Other People We Married (12 page)

“I just want to get out of the house,” I said.

Jessie, sweetly, put her hand on my shoulder. “Know how to make foam?”

Sometimes James would come in and grade papers in one of the threadbare armchairs by the window. He liked to drink the Dark Web of Lies Colombian roast. Of course, he poured in two solid glugs of milk, making it more of a Partially Cloudy Web of Lies. Jessie measured everything in glugs. I was learning.

“You know,” he said one afternoon, “if everything goes well here this semester, I could probably apply for the assistant professor job in Milwaukee. We’d barely have to move. Wouldn’t that be great?” James was wearing his reading glasses, and looked studious, which was the only look available. He was too thin to be anything but an academic. When we were in college and I first saw him naked, he reminded me of those ads they used to have in the back of Archie comics, where the skinny
guy gets sand kicked in his face. Ectomorph. Concave. I’d gone on a diet immediately, so as not to crush him.

“Milwaukee? Isn’t that where they have all the rapes and animal cruelty?” In Milwaukee, we could live by an even bigger lake, in a house with even more rooms. As it was, there was too much space. My laptop and I shared a room that James generously referred to as “my office,” which by virtue of its existence exerted so much pressure over us that we had to avoid it and stay in the kitchen.

“Honey, would you mind?” James offered up his empty mug.

On Saturdays, James made pancakes and I would do interpretative dance, miming the cracking of the eggs, the stirring of the batter. If he was feeling particularly good, James would rummage through the cupboard for his mortar and pestle and then grind some cinnamon sticks and vanilla beans. He’d found the recipe in a magazine, ascribed to an actress who hadn’t eaten carbohydrates in a decade. We took her word for it. I was just reaching the climax of my movement, wherein the flour and liquid have emulsified, with my arms raised overheard, when the doorbell rang. It was nine fifteen in the morning. James and I walked together toward the front door, he carrying the bowl of batter.

Mud stood with his back to the door, as though he’d rung the bell accidentally and was waiting for a bus to stop, just there, on our porch.

“Can I help you?” James gave the batter a flick. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and squinted into the light.

Mud turned, surprised to hear a man’s voice. He looked at me over James’s shoulder. “Same deal as last time.”

I hadn’t
told James about driving Mud to work. After all, he no longer told me the minutiae of his days, the way he had when he’d first started teaching, when I’d known all the students’ names and their brief, young résumés. I was only being neighborly. Charitable. It would have been like telling James every time I gave a dollar to the Cerebral Palsy Fund in those round metal jars at the movies, or cooed at someone’s less than handsome baby.

“Sorry, Mud, we’re in the middle of making breakfast.” I scooted in front of James, blocking the doorway with my arm.

Beneath the orange hat, Mud’s face began to glow slightly pink, like skin after a punch. He nodded, turned away, and trudged slowly down the steps and back toward his house.

“Penny drive at school,” I said to James as I shut the door, pushing his back toward the kitchen. “Like UNICEF, you know? For Sudanese refugee camps, I think.” I shook my head, saying,
It’s nothing
. I wasn’t sure why I was lying to him.

“He’s still in school?” James put the bowl of batter down on the counter beside the stove and stuck a finger in the pale, milky goo.

“Community college, I think.” I tried to think of a single thing Mud might be interested in enough to continue his studies. Auto repair, maybe. Accessory design.

“Huh.” James turned the knob for one of the back burners. We listened to the slow clicking of the igniter, watching for the short blue flames to appear.

Margaret came around one night with flyers. In addition to her work with the neighborhood committee, she also volunteered
at the Eastside Senior Center, which occupied two small buildings across the narrow river near our house. Some of the members were putting on a show, an abbreviated production of
Guys and Dolls
, which turned out to mean a handful of scenes that could all use the same props and backdrop. James had to stay late at work, as it was nearly midterms, so I went alone and stood in the back. Rows of folding chairs were set up in what looked like a dining hall, with a small wooden platform at the back of the room. The overhead lights were dimmed, but there was still enough light that the residents with canes could see what they were about to trip over.

Three of the Nelson kids were working at the makeshift concession stand, where a slice of chocolate cake was a dollar and glasses of milk were free. Margaret, I understood from seeing her flit about with a plastic bag full of safety pins and a feather boa draped around her neck, was doing costumes, which made me like her more.

A seventy-three-year-old woman wearing a nightie got up on stage. She had the lithe legs of a former dancer, and even though her voice was shaky, I knew by the way the men in the audience held their hands over their heads to clap that she was a hit before she sang a note. Margaret had painted the woman’s lips magenta, so even from the back of the room, I could see her mouth open and close. In the city, she would have been a thirty-year-old guy in drag, legs and chest waxed, fake eyelashes and wrinkles. If I’d had a friend next to me, I would have squeezed her arm and said,
Can you believe this?—
but kitsch wasn’t kitsch if you were alone. I could hardly hear the woman’s voice, but I knew all the words to the song and mouthed along with her. My grandmother Sophie
had lived in a place like this, and all I remembered were the hallways full of people who’d suddenly found themselves single after fifty years. They’d had a little chapel on the ground floor, wheelchair accessible, and they had lots of weddings. No one’s family ever understood. If I died, I wanted James to get married again as soon as possible, either to a librarian or a reporter for a trashy magazine. It was something we’d discussed.

After the performance, I found Margaret standing by the side of the stage, her cheeks flushed with success. She was folding clothes and neatly putting her little bags back into a rolling suitcase. She’d given herself a swipe of the bright lipstick, and her thin lips seemed to hover a few inches in front of her face.

“Oh! Sophie!” She was surprised to see me, and opened a plastic wallet of baby wipes and quickly doused her face, removing all but a pinkish smudge on her chin.

“I thought it was just wonderful, Margaret, thanks for inviting me.
La grippe, la grippe, la postnasal drip…
” I sang a few bars to prove that I’d been paying attention. Sometimes James asked me to sing to him while he mashed the potatoes.
The shrillness of your voice makes it go faster
, he’d say, whirring away. The electric masher and I competed for volume in the kitchen, which was big enough to have a slight echo. One of these days we’d have to buy some more furniture. Maybe in Milwaukee. Maybe in Boise. Maybe in the Yukon.

Her face relaxed, which made her look both older and prettier. Mud didn’t look anything like her, except for a little bit around the eyes. They both always wanted to look away. “That’s very nice of you to say.” She paused and looked at me
the way a girl in a clothing store would, before inaccurately overestimating your size or, worse, getting you the correct size, which you’d rather not be. “Mud has told me that you’ve been very friendly to him.”

I was surprised to hear that Mud spoke to his mother in full sentences, that he knew the word
friendly
. “Your son is an interesting individual,” I said. Clowns were interesting. People on death row were interesting. Mud qualified.

She lowered her gaze and nodded, smiling to herself. A feather from the boa around her neck disengaged itself, and we watched it fall to the floor in slow swoops.

At first, the siren sounded like a passing ambulance, just a vehicle in a hurry. The ringing continued, though, and when I looked out the bedroom window, the backyard seemed lit for a movie set, as though it were night, but with hidden floodlights illuminating each blade of grass, each shuddering leaf. The bed was empty—it was Thursday, a teaching day, and James had been gone for hours. If we’d stayed in New York, it would have been a real movie set. Once James came home, we would have gone outside and seen who the stars were, where their trailers were parked, what the craft service table had laid out for the crew. But it wasn’t a set; the sky was really that yellow. The wind picked up and whistled through the branches, sending dying leaves to the ground outside my window.

Dorothy came to mind, Kansas in black and white. One was supposed to stand in a doorway, under furniture, in the basement. I put on my slippers and walked over to the kitchen. It was the twilight zone on the other side of the house, too. But there was a light in the basement next door.

Mud didn’t look as surprised as I thought he might when I knocked. Maybe he thought I needed to borrow his bicycle to go stock up on bottled water and batteries, cans of soup, whatever it is one is supposed to have on hand in case of an emergency.

“Can I come in?” The tornado siren kept howling. Where were the speakers? It was like going to a concert and sitting on one side, next to the amplifier. Everything skewed toward distortion.

In answer, Mud started walking back down the stairs. I ducked in quickly behind him before the door closed. I hoped his mother wasn’t watching. Across the street, the Nelsons were probably performing search-and-rescue missions for all the neighborhood cats.

The basement looked like what it was, a refuge. There weren’t the posters I expected, or the level of filth. A television was on, pointing the other direction. There was a pizza box and some empty beer bottles, but mostly the space was clean. It even smelled good.

“Do you vacuum?” I asked.

Mud looked offended. “Don’t you?”

“Not really. I think my husband does, sometimes, yeah, but no, I don’t. Honestly, I don’t really clean the house that much.”

Something started to tap against the window,
ting ting
, like a tiny bell.

“Well, I guess that’s the hail.” Mud looked at my feet. I still had on my worn terry-cloth slippers. “Those waterproof?”

The basement was one large room—he must have had to go up into the house to use the kitchen, although there was a minifridge, the kind kids have in their dorm rooms. It was like a loft in Tribeca, only with wall-to-wall carpet and no windows. It was practically cosmopolitan. There were even books. I stooped to look at the spines. Wedged in between the bird field guides and almanacs were novels—novels James taught, novels I hadn’t read.

“You going to move?” Mud said. I shifted my body out of the way, although it didn’t appear that I was blocking anything. “No.” Mud shook his head. “I mean out of town.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I guess it depends on my husband.”

“You don’t have a real job?”

“Do you?” I asked.

Mud crossed his arms over his chest. He looked like the bouncer at the kind of nightclub that’s well stocked with pasties and spangled G-strings. I exhaled. “I think I’m still working on that.”

“So, you’re from New York?”

I nodded.

“What was it like?” Mud walked behind me and ran his finger across his rows of books. “Was it like in the movies?”

I didn’t know how to tell him that nothing was as much like the movies as the last month of my life, when strange women brought me lemonade and baked goods, which I then consumed without worry that I was being poisoned for the lease to my co-op; that this street, where he had lived his entire life, was more beautiful than anywhere I’d ever been able to afford; that the only extreme weather that mattered in
New York was when the air-conditioning went out on the subway. That it was just a place, like any other place, where people lived.

The TV flashed a blue square on the wall behind Mud’s bed. Even before I walked around to see what was on, I knew what I would find there. Two enormous, saline-filled breasts bounced inches away from the camera, as someone rocked her hips back and forth somewhere below the sight line. I turned away before the director decided to change the angle.

“Do you mind?” I said.

Mud shrugged. I crossed my arms over my chest, as though it would make either of us forget that I had breasts, too. But Mud seemed neither bothered nor embarrassed by my request. He lumbered over next to me, picked up the remote, and shut off the television.

“It’s not a big deal,” Mud said, and he was right. The actors had jobs, just like he did, just like James. They had a schedule and health insurance. They called their mothers when they remembered to do so. I thought about my mother standing on her back porch, surveying the rhododendrons. We all had to fill our days.

We took turns standing at the top of the stairs, staring out the glass pane of the window, waiting for the rain to stop, watching the fat drops of water hit my house, the trees, the shed. A puddle grew on my driveway. Across the street, my telephone might have been ringing. James could have walked by a window at school, seen the deluge, and thought to check up on me. I wondered what he’d have thought if he’d known where I was. There was gossip and there was slander; it would
have been too much. When he came home, I would tell him I’d ridden out the storm in the bathtub, alone.

Mud aimed his rifle at the squirrel that had just shimmied up the tree in my yard—one of the biggest trees on the whole street. The squirrel had discovered an apple core that Mud had conveniently left sitting in the grass, alongside a handful of salted nuts, mostly cashews and almonds. Hunters, he told me, knew how to use good bait. I stood over his right shoulder, careful to stay out of the way, should the gun kick back. His extra gun lay flat against my shoulder.

“Do you ever think about moving out, you know, out of your parents’ house?” I ate a small handful of nuts with my free hand, chewing them as quietly as possible so as not to disturb our quarry.