And the Dark Sacred Night (2 page)

“They have babies. How do you raise babies on a diet like that?” says Kit, realizing too late that by joining the conversation he has
merely increased the risk that Will and Fanny will miss the bus, sentencing him to a long wait in the drop-off line at their school, where no amount of intellectually skewed radio can ward off emasculation by the surrounding battalion of soccermobiles, their exhaust fumes colluding in a cloud bank that threatens to engulf his lowly antiquated Civic. The occasional Mini does nothing to assuage his gloom.

Sandra, clearing plates, declares that though she will support Fanny if she wants to follow the “usual vegetarian restrictions,” veganism is another matter. While urging the twins toward brushing their teeth, she points out that vegans do not wear wool or leather, meaning that Fanny would have to give up her favorite purple sweater and the purse that her grandmother bought her at the crafts fair in Maine.

Kit gets them to the bus just in time, one child an aspiring quarterback, the other resembling a small punk musician the morning after a three-set gig. Please let that not be
her
aim in life, he thinks as he waves at Fanny through the passing window. Given the choice, he would prefer the crush of a murky, airless rock ’n’ roll dive to that of a football stadium, but boys who like the tough sports—boys who are virtually nursed on that potion of hustle, slam, and grunt—they’re the ones with the best chance in life. He believes this now, though with more resignation than zeal. Kit has even begun to admire the beefy dad who coaches Will’s football team, lingering at pickup time to thank him for his efforts, laboring at small talk. Lame, he knows, but Will is the one whose passions should call the shots (so to speak), whose wants Kit should also want for him, no matter how far they seem from Kit’s desires. Illogically and prematurely—and absurdly, considering his own predicament—Kit has begun to brood about what his children will “be” when they grow up.

Returning to the house, he notices that one of the jack-o’-lanterns by the front door was savaged by squirrels and that the leaves he has yet to clear from the lawn are membraned with frost. In the kitchen, Sandra idles at the sink, eating yogurt from a bowl, looking intently out at the yard.

“Should have cut back the butterfly bush before now. And that rose by the shed. Snow will break those canes—look how tall they’ve grown.” She speaks with a tone of regret—rare for Sandra—and Kit
knows she’s worried because the peak season for her work is over; no one will be hankering after new bushes, new pathways, arbors, or flower beds for the next several months.

He waits a careful moment before saying, “Interesting—if Fanny really does give up meat.”

“Not a bad thing,” says Sandra, still focused on the garden. “Will’s been brainwashed by the notion that athletes eat steak for breakfast. Something he read in a magazine at the dentist.” She knocks loudly on the window. “Away from there, you fiends!” Squirrels: Kit knows without looking. “Maybe,” she continues, “we should get a cat.”

“Fanny would be thrilled. Though cats are meatatarians. Potential conflict of interest.”

Sandra smiles at him. “Meatatarians. They certainly are.”

Kit coined this term for members of an Inuit community they visited back in his grad-school days, a place where the body shape of everyone over twenty tended toward spherical—somehow, pleasingly so—and the oldest people had bronzed moonlike faces, cheeks taut and lustrous from all the animal oils and blubber they consumed. That was well before children, before the Jersey suburbs, before they could imagine a spectrum of tribulations ranging all the way from the vandalism of squirrels to the whims of professorial committees. Days of whales and ice floes, Sandra calls the time they were crazy in love. And they were. (But what couple, nowadays, does not have a history of crazy-in-love? Arranged marriages, shotgun marriages, marriages by mail order—all such unions persist, but among the people Kit knows, everyone chose freely after a long leisurely dance of passion and deliberation.)

Sandra sets her bowl in the sink and fills it with water. She turns to the counter, where yesterday’s mail still lies in a pile: catalogs yet to be recycled; envelopes opened, the contents perused but unfiled—uncensored, Kit realizes as Sandra utters the words he’s come to dread from her more than any others.

“What is this?”

Sometimes the stress changes (What is
this
?
What
is this? Or even, though this variation is sometimes a sign of amusement, What
is
this?), but whether she is looking at an overdue bill or a magazine whose subscription was supposed to be canceled or a package containing
an unnecessary book he ordered, the person required to answer the question is almost always Kit, even when the answer is plain as frigging day.

This time she’s addressing a sheet of paper she has just removed from the dignity of its envelope. Without looking over her shoulder, he knows exactly what it is: notification that he’s being denied an adjunct position because his file is incomplete, the deadline past. There would be no letter, of course, if Kit did not know someone at the school in question, a school where he has no desire to teach, mostly because it lies across two rivers, so far out in Queens that it might as well be in Montauk.

“It wouldn’t have worked. It was one course.”

“Which could have led to more,” says Sandra. “Would have, once they saw you in front of a class. You can’t afford to be so picky. I don’t need to tell you that, do I?”

He doesn’t want to talk about what he, or they, can or can’t afford.

“Didn’t Ian write a letter to that guy he knew in Chicago?” she asks.

“I’ve asked enough of Ian already. And Chicago? Would you really, honestly consider moving to Chicago?”

She refolds the letter, puts it back in the envelope, and says conclusively, “Oh, Kit.” Sandra doesn’t waste energy on arguments she’s had before. Yes, she might have reminded him, she
would
move to Chicago. Children change everything. Long stretches of unemployment, too.

She goes upstairs to dress. When she returns, she tells him she’s going to the garden center to pick up salt hay, which goes on sale once Halloween scarecrows have served their purpose. Would he deal with the children’s bathroom sink, which isn’t draining properly? Would he transfer the clothes from the washer to the dryer when the cycle is done? Would he please rake?

He doesn’t answer. The assumption (even his, if briefly) is that he will.

Kit does the autopilot things: puts dishes in the sink, turns off the coffee machine, turns off the lights they switched on two hours ago when they woke in the thick residue of night. (Soon, once the clocks change, the sun will rise before they do. That will restore at least a degree of normality to their lives.)

But when he hears the car recede from the driveway, he sits down on a stool at the counter facing the window to the yard. He watches a brawny-looking squirrel attempt to flatten its body just enough to shimmy under the door to the shed, where Sandra keeps the birdseed. It tries for a good long while before it gives up, thrashes its tail in scorn, and sprints up the nearest tree.

Theatrically, Kit shakes a finger toward the upper branches. “That’s what you get for eating my daughter’s pumpkin, fatso.” His teaching voice. A voice he hasn’t used in a classroom for ages.

The children’s sink, he tells himself. The leaves. The clothes in the now-silent washer. He rises and moves toward these tasks, but he pauses at the kitchen table, where he sits again. There is no newspaper to reach for; he canceled their subscription to the
Times
a month ago. The only available text is Will’s forgotten math homework, a sheet of penciled scrawl that feels, in Kit’s hands, like a permission slip for despondency.

When he hears Sandra’s car pull in, he knows he could make a dash for the second floor or the backyard—grab a plunger, seize a rake—but he doesn’t. Sandra enters the kitchen and stops. When he looks at her, she is unbuttoning her long green sweater; her bushy peat-colored hair cleaves to the hood. The room is so quiet, Kit hears the prickle of static.

“Could you at least,” she says quietly, “carry my bales of hay from the car to the shed? I’d be grateful for that.”

“Sure thing,” he says. Being outdoors in the chilly sun feels hopeful, wakes him up all over again. But when he goes in to take care of the laundry, Sandra’s done it. Over the purr of the dryer, the intermittent clicking of a zipper against the metal drum, he hears her raking leaves.

He goes upstairs, finds the bottle of drain opener in the linen closet, takes it into the children’s bathroom. He pours a slug down the drain and listens for the hiss of decomposing hair balls. Stepping into the hall, he glances through the door of the front bedroom. He happens to notice that the air conditioner is still in the window and, to his own surprise, feels the urge to take it out—as he should have done weeks ago.

He fetches the necessary screwdriver, along with a flattened cardboard carton from the recycling bin, something to protect Sandra’s
favorite kilim from the corroded seams of the metal box. He has no right to feel proud of himself, but he does, just a little. (How pathetic is this, congratulating himself for doing a task that Sandra did not ask him to do?)

Once he’s wrestled it out of the window frame and onto the cardboard, once he’s lowered the three storms in the wide bay (another unbidden chore, one to be repeated throughout the house), he goes into the hall and pulls the cord that summons the ladder of stairs leading into the attic—an act that once delighted the twins, who would shout “Presto!” every time they had occasion to witness this quaint open-sesame feature of their home. They are not allowed in the attic, where nails protrude, porcupinelike, from the underbelly of the roof. But when they were small, they would watch Kit ascend, eagerly awaiting his reappearance, as if he were Jack climbing down the beanstalk to bring his family a pouch of gold coins. (Oh, for a pouch of gold coins from on high.)

“Presto,” he says to himself as the spring in the trapdoor yields to release the stairs. “Presto change-o.
Molto
change-o.”

He carries the air conditioner braced against his torso, which is softening ever so gradually since he lost privileges at the college’s weight room. He maneuvers it up by hefting it from one tread to the next. At the top, he will slide it straight back to its appointed place against a wall, cover it snugly with a thick plastic bag.

Kit has not climbed into the attic since midsummer, when Sandra was sure she heard wasps through the ceiling. They do not store many possessions up here, because this is the only house they’ve ever owned: furnished from scratch, as Sandra likes to say. She is a bargain huntress, a follower of haphazard handwritten yard-sale signs, an agile hoister of armchairs and tables onto the roof of her station wagon. A morris chair here, a ship’s lantern there; a set of horn-handled steak knives, a tablecloth printed with lobsters, even—a triumphant find, a nod to their courtship—a small hooked rug depicting a polar bear beneath a crescent moon. One practical yet artful possession at a time, Sandra filled their house, each new object an unmeasured though rarely impetuous risk; nothing was saved if it didn’t work.

Ten years ago, pregnant with the twins, she came home one day with a hexagonal deco mirror, its frame inlaid with ivory. “Front
hall!” she exclaimed with fierce delight as Kit unwrapped it on the kitchen table.

“A find,” he said, holding it at arm’s length to reflect his upper half. “A little scary, though. Like the gravestone that reads
AS I AM NOW, SO YOU SHALL BE
. But maybe that’s the idea. Take our vanity with a dose of humility. Mortality.”

“What are you talking about?” Sandra’s face entered the frame from behind his left shoulder. For an instant, it felt as if he were holding their wedding portrait. A portrait by Grant Wood.

“Earth to Sandra. It’s shaped like a coffin.” A coffin for a small child.

In the mirror, she stopped smiling. She stepped out of the picture.

“It’s beautiful,” said Kit. “I’m not superstitious, and neither are you.”

“Speak for yourself. I don’t know if that’s true anymore about me.” She spread her hands across the prow of her belly.

So away the mirror went, even though it could not be returned to the consignment shop where Sandra had found it, by accident, on her quest for a bureau to hold the babies’ clothes.

In summer, the attic is unbearably hot, but on a cold bright day in the fall, it hoards a genial warmth from the sun pressing down on the shingles. The window in the rear gable presents a view of the small wood behind their yard. A patch of four acres became a park—pretentiously called the Green Sward—when the farm that once occupied this land was sold and divided into house lots in the heady 1960s. Reportedly, the park was a simple meadow back then, but since it lacked the amenities of modern recreation—no baseball diamond, no swings or climbing structures—few people used it, and random saplings took hold. (It is now a breeding ground for the villainous squirrels: a parallel development of sorts.)

Kit and Sandra’s house, at the end of its cul-de-sac, stands out from the curving rows of ranch houses (some sullen and faded, others preened and sprawling with twenty-first-century additions). Though the developers razed the main farmhouse (reputedly riddled with termites), they spared a second, smaller dwelling. “Back in the day,” the broker said, “this would have been a house for the help.” She sounded confessional, even guilty, when she told them that it had
been built in a modest, even miserly fashion for a house in 1910, “but by today’s standards, it’s a classic. Solid as you please—I mean, look at these floorboards!—and charming in the most totally understated way. Don’t you think?”

She kept laying her palms on the walls and windowpanes, even stroking them, as if she were selling a horse or a gown, something far sexier than a tall but compact three-bedroom house with burlap-colored walls, gray carpeting, and appliances so heavily veneered in cooking oil and cigarette smoke that you couldn’t tell if they’d once been yellow or pink—or might, if you bothered to scrub rather than discard them, turn out to be white.