What You Don't Know(76)

*

There are always people at the house, sometimes professionals from one of the different clubs Jacky belongs to, other business owners looking to network, or sometimes kids from one of the restaurants, teenagers who come over for dinner and stay late, watching TV and drinking beer with Jacky, talking and smoking and laughing about sports and movies and everything, because Jacky can make conversation about anything, that’s always been one of his gifts.

Ever since he took over the restaurant, Jacky likes the house full of people, the floors groaning under the weight of shuffling feet and thick with the smell of perfume and cigarettes, he was never like that before, he always liked their privacy, he liked to come home from work and eat dinner and relax, read the paper and watch the news. It’s called networking, he says, it’s for the business. But she thinks this change might be because they’ve never caught pregnant again, even though they’ve been trying for ten years, even though the doctor says there’s nothing wrong with either of them, and their plans for a family are quietly shelved, then disappear altogether. The house is too big, too empty without the happy sounds kids would make, and he wants it to fill it up, kill the silence.

So he puts out an invitation to everyone, and at first not many show up, but Jacky keeps pushing, keeps cajoling, and more and more come, until every night is a party at the Seever house, plenty of food and beer, Jacky sitting at the head of the dining-room table like a king, his face red and jolly, and it all seems so ridiculous and sad, and there’s something desperate about it too. She doesn’t like Jacky very much when there are other people around—she actually doesn’t like him at all, with his deep, gusty laugh and moronic jokes, and she feels embarrassed for her husband, because he’s busy making a fool of himself, although no one else seems to mind. They all think he’s one helluva good guy, a real gas, like her father used to say. They laugh and slap him on the fat of the arm and sit around her nice cherrywood dining-room table and eat and leave behind wet rings with their glasses because they won’t use the coasters she puts out every damn night.

You should join us, Jacky tells her, but she won’t. She cooks the food, puts it out on the table before they all sit down, and then cleans up, after everyone has moved to another room, so they don’t watch her picking up their messes and wiping up their spills, like a maid in her own house. She loads the dishwasher, wipes down the tables and counters once, and then again, and heads upstairs, puts her hair up in rollers and applies her cold cream. She doesn’t like the noise, their talk about people and places she doesn’t know, will never know. She’d rather be in her own bed, tucked down under the comforter with the ceiling fan whirring companionably overhead.

*

It’s easy to spend money, easier than she ever knew. Her father is a man who uses cash to pay for everything, who has a big steel safe in his bedroom full of greenbacks. He doesn’t trust banks, but that’s not a surprise, because he doesn’t trust anyone. He jeers when Gloria shows him her credit card, his face mean as he mashes his cigarette into a saucer.

“You’re coming up in the world, are you?” he says. “Managed to trick a bank into lending you money you don’t need?”

“It’s not like that—”

But her father shouldn’t be one to judge, not when he never let her mother treat herself to a new dress, never let her tithe extra to the church. Her father always called himself frugal, but she sees now that he’s stingy, that he wouldn’t let a dime squeak out of his wallet to make anyone happy, even his own wife. At least Jacky isn’t like that. He likes to give people things, wants to help them—she can’t count the number of times high school kids have stopped by the house for career advice or guidance, or because Jacky promised them a few bucks to mow the lawn or rake the leaves, even if it’d been done only a few days before. She’s heard people say that you sometimes have to sacrifice to get ahead (she’s not sure where she first heard that saying, and even though she thinks it’s about chess, it still applies to her husband), and that’s what Jacky is doing. Sacrificing. Spending a few bucks to make other people’s lives better.

She still wants a baby, more than anything, but they can’t, so why not get a job? Or go back to school, become a teacher. Bring home her own paycheck, contribute to what they have going on, have something going on that could fill her days. But Jacky tells her no, gently, in a soft voice, reminding her that he provides everything she will ever need. Everything she could ever want. And that’s true, but sometimes Gloria thinks there should be more than this, than grocery shopping and planning meals and watching television and ironing, that she wants more than this, that she never thought this was how her life would turn out, even though women friends are always saying how lucky she is, what a good man Jacky is. And he is. She feels guilty when she thinks otherwise, because he pays attention to her, and takes her out for nice meals and opens doors and pulls out her chair, and he’s always careful about putting the toilet seat back down when he’s finished. And there’s the things he doesn’t do, let’s not forget, heavens no, because the things a man doesn’t do are just as important as the things he does—he doesn’t complain when she comes home from JCPenney and Montgomery Ward with armfuls of bags and he doesn’t care when she burns the casserole and he doesn’t mutter when she wears a flannel nightgown, the one that covers from her chin to the tops of her toes, and tells him that her head hurts, that she wants to go to bed, that she’s not in the mood. There’s never been a repeat of that episode so long ago, no more sex that might be rape but probably isn’t, and he doesn’t say that she’s so beautiful that she deserves to die, and he doesn’t hold a gun up to her head and promise that after he shoots her he’ll shoot himself too and the police will never find them, two bodies lying side-by-side on the cold linoleum, their bodies so close it’ll be impossible to tell one person from the other.