Young Wives

by Olivia Goldsmith

  “I have to go to the toilet,” Angie said. Then she stood up abruptly and almost ran across the dining room.

  2

  In which we meet Michelle Russo, Pookie the dog is walked

  Michelle got Frankie into bed, which wasn’t easy now that he was six. She shrugged into her jacket and told Jenna she was going out to walk Pookie, their cocker spaniel. In the driveway she looked around guiltily. Frank always yelled at her when he caught her walking the dog. “It’s the kids’ job. You spoil ’em,” he said. It was just that it was easier for Michelle to do it herself than nagging at Jenna. And she could use the air.

  As Michelle walked the dog through drifts of leaves she took a moment to look up at the stars. It was chilly and Michelle took her hair out of the scrunchie that bound it up. It fell down below her shoulders in an unmanageable cascade of blond curls that would keep her warm and make Frank hot. She shivered. Elm Street was dark, and despite the cold, this was a time Michelle really enjoyed. It was perhaps the only moment of the day that she spent alone—if you didn’t count Pookie as a companion. The dog pulled on the lead a little bit and Michelle stepped along the sidewalkless curb.

  Pookie paused. Uh-oh. Her neighbors, the Shribers and the Joyces, went ballistic if Pookie even lifted a leg anywhere near their property, so she discreetly tried to tug him in the opposite direction. But then she noticed the Joyces’ windows were dark. Maybe they were traveling. Since Mr. Joyce had retired, they had been doing a lot of that. They had lived on this block longer than anybody else. They were pleasant, but never really warm.

  Still, Michelle loved them, just the way she loved the entire street and every house on it. This was where she and Frank had chosen to live. The place she had brought both of her children home from the hospital. Frank had taught Jenna to ride without training wheels right here, and one winter afternoon Frankie Junior had gotten his tongue frozen stuck to the lamppost that Pookie was now sniffing. This street was filled with, if not friends exactly, then friendly acquaintances; it was the place they all called home, where their children and their cats and their dogs ran in the grass and fought and played.

  Michelle hadn’t had a home growing up. Her mother usually worked as a waitress and came home with some take-out and a six-pack of beer. Her father was always involved in some scheme or other, none of which ever made any money, but did require hours spent in bars.

  For a moment Michelle shivered, as if someone had walked on her grave. There was no reason for her to wind up so lucky, unless it was a payback for a really rocky start. Michelle had been born in the Bronx, which was only twenty or thirty miles south of here, but a whole other world. Her mother was Irish, straight from County Cork. Her father was Irish-American, the son of a fireman and a fireman himself—until he reported to work one night so drunk that he walked into a burning building and, feeling invincible, fell six stories when it collapsed.

  Michelle hadn’t missed her loud, frightening father. But Michelle was that rare Irish entity, an only child, and she’d been left with her depressed, unreliable mother. And when her mom’s mom got sick “back home,” Sheila returned to Ireland to help. Michelle, only a little older than her own daughter was right now, had waited and waited for her mother’s return. A month seemed a long time to a child; half a year seemed a lifetime. The two years it took before Sheila came back had been enough to do a job on Michelle, dumped as she was with her paternal grandparents, lonely and suspecting that her mother stayed away because she couldn’t face coming back. Michelle had decided then that nothing was as important as loving your husband and your children. She would never be a Sheila.

  If Michelle could do it all over again, every bit of her hard, sad early life, she would live through it all as long as she could be assured that she would wind up with Frank Russo, her two kids, and her dog in the safety of this clean suburban harbor in Westchester County; no crime, no grime, no horrors. Healthy food on the table. Clean sheets on the bed. Clothes folded in neat piles in dresser drawers. A yard full of flowers, and two nice cars which never broke down. In the first couple of years of their marriage, Michelle had watched every glass of dago red that her husband drank, expecting him to get drunk and for the picture to fall apart. But he never had. Not once.

  Michelle walked the dog up and down the street and, as she did nearly every night, couldn’t help feeling grateful for the fact that her family, her marriage, and her friendships were going so well. She knew that just five houses down the street, Jada was having to deal with her unemployed husband sitting on his butt while Jada worked hers off all day at the bank. Michelle also couldn’t get over the fact that Clinton, Jada’s husband, was “acting up” again. How did Jada put up with it? Michelle was only a little sorry the partnership that Frank had tried to put together with Clinton had never worked out.

  Michelle knew she was a survivor, the lucky one, satisfied with her life, stable in a time of instability. Up and down the block marriages had failed, families had split, and houses had gone up for sale. Not hers. The two things she knew for sure were that her friendship with Jada had survived during all of the upheaval, and that her own marriage was secure.

  It hadn’t always been so perfect here. When she’d first moved in, she’d been a little lonely. Then she met Jada. Every morning for the last four years, since Jada moved in, the two of them had been walking what people in the neighborhood called “the circuit,” following the curving route of the old suburban streets at the fastest pace they possibly could with a dog in tow. They’d been religious about it, forty minutes of walking, no matter what, and Michelle believed that Jada found the habit as comforting a way to start the day—and lose some weight—as she did. It was the only time they gave to themselves, and it bolstered both of them. At first they’d only talked about the kids, their school, that sort of stuff. But then when Michelle’s mother died, they talked about that. And Jada had told stories about growing up. Finally, Michelle had opened up about her own lousy childhood. They’d been best friends since then. They gossiped about the neighborhood. And recipes. And clothes. And all the other girl stuff. Now, since this problem with Clinton had surfaced, they talked about that.

  It was a luxury Michelle hadn’t had since her school days. Since her marriage she’d been so busy with Frank and the kids that she’d lost touch with the gang back in the Bronx. She stretched her long legs and walked down toward the Jackson house. She could see Clinton, but not Jada, moving around the kitchen. Michelle took a deep breath, enjoying the crisp air, and started back toward her house. She got to the edge of her property and waited while Pookie sniffed the leaves, admiring her house.

  Michelle took pride in her home. She kept her house, her body, her children, and her life neat and clean and regular. She looked down at Pookie. The dog was a purebred cocker spaniel, not like one of the mutts that were always getting run over down home. “Right, Pookie?” she asked out loud. The dog looked up and cocked his silky head. “Let’s go in,” Michelle said, and the dog turned toward the front door light.

  Jenna was out of her bath by the time Michelle got back inside and she went in to clean up the kids’ bathroom. “Hey. What’s this?” she asked Jenna, and pointed to the full bathtub, which was just starting to drain.

  “Come on, Mom!” Jenna said. “I’m not going to drown. It’s too cold to wash in two inches of water.”

  “You know the rule,” Michelle told her. “No baths higher than the tape.” She pointed to the red line she had affixed years ago to the inside of the tub, along with the nonskid rubber stick-ons she’d glued down to the ceramic bottom. It was hard to get the dirt out from their edges but it was worth it. Most fatal accidents occurred in the home.

  “Mo-o-o-om.” Jenna stretched the single syllable out until it was an aria almost as long as Tony singing out Maria’s name in West Side Story.

  “Most accidents happen in the home,” Michelle told her eleven-year-old daughter for what, conservatively, had to be the three-thousandth time. She followed her
daughter into Jenna’s perfect bedroom—a room Michelle would have killed for when she was eleven. “I’ll give you ten minutes for VH1—no MTV—before you have to shut off the light,” she told Jenna.

  “Won’t I get to see Daddy before I go to bed?” Jenna asked, ready to pout. Trying to be more like a teenager every second.

  “No, sweetskin. He’s working,” Michelle told her, and watched the glower of disappointment bloom on Jenna’s perfect pink face. Michelle knew just how she felt. The Russo women—Jenna, Michelle, and Frank’s mother Camille—all adored their Frank.

  “Daddy might be taking us all out to dinner on Friday. And then it’s the weekend.” Frank never worked on the weekend. He was a really attentive father, and both Frankie and Jenna worshipped him. “Look, Daddy’s been working very hard for us lately. Let’s bake him a cake for tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Yes!” In a second, Jenna turned from sulky preteen to delighted child. “Can I frost it all myself? And can I lick the bowl?”

  A sugar promise did wonders in attitude adjustment, Michelle knew, but she wasn’t a total pushover. “You can frost it alone, but you have to share the bowl with Frankie,” Michelle told Jenna for what also must have been the three-thousandth time. She looked at her watch. “Now just five minutes of VH1. Then lights out.” Jenna smiled, snuggled under her quilt, and sighed. Michelle knew she’d be sleeping in less than three minutes and made a mental note to come back in after straightening out the bathroom to shut off the TV.

  She wiped up the splashes, put two washcloths up to soak, then picked up and refolded three bath towels (Two children and three towels? It didn’t add up.) She Soft-Scrubbed the sink and Windexed and wiped the mirror. Frankie, she noticed, had remembered to put his dirty clothes in the hamper (good) but he’d also thrown in one of his little Nike Airmax sneakers (bad—there would have been chaos before breakfast). Michelle left the bathroom, its towels hung, its tile gleaming, and looked in on Frankie, who had already tossed off his quilt. She put his sneakers beside the bed, covered him, and kissed his sweet, high forehead—just like his father’s. Then she shut off the TV in Jenna’s room. Jenna murmured something in mild protest from her bed, but the lure of sleep was too strong. Jenna held Pinkie, the toy rabbit she’d had since she was a baby, in a stranglehold that was her precursor to sleep. When she turned toward the wall, Michelle smiled.

  Then she went into her bedroom. She got out her best silk nightgown, took the Joy perfume bottle from the bureau, and went into the bathroom she shared with Frank. She began to run a bath but first, carefully, hung the shimmering gown over the shower door so the folds would fall out. Then she looked into the mirror.

  Michelle smiled. She was taller than average: she liked to say she was five-foot-eleven, though she was really only five-ten-and-a-half. Frank was her height, but he liked her tall. Way tall. So she always wore heels, except on her walks with Jada. Height helped her—it made her look much more attractive. But she admitted she was good-looking. She’d been lucky—she’d gotten the pert nose and strong jawline of her Irish heritage without the really narrow mouth. In fact, her mouth was so full that it made her self-conscious. In school girls had made fun of her—calling her “fish mouth” and “trout”—but the boys had flocked to her.

  She shook her head and her hair gleamed, but the roots…. She’d have to make an appointment to touch up her blond color. Her complexion could carry off the lightness. The only disadvantage she had was her skin; it was so delicate it showed every change in her mood by flushing or paling, but also—if she wasn’t careful—wrinkling like the poppy petals she swept off the patio all summer. Michelle perpetually slathered on creams and potions. Even with them she knew she had less than a decade left before the lines, a tiny network of wrinkles, kicked in. Oh, well. She still looked good.

  With the steam from the bath filling the room she could look into the reflective glass and see herself as she’d been at twenty-one, a decade ago, and it didn’t seem as if there had been a lot of change for the worse. Maybe her highlights were helped along just a little bit, but that wasn’t a bad thing. Okay, her waist had expanded from her pregnancies, but only by an inch or two. She peered at herself, her green eyes moving along her mirrored form. Her breasts … well, they had also expanded from the pregnancies, which was good—at least it made her waist look smaller. She pulled her sweater off and admired herself. Not bad. She allowed herself a smile. In an hour Frank would be home and admire her even more. She reached over her head to do up her hair—but just for now. Frank liked her hair down in bed. And she liked Frank to get what he wanted, as long as he wanted her.

  3

  In which Angela rings her father, rings the airport, and rings up a tab

  “Five months. I don’t know. Uh-uh. Because he told me.”

  Angela was crying, getting mucus and tears on the receiver of the phone in the vestibule of the Marblehead Yacht Club. Some man, leaving the restroom, gave her a look, then averted his eyes as if from an accident. Well, it was a wreck, or she was. She looked down at the Shreve box, still clutched in her right hand. She doubted she could open either of her fists again.

  “He told you?” her father was asking. “The cold Wasp son-of-a-bitch rat-bastid told you he’d been sleeping with someone else? And on your anniversary?”

  Angie couldn’t speak. She nodded—not that her father, four hundred miles south in Westchester County, could see her. But he heard her gurgle. “Brutal,” he said. “Where are you right this minute?” he snapped.

  “At a pay phone. At the club.” Now a woman walked past Angie, glanced at her, then actually turned back to stare. Her cold eyes seemed to say, “Don’t behave that way here.” She was about Reid’s mother’s age. She probably knew both Reid’s parents. Fuck her! Angela defiantly wiped at her eyes, then her nose, with her hand. The woman shook her head in disgust. Angie looked down. Her fingers were a mess, covered with eye makeup, but she managed to flip the bird at the old bat, who stalked off.

  “Angie, baby, didn’t I tell you never to trust a man with Roman numerals after his name?” her father asked. Oh God. Was she going to get a speech? Angie had tried to call her mother first, then her best friend Lisa, but had only gotten their machines.

  “Please, Daddy. No lectures. Not from you.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I can’t believe it. I want to kill him. What should I do?”

  “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay,” her father soothed.

  He was using the voice she trusted, the one she always obeyed. He’d used that voice when he had told her not to worry, she’d ace her SATs, the one that promised her she’d get into law school. Her daddy, despite his flaws, did love her.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “Here’s what you do. You hang up the phone. You walk out of that hellhole and get into a taxi. The last Delta shuttle to New York leaves from Logan in forty-five minutes. You can make it, easy. And I’ll be at the Marine Air Terminal to pick you up. Not one of my drivers. Me.”

  “I don’t know if I can make the plane. When I tell Reid I—”

  “You don’t have to tell that bastid a single fucking thing,” her father spat. “Don’t you go back to that table.”

  “You mean just … leave? But … I don’t even have my purse with me,” Angie said. She felt naked, helpless. But the thought of crossing that room, looking at Reid—impossible! While just leaving at least had … dignity. “I have no money, no I.D….”

  “I’ll have a prepaid ticket waiting at the counter,” her father told her. “They’ll ask you to tell them your mother’s maiden name and give your social security number.” Angie nodded.

  “But security. I.D. I … I don’t have anything.” That wasn’t technically true. She still clutched the Shreve box in her hand.

  “I’ll tell them how your grandma is dying and how close you were,” he said.

  “Nana? Okay.” She began to cry again. “Thank you, Daddy,” she said. “God, I’m so ashamed.”

  “Ashamed? What
have you got to be ashamed of?”

  “Being so fucking stupid,” Angie told him. “You never trusted him.”

  “Well, there is that,” he admitted. “Forget it. Women are all blind or else there’d be no human race. Just leave the bum. Let him sit there and wonder if you fell into the shitter and drowned.” Anthony Romazzano waited for a laugh but didn’t get one. “Okay,” her father said. “You promise me you’ll hang up and walk right out the door?”

  “Yes,” Angela agreed. She hung up the phone and turned herself around. She took a deep breath and pulled down on the cuffs of her sleeves as if the gesture built up enough courage for her to take the first step. She ought to go into the ladies room and clean up, but what difference would it make? She’d only cry some more. When she walked toward the exit door, she felt as if everyone was watching her and that they knew what had happened. She couldn’t believe she’d never see Reid again. But the fact was that she caught a last glimpse of her husband as she walked past the dining room door. He was calmly leaning back in his chair, looking out at the water. Why was it he always looked as if nothing bothered him? So pulled together?

  With all her built-up rage, Angie pushed hard on the club door and was blasted in the face with cold salt air. She waved to the first taxi in line. “Logan Airport, please. Delta shuttle.” Then she again burst into noisy tears.

  It wasn’t until they got to the Callahan Tunnel and its inevitable traffic that Angie realized she might miss the flight. But since she didn’t have a penny on her, she couldn’t even pay the driver. “Please hurry,” she said. He’d already looked at her once or twice in the rearview mirror.