Object of Your Love (13 page)

“Have you had your fucking hands on her?” Eric shouted, rising from the plumbing he was putting in. “I'll break your fucking neck!” he warned, throwing a punch at Reed.

After Reed roared off in his Jeep, Eric went looking for Anne and found her in the laundry room, folding diapers. “Have you been coming on to Reed?” he asked her.

Anne snorted. “I messed up my life badly enough marrying
you.
Why would I want to get involved with one of your dumb brothers?”

A couple of days later, when Anne finally figured out that Reed had taken her for a ride, she went down to the water's edge while Eric was at work and threw her wallet far out into the river. “It was stolen in town,” she said to him that night. “It had the grocery money in it.”

“I bust my ass to earn a dollar and you go and throw it away!” he shouted.

“I
told
you it was stolen,” Anne repeated quietly. She was kneeling beside the tub, running the bathwater for the children, her back to Eric. She didn't want him to see her face. She didn't care about the money. Two hundred dollars thrown away didn't make her any more miserable than she already was. Listening to Eric rage, she might even have been strangely happy the money was gone, she might have been amused by Eric's anger. It gave her a twisted pleasure to see him stiffed out of two hundred bucks by his own brother. He had it coming to him, for inviting Reed up here all the time to take advantage of them, for being such a son of a bitch himself.

That night in bed, staring up at the ceiling, she said, “I don't recognize myself any more.”

“I don't recognize you either,” said Eric. “You used to have a waistline.”

“I mean, I have no convictions about anything any more. Things used to seem so important. All my values are slipping away.”

“What values?” asked Eric, the glowing tip of his cigarette floating like a red star in the dark room. “I don't remember you ever having any.”

“When I met you I was a nice girl. I'd never sworn or told a lie or got drunk in my life.”

“If you were so much better, why did you marry me, then?”

Anne had to think for a moment. “Because you were wild and you had a bankroll and black satin sheets on your bed and you knew all about grass. If only I'd listened to Daddy's advice.”

“If you think he was some kind of saint, you're kidding yourself,” Eric told her. “He ran around on your old lady.”

“Bullshit.”

“He told me himself.”

Eric waited for Anne to rise up from the mattress and pummel him on the chest with her fists, as she'd often done when they were young, when they were still in love, but she lay still.

“I feel sorry for you,” she said quietly. “You don't even know any more when you're lying.”

*   *   *

Down on the river, Anne's mother-in-law, the original Mrs. King, emerging from the water wearing a purple bathing suit and a gash of red lipstick, peels a bathing cap from her short white hair. She climbs the grass to the deck with the long, mannish stride she developed in the Women's Army Corps thirty years ago. Her broad shoulders and aggressive bosom make it easy to imagine her in a uniform studded with brass buttons. She is capable of giving as crippling a bear hug as any of her sons, and of drinking them under the table. As long as she can remember, they have called her “The Boxer,” because of the way she punched them around as children when they stepped out of line. She still terrifies them, but they worship her all the same, as soldiers fear and love their commanding officer. She, in turn, is proud of her boys, whom she raised on her own, after their father drank himself to death. In her wallet she carries baby pictures not of her grandchildren, but of her sons. Of course, she loves her granddaughters too, but thinks it's a shame that Anne had all girls. Mrs. King has driven up for the afternoon, bringing her own bottle of gin, and is threatening to stay the night.

“I didn't bring a suitcase,” she bellows. “I'll sleep in the raw.” She is what people call a “character,” and want to have at their parties, just as they might import a magician or a clown to entertain their guests.

“You wouldn't dare!” says Lance, grinning with admiration. Then he pauses and looks at her. “Would you?” he asks with serious concern.

The long clapboard bungalow used to be Mrs. King's house. Anne and Eric bought it from her, using most of Anne's small inheritance as a down payment. Mrs. King has moved to an apartment in the city where, in the evenings, she weeps and cheats at solitaire. She has got thick in the waist.

The three boys rise to meet her when she comes out of the water. Reed, fresh from a jail term for street-fighting and possession of marijuana, hands her a towel. She takes it from him, then swats him with it, a playful, malicious grin on her face. Reed, in turn, dodges the towel with a graceful swing of his hips, steps across the patio and punches Lance in the shoulder.

Anne, coming down the grassy slope with what she's been able to scavenge from the fridge—dill pickles, some cold chicken she'd forgotten about, the remnants of a jellied salad, potato chips, and the cheese sandwiches for the girls—feels the tray she's carrying begin to shake. Seeing Mrs. King and her sons together, she is trembling all over with the feeling that there is violence simmering just under the surface of things.

As it turns out, Eric, Reed and Lance are not interested right now in food, for Eric has brought his telescope out from the shed and has set it up on the patio. He directs it at a beach down the river where, all weekend long, he and his brothers have been observing the movements of a young girl named Judith.

“Judith babysat for us once,” Anne tells them, “and at the end of the evening it took Eric three hours to drive her home.”

“I ran out of gas,” Eric says.

“Sure you did,” says Anne cynically.

“Jesus! Look at those cans!” cries Eric, squinting through the lens.

“Lemme see,” says Lance greedily, but Eric will not surrender the telescope.

“That must be against the law,” observes Anne flatly. “Invasion of privacy or something.”

“There is no law up here,” Mrs. King boasts in a proprietary tone, as though she'd invented the river herself. “Never was.”

“She's taken her top off,” Eric reports, peering through the lens. Lance and Reed grab for the telescope and Reed wins it. He bends, squints through the scope, one eye squeezed shut.

“Liar!” he says to Eric, disappointed.

“Juveniles,” Anne observes with disgust, holding the wooden bowl of potato chips, ready to offer them around.

“Oh, be a sport, Anne,” says Mrs. King. “Boys will be boys.”

The two little girls run up from the water's edge. The older one, Jade, is crying because her younger sister, Desiré, has splashed water in her face. Jade has legs like a sparrow and Anne's straight sandy hair.

“What a sullen little face she has,” observes Mrs. King, rubbing at her own arms with a towel. “She didn't get that from
our
side of the family.”

“I didn't splash her,” says Desiré, crossing her arms stubbornly. Like her father, she is a fluent liar. She refuses a sandwich from the plate.

“We don't know what Desiré lives on,” boasts Eric. “She's never hungry.” Of all the girls, Desiré would be Eric's pick. He says she's got street smarts, at the age of four.

“If she doesn't want her sandwiches, I'll eat them,” offers Lance.

Anne bends over, taking Jade's hand. “Don't cry,” she says comfortingly.

“You baby that kid,” Eric accuses Anne. “No wonder she's a suck about water. You can't live on a river and be a suck about water.”

“It's too cold for her,” says Anne. “She's thin-blooded.”

“The water is seventy-two degrees, for Chris'sake,” says Eric. “I checked the temperature half an hour ago.”

“When the boys were young,” recalls Mrs. King proudly, a glass of gin in her hand, “they went for a swim every morning, before school. In the month of May. I drove them into the water with a two-by-four. No better way to toughen a kid up. You could hear their howls miles down the river.” The boys grin, remembering.

“'S'true,” says Lance, a sandwich in each of his big mitts.

Mrs. King puts down her drink, gets up and moves toward Jade. “Here,” she says. “Grandma's going to teach you about water.” She seizes Jade's wrist. The child, squeezed in beside Anne on a lawn chair, pulls away, grabbing at Anne's leg. She whimpers as Mrs. King yanks her up and leads her across the patio.

“Eric, stop her,” says Anne, alarmed, rising from her chair, but Eric holds Anne back, twisting her arm behind her.

“It's only water,” he says.

Mrs. King has picked Jade up by both wrists. The child's legs churn the air, her body twists in Mrs. King's iron grip. Her screams carry across the water. Neighbours on nearby beaches rise from their chairs and stare across at the Kings' property, shading their eyes from the sun. Now Mrs. King has waded into the water up to her waist, pulling Jade along beside her.

“Hold your breath,” she warns, but Jade, her chin touching the water, is screaming too loud to hear her. Mrs. King dunks her once and Jade comes up choking, spitting water, red in the face. Mrs. King dunks her again.

“Eric, let go!” Anne protests, struggling to free her wrist from his grip. “Mrs. King!” she pleads on Jade's behalf.

“Mom, take it easy,” Reed calls out, concerned but respectful. Lance steps forward, nervous. Finally, Mrs. King turns and pulls Jade through the water, back to shore. Jade runs, sobbing, to Anne, who wraps her in a towel and picks her up.

“She's okay, the big baby,” says Mrs. King, standing now on the shore, water streaming down her heavy, blue-veined thighs.

“A little water never hurt anyone,” agrees Eric.

Anne picks Jade up and carries her across the lawn toward the house. “You're nothing but a pack of thugs!” she calls over her shoulder.

Reed and Lance look at each other a little sheepishly. They like Anne because she's a good cook.

“Anne!” Eric calls after her. “Anne, for Chris'sake!” He turns and looks at the river angrily. “Shit!” he spits out in disgust.

Later, up at the house after Jade has gone down to the beach again, Anne opens a kitchen cupboard and removes a glass. Glancing outside to make sure that nobody is coming, she closes her eyes, raises the glass and smashes it violently on the floor. The shards shoot in every direction, skidding across the linoleum, raining against her bare ankles like needle pricks. The pain and the sight of the shattered glass strengthen her, make her feel purified, purged of her anger. She places her palm flat against her brow, closes her eyes and takes several deep, calming breaths. Then, relaxed, she crosses the room, opens a long cupboard, takes out a broom. She sweeps the glass up into a dustpan and dumps it in the garbage, humming to herself. Sitting down in the living room, she picks up a book.

Soon she sees Eric coming up the sloped lawn to the house. She watches him, unmoved, and tries to remember precisely when it was that she made up her mind not to love him any more. She has learned that life is a lot easier if you keep your choices simple. Not loving Eric was the best way she knew to protect herself and the girls from him.

The sliding door in the kitchen opens and closes and she hears Eric looking through the kitchen cupboards. “Where are all our glasses disappearing to?” he calls out to her.

“The girls keep dropping them,” answers Anne.

“Bloody kids.”

From the kitchen, Eric calls, “Why don't you come down? Mother's going to think you don't like her.”

“I don't,” Anne answers.

He comes in and sits down beside her. “You really embarrassed me down there,” he says. “Everybody wants to know why you're so goddamn touchy.”

“Tell them I'm having an attack of sanity.”

Anne notes that Eric's hands are shaking, which means he's going to ask her about the money again. These days, he shakes whenever failure is imminent. For instance, when he tries to make love to her, he trembles until his teeth chatter.

“Let's go out tonight,” Eric says. “Just you and me.”

“What for?”

“We never talk like we used to.”

“If you want to talk to me, all you have to do is turn off the television during supper.”

“The kids would interrupt.”

“Look, Eric,” warns Anne. “Don't get coy with me. I know what you want. I told you before, I told you a hundred times, I can't give you the money.” Eric wants to invest the rest of Anne's inheritance in a tavern that is up for sale in a nearby town. “That money is my nest egg,” she says. “Besides, Daddy wouldn't have wanted me to spend it that way.”

“When you met me, you didn't give a damn about Daddy.”

“I know,” says Anne. She looks at Eric's bewildered face and bites her lip, momentarily torn. “Let me think,” she says, to appease him temporarily. “Let me think about the money.” But thinking about the money is no use, because Anne's inheritance is quickly draining away in payments to her analyst, whom she is seeing on the sly. It is he who told her to smash the drinking glasses, to employ her anger in an empowering way. Better to smash a glass than Eric or herself, he told her.

*   *   *

At three o'clock in the afternoon, the sun and the gin drive Mrs. King into the house. She falls onto Desiré's bed and snores. Lance plays Parcheesi with the children in the living room. Reed and Eric have taken the sailboat out on the river. Anne goes outside to weed her rose bed. She hears snatches of dialogue carrying across the water from other cottages. “My God!” a woman's voice exclaims, “—
freezing
!” Standing up to stretch her legs, Anne notices that Eric's sailboat has pulled in at a dock further down the river. She sees Reed leap out, another figure climb in, then Reed push the boat off, hopping in himself. The boat heads out into the wind again, rocking as the sails fill. Anne moves quickly down the lawn to the patio, squats and scans the river with the telescope until she picks up the boat. On the deck with Eric and Reed, she sees the blonde girl, Judith, wearing a bikini. She is sitting in the stern of the boat, beside Eric, who guides her hand on the tiller. Now the boat slips behind an island in the river, disappearing from view. “Damn that Eric!” mutters Anne, jerking the telescope away from her face so that it spins round and round on its pedestal, like a pointer on a board game. “Damn, damn, damn!” She begins to walk away, then turns and kicks the telescope over.