Still Life with Husband (11 page)

My mother stands waiting for us at the door, wearing a flowered apron over her clothes, although I doubt she did anything more culinarily taxing than heating up frozen stuffed chicken breasts. She is like an older, shorter, bustier, eyeshadowed me. Her frizzy hair is pinned back with little spangly barrettes that look like ones I wore when I was ten, and probably are. She wears lots of jewelry—big gold button earrings, bracelets, sparkly rings—at all times. She favors loose, tunic-style, silky blouses with sequins on them. “Erica Marchese had twins,” she says by way of greeting, giving first me, then Kevin a perfumey kiss on the cheek. “She named them Chloe and Zoe, however.” I went to grade school with Erica Marchese, although I haven’t seen her in about twenty years. But my mother keeps her finger on the pulse of her thriving, procreating suburban community.

“Chloe and Zoe, huh?” I say, humoring her, even though I don’t care. Bright light and the murmur of voices fill the front hallway and spread throughout the entire house. My parents have a habit of leaving electrical appliances on—televisions, radios, lamps. It always seems like there’s more going on here than there actually is.

“I bought you some underwear, sweetie,” my mom stage-whispers to me. “And some darling earrings. They’re on your bed. See if you like them.”

I take Kevin’s heavy leather coat and carry it along with mine into my old bedroom, which has been preserved as a shrine to me. If I ever wanted to move back in, if I ever wanted to move back to 1992, there’s a room in Bay Point, Wisconsin, six-and-a-half miles north of downtown Milwaukee, waiting to oblige me. My one trophy, which I received for being an integral part of the 1990 Bay Point High School debating team, holds pride of place on my yellow bureau. The pink polka-dotted bedspread I picked out to match the light purple carpeting still covers my little twin bed. I enjoyed pastels in the late ’80s. The color scheme in here is accidental Easter egg. Every time I walk through the door of this room, I am overcome with the feeling of both safety and suffocation.

“Hiya, sweetheart,” my dad says, emerging from the wood-paneled den, where he’s likely been watching public television and/or reading about the history of aspirin or of tree-trimming or of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency for the past four or five hours. He stands in the doorway to my room, scratching his bald head. He’s wearing one of Heather’s old sweatshirts, which pulls tightly across his belly, and a pair of light brown polyester slacks that were perhaps in fashion circa 1973. Black dress socks complete the picture. My dad, a retired high school social studies teacher, spends his time reading educational nonfiction or watching PBS. He’s a gentle man who seems to inhabit a different planet from the rest of us, near to ours but not quite intersecting, one where the pursuit of facts and knowledge provides infinitely more sustenance than food and oxygen. He blinks a lot, as if natural light surprises him. He has the habit of wandering off in the middle of a conversation to look up a word in the dictionary or to page through an encyclopedia in search of a historical reference. Naturally, he and Kevin get along famously.

Kevin is in the kitchen, helping my mother set the table. I don’t know this for sure, but since things unfold in the same manner every time we’re here, I’d bet on it. I hear the clink of silverware and glasses, the low sound of Kevin’s voice pitched against my mom’s high titter. I wish I could close my bedroom door and read a book for the rest of the night instead of eating dinner with my parents and Kevin. Containing my turmoil has been exhausting. I feel like I’ve been holding a lid over a boiling pot for three days. I just want to lie down.

“Hi, Dad.” I walk over and hug him.

“Very interesting show on channel thirty-six about the brain,” he says, as if we were in the middle of a conversation and had been interrupted just a few minutes ago. “For one thing, the human head weighs between ten and twelve pounds. I had no idea.” He blinks, smiles at me as if he’s giving me a gift. “I’ll tell your mother the next time she says I need to lose weight,” he whispers conspiratorially. “I’m not ten pounds overweight. It’s just my head!”

I don’t quite understand my dad, most of the time.

“Come,” he says, taking my arm. “To the mess hall!”

“Oh, hello, Leonard,” my mom says showily as we walk into the kitchen. “Nice to see you.” She hates that my father prefers to spend his free time alone. She’s a butterfly, colorfully flitting from lunch date to social engagement to shopping trip with friends, requiring only companionship; he’s a strange, myopic, solitary bookworm. They’re polar opposites, Barbara and Len Ross, and it amazes me not that they’re still married, but that they ever fell in love in the first place. Watching their psychological contortions and battles embarrasses me, feels like spying on them as they tussle in bed. I wish they would keep it to themselves.

“Kevin, my good man,” my dad says, ignoring my mom, possibly not noticing her tone. He and Kevin shake hands mock-formally, as they’ve been doing for nine years.

“Sir!” Kevin says. The table is set properly, the precooked chicken breasts are cooling—they’ll be cold when we eat them—while my mom fiddles with a fruit salad made solely of brownish sliced apples and canned mandarin oranges. “How’s everything going?” Kevin asks.

“Everything is going swimmingly,” my father says. “Just swimmingly.” This is the same script we always follow. I could film it, and then next time just send the video.

I ask my mom if there’s anything I can do to help her, a calculated strategy Heather and I perfected when we were teenagers to coincide with the moment when she’s just finished and doesn’t need help.

“Are there napkins on the table? Glasses?” There are. “Then everybody, just sit down,” she commands. We do.

My mom pays no attention to my dad or to Kevin, whose sin is that he really likes my dad, and turns to me. “Did I tell you about Stephanie Wagner’s baby shower?” She nibbles on an apple slice, wipes her mouth daintily. “Well,” she begins, already deliciously outraged, before I have the chance to respond. “Mrs. Wagner, who really had nothing to do with the planning of this shower—it was given by Mrs. Sheffield and Mrs. Gold—decided that she wanted to help. But you know what that means for Mrs. Wagner. She just wanted to get her fingers into the pie.” These are women I’ve known my whole life, but in the lingua franca of these suburban ladies, referring to them by their first names would be sacrilegious. My mother continues with a story having something to do with place settings, where one of the main characters is the Jordan almonds. Somebody is adamantly insisting on, or flat-out rejecting, these party nuts. I don’t know. I stopped listening somewhere around the words “baby shower.” And my mother, perceptive though she is, is just a sucker for a captive audience, so I nod and nod, and occasionally gasp, which keeps her happy.

My dad and Kevin are chatting amiably about the central nervous system. My dad seems to be explaining something complicated to Kevin about the myelin sheath, and is using mandarin oranges to illustrate his point, moving them around on his plate.

The conversation remains segregated throughout the meal. I catch Kevin glancing over at me a few times, but I can’t read his expression. During dinner, my mother regales me with her ideas for redecorating the kitchen (it’s all about granite countertops), and I offer my opinions, a bit wantonly: I give myself over to it and suddenly, for the moment, I really do care, passionately, whether she ends up with light wood for the cabinets or dark. (“Blond wood, Mom, would bring so much natural
light
into the room!”) My father asks Kevin about his work, Kevin questions my dad about his latest intellectual interest. A few minutes later, my dad asks Kevin’s opinion on a problem they’ve been having with the leaky garage roof, although Kevin has as much experience with leaky roofs as I do (it’s
flat;
it
leaks
!). I watch as Kevin chews solemnly, nodding to my father, reflecting on this situation. I take a bite of baked potato that tastes like cotton and wash it down with a long gulp of water. There is so much good in Kevin. How did I ever find a man so unflinching in his devotion to me, whose steady commitment extends all the way to my squabbling parents and their flat, waterlogged garage roof? If Kevin and I broke up, if I left the kind man sitting next to my father, I would never have this again. I would have meals with my parents, of course, but without Kevin, I believe I would never again sit at this dinner table in the same easy comfort of our similar domesticities, the four of us accomplices in the shared, unspoken knowledge that Kevin and I are replicating my parents, that we are justifying their choices, that we are their legacy.

It’s somewhere between the baked potatoes and the store-bought lemon chiffon cake that I realize the obvious: I don’t have a choice to make. I’ve already made it. Kevin is my choice. True, I picked him long before I knew David, but so what? When we got married, we said to each other: nobody else, no matter what. I promised. I’m not in high school. I don’t need to be so torn up about this. And if being with Kevin feels at the moment more like a life sentence than a lifetime of happiness, well, that’s just my burden. I love him, and I’m duty-bound to him. Babies and houses are my future, I suppose. Why should I be any different from everybody else? This is the way grown-ups negotiate their marriages, I finally understand. They bear up under the weight of them.

Kevin and my dad are talking about Freud now, the logical extension, I guess, of their in-depth dinnertime analysis of the brain. My mom is watching them, not participating. She doesn’t look peeved, though, just distant, more like she’s watching a circus, a freak show she couldn’t possibly join, but one she holds tickets to and doesn’t seem to mind viewing.

Kevin says, “Freud was the first person to recognize the effect paranoia has on our daily lives.”

“A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office,” my dad responds, waving his fork for emphasis, “and says, ‘Doctor, people keep ignoring me.’ The doctor says, ‘Next!’”

We laugh, because we’ve all heard him tell this joke a million times, and also because in a weird way it’s still funny. Now is the chance for somebody to change the subject, to bring everyone back together. I notice the way my mom is looking at my dad, her head tilted, one hand wrapped loosely around her lipstick-smudged water glass. At first I think that it’s just run-of-the-mill annoyance that’s causing her mouth to curve into a tiny, enigmatic smile. But I see that it’s something else. Her stubborn irritation with him is certainly real, but right now it’s background noise, just the daily murmur and thrum of the crowd. Ringing through it like a clear bell, at least for the moment, is fondness. Definite fondness. Or something like it.

DICK IS IN MY OFFICE AGAIN WHEN I WALK THROUGH THE DOOR
on Monday morning. On the way over, I prepared myself to sit down and immediately send the e-mail I’ve been writing in my head all weekend, but I see Dick and I’m grateful for the postponement.

“Hi!” I say, taking off my coat. The fluorescent light above my head is flickering slightly, which means I’ll have a throbbing headache by the end of the day. I’ll call the maintenance people, who will tell me they’ll fix it but won’t. Dick is sitting in a rolling chair in the middle of the room next to a huge stack of manuscripts. Are those
slippers
he’s wearing?

“What is your opinion of ethics?” he asks loudly, looking up from a piece of paper in his lap. I freeze, my coat shrugged halfway off my shoulders. Ethics? Why is he asking me about ethics? What has he heard? Jesus, does he know? Did he see me with David at the lake?

“What?” It comes out of my mouth as a squeak.

“Ethics, ethics.” He plants his suspiciously corduroy-shod feet flatly on the carpeting and rolls his chair around to face me. “It’s the age of Dolly the sheep. Stem cell research. George W. Bush. We’re behind the curve. I think the journal needs a few essays on bioethics. Some op-ed pieces.” He emphasizes the syllables “op” and “ed” so that they sound vaguely Swedish.

Bioethics. I exhale, peel off my gloves, stuff them into my pockets. “I think that’s a fantastic idea.”

Dick is thumbing through a list of our referees, the scientists and doctors who review article submissions for us. “Ah, ah…” He concentrates; his eyebrows converge. “Emily,” he says, finally remembering my name. I’ve been noticing that his expressions have begun to resemble Ronald Reagan’s at the end of his presidency, and this worries me. “May I ask you to organize a rather large number of manuscripts for me today?” He sweeps his hand over the stack at his feet like he’s performing a magic trick. Poof. Dick has the tendency to foist an unwieldy administrative task on me when the mood strikes him, not minding or noticing that I have a certain system, a certain organized number of jobs to do at any given time, measured out to keep the office running smoothly. Fussy librarian is not really the kind of person I consider myself to be, but I can’t stand the break in my routine. So I guess I am. “I seem to have let things run a bit amok,” he continues. “I’d like you to divide these articles into groups. Rejected and pending. I’d also like you to fashion a folder for each of them and clear out the extraneous paperwork. Would you be so kind?”

I see my day at
Male Reproduction
unfolding before me: a mountain of typed labels, scattered papers, and folders heaped under the gently strobing fluorescent light. I smile, nod, sigh. He means well. He means well. “Sure, Dick.”

I spend the next eight hours categorizing my boss’s files, unable to get to my computer and write to David. Heather once told me that the highest level of productivity a company can expect from its employees is fifty percent. At this rate, I’m now due a full day of paid vacation (which I will probably take the next time Dick goes out of town, in the form of one of my patented work slowdowns, involving but not limited to calling Meg, sending personal e-mails, and relentlessly snacking on Junior Mints).

Dick decides to work in my office. As I sit cross-legged on the floor surrounded by the detritus of the journal, he rolls up to my desk and proceeds to make dozens of calls to scientists, asking them to write about bioethics. “Genome mapping,” I hear him say. “Genetic counseling.” From my uncomfortable perch in the middle of the room, I make up my own topics to amuse myself. “Three gnomes napping.” “Frenetic bouncing.” I debate sharing my excellent ideas for the name of the section, “Send in the Clones,” or maybe “Sperm und Drang.” I decide to keep quiet. In between serious conversations with scientists, Dick chats genially to me about his family, his NIH grant application, his favorite kind of pie
(rhubarb!),
so that I can never enter the zone where I might at least be able to enjoy concentrating on a menial job and getting it done. My day inches along. I spend a full hour typing “Submission” onto folder labels. I spend another forty-five minutes typing “Reject” onto another set of labels. Under these circumstances, how can a girl not feel slightly nudged by the universe? As soon as Dick leaves, I will write the e-mail.