Household Gods

and let him practice impaling them with a fork. After four or five bites, he was picking, not eating: the Teddy Grahams had taken their toll on him along with his shoes and the floor.

She’d managed two bites from the tray in front of her (too much sodium, and low-fat only by comparison to some of the other frozen food out there) when the telephone rang. She got up so fast, she almost overturned her bottle of Evian. Maybe Frank would come through after all. Stranger things had happened.

“Hello?” she panted, breathless from the dash to the bedroom.

“Hello, is this Nicole?” asked a friendly and completely unfamiliar male voice.

“Yes,” Nicole said warily. “Who is this, please?”

“My name’s Bob Broadman, Nicole.” Too friendly. “Now, I know that a busy homemaker like yourself doesn’t have a lot of time, so I’ll make this quick for you, all right, Nicole?” Way too friendly. “Would you be interested in trying in your own home — ”

Nicole slammed the receiver into its cradle. She hated telemarketers. She particularly hated telemarketers who, hearing a female voice, assumed the person who owned it was a housewife. She most particularly hated telemarketers who did all that and — insult on top of injury — called at dinnertime.

Her gaze fell again on Liber and Libera. She could have sworn they looked back at her with sympathy in their stony eyes. The thought wasn’t so absurd as it might have seemed before she went through this day from hell. Nobody in their time could have had to put up with what she’d just put up with. Just look at them, god and goddess side by side, equal and anything but separate. No repressive patriarchy. No fat plaid-jacketed lawyers leering up an employee’s skirt. “And, by God,” she said, “no telemarketers.”

Times were simpler then. They had to have been better. How could they possibly have been worse?

She trudged back to the kitchen. Justin, gymnast extraordinaire, had succeeded in standing up on the seat of his high chair. Just as she caught sight of him, he set himself up for a swan dive to the floor. Nicole caught him with a grab that would have made a big-league center fielder jealous.

“I think you’re done,” she said. Amazing how calm she sounded — she had to be numb. “Go play quietly in your room and let me finish eating my dinner.” Maybe that would buy her the five minutes’ peace she’d prayed for in the morning. She hadn’t got it then. She didn’t honestly expect to get it now.

No more than a minute and a half later, Justin was in the front room pestering Kimberley. Most of the time, Kimberley could take care of herself, but not when she was laid flat with a virus. Nicole charged to the rescue, to find her daughter halfway toward falling asleep, and Justin trying to wake her up by shoving a toy truck in her face. Nicole laid down the law to him, which wasn’t easy when she was trying to be quiet and not disturb Kimberley. She doubted it was sinking in. Two-year-olds paid even less attention to the laying down of the law than some juries did.

By the time the credits rolled on the Toy Story tape, Kimberley had dozed off. She hardly stirred when Nicole picked her up and carried her to bed. It was well before her usual bedtime, but Nicole didn’t worry about that. If her daughter got a long night’s sleep, she might be close to her old self in the morning. Kids got sick in a hurry, but sometimes they got well in a hurry, too.

Justin wasn’t used to being up when his big sister was asleep. He took one of Kimberley’s Barbies and tried to fracture its skull on the coffee table. Nicole looked on with benign approval. She would never have given Barbies to Kimberley: they sent all the wrong messages. The damn dolls were Frank’s fault. What was worse, and what worried Nicole most, was that Kimberley liked them far too much to make it worth her mother’s while to confiscate them.

“The minute they’re born, they’re trapped in gender roles,” Nicole muttered.

Justin looked up from his mayhem, distracted by the sound of her voice but not curious to know what she meant. Nicole smiled at him. Justin whacked happily away at the coffee table. “Wham! Wham!” he shouted.

“Beat her brains out, kid,” Nicole said. The doll, she thought with malicious glee, looked a little like Dawn.

After he’d worked out all of his hostility and some of Nicole’s, too, Justin went to bed with no more than a token protest. Nicole took a shower, pulled on a clean pair of designer sweats — Neiman-Marcus this time, with blocks of pure strong color, blue and hot pink and acid yellow, as if she could brighten her mood forcibly by livening up her color scheme — and scowled at the telephone. She didn’t think Frank had classes on Wednesdays this quarter. If he didn’t, he could take the kids, and she wouldn’t have to burn a vacation day riding herd on them.

When the hour crawled past nine o’clock and he still hadn’t called, she called him again. Again, she got Dawn on the answering machine. This time, she tried to be more civil. She didn’t know how well she succeeded.

Ten o’clock rolled by. The telephone stayed obstinately silent. Shaking her head, Nicole went into the study and turned on the computer. She used America Online just often enough to keep from quitting the service. One reason she hadn’t quit was times like this. Frank might take too long to answer telephone messages, but he was religious about replying to e-mail the minute he saw it.

As soon as she logged on to AOL, a bright electronic voice announced, “You’ve got mail!” Nicole blinked. People didn’t send her e-mail all that often; the ones who knew she was on line also knew the mail might sit in her box for a couple of weeks before she saw it.

What the hell, she’d read it before she sent her own.

There was only one letter. It was from Frank, from his UCLA Internet address, and sent that afternoon. In the way of e-mail, it was short and to the point: The reason I can’t take the kids tomorrow is that Dawn and I are leaving for three weeks in Cancun tonight, so you might as well stop bugging me for a while, all right? I won’t be around to listen to it.

Nicole stared at the screen. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “You can’t pay child support, but you and Ms. Dumb-Blonde can bop off to Mexico any time you feel like it? You son of a bitch.”

She logged off in controlled fury and shut down the computer. No point to sending e-mail now. Frank was off to sunny Mexico, Frank and Dawn and — god damn her — Josefina, though even in a well-nurtured rage Nicole couldn’t imagine Josefina doing the sights in Cancun with a pair of irredeemably Anglo tourists. Frank didn’t give a damn what happened back here in smoggy L.A. That was Nicole’s job. Women’s work. Sit at home mopping up puke and scouring Teddy Grahams out of kitchen tiles, while the big brave man went gallivanting off to play.

She trudged back into the bedroom. Time was when it had been a sanctuary, a place she’d made for herself after Frank left. She’d hauled the curtains and the comforter and the rest of the bedroom accessories off to Goodwill, got the dresser and the bedside tables refinished, dumped the king-sized waterbed that took sheets the size of Alaska, and bought herself a nice brass bed with a queen-sized mattress. She’d even painted the walls, got rid of the old ugly peach enamel in favor of a nice flat oyster white. She’d been proud of it then, determined to make it a new beginning: Nicole Gunther-Perrin, independent woman.

Now the bold Aztec print of the comforter was crumpled and dingy and flung half on the floor. The sheets still matched, but hadn’t been changed in a week. Justin had tried to climb the drapes and pulled the whole thing down, double rod and all. The window was naked but for the Venetian blinds that she’d used to open to let the daylight in, but she hadn’t done that since she could remember.

Not that, at the moment, there was any daylight to let in. If she bothered to look out, she’d see a dark stretch of yard and the fence that divided it from the neighbors’ swimming pool. She was glad the fence was good and strong and high, to keep the babies safe. She hadn’t had to have it built; just about all L.A. backyards were fenced, which still struck her as strange.

Both of Nicole’s babies were as safe as they could be, when their father had walked out on them and their mother had just been bilked of a partnership. She and Frank had planned to put in a pool themselves later, when the kids were past the drowning stage. Now they’d never do it. The yard was a nondescript patch of dirt with a sunburnt swingset and a sandbox that Kimberley and Justin could turn into a battlefield. These days, they never got to use it. They were always either at daycare or doing weekend visitations with Frank and Dawn.

It was all dark now, invisible. Nicole turned back to the disheveled bedroom. An impulse struck, to straighten up, make the bed, dust the tables and the dresser, pick up the scattered clothes and the pile of assorted shoes. Before she could start, a glance at the bedside clock changed her mind for her. Ten thirty-eight at night was no time to make her bed for the day.

She settled for shaking out the sheets and the blanket and pulling the comforter straight. It was an absurd thing to do, anal and rather pathetic, but at least she’d crawl into a more or less orderly bed. Sleep didn’t enter into it. She was wide awake, almost painfully so.

Well, and who cared? With Kimberley sick, with Josefina off to Mexico, and with her louse of an ex-husband