The Obituary Writer (5 page)

She shook her head, as if to shake these thoughts away. For weeks now she’d been doing nothing but worrying about what to do about her marriage. Women did not leave. Unless there had been adultery or abuse, and even then, they usually stayed. She remembered the story of a woman who had lived a few streets away, long before Claire and Peter moved into the neighborhood. She’d left her husband and the judge had not let her take her children.
She abandoned them,
Dot had explained, her face set in disgust. If she left Peter, would a judge let Claire keep her children? Or should she stay and possibly never feel happy again?

Claire swallowed hard, then offered, “There’s a Howard Johnson’s up ahead. Maybe you could use a cup of coffee.”

“Maybe,” he said, softening.

He liked when she took care of him; Claire knew this. But it was getting harder for her to take care of him when she didn’t really like him very much anymore. She had to keep reminding herself that it was her job to care for him. That was what wives did.

“It might be a long night. We might as well have a little something in our stomachs.” He added gently, “You, of course, already have a little something in yours.”

Claire laughed politely. This baby did not feel at all little. It jammed up against her ribs and pressed on her bladder. It made her short of breath and short on patience. When Peter made love to her now, she kept her nightgown on. She didn’t feel very pretty these days.

Relieved, Claire felt the car slow even more and make a slippery turn into the Howard Johnson’s.

“Maybe I can call Birdy and be sure the party is still on,” Peter said, opening his door and stepping into the night.

The snow seemed to gobble him up.
If only,
Claire thought. She imagined that when she too stepped out of the car, Peter would really have vanished. She would go inside and wait out the storm, sipping coffee and dreaming of her new life, free of her husband. Stop it, she told herself. You are married to this man, for better or worse. When she had spoken those words four years ago, she had meant them, hadn’t she?

Peter’s voice cut through the storm. “What are you waiting for?” he called.

Claire sighed and got out of the car. She opened the back door, and awkwardly lifted their sleeping daughter into her arms.

“Come on, baby,” Claire murmured to Kathy.

Kathy wrapped her arms around Claire’s neck and hung on her like a koala bear. The parking lot hadn’t been plowed yet, and Claire had to pick her way slowly across it, trying not to fall. Peter stood in the harsh light by the front door, smoking and waiting for them. Claire could feel his impatience in the air.

“Of all days for the world to come to an end,” she heard him saying.

Kathy’s breath, sour from the potato chips she’d eaten in the car, warmed Claire’s cheek.

Finally, they reached the entrance. Claire panted from the walk and the weight.

Peter dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his boot.

Claire grabbed at his arm.

“What?” he said. His eyes were bloodshot from the hard drive.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “If I could take it back, I would.”

Their eyes met briefly before he walked over to the hostess, stomping snow from his overshoes as he did.

Claire watched him. She was sorry. Sorry about the blizzard. Sorry that she’d fallen for another man and had an affair with him. Sorry Peter had caught them together, Claire and this man. She let herself remember him for a moment. How they thought so alike he sometimes could finish her sentences. The way he kissed her with such ardor. His ability to laugh and be—oh, the word that Claire thought of was carefree. He could be carefree while Peter always seemed so serious, so burdened.

Standing in this restaurant, her husband’s angry eyes on her, the storm raging outside, Claire even let herself miss Miles.

Peter was in the orange vinyl booth now, opening the large menu.

Claire walked clumsily toward him.

“I always like the fried clams here,” he said, without looking up.

“They are good,” Claire said, even though all during this pregnancy fried foods made her sick. Also certain fruits—melon, pears, grapes. And tomatoes. Or were tomatoes fruit too? She wasn’t certain.

She glanced around for a high chair for Kathy. The restaurant was oddly bright and very crowded. Travelers had decided to pull over, out of the storm, like they had, and there was a buzz in the room, a sense of being in something together. The name Kennedy swirled above the noise, adding to the excitement of the blizzard.

“Are you going to sit?” Peter said, as if he had just noticed her.

Kathy, asleep against her shoulder, mumbled.

“I was looking for a high chair,” Claire said.

He’s the man we need,
she heard.
Things will be different now.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Peter said. “Does anybody work here?” He waved at a waitress who carried a large tray overflowing with plastic baskets of food.

Claire’s cheeks grew hot. He was always short, even rude, with people in service jobs: waitresses, the washing machine salesman at Sears, Roebuck, bellboys and meter readers. It embarrassed her, the way he snapped his fingers and ordered them about. Even on their first date, a romantic steak dinner at Frankie & Johnnie’s on West 45th Street in Manhattan, he’d acted like that. Claire had two brandy Alexanders and French wine and crème de menthe afterwards. She’d blamed the drinks for the flush that crept up her chest and neck when he complained about the temperature of their soup, that his steak was overdone. When he’d snapped his fingers at the busboy, she’d looked down and sipped her cocktail.

The waitress delivered the food to a large rowdy group of men and boys, all wearing red shirts with logos, a team of some kind. When she was done, she came over to their table. Her uniform was splattered with ketchup and brown gravy and she looked exhausted.

“Two fried clam dinners,” Peter said, snapping his menu shut. He didn’t even glance at the waitress.

“Oh, just one,” Claire said.

He frowned, confused. “You just told me you wanted the fried clams. You said you loved them.”

In her wet boots, Claire could feel her feet swelling. She looked at the waitress, a tired woman with rings of smeared mascara beneath her eyes and a drooping ponytail.

“Just a grilled corn muffin for me,” Claire said. “And a hot dog for Kathy.”

The waitress wrote the order on her pad.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said. “And a high chair?”

“Right,” the waitress said. She lumbered off in her white nurse’s shoes.

“Why do you do that?” Peter said.

“Do what?” Claire lowered herself to the very edge of the booth, the only place her belly and the sleeping child could fit.

“Apologize,” Peter said, leveling his gaze directly at her in a way that made her look away. “For everything.”

“I don’t,” she said.

“You did it just now. Apologized for asking her to get a high chair when that’s part of her job.”

In the booth behind her, two men argued about how Kennedy’s Catholicism would affect the country.
The pope’s our new boss,
one man said.
You’ll see.

“Claire?” Peter said.

“It’s just politeness,” Claire said. “That’s all.”

“Well, it’s annoying.”

Claire nodded. Since Peter had walked into that room that day, the traits of hers that annoyed him had multiplied. She touched her hair too often. She wasn’t a good listener or a careful shopper. She could not parallel-park. Claire did not argue with him when he attacked her this way. It was her guilt that kept her silent. She knew that. Her guilt and her foolish idea of how to be a wife. Of course, she reminded herself, if she truly believed that foolish idea, she would not have slept with another man.

The waitress arrived with the high chair, banging into tables as she did. The high chair was covered in vinyl with a cowboy pattern. Claire stood to put Kathy into the seat. The waitress helped her to hold the child while she buckled the strap and slid the tray in place. Gently, Claire lowered her daughter’s head onto the tray, smoothing her tangled brown hair.

“Where’s our coffee?” Peter said.

“You didn’t order coffee,” the waitress said, flipping the pages of her pad until she found their order. “Two fried clams, then one fried clam, a grilled corn muffin, and a hot dog.”

“And coffee,” Peter said.

The waitress didn’t answer him. As she walked away, she squeezed Claire’s shoulder.

We’ll all have to become Catholics,
the man behind her said.
You know that, don’t you?

Claire leaned across the table. “Can you hear this?” she whispered, motioning with her head.

Peter nodded. “Foolish, isn’t it?’ he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“What do you know about it?”

“Well,” Claire said, “for one thing, I know we won’t all have to become Catholics.”

Peter laughed. “Some people worry about what’s next. If we have a Catholic president, then who knows? We might even have a Jewish one someday.”

“Or Negro,” Claire said.

Peter grinned. “There will be no stopping anyone.”

With the tension diffused momentarily, Claire relaxed a bit. How ironic, she thought, that Miles had been the man to talk these ideas out with her. And now this was what her husband found interesting. Four years earlier, on Election Day, Peter had told her as he left for work, “Remember to vote for Stevenson,” as if she wouldn’t know who to vote for. But they were newlyweds then, and she’d found it charming, how he liked to think for her.

“I thought when you worked on the campaign it was just out of boredom,” Peter was saying, watching her face.

“I told you I believed in John F. Kennedy. I told you it was a passion.”

“Yes,” Peter said. “You did.”

The waitress arrived with their food, announcing each item as she placed it on the table. Fried clams. Grilled corn muffin. Hot dog. Claire saw that she wore a wedding ring, a thin gold band with a small diamond ring above it.

The greasy smell of the clams made Claire queasy. She took a quick bite of her muffin, hoping it would settle her stomach.

“We never got our coffee,” Peter said. He had already begun to eat his clams, dipping them in the tartar sauce and splashing ketchup on the French fries.

The waitress sighed.

“Busy day, huh?” Claire said to her.

“I’m working a double,” the waitress said. “Some of the girls couldn’t get in ’cause of the snow.”

Claire wondered how late the woman would have to be here working. By the matter-of-fact way she had helped get Kathy in the high chair, Claire thought she must also have a child. Or children. And a husband at home while she served cranky people food all day. And then drove home through this blizzard.

“Sorry,” Claire said as the waitress went for the coffee.

“You just did it again,” Peter said. “Why should you be sorry because she can’t get the order right?”

Suddenly, all Claire wanted to do was sleep. She wanted to be in her own bed back in Alexandria with its layers of warm blankets and the familiar pattern of violets on the wallpaper, the curtains drawn against the snow.

“I don’t know, Peter,” Claire said wearily. “I just am.”

He looked confused. “You’re sorry because she’s not good at her job?”

“I’m sorry she’s working in this storm instead of being home with her husband.”

The waitress returned. “Two coffees,” she said, placing the cups on the table.

“Thank you,” Claire said. Steam rose from them, and the bitter smell comforted her. She wrapped her hands around the cup to warm them.

Peter added milk to his coffee, then to Claire’s. A small gesture of kindness that she appreciated since he was so rarely kind to her anymore. She smiled to let him know that and, for an instant, his face softened.

“Peter,” Claire said. “Look.”

The waitress was standing across the aisle from them, taking orders from new customers who had just come in, noisily shaking snow from their coats and stomping their boots. At this angle, Claire saw clearly that the waitress was pregnant. As far along as Claire, maybe more.

Peter followed her gaze. “Jesus,” he said.

“Poor thing. Working two shifts.”

“People do what they have to,” he said.

“Still.”

“It’s not right,” he said.

Claire reached across the table and took his hand, oddly grateful for her own easy life. Instinctively, he recoiled at her touch. She almost apologized, but stopped herself.

The afternoon that Peter discovered them, after Miles left, after she’d dressed and gone into the living room where her husband sat on the turquoise Danish sofa they had argued over buying, she sat across from him in the square pink chair. He had thought that modern furniture wasn’t comfortable or inviting enough, and sitting there that afternoon, Claire understood what he meant. It was all angles and wood, this Danish contemporary.

Peter had demanded details. Not when or where they had met, but what they had done. “How many times?” Peter asked her. “Did he come inside of you?”

Out of spite or fear or something else, Claire told him. “I have lost track of how many times,” she said. “And he does come inside me. Yes.”

Peter jumped off the sofa, his eyes wild. As he loomed in front of her, she thought for a moment he might hit her. But he just stood with that scary look on his face, a look that told her he was capable of anything.

The clock, the one she thought looked like a sunburst and he thought looked like a spider, ticked into the silence.

“I have to pick up Kathy at the sitter’s,” Claire said finally.

She stood. He didn’t move. She put on her white car coat, not because the weather had turned cool but for protection. From the pocket, she took a tube of lipstick, Rio Red, and smeared it across her lips. She took the car keys from the little ring where they hung.

When she reached the door, Peter said, “If you see him again I’ll kill you.”

Claire turned to her husband. “No you won’t. You’re not a murderer,” she said.

Her heart was beating so fast she thought she might be having a heart attack. She didn’t wait for him to answer, she just walked out.