“Do you know what that is?” she said, and before he could answer, because she knew he would answer wrong, she said, “That’s a dead man, James, a corpse.”
Kiss it! Kiss it! Julia had said. Those thick pink toes.
James shrugged, rolled away.
“You think too much,” he said.
Saturday morning, Ellen gets up before dawn to help James pack. He is going to Minnesota this time, to a sellers’ convention that will last three days. He sits on the bed in his boxer shorts; she can feel him watching her as she moves around the dark room, filling the battered brown suitcase with his good pants, his casual pants, four crisp white shirts, socks, and underwear. He doesn’t move to turn on a light and neither does she. She imagines that her back feels warm where he’s been staring at it. A faint glow from the children’s night-light in the hallway tinges the air like a scent.
“You better dress,” she finally says, wishing he were already gone. She no longer suggests that he look for a job with regular hours. He was home sick for four weeks in March, and his presence surrounded the house like a shroud. He sided with Mary-Margaret whenever she complained about Ellen’s poor cooking, Ellen’s wastefulness, the inadequate way Ellen ran the house. He fussed at the children. He brooded in front of the TV. Now that he’s traveling again, Mary-Margaret is subdued. She eats Ellen’s cooking with a sigh but nothing more. Afternoons she sleeps on the daybed while Fritz plays cards at Senior Citizens’, and when she wakes up she takes too many of the small yellow pills she keeps in a mother-of-pearl pillbox.
Ellen has her own supply of pills, though she is careful to conceal them. After several months of insomnia, she went to Dr. Heich for a checkup. “You’re fine,” he said in a way that let her know he wasn’t really listening. Afterward, when she went to pay her bill, the receptionist handed her a prescription.
“Isn’t this addictive?” Ellen asked.
“Doctor knows what he’s doing,” the receptionist said sternly. “It’s something to help you sleep.”
Now Ellen takes one every night, an hour before she goes to bed. Sometimes she takes an extra one because it doesn’t seem like the first one is working, and she frequently takes one in the afternoon to smooth away what she feels when she thinks about going home, fixing dinner, cleaning up whatever mess Fritz and Mary-Margaret have made during the day. Dr. Heich has extended her prescription; she may take up to four pills per day, as needed, and the new bottle allows three refills. She looks forward to each pill, the vague dizzy warmth that follows. She tries not to imagine saving them up, filling each new prescription until she has enough so she can swallow them all and completely disappear.
This morning, it is hard to keep her eyes open as she fingers James’s clothes. She hears him stand up and begin to dress. When she turns to face him, he has put on his shirt; his arms and chest, which were invisible, glow white. It startles her briefly; he looks like a ghost. He says, “Do you believe that the Pope is never wrong?”
Ellen’s thoughts have already drifted to the weather, because if today turns out nice, Barb will take her and the kids for a ride in the Camaro. Perhaps they’ll drive up to Herring Bone Beach; the kids will amuse themselves finding gull feathers and driftwood while she sits with Barb on a flat, cold stone, bundled together in a blanket. James’s question does not belong at the beach with the sound of the water, the weak gold sun, the throaty calls of the gulls.
“I don’t know,” she says after a moment. The question doesn’t seem real.
“I want to know what you think.”
“I’m not sure any of that stuff is true,” she hears herself say. She kneels on the suitcase, snaps the locks. James gets up and pulls on his trousers, and the sound of the zipper sends a chill up the back of her neck, it is so filled with rage. He says, “You shouldn’t have said that.”
The darkness breathes between them.
He says, “The Pope knows what’s best for the Church just like I know what’s best for this family. Living with my parents makes the most sense, even if you don’t like it.” He steps past her, picks up the suitcase, and carries it down the hall in his sock feet. Always, Ellen has fixed him a hot bowl of oatmeal, followed him to the door, kissed him good-bye, and then lingered in the cold air to wave. In Illinois, she had eaten with him, watching carefully as he traced his route in red marker on the map. By noon, I’ll be to Watertown. By six, I’ll be at the Holiday Inn in Westdale. His face would be flushed, still sleepy, and she’d kiss beneath his chin to feel the roughness there, despite his fresh shave, and he’d tilt back his head because he liked that, liked her special way of kissing him. Now she can feel that he is waiting at the end of the hallway, thinking to himself, In a minute she’ll come. Perhaps he is remembering those mornings, too, when he would lean his chin on her shoulder as she washed the breakfast dishes; she felt his breathing, sad and slow, and she’d pause with her hands in the soapy water, matching her breaths to his own. Although he never spoke of it, she knew how nervous he got before he traveled. She knew that as he stood there, his chin digging into her shoulder, he was telling himself who he was—the husband, the father, the man—and because his fear did not fit those roles it evaporated into the morning air.
But she had said, I’m not sure any of that stuff is true. Surely he can sense what this might mean. Like Heaven, he is part of the natural order of things, something not to be questioned. And like Heaven, he has become more distant, more unknowable; like God, James has been slipping away.
Ellen has tried to be more religious, to recapture what she used to feel when she prayed. Some days, even now, she gets up early and goes to Mass before work. The wooden pews hold her erect, at attention; the Host rises up above the altar and magic surrounds her like a damp cloud. Then she eats God, swallows Him into her, waits for him to fill her up like those nights after work when she buys candy bars in the teachers’ lounge and eats them, all of them, one by one, that bright forbidden sweetness. She tries to feel the smugness of faith, to know she is important and that her life has great, if hidden, meaning. But the more she has tried to claim God, the more He has rejected her. She wants to be lost in Him, but He vomits her out again and again, and each time He asks even more from her before He’ll permit her return. She is proud, she is defiant, she is selfish, she is sinful. There is too much of Ellen in Ellen for God; she sticks in His throat like a bone. And perhaps James, too, finds her unpalatable, sour. You should not have said that. You should not feel that. You should not be as you are.
Across the hall, Fritz coughs in his sleep and begins to snore. It is growing light; James is no longer waiting. The front door opens, closes with a click. Even if she wanted to catch him, she could not, and reminding herself of that brings relief. She gets back into bed, settling into the still-warm sheets, and sleeps suddenly, soundly, completely, the way she did when she was a child. When she wakes up it is almost eight. The sun is a yellow slice beneath the curtains, and Herbert is tucked under her arm.
“You were sleeping,” he says in his funny way when he sees her eyes are open. His breath smells like peanuts. He sticks his thumb back into his mouth and sighs contentedly.
At breakfast, Mary-Margaret knocks the orange-juice pitcher to the floor. A piece of flying glass cuts Amy across the top of her bare foot, but no one notices this, not even Amy, until Ellen, on her hands and knees wiping up the mess, sees blood.
“Somebody needs a Band-Aid,” she announces cheerfully; although a vein of blood trails across the floor, she is hoping it’s not as bad as it seems. The kids look down, checking themselves out. Mary-Margaret glances at Amy’s foot and faints, clattering forward into her plate. It happens so suddenly that, for a moment, nobody moves.
“Ach,” Fritz says, “she always faints at blood. How ’bout you, missy? You gonna faint on us, too?”
Amy looks at him disdainfully. “It doesn’t even hurt,” she says.
Ellen gets up and lifts Mary-Margaret by the shoulders, leaving damp marks on her pale pi
nk bathrobe. Bits of stewed prune are smeared in Mary-Margaret’s hair, and a bruise is forming on the bridge of her nose. A blue vein stiffens between her nose and upper lip.
“Is she dead?” Amy says, voicing Ellen’s thought, but then Mary-Margaret opens her eyes.
“Blut,” she says, and as Fritz laughs, she begins to cry, horrible choking sobs. Between breaths, she speaks in German, slapping Ellen’s hands away. Then she gets up and goes down the hallway toward the bathroom, patting the wall ahead of her as if she has forgotten the way.
“Never could stand the sight of blood.” Fritz chuckles, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Good thing Jimmy ain’t here or he’d keel right over with her.”
“I like blood,” Amy says firmly. Ellen washes her foot with witch hazel. The cut is deep but clean. She lets Amy bandage it herself while Herbert looks on, properly impressed.
“How come I never felt it?” Amy says.
“Stepped on a nail once, drove it into my foot,” Fritz says, “through my shoe right up between the bones. Now all day I thought to myself, I got something in my shoe, but you know, I was so durn busy, I couldn’t be bothered to take a look. Come nightfall, I couldn’t get my shoe off. I’d nailed my goddamn foot to my shoe.” He laughs, showing all six of his teeth, which are stained a cheerful gold.
“What happened?” Amy says cautiously.
“My foot turned black and dropped right off. That’s why I got this here false one.”
“You have a false foot?” Herbert says while Amy rolls her eyes.
“No he doesn’t,” she says.
“You don’t?” Herbert says, and he looks from one to the other.
Fritz laughs and laughs. From the bathroom come the soft soft sounds of Mary-Margaret crying.
Barb stops by for Ellen and the kids in the afternoon. Ellen hears the horn in the driveway and scrambles the kids into their coats. Barb, like Ellen’s mother, like Ellen’s sisters, does not come inside.
On the way to Herring Bone Beach, Barb fiddles with the radio until she finds a Beatles song; she turns the volume way up. “I’m gonna clean out the gas line,” she shouts, accelerating past eighty. Ellen marvels at the way Barb can talk about car things like a man. Logically, she knows that most human beings can pick up a manual and learn about transmissions and carburetors, but to Ellen they sound like the names of foreign countries in which she would be terribly, hopelessly lost. As Holly’s Field fades behind them, the blue shine of the lake stretches far and flat to their right. There are no islands, only water that lifts to meet the horizon, the precise seam concealed by mist. She stares out across the rich lake farms, the edges of the fields still trimmed with snow. Ring-billed gulls litter the darkest soil for warmth, heads pointed north toward the farm where James grew up. The barn burned mysteriously five years ago, and the old stone house stands alone beside the deep, blackened hole, without even a shade tree for comfort. As they pass by, a red-tailed hawk lifts away from a weathered fence post, its shadow floating over the highway.
“How beautiful,” Ellen says, but Barb hasn’t seen it. Ellen glances back at the kids; they are both lost in the music booming from the speakers behind their ears, something with a steady, driving beat. James’s departure seems like a dream, and she relaxes deeper into her seat, enjoying the way Barb controls the car, speeding up at just the right moments as they fly through the curves by the old grain mill.
“So did James take off again today?” Barb says.
“Yes.”
Barb turns down the music. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Doesn’t it stink, him leaving you stuck with his parents like that?”
“I guess I’ve gotten used to it,” Ellen says, surprised.
“No you haven’t,” Barb says. “No one gets used to anything, they just get numb. That’s what’s happened to you. You let him get away with anything he wants, him and his parents, too.”
Ellen sees a white flash of rage. “What?”
“Now, look,” Barb says, “we’re friends, right? So I’m trying to help you stick up for yourself. Just because you married James doesn’t give him the freedom to run your whole life.”
“Not in front of my children,” Ellen says, hating Barb fiercely.
“Oh, c’mon,” Barb says. “Kids know these things before the rest of us do.”
“No we don’t,” says Amy.
“I take my marriage vows seriously, even if some people don’t,” Ellen says; it slips out before she can stop herself.
Barb pulls over to the side of the road. Ellen wishes helplessly for another car to pass by, a deer to stray into the field, a dog to trot over from a nearby farm—anything to distract Barb, who wears the same look of fierce concentration she gets whenever she zeros in on a child’s problem at school. Her teeth are sunk into her lower lip; her eyes are glittering, snake eyes. In another moment she will unhinge her jaws, swallow Ellen whole, crush her shell against her ribs, and digest whatever secrets spill out.
“This isn’t the Dark Ages,” Barb says. “Women have choices. I don’t care what a priest will tell you, you shouldn’t have to stay with a man who’s hurting you.”
“This is none of your business,” Ellen says. “Maybe you better just take me home.”
“I look at you and I see myself. You think it’s going to get better somehow, but it won’t. Baby, it just won’t.”
“Stop it!”
“Sometimes marriages don’t work out.”
“Take me home,” Ellen says.
“Sure,” Barb says. “Fine. Hide your head in the ground.” She pulls the keys out of the ignition, tosses them into Ellen’s lap. “But you’re going to drive.”
“I can’t drive a car like this.”
“What do you mean, a car like this?”
“With gears.”
“You mean, you can’t drive stick.”
Ellen glares at her.
Barb says, “Well, you’re going to learn. When was the last time you did anything new, for Christ’s sake?” She gets out of the car, walks around to Ellen’s side. When Ellen doesn’t move, she opens the door, pulls her out by the arm. The keys fall into the road and Ellen starts to hiccup. “Hold your breath,” Barb suggests, but Ellen can’t stop. The hiccups are shrill, painful. She bends over, hands on her hips, trying to catch her breath. “I’ll crash,” she says, her shoulders jerking. “I’ll end up killing us all.”
“You wanted to kill me a second ago, didn’t you?”
“I still do.”
“Drive,” Barb says, and she picks up the keys, presses them into Ellen’s hand.
They stall out twice before Ellen gets the Camaro into gear. “Push forward to find first,” Barb says, but the gearshift sneaks to the left and Ellen, still hiccuping, throws them into reverse. The Camaro scoots backward into the ditch, stalls again.
“I can’t do this,” Ellen says.
The kids are holding each other’s hands. “Don’t flood it,” Barb says. “Go easy now,” and Ellen starts it up again, kicks up dust, then lurches onto the road.
“Use your clutch. Shift. Shift,” Barb says, and they almost stall but then they don’t. Ellen peeks at the speedometer; they’re steady at thirty miles an hour. She keeps both hands on the wheel. She hiccups, checking the rearview mirror, but there are no other cars in sight.
“I thought you wanted to go home,” Barb says after a while.
“I do.”
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“I know that! I don’t want to have to turn around.”
“You could turn around in a driveway somewhere.”
“No! There’s not enough room.”
Barb turns up the radio again, settles back. “What are you going to do, then?”
“I’m going to turn around in the parking lot at the beach where I won’t hit anything. Turn that noise off so I can think.”
“Do you think I’d let you drive my car if I thought you were going to wreck i
t? You turn down the music,” Barb says, but Ellen doesn’t want to take her hands from the wheel. She hiccups three times in rapid succession. She has read in the Guinness Book of World Records about a man who hiccuped for seventeen years straight before he died, and she wonders if this is how something like that starts. Barb turns to the kids and says, “Your old ma’s a pretty good driver, hm?”
Ellen checks the mirror again and sees the children look at each other as if they think both she and Barb are crazy.
Five miles and fifteen minutes later, Ellen coasts into the beach parking lot and the Camaro stalls again. Before she can start it up, Barb has the keys. She says, “Say, kiddos, why don’t you play on the beach while your mom and me have a chat?”
They leave the car like sparks darting away from a fire. Amy yanks up Bert’s hood before they walk down to the ice along the edge of the water. There they stand, shoulders touching, two small dark figures on a wide gray surface. “I’m sorry about what I said before,” Ellen says to Barb. “Hey, my hiccups stopped,” and she starts to cry. Barb passes her a tissue, another tissue, another. She strokes her hair. She finds a linty roll of Life Savers in the bottom of her purse and tries to get Ellen to take one. She offers Ellen blush, rouge, cherry-flavored Chap Stick. Green eye shadow. The blunt cap of an acorn. A pen. Ellen cries and cries.
“I just wanted you to talk to me,” Barb keeps saying. “I just wanted you to know that you’re not all alone.”
That night, Amy takes Ellen by the hand and pulls her into the bedroom. Herbert is already in bed, his thumb wedged into his mouth. Ellen expects to be bombarded with questions: Why did Barb say those things about Daddy? Why were you crying in the car? But Amy closes the door behind them and puts her finger to her lips. “Shh,” she says. “Look what she gave me.”
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