by Jamie Zeppa
She kept trying to pinpoint the exact place she had gone wrong. Should she not have married him? But that’s what people in love did. Should she not have fallen in love? But how could that be helped?
That night in the Algonquin Hotel, he had said he loved her. He had said he was crazy about her. She was the only one for him. He’d lost her, but then he’d found her, and he was never going to let her go. He wanted to spend the rest of his life, etcetera, etcetera.
So why wasn’t he happy?
He said, Tra la la, tra la laa. He said, Doo wop ditty, da doo run run. Or he might as well have, because what he actually said made no sense. He protested and promised. He talked in circles. He loved her, of course he loved her, he was happy, she was happy, the children were happy, they were all happy, yes, for fuck’s sake, he loved her, why did she keep asking him that?
She kept asking because she’d overheard two women in line at the grocery store. “What, is he still running around on her?” (Still?) “With that little bit of a blond thing?” And then they had seen Laura and had a desperate need, both of them, to paw through their purses. Because a woman had called and asked for him, pretending to be a clerk from Davis Men’s Wear at 10:30 at night. And because Laura herself had seen him one evening, talking to some people at the entrance of McSweeny’s, his arm slung around a woman’s neck. She didn’t know the woman, but she wasn’t a little bit of a blond thing at all, so maybe he was running around on the woman he was running around with, and maybe that meant these women meant nothing to him, they were a phase, and he would pass through them and come out on the other side. It had to mean that or something close to that, because it made no sense otherwise.
She didn’t want to have made an unfixable mistake, and in fact, the mistake was easy to fix. All he had to do was stop seeing that other woman, or women. All he had to do was go to work in the morning and come home at night. Come home and stay home. Stay home and be her husband. It wasn’t too late. As long as they loved each other, the story could be saved, because nothing was more powerful than love.
She overheard Deb McKenna in the employee lounge (“Well, she wanted him, she got him”) and stumbled outside to stand in her shirt sleeves in the raw wind, too numb to feel the frost in the air. Will Wharton drove up in his truck and saw her standing there. “Jeez, Laura, aren’t you cold?” He offered her a cigarette, and she took it from him. He was talking to her, and she talked back without understanding anything either of them said. Will didn’t seem to notice. “You’re a great girl, Laura,” he said. “I always liked you. You know that?” He stroked her arm and then, when she didn’t pull away, he pulled her close and pressed his mouth against hers. She let him kiss her, and then she went back inside. From her desk, she could see Will outside, finishing his cigarette. She didn’t care that he had kissed her, or that anyone might have seen it, because it didn’t make any difference. Nothing she did could make a difference. Only Dean could change things.
Vera was irritated with her because she was helping less and less in the house. “But I’m sick,” she protested, and Vera snapped, “Then see a doctor.” She made an appointment, and the doctor seemed to know exactly what she was talking about. He nodded as she ran through the list of symptoms, and handed her a prescription. So I am sick, she thought. The pills filled her head with a different kind of fog. She watched thoughts appear out of it (I should get up and see why the baby is crying) and fade back into it.
She wanted to be a good mother. She wanted to pick up the baby, oh her sweet, fair boy, with his plump little hands, his face nestled against her shoulder. But the sweet moment never lasted; there were bottles to be washed and clothes to be folded and now the baby was crying and wouldn’t be soothed, and her daughter wanted Jell-O “Right now, Mommy, right now,” and why was this all her fault and her responsibility? The only relief came from putting her face into the pillow and forcing herself down into the well of sleep.
A door opened and a voice said, “Shh, shh,” and the baby’s cries faltered and stopped. He prefers her, Laura thought. He smiled and kicked his legs when he saw Vera, whereas he fussed and squirmed when Laura picked him up. Even Dawn said, “I want Grandma to cut my pancakes. You don’t do it right.”
She wondered how many more pieces she could separate into, and whether it was the sickness or the medicine that was dissolving the shell that held her together. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. She used to read that to Dawn. Now her father-in-law read to her daughter while her mother-in-law rocked her son to sleep. An egg fell off the wall, then curds and whey got spilled, but that might have been a different story. The pills mixed up her thoughts. But if she didn’t take the pills, she wouldn’t sleep, and the birds of terror would be flapping and shrieking all night long. She lifted her hand off her face. It was four o’clock. It was always four o’clock. She would not go down for dinner. She was sick. The name of the ailment was uncertain. Headache. Stomach ache. Separation of self into parts. Tomorrow morning, she would have to get up, wash and dress herself, wash and dress the children, bring them downstairs for breakfast, find her purse and keys, and be out the door by eight o’clock. She would be drained and dead-eyed before she even left the house. But if she stayed home, there would be no money. If there was no money, the bills would not be paid. If the bills were not paid, the calls would start again. The people who called were polite, toneless. Mrs. Turner, we require. Mrs. Turner, we must have.
They didn’t even bother asking for Dean anymore.
She didn’t know how much was still owed. It was better not to add it up. They didn’t know, downstairs. They thought things were under control, that money to buy a house was flowing into a savings account. She couldn’t tell them that a river of debt was sucking them under. If she told them, something would have to be done, and she didn’t know what could be done. They would say, “We don’t blame you,” but they would. She couldn’t keep her husband home. She couldn’t manage the accounts. She couldn’t look after her children.
They would blame her, or worse: they would tell Dean to shape up or ship out, and Dean would choose the latter. Frank had already hinted at this. “You can always stay here,” he’d said one evening when Dean had failed to come home for dinner and Vera had gone upstairs to put the kids to bed and it was just the two of them, sitting over remnants of chicken pot pie at the dining table. “You and the kids. If things don’t work out with him, I mean. We can tell him to go.”
Laura had leapt up from her chair, rattling the plates on the table. “I’d better start clearing up,” she said, grabbing the gravy boat and some glasses. In the kitchen, she ran the water and tried to breathe through the pain in her lungs. It was the cruellest thing she had ever heard. We can tell him to go. It was like offering to cut off someone’s head because they had a headache, she thought, and a gasp like a laugh escaped her.
If things didn’t work out with Dean, they didn’t work out. Without him, it was all wrack and ruin.
She went to work in the morning, and she came home sick and went to bed. The name of the ailment could not be said with any certainty, but she knew something was wrong, at the very core of her.
“What, sleeping again?” Vera said. Laura showed her the pills. Vera read the label and said, “Nerves. I told you it was all in your head.”
All in my head, Laura thought. Just like my father.
Vera said she had to fight it off. Pull herself together. Snap out of it. “I had it too,” she said. “After my operation. The doctor gave me medicine.”
“What operation?” Laura asked, although she had already guessed.
Vera said, “A tumour. In my uterus. That’s why I couldn’t—why we adopted Dean.”
“Did the medicine help?” Laura asked.
“I didn’t take it,” Vera said. “I just put my foot down. I said, ‘I’m not going to feel like this anymore.’ And that was the end of it.”
“I’m trying,” Laura said, her eyes hot with tears that could not be shed.
“Well, you need to try harder,” Vera said. “That’s all there is to it.”
The name of the ailment was failure and shame. There was no cure.
She called home. Her mother answered. They had started speaking again after Dawn was born, and for the last three years, Laura had been telling her how wonderful it all was, her handsome, dashing husband, her beautiful little girl, her kind, loving in-laws, her angelic little boy. Now Laura told her mother she was thinking about coming home with the kids.
“Oh, at last!” her mother exclaimed. “Dean will drive, I suppose?”
Laura said she was coming alone. With the kids. To stay for a while.
Her mother said, “What do you mean?”
What Laura meant was, she was leaving Dean. She would take the kids and go home, and then he would realize. He would come to his senses. She said, “I need to come home, Mom. Just for a bit.” Then she was crying, and in the sweet relief of it, she told her mother everything.
Her mother’s voice was gentle. “Laura, honey, I wish you’d told me sooner.”
“I know, Mommy. But I thought it would get better.”
“It will get better, honey. It will. You just have to work at it. You’ll see.”
Laura blew her nose. “I am working on it, and it’s not working. I need to leave him.”
“Laura.” The gentleness was gone. “Listen to me. You cannot leave your husband. You have two kids. How on earth would you manage? Believe me, I know. It was hard enough for me with one—”
“Mom, if I stay here, I don’t know what will happen to me. I don’t know what I’ll do.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Her mother said, “Laura, you sound just like your father.” Then she said, “Your father is better now, and I won’t have you upsetting him. Can you imagine—if you show up with Dawn and Jimmy? What would people say? After the stunt you pulled the first time?”
Her mother said no, absolutely not. She said Laura’s place was with her husband and her children. She said Laura would have to work at it. That’s what marriage was. Did she think it was all flowers and candles and a stroll in the park? It was no picnic, but you didn’t jump ship when things got difficult. Laura’s mother hadn’t left Laura’s father, had she? No, she had stuck by him, through thick and thin.
“I don’t want to leave Dean!” Laura cried. “I want him to come back to me.”
“Honestly, Laura,” her mother snapped. “I can’t talk to you when you don’t make sense.” She hung up.
Dean came in just as the sun was coming up. “Where were you?” Laura asked quietly from the chair she had been sitting in all night.
“At Wharton’s.
“Don’t lie to me.”
He yawned. “I’m going to bed.”
“What about work?”
“I’ll call in sick.”
“They’re going to fire you.”
He shrugged and dropped his shirt on the ground. “I don’t care if they do.”
“You don’t care if they do.” She leapt up. “I’ve been breaking my back working and you—you’re out until all hours with god knows who. You have a wife and two kids living with your parents. You can’t even—”
The lamp came flying across the room and broke against the wall.
She staggered backwards with a cry. “Oh, calm down,” he said, climbing into bed. “I didn’t throw it at you.”
“But you threw it,” she whispered. A deep, wrenching sob shook her. When it was bad, it was horrid. “Why do you behave like this? What is wrong with you?”
He lifted his head off the pillow to look at her. “I don’t want to do this,” he said.
“Then why don’t you call to say where you are? Why can’t you—”
“No! This! I never wanted any of this.” He gestured wildly at the room.
“If you hadn’t quit the plant, we wouldn’t have to live here.”
“Will you listen? I never wanted to get married and live in this shit town and punch a clock. You wanted this. This was your idea.” He turned his back to her and pulled the blankets up to his neck.
Laura stood in the middle of the room, her arms hanging uselessly by her sides. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Are you saying you don’t love me?”
“No, okay? No. I do not love you.”
There it was, the truth, shaped into words and launched into the air at last. And even though she had known, it still came at her like a punch in the head; she saw flickering lights and felt an implosion of blood in her temples. “Are you leaving me?” she asked him. “What are you saying?”
He made a snorting sound. “I’m not saying anything. Now let me sleep.”
Laura went into the next room, where Dawn and Jimmy were curled up in their cot and crib. Something dense and enormous had crash-landed in the middle of her head, and it was impossible to think around it. Half her thoughts were on one side of the blockage, half on the other; the beginning and ending of sentences didn’t match up.
He hadn’t wanted to marry her. But he had loved her. He hadn’t wanted a wife and kids. But he had married her.
He didn’t want to be married. But he was married.
He wasn’t leaving. But he wanted to leave.
He never wanted this. But she hadn’t wanted this either—living with her in-laws, paying bills that were never paid off, waiting for her husband to come home and stay home. The black fog, the birds of terror. She hadn’t wanted any of it, but she was going to be stuck with it.
She could hear the kettle being filled in the kitchen. In a few minutes, the kids would be awake, and she would have to take them downstairs for breakfast. She stood up and began to dress for work, pulling on nylons, a black shirt and a white blouse. It took her a long time; her hands seemed to be very far away from the rest of her.
Downstairs, as she was shoving her feet into her boots, Vera said they were running out of cereal for Dawn. “I’ll bring some home tonight,” Laura said. Her voice came bouncing back off the kitchen tiles and echoed in her head, but Vera didn’t seem to notice. “Not that expensive kind. Get puffed rice,” she said, setting down a plastic bowl in front of Dawn.
Dawn chanted, “Get puffed rice! Get puffed rice.” Laura pulled on her coat. Dawn waved her spoon gleefully. “Bye, Mommy!”
At 3:30, she was sitting motionless at her desk when Will Wharton came by with a load of paper and ink and told her she looked awfully pale. A tear burned a track down her cheek. Will said, “Jeez, Laura. Let me drive you home.” She shook her head, but he insisted. “Go on, get your coat,” he said.
She walked across the room on shaky legs. No one said anything, but she saw them watching her as she pulled on her beige woollen coat and boots. “Going home early?” Deb McKenna asked. Laura didn’t answer. Will Wharton held open the door, and she walked out into the stinging cold.
He helped her into the truck and then got in and turned on the heater. She was crying silently, just tears and snot. Will handed her a crumpled tissue. “It’s clean,” he said. She held it limply and continued to cry as Will told her that Dean was a son of a bitch who didn’t know how lucky he was to have a woman like her, and if she had been his wife, he would have made damn sure she wasn’t sitting in a parking lot crying her eyes out like this. When he put his arms around her, she made no effort to push him away, and when he started to kiss her, she let him. He rubbed himself against her, jamming his hands under her coat, squeezing her breasts, groaning in her ear, “Laura, Laura.” Finally, he shuddered and sat back and said, “Jesus … You wanna get a room or something?”
Laura pulled herself upright and buttoned her coat. “Can you take me to the bus terminal?”
“The bus terminal? Why? You wanna go somewhere?”
“Toronto.”
He was silent for a while, and then reached for the gearshift. “You know what? I’ll drive you. What the hell. It’s Friday. I wouldn’t mind getting out of town for the weekend.”
SECOND LIFE
; Will Wharton dropped her off on Saturday night, after spending Friday night in a motel room in Sudbury trying to convince her to come away with him. They would drive to Buffalo and keep going, get as far as they could with the company truck before it was called in missing on Monday morning; they could get a place, get jobs, start new lives. She said no. She had heard this story before. Will sulked. He was still sulking when they reached the driveway of her parents’ home in Toronto. “You could at least invite me in,” he said. She shook her head. He said, “Well, I’m gonna keep going. I’m—”
“Goodbye,” Laura said and climbed out of the truck.
For the next three days, she did nothing but sleep, waking only to stagger to the bathroom or sit up and drink the cool, milky tea her father brought her. When she finally got up, he talked about the smallest of things: the book he was reading about birds of Ontario, the strange badger-like creature he had seen in a field at Don Mills. He said he was going to paint the kitchen a very light green. He asked her if she wanted a slice of toast.
He didn’t ask her why she had left, or tell her that she had to go back. She leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes. The fog was gone, and the strange pains in her limbs. Her insides had been completely hollowed out. She was almost weightless. She had come through something terrible, but she was too weak to look back and see what it was.
After her mother left for work in the morning, her father asked if she wanted to go for a walk. She had to wear her old camel hair coat and a pair of her mother’s boots from the front hall closet. Her father held her arm and guided her down the street to the corner. The air was sharp and clean, and her breath formed wet circles on her wool scarf. “Shore lark,” her father said, pointing to a small bird on a fence. “They like the snow.” They stopped to watch the small bird with its little cap and scarf of dark feathers. Laura pulled her fingers out of the ends of her gloves and balled them up against her palms for warmth. Her wedding ring was loose on her finger. When she pulled off the glove, it dropped into the snow. “Did you lose something?” her father asked. She shook her head.
