It did occur to Cass that this competition might one day veer from rivalry to something more rancorous—and that Ryan’s contributions, while often helpful, did slightly encroach on certain spheres traditionally reserved for the mother. Worse, it sometimes occurred to her that his ambition might ultimately end their marriage; that when her beauty and reproductive role were exhausted, she might be reduced to obsolescence. For example, what if, once she finished nursing Sam, Ryan decided he was the better parent, the only parent necessary, that Cass had served her use and was now disposable? He was not without awareness of other younger specimens in their environment. But such dire Darwinian prophecies seemed more fitting for a mongoose than a man, more likely for a wolf than this wanderer who had stationed himself in her kitchen, and so she squelched her misgivings as the same kind of rivalry that rankled her own children. Instead, she counted her blessings. This new man and all that he came with—a home undivided by maternal and paternal roles, by the gender norms prescribed by pink and blue lines, by any expectations whatsoever—was a man, a home, a life that a generation of women had fought for, a life that allowed her to focus on what she loved the most—her kids and her work and her husband.
FIVE
Cass wakes with a start just before sunrise. A noise outside? One of the kids? She bolts out of bed, riled. She hurries down the hall, pulling on her bathrobe. The window is open again. She closes it, bothered. She checks the kids’ rooms. They are asleep. All is well. All is quiet.
“Ginger,” she calls. Still moving quickly, she continues down the stairs in her nightgown and sweater. In the kitchen, she checks cabinets, opens closet doors. She bursts out the back door into the backyard. “Ginny,” she calls. “Ginger.”
Scanning the yard, she spots a neighbor’s fence and a swinging dog door. She looks around, then up. The family cat is perched at the top of a telephone post.
Minutes later, Cass walks back down the hall, holding the cat, only slightly breathless.
She gets back into her bed, more confused than before, addresses her sleeping husband.
“Did you leave the upstairs window open?”
“Nope.”
“Cat got out,” she says.
“Something must’ve spooked her.”
“What does she know that we don’t?” says Cass.
“That sleep is not allowed in this house anymore.”
“Nora said there was a burglary in Bayview.”
“Maybe you should dust for prints, Miss Marple.” He turns to his wife, kisses her neck, but she does not engage. He rolls over and goes back to sleep, now as annoyed as she is.
* * *
The Connors are not morning people. Waking occurs in phases, beginning with a ten-minute incubatory stage that looks a lot like sleeping. Alice’s entrance is the most dramatic. Her hair is in a tornado, as though she has averted being sucked into the sky by a vacuum and escaped with only this evidence of her nearness to natural disaster. Pete’s arrival is less dramatic, more of a saunter than an entrance, in which he migrates from the bedroom to the kitchen like a coastal bird, stopping at a pile of LEGOs, poking around a bit before advancing to the breakfast table. The baby wakes up in a spectacular blaze of tears and laughter, followed by an onset of delight that is brighter than summer sunshine. It will be another twenty minutes before the whole group is assembled.
Finally, they achieve that precarious moment just before hunger overwhelms and lateness becomes inevitable. But the fragile stasis is interrupted by an urgent message: Ryan calling from upstairs, upset about something.
“Cass!” Footsteps increase in volume as he marches down the stairs and enters the kitchen.
“What is the matter?” Cass asks.
“She ruined another shirt. That’s like a thousand dollars in damage.” Ryan holds up a crisp blue dress shirt, the color of a baby’s bonnet. “We need to find someone new.”
“Ryan, what happened?” Cass says. She looks at the empty stairs.
“Marta destroyed a brand-new shirt. These shirts can’t go in the dryer.”
Marta works part-time for the Connors, watching Sam when Cass teaches and helping to ferry the older children from school to sports and playdates. A mother herself, she has large brown eyes, graying black hair, and a soothing demeanor. She focuses on Sam, pitches in around the house, and otherwise helps Cass solve the daily mathematical challenge of getting three kids to and from three different places. She has not been working long, only started at the beginning of Cass’s semester but, from Ryan’s critique, seems destined not to stay much longer.
“You’re always saying you need more clean shirts,” Cass says, trying humor.
“Now I have one fewer.”
“She was just trying to help.” Cass smiles again, a last attempt at resolution.
“She broke my LEGOs too,” Pete adds. He is always happy to second Ryan. His mother’s temper accelerates as soon as she’s outnumbered.
Ryan knows this. “Do you know how much time it takes to put those together?”
“Time and effort,” says Pete.
“Exactly. Time and effort. I want her out by the end of the week.” He is like a politician this way, seizing opportunities, capitalizing on weakness. It is almost athletic. “Promise you’ll find someone better.”
“It’s not easy to find someone good.”
“Apparently,” says Ryan. He is walking toward the door, signaling, without the usual niceties, the end of the conversation.
“Maybe you shouldn’t buy such expensive shirts,” Cass says. Sometimes self-defense and counterattack have no distinction.
“Maybe you should find someone experienced to be in our home and watch our children.”
Ryan is at the door now. He laces his shoes and puts on his jacket, leaving for work without a goodbye—knowing this will hurt her more than any comment.
“My children,” Cass mutters. She says this for her own satisfaction.
The kids look up as the front door slams, from their breakfast to their mother. They are waiting for him to come back, for the door to open again, and for him to burst in, smiling, saying, “I was just kidding!” But he doesn’t. They check their mother’s eyes, which do a poor job of hiding disappointment, but she deflects their looks with a valiant performance. “Someone woke up on the wrong side of bed,” she says, smiling. “No dessert for Ryan tonight.”
The kids take this as license to laugh. They cautiously relinquish their concern and go back to eating. Cass, too, returns to the business of breakfast, combating her own emotion with a rigorous focus on the wooden beam in the kitchen. The beam has a large splinter that descends from the top down the pillar.
Focusing on the day ahead distracts her from this revelation. She teaches tonight and needs Ryan to pitch in with child care. As the kids finish their breakfast, Cass drifts upstairs for a round of reconnaissance. She walks to the bathroom, stands at the sink, and opens the medicine cabinet. She removes Ryan’s prescription bottle and palms it, a biweekly habit, then conducts the measurement by which she can tell if he has taken his daily dose from the change in the weight of the bottle. The bottle feels as heavy as the last time she checked, a few days prior. She reads the label more carefully now, noting the name of the med and the prescribing doctor, Dr. Lugner.
Ryan is seeing a new therapist due to the onslaught of work and life stress he has lamented, and what he has acknowledged as an increasingly short temper. The anxiety med, while generally leveling, has the unfortunate effect of either curbing his temper or, when days are missed, making him prone to erratic moods and anger. With new concern, she walks downstairs, utters a five-minute warning to the children. Hoisting the baby to her hip, she hurries out the front door. A morning like this will ruin her day when a simple exchange can correct it.
Ryan is sitting in his car, typing into his cell phone. The look on his face is inscrutable, the look of a man writing an important work email or planning where to meet his mistress.
“Don’t
forget. I teach tonight,” Cass says, approaching.
“You’re kidding. Can’t Marta stay?” he asks.
“She has to leave at six.”
“You realize she is affecting my work. Who would you rather get fired?”
“You or me?” Cass asks.
“Me or her,” says Ryan.
“Hmm,” she says, pretending to think. “Marta helps out a lot with the kids. Tell you what,” Cass says. “If you get fired, I’ll fire her.”
Anger in Ryan looks like a smile before it looks like a snarl. His breathing sharpens.
“I’m sorry,” she says. Retreat is her only move now. The words work a strange magic on Ryan, defusing his anger.
“Meet me at six at the office,” he says. It is a concession. “But promise you’ll find someone better. Promise you’ll have someone new by Monday.”
“I’ll do my best,” Cass says. “I have work today also.”
He makes the half-mean, half-irresistible look that turns Cass into a puddle. Is it possible his cruelty turns her on, or just that she is addicted to the challenge of losing and earning back his affection?
Cass watches Ryan drive away and asks herself this question: How did she get to this place—was it slow or sudden? How did she fall so far afield from a happy marriage? Did everyone deviate gradually from a life they knew and loved to one that defied recognition? The only thing she knew for sure was that this switch escaped detection. She and Ryan have been married for three years. They have three children. They have lived in Portland for one of these years. Somewhere, though she could not say when, her confidence—and their marriage—faltered.
Standing at her front door, she takes a mental inventory of what she knows at this moment. One: she is not a child anymore. She is a grown-up. Therefore, she is not helpless. Two: she has all the clothes she needs, an assortment of skirts and dresses, tights and socks, shirts and sweaters. She has enough bras and underwear to get through a week without doing laundry, enough lace to pull together a respectable outfit for a date with ten minutes’ warning—and enough makeup (rose blush, pink-hued lipstick, gray eyeliner, black mascara, matte foundation). She has enough friends to go out once a week, get dressed up once a month, enough passion in her marriage to have sex once a week, and occasionally, if the baby’s nap conspires, in the afternoon on a Sunday. She has a job, she has a home, she has children, friends, and relations. She knows her children’s shoe sizes, their favorite flavors of cake and ice cream. She knows her best friends’ birthdays. She has, in a drawer in the laundry room, Band-Aids, scissors, Scotch tape, pens, and paper. She has saved all her kids’ artwork. She keeps a cabinet stocked with crayons, paints, and Magic Markers. She has a bulletin board with a calendar marked with all her children’s schedules. She has high black heels for an evening out, appropriate shoes for the classroom, hats and scarves and mittens, a bucket of umbrellas, and, somewhere in a box upstairs, Christmas ornaments, snowsuits, sleds, a Boogie Board, and, farther in the attic, shoe boxes stuffed with yellowing photographs of ancestors and exes.
She has things that she can count. Things that she can count on and by which she can be counted. She is depended on by a precious few and has those she can depend on. She has everything she needs to survive. She has the capacity for her and her kids to subsist in their home in a natural disaster. Water, batteries, canned food. She has achieved a self-sufficient state; she is not dependent on another person for sustenance and protection. She is depended upon by three people for food, water, sleep, hugs, kisses, and guidance, transportation to soccer practice, dance class, playdates, and sleepovers. She depends on someone only for the luxuries of advanced civilizations, companionship, love, sex, and conversation. She has achieved adulthood.
This realization gives her great comfort. More than comfort. Relief. The feeling after comfort. The hope that after comfort is lost, comfort can be recovered. The same feeling she gets when she loses her keys, that she is now locked out of her life, with as much hope to re-enter as a trespasser. But then, as she fumbles in her pocket, desperate to find her phone, to call a neighbor, a friend, a locksmith, she finds her keys in her pocket. Her belongings still belong to her. All may not be well in the world, but she still has access.
Stilled, she turns and walks back into her house to collect her children.
The phone rings. She sees the Westchester area code and declines the caller. It is her father, and he is calling to talk about work, to pepper her with his worries. To make sure she is doing all she can to get into the tenure track, taking on a bigger class load, meeting often with her superiors, trying to publish. He is calling to project his aspirations onto his daughter, while simultaneously demeaning her for falling short, for failing his lifelong goal of having a son simply by being a daughter. No, she will not be answering. Enough gender politics for one morning.
* * *
Cass and Nora are out for a run after school drop-off. Nora has asked if she can join in Cass’s weekly routine, and Cass has agreed in an effort to expand her friend base beyond one acquaintance. It is one of those rare breathtakingly clear days in Portland. The sky is a crystal ball. The future is sunny.
“I can’t believe you do this every day,” says Nora.
“Need it to stay sane,” says Cass.
Nora struggles to keep up. “You’re in really good shape,” she says. “What else have you been doing?”
“Just running.”
“After your husband?”
“Nora!”
“Most I’ve run in the last year is to catch my kids in the playground.”
“There is no better workout.”
“They should give us awards,” says Nora, “throw us a party. And this year’s award goes to … Every Working Mother.”
“Dream on,” says Cass.
“That reminds me,” says Nora. “I’m throwing something for Halloween. For grown-ups. Costumes. You’re coming.”
They run past majestic bay-view homes, uniform in their grandeur. The Victorian era was a good one for architecture.
“Would you guys ever sell?” Nora asks.
“The house? No. We’re just getting settled.”
“It needs so much work.”
“It’s good for Ryan. He needs a project.”
“Other than the move, the job, the beach house, and the stepkids?”
“He’s happiest when he’s busy.”
They hit a patch of uneven terrain. Cass slows down, cuing Nora about the roots and rocks underfoot.
“I just got the most amazing listing,” she says. “Water views. Totally mint.”
“Ryan would never sell.”
“It’s only his decision?”
“No, but we’re enjoying the process. Besides, I’ve already gone through it. When Jason died, the sale of the house was … a lot to deal with.”
“You’re tenants in common. On the deed. I remember from the contracts.” Nora has either missed or chosen against delving into the subject of Cass’s deceased husband.
“You trying to get me to leave Ryan?”
“No, just don’t drop dead.”
“What?”
“The house would automatically transfer to him. Not the children.”
Cass comes to a full stop. “You really don’t like my husband.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “I love Ryan. I just believe a woman should be able to pick up and leave at any moment. Feminism, bitches.”
Cass stares at Nora. This has gotten awkward. “I’d better go,” she says. “I teach at noon.”
“You should be sainted,” says Nora.
Cass peels off, heading back toward their neighborhood. Nora starts walking.
* * *
It is just after five o’clock, and Cass is on her way to Ryan’s office. She texts him as she gets in the car.
“Heading to you now,” she says. “See you at six.” He will need to be punctual. She is on a tight schedule.
The usual chaos of dinner is doubled
on nights when Cass teaches. Tonight, it is augmented by confusing logistics. Cass has made last-minute arrangements in light of the scheduling conflict. The older kids will go home from school with a friend. And Cass will bring the baby when she drives to the city, dropping him off with Ryan at his office before racing to USM for her seminar at six thirty. Ryan will pick up Pete and Alice at their friend’s house, drive the baby back home, and, if he keeps his end of the bargain, Cass will return home after class to a calm and quiet house, purring with sleeping children. But first she must drive a fussy baby into the city in rush-hour traffic. By the time they’ve reached the city, he is wailing at maximum volume, which makes the late hour and the lack of response from Ryan all the more unnerving.
* * *
It’s quarter of six, and there has been no answer to any texts or emails. Cass picks up her phone and dials. No answer. She dials again. Time is passing quickly.
“Ryan. Where are you? I teach at six thirty.”
And then again, five minutes later: “I’m going to have to take the baby to class if you don’t surface.”
With some effort, she parks and carries the baby into the building. It is one of the glass-and-steel buildings in the newly fashionable Arts District, buildings that seem to evidence radical changes in engineering, apparently standing on pillars of glass or rubber, with steel draped in the same way as canvas. Other than these architectural feats, the building has no distinct personality and produces no further indications of Ryan’s whereabouts, other than the blank look of the main desk receptionist and the photos on the desk of Stephanie, Ryan’s over-tanned, underage, also absent assistant. Stephanie is younger than Cass realized and prettier than Ryan described, with the bleached-blond hair of a sorority girl and the manly muscles of—who knew it was a sport?—a championship “bikini competitor.” An array of contest photos, ass splayed, tan sprayed, reveals his assistant’s hobby, along with a recent win at the “twenty-five and under conference” in Miami! No such luck for Cass, however, who is still failing at the simple task of finding her husband.
Poison Page 5
