When I came downstairs, Hugh was making breakfast. I heard the hiss of Jimmy Dean sausage before I got to the kitchen.
“I’m not hungry,” I told him.
“But you need to eat,” he said. “You’re not going to throw up again. Trust me.”
Whenever a crisis of any kind appeared, Hugh made these great big breakfasts. He seemed to believe in their power to revive us.
Before coming downstairs, he’d booked me a one-way ticket to Charleston and arranged to cancel his early-afternoon patients so he could drive me to the airport.
I sat down at the breakfast bar, pushing certain images out of my head: the meat cleaver, my mother’s finger.
The refrigerator opened with a soft sucking noise, then closed. I watched Hugh crack four eggs. He stood at the stove with a spatula and shuffled them around in a pan. A row of damp brown curls skimmed the top of his collar. I started to say something about his needing a haircut, that he looked like an aging hippie, but I checked myself, or rather the impulse simply died on my tongue.
Instead I found myself staring at him. People were always staring at Hugh—in restaurants, theater lines, bookstore aisles. I would catch them stealing glimpses, mostly women. His hair and eyes had that rich autumn coloring that reminds you of cornucopias and Indian corn, and he had a beautiful cleft in the center of his chin.
Once I’d teased him that when we walked into a room together, no one noticed me because he was so much prettier, and he’d felt compelled to tell me that I was beautiful. But the truth was, I couldn’t hold a candle to Hugh. Lately the skin on either side of my eyes had become etched with a fine weave of crisscrossing lines, and I sometimes found myself at the mirror pulling my temples back with my fingers. My hair had been an incredible nutmeg color for as long as I could remember, but it was twined now with a few strands of gray. For the first time, I could feel a hand at the small of my back nudging me toward the mysterious dwelling place of menopausal women. Already my friend Rae had disappeared in there, and she was just forty-five.
Hugh’s aging seemed more benign, his handsomeness turning ripe, but it wasn’t that so much as the combination of intelligence and kindness in his face that drew people. It had captured me back in the beginning.
I leaned forward onto the bar, the speckled granite cold on the bones of my elbows, remembering how we’d met, needing to remember how it once was. How we were.
He had showed up at my first so-called art exhibit, which had taken place in a ratty booth I’d rented at the Decatur Flea Market. I’d just graduated from Agnes Scott with a degree in art and inflated ideas about selling my work, becoming a bona fide artist. No one, however, had really looked at my art boxes all day, except for a woman who kept referring to them as “shadow-boxes.”
Hugh, in the second year of his psychiatric residency at Emory, came to the flea market that day for vegetables. As he wandered by my booth, his eyes lit on my “Kissing Geese” box. It was an odd creation, but in a way it was my favorite.
I’d painted the inside with a Victorian living-room scene—English rose wallpaper and fringed floor lamps—then placed a velvet dollhouse sofa in the box with two plastic geese glued onto the cushions, positioned so they appeared to be in the midst of a beak-to-beak kiss.
I’d been inspired by a newspaper story about a wild goose that had dropped out of the flock during migration to stay with his mate, who’d been injured in a mall parking lot. A store clerk had taken the hurt bird to a refuge, but her mate had wandered around the parking lot for over a week, honking forlornly, until the clerk took him to the refuge, too. The article said they’d been given a “room” together.
The news clipping was decoupaged around the outside of the box, and I’d attached a bicycle horn to the top, the kind with the red ball that sounds like a honking goose. Only about half the people who’d seen the box had actually squeezed the horn. I’d imagined that this said something about them. That they were more playful than the average person, less reserved.
Hugh bent over the box and read the article while I waited to see what he would do. He honked the horn twice.
“How much do you want for it?” he asked.
I paused, working up the courage to say twenty-five dollars.
“Would forty be enough?” he said, reaching for his wallet.
I hesitated again, bowled over that anyone would pay that much for kissing geese.
“Fifty?” he said.
I kept my face straight. “Okay, fifty.”
We went out that same night. Four months later we were married. For years he kept the “Kissing Geese” box on his dresser, then moved it to a bookshelf in his study. A couple of years ago, I found him at his desk meticulously regluing all the pieces.
He confessed once that he paid all that money just to get me to go out with him, but the truth was, he loved the box, and his honking the horn really had said something about him, hinting at a side of Hugh few people saw. They always thought about his prodigious intellect, the ability he had to dissect and anatomize, but he loved to have fun and often instigated the most unexpected things: We could go out and celebrate Mexican Independence Day, or would you prefer to go to the Mattress Races? We’d spent a Saturday afternoon at a contest in which people attached wheels onto beds and raced through downtown Atlanta.
People also rarely noticed how deeply and thoroughly he felt things. He still cried whenever a patient took his own life, and he grew sad at times over the dark, excruciating corners people backed themselves into.
Last fall, while putting away the laundry, I came upon Hugh’s jewelry case in the back of his underwear drawer. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I sat on the bed and went through it. It held all of Dee’s baby teeth, tiny and yellowed like popcorn kernels, and several drawings she’d done on his prescription pad. There was his father’s Pearl Harbor pin, his grandfather’s pocket-watch, the four pairs of cuff links I’d bought him for various anniversaries. I slipped the rubber band off a small bundle of papers and found a creased photograph of me on our honeymoon in the Blue Ridge Mountains, posing in front of the cabin we’d rented. The rest were cards and little love notes I’d sent him over the years. He’d kept them all.
He was the first one of us to say I love you. Two weeks after we met, before we’d even made love. We were in a diner near the Emory campus, eating breakfast in a booth by the window. He said, “I hardly know anything about you, but I love you,” and from that moment his commitment had been unyielding. Even now he rarely went a day without telling me.
In the beginning I’d felt so hungry for him, a ravenous kind of wanting that remained until Dee was born. Only then did it start to subside and grow domesticated. Like animals taken from the wild and put in nice, simulated habitats where they turned complacent, knowing exactly where their next meal would come from. All the hunt and surprise drained out of it.
Hugh set the plate of eggs and sausage in front of me. “There you go,” he said.
We ate, side by side, the windows still varnished with early-morning dark. Rain rattled down the gutters, and I heard what sounded like a shutter banging in the distance.
I put down my fork and listened.
“On the island when the storms came, our hurricane shutters used to slam against the house like that,” I said, and my eyes began to fill.
Hugh stopped chewing and looked at me.
“Mother would drape a sheet over the kitchen table and crawl under it with me and Mike and read to us by flashlight. She nailed a crucifix to the underside of the table, and we would lie on the floor and stare up at it while she read. We called it the ‘storm tent.’ We thought nothing could harm us under there.”
Hugh reached out his arm, and my shoulder slipped into the groove beneath his collarbone while my head glided into the nape of his neck, an oiled, automatic movement as old as our marriage.
We sat like that, pressed into each other, while the eggs went cold and the odd banging came and went, until I began to feel the ponderous meshing of our lives—unable to tell where his shoulder ended and my head began. It was the same sensation I’d had as a child when my father pressed the length of his finger against mine. As they rubbed together, they’d felt like a single digit.
I pulled away, straightening myself on the bar chair. “I can’t believe what she’s done,” I said. “My God, Hugh, do you think she needs to be committed?”
“I couldn’t say without talking to her. It sounds like an obsessional disorder.”
I saw Hugh look down at my lap. I’d twisted the napkin around my finger as if I were trying to stop a hemorrhage. I unwound it, embarrassed at how talkative my body was when I didn’t mean for it to be.
“Why her finger?” I said. “Of all things.”
“There’s not necessarily any rhyme or reason to it. That’s the thing about obsessions—they’re generally irrational.” He stood up. “Look, why don’t I come with you? I’ll clear my calendar. We’ll both go.”
“No,” I said. A little too emphatically. “She’ll never talk to you about this, you know that. And you have all your patients here to take care of.”
“Okay, but I don’t want you handling this by yourself.” He kissed me on the forehead. “Call Dee. Let her know where you’ll be.”
After he’d left for the office, I packed a suitcase, set it by the door, then climbed the stairs to my studio, wanting to make sure the roof hadn’t leaked again.
I switched on a lamp, and a swatch of waxy yellow light fanned across my worktable—a big oak treasure I’d found in a secondhand store. A partially assembled art box was spread across it, covered in dust. I’d stopped working on it last December when Dee was home for Christmas break, and somehow I’d never gotten back up here.
I was inspecting the floor for puddles when the phone rang. Picking up the portable, I heard Dee’s voice. “Guess what?” she said.
“What?”
“Dad sent me extra money, and I bought a navy pea coat.”
I imagined her sitting cross-legged on her dorm bed, her long hair grazing her shoulders. People said she looked like Hugh. They had that same burnished look.
“A pea coat, huh? Please tell me this means you’ve given up the Harley-Davidson jacket.”
“What about you? You had that red suede jacket with all the cowboy fringe.”
I smiled, the lightness I always felt around Dee fading, though, as I thought of Mother. “Listen, honey, I was going to call you this morning. I’m leaving for the island today to see your grandmother. She’s not well.” It occurred to me Dee might think she was on her deathbed, so I told her the truth.
The first words out of Dee’s mouth were, “Oh, fuck.”
“Dee!” I said. A little too indignantly, I suppose, but she’d genuinely shocked me. “That word is beneath you.”
“I know,” she said. “And I bet you’ve never said it once in your whole life.”
I let out a long breath. “Look, I didn’t mean to preach.”
She was silent a moment. “Okay, I shouldn’t have said it, but what Gran did is so twisted. Why would she do something like that?”
Dee, sharp-eyed in every other way, had always had a blind spot about her grandmother, re-creating her as a wonderfully doting eccentric. I imagined this would shatter her illusions once and for all.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I wish I did.”
“You’ll take care of her, right?”
I closed my eyes and saw my mother in the storm tent, the time I’d found her there right after Dad died. It had been a perfect, sunny day.
“I’m going to try,” I told Dee.
After I hung up, I sat down at the worktable and stared at the bits of mirror and eggshell I’d been gluing into the discarded box before abandoning it.
I had said the word. This past December, while Dee was home. I was standing in the shower, and Hugh had slipped into the bathroom, taken off his clothes, and stepped behind me, startling me so badly I’d jerked forward and knocked the shampoo bottle off the shelf that hung from the nozzle.
“Fuck,” I’d said. Which wasn’t like me. The word was not in my lexicon, and I don’t know who’d been more astounded, me or Hugh.
After a pause Hugh had laughed. “Exactly. Fuck is exactly what I was thinking.”
I didn’t say anything, didn’t turn around. His fingers moved along my ribs and brushed the edges of my breasts. I heard him make a tiny groaning sound in his throat. I tried to want him but couldn’t help feeling intruded upon. Standing stiffly in the spray, I must’ve appeared like the trunk of a tree, a petrifying tree quietly going to stone.
After a few moments, the shower door opened and closed. He was gone.
For days after that, I went about in a state of severe and earnest trying. I stepped into the shower with Hugh not once but twice, contorting myself into extraordinary yogic positions. The second time I’d emerged with the red mark of the faucet handle on my back. A tattoo that looked remarkably like a crumpled bird.
One day while Dee was out hitting the after-Christmas sales with her friends, I’d showed up at Hugh’s office after his last patient, suggesting we have sex on his sofa, and I suppose we would have, except his beeper went off. Someone had tried to kill herself. I’d driven home with all the trying knocked out of me.
The next day Dee had gone back to college.
I watched her car roll out of the driveway, down the street. After it had turned the corner, I’d gone inside to a stillness that was bewildering in its intensity.
The same stillness rose now in the studio. I looked up at the skylight. It was papered with elm leaves and a thick, putty-colored light. The rain and wind had stopped, and I heard the quietness for the first time, the way it clotted around my head.
Outside, the tires of Hugh’s Volvo turned into the driveway. His car door slammed, and I felt the vibration move through the walls. As I descended the stairs, the years between us seemed accumulated everywhere, filling the house, and it seemed strange to me, how love and habit blurred so thoroughly to make a life.