Precious (22 page)

“And you?” Ellie says. “How have you been?”

“What can I say?” Natalia responds, smiling unnaturally, unable to lie. Although Frank has given Natalia back the bedroom, he has taken, as if in stubborn retaliation, to the basement, where he has erected a cot next to the upright piano bought years before for the girls, the same one abandoned first by Eva in boredom and then later by Sissy, who showed no acumen for the instrument beyond a sheepish rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Could she tell them this? And though the outright fights between them have lessened, and though on Sunday they can force themselves through dinner and the strained small talk, there is still tension between Natalia and Frank when they are alone, there is still the sound she’s overly aware of during dinner—the knife as it digs into the plate, scratching it. Would they care to know that small detail that weighs on Natalia? There are days when she calls Frank only to have him ignore her entirely. There are days when he refuses to get out from under the car, days that, hearing her, he’ll throw something onto the pavement—a wrench, a pipe, a bolt. She is only too aware of all these minute gestures, and what they might mean in a man like her husband—he is still angry. He is still debating about Natalia, and she might still find herself alone, without a roof over her head. And she is sure that, to lesser degrees, others are aware as well. The lights are always on in the basement, the small slits of windows illuminating his new room late into the night. She’s certain someone has noticed this, passed by, talked. So, she wonders, what do they really want
to know, other than for her to confirm their suspicions? She picks up her advertisements. “It was nice talking, but I really should be going.”

“I guess we could collect the mail, put it in a bag, and leave it for her,” Jenny suggests, content to change the subject. “That would be the simplest thing.” She looks down the street and seems to focus on the white picket fence, Ginny’s car parked outside, as it has been parked for days and maybe weeks.

“Hm,” Ellie says. She gets up, leans over the railing. The breeze flaps her loose shirt, making it balloon. “That’s a good idea. We can’t get in trouble for that, can we? Just moving the mail?” She rests her elbows on the railing and lets her chin fall on folded hands. Each finger is adorned with rings. “Honestly, you don’t think she’s dead in there or anything?”

Jenny laughs uncomfortably. “Don’t say that. Though, God knows, if something like that happened to a child that was mine, I can’t imagine what I’d want to do to myself.”

“No,” Natalia says. “It’s hard to imagine losing a child.”

“We don’t want to be overly nosy, you know,” Jenny says. “We’re just worried, that’s all. We’re worried about you, Natalia, too, about you and Frank and the girls especially.”

“I’m sure Ginny’s fine,” Natalia interrupts. “Just keeping to herself It’s difficult sometimes when everyone is watching. She probably feels hemmed in.”

“Hemmed in?” Ellie raises her eyebrows. “We’re
her friends.”

Natalia is aware of the look that passes between the women, and she hears, too, the busy chatter of birds on the wires and in the trees. They talk a bit longer, about the upcoming year, about the possibility of Natalia partaking in the PTA and the annual bake sale in September. Natalia nods, assuring the women that of course she will help, though secretly she wonders if the women are just asking her, in a polite way if she’ll still be here, or if she and Frank might separate. “That sounds wonderful,” she says. “I’ll be there with bells on.”

“Well,” Jenny says, hesitating, “if you need anything, don’t be a stranger.”

“Never.” Once back inside the house, Natalia leans against the wall and feels as if she is receding into it. Her heart beats quickly. She peeks out the curtain, seeing the women there, still talking, though now probably about her, probably about the demise of her marriage, her affair, her inadequacies as a mother. For the rest of the day she cannot shake the women off, their comments, what their comments might have meant—they cling to her, like tiny hooks thrown at her flesh. The evening is made worse when Eva struts out with Greg, a boy Natalia doesn’t approve of—a boy she thinks smells like the bag she found in Eva’s bedroom. Natalia stands and asks questions, waiting for Eva to tell her where she’s going, but with Eva, as with Frank, her credibility of late has been ruined and though she fusses, Eva refuses to answer her because she knows she can.

“I’m going out,” Eva says, vaguely. Her tone is causally neutral. She’s dressed all in black—a halter top and skirt.

“Be back home by eleven,” Natalia reminds her, though even that has the meek sound of a request, and what she really wants to say is
Please stop hating me.
It seems to her she is always looking at the back of Eva’s head these days, the long wave of hair, the rush of her daughter out the door, the flurry of rather secretive activity that makes Natalia yearn to follow and spy on her daughter, were it not for the counter-impulse that always accompanies this thought—to leave Eva alone, to respect her need for space.
Does she need guidance?
Natalia wonders.
A sense of God and faith?
Only once did Natalia take Eva to church as a young girl. Eva knelt the entire time, fascinated, raking her hands over the red velvet cushions that lined the kneelers. She tried so hard to be good, but after the benediction, she yelled out, misunderstanding the phrase “Thanks be to God,” and thanking God that he was
speedy,
instead. “Thanks speedy God,” she said, her voice rising to a clamor. Natalia, who was herself trying to be as reverent as possible, buckled over with laughter. She doesn’t know why she thinks of that story now. Eva is gone, out the door—and the Eva she remembers is gone, too.

Within the house, Natalia takes care of other tasks: Sissy needs to be driven to a friend’s house, her first sleepover of the dwindling summer.
Sissy descends the steps with two too many suitcases and her rolled sleeping bag and fusses when Natalia makes her take less—less clothes, less games, less stuffed animals. After she returns, Natalia passes the time by reading a book, her thoughts made worse in the quiet. She thinks about Frank, and how she wishes they could have a life as frivolous as that of the young protagonists—lying idly on the beach, spending hours in bed. She makes it through thirty pages, then puts the book down. By eight, once the house lights around the neighborhood have flickered on, she decides to take a walk. The night is warm, appealing. She stops in front of Ginny’s house; the porch light remains extinguished, though through the curtained window she can make out the flicker of the television and movement—alive and well enough. She imagines Ginny in her own quiet rooms, her thoughts pricking her like briar. She stands, still unable to decide whether she should knock and make an impromptu visit.

Natalia continues walking. The streetlight above her flickers.

When she comes home, she finds Frank in the living room, back unexpectedly from work. At first she sees him in shadow, the living room illuminated only by the window. She jumps slightly, taken aback, but then, as her eyes adjust, she makes out the still-familiar contours of his wide shoulders and neck. He sits in his favorite chair, his cigarette dangling with a slow burn and orange flame. She turns on a light, sees the age in his face, the deep crevices across his flesh. “You scared me,” she says. She smooths her hair, suddenly worried about how she looks.

Frank leans back, and it seems to her he is deciding something. It is the same look he had when he returned from visiting Ginny, and it is a look that caused an inexplicable though quiet alarm in her. “What is it?” she asks.

“Work,” he says simply.

“Yes?” She sits down, across from him.

“A layoff.”

She folds her hands and waits for him to explain more, though she doesn’t really need the explanation in more detail. “In all our years of
marriage, there’s hardly no other reason you’re ever home early,” she says. To her surprise, she’s relieved to know it’s not them, that he hasn’t decided to give up on them. “Do you want something? Coffee? Are you hungry?”

“The steel industry is dying, you know,” he tells her. “I never thought that day would come when I started. When I was younger, steel was everything. It was all anyone goddamn talked about.”

“They’ll call you back in a few weeks, a month at the most, like they always do. What would they do without that plant? I think the town must have been built around it.”

“What would they do?” Frank grins in an embittered way. “Fill up the hole, bury it, I guess.”

“I’ve been looking for work.”

“I know.”

“I think there’s a good chance I can get hired downtown, maybe at the florist’s, or at the fabric store. I sent in applications. I could do books, numbers, if I had to.”

“I saw the paper,” he says. “The ads you circled.”

She falls silent then, not knowing what to say to soothe him. She hates to see him this way, to see how his calloused hands rest idly on the arms of the chair, how without his job Frank Kisch is a man suddenly so very lost and without purpose. She senses his disappointment, his defeat. She could tell him she knows he’s a good man. She could tell him she’s sorry for the fact that he was forced to take a backbreaking job so long ago, all because she was pregnant with their son, the boy dying just at the moment Frank seemed to be anticipating him most, just when he was finished with painting the extra room in their small apartment a powdery blue. She could tell him that it’s not them or even the world that’s bad, it’s just periods of bad luck. She says nothing.

“Natalia?”

She looks up, stands, and shakes her head. “I’ll get you a coffee.”

“Don’t bother.” He gets up and walks to where she stands, feeling absurd in the moment. He stops and they are close—so close she can
feel his breath on her forehead. They haven’t been this close since the night together in the kitchen, when she came back home and there was that terrible, rancorous fight. How warm his skin always seems, how the heat emits from his body. Or maybe it’s her. She feels a wave of desire come over her. The moment seems sharply lined, entirely clear. She looks at Frank—his eyes serious in the moment—and wonders if he even remembers the two of them together, their bodies tangled in plea surable ways. He places his wide hand behind her neck and draws her closer. He kisses her hard, with a measure of contempt, or anguish, or love—it is impossible for Natalia to tell, and perhaps it is everything, everything hitting them both all at once, all the years. The force of it all is crushing, tangible, a desperate need pressing in them both. Even if his kiss holds contempt, she takes him to her, thinks,
to be touched at all.
He is there, like someone lost that she’s managed to find, someone once at great distance but now near. In the bedroom, his hands are rough and quick, his body rank from the day, his pants only half off the entire time. Her skirt is lifted above her slender thighs, her cheek against the pillow. She sees only a blind whiteness, hears only a low moan, a quickened breath. Still, she thinks,
to be touched by him at all,
to have his firm hands around her, familiar as he lifts her rump, to have him so near, the flesh of his belly against her. There is nothing to hold back. There is everything to risk.

She says nothing when, later, he pulls from her and composes himself, zipping up his pants and tucking in his shirt. She watches him, wondering if there is always inequity in any relationship, if there is always one person who loves the other more, even if by barely a perceptible amount. She decides only that any love matters, the binding of years. She decides only that she will do anything to keep him close, to not lose him again. “Are you through being angry?” she asks.

He doesn’t look at her. “No.”

“How long, then?”

He ignores her question. “I thought of you when you were gone. I missed you.”

“You can sleep here, if you want,” she continues, her voice urgent, pressing. “The cot must hurt your back. The draft—”

But he leaves, closing the door behind him, and she hears him shuffle through the kitchen. She waits, thinking he might come back to their rumpled bed. He might forgive her everything. It strikes her that Frank is still a handsome man, his thick head of hair, his strong features. She thinks of his face up close to hers—close but not touching—the small, complicated spaces that exist between people.

The next morning, she finds a dollar bill on the kitchen table alongside a note that she suspects Frank penned before he retreated down to the basement. “For last night,” she reads, and then crumples the paper and throws it away. It should hurt—it is meant to hurt—and it does. She stares at the bill for a few moments, folds it and unfolds it in her hands, and then finally places it in the jar she keeps in the kitchen, one filled with spare change.

Still, if on occasion something good happens from something bad, Frank later apologizes, and there is, in the week that follows, an easing in him if not exactly an acceptance or a forgiveness. On days when they are both home and around each other, they parcel out activities that mostly leave Natalia to the house. If he is not at the unemployment office or out helping his friend Lennie with landscaping work for which he is paid under the table, Frank busies himself. He cuts the weedy grass, which the rains have made long again, flushed with new color. He paints the porch railing and sands down the screen door to keep it from scraping the porch. He washes out the shed and stacks his tools, paint cans, and cement buckets neatly. Over a few days, he rips through the tree in their backyard after judging it deader than dead, an act that practically sends Sissy into hysterics and leaves Natalia to wonder why her daughter has such an unnatural, worrisome attachment to absolutely everything around her. When the chain saw roars to life, wood chips spew out from under its bite and land in the pool, floating idly on the surface. Eva, in an effort to make Sissy feel better, skims the wood chips out and into a bucket. “We can plant something new in its place,” Natalia hears Eva say,
with a maturity and consoling tone that surprises her. Frank stacks the wood, piece by piece, next to the shed for winter. He covers it with a tarp, to keep it dry. Natalia pulls down laundry from the line and catches Frank watching her between the fluttery dance of still sheets, flapping like swan wings. She considers this a slow progress between them. Some days she even feels hopeful, the house finally breathing properly again.