The Actor and the Housewife (33 page)

In which Felix plays Santa Claus for the first time

“I hate death,” Becky would mutter to herself.

Nevertheless, the weight of the grief lifted, just a little, just enough to let a breeze into the room. It was a miracle in Becky’s eyes, as much as water turning to wine (though water would do just fine, thank you). Of course, getting better also meant growing a new half of herself so she could stand upright again. That hurt. A lot.

So she began to grieve in earnest—not in the fold-herself-up way, not as a pillar of salt, but grieving as a way of putting names to her sorrows, understanding them, and yet still choosing to live. It was as if she’d broken all her bones and untreated they healed wrong, so now she had to rebreak them and set them right.

Looking inward made her want to howl, so she tried to look outward. The Sunday after she returned from Mexico, she made three pies, a tradition she’d put on hold for a year and a half. Mike wasn’t sitting there across the counter, talking to her while she baked. She hoped her bitterness wouldn’t infect the pastry.

The kids ate one pie that night, and per usual, Becky kept the other two for giving to persons yet unknown. She waited, but no names popped into her mind. Monday afternoon passed, then Monday night, and still she had no ideas. She leaned against the counter and said a prayer. Who should I give these to? Who is hurting and could use a pie?

You.

It was the warm, quiet kind of thought she’d always believed didn’t come from her own mind but from God. Not a word or an image, but an idea, simple and sweet, and it made her heart burn.

You, Becky. You.

She felt noticed, and that both sang and stung. She sat on the kitchen floor and cried. Then she ate half a pie.

Over the next few months, Becky cried so much she feared she might sustain permanent water damage. Hyrum as a baby had been constantly wet—drooly, weepy-eyed, runny-nosed, his chin and nose covered in red prickly rash from the constant moisture. She’d kept him in a cloth bib so she could wipe him down at will. That was how she felt now. If only she could find an adult-sized bib.

Between the sobbing and breathing, sobbing and healing, she found a new sensation entering into her hollowed parts—mystification.

But I wasn’t supposed to be alone, she thought. The kids keep growing up and they’ll have their own lives, and I’ll be alone. I’ll always be alone until I die. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Noise, chaos, ruckus were Becky’s lullabies. Mike’s snoring had soothed her to sleep. Now she was standing in the hurricane-swept desolation of her life and wondering how on earth she had ended up there.“

What haven’t you taken care of that you should?” Alice Hyde asked Becky during their now-weekly lunch. It had been ten days since the Mexico trip, and Alice was looking over Becky with a shrewd expression.

“Nothing, I’m doing better, really.”

“Rebecca Louise, I’m asking you again as your mother. What do you still need to take care of ? What’s hanging over you the heaviest?”

“The bedroom,” Becky said. Even as a child, she couldn’t lie to her mother.

The bedroom had been the site of her companionship, her quiet love with Mike, where they met up and checked in with each other after the kids slept and the house was still. “I hate being there. Alone. I detest it. I . . .” She choked, surprised to discover a sob in her throat.

Alice nodded. “Let’s reinvent it.”

“I don’t want to disturb anything that would upset the kids.”

“Nonsense. It’s been a year. This won’t bother them.”

“Mom . . .” But Becky didn’t argue. Her mother’s gaze was distant and calculating, and Becky well knew there were no words to bring her back now. Besides, her other reason for leaving the bedroom intact was too horrible to speak. (I need to keep it as-is, just in case it was all a mistake, just in case Mike’s alive and coming home any day.)

They bought a secondhand bedroom set and painted it deep purple. The walls they redid in lime green, Sam and Polly lending a hand. Alice got one of her theater friends who painted sets to create a forest scene on one wall. Alice made a quilt and shams in garish colors. The new bed was a double, the king gone, leaving room for a love seat, chair, and coffee table. They ripped out the old, dark curtains and put in new light-permeating blinds. The room was brighter, inviting, felt more public than private, and Becky kept magazines on the coffee table and little bowls full of candy to lure in kids and visitors.

It became a ritual to gather in Becky’s room before bed. Sometimes it was just Sam and Polly, who were still a little more tender and apt to weep, a little more eager for their mother’s embrace and voice. Sometimes Hyrum joined them for family prayer, followed by snacks and chats in the love seat.

“Better?” Alice asked, inspecting the room one clear winter morning.

“Yeah . . .”

Alice put an arm around Becky and pulled her into her soft chest. “Tell me.”

“I miss him.”

“Of course you do.”

“And . . . I don’t know how to be a mother anymore. I thought I was good at it. But so much of the parenting was really Mike—we talked about everything, and his surety gave me confidence. Now I feel like a fraud.”

Alice kissed her daughter’s head several times. “It’ll come back. Your confidence. You’ll find it again.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“You’re a good mother, honey lamb. I know it, and so do your kids. Just promise me when that confidence comes knocking, you’ll let it in.”

Becky gave in to the spiritual proddings poking soft fingers at her heart, began to pray more, and allowed herself to feel the comfort that she was accustomed to feeling after her prayers. She dreamed of Mike nearly every night. Dreaming of him helped her believe that Becky and Mike hadn’t ended that day in the hospital, that they would go on forever. He didn’t carry important messages from beyond. He was just there, they were together, and the feeling of it would linger with her in the morning, the way the smell of cookies baking hangs in the air even after they’re all eaten.

And there was something else. A quiet buzzing of anticipation whenever she thought of Felix helped drone out the pain of loss, just a little. It helped give her something to wonder about instead of the constant questions: Will my kids survive the loss of a father? Will my heart hurt this much for the rest of my life? Will we ever be okay?

Right about two years after Mike’s death, the extended family began to talk to Becky about “moving on.” It was a sudden attack from all sides, like those ants that crawl up your leg then send out a chemical signal to all bite at once.

“One of my co-workers, Paul, he’s a really great guy, a widower himself . . .” her brother Jerry said as they cleared the table from Sunday dinner.

“Time to get that meat back on the market,” her brother John said, slapping her backside. He was always the tactful one.

“It wouldn’t mean you love Mike any less,” her sister, Diana, said as they planted bulbs in the backyard, five of their combined twelve children chasing each other with worms.

Becky buried her face in her dirty hands. “Shut up,” she said, because that was a forbidden phrase growing up in their mother’s house, two words that would send them to bed without supper. And Becky was feeling like a cornered animal and wanted nothing more than to lash back as if for her life.

“Becky . . .”

“Are you telling me that if Steve died, a couple of years later you’d be over it and out dating again?”

“Let’s be honest—I have eight children. Any man who would have me would be insane, and I couldn’t marry an insane man. But yes, personally, I would be ready. I could get married again.”

Becky nearly called her a liar, but she supposed that Diana and Steve had always had one of those professional partnerships, where both knew their responsibilities and kept the family running. They didn’t seem to laugh together. And when Steve was out of town, Diana didn’t speak as if she missed him. Not like Becky and Mike. There was that fl are of pain in her general heart region again.

“Diana, some animals mate for life. You don’t tell a goose that lost her mate, ‘It’s time to move on.’ No moving on for a goose. In fact, a goose doesn’t even appreciate the insinuation. Try to be all cute and helpful with a goose and just hint at the moving on advice, and that goose will up and bite you on the tush.”

Diana knocked the dirt off her shovel. “How about we just pretend I didn’t bring this up?”

“Sounds good to me.”

At least one Jack was open to new love. Polly had a boyfriend named Theo, a pale, sad-eyed, fl oppy-haired ghost of a boy who was never without his black trench coat, a beaten-up paperback of Sartre’s
Nausea
peeking out the front pocket.

For weeks he’d wandered the Jacks’ front yard or sat on his bike staring at Polly’s window before Polly ever invited him in. Becky wasn’t sure how they had any relationship, both just sitting in silence, sometimes listening to music, sometimes not. They would lounge in Polly’s room (with the door open—house rule), studying together. When Becky passed by, Polly’s eyes would be on her book and Theo’s eyes would be on Polly. Eerie? Still, the girl seemed happier than she’d been in two years.

Good for her, Becky thought, and better her than me.

While Diana had backed off the Move On harassment, her brothers and parents kept the parade going. Becky didn’t tell Felix about it. They spoke a few times a week, but she couldn’t even consider leaving her kids to visit him, and Felix was busy, having started a production company.

But he did come for Christmas—two years, three months, and five days since Mike died. Felix had arranged a hotel, but the first night he and Becky stayed up so late talking that he ended up sleeping on the sofa. The next day he brought his bags from the hotel and took over Fiona’s room. Fiona was in Los Angeles, having finished a one-year program at a design school in New York and was now fulfilling an internship Celeste had helped set up. When she arrived on December 23, she insisted she wanted to bunk with Polly, leaving the basement room to Felix.

Becky couldn’t find
The Little Mermaid
comforter in their storage room, but she did dig out the matching shams and put them on his pillows.

Felix jumped right into the Jack Family Christmas Week Extravaganza, which included caroling, attending a production of
The Nutcracker
and
The Christmas Carol
, a
Messiah
sing-along, strolling the Christmas lights at Temple Square, wrapping presents, and baking herds and herds of reindeer cookies for neighbors. And he was introduced to Loki, the family’s hairless cat.

“The kids wanted another pet,” Becky explained as Felix stared in horror at the creature beside him. “But with Polly’s allergies . . .”

“You are lying to me. You borrowed this creature from a zoo to play a prank on me. This isn’t even really a cat, is it? This is some sort of rat and opossum hybrid. This is a lifelike Japanese robot that can dance to disco music.”

“Funny. They’re called sphinx cats. Come on, feel her skin. Like peach fuzz, right? Isn’t she sweet? Give her a good rub. She’s very affectionate.”

“Ah-ha, yes, isn’t that just . . . er, what is coating my hands?”

“It’s . . . it’s like a body wax. I should’ve bathed her before you came. The hairless cats, they ooze this waxy stuff to protect their skin. ’Cause they don’t have hair. To protect them. So the waxy ooze helps. You see.”

Felix stared at her for several seconds, his hands held up like a doctor about to perform surgery.

“I’m going to wash my hands now. And I’m going to try very hard not to run out of this house screaming.”

Besides that, there was no drama during his visit, unless you count a minor (and mostly pleasant) fuddle when they took the three kids to the movies.

“I’ll pay the admission,” Becky insisted.

“Fine, as long as I can buy the concessions.”

That seemed fair until Felix, Hyrum, and Sam came back from the concession stand loaded with five jumbo popcorns, bucket-sized sodas, and a heap of enormous candy bars.

“Look what he bought us, Mom!” Sam said.

“Felix, are you planning to supply the Russian army?”

He schlepped his provisions up the stairs to their seats, spilling popcorn in his wake. “Er, the boys assured me it was the typical fare for a family movie night.”

“I bet they did. Now at last we have inventory to open that concession stand of our dreams.” She sighed. “Better set aside half that candy for later, ’cause that’ll be the last movie treat you boys get for a year.”

“Mom!” they both whined.

“I’m kidding. It’s Felix’s treat, so I can’t complain. Go ahead and make yourselves sick.”

“Sweet,” Sam said. Out of his ten-year-old mouth, that word sounded so cute Becky just had to kiss his cheeks.

“Oh,” Polly said sadly. “Everything has chocolate.”

“Boys, I’m surprised,” Becky said in a so-not-surprised tone. “You know Polly’s allergic to chocolate, and usually your snack food motivations are purely selfless.”

Felix gave Hyrum a bill and asked him to be a gentleman and go buy Polly some licorice, then sat next to Becky. “Since we’re on the subject, how are you managing? I mean, financially?”

“Are we on the subject?”

“We are now. So, how are—”

“Fine,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“If you don’t, I might get rough.”

“Do and it’ll be Momma’s smack-down time.”

He picked her up, right there in the movie theater, gripped her around her waist and turned her upside-down. “Tell me or it’s the dirt nap, baby.”