by Kim Wright
I shake my head. He kisses me again. This time he breaks away first and I am left hanging and abandoned in the space between his chin and his shoulder, my eyes still closed and my mouth still open. “A card,” he says into my hair. “I need your card.”
I am trying very hard not to faint. I flatten my back against the stucco wall and open my eyes. Gerry is adjusting his pants, looking away from me as he arranges things, his face as flushed as a teenage boy’s. I am digging in my purse and my hand is finding ink pens, breath mints, Tampax, everything but the business card that could propel this madness into the future tense.
“I’m shaking,” I tell him as he presses something into my hand, and then we are running again, out the chapel door and through the airport to Gate 37. People are lined up waiting to enter the tunnel.
“I’ll go with you to your gate,” he says. “If you’ve missed your flight, I’ll miss mine.” I look at the monitor behind the desk. My flight was supposed to have left two minutes ago. There is nothing I can do about the situation one way or another and this thought thrills me. We are walking now. Five numbers down to my gate and the sign says CHARLOTTE and there are no people except for one woman in a US Airways uniform. “Are you still boarding?” I ask her and I am amazed at the neutrality of my voice. She asks me my name and I realize this is the first time that Gerry has heard it. She looks down at the monitor and says, “They haven’t pulled back. I can get you on.”
Somewhere in the high thin air between Phoenix and Dallas we took turns reading the Redbook article about what a woman can do to a man in bed and Gerry picked three things from the list. The only one that I can remember now is that he said he likes for women to show that they want it. Jump the guy. Take charge of the situation. All men like that. I know he wants me to be the alpha female, the un-wife, the person you meet in strange cities who is cool and aggressive and uncomplicated and self-assured, and so, right on cue, I burst into tears. Gerry kisses me again, only I am so weak that I can hardly move my mouth. I slide off his tongue like a climber with bad equipment.
I break away and follow the US Airways lady down the tunnel. I don’t look back. As we walk I sniffle and she pats my arm and says, “Airport goodbyes can be very hard.” I have never been the last person on a plane before. Everyone looks at me as I bump my way down the aisle to the only empty seat. A nice-looking older lady is beside me and I want to tell her everything but the overhead is full and it takes my last ounce of strength to shove my carry-on under the seat in front of me. Gerry’s crumpled business card is in my hand. I never found a card so he can’t call me. I can only call him and this is no good. If I call him first he will always know that I walked in free and clear, that I’m willing to have an affair, that I don’t care that he’s married and I’m married, that I chose it, that I wanted it, that I knew what I was getting into before I picked up that phone and made that call.
As we pull away from the gate I am calm, or rather I am in that strange state where you’re so upset that you behave as if you were calm. I close my eyes and try to picture a flat thin Jesus holding up my plane. Gerry doesn’t like landings, but I don’t like takeoff. I don’t like the feeling of being pushed back in my seat. This is the point where I pray things like, “Into your hands I commit my spirit,” or maybe it’s “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” Neither one makes a lot of sense but I’ll say anything on a runway. I’d speak Hebrew or Arabic or Swahili if I knew them, anything to hedge my bets. But today I am too exhausted to bargain with God. Hell, we all have to go sometime.
I open my eyes and look around. The nice lady beside me has bent her head forward and her lips are moving. Good. Let her pray for all of us. The odds are if God chooses to spare her, I’ll live too, through sheer proximity. I look down at the card in my hand and practice saying his name aloud. I’m not sure what has just happened to me. I don’t know what it means. I press my palms against my trembling thighs and listen to the engines beneath me gain strength. Strength enough to thrust us into the sky where we have no business being, but where we go sometimes, nonetheless.
Chapter Two
In the morning Phil’s alarm goes off first. I lie in the bruise-gray darkness and wait for the sound of his shower, his zipper, the jingle of his car keys, the opening of the garage door. At 7:05 the coffee begins to drip. Tory’s ride comes in thirty-five minutes. She does not want to wear her new twenty-two-dollar rugby shirt from Gap Kids. She is not destined to spell the word “scientist” correctly in this lifetime. Her vocabulary list hangs on the refrigerator with a magnet. It’s only Tuesday, so I have to keep checking the list, but by Friday I will know the words by heart. I call them out to her while I refold the Gap shirt and get out the old Target one that she loves. I bring her cinnamon toast to the recliner where she is curled up watching TV. The Coyote is still chasing the Road Runner after all these pointless years.
One cat wants out, the other wants in. They rub themselves across the French doors, their tails flicking the glass. There’s a station break, which means we should be farther along. I call to Tory to brush her teeth as I close the lunchbox, zip the backpack. She dumps her crusts into the part of the sink that doesn’t have a disposal. I kiss her head and send her out to the end of the driveway to wait for the mother who has this week’s carpool.
The cats’ morning kill lies on the deck, a small unblinking mouse. It’s the ultimate perversity—they’re so well fed and yet they stalk. The mouse has already gone stiff and I sweep him to the edge of the deck where he freefalls into the bushes, into a mass grave for all the animals that the cats have killed on previous nights. The plot of ground below the deck is dark and rich with small curved skeletons and it gives up flowers in waves. Through the glass of the French doors the TV flickers. The Coyote’s Acme rocket has failed him once again and he is falling into the canyon. He holds up a sign that says HELP.
I make it a point not to think about how the mouse died. He and the birds and squirrels and openmouthed moles I’ve found on other mornings or the baby bunny that I wrapped in a dishcloth and buried in the soft ground behind the swing set. I put down the broom and scoop Friskies into the green bowl. The cats are brother and sister, Pascal and Garcia. They fall upon the food as if they’ve never eaten, their heads nudging my hand away from the dish.
I go into the kitchen, pour another cup of coffee, and stand at the sink eating the crusts of Tory’s toast. The house is silent. This is the part of the day I like, the only part I can truly control, and my thoughts run, swift as water, to the place where they’ve been collecting for the last forty-eight hours. I deposited the checks from my Phoenix trip in the bank yesterday. Paid the bills that Phil had left stacked neatly on the kitchen counter. Unpacked my suitcase, threw the little lotions and soaps that I always swipe from hotel rooms into the wicker basket under my sink, rinsed out my green silk blouse. All evidence of the trip has been wiped away and there is nothing but a single business card to prove that the man was real. Thinking about him is addictive, I know that from yesterday when I became so drunk with memory that I took to my bed like some old-time Hollywood starlet. I look at the clock. I give myself five minutes, exactly five, to think about how much and how little my life has changed. Five minutes to indulge this ridiculous and intoxicating notion that there is a man somewhere up in Boston who wants me. Five minutes, and then I will start work.
* * *
When we moved in here seven years ago, I turned the garage into a studio. Well, not exactly. At first only half of the garage was a studio, leaving Phil a space for all his gardening supplies and room to park his car, but these things have a way of expanding. There is my wheel, of course. There is the bin lined in plastic where I store the clay. There are bags of grout, and three sets of shelves and my kneading table. And then there is the little storage closet where, as Phil says, normal people would keep their lawn mower. This is my damp room, where I take the pots just after I throw them. It has a hospital-strength humidifier. You want the pots to dry slowly
, I try to explain to Phil, so they need to dry in a damp room. But he tells me that this makes no sense. He seems to think I have expanded my studio just to displace him, that I have moved out his tools and taken over his storage closet to prove some sort of housewife-feminist point.
On this particular morning I find—not for the first time—a note. A Post-it stuck to a pot I have left on the kneading table, and it bears a single word: “Mine.” It is, like so many of my husband’s messages, nearly impossible to interpret. Does he mean he likes the pot and wants it, perhaps to take to his office and put on his desk? Highly unlikely. That the kneading table is intruding into what is officially his half of the garage? A more plausible theory, but the table has been inching its way into his territory for weeks, ever since I added an extension and turned it so that I could avoid working in the afternoon sun. Hard to say why either the pot or the table would irritate him at this particular moment in time or, for that matter, why he wouldn’t have told me about it last night over dinner. I have often lobbied for direct conversation, but Phil seems more comfortable with Post-it notes and it doesn’t bother him that I’m never quite sure what he’s trying to convey. The notes are sometimes a single word: “Good,” “Why?” and “8:15” have all been previous messages. At other times they’re longer and a little more clear: “Please take” left on a pile of clothes meant for the dry cleaners, or “Not now” on a brochure for a nearby bed-and-breakfast. I save them, this never-ending stream of Post-its, and sometimes I arrange them across the refrigerator in sentences: Not now good. Why please take?
But this morning I’m not in the mood to play detective. I pull the “Mine” off the pot and stick it to the front of my T-shirt. Yesterday a gallery owner in Charleston called and said she’d take three sample pots in anticipation—my anticipation, possibly not hers—of buying more. I’ve got four good hours until I meet the other women at the elementary school track.
There are a lot of steps to making a pot. I open the bin that is lined in plastic, push aside the damp towels, and remove the clay. I carry it to the table, sprinkle a little grout on top, and begin to knead. Mindless work. Actually rather hard work. I am proud of my arms. People are always asking me if I have a personal trainer. After kneading I cut the clay, over and over, to remove the air bubbles, and then it goes onto a small round platform called a bat. The bat goes on the wheel and from there I shape the pot. Ironically, this is the easiest part of the process, although other people seem to think that shaping is where the art comes in. And then I carry the bat into the damp room, where the pot will dry over the course of several days. It’s greenware at this point, still embryonic, and still, I suppose, monstrous in that way that unfinished things sometimes are. I plug in the humidifier and wait until it rumbles into action, leaning back against the doorframe as I inhale the raw, wet smell of the clay. When the gallery owner phoned yesterday I didn’t recognize her number on my caller ID and my heart had jumped. I should have known that 843 is South Carolina, not Massachusetts, but still, just for a moment…
At any point something can go wrong. You can get through all the steps just fine and still break the pot. Getting it off the bat is tricky. I’ve even lost a couple while flipping them over to trim the bottom. The pots can shatter in the kiln if you weren’t careful to get out all the bubbles during the knead, and they can shatter in the kiln even if you were. Sometimes you get all the way to the glazing and just suddenly stop and think, “This wasn’t how I pictured it in my mind.” Possibly one piece in three is salable and in my line of work that’s a pretty good average. Potters have to get comfortable with the act of throwing things away. My studio is full of abandoned projects, literal misfires. Sometimes I recycle the clay, sometimes I just toss the pots into the trash, but sometimes, if I leave them sitting around long enough, they begin to look almost beautiful to me. Beautiful in an ugly sort of way.
It’s one o’clock before I look up. I’ll be a little late for the daily walk, but one of us is often late and the others all know that things can happen, that no one’s schedule is entirely within her control. We have agreed that whoever arrives first will just start and let the others join in or drop out on their own pace. It’s one of the advantages of walking in a circle.
Yeah, Kelly and Nancy and Belinda are all there when I arrive. I park the car and wave at them, but they don’t see me, and I stand there on the hill above the elementary school track and watch them. Kelly is leading slightly as she often does, glancing back at the others as she talks. She could walk much faster if she wanted. In fact she could run. But what would be the point of that?
Because it isn’t really about walking, it’s about talking. Out here, in the suburbs, we live and die by our friends. There may have been a time when it would’ve surprised me to realize that nearly every woman I know is someone I met through my church, that the highlight of my day is meeting them at one o’clock to walk for an hour before we pick up our kids. But I’m over that by now. I can’t afford to think about it. I need these women too much. I begin picking my way down the damp overgrown grass. Over the years we’ve shared secrets and toys, passing down car seats and strollers and cribs as the kids grew older, taking turns keeping them so that we can occasionally get a free afternoon. Once, in a dreadful pinch, I even nursed Belinda’s sobbing daughter when I couldn’t find a bottle, although it makes me feel strange to say that, as if even our bodies are interchangeable. We have a running joke that some Sunday we should all go home from church with the wrong husbands. We debate how long it would take them to notice, but the truth is I’m not sure we would notice either. We’re too busy, the details of our lives wrap around us like cotton, and we meet almost every afternoon at the track, trying to walk off the weight from the baby, trying to walk off the weight from the baby who’s now in second grade, trying to get down to 130 or 140 or something decent. We’re always moving, more like nomads than housewives, circling the drop-off for preschool, pulling around to load the groceries, hitting the drive-thru and passing back chicken nuggets one at a time at stoplights, running the middle one to soccer and the oldest one to the orthodontist, putting in sheets and taking out towels, spinning in the cyclic world of women.
By 2:30 I’ve picked up Tory and we’re back to the house. It’s early in the school year and she’s tired from having to get up so early. She isn’t used to it yet and probably needs an afternoon nap, but she seems to have caught my restless mood. She tosses her brand-new backpack on the table and throws her arms around my waist.
“Can I help you make coffee?” she asks.
I start to tell her I don’t drink coffee before dinner, but seeing the eagerness on her face, I relent. Phil gave me a cappuccino machine for my birthday last week but I have taken my time in getting it set up. The machine has many little cups and dishes, like a chemistry set, and Tory is obsessed with it. She sits on the floor, carefully unwrapping each element. There’s jazz on the radio. I think it’s Miles Davis, but then I think everything is Miles Davis. I wish I could play the trumpet, or maybe the saxophone, that there was something cool and sexy and indifferent about me. I throw my arms over my head, arch my back.
“Look,” Tory says. She has pulled all the cups from their cardboard tunnel. “Are there enough for a tea party?”
“Plenty,” I say. “You did a great job.” It would be easy to let her just sit there all afternoon stacking cups, but I have seen her homework sheet. I know she has to do a timeline of her life by Thursday and I won’t be home to help her tomorrow night. We get out the big roll of yellow paper and a box of fireplace matches so that I can burn the edges and make it look like a historical document. We did this same trick last year in second grade when she had a report on Thomas Jefferson and the teacher liked it so much she hung it in the auditorium lobby. So now Tory thinks this is the secret to academic success, to burn things around the edges. She holds the paper steady while I run the match back and forth along the bottom, a wet sponge in my other hand in case things flare up. We’ve
finished three sides of it when Phil comes in. He looks at the timeline and asks me how I learned to do this. He seems surprised when I tell him my mother taught me. Phil thinks my mother is crazy and he’s always reluctant to accept evidence that she can contribute anything practical to daily life.
“Now you won’t have to go out for a good cup of coffee,” he says.
It takes me a second to realize he is talking about the cappuccino machine. “I love it,” I say. “I tried to use it yesterday but I’m doing something wrong. The steam came out but the milk wouldn’t bubble.” Phil is flipping through the mail. He looks a little blurry to me. I take out my contacts when I’m in the studio because of all the dust and I can’t seem to find my glasses. I may have left them in Phoenix. Or maybe on the plane. “You know I’ve got book club tomorrow night. You remember I told you that.”
