Still Life with Husband

by Lauren Fox

  I walk over to the wall opposite Kevin, where the broken glass is strewn over the carpeting. I kneel down and start picking up the bigger pieces, placing them carefully in the palm of my right hand. They’re like tiny daggers, and I’m slow and deliberate as I try not to slice my skin. I avoid the tiniest shards; when I’ve cleared up most of the bigger pieces, I’ll use the mini–vacuum cleaner we keep in the bathroom closet for the smaller ones. I pile bits of glass into my hand. I reach for the thick, intact bottom of the green bottle my mom got me for my birthday, the razor-sharp edge of my favorite, delicate, pink one that I found at a garage sale. For a second, I feel unfairly, unaccountably angry for what Kevin has done to my bottles. Then that feeling disappears. Mixed together in my palm, the broken pieces look like little, lethal Christmas ornaments, or precious jewels.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Kevin says softly. It’s all ahead of him, all of the ugly cleanup work, how he’ll have to navigate the terrain of despair and recovery and the way he’ll finally shape his life without me. Just like Meg and Steve, who will have to stumble through their own new, familiar grief: it’s all just beginning. I suppose there are emotional minefields ahead of me, too. Along with other things.

  “I don’t mind,” I say. I pull a longish segment of the neck of a blue bottle from the carpeting. My hand is full of broken glass now. I can picture exactly how Kevin did this, exactly how he destroyed these bottles: not in rage or bitter passion, not blinded by the image of my face as he hurled the glass against the wall in uncontrollable fury. That’s not Kevin. Kevin, I’m certain, considered his actions for a full ten minutes before lining up the bottles in a careful row on the coffee table, one by one pitching them deliberately, precisely at the wall as if he were trying to win a giant teddy bear at the fair. Step One, lift bottle in hand and aim at target. Step Two, extend arm back and behind head for maximum velocity. Kevin, I’m sure, winced as each bottle shattered and fell, beyond repair, to the floor.

  “Kevin,” I say, still kneeling, surrounded now by only the most minute shards of glass, still gingerly holding the larger pieces in the palm of my hand. “I’m going to vacuum the rest of this, but don’t walk around in bare feet for a while, all right?”

  He nods, absently fiddles with the corner of a couch pillow. What a mess, what a mess, what a mess. I could turn things around here; in an instant, just by squeezing my hand shut, I could initiate a sequence of events, a reaction: Emily feels pain, sees blood, cries out. Kevin jumps up. Together, Emily and Kevin discard glass, clean and rinse wound, apply bandage. Kevin would tend to me with sympathy. He would wash away my blood, watch with me as it mixed with water and flowed down the sink. Kevin would hold my hand and carefully wrap it in gauze. He would do this, tenderly, whether he wanted to or not; unlike me, he always rises above his worst instincts and obeys his best ones. And I would stand there, inelegant and dripping, letting Kevin comfort me. I would ease into him, let him cradle my hand in his. Maybe then I could inflict the final injury.

  Instead I stand, walk over to the kitchen garbage can, and let the pieces of glass drop from my hand into the pail. See, kid? I didn’t manipulate this one. I’m getting better. I stand there, looking at the contents of the garbage pail: coffee grounds, take-out containers, dirty napkins, onion skins and spinach stems from a dinner I made two nights ago. I stare at the debris, trying to divine my future. A stink rises up to meet me. How will I do this? How exactly will I say to Kevin, “I’m pregnant, but it’s quite possibly not your baby?” Hey, fetus, any suggestions? Now’s your chance.

  I hear Kevin move in the other room: there’s the soft thud of his feet on the floor; there’s the creak of the squeaky floorboard next to the rocking chair. “Go,” he says from the living room, just loudly enough for me to hear. I’m still standing in front of the garbage can, my feet glued to the ground. I let the lid drop, but I don’t move. “Forget about vacuuming,” he says, more loudly now. “Just leave.” I’m immobile. After another minute, I hear Kevin start coming toward me. I’m still frozen where I stand. “Emily, just leave!” he shouts from the hallway just a few feet away. “Why can’t you listen to me? Just LEAVE, JUST LEAVE, JUST LEAVE!”

  He’s behind me now as I turn away from the garbage can. “Leave,” he says again, this time almost a whisper. I turn to him. His face looks pinched, as if I repulse him, or he’s bracing himself, or both. He stands there for a minute, studying me. We’re close enough to kiss. I’m seized with the urge to look away again, but I don’t. Kevin’s hair is greasy and sticking up in strange places, and he’s unshaven, although, since he is not a hairy person, only the most observant viewer would recognize this. He looks like he hasn’t showered in a week, even though he learned about my infidelity just a few hours ago. He looks like he’s aged five years in one morning. He presses his lips together so hard they disappear. “Did you love him?” he asks finally. “Was it worth it?”

  It’s an amazing thing to wrap your life around someone else’s. It’s mind-boggling, really, to choose one partner, a single mate, from so many, many men: men who may have been boyfriends or lovers or flings or one-time dates, or just harmless, brief flirtations; men who passed by on the sidewalk and smiled, men who were just a moment of eye contact. There are so many of them, on airplanes and in classrooms, living in apartment buildings across the street, inhabiting neighboring offices. So many fish in the sea! That’s what my mother always said when one of those eligible men turned out to be a loser, or not interesting enough, or plainly not interested in me. It really is quite a thing to pick one person from the throngs, to be picked by him in return, and to say: you, forever. And it’s even more astonishing to wield the power to devastate that one person with nothing more than a broken promise. Did I love David? Was it worth it? Yes, no, maybe so. Kid, was it worth it? The fetus is unhelpfully mute, as usual. David wasn’t really the point, I think, but I don’t say it; I just hold out my empty hands to Kevin, palms up, an unanswerable question, a wordless apology, a plea.

  It’s not entirely true that I’m homeless, I think, as I sit in the car around the corner from my apartment building, wiping nonexistent tears from my face. After I left Kevin dazed and alone and staring at the garbage can, I managed to get into my car and drive a half block to a side street so that he wouldn’t see me if he moved from where he was rooted and glanced out the window. Then I pulled over, turned off the engine, let out a loud, weird moan, and tried to cry. Nothing came. I rested my head on the cool steering wheel. I’m alone, I’m pregnant, David dumped me, I’ve destroyed Kevin, and I’m homeless, I thought. A tear or two would not be out of line here. I took another deep breath. “Ohhhh!” I said out loud, forcing the air from my lungs. “Unnnnhhhh.” Then, in a last-ditch effort, I bit the inside of my cheek, hard. My cheek began to throb, but my eyes were dry as stones. I raised my head and looked around, licking the pinched skin on the inside of my mouth. I was parked on Edgewood Avenue, a street of small bright bungalows and trees on both sides that are so big and vibrant their leaves meet overhead, like they’re shaking hands. A woman wearing a long flowered dress and mittens was unloading shopping bags from a nearby car. A few houses over, some children jumped in a pile of leaves. “Fuckers!” I said, from the privacy of my car, for the hell of it. “Fucking happy normal people!” Just then one of the children in the pile of leaves caught my eye and waved shyly. I waved back.

  Now I pull a map out of the glove compartment and pretend to study it so that nobody calls the police on the strange, ranting lady in the red Toyota. True, I can’t go to Meg’s at the moment, and I can’t go back to the apartment that may or may not still be mine, but I can always go to my parents’. Just not right now. The idea of staggering into my family’s warm, judgmental, loving embrace is about as appealing as heading back upstairs and asking Kevin if he has change for a twenty. I consider checking into a motel. I contemplate driving somewhere secluded and huddling up in the backseat with the ratty picnic blanket we keep in the trunk. But in the end
, I follow the time-honored tradition of uninspired women everywhere with time to kill: I head for the mall.

  I grew up with a girl named Linda Payne. She was in the year between Heather and me in school and, aside from being called Window Payne throughout grade school, she mostly flew under the radar. During my junior year of high school, though, the amazing rumor circulated that she was having an affair with Mr. Giesler, the boys’ gym teacher and girls’ basketball coach. Baypoint High School, noted statewide for academic excellence, was a hotbed of nothing much. So the idea that a student was involved with a teacher ignited the place. Mr. Giesler must have been in his mid-twenties then. He had acne scars but he was thick-haired and handsome; his lightly pocked face made him seem worldly, like he’d lived through something. He was the kind of teacher who knew not only the names of the boys who’d had him for gym class, but all the girls’ names, too, even the ones who didn’t play basketball, which, in retrospect, is creepy. But it didn’t seem creepy then. Back then, when he said hi to you in the hallway or patted your back as he passed you in the cafeteria, you felt special: for a moment, his coolness alighted on you; in a blink, it drifted away. The idea that Linda Payne and Ted Giesler were sleeping together was so titillating that for a while, Linda carried an exotic cachet, and Mr. Giesler seemed admirable instead of what he really was, which was criminal.

  Linda, of course, got pregnant. Mr. Giesler got fired and divorced, in that order, and the next year, instead of going back to high school, Linda ended up working at Sugar’s Shoes in Shorebrook Mall.

  Sugar’s Shoes is tucked away in a dark corridor of the mall and barely does any business. In the ’80s and ’90s, the store occupied a trendier, higher-rent location in Shorebrook. Since then, it’s moved two or three times, farther and farther away from the main foot traffic. If it has to relocate again, the store will be a small kiosk in the parking lot. Even I can see that Sugar’s footwear is four or five years behind the times: the clunky wooden heels and cutesy pastel flowers that adorn most of their shoes do not achieve the funky retro look they’re going for, but instead seem sad, tired, like shoes that are trying too hard and, at the same time, not trying hard enough, shoes that get into trouble for passing notes, shoes that do not pay attention to current events. I suddenly feel a great and surprising affinity for Sugar’s Shoes.

  I used to see Linda Payne once in a while during my senior year (what should have been her junior year), the last time I had occasion to spend much time here. I’ve always hated shopping, but when I was in high school, I would sometimes allow myself to be dragged on aimless trips to the mall with my friends, friends who were like rechargeable shopping batteries, gaining more energy in each store, while I slowly dwindled. After an hour or so, I’d gasp dramatically and tell them to go on without me, and I’d park myself on a bench somewhere out of the way with a book and a soda. On her breaks, Linda would usually lurk in one of the vestibules or, if it was warm enough, outside on the concrete, smoking and pulling at her eyelashes. She’d taken on this eyelash-plucking habit, as far as I knew, after she’d had her baby. As a result, her face looked vulnerable and alien, with big pale blue irises and protruding eyeballs behind blinking, naked lids. I’d always say hello to her, and she’d wave back solemnly from the midst of a cloud of cigarette smoke. Even then, when I didn’t know anything, I knew that sex had ruined Linda Payne. And even then, I knew it didn’t have to be that way.

  I plunk myself onto an empty plastic bench across from the shoe store. It’s the same bench, or its replacement cousin, that was here thirteen years ago, and probably much longer. The cigarette burns dotting the edges could be Linda’s, for all I know. Two slim, gray-haired ladies in track suits march past me at a surprising clip, arms swinging. I scan the mall and it occurs to me that I am looking for her, that I have come here looking for Linda. But what on earth would I say to her if I found her? How did you manage it, Linda? I knew she gave up her baby for adoption, and rumor was that it had been a boy.

  Restless, I stand and make a quick pass of the few floundering stores in this dark section of the mall: a cheap no-name perfume store, a shop that sells only sugar-free candy, and, improbably, Santa’s Warehouse, a store that sells Christmas items year-round. Someone has seized the obvious opportunity and scrawled “Santa’s Whorehouse” over their sign. I wander into Sugar’s Shoes; a young girl wearing great gobs of blue eyeliner looks up from the counter and fires at me, fast as an auctioneer, “Welcome to Sugar’s Shoes. MayIhelpyoufindsomethingtoday?” I shake my head, and she bends back over her magazine without another glance. I make my way slowly up and down the aisles, feigning interest in a pair of thick-soled Mary Janes, some high-heeled plastic flip-flops. My life is a train wreck. How is it that I’m shopping for shoes instead of perched on the ledge of a tall building? Why am I okay? My future has derailed. Everything I love, everyone I have loved, is piled up around me, twisted and unrecognizable. I pick up a pair of brown boots from the shelf. Actually, I could use a pair of boots. I run my hands over the soft suede, scan the shelf, and find a size eight. I did this, though. I drove this train off its tracks. Yes, no, maybe so. I engineered this disaster. So maybe there’s comfort in having no one to blame but myself. I sit down, slip my shoes off.

  Here’s a question for you, Linda Payne: Why did you let things get so out of hand? You could have done it differently: no one would have had to know. I imagine her still-puffy body next to mine on the little mirrored shoe-store seat. Why didn’t you have an abortion, stay in school, graduate? You didn’t have to do it this way.

  “Hey,” she would say, her left hand tugging at the few remaining lashes clinging to her eyelid. The smell of cigarette smoke would waft from her hair. “I might have, you know, done it differently. But I didn’t even know until, well…”

  I pull on first the left boot, then the right, understanding then that she wasn’t thinking about a couple of missed periods, a bit of inexplicable nausea, a slight weight gain. Stress, she would have thought, if she noticed at all. And then a swelling, growing, the sudden knowledge, much too late.

  “Do you have regrets?” The brown boots are comfortable, cushiony. I stand up, admire them in the floor-level mirror.

  Imaginary Linda looks up at me from the bench. “There’s no right answer,” she says, wistfully. “Regrets?” She wriggles a pack of cigarettes out of her back pocket and lights one.

  “Are you allowed to smoke in here?” I ask. She shrugs. “I bet you wish you hadn’t smoked while you were pregnant,” I say. “Somewhere out there a fourteen-year-old asthmatic probably resents you.” Linda looks at me blankly and blows a big puff of smoke in my direction.

  It occurs to me that I could just walk out wearing these soft boots. The Cosmo-reading girl at the counter hasn’t looked up in five minutes. If she notices, she might not even say anything. And if she does, I’ll just say I wasn’t paying attention; I was distracted. I wander around the store wearing the boots, casually regarding the merchandise. Imaginary Linda trails behind me.

  “So, what are you going to do?” she asks. She takes a long drag on her cigarette.

  “Possibly shoplift these boots,” I say. The idea of it, the thought of such a pointless, reckless act sends a thrill down my spine.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Linda says, yanking away at her eyelashes with her free hand. “About the baby.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I make my way quietly to the front of the store. My old sneakers are where I left them in the middle of the floor. This will be a tip-off to Cosmo-girl, but who cares? I’ll just never come back here. “Seeing you…I haven’t thought about you in years,” I say. “I’m going to do what you should have done. I’m going to make an appointment, fix things, maybe go back to Kevin. I know he’ll forgive me eventually, if I try hard enough. He never has to know about this.” Yes, this is what I’ll do. Clean up this mess.

  But suddenly, like a sucker punch, imagining my life with Kevin takes the breath out of me. The heady confidence I was feel
ing a moment ago flies away, snickering. I collapse onto the nearest footstool. Do I really want to spend the next months, years, repentant, tiptoeing carefully around the man I have injured, trying desperately to repair the marriage I deliberately destroyed? And my other, imagined possibility? It no longer exists: David has taken himself out of the picture. And then, what about this pregnancy? Almost imperceptibly, as I sit here in Sugar’s Shoes wearing brown suede boots that are not mine, something moves through me, settling, shifting. I’m not Linda Payne; I’m not a misguided fifteen-year-old with no resources, no options. I’m a thirty-year-old pregnant woman who just came within an inch of shoplifting a pair of boots. I kick them off and plod back to my shoes.

  “There’s no right answer,” Linda says again, her bare eyelids like tiny clamshells closing and opening over the pale pearls of her eyes, closing and opening. She takes another puff of her cigarette. “I will say this, though,” she says softly. “Don’t start pulling out your eyelashes. That, my friend, is the road to hell.”