Every Other Wednesday

by Susan Kietzman

  And so Alice sent a group text message to Ellie and Joan, asking if they could come to the police station together so that one of them could drive Alice’s car home. Officer Walsh told Alice that she had been able to drive her car to the station on pure adrenaline, but that it wasn’t a good idea for her to drive home. And within seconds, both women said they would be there in ten minutes.

  When they arrived at the station, they were escorted through the locked door next to the reception desk. Ellie and Joan had stated their names and their purpose through the perforations in the bulletproof glass that separated them from the officer asking for their information. On the inside of the glass, of the locked door, they were greeted warmly, taken directly to Alice, and asked if they wanted coffee. Ellie’s hands flew to her mouth as soon as she saw her battered friend.

  “Oh God,” said Joan, using the exact words that would have come out of Ellie’s mouth had her hands not been in the way. Joan reached down and gently hugged Alice. Ellie did the same. Joan then turned to face Officer Walsh. “What can we do to help?”

  The officer told them to take Alice to the emergency room for an evaluation. “Her nose is broken, and she probably has a concussion,” Marilyn said. “As you can see, she’s already developing a nasty contusion on the right side of her face, as well as having more superficial cuts and scrapes on other parts of her body. After that, take her home and stay with her until her husband gets there.” Marilyn spoke to Alice. “Are you ready to go?” Alice nodded her head.

  Joan and Ellie helped Alice into the front seat of Joan’s Range Rover, and then Ellie took Alice’s keys from her and said she’d follow them in Alice’s car. At the hospital, they learned that the officer’s suspicions were correct; Alice had a broken nose, a hairline fractured cheekbone, a concussion, multiple cuts and scrapes, and emerging bruises. She was given a prescription for pain medication and told to avoid aspirin products, restrict physical activity for at least two weeks, rest as much as possible, and schedule a follow-up visit with her primary care doctor. On the way from the hospital to Alice’s house, Alice’s cell phone rang.

  “Alice, honey, it’s me. Are you okay? What happened?” Instead of being reassured, calmed by Dave’s voice, Alice was angered.

  “Oh, so you got the voice mail that I left for you”—she looked at her plastic watch that was still clocking her run—“three hours ago?”

  “Shit, I know. I just listened to it. I’m sorry. It’s this damned midwinter blowout sale,” he said. “I’ve been on the floor with customers nonstop all afternoon.” He waited. Alice wondered if he expected sympathy from her. She said nothing, concentrating on her breathing. “Where are you now, sweetheart?”

  Alice took a moment to select her words. “My friends Joan and Ellie are taking me home. They’ve been with me at the police station and in the emergency room—every step of the way, they’ve been with me. I have a broken nose, a broken cheekbone, a concussion, and a banged up body. My friends have further offered to be at home with me, since we had no idea what the hell you were up to or when you’d show up.”

  “I just turned the car onto the highway,” said Dave. “You know I was at the Kensington store today. I’ll be home in thirty minutes. I’m so sorry this happened, Alice, and that I didn’t respond to your voice mail sooner.”

  “Me too.” Alice pushed the end call button on her cell phone.

  * * *

  As soon as Joan and Ellie heard Dave’s voice as he came through Alice’s back door, they stood and put their coats on, hugged Alice and, after very quick hellos with Dave when he found them all in the family room, made their way out of the Stones’ house. Dave looked at his wife on the couch and said, “Oh my God! Alice, I had no idea you were so beat up. Honey, are you okay?”

  “No,” said Alice, her voice rising. “I am not okay! I hurt everywhere, and I am furious—more so at you than at the monster who attacked me!”

  “Honey,” said Dave, approaching her.

  “Don’t touch me!” screamed Alice. “Don’t come near me! You, Dave, are why this happened! It’s your fault! I’ve asked you a hundred times to run with me, and each and every time you turned me down. What kind of husband does that?” Dave opened his mouth. Alice held up her hands. “I’ll tell you what kind of husband—a shitty husband! A self-absorbed husband! A bastard!” Dave lowered his chin, lowered his gaze to the floor. “Yes, that’s right,” said Alice. “Bow your head in humiliation.” When he raised his head, there were tears in his eyes. “It’s a little late for that,” said Alice, arms folded tightly across her chest.

  “What can I do for you, Alice,” asked Dave, submissive, subdued.

  “Nothing,” said Alice. “I want nothing from you.”

  Dave removed his coat and hung it on the back of the desk chair in front of him. “I’ll run you a tub,” he said. “And I’ll help you out of your clothes.”

  “Just get out of my sight,” said Alice. “Get the hell away from me.” She closed her eyes. And when she opened them, Dave was gone.

  CHAPTER 20

  Alice cut her last piece of butternut squash filled ravioli in half and dragged it through the remaining pesto sauce on her plate. “I feel unsettled,” she said. “If I can put a name on it, that’s what I feel—unsettled.”

  They had talked about her blowup at Dave, which both Joan and Ellie said was completely justified. And they talked about all the physical ailments, her nose, her face, her head injury, the scratches, the cuts, the bruises—all of which were healing and were, aside from the concussion which had never been visible, much less prominent. Alice hadn’t left the house much the first week after the incident. She had referred to herself as a freak show and had not, she told Joan and Ellie over coffee in her kitchen on the first Wednesday instead of meeting at a restaurant for lunch, wanted to force her ugliness and its accompanying trauma on the people out there who were simply trying to shop for groceries or wander the aisles of the hardware store. She did not want to have to endure their lingering stares, their probing questions, or their sympathetic countenances. Although what happened on the running trails would be stored in her memory for as long as she lived, she was tired of telling the story—even though she knew it should be heard.

  Joan reached across the table and gave Alice’s bruised right hand a very gentle squeeze. “Of course you feel unsettled,” she said. “How can we help you?”

  “I wish you could help,” said Alice, reaching for her water. “But I think I have to do this myself. I have to get better and feel stronger on my own.”

  Joan shook her head. “No, you don’t. This is what friends are for,” she said. “Push the social lunches and text messages aside, and this is what friendship comes down to—being present when you are needed.”

  Alice’s eyes brimmed with tears. She had been overly emotional since the attack, quick to tears and flashes of anger. She had yelled at Dave that very morning for spilling his coffee on the kitchen floor that she had washed the day before, telling him that he would never understand the difficulties and challenges of being a woman. She knew afterward that the connection between the spilled drink and the gender issues was an emotional response. But it was real for her. She had been thinking about what women have suffered at the hands and minds of men for centuries—and the spilled coffee seemed to illustrate this power struggle perfectly. Men sometimes didn’t know what dicks they were, how little they paid attention to what seemed to be the little things in life, which were, in fact, representative of much larger questions. “And I want you to be present,” said Alice, making eye contact with Joan and then Ellie. “But I also increasingly feel that I need to do this alone.”

  “What do you need to do?” asked Joan.

  Alice hesitated a moment before saying, “I need to feel strong and safe.” She reached into the bread basket at the center of the table. Alice rarely ate bread, but she took a piece and slid it through the last puddle of pesto sauce still on her plate. She held it in front of her mouth as
she said, as casually as if she had been commenting on Joan’s new handbag, “I’m thinking about getting a gun.”

  The silence was instant, as if someone had muted the conversation. No one moved. They were barely breathing, until Joan said, “Alice?”

  Alice held up her hands in front of her. “I know what you’re going to say, Joan. I understand your viewpoint. Mine is different. It always has been, but it is especially so after what happened to me.”

  “Tell us more,” said Ellie.

  The tears returned to Alice’s eyes. “I don’t know what else to do,” she said. “I don’t know what to say to my daughters. I’m terrified that something like this might happen to them. And I don’t know what to do with my husband. Since I screamed at him, Dave has tried to be sympathetic and caring. But I can tell he thinks, deep down, that this will go away. It’s like he’s nursing me through the flu. He doesn’t understand that the problem is systemic.”

  Joan momentarily closed her eyes. Alice had been spending a lot of her time at home on the Internet, researching women’s rights groups, reading about gender inequality. And a number of the articles Alice had shared by e-mail with her and Ellie made sense. But it was easy to claim the world was run by men, that men had all the power. The historical relationship between men and women was a lot more complicated than the versions offered by zealot Web sites; forward movement certainly did follow radical action, but only if accompanied by deep reflection, uncommon levels of patience, and long spans of time. And Joan did not think that owning a gun was part of the solution, of any solution.

  “I can’t change the world,” Alice said, as if reading Joan’s thoughts. “But I can change mine.”

  “Will you really feel safer with a gun?” asked Joan, as gently as she could.

  Alice raised her eyebrows. “Of course I will, Joan. With a gun, I can run again. With a gun, I can walk through a dark parking lot at night with confidence.”

  “With a gun you can win arguments?” asked Joan.

  “I don’t think that’s what Alice is talking about,” said Ellie.

  “And I understand that,” said Joan. “But what happens when emotions surrounding an event escalate? If you’d had a gun the day of your attack, would you have shot the man who tried to rape you?”

  “Absolutely,” said Alice.

  “I don’t think it’s a yes or no question,” said Ellie. “There is a lot of in-between ground, Joan. If Alice had had a gun on the trail, she might have just pointed it at the man. She might have frightened him off.”

  “Yes,” said Alice. “And if that didn’t work, I would have shot the asshole.”

  “There are repercussions. There are consequences to that, too,” said Joan.

  Alice shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re fighting me on this.”

  Joan breathed in through her nose and exhaled through her mouth. “I’m not fighting you, Alice. I’m worried about you. I’m worried about what might happen. You’re emotional right now. Sometimes our emotions can cloud our reasoning.”

  “Yeah, I’m emotional,” said Alice. “I came close to getting raped two weeks ago. Jesus, Joan.”

  “I’m sorry, Alice,” said Joan.

  “I’m not an idiot, Joan,” Alice said. “If I get a gun, I will learn everything about it. I’ll keep it locked up when it’s not on my person. And I’ll probably never use it. But owning one and carrying one when I need it will help me no longer feel afraid. I can’t count on Dave to save me. I’ve got to save myself.”

  Their server, who had left them alone for ten minutes, eased up to their table and asked if he could get them anything else. “The check,” said Joan.

  CHAPTER 21

  Joan was determined to win the money back, even though Stephen didn’t know it was missing, and, therefore, hadn’t questioned her about it. She had been taking cash withdrawals from a bank he was not associated with, from an account she had opened the year before in secret. Since she didn’t have a job with a paycheck, the only deposits she made were the weekly checks Stephen wrote to her. He gave her five hundred dollars every Sunday night to do with as she wished. The money was not for groceries, bills, or other household items; it was for her. She could use it to buy clothes, take an educational or creative class, or eat lunch out with friends. All the Howard women got weekly allowances for their amusement. They were all discouraged by their husbands from talking about the amount they received, but Joan, a numbers person since early childhood, had figured out what her sisters-in-law, mother-in-law, and various Howard cousins made, based on their purchases and conversations. At two thousand a month, Joan was at the lower end of the scale. This was not because Stephen was stingy. It was more because, although he complied with the practice, he thought the idea of a twenty-first-century husband writing weekly checks to his spouse was archaic. He had long ago told her to put whatever she needed on her credit card.

  And while Joan thought the issuance of the weekly checks from a husband to a wife was insulting, she cashed them. She put up with a number of Howard traditions because she had been raised to do as she was told, because she knew her protests would be misunderstood, because her opinion would always be outvoted. The Howard women liked their role in the family. They enjoyed preparing and serving their communal meals. They took pride in their appearance, presenting to the world freshly made up faces and snappy, if a bit conservative, clothing. The Howard women were involved with several local charities, including one to benefit Southwood Hospital and another to send underprivileged kids to summer camp. They lived comfortable lives, the Howard women, and made no apologies to those who judged their existence as anything less than exemplary. Over the years, Joan had come to admire them. This was not because they could make a cheese soufflé without a recipe or collected thousand-dollar scarves like others, less financially fortunate, collected shapely pinecones or smooth beach stones. It was because the Howard women knew who ran their households—and it was not their investment banker husbands. They were an intimidating force, and when Joan was amongst them, their influence was palpable.

  Before her losses amounted to real money, Joan’s bank account balance had been close to six thousand dollars. It was money she was planning on using to pay for a vacation for Stephen’s fifty-fifth birthday. And while she still had two more years to save, she knew that a top-notch holiday for a family of four—one worthy of Howard approval and, perhaps, envy or imitation—would cost at least double that amount. And now she was down to four thousand. Plus, she needed to buy a dress for Stephen’s cousin’s black-tie wedding, and that would cost at least a thousand. On her way from her car to the casino, Joan again analyzed her gaming strategy, tried to figure out why she was losing. At first, she had played only numbers that meant something to her: birthdays, anniversaries, and other dates; phone number sequences; even meaningful highway exit numbers. And then she had branched out to random, chance numbers that popped into her head or had been successful for others at the table. There had been no pattern. She had been winning, and now she was losing. She had fleetingly thought about trying another game, blackjack or craps. But the former seemed to require more knowledge of card playing than Joan possessed at the moment, and the latter involved throwing dice, which Joan had decided was juvenile. Plus, it had a distasteful name.

  There was an elegance to roulette that appealed to Joan—the noiseless spin of the wheel; the long seconds the ball traveled around its track; the pink-pink-pink sound of the ball bouncing from one number to another. The statistics that ruled other games—what were the chances of rolling a seven or an eleven?—didn’t seem to apply to roulette. All things were possible. This was exactly what was running through Joan’s mind when she took her normal seat at her normal table in the section of the casino she had long ago learned was called Earth. Chaz, her favorite croupier, winked at her when she sat down. He was attentive to her needs and just flirtatious enough to give her the confidence she needed to play longer than she knew she should.

  “
Red or blue today, Ms. Joan?” he asked when the demands of the previous bet had been satisfied.

  “Green.”

  “Mixing it up a bit? I like that,” said Chaz. “How many?”

  “Five hundred,” said Joan, pulling five crisp bills from her wallet.

  “I like that too,” said Chaz. “A bold move. Are we imbibing this afternoon?”

  Joan looked at her watch. She had four hours before she had to be home to start the pasta dish Stephen had requested for dinner. “Sure,” she said.

  Three hours later, she finished her second cup of coffee. The buzz from the back-to-back vodka drinks she’d had when she sat down was gone, replaced by fatigue. The coffee had perked her up, but it had done nothing to stifle the sense and scent of dread that pervaded her brain and body. The adrenaline that had been pumped into her bloodstream had run its course; she was fed up and anxious to get home. And she was down another thousand dollars. She tossed her last chip at Chaz, a tip for his kindness, and stood. “I’m off.”

  “Bad luck today,” he said, dropping the chip into his shirt pocket. “You played well. I’m surprised by the outcome.”

  “Me too,” said Joan, wrapping Ellie’s gray scarf around her neck.

  “Are you coming in tomorrow?” Chaz had just spun the wheel. Joan watched it, as she had all afternoon.

  “No,” said Joan, breaking eye contact with the wheel and making it with Chaz. “Maybe on Friday.”

  “I work ten to six on Friday,” he said. “Come see me.”

  Joan gave him a weak smile before she turned her back. The uneasy sensation had moved from her head to her chest to her stomach, an unwelcome companion to the iced vodka and hot coffee. She suppressed a burp and then quickened her pace, knowing from experience that the next eruption would contain liquid as well as gas. She walked quickly into the ladies’ room just outside the Earth casino. She burst into a stall, dropped to her knees, and vomited her lunchtime egg salad sandwich and then, eventually, bile into the toilet bowl. Afterward, Joan slowly lifted her exhausted body, moist from perspiration brought on by retching a half dozen times, off the floor. Standing but wobbly, she braced her arms against the stall walls for balance. She made her way to the sink, where she wet several paper towels and used them to dab her face, to regain cognizance and composure.