over us. I don’t have a tissue. I wipe his nose with my sleeve.

  “Danny,” I say. “Just calm down now. Please. Tell me what’s wrong. It’s me, Becca, remember?”

  And then it all comes out. In a jumble, in sobs.

  He hates the quest. Nothing good happens, all we do is go from motel to motel. Every day is the same. The food is bad. He’s TV’d out. He hates making poopies in the potties. He misses his own potty at home. He misses his one-eyed bear. He misses the third floor. He doesn’t like the coloring books I’ve gotten him, or the stamp set. We haven’t seen any witches. We haven’t seen any warlocks except the one. We still don’t have a rocket car.

  I try to reason with him. I never said the quest wouldn’t be boring lots of the time. Quests almost always are.

  No good.

  This isn’t just boredom, I think. And he isn’t coming down with something either.

  Was it nothing that he called for Georgia in the middle of the night?

  “Do you want to go home?” I ask him. “Is that it?” I’ve got him perched on my knees, facing me, supporting him under the arms. “Look at me, Danny. Is that what you want? Do you want to go home?”

  “No,” he says, averting his eyes.

  “Would you rather be with your mommy and daddy in your own house?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  But he can’t answer. He turns his head away, and I can see his little face squinch up again.

  “Look at me, Danny,” I insist. “This is important. You have to tell me. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be with your mommy and daddy? And your new sister? At home in your own house?”

  His face dissolves into new tears. He shakes his head, chin tucked in as though he’s trying to control himself. Then I hear, in his small, stammering voice: “Wanna … wanna stay … stay with … ’arrit.”

  ’arrit. Loud and clear.

  It shock
s me. I want to say: But that can’t be, sweetheart, it’s not my name. Instead I pull him back into my shoulder, push his head into the crook of my neck, rock. I pat him on the back, tousle his hair. I understand what he wants. It’s things the way they were before, on the third floor, Harriet and Justin. The quest—and Becca, Danny, the cars, the motels—is like a game that’s over.

  He wants it the way it was before.

  It makes me cry too, soundlessly, makes me hug all the tighter, until I realize that that’s not doing either of us any good.

  “Would you feel better,” I say, holding him still, “if you could call me Harriet some of the time?”

  “Uh-huh,” comes his muffled reply.

  “And I called you Justin?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I don’t see why we can’t do that, at least on special occasions. But only when we’re alone together, never when there are other people around. Do you understand?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Who are we when other people are around?”

  “Becca.”

  “Becca and …?”

  “Danny.”

  “Right. Well, here’s an idea,” my voice lightening, “why don’t we make today a special day? Like, why don’t we go out for lunch for a change? In a real restaurant. Would you like that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You could order whatever you liked. No more of Becca’s crummy sandwiches. You could even have scrambled eggs and bacon, french fries, would you like that?”

  “Ketchup.”

  “Ketchup too. Then, if it stops snowing and the roads are okay, we could find a store and buy real snow boots. Waterproof mittens. Then we could play in the snow if you still wanted to.”

  “Build a ’nowman?”

  “Build a snowman, what a great idea! Do you know how?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No kidding. You really do?”

  “Uh-huh.” Nodding.

  “That’s great! Totally. Well, we’ve got a lot to do then. We’d better get organized, beginning with your teeth, young man. Now go get me your toothbrush, and let’s get cracking!”

  He disentangles himself from my lap. I watch him head off toward the bathroom as though nothing at all has happened. Leaving me alone with my cramps, and my deflated enthusiasm, and the idea that maybe all I’ve just done is postpone the inevitable.

  We play in the room the rest of the morning. That is, he colors, I color. I’ve bought him a pack of Old Maid cards, but he’s still too young for it. I end up trying to build a castle out of the cards, but he knocks it down before I can finish the third level.

  We’re at the motel café early. I figure that will minimize the risk of anybody recognizing us.

  I needn’t have worried. Except for a couple of men in work clothes drinking coffee at the counter, the place is empty.

  “Of course that’s the weather,” I explain to Danny. “Otherwise, we’d never have gotten a table without waiting. You may not know it, but this place is historic. I even saw it listed in the guidebooks: ‘one of the last old-style diners in Ohio.’ Who knows? By the time you grow up, it might not even be around anymore.”

  Well, you do what you have to do.

  The waitress who serves us catches on. She recommends, for Danny, their “historic” quarter-pounder, which comes on a sesame roll with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle and, of course, french fries, and “from the bar,” a shake special, which combines three flavors of ice cream with a syrup of his choice and milk straight from the cow.

  He takes chocolate syrup in his shake and tops it all off with a piece of apple pie à la mode. I haven’t seen him eat like this since … well, I guess I’ve never seen him eat like this. We sit in a booth, side by side, from which I can watch the front door, also the cars coming into the general store and the motel entrance. I see a couple of Jeeps, pickups with snowplows attached, and out on the main road a big snow remover with a long line of cars inching behind it.

  I ask the waitress where we can buy some “heavy-duty” snow gear. She said there’s a shopping center a couple of miles away, with a sporting goods store and a discount chain. But will we be able to get through?

  “You talking about the snow, honey?” she says. “This is nothing. Around here, we call this a dusting.”

  Some dusting. At the same time, I have a choice to make. Earlier, the man in the motel office refused to let us stay the afternoon. Check-out time is twelve noon, he said. If we stayed beyond that, I’d have to pay for another day.

  But the motel is half-empty, I pointed out to him (a generous estimate), did he really expect to fill it up in the middle of a snowstorm?

  Finally, he agreed to let us stay till two. But no later.

  Go then? Or stay?

  After lunch, Danny votes to stay. We should buy boots and build a snowman. Why do we have to move all the time? He likes it here, and if we stay, we can eat dinner in the café too, can’t we?

  “Please, Becca, please?”

  The truth is, I don’t feel like driving around either, looking for another motel, even though the snow has mostly stopped.

  We find the mall. The giant discount store has everything we need. Danny runs around like a wild man, up and down the aisles. In the toy department, we have a short war over a plastic Colt .45. (I win, with the help of a bo from Ninja Turtles.) Along the way, I manage to get him into a pair of boots that fit, and Thinsulate mittens, and even a red-and-blue hooded snowsuit on a fifty-off sale. The snowsuit is a size too big—he’ll be able to wear it next year, I joke with myself—but with the pants and sleeves rolled up, it fits him well enough, and he insists on wearing it out of the store.

  The joke about next year makes me weepy. I chalk it up to my period. I buy buttons for the snowman, and a pail-and-shovel set designed for sandbox use but why not snow, and, for myself, boots, gloves, a new sweats outfit, underpants, tights, Tampax, lipstick, shampoo, and, on a whim, a tin drum of popcorn that’s been marked down from Christmas.

  Not a spree exactly, but still.

  Nobody looks at us strangely. As nearly as I can tell, nobody looks at us at all.

  I pay by MasterCard—it’s the first time I’ve used it except for cars—and to top it off, I buy Danny three rides, a quarter apiece, on a bucking locomotive near the main entrance.

  Back at the motel, we build our snowman. I can’t remember ever having done one before, only ice sculpture, once, back in Minnesota. It ends up bottom-heavy no matter what we do, a little like an old woman with full skirts, but thin-torsoed. A noticeable curve to the spine, I see when we step back, flushed and sweaty, to inspect our craftsmanship. Also, the button eyes are slightly crossed.

  I fix the eyes, adjust the orange-rind mouth.

  “Well, what do you think?” I ask.

  “No scarf,” he says seriously. “No ’at.”

  I can do something about the scarf—a pair of pantyhose I was going to chuck anyway—but the hat confounds me, except for his own Pirates cap, which I’m not about to sacrifice.

  “Well, maybe it’s a woman,” I say. “A snowwoman.”

  “No ’air,” he says.

  “Well, I don’t know, maybe it’s a bald snowwoman.”

  The idea tickles him. He starts to giggle, then laughs contagiously, and I catch it from him, pick him up, toss him hilariously into a snowbank. Then we start a snowball fight, first with balls but then great armfuls of loose snow that, whooping and giggling, we heap on each other from close range. Finally, our faces deliciously wet and cold, we collapse back into the snowbank.

  I get his wet clothes off in the motel, pop him in and out of a tub, then make a quick detour to the state liquor store. I ask for Dewar’s, a pint bottle. Medicinal, I tell myself with an inner giggle. On account of my cramps. Then I think better of it and buy a fifth.

  The woman at the counter doesn’t even ask me for proof of age.

  I collect a bucket of ice on the way back to the room, fill a plastic glass to the
brim with ice and Scotch, and humming, sipping—ahhh, God, when that warmth hits my stomach!—tell Danny to get ready for the big makeover. Then I set him up with TV, pry the lid off the popcorn drum for him, and, with a fresh Scotch within reach, set to work in the shower.

  If I shampoo my hair once, I do it six times. I soap, squeeze, twist, rinse, shampoo again. I’m under the steaming water so long that my fingers turn to prunes, my toes too, probably my knees and elbows.

  After a bout with the hair dryer, I still haven’t gotten rid of all the dye. My hair is now a darkish blond, but still with tints and glints of the unnatural color. It looks a wreck frankly, the worst of both worlds, but it will have to do. Tomorrow, when I make up my mind what we’re going to do next, I’ll either redye it or shampoo some more. For tonight, I don’t give a damn. I’m Harriet Major, and I have a dinner date with a young man named Justin Coffey.

  I dress in the new sweats and, still barefoot, go into the room, glass in hand, for fresh ice and another—

  The TV is still going.

  Danny is sitting on the floor on the far side of the room, his back propped against the wall. The popcorn tin next to him.

  Not where I left him.

  The man is sitting in the comfortable chair between Danny and the door, filling it to overflowing. Still in his overcoat.

  Goddamn, why did we stay over? Why did we build the snowman? Why why why why why why why?

  We’re caught! We lasted all of two weeks!

  “No problem,” the man says with a half-wave when he sees me. “Take your time. We won’t have any trouble.”

  He’s holding a plastic glass in one hand. My Scotch!

  “Who are you?” I shout at him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

  He grins at me. Big, jowly, florid face.

  “Oh, you can call me Harry,” he says with a laugh. “Or Tom or Dick, no problem. Harry and Harriet. Or would you like Rebecca better, maybe?”

  I stare at him. He’s big, bulky, about ten times my size. I glance at the door, the phone. He’s closer to both. A lot closer to Danny.

  Danny is looking up at me.

  Scared? Looking for some signal? I can’t tell.

  “Come on, just cool it,” the man says, following my eyes. “The kid’s fine. Why don’t you pour yourself another drink anyway? We’re going to have to wait awhile.”