by Kim Wright
After services, they swarmed us. Of course they did. We were a young couple with a child. We were what they wanted. Did we play whist? Softball? Handbells? Would I be interested in joining the book club? Would he like to sign up for Habitat? Everything that starts out as comfort ultimately becomes a vise—I know that now and I knew that then. But there was a part of me that wanted a community. I craved the God of my childhood. We picked Tory up from the nursery, where a big-breasted woman told us she’d been an angel, and ran the gauntlet of well-wishers out to the car. And as we were backing out, waving at all the people who were waving at us, Phil said, “Maybe we should do it. For her. To give her a base.”
“Yeah,” I said. “To give her something to rebel against when she turns thirteen.” I looked in the rearview mirror as we drove away, watching the church grow smaller and smaller. When I was a kid I’d gone to church and learned the hymns and the Bible verses. I’d drunk the sweet juice, and eaten the thin cookies, played with the broken dolls in the nursery, and listened to the flies drone and thump against the stained glass windows. It hadn’t hurt me.
Phil was squinting into the midday sun. “There’s something sweet about it.”
“I know.”
“Did you see they had a basketball team?”
It wasn’t long before I fell into the kind of relationships you have with women whose children are the same age as yours. Belinda first. She was aggressive in her efforts to befriend me. She came up and invited me to coffee the second week I dropped Tory off, and before long she was calling me every day, sometimes in the morning even though I repeatedly told her that was when I worked. I used the answering machine against her like a shield. In the afternoons, when Tory was fretful and all concentration was shot anyway, I’d call Belinda back. I’d walk around the house with the baby in the Snugli and the portable phone in the crook of my neck, carrying out the trash while she said that Michael had worked late every night that week, watering the plants while she whispered she was pregnant again, folding the laundry while she told me she was losing her mind. It was a relief when Nancy moved down from New Jersey and Belinda abruptly quit calling me. Nancy was so well-organized that she alphabetized her spices. Nancy was better equipped to save Belinda, anyone could see that.
So Phil and I settled in. We joined the church and bought a house on a tree-lined street in what is considered the better side of town. The women here subscribe to Martha Stewart and O at Home and we like to believe that our houses reflect our particular personalities, that each has its individual charm. I suppose that’s true to some degree, but for the whole first year I lived here my mother got lost every time she came to visit. She said she couldn’t help getting turned around, that every house on my street looked just alike.
I guess I was happy—or at least, to use Nancy’s term, I was content. If I was losing touch with my husband, that did not bother me unduly at the time. Phil was building his practice, and I took over half the garage and announced to everyone who would listen that I was working on my art. I carried my pots around to local vendors where they sold them for fifteen dollars, or sometimes—if they stuck a plant in them—for eighteen. We passed the baby back and forth like a baton. It was all very bloodless and civilized, and even now I can’t think of another way we could have done it. Before long it came to seem like it was a total waste of energy for the two of us to be in the same room at the same time. I would hear his door slam in the driveway and I would already be picking up my purse. I didn’t greet him in the foyer like some sitcom wife, my stiletto heel rising behind me as I reached up to kiss his cheek. I greeted him in the driveway, in passing, saying, “My God, could you have been any later?” This was my chance to go out for an hour, and when I got back he would leave for his run, and when he came in I would make a phone call, and when I hung up he would go into the shower, and I must remember this now, that it wasn’t just Phil who was cool and businesslike. It was me too.
Did he ever stop and think that this wasn’t exactly how he’d planned his life, that something inside him was going dim or slipping away? I don’t pretend to know what men want, what they dream about, or when their dreams stop. All I know is that when we were moving into the house I put his collarless denim shirt in a bag for Goodwill. He hadn’t worn it since the day Tory was born, but when Phil found the shirt, the sleeve trailing out of a Hefty bag full of pink baby clothes, he was furious.
“I told you to throw this away,” he said.
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with that shirt,” I said, pulling it out and sniffing it again just to prove my point. It was two weeks before Christmas. We had built our first fire in the new house, we had put up our first tree, and I was trying to unpack in the middle of it all. I’m sure there was anger in my voice, maybe even accusation. “But since you’ve always been such a nutcase on the subject I’m giving it to Goodwill.”
But Phil said you couldn’t give clothes that stank to other people, even if they were poor. He grabbed the shirt from my hands and balled it up and threw it into the fireplace where it slowly caught flame and bits of blue cloth flew against the screen.
This is, to my knowledge, the only irrational thing that my husband has ever done.
Chapter Seventeen
No really,” I tell him, “I want you to restrain me.”
He says he can do that. Maybe we could buy handcuffs. You can get them on the Internet. You can get anything on the Internet. You can get blindfolds and harnesses too, and those white Catholic candles, and whips.
I don’t know. Maybe. Part of this game is trying to determine how much I can take. Perhaps I can take being handcuffed, but maybe I can’t take being blindfolded at the same time, or feeling hot wax dripped across my belly. I ignore what he says about the whips.
“If it gets bad,” he says, “you can stop it.”
He is eating lunch. I hear him crunching on the other side of the line. It sounds like an apple. He thinks I should eat more fruit. He talks about this all the time, how I don’t get enough fiber. The books say to choose a safeword, a way to communicate that you’ve hit your personal limit, and they suggest that it be an utterly incongruent word. Not “no” or “stop,” because people always say these things in bed, even when they don’t mean them. For all I know, “stop” is the most frequently uttered word in the universe.
“We could make it ‘apple,’ ” I tell him. “That’s a word you wouldn’t normally say during sex.”
“The fruit of temptation, very appropriate. We’ll try it in Miami.”
I was making the bed when he called. I hardly ever talk to him on my home phone. We mostly talk on the cell and I was surprised when he called me here, on this traceable line. This number that could show up so easily on his phone bill, if anyone bothered to check. And if someone bothered to pick up my bedside phone and hit star 69, they would reach him. Or at least they would if I didn’t make a habit of calling Kelly immediately after I hung up from Gerry. We take precautions. He assures me that most of them are not necessary, that his wife is no more interested in his daily activities than my husband is in mine.
“I’m not sure about Miami.”
“In New York we agreed that we’d meet once a month. And by the time we’re together in Miami it will be exactly one month.”
“I know,” I say. I flatten a pillowcase, ironing it with my palms. Normally I only pull up the duvet and let it hide the snarled sheet underneath, but today for some reason I have decided to make the bed up properly. Layer by layer. He’s probably right. When we were in New York I probably did agree that yes, we’d meet once a month, but now that I’m home it’s different. A month seems fast. It seems too much.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. “What are you thinking?”
“That meeting you one time seems like something that could just happen. Something forgivable, you know? But meeting you every month, that’s an affair.”
“There’s not any moral difference between doing it once and doing it a hundred times.
If we’re going to hell anyway, we might as well go completely to hell.”
“Well, Kelly said… you know Kelly?”
“Of course I know Kelly. My God, Elyse. You talk about her all the time.”
I flap the duvet in the air and it falls over the sheet like snow. “When I got back from New York Kelly said, ‘Okay, so now you’ve got it out of your system. You just needed to go up there and get it out of your system.’ ”
“Is it out of your system?”
He knows it isn’t.
“You just said,” he continues, picking up steam with his argument, “that the next time you wanted me to restrain you. The next time. Implying that we’d meet again.”
“I know. But maybe once a month is too much.”
“When we were in New York you pushed for twice a month.”
Did I? I can’t seem to remember what I said when we were in New York.
“Do you want Miami or not?”
“You know I want it,” I say, arranging the throw pillows on the top in the careful way I do when I expect company.
“So we’re locked in?”
“I guess.” I stand back. The bed is perfect.
“I’ll get the tickets. Are you having any trouble explaining—”
“How I can fly around for free? I’ve had an airline credit card forever so Phil thinks I have a bunch of frequent flier miles.” Which, come to think of it, I actually do.
“Great,” Gerry says. “And don’t worry. Meeting once a month is the perfect amount. Twice a month would be too much, like we’re always coming and going.”
“I know. It would look suspicious, like we’re almost in each other’s real lives.”
“And we certainly can’t have that.”
I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not. We e-mail every day and right now we’re just wrapping up thirty minutes on the phone during which the main topic of conversation has been his wife. Not how awful she is. Not how he’s going to leave her. But about how much she and I are alike, at least when we’re up and dressed and walking around. Her name is Susan and he says she’d fit in great at book club, that she’d want to walk with us at the schoolyard and then get coffee with me and Kelly. “You’d like her,” Gerry says, and I have no reason to believe that I wouldn’t. “It’s just that she’s sexually broken,” he adds, and I murmur in sympathy, even though this is probably what Phil says about me.
“Miami’s fine,” I tell him. “Miami in two weeks.”
“And I’ll restrain you.”
“You know what Kelly said? She said we’re like kids in a candy store, grabbing everything we see with both hands.”
“Kelly’s right.”
“Do you think it’s weird that we’re getting kinky already?”
“This isn’t that kinky.”
I’m offended. “It is to me.”
“I know. I think it’s kinky too, that was just my half-assed effort to reassure you. Promise you’ll tell me if it gets to be too much.”
“I tell you everything.” I say it flippantly, but the minute it comes out of my mouth, I realize it’s true.
I always glance at the church as I drive by and this afternoon I see Lynn, dragging something across the parking lot. I pull in and roll down my window to ask if she’s okay.
“I’m fine,” she says. “It’s just tarps from Home Depot. They’re bulky but they’re not heavy.”
“You’re painting?” I ask, rather stupidly.
She lets the tarps drop and pushes her hair up with the back of her hand. “You wouldn’t believe the estimate those guys came up with. Absolutely outrageous. I’ve decided to do some of the work myself. At least the Sunday school wing.”
“I don’t think anybody—”
“Expects me to really do anything?”
It feels like she’s smacked me and I guess it shows because she looks down and taps the tarp with her foot. She’s wearing heels. Only Lynn would wear heels to Home Depot.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s been a long day.”
“Do you need some help?”
“Aren’t you on your way to carpool?”
“I mean can I help you when you’re ready to paint?”
“It’s not your job.”
“I’d like to,” I say. “We never get to talk anymore.”
“I see your car here a lot.”
“I’m in counseling with Jeff. You don’t have to act like you don’t know it.”
She smiles then, for the first time. “What kind of counseling?”
“Marital.”
Lynn bends down and gets a fresh grip on the tarps. “It would be nice to have some help,” she says.
Chapter Eighteen
By the beginning of December, Nancy has cut her hair like mine. She’s also wearing bright red lipstick, a fact Kelly gleefully points out to me as we arrive at the track to put in our four miles.
“She’s going to trade in the Volvo for a Mini Coop next, I swear,” Kelly says, gripping my waist from behind and putting her mouth to my ear. “She can’t help herself. She wants to be you so bad she can taste it.”
I shake my head. That’s not what she wants.
Today’s conversational agenda is the Christmas pageant. After three straight seasons on the manger and wise men detail, I’ve begged off this year and Nancy has agreed to be in charge. As we walk she asks me what I did with the bales of straw and angel wings from the last pageant and she asks me exactly how I managed to rig up that movable Star of Bethlehem. It preceded the wise men down the aisle last year and it was a big hit—several people came up to me afterwards and said it was the best nativity scene the church had ever done. Nancy can’t quite admit this. It galls her that I actually came up with something she never would have thought of doing. But she asks me lots of questions about the mechanics and she’s wearing lipstick, even just to the track. I guess it is sort of flattering.
It’s funny, these little ways we’re interconnected. Belinda often uses the phrase “all in the same boat,” and the rest of us exchange glances when she says this. We don’t really think of ourselves as being in the same leaky rowboat as Belinda. But she does have a point. Any change in me seems to make the others feel unstable. I slide a couple of inches to the left, and suddenly the world shifts beneath their feet too. At some level I’m sure they were all sick of my whining. It’s like I’ve had this disease for so long that by now I should either have recovered or had the decency to die. That’s one level. On another, they counted on my bad marriage to make them feel better about their own. If I agree to be the angry one, then the rest of them don’t have to feel it. But if I’m happy, where does that leave them?
I say, when they ask, that thanks to the counseling I’m learning how to make small gestures that I know will please Phil. I brew decaf in the morning in my new cappuccino machine because he prefers it that way. (And, for the record, he was quite right—the reason it wasn’t frothing was that I was using too much milk.) I wear blue because he likes that color. I lay his robe out on the bed while he’s taking a shower and I leave the paper beside his cereal bowl in the morning, already turned to the sports section. We have sex once a week. As Jeff has repeatedly pointed out, all Phil really ever wanted from me was kindness, and ever since I got back from New York, I have suddenly found that I can give it to him. The coffee… the paper… the robe… the sex. I can give him all those little things that add up to kindness. It turns out it’s quite easy to save a marriage. All you have to do is stop caring about it.
But the fact that I’m no longer bitching has thrown the rest of the women for a total loop. Kelly has begun to admit how harsh Mark can be in his criticisms, how he’s never there, and when he does come home he drinks too much. Nancy has begun to say, “Well, you all know how he can be…” when she talks about Jeff. But it is Belinda who surprises me most, Belinda who seems to be heir apparent for my title of the Discontented Wife.
“Phil and I are getting along,” I tell the women and i
t’s like waving a red flag at a bunch of bulls.
Immediately Belinda blurts out, “Why does Michael act like he’s doing me a favor when he keeps the kids? They’re his kids as much as mine, but whenever I walk out the door for five minutes he acts like he’s doing me this big favor.”
“At least he comes home,” says Kelly.
Belinda says that maybe she should get a job, but she barely got through two years of college and the only job she’d be able to get would be a crap job. Nancy has started tutoring high school kids in math, and maybe Belinda could do something like that. Not math, of course, because Belinda stinks in math, but something like that, part-time. She doesn’t want to end up like her mother. You know, bitter. Kelly says maybe we can list all the things Belinda is good at while we walk, but I suspect this will be no help at all. Women like Belinda never get jobs that have anything to do with what they’re good at. Belinda is very close to that most dangerous of questions—“But what about me?”—and I dread this for her. It’s the potato chip of thoughts. You’re better off not opening the bag.
“It’s not like I’m asking for the world,” Belinda says.
“The key is to have balance,” Nancy says. “Time for the kids and your husband and volunteer work and maybe a job, and you need to keep a little bit of time for yourself.”
Belinda doesn’t even bother responding to such a ridiculous statement. “I need to join that gym you guys go to,” she says. “I’m fat. I weigh thirty pounds more than I did the day I got married and I was pregnant the day I got married.”
“We’ve all gained weight,” says Kelly, who clearly hasn’t. “You’re being way too hard on yourself.”
But Belinda is having none of it. She starts telling us how one night she wasn’t in the mood for sex but Michael was, and you know how it is. Sometimes it’s easier to have sex than it is to sit up and turn on all the lights and talk about why you don’t want to have sex, so she says fine, just make it fast. But in the middle of it she starts crying.
