She Poured Out Her Heart

by Jean Thompson

  Stan said, “How about you quit messing with the fire? It was burning just fine.”

  “Well it just got a little stirred up.”

  “Claudia,” Stan said, “do I hear the dinner gong?” He was not a big fan of his stepson’s theatrics.

  “Table’s already set, I just have to . . .” Claudia already halfway to the kitchen.

  Bonnie crossed the room and went to sit next to Haley and the babies. She couldn’t tell if Will watched her, but Franklin seemed to be looking at her ass. Creep. Thanks, Charlie, for that one. “They fell asleep,” Haley said, as Bonnie sat down. “Right in the middle of all the commotion. They were exhausted.”

  “They look like somebody flipped their Off switches,” Bonnie said, examining their tiny, slackened faces. “And fortunately, they’re too little to remember any of it.”

  She’d meant, the gas pains, but Haley rolled her eyes and muttered, “I wish I could say the same.” It always took Bonnie a little while to get used to seeing Haley again. They resembled each other, but in an inexact way that cast both their faces into doubt, as if one or the other was the imperfect version. “Scott, please go see about that crib so we can get them settled.” Scott got up and went looking for his coat. Bonnie wondered if he’d always been so compliant, or if it was a new dad thing.

  “You know,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve brought a boyfriend home with me since high school. They’d have to be made of pretty stern stuff to handle it all.” Will certainly didn’t count as a boyfriend. He was there under entirely different auspices. “I guess once you’re married, they have to show up. Did your in-laws meet the babies yet?” Scott’s parents were missionaries in Lagos and had not been able to leave their posts.

  “No, but they’re hoping to get back this summer. Of course we send them all kinds of pictures. And they write the sweetest letters. They’re so strong in their faith.”

  Charlie left the fireplace and retrieved his glass from an end table. “The Lord loveth a cheerful drinker.” His friends, a rat-faced girl and the two hipster boys, looked particularly out of place, as if they’d been expecting a party with a DJ. Charlie always did cast a wide net. He was almost thirty, and managed a bar in Lakeview, but mostly Stan paid him money to stay away. Will was an old friend from college, back when Charlie had briefly gone in for college.

  Will and Diane—Bonnie could see them without turning her head—were having some whispered conversation. Bonnie hoped they were rethinking their plan to stay the night. Diane stood up and left the room. She wore a red sweater, a short suede skirt, patterned tights, and high boots. She was one of those women who looked good from behind. Was there a ring? Bonnie couldn’t tell. She got up and went to sit next to Will, close enough to make him look at her with lurking dread. Chickenshit. “So, how’s Phoenix?”

  “It’s good, yeah, real good.” He didn’t seem to believe she was going to put him through this. Believe it. “How’s things with you?”

  “Never better. Processing those who are a danger to themselves or others just as fast as they surface. I’m still in Wicker Park. I can’t remember if you ever saw the place. Nothing fancy. Just where I hang my hat. You must tell me all about your golf game. Does Diane play?”

  “A little. She just started.”

  “Give her time. I bet she’ll really, really get into it.”

  No one was paying them any attention. Will dropped his voice. “Can’t you just leave it?”

  “Not yet,” Bonnie said, at full, cheerful volume. “Maybe later. I haven’t decided yet.” She had drunk quite a bit of the wine by now, but something tight within her was keeping her from feeling it. She didn’t know what she wanted from him, but something other than this limp-dick, skulking fear.

  Fear of her? It made her furious. She wanted him to be worthy of all the feeling she’d invested in him. All those times when the very fact of his absence had made him so spectacularly present, when the edge of her longing was so sharp, she could have cut herself on it. Was his face different now? Weathered? Sure, the desert sun. She was staring. Don’t.

  Looking up to address Charlie, she asked him, “Where are all of you sleeping tonight? Curled up next to the fire?”

  “The studio. We brought a bunch of foam mattresses and stuff.”

  “That’s great! It can be like, your clubhouse.”

  “You can hang out with us if you want to stay there too.”

  “Slumber party! Maybe I will,” Bonnie said, just to watch Will flinch.

  Stan said, “If anybody breaks anything, I will weld their ass to a post.”

  “Don’t worry,” Charlie said. “We’re all art-lovers.”

  “If you think I’m kidding, boy . . .”

  “Naw, Stan. We know you never kid around.”

  Crisis intervention time? No, Stan just shook his head and growled into his drink. Charlie grinned. Charlie was putting on weight. Drinking, Bonnie guessed. Of the three of them, he’d always been the one with the looks, taking after the BioDad. Their mother’s beautiful boy. He used to have a pirate’s lean, dark face. Now he looked like a fat pirate. He wheezed when he laughed. Nobody ever stayed the same, was the same person you fell in love with.

  Bonnie drank some more of her wine, waiting for it to do its thing. She wanted to be drunk enough to aim herself like a weapon. Diane was walking back toward them. Will stood up to meet her. Bonnie stood up too. There was indeed a goddamn ring on her left hand. A sparkler. Hooray!

  “I understand,” Bonnie said, “that congratulations are in order. So, congratulations!”

  “Thank you.” Diane smiled up at Will, who smiled back in return, a little curdled.

  Charlie said, “They look good together, don’t they? Like, I don’t know, two sportswear models.”

  “Ah.” Bonnie nodded and took a step back as if appraising them. Who wouldn’t want to marry Diane? She had dark gold hair and skin like peach ice cream. And Will! It broke off another piece of her heart every time she looked at him, still handsome, and only someone who had known him before would have noticed the claw marks of age. The two of them did look good together; she couldn’t stand it, why hadn’t she kept her distance, kept her mouth shut? She’d overestimated her capacity for righteous indignation. She should fall on her knees in front of them. No, her face. Get over it. Diane was explaining that they hadn’t set a date yet, there was still so much to think about. “Ah,” Bonnie said again.

  “Did you see the nativity set?” Charlie asked Bonnie, tugging at her sleeve. “Come on.”

  Bonnie followed him. Had she looked like she needed to be called off? Just how flipping obvious had she been? She flushed, then went cold. But Charlie only seemed impatient to show her the annual prank. The nativity set was arranged on a side table. The same old splintered and faded cast of characters, the camel who by now resembled an ordinary cow, the Angel of the Lord with its open, surprised mouth, Mary and Joseph posed in reverent parenthood over the small wooden manger and the Holy Child, here represented by Mr. Potato Head.

  “Oh, too much. Don’t let Haley see it.”

  “We could add Mrs. Potato Head, then there’d be twins.”

  “This family,” Bonnie said, “is just one big practical joke.”

  “Yeah. Happy Christmukah. So what’s with you and Will?”

  “Nothing,” she said, too fast.

  Charlie shook his head. Not buying it. “OK, nothing now,” she admitted. Her brother kept peering at her, eyebrows raised. “It was a while back. You know, one of those clean breaks so he could go off to Phoenix without any annoying entanglements from his past.”

  “Shit. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too.” Over Charlie’s shoulder, she saw Will and Diane, seated again, talking earnestly, perhaps deciding what sorbet to serve at the reception. She was so tired of being a moron loser.

  “No, I mean, I’m so
rry I brought him. Them.”

  “Here I thought I was being smooth.”

  “Maybe on some other planet you’re smooth. Want me to do anything? Punch Will in the nuts? I feel, you know, implicated.”

  She could have told him not to pimp her out at family gatherings, but it was too late for that, and besides, he wouldn’t have seen the harm in it. Her poor dopey brother in his outgrown, unfunny sweater, picking all the wrong times to be chivalrous. “Don’t punch anybody. Don’t say anything either. It’s nobody’s fault.” Except, probably, her own.

  “Water over the bridge,” Charlie said, nodding seriously. “Wait, that’s not it.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Dinner!” Claudia sang. “Now there’s plenty for everybody, so don’t be shy.”

  One of her mother’s talents was the ability to put together a meal for an always expanding number of guests. There were twelve of them, not counting the babies. This dinner was like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, although with more upscale ingredients. The cioppino was fragrant with fennel and the perfect, briny fruit of distant oceans. Claudia had made the loaves of peasant bread herself. And there was pasta with peppers and lamb sausage, and a platter of deep fried eggplant. Haley asked if she could say grace, and they all sat politely as she thanked the Lord for His bounty and for their many blessings, Amen, and then got up in a hurry to check on the babies. “I thought she was holding back,” Charlie remarked. The two hipster boys sitting with Charlie looked around them, wondering if it was OK to laugh, then decided not to.

  Stan took his usual seat at the head of the table, and Claudia sat next to the kitchen so she could run back and forth and not eat. Will and Diane were next to each other at Claudia’s end, where Bonnie didn’t have to listen to them. She was glad for that. She was tired and dismal and she wished them both a long and happy life somewhere far away from here.

  Bonnie found herself sitting next to one of Charlie’s friends, the rat-faced girl called Irina. Irina was a videographer, she told Bonnie, doing some commercial work, some event work, just to pay the bills, though what she really wanted was to go to Japan and make documentaries about their youth culture. The fads, the alienation, the revolt against materialism. Bonnie said that sounded interesting, although it didn’t especially. To her annoyance, Franklin was seated on her other side. She didn’t feel like making conversation with him, although she wondered what his story was, and how long he was planning on sticking around.

  Stan looked to be in a better mood now that his dinner was in front of him. Claudia called it a blood sugar problem, but really, he was just a mean drunk. He started in on the pasta, then sawed off a portion of bread and used it to soak up the fish broth. He noticed Scott spearing different pieces of fish and dredging them up to lay on the border of his plate. “What,” Stan said to his son-in-law. “Why are you playing with your food?”

  “There’s stuff I’m allergic to,” Scott said, but he stopped fooling around with his stew and buttered a piece of bread. For a religious person, he had an unfortunate guilty face.

  “Yeah?” Stan looked as if he might have more to say on the topic of finicky eaters, but instead turned to Franklin on his other side. “Let me tell you, I had no idea what I was getting into when I got married. I mean the first time, when I was young and green. Then the kids start coming. And you think, ‘Wait a minute, can I just skip to the part where I’m an ancestor?’”

  “Hah,” Franklin said, by way of agreement. He didn’t seem to be eating any of his food.

  Stan took a pull of his drink. “Not that I’d change any of it. Being a part of, you know, the great chain of being.”

  Franklin leaned toward Bonnie and gave her a smile that had some cross-eyed effort at flirtation in it. “You remind me of my ex-wife.”

  “As long as I don’t remind you of your next wife.”

  She turned her back on him. Irina was still talking about her Japanese documentary. “They have their own urban legends. Perhaps you’ve heard of One Man Hide and Seek? A ritual for contacting the dead. Very elaborate. Theirs is a culture of ceremonies. I’d love to film it. Not a ghost story per se, but a kind of meta-ghost story.”

  “That’s very high concept,” Bonnie told her. The wine was finally loosening in her. Drunken bad ideas were beginning to seem plausible. She’d get Will alone somewhere, fling herself at him, have one last sublime fuck for old times’ sake.

  Stan said, “Not that there weren’t difficulties. Financial strains. Compromises. Accusations of bad faith. I wasn’t selling anything yet, any of my pieces. Nothing taking off, no commissions, no matter how many hours I busted my ass. Then, around eight or nine at night, I’d come out of it and remember I was supposed to be home for dinner. Or no, I was supposed to bring the dinner. Wife and children, not happy.”

  “. . . I mean, what if ghosts look entirely different than what we expect? I’m not saying I believe in ghosts, but . . .”

  Haley came back to the table then. “I tried nursing them,” she told her husband. “I think it went OK. Benjamin was a little fussy.” Scott got up to take his turn at baby-tending. “We never eat a meal together,” Haley complained. “Everything is tag team.”

  “Ah, try and enjoy this part. They don’t stay little forever,” Stan said. He looked morose, perhaps remembering his own long-ago babies.

  “Are you supposed to enjoy it?” Haley said wearily. She prodded at her bowl of cioppino. “Cold fish soup. Yum.”

  “Because after all,” Stan said, “the kids turned out all right. And the sculpture, well, the record speaks for itself. So cheer up, Haley girl. I remember when you were just a wee bit of a lump in a blanket, squalling and filling your pants. Now look at you, a blossoming Madonna. Look at . . .”

  “Bonnie.”

  “Our own sweet Bonbon. How old are you now, twenty-six? Five. What the hell. Soon, I expect, you’ll be procreating too.”

  “Not tonight, sorry.” Why hadn’t she gotten Will to impregnate her when she had the chance? Talk about a missed opportunity.

  “Well, try to choose the right sire, would you? No scrub horses in the bloodline.”

  Haley said, “I don’t know what you have against Scott, but it’s very unfair to keep making these little sideways remarks when he’s not here to defend himself.”

  “Me? Unfair?” Stan raised his eyebrows, all astonished innocence. “Did I even mention Scott? You’re just oversensitive.”

  “In the One Man Hide and Seek ritual, a cloth doll is stuffed with rice, also the clippings of one’s fingernails. The doll is sewn up with crimson thread. The rice represents innards, and the crimson thread is a blood vessel. A bathtub is filled with water and the doll is submerged in it. The ritual also requires a sharp-edged tool, like a knife.”

  Oh, Stan, but she’d tried to get herself a good one. There he was at the far end of the table, leaning forward and smiling at something somebody said, handsome, sun-tarnished, long gone. One arm draped over Diane’s delightful shoulders. If you could kill people with a thought, she might have killed him. Or Diane. Somebody. Herself. She could move her dead self to Phoenix and haunt them.

  “Make up a cup of salt water,” Irina was saying. “Put half of it in your mouth, but don’t swallow.”

  “Excuse me,” Bonnie said. “But does it work, this ritual thing? Do people really see ghosts?”

  “They think they do. That’s the important part.”

  From across the table, Charlie was trying to catch Bonnie’s eye. When he did, he made a pantomime of slugging Will, who was sitting next to him. Want me to? his raised eyebrows asked, and Bonnie shook her head.

  Haley got up from the table again. “I’m going to put my dinner and Scott’s in the fridge. We’ll eat later, when things aren’t so hilarious.”

  Bonnie jumped; Franklin had put his hand on her knee under the table. Bonnie picked his arm up
by its shirt sleeve and dangled it in the air. “Whose hand is this, and what is it doing on my body?” She let the arm drop and got up from her chair. “Come on, Haley, I’ll help you.”

  In the kitchen Haley said, “Why is he picking on Scott? Why is he all of a sudden picking on me? He doesn’t even seem that excited about the babies. That’s unnatural.”

  “Maybe they make him feel old.”

  “Well he is old. What was Franklin doing, feeling you up? He was teaching in some college and got fired for a sexual harassment thing. Him and Stan were talking about it.”

  “Nice. Bring a pervert home for the holidays.” Claudia had made a Sicilian cassata for dessert, layered with sweetened ricotta and candied fruit, frosted with swirls of bitter chocolate. It lurked on the counter like a sugar bomb about to go off. “Want any help with the kids? I don’t think I’m going back in there.”

  “Thanks, we’ve got it under control. And thanks for getting us out of the basement.”

  Haley leaned in and gave Bonnie a hug. Her nursing breasts were enormous, pressing against Bonnie like a pair of nosing puppies. “Happy Christ’s Birthday. I know you think religion is all stupid but I pray for everybody. I pray the spirit will come to them.”

  The Holy Ghost? Bonnie said, “Sure, go ahead, what can it hurt?”

  Once Haley left, Bonnie went downstairs, opened the fold-out couch, and lay on it, trying to feel either a lot more drunk or a lot more sober. The room was dark except for the path of light from upstairs, and the snow outside the windows glowed with its own cold radiance. Everybody believed in something. Stan in his own massive ego, Claudia in Stan. Haley in God, the Better Father. And Bonnie? She believed in the ghosts of old boyfriends.

  But he wasn’t one of her usual bad choices. He really wasn’t. There was no reason they shouldn’t have been happy together. Except that he didn’t love her.

  Some kitchen operation was going on overhead, voices, plates. She thought she heard Diane, asking sweetly if she could help serve dessert. Why sure, Diane honey, help me slice up this cake, now smile while I smash it into your face. Bad Bonbon! She got up, found the puffy coat Haley had left behind, and let herself out the sliding glass door.