Ordinary Hazards

by Anna Bruno

“What’d you do?” I think about Pamela Randolph Walsh and all those police cars in her driveway.

  “I ran all the way back to the house. I didn’t stop to catch my breath. I yelled, ‘Daddy, they found us. Daddy, Daddy, they found our weed patch.’ ”

  Cal must have explained to her that what they were doing was illegal and that at some point the police might come for them. Summer knows things little girls shouldn’t know, and at the same time, she is perfectly innocent and childlike: Cal’s little girl.

  “What happened?”

  “We put all the weed into trash bags as fast as we could. Then we took the trash bags out to the cans.”

  “Why?”

  “Daddy said maybe they wouldn’t look there.” She looks at her paper, not me, when she talks. Using her green crayon, she colors in more marijuana leaves. The plant is huge now, bigger than the pony.

  “But they did look there,” I say.

  “Yeah, one of the cops put Daddy in handcuffs, and then another cop took me into the living room and said I shouldn’t be afraid. I didn’t like the way he looked at me. He eyeballed my tangles—I hadn’t combed my hair that morning. I wanted to keep my tangles. I yelled, ‘I ain’t afraid of no cops.’ ” She stops, looks up at me, and corrects herself. “I should have said, ‘I’m not afraid of cops.’ ”

  I nod. “Very good.”

  “Then I ran back into the kitchen where they were talking to Daddy, and he told me to get the duffel bag from the hall closet.” She continues, “I knew where it was already, back behind all my toys.”

  “What was in the bag?”

  “Twelve thousand dollars.” She says this matter-of-factly, like an adult.

  “Cash?”

  “Yep, the bag of Benjamins.” By the way she says it, I can tell that’s what Cal called it. “Daddy said, ‘I’ll be back in two hours.’ Then the cops took him.”

  “Was he?”

  “One hour and forty-eight minutes,” she says, mimicking the rotation of a clock’s hands with her finger in the air. “I timed him on the oven clock.”

  “So they didn’t arrest him?” It occurs to me as I ask a little kid this question that they did arrest him but it went away. The twelve grand was to pay off the cops and the prosecutor and the judge and maybe several other people in the county. Twelve grand, and poof, the whole thing never happened. Just like that. Small-town liberty.

  “Now we’re on the up and up,” she says. This too is one of Cal’s expressions.

  My conversation with Summer reaffirms my plan to get rid of Yag. I convince myself that this business with the Wrestler is dangerous, that the way he treats women is inexcusable, and that he has brought an element into The Final Final that none of us, least of all Summer, wants or needs.

  I ask her what she wants to be when she grows up and she says she’s not sure, maybe a veterinarian. I tell her that’s a good idea but she should keep her options open, apply to colleges someplace other than the U., go to New York or Boston, make the big bucks. She has ambition, I can see. The hard part will be pulling herself away from her father.

  My eye catches Jimmy and Yag at the bar, chatting with Amelia. Sliding off the chair, I whisper to Summer, “I need to use the loo.” She asks what that is, and I tell her it’s British for toilet, to which she giggles.

  Then I slip the wallet into Yag’s jacket, which hangs on a stool near the pool table drying out, and make a beeline for the bathroom. I empty my bladder, wash my hands, and take a long, hard look at myself in the mirror. There’s nothing to do now but wait.

  * * *

  RIGHT UP UNTIL LUCAS and I started trying to get pregnant, I’d spent all my sexually active years trying not to get pregnant, which I defined as success. The minute I went off the pill, that experience of success shifted to an experience of failure. Weird, right? One day, not getting pregnant is success and then, wham bam, it’s failure, just like that. And my sense of failure was nagging and persistent because it hit me every month like clockwork.

  It was during one of these monthly mental reckonings that Lucas and I went to a party at Samantha’s house. The occasion was her daughter’s first birthday.

  Lucas and I were among only a few childless couples at the party. Samantha had a full bar for the adults but that didn’t make the party fun. At one point I found myself separated from Lucas, in a circle of moms. After each of them swapped stories of the endearing mischievous acts committed by their precious children—throwing up on the Persian rug, eating an entire box of macarons carried home from Ladurée in Paris, refusing to put on clothes—I smiled knowingly and said, “Sounds like my Addie!”

  Sienna, the neurotic, bake-sale tyrant with the hungry-spirit kid, replied, “Oh, you must be relieved to have a babysitter today.”

  And I said, “We just leave her home alone. It’s no big deal.”

  After letting the joke linger for less than a minute, Samantha informed her, “Addie’s a dog.” I couldn’t tell if Sienna was offended by the joke or by the comparison between a dog and her four-year-old. Either way, she didn’t talk to me for the rest of the party.

  I asked Samantha if I could borrow a charger because my phone needed juice. When she pulled it out of the odds-and-ends drawer in her kitchen, I glimpsed a roll of “I voted” stickers. She caught me looking and said, “Oh, these? I keep them on hand in case I don’t have time to vote. It’s no big deal. Everybody does it. Here, take ten.” Momentarily, I considered declining but it occurred to me that I could stick them to my chest on random Tuesdays and really cause a stir with the politically informed set. I shoved them into my wallet and walked away to plug in my phone. That’s when I noticed: all the outlets near the floor were covered with childproof guards. Samantha’s prodigious use of outlet guards would come to haunt me later, when I had a child of my own. I would look at my unguarded outlets as if they had eyes watching me, each outlet with two sockets: four eyes for every outlet multiplied by, say, three outlets in every room, not to mention the six-outlet power strip behind the TV. A twelve-eyed power strip can register a lot of judgment all at once. I never did anything about it, though, because I thought, rationally, Electrocution by outlet is statistically very unlikely.

  Samantha’s house is a Pottery Barn house. All the walls are some shade of taupe, and the tan chairs are topped with perfectly placed, color-accented throw blankets. A level-five finished house.

  There are five levels of drywall finishes. Most people think of walls as smooth and perfect, or old and cracked, but in the end, they think a wall is a wall. This implies that drywall guys are always working to level five, which means they’ve applied three layers of joint compound to the tape and screws, they’ve sanded, and then they’ve applied a skim coat. In reality, level five is not the default; it’s the exception. For one thing, there’s plenty of wall that gets covered up—by tile, by wainscot paneling, by cabinets, et cetera. Does the wall need to be mirror smooth if it’s covered floor to ceiling? And most people don’t have level-five finishes in their basements and garages. No one notices or cares. Lucas probably notices, I suppose. He probably walks around judging everyone’s walls.

  Occasionally, we’d go out to eat or walk into a store and he’d look around with pride and say, “I did these walls,” and I’d say, “Wow, smooth.” But we had plenty of surface area in our own house that wasn’t level five, and Lucas was perfectly fine with that.

  Lucas and I assigned levels, one through five, to a variety of situations. The categorizations were unscientific but usually pretty accurate. Our yard, with all those weeds, was level-one manicured, in reference to which Lucas once said, “We all experience self-loathing to some degree.” Level two was Spanish rice made by throwing everything in the rice cooker at once: mushy, edible but not delicious. The rug under our coffee table was level-three clean—it looked okay because Lucas loved vacuuming but if you put your nose right up to it, you could smell dog. Antolini’s served level-four pasta, which was always delicious but the plating was imp
erfect, and the noodles weren’t always al dente. My tits, according to Lucas, were level five, which meant he adored me. Sometimes when we got drunk, we’d have meta conversations about our conversations reaching level six, but level six didn’t really exist—there’s nothing smoother than smooth—even if we were several whiskeys deep.

  There was something off in the image of Lucas drinking a beer in Samantha’s level-five house—a dead space, lacking cosmetic flaws—his posture stiff, altered to match his surroundings, and beyond posture, his facial expression, uneasy and tight, a stress vein appearing just above his temple. He didn’t belong in a place like this: a beautiful flawed man inhabiting a taupe consumer world.

  On our way to the car, I informed Lucas that if we were lucky enough to have a child, I would not turn into Samantha or Sienna. I would not be that kind of mother. I would be more like a French mother—I’d raise my kid like the little adult I already wanted him to be, my enfant sauvage, born from my womb with ingenuity and a taste for aged cheese.

  * * *

  ANOTHER TEXT FROM SAMANTHA flashes across my phone: Where are you? I’m at your apartment.

  I reply: Why are you at my apartment?

  Picking you up!

  I’m not home.

  The Final Final is only eight blocks from my place but Samantha won’t think to look for me here. She’d never suspect I spend all my free time at a townie bar (I’m good at hiding my transgressions), and anyway, as far as she knows, this is Lucas’s bar, always was.

  Outside, the sky remains open. Through the darkened front window, I watch the rain come down in torrents. Thunder cracks. I’m not leaving the bar anytime soon. Fancy Pete calls the storm a “doozy.” We are all happy to be in this familiar place, comfortable and dry, drunk or well on our way to it, but we know we’ll have to leave after last call. God willing, the storm will be long over by then.

  I google Elisa Monfils. Her website says she’s the Henry Ford of human productivity. I’m not sure what that means but I’m embarrassed for her. A free app is available for download. It’s called “Unstuck.” The description makes it sound like a fertility app but instead of tracking your cycle, basal body temperature, and cervical fluid, it tracks your stuck-ness: procrastination, negative thinking, and emotional consumption. Sounds like a new way to procrastinate. No thank you.

  If the U. invited her to speak, we’ve sunk to a new low in scholarship. She is based in Boston, which is ground zero for the corporate psychobabble that passes for sociology these days. It doesn’t surprise me that she knows Grace.

  Grace has a husband and two kids: a life outside of work filled with soccer games and family dinners, and doing whatever parents these days do to get their kids into Ivy League schools. She is one of those people who get by on four hours of sleep. A live-in nanny cooks and cleans. Grace’s strategy is to outsource all tasks that aren’t “touchstone moments.” Whether she does them, or pays to have them done, correlates to the impact on the development of her kids. Personal grooming, oversight of chores, some chauffeuring—touchstone; laundry, bathroom scrubbing, cooking—not touchstone. She eats with her family but doesn’t cook for her family. Grace is the kind of perfect I find exhausting, and though I wonder if growing up in her shadow will fuck up her kids in incalculable ways, I tip my hat to her. I really do.

  * * *

  THIS IS THE MOMENT when I’ve had enough to know I will be hungover tomorrow but not so much that I don’t care. I’ve always been able to hold my liquor. I don’t slur words. Anger has never been a problem. Apathy, maybe. In fact, my personality generally gets better after several drinks. In business school, we all took the Myers-Briggs, and I found out I’m a “contained extrovert.” After a few drinks, I’m just an extrovert.

  But getting drunk isn’t all fields of poppies. The flip side of a good binge is a hard hangover. And kidneys be damned, ibuprofen has become my oh-God-make-it-stop drug of choice in my thirties. Gone are the days when all it took was a greasy breakfast and a hard run.

  In the company of friends, revelry usually overshadows any accounting for tomorrow. But right now, I’m paying attention. And my anticipation of a hangover is almost physical. My body and mind feel good, comfortable and loose, a little absent, perhaps, but there is this barely noticeable anticipation of sickness, a physical premonition, as if my mind is telling my body, Here’s an itty-bitty taste of tomorrow. It is the physiological equivalent of receiving a text that reads, Let’s talk about this later.

  I need to switch to water for a minute, so I catch Amelia’s eye.

  She is a one-person dish-washing assembly line. There are three sinks behind the bar. Actually, they’re behind and under the bar so I can’t really see them, but I see her hands moving in and out. The Final Final also has a star sink, where Amelia can press a glass, rim down, into a rinser, which shoots up water to clean it one final time before she pours a beer. She doesn’t always use the rinser, though, depending on a combination of factors—whether she’s pressed for time and how well she assumes the customer will tip.

  Amelia dunks the glasses in hot soapy water in the first sink, then shuffles to her left and rinses them in hot water in the second, half-soapy from the glasses that passed before, and finally she dunks a third time in a sink of cold, mostly clear water before wiping them down with a towel. It’s a germophobe’s nightmare. Drunks assume the alcohol will kill anything left behind, which may be true, but it doesn’t kill whatever’s left inside us—all those if onlys.

  * * *

  LUCAS TOLD ME ONCE that he was like water flowing downstream, over, under, and through all the various impediments that hold other people up. He was proud of this fact, and it was part of what made him so likeable, so easygoing and fun. I, like everyone else, loved this about him, until I grew to resent it.

  “What’re you doing over there?” Lucas called to me from in front of the TV.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” I was in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher so I could refill it with the new stack of dishes that had accumulated. Every third object I pulled out was still dirty, crusted with old food. I held up a fork with yellow egg webbed in its prongs.

  “Jimmy’s at the bar. He wants us to meet him,” Lucas said.

  “Are you constitutionally incapable of rinsing the dishes before loading them?”

  “Just leave it. I’ll do it later.”

  “That’s just it—you’ll do it later. And then I’ll have to redo it later.” I held up a steel pan dotted with what looked to be blackened tomato paste. “At least let Addie lick it clean before you load it.”

  “I don’t think she liked that one. I burned it,” he said.

  “What exactly goes through your head when you place a crusty pan in the dishwasher? Is there a voice telling you that this time it will be different? The god of the dishwasher will kick it up a notch? This time, the pan will come out shiny and clean?”

  “I don’t like washing the dishes before washing them. That’s redundant,” he said.

  “No, Lucas, what I’m doing right now is redundant.” I held out a mug with a ring of black coffee on the bottom.

  “I’ll do a better job next time. Just leave it. Let’s go to the bar.”

  “I have zero confidence you’ll do anything different next time.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve had this conversation before.”

  “My aversion to redundancy created cognitive dissonance, which forced me to forget we’ve ever talked about this before,” he said. “I want to do a good job on the dishes, but I can’t.”

  “Your aversion to redundancy?”

  “To doing the dishes before the dishwasher does them.”

  “The dishwasher doesn’t do the dishes. I do them.”

  “Maybe we need a better dishwasher,” he said, laughing already at the joke I knew he was about to make. “One that doesn’t talk back.”

  “We’ve talked about this at least six times. That’s not cognitive dissonance. It’s
motivated forgetting.”

  “It’s really sinking in this time,” he said. He came up from behind and put his arms around my waist. He tickled me and I squirmed. Addie ran over to us and bounced up and down.

  After wiping the coffee out of the bottom of the mug with a sponge, I placed it back in the dishwasher. “I don’t feel like going to the bar tonight.”

  “I promise I’ll clean up tomorrow,” he said. “Come on. It’s Friday night.”

  “Why don’t you meet Jimmy, and I’ll stay here with Addie?”

  “He wants to see you too.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “I want to see you.”

  “I want the kitchen to be clean.”

  He watched me scrub the sink for a minute. “Just one drink,” he insisted. “Then I’ll walk you home.”

  “I’m wearing yoga pants.”

  “Then you will be the best-dressed person at the bar,” Lucas said.

  I had on yoga pants because earlier in the evening we’d had sex, and afterward I’d thrown on clothes that were comfortable for lounging. Back then, we were very regimented about having sex on and around the time I ovulated. The sex was still good but it was also purposeful. Each time it came with the slightest dual twinge of hope and failure. Hope that this time it would work; and failure, because chances were it wouldn’t.

  In my right hand, I held our plastic slotted spoon. There were grains of rice stuck in the slots and caked on the back, remnants of the pineapple fried rice we’d made for dinner. I poked Lucas in the gut with it and jumped backward, holding him off with the spoon, an extension of my arm. He batted it with his hand. Then he grabbed a spatula and we began to fence. Addie got in on it, dancing on her two hind legs for as long as she could, holding her mouth open just enough to turn the vibration of her vocal chords into a playful growl. I pointed the spoon at her. She put her nose to it, feeling me out, determining if I meant to give it to her.