3

THE SOUND OF hammering has become unbearable for Kaye. She has finished her second Macallan’s and is sucking on the scotch-coated ice cubes. Sitting on the back steps, playing with the ice in her mouth, she watches over the newly mowed lawn to the garage where her husband, Eric, and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Clara, are building a boat. Boat-building is something they do easily without her. Kaye grew up far from water, in landlocked East Central Illinois. She knows nothing about boats.

How many times have Eleanor and her other friends told her that teenagers fight the most with the parent of the same sex? Does this make the fuck-you-moms feel any better? Clara abandons her mother at every possible interaction, which Kaye feels is unwarranted. Frequently, Clara will run out to the garage, refusing to speak, or to help in the house. Kaye does not understand Clara. Clara’s personality is one hundred and eighty degrees different from what Kaye’s was at that age.

Clara has a busy and full life that Kaye envies. She has boyfriends. She loves junk food, pop music, and fashion. She starves herself to fit into tight jeans. She sings in the shower.

Kaye sips the melted ice from her highball glass. She watches as the empty tire swing that hangs from the cottonwood tree sways with the wind. Once, Clara and her friends spent a lot of time on this swing. Now, they hide in Clara’s room, or they leave the house and wander the neighborhood.

Clara goes to her father for advice. He is less questioning, less judgmental. And he laughs. Sometimes Kaye can hear his booming laugh from the garage across the back lawn. Clara can work alongside her dad without persecution, without questions about whom she is with and what she does in her spare time.

Eric had said, “Could you please stop doing that?” when Kaye reminded him of the exam Clara needed to study for, and her math homework, and the chores she was supposed to do.

And Kaye had said, “She needs to take care of herself and be responsible.”

“And learning to work power tools isn’t learning to take care of yourself?”

Kaye couldn’t tell if he was being serious. “She has homework.”

“Which she can do later.”

Kaye turned away. “I just want her to empty the fucking dishwasher and put her clothes away before she goes to have fun! Is that too much to ask?” But by this point, Eric had entered the garage, turned on the table saw, and was unable to hear his wife.

Kaye takes the last whisky-coated ice cube between her fingers and puts it in her mouth. The sweetness quickly fades.

Today, the temperature outside was warm, but now Kaye can feel the cool coming in from Lake Michigan, a mile-and-a-half away. Usually it floats in a traveling mist, the cold air mixing with the warm, which hovers near the street. As evening progresses and the light in the sky wanes, the garage windows begin to glow steadily and grey shadows move behind the frosted glass. Kaye thinks of the spiders and the mice that live in the corners and cracks of the garage floor. She involuntarily twitches as she moves through the double doors at the back of the house, into the family room. She pads quietly through the dark hallway into the kitchen.

There, she thinks about preparing dinner, though it’s late. She remembers dating Eric in graduate school, then following him to Scotland, to a suburb of Edinburgh to meet his parents. She’d had more energy then. They had taken a standby flight to London, and then transferred to a high-speed train north for another five hours. It had been a dank summer. Her feet were always cold and it was always raining. Eric’s parents set them up in his boyhood bedroom and they shared his single bed. Eric was an adventure. He was fast-talking, loud, and enthusiastic. Now he is bossy. Now he spends all of his spare time building a boat.

In the beginning, Eric had impressed her with his ability to absorb everything around him. At some point in their courtship he revealed his love of Viking culture. This in turn manifested in a liking for Scandinavian cuisine. Eric and Kaye and five more graduate students would work all night then pile into an old Honda Civic and drive to Andersonville, for Swedish pancakes and cinnamon rolls, crowding around a table at a place that offered large portions at a cheap price. At these times Eric made Kaye laugh so hard that she forgot her fatigue.

Now, years later, Eric keeps himself busy and separated from his wife, a Scandinavian cooking class one summer, a kayak trip another summer. Kaye now experiences his gregariousness as overwhelming, where once she thought it a useful quality to balance out her own shyness. It was entertaining. Now she knows all of his jokes. In the garage with Clara, he can talk all he wants. Kaye doubts Clara listens. But, maybe she does.

Kaye draws a corkscrew from the utility drawer and takes an unopened bottle of white wine from the refrigerator. Thank God, she tells herself, for the small mercy of wine. She drinks a glass while chopping garlic, squeezing limes, and pouring olive oil into a large plastic container with the chicken breasts. Alcohol takes the bitterness from her life, helps her to speak out where once she was shy. She places the chicken container in the fridge and takes out a tomato and some lettuce to make a salad. Sometimes she feels she can perform these tasks in her sleep.

WHEN KAYE OPENS the garage door and asks her husband and daughter when they will be ready for dinner, they say they don’t know. So, she closes the door and walks silently away. In the light of the patio, she cooks the chicken on the gas grill. She pours another glass of wine from the bottle she has brought outside.

The chicken and salad are good. Kaye knows she is a good cook. In the years of her marriage she has moved far beyond frying ground beef and adding canned soup and frozen vegetables. She sits on the couch in the family room with her dinner plate and her wine.

She wakes up at the hint of dawn, at least she thinks it’s dawn. As she comes to, she realizes that it is her neighbor’s backyard floodlights. Someone has covered her in an old quilt that had belonged to her grandmother. The quilt is soft from years of giving comfort. Kaye keeps it in the back of the coat closet and she doesn’t remember how it came to cover her. Her mouth is dry, furry, and she tries to hack a cough to relieve it, unsuccessfully. Vaguely, she begins to put together the scenario of the night, the lights on in the garage, her late dinner alone, finishing the bottle of wine and falling asleep on the couch. In the kitchen she finds that her dishes have been cleaned and that the remains of the grilled chicken are in a container in the refrigerator. Had Eric and Clara eaten? She assumes so but she is too tired to check inside the container. Her head throbs and her legs are stiff as she climbs the stairs to the bedroom she shares with Eric. His body forms a mound under the comforter. She lies far away from him, on top of the blanket, in her clothes. She drifts back to sleep, not touching him. She is far away.