Range of Motion

by Elizabeth Berg

  I opened the medicine chest to look for Jay’s deodorant. “It’s not there,” Sarah said. “She threw it away. She didn’t like it.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. And then I ran down the hall to look for Amy, found her sitting on her bed, pulling her socks on. “Amy!” I said. “Did you eat deodorant?”

  “No!” she said. And then, spying Sarah behind me, “Fine, I just tasted it.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” I yelled. “It’s probably poisonous!” Amy’s eyes widened. I ran into my room to call poison control, and the two of them ran after me, sat on my bed on either side of me.

  The calm but concerned woman who answered wanted to know how long ago Amy had eaten the deodorant. “When did you eat it?” I asked her, my hand over the receiver. My towel opened and fell, and I pulled it back up. I was thinking, What is the fastest thing to put on so I can get her to the hospital?

  Amy looked at me, blinked. “Huh?”

  “How long ago did you eat it? Quick!”

  She frowned, thinking.

  “It doesn’t have to be exact,” I said. “About when? Early this morning? Just a few minutes ago?”

  “No,” she said. “It was … maybe was it Tuesday?”

  “It was last week, Mom,” Sarah said.

  I told the person on the phone that it was apparently a number of days ago and that Amy had only tasted it. The woman said she wouldn’t worry about it. Right, I thought. As if I could prevent myself from thinking that Amy would suffer some unique kind of damage at some point in her life that would be all my fault. Once I was in the drugstore picking up a few things and when I got to the register to pay for them there was a man in front of me who’d seated his little girl, maybe two years old, on the counter directly before him. He was offering her nearly constant sips from a huge cup of water, smiling at her, but also crying, lifting his glasses to wipe tears away. Once when she took a particularly big drink, the man said, “Oh, that’s good, honey, that’s so good,” and he kissed her cheek tenderly, once, twice, three times. The pharmacist came up and gave him a plastic bag, saying, “Here. You’re going to need this.” Then the pharmacist told me to come to his register, I could pay for my things there. “Is this an Ipecac situation?” I asked quietly. “Yeah,” the pharmacist said. “Pretty soon that little girl is going to be real unhappy with her daddy. She’s going to be throwing up like crazy.” He told me how the man and his daughter had been out on a walk and she had eaten some berries and the father hadn’t known what they were. So he’d called the poison control center and they’d told him to get his daughter to throw up and then bring the stuff in to them so they could look at it. I thought, that little girl won’t be mad at her daddy. When she’s done throwing up, she’ll put her small arms around his neck and lay her head against his chest for comfort and that will make him feel even worse than he already does. He’ll be looking at the back of her pink dress, at her little shoes bumping into his stomach; he will be caressing her silky hair, and he will be thinking, Oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I am too careless ever to have had you. I’d wanted to tell that man, “Listen here, don’t you worry. I’ve had my kids do things like that and nothing ever happened. They’re fine.” Only my kids had never done anything like that. Until Amy ate Ban. The poison control center asked me for my name and address and they sent me a lot of information about how to be careful in the future. Don’t let your kids eat poinsettias. That kind of stuff. Well, I’ll try. I was relieved they hadn’t sent someone to arrest me.

  I go downstairs and turn on the kitchen light, notice that a fluorescent bulb is out. I have no idea what kind it is or how to change it. I start to get mad at Jay, then let it go. This happens sometimes, my getting mad at him. I envision him as though he’s enjoying himself, lying in bed, having his back rubbed a few times a day by a variety of women, not having to clean behind the toilet or fill the car up with gas or listen to the kids fight.

  I put some water in the tea kettle, go to sit at the kitchen table. And then I hear a sound, coming from outside. It’s someone walking around on the porch. I get up, feel goose-flesh forming on my arms, put my hand to my throat. I can call Alice and Ed. I can call 911. I wait, paralyzed, and then the teapot whistles. I rush to shut the burner off, then stand there. It’s quiet now. My chest hurts. I get the biggest butcher knife I own and tiptoe out into the dark living room. I go over to the window, look through it, then breathe out my relief. It’s only Alice. I see her sitting hunched over on the top step. She’s smoking a cigarette, her elbows on her knees. I go to get my tea, make her a cup too. “Sleepytime,” it’s called. Very funny. My heart rate must be 140.

  She turns around, surprised, when I open the door. “Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”

  I hand her a mug, and she nods her thanks. “You didn’t wake me,” I tell her. “I was up. Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me either. Obviously.”

  “Don’t you hate it when that happens?”

  She puts out her cigarette, shakes her head. “No. I always feel like there’s a reason. I never feel tired the next day. I just go with it—get up for a while, then go back to bed. My dad was like that. I think he got up almost every night, just took stock of things, then went back to sleep. I liked that he did that. It made me feel safe. Plus I was always sort of hoping he was thinking of me, reviewing my excellent qualities, thinking how lucky he was that he had me and what he would like to buy me.”

  “He was lucky to have you,” I say. “Didn’t he ever tell you that?”

  She takes a sip of tea, looks up at me. “Yes. He told me that a lot. That’s what accounts for my extremely good mental health. For my niceness. Aren’t I nice, Lainey?” She pats the place beside her.

  I sit down. I’m not sure about the edge I’ve just heard in her voice. I suppose she might be a little angry at me by now, tired of giving. Even in the best of friendships and even under the most dire circumstances, the One will at some point get tired of giving to the Other. She will sigh behind her sympathy, clench her fists behind her back. I understand that. “You must be about worn out, helping me,” I say.

  “It’s not that,” Alice says. She looks over at me. “It’s not.”

  “Okay.”

  I wait, but she doesn’t offer me more. I drink my tea, survey the line of black trees along our block. The leaves have come out a little more, you can see some progress every day now. It’s such a forgiving time. There’s something vaguely religious about it. Soon the trees will meet in the middle of the street, forming a high canopy, which is another good thing about living here. On a hot summer day, you turn down our street and feel like you’re entering a cool, green tunnel. And though you know it’s not true, you believe no one else has this.

  “You know, Alice,” I say, “I’m positive Jay’s going to wake up. I know it. It’s just a matter of time. And when he does, I’m going away. I’m going on vacation. To Bermuda. And he can just stay home and try to do everything, like I’m doing now. He can see how he likes it.”

  Alice stares straight ahead, nodding. “Yeah. Be gone a good month or so. Don’t call, either.”

  “Oh, I’m not. I’m not going to call or send a postcard or one thing. He can just suffer.”

  “Right.”

  It is quiet then, and the two of us sit and hold our mugs, thinking our own thoughts. There’s a very bright moon, a black cloud across it that looks like a floating negligee. Werewolf moon. Black-magic moon. I feel a slight breeze move up under my nightgown and I close my legs together, pull the fabric tighter around me, then push my face into my lap. “I can’t think that he’s not going to come back.” My voice is muffled like we’re playing a game. Like I’m counting to one hundred before I can find anyone. “I have to act like there’s no question that he’s coming back.”

  “I know, Lainey,” she says quietly. “I know that.”

  I raise my head, look at her. “So that’s what I do sometimes, I make up these fantasies, think about punishing him. I think about re
venge! It’s so stupid!”

  “It’s not stupid,” Alice says. “I understand. I think anyone would. You need relief from pain. Anger’s good. Anger works. Be angry. He won’t know. You’re not hurting him.”

  I’m not so sure. I wonder sometimes if he’s lying there thinking, “Lainey, don’t. I can’t help it.”

  Alice puts her arm across my shoulders and squeezes a little. I have a vision, suddenly, of the two of us, as though my eyes have left my body to look down on earthbound figures casting moon shadows and sitting in their nightgowns on the wooden front steps of a house that has seen hundreds of lives come and go and still offers no comment. It’s one of those eerie times of seeing myself from both the inside and out; a breathless moment, like catching a floater on your eye the right way, so that it holds still, and you can look at it. Your eye looks at your eye from behind itself and you wonder what it is you’re seeing.

  The bushes rustle and Maggie comes out, shakes herself off, then comes up to Alice and noses at her elbow. Alice raises her arm slightly and Maggie crawls onto her lap, settles down to grieve with us, her chin on her paws. Alice scratches behind her ears, looks at me and shrugs. “What can I say?” She smiles. “She’s a woman dog.”

  I scratch Maggie under her chin. She closes her eyes halfway, raises her chin higher. “Doesn’t she look like Queen Elizabeth when she does that?” Alice asks.

  “How come you couldn’t sleep?” I ask. “What were you thinking about?”

  She stops smiling, sighs. “You really want to know?”

  “Sure.”

  “I haven’t told you ’cause … Well, you know. You’ve been busy. But I think Ed’s … involved.”

  “Oh, Alice. Really?”

  She shrugs.

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, you know. Believe me. You know.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  I wait.

  “It’ll go away. It’s happened before.”

  “Wow,” I say stupidly. And then, “I had no idea.”

  “Well. When you look like me …”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “I guess I mean that’s a stupid reason, if that’s the reason. And it’s not okay, Alice.”

  “You don’t need to get angry on my account, Lainey.”

  I’m confused, a little hurt.

  “It’s an accommodation I make. It’s just that when a new one starts … Listen. He loves me. I know that. But sometimes a pretty face comes along and he can’t help himself. There are such things as open marriages, you know. We have an open marriage. Only we don’t talk about it.”

  “So do you—?”

  “No. I don’t.” She drains her cup, hands it back to me. “Come on, Lainey. I know what the deal is. I’m grateful to have what I do.”

  “Alice, this doesn’t fit. I just don’t see you putting up with this.”

  “You should lower your voice. You’ll wake everybody up.”

  I look back at the house, then whisper, “I don’t want this to be true, Alice. I think you deserve better than this.”

  She smiles. “Well.”

  “I do!”

  “Lainey. The world is very different from the way you wish it were. The way you seem to pretend it is.”

  I suppose it is. Once I cut an article from the newspaper and kept it on the refrigerator for almost a year. Jay asked me why I saved it and I told him it was because the article was about an ice-cream truck man, a forty-seven-year-old guy who drove around neighborhoods in the summer, playing pied-piper songs from his truck and selling ice cream to children who came running up to him in their pajamas; and that’s all it was about. There was no violent, surprise ending. That’s all it was about. I liked thinking about that man, taking a slow turn onto a wide neighborhood street. I made the sky a faint purple color, dusk. I gave the driver a nicely trimmed mustache, a T-shirt that smelled like detergent. I gave the children limp dollar bills that folded over in their hands. I had them line up crooked, so that each could see what the other got. I had parents watching from the doorways, the light behind them a deep yellow.

  I swallow, hunch over into myself, embarrassed by my usual inability to be with the program.

  “Guess what I saw today?” Alice says.

  “What?” I ask miserably.

  “I was at a stoplight and this guy pulls up to me, his radio’s playing really loud, and he’s seat-dancing, you know, and singing along.”

  I straighten up. “I love that. I love when you see people doing that.”

  “Oh, but this was even better than usual. The guy pulls down the rearview mirror and checks out his hair, spits on his fingers a little to get the sides pushed back right. And then he starts wiping off his teeth with his forearm!”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he did! He was brushing his teeth with his arm!”

  “Huh! Hot date, maybe.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” She holds her own arm up, rubs it across her teeth. “It tastes salty,” she says. “Hairy. I think I’ll stick with Pepsodent.”

  “Right. Stick with Pepsodent,” I say. I want to add that there are some things she should not stick with, however.

  When we finish our tea, I go into the house and head upstairs. I climb into bed, think about how you never quite know what really goes on in someone else’s house, even when you share a common wall. Which of course we all do. I wonder if Alice has wanted to tell me this before, if she has sat alone in her living room, head in her hands, hurting, while I vacuumed or raided the refrigerator to take a bite of the Milky Way I keep hidden in the baking-soda box. I think about Ed with another woman while Alice is at home leafing through cookbooks, looking for something interesting to make for dinner. She stays home to raise Timothy, to make salad dressing from scratch; Ed whispers into the ear of another woman, who giggles and then says through her pouty, glossed lips, “Oh, we’re bad, aren’t we?” Life is so unfair, I’m thinking. And then I laugh. As if I didn’t know that.

  I know I have a hard time dealing with real life. I know I glorify the past. Alice calls me Nostalgia Woman. I say, What about you, you’re not so modern, you don’t even work. She says that has nothing to do with it; she doesn’t wish she lived fifty years ago. Well, I can’t help it. Open marriage. Isn’t that liberating, one person being given permission to break the other’s heart. I think it was better when promises were kept. When people meant what they said, or at least tried to. I’ll take the guys in bow ties working in the gas stations over sullen men slumped in chairs behind bullet-proof glass, who take your money with a kind of hatred.

  The next day, when the kids are in school, I go to the grocery store with Alice. I need everything, so we go to the huge Super Save, which has what seems to be a drugstore built into the middle of it. I throw Q-Tips into my cart, then wait for Alice, who is standing in front of the boxes of hair dye. She picks one up, puts it down, picks up another, puts that down. “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Just looking.”

  “Are you going to dye your hair?”

  “I might.”

  “What for?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  I want to ask her if she’s out of her mind. I want to tell her that instead of dyeing her hair she should ask him to change. Instead, I pick up the ash blond, hold it up to the side of her head. “How about this one?”

  “No, not blond,” Alice says. “I’m sure she’s blond.”

  “Right. You’re probably right.”

  Alice looks at my hair. “No offense.”

  “None taken. Mine’s dirty blond, anyway.”

  Alice picks up a box with an auburn-haired model on the front. “You think?”

  I look at the model. She is wearing a blue scarf around her perfect neck, smiling with her perfect mouth open to reveal perfect teeth. She would look quite lovely bald. “Yeah,” I say. “That’s the one.”

  Alice
puts the dye in her cart next to the Cheerios, walks away too nonchalantly. Later, when I’ve gone to see Jay, I bet I know exactly what she’ll do. She’ll buy gorgeous underwear, a new nightgown not made for cold nights. I look at Alice’s straight back moving away from me, sigh quietly. It happens to the best of us.

  In front of the chicken bin, I tell Alice about a friend of mine who dyed her hair a different color every week. “It was fun,” I say. “I always kind of admired her, playing around like that.” I throw a package of drumsticks in my cart. “That girl is the same one who used her vagina to perfume herself.” An older woman standing next to us looks up, moves away.

  “She used what?” Alice says.

  “Didn’t I tell you about her? She stuck her fingers in her vagina and then rubbed the stuff behind her ears. She said it made the men crazy.”

  “That is so disgusting,” Alice says.

  “I know.”

  “God!”

  “I know.”

  “Did you try it?” she asks.

  “Of course.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Not for me.”

  Alice looks over both of our carts. “Are you done?”

  “Done enough.” I hardly ever finish at the grocery store anymore.

  When I get home that night, Alice comes over with a bag from Victoria’s Secret. “Nice,” I say. Over and over again. “Nice.”

  Saturday afternoon, Alice and Timothy come to the playground with us. Timothy swings listlessly, his forehead wrinkled, deeply engrossed in thought. Amy swings beside him, seeing, with each forward thrust, how far she can lean back. The idea is that her ponytail will make a design in the dirt. Sarah, who has declared herself too old for playgrounds—and is—pouts on the bench farthest away from us. She has brought a book, but she is ignoring it for the time being, focusing instead on communicating her silent anger.

  “She’s getting so moody,” I tell Alice. “She’s too young for PMS isn’t she?”

  “Who knows? Probably not.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s something else. I feel like she’s begun this pull away from me. I know she has to do it, but it seems too soon. I’m worried that Jay’s accident is making for all this unexpected fallout.”