by Corine Gantz
Her silence had a way of making him even more furious, but she didn’t know what to say, especially with the children in the room. The angrier he got, the more she became paralyzed.
“Please calm down,” she pleaded finally.
“Why should I?” he screamed.
She searched for words, a reason to give him. “Because I...I can’t handle it?” she finally said. Yes, it was formulated as a question, and in that question, she got her answer.
“What is it you can’t handle? Is it your basic role as my wife?” He lowered his voice and talked in her ear between clenched teeth, showing that he was enough in control of himself to spare the children. “If you can’t handle it, get yourself a fucking divorce. That’s what all your girlfriends are doing, sucking their husbands dry, those gold diggers. I don’t even know what you’re fucking waiting for.”
Divorce, that word. Here it was again, used in vain. It occurred to her finally that Mark was no longer talking about shirts, but about her turning him down for sex again earlier that morning. Her basic role as a wife.
Lia was standing near the front door, suddenly ready for school. A miracle. She had managed to comb her hair in front although the back of her head was still a tangled mess. She had found her backpack, her jacket even, and had put them on. Her little face was pale and tight. Simon’s wails were like a siren in the background. He was still fighting his way out of Tamara’s arms. Serena was wiping the granite kitchen counter with ardor.
“I’m getting the shirt,” Lola said, and a moment later, she and Lia darted toward the front door. Simon managed to break free and grab Lola’s leg again, so she picked him up, held him tight, and snatched her purse. The three of them sprinted toward her car while, still in the kitchen, Mark was thrashing shirts and hangers around the room.
Once in the car with the doors shut, an overwhelming sense of relief enveloped Lola. All she needed to do was get the shirt, drop it off at home, and then drive to school. It wouldn’t take more than ten minutes. Lia would get a tardy at school, but so be it.
She drove slowly along the driveway. I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out. Cleansing breath. Yoga breath. The worst part of the morning had passed. Tonight, Mark would probably act as though nothing had happened, or else he’d make a joke about it. The frustration over Lola avoiding sex would probably never be discussed. Mark would calmly explain what he was really angry about. He would give her the list of the ways in which she was failing him, and she would believe him. I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out. That night, they would have sex.
She swallowed the urge to cry. Serenity. She said the word silently. I have a choice about how I feel. I have a choice about my words, and I have a choice about my thoughts. She glanced back to look at the children in the rearview mirror. Lia was sitting tensely upright, her face pale, and her mouth tight. Simon was chewing on the sleeve of his sweatshirt and it was soaked. She turned onto Sunset Boulevard, accompanied by the creeping feeling that was with her everywhere lately and that she wasn’t able to name.
Althea allowed herself the apple that had been the ever-present center of her thoughts all morning long. She went to the bare kitchen where she had never prepared a thing but tea, and opened the refrigerator. Lemons, apples, baking soda. She took the apple to the coffee table, the only table in her apartment, and placed the apple on a large plate. She turned on the TV and, as she watched, cut the apple into quarters, then quarters of quarters with long, dexterous fingers that felt foreign to her. Over the next half hour, she chewed the apple slowly, making herself aware of the minutest sensation.
Later, on the way to her parents, she didn’t pass another soul. Half of Ohio had been battered by an ice storm, and the wind was merciless. She walked close to buildings for shelter as her long red hair battered her face like a whip. She was light enough to be carried away by the wind. Light and small, but never light enough or small enough. She would soon be twenty-five but exhaustion and anxiety made every step feel as though she was closer to eighty.
She stood in front of the door for a few seconds, and finally let herself in. Her dad’s glasses sat crooked on his face as he slept in front of the blaring TV. Althea wondered when her dad had started taking naps before lunch. Sounds were coming from the kitchen. Her mother, Pamela, was cooking. Althea gathered her strength and put her hands on the doorknob. In the kitchen, her mother’s body had the familiar stiffness as she moved around with heavy steps in a state of contained exasperation. Althea tried to not look at her thighs or her prominent stomach. The kiss she deposited on her mother’s cheek wasn’t acknowledged.
“What took you so damn long? Now we won’t be able to eat until one o’clock! Now the entire day will be off. We won’t be hungry at dinnertime!”
Conscious of the fact that she had deliberately arrived late, Althea didn’t ask why any of this mattered, since nothing would happen between lunch and dinner. Those were criminal thoughts, unacceptable thoughts. “I’m not that hungry at all. Maybe a small salad and we could eat right away?” she blabbered.
“I’m making Duck à la orange! It’s French. There is a sweet orange gravy, and I’m making a noodle pudding to go with it.” She gave her daughter a piercing look, her face like a permanent warning. “Your favorite.”
By coming over only once a week, Althea deprived her mother of her only joy, which was to feed her. “Thanks, Mom.” she said, and wondered how she would swallow that thing.
“Peel these oranges, will you.”
Althea curled up on a kitchen chair, took the sharp knife her mother handed her, and began cutting a shallow groove in the peel around each orange. She detached each peel with her thumb and laid it on the table, one orange peel spiral after another, and racked her brain for something interesting to say. “Sandra told me she overheard I wouldn’t receive a bonus this year. Anything she can say to upset me.”
“Sandra? Is that the girl with the gorgeous skin?” her mom asked.
“That’s the girl who’s jealous of me, you know, because of her obesity.”
Pamela grabbed the orange peels from the table and dumped them into the trashcan. Althea’s mind raced, madly searching for what in that story had displeased her mother. She handed Pamela the last peeled orange and laid both hands flat on the kitchen table, the knife set vertically between her hands. There had been no such exchange with Sandra; in fact, she had never spoken to her in five years at the company. Sandra was just a person in a cubicle. Althea was here to give her mother a reason for living by swallowing her food and bringing her the exterior world. But she felt so disconnected from the exterior world herself that she had to make things up as she went or there would truly be no point in her coming here week after week. “Sandra has no self-control with food. It’s tragic!” she said.
“But she has such a lovely face!” Her mom always sided against her, defending perfect strangers.
“She’s a backstabber,” Althea protested weakly.
“Everyone is a backstabber to you.”
Pamela dipped the raw duck into a casserole where margarine and oil had begun to bubble up and turn brown. Grease particles exploded around the stove. Althea recoiled in her chair.
“How’s that ex of yours behaving these days?” Pamela said. “He could be spreading nasty rumors about you.”
“Tom was a loser. You were so right about him.”
“I told you it wouldn’t last,” her mom said, delighted.
It was true that pretend-Tom had to be dumped. It was getting too pretend-serious, and Althea was running out of plot for that character. The break up gave her an excuse to skip a few visits to her parents while she grieved the imaginary relationship. Those few weeks without the dread of the parental visit had been a relief. She had felt lighter at first, but then heavier than ever when she realized her parents did not feel the urge to call or visit her. Were they too depressed, too deadened or too selfish to bother themselves with her wellbeing? For as long as she could remember, it had been her job t
o worry about theirs.
At lunch, Althea devoured everything and flooded her mom with the required compliments about her cooking. Twice during lunch, Althea excused herself and went to the bathroom to vomit. When she got back to the table, flushed, neither parents lifted their gazes from the TV set.
Chapter 4
If Annie rented out three rooms, she’d make enough to cover all her expenses. Renting out the fourth room would be gravy. It solved so many problems, it was a thing of beauty. No need to sell the house, no need to move, no need to work, no need to go back to school. And like Lucas would probably say—and she could hear him from here—no need to go out of the house ever again. Her plan would keep her financially afloat, and terrifyingly busy, which was the name of the game. As a bonus, the plan would freak Lucas out. A thing of beauty indeed. The plan wasn’t without a glitch. She would be forced to deal with actual people. Actual people invading her space. That nagging thought kept buzzing about her head but she waved it away angrily like she would a mosquito.
In the kitchen, she adjusted the angles of the grow lights over the seedlings. Her chest fluttered with anxiety, her brain on overdrive. Could this be done? It had to be done. Had to. In her head, she rehearsed what she would tell Lucas. Trying to virtually convince him helped her convince herself. The fact that he would be against it fueled her determination. There would be people, yes, people. Strangers, in her home. Didn’t she used to be gregarious? What had changed? Was this the new her? The permanent her? Strangers would be fine. Just fine.
The first miniature tomato leaves were unfolding already. She had grown vegetables even when Johnny was alive. She liked to get her hands in the dirt, a primeval compulsion of hers she had not discovered until adulthood. Johnny had loved to poke fun at her ordering of rare seeds in the dead of winter, at her schlepping of store-bought soil and organic fertilizer. Later, in the summer, he’d say, “Could you pass the fifty euro tomato slices please.”
Growing the seedlings was her way of fighting winter blues. Tomatoes, especially, gave her a sense of hope. Tomatoes meant summer, sunlight, heat, the children home from school for nearly three months. She clipped a few leaves with her nails. The scent of tomato leaves suddenly threw her back to a few summers ago, her on her knees picking tomatoes in the garden. She was tired, hot, and dirty from the gardening but loving it, loving being eight months pregnant, with two little kids running around, loving living in France in her beautiful house, but furious at Johnny for being gone all the time, for not helping more. Johnny had been nearly impossible to fight with. He was the kind of man who could charm you out of wanting to kill him. But that day, she had had it. He was gone on a seminar for the weekend, again. This combined with all the evenings when he didn’t come back from work until late in the night. She was tired of being a single mom and tired of his excuses. Yet she remembered her anger at him transforming to joy when he surprised her by arriving in the garden dressed in a white cotton shirt and cream linen pants.
“I remember you,” she had said. “You’re my husband, the one supposed to be at a seminar all weekend.”
“I’m blowing it off.”
“You are?”
“I felt like being with you.”
Oh those sweet words. But not this time. No, this time she was mad. “How come you’re dressed so fancy? You look suspiciously gorgeous.”
Johnny had lifted her, taken her in his arms, tipped her backwards and planted a kiss on her lips. “You’re the gorgeous one.”
She had tilted her neck back to be kissed there and whined. “I’m fat.”
Johnny whispered in her neck. “You’re pregnant. What? Didn’t anyone tell you?”
“Pregnant? I thought it was the damned French food,” she had moaned. “I hate the French.”
He puts his hands all over her. “I like to have yummy things to hold on to.”
In the light of her bio bulbs, Annie shivered. She cleaned up the dirt around the pots, added the emulsion of fish and kelp, and wiped her hands on her jeans. Her fat jeans, without the excuse of being pregnant. She wasn’t exactly morbidly obese; maybe thirty pounds over her ideal weight, but even her ideal weight was unacceptably plump by Parisian standard. The chance of her finding someone, a man, so to speak, who’d be into her the way she looked, was, unlike her, pretty slim. Not that she was looking. Besides, this was Paris. Every woman out here was more put-together, more flirtatious, and more self-confident than she was.
She contemplated the neat little rows of seedlings. At least something in this kitchen was growing in height rather than width. These days, she felt a different kind of kinship with her house: she identified with it. Like her house, she badly needed some T.L.C. Like her house, it required just the right kind of person to see the beauty within. Like her house, she appeared to stand strong, but cracks were appearing everywhere. Like her house, it felt that just below the surface, everything could erupt or unravel without notice.
Ten years into the remodel, the house was greatly improved, livable, full of charm, but still falling apart at the seams in too many places. Even the plumbing was antique, though not in the noble sense of the word. But Annie didn’t mind the imperfections. Her house was like a demanding child, and she was going to love that child, take care of that child and above all else, accept it just the way it was, leaky plumbing and all.
The question was: would her tenants share her taste for charm and whimsy over modern comfort? Her decision to not rent rooms to French people had been immediate. She’d had enough of their cigarettes, and their complaints. Complaining in France, as she had discovered over the years, had nothing to do with negativity. Au contraire, it was the sign of a discriminating mind. Complaining was an art form here. Her house was her turf, and she intended to remain the complainer En Chef. Not only that, but a French or even a European tenant would have all those annoying rights, whereas she would have no problem kicking out a fellow American if things didn’t work out. And because of the language, renting out rooms to Americans was the logical thing to do.
She had feverishly typed numbers on her calculator all morning. She needed three tenants to make the money work. She had four rooms she could rent out, but could do with three tenants. She was also sure of one other thing. They had to be women. She wasn’t sure she liked women strangers so much better than men strangers, but women felt safer as far as having them under her roof and in contact with her boys. She had boasted to Johnny once, “I can beat the shit out of any woman, if need be.”
“Or given the opportunity,” he had suggested.
So maybe she had been antisocial even before Johnny was gone? Had she been less angry then? Her mind was teeming with images of perfect tenants. Why did they all look like herself, plump, in their late thirties, dowdily dressed, hair troll-like? The ideal woman would be single, of course. Not an adventurer. Maybe she had a child. The thought of additional children in her home reassured her. Kids running around, that was the salt of the earth. In her head, she was composing an ad, the kind of ad that would appeal to just the right person. A woman in need was something she could wrap her mind around. Not someone too needy, but someone vulnerable. Someone gentle. There had to be women out there looking for a chance to start fresh, and not everyone was the fighter that she was.
She would open her home, help them out. It would keep her busy, and if it all worked out, this spring, her tomato seedlings would find their home in the backyard again. But first, she had to face Lucas.
“Well, of course this is indeed the worst idea I have ever heard,” Lucas said. “Une très mauvaise idée.” He coughed, took out a handkerchief and dabbed his eyes. A real-life handkerchief, Annie wondered in amazement. Lucas recouped, put on his reading glasses and ceremonially opened his menu. “I’m told the braised foie gras is divine,” he said.
They were sitting at one of the most sought-after tables at Gourmet des Ternes, a restaurant as expensive as it was exclusive, and one of the perks of having Lucas as a friend. At the next table, q
uintessentially chic Parisian women chatted as they ate. Annie stared down at her white blouse for stains and realized the last wash had shrunken it a bit and her boobs were threatening to burst out. They very well might before the end of the meal. The waiter took their order with the manner of a funeral director. Lucas matched his tone, prompting Annie to stuff her mouth with too much bread. When the waiter left, she spoke with her mouth full. “For months now, you’ve been telling me I need to do something about my financial situation, and now that I do, you’re pissed.”
Lucas stooped as though he carried France’s national debt on his shoulders. “I said do something. Not do anything. Strangers are going to invade our—your life, and once they’re here, living here, you won’t have any way to get rid of them.”
Annie swallowed her bread and held her chin high. “I’ll select them very carefully.”
“On the phone? Carefully on the phone?”
“I can tell a lot about people on the phone. I’m pretty perceptive.”
Lucas shrugged for the tenth time in the conversation; a very French expression of disapproval combined with exasperation, adding to that shrug a grunt and an eye roll for added weight.
“I am. Don’t patronize me.”
“C’est une très mauvaise idée,” Lucas said, almost desperately.
The appetizers arrived, crudités for him, and for her, foie gras and another half a pound on each thigh. She watched Lucas eat and had to hide a smile. Lucas was slightly inbred, but in a good way. He wasn’t bad looking at all. He had style, definitely. He was tall, lanky, and awfully proper. On paper, he was a catch, but he gave out that subtle vibe, an interesting mix of womanizer and gay-in-the-closet, a type found a lot in Paris.
