Teresa clipped along the baking goods aisle, tossing items into her cart. More flour, more cornmeal, more chocolate chips, because you always needed those. Sugar and marshmallows. Evaporated milk. She stopped and picked up bags of coffee and inhaled deeply, enjoying the aroma. Amberlin trotted alongside her, silent until they reached the produce aisle.
“Teresa”, Amberlin said then, “I'm concerned about you. Are you sure you aren't missing Donnie more than you say?”
Teresa put down the bunch of basil she'd been sniffing and looked at Amberlin as if she'd just noticed her presence.
“Of course I am,” she said, and put the basil in the cart.
Amberlin sighed. “You know, it helps to talk about it.”
“Sometimes it does,” Teresa agreed. “And sometimes it helps to smell the scallions.” She grabbed a half dozen bunches of these and put them in the cart too. Amberlin felt a ruffle of irritation, then gave it up. Pushing against the wall of Teresa's silence wasn't very efficient, or very much fun. It was particularly futile when Teresa was concentrating on what she needed to get, already imagining it back in the kitchen becoming the food it would be, or luxuriating in the abundance of smells and textures and colors of food around her, which represented a world of possibilities.
Amberlin wondered why she had bothered to go along. Delia would probably say she told her so. At times like this, Teresa wasn't a talker. So Amberlin wasn't doing any good, and she didn't even like to shop. The abundance of choices at grocery stores made her nervous, and deep down she was sure that shopping provided a misguided substitute for the instinct to hunt, but since it wasn't real, it never truly satisfied. That's why everyone needed so much junk.
Whenever the women went to a mall together to have a day of cat shopping, where they'd touch everything and buy nothing, Amberlin would have to go outside and pace and wish she smoked cigarettes like Christine so she could coat her lungs with something other than mall air.
“I can't stand the air,” she said. “I can't stand what I'm breathing in.”
She thought it was because she was breathing in what everyone else breathed out, which was a sort of hopeless wanting. Like breathing in unrequited love, only worse, because it wasn't really love. It was just hunger. She was breathing in hunger. And now, with Teresa, in the kitchenware aisle, she was breathing in loneliness. She began to feel depressed.
“Tereesa,” a voice called, and Amberlin looked up to see a woman with bouffant black hair and very red lips rolling her cart toward them.
“Hello, Karen,” Teresa said, rather stiffly, Amberlin noted.
“How are you? Getting through the holidays?” She leaned in close. “Your first without Sam, isn't it?” she asked, oozing oily sympathy.
“No,” Teresa said, stone-faced. “He left me years ago, when he started sleeping with other women. Last year he just made it official.”
The woman's face lifted in shock, then came to rest again inside the lines of her heavy makeup. She made her way out of the conversation as gracefully as she could, and disappeared into the produce section of the store. Teresa pushed the cart ahead, stopping only briefly to pick up and examine a chef's knife, which she rejected after she ran her thumb along the blade.
“Teresa, what was that for? She was just being nice,” Amberlin whispered. “Karen? Not her,” Teresa said. “She's a … a vampire. Sucks people's grief like a tit.”
“A vampire?”
“You know,” Teresa said. “Always looking for someone who's bleeding. They smell other people's trouble, and they lick it like it tastes good. Maybe they think if they eat yours, they won't get any of their own. They go home at night and count off how many bad things happened to other people. Then they check the statistics and figure out how safe they are.”
Amberlin was surprised at the bitterness in Teresa's tone. She could be angry, but she wasn't bitter. “Teresa, maybe that's just your projection,” she said hopefully. Somehow, she'd feel less depressed if that were true.
“Maybe it is,” Teresa said, “and maybe she's a vampire.”
Amberlin made a tsk-tsk sound at her. Teresa turned skeptical when psychological terminology was bantered about, much to the irritation of her friends who were in various stages of therapy. Amberlin thought that half her skepticism was fear of what would happen if she let her skin be exposed in that particular way.
The closest Teresa ever came to therapy was after her third miscarriage, when she took time off from teaching and found a nun in her parish to talk to. She was looking for spiritual guidance, but Sister Anna was more of a social activist than a contemplative. She suggested Teresa come work with her in the soup kitchen downtown. Teresa did, and Sister Anna was surprised at how knowledgeable she was about cooking. She wondered why Teresa hadn't become a cook, and suddenly, so did Teresa. Maybe it was because cooking was too easy, and a job was supposed to be work. But that fall, instead of going back to the school where her husband was principal, she went back to school as a student of the culinary arts. As it turned out, that was all the therapy she needed. By the next year she was pregnant again, and Donnie was the result.
They turned into the feminine products aisle and clipped along. Amberlin grabbed at a box of tampons and tossed them in the cart with the rest of the goods.
“You got your period?” Teresa asked.
“Yes. I feel whiny about it. And I can't even complain to Sherry, because she has hers, and she feels whiny too.” Teresa grinned. “That's what's tough about being with a woman. You get in sync and got nobody to bitch to. It'll probably get worse when you live together.”
Amberlin stopped walking and frowned down at her feet. She felt suddenly and inexplicably alone. Terribly alone. She felt as if her rejection of Sherry's offer, and Teresa's rejection of her help, Teresa's bitterness at the woman who asked about Sam, James and Christine's fight, and Christine's absence were all signals of that aloneness. It was impossible, she decided, for humans to be anything but alone. Tears formed at the back of her eyes, and she stood in the aisle, waiting for the feeling to pass. It must be the holidays, she told herself. They make everyone a little crazy.
“Y'know,” Teresa was saying as she walked ahead. “You oughta try liver and onions. It'll build your blood.” She continued ahead about half an aisle, then realized she was alone. She stopped, turned, and looked at Amberlin, then dragged the cart backward to her.
“You okay?” Teresa asked, then ducked down to look at her face. “What is it? You don't like liver?”
Amberlin shook her head. “I'm okay. Just—gimme a minute, okay?”
“Some smart woman once told me it helps to talk about it,” Teresa noted.
Amberlin picked her head up. “You don't think I should just smell the basil?”
Teresa picked it up from the cart and offered it. “If it works,” she said.
Amberlin gave Teresa a weak smile. She'd come to the store to get Teresa to talk, and what she needed was someone to talk to herself. She wondered if that motive was propelling her all along. People, she thought, were peculiar.
“Sherry found an apartment,” she said.
“What?” Teresa asked.
“She wants us to move in together,” Amberlin concluded when she saw Teresa's uncomprehending expression.
Teresa's face curled itself into deep thought, then slowly spread into a wide smile. “Congratulations,” she said, mischief making itself known in her eyes. She turned to the rack of utensils behind her and slid a turkey baster off its hanger. “Maybe you'll be needing one of these?” Amberlin slapped it out of Teresa's hand. “Stop that. Teresa, put it back. Good God. We won't—I mean, honestly, Teresa. Do you have any idea how crude that is?”
Teresa laughed, and hung it back on its rack. Sherry had once told her a story about a lesbian couple who used a turkey baster for impregnation. They said it was more reliable than sex. “C'mon,” she said, taking Amberlin's elbow and walking with her. “I think it's wonderful. I'm very happy for you.”
Amberlin groaned and hid her face in her hands.
“What're you worried about?” Teresa asked. “Sherry's great.”
Yes, Sherry was great, and Amberlin was happy with her, but was that love? And did she want to be bisexual? She thought that was a kind of cop-out, a way of not declaring your real sexuality, but she didn't see herself as a lesbian either. She felt like she did sometimes when she couldn't decide what she wanted to eat. She'd stand in a store, staring at split peas and at lentils, going back and forth between them. Split peas or lentils? Lentils or split peas? Maybe she wanted both. Maybe she wanted neither. Eventually, a clerk would ask if she needed help, and she'd say no thank you, and leave with nothing.
She wished she could come down firmly on one side or the other. Be this or that. Find a fixed spot on the horizon and follow it.
She couldn't though, and she chalked that up to a general inability to commit after her divorce, which felt like such an awesome failure. She worried that she'd picked Sherry as a way of avoiding commitment. She worried that she'd want to be with a man the minute they moved in together. She worried that she was worrying so much over something that had nothing to do with world peace or the disappearance of the Karner blue butterfly and the rain forest.
“Worried,” Amberlin said, chewing on the word. “No. I'm terrified. It's not something I expected of my life, to live with a woman. I assumed I'd end up with a man and a house and a couple of children. It just seemed more likely, statistically speaking. I guess this makes me a lesbian, doesn't it?”
“What if it does?” Teresa said. “C'mon. Let's pick up some cat food.”
They made their way toward the pet food, passing down the baby food aisle. Amberlin nervously handled the jars of strained peaches, strained bananas, strained peas, then put them back on the shelf. After her divorce she would buy the peaches and the custard for herself. Just for herself. Comfort food. Easy to eat, and resembling the ancient comfort of mother's milk in texture, in ease of delivery, in accessibility. She was as embarrassed to admit this as she was to face her parents after the divorce, which happened only three months after a large and costly wedding. Her parents had told her she was foolish to marry. She still had the dress, because she didn't know what to do with it. She wondered if it would be right to wear it again, for a commitment ceremony with Sherry.
“So what're you most worried about?” Teresa asked.
“I don't know,” she said. “Just … what if it doesn't work out. I mean, I didn't expect this. I didn't plan it. And why do people want to live together?”
“We're social animals. We like the comfort of each other's presence. And sometimes it makes sense—for money, to raise a family, that sort of thing.”
“But why would anyone want to put more people in the world? I mean, really, we should be thinking about zero population growth, not babies. I think it's pure ego.”
Teresa's hand paused as she picked up a box of Cream of Wheat. Then the box went into the cart. “Maybe you're right,” she said. “Or maybe we keep trying to get it right. Thinking maybe with this human, it'll be perfect.”
“I think that's what my parents thought. If they just raised us absolutely right, they'd prove to the world that their stand on social issues was correct. That they had the key and knew how to use it. I remember them arranging a meeting with my kindergarten teacher to discuss ways of getting me over my confusion between yellow and green. Sometimes I think we were just social studies experiments.”
Teresa chuckled. “Better than cooking experiments,” she said.
Amberlin groaned. Threw her arms up in the air. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, so Sherry's great. She's the best. The best I met before, during, or since my first marriage. But she wants a commitment and— hell, Teresa. Not only do I have to stop seeing myself as someone who fits in the world a particular way, but I did that once. I got married. It didn't work. I'm not good at it.”
“You never tried the family part,” Teresa noted.
“I was pregnant,” she said flatly “I know. I remember. I was there when you terminated it. That's not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“I meant, you haven't tried living with someone just because you love them. Not because it's right, or acceptable, or because you're trying to make a political statement. Just because you love them and want to be with them.”
“Awful big risk to take before you know if you'll get it right. And I don't like failure. My family didn't believe in it. My school didn't even give grades.”
“Maybe,” Teresa suggested, “you need more practice, to get comfortable with it.”
“You think you're ever comfortable with failure?”
Teresa thought this one through. She supposed she wasn't comfortable with hers. Getting pregnant before she got married was seen as a failure by her parents. And then, when she miscarried after she and Sam were married, she saw that as a failure in herself. The subsequent miscarriages were just failure heaped on failure, but then she'd had Donnie after all, and she wondered if it was a failure that he was so angry at her right now. She wondered if her marriage was a failure because it ended in divorce. She and Sam had managed to stay married through all of the trouble of their lives, but the absence of trouble broke them apart.
He said he didn't see it as a failure. He said it was just life, moving around. She hated him for saying that, because it was just that sort of thing that made her love him to begin with, and now he was using it against her. Then, of course, there were her more recent failures. With Donnie. With Christine. All of them echoing her failure with Nan.
“Maybe you don't get comfortable,” she said. “Maybe you just don't name something a failure so quick. You call it learning, or manure, or something like that.”
Amberlin gaped. “Manure?”
“Yeah. It takes shit to grow good vegetables, right? Or—what's that phrase you use?—another fucking growth opportunity?”
“I suppose,” Amberlin said reluctantly. “But my parents didn't fail. They never divorced.”
Teresa rolled her eyes. “Your father lives in Maryland and your mother lives in New York. When's the last time they spent more than two weeks together in the same house?” she asked.
Amberlin's face relaxed, and then she giggled at the prospect. “They'd kill each other. Or starve from political correctness. Tuna's bad. Grapes are out. Coffee's no good. Teresa, you're not putting that slab of ham in the cart. Do you know what they feed pigs these days?”
Teresa cast her a look. “I know something about apples that don't fall far from trees,” she said.
“Teresa DiRosa,” a voice rasped behind them. The women turned to see a woman in a very short skirt and precarious heels under a faux fur coat and hat. “How are you?”
“Fine, Ann.” She nodded at Amberlin. “This is Amberlin Sheffer, the baker for Bread and Roses. Amberlin, this is Ann. She teaches at Sam's school.”
“So nice,” Ann said, extending a hand to Amberlin. “Busy for you this time of year, isn't it?”
“Very,” Teresa said. “You?”
“You know how it is. The kids're all hyped up. We're all overworked. I keep telling Sam he ought to let us out a week ahead of Christmas, and if he had any compassion at all he'd do it instead of just yapping about Penelope's pregnancy and how excited he is about it—”
The woman left her mouth open long enough to show Teresa how many fillings she had at the back, then snapped it shut and clapped a hand over it. “Gosh. Did you know? About Sam and Penelope?” she asked. “Or did I just put both feet in my mouth?”
Teresa gazed down at the woman's shoes. “No. They wouldn't fit. Not even in your mouth.”
She turned back to the cart and shoved it furiously in front of her.
Amberlin kept up, biting her lip. She looked at Teresa and saw her face set in stoic determination not to show her emotions, which held all the way through checkout. When they left the store, Teresa set the bags down on the trunk of her car and leaned onto the roof, her shoulders shaking hard.
Amberlin patted her back, said words like “There there. We knew he'd gone nuts anyway, didn't we? There there.” She wouldn't try to fix this, or cheer Teresa up. She knew better than to offer anything except the comfort of small sounds and her hand on Teresa's back. She'd been there through some of the end of Teresa's marriage, though Delia told her it had been going bad for some time before she knew Teresa.
He had his first affair a year or so after Nan's death, and Teresa was so closed in her own grief at that time, she didn't find out about it until much later. He had taken up with a woman in her twenties. And when Teresa finally put it all together, they had a screaming fight and he swore it was just a moment of craziness. He never got to shop, he said. They were married so young, he never got to look around at other women.
“You're shopping?” she screamed at him. “Get a car. Get a goddamn life.”
When she found out about the second one—another woman in her twenties—she didn't say a word. She just took all the wineglasses that were a wedding present from his mother and smashed them on the kitchen floor, one by one.
“Talk to me, Teresa,” he pleaded.
“I am,” she replied, and smashed another glass.
He had his affairs, but he wouldn't leave. He wanted to stay with her until he got this out of his system. Donnie was in his teens and very busy, so he claimed later not to have even noticed there was trouble, but that may have been because they knew how to act when he was around. When he wasn't, they grew grim and silent in each other's presence.
Then, after all their grim silences and her even grimmer waiting, he said he wanted a divorce. Donnie's senior year of high school, and he decided to book. When she wasn't furious, she was relieved. Their home had become an absence. That's all. Just an absence. He was absent—out shopping—and she was absent because she couldn't look at him with respect or love anymore. She couldn't see him outside of what he'd done to her.
She couldn't even remember that she used to love him. She couldn't remember who he was when he was twenty-eight and she was twenty-one and he was crazy about her and she was wild for him. She couldn't remember that they both had ideals about work and life. She couldn't remember the years in between when he'd comforted her over the lost pregnancies and rejoiced with her when Donnie was born. She didn't know if they grew apart the way you do from people you live with unless you make an effort to really see them. Or if it was Nan's death, her grief, coming between them. Or if it was him. Or all of the above.
“You changed,” he told her. “You closed up. I couldn't touch you anymore.”
“You changed,” she spit back at him. “I didn't want to touch you.”
And even if there was truth in what he said, if she had turned some essential part of her inward when Nan died, he hadn't tried very hard to coax it back out. He was too busy shopping.
She hated him for becoming the stereotype of middle age, shopping for someone else's youth to replace the one he'd lost. Hated him for not rising above it. Hated him for becoming a vampire. And she was so glad it was over, like a root canal she had to live through and now could recover from.
After a while Teresa lifted her head and wiped her eyes, at which point Amberlin could see that she was grinning broadly. “Did you ever see an expression like the one on that woman's face?” she asked, choking back a laugh.
“You're … laughing?”
“God yes. What an asshole. What a goddamn vampire”.'
“The woman?”
“And my ex-husband.” She leaned her back against the car and took a deep breath of night air. “I am so glad I'm through with him. I am so glad it's not me having that baby. God forgive me, but I am so damn glad, I can't even begin to say.”