Chapter Seventeen
Marriage has ways of dismantling certain measures of privacy, whittling down the walls of modesty over the years. This was why Henry didn’t even knock before he came into the bathroom as I settled into the tub. It was also why he didn’t hesitate to unzip his pants and pee as I sat only a few feet away from him, blanketed beneath a barrier of bubbles.
“Don’t wait up for me,” he said. “I’ve got to get these blueprints done tonight. Jack wants to see them tomorrow.”
“When’s he going to make a decision?” I asked.
Henry zipped his pants and closed the lid, but he didn’t bother flushing.
Thankfully, Marian had trained him well in putting down the toilet seat, a habit Daddy and Georgie never seemed to pick up. I had been considering getting a new toilet rug and seat-cover set, perhaps the green one with the pink rose overlay. It would only cost one book, so I certainly had the stamps to do it, but I hadn’t yet committed to making the decision. The one we had was still fine, even if I was growing tired of it.
“I don’t know. Last December, he said by May, but here we are, almost August.” Henry didn’t wash his hands. He leaned against the vanity and looked at me as I sat naked beneath the bubbles. He didn’t delight in the possibility, the potential peep show he had walked in on. Instead, he thought about work. “I had Alice do some asking around, trying to get information about what Jack’s thinking about Gary, but he wouldn’t let on.”
He said her name with his wife sitting naked in front of him, a reality he
didn’t seem to notice. I wondered how he felt when he said her name. Did he say it out of habit, almost mechanically? Or did he feel a zing of pleasure when her name crossed his lips? If he did, he didn’t let on. Instead, he ran his hands through his hair, pulling it back, revealing a widow’s peak that had become even more defined.
“I’ve got to get these done even if it takes me all night.” Henry didn’t try to look beneath the bubbles. He didn’t come run his finger along my arm, resting on the side of the tub. He didn’t notice me at all. He turned his attention to the vanity, looking over the collection of compacts and bottles.
Did her name echo in his thoughts, distracting him from seeing me?
“I can make you coffee,” I offered.
“Nah. Don’t get up. Enjoy your soak.”
While marriage may have chipped away at certain aspects of privacy, our thoughts remained our own. While I could’ve asked about Alice and watched the focus of his eyes, the movement of his hands, the posture of his body to tell me what his words wouldn’t, I decided to settle into the warmth of the bathwater. I put my head against the back of the tub, the water reaching farther up my neck, dampening the lowest roots of my hair. I closed my eyes and inhaled the scent of lavender until a rattle broke the silence. I opened my eyes, expecting to see Henry holding a baby toy, but instead he was shaking a pill bottle.
“You’ve been taking these?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Every day?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
He put the bottle down and turned to look at me.
“Do you think they’re helping?”
The real question was: Did he think they were helping?
I didn’t tell him how the pills made me feel, my senses more clouded than on a typical day, my thoughts no longer wandering because my mind was too dulled to think. I couldn’t tell him then that I would rather walk through the world in discontent than to feel the numbness those pills offered. It took more effort for me to hear the joy in Wesley’s laughter, more rocking for me to feel gratitude with Esther in my arms. The pills pushed me beyond the surface of myself, so I floated through my days, watching my life unfold on a shore too distant to reach.
But I couldn’t turn the question back on him. And I also couldn’t tell him how, a few times, I skipped taking them. On the days I most wanted to feel, I would happen to forget to pop one in the morning. So I sat up, stretched a smile across my face, and told him, “Absolutely.”
Henry held my gaze and I held my grin. As we looked at each other, I wanted to crawl inside him, to peer out through those eyes of his, to see what he saw in that moment. What did the world look like through Henry Mayfield’s eyes? What did I look like, stretched out in that tub beneath the cloud of bubbles? Could he see through them? Could he see through me?
I often wondered if we saw things in the same way—not in a figurative sense, but literally. Did he see colors the same way? What if blue to him was green to me? Or what if I saw colors he couldn’t even imagine? Wouldn’t that explain so much? We tasted foods differently. Heard sounds others didn’t. Responded to our children, other people, emotions in vastly different ways. Maybe it was more than perception that caused that. Maybe at our core, the world existed in two very different realities.
“Good.” He put the pill bottle back on the counter and left the bathroom, giving me the smallest gift of not forcing me to pull myself from that water.
I sat in the bath until its coolness began to rattle my teeth. I toweled off and twisted my hair into a turban. For another night, I would skip the rollers. I
didn’t have anyplace to be the next day, so no one to see. And my body was so tired that I ached for a good night’s sleep, not one where I had to fight the pressure of those plastic cylinders to try to sleep.
As expected, I didn’t find Henry already asleep in bed. It was empty, his side still made from when he got out of bed that morning. He always started the day that way, straightening the covers, pulling them firmly into place. I used to do that as well. I used to make the entire bed, but just like the rollers, I had stopped doing that over the last few months.
I decided to look for Luna, to take her some food before I turned in. With Henry working late, I might not be able to let her in that night. I put on my robe and walked into the hall, but I only got a few steps before I heard his laugh, followed by another man’s voice.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come over and drink your bourbon,” the man’s voice carried down the hall. It wasn’t a voice I knew well. I tried to think of who it could be. It had a tone I had heard before. I tried to place it. Conscious of my attire, I stood against the wall, not daring to take another step and risk being spotted.
“No, no, we should’ve done this sooner,” the words slurred out of Henry’s mouth, probably imperceptible to the other person, but I heard the change in cadence, the relaxing of his voice. The letting down of his guard. The laugh that came louder and more full-bodied than when he was completely sober. I could tell he’d had two, maybe even three drinks by then, not enough to be drunk, but definitely relaxed. And more than on a typical weeknight. “We haven’t had much of a chance to get to know each other since you moved in.”
“Well, I know it sounds silly. You know how the women can be, but it’s pretty important to Bitsy.” That voice belonged to Gary Betser, Bitsy’s husband. Had she sent him across the street because of a hair she found in her salad? I slid along the wall, crouching to the floor, following the shadows of the hall to stay hidden as I leaned in to hear better. “It’s hard to explain, but
this cat, it means a lot to her.”
“Sure.”
“She just, I don’t know, she has it in her mind that maybe your wife—”
“Lulu.”
“Yeah, Lulu. Maybe she has seen the cat.”
“I can’t say she’s mentioned any cat. I know she and Bitsy have become good friends.”
“Huh. I’ve heard her talk about Laura?” His voice trailed off, in search of the right name.
“Nora.”
“Yeah, that must be it. It’s nice she’s made a friend.”
A friend, as if Nora was the only one who made room for her around the card table. The only one who baked her a pie to welcome her to the neighborhood. The only one to watch out for her daughter when the girl’s mother wasn’t paying attention. Apparently, Nora was the only one who mattered.
“Well, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye out. I mean, if it was up to me, I’d just as soon let the cat go, but she’s gone and gotten attached.”
“Attached?”
“Yeah.” As his voice dropped low, I crept along the floor to hear better, not realizing where I was in the hallway, that I had reached that spot that I knew to avoid in the quiet hours of the night when my only task was to make sure no one else woke up. Now that my focus was on the living room, I forgot to watch my step and I hit the spot that let out a creak beneath me.
The men stopped talking. I stopped breathing. And the early sounds of unrest began to drift from the nursery. I knew I should go to Esther, help her settle before it became impossible to get her back to sleep, but I wanted to hear what Gary was about to say about Bitsy and her cat.
I closed my eyes and prayed to the heavens to quiet Esther. Just this once.
Please, God, strike the child quiet. And He did. For a moment. Long enough for me to hear Gary say, “You see, a while back, well, she needed some help.
She wasn’t quite acting like herself.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Henry sounded more sober now.
“Yeah, if you had seen her before, you wouldn’t recognize her. She’s a different woman now. I suppose I first noticed it when she stopped cleaning.
You wouldn’t believe what a pigsty the house was. She couldn’t manage it.
She couldn’t manage much of anything—not the boys, the cooking, none of it. She started making these awful frozen dinners that tasted like aluminum.
No matter what, she was always so—”
Henry filled in the blank before Gary could. “Unhappy.”
I could hear the fusses building, the precursor to a wail that would require attention. Esther just needed to hold on a few minutes longer.
“Yes,” Gary’s voice rose with relief. “No matter what.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Henry mumbled in agreement. “I don’t understand it.”
“Honest to God, I don’t either. Anyway, this damn cat… For whatever reason, she’s gotten attached. I mean, I couldn’t care less what happens to it, but if you see it, give me a call, would ya?”
Esther’s cries climbed to a crescendo. I needed to get to her, but then Henry said more. “The cat helped?”
“Well, sort of. I mean, we tried other things, you know, pills and such.”
I leaned in to the limits of the hallway shadow, trying to hear these words over the building wails, wondering what “and such” meant.
“I mean, I don’t know you folks or anything, but if your wife—”
“Lulu.”
“Yeah, Lulu. If she’s out of sorts, well, there’s a guy—”
“Thank you, but we have a doctor.”
“Right. Right. I’m sure you’ve got it under control, but if you change your mind, you let me know. I guess there’s a reason they call them the fairer sex.
I just didn’t know they were so fragile.”
If I hadn’t taken Miltown that day, the hairs on my arms might have stood up when Gary uttered that word: fragile.
As Esther nursed herself back to sleep, I watched Gary walk back home.
As he passed under the streetlight, I finally realized what he reminded me of.
That wisp of hair on top fluttered just enough to bring to mind that fox that Daddy’d had to deal with. It was one of the few times I saw him take out his rifle. He perched and waited, and as dusk fell, we heard two shots ring out: the first for the strike and the second for good measure.
I’d watched as Daddy dug a hole and placed the fox inside it, the ember- and-ash fur fluttering in the last movements of air that would ever again touch that breathless fox. Each shovelful covered the animal with dirt, smothering the smoldering hues of sunset in the fox’s coat.
“He was so pretty,” I told Daddy as we walked back to the house.
“Yeah, but he was sly. And once one gets into the henhouse, they’ll always come back for more.”
