Still Life with Husband (12 page)

Finally, at five thirty, just when I’d normally be packing up and happily contemplating dinner, Dick calls it a day, tells me I’m swell, pulls on his green-felt beret, and leaves, first attempting to use the supply-closet door before making his way to the actual exit. I worry, sometimes, that the next time I come in to work I’ll find him still obliviously wandering the corridors of Pfein Hall.

I wonder if there’s a reason that most of the men in my life are such emotionally incomprehensible beings who live so much more distinctly in their heads than in the material world. Dick, who may, in fact, be deteriorating, painting the brushstrokes of his life, long lost to its subtle details, its fine lines and specific shadings. My sweet father, his interior life a mystery, his off-kilter conversations mostly obscure factual references and strange jokes so confusing that they manage to round the bend and arrive on the other side of funny. And Kevin, stiff and controlled and certain that if he just pretends for long enough that I don’t have feelings, eventually I won’t.

My head is pounding now, since my eyes have, as predicted, failed to keep the pace of the flickering fluorescent light. The sky is dark and it suddenly feels much later than it is. My fingers, finally poised on the keyboard, look cinematic and slightly fake, just a shade wrong, too white, too thin, too large, like when you know that the hands playing the piano in the movie don’t actually belong to the actor.

Dear David,

I’m sorry you haven’t heard from me in a while. I owe you an explanation for running off the way I did. I had an amazing time with you the other day. I’ve been having an amazing time getting to know you, which is why this is so hard to write. I don’t know how I managed to screw up so badly, but I need to tell you that I’m married.

This is probably not what you were expecting. I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am for not mentioning it sooner. I should never have let our friendship progress the way it did without telling you.

I don’t know; I might have imagined that something was developing between us. I’m second-guessing everything right now. Either way, I should have said something. I think I let things go too far. I’m so sorry if I gave you the wrong idea. I just enjoyed our time together—too much.

I hope you can forgive me.

—Emily

P.S. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please just delete this e-mail and pretend I never sent it.

I hit “send.” With my hand—mine again—I turn off my computer and head home.

Two weeks tick by. I feel dull and dense, like my body mass has changed. I feel as if I’ve moved to an outlying suburb of my life. Soddenville. Over to the left is a new golf course, Listless Vista. On the right is a housing development, Low-Level Despair Estates.

I’m awake for hours in the middle of the night, and then I sleep till ten in the morning. I spend one entire day inventing time-consuming chores for myself that require no actual expenditure of energy: I call the toll-free number listed on a can of sparkling water to report that every can in the case we just bought is flat. This water does not sparkle! I dig around and find the phone number of the organization that removes your name from credit card company solicitation lists. I call the accounting department at my dentist’s office to question a bill that I suspect is probably right but might not be. I walk ten blocks to the grocery store to buy macadamia nuts. I consider making up a complaint about the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
’s shameful coverage of something or other and writing an irate letter to the editor.

I had wheels. And now they’re gone. And although I can still walk, although my wheels were not required for basic maneuvers, I was just getting to know them, starting to enjoy them. I was just beginning to feel wild and free and speedy.

I wonder what David is thinking. He must hate me. I guess I’ll never hear from him again. It shouldn’t bother me; after all, I wrote the e-mail. I put a stop to the whole dodgy mess. Still, at the oddest moments, while I’m driving somewhere, or in the middle of dinner, or during a stupefying telephone conversation with a scientist, I’ll start imagining him, thinking about his face as he read my message, imagining his reaction. I picture him pushing his chair back from his computer, raking his hand through his hair. I see him slumping onto his sofa in, what? confusion? anger? sadness? complete apathy? As long as it’s my fantasy, I usually imagine that he’s devastated, that he longs for me, that he forgives me and wants me. Sometimes, while I’m at it, I continue imagining him. He’s combing his hair. He’s eating a sandwich. I can’t help it. I tried to purge him from my mind. I did the best I could. It hasn’t worked yet. But I’m sure it will eventually.

Kevin doesn’t seem to notice any of it—not my lethargy, not my distractedness, not my sudden propensity for strange and useless household tasks. Or if he does, he’s too wrapped up in the daily muddle of his own life to ask me about it. Worst of all, I don’t even feel less guilty. I still feel as if I cheated on Kevin. One emotional entanglement has reconfigured us. The tectonic plates of our relationship have shifted. Will this get better, too, eventually?

On Tuesday, Meg calls and asks me if I’m free “all day Thursday.” As it happens, I am. I get excited because I think she’s going to suggest a day trip to Chicago, or a long hike in the state park. Then she tells me that we’re scheduled to head a classroom full of writhing five-year-olds. Thirty of them. For the entire day.

“Do you know the apples and bananas song?” she asks. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ in Spanish?” She’s serious.

“Uh,
no,
Meg,” I answer, in a subtle tone that I hope will indicate:
Meg, why on earth would I know those songs?

“I’ll try to print out the lyrics to a few of the kindergarten standards before Thursday,” she says, all business. “Can you be at the school by seven forty-five?”

The playground in front of Day Avenue Primary School is a surprisingly calm place at a quarter to eight. Eerily calm. It rained last night, and this morning everything shines. The sidewalks sparkle, the bright playground equipment gleams, and even the few fat, bobbing pigeons on the wet grass are shimmery and iridescent.

Well, this won’t be so bad. I see myself crouched next to a sweet five-year-old who is sitting at her miniature desk, feet swinging, intently trying to write her name. I’m gently guiding her, encouraging her as she forms adorably large, crooked letters:
E-M-M-A.
(Meg says all the girls are Emma and Olivia and all the boys are Max, like characters from a novel cowritten by Jane Austen and Isaac Bashevis Singer.) Good job, honey! Oh, heavens, you needn’t thank me. That’s what I’m here for. I will be Miss Emily, the kind, beautiful teacher’s assistant, and when they go home, they’ll rave about me to their ragged, overworked mommies. Miss Emily taught me to count to ten in French! Miss Emily told me she liked my dress! Maybe they’ll remember me forever. Between scrubbing the bathroom floor and driving the kids to soccer practice, their mommies will resent me.

Gingerly, I ease my too-wide self down onto a canvas swing and wait for Meg.

Just then, the four horsemen of the apocalypse descend: four yellow buses pull up. What emerges from their gaping maws can only be the end of the world. Masses, hordes of screeching, yelping demons pour out of the buses, pushing and shoving each other and running maniacally. They just whirl around, careening off each other, pointy little teeth bared, expressions of pure hedonistic joy on their faces. Wild animals! Hell monsters! It looks like some of them are headed for the playground equipment. I feel myself cower, shrink a little on my swing.

Meg comes up beside me, puts her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she says cheerfully. “They’re not all ours.”

I stand. I hadn’t seen her approaching. “When did you get here?”

“I’ve been here since seven. I wanted to prepare the room and get my head together. Let’s go inside now. We have fifteen minutes before the playground monitor will corral the kids and send them in.” I notice a harassed-looking middle-aged lady off to the side. She has a beehive hairdo and is wearing a dress the color of toast. There’s a whistle around her neck. She scans the crowd, making sure the prematurely huge ten-year-olds don’t crush the few minuscule four-year-olds before eight in the morning.

I follow Meg in the main door, and she guides me down the echoey hallway to the kindergarten wing. Our sneakers make loud slapping sounds on the industrial tiled floors. I’ve been here before, visiting Meg, but the identical-looking corridors are always a maze to me. Bright, splotchy paintings on construction paper decorate the walls above the little blue and red lockers. Posters exhorting kids to
READ
and to
SAY NO TO DRUGS
cover the remaining wall space. The image of a five-year-old politely refusing a tiny joint pops into my head, and I promptly chase it away. This is not the kind of thing that occurs to Miss Emily!

Meg greets a few of her fellow teachers as we pass. They’re a chalk-dusted, sensibly dressed bunch of women. They look harried, but several of them stop to hug her, welcome her back, whisper that they hope she’s doing okay, that they’ve been thinking about her. It’s obvious that these women form a close group and that they adore Meg. Who wouldn’t? For a second, I’m jealous. Meg introduces me quickly to her colleagues. “My best friend and teacher’s aide for the day!” she says. I squash my jealousy like a bug.

We enter Mrs. Rosen’s room, a landscape of orange all-purpose carpeting, bright pillows, and multicolored miniature plastic chairs lined up against a long U-shaped table. Meg is whistling a repetitive ditty that seems to consist of just six notes.

“It’s nice to see you in good spirits,” I offer tentatively.

“I feel great!” Meg says. “This was such a good idea. Em,” she adds, “you know how much I appreciate this.”

“Shut up!” I say.

She punches me lightly in the arm; I punch her back. We pretend to be guys. “You shut up.”

“What’s on today’s agenda?” I ask. “Mergers? Acquisitions? Hostile takeovers?”

“The lesson plan involves show-and-tell and a recap of the days of the week, followed by a three-martini lunch and an investigation by the SEC.” She motions me over to the closet at the back of the room and opens the door. “Art supplies,” she says, with a Vanna White swoop of her arm. “Oh, and they’ll be working in their journals today, too.”

“They keep journals?” I ask. “Can they write?”

“Not really. They draw pictures and scratch out a few words.”

“What else?”

“Follow my lead,” she says. “Activities last about twenty minutes each. Welcome to short-attention-span theater. A lot of what we do is wander around and give them encouragement, help them clean up. It’ll be obvious.”

The first students of the day charge into the room, two little girls with pink backpacks and identical haircuts—stick-straight short hair and bangs. Bangs! Maybe I should get bangs. They spot Meg and run up to her, stop just short of crashing into her legs. They haven’t learned the concept of personal space yet. “Hi, Miss Schaeffer!” Meg was their art teacher last year, when they were four, and I can see that they love the shock of seeing her now. I remember what it felt like the time my mom and I ran into my third-grade teacher at the grocery store (Did she buy frozen entrées like we did? An exotic kind of soda?), or even when I saw my high school Spanish teacher at the mall, holding hands with a handsome man—the sudden surprise of realizing that they had lives, possibly even complicated lives.

“Hi, Phoebe! Hi, Jessica!” She crouches down to their height and grabs them both in a hug. I can’t believe she remembers their names.

“Why aren’t you our art teacher anymore?” Jessicaphoebe asks.

“I’m substituting this year,” Meg says. “Mrs. Rosen isn’t here today, so I get to spend the whole day with you!” Meg is so good at this. If it were me, I probably would have overdisclosed to the little urchins.
Well, children, the thing is, I couldn’t get pregnant because of all the stress last year, so I took some time off and got knocked up, but then I miscarried, which was really sad, so now I’m just easing my way back into things. Any advice?
I don’t really know how to deal with kids. Meg is in her element. It occurs to me that I don’t really have an element. I would like to tell this to Meg, and then we would make a few jokes about chromium and magnesium—no, that’s
my
element. Well, I’ll take zinc then; you always get chromium—but she’s busy.

“And guess what?” Meg continues, motioning me over. “You get to have
two
substitute teachers today!” She seems to be operating under the principle that if you pretend something is a treat for a five-year-old, it becomes one. Guess what?
You get to have a rubella vaccination today!
“This is Miss Ross,” she says. I’m not a “Miss,” but I’m not a “Mrs.,” either, and neither is Meg; we both kept our last names, something we fervently promised to do when we were still in college. Not to mention, Emily Lee sounds like something Porky Pig would say. But “Ms.” sounds accidental, like it lost one of its consonants at the dry cleaner’s. Jessica and Phoebe look at me suspiciously. I stretch what I hope is a benevolent smile across my face.

More little kids arrive, one or two accompanied by their parents, most in distinct little groups. I watch as one girl tries to join a giggling threesome of girls who seem to be having a conversation about shoes. “Hi!” she says eagerly. “Hi!” but they ignore her. Is it because she wears glasses? Just as I’m about to move in and rescue her, she heads over to another couple of kids who immediately include her in their game of Throw the Jacket on the Floor. They’re tiny people, but they already have friends. They’ve formed cliques! They edge each other out, play power games. Observe the North American five-year-old in its native habitat. Watch its sophisticated interactions, its relentless quest for social survival. What a cruel and hearty beast!