Give, a novel

by Erica Carpenter Witsell

  The timing had not been good. It was January of 1973, the economy on the brink of recession. No one had been interested in hiring a new mother with an English degree. In the end, it had been Len who had used his connections at the university to get her the job at the lab, and although Laurel despised nothing more than being patronized, she had swallowed her pride and leapt at it.

  On the first day, Laurel’s stomach had churned with nerves. She had not set foot in a science lab since the ninth grade, when her lab partner had used their Bunsen burner to scribble curse words on their table, then set them alight when the teacher wasn’t looking. But Alice had taken Laurel under her wing. You didn’t need to know a thing about biology, Alice had assured her, as long as you cleaned the test tubes properly and left no fingerprints on the cover slips.

  At the lab, Alice had always been pleasant and attentive, listening with sympathetic noises as Laurel vented to her about the drudgeries of motherhood. Now she wondered if Alice had only liked listening to her because it made her feel so good about her own life. Newly wed and childless, Alice didn’t need an off-season weekend at the beach to spend time with her gorgeous husband. And she wasn’t paying out the nose for a babysitter, either.

  At the thought of the sitter at home with their daughter, Laurel felt a rush of irritation at her mother. Pearl lived alone in Los Angeles in a rented apartment; Laurel had seen no reason her mother couldn’t have moved to Arcata, too, to help her after Jessie was born. But Pearl had declined without apology. Her apartment was rent-controlled, she’d said. She couldn’t afford to give it up.

  “Nobody helped me when your father left,” she’d said. “And I managed.”

  “Mom, I was five by then.”

  Pearl snorted. “You think it gets easier?”

  When she and Alice got back to their table, Laurel plopped down in the seat beside Michael before Alice could sit down. She reached across the table for her glass and tossed the wine back. Almost instantly she could feel the alcohol buoying her, a flush of recklessness just beneath her skin.

  “Sit there, Alice,” she said, gesturing to the empty seat beside Len with a smile. “I see Len all the time. I want to get to know your husband.”

  Alice stared at her, and for a moment Laurel wondered if she would make a scene. But just then their waiter came to check on them, and rather than stand there looking a fool, Alice slipped into Laurel’s empty seat.

  “Can I get you anything else?” the waiter said. “Dessert?”

  Laurel held up the empty wine bottle like a beacon.

  “Another of these, please.”

  “Laurel—” Len began, then looked to Michael and Alice. “Do you two want more?”

  “Not for me, thanks,” Michael said, leaning back in his chair.

  “Alice?”

  “No.”

  “Laurel, I don’t think we need—”

  “Oh, none of you are any fun. Just another glass then, I suppose.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Len

  When her wine came, Laurel sat leaning forward over the table. She was angled in her chair toward Michael, one elbow propped on the checkered tablecloth, the other arm hidden in her lap. She held her wine glass loosely by the stem, her upper arm pressed against one breast, hoisting it upward. Her shirt was scooped low in front, revealing the deep chasm of her cleavage. Len’s face flushed and he looked away.

  “So,” he said, scooting his chair back a few inches and catching Michael’s eye. “What, um, what do you do exactly, Michael? What’s your field, I mean? Your profession?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Laurel make a face and he grimaced; even he could hear how awkward he sounded. He had never been good at this. Even when he was young, the easy chatter of the other children had intimidated him; they seemed to speak a lingo he had never mastered. But how dare Laurel mock him now? If it had not been for her insistence on this ridiculous trip, he would be at home putting Jessie to bed, instead of stumbling through this awful small talk.

  He looked back at Michael, suddenly annoyed by the other man’s happy-go-lucky ease, his insouciant good humor. What did Len care what he did for a living? Still, he leaned in a little, readying himself to smile and nod. But Michael was not looking at him; he seemed not to have registered Len’s bumbling question after all. Instead, his eyes darted around the room, his eyebrows raised slightly, as if in surprise or appraisal.

  “Earth to Michael,” Alice said sharply. “Len just asked you a question.”

  Len blushed. “It doesn’t—”

  “I’m sorry,” Michael said, bringing his attention back to the table with an effort. “What did you say?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Alice said. She threw her napkin onto the table and glanced at Laurel, who still clutched her half-full glass of wine in one hand. “Are we ready to go?”

  Len nodded gratefully and beckoned the waiter for the check.

  “But, Len,” Laurel said, her voice girlish. “I’m not quite finished.” She drew the words out, enunciating carefully.

  Len glanced at her sharply. “I think you’ve had enough.”

  Laurel rolled her eyes at him, then deliberately tossed back the rest of her wine. She set her glass on the table with elaborate care.

  “There,” she said, cutting her eyes at Michael. “Now I’m finished.”

  The four of them made their way back to the motel, their chins tucked inside their collars against the wind. In the lobby, Michael unzipped his jacket and gestured toward the bar.

  “Len? Laurel? Anyone for a nightcap?”

  Len glanced at Laurel and she nodded slightly.

  “Maybe just one,” Len said.

  But when Michael moved to let Laurel go ahead, she threw back her head and laughed.

  “Oh, I’m not going.” She looked at Len. “I’ve had enough?”

  “Laurel, if you’re not going to—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Len. Just have another drink.”

  Alice stood watching them, her face unreadable.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said flatly. “You three figure it out.”

  “Alice!” Michael called after her. “Come on. One drink.”

  “I’m tired, Michael,” she said, not looking back.

  “She’s tired,” Laurel repeated quietly. “You should let her go.”

  “Michael, look,” Len said. “I don’t want to be a party pooper, but if the girls—”

  “Girls?” Laurel said, arching her eyebrows.

  “I mean, if Alice and Laurel don’t want to, maybe we should—”

  “Len, it’s fine. Just have a drink already. I’ll be in the room.”

  She shot Michael a look that Len could not read and turned away.

  Len shook his head. “Jesus,” he muttered.

  Len and Michael leaned against the bar while the bartender got their beers. They said nothing, but Len felt that it was a companionable silence, tinged with a shared relief to be free of their wives for a while. He regretted his flash of annoyance earlier; Michael seemed a decent enough fellow.

  In the silence, Len felt the floor begin to vibrate. He looked down to see that Michael’s heel was pulsing rapidly, the movement causing his whole leg to shake. Len smiled to himself. He remembered when his own leg had used to vibrate like that, at school while he worked his math problems, or at the dinner table. It had driven his older sister Margie crazy.

  “Sit still, Lenny,” she would say. “I can’t digest with all that jiggling.”

  He could still hear her voice as she said it, the grown-up tone she used to scold him whenever their father was there to hear. It was a tone that said that their father needn’t worry, that she would fill in for their mother now. God, how I hated that tone, Len thought, smiling to himself at the memory.

  Michael glanced at him. “What’s funny?” he said.

  “Oh, nothing. Just . . . your leg reminded me of something.”

  Michael clamped down on his thigh with one hand a
nd shook his head.

  “Sorry. It does that when I’m nervous.”

  Len nodded. “What’s there to be nervous about?”

  Michael took a long sip from his beer. “Well, it’s not like in the movies, is it?”

  “What isn’t?”

  Michael narrowed his eyes at him. “You saw that movie, Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice?”

  Len shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’d remember it. I . . . I thought maybe that was where you people got the idea.”

  “What idea?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. What do you call it?”

  Len looked up sharply and saw that Michael was grinning at him.

  “I’m not really used to this kind of thing,” Michael went on. He swirled the pale liquid in his glass before taking another sip. “Arcata’s never been Berkeley, you know. I mean, of course we heard about stuff like this, but I seriously never thought I would ever be in a position to . . .” He paused, then went on hurriedly. “I’m not saying I’m not game, though. I mean—your wife. She’s something.”

  Len drew his eyebrows together. “Laurel? Yes. I suppose she is.”

  Michael raised his glass to his lips and drank quickly, his Adam’s apple bobbing with each swallow.

  “I’m not sure Alice caught on, though,” Michael said at last, setting the empty glass on the bar. “Don’t be surprised if she’s, um, surprised.” He let out a little burst of a laugh. “What was your room number again?”

  “116.”

  Michael stood up. “212.”

  “What?”

  “I guess I won’t need your key.” Michael opened his wallet and tossed a bill on the counter.

  Instinctively, Len reached for his own pocket.

  “No, let me—”

  But by the time he’d gotten his wallet out, Michael had gone. Len watched his back as he walked away. He felt dumbfounded, speechless. He wanted to call after him, to confess that he was lost, that he had not followed what Michael had said. But Len did not like—had never liked—to admit when he was in the dark. He had learned long ago that if he just kept quiet, kept thinking and puzzling, the answer would come to him. In college and then in graduate school, the technique had earned him the reputation for being both taciturn and brilliant. But Len secretly knew that he was not brilliant, not like they thought. He was only patient.

  Len took a deep swallow of his beer and tried to remember exactly what Michael had said. In an instant, the pieces came together. How could he have not understood before? He stood up so quickly that his barstool tottered.

  “Goddamn it, Laurel,” he muttered.

  The bartender glanced at him. “You need something?”

  Len shook his head as he steadied the stool. He left his half-empty beer glass on the counter and hurried out of the bar. He did not know what he would say when he caught up to Michael, but that was what he meant to do. Catch him, tell him that no, he had misunderstood. There had been no plan to . . . wife-swap? Is that the term that Michael could not recall? He did not blame him—it was a vile term.

  No, that had never been the plan. Laurel just . . . Suddenly, Len paused in the hallway that led to their room. Laurel just what? Felt up her friend’s husband under the table? He saw it clearly now: Laurel’s flushed face and absent hand, Michael’s obvious distraction when Len had asked him about his job.

  “Goddamn it, Laurel,” he said again. He continued walking in the direction of their room, but his steps slowed. Had Michael misunderstood? He thought of Laurel on the beach, pulling off her clothes. He had taken it for exhibitionism; certainly that was nothing new. He had grown used to his wife’s stunts, her need for all eyes to be on her. He had been embarrassed for her. But what if Michael was right? Had this whole weekend been a pretense? Was it all unfolding exactly as she’d planned?

  Len turned the corner of the hallway. Their room was three doors down, and Michael was not in sight. A “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on the door. It was this detail that pushed Len over the edge into fury. He wanted to ram down the door and shake her. This time she had gone too far.

  But Len had not taken two steps toward their room when he stopped himself. Would he knock at his own door, then? Knock and wait for it to be answered like a petulant child? I didn’t understand . . . He would be made a fool in front of Michael—a fool and a cuckold. He fingered the room key in his pocket. He didn’t have to knock. But the thought of barging in, to see Laurel, surely already half-naked in the bed, and Michael’s startled face—that would be worse. Len had never liked to make a scene.

  A few feet from the door, he turned around and strode back down the empty hallway. In the lobby, he hesitated, then went back inside the bar. The bartender looked up in surprise.

  “Oh, sorry, man. I cleared your beer. But let me—” He reached for another glass.

  “It’s fine,” Len said. “Don’t bother.”

  He turned again and left the bar, hesitating in the lobby once again. Room 212, Michael had said. She might be surprised. He thought of Alice, with her petite waist and small breasts, and felt a stirring of desire. He looked toward the stairs. Why not? But Len could not see himself rapping at Alice’s door any more than he could bear to knock at his own. Laurel had made her bed, he thought bitterly, and she would lie in it. He would not make his own.

  Impulsively, he pulled his room key from his pocket and tossed it on the front desk, then pushed through the glass door onto the street. Outside, the wind scoured his face, but once he was inside the car, stillness descended. The hands of the clock on the dashboard glowed faintly in the dark, and Len was shocked at how early it still was. It was barely after ten; if he hurried, he’d be home by one. He started the engine and backed the station wagon onto the street.

  Len held the wheel with two hands to stop them from shaking, but his mind would not relent. It rubbed itself raw on all the humiliating details of the evening, like a tongue on a chipped tooth. The licentious horror of it propelled him through the small town, but once he reached Highway One, the long, serpentine road home loomed before him. The car slowed, his foot uneasy on the gas. He laid the chilled fingers of one hand against his cheek; his face still burned with shame.

  He saw again Laurel’s flushed face at dinner, her absent hand, and a flash of fury shot through him. He leaned his foot onto the accelerator, felt the engine strain as the car lurched into the next curve. Now he imagined Laurel, bleary-eyed and hungover, waking to find that he had not returned. What would she do? He let out a short, bitter laugh. Take a bus, beg Alice and Michael for a ride home—it was no concern of his.

  And he? What was he going to do? What would he tell the babysitter when he arrived home in the middle of the night without his wife? What would he tell Jessie? He thought of his daughter, with her chubby knees and sly grin, the sweet warmth of sleep that clung to her bare limbs in the morning when she woke. No, to her he wouldn’t have to explain a thing. “Mommy’s not here,” he would say, and then he would take her to the kitchen to make pancakes as if it were any other Sunday morning.

  In all the week, it was his favorite time. He loved his daughter’s stubby, flour-covered fingers, the delight with which she stirred the milk and eggs into the batter.

  “You just get the fun parts,” Laurel had accused him once, watching them together. “You don’t know how infuriating she can be.”

  This wasn’t true; he did know. His daughter’s stubbornness often sparked his own temper, and more than once he had drawn back his hand to spank her as he remembered his father spanking him. But Laurel was right, too: Jessie didn’t get under his skin the way she did her mother’s. Jessie’s two-year-old tantrums could throw Laurel into answering fits of rage. She resented the child’s relentless demands: “I want duice! Read a book! Dessie up!”

  “Do I look like a slave to you?” Laurel would hurl back at the toddler, and when that happened, Jessie’s startled eyes and wrinkled forehead were almost more than Len could bear.


  “I’ll get her juice,” he would say. “Why don’t you take a break?”

  But his attempts to intervene only stoked Laurel’s rage.

  “I don’t need a break! I need our daughter to learn some goddamn manners.”

  Laurel seemed almost to thrill in her angry outbursts at the child, as if the collapse of her patience and the scale of her anger were flags she waved to Len: See how much I have to endure? Later, she would apologize—but only to Len, never to Jessie—and inevitably her remorse would cast her into the ready wallow of self-pity.

  “I’m just not cut out for this, Len,” she would weep. “God, I’m a bad mother.”

  Len had first met Laurel at Berkeley, when he was in the final stretch of his PhD program and she was a senior co-ed. Laurel was voluptuous and dark-eyed, full-lipped in a way he had found sexy then. She wore flowing pants that flared at the bottoms, her dark brown hair loose to her waist. For weeks, he had barely surfaced from the abstract math of his dissertation; Laurel’s free spirit had been a breath of fresh air.

  Back then, the ease with which Laurel cried had endeared her to him. Tears did not come easily to him, but he was, at heart, a sentimental man. On one of their first dates, they had seen a reshowing of To Kill a Mockingbird at the campus theater. He had heard Laurel begin to sob quietly beside him as soon as the jury entered the courtroom. He had taken her hand, then, and had felt the tightness in his own throat relent. Later, they had snuck onto the roof of Laurel’s dorm and watched the moon rise over the bay. Despite his protests, Laurel had gone to her knees before him. Gathering her hair in his hands, Len had felt some reserve in him loosen and give way.

  They had not been careful; Laurel was pregnant by Christmas. She had cried as she told him, but, holding her against his chest, her head tucked beneath his chin, his own tranquility had surprised him. He had always assumed that he would marry, someday, just as he had always known—ever since he’d been old enough to understand such things—that he would get a doctorate in math. His PhD in hand, it seemed only fitting that a wife and baby would come next. And he had worked so hard for the degree. If the family came more readily, he had seen no reason to rail against his fate.