Mendocino and Other Stories (13 page)

She had picked up my gloves, which I'd thrown onto the seat between us, and was pulling them on. She held her hands up in front of her face and looked at them. Then she reached out and ran her finger down my cheek, a soft, velvety touch. “I'm sorry you didn't win,” she said.

I sat without speaking for a while. Then I took her hand and pulled at the fingertip of the glove. “What am I going to do with these?”

“I know of this shoebox,” she said. She smiled at me; then she started the car and drove the last hundred yards to our house.

When they saw us, Danny and Bobby stopped playing. I got out of the car, and for a moment neither of them said anything. Then Bobby said, “I'm sorry, Elizabeth—it's too bad.” He brushed
the hair off his forehead and I could see he was trying to think of something to add.

“Thanks,” I said.

Danny bounced the basketball a couple of times. Without quite looking at me he said, “We could play one game of HORSE before dinner.”

“I'm kind of tired, Dan.”

He bounced the ball again.

“We could just play GOAT,” Bobby said. “That would be quicker.”

“Or DOG,” Danny said, smiling.

I set my books on the trunk of the car. “Jeez, guys—I'm not in a hurry. Let's play RHINOCEROS.”

“All right,” Danny said, jumping up and down. “You'll play.”

I looked at Bobby and we exchanged an amused smile.

“I know,” Danny went on. “I have a great idea. Let's play ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM.”

“What?” Bobby said.

“Antidisestablishmentarianism,” Danny said. “It's the longest word in the English language.”

That was something he'd gotten from our father. As a game at dinner we used to have these sort of spelling bees, and Danny always insisted that the longer a word was, the harder it would be to spell; our father gave him “antidisestablishmentarianism” once to show that he was wrong.

“Danny,” I said, “spell ‘puerile.’ ”

“Hold on, you two,” said Bobby. “I think it has to be an animal.”

THOMAS PICKED OUR
house because of the view, but there is something cruel in it to me: the sliding glass doors, the redwood deck, that sudden plunge of green; you could die falling out of our view. We live on a steep hill about an hour's drive south of San Francisco, and way below us, in the muted colors of a lovely old rug, is a sweep of neighborhoods and highways and trees that reaches all the way to the silver strand of the Bay. We have floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, pristine white walls, and exposed beams, and there are rugs for warmth and a big, open fireplace. But it's a chilling house to live in. A man killed himself here.

IT'S SEVEN O'CLOCK
and Thomas is up and gone. He's working very hard these first few months; he says he'll cut back a little once he gets his footing. This is something of a pun: his new job is to manage the finances of a company called ColoRun, which is
about to introduce into the marketplace a revolutionary new running shoe.

I'm smoothing the bedspread over our bed when I hear Jenny calling for me. Her room is on the side of the house and looks onto a small clearing; most mornings I find her standing in her crib, looking out the window at one of the small delights of our life here: a rabbit trembling in the wet grass, a deer moving along the edge of the woods. Today, though, she's still lying down.

“Mommy,” she says, reaching for me. “Up.”

I lift her as if she's still a baby and that dependent on me; in fact, she just turned two.

“Eskimo kiss me,” she says, butting at me with her nose. When I lean toward her, though, she wriggles loose and starts to sing a little song she made up a few days ago: “Mommy, Mommy. Mommy and Tommy. Tommy, Tommy. Tommy and Mommy.” Although I've never told her to and I'm sure she doesn't yet understand that he isn't her father, she has always called Thomas Thomas. Now there's a little boy down the street named Tommy, and this coincidence has been a source of intrigue and delight to her.

“Thomas went to work,” I say. I go to her dresser and pull open a drawer. “What are you going to wear today, Jenny?” Without hesitation she comes over and reaches for her yellow overalls. It amazes me, how clearly she knows what she wants.

In the kitchen, I settle her into her high chair, then slice a banana onto her tray. “Breakfast,” I say.

I pour myself a cup of coffee and when I see that she's eating contentedly, I wander out of the kitchen and through the living room, to the doorway of Thomas's study. At some point every morning I seem to end up at this spot, staring at the magazines and papers on his desk, looking for last night's old-fashioned glass or tea mug and hoping to learn from these artifacts how he is doing, to discover just who it is I have married.

I'm standing at the door eyeing a yellow pad on which he has scribbled half a page of notes, when suddenly the feeling comes over me—like the floor has vanished from beneath my feet and I am falling.

Where? How?

I wheel around, expecting a vision, an answer.

Did his wife find him?

My heart is beating too fast. I try to fix my concentration on the sliding glass door that leads to the deck: through the glass I can see that the early-morning fog is thinning and the sky is turning a watery shade of blue.

Thomas tried to joke me out of it at first. “In the billiard room with a lead pipe,” he would say when I brought it up. “Colonel Mustard in the hall with a revolver.” I'd laugh, but I would never be able to stop myself from reminding him—as if he didn't know it all too well—that we knew
who
did it. Not Colonel Mustard, not Miss Scarlett, but a man of our time. A man defined to us by an act that must have undefined him to everyone who thought they knew him. We have lived in his house for seven weeks now. We have been married for sixteen.

“Mommy,” Jenny calls from the kitchen. “Mommy!”

“I'm coming,” I call back. You'll never know, I tell myself. It's not something you'll ever know.

JENNY'S FATHER DIDN'T
want to be her father, or perhaps it was my husband he didn't want to be; I told him about her at a Chinese restaurant in the college town neither of us had managed yet to leave, and he lowered his forehead into his palms and shook his head. His face was as crimson as if I had shouted at him, or he at me, but for the longest time he didn't say a word.
Finally he called the waitress over and asked for the check; she had to make room for it among the plates of untouched food. It was anchored on its little tray by two fortune cookies, and I thought, He won't open his, and he didn't.

I went home to have the baby and ended up staying for well over a year; I began to feel guilty, but every time I suggested that I should get a job, that Jenny and I should move into our own place, my parents would get twin hurt looks on their faces and my mother would say, “But Claire, we're your parents,” and my father would say, “We want to help you,” and then together, in their uncanny unison, “It's our pleasure to have you here.” And I know it was. But somehow—perhaps because I'm their only child, born when they were both nearly forty—although they've always made me feel loved, I've never quite felt a part of them; they've got those twelve years of history on me. When my mother's sister invited me and Jenny to use her apartment in Rome for a month, I think we were all relieved.

The airport in Rome was dizzying—everyone rushing around, dark and full of purpose. With Jenny on my hip I had managed to maneuver us and the metal luggage cart on which I'd piled our suitcases into a corner, and I was feeling in my purse for the envelope of lire my father had given me, and going over and over in my mind the phrase of Italian I'd memorized to give the taxi driver, when Thomas saw us. He told me later that it was my calmness that attracted him, but I know he was teasing me: I've always thought it was a vision of himself as my white knight that made him follow me and, only two months later, marry me.

How marvelous, how mysterious, how brave! people exclaim. It must have been like marrying a stranger! And of course it was; but that stranger is the man I live with, and to my astonishment he isn't much clearer to me now than he was on the day we stood in
front of the justice of the peace and he said those words to me: I, Thomas. I thought we would live inside each other; but we live next to each other, in a glass house.

ON SATURDAYS THOMAS
is a family man. We go to the San Francisco zoo, we drive down to the Bay to feed the gulls, we cross the mountains to walk along the cold edge of the Pacific.

Driving back from the beach today, we took a new road. When we were back on our side of the mountains and nearly home we came around a sharp bend and through a space between the pines I saw a huge, sunlit meadow and a big yellow house. It was gone so quickly and the pines were so thick along the side of the road, I wasn't quite sure what I'd seen. I asked Thomas to turn back. He drove slowly, and when we came to the break in the trees he pulled over and we got out of the car.

I have seen grander houses, but perhaps none so perfect. It was set way back in the meadow, a house the color of yellow roses, with white shutters on every window, a chimney at both ends of the roof, a garden on one side, and, in the middle of the meadow, a quivering green pond. It was absolutely still, enclosed by woods, a house someone must have invented in a dream, then found through sheer force of will. I looked at Thomas and I was terrified that he would say something and terrified that he wouldn't. Then Jenny woke from her nap in the backseat of the car and called for me, and it was over.

It's black out. I can see the lights of the valley, then the absence of lights that is the Bay. The remains of Thomas's chili dinner are still on the table. Jenny has been quiet for half an hour now, so she's asleep. We are lying on the rug, playing gin rummy.

“It was beautiful,” Thomas says.

“What?”

“That house this afternoon.”

Ah, I think, at last, at last. I look up, expecting to lock eyes with him, for this moment to be the beginning of something. But he's staring at his hand, rearranging cards.

“Thomas!” I exclaim. “How did you—I was just thinking about that house.”

“I know,” he says, shrugging. “That's why I said it.”

“You knew?”

“Sure. Is that such a big deal?”

“Oh, Thomas,” I say. “Imagine if we lived there.”

He is silent.

“I could have an herb garden, and Jenny would have all that space to play in.”

“We have a house,” he says.

I stand and walk to the window, peer out into the night. Without even touching it, I can tell how cold the glass is. I turn around. “He could have hung himself from that beam,” I say. “How can you not care? He could have shot himself, there could be bloodstains under the paint!” I run into the kitchen and start cleaning, putting the sour cream away, finding a Baggie for the unused half of the onion. But there on the cutting board is a long, sharp knife, and I can't bear the sight of it. I turn to find Thomas standing in the doorway. He holds his arms out for me, and I think, No, it's only a body to hide against; but it's no use, I'm already there.

HE'S BEEN BRINGING
me flowers—pink roses one day, lavender freesia the next. I'm running out of vases and still he brings them, splashing the house with color and scent. He hands them to me sheepishly, as if each bunch in its waxy green paper is a specific apology. But for what? It's like Italy again, all those small gifts—wallets
stamped with gold fleur-de-lis, silk scarves in rich reds and browns. I'd open them with exaggerated care, thinking it was all practice for the day he'd hand me his soul wrapped in white tissue paper and I'd peel away the layers and know I was holding something I was meant to keep.

“
IT'S BECAUSE I'M
working too much, isn't it?” Thomas says.

I knew he was awake. I've been awake for hours. It's three or four in the morning, the dead center of the night, and I've been imagining the things I could do if I got up: write a letter to my parents, get out the sewing machine and work on the dress I'm making Jenny, look through recipes for something Thomas might especially like. I've been picturing myself doing each of these things, then finding reasons to reject them, but the real reason I don't move is that I simply can't.

He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Am I right?” he says. “Is that what's bothering you? I'll slow down after the New Year, I promise.”

I want to answer him, but I can't think of the right thing to say.

“Claire?” He pulls me into his arms. “Claire?”

“When you married Beth did you have a feeling in the back of your mind that it might not work? Did you say to yourself, Well, we can always get divorced?”

He laughs. “Of course not. What kind of way to get married would that be?”

I lie still. I can feel his heart beating against my shoulder. He doesn't like to talk to me about Beth; he'll answer questions if I press him, but then he always changes the subject. He says he doesn't understand what it is I'm trying to find out. I'm not sure either—just that I'll know it when I hear it.

“Do you want me to say I had some sense of predestination about you?” he says. He presses his lips to my forehead. “Beth and I were happy together for a while, and then we weren't. There's not much more to it than that.”

I wonder what she thought. From what distance she saw it coming, and whether she turned from the sight of its approach, or welcomed it because she had always known it was just a matter of time. I've never met her, never so much as seen a picture of her, but I'd like just once to witness her, to watch her for a few minutes from a distance. I think that would tell me something.

He reaches a hand up and touches my hair. “Try to relax,” he says. “Try to sleep.”

I'M CLEANING. ROOM
by room. I bought huge, budget-sized containers of ammonia and Fantastik, and a package of bright green sponges, each one bigger than my hand. The sharp, chemical smells please me. We had the house professionally cleaned and painted before we moved in, but there's something about doing it yourself—getting down on your knees and scrubbing until your elbow aches. Thomas says it's like a dog leaving his mark, but in reverse.

“THOMISH,” JENNY SAYS
, stretching her arms up from the living room floor where she and I sit among building blocks. It is dusk, the time of day when I feel loneliest, when the sky is a thick, dark purple, but not so dark that I can't see the black shapes of the trees.

He swoops her up and down, way up and down, then gently sets her back on the floor. It's my turn. I stand, and he kisses me
once, twice. “And what did you do today?” he asks as he moves into the kitchen to make our drinks. This is how it always is, the unfolding of ritual. This is how it's supposed to be.

Today, though, I have news. “I met a woman,” I begin when he returns, and he smiles too soon; he wishes I would make a friend and I wish I didn't understand this to mean that he cannot be the friend he thinks I need. “Down at the Safeway,” I say. She tapped me on the shoulder, a tall, grey-haired woman in a red silk blouse, and introduced herself, saying she recognized me from the neighborhood, saying with an ironic laugh that she was sorry she hadn't come over with a casserole or something.