They need another child. Susan needs a little brother or sister to love and care for, they all need someone to break up this dynamic of mother vs. daughter. Imogen hopes dearly it’s a boy. Girls are the mother’s job, aren’t they? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?
But Susan was an accident, and Vernon wants to hold off on another child until they have more money. He says ideally they would wait until they owned their own home. He implied that Susan is such a handful, maybe two would be—
“Stop right there, buster,” Imogen said. “Don’t you dare say another word.”
He held up his hands, as though to signal innocently, Geez, why so angry? But she could tell he was angry. He was angry a lot.
“I am not raising an only child, and that’s final,” she said.
She arrives at a corner. Bentley Court and Marine Street. Not sure where that is. She can see a commercial street a block away, which, when she gets to it, turns out to be Lincoln Boulevard. From here she knows how to get back to Ozone. She passes the park again—can’t tell if it’s different people now, fuck them all anyway—and goes back down Dewey to Dimmick to the little stucco box. She parks the stroller with sleeping Susan in the shade just inside the front door.
Vernon is out on the side patio, stretching a screen across a window frame. The worktable there is the first thing he built when they moved in. He’s secured the frame to the table with clamp screws and is manipulating a long dowel to which he’s stapled the leading edge of the screen. She watches him for a few seconds. He’s good with his hands. Imogen mentioned yesterday that insects were getting in through a tear.
“Thank you,” she says.
He starts to talk about the frame, something about the inadequate way it was reinforced at the corners. She waits patiently. Really, what would her life be like without him? She certainly wouldn’t want to be a single mother, would she? And face it, she would never fix anything, any house she lived in would fall apart around her, or she’d have to find the money to hire a handyman.
He leans far across the table and his stomach bulges out from his belt. She wishes he wouldn’t snack so much. He was so lean and square-jawed when they married. The physical side has never been her favorite, and his increasing roundness isn’t helping. “I don’t understand how a person could let himself go like that,” her mother said on her last visit. She deliberately said it in Vernon’s hearing, which made Imogen feel angry at her and defensive of her husband, but also hopeful he might be embarrassed enough to start dieting.
He’s still talking about the frame. He truly thinks she’s interested.
He’s a good man, trying to be kind.
When he got his PhD last year, Imogen thought they could finally go to Norway. Just three weeks, before he started work at RAND, a delayed honeymoon. Her mother had offered to take care of Susan. All the magazine photos and travel agency posters Imogen had looked at through the years—fjords, snowy glaciers, the midnight sun, little seaside villages of red and ocher houses on stilts above the kelp. She and Vernon could take the coastal steamer—didn’t that sound romantic?—and stay in refurbished huts with sod roofs. Then for the last four or five days they could go down into Germany and she could finally meet Hildegard and her family. She’d looked forward for years and years. But Vernon didn’t want to travel. He said they needed furniture. Most of what they had in Chicago belonged to the apartment, and the bungalow they’d agreed to rent in Santa Monica was unfurnished.
We can sleep on the floor, Imogen said.
That makes for a nice story, but have you ever tried it? Vernon said. And what do we eat on? And where does Susan sleep?
For everything Imogen said, he had a reasonable answer. She probably could have insisted—she’d earned about three-quarters of the money during the previous five years—but partly he wore her down with logic, and partly she saw that traveling with him after this disagreement would be no fun at all. So she caved. And the moment she did, he turned with the same tirelessness to the task of buying furniture. He contacted companies, requested brochures, had her pore with him over photos of tables, dressers, bed frames. He made lists of prices and wrote letters to store managers asking for more particulars. One day she came home from work and found him drawing a diagram. He’d contacted the owner of the bungalow and requested measurements of all the rooms, including the placement of the windows and doors. He was cross-checking that diagram with the dimensions of all the furniture candidates she and he had discussed. He was determining the optimal pieces to buy and the best way to arrange them.
She looked at that diagram with its neatly ruled lines and saw the bars of a cage. She saw that he would always be right.
And now when she sets his beef and potatoes down on the green Formica kitchen table, or does her sewing at the dining room table with the driftwood maple finish, or puts Susan in her Hollywood twin bed, or sits on the Naugahyde sofa with him to watch some silly program on TV, or joins his sleeping form late at night on the double extra-long Beautyrest mattress and box spring with the mocha maple headboard, it all reminds her of the trip he wouldn’t let her take.
But also—lying next to him in bed, his oblivious (and therefore, she supposes, innocent) breathing, the dip of the mattress down toward his warm solid bulk—she
