Unlovely (6 page)

"Mary Ann! Who gave you the flowers?"
Maggie called out as she drew near.

"They're from Tom," she
answered, walking over to their couch.

"Anniversary?"

"No. Just because."

Claudia tried to imagine what Tom looked
like: probably like a catalog model, too. Fair-haired and toothy, a little stubble
on his cheek.

"How long have you been
married?" Claudia asked.

"Twenty-two years."

"Twenty-two years and he sends you
flowers? All the time?"

"No, not all the time.
Sometimes."

"Wow, that's nice. They're
pretty."

"Thanks. I think so."

"Do you like being married?"
Claudia queried. "Are you happy?"

"Very happy."

"I hated it," Maggie
interjected. "All three times. I'm better off with my dogs than I was with
any of those sons of bitches." She laughed and completed a stitch, yanking
the yarn hard enough to make the pattern pucker. "Man, I miss my
dogs."

"I don't think I've ever met anyone
who really likes being married. Maybe my friend Melanie does, but she hasn't
been married anywhere near as long as you."

"I do like it. Tom's a good
man." Mary Ann caught the cynical expression on Maggie's face and added,
"I'm sorry you had a rough time, though."

"Rough time doesn't half describe
it," Maggie grunted.

Mary Ann gave them a perfunctory smile
and walked on to the kitchen. Claudia and Maggie observed her movements through
the sliding doors as she filled the tea kettle and put it on the stove top.

"I think she was acting kind of
smug," Maggie muttered, ripping back a couple of stitches. "She's in
for a surprise, though. Just wait and see. He's probably sending her flowers
because he's cheating.  Husbands get very nice when they're cheating on
you. If I were Mary Ann, I'd start checking his emails."

Claudia shrugged. Maybe.

School continued pretty much on course for Claudia. She
felt confident of success in her classes and secure in her reputation as a
scholar, so it was as good as she could reasonably hope it to be. Life at home,
however, was another story. In recent months Claudia had begun to entertain
vague worries about the state of her parents' marriage. Sylvia seemed more than
usually anxious lately – whining instead of asking, yelling instead of nagging
– and Tony was even more distant than he'd been when Claudia was little. There
were no fights, no cross words exchanged over coffee in the morning, but there
was definitely something wrong between them.

Claudia suspected her father was having
an affair, and the very idea made her sick.

The signs were there. More than once in
recent weeks Claudia had picked up the phone to hear a woman's voice asking for
her father. When Tony wasn't available, the woman would hang up without a
goodbye; when he was, Tony would take the phone, listen to the greeting, and
then ask Claudia to hang up on her end after he'd picked up the extension in
his office. Furthermore, her dad was spending less and less time with Claudia
and Sylvia: he was leaving home a little earlier every morning and coming home
a little later every night. Saturday afternoons were suddenly busy with
inventory or mysterious errands to the hardware store. Tony had even stopped
going to church with his family; he said he preferred to go alone to a later
service, that the solitude helped him to better concentrate on his prayers.
Claudia didn't buy it.

She felt helpless and frustrated. If
she'd noticed all of this, surely her mother had as well, yet to all
appearances she did nothing about it. Then one winter evening it all came to a
head.

Tony had returned home that evening
after eight o'clock, stomping his boots on the concrete landing to free them of
snow before pushing his way over the threshold. This had become a habit with
him in recent months: arriving too late to dine with his family. On this
particular night, Claudia had just balanced a difficult chemical equation and
was feeling very proud of herself and pleased with the world. In a rare display
of spontaneous affection, she dashed to her father as he stepped through the
door and threw her arms around his neck. His cheek felt cold next to hers,
which she found pleasant, but something was off. She moved back and appraised
him: he smelled wrong. He smelled like perfume, something very sweet.

"Why are you late?" Claudia
asked.

"I'm not that late." Tony
turned to hang up his coat on the rack. "Things come up when you run a
business."

"What kind of things?"

"Business things, Claudia. Things
you wouldn't understand. Go tell your mom I'm home."

Claudia felt a tingle of panic up her
spine. Her father was being evasive. All Claudia wanted was a simple,
straight-forward explanation. She wanted her father to convince her in a couple
of words that her suspicions were unreasonable. She would have even accepted a
lie, as long as it was a good one. At the very least, she wanted her dad to
give her a reason to doubt her own intuition.

"You smell like perfume."

Tony stopped unknotting the scarf at his
neck and gave her a long look.

"I don't believe it's your place to
tell me what I smell like." Claudia thought she saw alarm in his eyes
before he managed to check his expression. "Didn't I tell you to go to the
kitchen and tell Mom I'm home?"

Not to be put off, Claudia countered,
"What is that smell? Did some perfume fall off a shelf or something? Did
you spill perfume?"

Tony squared his shoulders and gave her
a hard stare.

"Go into the kitchen."

Claudia searched him with another long
look, taking in his whole person: he appeared the same as always, angry, but
nothing really out of place, his eyes no longer alarmed, but weary. Then she
noticed a hair on his lapel, blond against the black wool. Geez.

She walked back to the kitchen and found
her mother standing at the sink, drying a pot.

"Dad's home," she said,
debating what to say next, if anything. Should she tell her mom what she
suspected?

No, Claudia didn't suspect it: she knew
it. There was another woman. Of course there was. Claudia wanted to vomit.
There were few things worse for a teenage girl than to smell a strange woman on
her father's neck, but that's what had happened. And now this awful woman was
on Claudia, too – the odor of her clung in Claudia's nostrils. And that hair on
his lapel – a single long, blond hair.

On the other hand, it was entirely
possible she was blowing all of this way out of proportion, wasn't it? How
could she even think something like this about her dad? How could she imagine
he would be with another woman? She didn't want to imagine it. It was horrible.
And so unlikely. And what did a hair on his lapel mean, anyway? Wool coats pick
up hair sometimes.

But the hair in conjunction with the
perfume didn't seem right to her. And the way he'd been so gruff with her – her
father was taciturn by nature, but he rarely spoke to Claudia sharply. He
wasn't acting himself.

Claudia studied her mom. Sylvia looked
like she did every night, with her towel in her hands, her hair falling across
her forehead, wearing old slacks and a sweatshirt because she'd been doing
housework all day in her unending efforts to make the house nice for Tony. Her
mother was unspectacular, but she was his wife. She didn't deserve to be cheated
on. A man was supposed to love his wife, and only his wife. And even if he
couldn't stay faithful to Sylvia (and let's face it, she wasn't the most
lovable person in the world), what about Claudia? Was she nothing to him? He
was cheating on her, too, and cheating on your child was just despicable.

Should she talk about this with her mom?
The thought of sharing any part of her suspicion sickened her, but then, she
was sickened by the whole thing already. Maybe her mother already knew, but had
chosen to do nothing. Maybe she was in denial.

Maybe, though, she was unbelievably
naïve and had no idea anything was amiss. What then?

Part of Claudia wanted to hide
everything from her mother, to pretend all was normal, but another part of her
wanted her mother to feel the worry, too. She was the mom, after all. She
should shoulder the responsibility of suspicion so Claudia wouldn't have to
carry it anymore. Her mother had told her they could talk about anything, but
did she want to know about things like this? And what about her father? What
would he do if she told her mom about the perfume? Would her dad be angry with
Claudia for telling her mom? Yes, of course he would be. He would be very angry
with her.

Then she thought of the way her father
had spoken to her, and she made up her mind. Why not? Just say it. She was a
member of this household. She didn't deserve to be dismissed and her mother
didn't deserve to be deceived. If Claudia had to be loyal to one side over the
other, she would choose her mother. Besides, her mom would certainly smell the
perfume herself. Claudia would just be warning her, and there was nothing wrong
with that.

Claudia decided to share the bare
minimum and allow Sylvia to draw her own conclusions. Her mother would know if
Claudia was making crazy assumptions. She would know what to do.

Claudia looked at her mother's feet in
their worn penny loafers and repeated, "Dad's home and ready to eat."

"Oh, okay. Figures. Just when I'm
finishing up in here." Sylvia turned back to the counter and resumed
drying the dishes.

Claudia pinched the skin on her palm
hard to still her nerves and willed herself to speak again.

"He smells like perfume."

Sylvia had her back to Claudia, so her
expression was unreadable. She finished drying the pot and put it down on the
counter. Her voice betrayed nothing she might be feeling when she answered,
"Okay. Thanks for letting me know he's home. Go ahead upstairs and get
ready for bed while I see what he'd like me to warm for dinner."

Claudia started heading out. Her mother
stopped her, "And Claudia, please stay up there. Get a book or something.
I need to have a conversation with your dad."

Claudia left the kitchen and made a
beeline for the stairs, avoiding her father's eyes as she passed him in the
dining room. A confrontation was imminent. Her mom didn't always have the nerve
to address difficult issues with her dad, but this time she was going to have
to.

Claudia put on her pajamas, climbed into
bed and pulled the pillow over her head in an attempt to block noise from the
floor below. Although much of her parents' conversation took place in a
blessedly low hum, fragments floated up and penetrated the down pillow to reach
Claudia's ears.

As it turned out, Sylvia had suspected
Tony of infidelity for some time, and apparently, this was not the first
affair.

"I just don't understand how you
could do it. How could you do it? You of all people should know what it feels
like to have someone cheat on you! Or is that it? Do you want to prove you're
some kind of big man?"

"Really, Sylvia? Isn't that beneath
you?"

Then:

"There's your daughter to think
about, too, Tony. She smelled it on you. It's disgusting. Do you ever think
about her while you're climbing into bed with one of your whores?"

Then later:

"I'm sorry to hurt you, but you've
hurt me, too. No! No, you shut up and listen for once! Since the moment you
decided there wouldn't be any more babies, you've been nothing but cold to me.
What was I supposed to do? Go for the rest of my life without sex?"

"That's an exaggeration and a lie!
I didn't decide anything! Don't you know how hard this has been for me? Don't
you think it makes a difference?"

Still later:

"You're sick! You need to talk to
the pastor, you really do. Or does he already know? Does everyone already
know?"

Then her father again:

"Go ahead, then. Slap me! Hit me as
hard as you can if it will make you feel better! I couldn't possibly feel worse
than I already do."

Claudia wearied of lying with her head
under the pillow after the first half hour and she abandoned the strategy. It
didn't block the yells, anyway. She glanced at her clock: it was after ten and
they were still arguing. She couldn't remember them ever arguing this long or
loudly before. Were they going to get divorced? What would Claudia do then? She'd
probably have to live with her mother and her maternal grandparents. Claudia
couldn't imagine her dad wanting her around if her parents split up.

Sometime after eleven, the voices, which
had been reduced to a steady murmur, died away completely. Claudia heard her
mother's footsteps on the stairs and then the click of the bathroom door
closing. Claudia waited for her father's steps to follow. They didn't. He
wasn't coming upstairs tonight.

Claudia heard her mother leave the
bathroom and then shut the door to the master bedroom. The house was still. She
wanted to relax and go to sleep, but sleep wouldn't come. The thought of her
father kissing or embracing another woman was shocking. It had never occurred
to Claudia that anyone but her mother would find him attractive.