Chapter Eight
I thought I would be happy when Henry got home that night. Maybe relieved was a better word. But the man who walked in the door wasn’t the one I needed. He took off his tie and jacket before he mixed himself a drink, a habit he had gotten into when I was in the hospital and we both seemed fine with the new arrangement. He emptied that glass before he said a word. By the time we sat at the table, he had downed at least two drinks.
“Do I have to eat this?” Wesley asked as I placed the compartmentalized dinner tray in front of him. He leaned in closely, took a sniff, and wrinkled his nose.
Henry rubbed at his temples and said, “Your mother made it.” Then he took a sip of his third vodka martini.
“But—”
“No buts. This is what she made, so this is what we have to eat.” Henry looked at me and nodded, like I should thank him for taking control of the situation, for reminding them both that they must eat whatever I put in front of them, and be thankful for it.
“Remember?” I said to Wesley. “I showed you this when I got home. You were so excited.”
Wesley slouched in his seat, his arms hanging at his sides, his shoulders slumped.
“It looked better in the picture,” he mumbled before Henry reminded him
to sit up straight and act right, but the kid did have a point.
What didn’t look better in the picture? Go pick up any magazine off the end table and you’ll find all sorts of pictures—the perfume and makeup ads, the tips for being a better housewife, the foolproof recipes, the articles on how to better love your man. All the pictures showed a perfection more elusive than we wanted to believe.
But this reaction of Henry’s wasn’t typical. While he believed in being firm, he was usually patient.
“We haven’t tasted it yet,” I reminded Wesley.
“Do I have to?”
Henry looked in our son’s direction, and Wesley fell quiet. He sat up in his chair and took in a deep breath. Henry assumed he did it as a way to get his act together, but I knew that look; he was trying not to cry. After all, big boys didn’t do things like that.
Mothers shouldn’t either.
After grace was said, I let Henry take the first bite. He closed his lips, smiled, and gave an attempt at approval, enough to fool Wesley, who took a tentative bite. He then proceeded to nibble his way through dinner, eventually swallowing down most of the tray.
Each food tasted the same as the other, with underlying notes of aluminum.
I pushed the cubed carrots around with my fork, not having the appetite to stomach the meal even though I knew my body needed it.
After Wesley had been excused, Henry and I sat alone at the table.
Surprisingly, he hadn’t rushed to his office to get more work done.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
Henry chased a remaining pea around the square compartment as I waited for him to respond.
“Yeah, I mean”—he dropped the fork and pushed the tray toward the
center of the table—“Jack said he wanted to talk today.” I knew by the name he used that it wasn’t good news. When he spoke with respect, his boss was Mr. Ellis. When he was frustrated, he called him by his first name. “He’s been dangling this promotion in front of me for months now. He called me into the office, and I thought this was finally going to be it. But instead, he was pressing me on the blueprints.”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, I mean, other than the clients can’t make up their minds. ‘We want two bathrooms, no three. Well, how about a half bath instead? And what would it look like for the garage to be on the other side? Or, how about we take some space from the second bedroom and enlarge that walk-in closet?’ Nothing I do makes them happy, and Jack is apparently waiting to see how this plays out before he makes his decision.” He put his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands.
“I’m sorry.”
“Alice says I’m still a shoo-in, but I don’t know.”
“Alice?” I asked as a jolt ran up my spine and shook me awake.
“Yeah.” Henry yawned before continuing. “The new girl. I told you about her.” He hadn’t. “She came on when you were pregnant. She says I don’t have anything to worry about, but I don’t know. I just can’t figure out Jack.”
He reached for his glass and took the final sip of the martini.
I wanted to know more about this Alice, but then again, maybe I didn’t. I knew the other secretaries and saw the way they looked at him, no different from so many of the girls at college. I had never had to worry in the past, I reminded myself. But why hadn’t he told me about this one?
Henry rubbed his temples again and ran his hands through his hair. “I thought maybe I could take the night off, but I guess not.” Soon enough he would go into his home office, close the door, and work on floor plans while I went through the bedtime routine. Ever since the possibility of becoming a
senior architect at Simon and Glasser, the evening office hours had grown longer. Longer than I had anticipated. And he had also grown quieter.
But he didn’t get up from the table quite yet.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “How was your day?”
“Fine,” I told him, because that seemed like the easiest response, easier than asking questions about this Alice girl. But why bother him with details of how I could barely grocery shop? “Wesley got to spend some time with James, so that made him happy.”
It had been a while since we had lingered together. Though neither of us were in the mood to talk, we also didn’t hurry away from each other. As heavy as my eyes were, as much as my body cried out for rest, I delayed clearing and starting the dishes.
After a few minutes, Henry scooted to the edge of his chair and leaned toward me. The few moments of silence—or maybe the third drink—seemed to have calmed him at least somewhat, because he noticed me for the first time that evening. He placed his hand on my thigh as he looked at me with those brown eyes. And I thought back to before we were married, when we first met at school.
Being one of the few girls on campus, I was used to catching the boys’ eyes. But few caught mine in return. I had a scholarship and, according to my mother, four years to either find a husband or learn an employable skill. I didn’t blame girls for being there if their only intention was to find a guy. I just wanted an outcome other than my mother’s, which was to always be stuck inside, taking care of others. As a girl, I had imagined I would run the farm alongside Daddy, but when that possibility died with my father, I needed to find something else. A degree and the promise of a job was what I had expected, but Henry found me before the skill did.
He bought me more than just a soda on that first date, more than the other boys typically did. He drove me off campus to a restaurant with candles,
tablecloths, and multiple courses. My back hurt at the end of the night from sitting so still and straight, trying to be prim and proper in ways I’d heard about but never learned on the farm. All through dinner, I wondered what he would see in a girl like me. Some days I still did.
Henry kept his hand on my leg, the most intimacy we’d had in weeks. His touch felt warm as the remaining scent of his aftershave activated memories and moments I hadn’t entertained in months. I began to feel my muscles relax, my body exhale for the first time in what felt like ages. He leaned in and I felt a rush, an energy, excitement as my heart began to beat with anticipation instead of anxiety. After all this time, I didn’t know I could still feel this way, especially when all we were doing was sitting at the dining room table in silence, staring at each other.
And then his lips parted. I saw his Adam’s apple slide in his throat as he formed words. I waited to hear his voice, hungry for what he was about to say.
“You got dressed today.”
My heart thumped in my chest, but no longer from anticipation. The heat rose in my cheeks as I sat in the disappointment and the lack of the sustenance those words offered. I wanted to cry. Yes, I had gotten dressed and it had taken effort. He didn’t know how long I stood with my pocketbook in hand, trying to figure out how to manage a newborn and a child as I shopped so I could put a meal on the table that night. A barely edible meal, at that. He didn’t know how badly I’d wanted to stay in bed. How I hadn’t wanted to answer the door when Nora came. How I’d nearly cried when she offered to stay with the children. How abandoned I’d felt when Bitsy told me about the card game.
The fact that he noticed I had gotten dressed meant he also noticed the days when I didn’t.
But I didn’t want to talk about any of that. So, with his hand still on my
leg, I smiled and said with a wink, “Well, Mr. Mayfield, I am a big girl.”
Henry tilted his head to the side. He squinted his eyes and stared straight at me. There was that look, the one he would give Wesley when he tried to make sense of childishness—when he colored on the bathroom wallpaper or kicked a ball into the Reillys’ window. The look came before he would say something like, “What were you thinking?” He never said that to me, not with his words, but he did with his eyes.
But this time, the look passed quickly. He replaced it with the flash of a smile and squeezed my leg. “There’s my Lulu.” Then he took his hand away and stood up. “And you cleaned the house. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
He leaned toward me and pecked me on the forehead before going to his office and closing the door behind him.
I sat alone at the table, still feeling a warm spot on my leg where his hand had been, wishing he was still there, touching me, looking at me, smiling with me. Not thinking of that Alice girl, but thinking of me. Not the Lulu who could barely manage a trip to the store, but the girl he fell in love with.
The one we both wished I still was.
I heard Henry come to bed that night, but I pretended I was asleep. Even as the mattress shook with his movement, I lay still, waiting to hear his breathing slow to a sleep rhythm. Then I got up.
I knew Esther would be waking soon for her first middle-of-the-night feeding. How old had Wesley been when he finally slept through the night?
Nora told me to let them cry, that babies needed to learn to sleep, but what was I to do when I hadn’t even learned that lesson for myself?
Nora, Wesley, and James had done some cleaning while I had been away, but there was more to do to make the house presentable, especially if Bitsy was coming. It needed to shine. So I got to work.
I dusted what Wesley had done earlier in the day, polishing and buffing the
furniture to a shine. I couldn’t vacuum and risk waking the others, but I mopped the kitchen floor, Windexed the picture window and sliding door, and knocked down the cobwebs that had gathered in the corners. I had just begun to wipe down the refrigerator shelves when I heard the squeak of Luna’s paws on the glass door.
I let her in without thinking, relishing the quiet company. The soft body that didn’t demand anything from me.
After a milk snack, she curled up on the couch, her purr fading to silence as she napped. I watched her in the darkness, so content, finding a home wherever she could, calm enough to sleep despite being in a place that wasn’t her own. But where was her place? Did she even have a home? Where did she spend the hours other than twilight?
I let her rest until Esther began to fuss. I put her outside, promising I’d see her the next night, having realized our companionship only existed when the others slept. Then I hurried to Esther’s room, avoiding the squeak in the hallway floor.
“Shhhhhh—” I called as I opened the door and rushed to the crib. “Don’t wake your brother.”
I reached for her, pulling her toward me, nestling her tiny body in to my own. My mind still went through the motions every time I picked her up.
Support the head, I told myself. Get your hand beneath her neck. Pull her toward your body. Rest her against your own.
It had only been four years since Wesley was this age, this small, this delicate, but it felt as if I was learning all over again. Hatti was such a natural, so nurturing, so loving. When she saw a baby, her eyes lit up, her arms reached out, her hands cradling just so. I envied the comfort and ease she had with them.
Esther still fussed, still squirmed in my arms, and I couldn’t ignore the cries.
I sat in the rocking chair and unbuttoned my nightgown before holding the bundle to my breast. She had taken to nursing more easily than Wesley, who fought to latch and gasped every time my milk let down, as if he were drowning. After each feeding, I had to burp him until his body released every bit of gas, or he would spend hours fussing. Esther didn’t need any of that; she just needed me.
It didn’t take long for her to quiet, but I held her for a while, rocking back and forth. As many hours as I had spent sitting in that chair, I still missed the feel of Mama’s old rocker. I closed my eyes and imagined her sitting in it in the living room of our farmhouse. In my mind, I walked through the house, reminding myself of every knotted floorboard, every chip of plaster, every crooked step that lead to the root cellar. I escaped into the halls of the home that was no longer mine.
Soon dawn would come, the light sweeping over the horizon, sprinkling onto our rooftops, waking the morning dew. But at that moment, the world remained dark, quiet, caught in its own moment of dormiveglia.
I looked across the street to Bitsy’s house. What kind of a name was that?
Bitsy? Though I suppose some could say the same for my own name. I had been Lulu for seven years now, since our first date when, at the end of the night, Henry walked me to my dorm and said with a stammer, “I really l-l-l- like you, Lu-lu.”
He was a senior at the university. Under any other circumstances we wouldn’t have met, but there we were, our worlds given the chance to overlap. Six months later, Henry Mayfield proposed to me underneath the maple tree in the center of campus, just after the leaves had opened in all their spring fullness.
He had a picnic blanket laid out. I had a book in my hand, but I looked above me at the green leaves. We had never discussed marriage. I wouldn’t let Henry. I didn’t know how the two of us would work. He was too
optimistic for his own good and for our reality. His world was not mine. The fields of my childhood, the woods so deep and full, the pond with its dark water, all were as foreign to him as the need for multiple forks beside a dinner plate was to me.
He’d reached for my hand, taking it in his, requesting my attention. I looked away from the leaves to see those eyes of his. I knew what he was doing. I knew what he thought we needed to do. I knew what Mama wanted me to do. After all, that’s why she let me go away. Without the scholarship, I wouldn’t be there, but more than learning, she wanted me to find someone who could give me a good life because she didn’t believe I could provide that for myself.
And I had found someone. She should be happy about that, especially with someone from a family like the Mayfields, not one she could relate to, but one she could approve of. I wasn’t sure they would say the same of a farm widow like her.
As for Mrs. Mayfield, she had plans for Henry. We both knew it. And neither included me, regardless of what we thought had happened. So when Henry reached into his pocket and pulled out a little box, I didn’t know what to think. Surely he hadn’t thought at all through. This couldn’t work. It wouldn’t work. But then he’d proposed anyway.
I wonder sometimes, in the middle of the night, if he would ask me the same today. Especially in those moments when he gives me that look, when he compliments me on a major accomplishment like getting dressed for the day, I wonder if he would’ve been so quick to propose if he had waited just another week for my monthly to start up as if nothing had happened. And sometimes in the darkness of the hour, as the Frigidaire hums from the kitchen and the streetlights cast shadows, I wonder: Did I calculate right? Did I fool him into something? Or did we really love each other?
But I stopped thinking about all that when a light switched on in the Betser
house. It was the same light as before. I assumed it was Katherine’s bedroom.
This time, with the curtains open, I could see inside, noticing piles of boxes.
Had they not unpacked her room yet? I wondered how the girl could sleep in there with all that clutter, but then I saw someone move toward the window.
It wasn’t the girl. It was Bitsy.
What was Bitsy doing up at that hour before the sun had even risen? She walked to the window and stood, perfectly centered in the frame. I couldn’t help but notice her body silhouetted in the window, her nightgown hanging loose, not giving her outline any shape. The light burned in contrast to the darkness outside, and I wished I had my camera to capture the picture.
I don’t know why she stood there or what she looked at, but she lasted only a few minutes before Gary walked up behind her. I saw her body jerk as his hand touched her shoulder. I saw her gather her arms and hug herself as he reached around her waist and pulled her away from the window. I could see her try to pull free of him before they walked out of view. The light switched off, and I was left to wonder alone in the dark who this new family really was.
