Grace (2 page)

The herbal tea is to keep her calm, to chase away yesterday’s worries: the bad news on TV last night, bills to be paid, the rash on Giselle’s ankle. Giselle is their four-year-old daughter.

“Do you think she got it at the baby-sitter’s?” she asked him last night.

“I don’t think there’s anything to be worried about.”

“All the same.” She rubbed calamine lotion on their daughter’s tiny ankle. “You don’t have to teach at the college tomorrow. Maybe she should stay home with you. If it gets any worse, you can take her to the doctor.”

“It’s a little rash, Sally. All children get a little rash.”

“It’s a rash. It does not matter if it is little or not.”

“These things are normal for a child her age.”

But little things like that worried Sally. Not the big things. Not that she did not love him when she married him. Not that she does not love him now. Not that he does not care.

“A rash is no reason to take her to the doctor,” he said.

“Nothing bothers you, right?” Her face was tight with anger. “I wish I could be so casual.”

He did not want a fight with her, not in front of their daughter. “Giselle can stay home with me,” he said.

At night, in their bed, she asked, her voice soothing then: “Are you sure?”

The irritation he felt hours ago had not dissipated. “What is it you want, Sally? I said she can stay home with me tomorrow.”
“Won’t that be a problem for you? I mean, with your papers to grade?”

“Giselle is never a problem for me.”

That was how they ended the night, his words thickening the air between them, she turning on the bed without saying good night, he closing his book, switching off the light on his night stand, and brooding:
Sally does Not love me
hovering in the dark recesses of his brain, not yet a shimmering mirage.

But he knows this morning she wants to be happy. When the little children file into her classroom, she wants the smile on her face to be bright. She wants no furrows on her forehead, no darkness around her eyes. It is to be a Heavenly Morning, a Celestial Awakening.

“Good morning, children.”

She will sing out the words, her eyes trained to exude sunshine.

“Good morning, Mrs. Peters.”

Mrs. Peters is happy. The children are happy. The children are happy because Mrs. Peters is happy.

This has become the essence of Sally’s philosophy. Happiness is learned, she says. It is a skill like any other skill. Bad things come when they come. They cannot be stopped. I teach my children how to be happy. I show them how to forget the bad things.

She made this discovery, she told him, by accident, during a very bad time in her life. The man she loved had been murdered. She was driving home one day, tears almost blinding her, when graffiti on a wall caught her eyes. Someone had scrawled:
It takes strength to be happy. “Those words changed my life,” she said.

Which is why, lying on his bed this morning, Justin Peters knows that something is very wrong with his wife. It is not working, this skill she has taught herself. For some time now he has heard the heaviness in her voice, seen the darkness under her eyes. She is hiding something. He is certain of it.

A week ago she left the house before dawn. To prepare for her class trip, she said. She would be taking the kindergarten class to the Bronx Zoo. Ten boys, nine girls. Four parents would accompany them. She wanted to be in the school early, to get everything in order. Justin agreed to take Giselle to the babysitter’s and to pick her up after his classes.

Not to worry, he said. He had everything under control. He would get pizza for dinner.

When she came to say good-bye that morning, it was obvious: neither Celestial Awakenings nor Heavenly Mornings had worked its magic. The circles under her eyes were dark, the lines around her mouth stiff.

Now, as he tries to reconstruct that morning, he cannot remember if he asked about the circles, but he remembers that she offered an explanation.

“I always get so worried before a trip. It’s such a responsibility. The children are so young.”

“But parents will be there.”

“Four children for each adult,” she said. “Though not quite.”

“That seems more than enough.”

“I’d be worried if Giselle were on a class trip,” she said.

“Giselle is not in school.”

“I mean when she goes to kindergarten. I can’t imagine what I would do without Giselle. She is my life.”

He believes now that at that moment she was thinking of the consequences of the discovery of her secret.
She is my life.
She said it as if there were a real possibility that something could happen and Giselle could be out of her life, that she could lose her. Then, that morning, he wanted to reassure her. He kissed her and held her to his chest. “Giselle will always be with you, Sally,” he said.

Now he lies in his bed and recalls that she came home late that evening. When she slid next to him on the couch, she was trembling.

“It was terrible,” she said. “One of the children got sick at lunch. She was vomiting and vomiting. Something she ate. I thought she would never stop.”

He put his arm around her and she curled into him.

“I took her to the hospital.”

“Didn’t you call her parents?”

“Her mother came.”

“She couldn’t get off from work, huh?” Even when he said it, he knew he was covering for her. He had already made a mental calculation. If the child got sick at lunchtime and the mother came immediately, as any mother would, Sally would not have been needed and there would have been no reason for her to be home so late.

Why had he helped her? Was it fear? Was it because he was
not yet ready to face the truth of his suspicions? For more than month she had turned away from him in bed, and when she consented, their lovemaking was passionless. She went through the motions, but she wanted to be done. “Come,” she said, she urged him on. She wanted it to end.

Then there were the phone calls. Five when the caller hung up. Three times in the last month when she abruptly ended her conversation on the phone as he entered the room. All the signs were there that something, someone, was pulling her away from him. And yet that day he supplied her with an excuse.

“They’re so helpless when they get sick,” she said. “The little girl was so weak, she couldn’t stand up. I had to lift her. They need their mothers when they are so young.”

He connects that statement and the one she made earlier that morning and finds himself thinking the impossible:
If you do not love me, Sally, Giselle will not always be with you.

She comes in the bedroom and hands him his coffee. “Are you sure you’ll be okay with Giselle?”

“Haven’t I always been okay with Giselle?”

“You know what I mean. You have work to do.”

“I will take her to the park,” he says. “When we come back, she’ll be sleepy and when she sleeps, I’ll correct my papers.”

“I’ll get her ready,” she says.

“You don’t have to. Let her sleep late. I’ll dress her.”

She hesitates. “I may come home late this evening,” she says, and walks into the bathroom.

She cannot be this cunning, he thinks. It is she who suggested
that Giselle remain with him today. It is he who said Giselle’s rash wasn’t all that bad. But in the end, it is he, not she, who is insisting that Giselle stay at home.

She wants to be free, he thinks. She does not want to be encumbered. Not by a child, not by their daughter. Not by an obligation that would have her interrupt whatever she is doing, with whomever she is doing it, in the late afternoon.

Before she leaves, she kisses the sleeping Giselle. She does not kiss him.

“Is there something you want to tell me, Sally?” He has come downstairs. She has her hands on the doorknob, but he is unable to let her leave without asking the question.

She turns. “We’ll talk,” she says. “When I get home.”

He has it all wrong. “I know you’re seeing someone,” he says.

Justin begins this accusation at breakfast. It is late in the morning. He has already taken Giselle to the baby-sitter. When he returns, Sally is in the kitchen mixing batter for pancakes.

He does not teach today. Last night he persuaded Sally to call in sick. She did not need persuasion. She had come home with a headache. It was quarter to eight when she turned the key in the front door. He had checked the clock.

“I know you are having an affair,” he says. And yet he does not mean that exactly. He does not believe there has been consummation. He believes that someone is seducing her and she is weakening. That and nothing more. Machismo will not allow him consummation.

He is a big man, a man one could call a macho man, which he isn’t, not in the sense that he wears his manhood as a badge
of honor. But the expectations of others can be demonic. Only surrender gives reprieve. Sometimes Justin surrenders, sometimes he confuses his size with his pride, and Justin’s pride will not allow him to believe that his wife is sleeping with another man.

Dressed as he is today in black jeans and a close-fitting black turtleneck sweater—his usual attire, except for the black or gray jacket he wears in his classroom—it is obvious he is sinew not fat—broad shoulders, muscular arms, a washboard torso, and long sturdy legs. He has a typical Trinidadian face, he is told by fellow Trinidadians. He knows what they mean. In his veins, as in the veins of so many from the Caribbean, runs the blood of people continents and islands apart, histories smeared with ravage and conquest. On his mother’s side, African, French, and Carib Indian; on his father’s side, African, English, and Arawk Indian.

He is at ease with this ancestry, confounded by the irony of the flag-wavers of cultural diversity who would have him eliminate more than half his forefathers to lump himself in that political catchall called black. We are the true originators of multiculturalism, he tells them. It is a stance that does not gain him popularity at the small public college in Brooklyn where he teaches British literature and sometimes the Classics when he is permitted.

Yet it is this bouillabaisse of cultures that has made Justin handsome. His skin is brown, the color of sapodillas, his hair darker brown and wavy, his eyes grayish green, his lips neither
too thin nor too thick. Still, there is in his mannerism something not quite Caribbean. His face lacks the openness of people on the islands. He is guarded—his expressions less expansive than they were when he left Trinidad, a young man barely nineteen, to accept a scholarship at Harvard. He will not hug his friends as he used to. He will not let his arm linger on their shoulders. And this not only because of his age. It is America that has taught him wary walking.

“Perhaps you have not done anything about it yet,” he says to Sally, “but even if you have not done anything physical, it is still an affair if you love him.” And that, too, he does not believe nor want to believe.

She sits, puts down the batter, props up her arms by her elbows, which are bent on the table, holds her head between her hands and begins to cry uncontrollably. One or two words slip out between her sobs, but he cannot make them out.

“Is it
that
serious?” he asks her.

“No. No.” It seems to him that this is what she is saying.

He is unforgiving. “Whether it is serious or not, we cannot go on this way.”

“It’s not an affair,” she says. She is saying something else but the words are indistinct.

“Call it what you like,” he says, but he is hopeful. What he wants, what he needs, is reassurance. “Infidelity is infidelity,” he says.

“It’s not an affair.” She is looking directly at him as she repeats this. The whites of her eyes are crisscrossed with tiny
squiggly red lines, and below them the skin is almost navy blue, but these eyes are large and round, and though they are sad now, they fit perfectly in a face made for them: the wide cheekbones, the nose that curves slightly at the end, the lips full and heart-shaped. She is wearing blue jeans and an off-white V neck sweater. The V exposes her skin. It is flawless. Like burnished copper. She is tall, with narrow hips and full breasts. Any man would forgive him for being jealous over her. But Justin is not jealous over her, so he tells himself. He is angry with her, a righteous anger for which he has cause. She is hiding something from him.

“I want things to change,” she says.

“You want things to change?” He does not let up. His tone is almost a sneer.

“I can’t keep doing this.”

“I would imagine you can’t. It must be difficult juggling two lives.” The sneer is full-blown now, though at the edges of his lower lip a slight tremor betrays him.

“You don’t understand. There is nobody else. There is no other man.”

He folds his lip into his mouth and presses his upper teeth against it.

“No other man, Justin,” she says.

No other man.
It is all he wants to hear, but it will not do him good to have her see him cave in so quickly, to give her this advantage. “And if it is not an affair,” he asks, “then what?”

“I am not happy, Justin.”

“And when did you discover that?”