Valley of Ashes (13 page)

Maybe that was terrible advice, and, okay, Fassett
had
been married to someone else the entire time he was hanging out with Mom, but how the hell would I know? It’s not like I had a whole bunch of other marital paradigms to hold up for comparison so what the hell.

When all else failed, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try kindness or some vague kind of Gandhi thing. I mean, it’s not like I was going to win any awards for vacuuming prowess anytime soon.

My husband was smart, and a charming host. He was solicitous of my friends. He was on his way up in the corporate game, and our daughters wouldn’t be laughed at for wearing poor-relation castoffs and Goodwill rags when they were old enough for school, the way I had been after my father took off.

I didn’t have to serve up cheese-with-the-mold-pared-off or powdered
milk or dented cans of generic chili that always turned out to be made from shredded beef hearts, if you were dumb enough to read the ingredient list on the “No Frills” label.

I wouldn’t have to explain to Parrish and India why their father lived in a VW van behind the Chevron station in Malibu, buying weed and Volkswagen tools from the Snap-on truck guy who showed up once a week in lieu of paying child support—while worrying that the KGB was reading his mail.

With Dean’s help I had washed up safe once more on the shores of the lower middle class, despite my parents’ headlong sprint away from all remaining vestiges of their childhood wealth and privilege.

And he and I were a team, right? It’s just that we were tired, and overwhelmed, and doing our best to keep it together most of the time. The bad cranky shit would probably pass: Scorpio would move out of the House of Suckbag. Life would go on.

Besides which, it wasn’t like I was a pregnant single truckstop waitress in Fresno, or undergoing chemo. Nor, for that matter, was I currently being bombed by the Luftwaffe in Guernica.

Hey—in the grand scheme of things, I had very little to complain about.

And for that I was fucking well grateful.

Y
ou did a nice job with the food, Bunny,” Dean said, casting an approving eye over the culinary handiwork I’d arrayed across the kitchen table. As though none of it had been there before his shower.

His wet hair was neatly combed back, his pink Brooks Brothers shirt crisply starched and pressed by the cleaners on Pearl Street. Even his boxers were from The Brothers—my Valentine’s present to him the previous month.

I thought of Edith Wharton’s once having described a character’s husband as being blond and well dressed, with “the physical distinction that comes from having a straight figure, a thin nose, and the habit of looking slightly disgusted.”

He walked behind me, smelling of shampoo and peppermint, then sat down to slide his feet into a pair of Belgian shoes, brown with black piping and topped with discreetly tiny black bows (my Christmas present).

These were pretty much the WASPiest footwear in the history of the universe, and I had a momentary flashback to what Dean had been wearing the night we’d met: green garbage-man pants, white poly-blend Sears dress shirt through which you could see the outline of his undershirt (a pack of Viceroys rolled up in one of its short sleeves), thick-soled black cop shoes. Not to mention ugly glasses and a bad haircut.

None of which had mattered to me. We stayed up talking about FDR’s policy of farm parity until four in the morning after a party at
my pal Sophia’s parents’ apartment, and then he’d carried me up the stairs to an empty bedroom with a view of Central Park.

I apologized the moment we were naked in bed for not having shaved.

“That’s perfectly all right,” Dean replied. “I’ve dated English majors before.”

At which point I realized he might well be a keeper.

Since then, I had taught a Syracuse farmboy to look carelessly effete.

Perhaps that explained at least part of his bad mood. I’d become the man behind the curtain to whom one was supposed to pay no attention.

I rubbed at the smear of cake-batter craquelure on my sweatshirt’s cuff. “Could you watch the girls for a minute while I go change?”

It was only Setsuko and Cary coming over, but I felt like a fat lumpen mudhen compared with my minty-fresh spouse.

He glanced at his watch, lips pressed thin.

I hustled back upstairs to our room, throwing on a longish red skirt from Target and this dumpy black Goodwill sweater Mom had found me, then scraped my hair back into a ponytail.

I spent money on the girls’ clothes, or Dean’s. There never seemed to be enough for mine, too.

I looked myself up and down in the closet-door mirror: Ellis Island, fresh out of steerage—minus only the kerchief and hobnail boots.

Fuck that.

I yanked the skirt off, dumped it on our floor, and changed into my last pair of jeans and a pair of black Converse sneakers.

Low-tops, no socks.

Because I didn’t actually own any socks, either.

I’d never been a big sock person. And in a pinch—snowstorms, et cetera—I could always wear my husband’s.

Back downstairs, I found Dean with his pink sleeves crisply rolled back to each elbow, talking cheerful nonsense to make Parrish laugh as he replaced her diaper.

He looked up at me, smiling. “The food really does look amazing, Bunny. I can’t believe you pulled all that together in one morning.”

“Thank you for changing her,” I said, stepping up close behind him to wrap my arms again around his waist. “I’m sorry the house was such a pit.”

I squeezed my arms tighter, planting a kiss on his back.

He leaned forward over Parrish.

“Darling petunia,” he cooed, “your dad missed you so much.”

Through the living room window, I watched Cary’s truck pull up to the curb.

Setsuko swung her long legs gracefully out from its passenger door when he’d walked around to open it for her, extending a hand to help her down.

She was willowy—tall for a woman who’d grown up in Tokyo. A breeze fluttered the silky hem of her blossom-pink dress, tossing the artfully curled ends of her long black hair.

I liked her well enough. She was the receptionist at Dean’s office, unfailingly sweet to me when I called him at work—but our small talk always ground to a painful halt right around “I’m well, thanks, how are you?”

“They’re here,” I said.

Cary said something that made Setsuko giggle, and she lowered her lashes, raising a demure hand to hide perfect teeth.

The woman was so indelibly feminine she might as well have worn a powder-blue T-shirt that read I A
M THE
A
NTI
-M
ADELINE
across the front, in swirly girly paste–hued script.

I’d read once that the Japanese language has gender-specific first-person pronouns, which I immediately took to mean that women weren’t
allowed
to use the same “I” and “me” as men were. Perhaps because I also knew it was still perfectly legal to fire a woman there for having gotten married—or just having reached, say, her mid-twenties, should the male bosses decide they were in need of a fresher “office flower.”

Granted, this prickly attitude may well have been pure cultural
chauvinism on my part, or the result of having read far too many smugly misogynistic stroke-lit James Clavell novels, but I did try to cut Setsuko a little slack and at least think of her as
involuntarily
insipid.

If I’d been raised female in her milieu, I suspected I’d’ve long since stormed a bell tower brandishing twin AK-47s, my belt strung with grenades.

Setsuko reached back into the truck’s bed for two bags of groceries, waving Cary away when he offered to help.

Dean pushed past me to open the front door for them. I followed him out onto our front porch, fighting a sudden urge to plant my foot firmly in the exact center of his ass and shove him down the stairs.

D
ean and Cary had taken the girls out into the backyard, intent on firing up our barbecue.

Setsuko, meanwhile, had started unloading her grocery bags on the kitchen counter.

I figured she’d brought a salad or something, maybe a pie—the usual sort of adjunct foodstuffs one totes to an informal lunch at someone else’s house—but she kept reaching into the bags and pulling out piles of items. (I counted three packages of hamburger, two bags of buns, catsup, mustard, relish, tomatoes, lettuce, a tub of store-bought potato salad… and she
still
wasn’t done.)

I realized she’d virtually replicated my entire menu for the afternoon.

Well, okay, mine was way better—not least since I wouldn’t be caught dead serving French’s yellow mustard, iceberg lettuce, or Wonder Bread anything—but it was bizarre.

“That’s really nice of you,” I said, “but, um, we kind of already
have
food?”

She turned around to smile at me and I gestured toward the kitchen table, loaded down with my jam-packed trays and platters and bowls, not to mention a large jar of Grey Poupon, poppy-
and
sesame-seed-garnished kaiser rolls, and mixed baby field greens.

“Yes,” she said, beaming. “And I brought things, too.”

I wondered whether all females were Stepfordized at birth in her home country, and how quickly I could get her the hell out of my kitchen.

I looked out the window and watched Dean and Cary fiddle with the Weber on our backyard’s lawn.

Parrish and India were in their little sandbox a few feet away, brandishing plastic shovels with glee.

My husband filled a foot-tall metal chimney with charcoal, then wadded up half a sheet of newspaper and shoved it into the bottom of the thing, no doubt lecturing Cary on the efficacy of this lighting method as he lowered it into the barbecue’s kettle.

Our pal nodded, handing Dean the box of matches that had been sitting on the grass at their feet.

“Shall I start making the hamburger patties now?” asked Setsuko, from behind me.

“I’m so sorry, Setsuko, I’m a
terrible
hostess… would you care for something to drink?” I turned to smile at her, pointing pointedly toward the kitchen window and the great outdoors beyond it. “We have wine and beer on the picnic table. Or juice. I’m sure Dean and Cary would enjoy some company.”

“A glass of wine would be lovely, Mrs. Bauer, thank you.”

“Please call me Madeline,” I said, for possibly the hundredth time.

“I’ll
try
to remember,” she said.

“For one thing, ‘Mrs. Bauer’ isn’t my name.”

I hadn’t ever told her that before. Perhaps the information would act as a mnemonic device.

“No?” she said.

I was about to say it was what Dean’s
mother
was called, but instead found myself telling her, “I kept my own surname: Dare.”

“That’s interesting.”

Funny how much crisper her English got the minute there weren’t any men in the room.

Setsuko returned my smile and began picking her way toward the back door, pink skirt swaying with each tiny, ever-so-slightly-pigeon-toed step she took in her kitten-heeled sandals.

Yeah, good luck keeping
those
from sinking into the lawn.

The sandals were white. A good two months, I might add, before the advent of Memorial Day.

Just as I was about to forearm-sweep her three individually wrapped
pounds
of hamburger off my kitchen counter and into the brown-paper grocery bags on the floor, Setsuko turned back toward me.

“Would you like me to leave this door open,” she asked, “or closed?”

“Open, please,” I said.

We smiled at each other
again
and I fought the urge to sprint across the room and hip-check her down the back-porch steps, just so she’d finally fucking leave.

The moment she was out of sight, I tossed all her crap into the bags and shoved them under the kitchen table with my foot.

A billow of smoke rolled past our kitchen porch like ghostly surf, and I caught a sharp hit of charcoal at the back of my throat.

The muted trill of a giggle made me look out the window.

Setsuko held Parrish on one hip and was pushing India gently back and forth in the little plastic toddler swing that hung from our tallest maple tree.