Miniature horses and miniature sheep fenced into powder-blue pastures or waiting in a plastic barn; a piglet-sized velvet pig, rabbit-sized stuffed rabbits; a two-story, two-bedroom house you could close up and carry like a cheerily demented briefcase; the living room’s minefield of colored wooden blocks—these did not change. Nor did the room’s color scheme—blue and yellow and white—cornflower sofa, blue tufted carpet, pale lemon reading chair—nor the kitchen’s broad oak table, the shells along the windowsills, the finger paintings pinned to the walls. By the kitchen door: piled running shoes and school shoes and boots. In Katy’s room, stacks of hair bands, a poster of Colorado wildflowers. A fruit scent of shampoo wafted from the upstairs bathroom, spilling past laundry baskets of kids’ shirts and jeans and socks, baskets of pastel and dark blue pajamas. The pungent scent of coffee in the morning, sharpened by noon, the scent of stewed beef or roast chicken, onions, green beans, baked sugar, hot chocolate. All the same. A clock on a living room shelf—once belonging to James’s father—disappeared. In the bedroom, now Nora’s alone, James’s absence became apparent, his socks, boxers, and T-shirts gone from the drawers, the closet empty of shirts and suits. In the storage room, Nora stacked boxes of the things he’d left.
The brushing sound of turned pages continued from Theo’s room, except on weekends when Theo stayed out with friends. Absent were James’s predawn shower and kitchen rattling, the regular 6:00 AM opening and closing of the outer door, the revving motor. While other weekday sounds were unaltered, Katy’s footsteps turned heavy. Not stomping: not so forceful. A thudding, as if a kind of speech addressed to each room, or to the road beyond the exterior walls, perhaps to Boston. Or as if the sound might echo back through the house to an earlier moment, before James left; or back to Rome, and to the house before Rome. More often now, Nora would sigh, sometimes in response to the thudding, the two sounds alternating jaggedly.
In the weeks after James left, the membrane of each day seemed to Nora so thin it might tear any time. She felt a kind of vertigo. As if, on a sleepy morning, while you stood in the kitchen brewing coffee, the laws of physics might lose force, gravity failing. In what direction would you fall? And when she thought of the day James left, she thought of the way he addressed the column of air beside her—later she found herself stepping into that space—as if speaking not to Nora but to himself, or his former self, or to some other Nora, say the part that had leaked away. Perhaps he confused her with a column of air, not recognizing where Nora ended and empty air began.
Yet without the leaching drag of James’s discontent, the days became simpler. The trick was to stay in the traces of household routine. One night after she put the little girls to bed, Nora allowed herself a martini, and a second one, and the cocktail party scrim returned. She’d begun to buy packs of cigarettes and ration them, two or three a day, though that night she took her cigarettes and her drink out on the deck, at the east end, sheltered from the wind. She sat on the wood planks, knees bent, back against the house wall, and drank and watched the lights down the beach, and the stars between clouds, and fell into the sound of the waves. She smoked a cigarette and then another, let herself drift, and was for a short time almost peaceful. Eventually the cold and the stiffness in her legs drove her back inside. She’d paid no attention to the time; it surprised but did not trouble her that an hour had passed. Only an hour, and on the deck of her own house. But on the living room sofa, Theo sat rocking Delia, Delia hiccupping, her face tear-streaked.
“What’s up, Mom?” Theo said.
Nora crossed the room to take Delia, and when Theo stood, Delia clung to him. “It’s okay,” Theo said. “Dee’s okay, aren’t you, Dee? I’ll put her back to bed.”
Only an hour. Only her own deck; but the feeling on the deck, the relief, the sensation of her body relaxing into some other place, her mind loosened from trouble, then floating—how lovely that feeling had been. Not exactly necessary, not quite. The next day neither she nor Theo referred to that evening; but how easily it could recur, how easily those scrim moments might accrue. She wasn’t, she thought, sorry enough.
For now, there would be no more drinks. Cigarettes—rationed—but only when the little girls were asleep, or occupied by Katy or Theo, only when Nora was in hearing distance. Then Nora would open the window above the kitchen sink and blow the smoke out; so, too, those seasons in the house were marked by the creak of the window opening, and the increased rush of wind, and the hard click of the window latch. More days smelled faintly of tobacco mixed with salt air; more evenings only of milk.