She Poured Out Her Heart (12 page)

The air was so cold, it made her lungs seize up. The snow wasn't deep, but it had a thin crust that resisted each step. She struggled and almost skidded down the slope into the woods. She'd fall, break her leg, freeze to death because no one inside would miss her or hear her piteous cries for help. She had the lamest fantasies in the world, and none of them did her any good. She walked around a corner of the house and watched Stan's light show from this new angle. The shooting colors, orange-red, purple-blue, rose and fell away and rose up again. They were entirely beautiful in and of themselves, no matter how self-satisfied Stan might be, or how much damage he did to everyone else. The record spoke for itself.

She turned and headed back the way she'd come. She hadn't gone that far, but she was clumsy with cold by now, and it took her longer than expected. Her fingers and ears ached. She fumbled with the glass door, alarmed now by how fast the cold was getting to her, as if she might freeze solid on the spot.

Finally she got the door open, closed it behind her, and hurried into the bathroom to run water over her hands. They burned. Her face was bright red and her eyes watered. She might have wanted to die a tragic death in the snow, but she certainly hadn't wanted to look bad while doing it.

Once she'd thawed out and turned a normal color again, she went back upstairs. The kitchen was crowded with people, all of them making some hectic effort she couldn't fathom, opening drawers, lifting things from the countertops. Claudia was going through a garbage bag, unloading vegetable peelings and fish scraps and paper wrappings. Will was under the kitchen sink with a wrench and Diane was standing next to him, looking fretful. Charlie had the broom out and was sweeping the floor one section at a time, stopping every so often to examine the bristles. “What's going on?” she asked him.

“Diane lost her engagement ring.” Waiting to see what she'd say.

“Oh, that's.” Dead stop. She wasn't sure what it was.

“She took it off while she was doing dishes.”

Another stop, while each of them waited for the other to . . . Confess? Condole? Rejoice? “I expect it's insured,” Bonnie said.

“I put it right there, in the little saucer on the sink, and I didn't even notice I didn't have it until I finished dessert, I don't believe it!” Diane kept rubbing her fingers together, all teary.

Claudia said, “It has to be here somewhere. I haven't run the garbage disposal yet, so we don't have to worry about that.”

Will unbent himself from where he'd been working on the piping. “It's not in the trap or anywhere I can reach.”

The others, Irina and the hipster boys, gradually gave up their effort and stood around looking ineffectual. Will said, “You're sure you put it on the sink. Not in your purse or anything.”

“Why would I put it in my purse?”

“Why would you put it on the sink? Come on.”

Franklin came in then, stopping in the doorway and blinking. “Diane lost her ring and we're looking for it,” Claudia explained.

“Ah.” Franklin nodded. He walked to the refrigerator and held his glass against the ice dispenser to chunk some ice cubes into it.

“I know it'll turn up,” Claudia told Diane. “Things always do. Why don't you and Charlie and the others go get yourself set up in the studio?” She gave Diane a motherly hug. “I'll keep looking, it'll be easier without such a crowd.”

“I'm never going to forgive myself,” Diane said, but she let Will lead her out of the kitchen.

By the time Bonnie followed, they'd collected their coats and headed outside. The dining room table was cleared, the main room empty. Stan must have gone on to bed. The fire in the hearth had burned down to ash and embers. The Christmas tree lights had been switched off. The crow at the top brooded in the dark. She sat down on the couch and
yawned. She supposed she took some small, mean pleasure in the lost ring, but nothing that changed the essential cruddiness of everything.

The front door opened and Will came in, scraping the snow from his boots. He stood in front of Bonnie, looking down. “Do you know anything about this?”

“About what?”

“About Diane's ring.”

“Not a thing. How many carats did you get her?”

“Did you take it? Just tell me, all right?”

“Drop dead.”

“Were you in the kitchen after she left? Did you see it?”

“I wasn't there. I went for a walk.”

“It's below zero out there.”

“Yeah, it was cold.”

They stared at each other. Charlie thought she'd taken it too, although he would have sympathized. “Look,” she said, holding out her hands and spreading her fingers. “No rings. Nothing up my sleeve.”

He shifted his weight and looked away, as if he might believe her in spite of himself. “Diane asked me about you. Like she figured out something had, you know, happened with us.”

“Yeah, something did. Maybe you should tell her. Whatever it is that, you know, you decide to say.”

He sat down next to her. “I'm sorry.”

“Sorry for what, exactly?”

He turned and kissed her then, pulling her up to him and holding her face in his hands. It was a surprise and then it wasn't; it was everything remembered and familiar and starting up all over again. Because nothing was ever over as long as you were both alive. Or maybe even then it went on and on, ghost love? It had not gone to waste, been dismissed or forgotten. It could not be undone. She leaned into him with her entire self and finally he pulled away, got up, and walked out, closing the front door behind him.

Bonnie sat there a long time. Then she stood. Her whole body hurt, as if she was coming down with the flu, as if she'd been beaten.

So she guessed she'd been kissed off.

Moving with care, she reentered the empty kitchen and turned on the light to the stairs. She got halfway down then stopped. Someone was snoring.

It was Franklin, face down on the fold-out couch, arms and legs in a dead man's sprawl. His shirt had come untucked and a wedge of fat showed above his belt. She contemplated him for a moment, then retraced her steps back upstairs.

The house was quiet. A baby started up crying, faintly, at some distance, but even as Bonnie listened, it ceased. The kitchen had been scoured down and the dishes done and put away in the course of all the searching. Hungry now, Bonnie found the leftover cake in the refrigerator, cut herself a slice, and ate it standing at the sink, looking out at the woods. The window had begun to ice over in crescents of frost.

When she was finished eating, she rinsed her dishes and washed them, and reached into the top drawer for a clean dishtowel. Something popped out of a fold of the towel and bounced tinnily on the floor.

She picked it up and examined it under the light. It was a pretty ring, sweet rather than showy, with a round-cut diamond held by prongs, and small chips of diamonds in the band.

It didn't quite fit her, but she could get it on her little finger.

She thought about her choices, the different things she might do, the different selves she might decide to be. Then she went back into the main room. She bent over the nativity scene. Mr. Potato Head's arms were white curlicues and he had cartoon-style white gloves, waving. Bonnie hung the ring on one of his outstretched hands. “There you go,” she said. “Congratulations.”

S
he was Mamma, Mamma, Mom-mee! All day and all night, each and every day and night, forever and Amen. She'd gotten pregnant again when Robbie was only eighteen months old. Now, four months along, she moved like a sleepwalker, though her actual sleep was dead and dreamless. Ma! Mamma! Mom-mee! Her son needed everything every minute: his breakfast toast cut into squares, his stuffed Tigger retrieved from where he'd thrown it behind the couch. His nose blown, his ass wiped. He was in constant motion, slamming himself into walls and leaping off furniture and tumbling onto grass, dirt, gravel, asphalt, howling and covering himself with blood and bruises.

Everyone, that is, her husband and the other residents who were their friends, and the wives (and the husbands) of the residents, said that this was what little boys did. Eric said he'd been a tree-climber himself, big time, back in the day. Boys were just naturally energetic and into everything. Jane wasn't so sure. She didn't remember either of her brothers getting their foot stuck in an empty mayonnaise jar, as had been the case in their most recent trip to the emergency room.

The new baby swam and tumbled inside her, only inches long. It had been not much more than a bubble of blood and a few ambitious cells, but now it had grown enough for the sonogram to determine it was a
girl. And everyone said, wasn't that just perfect, a boy and a girl. A pigeon pair, it was called, did she know that? Jane did not. The extent of her ignorance was vast, profound. Perfect? Were they serious?

She'd wanted children. They both did. She and Eric had talked it all out. Of course you did not know what to expect. You took what came. You held hands and jumped over the cliff together into this grand adventure of adulthood. But did you ever stop falling?

Eric was such a good father. The everyones agreed. He was cheery and helpful and patient, running Robbie's bath and telling him stories and fetching Jane a pillow when her back hurt. Of course he had to work his killer hours, coming and going, and then he'd have a day, or a day and a half off—except for those times when he was on call—and the house would transform into a kind of brightly colored and hectic Daddyland. It was a little bewildering, and perhaps a little unreal. But Jane and Eric were determined to make the best of things, and not to let the marriage drift, and now the joke was, with two babies so close together, they had certainly not wasted any of their precious time.

There were no doubt easier ways to be married, less demanding schedules for sure, but this was the deal they'd signed on to. You put your head down and scrambled to get through the maze of doctor world, to get the children birthed and launched, and eventually, surely, it would get better. The two of you would reunite on the battlefield and lean on your swords and congratulate each other on surviving. The old war stories, now fond reminiscences. Remember when Robbie got his foot stuck in the mayonnaise jar? Except that Eric would not remember it entirely the same way she did since he had not been there.

Only a few of the residents had families underway or planned. A number of the wives were doctors themselves, or had their own busy jobs. So that stay-at-home Jane had managed to become a subset of a subset. The other mommy-women were considered her friends, although fellow travelers would have been more accurate. The mommies were like military wives left behind on base while the wars were fought elsewhere. Jane
would have liked to get to know some different people, different kinds of people, but where was there time or opportunity for that?

Atlanta didn't feel like home. It didn't feel like much of anything, just a place they had landed for now. When they were first exploring it they'd gone to a historic house and World of Coca-Cola, and they'd eaten in a couple of celebratory restaurants. But those were tourist things. The survey research job at Emory, which might have helped to ground her in the place, only lasted a few months and was not renewed. Jane learned her way around well enough to get to the grocery and the bank, the shopping mall, the doctor and dentist. All the while, the city itself escaped her. It was too big and spread out, a whorl of freeways and skyscrapers, always seen on the horizon, like the Emerald City of Oz. They didn't even live in Atlanta itself, but in one of its all-purpose suburbs. Eric and the other residents worked downtown at Grady Hospital, where the real Atlanta went about its business of living and dying.

One of the mommies in their group had a little girl who was a few months older than Robbie, and they arranged some play dates. These did not go very well. The little girl was bossy, and her speech was better than Robbie's, so she called him stupid, and poop-head, as her mother made too-mild objections, and usually the session ended in tears when Robbie hauled off and chunked some plastic toy at her. But when the two women did manage a conversation (the children's truce holding, the iced tea or Coke or wine cooler poured out), they often gave Jane pause.

“Are you going to stop at two, or keep going?”

There was no need to ask two what; everything was about babies. “We haven't decided,” Jane said, although they had. Two children were enough for them. It was a nosy question, but Jane guessed it was the kind of thing women were supposed to talk about when they got together in henlike groups.

“We'll probably wait until Bree's a little older. But there's something to be said for having one right after the other, like you. Just go for it.”

There was something to be said, but it did not make for pleasant
speech. In the weeks when Jane was fighting nausea, the sight of Robbie with oatmeal or pink meat paste smeared and crusted all over his face, hands, clothes, etc., had often made her stomach empty on the spot.

“Anyway,” her hostess continued, “if you decide you're through after this one, you can go ahead and schedule some work down there. You know?”

Jane didn't. She must have looked particularly clueless, because the other woman put down her glass and smirked. “Rejuvenating the vag. Get things back to where they were. Oh don't look so shocked. It's just a little tuck here and there. The magic of modern medicine.”

“I'm sorry, I guess sex is the last thing I've been thinking about.”

“Well it's not the last thing the guys are thinking about. If they could make their penises bigger, don't you think they would?”

The thought of ever again using her body for any sort of pleasure (that is, someone else's pleasure) was alien. She was at its mercy. And her body was, if you could say such a thing, single-minded. It existed only to serve the child within her and the child without. Her body dragged her from one place to another. She was not tired. Tired had been months ago. This was some other condition, a weight in her limbs, a haze in her head, her eyelids falling shut without warning. Between this pregnancy and the last one, she'd had every form of discomfort and every wretched symptom, so much so that Eric said she must have read all the textbooks and memorized them. “Don't,” she told him, “joke about it.” She was swollen, constipated, seeping, itching. Gaseous and plagued with heartburn. She made constant, ignominious trips to pee. There was a lot she wasn't looking forward to, up to and including childbirth. With Robbie her breasts had enlarged, pulling her forward. She'd had hemorrhoids and varicose veins. She felt like she'd been pregnant for the last five years.

What was the matter with her? There were women who loved being pregnant, who sailed through any distress and nested comfortably throughout. But Jane felt submerged. As if she was being dissolved. Absorbed. Something. It was all wrong, or maybe the way she felt about
it was all wrong. Although she was a mother, she did not feel motherly. She loved Robbie, his damp eyelashes after tears and his breath at night and his warrior's heart. She already loved the baby inside of her; she was only waiting to find out exactly how. But it was not a comfortable love. They took too much of her. They would always do so.

It wasn't anything she could tell anyone else, certainly not Eric. He adored Robbie, of course, he was excited about the new baby, he spoke often of how lucky they were. Which was true, in so many objective ways. She was a part of Team Eric now, and the team was accustomed to winning out. He could not be blamed for anything, except, perhaps, his certainty that things would always go well.

One night they were having a late supper of sandwiches while Robbie slept on the carpet in front of the television. He'd wrapped and twined himself in his favorite blanket so that he appeared, at first glance, to have successfully strangled himself.

Eric said, “We need to switch him over to a big boy bed pretty soon. He's already climbing out of the crib. How about for his birthday? We could make it part of the occasion.”

“Sure.”

“Then there's time for him to get used to it before the baby comes. So he doesn't feel like he's being kicked out when we move the crib.”

“Sure.”

“Not much of a conversationalist tonight, are you?”

“Perhaps,” Jane said, “we could talk about something other than babies.”

They both worked on their sandwiches for a while, waiting for another, nonbaby topic to emerge. Eric smoothed his hair with one hand in what had become a sorrowful, unconscious gesture. His hairline was receding. He made a lot of mortified jokes about it. Jane was almost glad. She didn't want to be the only one whose looks had taken a beating.

“Well,” Eric said, “I could tell you about the bowel resection I observed today. But maybe that's not exactly a dinner table story.”

“We generate enough of our own bowel stories around here,” Jane agreed.

He reached over and patted her stomach. “I do a rotation in urology next. That should be good for snappy repartee.”

“Ha ha,” Jane said. She was in a white, white room. No, she was not in anything. There was only the beautiful floating white. There was a sound that might have been a buzz or a hum but was neither. It was the most curious thing, not to be anywhere. Where did you go instead?

“Honey?” Eric was leaning over her. “You fell asleep.”

Had she? She didn't think so. It was something different, more unearthly, more beguiling and transporting. But because it would alarm him if she said this, she yawned and stretched and said, “Really? How long was I out? I'm sorry. You were saying something.”

“I said, once the baby's born and we feel we can leave her on her own for a day or so, I want you to tell me something you'd really like to do, somewhere you'd really like to go. For a getaway. A special treat.”

“Would you come too?”

“If you want me to,” Eric said gamely. “Or it could be something just for you. Like, a spa day,”

“That would be nice,” Jane said, as she was supposed to. And it was sweet of him. He wanted to express his appreciation and concern. Jane could have her depleted body lotioned and steamed and kneaded. Maybe get the vag resurfaced. Come home relaxed and beautified and ready for a merry time between the sheets. “A spa day, that sure would be something different.”

It wasn't Eric's fault. She had to be fair. No one had forced her to accept the life he'd offered her, and she would have been desolated if he'd passed her by. Any normal woman would have been content, or at least, would have been a better, if burdened, wife and mother. But she had always known, even as it shamed her, that she was not entirely a normal woman.

She called it the white room. It opened itself to her at her times of
greatest fatigue and stress, some bodily limit reached. When Robbie in his car seat squalled and writhed at a traffic intersection and her hands locked on the steering wheel and she couldn't move and the white room pulled her in. How long did she sit there? When she opened her eyes again, Robbie was still screeching and the milk she'd bought was still chilled in its carton. The traffic light was still red, although whether it was the same light or the next cycle, she couldn't tell. Nobody behind her. She'd been weightless, diffuse, a state one might think of as non-Jane.

Was she going barmy from exhaustion and pregnancy hormones? There was probably some reasonable physiological explanation that she didn't want to hear. So she did not bring it up to her obstetrician, a smart, delightful young Indian woman who was expecting her own first child. She did not feel mentally ill, but then, maybe that was a backwards proof of being mentally ill. And there was something deeply, deeply pleasurable in these episodes of non-Jane, like another woman's secret drinking.

The white room erased sadness, fear, pain. It was pure anesthetic. She came back to herself, the world, her unhappy body, with regret. It always seemed as if she had a choice.

Leave poor old droopy hangdog Jane behind and paddle around in the ether. She guessed it had become her kind of spa.

She didn't think anyone would have noticed. After all, most of the time she was easy enough for people to ignore. But one morning Eric asked her if she thought she was depressed.

They were in the kitchen. Robbie was in his booster chair, eating fistfuls of cereal from a bowl in front of him. Half of his face was still swollen from climbing headfirst into the empty bathtub. “Depressed?” she echoed back, stalling. “No, just, I'm tired a lot. You know.”

“Sure. But you seem kind of like you've . . . checked out.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

She knew exactly what he meant. There was a brief, obstinate silence, broken by Robbie.

“Maaaama!”

“What, honey?”

“More cereal.”

“More cereal, please.” Jane reached for the box and shook it over the bowl.

“Shouldn't he be eating with a spoon by now?”

Wordlessly, Jane picked up the spoon from the floor where Robbie had thrown it and presented it.

“Did you do that, big guy? Huh?” Eric ruffled his hair and mugged until the little boy giggled. “Pitch a fastball? Huh?”