It was dark by the time Kay got home. She could smell West Valley as soon as she turned off the freeway—the damp woodsy kick to the air, the whiff of dead skunk, the undercurrents of horse manure and wild blackberries. She walked up the cottage path with the groceries—lamb chops and raspberries, rosemary and cream. She would make a feast tonight for their anniversary, she would trick Neal into celebrating. In the bag too, a fifth, not a gallon, of good, not cheap, red wine. She would be a better wife, a better mother, and a better alcoholic.
Nicky met her at the back door, swinging the stuffed animal he was too old for. “You’re in trouble,” he sang. She nuzzled his hard little head and breathed in his day—the dinosaurs he’d drawn instead of writing down the spelling words in his workbook, the butterfly he’d watched instead of the ball on the soccer field, the long dreamy route he’d taken along the creek instead of coming straight home.
“Stop gloating,” she told him. “Where’s your dad?”
“He gave up on you.”
“He what?” Kay grabbed for her son but Nicky giggled and wiggled away. She caught him, kissed him, and gave him the bag of groceries to unpack in the kitchen. He tore through to the bottom, looking for cookies. He had quick clever hands, long-fingered, like Francis’s. He had Neal’s thick bangs, Victor’s pink cheeks, Ida’s clear voice. Nothing of hers. He’d be all right.
She looked up as Neal came in. “Don’t tell me you’re still buying that poison,” he said. She looked down at the innocent carton of milk in her hands and tried to remember the article Neal had made her read in Prevention magazine. Cow’s milk damaged bones, teeth, skin, and, if she remembered correctly, caused a form of liver disease not unlike cirrhosis in children.
“It’s low-fat,” she offered. Neal shook his head. He measured something dry and green from a box in the refrigerator, stirred it vigorously into a glass of purified water, and swallowed it down with his face squinched up. Pitiful, Kay thought. You’d think someone who valued their health so much would like their life a little more. She handed Nicky a box of animal crackers under the counter and watched him tiptoe backward out of the kitchen. “I thought we could have a nice dinner,” she began, but Neal shook his head again.
“Maybe tomorrow night. But it’s too late now. Nicky had cereal and I’d just as soon fast. I read this new study. You’re not supposed to put anything on your stomach after six.”
“But it’s our anniversary,” Kay protested.
Neal looked at her, genuinely astonished. “It is?” His voice wavered in its reedy censure, broke. “Oh babe. Why didn’t you remind me?”
“I thought you’d remember.”
“No.” He stared down at the scummy residue in his glass. “No, I didn’t.”
Kay reached in her purse and pulled out a card. “Well, I didn’t do much about it either. All I got you was this.” Self-pity spasmed inside her as she turned to the sink and started to rinse Nicky’s cereal bowl. Neal stood silently behind her. She knew he felt bad. He had always given her something on their anniversary: jewelry, or new sheet music, or dinner out. They used to toast each other with champagne cocktails at Le Petit Jardin and then order garlicky escargot and melt-in-your-mouth sweetbreads and lovely gold and green purees of baby thises and baby thats; they’d hold hands and make plans for trips they’d take, remodeling they’d do, gardens they’d put in. But all that was gone now. All this last year, Neal had been distracted. At first she’d believed him when he said it was business worries that weighted him down, made him too tired to go out, or talk, or make love. But his mysterious weariness had gone on for month after month and finally she had to face the truth: He didn’t love her anymore. She’d been a fool to think anyone could. Maybe her skin exuded some invisible chemical repellent. Maybe she was repellent, heart and body and soul. Neal wouldn’t tell her what was wrong and when she stormed he said she was “spiraling” and “insecure.” Well who wouldn’t be insecure? She sniffled, wiped her nose with the back of her wrist, and watched the evening’s first tears splash effortlessly into the sink. “What’s happening to us?” she asked.
Neal came up behind her, placed his hands on her shoulders, and leaned close to her cheek. “Nothing’s happening,” he said as he always said. “We’re fine. I’m worried about the shop is all.”
Kay thought of Neal’s shop: Sorensen’s Art Supplies & Framing, a dusty high-raftered storefront in a reconverted stable in downtown West Valley. She had always loved the big room with its clutter of brushes and paints. Prints and posters swung from the ceiling in bright banners and old photos and oil paintings lined the walls. It smelled good in Neal’s shop, like sweet chalk and turpentine and charcoal, and the acoustics were great. The last time she’d gone in, Neal had been blasting the World Series, but he also had tapes of her playing Beatles songs, with Nicky singing along in a brave off-tune voice. The shop didn’t make much money, barely enough to live on, but Neal had never cared much about money; that was one of the best things about him.
“Is there something there I could help you with?”
“What could you do?”
“I could do whatever you want. Frame. Mat. Charm the customers.”
“No.”
“Just no?”
Kay looked down as his hands trembled along the length of her arms, carefully avoiding contact with her breasts. She had never liked Neal’s hands; they had always reminded her of rat paws, with their glaze of fine white hairs and deep-set narrow nails. But she had liked other things about him. The way his eyes closed up when he smiled. His gentle fussy kindness to children and animals. His niceness. Neal was—used to be—the nicest man she’d ever met. She touched an age spot on the back of his hand she had not seen before. “This is Kay’s old old man,” Francis had said, introducing Neal to some friends at a cocktail party at his golf club. “I’m just her father.” She remembered Neal’s eyes darting toward her, his smile faltering as the other men laughed. He had seemed frightened then, and he seemed frightened now. She brought the age spot to her lips and kissed it.
“Things will get better,” Neal promised. “I know right now is bad. I’m preoccupied at work and you’re under a lot of pressure too.”
“The concert,” Kay nodded.
“No, I meant your mother. Her dying.”
“She’s not dying.” Kay pushed back, puzzled. Didn’t Neal know Ida at all? He didn’t seem to. When he’d first met her parents he had turned to her, eyes shining, and pronounced, with conviction, “Your father’s a genius and your mother’s a sweetheart.” She should have known then that Neal could never help her. “Mom will live forever,” she explained. “Dr. Deeds says she’s got the heart of a twelve-year-old. She’ll be in a wheelchair for life, but it’s going to be a really long life.”
“Oh babe.” Neal sucked in his breath. Kay stood silent, stubborn. After another second, he released her. “Well,” he said, “happy tenth.”
“Ninth.”
“Really? Seems longer.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean … oh forget it.”
Neal trudged back to the living room and Kay threw the sponge into the sink. Charles Lichtman bicycled through her brain, shot her a heart-stopping smile, and disappeared, his rose-colored bandanna fluttering behind him. She sighed, fished the sponge out, and finished rinsing the dishes—thick brown and white dishes Neal had used during his long stint of bachelor life. She soaped and rinsed the flatware Francis and Ida had given her when they bought a new pattern. The griddle she wiped down on the Wedgwood stove had belonged to Neal’s mother. In fact all the appliances in the kitchen had belonged to Neal’s mother; she had lived in this cottage until the night Neal told her he was getting married, whereupon she had a quiet, tactful stroke and died. Kay folded a dish towel and hung it back on the rack, then refolded it and hung it a bit straighter She often caught herself doing things like that for Mrs. Sorensen’s approval, and sometimes when the house settled she imagined she heard a heavy step and felt Mrs. Sorensen’s round eyes in steel-rimmed glasses rest dimly upon her. She had liked the old woman and didn’t mind trying to please her ghost. It was child’s play after years of trying to please Francis and Ida.
Still, some willful displeasuring was in order once in a while, wasn’t it? She opened the bottle of expensive Bordeaux, poured a full glass, and drank, frowning at the faded plaid paper on the walls. She had taken the ruffled curtains down long ago and repainted the cupboards; she had refinished the dining room table and bought a new bed for their bedroom. She had transformed Mrs. Sorensen’s sewing room into a music room; it was just big enough for her baby Baldwin, and with the door closed and his earphones on, Neal could watch television without having to hear her practice. Nicky’s room was redone, with dinosaur decor wall-to-wall. But most of the cottage was as it had been in Mrs. Sorensen’s time, a warren of low-ceilinged rooms with a musty stench to them. The best thing about the place was the wide front porch that looked out onto the street, and the creek and woods in back.
She saw Neal enter the back yard now. She narrowed her eyes, wondering how she would see him if she didn’t know him. A tall man with bad posture and a thick grey ponytail in a faded Jefferson Airplane tee shirt—someone’s bachelor uncle, gentle and solitary. From this distance you couldn’t see the gold lights in his eyes or hear the catch in his voice when he said “Oh babe.” Curious, Kay watched him pause under the porch light to pick mint leaves and drop them into his pocket. He would take them to the shop tomorrow and boil them on his hot plate and make a piss-colored tea which he would sip as grimly as hemlock, pausing only to take his pulse. When had this unwholesome fixation on his health begun? When the fertility doctors told them his sperm count was so low that Nicky’s conception must have been a statistical miracle? He had taken that news with his usual stoicism, had promised her they’d adopt when they could afford it, and had refused to talk about it since. When his biggest client died of a seizure he had become a vegetarian, and when the owner of the shop next door died of pancreatic cancer he had started taking massive vitamin supplements. But he hadn’t really started to proselytize about nutrition until Ida’s second or third amputation. Her illness made him ill, Kay decided. His fear of it. She refilled her wineglass. If Neal ever had to live a day in Ida’s body he’d get a lesson in courage and endurance that would probably kill him.
Oh what was the matter with him? with her? with them? Other couples didn’t live in silence or go for months without sex. When was the last time they had made love? Labor Day? Victor and Stacy prayed together, hand in hand, every night in front of their waterbed before tumbling into the missionary position. Zabeth and her lovers soaped each other up with chocolate guck and licked each other off in her candlelit shower. Even Francis and Ida were sexual; Kay had grown up to the rhythmic squeal of their bedsprings. Every morning when Francis left for work Ida tipped her face up and he kissed her goodbye on the lips with a sweet little smack that rang through the house like one of Chopin’s trills, and every night when he came home he whistled to her from the front door and she whistled back.
Neal and I should move, Kay thought. She turned from the window and dried her hands. We should sell this house and his shop and go away. Start over in Oregon or Colorado. Get away from all these role models and family ghosts. Nothing’s keeping us here, not really. Mother needs help but she doesn’t need my help specifically. She has Dad on the weekends, Greta during the week. “I don’t know what I’d do without you”—Ida had always said that, but it didn’t mean anything. She said it to everyone. She could get an ad out tomorrow, Kay thought, and replace me. Wanted: Dum-Dum for Grande Dame. No Skills Needed.
She filled her wineglass again and began to leave the kitchen. As she reached for the light, she saw Neal’s card lying on the table where he’d left it. It was a silly card—a picture of a prince embracing a princess over a slain dragon. The prince had a familiar weight-of-the-world slump to his shoulders, the princess was hamming it up, clasping her hands and batting her lashes, and the dragon had one eye slyly open: the whole effect was meant to be lighthearted, but it fell flat. Kay was ashamed of it and ashamed of the sentiment inside: “To My Hero. You Saved Me.” It wasn’t true. Never had been. If she had any hero, besides the Jamaican laundress who had finally let her out of the hospital courtyard, it was still, for some stubborn, perverse, unimaginative reason, her father: Francis X. McLeod. She wondered why, after all these years, she believed she could call him from jail, from Mars, or from the bottom of the sea and he would come to her rescue. He had not even come to her wedding. Ida had been in Emergency that day with a cracked tailbone from a fall during her tango class, and Francis had been at her side, practicing his putts on the floor.
The kitchen phone rang and she picked it up, nuzzling the receiver under her chin as she tore the card in half. A deep voice said, “Sis?” Oh-oh, she thought, Victor. Victor never phoned unless he wanted something. She pulled the stool over and perched on it. It was best to sit when Victor spoke.
“Yes?” she said. “What can I do for you?”
His salesman’s laugh, not yet perfected, rippled out and ended a note too short. “I just wanted to say hello and give you some good news. Mom’s coming home from the hospital Sunday.”
“So soon?” Kay scanned the calendar on the wall. Two days away. Ida would need lots of care—she always did when she first came home—and now, legless, she would need even more. Greta was a housekeeper, not a nurse. Had Dad hired a nurse? He always said he was going to, just like he always said he was going to fire Greta, but he never did. Usually, Kay had to come up and help.
“That really seems soon.”
“Doesn’t it? Just great. So here’s the thing. Stacy and I were thinking we should all get together and give her a welcome home dinner. Like if we all go up to their house Sunday night and have a real gourmet meal.”
“And who’s going to cook this ‘real gourmet meal’?”
Victor hummed a scrap of hymn and said nothing.
“Stacy?” Kay suggested.
That salesman’s laugh again. “Stacy’s got Bible class all morning and, frankly, between you and I, she just doesn’t get it, about food. And I’d like to, you know that, but it’s hard on Sundays with church in the morning and the lot until six.”
“All tied up, huh. So what were you thinking?”
“Cassoulet.”
“Right. With the goose confit and the boned rabbit? The one that takes four days to make and costs a hundred dollars and still tastes like baked beans?”
“That beef bourguignon you do is always good too. Or plain old coq au vin. There was too much salt pork in it, remember, last time I think I told you, but I really liked what you did with the little pearl onions.”
Kay pulled the phone pad toward her, poked through a kitchen drawer until she found a pencil stub, doodled a second, and finally wrote “pearl onions.” What was the use. She’d been feeding Victor ever since he’d been born; she’d given him his first bottle of formula and his first spoonful of mashed banana. She’d learned to bake before she was six because he liked her egg custards, and by the time she was ten she was frosting the six-layer coconut birthday cakes he requested. So what was one more meal? One more time? She cooked for her parents practically every Sunday anyway. And at least, unlike her husband, they ate what she served. “Have you talked to Mom at all?” she asked.
“I did.” He paused. “She sounded a little strange.”
“I’ll say. I think she’s hallucinating on the morphine. Did she talk about a horse?”
“The thing about Mom is, she needs Jesus. I keep telling her and telling her. She really needs Jesus.” Victor’s voice dropped, then boomed loud and false again. “So we’re all set for Sunday. Terrific. And oh hey I meant to tell you, there’s a sale of late summer peaches at Gladstop’s.”
“No pie. Forget it. You bring dessert.”
“Nothing is better than your warm peach pie.”
“You … bring … dessert.”
“Hey! No need to bite my head off.”
Kay swallowed the last drop of wine in her glass and tried to remember if Victor had been this awful before he turned Christian. He had been a frightened child with fastidious habits who hoarded money. He’d been slow in school and poor at sports and almost invisible at home. Neither Francis nor Ida seemed to expect much from him. He’d been free to eat and watch TV all day. Kay had read to him, helped with his homework, taught him to drive. After she left home, he had a breakdown she still felt guilty about, but what could she have done? She was with Biff and having a breakdown herself. He’d done a lot of drugs, gone in and out of rehab, and then he’d met Stacy and the two of them had gone to a Bible meeting and found Jesus and now he was a militant Christian who believed everyone who wasn’t should be shot.
“I’ll see what I can do about a pie, Vic,” she said now, and he, relieved, said, “I knew you’d come through.”
She hung up the phone, dumped the rest of the wine into her glass, and went into Nicky’s room. “Ready for your story?” She could hear her voice, how thick it sounded. Last week she had started to hiccup in the middle of reading; the week before that she had passed out and he’d had to wake her up. She steadied herself on the back of a chair.
“Not a story, Mom,” he reminded her. “This.” He raised the stuffed animal he called Pokey and pointed to the same thick green book, Dinosaur Facts and Figures, that she had been reading to him for months. She made a face but settled down beside him, the book propped open on her knees. She had just read the dimensions for the tail span of the tyrannosaur for the umpteenth time, trying not to slur, when the phone rang. “That will be your uncle again,” she said, sliding off the bed. “Asking us to bring homemade ice cream with the pie.” She picked the phone up.
But it was Ida. Her voice was small and clear. “I want you to stop it right now,” she said.
Kay laughed. “Stop what?”
“Killing me.”
“What?”
“I want you to stop killing me.”
Kay leaned into the receiver. “Mother?”
“I mean it,” Ida said. “I am not kidding about this. I have had it up to here with you two.” There was a sudden clatter, the sound of something falling. “Goddamn you to hell,” Ida screamed. The phone dropped and went dead.
· · ·
That was a mistake. She would surely pay for that one. Sometimes the penalty was worth it though. Ida waited until the horse finished laughing. His tongue was wet and fat and his teeth were small, stained, and oddly human. Everything about him was wrong, off kilter, like one of her own paintings. She had probably made him up from parts of old enemies. That smug abortionist in Oakland. The art teacher. The redhead at Ransohoff’s. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again the horse was gone but Kay was there.
I know I owe you an apology, Ida thought. And you’ll get it. A big one. But—she closed her eyes again and feigned a deep sleep—not right now, it’s too complicated, I can’t even start. She felt Kay bend over, stole comfort from her smell of soap, red wine, and sweat, the brush of her hesitant lips, her rabbit breath—she must have driven like the wind to have made it over here so quickly—and then fell into a real sleep at last. The dream, if that’s what it had been, did not follow. Kay and Francis did not tumble naked onto her bed, mocking her while she lay beside them helpless, pinned beneath the horse’s sharp hoof.