The Egg Code (36 page)

“He’s pres—”

“—he’s president of the United States. The most respected—until recently, the most respected job in the world! And he had to deal with all sorts of things. I just saw it on TV.”

“I think I missed that one.”

“Incredible stuff. They had this actor playing Harry Truman. And he’s walking down the street. And he sees this guy, right? And while he’s standing there, this car comes—boom!—and knocks him down. And Harry Truman’s standing there. The actor they had playing Harry Truman. And he goes up to the guy and says, you know, whatever, I’ll take care of you.”

“Nurse you back to health.”

“Exactly, whatever it takes. And the guy says, Fine! Take me back to your home. I mean, I don’t know, they might’ve—”

“Fluffed it up a bit.”

“Changed it around, sure, but the way I saw it, the way I interpreted the film was—”

“Things happen.”

“Things happen, and when they do—”

“You just gotta say okay—”

“And then you move on. And that’s all you can do. And that’s all
we
can do, as a society. But the important thing is, we shouldn’t look at a given situation and say this is this or that’s that. It doesn’t have to be one thing or the other.” She paused, a word lingering on the edge of her tongue. “This can be . . . conceivably, this could turn out to be a very good thing. But I have a sense that Simon isn’t the kind of boy who would be . . . well served by the services we can provide.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“The scores. The scores are a problem. The scores are not very good.”

“The scores are . . . poor?”

The woman nodded, less anxious now. Lydia seemed to understand. This was good. They could skim over the details. “The scores are very bad. Well below average.”

“We were worried that it might be an issue. But you never know.”

“You never know until you try. And you
should
try. And this is not the end of the world. This is a very small thing. In the large scheme of things.”

“I suppose.”

“But I’m so sorry.”

“No, no.”

“And if there’s anything—do you have a way of getting back to . . . ?”

“Oh, we drove in from town.”

“Okay, I wasn’t sure. Some people have . . . things to coordinate.”

“No, we’re . . . we should be okay.”

The ladies stood and walked across the room. Leaning against the partition, Mrs. Olivet folded her arms and sighed. It was the end of a long working day and she wanted to go home. She needed a bath. Bubbles. Steam. A bath and a big glass of sherry.

“If it’s all right, I’ll just let you find your way out.”

“Where’s . . . ?”

“Oh! He’s still in the other room. He was feeling a little low, so I told him you stay here and I’ll talk to Momma.”

Lydia walked back into the testing room and sat down, taking Simon’s hands in her own. Embarrassed, she longed to leave him here, to return home by herself, watch a movie, drink some wine, then wake up at six a.m., single and childless.

“Listen, Simon,” she said. “I love you and that’s not gonna change. Now we’re gonna go home and we’re gonna have a nice dinner.”

“You’re not mad?” he asked.

She bristled, detecting something manipulative in his voice. “No, of course I’m not,” she said, then stood and led him out of the testing site, past the fancy vending machines, the girl playing air violin, the scores of other children engaged in their prodigious activities, arguing in Portuguese, constructing DNA models out of straws and bent paper clips, writing morose one-act plays on the backs of old calculus exams. No one looked up as they passed; no one noticed and no one cared.

It was cold outside; the car started on the third go. Driving home, Lydia turned on the radio, waited a second, then switched it off. A single note squeezed through the speakers; she recognized the song: “Hungry Heart,” by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and from this she reconstructed the rest of the tune in her head. Her memory of the song was not as a linear piece of music, but rather as a single impression, all notes and all phrases heard at once. She
felt
“Hungry Heart” as a compact moment of art, and along with it came memories of the time when the song was popular, when she and Steve were still newlyweds living in Crane City and he was working four jobs, seven days a week, including a night gig sweeping up at a pharmacy, a humiliating experience for everyone involved—especially for Lydia, who had to watch her husband leave the house every night dressed in an apron and a nametag. What else did she remember from that time? Cheap furniture. Cheap wine. The magnets on the refrigerator—a watermelon magnet, a single slice of watermelon, and for a joke Steve would sometimes hold it up to his lips and pretend that it was a smiley-mouth, and Lydia would laugh and kiss him to get him to stop. The smell of Steve’s socks. The smell of the hamper. The way the hamper lid squeaked when you lifted it. How a whole week’s worth of their clothes fit perfectly inside the hamper. The thrill of mixing your dirty clothes with another person’s dirty clothes, a person of the opposite sex. Doing the dishes together. The rack where the dishes dried. The fun of being annoyed by another person’s stupid habits. Rolling your eyes in public.
Yeah, that’s my husband.
But loving it, loving all of the awful things.

East of the expressway, the woods took over, and Lydia could feel Big Dipper Township pulling her toward its frozen heart, where her own home gazed out upon the water and the high tower and the ring of trees that seemed to go on for hundreds of miles. Rounding the lake, she touched her son’s cheek. “Were you afraid?” she asked.

Simon scrunched his fists into his lap and pouted. “They had it too hard,” he said.

“They had it too hard? What was too hard about it?”

“They asked me, they said I had to know who was the guy who made the book machine.”

“Okay.” She thought about it. “And what did you say?”

“I said, I dunno, I dunno who he was, and they said okay, one wrong.”

She nodded as they turned up the winding drive. “That’s okay, Simon. It’s okay not to know things.”

Leaving the car, they walked across the driveway and into the house. Motion-sensitive switches activated the recessed lighting as they moved from room to room. Simon chucked his jacket over the back of the sofa and trudged upstairs. The quiet of the house seemed volcanic—the quiet of landscapes, not of living rooms. Passing into the kitchen, Lydia opened the freezer door and took out a steak to defrost.

At six o’clock, she picked up the phone in the master bedroom and called the store. A girl named Scarlet told her that Steve had left earlier that afternoon with Mr. Pee and Mr. Carroll and had not returned. Lydia said thank you and hung up the phone. She sat there for a few minutes, seized by a weird paralysis. Sliding out of her shoes, she propped up a few pillows and rested against the headboard. If Steve was here, he would be sleeping on his stomach with his head turned toward the window, toward the edge of the bed. If Steve was here, she would be more conscious of her every movement, the way she took off her shoes, how much noise it made, the clunk of the shoes dropping to the floor. He would be lying there without his shirt on, and Lydia would be able to see the silver-blond hair on the back of his neck, and if she crept around to the other side of the bed, she could look down at his sleeping face, his mouth open as he snored or cleared his throat. She grabbed the phone and redialed the store, demanding to speak with the manager. The same girl laughed and said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m doing two things at once.” Lydia wedged her feet under the comforter and snapped, “Why don’t you do
one
thing at once?” and the girl’s tone changed from friendly and professional to stiff and mean, something along the lines of, “I’m sorry, madam, but Mr. Mould left several hours ago and I have no idea where he is,” and Lydia—trying not to sound desperate—said, “Well, this is his wife and I would like to know where he is,” and the girl—hoping to gloss over her earlier remark—said, “I don’t know, Mrs. Mould, I’m very sorry, I wish I did, but the second we hear anything we’ll—” and Lydia said
fine
and hung up.

Padding past her son’s room, she leaned across the doorway and said hello. Simon looked up from his special coloring book; extra-huge crayons, the kind you’d buy for an infant, lay in piles and broken pieces. A few minutes later she came back, calling up from the bottom of the stairs, “Dinner soon!” His voice returned, unreasonably annoyed: “WHAT?!” Lydia scowled—
Oh, fuck you
—then went into the kitchen. The cat, hunched over its dinner, froze and stared, ashamed of itself. Lydia clucked softly but the thing ran off anyway, upsetting a few knickknacks in the living room. She walked over to the counter and picked up the steak. It was still hard; when she dropped it on the countertop, it made a noise like a giant poker chip. Pressing her thumb into the shrink-wrap, she felt the cold of the meat, the way it pulled at her skin. She removed her thumb and stared at her pink thumbprint, a little oval of color surrounded by frost. This was the color of flesh, of gore. The way things look when you cut them open. Her own flesh. What part would people eat? The muscles, probably. Lydia pinched her forearm. That’s the choice part, right there. Ass is too tough. Too much chewing involved. The organs? More of a delicacy. A little green sphere coated with gravy. And then when you cut that open? Chambers, cavities. Undulating tubules. What hideousness we conceal. Thank God for skin. Steve’s chest. Steve’s stomach. The rumbling underneath. The dumb response of his genitals. Everything hacked apart. The body splayed across a bloody patch of road. A hand here, fingers curled in death. Evidence for the re-enactment. Medics swarm as wild deer look on curiously. They’re waiting for leftovers. They’d eat it—oh, sure! Lap the blood. Fighting over the skull. An ear in one mouth, an ear in the other. The deer pull and the skull breaks apart. Braaayyyns! His last facial expression. Fear of the road. The wall ahead. Thank God he can’t see this. Eye stalks severed.

Headlights skimmed across the driveway as Lydia dropped the frozen steak into a bowl of hot water. She leaned over the sink and saw, through the window, Steve’s car parked next to hers. He climbed out and stood between the cars for a moment, his breath white and heavy in the cold air. Glancing up at the house, he gulped and slipped his keys into his pants pocket. Lydia ran out to meet him at the door. He looked horrible.

“Okay, okay.”

“You’ve been gone all afternoon!”

He slouched across the foyer, staring vaguely at the bare dining-room table. His eyes were red and his coat was wet with slush. “Lydia, I’d like a moment to take off my jacket.”

“Don’t be relaxed!”

“Just a little time would be ever so nice.”

“It’s already—what time is it?”

“I don’t know, Lydia. It’s a long drive, you know? You’ve done it before. You gotta go all the way down and then all the way back. It takes some time. So here I am.”

Closing the door, she herded him into the next room. “So now what am I supposed to do?”

“Let’s all do nothing. For a treat.” He sighed as he took off his jacket and let it fall to the floor. A wedge of perspiration made a dark trail along the back of his shirt.

Lydia stood directly under the blurred light of the chandelier. “I called. Some girl picked up. ‘Oh, I don’t know where he is!’ That was helpful.”

“Great, you got ’em all worked up. Let’s blow up the whole world while we’re at it.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. And don’t put your coat there.”

Halting in mid-reach, Steve laughed and slung the jacket over his left arm. “Lydia . . .”

“Don’t put your
coat
there!”

“Pffehhh. I’m gonna put it on the chair.”

“Don’t put it there either!”

“Where do you want me to put it?”

“That chair was my mother’s and it’s worth eighty-five hundred dollars.”

“Okay! I won’t put it there!”

“Don’t you care?”

“About what—the chair?”

“The chair, for one thing, it’s a beautiful piece of furniture.”

“It’s a great chair. I’m not saying anything about the chair.”

“Don’t you
dare
insinuate anything about
that
chair or
my
mother, because this house belongs to me!”

Steve’s fist tightened around the jacket. “I am well aware of that, Lydia, and I’m not going to get into a big fight about it. We
all
know—
I
know. I’m a worthless, horrible, miserable person. That’s fine! We’re in total agreement about that.”

“I’m not saying you’re a miserable person, Steve. I’m saying if you touch that chair, I’m going to rip your fucking head off.”

“Jesus!”

“What?”

“If you’re serious about that. I need to get away from you.”

“Oh, stop.” She went into the kitchen and turned on the lights, but they were already on, and now they were off and so she turned them back on again. “Hang up your jacket and sit down. We’re having steak for dinner.”

“I don’t want any steak.”

“You’ll eat it. It’s expensive.”

“I’m not hungry. I had lunch with Cam and Jim today.”

“That’s what you did with your day.”

“That’s what I did with my day. We had a nice long lunch—on the house!—and I drank a beer.”

“Reckless.”

“Darn right! I had a Michelob Light and a plate of nachos, and then a scoop of ice cream for dessert, and then I got FUCKING FIRED!”

Breathless, she dashed out of the kitchen. The two rooms seemed to crash together. “Oh, my God. Why on earth?”

“Listen. Let me tell you—”

“Jesus
Christ
, Steve!”

“Let me
tell
you—”

“Now we’re broke!”

“Oh, we’re not broke. That’s an absurd thing to say. I’ve got severance pay, they’re giving me . . . for six months.”

Lydia shook her head and sat down. “What about the house?”

“The house, as far as I know . . . I don’t know about the house.”

“The whole point of you working, Steve, was so I wouldn’t have to use my savings to pay this property tax.”

“How much savings do you have?”