8
Avis
MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS
that Jim and I should meet in some neutral place, that I didn’t want him in our home. I was almost used to being there alone, and I didn’t want him to come in, take a look at what was in the fridge, or see how many messages were blinking on the machine. But I kept playing out the possibilities in my mind, exactly why he thought “we should get together, make some decisions,” and I realized that I did not want to be in a restaurant if certain things were going to be said. I had lived my entire life in Las Vegas. There was nowhere we could go without the risk of running into someone one of us knew.
“Jim, I think it might be better just to meet here. Maybe you could pick up something for us to eat.”
I didn’t want to serve him food.
“Okay. Sure. However you want to do it.”
He sounds distracted. The hotel would be getting busier. Fall was busy, the holidays were busy. Even this year.
It’s as if he is confirming a business appointment. I wonder if there will come a day when he leaves my calls to get picked up by Elizabeth.
“Yes, that’s how I want to do it. Seven thirty.”
My voice is abrupt, because I don’t want him to hear how crushing his eight words were. I can’t help myself. I am looking forward to seeing him. I miss my husband. I have lived with him my entire adult life, and if I just close my eyes and pretend I never heard what he said about Darcy, I miss him.
Cheryl says I had better stop closing my eyes. And I damn well better not forget about Darcy.
JIM AND I WENT TO
Oregon once, for the wedding of Jim’s college roommate. I felt uncomfortable around all those friends of Jim’s, friends from a different life, who couldn’t imagine how obscure their references were to someone like me.
Emily was a baby, not quite one, and she was fussy all weekend. Wouldn’t let anyone hold her, didn’t want to take a nap, screamed when the bride tried to take her photo.
After the wedding—it was in a beautiful park, with a red Japanese bridge arched over a sliver of water—Emily would not let me set her down. She kept clinging to my leg, literally trying to crawl up it, and her hand tugged the band of my skirt down obscenely. So I scooped her up, and held her, hoping she would not suddenly pull at my shirt and expose more of my flesh, and then suddenly, she was bent half over, reaching, trying to get back down. I resisted for a moment, frustrated with her, and then gave in and set her down.
Immediately, she dropped to her knees and lightning crawled toward a patch of rock and dirt surrounding a bamboo shrub.
“Look. You’ve got a desert baby. She likes rocks.”
I stiffened, not sure if the woman, a girlfriend of another college friend, was being critical.
But it was true.
The patch of dirt was what Emily had wanted. She sat there, her pale pink dress smudged with brown, eyes bright, a rock in each hand, a telltale trail of dirt and pebbles disappearing between her lips. She gurgled happily.
“Wok. Dada. Wok.”
I couldn’t love Emily any more than I already did, but I remember the rush of warmth, knowing that she too felt out of her element, ill at ease in this wet, green world. And I remember looking at Jim, at his utterly unguarded face, as his daughter cooed
dada
below him.
Could anyone have imagined that I would have a life so sweet? A husband who loved me, a daughter we adored?
JIM ARRIVES RIGHT ON TIME,
carrying food from the Japanese restaurant at the hotel. I pour some beer into frosty glasses I keep in the freezer, but when I start to set the table in the nook, I suddenly remember that this is where Emily took her first steps. It was tiled then, but she had gone from this edge of the nook wall to that cabinet, this exact place, with her wobbly, lurching, leaning steps.
We were so proud of her. We had her do it again and again. Walk between us. Lift her up. Laugh. Jim holding her in the air. And then, again. Walk between us. Walk to Mommy. Walk to Daddy. Look at our girl. Look at our big girl. A walker!
She lay in her crib crying the next morning, feet in the air, pink fingers holding her thighs. A little walking girl with muscles that ached. Poor thing. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when we saw her.
It’s too much to sit in that spot with Jim tonight, so I set the table in the dining room. I knew these kinds of thoughts would come up. I’ve steeled myself for them. I spent part of the day forcing myself to think about some of Sharlene’s more memorable breakups. I figure if anybody has the core knowledge of what not to do at the end of a relationship, it should be me.
Jim takes the food out of the white boxes, and places it in six or seven different ceramic bowls. When he is done, it looks like we are about to have guests for dinner. I know that he is trying to be nice, just like I am trying not to think about whether he is still staying in a suite at the hotel, and whether or not Darcy stays there with him. Both efforts are worth something.
Still, he gets to the point quickly.
“I want to buy a house. These are the lowest prices we’ve seen in twenty years. And I want to sell this house. It needs work, and I think it would be better for you to have something newer, smaller. I’m willing to buy that for you.”
I’ve been preparing for him to say something definitive all day, but still I am stunned. He’s moved so much farther ahead of me—not
I won’t be coming back
or
I want a divorce,
but
I want to buy a house,
and
I want to sell this house,
and
I will buy you something else.
The divorce, the word I thought I was going to hear today, is already hindsight to him. So evident that he seems to have forgotten that we haven’t actually discussed it.
My whole body reverberates with the shock.
FOR WEEKS NOW, I’VE BEEN
dwelling on these questions that I somehow missed when everyone else was asking them. Maybe because I never went to college. I was never in a dorm room. You know: the meaning-of-life questions, the why-be-moral questions, the questions about scale.
Our eighty years is a fraction of a second in geologic time, and our planet less than an atom against the universe, and our individual lives puny against the seven billion people living right at the same moment we are. How could any of us think that our lives have meaning? And if they have no meaning, then why aren’t I doing whatever I want? Why do I expect anyone to act in any certain way? What difference does it make if there is anarchy and mayhem and murder? Who does it hurt? And what does that matter?
I tried this argument out on Cheryl last week.
“Well, your human life might be trivial, Avis, but my fraction of a mite of an atom of an electron is fucking great. Do you think maybe you just need a drink?”
JIM LOOKS DOWN AT THE
bowls of expensive Japanese food. He is realizing that he has handled this badly. That he should have gone slower.
Actually, he should have realized that it is none of his business if I stay in this house or not. Who the hell does he think he is? Planning my half of this new life?
I shiver with anger and hold on to the beautiful strength of this clean emotion.
“I’ll make my own decisions about where I live, Jim.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean that, Avis. I mean, you could stay in this house. It’s just . . . it needs a new roof. It’s not well insulated. The power bills are too high. It would be a really expensive house to maintain . . .”
I am trying to stay angry. I am angry. But I know Jim so well. He is trying to plan this next phase for me. He has leapt way ahead, to a future in which I can’t pay the power bill on this house, and I know already—because Jim is good at this kind of thing, because Jim would have thought out all the options—that he is probably right, that I am not only going to lose my husband, but I am going to lose my house too.
I TRIED TO MAKE CHERYL
understand what I meant.
So what if three toddlers were drowned by their mother? So what if a sick old man rapes little boys? Even, so what if Emily died? I mean these are terrible things. We can all agree. And yet, to think they are terrible, aren’t we elevating ourselves beyond what is rationally possible to support?
Is it terrible if an ant steps on the leg of the ant in front of it?
Is it terrible if a mussel dries out because a high tide cast it too far ashore?
Is it terrible if a cat burying its own dung scratches up a few blades of grass?
And in the length of time measured by infinity, and in the size of a world measured by countless universes, is it possible to believe that our lives are anything more than a few blades of grass?
“Cheryl, I don’t just need a drink. I mean it. Why am I so mad at Jim? Why shouldn’t he do whatever he wants?”
“Why are you so mad at Jim? Why aren’t you
madder
at Jim? Jim is an ass, and what he did is wrong, and whether or not his life is meaningful has nothing to do with it. You shouldn’t hurt the people you love, or the people you used to love, and it isn’t any more complicated than that.”
“Then to hell with Jim.”
“To hell with Jim!”
And we laugh. Because we always end up laughing. Because if I could just keep laughing, I could get through this.
I HEAR THE CHIMES OF
an ice-cream truck coming down the street. Jim hears it too, and we look at each other over the top of the uneaten Japanese food. I think of Emily’s first ice cream, and then I think of Nate, a little boy, barreling full speed out the door. He always wanted to be first to get to the truck. First to get an ice cream. It’s a crazy idea. Putting ice cream on a truck in the street. How many kids have hurled themselves in front of a car in a race to get to the ice-cream truck? You can hear the music for a mile. Kids are running into streets when the ice-cream truck is blocks away. My heart used to stop every time I heard that sound, imagining Nate running into traffic, knowing that he could, and that if he did, he would be going full speed and never know what had hit him.
“Do you remember how Nate used to go crashing out the door?”
He smiles.
“Yes. He wouldn’t even stop so I could hand him a dollar. He’d yell, ‘Dad, Dad, come quick! The ice-cream truck is here!’”
We look at each other for a moment. I try to keep it out of my eyes, everything I remember, everything I feel. I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know how he remembers Nate at seven; how he suggests I leave our house, knowing that the same sound has brought the same darting child into both our minds.
ON BAD DAYS, MOSTLY IN
the summer—when the thermometer hit 115 and it was too hot to go outside, too hot to run an errand, too hot to distract oneself with anything at all—I used to try to figure out if it would be better that I didn’t have any other children. If Nate died, I would be childless. I wouldn’t be a mother. Which was unimaginable. And yet, at least, I wouldn’t be a mother. I wouldn’t have to carry on. It was almost solace, that I would not have to live with Nate’s death in the way I’d had to live with Emily’s. I wanted more children, but at least if I didn’t have any, I had that option.
I LOOK AT JIM ACROSS
the table, and I see Nate in thirty years. They are more alike than I ever thought they would be: the way their eyes tip slightly at the corners, the flat plane of the cheek into the neck, the wide, square hands.
“I thought . . . I think . . . I don’t know . . . Jim, could we try talking to someone? Could we go to a counselor or something?”
I hadn’t meant to say this aloud. Not true. I have been trying to think how I could bring this into a conversation for weeks now. There just hasn’t been any opening. Arguably, this isn’t much of an opening now.
“Avis.”
He stops. Looks down. I wait for a long time, but he doesn’t go on. He doesn’t reply.
I KEEP CIRCLING BACK TO
these horrible ideas. If a man rapes a child, we are horrified. If a rapist murders a young woman, we are horrified. If a mother kills her baby, we are horrified. These are horrible experiences for the child, the young woman, the baby. They are horrible experiences for anyone who loved them, maybe anyone who knew them, maybe even anyone who heard that they happened. I get that.
What I can’t get to is why it makes any difference that a mussel or a blade of grass or a human being feels horror.
There’s a gun upstairs. I could kill myself. I could kill Jim. I could kill Darcy. I could kill a busload of children. Would it matter?
I CAN JUST IMAGINE MAKING
that argument to Jill and Margo and Julie.
“Avis, do you hear yourself? These are not normal thoughts. These are not healthy thoughts. These are thoughts that say ‘Get some Prozac.’”
“But I don’t want a drug. I don’t want to be drugged. I want to understand these things. I want to know the truth.”
“Avis, you’re not thinking about this right. It’s like hormones. Your brain is not creating a chemical that you need. Like insulin for a diabetic.”
“I don’t see it that way. It’s not that I don’t believe you. But I think there’s more to it. I’m not just a machine that needs oil or something.”
“Give it up. Avis is not going to take a drug. We’re going to have to use alcohol in her case. We’re just going to have to drink our way through Avis’s crisis.”
“Right. Nothing drug-like about that.”
And then, we would laugh.
I DON’T LET JIM OFF
the hook. I let the silence stretch out, long. We have been married for three decades, and he is not willing to try one session with a counselor? How could he care so little for me? How could Darcy matter this much?
“I’ve made promises, Avis. To Darcy. I can’t go back on those.”
He can’t go back on promises to Darcy.
“Then get out, Jim. Get out. You fucking asshole. Get out of this house.”
I’ve spent most of my life making sure I could not be mistaken for my mother, and Jim looks physically repulsed when I say this, but I think that my language is perfectly appropriate and that I am not like Sharlene at all.