Precious

by Sandra Novack

  He swigs his beer, finishing the can. She begins to seem ridiculous to him, foolish, worthy of his contempt, sitting there, her gaze not holding his—his is an iron lock on her, how he could crush her. He knows his strength in this moment is her inability to quell his anger. She’s looking out the window, to nothing. Perhaps, he thinks, she doesn’t glance at him because he holds the day’s sweat, the grease and grime, perhaps in this moment he disgusts her as well, his thick hair and body, the grizzled stubble. But she’s still back again, still back in the house—for what, then, or whom? The girls? Only the girls? And this thought makes him angrier.

  Natalia drums her hands against the wood. For the first time he realizes her knuckles have gone pale. She says, “Say something.”

  He will give her nothing. He will give her as much as she has given him over the past months—not one iota of care. Finally, after a long pause, he says, “I was thinking that I should have kicked you out years ago, when you first got knocked up. Would have saved me the hassle.”

  She adjusts her nightgown, pulling it upward, her hand to her chest. “You’re angry,” she says. “I know that.”

  “You think?”

  “It wasn’t easy to come back home. You don’t have to make it harder.”

  “It feels good to make it harder,” he says. “It shouldn’t be easy. I don’t know what you’d expect, what you want from me.” For the first time since being home he notices that the house is clean, that there is an order to everything he has almost forgotten. “Why did you go, again?” he asks. “You never said, did you?”

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “You left apples. What the hell was I supposed to think? Crazy is what I thought. You went fucking crazy, leaving apples.”

  “I wasn’t crazy,” she says.

  A fan hums in the hallway, circulating warm air. He notices the way her voice trembles as she speaks, while his quakes. “You know after you left, Lennie was on shift with me. He got transferred from days. I hadn’t seen him in months and he asked how you were, and you know what I told him?”

  Natalia rubs her neck.

  “I told him, without even thinking, that you were dead. That you died in a car wreck.”

  “Did that make you feel good?”

  “You’re damn right it did. You have no idea how good it felt.”

  “I needed something,” she says, still looking out the window, still quietly refusing him. “Something that wasn’t this.”

  “ ‘Fucking dead,’ I told Lennie. I said, ‘Geez, that bitch just died on me.’ ”

  She studies her hands then, rubbing her thumb over her finger. He has a perfect view of her profile.

  “Did it make you feel better to say all that?” she asks, finally glancing over. She holds his gaze now. “The girls are so angry. Eva, especially.”

  “They’re old enough to draw their own conclusions. They’re old enough to figure out things. I didn’t need to say anything. Both of them were wrecked. We—” He stops short of his last thought.

  Natalia waits. “It was my mistake,” she says finally.

  “Is that what it’s called these days when you fuck someone else?”

  There is a long, anguished silence that makes Frank want to get in his car and leave, just drive for the night. Natalia starts talking then, making small talk first, and next trying to explain everything. She prattles on, in Frank’s estimation, seeking reconciliation when there is nothing he can forgive. It all strikes him as insincere. It all strikes him as excuses that aren’t grounded in anything concretely real, as if he kept her from her life, when the simple fact was that, prior to the doctor, and out of either ostentation or diffidence, Natalia had only kept herself from things and people. It wasn’t Frank who’d shortchanged her, held her back. He hadn’t held her hostage in the house. It never bothered him much, short of his pride, which even he knew to be foolish, that she got a job. There was no reason that she couldn’t go and find herself.What self-containment she felt was born of the simple fact that Natalia finally didn’t know what she wanted. She had never known herself, and she never would. And the more she talks now, the more he denies her, arms crossed. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—she can say to assuage him.

  “Shut up,” he says, suddenly. “Just shut up.”

  “I can handle a lot of things,” she says, “more than you can guess, but I can’t handle this from you.” She gets up, pushes the chair in as if she might be finished.

  For the first time since he’s been home, it registers: that she knew he wouldn’t insist she leave, that she had already settled in, that she was as ungracious as the girls often were, bent on somehow making him feel as if he didn’t deserve a place in his own house. As if she was the one in control. He’s furious at this thought. In a rush, he moves toward her and pulls her around before she enters the bedroom, his arm pressing down on her flesh, hard, drawing her near. He can smell her, the warmth of her. “I don’t know where you’re sleeping,” he says. “But if you think you’re sleeping in here, you’ve got a hell of a thing coming.”

  It is something of a spectacle then, the escalation of an argument. The words spoken bitingly the shouting and Natalia’s demand that Frank keep his voice down, but Natalia, her nerves frayed from waiting all day, also begins to yell. She pushes Frank away. And when Frank pushes back, he stops himself suddenly and takes to the bedroom, ripping up the covers, the sheets, the mattress, throwing them to the ground.

  The next morning and for the next two weeks, there will be a silence so stiffening that it will be painful for anyone to be around anyone else in the house. Sissy will spend days reading in her room, alone. Frank will spend the morning tinkering outside before going to work. Eva will disappear from the house for the entire day, and no one will think to ask why. But for now there is a spectacle, this screaming and noise.

  Thank God, Natalia thinks, I shut the windows.

  Upstairs, through the thin walls, Sissy lies awake, straining to hear but not wanting to hear anything at all. Her clock—a plastic cat and mouse that, on every hour, engage in futile play turning in circles, the cat never catching up—ticks and ticks, and the half hour sounds. Outside, the tree branches scrape against her window like fingers, and the leaves, black in the night, press against the glass. She concentrates on the ticking, not the sound of something hitting the wall. What was that, though? she thinks. A body? She thinks, Is someone really dead?

  She knocks on the wall. Hearing the muffled sound in response, she slides out of bed and sneaks over to Eva’s room. She finds her sister lying on her side, her hand tucked under her cheek, listening. Eva lifts the covers, takes Sissy in. Eva threads her hands through Sissy’s hair. She pulls, gently, through knotted strands, separating them. “If life were perfect,” she whispers, “we would find a cure for all these split ends.”

  “I know,” Sissy says, taking her strand from Eva’s hand and staring at it. She lets it drop against the pillow. “But no such luck. I’m cursed.”

  “You are,” Eva agrees. “We both are.”

  “Eva?”

  “What?”

  “Are you okay with Mom being home?”

  “No,” she says. She pushes her own hair back, rests her chin on Sissy’s head. “Maybe. I don’t know how I feel.”

  “Me neither,” Sissy confesses. “I hate it when they yell.”

  “Don’t listen, then,” she says. “Just think of something else. Think of anything else.”

  “Mom filled the pool today. Started to.”

  “She’s a fucking miracle worker.”

  “You didn’t do it.”

  “I didn’t have time to do it,” Eva says, lifting her head. “I’ve been watching over you, remember? And by the way, there’s a drought, moron.”

  A crash, another dead body.

  “Why do they do that? Why do they yell?”

  “I don’t know,” Eva says. “Because they can’t get along.”

  “Eva?”

  “What?
”

  “Was it always like this?”

  Eva thinks. She pulls her fingers through more of Sissy’s hair. “Not always,” she says finally.

  “Were you happy then?”

  Eva pauses, thinks, her thoughts far away. “I think I was.”

  “Was I happy then?”

  “Yes,” she says. “You definitely were.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Do you remember those fights they had when I started dating?” Eva asks.

  “Yes,” Sissy says, though she barely remembers. “Eva?”

  “What?”

  “Can you tell me a story? Can you tell me a story about the two of us, one that you remember?”

  “Does everything just fall off the face of the fucking earth?” Amy wants to know.

  Peter refuses to ponder the implications of such a question and instead watches as she reaches under the couch, groping, her frayed cutoffs riding up on her every time she moves. She curses again, and Peter thinks to remind her about language but decides that would only be wise if Sophie weren’t in the kitchen, screaming, her gums worn raw. Exasperated, Amy reaches deeper, looking as though she’s being eaten by the cushions and ribbed fabric. He kneels down beside her and gropes under the sofa, too. “What are we looking for, anyway?”

  “Sophie’s pacifier, Peter. I already said. Didn’t you hear?”

  “Doesn’t she have more than one?”

  “That’s not the point,” Amy says, still intent on the task before her. “The point is I can’t find it and this is the third thing I’ve lost today, and now I feel fairly cranky, like I’m incompetent or something. Do you know what I mean? I have to find the crummy pacifier. I’m hoping it’ll set the world straight.”

  Peter reaches farther and ignores the early August light. He wishes that he and Amy could be outside on such a day as this, passing time in pleasant ways—a trip to the zoo, or a leisurely lunch. He wishes she’d say, Forget it, we’re incompetent, yes, but let’s just get out. His hand brushes against Amy’s—the smooth line of thumb, the rough cuticle. He apologizes, though he doesn’t know why, really. He finds a toy mouse and thinks again of how, two weeks ago, when he came home from helping his father-in-law repair his shingled roof, Amy told him that Lear had gotten lost, escaped out the front door when she’d gone to retrieve the mail. Though Peter left cat food and milk on the front step in the following days, the food remained uneaten and the milk turned into a sour graveyard for gnats, their minuscule wings spread, their lifeless bodies clinging to the sides of the bowl. He felt such abject guilt. He imagined that the cat might have been hit by a car, or be stuck up in some tree. Lear’s image haunted Peter as he composed a particularly brutal poem about accidental death.

  Amy curses under her breath. “Finally,” she says, pulling out the pacifier. She wipes dirt from it. “I knew it was under here. Sophie was playing on the couch today.” She walks to the kitchen and beneath their child’s sobs Peter hears a blast of water from the faucet. He sits on the floor, resolving himself to the tension he can’t break of late, the lingering silences and tentative looks. In bed at night, Amy tucks Sophie between them, letting her sleep while she reads and Peter wrestles with another failed poem, one he plans to enter into a contest sponsored by the local college. He hopes Amy might address his sullenness, his own lack of conversation that often matches hers. He even hopes she might uncover his affair, which he wrote about in his third sestina of a planned sequence of twelve. He hopes the poem might afford them an occasion to air their grievances openly. Then, if they are lucky enough, they might emerge on the other side of their marriage, still intact. But Amy only views his work casually, informing Peter that his poetry always seems to be an act of verbal masturbation.

  In fact it seems that all his hopes of late have been dashed, that he has made the wrong choices. Even at school his students seem bored with him and his anecdotes. As he gazes from face to face, he realizes that he’s failed them, and that they know this all too well. He wants fresh faces. He wants to erase the board, walk out of the classroom, and forget.

  In the kitchen, he finds Amy atop a stepladder, stenciling lacy borders of ivy around the window frames—and once again he feels choked up and weedy. “Why so much ivy?” he asked, when she started this hobby. He told her it was becoming a bit ridiculous, that they didn’t live in a jungle, after all, but she responded, not unkindly, “I need something for me. You have the library, your poems, and I have Sophie and my stencils.”

  He cannot argue with this now.

  Age has caught him. His affair catches him as it becomes increasingly complicated and when Eva’s emotions become finely limned. When he and Eva lie together in his van after sex, her stare often grows too intense, her need overbearing—sweetly simple, in a way—and, in that moment, he is frightened and ashamed. And how bizarre that, despite knowing all this, he still continues to see Eva, still continues to sneak out when he can, or call, yearning for a break in the day. He cannot reconcile the contradictions he feels in his heart. He doesn’t understand, really, why people—himself included—risk so much only to be reminded of what matters most—to somehow feel love press more urgently. Everything, absolutely everything, has taken on a quiet, conspiratorial air.

  Amy leans back slightly and regards the wavy outline, the veined pattern of leaf. Peter looks for his keys.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Library.”

  “Another library excursion? What is that, twice this week? You must be a genius, with all you read.”

  He ignores this. “I might also look for Lear.”

  Amy positions a small brush on the container of paint. “We should talk about Lear.”

  “I already know you think the cat poses a health hazard,” he says. He searches the junk drawer, which is stuffed beyond reasonable capacity with birthday cards, packets of lavender, tomato seeds for the garden Amy wanted but failed to start in spring, and, inexplicably, a pack of razors. He looks up. “Where are my keys?”

  Amy descends the ladder and sits down at the kitchen table, next to the playpen. She offers Sophie a small rubber toy. “How should I know? They’re your keys.”

  Peter doesn’t answer. Already he’s thinking about the phone call he’s made, the proposed meeting, the frenzied tangle of skin that is to come, along with the afterthoughts, the sweet longing for so much—how pronounced it all is, after he risks.

  “Lear is gone, Peter.”

  “I know that. That’s why I’m looking for him. And my keys. Yes, to answer your question. Apparently everything in this house falls off the face of the goddamn earth.”

  Amy becomes quiet. She looks down at her toes, wiggles them, and looks up again. “Lear—I took him to the shelter.”

  “I checked the shelter, and what do you mean, you took him?”

  “The one in Jersey. I drove him out to Jersey and dropped him off.”

  Peter shakes his head, unwilling to embrace the slow realization that comes to him. “You told me that Lear got out,” he begins, almost tentatively. “You said he ran under the bushes …”

  “I already know what I said. I’m not an idiot.” Her tone is short. “The cat wasn’t getting enough from either of us. It’s better this way.”

  Peter can’t help but think of Lear fated to a cage, sentenced to an early demise by lethal injection. He remembers better days—the cat just a kitten, Amy and Peter making the wide, rugged journey across the states, their vision for the future optimistic and wonderfully bright— the two of them holding hands, music playing on the radio. “No,” he says, his voice flat. “It’s better for you.”

  “I’m not in the mood to fight,” she says, though it’s clear to him she is.

  Peter grows silent. He slams the drawer shut and opens another, which causes Sophie to cry more.

  “Don’t be bitter,” she says.

  But he is suddenly very bitter. He finds his keys tucked in the bread drawer, behind the Stroehmann’s. Under them, there
’s a scrap of paper, the handwriting recognizable and thickly looped, but still not matching the name or number. He picks it up, thinking of what to say to recuse himself. He crumples the paper before tossing it into the trash.

  “Why do that?” Amy asks. “What’s so upsetting?”

  “It’s junk,” he says. “Nothing is upsetting.”

  “No,” she says. “That’s not junk, that’s the name of a girl who stopped by the other week. She asked for you, by the way.”

  “Did she?” he asks too casually. “And what did she want?”

  “She said she wanted a job babysitting. But I’m just not sure. I don’t know how we could trust a young girl with our baby, with our house. Just exactly how well do you know her?”

  What is he to say? The plain truth and absolute lies are both bad in equal measure, his reasons for lying in the first place mercurial at best. He studies Amy, her thin lips, her questioning expression. “She’s a girl from class,” he says finally.

  “That makes sense.”

  “It’s not like that,” he tells her. “Look, she’s got a crush. Frankly, she’s got a lot of problems.”

  “What kind of problems?” Amy waits.

  “I don’t know—domestic things, the usual stuff. She’s looking for someone—for something—to cling to. It’s nothing at all, nothing I’ve done.”

  “You blame a girl?”

  “I don’t blame anyone,” he says, gripping his keys tighter. “You asked. I’m just saying.”