On the bathroom counter she’d come to hate (it was old, beige-flesh-toned Formica, with faint cracks you could not help mistake with a shudder of repugnance for loose hairs) the wife set out the husband’s prescription pills both current and years-old.
So many! The wife had foraged in the medicine cabinet and in cupboards beneath the sink. The husband’s medical history in miniature: digoxin (heart), blood thinner (high blood pressure), painkiller (root canal work), Lipitor (cholesterol), barbiturates (insomnia). Plus capsules for kidney dysfunction, so old they’d begun to crack and leak their white gritty powder.
Also on a shelf beneath the sink her groping fingers found an old sticky four-ounce container of Deet.
Her plan was to grind a selection of the medications into a fine powder and this powder she would dissolve in tea. Very hot exotic tea, to disguise the taste. She’d become a connoisseur of herbal infusions and had an impressive array on a kitchen shelf: passion fruit, cinnamon apple spice, citrus zinger, pomegranate zinger, peppermint, Bengal. Even the Deet would be undetectable if she didn’t include more than a drop from an eyedropper.
In this way, she would regain control of her life. Of what remained of her life.
Yes, it was deliberate: she was using the husband’s medications exclusively, and none of her own.
Beautiful Wedgwood teacups she would place side by side on saucers, on a tray. One of these would contain the lethal concoction, the other just herbal tea. She had yet to work out how precisely she would do this, for she had to be very clever; she must not arouse suspicion in her visitor, for that would be catastrophic. Even if others forgave her, never would she forgive herself.
To the casual eye—to the visitor’s eye—there would appear to be no difference between the teacups and their contents: steaming-hot pungent-smelling herbal tea. Out of Solomonic fairness the wife would so position the teacups, she would so turn the tray about, that she herself could not know which cup was which.
For this solemn transaction, as she thought it, the wife would use two of her most exquisite teacups, inherited from a long-ghosted great-grandmother: pearl-white Wedgewood with tiny pink roses. She would have to wash the cups beforehand, fastidiously—the cups had not been used in years. No one gave a damn about teacups any longer: in the wife’s lifetime the world had coarsened to stout, sturdy-proletarian mugs for all hot drinks. Certainly the husband’s thick fingers could not have handled such delicate teacups, he’d probably broken china from the Wedgwood set years ago which was why so few pieces remained. But the visitor would notice, probably: the classy visitor would exclaim Oh! How beautiful!
Or possibly: Oh, Mrs. Stockman! How beautiful!
Like the gracious hostess the wife knew herself to be, or would have been if her life had not rattled along a terribly wrong, mistaken trolley track, she would allow her visitor to choose between the cups. She would drink from the cup that remained.
Like Russian roulette, it was. Though radically abbreviated, and played without the opponent’s knowledge. You don’t owe your adversary the first shot—this was a principle of gun ownership, one of myriad fatuous catchphrases you often heard in rural New Hampshire.
What mattered was, the wife’s fate would lie outside her. She would be blameless.
The music of chance. Whatever is, is.
By the time the medications are ground into fine white odorless powder and a single droplet of Deet mixed into the powder the bright May afternoon has waned. A roller-coaster day, a rare day when the wife can breathe. (For the wife is asthmatic, at times. More recently, more frequently.) Now trembling with excitement, or with dread so thrilling it is indistinguishable from excitement. At the stove staring at the teakettle heating on blue flames with a vibratory hum.
She hears the doorbell. Is it five-thirty P.M.—so soon?
Hears the oldest daughter’s just-slightly-mocking voice: “Hey, Mom? One of Dad’s students is here.”
“God damn. No.”
But yes. For everywhere in the village the wife’s eyes locked onto her: the long-legged girl.
Even before the wife knew the girl’s name. Even before the wife knew, could guess, could not not-know, how (intimately, outrageously) she and the long-legged girl were connected.
Along the periphery of the sprawling college campus on its several wooded hills. On leafy walkways in the village, and on pedestrian crossings on Main Street. In the college bookstore, in the frozen yogurt store, in the CVS and in Geno’s Pizzeria. In the post office facing the village green, and on the graveled paths of the village green. Suddenly it began to happen that the hapless wife’s eyes swerved in their sockets like magnets drawn to the irresistible figure of the long-legged girl.
An elegantly poised girl. A girl with long straight silver-blond hair that fell past her shoulders, a perfect patrician profile, gray-green eyes gliding like liquid over prim adult faces. A girl who wore black leotards, or very short black spandex shorts, or skintight jeans that curved down at her impossibly narrow hips to expose not only her dimple of a belly button but the soft pale down surrounding it like a halo.
A girl of (perhaps) twenty-one. A girl with a face so young, so unlined, she might’ve been a fetus. (The wife thought, meanly.) Lithe, sly, graceful as a dancer even when straddling a bicycle crossing College Avenue in front of the wife’s compact Nissan.
In fact, was the long-legged girl a dancer? One of the husband’s young protégées?
Strange and unnerving, that the wife (who had a reputation for not seeming to recognize anyone in public places) should so frequently see the long-legged girl, and be stopped in her tracks by the sight of the girl.
Especially, driving had become hazardous for the wife. At such times she was particularly prone to seeing the girl and so she’d become apprehensive, distracted whenever she left the house. Lately insomniac, sleep like a tattered quilt that didn’t quite cover her stubby feet, she had to make an effort to stay awake behind the wheel of her car, to brake at traffic lights and stop signs, crosswalks. Once, she’d been a quite good driver. The children would never believe it.
Mom, wake up!
But she was awake. That was the problem.
Spring was dazzling-bright and all too soon, too much after a bitter-cold New England winter of terrifying ennui. The wife was a food writer, of some small, quality renown. But food had begun to fail, as inspiration, even as she overate compulsively. (Or is all overeating compulsive?) Writing had become too much effort, like trying to push a coarse thread through the eye of a small needle: nerves of steel were required, and for so paltry a reward. She’d even begun to dread leaving the house where once any excuse had been enough to propel her out the door—like checking out a new organic tofu restaurant. Reckless courage had to be summoned to press the switch in the garage, to send the door upward in a roll of thunder, to climb into the car that smelled as if something small had died in it, to back out of the garage with shut eyes. An accident waiting to happen but if it was truly an accident that awaited, somewhere beyond the end of the badly cracked asphalt driveway of the Stockman residence on cryptically named Hope Street, how could the fault be hers?
Nothing so demoralized the wife as household errands involving groceries, dry cleaners, hardware stores. The sand fleas of quotidian life crawling up your legs, invisible and awful. And bloodsucking, in the tiniest increments.
Dreading the short drive into town. Scarcely a mile. She’d put on weight, no longer walked where once, not so very long ago, she’d not only walked but ran—or almost. Fast-walked, it used to be called.
So, had to drive. Had to hoist herself into the car. Damned Nissan so compact, so cheap-built, she could feel it (she’d swear) sag beneath her weight with a faint jeering protest. And as she drove toward Main Street where during the school year the procession of undergraduates never ceased, like marionettes that have broken their strings, she would begin to feel a deeper dread, as of something in the marrow of her bones begging, pleading with her—No. Turn back. It isn’t too late—even as another time she felt the rapid-eye excitation of REM sleep, an involuntary tug of her eyeballs so that she was seeing, to her dismay, the long-legged blond girl on a sidewalk, or in the street, or on her bicycle hurtling past like the Greek goddess of the hunt Artemis …
Unmistakably, it was that girl. Though two-thirds of the undergraduates at the college seemed to be blond, and most of these were tall and long-legged, and attractive, and wore interchangeable clothes, yet the girl the wife chanced to see was invariably that girl.
“But I don’t know who she is. I have never seen her before.”
The wife spoke to herself in vexed terms, usually. Dismay with herself, mounting frustration.
At the spring dance recital at the music school? Had it been there the wife had first seen the long-legged girl who was one of Victor Stockman’s senior thesis students?
With an effort the wife could remember. But perhaps she did not wish to remember.
So many dance recitals. So many senior advisees. Decades of girl-undergraduates at the liberal arts college in the Hampshire hills. And dance was a popular major of course since for virtually all majors it was a useless art, a perishable craft, an expensive vanity, a folly to be performed for visiting families, to stir pride in the foolish, and to assuage the unease over the preposterously high tuition and fees at the college.
Founded in 1879, the college could claim its history as one of the first women’s colleges in the United States. On its fabled wooded hills it had been kept small and select, a handpicked fifteen hundred students, unlike the slovenly-large state university a few miles away with its democratic masses; now coed, but with far fewer young men than women and these young men, on the whole, less academically impressive than the women.
It had been purely chance. On a blindingly bright day in April not the wife but the husband was driving the Nissan. Poor Victor, like Elinor, having difficulty lately fitting himself into the car, grunting and panting behind the wheel, fat knees pressed against the underside of the wheel and belly straining against the seat belt, and he’d been fiddling with the radio dial, an NPR interview with a rival composer in residence at Yale, the wife could only just imagine what savage lunges the husband’s heart was taking in his chest even as he was determined to remain stoic, unperturbed—yet suddenly he’d had to brake the car to a stop at a crosswalk near the front gate of the college, sucked in his breath and stared at a tall lithe gliding figure passing just a few feet in front of the car, in the company of two others—the blondes, Elinor would have called them contemptuously if she hadn’t understood that to be scathing in such circumstances was to sound envious and venal instead.
She’d been blond once herself. When she’d been a single-digit age.
Now, what you’d call dirty-blond. Split ends, crackling-dry and casually combed. It was enough to see to the children’s hair and general grooming, she hadn’t time to squander on her own or on anything of hers that was merely hers.
Seeing the flush rising from the husband’s wattled neck into his face, hearing that startled intake of breath, the wife asked coolly, “Is that the one? The long-legged one? And is she one of a series, or is she the last of a series?” It was a wild stab, and a mistake.
For the husband did not laugh. The husband did not laugh at the wife for uttering so bizarre a remark, as ordinarily he’d have done with a dismissive wave of his hand, but instead the husband flushed more deeply and stammered: “Eli, I am sorry. Oh, God! Can you forgive me …”
Very still the wife sat. This was not what she’d anticipated. Caught in the God damned seat belt like an overgrown baby in a high chair. Oh, the wife could not breathe.
Yet she managed, in her most caustic voice, like Eve Arden of the nineteen forties: “Don’t be silly, Victor. Take your foot off the brake. Look where you’re going. Drive.”
By this time the long-legged silver-blond girl and her companions had crossed the street and were gone. Not a glance had they given to the short-of-breath middle-aged couple in the corroded Nissan whose lives were visibly unraveling like a cheap sweater given a sudden yank.
She would forgive. Of course.
She would not forgive. Not this time.
Over the course of years, now nearly seventeen at the college in the Hampshire hills, and several years preceding at the state university at Durham, there’d been a number of girl-protégées who had entered the husband’s life. Not always but usually dancers. Not always but usually blond with fetus-perfect faces, unlined and unlived-in.
Most of these girls had been nameless, faceless. The wife had known, but had not-known. In his sleep beside her the husband might grind his teeth and mutter an obscure name—Em’ly! (Emily?) Tiff ‘ny! (Tiffany?)—that vanished even as the wife tried to decipher it.
In fact, for all of those years the wife had been enormously busy with her own life and a good part of this life the care and nourishment of the lives of others: husband, young children. Her career as a food writer with an anthropologist’s cool eye and a food lover’s avidity of appetite was challenging and occasionally thrilling. I know who I am. That will not change. For a brief, hectic season her husband might be distracted by a girl—or two, or three—but after graduation the girls disappeared. Or so the wife believed.
Other faculty wives assured her, this was so. Usually, this was so.
Well. Possibly the husband kept in touch with some of the protégées, the most promising, the most attractive. The protégées who’d most seemed to admire him. And to need him.
Possibly the husband exchanged emails with the girls. In the city, and away overnight, he might arrange to see them. That was possible. If a girl was performing in a dance program, or in a play, naturally she would provide a comp ticket for her favorite professor Victor Stockman, and naturally, the favorite professor would accept; because she was likely to be a girl from a rich family, whose parents were underwriting her New York lifestyle, it was not unlikely that the comp ticket entailed dinners at swanky restaurants as well, following the performances. And what followed then, the wife could not know. The wife did not wish to know, enormously busy with her life in the Hampshire hills, unable to accompany the husband to New York City for such festive occasions, and uninvited. Certainly the wife had not been jealous.
Telling herself how she had her own life. After all.
Victor believed in monogamy, he’d often said, in jest. One wife at a time.
Truly it was a jest. Those who heard laughed, obligingly.
The Stockmans were devoted to each other, it was often said. Not by the Stockmans perhaps but by others, observing.
There was something fairy-tale about the couple. Each looked subtly deformed, yet you could not put your finger on where the deformity lurked: in the body, in the face, in the gaze, in the soul. Each was “witty”—yet clumsily shy. Each was gifted—the husband a musician-composer, very avant-garde; the wife a writer—a “food critic”—who published in New York City–centric publications and whose first book had had a small, cheering success, too long ago to matter. Neither had been married before this marriage that seemed to have begun in a fairy-tale childhood, as if dwarf-children had married.
That the Stockmans had children—altogether normal-seeming, normal-sized and normal-mannered children, who were mortified by their odd-looking, oddly-behaving parents—was an astonishment of which the parents could know little; though sometimes Elinor saw the wincing look in the oldest daughter’s face, when slovenly Elinor appeared in public in some proximity to the slender, sardonic Isabel—Oh Mom! Isabel murmured with a roll of her beautiful brown eyes.
If the Stockman children knew of their mother’s unhappiness, they could not have known its source. In the Stockman household, the adults never quarreled; the most antagonism their gentlemanly father revealed was a furious humming of the more bellicose composers (Beethoven, Mahler, Shostakovich) through clenched teeth while their mother, hiding away in her kitchen-space like a fat dimpled spider in its web, seethed in silence, and sampled spoonfuls and handfuls of the meals she was preparing.
Old friends of the couple knew something of the frayed nerves between them though Elinor had too much pride to complain of anything so banal as a husband romantically obsessed with blond teenagers. Indeed, Elinor made it a point to amuse house guests and visitors, complaining wittily of the New England town “perfect on the surface” as a Norman Rockwell Christmas card—“We do ‘quaint’ here very nicely,” Elinor told them. “We have plenty of practice.”
Yet, Elinor took a perverse sort of pride in living there. In having persevered, in this remote New England place to which her (then-young, ambitious) composer-husband had brought her, with a promise that it would be for only a few years—until Victor Stockman was established as a brilliant young composer, with invitations to join the music faculty at Juilliard, Curtis, Princeton.
“Well. We are ‘still waiting.’ We do that well, too.”
Driving by the music school, a squat gothic building with leaded windows, Elinor gave the impression of being undecided about whether to drop in to say hello to Victor—“He’d love to see us of course, but probably it isn’t a good idea without calling first. He’s always so busy—teaching, in rehearsals, auditions …” Her bright voice faded, trailed away.
Teaching. Its verbal proximity to leching. Shame!
Sometimes, to the astonishment of a friend to whom Elinor had hinted no unhappiness or unease, scarcely even a characteristic crankiness, she began crying with no explanation. God damn.
Quintessential New England, Elinor told her friends. The residents did not see themselves as “quaint” but rather as “realists”—their suspicion was bred in the bone, like certain types of cancer.
“They believe in expecting the worst. That way they’re rarely surprised and never disappointed.”
Elinor quite enjoyed playing the cynic. It gave her a small mean pleasure to hear her friends laugh appreciatively, sometimes warily, at her witty remarks. Oh, they went away marveling, Elinor Stockman is so funny.
So brave, and so funny. But what a shame, she must have gained forty pounds in the past year alone … Her graying hair was coarsely and crookedly braided and her face looked as if it had been scrubbed, sallow and plain, defiant. Her favorite article of clothing was a sacklike denim jumper worn over a black sweater with a frayed neck; in cold weather she wore a red quilted down coat that resembled a small, strangely ambulatory tent, from which the children hid their eyes.
One of the visitors would recall how quickly Elinor began to pant walking uphill across the village green on a mild spring day. How oddly Elinor stared at several college girls who were talking and laughing oblivious of Elinor and her friend a few yards away.
When the friend asked Elinor if she knew the girls Elinor said irritably of course not, she’d never seen them before.
“There are hundreds of them at the college. You can’t tell them apart. Spoiled little rich girls with long straight hair and perfect orthodontia.”
Elinor spoke with such venom, the friend thought at first that she must be joking. But there was Elinor trembling with something like indignation, turning away from the sight of the girls.
Quickly, the friend changed the subject. Though thinking how unlikely it was that there could be hundreds of girls quite like these with their long straight corn-silk hair, so striking and so self-confident, so beautiful, even in all of New England.
It had become a not-funny joke. Where was Daddy, Daddy was away.
Where was Daddy, Daddy was not having dinner with them that night.
Unfair, Elinor thought. Why do they blame me.
A flame of pure senseless hatred for the children swept over her, their hurt faces, accusing eyes as they stood in the kitchen glaring at her and preparing to sneer at whatever she’d prepared for them to eat.
Then, in a contrary motion, a wave of love for them deeper and more profound than any love she could have discovered for herself came over her, leaving her faint. They are of my body, we are bonded forever. I am responsible for their happiness, and I am failing them.
For it was her fault, essentially. The woman’s fault, failing to satisfy the man. Failing to be enough for the man. No matter that the man is not nearly enough for her.
In the children’s eyes the mother was humbled, humiliated. In the eyes of the oldest girl Isabel, especially.
In the girl’s face a look of anguish, mortification that hardened into the jeering mask—“Oh, Mom. For God’s sake.”
It was Elinor’s very existence that exasperated the girl, and turned her heart against her mother.
Since the previous November the husband had often been away. What was worse, he was rarely far away—just in his damned studio at the college where he frequently worked so late (teaching, meeting with senior advisees, conducting rehearsals), it was easier (as he reasoned) to remain there all night sleeping on a couch than to “hurry home” to sleep for just a few hours.
But what about dinner. Don’t you want to eat with your family.
Why don’t you want to eat with us? YOU ARE US.
She wanted to scream at him, when he did return home. But that would only drive him away again so she hid in the shower filling the drafty bathroom with steam, or in an attic room she’d fashioned into a study. Her first book had been titled Comfort Food: Favorite Recipes of Childhood. Her second book, at which she’d been working for years, would be titled After Comfort Food: Recipes for Adult Survival.
In a rash and uncharacteristically vainglorious gesture the wife had accepted an advance for this second book, that promised (her editor believed) to be a “runaway” bestseller. The advance had long been frittered away, lost.
The husband had always been Elinor’s first reader. He’d been a most enthusiastic reader before Elinor had begun to publish in such places as The New Yorker, Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine; he seemed less certain of her talent now, more critical and grudging with his praise. Not that it mattered greatly for Elinor wasn’t writing much any longer, and had only a scattering of notes and outlines for the second book.
In case of death of author: DNR (do not resuscitate) manuscript.
This notice she’d tacked onto a wall beside her desk. Not sure if it was intended to be funny.
“Elinor, you have changed my life. You have made my life possible.”
In an earlier phase of his life Victor Stockman had been one to make such grandiose pronouncements. Shy, yet stubborn; clearly very intelligent, yet naive and gullible; sexually inexperienced, as Elinor was also, and therefore easily led, seduced. A fattish young man with owl-eyed glasses, a weak chin and a faint stammer, in his early twenties when they’d met and Elinor had perceived in him a musical genius of an arcane type, unworldly, unexpectedly kind (at times) and (at times) childishly short-tempered. Above all, she had perceived in Victor Stockman an inexpert with women, which was to her advantage as she’d been certainly inexpert with men.
Victor was a passionate theorist and composer of “new music”—a protégée of Milton Babbitt (the experimental composer who’d once given an interview titled “Who Cares If You Listen?”) and one of a very small, elite circle of contemporary composers: electronic, minimalist, aleatory, “atmospheric.” Of Victor’s myriad compositions only one had been singled out for acclaim, a chamber quartet influenced by Babbitt, John Cage and Philip Glass, which, by one of those flukes that occurs occasionally in academic music, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1987. (Later, Victor would learn that Milton Babbitt had been one of the jurors on the Pulitzer committee. Mortified, he had wanted to turn back the award but had been dissuaded by Elinor, among others.)
The CD of this prize-winning work would sell less than a thousand copies; Elinor’s Comfort Food sold nearly a hundred thousand copies in hardcover and paperback. Yet, within the Stockman household, as within the college community, it was Victor Stockman who was the renowned, primary spouse, and not Elinor; Victor was the designated genius of the family while Elinor was the faculty wife-and-mother with an “interesting” career on the side.
Since the Pulitzer, now twenty years ago, Victor had completed few ambitious compositions. It had seemed easier, certainly more emotionally rewarding, to concentrate on teaching. He advised on senior honors theses. He codirected the dance program. He’d established a center for young composers and coauthored music with some of them—“Aleatory Harmonies for Farm Implements” was a notable title. His lecture course Experimental Music of the 20th Century from Stravinsky to Glass became so popular it had to be moved into an amphitheater with three hundred seats; his lectures, meticulously prepared, rapid-fire in delivery and bristling like his stiff, graying whiskers, were considered “brilliant”—“cool”—“genius.” The less his admirers understood, the more evident the “genius.”
Elinor did not think it much evidence of genius that Victor was reluctant to ask for a raise in his salary at the college. No one at the famously liberal college was paid what you’d call “well” but Victor was reputed to be a star, one of just a few. His salary raises were minuscule, insulting.
He exasperated the wife by declaring that he’d gladly have worked for half what they paid him, he so loved teaching and working with young people.
Working with young girls, he’d meant. Elinor knew.
“‘An administrator is one who knows how to take advantage of the foolish idealism of another. An idealist is one who knows only how to be taken advantage of.’”
Asked who’d made this sardonic remark Elinor retorted, “H. L. Mencken.” But of course, the remark was purely Elinor.
Yet Victor was a man of pride, including sexual pride. That was the irony. No man however middle-aged and fattish, short of breath, suffering from hypertension and erratic heartbeat, discouraged about his career as by life in general, with badly deteriorating teeth, is totally lacking in sexual pride.
The long-legged girl was not a figment of the wife’s imagination but indeed a dancer, a senior advisee of Victor Stockman’s. One of a lengthy series of “talented” young people with whom he’d worked—the wife told herself—not anyone singular, special.
Yet, the girl’s work was indeed unusual. Her thesis was an adaptation of Herman Melville’s dark allegory “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” as an eerie and starkly sexual ballet set to little-known music of Bartok, which her advisor Professor Stockman had arranged. Not only did the long-legged girl dance the lead role but she’d painted the set herself in blood-red streaks. The costumes (which she’d made herself) were blood-red, in tatters. Male dancers wore black leotards. There was much rushing from one side of the stage to the other. Undeniably, the long-legged girl was outstanding in the lead as a figure trying to free herself from the clutching of others, who seek to drown her or (it wasn’t always clear) mate with her. Beside Elinor, in the first row, Victor stared and stared and stroked his whiskery jaws in a way that seemed to Elinor far too intimate, verging upon the obscene.
At the curtain the girl bowed in a graceful pose of humility from the waist and her long straight silver-blond hair fell about her face shimmering like a falls. And there was Victor Stockman, summoned by the triumphantly smiling girl to stand beside her, that the amphitheater might applaud them both: student dancer, professor/advisor. The two of them—(could it be?)—grasping each other’s hand.
Afterward Elinor accused the husband of holding the girl’s hand in front of a gaping audience—“How could you, Victor! I hate you.“
“That’s altogether ridiculous, Elinor! Nothing of the sort happened. Stacy and I did not touch.”
(So the girl’s name was Stacy. Elinor had not been able to avoid this demeaning knowledge.)
She’d seen what she had seen. Looks of blatant adoration passing between the long-legged dancer in the tattered red leotard and the husband in an ill-fitting suit.
Or indeed, was Elinor imagining it? This past year the children had begun to speak of her in the third person as if she weren’t present. Mom is losing it. Mom is too weird. Mom is having a meltdown. Mom is pitiful. You have to feel sorry for her—poor Mom.
Following this public humiliation, private humiliations.
Heavily the husband sighed. Dared to roll his eyes.
A new habit of Victor’s, stroking his whiskery jaws. Hard little drum of a belly so low, he had to maneuver his belt beneath it. Which made walking just slightly difficult.
Swaggering confidence and yet (if you observed closely) a nervous tic in every pocket waiting to be tugged out like a magician’s handkerchief. The wife tried not to notice how eagerly the husband checked his emails and text messages. Like a teenager, how he could not bear to be separated from his cell phone. (Elinor had misplaced two cell phones out of indifference. But then she was Elinor, an old person’s name.)
Weeks had passed since “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” Weeks of subterranean resistance on the part of the husband and a stiff wounded silence on the part of the wife. As if she were to blame for his behavior.
Please look at me. Please acknowledge what you have done.
Though it wasn’t clear, it had never been clear, exactly what Victor had done: if his erotic obsessions were what you’d call consummated, or just wishful fantasizing.
In calmer moods the wife reasoned that an actual love affair with one of his students was (probably) not likely for prissy fussy clumsy short-of-breath Victor Stockman with his scratchy whiskers and (occasional) flatulence; even if Victor could overcome his physical clumsiness and timidity, how likely was it that a beautiful young girl could succumb to his charms? Why would a beautiful young girl make herself sexually available to him?
Yet: such affairs happened. Dismayingly often, even routinely. Marriages dissolved, wives were left behind—dumped was the ungracious term. Elinor dreaded the possibility, could not bear to consider the probability: dumped.
And perhaps it was insulting to her simply as a woman, as a wife, as one who’d been impregnated by the man and bore his children, that Victor was infatuated with any girl, mooning over her like a lovestruck puppy while Elinor stood before him trying to make conversation like an adult. Trying not to notice how distracted the husband was, clearly impatient to escape the house, before even the children left for school. Always he was saying, avoiding the wife’s eye: “Don’t wait up for me tonight. Please.”
And the husband’s ridiculous humming. In the shower especially. Like a hive of bees gone berserk.
“There is no girl. You are confused. You’re looking feverish, Eli. Maybe you should see a doctor.”
This was gaslighting. Elinor knew. She’d plied the technique herself more than once.
Had he forgotten, Elinor had already seen a doctor? Doctors? Who’d prescribed medication to calm her nerves, stir her cognitive abilities, allow her to sleep past dawn, quell suicidal thoughts. Make her feel good about herself again.
She’d tried diet pills also. For years. Prescription and over-the-counter. Might’ve worked if she’d mainlined amphetamine directly into her carotid artery, otherwise no. The more jumpy, edgy, depressed and angry, the more the raging appetite, like a fire into which someone has tossed kerosene.
She’d considered, then decided against, using some of her own medications in preparing the lethal tea. But the long-legged girl belonged to Victor exclusively.
Pulverizing pills and capsules, and a droplet of Deet. Who would know?
None of the previous girls had called the house, so far as Elinor knew. It had been a radical, bold step, the dancer who’d choreographed “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” under Professor Stockman’s direction—the long-legged girl herself!—had dared to call and leave a message asking if she might drop by to leave Professor Stockman a token of her esteem and gratitude.
Not wanting to bring the gift to the professor’s office. Not wanting to give it to him in person. Just—Thought I’d leave it for the Professor. And you could give it to him after graduation—after I’m gone …
Elinor had listened in astonishment. The nerve of this girl! A flimsy excuse for her wanting to come to Victor’s house, to see where he lived; to flaunt her youth, beauty, poise in the very face of the betrayed wife …
It was intolerable, a devastating insult, and yet the wife called the number the girl had left, to set a date. Feeling the cunning of a hunter when through some confusion, misunderstanding or plain accident his heedless prey is approaching him.
And so in the kitchen of the big wood frame house on Hope Street the wife is trembling with excitement, apprehension. Staring at the old, dented teakettle on the stove beginning to whistle a plaintive upbeat tune: first the vibratory hum rising sharply, then the pent-up breath before the actual whistle penetrating Elinor’s eardrums.
Doorbell. Already five-thirty P.M.? Five thirty-five?
She’d meant to answer the door herself but Isabel has gotten there first which is just as well (the wife thinks) for seeing the thirteen-year-old daughter, taking in the fact that Elinor appears to be a normal wife-and-mother, the long-legged girl is even less likely to be suspicious of her invitation to tea.
“Mrs. Stockman! How do you do …”
The query is polite, forthright. Clear-blue-eyed. Here is a very poised and self-confident young woman, and tall.
“How do I do. ‘Well,’ I guess. Though not exactly ‘very well’—that would be excessive.”
Elinor laughs, as one might laugh standing on the tilting deck of a ship in a windstorm. She sees the girl blink at her quizzically as her own children often blink at her when she says something witty with a deadpan expression.
Gaiety in the professor’s wife’s laughter, and something like a shark-flitting shadow beneath.
“Come this way, dear. Please …”
“My name is Stacy, Mrs. Stockman. You know—Stacy Donovan. We met after the dance recital …”
“Did we? I don’t think so, dear. I’d remember, if we had.”
Calling the girl dear. Best to deceive, disarm. And smile, smile. The witch inviting Gretel inside the gingerbread house, quick shut the door.
Good that the husband is away. For once the wife is damned happy that the husband will be away for hours.
How pleasant the professor’s wife is to her long-legged silver-blond patrician visitor. Pebbles wouldn’t melt in the woman’s scrubbed-looking resolutely un-made-up mouth.
Probably, the wife thinks, she is no older than the girl’s mother. Yet, the wife doesn’t doubt that she looks much older than the girl’s mother in the girl’s eyes.
“In here, dear. You will stay for a few minutes, I hope …”
In her arms against her flat chest the girl is carrying a tinselly gift tote bag containing something fairly sizable and heavy, probably expensive. The wife recalculates—certainly expensive.
Possibly, the girl would like to leave the gift and escape. Possibly, she is somewhat nervous, not quite so self-confident as the wife has imagined.
“… don’t want to take up your time, Mrs. Stockman …”
Not at all! Not at all. The wife insists, she has been looking forward to the visit. The wife was so impressed with that “remarkable, original” dance thesis based on the Melville story.
(This is true. The wife was indeed impressed with the dance adaptation, and bitterly jealous of the long-legged dancer.)
Away from the front door of the house, away from the hall where there is the danger of family traffic, the wife and the long-legged girl find themselves in a little parlor where “tea things” have been laid out very prettily. Imagine a nineteenth-century daguerreotype of young ladies at tea: that would be it.
Two very dainty, antique-looking teacups on matching saucers, a plate of macaroons, red paper napkins in the shape of valentine hearts. Certainly this is an occasion: Mrs. Stockman has even groomed her (usually disheveled) hair, to a degree. She has changed from the perennial denim jumper to something resembling a dress, waistless, with billowing sleeves and a long skirt, of the kind a captive wife in a cult might wear, with a bright unwavering smile.
The perfect girl is seated on a worn velvet love seat. The imperfect wife sits facing her in a cushioned chair that seems but grudgingly to contain the wife’s heft, her fleshy thighs that spill over the edge of the cushion like an excess of pudding poured into a mold.
“… just thought I’d leave a little gift for … ‘token of my esteem’ …”
Glancing about like a curious little bird wanting to see and to know what is not her business. Where the great Victor Stockman lives, how he lives and with whom.
Such a messy house. Not to be believed.
It smelled like—I don’t know … old, musty things.
And his wife! The wife is so, so—awful …
Having obsessively planned her stratagem for days, weeks, perhaps years the wife sees her hands moving briskly, deftly above the tea tray. If her visitor thinks it odd that the teacups appear to be half-filled with tea even as she and the wife sit down, the visitor gives no sign for she is easily distracted by the wife’s chatty remarks (weather: lovely; graduation in twelve days: so exciting) and her own audacity in being in the home of the adored Professor Stockman.
Charming old teacups, pink rosebuds on white. As boring as you’d expect a great-grandmother to be but comforting.
“I hope you like herbal tea, dear? My favorite at the moment is quite exotic—Bengal. Have you ever tasted it?”
From out of a squat tortoise-colored teapot the wife pours steaming liquid into both cups. A rich, spicy singed-orange aroma wafts to their nostrils.
“‘Bengal’? I—don’t know. It smells delicious.”
With a display of childlike eagerness the long-legged Stacy reaches for one of the steaming cups. (As the wife might have anticipated, the girl reaches for the cup on the right.) If the husband could know the wife’s plan in theory he would applaud it. For the husband is one of those American minimalist composers for whom “chance”—“the aleatory”—is a crucial element in creativity.
The music of the aleatory, of chance.
Whatever is, is meant to be.
God is expressed through chance.
Was that John Cage? Henry Cowell? Milton Babbitt? Stockhausen, or—Stockman?
None of them believed in God for a moment. Yet it was common in such avant-garde circles to evoke God as a hypothetical agent, to diffuse one’s responsibility for a work of alleged art.
“‘Bengal’—it’s meant to evoke India, tigers. It’s noncaffeine but tastes as if it might have caffeine—that tartness on the tongue.”
“Y-Yes. It does …”
The hapless girl takes a tentative swallow. The wife holds her breath as the girl coughs, just a little. But then, emboldened, wishing not to offend the wife who is staring so strangely at her, the girl takes a larger swallow, and manages not to cough.
“Please take a macaroon! I didn’t make them myself.”
The long-legged girl laughs startled at this remark, which the wife intends to be witty and disarming, not ironic or (self-) belittling.
Politely the long-legged girl selects a macaroon to nibble like a rabbit.
Probably, the girl is anorexic: eating a macaroon would be a reckless act for her. The wife resists asking her how much she weighs reasoning that she would not wish the girl to ask her.
Not wanting to think that the girl might weigh one-third of Elinor’s weight. Just barely.
The wife’s heart is beating rapidly. The wife’s heart feels enlarged to near-bursting.
All this day she has been entranced. A very special day in the wife’s life she cannot (quite) believe has actually arrived.
Breathing deeply and fully and with joy. A brazen sort of joy. In the upstairs bathroom and then in the kitchen on the first floor, the wife’s special places.
The unused medications returned to their original places upstairs including the Deet to the shelf beneath the sink.
No one will know. No one will guess. How possible? Why?
With dogged inanity Elinor asks if the long-legged girl likes the Bengal tea and the girl murmurs enthusiastically—Yes. Elinor has grasped the remaining Wedgwood cup by its delicate handle and brings it to her lips.
This is the cup to the girl’s left. Which is the cup to Elinor’s right.
Still, it is pure chance. Perhaps in a sense all is chance.
Saying, as if this were a remark of some profundity, “Usually, my favorite is cinnamon apple spice. I also like peppermint.”
“Yes—peppermint. I do, too.”
The girl seems cheered, drinking tea. The macaroon, though stale, must not be excessively stale, for the girl is eating it as a doll might eat, if a doll could eat, daintily, with self-conscious gestures.
If the scene were a ballet, what sort of music would be played? Not Bartok—too strident. Not Stockhausen, or Stockman. Possibly, the lone pure enigmatic piano notes of Erik Satie that suggest something-to-come of a catastrophic nature.
But how numb Elinor’s lips are starting to feel!
Only her imagination since she has swallowed a very small quantity of tea.
Crucial not to falter. Not after so much planning.
(The tea does not taste strange. At least, no stranger than Bengal tea usually tastes.)
(It is indeed tart, somewhat stinging. Which is why the wife has chosen it.)
Since the dance recital the wife had done some research. She’d discovered that Stacy Donovan is the daughter of rich parents. Grandparents who’d donated so much money to the college that the library was (re)named for them—Donovan Library.
It has been said that if the girl is asked about her last name, is she related to the Donovans who’d given money to the college, she will smile mysteriously and change the subject as if embarrassed.
Of course, Stacy Donovan isn’t in the slightest embarrassed.
At the college no one can recall what the library had been called previously. So quickly memories fade.
Probably, Victor Stockman can’t recall the names of some of the undergraduate girls with whom he’d been in love, so desperately in love years before. But now, the long-legged Stacy has replaced these. The wife has no doubt, the husband knows Stacy’s name.
Close up, the long-legged girl is indeed perfect. The wife can’t (reasonably) object to the husband’s infatuation with her except (of course) the wife is not reasonable. It is not fair to expect the wife to be reasonable.
Patrician smile, flawless skin, clear pale-blue eyes, beautiful mouth. Dancer’s slender and poised body. Even the silver-blond hair falling straight beside her face seems to be natural, judging from the girl’s eyebrows and lashes.
(No flaw anywhere? Really? The wife’s hungry eyes dart about the girl looking for a blemish, a pimple. A hidden tattoo peeking out of a sleeve.)
Well. Here we do not have the cliché of the husband’s new love replicating the wife of thirty years ago. Fact is, Elinor never remotely resembled the long-legged girl at any age.
Nor would any girl who looked like this have given a second glance to Victor Stockman in his early twenties. It was Stockman the genius, the avant-garde composer, Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet whom students tried to impress, bevies of young-girl students vying with one another to win the lustful attentions of Daddy.
In her forties, or is it her fifties, the wife has gained weight about her hips, sides, breasts. Even as she has seemed to lose height. Once she’d been one of the taller girls in middle school; now she would be one of the squat dowdy girls, prematurely adult at twelve. Waist and hips have become indistinguishable, like camouflage. Breasts resemble foam rubber pillows that have begun to collapse from overuse.
Swollen ankles, legs thick as an elephant’s and stippled with varicose veins. (If the beautiful visitor glances at these legs she will look quickly away, shaken.)
The wife has been asking the visitor what she will be doing “next year”—a question so frequently asked of graduating seniors you would expect the girl to gag hearing it another time. But the long-legged girl is too well-bred not to give a sincere answer involving the word intern to which the wife does not listen.
Difficult for the wife not to become distracted. Though telling herself it does not matter really—essentially—which of them has been drinking the lethal tea yet she is thinking Oh God what if. It is me.
She had not planned beyond the gesture. Had been thinking it would be over in an instant but of course, no.
Thinking how it is the husband’s fault of course. Should have poisoned him.
The coward hadn’t had the moral courage to declare—I have something to tell you, Elinor.
Bastard has been incapable of saying—It’s wrong to continue to deceive you when I love you.
Moony-eyed. Dreamy-mouthed. In the bathroom in the shower humming loudly, obscenely. Oh, she can’t forgive him!
Wife wants to bang on the bathroom door with both fists crying Do you think I don’t know what you are doing in there? You are disgusting—you make me sick.
Well. She’d been pregnant after all. Several times. Which has contributed to her alarming weight gain. Her belly had never quite recovered from being so huge you’d have thought she was a kangaroo mother carrying twins in a pouch beneath a billowing smock.
Something to tell you, darling. It isn’t easy. I am not proud. But I think—I think I will get over it, soon. Her.
He has not said this. Will not.
Instead, the long-legged girl is declaring in her trilling voice that Professor Stockman changed her life, totally—“He had faith in me when I did not have faith in myself …” Wiping at her eyes. Laughing thinly. The wife is impressed that the girl can utter such banal clichés, the auditory equivalent of detritus if not excrement, with no awareness that they have been uttered countless times before, by girls very like herself.
Out of nervousness the girl has drained her cup of Bengal tea. She has nibbled two macaroons. Is the wife imagining this?—the girl’s hands are shaky.
“… bad time last fall, tried to keep it a secret … Tylenol … Lucky that I got sick to my stomach and no one ever knew. I did not tell Professor Stockman of course. But he gave me an extension on my senior thesis, he was sympathetic and seemed to know …”
Elinor is pouring more Bengal tea into their cups. Splashing into the saucers. Her hands are shaking. Runaway heart in her chest feels swollen to the size of a basketball.
Thinking, as she’d gained weight since the last of her pregnancies she’d become more fatalistic. Or perhaps it was her fatalism that was causing her to eat and drink more. (Especially drink. Near-empty bottles in the kitchen cupboards hidden behind canned goods.) Once, she’d been deeply in love with what’s-his-name, the owl-eyed young man with a clean-shaven weak chin, the musical prodigy who’d seemed to adore her. Or perhaps he had never been intimate with any girl before her and naturally he’d imagined it was the real thing—love.
Each of the pregnancies had been an accident. Aleatory.
He’d encouraged her to write about food as culture, food as pleasure, food as fetish, food as custom, ritual. Food as compensation for what is inaccessible, or has been lost.
Here is the truth: the husband had loved Elinor, once. He had been proud of her, once. As he’d been a young, ardent composer once, intent upon creating a profound and original body of work.
Folders of notes she’d assembled for her second book. Research slow as picking up grains of sand with a tweezers. Captivating, so slow. But finally she’d lost her way. Eating at the computer. Drinking. Online she’d begun to follow in secret several white supremacist websites. Deluded people, mostly male, who seemed sincerely to believe that there is something inherently valuable, God-ordained about an attribute so trivial as the hue of their skin.
Amazing to Elinor, and gave her hope in a way: she, too, could be happy about something, take pride in—something.
Hi! I am an overweight homely unhappy woman with a husband who is in love with a girl young enough to be our daughter and with children who quickly turn a corner if they see me somewhere outside the house. But I AM WHITE—so there!
In cyberspace, this (piteous) declaration was taken at face value. Several Aryan males had written to Elinor seeking to befriend her.
What is the long-legged girl going to do “next year”—attend dancing classes in Manhattan. Juilliard?
Maybe it isn’t the husband’s fault entirely. A paradise of bachelors, but a Tartarus of maids. Love is biology, fate. Love is just metabolism. Flesh-eating bacteria in the heart.
Must mean something that fat and fatal echo each other.
Fat the essence of fatal.
Fatal containing fat.
The wife is facing the long-legged girl, teacup in (shaky) hand. Hoping that the perfect girl does not see the wife’s uneven, bitten, dirt-edged nails, or peer too deeply into the wife’s mildly bloodshot eyes.
Girls at the college are so wealthy, they make a fetish of dressing shabbily. Faded T-shirts, torn jeans. There are at least a dozen rents in the long-legged girl’s designer jeans. Yet there are unmistakable touches of wealth: the newest smart phones, expensive wristwatches, sports cars. Smiles flashing like scimitars, the gleam of expensive teeth.
It had become a fad that year, wearing pajamas to class beneath coats. In warm weather, going barefoot.
“Professor Stockman opened my heart …”
Professor Stockman opened your legs.
And what long beautiful legs, smooth as swords. Elinor feels faint imagining them wrapped about the portly, dense-fleshed Victor who frequently smelled of his underarms after he had been at the college too many hours, immersed in his work.
“… the most wonderful, generous teacher …”
Most wonderful, generous lecher.
The wife has to laugh, imagining the husband’s myopic expression while having sex, that prissy frown he directs at the newspaper in the morning most mornings to avoid having conversations with his family.
Oh, how could the husband have sex. The man is so out of condition he could not execute a single push-up on the floor.
As if the long-legged girl knows exactly what she is imagining, the wife pauses, coloring faintly. The girl seems to have been moved by her own, inane words. The wife supposes that even spoiled rich girls succumb to emotions now and then, unavoidably.
Like one wielding a paddle a little too energetically the wife takes up the conversation, causing it to veer off-course.
“You’re hoping to continue as a dancer, you say? Bound for—New York City? Good that your parents can pay your way. It’s a cruel world, dancing—you’re already too old, I think. If you’re twenty, still less twenty-one, that’s old. You’d have to have a genuine talent to overcome your age but I have to say, I don’t think that you—quite do.”
Blankly the long-legged girl gapes at her. The wife smiles as you’d smile at a gaping infant in a crib who has not the slightest idea what you are saying to it, so that you can say anything.
“Of course, you have nerve. Audacity. Dancing the way you did—stomping around half-naked—that takes guts.”
This is very pleasurable to the wife. Like playing Ping-Pong with a badly handicapped child who can barely grasp the paddle.
The Bengal tea is very tasty. But so hot, it has slightly scalded the wife’s mouth. It has caused the wife to perspire inside her baggy clothes.
“When you have your first babies, Tracy,” Elinor says pleasantly, “your figure will slacken, as mine did. You will become flaccid, flabby—you will gain fifty or sixty pounds. That’s the point of the female body—to have babies, and to become flabby. Following which, the normal response of the male is to seek younger victims, I mean females, to impregnate. It’s the way of the world without which there would be no evolution of Homo sapiens.”
That is not true, precisely. The wife knows better.
“You are not the only girl, you know. You shouldn’t feel guilt. (You don’t feel guilt? Well, good!) Victor has been a lecher for so long, his girls have become mothers; their offspring could be his grandchildren. And we wonder—will the man have sex with his own grandchildren? The girls, at least? Will he try?”
What’s-her-name—not Tracy but Stacy—is shocked. The perfect jaw hangs open. The long-legged girl has met her match—and more. Except that she has been trained to be polite to her elders, no-matter-how-slovenly-elders, Stacy would jump up and flee the house on quaintly named Hope Street where her idol Victor Stockman resides with his witch-wife.
“I—I think that I should leave now, Mrs. S-Stockman …”
“What an original idea, dear! Yes. I think you are correct.”
Small comfort in being snide. Small comfort in revenge. But small comfort is all that a betrayed witch can expect.
Now on her feet the long-legged girl resembles one of those long-legged birds that seem always to be about to teeter, and fall. She is confused, embarrassed. Perhaps (Elinor thinks) Stacy has never been spoken to in quite so blunt frank unabashed a way in her privileged life. Perhaps (Elinor thinks) the lethal potion has begun to course through her delicate veins.
“Here—this—for Professor S-Stockman …”
In the tote bag is the gift the long-legged girl is leaving for the Professor who so changed her life. Elinor sees that it is a briefcase or attaché case of some impossibly elegant soft leather with gold trim—Gucci.
“There’s a c-card inside …”
The girl speaks softly, apologetically. Lowering her eyes.
The wife is determined not to register all this chagrin, self-effacement. Briskly she takes the tote bag from the girl: “Thank you, dear. It will mean much to Victor, to add to his collection.”
“His collection?”
“Gucci is something of a cliché, as leather-goods gifts from grateful students go. But you couldn’t have known this.”
“Oh, I—I’m sorry …”
“Why should you be sorry? You couldn’t have known.”
The long-legged girl laughs awkwardly. Her face is mottled with the heat of embarrassment, adolescent shame. One of the little valentine-napkins has fallen to the floor and she stoops to pick it up.
“You can leave now, dear. You have made your point.”
“Oh. Did I s-say, there’s a card inside …”
“Yes. You said. Victor will be especially intrigued to read the card.”
The long-legged girl looks as if she is about to cry. She is a nice girl really. She is much too old to take dance lessons in Manhattan, it is good that someone has been frank enough to tell her. The wife feels a rush of sympathy too late, she has hardened her heart against all long-legged girls.
Ushering the dazed-looking visitor to the front door, and so out onto the front stoop. So little time has passed since her arrival!—scarcely a half hour.
An eternity. Never again repeated.
Behind the window watching the long-legged girl walk away. Not so confident as she’d appeared in previous weeks, months when the wife had sighted her everywhere in the village like an assault of delirium tremens. Does the wife imagine it or is the girl less than steady on those long perfect legs? Is the girl pausing at the end of the walkway, to lean against a post as if drained of energy? The silver-blond hair obscures the pale face, the perfect profile.
The wife had not realized, the girl had bicycled to Hope Street from the college, a distance of about a mile and a half; there is her smart Italian bicycle propped against the front gate.
With a wave of guilty excitement Elinor imagines the long-legged bicyclist on Main Street, and on College Avenue where there are trailer-trucks: the bicycle careening, falling. The front wheels turning sharply and the girl losing control, falling in front of a thunderous truck. A terrible scream, and silence. She seemed to lose her balance. The bicycle jackknifed. I couldn’t stop in time. God help me, I couldn’t stop in time.
So vivid the trucker’s earnest voice, the look in the man’s eyes, the look of a stricken father. He will be aghast, his life will never be the same. The wife feels sorry for this stranger, deep sympathy for him; but not for the long-legged girl who’d dared to come beneath her roof bringing her husband a token of her banal esteem, boldly entering the wife’s domain with the Gucci label in hand.
Not the trucker’s fault, a careless college girl has died beneath the gargantuan tires of his trailer-truck.
A bulletin would be issued by the township safety officer. Bicyclists have been warned many times about riding on Main Street (Rt. 31). The speed limit is thirty miles an hour. Trucks can’t possibly stop in time if bicyclists turn into their lane. This is a tragedy that might have been avoided.
“God help her. God help us.”
The wife is no longer feeling so airy, ebullient. The basketball-heart has begun to shrink. She has become too tired to walk outside, let alone peer down Hope Street to see how far the bicyclist has gone. (Before Stacy has collapsed? But has Stacy collapsed?) Her head is riddled with light like bullet holes. Yet, she is having difficulty holding her head upright for it seems to want to sink down, downward to her feet.
Well, it’s funny!
(What is funny?) (Everything.)
She will lie down for a while, she thinks. Plenty of time before she needs to start supper and anyway her family doesn’t respect her.
The teapot is still hot, half-filled with pungent Bengal tea. Red paper napkins on the tray. The matching Wedgwood cups in their saucers, with cracks thin as hairs.
Difficult to climb to the highest floor of the house—what is it called? Halfway up the first flight of steps she is panting. Thighs ache, knees ache, back aches. Head.
What is the name she seeks—attic?
An attic. Antiquity.
Lowering her bulk-body onto a stained nubby sofa. Why is she so warm, sweating as if she’d been toiling in a field like a beast. The springs beneath her moan as if surrendering to love. Yet perhaps it is a joke, one of those cruel jokes people make about fat girls.
No matter. She will wait for her deliverer, whoever he is. Whoever they.
Later, a door slams open two floors below just dimly waking her from a sleep heavy as concrete—“Mom? Mom?” The little darlings’ voices are edged with irritation, concern. They have reason to be annoyed with their mother—of course. Who does not have reason to be annoyed with a mother?
Crouched on little skiffs the children are borne by the river current past her. Looks like the Amazon River—that swift curling mud-colored current, and beneath the surface predator-shadows (piranhas? alligators?) darting and drifting.
She is safe from them, for now. Love of them has lacerated her heart, but no more.