Lenore just cannot think how to respond. It was really very kind of Julie to say something. She is very close to tears, so she says nothing.
“Okay,” Julie says, to reassure herself. “Good night. We’re going.”
There is no more crying. Footsteps. Miraculously, the baby does not wake up again, and Maria has slept through all of it. She has always slept well. Lenore herself sleeps worse and worse, and she knows that George walks much of the night, most nights. She hasn’t said anything about it. If he thinks she’s simple, what good would her simple wisdom do him?
The oak tree scrapes against the window in the wind and rain. Here on the second floor, under the roof, the tinny tapping is very loud. If Sarah and Julie say anything to George before they leave, she doesn’t hear them. She hears the car start, then die out. It starts again—she is praying for the car to go—and after conking out once more it rolls slowly away, crunching gravel. The bed is no warmer; she shivers. She tries hard to fall asleep. The effort keeps her awake. She squints her eyes in concentration instead of closing them. The only sound in the house is the electric clock, humming by her bed. It is not even midnight.
She gets up, and without turning on the light, walks downstairs. George is still in the living room. The fire is nothing but ashes and glowing bits of wood. It is as cold there as it was in the bed.
“That damn bitch,” George says. “I should have known she was a stupid little girl.”
“You went too far,” Lenore says. “I’m the only one you can go too far with.”
“Damn it,” he says, and pokes the fire. A few sparks shoot up. “Damn it,” he repeats under his breath.
His sweater is still wet. His shoes are muddy and ruined. Sitting on the floor by the fire, his hair matted down on his head, he looks ugly, older, unfamiliar.
She thinks of another time, when it was warm. They were walking on the beach together, shortly after they met, gathering shells. Little waves were rolling in. The sun went behind the clouds and there was a momentary illusion that the clouds were still and the sun was racing ahead of them. “Catch me,” he said, breaking away from her. They had been talking quietly, gathering shells. She was so surprised at him for breaking away that she ran with all her energy and did catch him, putting her hand out and taking hold of the band of his swimming trunks as he veered into the water. If she hadn’t stopped him, would he really have run far out into the water, until she couldn’t follow anymore? He turned on her, just as abruptly as he had run away, and grabbed her and hugged her hard, lifted her high. She had clung to him, held him close. He had tried the same thing when he came back from the walk with Sarah, and it hadn’t worked.
“I wouldn’t care if their car went off the road,” he says bitterly.
“Don’t say that,” she says.
They sit in silence, listening to the rain. She slides over closer to him, puts her hand on his shoulder and leans her head there, as if he could protect her from the awful things he has wished into being.
Tuesday Night
Henry was supposed to bring the child home at six o’clock, but they usually did not arrive until eight or eight-thirty, with Joanna overtired and complaining that she did not want to go to bed the minute she came through the door. Henry had taught her that phrase. “The minute she comes through the door” was something I had said once, and he mocked me with it in defending her. “Let the poor child have a minute before she goes to bed. She
The men I know are very friendly with one another. When Henry was at the house last week, he helped Dan, who lives with me, carry a bookcase up the steep, narrow steps to the second floor. Henry and Dan talk about nutrition—Dan’s current interest. My brother Bobby, the only person I know who is seriously interested in hallucinogens at the age of twenty-six, gladly makes a fool of himself in front of Henry by bringing out his green yo-yo, which glows by the miracle of two internal batteries. Dan tells Bobby that if he’s going to take drugs, he should try dosing his body with vitamins before and after. The three of them Christmas-shop for me. Last year they had dinner at an Italian restaurant downtown. I asked Dan what they ordered, and he said, “Oh, we all had manicotti.”
I have been subsisting on red zinger tea and watermelon, trying to lose weight. Dan and Henry and Bobby are all thin. Joanna takes after her father in her build. She is long and graceful, with chiseled features that would shame Marisa Berenson. She is ten years old. When I was at the laundry to pick up the clothes yesterday a woman mistook me, from the back, for her cousin Addie.
In Joanna’s class at school they are having a discussion of problems with the environment. She wants to take our big avocado plant in to school. I have tried patiently to explain that the plant does not have anything to do with environmental problems. She says that they are discussing nature, too. “What’s the harm?” Dan says. So he goes to work and leaves it to me to fit the towering avocado into the Audi. I also get roped into baking cookies so Joanna can take them to school and pass them around to celebrate her birthday. She tells me that it is the custom to put the cookies in a box wrapped in birthday paper. We select a paper with yellow bears standing in concentric circles. Dan dumps bran into the chocolate-chip-cookie dough. He forbids me to use a dot of red food coloring in the sugar-cookie hearts.
My best friend, Dianne, comes over in the mornings and turns her nose up at my red zinger. Sometimes she takes a shower here because she loves our shower head. “How come you’re not in there all the time?” she says. My brother is sweet on her. He finds her extremely attractive. He asked me if I had noticed the little droplets of water from the shower on her forehead, just at the hairline. Bobby lends her money because her husband doesn’t give her enough. I know for a fact that Dianne is thinking of having an affair with him.
Dan has to work late at his office on Tuesday nights, and a while ago I decided that I wanted that one night to myself each week—a night without any of them. Dianne said, “I know what you mean,” but Bobby took great offense and didn’t come to visit that night, or any other night, for two weeks. Joanna was delighted that she could be picked up after school by Dianne, in Dianne’s 1966 Mustang convertible, and that the two of them could visit until Henry came by Dianne’s to pick her up. Dan, who keeps saying that our relationship is going sour—although it isn’t—pursed his lips and nodded when I told him about Tuesday nights, but he said nothing. The first night alone I
