A Place at the Table (24 page)

Cam doesn’t speak much during dinner, other than to comment that everything is delicious. He wears his pin-striped suit from work, his red tie still on. I keep stealing glances at him, as if we are on a first date and I am trying to discover who he is. He is almost a handsome man. I mean, he is handsome, in that he dresses well and keeps in shape and has green eyes with long lashes. But his forehead is too wide and there is a beefiness to his lips that always makes me think of Vienna sausages. They’re strange things, those Vienna sausage lips. They are sexy to kiss, warm and thick and molten. Cam can get me wet just by kissing. But they indicate petulance.

After dinner, as I begin cleaning up, Cam lets our dog, Sadie, into the backyard for her nightly pee. We had another dog, Cleo, who died a few months ago, a reality I have not entirely adjusted to. Sometimes I’ll look at the couch and see Cleo lying on the back cushions, or see her little face pressed against the lowest of the windowpanes that frame the back door. It is so natural to see her waiting to be let in that I will head to the door to do so and then, halfway there, realize that what I saw was an illusion, a trick, the brain filling in what it expects to see, creating substance out of nothing at all.

Cam clears the rest of the table while I start rinsing off dishes; then he goes to the door to let in the dog.

“Sadie?” Cam holds the back door open as he calls her name again and again. It is September, and the weather is already turning. The hair on my arms lifts as cold air floats into the kitchen.

“Goddamn it,” mutters Cam, and without putting on a jacket
he ventures outside. I hear my husband call Sadie’s name once more before the door shuts behind him. By the time Cam and Sadie return I have loaded the dishwasher and am wiping down the countertops with Fantastik.

“Hey, naughty puppy,” I say as Sadie darts to her water bowl, taking great gulps from it.

“You left the back gate open,” Cam says, his voice devoid of warmth.

I feel my throat tighten as he plants himself in the middle of the kitchen, hands on hips.

“I did?”

“She was all the way down in the Fergusons’ yard, Amelia. You have got to be more careful. I mean, good God, was it not enough to kill Cleo?”

It takes a moment for my brain to catch up. Did he actually just say that? Reference the terrible thing that occurred a few months ago, last June, while I was cleaning out the car, parked in the driveway?

It was midmorning, and I had just returned to the house from the gym, where I had signed up for a low-impact aerobics class with the hope that it would help me work off the extra twenty pounds I’ve put on over the last few years. (Since I hit my forties, everything I eat seems to stick to me, which is particularly aggrieving considering how much I love to cook, how it is the thing that soothes me when I have had a bad day.) My car was pretty junked up, so I decided to take a moment to clean it out, leaving the driver’s side door open while I took takeaway boxes from Alpen Pantry, candy wrappers, apple cores, and Diet Coke cans to the trash bin by the side of the house.

Cleo, our little Houdini of a poodle, must have somehow gotten out of the fenced backyard and, while I wasn’t looking, jumped into the car.

I didn’t realize she was in there. I was distracted. Cam and I had fought the night before, and I could not get some of the things he
said out of my mind. That he was tired of our lives. That he was bored. That he wondered if maybe we should call it a day, leave the messy past behind, start over. (I argued with him in my head:
I thought you liked our messy life, the comfort of it, the ease of not having to be perfect all the time, like you were expected to be when you were a child, of letting the dogs get on the couch, of eating ice cream from the carton, of leaving the
Sunday Times
scattered over the couch so you can settle in and read whenever you want.)

After cleaning out the Volvo I had gone inside, taken a shower, blow-dried my hair, puttered around. Hours later I returned to the car. Mandy had spent the night at a friend’s house, and I was running late to pick her up.

The moment I slid into the driver’s seat I was overwhelmed by a terrible odor, a smell that reminded me of the time Mandy forgot to take in her container of leftovers from the restaurant and her half-eaten roast chicken stayed in the hot car all the next day. I glanced over my shoulder to see if there were any telltale take-out containers. And just as it occurred to me that there couldn’t be, because I would have already cleaned them out, I saw Cleo, my sweet puppy, curled in a semicircle on the floor mat below the backseat. I did not need to touch the animal’s body to know that she was dead. She had shrunk and was lying in a shallow pool of water, water from her own desiccated body. I reached out my hand to touch her anyway. She was stiff, her curly hair hard and lacquered.

Oh God. Oh God.

I opened the door of the front seat, jumped from the car, crying, wailing. Oh God, my poor dog. I imagined her bounding into the car, so happy to surprise me—and then becoming confused when she realized I was not coming to get her. Growing hotter and hotter. Starting to pant she was so hot. Jumping to the floor to get out of the awful heat, but the heat would have been unrelenting.

It was June. It was an unusually hot day for Connecticut.

I needed to go pick up my daughter. I was late already. But I could not bring myself to touch Cleo’s body again, to remove her from the car. And besides, it would be cruel to pick Mandy up in a car smelling of our animal’s death. I could take Lucy’s car, the wood-paneled Wagoneer we’d had since she was born. But that would mean leaving Cleo in the Volvo for longer, untended to. And though Cleo was and would remain dead, it seemed wrong to leave her in the spot she had died for any longer than necessary.

But then I remembered: If Lucy’s car was there that meant Lucy was home. And if Lucy was home that meant she could pick up Mandy at her friend’s house. I felt hysterical for one more moment, but as is often the case when I am in crisis, I went into survival mode. Went inside, dialed the home of Mandy’s friend, spoke to her mother. Held back my tears while I explained that I was running a little late, that there was a crisis I had to attend to, that my older daughter, Lucy, was actually coming in my place and would be there as soon as she could.

The woman on the other line simply clicked her tongue and said she hoped everything turned out okay. That’s the thing about Daughters of the American Revolution types—they value reserve above all else. A patrician matron will never pester you for personal details. Such reserve has always driven Cam crazy, he who was born and raised in Atlanta by the effusive and gossipy Taffy. (Give my husband one drink and he’ll launch into a litany of complaints about living “up north.” Connecticut winters top the list, with “Yankee manners and mannerisms” falling close behind.)

I went to Lucy’s room, asked my lithe, limpid daughter if she would pick up her sister, gave her twenty dollars so the two of them could stop for a treat, then shut myself in my bedroom, where I watched from the window until I saw Lucy’s car turn out of the driveway. Once the car disappeared from view, I sat on the edge of the bed and dialed Cam at his office. The instant his secretary put
him through I started crying again, crying hard enough that Cam had to ask me several times to slow down, to take a breath, to repeat myself until he finally understood what it was I was trying to say.

Once he did I heard him take a deep inhale, and then I heard a sudden exhale, and I knew that he was crying, too.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and as the words came out of my mouth it occurred to me that neither of us had apologized for the terrible things we had said to each other the night before.

“Oh, honey,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

His tenderness rushed over me, a balm that soothed my still open wounds.

“I was careless,” I said, starting to cry afresh. “I was not paying attention. I was lost in my head.”

“You didn’t see her. She jumped in the car when you weren’t looking. There’s no way you could have predicted that was going to happen. She wasn’t supposed to be there.”

I thought of Cleo eagerly waiting for me in the car, wagging her tail in anticipation of a ride. I thought of the black leather interior, how it matched her hair, how disguised she was against it. I thought of how hot she must have been, how she must have suffered. I started crying those great, rolling sobs, the ones that take over your body, like when a plane flies through turbulence, only internal. So instead of passing through the rough air, you must let the disturbance pass through you. You must wait until the intensity of the grief lifts.

“Look, it’s a fairly light day at the office. I can cut out early. Why don’t I come on home?”

“Yes, yes, please. She’s still in the car and I just don’t know if I can bear to move her. I’m so sorry, Cam.”

“Okay, sit tight. I’m coming.”

•  •  •

God bless him, when Cam showed up he took over. Got an old towel, scooped up the dog, rolled her in it like a shroud. He tried to dig a hole in the backyard so we could bury her, but it had been a dry summer and the ground was too hard. So Cam put Cleo’s body in a cardboard box, the kind you pack books in, and we taped it up and left it in the outermost area of the backyard while he called around looking for a crematorium that could take her remains. He found one and drove the body there that afternoon. (Later, when I went to pick up the ashes, I was given a squat tin box filled with sticky gray dust, littered with bits of white bone.)

I fixed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner that night, serving them with milk and Lay’s potato chips. As we were finishing our meal I told the girls Cam and I had some news to share that wasn’t going to be easy to hear.

“You’re getting a divorce, aren’t you?” said Mandy. She held her fork in front of her, studying its tines casually, looking bored.

Cam and I looked at each other and I saw the answer clear in his eyes. No. No, we were not.

•  •  •

In bed that night Cam held me tight, and his holding led to us making love, and it was more tender and affectionate and fun than it had been for a very long while. I felt he was present in that room with me, at that moment. I felt that we were connected bone deep, pelvis to pelvis and beyond. I looked down at his soft green eyes while I rocked on top of him, and he murmured my name with such warmth, such openness; it broke my heart. It broke my heart to think of how detached we had become from each other. Afterward I rested my head on his shoulder, and he told me what a good life we had given Cleo, how Cleo enjoyed every minute of her existence, our cute black poodle who loved nothing more than to roll in the warm dirt.

Cam was so tender with me that I came to believe that Cleo had died to save our marriage, that Cleo had become a sort of canine Christ figure. Ridiculous, I know, but because of her death, and Cam’s generous reaction to it, our union was renewed. For a long time I had felt so very alone in my marriage. For a long time I had felt unseen, just a middle-aged woman with no one’s focus upon her.

But now this: resurrection.

•  •  •

And yet with Cam eventually you pay.

“I’m sorry I left the gate open,” I say, burying my own sense of injustice, thinking that if I could unearth all that I’ve buried I would have something very lethal on hand. “Let’s not fight. Please. I just got back in town. Let’s find something good to watch on TV. Or if you want, we could go into town, get ice-cream cones.”

“Fine,” he says, walking into the living room and turning on the television. I am both surprised and relieved that he backed down. We watch junk until
L.A. Law
comes on, a program we both love. We sit side by side on the sofa. At one point I stretch out and put my feet in his lap, as we have done for countless nights of our marriage. During a commercial I make microwave popcorn, splitting the bag between two bowls. I keep glancing at him, smiling, trying to get him to connect with me, but he stares straight ahead, his jaw locked. He doesn’t have to say anything to let me know he is still angry. When the show ends I stand to take our empty bowls to the kitchen. He follows me.

“I’m extremely upset with you,” he says.

It is now eleven at night. Yesterday I left my older daughter in a city over a thousand miles away.

“Cam. I’m exhausted. I need you to consider that maybe I’m going through a hard time right now with both Lucy and Mandy gone.”

“You don’t think I go through a hard time every day?”

Oh Jesus. Here we go again.
I must have rolled my eyes, because it is
as if suddenly someone struck a match and let it drop on the spilled gas all around us. He starts screaming.

“You don’t think I miss my daughters, too? And then when I call in my dog, she is on the loose, could have been run over, could have gotten lost.”

“You found her!” I yell. “She was at the Fergusons’! She’s always at the Fergusons’. She digs up their compost pile; you know that.”

“And you know that, too! How could you leave the gate open knowing that? I need better from you, Amelia. I need you to take some responsibility. Notice if the dog jumps in the car. Notice if the back gate is unlocked. Notice when the bills are due, dammit. When I came home tonight I saw a stack of unopened mail on the counter, from days back. It was the electric bill, the water bill, the mortgage. Jesus, Amelia. Keeping up with this shit is part of your job.”

“I was away!” I scream, the sound so primal Sadie jumps up and trots out of the room, allowing Cam to give me a look of absolute reprobation. I lower my voice. “I was taking our daughter to college. God, what is wrong with you?”

He lowers his voice. “You want to know what’s wrong with me? You want to know what’s wrong? When was the last time you looked in the mirror, Amelia? You’re twenty-five pounds overweight. You are. You can wear oversized sweaters and scarves all you want, you can bandy about words like ‘earth mama’ and ‘goddess,’ but the truth is, you let yourself get fat. It’s like, you’ve given up. You’ve stopped trying. But you know what? Just because you’ve stopped trying doesn’t change the fact that I’m still a man and I still have needs. Yes, Amelia, you may not want to acknowledge it, but I still have needs. And I’m not ready to sign on for celibacy for the rest of my life just because you’ve given up. You didn’t even look at me when you returned home from Atlanta last night. You just went upstairs and started unpacking your bags, as if I were nothing. As if I were a piece of furniture
in the house. But I’m not. I am a man and I need sex. I do! I need it, Amelia. I need sex! I need sex!”