The Almost Archer Sisters (7 page)

Beau turned around holding a sauce brush. It was the first time I noticed he’d been wearing an apron.

“Hey, why is it, Beth, when a dad watches his kids, it’s called babysitting? And when Peachy does it, it’s called parenting?”

“Because, Beau, watching TV with your kids is not parenting. It’s sitting.”

“Oh, like you would know what parenting is? When’s the last time you volunteered to help out around here? You treat this place like it’s a hotel.”

Beth’s eyes widened and she looked at me as though to say,
Do something about your husband
. I too was a little shocked at the tension between them.

“Beau, just cook, okay?” I said.

Sam came over to Beth’s side to straighten up his stones. She put a hand on his head and messed his hair a little, mouthing to me, “How is he?”

I searched for neutral words. “We don’t know yet.”

“What don’t you know?” Jake asked, helping his brother with the stones.

“Anything. We don’t know anything,” I said, looking at Beth, trying to read the weather on her face.

“Well,
I
know something,” she said, a hint of accusation in her voice.

“What do you know?” Sam asked, thinking we were talking in code about him or his condition, something he hated.

“Nothing. It’s about your mother, Sam.”

“What about Peachy?” Beau asked, keeping his back to us. I kicked Beth under the table.

“Nothing, I’m just teasing, Beau,” Beth said. “As if Peachy’s got secrets.”

“Yeah, as if
I
would have secrets,” I said, trying to deflate suspicion by acting exaggeratedly suspicious. She kept her eyes on me. The only person in the room who could tell we had been up to something was Lou.

“Okay, let’s change the subject. Peachy, let’s get drunk tonight, shall we?” Beth said, draining her beer and slamming the glass on the table.

“No driving then,” Lou said. “I’ll happily drop you off and pick you up at Earl’s. Okay, ladies?”

Lou gave me his look that said,
I am not judging Beth’s drinking, but I have been noting its subtle, though unmistakable, escalation, as are you, Peachy. So enjoy yourself tonight, but not that much
.

“Thanks, Dad, but I’m taking it easy tonight,” I said, pointing to my beer.

The gravel driveway announced more arrivals.

“Uh-oh, Lucy and Leo are here. Be nice, they’re having ‘the troubles,’” Beau said, holding the plattered breasts. Beau’s older sister Lucy fought with her husband so often that they indeed made the institution of marriage sound like Ireland, a once lush paradise ruined by messy children, too much drinking, and religion.

“I’m heading the hell out back,” Beau said. “Tell Leo to bring the kids there. Boys, let’s go. You can fire up the Water Willy, Sam.”

“What about me?” Lou said.

“You ref.”

“Not on your life,” Lou said, scrambling after Beau.

“I’ll ref,” Sam said, making his way over to the laptop on the desk. “I want to play some Scrabble.”

I felt a twinge of anxiety. I had been waiting for an email all day. But I didn’t have the heart to force Sam outside. Jenny was four, Micha six, perfect ages for Jake, but Sam was trying to outgrow his
cousins. Plus, he was afraid of having a spell and peeing his pants in front of the younger children. The doorbell rang.

“Why, I’ll get it,” Beth said, acting Southern and dopey.

“Be nice,” I repeated.

“I am always nice. Lucy is the cunt.”

Lucy’s sturdy animosity toward Beth took root in high school and had flourished ever since Beth had broken Beau’s heart. It was a weird resentment but so consistent I no longer challenged its longevity. When Beth opened the door, Lucy’s expression was of someone who had accidentally stumbled onto a teeming wall of maggoty garbage.

“Well, hello to you too, Luce,” Beth said.

“Beth Ann. Hi, Peachy. Where’s Beau and the boys?” She was holding a present for Lou.

“They’re all out back,” I said.

“I was hoping we could crash here tonight if we drink too much, but it looks like you won’t have the room,” Lucy said.

“You can share my bed, Luce,” Beth said, knocking a cigarette out of her pack and heading toward the back porch. We kept her room almost exactly as she’d left it, though she often opted to sleep on the converted couch in Lou’s air-conditioned Silverstream, especially in the summertime.

“Thanks, Beth, but no. I think I’d like to remain about the only person in town you haven’t slept with.”

“Sorry to break it to you, Luce, but you’re not my type anyway.”

“Please, people, please,” I said, holding up my hands. “We are almost middle-aged women now, and no one’s drunk enough for this. You guys can put the camper up if you want, Luce.”

“We’ll play it by ear,” she said.

Beth slammed the back door and Sam turned around.

“Auntie Lucy wanna play Scrabble on the computer? It’s very cool. I’ll show you how.”

My boy, my boy, my beautiful boy. I was trying hard to ignore him that night, or rather, to not monitor his every move and sound. Lucy sat down next to him at the piano bench. The corn boiled on the stove, and for an instant I felt a sense of fortune settle around my shoulders. I was thinking, This is a good life. Don’t do anything to threaten this life. Why would you even want to?

Through the window I could see Beau out back standing over the barbecue like a conductor. Leo suddenly startled me by tapping on the glass with his awful opal pinkie ring. I gave him a weak smile. Years earlier, before Jenny and Micha were born, Leo had a fling with his Korean manicurist. I was shocked, not by the crime, but by the fact that he went to a manicurist.

“What kind of guy goes to a manicurist?” I had asked Beau. I had just had Sam, and my body had dropped so much weight from the breast-feeding, I could fit into Beth’s sexy red hand-me-down sundress.

“The dickhead kind,” Beau said.

After the whole thing blew up, Lucy spent six weeks with us crying as often as my new baby. One morning I held a firm finger, microphonelike, in Beau’s face.

“No infidelity, no adultery, no divorce, no irreconcilable differences. Got me?” I said. “None of those words in this house. There is no room for them.”

Date, flirt, cheat, those were “Beth Words,” single-people words, each a tiny, stupid Ikea-type name for replaceable things like lamps, cups, ashtrays. Beth could cheat on her guys, tests, and taxes, and the consequences were negligible. But we had a
mahogany hutch
, a
chesterfield, antimacassars, hydrangea bushes
, a burgeoning
oak
, from which we had plans to cut another table. Our kitchen was carved out of
granite
and
stainless steel
, these were all married words, and our house was full of them. Even the word
husband
had always invoked in me the permanency of mortgages, God, and cattle.

At the kitchen window Beau had put his mouth around my finger and gently sucked it.

“What about like other words?” he asked.

I was amazed to think we might have once had the ability to read each other’s thoughts, but our minds were so uncomplicated back then there couldn’t have been that many thoughts to choose from.

“What words did you have in mind?”

“Like ‘fuck.’ Like ‘suck.’ Like ‘cock.’ Like ‘pussy,’” he whispered, stepping back to seriously assess the architectural challenges of that sundress, which would always give him a bit of trouble. I turned to press my back into him and saw Lou through the window playing with the baby in the grass. Beau placed his erection between the canyon of my ass and started to fiddle with the knot behind my neck. (Was it ridiculous to be angry at Beth for ruining this sexual position for me as well? Now not only couldn’t I imagine facing my husband during sex, I couldn’t imagine not facing him either.) Giving up, Beau lifted the skirt part, ripping it slightly at the hem.

“Oops. Sorry. Hoping to avoid that,” he murmured into my unburdened shoulders.

“Liar, you hate this dress.”

“No I don’t. I love it on you. I just hate taking the fucking thing off.”

What had I worried about eight years ago? Saggy boobs and an unpaved driveway? The creepy notion of my dad catching me going at it with my husband? My hip bones getting bruised against the granite counter? Being twenty-one with a new baby? Finishing school? I don’t remember worrying about any of those things. For those few minutes, while my husband moved behind me with uncharacteristic grace and my father washed our stinking dog in the baby pool, our life was still only a series of regular vignettes—the wedding, then the baby, and then there
should have been a graduation, and then a job, and then perhaps another baby, in that order, a long story with a happy ending. And though it had felt wrong having stand-up sex not twenty feet from my dad and sleeping son, I remember it had felt necessary, because this, I thought, was how husbands and wives inoculated themselves from disaster. This was how you kept the demons of marital disaster at bay.

T
HE CORN SPUTTERED
and hissed on the kitchen island. I glanced at the back of Sam’s head; there had been no fit, no spell, so far that day. I made a mental note for Dr. Best.

“That’s not a word, Auntie Lucy. It’s a swear,” Sam said, sounding manly, a bit too scolding and professional. I walked over to where they were sitting and looked over their shoulders. Lucy had organized her computer tiles to read “bitch.”

“It’s a word. It’s a female dog. Scoots is a bitch, isn’t she?”

“Actually,” Sam said, correcting her, “Scoots is a guy dog.”

“Then that would make Scoots an asshole,” Lucy said, hand cupped under Sam’s chin. “And don’t you ever become one. I’m going to check on Leo and the kids.”

It was going to be that kind of night, I thought, as Lucy grabbed another beer from the fridge and headed out back. Most likely she wanted to keep an eye on Beth, a wise move on her part.

“I’m coming too, Auntie Lucy,” Sam said, scrambling after her, leaving me alone for a few blessed minutes to check my email.

At that point in our awful, rueful prank, no outright physical infidelity had occurred. But my thoughts and actions had all of the hallmarks of betrayal; obsessiveness, secrecy, sneaking around to check email, lying to myself that I’d stop, that it didn’t mean anything, plus that rush of blood to the groin when I’d be driving and thinking about sleeping with a man other than my husband,
in particular Beth’s most recent ex, Marcus Edward Street. The problem was he felt the same way. About me. Well, not me, another me, a different me, a woman Beth and I have both come to think of as our “almost me.”

Maybe I got easily snared in this mess because I was both bored and scared, and infidelity was spreading like a flu through many of the homes in our town, and what business did I have of thinking us immune? Still, nothing about our drama started out innocently. It was all venal—and ballsy and galling—and though Beth had been the plan’s unapologetic architect, in the weeks prior to my first trip to New York, I had been the avid builder.

D
URING THE SUMMER
between my first and second years of school, I had signed up for a stint (for credit) with physically and mentally challenged kids. They were sweet kids with gummy voices, sticker-strewn wheelchairs, hovering moms, and thick necks. In fact, I had wondered if perhaps special ed would suit me more than social work. Then I was handed the unwanted task of supervising special ed arts and crafts, myself in turn supervised by a couple of stern doctoral candidates, sent to evaluate my skills and report back to the university. I thought it would be a cinch. I had always stood up for the slower kids, those lumped with regular ones, kids forever screaming
Wait for me, I have asthma
. But I was not prepared for these ones. Regular kids are messy enough, but these kids moved like demented dervishes. None of our exercises were completed on time, if at all; nothing we produced was remotely close to the curriculum. The trees we drew were lightning bolts or freckles or flowers. The Popsicle-stick houses looked like what
a tornado would see in its rearview mirror. The macaroni pictures reminded me of the table-scrap shrapnel on the floor around Scoots’s bowl. I knew the point wasn’t to produce perfection. I knew these kids were only to be coached on the attempt, and that art was merely meant to enhance expression and release. No one expected them to become accidental Picassos.

But I took their results personally. Somehow I thought it was my fault that I couldn’t bust through the plasma that prevented them from creating little linear masterpieces. And my frustration rubbed off on them. I was too young to understand that teaching people to attempt the impossible, then to be unafraid to try again after failure, was about the best lesson you could grasp in life. Instead, I panicked. And then I insinuated myself in their tasks. I’d sit behind Chelsea, my hand firmly wrapped around her hand, and I’d make her draw what was assigned. I’d sit next to little Monty and efficiently shape the macaroni elbows into a radiating sun, even though he had no idea what I was building in his name. I’d pivot to catch and wash Joey’s brushes. Then I’d helpfully guide his palsied hand toward the correct colors for oranges, bananas, or trees in summer. The kids were overjoyed at the results, the parents a bit less so after they discovered me to be the kids’ arts-and-crafts Svengali.

Despite showing what I thought was real verve and command, my evaluators did not agree. They wrote that I was “uncomfortably impatient, and overly protective.”