by Carol Anshaw
Alice couldn’t listen to Jean talk about Sylvie at the moment. She told her that Maude might have left her.
“You don’t know for sure?”
“What can I say? She’s here, then not here. She won’t stay put. I am either with her or waiting for her. I’m so used to the pattern I’m imprinted with it by now. Like T. E. Lawrence. He was beaten and maybe buggered by Turkish guards in a prison cell, and then for the rest of his life, to get aroused he had to hire someone to give him a good whipping.”
“Yes,” Jean said. “Just like you. A little more exotic than your case, maybe, what with the Turks and the prison cell and all.”
“There’s something else,” Alice said. She needed to tell someone who knew Carmen, to test the waters. “Matt is having an affair with the babysitter. I saw them in his car in a 7-Eleven lot.”
“Maybe they were getting milk.”
“They were not getting milk. They were having a big serious conversation. It’s worse than if they were making out. It means they’re already up to the serious conversation stage.”
“What’s Carmen going to do?”
“I haven’t told her. I’m still thinking about that. I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s better she doesn’t know. Maybe it’ll blow over.”
Long blank of dead silence from Jean. One eyebrow went up and didn’t come down.
“Okay, I know. But shut up about it now. Shut up that silence. And especially shut up that eyebrow.”
On the way back into her building, Alice pulled a handful of mail out of the box. Here was something good. She had won a fellowship. A few thousand dollars. She had applied for this, among many others, so many months back she recalled its specifics only vaguely. Coming off the elevator into her loft, another small surprise awaited her. The small breeze of Maude’s absence was no longer present. The space was filled with vague energy. Maude was on the sofa, reading a script. She was making tentative moves out of modeling, into acting.
“I missed you,” she said, then took Alice’s hand, pulling her down on top of her. “I just fucking missed you.”
At the bank the next day, Alice hummed along to the jaunty instrumental piping ludicrously from the speaker in the ceiling above her. “He blew his mind out in a car,” she hummed as she filled out a deposit slip, and saw that she had misread the amount of the fellowship check, that there was another zero at the end, ten times what she thought she was getting. About twice what she made in a year. She went over and sat down on a long leather-covered bench near the entrance. Alice had wondered in the past what this padded bench was for, who would need to sit down at the bank. Now she knew. People who needed a moment or two to accommodate the news that their life was about to change.
saints and martyrs
Carmen was frosting a cake in a kitchen electrically bright, and cozy—twice warmed by the furnace and the oven, an atmosphere antidotal to the damp chill pressing against the windows. “Imagine” was playing on the radio. Today marked ten years since John Lennon’s death and the airwaves were thick with Beatles songs.
She was so exhausted she could almost fall asleep right here, standing up. Her nights lately passed with a tumble of fatiguing dreams, wet socks in a dryer.
Abruptly, a work crew—husband, son, dog—barged in through the side door. They dragged big smells—adrenaline and chilled sweat, damp fur—with them from the alley where they’d been shoveling last night’s snow to clear a patch in front of the garage door. The blast of cold air, the noisy explosion of arrival, filled the kitchen and jostled the delicate balance of elements Carmen had assembled around her.
Matt was big when she met him, but a couple of years ago he started working out at the Y, and his mass had taken on architecture. He had turned himself from a Paul Bunyan kind of guy, into a hunk. Now any room he entered strained to contain his physicality. He hadn’t reinvented himself for Carmen; she thought he was fine the way he already was.
Gabe followed Matt with an exaggerated, slouchy walk, trying to imitate his father, trying to figure out what being a man felt like. So far, he was a mild disappointment to Matt, who was extremely sports-minded. Gabe hadn’t shown any interest in catching or throwing or hitting any sort of ball. Neither was he interested in watching professionals throw or catch or hit balls. Of course, Matt tried not to let his disappointment show, but still, somehow, Gabe knew.
Since they’d come inside, their dog, Walter Payton—an unsortable jumble of breeds, they’d had him almost a year now—skittered back and forth among them, trying to translate for Carmen the excitement of their hard work. All done! Gabe caught him and knelt to kiss the dog’s head, to show him he had been a big help.
At six, Gabe was tall for his age, but with a fragile air. He wanted to make paintings, like his aunt, his grandfather. He wore glasses and his complexion was pale, his cheeks freckled. Skinny and often distracted, he looked beat-upable, snatchable. This pressed on Carmen’s heart and made her fearful every time he stepped out of her view, into the wider world.
“It’s chain-gang work out there,” Matt said, pumping up Gabe’s pride in the job. “Warming up. Everything’s turning into ten-ton slush.” He dragged a passing finger through the frosting bowl, the sort of invasive gesture Carmen hated when they first got together, then became inured to, and now hated in a fresh way. She didn’t say anything, though, just kept spreading the cream cheese frosting over the cake, like a patient in a mental institution performing a calming, repetitive task. The cake was for her father’s birthday dinner tonight, an old-fashioned prune cake recipe from his childhood.
Gabe had shrugged off his parka and was going through the Tribune on the table to find the comics. Walter had opportunistically wedged himself between Carmen’s legs and the cabinets under the counter where she was working, just in case any frosting might drip his way. This warm family tableau was deceptive. It only existed because Carmen stood here in this kitchen, determined to keep things small and regular.
“What about we just get some takeout for supper? Chinese maybe,” Matt said to Gabe. “Give your mom a break?”
Carmen’s response to this innocuous suggestion was to start crying—because Matt was being kind to her, because she hadn’t had any good sleep in days, also because he had completely forgotten her father’s birthday, an occasion they used to have fun dreading together. She kept standing at the counter and braced up her voice. “We can’t,” she said. “We have to go see Horace.”
“Oh boy, I totally forgot,” Matt said. “The thing is, I’ve got someplace I have to be later.” As he said this he moved to put a hand on her shoulder, to touch her, but stopped shy. This was worse even than his telling her the other day that she had been such an important person in his life. These were the sort of terrible, quiet things that had been happening in the weeks since Matt told Carmen about him and Paula.
That Paula was only nineteen and Gabe’s babysitter made the whole situation look like a giant lurid cliché, like some sort of early midlife crisis for Matt, or some delayed oat-sowing. But it wasn’t any of this. Matt was not an oat-sower, and he was too sane and organized for an inner crisis. And “nineteen” and “babysitter,” while both true, gave no picture at all of Paula. She was not a naughty nympho teenage babysitter. She was a studious, willowy, plain girl with late braces she had been paying for herself. The affair had been going on for several months and had yet to be consummated. Matt was Catholic, and Paula was very Catholic, and so they were waiting until he got out of his marriage.
The reason Matt had given Carmen for discarding his marriage was that Paula was “more traditional, more religious.” She went to daily Mass and wore her hair long and straight, parted down the center. She wore a lot of clothes patterned with small flower prints; she sewed a lot of these out-of-date garments herself. She told Carmen she loved helping her mother at home, both with the housekeeping and with the younger kids. When Carmen tried to make conversation with her beyond what Gabe ate for lunch or did the guy come to
service the furnace, she quickly found herself drowning in long anecdotes about Paula’s large, ailment-ridden family and their miraculous cures as the result of prayers, particularly the family rosary. Or an installment of Paula’s school life, or her latest failure with one or another of her complicated knitting projects. How could she be the person Carmen was being left for?
Now Matt was waiting for their divorce to come through, also for an annulment so he could remarry within the Church. This was apparently a tricky business and Carmen had no idea how long all this would take. She was letting him stay so they could have Christmas as a family. If all the legal rigmarole lingered past January, she would ask him to move out. But for the time being, she just stood in the kitchen at the back storm door at night, watching Matt sit on the steps hunched inside his pea coat, his exhalations creating small clouds of condensation, his heart sunk with the gravity of his love.
Gabe would probably be fine with the rearrangement. Paula had been part of his life for half its length, and if his father moved in with her, it might not be all that disruptive. His people would still be in place for him. In reality, Carmen was the only one being left.
She was beginning to see the depth and breadth of her misunderstanding. She thought, in spite of their differences, that their partnership was complicated and interesting. Marriage and parenthood seemed so fascinating to her right from the start. Matt had come into the picture already assembled, a full complement of personality aspects with which she had to acquaint herself. Gabe was a total surprise. Until his arrival she had only considered him hypothetically, as someone small who would need to be fed and changed and kept from harm and illness. One or another of the generic babies on the covers of the books she read in preparation. From the moment of his birth, though, he had been such a specific person. So particularly kind, and reflective. As soon as he discovered that meat came from animals, he would no longer eat it. So she and Matt became vegetarians by default and sympathy. Once everyone wore out on grilled cheese sandwiches and scrambled eggs, Carmen tapped into cookbooks from nostalgic non-places like Greenwood Hollow, or volumes like The Bountiful Bean that came at the challenge from a particular angle. All of this minutiae was so interesting, life spilling into the blanks without her having much to do with it. And she thought that this was what family comprised, the creation of little dilemmas and challenges, which then had to be figured out, or met, and that both she and Matt were equally engaged in this enterprise. She let herself be lulled by a companionship that seemed to blossom and prosper, a day-to-day built on small conversations, endless amazement at their child, hilariously awful camping trips, messages left on a kitchen marker board for ingredients that needed to be picked up for dinner. The only problem with this calm assessment was that she was, as it turned out, completely wrong.
When Matt took Carmen to dinner one night last week at her favorite restaurant, the Paradise Café (while Paula stayed home with Gabe; that was the truly noxious part), to talk about “something important,” she thought he was going to say he’d found a way they could move into a bigger house. Their current one was too far west, and too small. They were on Ravenswood, facing the tracks. The urgent rush of the commuter trains heading north to the suburbs and south to the Loop was a large component of their immediate surroundings. They would have both preferred a less locomotive setting.
So she thought the “something important” was “new house.” All of Matt’s surprises up to that point had been pleasant ones. But this time the surprise was Paula. Now Carmen could see, with heated humiliation, that the peaceful atmosphere in the room of their marriage was, for Matt, only a muted backdrop to a large, loudly ticking clock. While she had been going on, pretending their union was a rough but working organism, he had been quietly waiting for something to get him out of a marriage he had always seen as tainted. Carmen saw the stain, too. She could still, anytime, look back and see herself standing there in her ironic red wedding dress, just wanting her guests to leave, sleepily watching the splayed fins of Olivia’s old Dodge sashay with her good wishes down the dirt road, off the farm, navigating by its fog lamps, on its short, murderous course. At first they talked a lot about their culpability. They even went a few times to a couples’ counselor. After that, Carmen didn’t think the problem had gone away, or would ever go away, but that it was something they shared, as opposed to something that divided them. But now she could see the whole of the marriage played out under a long stretch of shadow it couldn’t outrun.
Carmen and Gabe dressed up a little for Horace’s party. For Gabe this meant fresh pants, shined shoes, and a dress shirt. An outfit to which he added a cheesy red satin magician’s cape.
“Peeeuuw!” He climbed into their car, following Walter, who liked to come along, anywhere. He didn’t mind the sour mildew aroma at all, and settled with a wheeze into the pile of old clothes in the back.
“Just hold your nose,” Carmen told Gabe. “We don’t have very far to go.” Yesterday she spent the afternoon combing the racks at AMVETS and Salvation Army for large-size dresses and pants suits for women at Hearth/Home, the shelter where she worked—women who were going on job interviews, or back to school. Except for the really old women, who could be small and gnarly, clients at the shelter tended to be large gals. They lived on McDonald’s and sweet wine. Plus, they hadn’t been putting in much of an effort to keep themselves up.
Coming up the stairs to her parents’ apartment, Carmen could hear the overlapping ebb and spike of party conviviality. Walter had rushed ahead and was already standing with his nose touching the apartment door.
“Pay attention to your grandfather,” Carmen told Gabe, her hand on the doorknob. “It’s his birthday.”
“Okay. But inside me, I don’t like him. He’s too loud, and he’s always mad at everybody.”
The apartment, which occupied the floor above her father’s studio, was pure sixties bohemian, beatnik through and through. Danish modern furniture, blond and webbed; sagging brick-and-board bookcases; a set of bongos gathering dust in the corner, primitive African art on the walls along, of course, with Horace’s paintings. The apartments of all her parents’ Old Town crowd bore a similar stamp. These were the lairs of old artists and their younger trophy muses, women who were themselves now creeping through late middle age, variously thinning down or plumping up dramatically. These apartments were historic sites of landmark parties filled with artistic proclamations, the ignition of feuds, the birth of signature cocktails. Also of false teeth lost in toilets, tatami mats puked on, friendships bitterly ended, chops busted, cross-pollination among couples transacted in bathrooms and broom closets, and usually someone naked found passed out between the layers of coats on the bed.
This apartment had also—between the parties—been Alice and Carmen and Nick’s home. There was little of the empty nest to it now, though. The girls’ room had been refurbished into Loretta’s office when she got her realtor’s license. Nick’s was now home to a giant ornate wood console television Alice called the Credenza Cordoba, and a low-slung, U-shaped sofa. Loretta referred to the room as the “entertainment center.” Everything else was much the same as it had always been. The whole apartment had its own distinct, static smell.
Gabe zipped through the crowd in the living room and headed for Nick’s old reflector telescope, which had, over time, washed up against the far wall of windows. Carmen set her cake at the end of the buffet and told Walter, “Nothing on this table is for dogs.” At the center of the buffet was Loretta’s infamous Texas jailhouse chili. Carmen got a cautionary aura of heartburn as she stared it down.
She checked out the crowd, mostly old friends of her parents, the people who represented adulthood to her when she was a child. Paco and Cindy Beecham. Larry and Giselle Zorn. Phaedra Carlson, who was now widowed and on her own.
She found her brother sitting by himself against the wall beyond the buffet table, a little too upright on a frayed sofa, holding a can of ginger ale as though it were a grenade on
which he had just pulled the pin.
“Hey,” he said, and shifted over a little to make room for her.
She was by now used to the thinner, more aquiline nose that emerged from the reconstruction after it had been broken by Casey Redman’s father. It made him look maybe British, like someone who collected butterflies and had read all of Trollope. She also noticed that his hair was meticulously cut, the tips blonder than the rest.
“Has Olivia been doing something bleachy here?” She pulled at a piece for inspection.
“Ouch. Come on, you think that doesn’t hurt? What can I say? When you live with a hairdresser, shit happens.” His breath, as usual, was deeply wintergreen. It was like talking to someone in a Norwegian forest. He used tiny squeeze bottles of concentrated freshener he picked up at truck stops. He had used this stuff since the days when he needed to show up for work, but was dead drunk.
“Where is she anyway?”
“She’s supposed to be parking, but my guess is she’s just sitting in the car, building enough critical mass to come in here.”
Carmen was grateful—everyone was—for Olivia’s presence in Nick’s life, for the constraining effect she had on him. She was the one thing he seemed to value more than getting high. Carmen no longer thought of Olivia as a murderer. By now she was stern and focused, a new person who seemed to have been designed in opposition to the stoner who casually got behind the wheel and killed a girl. Plus she had paid, paid a little for each of them. They were all aware of this.
“Well, sure. I can see that.” And she could. She could picture Olivia in sharp detail, sitting in her car down the block, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. “So what’s up? How is it being back at school?”
“It’s weird. You drop out for even just a couple of years and you come back and you’re already the old guy.”
