The Measures Between Us (28 page)

Invariably it was unsuccessful, even though she thought she had followed the recipe step by step. She and Henry would take a few bites and then look at each other.

“It's awful, isn't it?” Lucinda would say.

Henry nodded. “Pretty bad.”

“Maybe more salt?”

“I don't think that'll change much.”

“Pepper?”

Henry shook his head. “Same issue.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Pizza?”

And then they would order a large pie from Scappy's, drinking wine while they waited for the delivery boy, the failed dinner sitting on the table like an abandoned home-ec experiment.

Lucinda thought, in fact, that the baby had been conceived in the aftermath of one of these aborted meals. It wasn't uncommon for the two of them to have sex while they waited for their second, edible dinner. Something about the humor of the moment, the humility and absence of pride and envy, pushed them close together, and often Lucinda would get up from her seat at the table and climb into Henry's lap.

“Sorry,” she said again that night. “Someday I'll get it right.” “I hope you never do,” Henry said. They kissed, and she tasted the red wine on his lips, his tongue. She glimpsed the small stain she would notice again later, in the corner of his mouth. She started unbuttoning his shirt, and he did the same to her, leaving the bottom couple buttons fastened. “This is what I really wanted anyway,” he whispered. “This you get right every time.” He ran his finger from her collarbone down, between her breasts, up and over her bra. His mouth grew hungrier, more devouring, and he massaged her thighs, moving steadily, rousingly, inward.

When they paused for a moment, she dipped her finger into the soup she had attempted and tried to force him to eat it. He resisted. “Yes,” she insisted, and he jerked away from her and shook his head back and forth like a child, and she ended up smearing his chin and neck with it instead. Laughing, she took a napkin and dabbed at his skin, wiping the soup off gently, and this was another segue, another unexpected gesture that ushered
them back into it. He unbuttoned her jeans and she stood up to wiggle out of them, kicking them into a pile on the linoleum floor. Clad in only her underwear, she helped him strip his clothes, too: shoes, socks, pants, shirt, boxer shorts. Finally she pulled off her underwear and they sat back down, and she straddled him and closed her eyes, leaning close against him, staying still for a second, more, just suspended, the room and the stove and the ruined dinner and the cars outside and the house and the world dropping away into nothingness. Their rhythm built, slowly, seconds within seconds, minutes within minutes. Often they barely moved, the two of them on the chair, moaning, sweating, Henry's grip tight on her hips.

After they finished, she remained in his lap for a while, nestling her head below his chin. She could feel his quickened pulse against her cheek. He kissed the top of her head; she let her mouth linger on his neck. Sometimes she wanted to stay there for hours, his arms wrapped around her naked back, his lips skirting her hair. She loved this time, the wake their exuberance had left, how it required no words, no questions, no answers. It was itself an answer, the only right answer. Newton, their city, suddenly sounded like poetry, and their neighbors' ugly houses had been razed and replaced with sea, with whitecaps and calm coves, lobstermen and shiny schools of fish.

Lucinda never honestly answered Janet's question. She had mumbled something vague about needing to get away for a few days, to somewhere totally new. It wasn't a lie, it just wasn't the whole story, since she wasn't ready to tell anyone the story, not even a half stranger.

She had flown to Texas because she was considering leaving
Henry. Along with her small suitcase, she had brought the names and phone numbers of three divorce attorneys, referrals she had gotten from the Massachusetts Bar Association. She had called one already, on a morning when Janet was out of the house at work. He asked her straightforward questions: how long had she been married, whose name was the house in, were there any shared assets aside from the home. He asked about debt and car payments and insurance policies. Questions that sounded banal but hinted at anything but. When he asked why she wanted to divorce her husband, Lucinda went mute. She was silent for so long that the lawyer said, “Mrs. Wheeling? Mrs. Wheeling, are you still there?”

“Still here,” Lucinda said.

“Okay. I know this can be hard, but I was inquiring about the reasons for divorce. We don't need to get into a long discussion right now. I just need something to write down for my initial notes.”

“I'm not really sure,” Lucinda said. “I feel suffocated. I don't know if I can be with him. I don't know if I can be with anyone.”

“I guess that falls under irreconcilable differences,” said the lawyer.

“Did I mention I'm pregnant?”

“You did.”

“Does that change anything?”

“Yes,” said the lawyer. “It'll make the settlement a little more complicated. Nothing undoable but not as simple as a divorce with no children.”

“She's not born yet, though.”

“Right, but soon.”

Lucinda was surprised she had stayed on the phone so long.
She'd hoped that a lawyer's voice, words like
settlement
and
assets
, would instantly make her reconsider and hang up. First there was the trip to Texas—that too was supposed to jar her out of wanting to leave Henry. And when it didn't she called the attorney. She was quickly running out of ideas. At her darkest moments she wondered whether getting pregnant was an attempt at the same thing: finding a reason to stay. Instead it inflamed her doubts all the more, and she thought if she conceived a child as an excuse to remain married then she was a horrible, selfish person—someone Henry wouldn't want to be with.

The truth was that when Henry came home at night all she could see was the divide between them. He was too calm, too confident that they belonged together, and his lack of doubt made her feel more alone than she could ever remember. She picked fights with him over nothing, really, because she wanted to see him lash out. It wasn't that he lacked passion—she needed only to remember their sex that left her gasping and grateful to know that—it was his stubborn faith in the two of them.

How desperately she wanted this feeling to fade. She didn't dare tell Henry, but there were moments when she was jealous of the shop teacher's daughter, alone in that hospital, where she got to say anything she wanted, where it was safe to push away everyone who loved you. There was no recrimination there.

Ever since Cynthia's hospitalization, Mary Pareto had been going to church. As a child she had gone every Sunday, through her confirmation, but like many teenagers she stopped attending Mass once the grip of boys and movies, and anything else that kept her out late Saturday nights, became too distracting.

Her parents quickly grew weary of struggling with her on Sunday mornings. Even when they were successful at rousing her from bed, she was sullen on the ride over and spent most of the service fending off sleep. When they whispered to her to sit up straight, she sighed dramatically, folded her arms, and corrected her posture—for a minute, maybe two if she was feeling generous. Their only consolation was seeing other parents flanking their own heavy-lidded sons and daughters and realizing they weren't alone. Sometimes it seemed as if all the teenagers in the pews were jerking their heads awake. They still insisted she go twice a year: Easter Sunday and Midnight Mass at Christmas.

Though she made a show of battling even these minimal commitments, secretly Mary enjoyed the excuse to dress up and go back, especially the Christmas service. Everyone seemed
so happy that night, brimming with expectation and gratitude, with no mourning, no dwelling on guilt, sin, and retribution. The hymns were loud, layered with promise, and when there was snow on the ground, that too seemed like a gift, evidence of mercy and small miracles. The service ended late but people lingered on the steps of the church, still charged with song and chant. There were presents to wrap, children to be coaxed to bed on the hardest night of the year to fall asleep, yet no one wanted to journey home.

Vincent knew Mary had been going again, but he didn't accompany her and she didn't expect him to. She went three times a week: on Sundays for a formal service and two other days just to drop in, kneel in the pews, and say a prayer for Cynthia. She liked the weekday visits best because she was often the only one in the great, high-ceilinged room. She looked at the stained-glass windows and saw in their Bible scenes hope and history. It was reassuring to her that some stories, like love and sorrow, are thousands of years old. At these moments she was very far from the world of psychiatric hospitals and suicidal daughters, and she understood the reprieve to mean that this part of her life would soon pass and her daughter would soon come home, and none of them, none of the three of them, would have any scars.

Occasionally she heard quick, rushed steps behind her and she would turn around and see strangers hurrying into and out of confession. As a little girl, before she had ever confessed, she was so curious about what went on in the mysterious booths. “You go in there and you tell the priest what you've done wrong,” her mother had told her. “That's it?” Mary had asked. “What's the big deal? Why can't you just say it out in the open?”

“It's a conversation between you and the pastor and God,” said her mother. “It's not for anyone else to hear. It's the most private business.”

“What does the priest say?” she asked.

“He mostly listens,” said her mother. “Then he gives you some blessings.”

“And then you're done?”

“Right. Then you're done.”

“Why do people go back then?”

She didn't remember how her mother had answered this question. Probably she didn't know how to explain the redundancy and temptation of sin. The way we swerve in and out of what's right.

The confessional booths made her think of Cynthia, of what she might be talking about with her therapist. Vincent had told her what Henry Wheeling had said: that Cynthia wasn't necessarily spending all her time hating the two of them, convincing the psychiatrists they were terrible parents. But her fear, for years, ever since Cynthia had first started having problems, was that she herself was the cause. She knew she never abused her daughter, yet what if she had withheld love and affection without even realizing it? Then she might truly be the root of all this. She might have driven Cynthia into despair without ever raising a hand to her. What if she might as well have bought all the pills for her?

Vincent had taken to his role as a father naturally. Sometimes, especially when Cynthia was an infant, Mary resented how easy it was for him. He never seemed plagued by the nagging questions she had—whether she was coddling Cynthia too much, too little. Whether she was being too firm, too lenient. When to enforce her bedtime and bath time and when not to push. He
acted by instinct and reflex, and his instincts always seemed right, more often than not causing Cynthia to break out in a great big grin and erupt in laughter. He would get down on the ground with her, let her climb all over his body like he was a gentle bear. Mary watched the two of them, smiled herself at all the fun they were having, but often she felt a little lonely, too, like it was some club she wasn't allowed to join. Even when he had to be strict with her, Cynthia rarely resisted, never wailed or stomped her feet or flung her silverware to the floor.

She had tried to tamp down this anxiety. She held Cynthia as much as possible, touched her as much as possible, sang her songs and gazed at her while she slept. They played with her dolls together, sat side by side at the upright piano in the den and banged out nursery rhymes. Mary even dug out her old flute and let Cynthia make a racket that would have made her music teacher cry. They made up names for the songs, nonsense names for nonsense songs. It was all an attempt to push away the creeping suspicion that she wasn't meant to be a mother.

Outwardly she did nothing wrong. Didn't snap at her daughter, didn't punish her harshly. In fact, she rarely even raised her voice with Cynthia. And it occurred to Mary, sitting in the empty church pew, that maybe she never lost her patience because she was afraid she would blurt out something truly, deeply hurtful and damaging:
I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I know there is something I'm supposed to feel, but I don't feel it
. They would have been words she couldn't reel back in, couldn't erase.

She looked back at the confessional. She should go in there, unfurl her sin of not loving her daughter enough. But the priest wouldn't understand. It wasn't like stealing, adultery. To Mary it felt worse, far less fixable than those sins. At least with the ones
with names, there were blessings to recite, something to atone for. Beyond religion, there were prisons, courts, justice, sentences.

She tried to empty most of her fear amid the silence and quiet dignity of the votives and stained glass, the strangers and the rigid, geometric pews. It was a place with rules, directions, not just a swamp of mistakes. She went partly so she could be comfortable at home with Vincent, where, free of much of her anxiety, she slipped back into the role of doting wife, concerned mother. She had pulled it off for so many years—what were a few more? His loyalty gave her hope. Would Vincent have tolerated her if she was such a bad mother? Wouldn't he have said something, asked his mother or mother-in-law to teach Mary how to be a better parent? Wouldn't he have demanded a divorce?

One thing she treasured about her husband was that he never questioned her. He was a man of simple equations, precision, with little tolerance for ambiguity, moral or otherwise. He understood consequences and results and was prepared to live with them. When she walked down a dark alley with him, she never felt scared. She had no doubt that if a mugger appeared, Vincent would wrestle the man to the ground and beat him senseless for scaring his wife. It was a crude sort of strength, primitive, but she loved him for it, and in some ways she married him because of it. When she was with him, she knew no one would touch her.