The Secret Ingredient for a Happy Marriage

by Shirley Jump

  That day wasn’t today. Nora didn’t have the heart to speak those words.

  She thought of her mother, and the incredibly difficult conversation Ma had had with the four of them. They’d all been sitting on the couch in the formal living room, while the sun streamed through the windows and danced on the oval rug. Four girls under ten, fidgeting and squabbling, until Ma knelt before them. Dark shadows rimmed Ma’s eyes, and she was shaking as she spoke. She looked so fragile, Nora was afraid her mother would fall apart like the porcelain doll Nora had dropped on the sidewalk.

  “Your father died,” Ma said, and even though Nora was too little to comprehend the permanence of dying, the impact losing Dad would have, she remembered feeling as if the earth were shifting beneath her. A wide crevasse of the unknown opened under the girls, breaking the perfect world they’d always known.

  The irony that Sarah was also eight and that Nora was debating about telling her own daughter that her world was falling apart, didn’t escape her. Even if it was just a divorce and not a death, Sarah’s world would never be the same.

  Tomorrow morning, Nora was going to call Anna’s mother and find out where that rumor had started. Even if it wasn’t a rumor at all. Until then, she wasn’t going to rock Sarah’s world. “You don’t need to worry.”

  Sarah took in that information with a tentative nod. “Daddy’s going to be excited when we come home, and maybe he can make a fence for the dog.”

  Nora could feel Sarah watching her, waiting for the only answer she wanted to hear. That they were going home after this and everything was going to be okay. Just like it was before. Nora drew in a deep breath. It was past time she started facing the truth—and admitting it to her children. “Honey, we aren’t going home to that house. We’re going to go live at Aunt Mary’s for a little while.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Daddy and I don’t have enough money for that house anymore and we need to find another one.” Not exactly a lie but not exactly the truth.

  “But…but I love that house. I don’t wanna move.”

  “I love that house too.” Nora swept Sarah’s bangs off her forehead. Her little girl was growing up, faster than Nora wanted. All these losses and changes were hastening that process, and Nora hated that. If she could rewind the clock, take them back to the days before—before Ben started gambling, before they went broke, before her marriage fell apart—she would. “That house is where Daddy and I brought you home from the hospital. We painted your room pink, and we built a white crib, and we put those glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling for you to see at night.”

  In those days before their first child was born, Nora and Ben had been a happy team. She remembered painting the walls, the two of them working side by side, their rollers completing each other’s swipes of paint. They’d laughed, they’d kissed, they’d dotted each other with paint, and then they’d made love on the floor, while the paint dried and the sun set.

  A watery smile spread across Sarah’s face. “I remember those stars.”

  “We didn’t want you to be scared at night, and Daddy told you that the moon and stars were always watching out for you. That the angels sat on the edges of the stars and made sure all the little kids were okay.”

  “And Daddy drew an angel on one of the stars. And he said he made it look like you, because he thought you were an angel. Just not the dead kind.”

  Ben had said that about her? She remembered the night he’d brought the stepstool into Sarah’s room to pencil an angel at the edge of one of the stars. Later, he’d gone back and traced the drawing with a Sharpie, making the image more permanent. The stars and the angel had stayed until Sarah turned six and wanted a big girl’s room with princess wallpaper and a ballerina lamp. Nora had spent an entire Sunday afternoon peeling the stars off the ceiling and painting over the spots where the glue had stuck. She’d erased the constellation and the angel with a few swipes of white paint, working alone this time. By then, those moments of laughter and kisses had been replaced by late nights beside a roulette wheel.

  “I don’t want a new house,” Sarah said, and the tears started again, sliding down her cheeks in slow, sad rivers. The cold maturity that had filled her face earlier yielded to the pain of a little girl who was losing everything she knew. “I want my house, and I want Daddy to draw me another angel. I want everything to stay the same.”

  Nora drew her daughter into a hug. She rested her head on top of Sarah’s, inhaling the sweet strawberry scent of her shampoo. Even that wasn’t the same. At some point, Nora had changed brands, and she couldn’t remember why. “I do, too, honey. I do too.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Magpie curled into the leather armchair in the corner of her living room, with Nora’s dog asleep at her feet, and looked out over a sparkling nighttime city. She loved this apartment, a fifteenth-floor space in a busy neighborhood that had a clear view of the Mystic River, and just beyond that, the northern side of Boston. She’d rented the space two years ago and spent so little time here that her neighbors greeted her as a stranger every time she came home.

  Home. It was a funny word, Magpie thought. A word she didn’t really understand or know. The only home she’d ever really had was the one she grew up in, that triplex on Park Street with her sisters and her mother. After her father died, home had become a place with a hole in it, a space no one could fill. The first time she got on a plane and headed to Texas on a magazine assignment, she became a wandering vagabond and told herself that was the life she wanted. She’d gobbled up assigned trips to far-flung places like they were Xanax, using the constant travel to ease the gnawing unrest inside her.

  Her apartment was bare bones, filled with furniture from a single marathon shopping trip to IKEA and a smattering of mementos she shipped to herself, most of them still in boxes, waiting for her to be here long enough to unpack them and settle the vases and handmade bowls and artisan mirrors on some shelf where they’d gather dust and wait for her to return.

  Her cell phone began to ring, dancing across the glass of the end table. Charlie’s name and face lit up her screen, but Magpie didn’t answer, just like she hadn’t answered the last few times. She didn’t have an answer for him, and if she knew him like she thought she did, not answering would eventually make him give up. Charlie would move on to the next challenge, the next girl in the next city.

  Chance got to his feet, came over, and laid his head in her lap. “Silly dog. Don’t start depending on other people. You’re better off alone, you know.” Magpie rubbed his head. The dog sighed, content with the simple love.

  Her phone lit again, texts from her sisters wondering why she hadn’t gone to their family dinner. She texted back and told Bridget she was feeling under the weather, worn out from the days on the beach.

  She lied.

  All those days in Truro with Nora and she’d never brought up the real reason she’d asked her sister to go with her. Maybe because she’d hoped it wouldn’t become real if she didn’t talk about it. Or maybe because she didn’t want to see that look of judgment and disappointment in Nora’s eyes. Nora had been the one who had encouraged Magpie, told her to go after her dreams, travel the world. What would she think if Magpie told her sister that those very dreams were about to end?

  So many times, Magpie had come close, dancing around the edges of the topic, thinking maybe she could speak the words, but then she’d seen the struggle in Nora’s face, the stress that her sister was dealing with, and she’d changed the subject. Avoided it, was the truth.

  “Maybe you and I should run away together,” she said to the dog. “Go to Africa or Japan or Costa Rica. Somewhere far, far away from…everything.” Chance wagged his tail and leaned into her touch. “Or maybe we should stay right here and deal with shit. What’s your vote, puppy?”

  A set of chimes sang. It took a minute for Magpie to recognize the sound as her doorbell, not surprising given how infrequently she’d been home. She got to her feet, which made the dog sigh in
disagreement.

  Through the peephole she saw a familiar face. A face she didn’t want to speak to right now.

  “I know you’re home,” Charlie said. “Your car is parked in the carport.”

  Damn it. Magpie pulled open the door and leaned against the jamb. He looked good, damn him, wearing a blue chambray shirt and a pair of faded jeans. Charlie had warm brown eyes and sandy blond hair that brushed along his brows and a grin that could charm the coat off a bear. “Why are you here, Charlie?”

  He frowned. “I have to say, that’s not the greeting I was expecting after flying twenty-three hours to get here.”

  “Don’t pretend like you flew back to Massachusetts for me. You have an assignment.”

  “Exactly. Two birds. One stone.” He put his hand above her head and leaned closer. That grin widened and lit his eyes. “What’s up with you? Why are you so pissed at me?”

  Magpie shrugged. Chance came up beside her, nosing at the door. She shifted to block the dog from getting out, though a part of her wished Chance had more guard dog in him than lover dog and that he would be intimidating enough to chase Charlie away. “I told you. We had a great time, but now it’s over. We’ll be friends, maybe hook up once in a while.”

  “That’s what you want. To hook up once in a while.” The words weren’t even questions. His gaze flattened, and his grin dropped.

  “Well, depending on where both of us are. I mean, you might meet someone else, and I—”

  “I’ve already met the woman I wanted to. A woman I don’t want to just hook up with.”

  She sighed. How many women had he used that line on? She’d known what she was getting when she’d first gone back to Charlie’s room in a tiny hotel in Leningrad, but now he was acting like those nights they’d had were more than a momentary salve for loneliness. “Come on, Charlie, don’t make this into some Nicholas Sparks movie. You were the one who said you were in it for a good time. I was cool with that. We had the good time; now we move on.”

  “Move on. Huh.” He leaned in closer, his eyes meeting hers with that twinkle that had first attracted her to him. Charlie was the kind of guy who loved a woman for a week or a month, then found another. She had the same commitment allergy and had gone out with him because she thought he knew and understood the rules. No I love yous, no long commitments, no promises. “You really want to move on?”

  He was so close she could feel the warmth of his skin, see the flecks of gold in his eyes. Tempting. And wrong. Magpie pressed a hand to her stomach, and there, in her gut, she knew the right answer. She stepped back. “Yeah, Charlie, I’m moving on. Thanks for coming by.”

  Then she shut the door and went back to her chair and her view of the city. Chance lay down beside her, his tail arcing against the floor as if he was happy with that answer too.

  The soft sugar paste yielded easily under Nora’s fingers, curving into petals that hugged the pink conic center mounted on a thin wooden stick. Three dozen pastel molded roses stood at attention in the box beside her, hardening in the air. She repeated the process over and over—roll the sugar paste into a flat circle, then cut out concentric floral shapes that gradually stepped down in size. She’d slide a cone through a stack of three of the shapes and then dampen her fingers and work each petal up and around the center, layering rose petals one on top of the other, tweaking the edges with a slight crinkle. A set of modeling tools sat on the shelf before her, but Nora preferred to fashion flowers by hand, giving each one its own unique look.

  Her fingers moved fast, spinning magic with each touch, transforming pale pink paste into replicas of Mother Nature. Later, she’d dust them with the airbrush, adding hues and shadows to create depth.

  Like Will did with his paintings. Even the simple one on his mailbox. Thinking of him reminded her of her cowardly exit yesterday morning. She’d ducked out of Truro without stopping by his house. When she’d glanced in her rearview mirror, she’d noticed that he had finished the mailbox, adding a quartet of seahorses cavorting in the seagrass.

  Across from her, Bridget was piping Bavarian cream into golden puffed shells. She hummed along to the radio, to an old Chicago song about love and missed opportunities. Ma was out front, in a consult with a woman planning a family reunion. Abby was in the back of the kitchen, unloading baked loaves of bread from the oven before sliding in the next batch of dough.

  Life was back to normal, at least within the bakery. The routine and schedule settled the rolling anxiety inside of Nora. For at least eight hours a day, she could create faux flowers and decorate wedding cakes and control what happened.

  “Those are beautiful. Can you teach me how to do that?”

  Nora glanced over at Iris. The girl had tamed her Goth look since the last time Nora had seen her, edging away from Marilyn Manson and closer to Joan Jett. Bridget sang Iris’s praises, telling Nora that Iris often showed up early and stayed late and was always eager to learn. As much as Nora wanted to just be left alone in her perfect, controlled world of sugar flowers, she couldn’t resist Iris’s clear interest. “Sure. Sprinkle some powdered sugar on your work surface first. Then grab that little rolling pin and a ball of the sugar paste.”

  Iris did as Nora instructed. “Okay. Now what?”

  “Remember how you roll out a pie crust? Same principle here, though you want to get it thinner. Flowers are delicate, and making them is a delicate process. Too thin and the flower crumples, too thick and it droops.”

  “How will I know when it’s right?”

  “Trust your gut. If I had to give you one piece of advice, that would be it. Do this often enough and you’ll just know when it’s right or when to start over.” Or when to throw in the towel and admit defeat.

  Last night, long after she’d put the kids to bed in the twin beds in Aunt Mary’s guest room, Nora had lain awake, Googling “divorce in Massachusetts” and “renting after foreclosure.” Every Web page she visited made her more and more depressed. The dream she’d had that bright summer day she’d married Ben was dying a slow and painful death.

  Actually, that dream had died last winter. She just hadn’t faced the truth until now.

  She was exhausted, and if she could have, she would have crawled into bed and stayed there for a month, hiding under the covers in a cave of denial. But someone had to be responsible and someone had to pay the bills, and as always, that someone was Nora. So she got dressed, went to work, and pretended everything was fine.

  Nora started working on another rose while watching Iris work the tiny rolling pin and press the pink paste into a circle. The young girl rolled a few times, stopped, checked the thickness, rolled some more, checked it again.

  Nora could see herself in Iris’s hesitant movements. The need to please, to earn those rare words of praise. Twenty years ago, that had been Nora. Too short to stand at the counter, she’d sat on a metal stool between her mother and grandmother, listening to them chat about the neighbors or the weather while their fingers created magic out of little more than shortening and sugar.

  “Is this good?”

  “Perfect,” Nora said. She handed Iris the trio of petal cutters. “Cut out one set of three different sizes.”

  “Just enough for one flower? Why not do a bunch at a time?”

  “The sugar paste dries too quickly. You need it to be pliable to create the flowers, then allow it to harden before putting them on the cake, so they’ll last.” She watched Iris wriggle the plastic cutters into the paste and set the shapes aside. “Now take that little bit left behind and roll it into a ball.” Nora demonstrated with a scrap of sugar paste. “About this big. Once you have a ball, form one end into a point.”

  Iris did and then stepped back to marvel at the tiny cone. “Ah, that’s the center of the flower.”

  “Exactly. We always work from the inside out.”

  “Sort of like working on yourself,” Iris said softly. Her bangs swept across her forehead, hiding her eyes.

  “I never saw the metaphor in
sugar flowers, but yeah, I think you’re right.” Was that the point she had missed in all the busyness of working and raising children? That she hadn’t worked on herself? Hell, she barely had a self after she had kids. In an instant, life’s focus shifted to this tiny, vulnerable human being who depended on her for everything. Perhaps that was where all those midlife crises came from. Women who had set their selves aside while they raised their children and too late realized they were staring at a stranger in the mirror.

  “It’s something your mom said to me.” Iris shrugged. “I mean, we all have shit—sorry, crap—that we need to deal with, and the best way to do that is by starting on the inside. Like, with believing I can do something like this. I kinda have issues with that self-esteem thing.”

  “We all struggle with that,” Nora said. “Believing we can handle the challenge before us. Believing we are strong enough. Believing we won’t fail again.”

  Which was why Nora had sought solace in the bakery today. Here, at least, she didn’t fail. Here, she controlled her environment and knew what was coming, day after day. Three of these flower cutouts would come together to create a thing of beauty, every single time she made one.

  “Yeah. My friend Monica and I were talking about that. She’s the one who’s, like, pregnant. And she’s really scared about screwing up her kid.” Iris began rolling another set as she talked. “Monica is super poor and she’s got to buy diapers and baby food and stuff. And the baby is gonna be here like any day.”

  “There’s aid for that kind of thing, right?”

  Iris nodded. “Roger’s helping her out, too, but she’s still worried. You have good kids, like, what would you tell her to, like, help her be a good mom?”

  Nora scooped out some more sugar paste and rolled it into a ball in the palm of her hands. She thought of Sarah’s little hand, then Jake’s, tiny infant fingers that latched on to Nora’s from the minute they were born. Trusting and needing parents who wouldn’t screw it up. “You just do your best,” Nora said. “And then you pray the kids turn out okay.”