A Stranger in This World (12 page)

It’s their day-care-person calling to say that Alison, her daughter, is sick with rubella. “Is Will all right?” she asks.

“So far, so good,” Marian says.

“You can only get it once,” the day-care person says. Her daughter will only be contagious till Wednesday or Thursday, that’s what the doctor said. She’s sorry for the inconvenience.

“Rubella,” Robb says. “Sounds like a blues singer, Rubella Hawkins or something. Little Rubella and the Flames of Rhythm.”

“German measles,” Marian says. “It’s nothing to laugh about.”

“I’ve got a meeting tomorrow that I can’t miss,” Robb says. “Can you take him? I can maybe take him Tuesday.”

“That’s all right.”

“Wednesday?” And then, when Marian says nothing: “You’ve got to go to work sometime, don’t you?”

“Don’t lecture me,” she says in her bitch voice. She’s instantly sorry but it’s too late, the words can’t be unsaid, the anger can’t be erased from Robb’s face. He glowers at her like a parent, as if Marian were a disobedient child too small to punish. A
little
bitch, she thinks. He goes into the living room and starts to read his newspaper again.

If we could only get away for a little while, she thinks, a week or two. If I could have a little break. That would be the practical thing. She sees them on a beach in Florida. It feels like two weeks ago that she was a college student, the endless expanse of days, the luxury of boredom. She remembers smoking a joint with her boyfriend, the last one before Robb, and then bicycling down through the dark Florida streets to get some ice cream. The air smelled like orange blossoms, and she could hear laughter and splashing, the sound of diving, from the backyard pools.

This is just what happens when people get married, Marian tells herself. No bed of roses, as her mother would say. The little things add up. Let’s be reasonable. There is the good side. Robb was just brought up to run things, he can’t help it—and what’s the alternative?

Reasonable Marian. But the little spark of anger won’t go out. It’s time for her to be good, time for Marian to apologize, but she won’t. I’m done praying to the daddy god, she thinks, at least for today. I’m tired of being wrong. And why German measles? There’s something heavy, relentless in the name.

Here in the Fatherland. She says, just to hear it, not even a whisper, “My child is very slightly ill with the Italian measles.”

“What?” Robb says—pouncing, eager for a clue.

“It’s nothing,” she says.

The next morning, with Robb gone, she stacks the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher and tidies the empty house. Will is watching television, another small failure. How did she get from her childhood to here? Princess, ballerina. It’s snowing again.

She shuts off the TV racket, over Will’s protests, though
Sesame Street’s
gone by then and there’s nothing on but educational French. They play on the floor: bus, cowboy, house. Will builds a tower as tall as Marian from plastic Duplo blocks—my size, Marian thinks; he can build a thing as tall as me—and a house for the horses, and a house for the alligator. They talk about Eskimos. They lapse into milky, expanded time, clocks replaced by rhythms of hunger, sleep, play, nothing outside the living room. They have Oreos, SpaghettiOs, apple juice, the tap of bare branches on the windows, stray cars splashing by through the slush. They don’t need clocks or shoes. They don’t need anyone else. This, she thinks, holding him in her lap, sharing a morning snack of bananas and cookies, this right here: a pillow, a comfort, a mom.

By dinner she’s tired, by nine worn out. In the lamp-lit quiet of their living room she reads the paper for the first time all day.

“I had a lovely day,” she says to Robb. “Alone with Will.”

Marian means this as a kind of forgiveness, opening up,
letting him back inside her; she’s surprised when Robb doesn’t even look up from his magazine, when he gives a sour laugh and shakes his head.

“What’s wrong with that?” she asks.

“It’s just so childish.”

She draws herself back up, then, all the way inside herself, slightly hard to the touch. “Meaning what?” she asks. “He
is
a child, isn’t he? He’s
our
child.”

One of them is going to have to say something. I just want to watch television, she thinks. I just want to live according to the regular clocks of our lives and I don’t want you to make words about it. But it’s too late. Robb is making up his mind on what to say and then the clocks will all be broken and television won’t help. And part of her wants this. Part of her is eager to begin. I will write my name in blood, she thinks, yours or mine, it doesn’t matter.

“I don’t know,” Robb says. “Lately it seems like …”

“Sssshhh,” Marian whispers, holding up one finger, hearing a faint cry from the top of the stairs. She rushes toward Will, grateful for the interruption, my son, my savior. How did Mary feel, worshipping her son? Women are always praying to somebody. She finds her son sobbing in the darkness of his room. “Tigers,” he says, “bad tigers.”

“Just a dream,” Marian says. In the slit of light from the door, he looks pale, red-eyed, her poor maimed baby. What an ugly child, she thinks, with the tears streaking down his blotchy face. Why can’t I shut myself up? She has these feelings and feelings and how can she contain them? She takes her son into her arms as if she could press him back into herself, and rocks him gently as his chest subsides. This is where I belong, she tells herself, this is my rock, the place I touch
ground. But she’s flying, watching this other mother hold this other child, listening to this other mother whisper, “It’s a dream, just a dream. Dreams can’t hurt you.”

“Bad tigers,” Will says.

When he’s asleep again she goes downstairs and sits with Robb, with the clocks and magazines. A winter night, pretending to be cozy. Robb has forgotten the near fight, forgotten everything but his own comfort. He’s gifted in this way. He’ll never know the thoughts in her head, or even whether she has them. Just waiting and waiting until he finally closes his book, clicks off the lamp, kisses the top of her head and goes to bed. Marian sighs with relief, another small luxury. She waits until the bathroom sounds subside and then fifteen minutes more, knowing Robb will be asleep by then. He’s a gifted sleeper, too. Marian then pads barefoot into the garage, the oily floor, and collects her down sleeping bag and a couple of foam pads from the camping gear abandoned in the corner.

Am I breaking things? she wonders. The word “survivor” goes through her mind, also the word “rescuer.” She thinks of the beautiful quiet of the house today, with the snow falling and Will asleep.

She sets up camp in the night-lit room, next to Will’s crib: tucks an extra quilt around him and opens the windows wide to the cold and slides into the slick nylon of her sleeping bag. Her warmth releases the familiar smells of sweat and insect repellent, a specific memory, lying in the beach pines and listening to the waves roll in from the Atlantic, the warm wind rustling in the palm trees, the touch of a boy’s naked body next
to hers. She shouldn’t be here, she belongs in her marriage bed. I shouldn’t, I mustn’t, I thisn’t, I thatn’t … I vote for warmth and for pleasure, she thinks. Not so much unfaithful to Robb as to this invisible house they have built, their adult lives together. The weight of it, and every day they build a little more.

In the morning they play quietly in Will’s room until she’s sure Robb is gone.

Still snowing, still quiet. She thinks, I vote for warmth and for pleasure. She makes Will pancakes, not from a mix but from flour, eggs, baking powder, the red Calumet can with the Indian on the front. Wonders what will happen when Robb comes home, if anything will stay unbroken. They line up all the chairs in the dining room and play train, then horsie, a morning of milky quiet. Like music, she thinks: you get the beat and you sing along.

After his nap she decides on an adventure, a trip to the supermarket. This will break the mood. This is the practical thing to do. It’s just a mood, a feeling, less substantial than the air. And no wonder: she hasn’t put her shoes on for two days, nor has Will, and this far north with the short days it’s no wonder … She hears the voice of public health. A good brisk walk and you’ll snap right out of it.

But getting Will dressed is an hourlong tragedy, and then the slow escape from the house. Money, umbrella, checkbook, driving glasses, extra diapers, snacks, wipes, his little jacket, Byrd left for the North Pole with less. She straps him, finally, into the safety seat in the back of the Volvo and tiptoes out of the garage, armored by all that good Swedish steel. The world
outside her living room is dark and small and dangerous. Robb is somewhere out in that world, enjoying himself. The roads are icy and black with water. Filthy snow is piled in the gutters, and all the cars have their lights on in the afternoon, like driving through a tunnel.

In the supermarket no one but Marian hears the music: “If you see me walking down the street …” Carts battle in the aisles under the bright lights. Will sits strapped into this folding chair, master of his vessel, hooking random items with his arms and tossing them into the cart: cans of soup, matches, a translucent bottle of Mr. Clean, luminous green, like antifreeze. So many things, so many of each, so brightly colored. I will be like you, Marian says to every passing shopper. This is just what happens when you get married, when you go to live in the Fatherland. What would happen if they just lay down to rest in the aisle? Would the management call the police? Or would they just cordon Marian off with a little blue ribbon, making the other shoppers steer around her, the other mothers courteous, mistaking her for one of their own … Marian is rounding one crowded lane when Will reaches out and hooks a half-dozen jars of five-bean salad from a display. In slow motion they tumble over each other, racing to the floor and shattering in bright profusion and glittering shards of glass across the floor.

“Will!” she shouts. “William, you’re a bad, bad boy!”

She slaps the soft, exposed skin of his arm. Will starts to wail and then there comes a moment of stillness, like a picture, the other mothers staring, pursing their lips: there’s the bitch over there. Some of the other toddlers, captive in their seats, start to whimper along with Will. And this is intolerable. Holding him to her shoulder, she leaves her cart, her coupons, her
collected groceries stranded in the middle of the aisle and flees into the dark afternoon. Car, keys, purse, glasses, buckles, nothing simple or clean, no straight lines. Does this happen? Is she the only one? Driving home she sees the eyes of the other mothers, the way they stared at her, and she wants to go back and tell them: I’m under a little stress right now, nothing special. If I could only have a little break … At 7-Eleven she buys enough junk to get them through the evening: TV dinners, cheese and crackers, Robb’s favorite brand of imported beer. She feels like she has too much money to be shopping here. The clerk is looking at her.

Sesame Street
that afternoon is brought to them by the letter “J” and the number “4.” Sipping a little white wine, watching Will sing along: it’s not easy being green … Daytime drinking, another life solution. Robb will come home soon, something will happen. In the one blue eye of the television, dancing shadows on the living room walls, evening fading from the windows, she waits. Will’s face is transformed in the television light, enraptured.

“I want to talk with you,” Robb says.

She startles at the sound of his voice, looks up to find her husband in the hallway in his green hiking coat, dripping water onto the carpet, a few loose flecks of snow on his shoulders.

She says, “I didn’t hear the car.”

“I parked it on the street,” he says. “I didn’t want to block the driveway. I didn’t know if you were home or not.”

Marian can’t read him, can’t tell if this is regular hurt feelings or the prelude to something worse, an assault. She goes to him in the hallway, no kisses. She sits on the stairs while he towers over her, the injured party, the daddy god angry at last.

“I can’t live like this,” he says.

“I know.”

“I’m worried about you all the time,” he says. “Everything is different with you.”

She says, “It’s just the other day, the suffocation …”

“He didn’t suffocate. He’s fine.”

“He nearly did.”

“I woke up this morning,” Robb says, “and you weren’t there and I didn’t know where you were.”

Tough shit, the bitch voice wants to say. But Marian doesn’t even know where the words came from. Whose feelings are these? And Robb is suffering and she’s making it worse. His lips are trembling so that his words come out awkwardly, as if his lips disagreed, and she should touch him but she doesn’t. Then this silence. Words come and go: I love you, I’m leaving you.

Before she can say a thing, though, she looks past him toward the open door and sees a lovely dark-haired woman in a black raincoat, walking into the halo of light outside their door, slender, ghostly skin, twenty-four or so. She’s walking toward their door.

At first Marian doesn’t know what to make of this lovely stranger; then realizes, with a choking, slow-motion horror, that Robb has brought a lover home with him—and she’s beautiful and she’s young, this lover of Robb’s, even if she isn’t blond. She’s the kind of girl who reads books, who could make him happy, who could stand him.

“You really are a bastard, aren’t you?” Marian says. “Aren’t you a bastard?”

“What are you talking about?” Robb asks. He follows her eyes, turns his back to her just as she starts to shout.

“Get out of here!” Marian yells through the screen. “Just go away.”

The beautiful dark-haired woman stops and stares into the dim hallway. “I’m sorry?”

“Shut up!” Robb shouts, looking at something he can see and Marian can’t from where she sits.

“What is it?” Marian asks, but Robb pays no attention. He runs to the door and slams the screen open and Will is standing there, dangling at the end of the dark-haired woman’s arm. There is Will.

Marian runs to the living room, where she left her son, as if there were suddenly two of him. But his chair is empty, he’s not there. She comes back to Will in the hallway.