Wife 22 (24 page)
Authors: Melanie Gideon
Me:
The lanterns are magical. It’s like Narnia back here.
Bobby:
I can email you the name of my contractor.
Me:
If we made two master suites out of our bedroom, we’d each be in a room the dimensions of a prison cell.
Bobby:
It’s changed our lives. I’m not lying.
Me
(
touching his cheek with the palm of my hand
)
:
I’m happy for you, Bobby. I really am. But I don’t think separate bedrooms is going to fix us.
Bobby:
I knew it! You guys
are
having problems.
Me:
Do you think Aslan could be waiting for us on the other side of that hedge?
Bobby:
Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so enthusiastic about your struggles.
Me:
I’m not struggling, Bobby. I’m waking up. This is me waking up (
lying down on the grass
).
Bobby
(
staring down at me
)
:
You waking up looks remarkably similar to you after five glasses of wine.
Me
(
gasp
)
:
Bobby B! There’s so many stars! When did there get to be so many stars? This is what happens when we forget to look up.
Bobby
: Nobody’s called me Bobby B in a long time.
Me:
Bobby B, are you crying?
Me:
It would appear I’m a little drunk.
William:
Take my arm.
Me:
I suppose now would be a good time to have sex.
William:
You’re more than a little drunk, Alice.
Me
(
slurring
)
:
Am I unbecomingly drunk or becomingly drunk?
William
(
escorting me into the bedroom
)
:
Get undressed.
Me:
I don’t think I’m capable of that at the moment. You undress me. I’ll just close my eyes and have a little rest while you take advantage of me. That will still count, won’t it? In our monthly total? If I fall asleep while we’re doing it? Hopefully I won’t vomit.
William
(
unbuttoning my shirt and taking it off
)
:
Sit down, Alice.
Me:
Wait, I’m unprepared. Give me a second to hold in my stomach.
William
(
sliding my pajama top over my head, pushing me back into the pillows, and covering me with a blanket
)
:
I’ve seen your stomach before. Besides, it’s completely dark.
Me:
Well, since it’s completely dark you’re welcome to pretend I’m Angelina Jolie. Pax! Zahara! Eat your whole-wheat pasta or else. And all six of you scram out of the family bed—NOW! Hey, why don’t you be Brad?
William:
I am not a role-playing sort of man.
Me
(
bolting up
)
:
I forgot to buy candles at Ikea. Now I have to go back. I hate Ikea.
William:
Jesus, Alice. Go to sleep.
I
wake in the late morning with a terrible headache. William’s side of the bed is empty. I check his Facebook status.
William Buckle
52,800 feet
One hour ago
Either he’s on his way to Paris or he’s gone for a ten-mile run. I lift my head from the pillow and the room tilts. I’m still drunk. Bad wife. Bad mother. I think about what embarrassing things I did last night at the potluck and cringe. Did I really try and pass Ikea meatballs off as my own? Did I really crawl through a hedge in Nedra’s garden looking for a portal into Narnia? Did I really admit to our friends that we have sex only once a month?
I fall back to sleep. Two hours later, I wake and weakly call out “Peter,” then “Caroline,” then “Zoe.” I can’t bring myself to call for William—I’m too humiliated, plus I don’t want to admit to him I’ve got a hangover. Finally, in desperation, I yell “Jampo” and am rewarded with the immediate frantic pitter-pat of tiny feet. He rushes into the bedroom and hurls himself up on the bed, panting at me as if to say “you are the only thing in this world I love, the only thing I care about, the one thing I live for.” Then he proceeds to pee all over the sheets in excitement.
“Bad boy, bad boy!” I shout but it’s useless, he can’t stop in midstream, so I just watch him dribble. His bottom lip has somehow gotten stuck on his teeth, giving him a pathetic, unintentional Elvis sort of sneer that could be read as hostility but I know is shame. “It’s all right,” I tell him. When he’s done, I drag myself out of bed, strip off my clothes, the duvet,
sheets, and mattress cover, and make a mental list of things I will do today to set myself right.
1. Drink room-temperature water with lemon.
2. Knit a scarf. A long, thin scarf. No, a short, thin scarf. No, a coaster, i.e. an extremely short, short scarf.
3. Take Jampo on a brisk walk outside: 30 to 45 minutes minimum without sunglasses, perhaps in a low-cut V-neck, so I can fully absorb optimal daily dose of vitamin D through my retinas and the delicate skin at the tops of my breasts.
4. Plant lemon verbena in the yard so I can start drinking tisanes and feeling organic and cleansed and elegant (providing 1. lemon verbena is still alive after buying at Home Depot a month ago and then forgetting to water or repot AND 2. if able to dip head below waist without puking).
5. Laundry.
6. Make Bolognese sauce, simmer on the stove all day so the family comes home to homey smell of cooking.
7. Sing, or if I’m too nauseous to sing, watch
The Sound of Music
and pretend I am Liesl.
8. Remember what it felt like to be sixteen going on seventeen.
It’s a good to-do list—too bad I don’t do a thing on it. Instead, I make another mental list of things I absolutely should NOT do and proceed to knock off every single item:
1. Load the washer but forget to turn it on.
2. Eat eight bite-sized Reese’s peanut butter cups while telling myself they only add up to half of a regular-sized cup.
3. Eat eight more.
4. Put a bay leaf (because lemon verbena very clearly dead) in some boiling-hot water and force myself to drink entire mugful.
5. Feel great because I picked that bay leaf while taking a hike in Tilden Park and then dried it in the sun (okay, in the dryer, but I would have dried it in the sun if I hadn’t left it in the pocket of my fleece and then stuck it in the wash).
6. Feel really great because I am now officially a forager.
7. Contemplate a new career as a bay leaf forager/supplier to Bay Area’s best restaurants. Fantasize about being featured in the annual food issue of the
New Yorker
wearing a bandana on my head while holding a woven basket full of fresh bay leaves.
8. Google California bay leaf and discover it’s the Mediterranean bay leaf that is used for cooking and while the California bay leaf is not poisonous, ingestion is not recommended.
9. Go online and reread all the communication between me and Researcher 101 until I’ve read between all his lines and sucked every bit of titillation out of his words.
10. Exhausted, fall asleep on the chaise in the sun, Jampo curled up beside me.
“You smell like booze. It’s oozing out of your pores.”
I open my eyes slowly to see William looking down at me.
“It’s customary to give a person some warning when a person is sound asleep,” I say.
“A person shouldn’t be sound asleep at four in the afternoon,” William counters.
“Would now be a good time to tell you I’d like to change schools and enroll at the Pacific Boychoir Academy in the fall?” asks Peter, he and Zoe strolling out onto the deck.
I raise my eyebrows at William, giving him my see-I-told-you-our-son-was-gay look.
“Since when do you like to sing?” asks William.
“Are you getting bullied?” I ask, cortisol flooding through my body at the thought of him being picked on.
“God, Mom, you stink,” says Zoe. She waves her hand at me.
“Yes, your father already informed me of that. Where have you been all day?”
“Zoe and I hung out on Telegraph Avenue,” says Peter.
“Telegraph Avenue? The two of you?
Together
?”
Zoe and Peter exchange a furtive look. Zoe shrugs. “So.”
“So—it’s not safe there,” I say.
“Why, because of all the homeless people?” asks Zoe. “I’ll have you know our generation is post-homeless.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“It means we’re not afraid of them. We’ve been brought up to look homeless people in the eye.”
“And help them panhandle,” adds Peter.
“And where were you while our children were begging on Telegraph Avenue?” I ask William.
“It’s not my fault. I dropped them off at Market Hall in Rockridge. They took the bus to Berkeley,” says William.
“Pedro sang ‘Ode to Joy’ in German. We made some guy twenty bucks!” says Zoe.
“
You
know ‘Ode to Joy’?” I ask.
“There’s a ‘You Can Sing Ludwig von Beethoven in German’ channel on YouTube,” says Peter.
“William, should I start with the potatoes?” Caroline shouts from the kitchen.
“I’ll help,” I say, hauling myself out of the chaise.
“No need. Stay here. We’ve got it under control,” says William, disappearing into the house.
As I watch everyone bustling around the kitchen, it occurs to me that Sunday afternoon is the loneliest time of the week. With a sigh, I open my laptop.
John Yossarian
likes Sweden
3 hours ago
Lucy Pevensie
Is in need of her magic cordial but seems to have misplaced it.
3 hours ago
There you are. Have you looked under the backseat of the car, Wife 22?
No, but I looked under the backseat of the White Witch’s sled.
What does the cordial do?
Heals all illnesses.
Ah—of course. Are you ill?
I have a hangover.
I’m sorry to hear that.
Are you of Swedish descent?
I can’t divulge that information.
Well, can you tell me what you
like
about Sweden?
Its neutrality. It’s a safe place to wait out a war, if one is in a war, that is.
Are you in a war?
Possibly.
How can somebody “possibly” be in a war? Wouldn’t it be obvious?
War is not always obvious, particularly when one is in a war with oneself.
What kind of war does one typically have with oneself?
A war in which one side of him thinks he may be crossing a line, and the other side of him thinks it’s a line that was begging to be crossed.
Researcher 101? Are you calling me a beggar?
Absolutely not, Wife 22.
Well, are you calling me a line?
Perhaps.
A line you are in the process of stepping over?
Tell me to stop.
Wife 22?
You’re Swedish.
What makes you think that?
Based on the fact that you use the word “ah” sometimes.
I’m not Swedish.
Okay, you’re Canadian.
Better.
You grew up on a cattle ranch in Southern Alberta. You learned to ride when you were three; home-schooled in the mornings with your four siblings, afternoons spent poaching cows with the Hutterite children who lived in the Colony next door.
How I miss my friends, the Hutterites.
You were the oldest, so much was expected out of you, not the least of which was to grow up and run the ranch. Instead you went to college in New York and only came home once a year to help with branding. An event to which you brought all your girlfriends to impress and shock the hell out of them. Also so they could see how good you look in chaps.
I still have those chaps.
Your wife fell in love with you when she saw you mount a horse.
Are you psychic?
You’ve been married a long time. It could be she is no longer as interested in seeing you mount a horse, although I would imagine that would never get old.
You’ll get no disagreement from me on that.
You are not: pasty, a gamer, a golfer, a dullard, somebody who corrects other people’s malapropisms, somebody who despises dogs.
No disagreement there either.
Don’t stop.
Don’t stop what, Wife 22?
Crossing my line.
67.
To want the people you love to be happy. To look homeless people in the eye. To not want what you don’t have. What you
can’t
have. What you
shouldn’t
have. To not text while driving. To control your appetite. To want to be where you are.
68.
Once I got past the morning sickness with Zoe, I loved being pregnant. It changed the dynamics between William and me utterly. I let myself be vulnerable and he let himself be the protector, and every day this stunned, primal, bumper-stickerish voice inside of me whispered
this is the way it should be
.
This is how you were meant to live. This is what your whole life has been for.
William was gallant. He opened doors and jars of spaghetti sauce. He heated up the car before I got in and held my elbow as we navigated rainy sidewalks. We were whole, the three of us, a trinity way before Zoe was born—I could have happily stayed pregnant for years.
And then Zoe arrived, a colicky, drooling, aggressively unhappy baby. William fled to the sanity of the office each day. I stayed home on maternity leave and divided hours into fifteen-minute increments: breastfeed, burp, lie on couch with screaming baby, attempt to sing screaming baby to sleep.
This was when I felt the loss of my mother most acutely. She never would have let me go through those disorienting early months alone. She would have moved right in and taught me the things a mother teaches her daughter: how to give a baby a bath, how to get rid of cradle cap, how long you should stay mad at your husband when he straps your baby into the swing haphazardly and she slides out.
And most importantly, my mother would have filled me in about time. She would have said, “Honey, it’s a paradox. For the first half of your life each minute feels like a year, but for the second half, each year feels like a minute.” She would have assured me this was normal and it
would do no good to fight it. That’s the price we pay for the privilege of growing old.
My mother never got that privilege.
Eleven months later, I woke one morning and the disorientation was gone. I picked my baby up out of her crib, she made the sweetest dolphin squeal, and I fell instantly in love.
69.
Dear Zoe,
Here is the story of the beginning of your life. It can be summed up in one sentence. I loved you and then I got really scared and then I loved you more than I ever thought it was possible for one person to love another. I think we are not so dissimilar, although I’m sure it feels like we are right now.
Things you may not know or remember:
1. You have always been a trendsetter. When you were two, you stood up on Santa’s lap and belted out “Do, a Deer” to the hundred irritated people who had been standing in line for an hour. Everybody started singing with you. You were flash-mobbing before anybody even knew what flash-mobbing was.
2. The first vacation your father and I took without you kids was to Costa Rica. You know how some girls go through a horse stage? Well, you were going through a primate stage. You convinced yourself I’d agreed to bring you home a white-faced capuchin. When we returned and I gave you your gift, a stuffed chimp named Milo, you said thank you very much, then went into your room, opened your window, and threw it into the branches of the redwood tree in the backyard, where to this day it still lives. Occasionally, when there’s a big storm, and the tree sways from side to side, I get a glimpse of Milo’s face, his faded red mouth smiling sadly at me.
3. Often I wish I were more like you.
Zoe, my baby—I am in the still-in-your-camp-even-though-you-can-barely-stand-to-look-at-me-most-of-the-time-right-now stage. It’s difficult, but I’m muddling through. Soy venti lattes help the time pass, as does watching
Gone with the Wind
.
Your loving Mama