The asshole actually said ‘homemaker’?” asked Ellis. “You’re fucking with me, right?”
“Direct quote,” I said.
“Hold on a second…” I heard the palm of her hand smush over the phone’s mouthpiece, then her slightly muffled voice. “Perry, give me those scissors right now. You are not giving your sister another haircut…”
I laughed.
“Jesus,” she said, voice clear again. “Where were we?”
“Homemaker.”
“Exactly. What is wrong with him? Why’s he being such a dick?”
“Well, it’s not like I’m the greatest roommate in the world. I mean, you’ve lived with me…”
“And this comes to him as a fucking surprise? You guys lived together for a solid chunk of time before you got married. I’d say his caveat was entirely emptored.”
“I guess it’s wearing thin.”
“Let me call the rat bastard at his goddamn office, tell him to hire a goddamn maid already…”
“Then it will be my fault he has to spend money on a maid, and it will be worse.”
“Okay, then I’ll just fly out there and slap him around a little. He’s lucky to have you. I think he needs a little reminding.”
“He basically rescued me from being homeless,” I said. “Who the hell else would’ve married me?”
“I shouldn’t have to remind you of this: Dean got a gorgeous woman who’s brilliant and funny and an amazing cook and who likes to fuck. Plus you did three years’ hard time in Syracuse for him. More than he deserves. All of it.”
“Thank you for hating my husband for me.”
“Anytime,” she said, and we agreed to hang up.
Upstairs, Parrish resurfaced from her nap and started weeping—just as India was finally winding down in the playpen, eyelids already at half-mast.
I reached across the little wooden fence to pick up India and started for the staircase, relishing the warmth of her sweet weight in my arms as she drifted fully off to sleep.
When I’d tucked India into her crib and carried Parrish downstairs, I got walloped by my daily midafternoon wave of exhaustion.
It came on hard as a Jones Beach breaker, the kind that smacks the wind out of your chest and then scours you, tumbling, across the green-lit underwater sand.
I tucked Parrish into her booster seat and started slicing up a small red apple, sleep deprivation’s bone-deep illogic making me wonder yet again why I always had to stay awake with the conscious twin when at that moment I ached with such visceral longing to abscond into the luxuriant bliss of her sister’s nap, right there on the kitchen floor.
While I was arranging the apple slices into a happy face on the chrome-yellow plastic of Parrish’s chair tray, the phone rang.
I shoved the last slice into my mouth on the way to the phone.
So it was a one-eyed happy face, who’d know? And if my child remembered this when she grew up and felt deprived, I’d tell her Mr. Happy Apple had been winking.
“Yo,” I said into the phone, hoping that might be a quasi-intelligible salutation through my juicy mouthful of Red Delicious chunks.
“Acetone,” said Mimi. “That and using a cigarette for a fuse, I’d say it was definitely the same guy.”