If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (16 page)

The next day she asked her mother if there had been any mice in the traps, if the peanut butter had worked. She had left for home so hurriedly, she had been so preoccupied. “One in every trap,” Jean said; though in fact they had all been empty when she came down—to her relief—and she had sprung them with the end of her broom, tossed them in the trash behind the house.

“I’ve never seen anyone take such care with anything,” Brooke said, smiling. “Leave it to an engineer.”

She mentioned the dinner many more times over the next months, when she visited and also on the phone. She never told her mother the whole story, though whether because she understood that Jean already knew or because the story had an end it would always have to reach, Jean never decided. Brooke only wanted to hear this, over and over, like a child delaying sleep: He had been there. She had cooked for him. He had set traps. Remarkably effective traps. Jean had liked him, very much. And after a time, Jean could see them there, herself, the four of them. She hadn’t earlier, not in the winter, when she had only listened as Brooke needed her to; but as weeks passed, she began to see them sitting there around the maple table, where Cliff was younger, much younger than he had been, those opened years between them back in their buds, closed tight; and though they were at the cottage, the scene seemed to crackle again with his restlessness and with their desires.

By April, when the newest bed was dug, it wasn’t only when Brooke needed her mother to remember, needed the testimony of Jean’s memory to confirm her own, that Jean’s thoughts turned to that meal. Sometimes, by herself, she would mouth those words,
Let’s go
, as though they just might, the four of them—all deals off, whatever bargains brokered, now dissolved. And every once in a while, by herself, she would touch the turquoise scarf, hanging now on the post of her bed, as though it were a souvenir of an important time, a talisman of what might lie ahead.
Let’s go
. And then, when a box of kindling and roots appeared like a foundling infant on the front porch, when she realized she had never had her name struck from that list, instead of sending them back, as she should, she asked Tyler to unpack them for her, so she could soak the roots overnight, softening and opening them, it not even occurring to her at the time that she had never before taken anything not rightfully hers.

Pine

H
EIDI’S KITCHEN FLOOR
is marble tile, a hard and unforgiving platform for her clumsy gait. If it were me, I think, watching her, I would have put down pine—soft, uneven planks of gentle pine to absorb the step-clump, step-clump sound of my own feet. My foot, and then the pause that would be seared into my soul, that sad and silent pause. And then my other foot.

If it were me, I would have built a smaller kitchen too, I’m sure, a room of easy reaches and rolling carts. But Heidi, with her latest-model leg—her fourth she told me, since losing the original—Heidi is more defiant than I, perhaps. More feisty. Or possibly just more in denial. And so her kitchen is bowling-alley large. Stadium large. Superdome large. There are two cooktops, two dishwashers, two ovens, and a microwave. There are appliances so modern that their function is indiscernible, and these marvels are spread across three islands all in all, an archipelago of kitchen design, which Heidi navigates with great goodwill, cheerful as she clumps across each expanse.

Four of us, four women, are gathered here because Heidi wanted to bring together her friends who like to cook. She brightened, during chitchat at my daughter’s soccer game, when she asked me if I do and I said yes. Yes, I enjoy it.

As we empty our shopping bags onto the largest of the countertops, I learn that the other two women here are Heidi’s friends in a way that I am not. They know where she spent her vacation last August. They know where she keeps her coffee mugs. They know how she loves asparagus. They know that her husband, Roger, turned fifty last month, and they know why that fact is such a riot.
Hilarious
. They call her “Hei” and tease her about tendencies I cannot guess she has. “Well, you know Hei!” they say, smiling in the completely closed-circuit way of intimates. With their blond pageboy hair, their gray sweater sets, they look enough alike that I am forced to go for crude distinction at first just to remember which is which. One tall. One short.

“Well, that’s exactly Roger, isn’t it?” the short one says.

“Have you
met
Roger, Claire?” The tall one turns to me. “Don’t you just
know
what we mean?” And I tell her that I have met him, but only at the girls’ soccer games. Really just to say hello. Just as I met Heidi. My daughter, Alyssa, I explain, is on a team with their daughter, Katherine. I don’t really know Roger, I admit; and as if I have disqualified myself somehow, the tall woman allows her eyes to drift off me as she states to no one in particular: “Well, anyway.”

The thread of conversation is soon picked up, the story about Roger followed by a story about another husband, the husband of the short woman. He too has done something, or said something, worthy of their mirth. And so, it turns out, has the third. Every husband is comical, it seems, a figure of fun and yet also of obvious pride. A quirky, worthy companion for them each.

I try not to hear their stories in these terms, try not to be so entirely the widow here. I strain to hear the amusing yarns as only that, and not envy these women who are wives, not hate them, not fall into this familiar shadowed valley of self-pity and grief. But of course I do. I am going down. I feel my descent, as the words and the laughter fly, scattershot, unavoidable, catching me in the friendly fire. Still, I keep a smile frozen across my face.

From up the long granite countertop, Heidi rolls an onion to me and instructs me on how small the pieces should be. The tall woman hands me a short knife. Glad for an excuse to be occupied, I bisect the bulb and peel down the skin. As I begin to chop in earnest, tears swell in my eyes, threatening to burst and stream. They are only onion tears, but I fight them, feeling suddenly exposed. I blink, to no avail, as my cheeks grow wet.

It doesn’t matter. The other women are oblivious to my tears. They chatter on. They laugh. I feel out of place and absurdly, embarrassingly hurt, angry that no one sees me cry, worried that anyone will, too obvious and too invisible all at once.

Heidi asks the tall one to reach for a mixing bowl tucked into a cabinet overhead. Obliging, she stretches impossibly far up, retrieving the enormous stainless steel container.

“It must be lovely to be so tall,” the short one says. “Especially given who you’re married to!” she adds, and they all laugh.

“Y
ou only went because she has a wooden leg,” Kevin accuses me that night, over wine, wine, spaghetti, and more wine. He is over, keeping me company while Alyssa is out at a school dance. We are indulging in her absence now, playing Bowie too loudly and drinking too much.
How can you stand listening to him?
she would say if she were here.
He’s so middle-aged
. And:
That much wine isn’t good for you, you know
.

“It had nothing to do with her leg,” I correct, though I think he may be right; and Kevin takes the accusation back. As I knew he would, because he has been my yes-man for years and I, his yes-woman—which for all this time has meant that we aren’t allowed to disagree with each other. Not when it comes to things like why we did what we did, or whether we were right when arguing with someone else. Kevin has long been my best friend, and this unquestioning affirmation of each other has formed the central tenet of our best friendship. We met at work before Joe died, in the glory days of my marriage, when all I wanted from any man other than Joe was friendship, and all I wanted from friends was that they agree with me that life was good, that my choices were inspired and my future bright as anything can be.

After Joe died, while I was struggling within the tangled, matted mess that Once Upon a Time had been my life, I tried to take things somewhere else with Kevin, beyond friendship and into bed. But Kevin’s inherently agreeable nature ruined the sex for me. At that point, I didn’t want sex to be about concurrence anymore, about agreement, about saying yes. That had been sex with Joe. That had been the glorious synthesis of lovemaking and lust we’d had. With Joe gone, I needed sex to be something more like a knock-down drag-out fight, one I could only win by fucking the living crap out of someone. And without having to think about making love. Or about love at all. Most importantly, not about love. And I couldn’t fuck the living crap out of Kevin; he was just too nice. I fired him as a lover after one tender, terrifying occasion on which, as I felt him rocking just too gently back and forth in me, I lay beneath him petrified he would declare himself in love. Horrified that in fact we might be making love, creating love, where love had not been before. Kevin came, I didn’t, and I fired him. Being my yes-man, he took the decision well enough. At least he didn’t abandon me, didn’t stop being my friend. And since then we’ve been pretty much okay. Not discussing what happened. Not discussing that we aren’t discussing it. Not discussing that either. Just saying yes to each other, and trying to be kind.

“It wasn’t the leg.” I shake my head. “Which, by the way, isn’t wood. It’s like fiber flesh or cyberflesh. It has complex circuitry. It’s not like she’s a pirate, Kev. I went because I just couldn’t come up with a good reason to say no. And because, let’s face it, next Saturday, there she’s going to be at Alyssa’s game. It just felt expedient to go and get it over with. And I left early, anyway. I didn’t stay there long.”

As I tell him this, I remember Heidi’s face, round and pretty, falling in disappointment at my hurried apologies. Behind her stretched the long mahogany dining table set with four place mats, four china plates, four sets of silver, four long-stem crystal wineglasses. As I nodded my goodbye,
yes, yes, I really have to go
, Heidi glanced over her shoulder at that perfect quartet, then turned back toward me with a mournful look.

“I’m so sorry. I just realized I have a conflict,” I said. “I don’t know where my brain is. I’m so sorry. This has been so much fun.”

I don’t tell Kevin that as I drove from Heidi’s home, I imagined her making the long trek toward the table, unsetting my dishes, disrupting that perfect foursome she had created, laboring across the floor, every square of unrelenting tile a defiance of her amputated state. I don’t tell him how I wondered if I, like more things than I can list—husbands and legs, to name but two—might demand a more difficult attention as an absence than I had ever required while there.

“That was a good call,” Kevin says, which is exactly what I would have said to him. “That fancy food in the middle of the day would have made you sick as a dog. There’s no doubt about that in my mind. Those women are all puking into their toilets right now. Does she sleep with it on?”

“Who? What?”

“The leg.”

“I have no idea.” I laugh a little. “I don’t quite know her well enough to ask. Maybe when you come to Alyssa’s game you can sneak that question in, you know, between penalties. Did I tell you this is her fourth leg? Her fifth, actually, if you count the first. The original limb.” I reach across and pour us both more wine. “Do you suppose she keeps them all? Do you suppose she has them locked up somewhere? Like Bluebeard’s wives?”

But Kevin is looking away from me now, leaning back into his chair and staring at nothing much. Only away from me. “What precisely is the line,” he asks, his words measured, slow, “between knowing someone well enough for them to tell you they’ve had four or five legs and knowing them well enough to ask them if they sleep with any of them on?” He lifts his glass and takes a long, steady drink.

“I don’t exactly know. It’s a good question, though,” I say, realizing that once again he and I have wandered to the subject of intimacy, where it starts and where it stops. How it is to be defined. This is the persistent unshakable hangover I can detect from those few nights of sex we shared. This continual conversational drift we have. A current, moving ever toward the question of how these lines are drawn.

“I don’t know precisely what the difference is,” I say, shifting in my own chair to meet his eye, holding his gaze, pretending to us both there’s no tension here. “But if I ever know her well enough to ask, you’ll be the next to hear.” I look at the empty bottle, wrap my hand around it, start to stand. “We need more wine.”

“It’s a funny word.”

“Wine?”

“Need.”

“They’re all funny words, Kev. If you think about it.”

An hour later, as he leaves, he tells me to call him if I’m sad. “Standing offer.”

“I know. I’ll be fine.” I smile up into his gentle eyes, and find them full of concern, full of offer:
Anything, anything, anything at all
. “Don’t worry about me,” I say.

Not yet
, I tell his eyes.

It hovers between us, increasingly. This other conversation. This critical discourse we never speak out loud. This dishonesty of ours, as we prop each other up, tell one another jokes, encourage each other to go out on dates and have some fun. It is the force of this pretense that pulls our words endlessly into those places of intimacy. With a sign, I believe, with just a whisper, I can have him still.

“Go home,” I say and softly kiss his cheek.

A
fter he’s gone, I am grateful, in bed alone, for the fuzzy muting of all that wine. In general, I have become careful about drinking too much, too much of the time. There were months after Joe died, months that were a little drowned, a little blurred, in retrospect. Liquor certainly fueled some of the loveless loving my body sought and found with men I barely noticed, except to pummel them in bed. But I don’t fool around like that anymore. And I watch it now, with alcohol. Every once in a while, though, that softening patina an extra glass of Chianti can give, that velvet cloth it lays over every jagged edge, evokes a kind of humble gratitude in me.

I can hear music humming still in Alyssa’s room. She came in late, full of stories about her friends. I tried to listen with good humor to her tales of adventure at the dance, tried not to allow my resentment toward her companions seep in. But no doubt she senses how I feel about them all. Awkwardly emergent female forms, not children anymore, not adults yet, creatures of transition alone, they call my daughter
Ally
one day and then
Lyssa
the next, as though she were their property, to name and claim. As though she no longer belongs to me and only I have not figured that out. Deceptively clothed in bell-bottoms and horizontal stripes, outfits reinvented from my own youth, they are the trumpeters of my daughter’s departure, the harbingers of yet another loss. They are the clock ticking forward with no concern for me. All of them. The one with bad skin. The one with enormous thighs. The one who dresses like a whore. The one who smells like dope. I have trouble telling them apart too—as I did the women in Heidi’s kitchen. My tags on them are a mother’s silent protest against their undeniable power over my own little girl, herself half woman now. Half already gone from my home.

It’s not a level playing field. My foes do not play fair. Death and all of its traveling companions and close associates, all of those beings who sneaked into my house, camouflaged in the chaos that surrounded Joe’s swift disease. Loss and grief. Reality itself. And always, with me since, this horrible heightened awareness of impending abandonment.

Booze is a necessary tiny kindness from time to time, I tell myself as I roll over on my side and try to sleep.

I
n the morning, Alyssa asks after Kevin as she pours herself some juice. “He’s coming to the game, right?”

“He’ll be there,” I say.

Her eyes are large and brown, just like Joe’s. I see them across the table, strangely highlighted with the traces of makeup she’s started to wear. As though a part of him has been recently altered in her. Over her soccer clothes she has on his old Penn sweatshirt she found in my closet and claimed. Her long chestnut hair is falling, pooling, caught in the hood.

“So what do you guys do when I’m not here, anyway? Watch TV or something?” Her tone is casual, but I think that I hear worry underneath. I think I hear her fear that I have forgotten her father, that Kevin is replacing him. “Are you guys going out or anything?” she asks. “Are you a couple?”