Sisterland (47 page)

Just before ten, as the head chef berated a contestant, Owen let out a cry, and I said, “I’ve been summoned” and went up to feed him. Usually after his ten o’clock nursing, I didn’t go back downstairs—I went to bed, where Jeremy joined me after he’d closed down the house—but sitting in the glider in Owen’s darkened room, I was completely awake. And what I was thinking about wasn’t the countdown to the end of this bizarre day, this whole bizarre period; I wasn’t thinking of Owen, even as I burped him, changed his diaper, and set him back in his crib. I was thinking of Hank, and what I realized was at once shocking and unsurprising: I wanted to have sex with him. I had never felt this way before. Had I? I was pretty sure I hadn’t. Clearly, I needed to get him out of the house as quickly as possible. (I wanted to take off my clothes and I wanted him to take off his clothes, and when we were both naked, I wanted—well, any number of scenarios would work. I could get on top of him, or he could get on top of me, or he could enter me from behind, with me pressed against the couch cushions. I didn’t generally love that position, but in this case, I’d take it. I’d take any of it.)

As I descended the stairs, my heart pounded, and this was not anxious heart; it was something else entirely, something familiar, though I hadn’t experienced it for years. There was a pressure in the roof of my mouth, and even my saliva had thickened. Surely when I saw Hank sitting there, regular Hank, the friend with whom I discussed diaper rash and preschool admissions, surely this anticipatory alertness in my body would correct itself. Surely.

He turned his head as I entered the living room, and nothing was corrected; I felt deranged with lust. How had I managed, for the last two
years, to ignore how good-looking he was, his eyes and his smile and his smooth, dark forearms? He patted the couch next to him and said, “Come on over,” and still, we both might have pretended this was all just friendliness—maybe on his part it was—as I foolishly, foolishly sat beside him. Not as close as I’d have sat to Jeremy, not touching, but not far enough away.

The local news had come on—the anchor was describing a bank robbery in Fenton—and I said, “Did they mention Vi yet?” My voice sounded oddly normal.

“Are you kidding? She was the top story.” His tone was normal, too.

“Of course she was.” I reached for the beer I’d left on the table and took a sip. (I wasn’t drunk; I can’t use that as an excuse.) I tried to make myself think of Jeremy, but he seemed like an idea and not a person; instead of being a body next to me, his name was just a word, and the body next to mine was someone else’s.

The local news turned into
The Tonight Show
. It had been fifteen minutes since either of us had spoken, and I was afraid that if I did speak, it would be to beg Hank to touch me. Then, at the same time, we both started to talk. Hank motioned for me to go ahead, and I said, “I was just going to say we should go to the zoo tomorrow. I’m driving out to my dad’s at some point, but we’re free besides that.” (Really, I was the dullest person on the planet. No wonder I irritated Vi.)

“Sure. We’d be up for the zoo.” There was another full minute of silence, then Hank said, “See, I’ve gotten used to people seeing me out with Amelia during the day and assuming I’m her deadbeat dad—that she’s one of the seven children I have with my five different baby mamas, and she’s just the one who’s with me while her mom is off, you know, collecting welfare.”

“Hank,” I said. “No one would ever think that.”

“Trust me,” he said. “They would and they do. That’s not even my point. I’m used to it. It’s just that, the idea that I’d kidnap this little white girl—it’s like, okay, assume I’m a deadbeat, but seeing me as a child molester—that’s where I draw the line.”

“Hank, I’m not just saying this to make you feel better. I swear to God
I can’t imagine anyone ever in a million years thinking you’re a child molester.”

“Besides the security guard who thought exactly that? And the responsible Target shopper who turned us in?” He was quiet before saying, “You want to feel like you’re above all these prejudices and stereotypes. Like, hey, it’s 2009! We can chart our own path! But me being the stay-at-home parent, it’s not just other people who still don’t get it. With Courtney, our deal was that this setup would give me more time to paint, and she’s like, ‘I don’t see any paintings.’ Not even from the perspective of generating income—she just wonders how I can have any self-respect doing nothing besides hanging out with a three-year-old all day.”

Of course Courtney would wonder this. “I think anyone who’s ever stayed home with a child knows how hard it is,” I said.

“She’s right, though,” Hank said. “I mean, what the fuck am I doing with my life? You wouldn’t think it to look at us now, but there was a time when Courtney and I were considered equally promising. In our separate fields, we were both going to light the world on fire. Do you even know that I have a master’s in painting?” Before I could respond, he said, “Not to mention the whole traitor-to-the-race thing. First I squander my Harvard education studying art, then I marry a white girl, then I let her support me. When I could be a hedge fund manager in Manhattan, making big donations to my church, grooming my daughter for Jack and Jill.”

“I think you’re being way too hard on yourself.”

Hank half-smiled. “I’m sure you do.” He took a sip of beer. “When Courtney was interviewing at Wash U, a friend of ours who’d done his postdoc at Mizzou told us Missouri is the northernmost southern state.”

“And the southernmost northern state,” I said. “And the easternmost western state, and the westernmost eastern state.”

“But it was the southern part that got my attention—I was picturing good old boys waving Confederate flags.”

I said nothing; I did sometimes see Confederate flags, mostly in the form of bumper stickers.

Hank said, “What happened after Wash U offered Courtney the job was almost the opposite. People were overly excited to find out I’m black.
I’d been teaching at a prep school in Boston, but when Courtney put out feelers about whether Wash U could help me find a job here, the two schools I was interested in said they didn’t need an art teacher. They’d meet with me for an informational interview, but they weren’t hiring. So Courtney and I make a trip out anyway, I go to the schools, and from the minute I introduce myself, they’re falling all over themselves, and what do you know? It turns out they
do
need another art teacher. Both schools! It was like they’d never met a black man who knew how to hold a paintbrush.”

“But you took one of the jobs, didn’t you?”

“I did, and my co-workers were nice, for the most part. There wasn’t an admissions tour in my three years there that didn’t stop in my classroom, but they were nice.”

“For what this is worth,” I said, “that Target security guard doesn’t represent everyone in St. Louis.”

“Granted. But no matter how many liberal professors we know, there are certain realities. And then I think about Amelia, and were we selfish to have her? Like, ‘Yeah, the world is a fucked-up, racist place, but let’s make our little half-black, half-white baby anyway because we’re in love and she’ll be so cute!’ ”

“I think every parent wonders some version of that,” I said. “I definitely wonder what I’ve saddled Owen and Rosie with.”

“Maybe Courtney was right,” Hank said. “Maybe being biracial and retarded would have been too much for one kid.”

“That wasn’t her reasoning, was it?”

Hank shrugged.

“You know how earlier you asked if I’d ever had premonitions?” I said. “Well, I lied. Vi and I started out exactly the same, when we were little, but as we got older, I decided being psychic was creepy and embarrassing. Before I met Jeremy, I was sure I wouldn’t have biological children because I was afraid they’d be psychic, too. I wanted to be a mother, but I was planning to adopt.”

“Holy shit,” Hank said.

“I’m barely psychic anymore,” I said. “Although today, when it was
raining in the morning, I knew Vi was wrong about the earthquake. I just knew.”

“And
have
your kids shown signs of ESP? I guess Owen wouldn’t yet, but has Rosie?”

I shook my head. “And now I can’t imagine my life without them. But sometimes I feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“I can’t believe you’ve been holding out on me all this time.” Hank gave me a mischievous look.

“I’m telling you that I’m fourth-rate now. At best. Please don’t put your hand behind your back and ask how many fingers you’re holding up.”

“Oh, I’m planning to exploit you for far bigger gain. Investments I should make on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and that kind of thing.” Then he said, “I know you feel really burned by Vi right now, but she completely looks up to you. You realize that, don’t you?”

“Vi thinks I’m a shallow, boring housewife.” I laughed. “And she’s right.”

“We all need someone in our lives to keep us honest.” Then he said, “That’s not really how you see yourself, is it? Because you have everything going for you: your happy marriage and your cute kids, and you’re all nice and pretty—” There was a weird way his voice caught on
nice
and again on
pretty
, like he was preemptively making fun of his own sincerity. Even so, these were by far the most generous things anyone had said to me in a long time. Jeremy and I were too tired to give each other compliments.

Simultaneously, I felt the impulse to point out the reasons Hank was wrong—and really, he of all people knew how messy our lives were, how narrow and repetitive our days—and the impulse to bask in this version of myself, to pretend that everything he said was true.

“You forgot organized,” I said. “How well-organized I am and what a tidy housekeeper and that’s why there are never any mice in our kitchen.”

We looked at each other, and he said, “If I kissed you right now, it would probably be a really bad idea, huh?”

This was the final opportunity to avoid the evening’s outcome. Deflecting his overture would be awkward, but surmountably so. We wouldn’t have transgressed in any explicit way.

And so I did the opposite of deflecting: I lunged forward, I pressed my mouth against his, and we were kissing in a way Jeremy and I hardly kissed anymore—it was like Hank and I were trying to consume each other. Again I wondered, had we been waiting all along to do this? The idea that because he was a straight man and I was a straight woman, there would therefore be sexual tension between us seemed so clichéd that it had never been difficult for me to dismiss.

And then I wasn’t wondering anything; his hands were all over me and my hands were all over him, and there was that good smell Hank had, like cloves and soap, a smell that I’d always been faintly aware of and now felt drugged by. Jeremy did not, of course, exist in this moment (if he existed, how could I have done what I was doing?), yet even so I was conscious of Hank as Not Jeremy: Hank’s torso was bigger, his shoulders were broader, his biceps harder. I had not held a man other than Jeremy for seven years; to me, sex meant sex with Jeremy. But here was a reminder that the narrowness of my life, the repetition of my habits, were choices I made.

We’d shifted so his back was against the arm of the couch, his legs out in front of him, and I was on his lap, and without much difficulty Hank managed to get his hand past the waistband of my jeans, into my underwear, and to touch me in a way that made me twist and moan above him, a way that made it seem extremely urgent that I unfasten his pants and pull them off, past his knees, that I then pull off his briefs—so Hank wore briefs; they were gray Calvin Klein—and I held his erection (again, in a fleeting not-thinking way, I did note that, consistent with the racial stereotype, his penis was larger than Jeremy’s, though not dramatically so) and with my thumb I rubbed the exposed underside of the tip, this rubbing motion being something my husband who didn’t exist liked, and something Hank apparently did, too, and then I guided Hank into me; I was slick and he glided right in.

He stayed inside me as he moved into an upright sitting position with his back to the couch cushions, as if he were watching television. And in fact the television was still on, but instead of following
The Tonight Show
, we were naked from the waist down, grinding against each other, both of us breathing quickly, and he was pushing up my shirt, pulling down the
cups of my bra without bothering to unfasten them, and rubbing his face between my breasts, sucking my nipples, which was something I hadn’t let Jeremy do since I’d given birth to Rosie, because it was too confusing to have my nipples in the mouth of more than one person. But with Hank—and I was wearing one of my usual threadbare nursing bras, and it was possible that I’d start leaking milk—I didn’t care. Hank’s tongue on my nipples was the least confusing part of what was happening, but I didn’t care about any of it. I just needed him to keep jamming up into me, I needed to feel his warm skin under my hands, his solid body, which offered a comfort I had been unable to find elsewhere for the last several weeks. And then the good feeling tipped over and spread, I was shuddering with it, and when I moaned, he bounced me against him faster, gripping my hips, and a minute passed, and another minute, another minute after that, and he was still going. First, enough time elapsed for the woozy glow inside me to dissipate. Then I began to wonder how long it would be until he finished—was this intentional on his part, or was there a problem. Or neither; was he just not efficient but didn’t see a need to be? And then I was officially waiting for him to be done, and then, perhaps seven minutes after I’d come, I heard from the other room a clacking sound, a single snap, and I knew immediately that the mouse had been caught. This was the moment when Jeremy reentered my consciousness, and I understood that I had betrayed him in an irreversible way.

Because if a mousetrap had snapped while Jeremy and I were going at it, we’d have started laughing. Or at least we’d have acknowledged it, whereas with Hank, as well as I knew him in other contexts, he was sexually a stranger to me. Had he even heard the mousetrap? If he hadn’t, I wasn’t about to bring it to his attention and thereby risk prolonging the conclusion of this act. (Later, there would be opportunity to wonder why I hadn’t done exactly this. Or not prolonged the conclusion but prevented it. But in the moment, the idea of not allowing Hank as much time as he needed would have struck me as bad manners, like clearing the plates at a dinner party while your guests were in the middle of their meal.)