Acts of Love (16 page)

There was, in actuality, only one Parsell, the “brother” having been invented to give a sense of width, of substance, to the title at the company's inception. It was something of a joke in the office, this phantom brother, and whenever anything went wrong—blueprints mislaid, erroneous lumber orders placed—it was said that Lefty Parsell did it. The extant Parsell, Nolan, was an easygoing, affable man in his mid-forties who, in this year of hefty contracts, entered readily into the ribbing about the presumptuous title and the ghost. Nolan Parsell saw immediately that Ted's talents lay in planning, in conception, and he entrusted him with more than his experience might seem to have warranted. Ted, acknowledging this with a reservoir of pleasure he would not have admitted to (no one had ever valued him in this way before), worked twelve-, fourteen-hour days to justify the trust. The men he supervised tended to find him dogged and humorless, impatient if they did not immediately understand what he had in mind even though he was not always good at articulating it, but the results were indisputable, and if they thought him aloof, they nevertheless respected him. The East Graydon mall came in under deadline and under budget, and Ted was assigned the supervision of the larger, Deertown mall, and then, two years later, the Kennelly Plaza, with ninety-two shops and an indoor waterfall.

Ann, preoccupied with the baby, with formula and first steps and teeth, seemed lost in a talc-scented nimbus those early years, by turns exhausted and manic and anxious. Days, weeks passed when she did not speak to another adult. Looking back, she could only remember seeing Ted, talking to him, touching him, deep in the middle of the night; they were 4:00
A.M
. silhouettes, profiles in shadeless black.

She made lists. Lists of what had to be done each day: go to the drugstore for Julia's ear medicine, vacuum, call Sandy, wash hair. Lists of what money they had saved. Lists of qualities she strove for: patience, grace, and, newly, after reading a book Sandy had given her, assertiveness. Lists that she hoped would fill the long hours in the house in which she always seemed, even when she was inordinately occupied, to be waiting for Ted.

She carefully constructed timetables. Breakfast at precisely 7:15, washing on Tuesdays, candlelight dinner on Saturday—no matter what. It was as if she believed that these schedules, if rigidly adhered to, would provide the structure, the glue, that seemed to come so naturally to every family but hers. Ironing on Wednesday, pot roast on Thursday.

 

B
UT THESE TIMETABLES
, which had once seemed amusing, endearing even, to Ted, began, as the years solidified them, to feel like a geodesic dome rising up and around him, cutting off his very air, choking him.

He stared at the clock above his desk. Six forty-five. Exactly the time he was supposed to be home. He leaned forward, his chair creaking on its metal wheels. Frowned. Dialed.

“I'm running a little late,” he told her. “I still have some papers to go through.”

At 7:30, he called again. “It's taking a little longer than I thought.”

And at eight, again.

When he got home, past nine o'clock, for the fourth night in a row, Ann stood with her back to him in the kitchen, dressing the salad she had made hours ago, the fork and spoon clanking loudly against each other.

“At least I called,” he said.

“If you're going to be home at nine, why don't you just say so? That way I can go ahead and plan my evening. It's being on hold I can't stand. It's the waiting.”

“Well, just go ahead and do what you want to do. I didn't tell you to wait for me.”

“But you know that I will.”

“Whose fault is that?”

She tried, from time to time, to do as he suggested, to plan her night as if she were not waiting for him, but it was a difficult habit to break, and even when she ate her own dinner without him, gave Julia her bath and put her to bed, watched television, she was listening for him, expecting him, worrying about him, waiting for him.

 

S
ANDY SAT AT
A
NN'S KITCHEN TABLE
with a stack of
Chronicle
s before her. Despite the fact that her byline had been appearing with some regularity for a couple of years by now, Ann still clipped each article and had even asked Sandy to bring extra copies of the series she had written on the county's successful efforts to halt construction of a nuclear power plant in its vicinity. The story had been picked up by the wires and reprinted in a number of papers throughout the country.

“I can't help it, I'm proud of you,” Ann said, smiling. In the eighth month of her second pregnancy, her face had taken on an indolent fullness, and the smile meandered off into her puffed cheeks. This time the weight was just weight, something to be lost as soon as possible.

Sandy pushed the papers aside. She had taken to coming over for dinner often in the last few months, ostensibly to keep Ann company while Ted stayed late at the office. She came, too, armed with a list of new words that she had recently acquired and wanted Ann to learn, repeating and explicating them with earnest and insistent patience: manic-depressive, enabler.

“But what difference does it make what you call it?” Ann asked. “Estelle is just who she is.”

“Don't you see, it has a name. It's not just Estelle. It's not what she did to us. It's not something amorphous, Ann. It's real. It's a disease. It has a name and a profile.”

“I still don't see how that changes anything.”

“It changes how we see it. It's not in our minds; we didn't make it up. It wasn't our fault.”

Ann was silent for a moment. “You think if you tag Jonathon and Estelle and put them in a little box, they'll go away. Can't you just accept them for who they are?”

“No. Can you?”

Ann didn't answer.

When Ted got home, he opened a beer and joined them at the table, resting his bottle on top of the
Chronicle
s.

“Good work, Sandy,” he said sarcastically.

“What's the matter? You didn't like my syntax?”

“Naw, your syntax looks just fine to me,” he said, smiling. “Style is not your problem. Subject is another thing.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Just that the plant you were so opposed to could have provided a lot of jobs in this town. Something we sorely need at the moment.”

“Ted,” Ann interrupted. “I thought you were against the plant. You said yourself they didn't know enough about it.”

He ignored her. “How does it feel, having so much power?” he asked Sandy.

“I wasn't aware I had any power. But I bet if I did, it would feel real good.”

Ted laughed. “I bet it would.”

“You should know,” Sandy went on. “It seems to me you have all the power in this house.”

“Is that how it seems to you?”

“Yup.”

“And what makes you such an expert?”

“Call it my superior skills of observation.”

Ted smiled. “Well, looks can be deceiving. Behind that sweet facade, your sister has an amazingly good batting average for getting her own way. Don't you, Ann?”

They both glanced at her.

“Fuck you,” she said, so quietly that at first neither was sure they had heard correctly. “Fuck you both.” She rose and waddled as quickly as she could from the table.

Sandy's and Ted's eyes met and scurried away from each other. Sandy got up from the table and followed Ann into the living room.

“Ann?”

“Just leave me alone, okay?”

“I'm sorry. I don't know what this is all about, but I'm sorry.”

“You think just because I don't write for some goddamned newspaper I'm an idiot. Hell, what do I know, I don't even have a job. You have all the easy answers.”

“Oh, Ann, I never meant that. I've never even thought that.”

“What makes you such an expert on my life?”

“I'm sorry. Please.”

Ann sighed.

“I'll call you tomorrow,” Sandy suggested as she gathered her things, car keys in hand. “Okay? Okay, Ann?”

“Sure.”

When he heard the door close, Ted joined Ann on the couch.

“I didn't mean anything by it,” he said. He nuzzled her. “I mean, I love your batting average. Come on, give us a kiss. Come on. That's better.”

 

J
ULIA, THREE
, ran ahead of them, her sturdy legs a cavalcade of motion, her face thrust forward toward the front steps. She had started walking late and had been making up for lost time ever since with a singular concentration. One of the first words she had learned was “me,” and though she now had full and cogent sentences, whenever she grew frustrated, particularly if someone was trying to do something for her that she was certain she could do herself, language and will still collided in a cyclone of “me, me, me” until she got her way. She was the only child her age Ann had ever heard of who was completely and utterly content alone in a room.

Ann walked a few yards behind her, holding Ali swaddled in a yellow crocheted blanket. Ted, his arms loaded down with two cartons of books, was by her side. After five previous trips that day, this was their last. Boxes and bags still sat in towers and forts about the entrance to their new house on Sycamore Street, and Ted tripped over one on his way in.

“There's no place like home,” he said as he rose from a heap on the floor.

Ann carried Ali up to the bare bedroom where she had earlier set up a crib and laid her down gingerly. The floor, the walls, and the window were bare, and, as she gazed back from the doorway, it seemed that she had set the baby precariously afloat amid so much empty space. In the next room, Julia was standing at the window, her eyes just at the ledge, looking out over the backyard with all the satisfaction of the newly landed gentry. She did not hear Ann behind her, depositing her favorite blanket, a mottled crimson rectangle, on the bed.

Ann walked quietly downstairs and stopped next to Ted, balancing a metal box of tools on the newel post.

“Do you feel like a grown-up?” he asked, smiling.

“More like an impostor. Do you think we can pull this off?”

“You mean financially?”

“I mean the whole thing.”

He laughed and pulled her to him. “Yes.”

She kissed the back of his neck, and the smell of him, the heat of him, stirred something in her that had been dim and frail recently. He felt her mouth opening, met it, slid his hand up her sweater. “Not here,” she whispered, her voice already growing hoarse, and he pulled her into the large and barren coat closet a few feet away, where, standing up in the dark, they crammed into each other with a fast and desperate and bottomless desire.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered, her forehead, lacquered with sweat, against his chest.

“What?”

“Ssshhh.”

She smoothed down her sweater, zipped her jeans, and opened the door a crack to see Julia sitting on the bottom step, the crimson blanket pressed against her ear.

 

A
FTER THE BOOM YEARS
in the mall business had glutted and fractured, Nolan Parsell, anxious not to lose Ted, assigned him to ever smaller projects, house extensions, patios, garage apartments. Parsell himself grew increasingly cantankerous, and it became apparent, in angry little pellets of information he emitted in unguarded moments, that the company was saddled with debts taken on when expansion seemed an endless proposition. “Lefty needed money,” he muttered. “Dumb, greedy bastard.”

Ted, used to supervising crews and managing numerous subprojects at a time, suddenly found himself Sheetrocking again. Any sympathy he might have felt for Parsell was subsumed by his own intense frustration and by Parsell's growing acrimony.

When Ted stayed late in the office now, it was to Xerox clients' names, to study account information, billing options, lumber suppliers, truckers, insurance. With figures and names stuffed into his coat pocket, he would walk across the street and meet Carl Freeman at the Bluebird Inn for beers and strategy planning. Only gradually did the hypothetical musings of the two co-workers start to take on the gravity of possibility and, finally, probability. Why not?

And the planning began to spill out into his talks with Ann, until it was almost like those early nights in the E-Z Rest Motel, when he had first unleashed his dreams. Here, then, after all this time, was his chance for autonomy, control, quality. Each sentence, each step he took closer to its realization seemed to embolden him, and a wiry energy crackled through the house, a static electricity sparking Ann, even the girls; maybe this, maybe this is it.

 

O
N THE EVE OF THE OPENING
of Waring and Freeman, a party was held in the new offices on the west side of town. All the previous week, Ted had been consumed with an insomnia that, rather than leaving him weary, elevated his anticipation until he could not sit still long enough to eat or lie down long enough to rest. He spent the afternoon in the offices with Carl and their new secretary, Ruth Becker, staring at the silent phones, white and sleek and multifunctioned, flipping through the Rolodex that Ann had given him, drinking the whiskey he stashed in his desk, which had no obvious effect but only burned up in the heat of his excitement.