“Is this about you?” Nan asks.
Alice sighs. Nan and Lily are far too literal. She can’t fault them for it. They grew up around farmers and well drillers. But she pities them sometimes, and often hates them. If your friends are simple-minded, friendship can be more like babysitting.
“It’s a story. What do you think?”
Nan is about to take a big risk. She looks at Lily and realizes she’s on the same wavelength. The question she is about to ask may damage their friendship, but she can’t stop herself from asking:
“Are you queer?”
“Queer?” asks Alice.
Lily is almost bouncing up and down in her chair awaiting the response.
But the question only confirms for Alice her innate superiority. To hell with them for dismissing her story and picking it apart. She answers with a question of her own:
“So, Nan, would you fuck another woman?”
“Excuse me?” Nan jerks up in her seat.
“You heard me,” replies Alice, “another woman. Would you have sex with one? Ever. For any reason.”
“I highly friggin’ doubt that!” Despite her cocky response, a knot in her stomach hardens. She hasn’t dated anyone in such a very long time. She’s made the rounds with all the suitable locals, even Lily’s husband. There’s virtually no one left. Alice knows that. Hunting filled that void somewhat. Carrying the gun and firing it off into the bush was a rush, the closest sensation to orgasm she’d had in years. But Alice is a bitch to rub this in her face now, in front of Lily.
“You highly doubt it? So there’s room for the possibility? Okay, Nan, let’s say you were on a desert island.”
“These kinds of questions are so stupid, Al.”
“Just answer.”
“Yeah,” Lily pipes up, “just answer the question.”
Alice lights a cigarette while Nan ponders.
“If I’m on an island forever?” Nan responds finally.
“Forever.”
“Come on, Nan, answer the question!” Lily says.
“How many women are there?”
“Just one.”
“So I don’t get to pick?”
“So you’re at least interested enough to see that you might like to have choices!”
Lily is bopping in her chair again, rubbing her hands together excitedly.
“Well, she can’t be disgusting,” Nan says.
“She’s not. She’s cute. One cute woman and you on the island. What do you do? Bang her?”
“No hope of rescue?”
“Aw, come on, Nan, quit stallin’!” Lily interjects.
“All right, fine. Yes. I would, I guess.”
“Great,” says Alice. “So, you would if you were on a desert island. What about other circumstances?”
“None.”
“What about jail?”
“Yeah! What about jail?” Lily squeals.
Nan asks, “Life sentence?”
“Yeah.”
“I suppose so.”
“All right then.” Alice drags off her cigarette. Her tone takes a serious edge. “How would you feel about making love to a woman?”
Nan says she is sure she doesn’t know what Alice means.
“How do you feel about it? Awkward? Foolish? Inexperienced?”
“Like a freak,” says Nan, growing more pissed off. The only good thing about this tangent in the conversation is that it helps her forget the sight of orange jello salad. Still, why can’t Alice pick on Lily? It’s never much of a challenge.
“Come on, cut the high school crap. How do you feel?”
“Awkward? Yes, I guess, like I don’t know what I’m doing at all, but worse, because I’d feel so weird about the whole thing. I don’t know. Unconfident? Is that a word?”
“Diffident?” Alice jabs, but no one picks up on the reference.
“I don’t know! Just odd and strange, like I’m in a foreign country and can’t speak the language.”
Lily snickers.
“Vulnerable?” asks Alice.
“For sure.”
“More vulnerable than when you exposed yourself to Lily?”
Alice’s strategy is suddenly clear to Nan. She’s cornered.
Alice continues, “So you might feel as vulnerable as Lily feels towards you? Being naked in front of her just wasn’t enough, was it Nan? But what if you made love to her? Surely that would be an act of utmost vulnerability! Wouldn’t that even you two up? Wouldn’t that be the great equalizing act?”
Alice takes one last satisfied suck on her smoke, waves it across her face like a conductor’s baton, and settles back in her chair. She flicks the butt over her neighbour’s fence.
Lily’s mouth gapes open. Alice thinks she is blushing.
Finally Nan responds. But she doesn’t address her comments to either Alice or Lily. She addresses Delane.
“So you’re saying, Alice, that I should have sex with Lily to make up to her for the fact that I ran over her?”
“If it would make you vulnerable enough.”
Nan never takes her eyes off the mannequin.
“Jesus Christ,” is all she can say. “Jesus Christ.”
Alice leaves the two of them on the porch and goes inside the house thinking, that’ll teach them to criticize me unjustly.
Daryl is still sleeping. He’d sleep all day if you’d let him. These are the times when Alice must take him in hand and tell him to get up, brush his teeth, and dress, as though she were his mother. This is what living with Daryl is like. He needs to be told what to do.
“Come on now, sweetie, wake up.”
She lies next to him, rolls him over, and swats him with the rolled up copies of her story,
“Don’t be such a crab. Get up. It’s afternoon already.” Her tone is curt until he responds with a hug or a kind word. “Are you grumpy? Come on, get up. I want you to read my story.”
Daryl looks at her patiently, the way someone might at a puppy that had chewed through the telephone cord. “You said you didn’t care if I slept in. You could’ve stayed and cuddled.”
“Yeah, well, people came over. I had stuff to do.”
“Those two idiots are out there drunk, aren’t they?”
“So what’s it to you?”
“Maybe I’d like our house to ourselves for once!”
“Well, I didn’t invite them. They just showed up.”
“Tell them to go away.”
“I’m not going to tell them to go away. Get over yourself.”
“Christ, Al, you’re drinkin’ already, too, aren’t you! For fuck’s sake.” Daryl swings his legs over the side of the bed. The puppy look is gone, changed into something harder and disappointed. “Can’t you go for one day? One day without a drink? No, I don’t suppose you can. It doesn’t matter what I think about it either, does it? You just don’t give a shit about anyone but you.”
“Fuck off.”
“Just get out of my way. I’m gonna shower and go out. I can’t bear to listen to you three drunken goons all day.”
Alice wishes she had stayed in bed with him and feels guilty. The effect of the night together is lost now. Daryl is disappointed in her and Alice is too tipsy to tell him the lies he needs to hear.
“I said, get out of my way.”
Alice can’t stand up. Daryl pushes against her.
“I want you to read my story.” She fumbles for reasons to keep him in bed until they can figure out where this conversation went wrong.
“Maybe some other time,” he says, but Alice persists.
“Please, just read it!”
Daryl pushes against her a little harder. He thinks if he doesn’t get her out of the way, he’ll have given in to her once again and lose his manhood to a drunken woman. “Whipped” is what his friends say.
“Come on, come on.” Alice’s voice grows whiny and nasal.
Daryl can feel the blood in his temples. “Get out of my way,” he tells her again.
But Alice can’t move. Guilt weighs her down. She must keep him on the bed, apologize, kiss him, massage him, do whatever it is that women do to the men they love to make things right. She doesn’t even know. It used to be so easy to keep Daryl where she wanted him. But the longer they stayed together and the more she drank, the more she felt her power slipping. One day he would leave her. One day, Daryl — the man she thought she had wrapped up tightly and securely; the man who idolized the way she dominated him — would be gone. He would leave, and Alice would know she hadn’t played him properly.
Hadn’t she promised herself that she would be a good wife to him from now on?
Daryl finally pushes her to the floor, steps over her, and heads for the shower. Alice doesn’t move. She cries loudly, but soon she hears the water running in the shower and she stops. She hugs her knees to her chest and quietly says to the empty room how sorry she is.
She planned to be a good wife to him today.
Nan and Lily are grateful that they have Delane to look at. At least Delane appears undaunted by Alice’s provocations. Sitting together on the porch now seems complicated and unsettling. In a few moves, both realize, they could be lovers, lesbians, like those women in pornographic movies or the magazines on the top shelf in Corner Convenience.
Nan is the first to speak. “Is that what you want?”
“No!” Lily replies quickly.
Nan’s shoulders relax. The notion vanishes. It’s a day like any other day after Thanksgiving, except for the memories of orange jello salad. “Goddamn. I could really use another drink.”
Thanksgiving Day, Lily had the kids up early, showered and dressed and ready to be picked up by noon. Mark’s grandparents had them for this holiday. Lily had them for the next. She despised rationing her own children, but it was the court’s will at the divorce. The judge had signed away two generations of Lily’s family. He separated Lily from her crazy mother and Lily from her children. She hoped the judge was alone on Christmas or Easter or on his birthday and knew what it was like to wait all day to hear his children’s voices and open presents. She wondered if the judge knew how it felt to give birth to something that virtual strangers could take away with a signature.
Lily dressed them up, packed their clothes, kissed them goodbye, and shut the door behind them. Her house was quiet. There is no smell of rosemary or sage in the air. If she ate at all, depending on her mood, it might be a Cup Noodles or a Lite Delite frozen entree. She treated herself to an extra antidepressant and a rye and Coke, adding a slice of lemon as a garnish.
In divorce court, the issue had been allowing each parent equal influence over the children. That their children had witnessed Mark beat her until her eyes had swollen shut had not come up. Nor did the court learn that Mark had leaned on her to put Carol in Golden Mornings.
Mark filled their daughter Samantha’s small head with untruths. Samantha asked, “Is it because you’re crazy like Grandma that we go away?” Lily cried and told her no, that wasn’t true, and Grandma wasn’t really crazy, not like bad people, like Charles Manson; she just saw things and did things a little differently. And no, darlin’, Momma’s not crazy either. People say things sometimes just to be mean.
“Why does Daddy want to be mean?”
“I don’t know, sugar. I don’t know.”
Lily would think, much more of this and I will be crazy, and she thanked her doctor for the Valium and the lithium. Drugs smoothed things over, smoothed her out.
Maybe she was crazy. She allowed Nan to run her over, just to get Mark to notice her. How sane was that? And then she wondered about Nan’s motives — she had dated Mark in high school, after all.
Lily didn’t feel crazy. But, really, how many crazy people do?
Near the end of their marriage, Mark pinned that label on her, to repel her. Carol was gone, trapped in Golden Mornings, nearly two decades the junior of most residents, the same age as the health care aides who spoke to her as if she were hard of hearing or a fool. Lily’s youngest no longer nursed. Mark was glad of that. But as soon as she had her body back, Mark wanted it, and he resented the time he had given up to his children. Lily didn’t want sex, but Mark insisted, and when Lily didn’t come (she found it difficult to climax with his hands so tight around her throat), he got off her quickly, his face twisted in disdain. If she summoned the energy to explain how it hurt, he reminded her of her duties. He reminded her of his opportunities. He told her she was going crazy. Just like her mother. Any woman, even Nan Underhill, would be thrilled with a catch like him. Really, if you looked at it, he had done her a favour.
Lily wished some days that he would die.
Other days, she just wanted him to hold her. It was her nature to be loving, to touch and hug frequently. A hug was so easy. After a hug, she was prepared to let him touch her, but he laughed at her, told her she didn’t deserve no goddamn hug. Not today, not any day. Not even on her birthday, which would have compensated for the lack of cards and presents.
“Please, Mark,” she pleaded. “All I want is a hug. Just a quick one. Please.”
And he would look at her from top to bottom like she was some kind of insect and walk away.
*
By 3:00 pm on Thanksgiving Day, Lily had decided to break into Mark’s house.
It didn’t take much. She smashed the glass in the back door window with a loose piece of patio stone, reached through, and unlocked the door.
She inspected everything. She touched his clothes, which hung in the closet beside Caroline’s, and gathered up his dirty laundry, which was strewn across the floor, and packed it nicely into the laundry hamper. She read the grocery list on the refrigerator door, the receipts and bills on the kitchen table, and examined the kinds of soup in the pantry. She stared at the framed photographs of the happy couple and their families, of her children, and of pets who had long since died. She opened the medicine cabinet and read the labels on the pill bottles, counted the towels in the linen cupboard, and smelled the sheets to see what fabric softener they used. Caroline wore Opium and Alfred Sung. Mark still wore Old Spice and someone had given him a bottle of Stetson, still untouched. They had two kinds of mustard, four types of salad dressing, and china that was mismatched. The tablecloth had never been ironed. Caroline had a penchant for ceramic pigs, dabbled in rug hooking, and read Danielle Steele. Mark still used Colgate, left his socks in the living room, and smoked in the basement. They used ribbed Trojan condoms.
After an hour of searching for answers to why Mark loved Caroline more than her, Lily’s legs were tired and aching. Walking over to their house had taken a lot of her strength. She hadn’t taken a pill for hours. She sat down on Mark and Caroline’s beige L-shaped sofa with matching blue throw pillows.
Forty-five minutes later, her legs felt better. Then she took a lighter and a small flask of butane out of her pocket. She squirted the butane on the sofa in the shape of a happy face, screwed the cap back on, replaced it in her pocket, and set the sofa on fire.
Ten minutes later, when the sofa was burning nicely, she went to the phone on the kitchen wall and dialed 911.
Lily was surprised she wasn’t arrested, but the police officer who arrived shortly after the fire department had responded to several domestic calls when she and Mark had been together. His last name was Cool. Harris Cool. He knew Lily. He knew her mother. And he let her go.
Somehow, later that Thanksgiving Day, she found her way to church.
She tells Nan all this as they sit on Alice’s porch.
“Yesterday?” Nan questions her. “Yesterday afternoon, you broke into Mark’s house and lit his sofa on fire?”
Lily nods.
“You picked up his laundry?”
Lily nods again.
“Then you went to church?”
“You know what the funniest part was?”
“No idea.”
“The goddamn front door was unlocked the whole time. I could have just walked in.”
Nan smiles. “I don’t know why you picked up his laundry.”