The Transformation of Things

by Jillian Cantor

  I sighed as I looked at myself in the mirror now; I still couldn’t shake the sick feeling in Will’s stomach from the dream. And my limbs felt like Jell-O, too heavy for my body. It was just a dream, I repeated in my head a few times, but the awkward feelings refused to disappear. Is this the way Will had walked through life? Had he felt this way all the time?

  For the first time it occurred to me that I’d known nothing about Will’s life as a judge. Nothing at all. And it wasn’t just because Will hadn’t told me, but also because I’d never asked.

  Twelve

  By the week before Thanksgiving, Will had sold three yearly landscaping packages to three unsuspecting families in Deerfield. And by unsuspecting I mean that they had no idea that they were purchasing said packages from a judge—no, former (indicted) judge—only that they were buying them from a guy named William Kenneth who had driven up to their house in a little blue Daniels and Sons truck. The name William Kenneth left out something very important, of course, Will’s last name, but it was Dave who’d printed up the business cards. And Will told me he thought the omission was actually for the best. Though I wondered if deep down it was soul-crushing, to have your identity taken away, just like that.

  But Will said there were people who still recognized him anyway. These people knew him from the pictures that had been plastered in the Deerfield Daily for the better part of a week in the beginning of October. He told me he could always tell when that happened, when the surge of recognition flashed across an old woman’s face, as he tried to explain the essence of their organic compounds, when a housewife suddenly asked him to leave after offering him an iced tea only moments before.

  “People will forget,” I told him, as he complained about it in the middle of getting ready for bed. “Everything gets forgotten eventually.” I knew that some people wouldn’t forget—Lisa and Bethany and the rest of the Ladies Lunch Club. But the other people, the ones who hadn’t ever known us before in our life as “The Levenworths,” those people who hadn’t known him as anything more than a black-and-white photo, those people would let the image of the indicted judge slip away; they would forget eventually.

  He rubbed his hand over the stubble on his face, the stubble that formed in the space between his new shaving routine, which only happened every fourth or fifth day now. “Yeah.” He let out a dry laugh. “Before you know it, I’ll cease to exist. Will Levenworth will be no more.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Of course you’ll exist.”

  I watched him pull off his pale blue cotton golf shirt, the one that I’d always thought had looked good on him because it really brought out his eyes. “You’re ovulating this week?” he asked, popping his head out of the shirt. It sounded almost more like a statement of fact than a question, so I knew he must’ve noticed it on his calendar, and it popped out so easily, so carelessly, that he might as well have said, Did you remember to buy milk this week?

  I shrugged. I actually wasn’t exactly sure that those calendar days were all that accurate anymore.

  Kelly had given me a book called Fertile and Free, back when Will and I had first gotten married. I’d flipped through it when we first moved to Deerfield, then put it high on a bookshelf, and had never bothered to take it out again. But this week I’d taken to reorganizing the bookshelves, and I’d come across it. I’m not sure what made me start reading it, but I’d sat there one afternoon and read through the whole thing.

  I learned there was a lot more that went into figuring out when you were ovulating than just simple timing, that the fourteenth-day-of-the-cycle bit that Dr. Horowitz had hastily recited off to me at my last appointment was something of a myth, and that there were all kinds of ways to figure out when you really were ovulating. Special thermometers and charts and graphs and analysis of cervical mucus. I found it more than a little horrifying, the way the whole baby-making process seemed a hell of a lot more scientific and complicated than I’d ever imagined.

  “Jen.” He walked toward me, and he pulled me close. He kissed my forehead; the scratchiness of his face was rough enough to sting a little bit against my skin. His body felt warm against mine, and a part of me wanted to lean up and kiss him. “I really want a baby,” he whispered.

  “We’ve been trying,” I whispered back.

  “Let’s really try. For real.”

  “I don’t know, Will.” I paused. “I don’t know if it’s the right time now.”

  He pulled back. “You never think it’s the right time.” It was true, even when I’d consented to try a few months back, I’d still mentioned that I wasn’t sure I was ready. Then Will had reminded me that we weren’t getting any younger, and I’d reluctantly agreed. The truth was, I wasn’t sure I would ever feel ready, though this much I’d never admitted out loud.

  But right now seemed like it might be the worst possible time, no matter what Kelly said about flowers growing in shit. I tried to imagine what it would be like for him or her, the baby, to be born into this world, with two parents who didn’t exactly know how to talk to each other, and who didn’t fit in with their surroundings anymore. There would be no Swedish pram walks with Bethany and Angel, no playdates with the neighbors, no swimming lessons or birthday parties at the club.

  “Maybe we should give it a few more months. Wait and see …” I finally said.

  He frowned and turned away. When he turned back to face me I couldn’t tell if he wanted to yell or cry. “Why don’t you just say it, Jen?”

  “Say what?” I whispered.

  “That it’s not that you don’t want to have a baby.” He paused. “It’s just that you don’t want to have a baby with me.”

  “That’s not it,” I said, and I was so surprised that I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach, the wind knocked out of me. It had never once occurred to me to want a baby with anyone else.

  He shook his head, and I knew he didn’t believe me. But I had no words to say it, the way I was really feeling, thick and heavy like the way I’d walked through the dream as Lisa, the world so foggy that my thoughts felt impossibly stuck in my brain.

  Will went into the bathroom and shut the door, and I got into bed and closed my eyes, if only to stop the tears from coming. I thought about Kat, about what she’d said about how some women were meant to be mothers and others weren’t. And maybe I was the latter. Yes, that’s what I wanted to tell him. That it had everything to do with me, and nothing to do with him. But my head was too weighted with sleep for me to get out of bed to say anything.

  I was sitting in the coffee shop, the whir of the espresso machine making it hard to hear. But there was a man talking to me, a voice, deep and sexy and smooth. “Katrin,” he was saying. “Katrin, are you listening to me?” He put his hand on top of mine, looked me in the eye, and smiled.

  No, I am not listening, I thought. How could I be listening, when you’re touching me? When all I can think about is your hand, your hand on my skin. “I’m sorry.” I shook my head. “What were you saying? “

  He leaned in, just about to kiss me, his face close enough for me to notice that his breath smelled like coffee and grapefruit.

  I sat up, startled, the smell of coffee so strong in my nose that I was positive it must be real, that Will must be downstairs, brewing coffee. Only it was dark, so dark that I could barely see, barely make out the shapes of the furniture in the room. Will was snoring softly beside me, and when I took another deep breath, the smell of coffee slowly dissipated. But when I lay back down, I couldn’t fall back to sleep right away; I couldn’t get the image of Grant’s face coming closer, coming toward mine, out of my head.

  The next morning, Kat called to congratulate me. City Style was running my first set of wedding announcements.

  I’d just gotten out of the shower when she called and I ran to get the phone in my towel, thinking it might be Will, and hoping I could find the words to tell him what I’d been feeling before I feel asleep last night. “How does it feel to have your name back in
print?” Kat asked. As soon as I heard her voice, the image of Grant’s face, coming closer, the smell of coffee and grapefruit, overtook my senses.

  “Great,” I said, after a moment. The truth was—well, aside from the obvious truth that it wasn’t exactly my name—I didn’t really care all that much about the wedding announcements.

  “I know it’s not much,” she said. “But I thought they were very well written.”

  “Thanks,” I said, because I knew she was trying to make me feel better. But I couldn’t shake the feeling of Grant. Grant’s smell. Grant’s hand.

  “How’s everything going?” Kat lowered her voice to a whisper, and I wondered who she thought was within earshot. I wondered if it was Grant, if he was there with her, leaning over her desk, leaning in close.

  “It’s going,” I said.

  “And Will?”

  I thought about the way he’d looked at me last night, with a mixture of anger and disappointment, and it was so different from the way he’d looked at me that night when he’d cooked me dinner. “Will’s good,” I lied. I paused. “Kat, you’re not really the motherly type. What made you decide to have children?”

  She laughed. “There wasn’t any deciding about it, the first time around.” She paused to contain her laughter. “I’m telling you, we could’ve made a fortune if Danny would’ve had the balls to sue Trojan.”

  I chuckled, picturing straitlaced, red-haired, freckled Danny actually filing a complaint against a condom manufacturer.And it was impossible to imagine. But who would’ve ever imagined Will wearing khakis to work and selling weed control either? “What about the second time?” I said.

  “Ahh, the second time.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Danny got me drunk, and he swears I said I wanted to get pregnant. But I honestly don’t think I ever woulda said that, even three sheets to the wind. I think he liquored me up and took advantage, because he thinks being an only child would’ve scarred Sarah Lynne for life. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “Well, it all worked out,” I said. “You have two beautiful children.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do, don’t I?” She paused. “Look, you ever want to try on the whole motherhood thing for size, I could drop the girls off at your place for the weekend.” When I didn’t answer either way, she kept talking. “I’m thinking about renting them out to prospective parents. Talk about population control,” she said. “Kidding. I’m kidding.” She paused. “I’m telling you, though. Motherhood is the toughest fucking job you’ll ever have in your life.”

  After I hung up with Kat, I got dressed, and checked the mail to see if my issue of City Style had arrived yet. It hadn’t. I didn’t feel like driving all the way back to Oak Glen again, so I decided to risk it and run quickly into Whole Foods to pick up a copy.

  I was standing in the magazine section, thumbing through the issue, when I heard someone say my name, and I looked up and saw Lisa standing in front of me, hanging on to her overflowing shopping cart as if it was another appendage. Oh shit. I was never coming back to this store again.

  “You cut your hair,” she said. “You look different.” She paused. “It looks nice.”

  “Thanks.” I nodded. Then I looked back down at the magazine,hoping she would disappear. I knew she was right, that she’d only been the messenger for the other women, but also it was something else. Seeing her there, I saw it in her eyes, low and red-rimmed and moist—I saw the feeling I’d felt in my dream, the intensity of her sadness, the way it consumed her. Maybe Ethel had been right, that I’d only been dreaming what I already knew. And maybe, deep down, I’d known it the whole time with Lisa, that part of her was broken, a deep part of her, the part that dies inside you when you lose something unfathomable, a parent to cancer, the part that starts off small, but then grows and grows, enough to choke the rest of the life right out of you.

  She cleared her throat. “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said, not looking up again.

  She grabbed on to the magazine with her hand and lowered it, so we were staring at each other, eye to eye. Lisa had a steely gaze when she wanted to—I’d seen it on her before when she was yelling at Chance and Chester for playing in the street—and I’d always imagined that once upon a time she’d been a formidable opponent in the courtroom. “I’ve been worried about you,” she said. In the whirl of the supermarket noise, her words almost seemed to disappear, making hardly any sense against the beeping of the checkout counters and some announcements coming across the PA system. She frowned. “Bethany’s making a mess of the auction.” And then I felt the world go quiet, the rush of the market dulled by her words flooding my ears.

  I closed the magazine, and for the first time since being booted out of the Deerfield social scene, I really thought I might just burst into tears. It was one thing to lose friendships with the petty and the spineless women of the lunch club, but another to hear that my baby, my auction, was falling apart. I blinked the tears back, and I shrugged. “So,” I said, “what do you want me to do?”

  Lisa appeared to be considering saying something, and even though I hated myself for it, a small part of me wanted her to ask me back, to ask me to come swooping in to save the auction, to save her. Even something smaller, even her saying that she would talk to the other women for me, plead my case—she’d been a prosecutor, for Christ’s sake—would’ve been enough. But all she said was “You’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  I nodded, and I watched her awkwardly turn the stuffed shopping cart toward the checkout. Her hair looked dry and brittle from being dyed and blown out one too many times, the skin under her eyes was starting to sag, and her butt looked downright huge from this angle and in those horribly tight jeans she was wearing. I knew it was harder for her to fit in than, say, someone like Bethany, but that still didn’t feel like an excuse for abandoning me.

  Thirteen

  The night of the charity auction, I was sitting at the kitchen table, organizing my coupons in my Filofax, when Will walked in, dressed in a tuxedo. “You’re not dressed,” he said, seeming stunned. “Jen, you haven’t even showered yet.” He lifted up his arm to look at his watch, thinking perhaps that he was the one who’d erred—gotten the wrong day or time. I felt a steady sinking in my chest.

  By this point, my ousting from the Deerfield social scene had become something I’d gotten used to, something that only bothered me a little bit, but it was also something that I hadn’t mentioned to Will. At first I hadn’t wanted to upset him, thinking he had enough of his own to deal with. And then it was hard to stop lying.

  Now that we actually had started eating dinner together every night and having coffee together some mornings, there were questions: “How was your tennis match?”

  “Oh, good,” I lied. “We won.” I invented a score in my head, and a play-by-play of the action each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon, just in case he ever asked. I also didn’t mention that when I was supposedly playing tennis, I’d been jogging in Oak Glen.

  And Will hadn’t noticed that the house was extra clean, his closet extra organized. He hadn’t noticed that I now cleaned the spotless oven weekly or shined the bamboo floors biweekly, or cleaned out the attic, or alphabetized some of his old jazz records in the basement. Or, if he had noticed, he filed it under “Things Jen Does That I’ve Never Been Around to Notice Before.”

  I stared at Will for a minute now, handsome and sweet-looking in his formal wear, and I had to close my eyes and take a deep breath before I broke the news. “I guess I forgot to mention it.” I tried my best to sound breezy, casual. “Bethany is running the auction now.”

  “What? Why would Bethany …” His voice trailed off as he understood why, and then his face turned a shade of white that made him look like a ghost, an apparition of his former self, so he began looking oddly out of sorts in his tuxedo. “Jen, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s no big deal.” I shrugged and pretended to go back to my cou
pon organizing, while blinking back tears. “It was a lot of work anyway.”

  “But you loved it.” He sat down next to me and covered my hand with his to stop it, to stop me, from moving. “Jen.” I looked up. His eyes were a cool shade of blue in the slow evening glimmer of the kitchen. They were sad eyes, anxious eyes, and I had to look away. “You’re not even going to go?” he asked.

  I swallowed hard. “We weren’t exactly invited,” I said.

  He stood up and ran his fingers loosely through his hair. “That’s ridiculous. This is your auction.” He started pacing across the bamboo floor, the heels of his dress shoes clicking on each turn. “I’ll call someone. Who should I call?”

  “Will, don’t.” I stood up.

  “You’ll go without me.” He held his hands up in the air. “None of this has to do with you.”

  “It’s okay, Will.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. He stopped pacing and looked at me, and I knew my own eyes were revealing more truth than anything that had come out of my mouth in the last month. “It’s not okay. Dammit, Jen. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What’s the point?” I whispered. I cleared my throat. “Besides, I’ve been busy. I have my freelance work, and …” I let my voice trail off because there was nothing else to add.

  He sighed, reached out for me again, and pulled me to him, so my head was against his chest, so his heart was beating in my ear. Still loud and strong and steady, like the grandfather clock that had been in the hallway of my parents’ house and now sat in the front hallway of Kelly’s. He kissed the top of my head. “You’re still here,” he said, almost to himself, as if he couldn’t believe it, and he said it so softly that I had this strange feeling that he was somewhere very far away, despite still being able to feel his heartbeat.

  “I am,” I said, feeling unbelievably sad about not being able to go to the auction, this deep, intense sadness. It worked its way from my stomach to my chest to my brain, until tears formed in my eyes again and threatened to spill over onto Will’s white tuxedo shirt.