Every Day (6 page)

“Oh honestly, Simon,” I say, “the sun rises and sets.” Jane was his first baby, and if she had her druthers, he’d be her only parent. The two of them sometimes seem the nucleus of the family, with Isaac, Daisy, and me floating around them in the protoplasm.

“I’ll open some Brouilly,” he says. “If you hurry, there’ll be a glass left when you get back! What a day!”

I squeeze his hand in apology. “Thanks.” I can’t go into a long lie about all I had to do in Manhattan today. I leave him for the stormy indoors, where Jane is slamming around in her room, and soon locate the diaper bag and Jane’s Barbie pocketbook.

“I’ve got it!” I call upstairs. Down she clumps in her leather sandals with heels, teary-faced, and snatches it from me.

“I was ready to leave hours ago!” she yells. “I wouldn’t have lost it if you were home when you said!”

I’m relieved to take recrimination from Jane instead of from my husband or Isaac. “Come on,” I say gently. “Let’s get Daisy.”

“Daisy’s a mess!” Jane cries. But she’s resigned, and we file
out. I wipe Daisy’s face, hands, and legs off with baby wipes. Isaac returns with a T-shirt dress he bought her that has his team emblem stenciled in orange on the front. He takes her from her happy perch on Simon’s lap, stands her on the flagstone, and teases her into cooperating with him. She squeals and puckers her face for kissing.

“Presto change-o,” Isaac says proudly. He carries her like a football to the car.

“What are they putting in those burgers?” Simon muses.

I leave him sitting in a lawn chair, where I know we’ll find him asleep when we return.

Isaac is in the front seat. I cower in anticipation of Jane’s reaction to this fact, but she doesn’t put up another fuss, just installs herself grumpily beside Daisy’s car seat in the back. Isaac smirks. “Forget the steaks, Mom. Simon’s not gonna deliver.”

“I know. He was sitting in his chair.”

Even Jane laughs over this. “Daddy’s really tired,” she explains. “He kept asking us if we wanted to eat dinner. He asked us, like, five hundred times.”

“No, she doesn’t exaggerate,” Isaac groans.

By now, we’re back on the parkway, heading north.

“Shut up, Isaac,” Jane orders. “You’re a waste of skin.”

As horrible an image as this calls up for me, I think it’s funny. “Where did you hear that one, my darling girl?” I ask her.

“From Isaac, of course,” she says. “He said it about me. So now I’m saying it about him. An eye for an eye, right?”

•   •   •

The clerk at customer service surveys me with a frown he wears like a too-tight hat, defying me to find a copy of
Jules and Jim
at any store on the planet, offering his empty palms as evidence of my ridiculous request, this from a woman carrying a child with most of one hand stuffed in her mouth.
How could I possibly care about esoteric film when I’m saddled with such common responsibilities?

“What did you expect from a guy with a flat-top and a fade?”’ Isaac whines. “You think he’s gonna know from
films
, let alone French ones?”

“I prefer not to think so categorically,” I say.
Teach them what you know,
I read somewhere. And I know that if I assume that men of twenty or so who have chosen to doctor their hair in such a manner know nothing about the films of Europe, then I am a bigot.

“Me neither,” Isaac admits, smirking. He hands me a CD of the Stones’
Goats’ Head Soup,
which was popular when Pam and I were dancing around our room in ski boots, the tune of choice being “Heartbreaker.” Jane skips up with her 10,000 Maniacs tape and one by Madonna. Then they want to go off to the Nintendo corner while I stand in line.

“Go,” I tell them. “Destroy some cities. Solve some mysteries.” They love it when I support their every endeavor.

It is hopeless in this environment to try to hang onto the glamour of secret, good sex, but I’m in line at Sam Goody with Fowler’s hands all over me, his mouth at my ear. I put our purchases on the counter, produce my Amex card, and smile mechanically at the cashier, another young man with the hairdo of our uninformed clerk. “Get him to smile at you,” Fowler whispers. “Do anything.”

He hands me my package and looks for the next customer. I flinch at the idea of my doing something to make him smile, then I go back into the cavernous store to locate my children, whom I find in front of two adjacent screens, both very excited over their conquests. Simon and I have not succumbed to household Nintendo, mostly because his computer wizardry provides all of the destructive and competitive options offered by a Nintendo setup.

“How goes the warfare?” I ask them.

“Level three and climbing,” Isaac reports. He won’t even
turn around to get horrified that I have given the stapled bag of cassettes and CD’s to Daisy for safekeeping.

“I’m losing, as usual,” Jane says. I’m convinced that Nintendo was made for boys, and it infuriates me to see Jane lose heart over something so pointless.

“Let’s quit while we’re behind and go get some takeout,” I say, urging her with my free hand outstretched. She comes away easily, and Isaac mumbles about meeting us at the car in five minutes. We walk through heavy, humid air to our car. Jane gets in the front this time while I load Daisy into her car seat, what my mother refers to as her “motley.” I turn on the air-conditioning. After grabbing the bag from Daisy, who breaks my heart with a wail of disappointment, Jane unwraps her tape and punches it into the tape deck. I get the bag back for Daisy, who may not get over the theft for a long time, and finally sit, doors shut, and try, again unsuccessfully, to make out the profundity of the 10,000 Maniacs. But this is a group that eludes parsing. I cannot for the life of me understand what they’re saying, they slur their words so.

“Janey,” I ask her.

“What.”

“Are you still mad?” As much as I hate to admit it, I do hang on the words of my children sometimes.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, could you tell me when you do know?”

“Mo-om.”

I watch her mouthing the impossible lyrics, closing her eyes when a particularly sensuous moment in the music arises. I am fascinated. She’s older than I thought. She’s a
girl
now, not a little girl. I wonder if Simon sees it, if he can bear it, because right now I can’t. Never mind how frighteningly old Isaac seems to me.

“Mom,” Jane says.

“Yes, Jane.”

“Don’t be late again. I really hate it when you’re late.” She watches the parking lot happenings, families loading in and out of their cars, everyone in a different mood, bound for some sort of friction, and I wonder if that’s what she sees, or if she doesn’t see them as I do, but simply as people going into a store to do what we’ve just been doing, looking and buying, leaving with something they’ve wanted and are now happy to have.

“I won’t do it again,” I tell her.

“Deal,” she says, and in the way she has of surprising me, she throws herself on me, hangs on my neck, and starts to cry. This must be what Fowler meant when he said he couldn’t bear the weight of Isaac, his perfection, the fear of holding something so beautiful in his arms. Except I bear the ache, and I cry too, for all of us, for her love of me and mine of her, for my imperfections and her disappointment, for the joy of knowing her.

“I see you two have made up,” Isaac says matter-of-factly as he gets in back.

I straighten up, embarrassed, the way I get when he notices intimate details about me these days, like the one about my looking good in Gillette’s dress. “We’re fine,” I assure him. I smooth Jane’s hair and help her settle back into her seat, into the music, into our sunset ride to our favorite Chinese restaurant, then home.

•   •   •

“Baby?”

He has called me this forever. I’ve never objected, and I don’t object now. I don’t and have never found it corny or belittling. I have always appreciated the fact that it highlights our ten-year age difference. Furthermore, I like and revere babies, and I know that Simon doesn’t mean to categorize me with them, only to point up flattering similarities: babies are beguiling and faultless, pure, honest, and dependable.

I am out in back being too vigilant about the steaks and
too free with the wine when he calls. In no way do I feel worthy of such an endearment. That I imagine Fowler’s response to hearing me referred to as “Baby” (certainly he’d find a way to disapprove, even if he were merely jealous) confirms my unworthiness.

“Almost done,” I call back.

He’s at the window above the kitchen sink, the one I frequently watch the children from during the day, when they’re doing their outdoor things and I’m doing dishes and planning activities for later on by telephone.

“Can you bear another salad?” he shouts.

“Anything.”

We have things under control. Daisy has been sleeping since we left the Chinese restaurant with our package of dumplings, noodles, and chicken with walnuts. Jane is upstairs readying herself for camp, which starts tomorrow, and Isaac is in his room watching something loud and angry on television. Jane woke Simon when we returned. He was still outside, but the steaks were on the counter, defrosted. I got everyone fed and up to their rooms. I was terribly efficient, which is part of being guilty, I guess. I should be more careful about exhibiting too much verve. Sudden bursts of enthusiasm will draw the wrong sort of attention. Already Simon’s eyes widened when I offered to start up the coals and tend to the grilling.

I turn the steaks, which look wonderful. I’m going to enjoy this meal, even though I probably shouldn’t. My husband, comforted by his nap and our favorite wine, will want to talk. And I will too, not just to keep from thinking of Fowler, of myself in the youthful pose of being desired, but for reassurance: yes, we live an enviable life that must be maintained without distraction.

Simon stays in, for the ten o’clock news I’m sure. I set down the barbaric fork and lounge in his favorite chair, watching the night sky, I suddenly realize, for the first time
since Jane was born. I don’t know why, in the eight years we’ve been together, I haven’t done this. It’s as if someone whispered to me when I got engaged, “Don’t look up.” Or “Stop looking.” I like looking up, looking around, seeing. Even if it feels strange and makes my heart pound.

“Ready when you are,” Simon calls a few minutes later.

I bring in the steaks. The table is set, candles lit, wedding china, which we now use as our everyday, in place. He shuts off the news. I ask what he’s heard.

“The usual,” he says, sitting. “Fires. Highway horror. Child abuse. Border troubles. Tyranny and devastation abroad. Stop me when you’ve had enough.”

“Enough.” I smile. I love my husband. How could I have done what I did today? But that’s the wrong question. The question—Gillette would back me on this one—is about marriage. I am beginning to suspect that I’ve been wrong about marriage. That it isn’t and could never be, given that human beings invented it, steady and predictable. Maybe everyone strays a bit, even married people. Perhaps they don’t all go to the lengths I’ve just gone to, although many go further. My parents are married people who live in separate apartments. As a child, I was quick to disapprove of this arrangement. It is no wonder that at times each of them looks at me sideways, as if they’d never met a bigger fool.

“Tell me about the day,” Simon says after the first few bites. “Starting after you dropped the girls with Kirsten.”

He’s not looking at me, only at his food, the perfection of angles he’s achieving with his steak knife.

“I drove into the city,” I say. “I saw Gillette.”

“What else.”

“She gave me this dress.” The dress has wilted completely, although I still like it for the freedom it offers.

“It’s a great dress,” he says. Now he stares. He takes something out of his back pocket and lays it by my plate. It’s Fowler’s postcard. I set down my utensils.

“I met him for lunch.”

Everything slows. The eating, the sounds of suburban night. The damn seconds.

“You had lunch with that jerk?”

Simon has never been so solemn, so intent.

I don’t know what to do. I turn on him. “Lunch is pretty innocuous, as a meal,” I counter.

He looks me in the eye. Then he pushes his chair back, stands, and walks out the back door.

chapter three

An hour later, when I’m doing the dishes, I imagine Fowler telling me things about myself that I’m glad rather than loath to know, apologizing, looking for my next remark, beholding my children and my house and blinking with amazement, having to sit down.

Simon, back from his fury walk, catches me talking to myself. He glares. I begin to make up a story, about trying out a new approach for the chapter we’re doing, seeing how it sounds.

“Save it,” Simon tells me, leaving the kitchen for the refuge of the television. Flirting with the blank space by the fridge, I tell the imaginary Fowler that he could do better than to hang on my every word during his last year on earth.

I’m guilty of wanting distraction and getting it. I’m guilty of succumbing to boredom, frustration, and vanity. I’m guilty of weakening in my resolve to provide a decent home for my children. At base level, I’m an adulteress. So I’m wondering why I don’t feel worse, like a criminal, like I ought to give myself up to some authority that could dispense the
proper punishment and make arrangements for our domestic life that would keep the children’s best interests and Simon’s above mine.