Other People We Married (19 page)

“What’s funny? What are you reading?” Kate sat down on the sofa and smoothed out the seat next to her. The sofa looked suddenly shabby, with Kate on it. It had always been just fine, for the last twenty years it had always looked just fine, but now it was all wrong.

Marjorie shut the book and shook her head. “Oh, nothing.” She took off her reading glasses and placed them, folded, in her lap.

If Marjorie had raised the children better, Kate would have said,
It’s not nothing, Mom. What are you reading? What just made you laugh? Come on, tell me!
She would have moved closer together and they would have talked for hours about all the birds Marjorie had seen in the park, and how smart Dr. Lawrence was, and how incredible it was to hear a warbler before you saw it and know—not think, but know—exactly what it was. But instead, Kate did just what Marjorie was hoping she wouldn’t, and started talking about her day, and how another parent from the school was having an inappropriate relationship with the soccer coach, and she just didn’t think it was going to end well. Marjorie did her best to listen, and to be concerned, for of course she did love her daughter very much. There had been times that Marjorie thought Kate ought to get a pet to serve that purpose, the good listener. When the children were small, Steve had lobbied for a dog, and so they’d had a dog, a great big slobbery one. It had been almost twenty years, though, and Marjorie wasn’t sure she was up to another one. She didn’t particularly like cats. Maybe she would get a bird, though it now seemed cruel to keep one inside, now that she’d seen them whoop and soar in the park, as high as all that.

It wasn’t a crush; that was absurd. Marjorie had been married for fifty-three years. Matthew was the one who used the word first. He’d started coming over on Wednesdays, also. There was a television program he liked, and they sat and watched it together on the new sofa.

“He sounds nice, Mom.” Matthew ate entire handfuls of microwaved popcorn at a time, not noticing or caring when
kernels fell to the rug. If Marjorie had a bird, the bird would have eaten them. She liked that idea—the bird and her son having a symbiotic relationship.

“Dr. Lawrence is better than nice, he’s smart,” Marjorie said. The program Matthew liked was about chefs competing for prize money. All the chefs worked very quickly and had tattoos. Marjorie supposed that’s what chefs were really like; she’d never known any. She liked the show, seeing behind the scenes. “I go twice a week.”

“So, he’s like your therapist.”

The chefs were making eggs, which Marjorie had never thought was very difficult. But then she saw what they made, the beautiful yolks spilling out onto the judges’ plates. The yellow was the exact same color as a canary, with its
witchoo-witchoo-witchoo
song. Out of nowhere, her eyes felt moist and teary.

“Oh no,” she said. “Don’t be silly. What do I need a therapist for? I have you.” Marjorie patted her son’s knee, and then went into the kitchen to make him more popcorn. Matthew shook his head; she didn’t really mean it, not literally, but Marjorie knew it was the kind of thing that would make them both happy, to have it hanging in the air like that.

One Friday morning, Dr. Lawrence brought a paper bag full of fresh bagels for the class. He held it against his chest, and the smell of warm dough filled the air, at least the air closest to Marjorie. She’d just bought a new pair of binoculars and was looking forward to showing them to Dr. Lawrence. They’d been expensive, but she didn’t care. Steve had always
shopped that way, with no regard for price tags, but Marjorie had been raised thrifty. The binoculars were her first major purchase since signing up for the class, and she was proud of them. She waited with her arms crossed for Dr. Lawrence to speak. Some of the younger women were still chatting when he cleared his tiny throat, and Marjorie looked sharply at them, on purpose.

“I have some exciting news,” Dr. Lawrence said. It was warm, the very end of June. Peak migration was already over, but there were still birds in the trees. Marjorie had learned so much already, and her heartbeat quickened at the notion that there was a new piece of information that Dr. Lawrence was about to impart. “The museum is sending me to the Serengetit.” He paused, smiling, and looked straight at Marjorie.

“What for?” Marjorie asked, not quite meaning to say it out loud, but not able to stop herself, either.

“To see it!” Dr. Lawrence’s pale pink cheeks were brighter than usual—he was excited. Marjorie hadn’t seen him look so pleased since the day they saw two downy woodpeckers chomping away on the same tree. “For my backgrounds.”

Marjorie remembered then: why was it so hard for her to remember? When Dr. Lawrence wasn’t looking at birds, he was painting the backgrounds of the dioramas. He painted the skies and the clouds and the mountains and the brush in the far-off distance.

“Oh,” Marjorie said. “How wonderful.”

Having received the response he wanted, Dr. Lawrence opened the bag of bagels and passed it around the crowd of people. One woman had brought her baby and had the poor thing strapped to her chest, where her binoculars should
have been. Marjorie felt that Dr. Lawrence deserved more than a trip to the desert. He deserved to have someone go with him, someone to go and touch his elbow when she (this person, this other person) saw a bird suddenly streaking across the wide-open
sky.

I
t was August, and the car’s air-conditioning was broken. That was part of the problem. John believed in waiting to see if appliances fixed themselves, if some benign magic from the greater universe would intervene. And so there we were, John in front and me in the back with the baby, all the windows down, sweat making the backs of our thighs stick to the seats. It would take three hours to get to his parents’ house on the very tip of the North Fork of Long Island, and the open windows only helped when we were moving quickly, which wasn’t often the case. John kept looking at us in the rearview mirror—no, not at us, at Eve.

“Is she okay?” he asked. Eve was too small to face forward, and so he could only see the car seat itself in the rearview mirror.

She was damp with sweat, just like us, her tiny brown
wisps of hair plastered to her forehead like a doll’s molded plastic coif.

“She’s fine,” I said. “Just hot.”

On cue, the baby whimpered. Eve was almost a year old and had mastered a few consistent words, all of which sounded like a drunk talking in his sleep.

“Sounds like she’s hungry,” John said. He narrowed his eyes at me. “Is she hungry?”

“She’s fine,” I said. Even thinking about breast-feeding made my body spring into action. I could feel the internal valves open. She would eat soon enough, whether she was hungry or not. John had made sure of it. Otherwise, we’d arrive at his parents’ house, John and Eve slick with sweat, me with sweat and tacky milk.

The day after our wedding, my parents told me they loved John. They said it together, at the kitchen table. I was already five months pregnant.

“He’s a good man,” my father said. “A good man.”

“We’re very happy for you,” my mother said.

No one thought I would ever get married, not to somebody as clean as John, as fancy. That’s what they were really saying—that I’d waddled backward into it like a scuba driver plopping off the back of a boat. That he wouldn’t have married me otherwise, and what luck. And they were right. Eve had three cousins already on her father’s side, slim, long children all. There were family outings to the beach, camping trips. They sang songs and did the puzzle. My parents didn’t close the door when they used the bathroom, and as far as I knew no one in John’s family had ever even had to go.

Eve looked like me, with dark features and a cloudy expression. She often cried when faced with cheery strangers at the grocery store, a trait I admired. She was an excellent screamer. In a few weeks, she would be a year old. I’d always hated it when parents counted in months, the same way that pregnant women counted in weeks, as though their time was too precious to use such large units of measure. John would have described Eve’s age in days, if he could count that high. It was like he thought that she was the only baby who had ever been born.

“I am too hot to breathe,” I said. We were only forty minutes out of the city but the concrete landscape had already relaxed into long, uninterrupted stretches of trees.

John didn’t respond, instead just stared at the road in front of him. We zoomed by the huddled body of a dead deer on the median, and then another. John seemed not to notice.

There was a beach an hour from Orient Point, one John’s parents never went to because people were always nude. We passed the first sign for it on the road, and I smacked the back of John’s seat.

“Turn here,” I said, as though it had been our plan all along. “Turn here, turn here, turn here.” The thought of the water, still cold in August, made my mouth begin to salivate with relief.

He did as he was told. Though he gamely pretended that his parents liked me, John was never in a rush to get me to their house, as white and clean as a furniture showroom. The minute I stepped inside, I could feel the whole family collectively hold their breath. I was an accident, Eve was an accident. We were placeholders that forgot to move on.

Our bathing suits were wadded somewhere in the duffel bag in the trunk, but when we got out of the car, and I’d unhooked Eve from her seat, the breeze from the ocean felt too good on my skin to wait another minute. “Forget it,” I said to John, as he started to unzip the bag. “Just come on.”

The path from the small parking lot to the beach itself was a narrow strip of sand carved out of tall sea grass, waving pussy willows that reached my shoulders. The hot sand poured through the gaps of my flip-flops and stung my toes. Eve made a noise like a wet rag being wrung out, the kind of noise that was ninety percent saliva. John was a yard behind us, his empty hands already clutching at the anxiety of arriving at a beach in his clothes, without a towel.

The beach was empty except for two old women sunning themselves far at the other end. They were too far away for me to tell if they were wearing anything but their sunglasses.

“Hold her for a sec,” I said, and passed John the baby. I pulled off my tank top and shorts in less than a minute, peeling the damp cotton of my underwear off, too, and dropped all my clothes into a pile on the sand. John stared at me as if I’d grown a third breast. Eve nestled into his chest like a barnacle. “Okay,” I said. “I’m going in.” And then I walked into the water, the icy Long Island Sound lapping at my ankles. One by one, I felt each of my blood vessels constrict until my body was half as big as it had been before. I walked until the water came up to my belly button, and turned around.

John and Eve hadn’t moved. They stood static, father and daughter, rock and barnacle, as separate from me as the Atlantic from the Pacific. John and I weren’t supposed to have gotten married. We weren’t even supposed to have liked
each other. We were supposed to have had sex a few times, always high or drunk or both, and then to sheepishly forget each other’s names. I would have. There had been possible exits before, choices he’d ignored, but it was still early enough to escape without permanent damage. But it wasn’t the two of us that didn’t fit, me and Eve. It was only me. John could take Eve and she would be one of them, as comfortable in that pristine white house as he was. She would never spill, never stumble. John would take her; was it strange, that I knew so clearly that he would be the one she clung to? She would see me on holidays, on weekends, and then hardly at all, until she only saw my young face in her baby pictures and recognized the scowl her father had taught her to discard. Everyone would be better off. John would be relieved. His parents would be quietly ecstatic and never say my name again. I smiled at him from the water before sinking to my knees and letting the cold water rise over my collarbones, over my ears, over my head.

C
amp Mohawk was in the Berkshires, three and a half hours out of the city. Fran and Jim had friends who’d sent their sons, a rowdy lot from the Apthorp, and Fran thought Bobby might benefit from the experience. He was eight and clung to his mother like a security blanket, only detaching for school and meals. The thought of an entire month with only the two of them in the house struck them as both terribly sad and terribly exciting, and so there they were, zipping up I-95 in the Saab, which creakily gave in to Jim’s insistent demands.

Bobby sat in the backseat and was completely silent until they hit New Haven. Fran kept her hand on the radio tuning knob and switched stations every time a song came on that didn’t strike her fancy, which was often.

“What if I don’t like anyone there?” Bobby said. He stared
out the window, as though the answer waited in a passing Connecticut gas station.

“Oh, honey!” Fran swiveled around in her seat and gripped the headrest, peeking through. “Of course you will! And they’ll all like you!” The camp was for boys who favored the outdoors, with canoe trips and hikes on the Appalachian Trail. They’d packed ten pairs of underwear, ten pairs of socks, four pairs of pants, four pairs of shorts, eight T-shirts, two sweatshirts, one mess kit, and one canteen, all with Bobby’s name emblazoned in one place or another. Jim would have been worried, too.

“Okay,” he said, still unconvinced. Fran handed him a Snickers bar, his last piece of candy for four weeks. Bobby took it with both hands and didn’t ask any more questions.

All the boys were split into bunks based on their age; as one of the youngest in the camp, Bobby was a Scout. He seemed to take this designation seriously, and nodded at his two slim-hipped counselors, who both looked so much like children that Jim half wanted to steal Bobby away, throw him in the back of the car, and drive away as quickly as possible. Franny eyed them both with particular interest, and the boys blushed under her gaze. She’d worn heels and lipstick knowing full well that she would have a tour of the grounds before leaving them her only child.

“Amherst,” she said to one of the counselors. “How
fabulous.
”