Every Day (7 page)

Tomorrow both Isaac and Jane start camp, Isaac as counselor and Jane as camper. I go upstairs to help with the labeling of Jane’s things. On arriving, I see she has already done this. She packs her extra pair of socks, T-shirt, swim-suit, and towel into a new knapsack with such precision that I’m sure she knows something terrible has happened between me and her father.

“Good work, sweetie,” I tell her.

“It’s not hard, Mom,” she assures me.

Children are instinctually self-protective. They just get overpowered by disrespectful, unthinking adults.

I go back downstairs and take up my place on the sofa near Simon, who watches CNN with the stony face it deserves. Isaac resurfaces for some general advice on how to manage ten-year-olds.

“I’ve got twelve of them,” he complains.

“And no help?” Simon asks.

“One guy,” Isaac says. “Garland,” he reads off an orientation sheet.

“First name?” I want to know.

“There isn’t one.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Simon says, gesturing for the packet. He looks. “Sure enough: Garland.”

Our eyes meet. Mutual alarm, the only response we seem capable of sharing at present.

“Just treat them like you’d treat anybody,” I offer, and then Simon looks away, disgusted.

Daisy rolls over in the Portacrib. The she reaches for me with her fat little arms and breaks my heart and saves my life all in one second. If repentance were possible, if there were any way of my going back to the “me” who hadn’t done this, I would, just to avoid this one unbearable moment of
need. Then Jane plods down the stairs, looking bored or sad, or both.

There is no “worst part” of it. It’s all terrible. I did what I did, and my husband knows, even though I’ve admitted nothing and no one has, to my knowledge, ratted on me. The thing is, I did it in full possession of my faculties. It was an honest act of will. For whatever reason, I wanted to.

“Thanks, Mom. You’re a load of help,” Isaac says.

“Treat them like you should treat Jane,” Simon tells him.

“Yeah,” Jane says. “Don’t try to kill them every day.”

•   •   •

Until a few months ago, our life was in constant upheaval: a relatively short courtship, according to Gillette and my mother, then instant pregnancy, moving to the suburbs, Jane’s birth, the process of legal adoption so that Isaac could finally start to feel like he had a father, temping here, temping there, the deaths of my remaining grandparents, then Daisy. I must have panicked without crisis and thus felt I had to create one. I must have worried, on the day of the party we had to celebrate the success of the adoption, when Rabbi Rosenthal brought his fingers to my cheek and told me I was pretty and that Simon was a lucky man, because I momentarily considered a reciprocal gesture, and thought I wouldn’t have minded his tongue in my mouth, the thrill of those fingers in other places, his sudden appreciation of me. I shared my concern with Kirsten, who can be so dismissive. “Welcome to marriage, Cinderella,” she said. “You hear a lot about the men who are bored but not much about the women who are. Let me tell you about boring.”

She didn’t need to. For one, I knew. I had wept in the shower late the night of the party. Simon and I had made love, and it was fine, I remember thinking. But “fine” wasn’t a word I wanted to think of as adequate to our lovemaking. I just kept staring at Simon’s chest, wondering if Rabbi Rosenthal’s was anything like it, whether he kept himself toned
the way Simon does. For two, Kirsten’s husband Ted, while being the most welcoming of neighbors and the most physically appealing, is dull to a fault. He shares his amazement over the latest in lawn gadgetry with anyone who comes within walking distance of his house, as well as his updates on local crime with anyone who isn’t too depressed to listen. I don’t know how Kirsten can bear him, or if she really does. She admitted wanting to jump her decorator, “but of course he’s gay,” she moaned. How does everyone stand it, I wanted to ask her but did not at the risk of sounding too ungrateful for words.

•   •   •

We’re to sit down shortly, to another anxious dinner. Tonight’s menu: spaghetti and garlic bread, Caesar salad, and more of the Brouilly. Simon has been home ten minutes, just long enough to promise the older children a trip to the miniature golf course after we partake of the dinner his estranged wife has prepared. Now he’s in the shower. No one has asked why he doesn’t speak to me; perhaps they haven’t noticed. Even Jane, whom nothing gets past, hasn’t demanded an explanation from us.

“Tell me about Garland,” I tease Isaac.

“Oh,
man
,” Isaac groans.

“What?”

“I’m there five minutes, just long enough to find out where my group is meeting, and he wants my ass,” Isaac says, very matter-of-fact, as if he’s given me a weather report.

“Isaac!”

“Mom!” he mimics. Then, more gently. “Chill, Mom. He’s a fag. He likes me. I’m not that desperate.”

I sit at our beautifully set table. When did my son grow up? Where was I? Why didn’t someone inform me?

“I just think it’s a little unorthodox for a man like that to be in charge of little boys.” No sooner is it out of my mouth
than I feel like Anita Bryant. Someone should dump a bucket of orange juice on my head.

“There are little girls there too, Mom,” Isaac reasons. “Jane goes there, remember.”

I cannot resist the notion that the world has never been so monstrous, so full of horror and violence and deviates, but who am I to subscribe to such a view? A woman who has created an extended family with such tenacity and now cannot find the strength to keep herself or it going in the only healthy manner the experts prescribe?

“I know,” I say. “You’re right. He’s probably a very nice man.”

“Maybe,” Isaac says. He’s flipping through channels, rejecting everything. “He changed his name though.”

“He told you?” My own interest isn’t proportionate to the information.

“Yeah. He kinda likes to talk.”

“Tell me about him.”

“I did,” Isaac says with irritation. “Look, when are we eating? I told the guys from the team I’d meet them at the golf course.”

“When? And when did you have time to call them?”

How dare I cling to him now?

“Seven. I just called.”

“Oh. Okay. Call Simon and Jane. I’ll wake Daisy and put her in her chair.”

“Why don’t you call them? I like to get Daisy.”

I smile at him, a sweet, tired-Mom smile. “Just this once.”

We assemble gradually, Jane bringing a book to the table and Simon bringing a hand towel that he keeps rubbing over his wet scalp. “Wow, Mom,” Jane says. “Is someone coming over to eat with us?”

Simon hangs his towel carefully over the rungs of his chair and sits. “Not tonight, sweetheart,” he says. “It’s just the family
tonight. But maybe your mother will have a guest for us later on in the week.”

I didn’t think him capable of such indirection.

“Who?” Isaac says.

“Muk,” Daisy says.

“No one,” I tell them all, and I go out to get Daisy’s milk.

“Your mother has friends we don’t know about,” Simon continues without expression. “Friends who drop in from exotic ports of call from time to time. Not necessarily to visit, you understand, just to call her away.”

“You guys have a fight?” Isaac asks.

“Not at all,” Simon tells them.

Jane looks frightened, and Isaac intrigued. I could dump the spaghetti all over Simon for bringing them into this right now, so soon, before we even know what it is we’re in crisis over: my infidelity, whatever in our life has encouraged it, whatever insecurities this calls up in him, for God’s sake some Jungian bit of projection if indeed he has ever betrayed me and not told me about it, maybe even some missed extramarital encounter he’s kicking himself over not having seized when it came up. I don’t know. But I don’t approve of this sort of cruelty, if I’m allowed that observation in light of my malfeasance. Yes, I’ve led us into uncharted territory, but he doesn’t have to drown the children in it.

I realize I haven’t moved, haven’t started serving the food, when Jane says, “Mom, are you paralyzed?”

Again, I go into automatic: Jane’s plate, small portion, Isaac’s and Simon’s plates, man-sized, Daisy’s bowl, noodles chopped up so she can spoon them, generally, into her mouth. I do these, then I pour us wine and them fruit punch and then I sit. I smile. Take aim, my face says to the people I love. I’ve double-crossed you.

“She’s not eating,” Jane says. “Okay, Mom. Are you anorexic? Because if you are I know this girl at school who is and she goes to talk to a shrink about it, and now she’s
actually gaining weight. Now she only looks like a skeleton. Before she looked like she didn’t even have bones.”

I burst out laughing. I can’t help it. We have to get through this meal. I stare at Simon, try to find him somewhere in his rage, beg him with my eyes: couldn’t we just
try
to communicate on this horrific subject, and in the meantime put in an appearance as parents even if one of us stinks as a mother and a wife and a citizen?

A smile flickers over his square face, then he sets his jaw again.

“It’s not funny, Mom,” Jane informs me.

“Yes, it is,” I manage to get out. “It’s funny the way you said it, even if you didn’t mean it to be.”

“Yes,” Simon admits. “The notion: people without bones.” He glares at me.

“I’m outta here,” Isaac says, his spaghetti gone. He can’t take tension between me and Simon. He whirls out of our sight until the storm he sees coming has passed over. This time, he hides out in his room. I can hear him above us, deciding on a place to sit.

I serve myself a healthy portion even though I have no interest in eating, haven’t since I saw Fowler. The others are enjoying theirs; even Simon isn’t having trouble with his appetite.

I ask Jane to tell us about her first day at camp.

“Oh God, Mom,” she says, putting down her fork and spoon, wiping her face with a napkin, gearing up. “They have
so much
stuff to do there. It’s unbelievable. Tracy and Alison are going there too, and they chose tennis and swimming like I did. It was really great, I’m telling you. I’m
so
tired, though. I’m going to bed early, after I call Tracy and Alison, if that’s okay.”

“What about our golfing trip?” Simon asks her.

“Oh, no! Daddy! I completely forgot! Can we go another time? I want to stay home with Mom and Daisy.”

“You forgot?” Simons asks. “In fifteen minutes you forgot?”

That she knew I wouldn’t be going along, would not be welcome, astounds me. Simon looks crestfallen, as if Jane’s sudden allegiance to me is the final straw, not my infidelity.

“That’s okay, baby,” he says. “You do what you want.”

I take some bites of my dinner, a few sips of wine, this amounting to more than I’ve ingested at a sitting since before Saturday. It’s all I can manage. I gather Daisy, out of the eating phase and into the throwing one, from her chair and take her into the kitchen to clean her up. Before I find a rag I sit her on the counter to behold her messy face, to test my love for her because I trust myself so little.

“You’re my sweet bird,” I say.

“Mom-may,” she says.

I take time with this cleaning effort, wiping her face so gently, as if I might tear skin were I to rub any harder. In the next room, Jane is chatting up her father, coaxing him out of fury for a few seconds. Soon he and I will have to face each other. I cannot leave another hour of this to my children to fix.

We go back out to an empty dining room, all having fled for the upstairs. I set Daisy down on the living room rug and drag over her bag of oversized Legos. I try to focus on building with Daisy, but it’s no use. I’m waiting, to quote my son, for the shit to hit the fan.

Simon appears on the landing rattling change and keys and summons Isaac to miniature golf. Isaac appears, having combed his hair down with water.

“Have fun,” I say.

I can’t wait for them to leave.

“Check ya later,” Isaac says, and vanishes.

Simon comes slowly down the last few stairs, every step an effort. He looks all around him before speaking.

“I expect to be back by ten o’clock,” he says. “At that time I’d appreciate an explanation, or whatever you think might
pass for one, for Saturday afternoon.” His voice shakes, and I can hear him near tears. “In a million years, Leigh, I never thought I’d be saying these words.”

He won’t wait for me to respond, just leaves quietly. I shift closer to Daisy at her work. “Da,” she says definitely.

“Daddy,” I remind her.

“Da.”

•   •   •

They called her
la palatine
because she came from a region that was called the Palatinate, which is part of modern-day Germany. She married, sight unseen, the brother of Louis XIV, and her letters reveal not only the depth of this mistake but the strength she possessed to endure it. She is frank on the subjects of his infidelity, his homosexuality, his excesses. In an era of excess, she kept her head while the rest of the court indulged. She is worlds from me, but I envy her endurance, her ease with going on record, with
being
the record. As for his side of the story, it seems he didn’t deserve to have one, and it strikes me as lucky that he died young.

I am ravenous for gossip, poring over these letters. I wait for her to confide any infraction against matrimonial law, but she doesn’t. My daughters are sleeping. My son and husband are out whacking golf balls over a cartoon landscape. I don’t want absolution, just company. I want to talk to Fowler.

I want so much more than that.

Liselotte, my seventeenth-century focus, doesn’t yearn for much except the company of her aunt and one or two close friends. She is not distressed, is instead relieved, that she has no sexual inclination toward her philandering husband. I have always found Simon attractive, although I’ll admit that while I sat at dinner with him tonight, no part of me filled with a yearning for sex. In fact, it wouldn’t be dishonest of me to say that I rarely think about having sex with Simon, and when I do the impulse is easily thwarted by circumstance. Perhaps it is high time that I worried about this.