Love in Mid Air (3 page)

I make it a point not to think about how the mouse died. He and the birds and squirrels and openmouthed moles I’ve found on
other mornings or the baby bunny that I wrapped in a dishcloth and buried in the soft ground behind the swing set. I put down
the broom and scoop Friskies into the green bowl. The cats are brother and sister, Pascal and Garcia. They fall upon the food
as if they’ve never eaten, their heads nudging my hand away from the dish.

I go into the kitchen, pour another cup of coffee, and stand at the sink eating the crusts of Tory’s toast. The house is silent.
This is the part of the day I like, the only part I can truly control, and my thoughts run, swift as water, to the place where
they’ve been collecting for the last forty-eight hours. I deposited the checks from my Phoenix trip in the bank yesterday.
Paid the bills that Phil had left stacked neatly on the kitchen counter. Unpacked my suitcase, threw the little lotions and
soaps that I always swipe from hotel rooms into the wicker basket under my sink, rinsed out my green silk blouse. All evidence
of the trip has been wiped away and there is nothing but a single business card to prove that the man was real. Thinking about
him is addictive, I know that from yesterday when I became so drunk with memory that I took to my bed like some old-time Hollywood
starlet. I look at the clock. I give myself five minutes, exactly five, to think about how much and how little my life has
changed. Five minutes to indulge this ridiculous and intoxicating notion that there is a man somewhere up in Boston who wants
me. Five minutes, and then I will start work.

*    *    *

W
hen we moved in here seven years ago, I turned the garage into a studio. Well, not exactly. At first only half of the garage
was a studio, leaving Phil a space for all his gardening supplies and room to park his car, but these things have a way of
expanding. There is my wheel, of course. There is the bin lined in plastic where I store the clay. There are bags of grout,
and three sets of shelves and my kneading table. And then there is the little storage closet where, as Phil says, normal people
would keep their lawn mower. This is my damp room, where I take the pots just after I throw them. It has a hospital-strength
humidifier. You want the pots to dry slowly, I try to explain to Phil, so they need to dry in a damp room. But he tells me
that this makes no sense. He seems to think I have expanded my studio just to displace him, that I have moved out his tools
and taken over his storage closet to prove some sort of housewife-feminist point.

On this particular morning I find—not for the first time—a note. A Post-it stuck to a pot I have left on the kneading table,
and it bears a single word: “Mine.” It is, like so many of my husband’s messages, nearly impossible to interpret. Does he
mean he likes the pot and wants it, perhaps to take to his office and put on his desk? Highly unlikely. That the kneading
table is intruding into what is officially his half of the garage? A more plausible theory, but the table has been inching
its way into his territory for weeks, ever since I added an extension and turned it so that I could avoid working in the afternoon
sun. Hard to say why either the pot or the table would irritate him at this particular moment in time or, for that matter,
why he wouldn’t have told me about it last night over dinner. I have often lobbied for direct conversation, but Phil seems
more comfortable with Post-it notes and it doesn’t bother him that I’m never quite sure what he’s trying to convey. The notes
are sometimes a single word: “Good,” “Why?” and “8:15” have all been previous messages. At other times they’re longer and
a little more clear: “Please take” left on a pile of clothes meant for the dry cleaners, or “Not now” on a brochure for a
nearby bed-and-breakfast. I save them, this never-ending stream of Post-its, and sometimes I arrange them across the refrigerator
in sentences: Not now good. Why please take?

But this morning I’m not in the mood to play detective. I pull the “Mine” off the pot and stick it to the front of my T-shirt.
Yesterday a gallery owner in Charleston called and said she’d take three sample pots in anticipation—my anticipation, possibly
not hers—of buying more. I’ve got four good hours until I meet the other women at the elementary school track.

There are a lot of steps to making a pot. I open the bin that is lined in plastic, push aside the damp towels, and remove
the clay. I carry it to the table, sprinkle a little grout on top, and begin to knead. Mindless work. Actually rather hard
work. I am proud of my arms. People are always asking me if I have a personal trainer. After kneading I cut the clay, over
and over, to remove the air bubbles, and then it goes onto a small round platform called a bat. The bat goes on the wheel
and from there I shape the pot. Ironically, this is the easiest part of the process, although other people seem to think that
shaping is where the art comes in. And then I carry the bat into the damp room, where the pot will dry over the course of
several days. It’s greenware at this point, still embryonic, and still, I suppose, monstrous in that way that unfinished things
sometimes are. I plug in the humidifier and wait until it rumbles into action, leaning back against the doorframe as I inhale
the raw, wet smell of the clay. When the gallery owner phoned yesterday I didn’t recognize her number on my caller ID and
my heart had jumped. I should have known that 843 is South Carolina, not Massachusetts, but still, just for a moment…

At any point something can go wrong. You can get through all the steps just fine and still break the pot. Getting it off the
bat is tricky. I’ve even lost a couple while flipping them over to trim the bottom. The pots can shatter in the kiln if you
weren’t careful to get out all the bubbles during the knead, and they can shatter in the kiln even if you were. Sometimes
you get all the way to the glazing and just suddenly stop and think, “This wasn’t how I pictured it in my mind.” Possibly
one piece in three is salable and in my line of work that’s a pretty good average. Potters have to get comfortable with the
act of throwing things away. My studio is full of abandoned projects, literal misfires. Sometimes I recycle the clay, sometimes
I just toss the pots into the trash, but sometimes, if I leave them sitting around long enough, they begin to look almost
beautiful to me. Beautiful in an ugly sort of way.

I
t’s one o’clock before I look up. I’ll be a little late for the daily walk, but one of us is often late and the others all
know that things can happen, that no one’s schedule is entirely within her control. We have agreed that whoever arrives first
will just start and let the others join in or drop out on their own pace. It’s one of the advantages of walking in a circle.

Yeah, Kelly and Nancy and Belinda are all there when I arrive. I park the car and wave at them, but they don’t see me, and
I stand there on the hill above the elementary school track and watch them. Kelly is leading slightly as she often does, glancing
back at the others as she talks. She could walk much faster if she wanted. In fact she could run. But what would be the point
of that?

Because it isn’t really about walking, it’s about talking. Out here, in the suburbs, we live and die by our friends. There
may have been a time when it would’ve surprised me to realize that nearly every woman I know is someone I met through my church,
that the highlight of my day is meeting them at one o’clock to walk for an hour before we pick up our kids. But I’m over that
by now. I can’t afford to think about it. I need these women too much. I begin picking my way down the damp overgrown grass.
Over the years we’ve shared secrets and toys, passing down car seats and strollers and cribs as the kids grew older, taking
turns keeping them so that we can occasionally get a free afternoon. Once, in a dreadful pinch, I even nursed Belinda’s sobbing
daughter when I couldn’t find a bottle, although it makes me feel strange to say that, as if even our bodies are interchangeable.
We have a running joke that some Sunday we should all go home from church with the wrong husbands. We debate how long it would
take them to notice, but the truth is I’m not sure we would notice either. We’re too busy, the details of our lives wrap around
us like cotton, and we meet almost every afternoon at the track, trying to walk off the weight from the baby, trying to walk
off the weight from the baby who’s now in second grade, trying to get down to 130 or 140 or something decent. We’re always
moving, more like nomads than housewives, circling the drop-off for preschool, pulling around to load the groceries, hitting
the drive-thru and passing back chicken nuggets one at a time at stoplights, running the middle one to soccer and the oldest
one to the orthodontist, putting in sheets and taking out towels, spinning in the cyclic world of women.

B
y 2:30 I’ve picked up Tory and we’re back to the house. It’s early in the school year and she’s tired from having to get up
so early. She isn’t used to it yet and probably needs an afternoon nap, but she seems to have caught my restless mood. She
tosses her brand-new backpack on the table and throws her arms around my waist.

“Can I help you make coffee?” she asks.

I start to tell her I don’t drink coffee before dinner, but seeing the eagerness on her face, I relent. Phil gave me a cappuccino
machine for my birthday last week but I have taken my time in getting it set up. The machine has many little cups and dishes,
like a chemistry set, and Tory is obsessed with it. She sits on the floor, carefully unwrapping each element. There’s jazz
on the radio. I think it’s Miles Davis, but then I think everything is Miles Davis. I wish I could play the trumpet, or maybe
the saxophone, that there was something cool and sexy and indifferent about me. I throw my arms over my head, arch my back.

“Look,” Tory says. She has pulled all the cups from their cardboard tunnel. “Are there enough for a tea party?”

“Plenty,” I say. “You did a great job.” It would be easy to let her just sit there all afternoon stacking cups, but I have
seen her homework sheet. I know she has to do a timeline of her life by Thursday and I won’t be home to help her tomorrow
night. We get out the big roll of yellow paper and a box of fireplace matches so that I can burn the edges and make it look
like a historical document. We did this same trick last year in second grade when she had a report on Thomas Jefferson and
the teacher liked it so much she hung it in the auditorium lobby. So now Tory thinks this is the secret to academic success,
to burn things around the edges. She holds the paper steady while I run the match back and forth along the bottom, a wet sponge
in my other hand in case things flare up. We’ve finished three sides of it when Phil comes in. He looks at the timeline and
asks me how I learned to do this. He seems surprised when I tell him my mother taught me. Phil thinks my mother is crazy and
he’s always reluctant to accept evidence that she can contribute anything practical to daily life.

“Now you won’t have to go out for a good cup of coffee,” he says.

It takes me a second to realize he is talking about the cappuccino machine. “I love it,” I say. “I tried to use it yesterday
but I’m doing something wrong. The steam came out but the milk wouldn’t bubble.” Phil is flipping through the mail. He looks
a little blurry to me. I take out my contacts when I’m in the studio because of all the dust and I can’t seem to find my glasses.
I may have left them in Phoenix. Or maybe on the plane. “You know I’ve got book club tomorrow night. You remember I told you
that.”

Phil rips open a bill, looks at it idly. “You’re using too much milk.”

“What?”

“The frothing device isn’t working because you’re using too much milk.”

“Did you hear me about book club?”

Tory and I have finished with the last side of her timeline and it looks great. She blows around the edges. Her hair is pulled
back in a low ponytail and her face is as serious as a pilgrim’s. I wonder how much she notices between me and Phil or if
she thinks this is the way all married people talk.

Maybe it
is
the way all married people talk.

I’ve been cutting things out of the paper, descriptions of apartments, tips for how to establish your own credit, starting
times for computer programming classes. I don’t know what any of this means, but I told Kelly that I’m looking for a sign.
She says the only sign I’m looking for is
EXIT
. Part of me wishes something final would happen, like a car crash. Not the kind that kills you, just the kind that shakes
you up and makes you do something drastic. Maybe Phil will hit me or be arrested for fraud or run off with his dental hygienist,
but I doubt he’ll make it that easy. I married a nice man and this is what will defeat me in the end.

“Look, Daddy,” Tory says, waving a picture in his face. She went through the photo albums all last night and she’s especially
transfixed by this one shot of me and Phil, taken two days before she was born. I am huge, wearing his red velour bathrobe,
and it is still gapped open, but I’m smiling and the focus is clear enough that you can see the title of the book beside me,
a grisly murder mystery, the only kind of reading that kept me calm in the last ponderous month of pregnancy. Phil is smiling
too and he looks young and confident as he reaches around me to put his hands on my belly as if it were a basketball he’s
getting ready to bounce-pass directly into the camera. “Be careful with that one,” I tell Tory. “Tape it, don’t glue it, and
don’t let it get lost or bent.” It’s my favorite picture of us.

“Who took it?”

“I set it on a timer,” Phil says. “Then ran around to be beside your mom before it snapped. I wanted to take the picture because
I knew something wonderful was just about to happen.” Tory ducks her head like she’s embarrassed, but she’s really pleased.

“You’re a good daddy,” I say to Phil. Quietly, as if this is some kind of secret we have to keep from Tory.

“Nice to hear I can do something right,” he says.