The Daylight Marriage (8 page)

Chapter 12

H
annah grabbed her purse and locked the door behind her. Autumn pollen caked the windshield of the car. She turned on the wipers and the wiper fluid. She backed her car out toward the street and narrowly missed the milk truck. The driver blasted her horn and gave Hannah the finger. Shaken, Hannah inched down the street, her foot on the brake as she approached the stop sign at the corner of the Sullivans' property and then the overgrown willow that spilled toward the street and brushed her windshield as she passed. She stopped beneath the tree and watched the wipers scrape the thick dust back and forth in a choppy rhythm and ensnarl one of the wispy branches, tearing it from the tree. She shifted to park, switched off the wipers, stepped out of the car, and yanked at the branch now braided around the torn rubber blade. She removed the blade from its rusted frame and picked at the gnarled stem that wove taut around it. She glanced over at the weeping willow, a mass of downward movement. It was a gorgeous tree. She wound the branch into a loose reel and set it on her backseat. Maybe she could replant part of it later in her backyard.

She drove toward town, past the Victorians with their broad porches and window boxes (“Mums, mums, and more mums,” she often complained), the rhododendrons bunched in front, the brick library, a group of preschoolers clutching a red rope and toddling down the sidewalk as they did each day. They looked at their feet, the sky, the cars—these sweet, jittery little people. She rarely, if ever, saw preschoolers or toddlers anymore. She counted the years since Ethan had been a toddler: five, almost six. Hannah had married and had her children, and this time now was shaped only by the maintenance of those things that had come before.

Ten years ago, when she and Lovell had been visiting her parents, she had surprised him with cross-country skiing on the beach during a blizzard. She had filled a thermos with bourbon. She had blindfolded him—and he protested and squirmed. He could hardly sit still during the short drive to Lambert's Cove. “I've never liked surprises,” he griped, and she said, “Who doesn't like surprises?” She refused to take off his blindfold until she had walked him up the snowy dune and onto the untouched beach, now a rumpled expanse of white. When she finally loosened the knot of the bandanna behind his head, he blinked at all that was around them, and said, “What is this?”

She gestured beside them to the skis and poles that she had dragged along.

“No. It's minus twenty degrees, and these winds are blowing vertically.” The surf spat up onto the snow.

“Jesus, live a little,” she said.

“All right, all right.” He pulled the zipper on his winter jacket up to his chin. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“You can be such an old man.” What had once been comforting had become restrictive, his unwavering logic and good sense. She tried to articulate this to him, to talk above the din of the wind and waves, her boots dug into a bowl of snow, to define this shrinking air inside her as a problem for both of them, but the shrillness and banality of her own loud words rang in her ears:
I want more. I want. I want
. Maybe she should no longer expect spontaneity. Was it unseemly at her age, a woman with a child and a husband and a home in a nice suburb, to try to get her husband drunk on Jim Beam and fuck him by the ocean in the middle of winter? “I sound like a shrew,” she said at last.

He pressed his mouth against her ear so that he would be heard. “Sometimes I can't tell whether you are arguing with me or with yourself.” He tried to rekindle her mood. “Come on, let's just do this.” They got their boots and skis on, their scarves wound tight. They glided a length of the beach, up and down the gradual slopes. She maintained a wide lead at first, but then he caught up and they skied side by side for a while. “This is nice,” he called to her.

When the beach grew narrower, she motioned for them to stop and she collapsed through a crunchy layer of snow. She lifted the thermos of liquor from her backpack and poured him a shot. She watched him pinch his eyes shut as he made himself down the bourbon in two pained gulps. She poured another small cupful, and they sat on the beach, huddled together in the icy air, and kissed gently for a moment, he apologetically, she dutifully. “I'm glad you got me out here,” he tried, and she nodded, if nothing else appreciative of his lie.

She was meant to exude calmness and control and, more than anything, stasis. She was meant to react to everyone else in a predictable way, never to provoke, never to incite. Women pretended that everything had changed over the years. Hannah thought of her mother. Did she ever have these sorts of thoughts? Lydia Munroe had little tolerance for self-questioning and indecision. She had set up the life she had wanted, and that was that. She had a clear image of the women she expected her daughters to become: emotionally strong, sufficiently pious, attractive women who were self-possessed and in control of every aspect of their days. Each night she timed the girls when they brushed their teeth (five minutes according to an egg timer kept on a shelf above the toilet) and took baths (no less than thirty minutes). “She was this walking contradiction in her silk paisley shift with her hair in a neat bun on top of her head,” Hannah told Lovell soon after their engagement. They had met Leah for dinner in Chinatown and sat in a booth over green tea and Yu Shiang shrimp. “She'd hold court from the head of the kitchen table. Remember?” she asked Leah. “She'd wave her paperback copy of
The Feminine Mystique
in one hand and a Virginia Slim in the other. And then she went to church each Sunday.” Rennie, the housekeeper, cooked dinner most nights, but Lydia always chose the menu.

Lydia demonstrated to the girls the privileges that came from stealthily but firmly maintaining household control. She taught them to simultaneously project fragility and strength, accessibility and mystery. She showed them how to walk a runway: head up, shoulders back, hands planted on hips. She taught them the various voices that a girl must use: the restaurant voice (“gentle but audible”); the department store and bank voice (“similar to your restaurant voice, but with more presence”); and the dreaded voice to be used in the presence of boys (“Quiet, with a hint of bewilderment. But at the same time, assurance—assurance is everything. Assurance, mystery, even danger”). Hannah and Leah had snickered across the booth from each other at this last word.

When Hannah was seven or eight, Lydia coaxed her to drop a live lobster into an iron pot full of boiling water, despite her abject refusal. “Boys love a girl with some savagery, but not too much. Never too much,” she said. “Now, come on. It's your father's birthday and he is waiting for his dinner.”

Leah set down her tea. “Dad, on the other hand, is the most harmless, obedient man you'll meet,” she said, reaching for more rice.

“He's got his opinions,” Hannah said.

“Maybe. Still, Mom thought that the woman always had to wear the pants. I guess she was ahead of her time in some ways.”

“Well, she worried for us,” Hannah said. “She still does.” She turned to Lovell. “I think she is secretly terrified that the bottom will fall out. Don't forget that her own mother had two husbands leave her. Mom's got this secret fear that if you don't control your life, if you don't control your man, he will eventually destroy you.”

Leah said, “We love to analyze our mother.”

“Ah,” he said. He moved his eyes from one face to the other, probably confused by this family that was so different from his own.

Hannah drove on past the stark white church, the small ranch houses farther apart, the trees that split the sunlight, those trees that made the town seem rural and tucked in. Insular. The other week, she had half-jokingly suggested to Lovell that they pick up and move to Boston or even New York, or why not another country, and he had said, “Sure, the kids would love that—leaving their schools and all their friends. Mass Environmental too, right?”

She stayed to the outside of the rotary and passed the prison and the stout farm stands with their pumpkins and gourds all laid out in the sun and eventually the turnoff for Walden Pond.

On the highway to Boston—that wide, flat road, the sky uninterrupted—cars and minivans surrounded her, so many cars and strangers right beside and behind and in front of her. Any one of them could jerk their steering wheel—or she could, just like that, in less than a second.

She entered Fresh Pond, the switchback road between those proud old houses. On Storrow Drive, cars flew through the quick turns as if on a racetrack, and her knuckles tight on the steering wheel, she took the Copley Square exit, which led her inside the motor of the city, businesspeople rushing across streets, clothes stores, bookstores, banks and more banks, cabs, tourist buses meant to look like ducks filled with mothers and fathers and kids quacking at the pedestrians, and the park, more silky, drooping willows, those poignant trees, the swan boats now tied together for the season. The empty boats floated on the water, drifting apart, then knocking back together.

She turned and drove through Chinatown, passed its glossy red facades, the stores and sidewalks throbbing with people, the shiny chickens upside down in the windows. As a child she had once found a dead frog on the seat of her bicycle, the still little thing belly-up to the sun, its rubbery arms and legs splayed out. Leah had left it there. Hannah hollered for her mother. “It's just a frog,” Leah said, laughing, but Hannah sprinted away down the street, her heart in her stomach. It hadn't gotten any easier over the years, the sight of a dead animal. She had dropped that lobster into the bubbling pot and slammed on the cover, raced barefoot down the hallway and into the coat closet. She had wedged herself between the winter jackets and snow pants, hiding until her father came to find her, her kind, generous father, who said, “I couldn't do that as a kid either, sweetie.” She didn't know anyone else as shaken by the sight of something dead. No one else had had to be exempted from dissecting frogs and fetal pigs in middle school. She had never gone to an open-casket funeral, even her grandparents'. “It's odd, I know,” she explained to Lovell soon after they met, and he seemed more bemused than anything else. “You're cute. I loved dissection,” he admitted. “Does that make
me
odd?”

She fixed her gaze on the rear window of the car ahead of her until she left Chinatown. She drove above the lumpy black water, past the Children's museum, the Westin, and onto the surprisingly clean and quiet streets of Southie. Hadn't it been here where, just last week, that elderly woman had been robbed and then beheaded? Or was it Roxbury? But what a naive suburbanite she was—it could have happened in Beacon Hill, for all she remembered.

The daylight glittered around her, and a crumpled paper bag blew past her windshield. She tried to ignore a rising disquiet. If she turned the car around now, she might be only twenty minutes or so late for work, and if she hit traffic, well, no one would mind all that much. She could tell them Janine was home sick, or that Ethan was, or anything, really.

At last she approached the beach and its long, narrow parking lot. Carson itself had been cleaned up, the water now devoid of garbage and broken old boats bobbing on the tide. She sat for a while facing the dark mirror that led to the sky and the tall grass and thought that it was pretty and seemed far from home here. If she turned her face from the buildings behind her, she could have been anywhere—Seattle or Savannah, Portugal or France, Duncannon Beach near her father's childhood home or even dreamy La Concha in San Sebastián, where she had gone with her family when she was fifteen.

Chapter 13

J
anine came home one afternoon bald, only a shadow of stubble across her head. When Lovell first saw her as she walked into the kitchen, he dropped the glass plate he was holding. “Hair,” was all he could say.

“Yes,” she said. “It's no longer with us.”

He could see the contours of her skull and the dark raised birthmark at her hairline. “You thought about this first?” He reached for the shards of glass on the floor. He had gotten back from the West Coast a few days ago.

“How about ‘It looks good.' How about ‘That was so brave of you, Janine.'”

“OK, OK, give me a second.”

“Go ahead and say it: I don't conform to your ideas of what a girl should look like, and that scares the shit out of you.”

“Oh, please, give me a break,” he said. “It's not like you went out and just bought a boy's sweater or something.” It occurred to him that Hannah had disappeared a month ago today. “Is this some sort of reaction to what's happening with Mom?” In movies, at least, girls and women so often shaved their heads—or at least cut their hair—when they were angry or sad.

“You can sound like a total dick when you want to.”

“Janine.” She looked just awful. Was that sexist to think? He couldn't help it. In her gray sweatshirt and old jeans, she looked like one of those hostile boys who sat on the curb outside the 7-Eleven every day.

“Stop staring at me like I'm some freak.”

“I'm staring at you because you are my daughter and you don't look like you right now. I'm trying to get used to what you do look like.”

Ethan appeared in the doorway. “What happened to you?” he asked.

“Take a good look, Eth,” Janine said. “Get used to it.”

He glanced over at Lovell, confused.

“Janine Ruby Hall,” Lovell said.

“What?”

He could only think to find the dustpan and broom and clean up the pieces of glass scattered around him.

“Can I touch it?” Ethan asked her.

Janine bent over so that he could run his fingers across the top of her head. “That is sick.”

“He means he likes it,” she said to Lovell.

“I know what he means,” Lovell said, although he hadn't been so sure.

“Can I do that to my hair?” Ethan asked.

Lovell said, “No.” He almost asked both of them,
What would your mother say right now?
But he thought better of it and left the kitchen.

In the living room, he ran his eyes past the framed pictures on the mantel. Since Hannah had disappeared, he had avoided looking directly at the one photograph of her, that picture of her kneeling in the garden. Nearly all the stations teased the story with this photograph. It was the first one that he gave them.

Janine had taken the picture. She'd had to write an essay for school about someone she admired. Lovell had been a little surprised that she had chosen Hannah, with all her questions about his work and weather at the time. But Janine had also studied Hannah as she blow-dried her hair in the mornings and dabbed makeup on her face, and asked her why. Why did she think she needed it?
How do you shave your legs, how did you meet Dad, how much do you love him? How much do you love me? Because I love you so much, Mom, more than music, more than Ethan.
Lovell had melted, listening from the next room. Hannah had certainly earned these moments. She was still toilet training Ethan then, still scrubbing his accidents from the carpet in the hallway, still cooking three different meals for them at dinner, getting up each time Ethan had his night terrors and then finally just past dawn, when the boy typically woke for the day—and Lovell tried to when he could, but without his sleep he was hopeless and could hardly be expected to work the next day. He let her sleep in sometimes, when he could, on weekends. Once, he brought her breakfast in bed on her birthday. But these things that Janine said—“I love you to infinity”—these were the real prizes, and it was good to see Hannah flash a secret smile at him and finally savor the feeling of being adored.

And then, almost overnight, Janine could hardly tolerate her mother anymore.

The picture—Hannah's widemouthed laugh, her abandon—gave the sense that you and Hannah were in on some hilarious secret. What had Janine said the moment before the shutter clicked? Behind her, a row of sunflowers tilted back and faced the sky. He reached for the frame. Tu. Smiling with her flowers maybe five years ago. Hannah's face, her long hair, those dimples.

Lovell held the photo in one hand as he tidied some books on the coffee table and moved Ethan's sneakers to the bottom of the stairs. At least Hannah had Ethan. At least one kid still looked up to her. Lovell finally left the photo on the side table near the front door, where it would be seen each time someone stepped inside.

Janine appeared right behind him. “I heard about the scratch marks, you know.”

He froze. “The marks on the pier?”

“What, did you think we wouldn't find out?”

“I don't know what I'm thinking anymore. I guess I was trying to protect you.”

“Well, you should stop doing that.” Her disdain for him was even more apparent without any hair to obscure it.

“We are not in some TV show here. This is real life. This is your mother. You're allowed to be sad sometimes. You don't always have to be this tower of strength, this warrior princess, you know?”

“
Warrior Princess?
” she snorted. “What, like Xena? I don't remember her ever shaving her fucking head.”

“You know what I goddamned mean. Instead of being pissed off at me, maybe stop and have a good cry once in a while.” He looked over at her. He himself had yet to cry in front of them. Had he ever?

“Don't tell me what to feel,” she said, but something in her face sank a little.

“Listen,” he began. “There could be plenty of explanations for those marks.”

“Right.”

“We don't know everything yet. We don't. It makes no sense to panic before we have all the answers.”

“I so disagree.”

He looked at her eyes. “You're not going to tell Ethan.”

“Don't you think he should hear it from us and not someone else?”

He sighed. “Maybe.”

“Dad,” she said, “what is going on here? I'm just going to come out and say it because obviously you're not going to. Did you do something? To Mom?”

“Jesus. Do you really think that?” he said. “You don't really think that.”

“I don't want to think that. Believe me. But you go away and then pull this shit and that night you went ballistic, and I mean, well, all of it, and you're so fucking stupid, Dad, because if you didn't do anything wrong, then you really, really, really need to stop acting like you did.”

He stared at her. How did she become this person? When had it happened? Had she always been this wise and bold and thoroughly obnoxious?

“I'm going to go tell Ethan,” she said. “And from then on, you can feel free to become the parent here again.”