Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories

'Have you tried this?' he asked. He had moved to the far side of the aisle where the fresh yogurt machine stood. He was filling a Styrofoam tub from the nozzle marked Raspberry Swirl. 'This is my favorite flavor. And you don't even have to feel guilty.'

'I like my guilty pleasures.'

He smiled, good-natured but puzzled. 'You don't know what you're missing. I eat this every night. Here, taste.' He squirted a little onto a plastic spoon.

'No, thanks.'

'C'mon, just a taste.' He held out the spoon as though he were trying to tempt a fussy infant.

'I don't like yogurt.' Her voice was sharp, and a shopper glanced in their direction.

He blinked, startled. She watched a tide of hurt surprise ripple across his face. And then it was gone.

'Okay.' He shrugged and tossed the spoon into a trash receptacle. 'But I'm telling you, this stuff is really good.' He smiled, forgiving her, then snapped a lid on his container of yogurt and tossed it onto the heap of bagged fruit and vegetables in his cart.

She hadn't seen Neil's car in the supermarket lot because it wasn't there. When she came through the sliding doors with her bag of toilet paper, milk, bread, and tomatoes (she had relented, after all, relinquishing the ice cream), Neil was pacing across the lot, talking into his cell phone. He waved and Elaine tossed him a wave back, but then he began loping toward her.

'Elaine, my car's gone.'

'Gone?'

Eventually it came out that he had left the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition, but as he explained to the policeman when he arrived, he parked the car right at the front door and he was inside for only ten minutes, fifteen at the outside. The officer was courteous, taking down the license and make of the car.

'You can come in tomorrow and file a report. Do you have a way to get home?'

'I've got a load of groceries.' Neil gestured to a cart stuffed with bags and abandoned in the dark asphalt sea. 'Elaine?'

She nodded.

'My wife'll give me a lift.'

Neil wasn't upset about the car so much as bemused. 'It's not like this is a bad neighborhood.' He was waiting for her to agree.

'I never could understand why you took chances like that,' she said. 'You act like the universe will suspend the rules for you.'

'Five minutes. That's just plain dumb to steal a car parked right in front of the door.'

They drove in silence for a few blocks, just the radio buzzing some tune too low to register, the hum of the car's engine. She searched for some neutral conversational topic – the threatened nurses' strike, the new stadium that was going up – but every subject she tested in her mind sounded false against the quiet. Neil, on the other hand, seemed comfortable. The intimacy of that annoyed her unreasonably.

'I'm not your wife anymore, you know.'

He looked at her blankly.

'You told the policeman I was your wife.'

'Did I?' He grinned. 'Do you want to go back and set him straight?'

They stopped at a traffic signal and waited for a ridiculously long time, the only car at the intersection, while the ghosts of daytime traffic were ushered through.

'Maybe it'll turn up,' she said.

'Yeah, I suppose so.'

She sensed his attention had shifted. His mind was onto something else and he was waiting for her to redirect the conversation, to pry loose his thoughts with a series of deft questions. This had been their pattern. Elaine resisted.

The light changed, and they drove through downtown. At night, it looked like a scene from a science fiction movie, silent and swept clean of humanity. The wide streets were deserted, traffic signals washing the empty pavement green, then yellow, then red. Warning lights winked from the tops of dark office towers, all jutting mirrored surfaces. A few squat buildings remained from the days when this was still a bedroom community. The old 76 filling station on the northeast corner was a video store now, its fluorescent interior spilling white light onto a row of empty parking spaces. Kitty-corner from the filling station was the Eastlake Savings and Loan where they'd taken out the loan for the second house; it was now a branch of one of the big interstates, but it looked more or less the same, smaller against the backdrop of high-rises.

Elaine finally relented. 'The kids told me about Nicole. I'm sorry.' The funny thing was, she truly was sorry. She could remember predicting bitterly that he would someday realize what a flimsy piece of packaging he'd traded her in for, all spandex and peroxide, but now that she'd been proven right, it gave her no pleasure.

'Did they tell you she's suing me for support?'

'Can she do that?'

'Nothing to stop her from trying, I guess.' He shook his head, with a kind of rueful bewilderment. 'No fool like an old fool, right?' He seemed to be actually asking her the question.

'Do you want me to contradict you?'

'Well, you could tell me I'm not so old.' He smiled wooingly.

In spite of herself, she smiled back. 'Face facts, Neil. You're an old goat.'

Somehow that satisfied him. He nodded, oddly pleased.

'Do you remember what we paid for the house on Phinney?' he asked.

'Thirty-seven thousand.'

'I drove by there last month. It's on the market. Just out of curiosity, I called up the realtor. They were asking three twenty for it.'

'You're joking.' She was continually shocked by how fast things changed.

'That was a cute little house.'

It had been the first of three houses, just four doll-sized rooms but with a wide covered porch and an old maple that shaded their bedroom with dancing green light. Darcy had been conceived in that room, and then slept in the bottom drawer of the dresser because there was no space for a crib. They would throw impromptu parties, half a dozen interns and their wives or girlfriends drinking sangria and dancing in the yard. Elaine felt a dull pang in her chest, something like grief for her child-husband and her younger self, the two of them bumbling and careless and, for a long while, lucky.

She passed the high school and the park and the Methodist church and then turned right into the neighborhood where Neil lived now. She found his driveway and left the engine running.

'Have you had dinner?' he asked.

'It's after eleven,' she said, as if this were an answer. In truth, she rarely sat down to a meal, just threw one of those little frozen pizzas in the microwave or nibbled at whatever was handy. It was a holdover from being married to a doctor. When the kids were little, she had fought to keep their dinnertimes regular, but it often meant she had cooked dinner in two shifts and picked in between.

'Well, how about a glass of wine or something?'

'I've got to get home and get this stuff in the fridge.'

'You can put it in mine. I hate eating alone,' he added.

She was curious.

The extra house key was hidden under a pot next to the back door, exactly where anyone would look first. They entered the kitchen through the back door, and when Neil flipped on the lights, Elaine blinked in the sudden glare. Every surface gleamed antiseptically under bright fixtures: an enormous stainless-steel gas range, a matching Sub-Zero refrigerator, double steel sinks deep enough to bathe a large dog in, frosted glass cabinets with metal pulls. What had surely been touted as modern and functional instead screamed 'operating arena.' Elaine could almost picture patients being prepped on the granite slab countertop of the island. He could bring his work home.

'Wow,' she said stupidly.

'Do you like it?' he asked, and she was surprised to see that he wanted her approval.