For the whole afternoon before Charlie got home from Atlanta, Alison’s stomach was upset. She couldn’t eat; her hands were cold. She moved aimlessly around the house, picking up toys in one room and setting them down in the next, separating laundry into darks and lights and leaving the two heaps in the hall. At one point she set a watering can in the kitchen sink and turned on the faucet to fill it, only to come back ten minutes later and find the water gushing down the sides of the can, splashing all over the floor.
Her parents had left that morning. Her mother wanted to stay, but her father had been anxious to get home. “I’m like a circus elephant. I need a routine,” he’d said.
“What are you going to do?” her mother asked as Alison sat on the floor of the TV room, playing with Noah and watching her pack.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want my advice?”
“No, I … ” Alison sighed.
“You need to talk to a lawyer.”
“Unh,” she grunted.
“Just to find out your options.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little premature?”
“Maybe,” her mother said. “Maybe not. It can’t hurt.”
“I don’t know,” Alison said. “Maybe it can hurt. Maybe I’m—we’re—blowing this whole thing out of proportion.”
“That could be,” her mother said diplomatically, holding her roller suitcase down with one hand and zipping it up with the other. “But Alison—you’re a housewife. If Charlie wants to abandon this marriage, you’re not in a strategic position to get what you need.”
“I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”
“Talk to a lawyer,” her mother said. “A good, smart, feminist lawyer. Then whatever happens, you’ll be ready.”
How had it come to this? All through the afternoon, as she made Noah a sandwich and cut it into stars and hearts, folded a basket of laundry, hung Annie’s dresses on hooks in her closet, Alison turned things over in her mind. Nothing about her life at the moment was what she’d envisioned for herself when she got married. For one thing, she and Charlie had always planned on staying in the city. They thought they would raise their children to be like the teenagers they saw on the crosstown buses after school, precocious and watchful and savvy; they’d juggle full-time jobs with the help of a nanny and take their kids with them to restaurants and gallery openings after work and off-Broadway plays on the weekends.
Instead, they had moved to the suburbs. Now Alison felt as if she were inside a giant bubble that moved with her wherever she went, shielding her from extremes, a bubble of middle-class suburban life—a life composed of errands and repairs and strolls to the playground, of chitchat with acquaintances in the grocery store, of scheduling electrician visits and car maintenance, of thumbing through magazines and catalogs that fell through the mail slot every afternoon at two, of her book club and health club and pediatrician appointments, of late-night lovemaking that evolved less from desire than from proximity, of bland kid dinners, fish sticks and chicken nuggets and Annie’s macaroni and cheese and Classico sauce with spaghetti on an endless loop.
“You’ve turned into a nag,” Charlie had said one evening several months ago when he announced he planned to go to a Saturday afternoon basketball game in the city, and she said she wished he wouldn’t. He was gone all week, she protested; it wasn’t fair to leave her with the kids for a whole day alone on the weekend (yes, she loved them fiercely, but enough was enough!). Also, she’d made a list of a few simple chores he needed to do around the house, like repairing a window in the attic and unclogging the basement sink.
Nag. It was such a retro, politically incorrect word that it made Alison seethe. She could not believe he had said it. She felt unfairly typecast as a character in a fifties sitcom: the hausfrau with the commuting husband she scolds and cajoles and manipulates, their gender roles as clearly drawn as the edging cut into the grass along their front walk. (For that matter, how had it come to pass that fixing windows and sinks were his domain; cleaning them was hers?)
“So I’m a nag and you’re the henpecked husband, huh?” she said. “Is that how it’s going to be?”
“Oh, stop it,” he snapped. She knew Charlie couldn’t really refute her objection; in her position—and they’d always resolved disputes that way, by trying to see each other’s point of view—he’d probably feel the same way. So instead he said, “This is why I didn’t want to move out of the city. I feel trapped out here. I can’t do a fucking thing on my own without a permission slip.”
“What does moving out of the city have to do with it?”
So many of their arguments were about pushing the other person to articulate the things they’d been threatening to say that were just under the surface, wounds that had scabbed over but refused to heal.
Not talking about things that matter was one of those surprises of married life that Alison wished someone had told her about in advance. She and Charlie could go for days, weeks even, without discussing anything more important than the phone bill. It wasn’t that they didn’t have time to talk; it was that the time was never right. Alison’s lurking fear was that Charlie’s silence masked a fundamental disappointment—that she wasn’t interesting or exciting enough for him; that he thought he had “settled.” That he felt trapped in a maze of bourgeois concerns and aspirations, that he resented having to work so hard to maintain their way of life.
There was plenty that Alison kept quiet about, too. She didn’t feel she had any right to articulate how powerless she sometimes felt as an unsalaried stay-at-home mother, how raising children essentially alone often felt like drudgery, how distant the mundane realities of marriage were from her idealistic girlish notions. She had chosen it, all of it. But with those choices came great anxiety. Together they had constructed a life that was, if not a lie, then some milder form of delusion. Charlie made $130,000 a year, and they could barely make ends meet. They lived on the knife edge of their means; each month they slid further into debt, until February, bonus time, when they could pay off their credit cards. They chose to live in a town with astronomical taxes so that their children would go to reasonable public schools; they chose to buy a “preowned,” still-above-their-means Volvo because they wanted a safe car; Alison chose to stay at home. But their fear lurked just under the surface.
Sometimes late at night Alison would whisper, “Maybe we should just leave all this, go somewhere—Kansas, maybe, or North Carolina—”
“But you’re the one who wanted this life,” he’d say.
“We had to go somewhere. We couldn’t afford to stay in the city.”
“Not with children, it’s true.”
“What are you saying? You wanted children. Are you saying you didn’t?”
“I’m not saying anything,” he’d say. Then it would become about that—about who wanted what kind of life. That was the problem with talking about anything. One of you might say too much, reveal too much, and there would be no going back.
For months Alison had chalked it up to their busy life, the hectic grind of parenthood. It had been ages since Charlie had looked at her—really looked, the way he used to—but she had barely noticed. She wasn’t looking at him, either. She was bandaging Annie’s feelings and Noah’s scraped knees, asking Charlie to hand her the antiseptic cream, it’s on the dresser, honey, in the orange bowl, thanks, without looking up. After the kids were in bed, Charlie would collect the recycling or the trash, depending on the day, and pour himself a Scotch, and sit down to pay some bills. If Alison made dinner they might eat it standing up at the counter, and ask each other perfunctory questions about their day. With friends, some evenings, over wine and candles, they might laugh about married life—the sex they weren’t having, the romance they’d sacrificed to a constant round of dirty diapers and ear infections, the endless repetitive motion of raising kids.
But thinking back now, Alison could see where the cracks had started to form. She hadn’t been looking closely enough. She extrapolated from parts to the whole. She built a bridge in her head over the spaces between them. A morning kiss, a bouquet of flowers, a Mother’s Day card—it had been enough for her, enough to ignore the gaps in their conversation, the white gully of sheet in the middle of the bed.
WHEN CHARLIE’s CAB pulled into the driveway at dusk, Noah was standing sentinel at the living room window. “Daddy’s home!” he shrieked, flushing Annie out of the TV room, where she was watching SpongeBob SquarePants. “Mom, Dad’s here,” Annie called on her way to the front door, sounding remarkably to Alison’s ears like a teenager.
Alison was in the kitchen, washing lettuce for a salad. She had roasted a chicken and boiled new potatoes and set the table for four. Maybe a normal family dinner—as abnormal as that was—would cure what ailed them: Chicken Soup for the Dysfunctional Marriage. She turned off the faucet and dried her hands on a dish towel.
“Hey, little guy!” she heard Charlie say as he came in the front door.
“I’m not little. I’m big,” Noah shouted.
“Yes, you are! Hi, Princess,” he said to Annie.
“Hi, Dad. Did you bring me anything?”
Alison winced. She went out into the hall. “Annie, that’s not very polite. Give your dad some time to get settled.”
Charlie looked relieved. He might have anticipated Annie’s question, rude as it was, since he usually came home with trinkets or candy from an airport vendor (a model plane with the Continental logo for Noah, a bracelet or Beanie Baby for Annie). But clearly this time he had forgotten.
“Hey, honey,” he said, leaning over and kissing Alison. Not on the lips, exactly, but somewhere close.
“Hey,” she said. Her hands were shaking. She clasped them behind her back. “How did the hand-holding go?”
He looked at her quizzically.
“The client.”
“Oh, right, right.” He emitted an odd little grunt. “It went fine, I think,” he said, nodding his head.
“Did you get everything worked out?”
“Yep,” he said. “I think so.” He was jumpy, as if he’d had too much caffeine.
“Well, that’s good.”
There might have been an awkward silence then, but Annie was holding up a drawing of a unicorn she’d done in school for Charlie to see, and Noah was tugging on his hand, pulling him toward the playroom and his Thomas the Tank Engine railroad track, saying, “You be Percy and I’ll be James.” Charlie shrugged and held his free hand up to Alison, as if to say, What can I do?
“I made dinner,” she called after him. “A family dinner, for a change.”
“Gosh, I wish you’d told me,” Charlie said with an exaggerated grimace as he headed toward the playroom. “I had a late lunch—and I’m wiped. When I’m done here I thought I might go lie down for a few minutes. If that’s okay with you.” He disappeared around the corner.
Alison felt as if she’d been slapped. Charlie didn’t want to have dinner with his family. He didn’t even feel compelled to play along. She took a deep breath and followed him into the playroom. “Actually, it’s not okay. I made dinner for the family. The least you can do is sit with us.”
Charlie looked aggrieved, as if she had misinterpreted his motives. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever you want.”
“Meaning … ”
“Be Percy, Daddy!” Noah demanded, placing the little green engine in Charlie’s hand.
“Meaning ‘whatever you want.’ ” Charlie opened his eyes wide in benign agreeableness.
“Meaning it’s not what you want.”
“Daddy, come on,” Noah said.
“Just a second,” Charlie said. “Alison, for Christ’s sake.”
“Fuck you,” Alison said. She turned on her heels and went to the kitchen. She’d folded yellow-checked napkins on four woven yellow place mats set for dinner. Three floating candles in the center of the table, an impulse purchase from Crate and Barrel, bobbed, lit and glowing, in their glass holders. Alison leaned against the counter and closed her eyes. Two, three, four. She opened her eyes. Charlie hadn’t followed her. She went over to the table and blew out the candles, then covered the top of the salad bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge—she was really the only one who ate salad, anyway—along with the open bottle of sauvignon blanc. She left the roast chicken and potatoes where they were, on trivets on the counter.
Standing in the doorway to the playroom, she announced, “Dinner for the kids is in the kitchen. I’m going upstairs.”
“Wait a minute,” Charlie said.
She waited.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m not hungry now.”
“Come on, Alison. This is childish.”
“Child—issssh!” Noah said, rocking on his heels. “You’re funny, Daddy.”
“Mom, I’m hungry,” Annie said, pushing past her into the playroom.
“Dinner is ready,” Alison said. “Daddy’s going to get it for you.”
“I thought you said it’s a family dinner,” Annie said.
“I thought it was, but I guess I was wrong.”
“Christ,” Charlie said, climbing to his feet. “If I’d known it was so important to you I wouldn’t have said anything.”
“That really would’ve made a difference?”
“Of course.”
“Jesus, Charlie,” she said. “The point is, it’s not important to you. Is it?”
Charlie stood in front of her with his arms crossed. “What are you trying to get me to say, Alison?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
He glanced down at Noah, who was sprawled on the floor now, busily running a blue engine around the train track, up a hill and across a bridge and through a green plastic tunnel, murmuring encouragement along the way: “Up the hill, Gordon! Now down the hill and over the bridge, that’s right!” Charlie glanced at Annie, who was looking apprehensively from one parent to the other. “We’re all a little cranky and hungry, aren’t we, Annie?” he said. “I think we’ll feel better after dinner, don’t you?”
“Maybe,” Annie said warily.
“Don’t go upstairs,” he said to Alison. “Let’s be a family tonight. Okay?”
She wanted nothing more than to believe him—that if she didn’t go upstairs they would be a family, that everything would be back to normal. But the word tonight sounded jarringly provisional to her, as if “family” might be a temporary condition.
Was she losing her mind? Could that be true?
“Come on,” Charlie said gently, taking her arm, and she went with him into the kitchen and took the salad out of the fridge and tossed it and set it in the middle of the table. Charlie carved the chicken, taking care to remove the skin and cut the white meat into chunks for the kids, and Alison lit the floating candles again and dimmed the overhead halogens.
Charlie sat at one end of the table and she sat at the other, father and mother with their children between them, sharing an ordinary dinner on an ordinary day, chatting about whether Annie should start ballet and what Noah was learning in his sing-along music class and whether it was time to plant grass seed on the front lawn. It was real life, the way things should be, and even as it was happening it felt to Alison like a distant memory, the moment already slipping into the past.