Between Husbands and Friends

by Thayer, Nancy

  “Eeeek!” Margaret screamed, and raced from the room.

  Matthew giggled and chased after her.

  “All right, Women, let the Men do their work!” Max and Chip lifted the lids off the huge pots, and steam roiled up into the warm air.

  They were dressed alike in khaki shorts, polo shirts and ancient, time-honored Docksiders. Chip was taller than Max by a good four inches, and he had an enviable thatch of thick blond hair, while my husband’s dark curls were receding. But Max was just as handsome, and he enjoyed life more, and was a better person. He had more integrity. He cared about the state of the world; Chip pretty much only cared about making money. I was fond of Chip, but what had happened between us had been insignificant. No one needed to know; it was almost as if it had never happened. Let the universe fold over it like a wave over a ripple in the tide. It was over. It was gone.

  “Ladies, start your shucking,” Kate said.

  Kate and I sat at the round kitchen table, each with a brown paper bag at our feet, pulling the rough green husks and the silken threads off the fresh butter-and-sugar corn. It was one of the rules of Big Lobster Night that the corn wouldn’t be husked until the last possible moment.

  The screened door banged as the M&Ms raced shrieking outside. Like does sniffing danger, Kate and I automatically lifted our heads and called out, “Backyard, kids!” In this isolated enclave on the cliff, traffic was slight and sporadic, but it was easy for children absorbed in their own fantasies to forget how, in the evening when the sun was still high and the air still shining with light, cars could speed around the corners, and shadows could play tricks with vision.

  “The lobsters are ready!” Max called out.

  Kate plunged the corn into the boiling pot. I filled the champagne bucket with ice and a bottle of Mumm’s, and filled two champagne flutes with apple juice for Margaret and Matthew as they came tumbling into the house.

  “Wash your hands!” Kate and I called simultaneously.

  Last year we’d added a microwave oven to the ancient kitchen; I melted butter, poured it into small ramekins, and set them before each place at the dining room table. Chip and Max carried in the heavy platters of lobster and corn. When everyone was seated at the table, Chip rose and lifted his champagne flute high.

  “To the summer of 1991!”

  “To the summer of 1991!” everyone echoed, and raised their glasses.

  We all reached to clink our glasses against that of every other person at the table. Arms crossed and recrossed over and under other arms. Chip had carried Abby’s swing in and set it next to him; he leaned over and toasted his daughter, touching his flute to the pacifier clipped to her terry cloth romper. Abby shrieked with joy at his attentions. The M&Ms got silly, as usual, but this year no one spilled anything.

  I looked around the room, and I was perfectly content. Big Lobster Night was an occasion with all the warm profound glow of any ritualized family holiday, when memories of past years provided an aura to the present. The seven of us were like family. We could all be one family, actually; we looked enough alike, healthy, strong, shining like polished apples from the day in the sun, our hair a gleaming woody palette ranging from Kate and Chip’s sun-streaked biscuity blond to Max’s dark chocolate.

  Chip and Max distributed lobsters onto each plate. I buttered an ear of corn for Margaret, cracked open a claw, extracted the meat, and showed her how to dip it into her bowl of butter. Over the past few years both Margaret and Matthew had been disgusted at the first taste of lobster, so we’d made a pact: If they would try the lobster, they could eat whatever they wanted if they didn’t like it. The lobster wouldn’t go to waste but would be made into lobster salad for the next day, and eventually, we grown-ups thought, the M&Ms would develop a taste for it.

  “I wonder,” Max said from his end of the table, “if anyone has ever done a psychological study matching the way people eat lobster to their personality types. For example, look at Chip. He reached for the tail right away, broke it off with one powerful crunch, and has already eaten most of the meat. I, on the other hand—”

  “You are anal,” Chip interjected, pointing at Max’s plate where the claws and tail lay cracked open, not yet touched, as Max drizzled the butter in swirls over the white meat.

  “I prefer to call it orderly,” Max retorted with fake hauteur.

  “And the mothers,” Kate pointed out with a grin as she used the nutcracker on Matthew’s lobster’s claw, “have not touched their lobsters yet, because they are unselfishly helping the children. Yes, I would say your psychological study might actually have some validity.”

  “This is yucky!” Matthew announced, spitting out a chewed white mass onto his plate.

  “You don’t have to eat it,” I told him. “What would you like?”

  “A peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” he asked tentatively. He didn’t want to be a problem; he knew this was a special night.

  “Fine. I’ll make it.” I rose.

  Stepping into the silence of the kitchen was like stepping into another world. It was quiet, and steam still rose like whispers from all the big pots. On the windowsill above the sink was an old vase holding a wild bouquet of lush, heavy creamy roses from a rosebush I had watched Aunt Grace plant and nurture. The refrigerator was new, and we had added a dishwasher, but the stove was the same one Grace had used, and the kitchen counter where I stood making Matthew’s sandwich was the original speckled green linoleum on which Aunt Grace used to roll out her infinitely delicate piecrusts.

  Had Aunt Grace ever wanted a child? Had she ever been pregnant, had she ever thought for fourteen fraught days, I am going to have a child, then miscarried? Had she been so fascinated by Dorothy Wordsworth’s life because Dorothy had also never married or had children but had lived with her brother and wife all her life, taking care of her nieces and nephews? As a child, in my naïve and innocent arrogance, I hadn’t considered the possibility that Aunt Grace might have desires I knew nothing about. It had seemed to me right and natural that I should have this woman in my life who adored me, whom in turn I adored, who opened the world wide to me in a way my parents never could. And Grace must have known that I worshipped her, that my life was changed because of her; she had left me this house full of our summers together.

  My aunt had spent hours telling me things. “This is a mussel shell. This is a clamshell. Those little skittering creatures are spider crabs.” In the evenings she had spent hours reading poetry to me, introducing me to the English Romantics and the American poets as well. She’d taught me to knit and crochet. During the long hot summer days of my childhood when I drowsed in the hammock beneath the cherry tree, or sat at the kitchen table, pinching with great concentration the piecrust into perfect peaks and valleys, or sat across from her at a card table, playing gin rummy as rain tapped against the windows, I’d felt a sense of satisfaction so deep that it resonated in my bones and belly. It was as if I were at the very center of a green and gentle world, as if I needed to know nothing more, as if this moment in time was good and true and right and would last forever.

  In my adolescent years and in the first extremes of sexual passion and jealousy and longing, such honeyed contentment was so lost to me that I never even remembered experiencing it. And then one night after Max and I had been married for almost a year, I found myself lying in his arms after making love. His hand loosely clasped my breast, his breath stirred my hair. Moonlight fell through the window into our rented apartment bedroom, turning the room silver, blurring the boundaries of ceiling and wall so that we seemed weightless and boundless, swirled in an ethereal sphere where stars spent luxurious eternities sailing across the sky. And I felt that old, slow-moving, profound satisfaction eddy in my blood again, a kind of melting original magic.

  Later, when Margaret was an infant, lying in my arms, hot and heavy, lashes brushing against her cheeks, drinking milk from my breasts, I felt that same contentment. I had so much milk, an endless supply, it seemed, and my daughter
was growing fat on it, on my milk and nothing else. My breasts were enormous, blue-veined, the nipples round, dark, and protruding. I could feed the world, I thought, let anyone come, I would lie there like a drugged queen, sharing my illimitable wealth. Everything was so profoundly sexual. The skin of my arms and legs was as receptive and sensitive as the tender skin between my legs; all the world was a caress. I loved everyone; I held Max, I held my infant, and sometimes it seemed I was so blissed out that I would have welcomed anyone, and everyone, into my arms.

  On that humid August night the moisture from the pots made my hair curl into ringlets as I made Matthew’s sandwich. I carried it into the dining room and set it on the table before him, then sank into my chair. Chip and Max were discussing the Red Sox. Kate was opening a lobster claw for Margaret, who was winding Abby’s swing. I loved Margaret and Max best, but I loved the Cunninghams, too. They were such good friends. I dipped a piece of tender white lobster into my butter and put the succulent piece in my mouth. It was as if I were clothed in silk, as if this night were a shimmering firefly in the vast darkness of the world. I loved everyone at the table. The profound contentment had come again. Deep in my heart I suspected I was pregnant.

  August 1998

  The morning after our trip to Children’s Hospital, I come awake all at once with a start, as if my sleep has been one long falling and I’ve just landed, smashing, onto the pavement of reality. My insides feel like jelly, wobbly and fragile. I lift my hand and am surprised to see that it is a whole thing, not lined with hair-fine fractures.

  Tying my robe around me, I walk through the house. Chip is in his room, packing. I hurry past. Matthew is sleeping, snoring in rhythmic drones like one of the little prop jets that fly us over the sound. Margaret is lying in bed, reading. I smell coffee and head for it. Downstairs the Littlies are still in their pajamas, building a house out of dominoes and cards under the dining room table. They call out to me, their faces round and clean and hopeful as suns.

  “What’s all this?” I drop to my knees and scoot beneath the table. Jabbering, pointing, they explain the intricacies of their make-believe world. I could stay here forever.

  The phone rings, spreading minuscule branches of alarm through my body. I back out from under the table and race to the kitchen to pick up the phone.

  Kate says in a cool brusque voice, “Could I please speak to Matthew?”

  “He’s asleep.”

  After a moment of silence, Kate says, “All right. Then Abby.”

  Abby fingers a scab on her knee while she chats with her mom. Her thick brown hair, normally in neat braids, hangs down around her face.

  Chip comes down the stairs, suitcase in one hand, coffee cup in the other. “Is that your mother?”

  Abby hangs up the phone. “She says Garrison is really sick. She’s got to stay in Sussex to help him.”

  “Look, sweetie,” Chips says, kneeling and pulling his daughter to him. “I’ve got to go, too.”

  Abby twines her arms around her father’s neck and pouts prettily. “Oh, Daddy, do you have to?” But she’s not truly upset; her attention keeps slanting off to the dining room, where, over her father’s shoulder, she sees Jeremy building stairs with a deck of cards.

  “You know I do, pudding,” Chip says. “Give me a hug.” He pulls his daughter to him so tightly that she squeals, “Daddy! You’re breaking all my ribs!”

  “Want us to drive you to the airport?” I ask Chip as Abby skips back to Jeremy.

  “I can call a cab.”

  “No, we’ll drive you. The kids can come; we’ll stop by the Downyflake on our way home and get doughnuts.”

  “Well, then, all right,” he agrees awkwardly. On this sunny day so much that was dazzling about Chip seems dimmed; his shoulders slump, the lines of his face are elongated and deep; even his hair seems less golden. In one evening his life has been changed forever. He looks at me, holding my gaze in his, and a long slow flush burns from his neck, up his jawline, to his cheeks, but I don’t believe it’s a flush of anger.

  He says, “Lucy.”

  My eyes fill with tears.

  “Look. This is just too hard on you and it’s not fair, all of us deserting you right now.”

  “It wouldn’t be right if you stayed.”

  He considers this; he knows I’m right. “It’s not the end of the world,” he says softly. “It might even be—”

  “No.” Quickly, I turn away. “Hey, Jeremy! Abby! Come on. We’re going to drive Chip to the airport and then go by Downyflake!”

  “Yay!” they both yell, and in their rush Jeremy hits his head on the table and Abby knocks over part of the card house and I yell up to Margaret that I’m taking the Littlies for doughnuts and in the ensuing commotion there’s no way that Chip and I can exchange one more private word.

  Jeremy and Abby chatter in the backseat. Chip and I ride quietly until just before we arrive at the airport Chip asks, “What are your plans?”

  “I guess I’ll spend the rest of the week on the island with the children.”

  “Do you mind? I mean having Matthew and Abby?”

  “You know better than that. It’s easier to have them all together. Anyway, the children were expecting to be here this week.”

  “Yes, but you were going to have some adults to help out.”

  I meet his eyes. Even a brief glance sparks a current between us, and I quickly look away. “We’ll be fine.”

  But later that morning, as I organize snacks and towels and coolers and herd the children into the car and off for the beach, I wonder if that’s really true, that we’ll be fine. I feel numb, dumb, and confused, so that it’s a kind of labor to decide to perform the smallest action. Driving to the Jetties, I drive right past the usual turnoff and we’re two blocks down the road before Matthew yells, “Uh, where are we going?”

  “Oh, thanks, Matthew. I wasn’t thinking.” I make a U-turn, go back to the right street. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking, but that overnight my mind has become cluttered with memories and fears that snicker and sway like gaudy beaded curtains, interfering with my vision of normal life.

  The children don’t notice; it’s the end of summer and the air shimmers with heat and light. They tumble out of the car, run over the hot sand, and plunge, yelping, into the sea. I find a spot for all our stuff and set about the domestic task of unfolding towels, setting up our little beach home for the day. The water is as tame as a housecat, rolling on its belly to display the sleek pattern of its stripes, mostly just drowsing in the sun, waves lifting and falling like the breath of a sleeping beast. Jeremy splashes with Abby, rides on Matthew’s shoulders and belly flops, whooping, into the waves, laughs maniacally, and does not cough.

  What were they thinking, I wonder, how could Max and Kate and Chip leave me in charge of four children? While the sun slowly slides across the sky, I pretend to read a book, but really I’m watching their every move with a kind of desperate vigilance, as if I’m being tested, as if the truth is out now, that I’m a worthless, reckless, dangerous woman, a poor excuse for a mother, a fool. A menace.

  I’ve forgotten my sunglasses. The sun on the water is so brilliant it blinds me, my eyes burn with the effort of watching the children in the glinting light, and I’m glad, the discomfort pulls my mind away from the seductive whispers of self-loathing that rose up in my mind yesterday and threaten to multiply, obliterating all other thoughts. Now I understand why young women burn themselves with cigarettes, why troubled adolescents cut themselves, because their very own body has become a stranger to them, a traitor, a thing apart that acts of its own stupid, stupid accord, and must be punished. Now for the first time I understand how one pain desires another, and when the memory of Max’s face last night, or Kate’s, or Chip’s, threatens to make me burst into a torrent of tears right here on the sunny beach in front of the children, I dig my nails into my skin as hard as I can, and that pain, pure and shrill, draws my mind away and provides a stinging moment of relief.


  But I am the grown-up here. It’s essential, I remind myself, to be rational, competent, decisive. If only because the other three have left us, these children are in my charge, and I can at least protect them now. This moment. This moment. And the next. So I track their every move in the water and slather them with sunblock. At the end of the afternoon I round them up and drive them home. We all shower and clean up and the M&Ms help me chop veggies for tacos while Jeremy and Abby return to their card house.

  Tacos are a naturally messy meal, and at dinner, the four kids laugh when the filling falls back onto the plate or a crunched taco shell flies across the table. They joke and tease and blast each other with obscene noises. They laugh so hard they spit. I let them. They are silly, even unruly, but they are safe.

  Every night Kate calls to talk to her children. The third night, when I answer the phone, Kate asks me, “Are my kids driving you crazy?”

  I miss you, Kate! I want to cry. I’m so confused, so lonely, so guilty, so bad, God, what I wouldn’t give to really talk to you now. But her voice is chilly and formal. I reply, “Not at all.”

  “They can come home any time. Just let me know. And I’ve mailed you a check for groceries and stuff.” She sounds like a stranger.

  Kate, I think, my Kate, Katie! “That’s not necessary.”

  “I know. But I want you to cash it. I’ll feel awkward otherwise.”

  At this I can’t help but burst out laughing. “Well, God, I wouldn’t want you to feel awkward, Kate.”

  She doesn’t reply for a moment, but when she does, her voice is softer. “How’s Jeremy?”

  “Fine. He seems perfectly healthy. But I’ve scheduled a complete workup for him in September. How’s Garrison?”

  “Not good.”

  “Perhaps you should talk to him about all this. He’s wise.”

  “Maybe.”

  We’re beginning to talk. Hope rises in me like a stream. “I want you to know that I didn’t tell Chip anything.”