Range of Motion (16 page)

“Alice?”

She looks at me.

“Is it true?”

“You know, Lainey, I wonder if it would be all right with God if we exchanged situations. If we could have Ed in that bed instead of Jay. Because that would make some sense. Wouldn’t it?”

I say nothing.

“Maybe I could go home and bonk him on the head a little, do you think?”

“Alice, I’m sorry.”

“You know, what’s really insulting is that he uses that. A house. I never wanted to own a house. I mean, couldn’t he have said … I don’t know, a car? A car, that would actually run? That doesn’t make weird noises all the time? It’s an insult to say I want a house when I love living here so much. I love it here! I love duplexes, I love having you as a neighbor, I love
our big front porch and the wood trim we have that you can’t find anymore and the size of our kitchens and the wide sidewalks out front. I love that we can walk to the store and the little library. I love that this house is so old, that there’s such a strong sense of other lives that have been here.”

At this, I start listening even harder. But she stops talking.

W
hen I turn out the light for sleep that night, I close my eyes and, as I often do, remember how it used to be when I didn’t sleep alone. This seems to be painful necessity, the way the tongue seeks out the sore in the mouth. I close my eyes, think of the pleasure it was to back up to Jay, to feel his arm around my middle, his face against the back of my neck. Everything was in place when we lay together that way. I knew I was home. His smell was a kind of blanket to me. Safety. I notice that I still stay on my side of the bed, leaving room for him. If this goes on for years, will I still do that? If this goes on for years, will there ever be a point at which I am able to laugh with all of myself? It doesn’t seem so. And if that’s true, if my spirit must stay forever restrained because his is, wouldn’t it be better if he died? Maybe it would be. It would be cleaner. And after a while, perhaps even easier.

I sit up, turn on the light. I want to know the thing I should say
stop
to, the thing I can tell
I didn’t mean that
. I didn’t
mean that. I put my hand to my mouth, rock back and forth. I didn’t mean it.

W
ednesday morning, I am putting on lipstick, getting ready to go to the nursing home, when I hear the front door open. “Lainey?” Alice calls.

“In the bathroom,” I yell, and then stand back, look to see if I stayed in the lines for once.

Alice sticks her head in. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Are you leaving?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Could you do something for me first?”

Her voice is different than usual. I turn around to face her. “What’s up?” I have a sudden and terrible feeling she is going to tell me she’s pregnant and wants me to go with her to have an abortion. It’s that kind of face, full of conflict. But what she says is, “I want to go to her house.”

“Whose house?”

“You know.”

“
Her
house?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to meet her?”

“She’s not home.”

“So why do you want to go to her house?”

“I just want to see it.”

“Alice—”

“Don’t—
tell
me anything. I want to see it. I have to see it. Don’t say anything about it. Just come with me.”

“Well, how do you even know where it is? How do you know
who
she is?”

“I found out.”

“How?”

“I followed him. After work. Last night when Timothy ate dinner at your house? I followed Ed when he left work.”

“Oh, Alice.”

“No! I wanted to see. For sure.”

“And?”

“And he went into a town house and came out about forty minutes later, looking … happy. And with a wet head from a shower.”

“Well, then you saw her house already.”

“No, you don’t understand. I want to see it
slow
ly. I want to look in the windows. I want to see her furniture.”

I turn out the bathroom light, walk past her. “Come and sit down with me, Alice.”

“No! Listen, Lainey. I know what I’m doing. I have my reasons. I’m asking you to come with me. I need someone to … help me. To watch for people to come.” This last she says in a lowered voice, looking down. Apparently she knows how she’s sounding.

“Alice,” I say gently. “Won’t this just make you feel worse?”

She looks up. “Of course. That’s the point.”

“Oh,” I say. “All right.” I get it. Sometimes, just when you think you’re going to die from pain, rage steps in to save you. There’s only so much room in a human heart. Thank God.

The town house is a tasteful gray structure with white trim, located in the arty part of town. There’s a pot of red geraniums on the little front porchette. The unit is an end one, toward the back of the complex. My job as lookout won’t be too hard. Alice goes up to the front door, reads the brass nameplate. “S. Hermann,” she says.

“Ugh,” I say. “It’s probably ‘Suzanne.’ I hate ‘Suzanne.’ ”

“It’s probably ‘Slut.’ ” Alice opens her wallet, takes something out, slides it in the crack of the door and up, and the door opens.

“Alice!”

She turns around, startled. “It works!”

“How did you do that?” I say. “
Stop
that!”

“Come here, come here!” she whispers. “Let’s go in!”

“Alice, you can’t do this! What if she’s home?”

Alice leans in, says, “Hello?” Then, looking back at me, “She’s not home. She’s at work, fucking my husband in the supply closet.” She goes in the front door.

I stand still for a moment, then follow her, close the door behind me. Alice is standing in the living room, staring at a painting over a sofa. It’s hypermodern, as is everything else in the room.

“How did you get in?” I whisper. And then, “We have to get out of here!”

Alice stares at the painting while she answers me. “A friend of mine told me about this a long time ago. She said if the dead bolt wasn’t on, you could slide a credit card in and open the door. She’s right.”

“Fine. Now you’ve seen the place. Let’s go.” Alice doesn’t move. I see a flowering floor plant in one corner, a beautiful burgundy throw over an armchair. Slut has a lot of books, a whole wall of them. Very nice. From the living room, I can see part of the kitchen. I tiptoe toward it.

“Where are
you
going?” Alice whispers.

“I just … let me see the kitchen.”

Alice follows me into a small room, nicely equipped. “Wow,” I say. “Look at her appliances. She has
every
thing.” I start to pull open a drawer.

“Don’t do that,” Alice says.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. An alarm might go off.”

“
Now
you think of that. If she doesn’t arm her door, I’m sure she doesn’t arm her kitchen drawer.” I pull it open. “Look, she has good knives, too.”

“Come on,” Alice says. “Let’s find the bedroom. That’s what I really want to see. Or do you want to inspect her spices?”

I do, actually. She probably has the mail-order vanilla, whole nutmeg that she grates on a special fifteen-dollar grater. But I follow Alice into the bedroom. I pass a bathroom on the way, see blue pottery on the tank top, blue and
white towels rolled up in a basket beside the tub, what looks like a silk kimono hanging on a hook. A small vase by the sink holds one white freesia.

In the bedroom, there’s a kind of Chinese motif—a lot of black lacquer and red. Alice uses a brass pull to open the drawer of the bedside stand and I lean over her shoulder to see in. There’s a pair of glasses in there, a tasteful tortoise-shell; a tube of generic hand lotion, a paperback book of poetry and a large number of condoms. “Oh God,” I say. “Come on, Alice. Shut that. Don’t look.”

Alice closes the drawer slowly, stands still for a long, terrible moment. “I just want to see her clothes,” she says. “And then we’ll leave.”

She starts toward the closet and then stops, stares at a sweater lying across a chair in the corner. “Look,” she says, pointing at it.

“What?” I say.

“That’s Ed’s.”

“Are you sure?”

Alice goes to pick the sweater up. “Yeah. I bought it for him.” She smells it, holds her face against it for a while. “Nice new cologne.” She looks up, her face remarkably impassive. “Let’s go,” she says.

I follow her out. On the porch, she touches the largest blossom on the geranium. I think she’s going to pinch it off, but she leaves it there.

I
come home before the kids, meet them on the porch when they come back from school. Alice doesn’t need to do anything extra today. I give them the candy bars I bought on the way home because I know if I give them those they’ll do whatever I say for the next hour. I tell them to eat outside, then to play for a while. And then I go over to Alice’s. She is in the kitchen, sitting before an empty cup. I think she’s probably been sitting there a long time. She looks up, smiles at me.

“So?” I say.

“So I’ll be a single mother. It’s all the rage.”

“You’re going to separate?”

She shrugs. “Yeah. That’s what I want to do. I think it might be better, anyway. It’s hard, to be lonely in a marriage. Especially when you try to act as though you’re not lonely. You know, every weekend morning I’d get up before Ed, and I’d make coffee and I’d hope that he would come down and sit with me, that it would be early morning and we’d be sitting in the kitchen together, having coffee and talking. It seems like once you have kids that’s such a rare thing. But he would never get up, even the few times that I asked him the night before and he promised that he would. I’d wait, and the coffee would get stale and when he got up he’d throw it out and make a new pot. And I always thought that was so sad, you know, that two people who lived together in the
same house would be making separate pots of coffee. Do you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean.” There would be an island of sun on the kitchen table, warming the bananas in the fruit bowl. Jay and I would be in our pajamas, teeth unbrushed, faces still creased with sleep, yawning, ignoring the paper in favor of describing our dreams, talking about what we might do that day, wondering if we had any money we could go throw around. I knew it was a rare thing every time it happened; I am not unaware of what happens on most Sunday mornings when the people have been married for a while, when they are past the time of lounging on love seats, looking cute in their T-shirt pajamas and sweatsocks and glasses, the woman resting her feet in the lap of the man as they read the paper. I know how uncommon it is for the interest to hold, the joy. Before I met Jay, I worked one summer as a waitress. An old man came in with his wife, taking her out to dinner on their anniversary. When I brought their salads, he told me they’d been married fifty-three years. Then he took her hand and they looked at each other with such honest and tremulous affection I had to go in the back room where the potatoes and onions were kept so I could weep. It was because I knew it was possible, that sort of staying power, and I was afraid I’d never find it. But I did.

Alice sighs hugely, then looks up at me. “Would you say that you’re happy? I mean, before the accident. Were you happy?”

I want to say no. It seems disloyal not to. She’s feeling so badly. I ought to keep her company. But I tell her the truth. I nod yes.

“But … would you say you’re a happy person anyway? I mean, you know, optimistic?”

“I guess so.”

“I’m just trying … I just would like to know some things about you, Lainey. About your nature. I’m just trying to figure some things out, here.”

“Well, yes, I would say I was optimistic.”

“So you look forward to the future.”

“It’s been hard lately.”

“I know. I know that. But I mean, generally.”

“Yes. Yes, Alice, I do! Okay?”

“Well, don’t get mad.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I’m not! It’s just that … I don’t know, it’s kind of a sore spot with me. People make fun of me for … Okay, I had a roommate my first year in college who was depressed all the time. I think she was majoring in depression. But she was very chic, everybody thought she was very hip. She dressed only in black, dyed her hair black, wore this thick line of black makeup around her eyes, even to bed. Black panties, black bra, black socks, black shoes … you know. She never smiled. And I really irritated her. We got a bottle of wine one night and got drunk in our room and she asked what I
felt like first thing in the morning. She said to tell the truth, now, tell the truth. She was talking in this really low voice, her head close to mine. So I said, in this really low voice back, that I felt happy first thing in the morning. She sat there for a long time, kind of swaying, and then she said, ‘You feel
happy
.’ And I said yes. And she said, Why? And I said I didn’t know, exactly, but that for one thing I was very interested to see what might happen. She said, ‘You mean, you feel, a sense of … ex
cite
ment?’ and I said yes, that was what it was. She said, ‘
Really
,’ and I said yes, really.

“The next morning I was standing at the window in my underwear and a T-shirt, watching the sun come up. She told me I had a rip in my underwear, and I said yes I knew that but these were my period pants, I used them the first day of my period, and she said she thought that was ridiculous. Sad. She pulled the covers back over her head and went to sleep. I got dressed and went out for breakfast. It was a fine day, a bit of cold in the air, frost on the grass. I had two over easy and hash browns at Al’s Diner and the coffee was so perfect I drank too much and then I talked too much in humanities class. When I got back to the room, it was one-thirty and my roommate was just getting up. And we just looked at each other, and I know she was thinking I was such a jerk and I said, ‘Look. For me, the glass is a fucking waterfall. Get used to it.’ ”

Alice is staring at me. I can’t tell how she feels. “I know,” I say. “I’m an imbecile.”

“You’re not an imbecile,” Alice says. “It’s something else. Naïveté, maybe. But that’s only part of it. I envy you. I mean, you’re the kind of person who gets happy if the leftovers fit exactly into the Tupperware container.”