The Transformation of Things

by Jillian Cantor

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. Of course,” I said, because once it was out there, I was totally serious.

  “Okay, I’ll talk to Danny about it. Maybe.”

  “Any weekend you want, okay? Will would be excited about it.” He probably would, probably would think it was a great way to convince me that I wanted a baby, though, as I watched Sarah Lynne wildly swing the red bat, I knew it would probably do just the opposite.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Just tell me one thing. Where were you, those times with Grant, when you were tempted?”

  “In the coffee shop,” she said. “The one below the office that we used to go to all the time.” I nodded and I tried to look calm, though my heart was pounding rapidly in my chest. I thought about the smell of the coffee, sitting in the plastic chair while I felt his leg brush against hers. “Is that where I was, in your dream?” she asked.

  “Oh no,” I lied. “Of course not. You were at my sister’s house,” I lied again, surprised by how easily it came out.

  “Weird, huh?”

  She reached over and squeezed my hand. “Thanks for coming with me.” She paused. “And don’t tell Will about the vodka. He’ll tell Danny, and then Danny will be pissed, drinking when I’m with the kids, and blah, blah, blah.”

  “Don’t worry.” I squeezed her hand back. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  Lying in bed, that night, alone, Will still down in the study, I thought about him. And just before I fell asleep, I wondered what he would say if Danny had asked him about me, about us, the way I’d asked Kat.

  I was standing in my office, staring out the window. Just below the courthouse, there was an entire world,people moving, doing things: a mother pushing her baby in a stroller, a family walking into the used book store across the street. I closed my eyes and imagined myself walking on the street, going somewhere, doing something.

  I heard a knock at the door. “Come in,” I called out, but I didn’t step away from the window. I couldn’t.

  “Judge.” I heard Janice’s voice, and I turned away from the window. “Is this a good time?”

  I sighed and gestured to the chair across the desk. “Have a seat.” With the weight of the baby in her stomach, everything about Janice seemed swollen, even her eyes, which were dark brown, the color of chestnuts.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll only be a minute.” She paused. “I just want to tell you that I don’t think I’ll be coming back. After the baby.” I nodded. “I’m really sorry. I love it here, but Rick and I talked about it, and it’s just too much time. I don’t want to miss everything with her.”

  “Is that all?” I asked. I saw her eyes swell up, begging me to tell her it was okay. So I did. “Look, Janice. It’s fine.”

  “Are you sure you’re not mad?”

  “No.” I sighed. “I’m not mad. “

  “Okay. Good.” She nodded. “I’ll start looking for my replacement then?”

  I nodded and turned back toward the window. The mother on the street was still there, sitting on a bench, lifting her baby in the air.

  It’s not fair, I thought, as I heard Janice walk away. Not fair that she can leave. Just like that.

  I rolled over and reached out my hand for Will. He murmured and rolled toward me. “Where did you want to go?” I attempted to whisper into the darkness, but my mind hung somewhere in blurry half sleep, and I couldn’t force the words from my lips.

  Fifteen

  Will spent most of Thanksgiving morning on the couch, watching football, while I spent it throwing my nervous energy into pies—pumpkin, apple, and pecan. I always did the pies because Kelly couldn’t bake to save her life. She was an excellent turkey roaster and potato masher, but she managed to ruin every baked good she ever touched. Hence her penchant for Tastykakes.

  I still hadn’t told my father about anything that had happened to Will, or to me, for that matter, and I was hoping we’d be able to get through the dinner without it coming up.

  As I sliced apples, I remembered a night from my childhood: It was snowing, and my mother was standing at the stove making soup, the bones of her face protruding in this unnatural skeletal manner, her chestnut wig on a little crooked. She kept stirring the soup, looking out the window, watching for him.

  It was dark by the time he got there, long after the three of us had eaten the soup. “It’s late,” my mother had said when she saw him. “I was worried.”

  “Sorry,” my father had grunted, sounding unapologetic.

  In the end, she’d been in hospice care at Twelve Oaks Nursing Home. Her last night, my father had been working late, and Dave, who’d just gotten his driver’s license, had taken Kelly and me over there after school.

  After she died, my father always managed to find a way to be disappointed in me whenever he was around, which was rarely. When I was in high school, our brief exchanges were frowns and grimaces. I didn’t get a scholarship to college like Kelly had. I was not a standardized test person, and my SAT scores had been too low. I didn’t find a nice Jewish boy like Dave to date, lose my virginity to, marry, and take over the family business.

  My senior year I’d dated a guy named Frank De’Anzo, a tall, lanky Roman Catholic, with a tattoo of a snake on his biceps that he liked to curl and uncurl just for fun. I “accidentally” left my birth control pills out on the kitchen counter just to see if my father would yell or really get angry. He didn’t. He just handed them back to me, said, “I think these are yours,” and then he frowned, a frown so heavy that it might have exploded under the weight of his disappointment if he hadn’t then gone into the other room to watch the baseball game and forget all about me.

  When my dad met Will for the first time he didn’t react. He shook Will’s hand. “Will’s Jewish,” I told him, putting heavy emphasis on the word Jewish.

  “Half Jewish,” Will corrected me.

  “Half, whole, it’s all the same.” I waved my hand in the air.

  My father frowned.

  At my wedding, my father walked me down the aisle. He hadn’t offered to pay the way he had for Kelly and Dave’s wedding. Will said he could afford it, that there was no need to ask my father for anything. Still, he should’ve offered. And that’s what I thought the whole time I held on to his arm, down the long white aisle that had been dusted with purple rose petals. None of this is yours. None of this belongs to you. When we reached the end, he hugged me squarely, still keeping me at a distance. As he sat down in his seat, he stared straight ahead, looking at Will and then back at me, and I thought I saw him frown.

  So I could imagine just the look on his face if I were to tell him about Will, a frown that yet again would tell me how I was nothing to him but an utter disappointment.

  Around noon, the phone rang. “Happy Turkey Day,” Kat said, when I picked up.

  I listened for background noise but heard nothing. “It sounds quiet. Where is everyone?”

  “Danny took the girls to the park, and I’m supposed to be getting the turkey in before his mother gets here. God help me.”

  “You’re cooking?”

  “Danny thinks his mother is getting too old to do it, so he offered me up. I feel like a fucking sacrificial lamb or something. I can’t do it.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I said.

  “Seriously, though. I can’t. I mean, I don’t know how.” She paused. “Okay, I have this fucking turkey sitting here, and I don’t even know what the hell to do with it.” I chuckled at the thought of Kat holding a raw turkey and feeling so bewildered. “You suburban bitches know this shit. So spill.” Her words tumbled out together, a little slurred, and I wondered if she’d been drinking again. If the vodka in the morning Sprite wasn’t an oddity at all.

  I told her how to wash the turkey, take out the giblets, and get it in the oven. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Take a deep breath. You’re going to be fine.” I heard her clanking around in the background, the turkey slapping up against the counter,
the water rushing over it, as she held on to the phone. While I waited, I checked on my pies to make sure they were browning evenly. And then finally I heard the slam of the oven door on her side.

  “I did it,” she said. “I fucking did it.”

  I laughed again, and I had this sudden flash of Kat sitting on a horse on a carousel, bobbing up and down, her long blond hair flowing out behind her. We were in Atlantic City for the weekend, the four of us, sometime just before Will proposed. The guys were trying to win us stuffed animals on the boardwalk, and Kat and I had chosen the carousel, chosen to spin around and around and around, the cool salty breeze whipping through us, making us feel like children, like two little girls on the playground.

  “Oh,” she said, interrupting the memory. “I almost forgot. Danny wants to go away next Saturday night. If that’s okay. If you still want to watch the girls.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, with much more confidence than I felt, thinking of the way it felt to be on the carousel, young and free and beautiful, and now wanting that all back, for both of us. “It’ll be great. Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. I told Danny he could choose.”

  “Atlantic City,” I said.

  “Atlantic City!” She laughed. “Oh God, that feels like a lifetime ago.”

  It did, and it made me sad, just thinking about it, the way a few years could change everything, the way love could disappear just like that. “Well, anyway, just let me know what time you want us to come over, and we’ll be there,” I said.

  “Be where?” I heard Will’s voice from behind me as I hung up the phone. He leaned down to kiss my shoulder, a gesture that I wasn’t expecting, a gesture that gave me chills. I closed my eyes for a minute, remembering him on that trip, in the gorgeous suite we’d had in the Taj Mahal, with the deepest spa bathtub I’d ever seen. I could still picture the way he’d looked at me in that bathtub, the way his blue eyes were lit up and the color of sea foam, the way I’d slid on top of him into the water, and the warmth that had rushed over me, that had invaded my body so intensely that I’d never wanted it to end, never wanted to get out of the tub. “So where are we supposed to be?” he asked now, as he moved toward the oven to check out the pies.

  I cleared my throat. “I told Kat we’d watch the girls next weekend, so she and Danny can go away.”

  “You did?” Will sounded as puzzled as I felt. And then it occurred to me, what the hell were we going to do with two little girls, for an entire weekend?

  “You don’t mind, do you? Because if you do, I can do it by myself.” I hoped he wouldn’t call my bluff, because the truth was I would be terrified doing it with him, much less alone.

  He shook his head. “Nah, it’ll be fine.” He paused. “And besides, maybe one day they’ll return the favor.” His voice was softer when he said it, almost pleading.

  “Yeah,” I said lightly. “Maybe.” And then to change the subject I quickly said, “Kelly wants us around four.”

  “I’ll go shower then,” he said. I stared at him for a second. His face was stubbly, and he was now in dire need of a haircut. It seemed plainly evident in his new face, his new demeanor, that he was no longer a judge. I pictured Sharon wrinkling her big nose, sniffing the air when we walked in, as if she could smell it on him, that something was entirely different.

  “You’re going to shave.” I posed it as a statement more than a question.

  He rubbed his chin. “I don’t know. I was thinking about growing a beard.”

  “A beard?”

  “You don’t like the idea?”

  I hated it. My father had a beard. Old men had beards and mustaches. Things that made your lips, made anything attractive about a man’s face, disappear into this utter mess of scratchy hair. I shrugged.

  “Yes, I think I might like a beard.”

  “Just shave for today, okay? For me? Please.”

  He nodded. “Okay. If it’s that important to you.”

  I put my hand on his arm as he turned to leave. “Will, one more thing.” I paused. “My father doesn’t know about …”

  He shrugged my hand off. “About your failure of a husband, you mean.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. It’s just, you know I never talk to him. And, well, it’s Thanksgiving. Let’s not bring it up today.”

  “Fine,” he said. “It’s your family.” His voice curled with something that might have been anger, or maybe jealousy, on the word family.

  * * *

  Sometimes I tried to imagine what Will’s family might have been like. I’d seen pictures of them, his parents, albums and albums of a small, slight woman with a big toothy smile and a lanky bearded man, who Will grew to look like more and more as he got older. There were pictures of the three of them together, in museums, in cities, in Europe. Will’s mother had been a law professor and his father a trial lawyer—until the summer after Will’s freshman year in college, when his parents’ rental car collided with a truck on their way to see the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam.

  Will told me once that he would’ve gone with them if it hadn’t been for his summer job, where he’d been an intern with a big ad agency in Manhattan. It was only after his parents died that he changed paths, that he decided to switch to prelaw, to go to law school. At the ad agency, Will had asked for two weeks off to tag along on the trip, and his boss, who Will said was a big surly man who always smelled of cigars, told Will that if he wanted to go, he knew where the door was. There were a hundred other college students lined up on the other side, just waiting to take his place, just waiting, he said, for the goddamn opportunity of a lifetime. Will had chosen to stay.

  Once, as he’d shown me an album of them together, the summer before that, on a cruise they’d taken around Scandinavia, he’d said it, barely a whisper at first, and then he repeated it louder. “I should be dead right now,” he said. “I was supposed to die.”

  “No.” I’d grabbed his hand. “No you weren’t.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t know. Maybe I was. Maybe I cheated fate.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe you actually weren’t supposed to die at all. That’s why you got the job, why you got picked out of all those other college students.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  But I knew the feeling, cheating fate, or tempting it—it was the feeling that caught in my throat every time I got a breast exam, every time I reached for my breast in the shower to feel it in a circular motion, the way Dr. Horowitz had shown me, every time I did that and felt nothing, nothing at all.

  Sixteen

  We arrived at Kelly’s at five minutes to four. Will was freshly shaven and showered, and he smelled of Dove soap and pine aftershave, the scent I loved because I always associated it uniquely with him. And now every time I smelled it, it felt familiar, like coming home.

  “You smell nice,” I whispered to him, as we walked up Kelly’s front steps.

  He grunted out a response that might have been thanks, or might have been shut the hell up. It was hard to tell. It had just started snowing. The snow fell hard and fast in plump, wet, late autumn flakes, and Will had wrapped his scarf close to his mouth.

  I took a deep breath as I rang the bell. I heard noises, laughter from the other side of the door, then Muffet barking.

  Dave’s mother, Beverly, opened it. “Oh, hello there, Jennifer.” Her lip curled when she said my name. Beverly had never really been nice to me, and why, I wasn’t sure. After all,she doted on Kelly, and deep down I’d always been jealous that Kelly had someone else, another mother after ours was gone. But tonight her frown seemed to crease a little more than usual. I smiled back in return.

  “Hi, Beverly, nice to see you again.” I nodded at her.

  “How’s the new house?” Will asked. He extended his hand. She didn’t take it. Instead she grabbed the pies from me and stomped off into the kitchen.

  Beverly used to live in a house just a few streets over from Kelly’s, but after her own mother-
in-law had recently died, leaving behind a vastly unknown and rather large fortune, she and her husband had bought a McMansion up in our neck of the woods. Tonight she was wearing her wealth, in the form of fur wrap and a large diamond necklace.

  I felt this burning twisty fear in my stomach. She knew. And she was going to say something about it at dinner. But before I could really digest that thought, I heard Sharon’s annoying shrill whine. “Oh, Jenny, sweetheart. Well, come on in and take your coat off. The cold doesn’t do your complexion any favors.”

  Kelly walked in behind her, an “I’m the Mom, That’s Why” apron tied around her waist, her hands encapsulated in two rooster-laden potholders that I knew must’ve been a gift from either Beverly or Sharon. I’d never seen them before, and I was sure Kelly would’ve thought they were just as ugly and tacky as I did. “Hi.” She shot me a sympathetic look. “Will, Dave’s in the den, watching football with Dad.”

  He nodded. I reached out to squeeze his hand, not a nice squeeze, but more of an I-know-you-hate-me-right-now-but-please-don’t-fuck-it-up-for-me-anyway squeeze. He didn’t squeeze back.

  “Gotta baste the turkey.” Kelly shot Sharon what I was sure she meant to be a smile but came off as more like a grimace.

  “I’ll help,” I said.

  Sharon swirled her drink in her hand, the ice clinking noisily against the glass, and the sound felt unnecessarily loud, piercing my eardrums. I assumed it was rum and Coke, what she always drank, no matter the time of day or the occasion. “Well, don’t you girls worry about me.”

  We wouldn’t.

  I grabbed Kelly’s arm and walked quickly toward the kitchen before she could follow us.

  “You didn’t tell me that your in-laws were coming,” I whispered.

  “They weren’t,” she said. “They were supposed to go Pittsburgh but Kathleen got the flu.” Kathleen was Dave’s sister. “And you know what germ-a-phobes they are.” She paused. “You don’t mind do you?”