Husband and Wife (21 page)

“Okay,” she said, and she squatted at my feet and tried.

The baby was curled against me, snuffling into my chest. I looked at the gold glinting in Mattie’s hair, her industrious little hands. I loved them both so much. Why couldn’t that emotion remain at the forefront? Why was it so often shadowed by my troubles, by the irritations of the day? The sublime is always dragged down by the ordinary, like a giant toppled by little men. Or maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe the ordinary makes possible the sublime. How long before Dorothy looked at the Emerald City and saw nothing remarkable at all? “What do you think of this experience, Mattie? Could I write a poem about this?”

“Actually, yes,” she said.

“What rhymes with leaky poop?” I asked.

“Sneaky loop,” she said. “I got the laces in. I did it! I helped you!” She stood up, beaming, awaiting my approval.

I moved my feet experimentally and my laces tumbled back out. “Peeky dupe,” I said.

She laughed. “Beaky soup.”

I had no diaper in my bag. I could have sworn I’d put a
diaper in my bag. “This is all about the can-do spirit,” I said to Mattie as I pasted paper towels around Binx’s crotch, like I was sculpting him an outfit out of papier-mâché.

“Pan-do beer-it,” she said.

“You’re a poet,” I said, and she finished the couplet, “And don’t know it.” Nathan and I had taught her that. Nathan and I. Mattie clinging to my shirt, I walked back through the McDonald’s, soaking wet, my laces dragging on the floor, my half-naked baby shivering in my arms, his balled-up clothes clutched at his back and dripping water down his skin. At the car I dropped the diaper bag on the ground and opened the back door so Mattie could climb into her car seat. “Buckle me in, Mom,” she said.

“Just a minute,” I said. I said it nicely. I was shivering now, too. I opened the passenger-side door, and there, sitting on the seat, was the diaper I’d thought was in my bag. I put Binx down on the seat, and only then did I see the healthy, unprocessed snacks awaiting consumption in a bag on the floor of the car. Nathan must have packed them for me. At the sight I unraveled. What did it matter if he was a cheating, lying bastard, when he’d remembered to pack the snacks? If he’d been there to tell me about those snacks, I wouldn’t have had to go in the McDonald’s at all. I peeled the paper towels off Binx, dropping them on the ground, which wasn’t like me, I don’t litter, and just as I lifted up his butt to slide the diaper underneath it he peed. He peed right in my mouth. I jumped back, and the pee went on arcing out, now landing on Binx’s face as he turned his head from side to side, grimacing, trying to avoid this sudden storm. I spit onto the asphalt. I spit again. The baby cried and cried, naked in the front seat of the car. Mattie said something indistinct from the backseat, her voice spiking when I didn’t
answer, and even though I couldn’t quite hear her, I knew the insistent word, “Mom!” I knew it by the insistence.

There was a moment when they seemed to recede from me. I could see that it would be possible to shut the door, to press the key fob and hear the car tweet-tweet, to go inside and hand the keys to someone and tell them to call the police and then to walk out the door and keep on walking. Who would I be, if I were capable of doing that? Who would I become? We pass again and again through these doorways, those of us who decide to stay.

I picked up my baby, my poor baby, and wiped the pee off his face with my shirt. I carried him over to Mattie, and with one hand I buckled her in while with the other I held him close, my shivering baby, and I said, “Shh, shhh, Mommy’s here,” and both of them were calmed, and neither of them knew how badly I wanted to cry. We can’t possibly understand, when we are children, how hard it sometimes is to say the necessary words.

Lack of sleep had flattened out my good emotions and amplified the bad ones. In the motel that night, lying in the dark while the children slept, I thought of articles I’d read in
Newsweek
about the brains of drug addicts, how they lose the ability to manufacture the chemicals that light us up with pleasure at good food, at a joke, at sex. Life without drugs is tedious and dull. A cubicle life, a seventh-period-history-taught-by-the-football-coach life, droning and endless. There must be joy, there must be grace, to leaven the despair, or there is only despair. I needed a transporting feeling, a Wizard of Oz drug to saturate the black-and-white
with emerald green. I’ll tell you what I wanted. I wanted a feeling so easy and liquid and vast I could swim in it, I would have no choice but to swim in it. I wanted to lay eyes on Rajiv, on Austin, and think, Yes, yes! This is where I’m supposed to be.

Helen had cut her hair. The last time I’d seen her, toward the end of her second pregnancy, her hair had been long, down past her shoulders, and that was how I’d been picturing her: the image of big-bellied maternity, her thick black hair even thicker, even shinier with pregnancy hormones, even blacker against her flowy white shirt. But she was skinny again, all collarbones and shoulders in her red tank top, and her hair fell exactly to her chin. She looked neat and contained, which was the very opposite of how I felt. There is something about a person’s physical presence for which our ability to keep in constant touch can never compensate, and you know that by how startling it is to see them, solid and real, a body instead of a voice, instead of words on a computer screen.

“You cut your hair,” I said. We were standing on her front porch, having said hello, having hugged, having discussed how I’d made good time, considering the number of stops the children had required.

“Yeah,” she said, and nothing else. Helen, unlike most
people, felt no compulsion to elaborate. If you asked her whether she wanted to come over for dinner and she didn’t, she’d say, “No.” Just “No,” when anyone else would rush in with a thousand excuses. I found this disconcerting when I met her, and then I began to find it admirable. Sometimes your answer wasn’t about the cold you couldn’t get over, your prior commitments, your long, hard day at work. Sometimes you just didn’t want to, and that was what they’d asked, after all, if you wanted to.

Helen looked past me at the backseat of the car, where Binx and Mattie slept slumped over, their heads nearly touching. “So cute,” she said. “He’s so big. I’ve been picturing him like he was in the photos you sent when he was born.”

“How was he in those photos?” I asked. “I can’t remember.”

“He was wrinkled,” she said. “He was swaddled in that striped blanket every hospital in America must use.”

“Oh, right,” I said.

“I remember thinking he had really long fingers,” she said.

“He did, didn’t he,” I said. The blanket, the long fingers—I could feel the beanbag weight of him in my arms, the new weight, the slightly scratchy white blanket with its blue-pink-blue stripe, his fingers waving like a sea creature’s extremities, moved by their own power or by the elements surrounding them, you can’t tell. Did Nathan miss the children right now? Did he miss the way Binx said, “Da-DA,” with that emphatic second syllable, as though it had an exclamation point? Did he miss the way Mattie’s eyes widened, her expression fixed and distant, when she launched into one of her made-up stories, surreal concoctions featuring babies who could fly, owls who wanted to
steal children’s eyelashes? Did he remember how our newborn’s fingers had moved?

“I can’t believe Binx didn’t wake up when I stopped the car,” I said. “It’s a miracle.”

“Mine are napping, too,” she said.

“Really? This late?” It was nearly five-thirty.

She shrugged. “We were out earlier,” she said. “They nap when they nap.” She frowned. “Did you hear something?” She backed up into the house, listened, and as she moved I heard flip, flop, flip, flop, because she lived in Austin and she didn’t have a job and these days flip-flops were all she ever wore. When we met, she’d just moved from Boston, and she owned seventeen pairs of nearly identical black shoes. I know this because her small apartment didn’t have a closet, and she kept the shoes lined up on the three remaining steps of a staircase that disappeared into a wall. “I know,” she said, when she saw me examining them, “they all look the same, don’t they?” She shrugged and hunted around for her pack of cigarettes. “I have a problem. When I’m in the store, they always seem like no shoes I’ve ever seen. It’s not until I get them home…” She lit a cigarette.

“You never take them back?”

She laughed. “Course not.”

“You know,” I said, “there are subtle but important differences.”

“That’s right!” She pointed at me with her cigarette. “
Thank
you.”

Now she didn’t smoke. Now she stepped up beside me, and I looked down at her feet. Red flip-flops, yes, but something else I hadn’t expected: a vicious scab across the top of her foot, a mangled nail on her big toe. “Ouch,” I said, pointing. “What happened?”

“I got mugged last week,” she said. “The guy dragged me a little ways.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “He dragged you?”

“These guys came up behind us in a parking lot and one of them jumped Daniel and the other one grabbed my bag, but I wouldn’t let go, so he dragged me.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Did he get the bag?”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t let go. I kept thinking, ‘That’s
my
bag!’ They gave up and ran off.”

“Was Daniel OK?”

“Yeah, the guy just kind of held him down. But he totally felt castrated. He kept apologizing for the fact that it happened. I did feel a little like, you wimp, even though I don’t think there was anything else he could have done. I kept saying, You did great.”

“Must be something primal in those responses.”

“I know. It really bugs me. I don’t like being subject to biology.” She stepped back a couple feet and listened again. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “And then we can sit on the porch with the door open until your kids wake up.”

For the past two days I’d had little in mind but my destination, and now here I was and I wasn’t sure why. And why had Helen’s story left me with a lump in my throat? It was scary, yes, but this urge to cry wasn’t about fear for her, it was about my own self-pity, the feeling that this arrival had not been
arrival
, that I was lost and no one could find me. Helen was trying to shore up her husband’s manhood while simultaneously questioning it, and I was—for the moment? forever?—cut loose entirely from such concerns. Maybe that wasn’t so bad, because I’d always found the whole topic of manhood or the lack thereof tedious, and just a couple of months ago Nathan and I had laughed and laughed at
a line in a Flight of the Conchords song:
Am I a man? Yes
,
technically
,
yes.
I hadn’t known she’d been mugged. I felt as though I’d missed some significant moment, like her wedding, like all her other friends and family had gathered to watch her hanging tenaciously from the strap of her bag, determined that nobody was going to take what was hers. From her top step I watched my children sleeping in the back of my car. My children. Mine.

I heard Helen approaching.
Flip flop, flip flop
.

She sat down beside me, and I saw that she was holding a tall glass full of ice and Coke. She handed it to me without a word. I felt a gratitude so deep it was almost painful. I took a sip. It was cold and too sweet, and when I said, “Thank you, Helen,” my voice shook.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

Nathan had tried to call me not long after I got on the road. I hadn’t answered. I hadn’t answered any of the times he’d called, or listened to the messages he’d left. I’d thought about it. I thought about it again while I sat on Helen’s couch nursing Binx—the three older kids watching
Charlie and Lola
—and listened to Helen bicker with her husband on the phone. Helen had a sectional couch, and the kids flopped across or leaned on various parts of it in the listless, stunned manner of children in front of the television screen. I wanted a sectional couch. It was on my list of things to buy someday, in that magical future when we were out of debt and could buy such things without remorse. But maybe now I’d never buy a sectional couch. Maybe I’d get fired and never find another job, things being what they were in the world. Maybe
I’d end up living in an apartment, too small for such a large and extravagant piece of furniture. Or maybe I’d just rent a room, put nothing in it but a sectional couch, and Mattie and Binx and I would live and eat and sleep on it, tumbled together like puppies in a basket. We could be happy as puppies, if we could manage to be as dumb.

“You told me six o’clock,” Helen said. “Yes, you did. That’s what you told me.”

Helen’s husband Daniel had what Nathan and I referred to as a “real job,” by which we meant a job that had something to do with business, a job that required professional clothing, that paid an extravagant amount and played some role in the economy. We weren’t too clear on what it was. I’d confessed this to Helen a couple months before and she had laughed and offered an explanation I hadn’t quite followed. She’d complained at the time that he was working longer and longer hours, even weekends, in anticipation of a promised promotion, and now, tonight, he was late getting back and she was pissed off, as I imagined she was every time, in the usual irritation at each other’s ongoing failures that so often characterizes the relationship between husband and wife.

“I’m not cooking, then,” she said. “No, we’ll go out to dinner.” She was close enough that, while I couldn’t hear exactly what Daniel was saying, I could make out the placating tone in his voice. He was a nice guy, Daniel, an optimist, someone who knew how to choose a course of action and cheerfully go forth. Helen was a natural pessimist, inclined to brooding and bouts of depression that, in grad school, had manifested as episodes of obsessively watching
Matlock
or
Star Trek
:
Next Generation
. A yen for Matlock might not seem fitting for a depressive artistic type, but what is depres
sion but the unwelcome conviction that the world will never be what it should? People saw her as a cigarette-smoking cynic dressed all in black, and in some ways she certainly was that, but she craved the honorable, earnest Matlock, the honorable, earnest Picard. She wanted to let the sun shine in, and so she married Daniel, and more than once I’d watched her glower at him and seen him smile back as though there was nothing but love in her eyes. “We’ll choose the place,” she said. “We’re the ones who have to haul all the kids there.” She stepped on a toy car, grimaced, kicked it under the couch. “Yeah, well, maybe I’ll call you and maybe I won’t,” she said, and then she hung up the phone.

She came round to the front of the couch and sat, pulling her daughter Abby up into her lap. Abby was twenty months old, between child and baby. She rested her head on her mother’s leg, her eyes still fixed on the television. She pointed, babbled some earnest nonsense that lilted up at the end like a question. “That’s right,” Helen said. She combed a tangle out of Abby’s hair with her fingers. To me she said, “He’ll meet us at a restaurant. Where do you want to go?”

“Remember how we used to go out for pancakes at midnight?” I asked.

“I don’t really want pancakes,” she said. “How about barbecue?”

“What was the place that had the brisket?” I asked. “Remember that?”

“Oooh, yeah,” she said. “Brisket sounds good. Which place do you like?”

“I can’t remember,” I said. We sat for a moment and listened to Charlie relate his polite exasperation with his little sister Lola, whose flights of fancy were at once charming and aggravating. I remembered a wooden building—maybe
near water? An outside deck, but every place in Austin had that. I remembered Nathan feeding me a bite with his fork. He’d been the one to order the brisket, and it was tender and juicy, while my pork was a little dry, and he’d shared his meal with me. “A lot of my good memories of Nathan have to do with food,” I said.

Helen nodded. “Living with someone else is all about food,” she said. “What are you going to eat and when are you going to eat it and who’s going to cook it or should you go out.”

“You told me you knew you wanted to break up with Sam when he asked you whether he should eat a banana.” Sam had been Helen’s boyfriend in our second year of graduate school. He was a fiction writer, friendly with Nathan, and for a few months we’d enjoyed a paradise of foursome-ness. Postbreakup, Nathan and I made one or two awkward attempts at hanging out with Sam, and then we stopped, because no matter what you say in the wake of a breakup, you almost always choose. Who would choose me? Who was I going to lose? Maybe Alex and Adam. Maybe Smith, who’d be angry I’d told Nathan about that kiss. But I didn’t want to think about that. Those people were hundreds of miles away.

“I don’t remember that,” Helen said. She sounded like she didn’t believe me.

“We were standing in your kitchen, in that house on Thirty-second. You said you didn’t care at all whether he ate a banana, and you couldn’t stand being asked to care about things like that anymore. I think you also said you didn’t like knowing what he had in his medicine cabinet.”

“I remember the part about the medicine cabinet,” she said. “There was nothing strange in there, I don’t think. I
just didn’t want to know what his
prescriptions
were.” She was stroking Abby’s hair, her gaze fixed unseeingly on the television. “That house had a stained-glass window.”

“That’s right. When the sun came through, there were colors on the walls.”

“What I remember is having a fight with Sam because he said he was sick of Korean food.” She frowned at me as if I had said it. “Koreans eat it every day.”

“I remember that one, too.” I sighed. “Not only do I remember my own squabbles, I remember yours.”

“Once you and Nathan had a fight about falafel.”

“Did we?”

“I can’t remember the details.”

“A fight about falafel,” I said. “Falafel. Crunchy outside, chewy inside. What could we have fought about?”

“Maybe he thought it should be chewy outside, crunchy inside.”

“Oh, I doubt it. We always agreed about falafel.”

“On our first date Daniel and I had ice cream sundaes, huge ice cream sundaes. He ate his and then finished mine.” She shifted Abby a little, grimacing. I imagined some sharp point—a tiny chin, an elbow—was digging into her thigh. “I know working late is not really his fault, but it still pisses me off,” she said. “I can’t seem to stop being mad about it.” She lowered her voice. “He’s been refusing to have s-e-x. He says it’s because he’s tired and I’m pressuring him, but I think he’s punishing me for being mad.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s not the usual configuration for that problem.”

“I know,” she said. “I should have brought that up when he was fretting about his manhood.”