Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  He sank down to the bed again, eyes downcast.

  I crossed my arms. “Because I guess you left that super-fabulous gift you bought me in New Orleans on the plane or something, right?”

  “It was a T-shirt,” he said quietly. “Turquoise, with LADIES SEWING CIRCLE AND TERRORIST SOCIETY printed across the chest in white script. I thought it would make you laugh. And I left it either on the plane or in my hotel room.”

  “Huh.”

  “I thought it was funny,” he said.

  “We first met in what, March 1986?” I asked.

  “David Goldsmith’s birthday party. Central Park West.”

  His tone of voice was way more “as you perfectly well know” than “aw, honey, remember how romantic?”

  Dick.

  “It’s now March 1995, Dean. Which means we’ve been together how long?”

  He cleared his throat. “Nine years.”

  “And in that period of time, have you ever seen me wear a single item of turquoise clothing?”

  He looked at the floor.

  I kicked one of his shoes at him, making it skitter across the hardwood into his ankle. “Buy yourself some fucking socks for my birthday. I’d cherish the gift of not having to hear you whine about how they’ve all gone missing every time you open that stupid goddamn drawer.”

  By the time Dean walked back into the house that afternoon, sweaty and red-cheeked with his bike helmet tucked under one arm, I’d finished making three salads (orzo-feta-kalamata, buckwheat tabouleh, and hominy with diced Granny Smith apples and roasted sweet potatoes—in a lemon-thyme vinaigrette), a platter of marinated hamburger patties plumped for the grill, another of romaine lettuce with sliced onions and tomatoes, and a flourless chocolate-whiskey torte with a bowl of fresh mint–spiked whipped cream on the side.

  The girls were bathed and dressed in their playpen, and I was just stacking whole wheat kaiser rolls and burger-ready chunks of sourdough baguette in an alternating pyramid.

  “The house still looks like shit,” said my husband. “They’re going to be here in half an hour.”

  “I wanted to get the food prepped first, so I can relax a little later on. It’s been forever since I talked with actual grown-ups.”

  Except for Mimi, but what business is that of yours? I mean, if you’re going to be such an asshole, generally.

  He yanked his sweat-soaked T-shirt up over his head and threw it on the floor, about a foot away from the laundry pile. “I’m sick of running around to shove all your crap in random closets at the last possible moment, every single time we have people over. It’s ridiculous.”

  I glanced into the living room. The girls’ toys were everywhere, but other than that there were only the two buckets of clean laundry I’d actually folded already, and a pile of dry-cleaned suits Dean had left draped across the sofa.

  Well, along with a couple of coffee mugs here and there. And several sections of last Sunday’s New York Times spread across and around the coffee table.

  “Just take your shower,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”

  “I mean, I work my ass off, day after day,” he said, timbre of his voice shifting from pissy to shrill, “and I have to come home to this shit after a week on the road? We live like goddamn animals.”

  I gritted my teeth.

  For this I went to college. Excellent.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Madeline? Jesus, you’re the lightning rod for entropy in the universe, and you obviously have no respect for me whatsoever.”

  I dropped my eyes to the kitchen floor, which, admittedly, could have used a little sweeping-and-mopping action.

  His voice ratcheted up another key. “You expect me to entertain my professional colleagues in this pigsty?”

  Fuck you…

  “It’s goddamn embarrassing.”

  Fuck you…

  “I’m ashamed to have people know I put up with this. To know I allow my children to be raised in this filth.”

  Drop dead, you petulant sack of rapidly balding shit. You and the glad-handing fancy-fucking-restaurants-every-night expense report you rode in on.

  Arguing back just prolonged his tirades. So did crying.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, eyes squeezed shut as I bit the inside of my lip, relieved my hair had fallen forward to veil my face.

  I’d gotten the last lick in about the socks and that was now his excuse to come back at me over something else.

  It was never about anything, or it was about everything. I couldn’t tell anymore.

  The litany varied: If the house was clean, I was spending so much money we were “doomed to end up living in some refrigerator box over a heating vent in the sidewalk.” If our expenses were in order, I was letting the girls watch videos all day instead of taking them out for “fresh air and healthy activities, like any sane woman would considering we live in such a beautiful place.”

  Lately it had been like being married to a brown paper bag full of Africanized bees. The tantrums were random as summer thunderstorms—squalls of pique during which he fumed and yelled and found fault with everything I did.

  And then the storm front would pass and he’d joke around like nothing had happened.

  I couldn’t remember anymore whether he’d always been like this, or whether he’d morphed into a wife-berating shithead gradually, over time.

  He never did it when we had an audience, and he was always unfailingly kind and patient with Parrish and India.

  Maybe it was the pressure of being low-on-the-totem-pole middle management. Maybe it was unmedicated depression.

  Or maybe my childhood damage had programmed me to seek out a man who’d treat me as badly as the majority of my stepfathers had—once he’d gotten me geographically isolated and financially dependent, saddled with kids.

  Dean took off his socks, shorts, and boxers, tossing them all vaguely in the direction of the laundry pile. He stalked naked out of the kitchen and toward the shower, slack white-boy ass jiggling.

  I scraped his clothes off the floor and shoved them into the washing machine, not bothering to turn the damn thing on.

  Or, worst of all, maybe I deserve it.

  I half wanted to hit him over the head with a cast-iron skillet for being such an asshole, half cowered with nauseating certainty that his rants were my fault and entirely justified. Mostly I was too tired to string together any kind of cohesive rebuttal.

  Plus which, for all I knew, this shit was what all husbands did—by definition, if you stuck it out in any marriage long enough.

  It might be just another thing the sitcoms of my childhood had glossed over, right up there with the prime-time pretense that all persons of the married persuasion slept solo and fully clothed in well-spaced twin beds.

  I jogged toward the living room, willing the tears that pricked at the corners of my lashes not to fall. People were due to arrive in twenty minutes—not enough time to rub ice cubes across my eyelids, erasing the evidence of a good cry.

  We’d been married seven years—two longer than my mother’s personal best in her four times at the nuptial bat.

  We had health insurance. We had two gorgeous children. And life with Dean was pretty decent at least 80 percent of the time.

  I hoped this was a rough patch, that maybe we just needed a couple of solid naps to restore the best aspects of our couple-hood.

  This guy called Fassett (my favorite stepfather-type person when I was fifteen) had once remarked that it was pointless both spiritually and practically to spend your time in a relationship bitching about what the other person should be doing for you, because the only thing you ever have control over is what you’re doing for them—how much you give and forgive, how generous you are—without worrying about what you should be getting in return for the effort.

  Maybe that was terrible advice, and, okay, Fassett had been married to someone else the entire time he was hanging out with Mom, but how the hell would I know? It’s not like I had a whole bunch of othe
r marital paradigms to hold up for comparison so what the hell.

  When all else failed, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try kindness or some vague kind of Gandhi thing. I mean, it’s not like I was going to win any awards for vacuuming prowess anytime soon.

  My husband was smart, and a charming host. He was solicitous of my friends. He was on his way up in the corporate game, and our daughters wouldn’t be laughed at for wearing poor-relation castoffs and Goodwill rags when they were old enough for school, the way I had been after my father took off.

  I didn’t have to serve up cheese-with-the-mold-pared-off or powdered milk or dented cans of generic chili that always turned out to be made from shredded beef hearts, if you were dumb enough to read the ingredient list on the “No Frills” label.

  I wouldn’t have to explain to Parrish and India why their father lived in a VW van behind the Chevron station in Malibu, buying weed and Volkswagen tools from the Snap-on truck guy who showed up once a week in lieu of paying child support—while worrying that the KGB was reading his mail.

  With Dean’s help I had washed up safe once more on the shores of the lower middle class, despite my parents’ headlong sprint away from all remaining vestiges of their childhood wealth and privilege.

  And he and I were a team, right? It’s just that we were tired, and overwhelmed, and doing our best to keep it together most of the time. The bad cranky shit would probably pass: Scorpio would move out of the House of Suckbag. Life would go on.

  Besides which, it wasn’t like I was a pregnant single truckstop waitress in Fresno, or undergoing chemo. Nor, for that matter, was I currently being bombed by the Luftwaffe in Guernica.

  Hey—in the grand scheme of things, I had very little to complain about.

  And for that I was fucking well grateful.

  17

  You did a nice job with the food, Bunny,” Dean said, casting an approving eye over the culinary handiwork I’d arrayed across the kitchen table. As though none of it had been there before his shower.

  His wet hair was neatly combed back, his pink Brooks Brothers shirt crisply starched and pressed by the cleaners on Pearl Street. Even his boxers were from The Brothers—my Valentine’s present to him the previous month.

  I thought of Edith Wharton’s once having described a character’s husband as being blond and well dressed, with “the physical distinction that comes from having a straight figure, a thin nose, and the habit of looking slightly disgusted.”

  He walked behind me, smelling of shampoo and peppermint, then sat down to slide his feet into a pair of Belgian shoes, brown with black piping and topped with discreetly tiny black bows (my Christmas present).

  These were pretty much the WASPiest footwear in the history of the universe, and I had a momentary flashback to what Dean had been wearing the night we’d met: green garbage-man pants, white poly-blend Sears dress shirt through which you could see the outline of his undershirt (a pack of Viceroys rolled up in one of its short sleeves), thick-soled black cop shoes. Not to mention ugly glasses and a bad haircut.

  None of which had mattered to me. We stayed up talking about FDR’s policy of farm parity until four in the morning after a party at my pal Sophia’s parents’ apartment, and then he’d carried me up the stairs to an empty bedroom with a view of Central Park.

  I apologized the moment we were naked in bed for not having shaved.

  “That’s perfectly all right,” Dean replied. “I’ve dated English majors before.”

  At which point I realized he might well be a keeper.

  Since then, I had taught a Syracuse farmboy to look carelessly effete.

  Perhaps that explained at least part of his bad mood. I’d become the man behind the curtain to whom one was supposed to pay no attention.

  I rubbed at the smear of cake-batter craquelure on my sweatshirt’s cuff. “Could you watch the girls for a minute while I go change?”

  It was only Setsuko and Cary coming over, but I felt like a fat lumpen mudhen compared with my minty-fresh spouse.

  He glanced at his watch, lips pressed thin.

  I hustled back upstairs to our room, throwing on a longish red skirt from Target and this dumpy black Goodwill sweater Mom had found me, then scraped my hair back into a ponytail.

  I spent money on the girls’ clothes, or Dean’s. There never seemed to be enough for mine, too.

  I looked myself up and down in the closet-door mirror: Ellis Island, fresh out of steerage—minus only the kerchief and hobnail boots.

  Fuck that.

  I yanked the skirt off, dumped it on our floor, and changed into my last pair of jeans and a pair of black Converse sneakers.

  Low-tops, no socks.

  Because I didn’t actually own any socks, either.

  I’d never been a big sock person. And in a pinch—snowstorms, et cetera—I could always wear my husband’s.

  Back downstairs, I found Dean with his pink sleeves crisply rolled back to each elbow, talking cheerful nonsense to make Parrish laugh as he replaced her diaper.

  He looked up at me, smiling. “The food really does look amazing, Bunny. I can’t believe you pulled all that together in one morning.”

  “Thank you for changing her,” I said, stepping up close behind him to wrap my arms again around his waist. “I’m sorry the house was such a pit.”

  I squeezed my arms tighter, planting a kiss on his back.

  He leaned forward over Parrish.

  “Darling petunia,” he cooed, “your dad missed you so much.”

  Through the living room window, I watched Cary’s truck pull up to the curb.

  Setsuko swung her long legs gracefully out from its passenger door when he’d walked around to open it for her, extending a hand to help her down.

  She was willowy—tall for a woman who’d grown up in Tokyo. A breeze fluttered the silky hem of her blossom-pink dress, tossing the artfully curled ends of her long black hair.

  I liked her well enough. She was the receptionist at Dean’s office, unfailingly sweet to me when I called him at work—but our small talk always ground to a painful halt right around “I’m well, thanks, how are you?”

  “They’re here,” I said.

  Cary said something that made Setsuko giggle, and she lowered her lashes, raising a demure hand to hide perfect teeth.

  The woman was so indelibly feminine she might as well have worn a powder-blue T-shirt that read I AM THE ANTI-MADELINE across the front, in swirly girly paste–hued script.

  I’d read once that the Japanese language has gender-specific first-person pronouns, which I immediately took to mean that women weren’t allowed to use the same “I” and “me” as men were. Perhaps because I also knew it was still perfectly legal to fire a woman there for having gotten married—or just having reached, say, her mid-twenties, should the male bosses decide they were in need of a fresher “office flower.”

  Granted, this prickly attitude may well have been pure cultural chauvinism on my part, or the result of having read far too many smugly misogynistic stroke-lit James Clavell novels, but I did try to cut Setsuko a little slack and at least think of her as involuntarily insipid.

  If I’d been raised female in her milieu, I suspected I’d’ve long since stormed a bell tower brandishing twin AK-47s, my belt strung with grenades.

  Setsuko reached back into the truck’s bed for two bags of groceries, waving Cary away when he offered to help.

  Dean pushed past me to open the front door for them. I followed him out onto our front porch, fighting a sudden urge to plant my foot firmly in the exact center of his ass and shove him down the stairs.

  18

  Dean and Cary had taken the girls out into the backyard, intent on firing up our barbecue.

  Setsuko, meanwhile, had started unloading her grocery bags on the kitchen counter.

  I figured she’d brought a salad or something, maybe a pie—the usual sort of adjunct foodstuffs one totes to an informal lunch at someone else’s house—but she kept rea
ching into the bags and pulling out piles of items. (I counted three packages of hamburger, two bags of buns, catsup, mustard, relish, tomatoes, lettuce, a tub of store-bought potato salad… and she still wasn’t done.)

  I realized she’d virtually replicated my entire menu for the afternoon.

  Well, okay, mine was way better—not least since I wouldn’t be caught dead serving French’s yellow mustard, iceberg lettuce, or Wonder Bread anything—but it was bizarre.

  “That’s really nice of you,” I said, “but, um, we kind of already have food?”

  She turned around to smile at me and I gestured toward the kitchen table, loaded down with my jam-packed trays and platters and bowls, not to mention a large jar of Grey Poupon, poppy-and sesame-seed-garnished kaiser rolls, and mixed baby field greens.

  “Yes,” she said, beaming. “And I brought things, too.”

  I wondered whether all females were Stepfordized at birth in her home country, and how quickly I could get her the hell out of my kitchen.

  I looked out the window and watched Dean and Cary fiddle with the Weber on our backyard’s lawn.

  Parrish and India were in their little sandbox a few feet away, brandishing plastic shovels with glee.

  My husband filled a foot-tall metal chimney with charcoal, then wadded up half a sheet of newspaper and shoved it into the bottom of the thing, no doubt lecturing Cary on the efficacy of this lighting method as he lowered it into the barbecue’s kettle.

  Our pal nodded, handing Dean the box of matches that had been sitting on the grass at their feet.

  “Shall I start making the hamburger patties now?” asked Setsuko, from behind me.

  “I’m so sorry, Setsuko, I’m a terrible hostess… would you care for something to drink?” I turned to smile at her, pointing pointedly toward the kitchen window and the great outdoors beyond it. “We have wine and beer on the picnic table. Or juice. I’m sure Dean and Cary would enjoy some company.”

  “A glass of wine would be lovely, Mrs. Bauer, thank you.”

  “Please call me Madeline,” I said, for possibly the hundredth time.