Five Tuesdays in Winter(52)

Her mother was reluctant to play; she was always the first to turn sour.

You haven’t even asked your daughter about her day.

C’mon, give it a shot.

All right, her mother said, taking in a deep, wary breath, C-U-N—

Wrong! There was far too much glee in his voice. He pointed toward the street. Back to Cranford Junior College for you! The windows blackened and it felt like the house was being buried alive. Her father brought two new drinks to the table. They were always so excited about a fresh drink, but all the alcohol seemed to do to either of her parents was uncover how little they liked life or anything in it. You haven’t even asked your daughter about her day. How often her mother said that, as if it were their last hope, a white ring tossed onto the waves. She tried to say the things they liked to hear: who got A’s, who got in trouble. But every night she failed. Such an uncompelling child, wholly unable, night after night, to keep her parents afloat. And then the poem slipped out of the spelling book and her mother snatched it up before she could. What’s this? Her parents’ eyes met. If they’d been wolves, they would have licked their chops.

She thought she’d disposed of these moments long ago. But now, in a house of her own, with children and a husband of her own, with dusk and dinnertime coinciding once again, they had begun to creep back in. And with them came a feeling, a presentiment, that she would eventually destroy this good life, for wasn’t her need to write like her parents’ need to drink? A form of escape, a way to detach? And, like the alcohol, it weakened and often angered her, left her yearning for the kind of rare and extraordinary ability she’d never have. What had her mother yearned for? She’d married at nineteen. Had one child. (Any more would have put me in the nuthouse, she used to say to people who asked.) Died at fifty. (Alone in a rented room, her father having left her for someone who let him be the only drunk.) After her mother’s death she’d searched her drawers for clues but there was nothing but a dinner party planner and a few manila envelopes of photographs stuck together. No note, no apology (it didn’t take her long to realize this was what she was really looking for). What had her mother’s life consisted of? When she came home from school in the afternoons, her mother would either be on the phone or flipping through a magazine, and even though she’d be doing nothing that she couldn’t continue doing now that the bus had come, a terrible wave of sadness seemed to pass through her, as if her daughter were the sun itself, setting on all her dreams. Her mother would often make herself a drink then, though she would rinse out the glass and put it back to dry on the paper towel on the shelf so that when her father came home she could pretend the one he made her was her first.

The book lay on the couch. Once again she took it in her hands. He’d crossed out nearly half the words. His red ink covered the margins of every page. He had an opinion about every choice. A grown woman would not own a toboggan! This is not the kind of man who would order a salami sandwich! She flipped again to the last chapter. It began with the four sentences she had written this morning, though he’d struck them through with triple lines, then a wavy one on top, and if she hadn’t been familiar with the words already she wouldn’t have been able to make them out. She’d been right; it was crap. The entire chapter was obliterated like that, his annotation no longer limited to the sides but covering the crossed-out type, the hand furious and uncontrolled, ending with a huge YOU CAN’T DO THIS!!!!! in the space left on the last page. Still, she’d had no idea she was so close to the end.

He returned. She could see the effects of the alcohol now, not in any carelessness of his movements but in their carefulness. He was in that state just before drunkenness, when the alcohol makes you more aware of your body and what it is touching. She felt that he drank for this moment: not for the dulling but rather for the heightening of his senses. There was something about the way he breathed through his nose, the way his fingertips touched the glass, the way his free hand settled in his lap as he sat back down beside her. Just watching him reminded her of the texture and temperature of things. She could feel the heat of his thigh. And yet his awareness of her had slipped a little. Her attraction to him came on fast and undeniably.

He turned to her sharply, as if she had spoken her desire aloud. He was young now, college age, with thick brown hair and those eyes, those haunted eyes that all the men who’d ever broken her heart had had. “You have more than one?” he asked.

“One what?” She could barely find a breath for the words. When was the last time her groin had throbbed so painfully?

He looked down at Matty, who had managed to put two pieces of a wooden track together for the bright-blue train to sit on. “Distraction.”

“I have a million distractions,” she said, hearing a long-gone flirtation in her laugh, knowing that if he touched her she would not resist. “But only three children.” Usually it gave her pleasure to speak of her children—their ages, their quirks—but now they were obscuring the conversation.

“Tolstoy had thirteen children. And most of them were born while he was writing War and Peace. I’m not sure he even knew any of their names. That’s the way it has to be done. You’ve got to forget your children’s names.”

Matty was pushing the train back and forth on the short track, making a noise she knew was “All aboard!” but to anyone else sounded like “Pla!” His long sleeves were pushed up nearly to his armpits, the way he liked them. His upper lip was tucked deep into the warm interior of the lower, which kept its slippery purchase with steady upward undulations. But when he glanced up to find her studying him, the lip was released for the sake of an enormous smile. He patted the spot on the rug beside him, mouthing mamamamama without diminishing the smile. He looked just like her husband then, beckoning her, eager for her. But she did not doubt Matty, did not suspect dissembling or duplicity. Why was it so much harder to believe in her husband’s love for her? She thought again of the time he had quoted her line about snow like nests in the trees. They had been walking around a lake, the three of them, their oldest, Lydia, not more than four months old and tucked in the BabyBj?rn inside her parka. Halfway around, he had stopped and wrapped them tightly in his arms. My family, he’d said, his voice a little squeak. Then, a quarter of a mile later, he said that about the snow and the trees and she marched off and he kept insisting he hadn’t been mocking her. Now she could easily see he hadn’t been. Of course he hadn’t been. She knew now, too, that even at the time she had known he hadn’t been mocking her—but she’d needed to find something to create distance, to put a wedge between her and that small squeak of joy he’d revealed to her. Monotony, especially the unfamiliar monotony of being loved, was something she couldn’t seem to get comfortable with.