by Amy Lapwing
“No,” said Pascale with authority. Nicolas called, “Aïe!” She paused in her basting to look at him for signs of distress. The chubby, dark-down-nobbed two-month-old grinned at his mother; he liked all these people, now. “She is angry, yes, but you stir her up too much. That is not good.”
“Then, what is it?” he asked. He pounded the lettuce stem on the counter. “Is she supposed to hide her feelings? Is that what we’re supposed to think now? Forget about it, it will go away?”
The two women looked at each other. “Imagine it was you, Michael,” said Helena. “Would you want to constantly think about your wife’s being unfaithful to you?”
“You have to let her work on it, by herself,” said Pascale. “It hurts, but no one can help her. You have to let her cry it out till it doesn’t hurt so much. It stinks, but it’s the way it is.”
“She will never accept it,” said Michael.
“You got to pray she will,” called Charles.
“She hates me,” said Michael. “I can’t just leave her alone.”
Denis popped a cashew in his mouth from the stash in his palm. “Isn’t that good?” he asked, looking at the women. They stopped what they were doing and looked at him. “That she hates him. Isn’t that good?” he repeated.
“No, cher, hating is bad,” said patronizing Pascale.
“Seems like I read somewhere,” said Denis, remembering a Reader’s Digest, most likely, “that hate and love are related. Cousins or something. One changes into the other.”
Michael turned an expression of hope on the women.
“Don’t believe everything you read,” said Helena.
They managed to get everything ready in time to sit down at twelve-thirty. After dinner, Denis, Charles and Michael took Nicolas up to bed. Denis laid the baby on his stomach and stroked his back as the infant’s eyelids closed and opened, the novelty of being in the company of men too exciting to be missed.
“You think I should, just, leave her alone?” asked Michael, looking at Charles.
“The big A,” said Charles, “is unequivocally unacceptable to a great many women, nowadays.”
“Ever since ‘An Unmarried Woman,’” whispered Denis. They were waiting for his explanation. “You remember that movie, with Jill Clayburgh? The husband tells her he’s having an affair, so, that’s it, she dumps him.”
“He is a Don Juan?” asked Michael.
“No. Just that one affair. That was enough, though. No second chance. Ever since that movie, women say to themselves, I don’t have to take it.”
Michael turned a look of distress on Charles.
“She hasn’t dumped you, has she?” asked Charles.
“She says she doesn’t love me,” Michael said.
Denis and Charles exchanged a look: that’s bad.
“She love you before all this started?” asked Charles.
Michael could not remember the last time she had said she loved him. But she bought him low-fat cream cheese. “Yes.”
“Then she was mad,” said Charles.
“And she may be thinking she doesn’t have to take it,” Denis reminded them.
Charles scowled at Denis and then said to Michael, “Look, you need to give her time to remember she does love you, even though she hates you right now. In the meantime, you have to help her, but very subtly, Stickbeater. Work whatever magic you worked when you first met.”
“I didn’t work magic, it was just, in the air,” protested Michael. “What do I do? Do I write her love letters?”
“I don’t know.” Charles pondered, looking at the rocking horse wallpaper border above Nicolas’ bed. “Try to think of what she wants, and then give it to her.”
At three Michael went to the dead grass house and got a rake from the garage. No one had raked all season. Some years they did it all, the two of them, other years they called one of the lawn services for a fall clean-up. He started in the back yard. After a half hour, he realized he would not be able to do the whole yard before dark. He moved to the front yard and started raking out from under the shrubs in front of the house. He collected the leaves in a row spanning the width of the house and stopped to rest by the cement burro. The uncovered grass was bright green still, the fall had been mild and wet. The leaves were mostly brown now, with a few red ones recently fallen. He tossed the rake in the air and caught it and moved down closer to the road and with a new energy he raked several small piles. He worked till past sundown and finally quit at six o’clock.
The lawn service came the next day. The owner himself was on the job, he had only a couple of men in the fall, with all the college labor back at school. It looked like no one was at home, and he was relieved because he had told the lady that he would have it done and looking real nice by Thanksgiving. He told one man to start on the front and he took the other man with him to work on the back. The front man had raked up the ‘J+M’ before he noticed it was part of a message. He stepped back and read the rest: shaped leaf piles spelled, ‘4 EVA.’ Teenagers. He smiled and raked up the rest of the front lawn, repeatedly gathering the leaves in a tarp and carrying them into the woods in back to dump. The stone-faced donkey stared at the tantalizing grass shiny as new spring growth; it was ready for winter fertilizer.
“I wish you had told me before, honey.” Mavis rubbed butter on the skin, just a breast, it would be only the two of them, the Kanes and Robin had traveled to Iowa to spend the holiday with Kim and his wife and their two children; Irish twins they were, just ten months apart in age.
Justina put her arm around her mother’s waist. “I don’t know. I was ashamed, I guess.”
Mavis’ brows came together at ‘ashamed.’ She sprinkled salt and pepper and thyme and basil on the breast and put it in the oven. “Peel the sweet potatoes, my sweet.”
Justina took the plastic bag of sweet potatoes to the table and sat and scraped them. Mavis buttered the casserole dish, then helped her daughter.
“Well, tell me where you are with it,” she instructed.
“I don’t know. I still get so pissed when I think of him doing it with her.”
Mavis shook her shoulders. “Disgusting.”
“Exactly! How do I cut these?”
“Quarters is fine. Just got to be mashable. Was he in love with her, or just lust?”
“Both, probably.” She tugged at a long root strand with her peeler. “When I think he was probably carrying a torch for her all this time.”
Mavis paused in her work to clean potato skin from her peeler. George had picked it up at one of the mall kitchen stores. It had a nice thick handle that felt good in her hand but it didn’t peel worth a damn. Why he had thought she needed a new peeler she would never know. “He’s always seemed awfully attentive to you,” said Mavis, “when we’ve seen him.”
Attentive. Nice old word. Yes, he was. He very seldom tuned her out. Her father had been bad about that, especially after he retired. He could go all day and barely talk to anyone, just thinking about something. Michael didn’t think, not for hours on end. He was pretty much always available to whatever was going on, music, students, people, her. That woman. It was hard to imagine him keeping something like a love affair alive all those years and not doing anything to betray it. To keep something like that all in his mind, it wasn’t like him.
Justina got a cutting board and knife and set to quartering the peeled sweet potatoes. He should think more. Think before you screw, Michael. “Mom, was Daddy ever unfaithful to you?”
Mavis kept her eyes on her peeling as she replied, “If he did, he kept it a secret.”
Justina cut her mother’s peeled potatoes. “What do you think you would’ve done if he did and you found out?”
Mavis took the quarters and put them into a four-quart pot. “I think I would wish I didn’t know.”
That night as she lay in bed it occurred to Justina that many wives must have unfaithful husbands. Maybe just once in their whole married lives. Some of them never knew about it. They might s
uspect or even just wonder, like her mother wondered. But they never had to deal with the certainty. Certainty brought crisis. Crisis brought decision-making. Excruciating decision-making. That was the only difference between her marriage and her mother’s, in the fidelity department. Her mother might have been uncertain; she was certain. Her mother had no reason to kick her husband out; she had every reason. But her father might have been just as unfaithful as Michael.
What if she had never known about this? She and Michael would be spending Thanksgiving together, they would have been thankful together at the progress her tenure application was making, approved by the department, now before the dean of the college. And they would have celebrated their fifth anniversary together. She would have been so charmed by the little wooden model of their house he had made and left on the doorstep, complete except for painting; “For to try out colors, for spring painting” the card had read. She would have teased him, said, ‘Very nice, now where is my “costly” present?’ He would have had his little affair and that would be it, never again, no unhappiness on that score ever. She went back downstairs and got another slice of pumpkin pie with whipped cream. She went back home on Saturday and sent Michael email asking to see him.
At ten o’clock on Saturday night he came to the door with a sack of apples. His love letter in the leaves was gone, he noticed as he came up the walk. Did she see it? He knocked.
“You want some coffee?” she asked as he followed her into the kitchen.
“Sure.” He put the bag of apples on the counter. “The jonagolds are perfect now,” he said, quoting the sign over the display at the Abbey Orchard store.
“They look good,” she said, pouring coffee into mugs.
“You want one?” he said, taking one off the top and rubbing it against his chest. “They say this is all you have to do to clean them.” He held it up to her, the burnished salmon blush. “Here.”
“I’ll have one later,” she said and she handed him his mug.
“Happy Anniversary,” he said.
His smile reminded her of Peter Lorre.
She seemed very cool, to him.
“Thank you for the house,” she responded. “Shall we sit in the living room?”
He sat in his plaid chair while she sat on the couch, her legs crossed. She took a sip of her coffee and cradled it in her lap. “I want a divorce,” she said.
Once, a very long time ago, perhaps he was ten, there had been a hurricane that dropped out of the Caribbean and headed straight for southern Central America. They had advance warning, of course, they lived near San José and played the radio constantly, in those days. His father had called the family and the campesinos that were still about into the house. There was no basement, none of the houses had basements, so they congregated in an interior hallway with their food and blankets and radio. It was like a party at first, they listened more to the music station than to the news. His mother and the other women went to and fro into the kitchen to make them food and beverages. Then the station stopped playing music and told them they were supposed to have evacuated the area by now. The rim of the eye had hit the Atlantic coast, the hurricane would be in San José within the hour. Everyone went to the bathroom as fast as they could, they got the rest of the food and they all hunkered down in the hall. The men remembered to get the mattresses and had just finished putting them over everyone when the roof blew off. They all screamed; his mother and father yelled to stay down under their mattress. No one could be heard over the chorus of roaring, whining and whipping of the many-voiced wind. One wall of the hallway was knocked over and leaned against the other wall, making a lean-to with all of them beneath it. People were praying to God. Michael prayed to God he would never pinch Marisol again and never tell on Catalina, never ever again, God, just let him live. He would be a good boy from now on. And my puppy, God, please save my puppy, he’s in his pen, God, he’s the black one with the tan legs. Please, please, please, I’ll be good, I promise. I want to be good, all the time. I’ll be good, God.
After Justina blew the roof off, she discovered Michael on his knees by her legs. His hands were on her thighs, his head in her lap. He pleaded with her, just one more chance, he would be a good man.
She closed her jaws tight and pulled her brows down over her smarting eyes and said nothing.
He asked her again, but her look told him it was no use. “Please?”
“I want to be free.” She looked at her reflection in the black window. She wanted to be free of the misery that face showed her. She looked down at her lap and resisted an impulse to touch his hair. “You can stay here if you want, tonight. In the guest room.”
He would have taken the bone eagerly except he felt the period of kindness would be short, and followed by an eternity of growing distance. He laid in the bed that smelled of their home, if not of themselves, and thought what to do. He could not resist the divorce, but he could not agree to it. He had no desire to divorce her. He loved her, she must feel it, just as she had before. How could she not respond, as she had before? Because he was not the same, to her. He was not desirable. Could he make himself desirable again? He was not supposed to provoke her, they all said, he was supposed to give her time. He had left her alone, since the disaster at Moe’s, for ten days now, and this is what had happened. He should have been trying something, to show her, something that she could like about him. He had made her the model of the house, to show her he valued their home together. He had not had time to think of other things. She must be so miserable that she thinks only divorce can bring relief. I have to show her she’s wrong.
Scheme after scheme his mind rejected, nothing he might do could work. When light returned at seven on Sunday morning he was still awake.
He put on yesterday’s clothes that he had neatly folded over the chair and found Justina in the kitchen. She brought him some coffee and offered him a bagel. He was not hungry. She sat at the table with him and ate her English muffin.
“I think—” he started. “Can we have a separation, first?”
She finished chewing and said, “Why?”
“To be sure.”
“I am sure.”
He rubbed his face. His eye sockets were dry from his vigil; it was going to be a horrible day. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I know.”
“A separation won’t hurt.”
“It’ll just delay things,” she said. “I want to be rid of this awful feeling.” She was looking at him, as though she expected him to come up with an alternative.
“I do not say what will help this,” he said carefully, trying to show humility, “I know I don’t know how you feel. But even Pascale would say, if you still want to divorce later, you can. We can.”
“If we separate,” she said, “I want it to be like we’re not married.”
He blinked.
“I mean,” she elaborated, “that if I want to see someone, I can. If that’s going to give you a problem, I want a divorce now so I can be free.”
“You’re seeing someone?”
She blew out a laugh: pih! “You’re asking me if I’m seeing someone?”
“Are you?”
“I don’t have to answer you.”
Over the pounding of his heart, he heard his mind say, ‘Ask Pascale.’ “No, I know, you don’t.”
“So if we’re separated, what I do has nothing to do with you. And what you do has nothing to do with me. If you want to see her—”
“No! No, Justina, no! I don’t! I swear to God, I love you!”
“Yeah, well, I’ve heard that before.”
“All right,” he said, “we separate as though we are not married.”
The black and tan puppy had been left in its pen during the hurricane. He had screamed at his father to let him go get it; his father had said it would be all right, it would dig itself a hole and hide, but they had never found that animal again.
Chapter Eighteen
In the Balance
It w
as stupid to have to go out to the store at night just for a tube of diaper rash ointment. Pascale got a red plastic basket with the arm-breaking square metal handles and went up and down the aisles and tried to remember the half-dozen other things they needed. She really should do a full grocery run, she did not have to keep an eye out for supermarket baby snatchers, Nicolas was home with Denis, they were watching a hockey game. But she was tired, so she stuck to the essentials, only two of which she could remember, garlic and muffin papers. She got in line: ‘Eight Items or Less.’ ‘Fewer,’ Pascale’s mind corrected, ‘eight items or fewer.’
A dark-haired man with a pleasant face came across the queues, finding his way between people and carts, and went up to a tall young woman with blond hair and two dark-haired children, a girl of about four who stood by her mother’s side, and a boy of perhaps two sitting in the baby seat of the carriage. The man and woman greeted each other, smiling with the pleasure of being together, it seemed, and the man picked up the boy and held him high as they grinned into each other’s face. He kissed the child and held him on his hip and talked to him while the blond woman looked on with approving eyes. He put the child back in his seat and knelt down and embraced the little girl. She smiled shyly back and looked up at him as he stood to talk to the woman.
How nice, thought Pascale, a husband meets his wife at the store to help with the marketing. She watched them talk, he seemed to be catching the woman up on his doings that day. The scene took on a different meaning as Pascale noticed the man caressing the little girl’s cheek as he spoke to the mother, his thumb and forefinger gently kneading the soft skin again and again as the child looked over the candy bar display. His pleasant expression had become melancholy, though he still smiled; it was something in the eyes, thought Pascale. The child stood patiently as her father repeatedly caressed her face, as though aware that the corner she held of the familial configuration was the key one and if she moved or turned her head the precious balance would be upset and he would be gone.
