Unbecoming (23 page)

 • • • 

For Christmas, Grace had bought Riley a gray sweater and a book about historical houses. She’d picked them weeks before, and they now seemed cruel, as if she were mocking his Garland tastes, his Garland comfort. Alls walked through the kitchen as she was wrapping them, and her face burned. He kept going, right out the back door. They hadn’t spoken at all. As she gathered the paper scraps to throw away, it occurred to her that both she and Alls had always wanted Riley’s life, and whatever desire Alls had felt for her had only been an extension of his envy.

I am Riley’s cunt
, she thought.

He hadn’t wanted Grace, but Riley’s Grace, and not even Riley’s Grace but Riley’s cunt. He’d only wanted Riley’s cunt.

Riley had gone to fetch her presents, hidden at his parents’ house, and he would be home soon. She tied the bows, curled the ribbon. How stupid she had been. She was ashamed at this turn in her misery.

You didn’t get two. She was lucky to have one, lucky he was the right one.

That night, Riley gave Grace a monograph on Van Gogh that she’d coveted the summer before. Now she was embarrassed by it. Van Gogh was just one cultural rung above the lamplit fairylands of Thomas Kinkade. But then Riley presented her with a painting of his own, a watercolor portrait of her. Her face nearly filled the paper as she leaned out toward the viewer. She was naked, but not much of her breasts could be seen at that angle. The paint itself was pale and delicate, dozens of layers of thin, filmy washes.

“What is this?” she whispered, running her fingers along the paper’s deckled edge.

“It’s you,” he said. “From the webcam. A screenshot. I hope you’re not mad—you were talking, and the crappy computer light had you totally washed out; you were almost glowing white, but you looked—”

Grace looked closely at her face. She must have been completely lost in what she was saying; she looked so unself-conscious.

“Beautiful,” he said. “You’re always beautiful.”

She was sure that this idea, a sincere watercolor portrait of his girlfriend based on a screenshot of a naked webcam chat, was the best thing Riley had ever painted, and far beyond what she’d thought him capable of. But the painting was also incontrovertible evidence that she was loved. He could never, ever know what she had done.

Why was it different, what she felt for Alls? Grace had loved Riley so much. She was an expert, an artisan, in the twin crafts of loving him and of being lovable. How was this any less honest than the other feeling, which felt more like the line in her fishing reel was spinning out away from her and she couldn’t stop it? That didn’t feel like any kind of love she knew. The line had all run out and the jolt had pulled her overboard.

Grace had learned to say
I love you
when she was just a child: first to her mother and father, then to Riley. Children learned to say
I love you
before they knew what it meant. They said
I love you
because their parents said it to them, and they returned it, a small gift passed back and forth. She had thought love was not so different from those other truths that became so once spoken: “I swear,” “I quit,” “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

“
I love you,” she told Riley then, and she meant it. She always had.

 • • • 

Grace only slept at her parents’ house for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when Riley slept at his family’s house. The twins ran in and out of the house in muddy snow boots with school-holiday urgency. Grace did her best to offer her parents cheerful thoughts about her semester and New York, a little about her job. She presented a few tidy anecdotes. Her father asked about that girl with the crazy hair.

At first, she didn’t tell them she wasn’t going back. She didn’t know how to say it, and they would see, soon enough. But on Christmas Day, she was alone in the kitchen with her father, his back to her, and he asked what classes she was taking next term.

“I’m not going back,” she said. “I’m enrolling here.”

He turned around, his hands dripping dish suds. “What? Why?”

“It’s too snobby,” she said. She could have sworn he looked proud.

 • • • 

The day after New Year’s she went to her parents’ again to paw through her childhood dresser for talismans: old pictures, trinkets, silly gifts that represented who she had been and who she should’ve stayed. She could hardly remember her life before him, just the lonely murk of childhood, and so she couldn’t imagine being without him now. It was like being told that you wouldn’t mind dying because then you’d be dead. If she and Riley were not together, she would cease to exist.

She found photos of her and Riley when he still had braces, small drawings he had given to her on the backs of receipts, ribbed cotton sweaters so boring that she’d known to leave them behind. She took anything Kendall would laugh at, anything Lana would pity. Maybe they were worldlier, in a cultural sense, but really, they were babied by their parents and their trust funds and would be forever. Grace was an adult doing the adult thing: admitting defeat, moving forward.

She heard her mother’s voice behind her.

“Clearing out, I see.”

Grace started. “Oh, hi. I’m just picking up a few old things.”

Her mother uncrossed her arms to pick a piece of lint from her sweater. Grace had not really looked at her mother in such a long time, and now she was surprised at how girlish—soft, even—her mother looked. She had bobbed her hair, and in her ears were pink pearl studs. It was difficult for Grace to reconcile the woman in front of her with the image she held in her mind, the Ocean City party girl with bleached hair and sunburnt cleavage.

“I did what you’re doing,” her mother finally said. “When I was pregnant with you. I imagined showing you things from my childhood, you know.”

Then why hadn’t she?
When did I first disappoint you?
Grace wanted to ask.
When you peed on the stick?
Grace was now the same age her mother had been when Grace was born, and her mother, life derailed and forever resentful, had never so much as uttered the phrase
birth control
to her daughter. Now Grace wondered if her mother, in some dark corner of her mind, had wished that Grace
would
get pregnant. Then she would see.

“I knew you’d grow up,” her mother said. “It’s not that I didn’t think you’d grow up. You’ve always been very confident.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Grace said. By
confident
, her mother meant
uppity
.

“You didn’t need me,” her mother said.

How dare she,
now
? Grace had asked her parents for so little. She had mostly raised herself. And now that she was grown, her mother was going to blame her for it.

“You were very busy,” Grace said, her teeth clenched. “With the twins, with work.”

Her mother shook her head. Her arms were crossed, her eyes far away. “You didn’t need me,” she said. “Even when you were a little baby, you were very calm, very sensible. You didn’t mind who held you, if it was me or not. You’d go to anyone.” She laughed a little. “Babies are not sensible.”

You stupid, loveless woman
, Grace thought.

“I’m sorry,” Grace said. None of this bore discussion.

 • • • 

Grace couldn’t get a job in Garland as easily as she had planned. Every post at the college was filled by work-study students, and in January, none of the local boutiques were hiring. Grace wouldn’t have been hired anyway. Local businesses only hired relatives. She applied at the three nearby art galleries, listing her lone art history course, Western Art I, which she had not even completed, as a qualification, along with four months of experience at a fake appraisal office whose e-mail address she made up and would have to monitor herself. She didn’t want them calling Donald. She did not ask for help from Riley or the Grahams, who she knew were confused at her return anyway. She would find her own job, without writing
Riley Graham’s secret wife
on the résumé she left with Anne Findlay’s assistant, a girl who looked a little like Grace, but happier.

The second week of January, she was hired part-time at the T.J.Maxx in Pitchfield. She had to drive Riley’s car to get there. He didn’t like that she worked at T.J.Maxx. Grace as a discount cashier didn’t fit into his vision.

“It’s a job,” she said. “My mom used to work at a T.J.Maxx.” She didn’t know where that had come from. It was true, but the comparison was unlike her.

“You’re not your mom,” he said, and there was nowhere to go after that.

Riley had made almost nine thousand dollars in his December show at Anne Findlay’s gallery. Grace didn’t believe him until he showed her his bank statement. He was dying to spend the money. When she came home at night, she found him obsessively looking at cars online. He bought a pair of white nubuck wing tips. He wouldn’t save the money. He talked as if he would, as in
of course
he would save the money,
most
of it, but his math was magical.

“Do you want to go on a trip?” he asked her. “Like a real vacation. Like adults.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Anywhere you want. Paris. L.A. Shanghai!”

“Do you?” she asked wearily.

“All by ourselves,” he said. “We could check into hotels.” This was the idea that really thrilled him—making reservations, signing his name.

She knew he was disappointed in her. Who was this tired, defeated knitwear cashier who dreamed of nothing? She couldn’t explain. She was stunned by how much of herself had become secret from him. It didn’t help that when she and Alls slipped past each other in the hallway, her neck tensed up for an hour. Once, she had gone to shower right after him and found herself holding his damp towel, breathing in the steam. Greg had knocked on the door to ask her how much longer she would be. She was naked and the shower was running, but she hadn’t yet stepped into the tub. She didn’t even know how long she’d been standing there.

More than a year had passed since she’d first stood in this bathroom, drugged by the steam, and how guilty she’d felt
then
.

 • • • 

When Riley told her one night that he had a surprise, Grace thought for a moment that he was about to pull out an engagement ring. Instead, she unwrapped lingerie, a red satin bustier with black lace trim.

She lifted the bustier from the tissue by its delicate straps. She didn’t know anything about lingerie, but she could tell by the soft sheen of the fabric and the intricacy of the lace that this had been very expensive. She hated the red, but she knew that gift lingerie seldom expressed the aesthetic of the recipient. As she stared, Riley watching her from the other side of the corset, she felt criticized by him, soberingly so, but she didn’t know why at first. The matching thong sat coiled in the box, a limp rubber band.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, because what else could she say? Lingerie! Grace was eighteen and her husband was barely twenty. She thought of lingerie as something for old people, bored with each other’s bodies and habits, trying to fake themselves into seeing something new.

He needed her to be new. She’d been so afraid of losing him because of what she had done that she had neglected the rest. She had disappointed him, coming home to wrangle the carts at a Pitchfield strip mall. In trying to seem pure in order to
be
pure, she’d bored him.

She smiled—shyly, he probably thought—and took the box into the bathroom. The lid had long since broken off the toilet, and she balanced the box across the seat. This was who he wanted her to be. She pulled the corset over her head, struggling to get the waist over her shoulder blades. She lifted and dropped her breasts into the seamed cups. She looked over her shoulder at the mirror and adjusted the thong so that it arced perfectly over her ass, now a dark clefted peach. Her face looked too pale and too tired. She rubbed her lips together and raked her fingers up her scalp to fluff her hair, and then she went back into the bedroom.

17

B
etween shifts at T.J.Maxx, Grace read as if she were still in school, though it was too late to impress anyone. She’d failed three of her classes through sheer neglect. She hadn’t responded to either of the e-mails from her adviser, a harried adjunct she’d only met once anyway. She hadn’t even responded to the texts from Kendall. She imagined Lana, wide-eyed, describing Grace’s “nervous breakdown”—or was that a Southern phrase?

She tried to read her giant art history textbook, which had cost ninety dollars, but the words just settled around her, dead as dust. Instead she buried her mind in Shakespeare, feeling that she finally understood the histrionics of betrayal, and fat old novels that all seemed to be about doomed women, both the wicked and the duped. She missed working for Donald, magnifying the photos to find chips and scratches and signatures, pinpointing a silver hairbrush in time and by place. Donald and Bethany had both e-mailed her, and Donald had called a few times, but Grace hadn’t answered. What could she say? That it had all been too much for her? She had no way to explain her decision without subjecting herself to their pitying concern.

She wondered if she might find a similar job in Garland, but she knew she was kidding herself. There was nothing like that here.

 • • • 

The main thing was to stay out of the house when Alls was home alone.

She knew what his footsteps sounded like, their particular creak. She knew his cough. She knew better than to be alone with him. They could never speak of what had happened. She had to act as though it
hadn’t
happened; she had to believe it herself
.

There were signs, if someone had known to look for them. Grace and Alls seldom joked around with each other anymore, and when Grace tried to tease him in front of Riley, he no longer teased her back. He was too aloof, too serious around her—too much like someone hiding something, she thought. Riley remarked on it one night, and Grace said that Alls was probably a little unhappy about her moving in.