The Safety of Objects: Stories (2 page)

She takes a sip from his glass. It is tainted. There is something wrong with the punch. She thinks about supermarket tampering, murder in the suburbs, and how much she hates food. She thinks she’s going to die.

“There’s something wrong with the punch,” she says, coughing.

“There’s vodka in it,” he says, taking the glass back from her.

She takes her plate and goes into the kitchen, planning to pile it higher, then go back upstairs and never come down. She stands inside the refrigerator door, snacking. She hates eating in the kitchen. It makes her think about cleaning up and then she loses her appetite.

She carries her plate into the living room.

Paul is on the floor two feet from the TV, sitting cross-legged, his drink in his crotch, playing with Daniel’s Nintendo. There’s a driving game on the screen. He crashes again and again. Paul’s been driving for more than twenty years. He should be able to get through a game; she’s seen Daniel do it a million times.

In a way it’s cute, Paul playing like a little boy, falling into the TV. But there’s also something incredibly pathetic about it.

“Could you turn it down a little?” Elaine asks.

Paul’s car slips off the road and crashes into a billboard. The car bursts into flames and
Game Over, Game Over
flashes across the screen.

“Can’t you see I’m doing something?” he screams, pushing the restart button.

“You’re playing a game.”

“Leave me alone.”

Elaine goes back upstairs. She can’t stand him. She can’t stand anything about him: the way he thinks, talks, looks, all of it. She knows he hates her too, and that makes it even worse. It makes her nuts. She should be able to hate him without any backlash.

She sits in the middle of their bed with her plate and turns on the TV. She sits in front of it, staring at it, and then gets upset when she realizes that she’s been watching golf for at least a half hour.

She pours herself a glass of wine, puts a piece of cheese on a cracker, and leans back on her pillow. She drinks the wine and then pours herself another glass. It’s so nice, she thinks, to lie in your bed and drink and not worry about drinking too much, about having to be on duty, like a nurse in a ward, so fucking responsible.

She feels like she’s floating. She feels wonderful. She wishes she could do this every day. It would make her life so much better. The phone rings and she ignores it. It rings and rings, and finally she has to pick it up.

“Mommy,” Sammy’s small voice says. “Mommy, why did you leave me here?”

She sits up in bed, spilling the glass of wine all over her shirt.

“I didn’t leave you there, sweetie, I brought you there to be with Grandma, to go to the beach, to swim. You’re on vacation, honey.”

She can’t believe how drunk she is; she’s trying to be normal, to sound like herself.

“I don’t want to be on vacation,” he says.

There’s a silence and then nothing. She wonders if her child has hung up on her. She wonders what kind of a mother she is.

“He’ll be fine,” her mother-in-law says. Her voice is deep from smoking and she sounds like Milton Berle. “I gave him some chocolate milk and cookies. I told him he has his brother and me. We’ll see how it goes.”

“If he’s not hungry don’t make him eat,” Elaine says.

She doesn’t want her child growing up with an eating disorder. She doesn’t want him fat or thin. She wants him just right.

“Make him eat? How could I make him eat? I put it on the plate. If he wants it, he eats it, my little prince. And Daniel, I think he’s starting to like girls. All around the pool, they crowd around him. Hold on, I’ll get him that misses his mother so much.”

Elaine is nauseated. Her mother-in-law is too much, too strong. She waits on the world hand and foot. Compared to her, Elaine is nothing.

“Mommy,” Sammy says, “why did you bring me here and leave me?”

“I just told you, baby, you’re on vacation.”

“When are you coming to take me home?”

“Grandma is bringing you home next week. You’ll be tan and beautiful.”

“I want to come home now. Come and get me now.”

“I can’t do that, sweetie. I’m here with Daddy. Have a good time with Grandma and I’ll see you soon.”

He starts to cry. She is annoyed. She’s annoyed, and then she can’t believe how selfish she’s being. This is her child, her baby. How could she be angry? How could she have gone to the grocery store and not bought anything for him, no animal crackers, Ho-Ho’s, nothing he likes?

“Oh, baby, it’s all right. I miss you too, you’re my boy, I’ll call you again later. Tell Grandma to give you another cookie.”

In the background Sammy is crying and Daniel is laughing. Mixed messages. She hangs up the phone, takes off her wine-soaked shirt, and tries to remember what you do to get wine stains out. She drops the shirt onto the floor, lies back on the bed in her bra, and pours herself another glass of wine.

Paul comes upstairs and asks what’s for dinner. She hands him a cracker with cheese. He lies down next to her on the bed.

“Did you take a shower today?” she asks.

He looks insulted. “I’ve been working all day.”

“You didn’t take a shower. You smell.”

He kisses her.

“Your face hurts,” she says. “I can’t kiss you when you don’t shave.”

In the old days when they were on vacation, they would shower together, make love, and then change into good clothes and go out for dinner. Now Elaine is lying half-naked on a crumb-covered bed, smelling like cheap rosé. Paul pulls off his shirt and sticks his nose into his armpit. “It’s not so bad,” he says.

“You must have a blockage in your nose. Maybe you should see an ear, nose, and throat man.”

He lies down next to her. She picks up the platter from the floor and puts it between them. They eat and pass the wine glass back and forth. When the plate is empty and the bed scratchy with cracker crumbs, they roll over and fall asleep.

In his sleep Paul knocks the empty glass off the bed and onto the floor. The stem snaps off.

At ten o’clock Paul gets out of bed and steps on the glass. Elaine spends the next half hour pulling pieces of glass out of Paul’s foot. She presses gauze pads soaked in peroxide against his wounds, and he yells into her ear. She feels like Florence Nightingale.

There is blood on the sheets, and on the floor. Little pieces of broken glass are everywhere.

Her wine-stained shirt is still on the floor. The empty plate is on the floor. They pull off the rest of their clothing, and curl up next to each other for warmth.

The television is still on, but they can’t find the remote control. They end up watching a special half-hour report on crack.

As they’re watching it, they’re both thinking it looks great. It looks fun.

When the report is over, they are quiet for a minute, uncomfortable, and then he turns to her and says, “I think I can get some.”

“When?” she asks.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

She turns away from him, puts her head down on the pillow, and falls asleep, looking forward, for the first time in a long time, to tomorrow.

*  *  *

“When are you getting the crack?” she asks, as soon as she wakes up.

“I’ll make some calls,” he says.

“This morning?” she asks.

“It’s going to take hours just to find someone who knows a crack dealer,” he says.

Elaine tells Paul she has errands to run. She gets in the car and spends two and a half hours driving around—practically in circles because she doesn’t want to go too far, she doesn’t want to get lost.

By the time she gets home the crack is there. Somehow Paul found a dealer who delivers.

It has been forever since either of them did anything new. Buying the house, moving out there was new, but it was also something they were expected to do. It was destiny.

There are six vials on the dining room table.

“Is that a lot or a little?” she asks.

Paul shrugs. “I dunno,” he says. “It’s too new for me.” He pauses. “Remember me?” he says. “Remember when I was young and had hair and knew about things?”

She nods. She remembers him twelve years ago, when he was young and brilliant and there was no one else like him.

“At least you knew where to get it,” she says.

“We may not like it,” he says.

“I like it already,” Elaine says.

Paul puts the crack into a pipe he also bought from the dealer, and Elaine begins to get nervous. It is too exciting. She can’t believe they are actually going to do this. It’s so not like them, not the way anyone would expect them to be.

Paul lights the pipe and draws in. The dining room fills with a smell that is at the same time familiar and completely unfamiliar, something vaguely like a doctor’s office or the house late on Thursday afternoon just after the maid’s gone home. She is not sure if it is the crack burning or the pipe melting. Paul scrunches his eyes closed, tilts his head back, and hands the pipe to her. She puts a little more of the crack rock in and nervously lights it.

Elaine has the sensation of being a fountain. She herself is the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. Sparks pour out of her and bounce across the ground before dying out. She is a Roman candle. It is so good that she almost can’t stand it. She has to sit down. She has to lie down on the living room sofa. She has to smoke again as soon as the sensation starts to fade.

“This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.” An image of a fried egg on television. A commercial. Sammy had looked at the TV and said, “No it’s not, that’s my breakfast,” and then collapsed laughing onto the floor.

Between then and midnight they go through four vials. When they stop it is only because they have the sensation that their bodies can’t stand anymore. They are sweating profusely. Paul starts taking his pulse every five minutes and writing it down.

“I’m making a graph,” he says. “Let me take yours too. Me in blue, you in red.”

Elaine doesn’t answer him. She goes into the kitchen, opens the freezer, and digs out a spoonful of ice cream. It feels like velvet in her throat.

“What are you doing?” Paul yells from the living room.

“Nothing,” she says.

She smells the crack burning again.

“My pulse is a hundred and eighty,” Paul says.

“Isn’t that aerobic?” Elaine yells in to him. She is pleased that she can be witty and stoned all at once.

Suddenly, in the kitchen, she gets nervous that someone will call, the parent of one of her children’s friends, someone in a carpool, and on the phone she’ll say something that will ruin her life or at least her future. She turns on the answering machine.

Paul screams from the living room. He doesn’t say anything, he just screams as loud as he can. Elaine runs in and tells him to stop.

“You have ice cream on your face,” Paul says, and then starts screaming again.

“You’re upsetting me,” she says. “I felt so good before, and now I feel as if everything is strange, everything is ruined.”

Paul stops screaming and holds his wife. He holds her and hands her the pipe. “Just do a little more,” he says. “And then we’ll stop. Just get it good again.”

And so she does one more, and it is good again, and the living room looks so nice and their halogen lights are so bright and modern. They are alone together in their house.

They lie on the sofa, having silent conversations with each other. The voices in their heads are so loud that neither realizes that they aren’t actually talking.

Finally, at about three in the morning, they begin to unwind, the lights seem too bright, and Paul gets up and turns them off, then picks up the two leftover vials and puts them in his pocket.

They go upstairs to bed, but neither sleeps. They turn the television off and on and fight about who should have control of the remote and how often they should change channels. At five in the morning, Elaine gets out of bed and brings them each a Valium. It’s like a party favor. They pop them into their mouths and swallow without water.

Elaine wakes up, dying of thirst and craving sugar. She can’t remember if they ate dinner last night. Walking down the steps she feels uncoordinated, spastic, as though she has a neurological disease. She feels the age of her body and the weight of gravity. Everything pulls toward the ground.

Elaine stands naked in the kitchen, sucking the last drops of Berry Red from a cardboard box of Hawaiian Punch. She shifts the straw around and for a second it slips out of her mouth. A little bit of the bright red drink rolls down her neck.

The doorbell rings and then rings again. She freezes. She thinks it’s the police. The neighbors smelled the crack burning.

Elaine is naked in the kitchen, there is no way out, no way to get anywhere without passing windows. There is only a dish towel too small to cover anything.

There is a knock at the door and a man calls her name. “Misses?” She crouches down so that if he comes around the side of the house, he can’t see her. Elaine slides across the floor and checks the calendar. It is written in that someone is coming to measure for carpet. She creeps over to the door, reaching up to check that it is locked. He knocks on the front door again.

“Anybody home?”

She is afraid he will try the knob and it will open. The carpet man will find her on the floor naked. Everyone knows that in a house you’re supposed to wear a bathrobe. People will talk about it. They’ll say she’s an alcoholic, she must have passed out like that. They’ll ask each other if she walks around naked when the children are home. They’ll stop letting their kids sleep over.

On her stomach she crawls across the linoleum toward the coat closet in the hall. When she gets there she opens the door and stands up inside the closet. Her stomach and breasts are covered with lint and dirt. She puts on Paul’s black cashmere overcoat and opens the door.

The police officer is there. It is the same police officer from the other night.

Elaine wonders if you can bust someone retroactively.

“Is there a problem?” Elaine asks.

“Somehow, I didn’t give your husband back his license. It took me a while to find you. The old address and all,” he says.