Gina gets to work chopping vegetables. As she tosses them into a wok, a huge cloud of steam billows toward the ceiling. She speaks as she cooks, nodding her head with determination, then shaking it with uncertainty, then wiping her cheeks and nose with the sleeves of her robe. An argument? Ted looks glum. Elinor can tell by his posture. Shoulders curling toward his chest. He doesn’t love you, Gina! Elinor tells the poplars. Surely they are about to break up. But then Ted gets up from the table and ambles up behind Gina. He pulls her away from the stove, his arms circling her waist, his hands sliding up under the V of her robe and across her breasts. Gina closes her eyes and tips her head back against his chest. Ted kisses her neck, kisses her shoulders, and the robe falls away. Then they fall away, onto the kitchen floor, where Elinor can’t see them anymore. Making love on the kitchen floor while the wok blows steam at the ceiling. The special effects affairs are made of.
Elinor covers her face with her hands and falls to her knees. The mud beneath the grass seeps through her jeans with a disturbing sucking noise. She wants to go back, to erase the past two years. It seems that the spam filter for their life has broken, and all kinds of junk is pouring through: painful medical procedures, negative test results, sleepless nights, and now this bimbo in leotards.
The next day, Elinor finds a book tucked under layers of undershirts in Ted’s drawer while putting away the laundry. Live Healthy in the Zone. Inside the paperback, there’s a date and an inscription: Dear Ted, Congratulations on reaching your goal! I knew you could do it. Here’s a reminder of some of your favorite dishes. Love, Gina.
Elinor flips through the pages, which are smudged with ingredients. Corners are turned over and hearts are drawn beside some recipes. The hearts seem to be a grading system, like stars for rating movies. “Soybean Croquettes” gets only one heart, while “Rainbow Vegetable Sauté” is worthy of three. “Creamed Tomato Soup with Cognac” gets four and a half.
The night she finds the cookbook, Elinor fixes Lean Cuisines for dinner. Rushed and tired, she and Ted often resort to frozen foods, grilled cheese, or scrambled eggs.
“These things are mostly carbs,” Ted says, poking his fork at the too-bright green beans. He pushes away the dinner. “I’m trying to cut carbs. Stick to complex carbs, anyway.”
“Oh? Since when?” Elinor asks. Why don’t you cook us a Zone dinner! she wants to holler. “Since when?” she repeats. The anger hisses and clanks, like the radiators in an old house when you turn on the heat on the first cool day in the fall. A slight burning smell. The house trembling and creaking all over.
Ted shrugs at his little black tray of pasta and beans. “Dunno.”
“I think you know.” The inscription in the cookbook was dated June 1. He and Gina have been having their low-carb trysts for at least two months.
Ted cocks his head and frowns.
“I know . . .” She wants to say I know about Gina. I know about the affair, but suddenly she has the uncontrollable urge to flip the table over on Ted. She presses her palms against her thighs to stop her legs from shaking; she pictures herself becoming less and less attractive in Ted’s eyes as she rants and raves and threatens and forbids. She cannot find the means to confront her husband with the firmness, grace, and composure she had hoped for.
Finally, she gets up from the table, carries her unfinished dinner to the sink, and stuffs it down the disposal. “Sometimes,” she says, unable to look at her husband, “I find complex carbohydrates a little too complex.”
Elinor awakens the next morning to the shrill whine of a table saw. It’s Saturday, but Ted is up already, out in the garage working on the cherry hutch he’s building from a kit. Save for the hours he’s fled to the gym, he’s been holed up in the garage working on this project for weeks. They do not need a cherry hutch. But the buzz of the power tools and the pages of detailed directions seem to soothe his nerves. “Perhaps this makes Ted feel as though he’s able to fix something,” Dr. Brewster gently suggested during their last session. Elinor kvetched about Ted only caring about the hutch. She knew this was an odd complaint, since all she seemed to care about was the laundry. But when Ted quit trying to make Elinor feel better and retreated to the hutch and the gym, she began to miss him—to realize that she’d been taking him for granted. She wondered what kind of madness would make her irritated by her husband when he was attentive, and then resentful when he stepped back to give her room.
Now she lies in bed, clammy from a restless night’s sleep. Her reading glasses and her heavy copy of The Iliad are tangled in the covers. She fell asleep reading again. While she found The Iliad impenetrably boring in college, now she likes escaping into the bloody tragic mess. She’s rooting for handsome Hector, who’s stuck in a war simply because his cocky brother fell for a beautiful girl who wasn’t his.
Elinor composes a Saturday-morning to-do list in her head. 1. Get rid of husband’s lover. She will deal with Gina herself. Forget the counselor, forget confronting Ted. She’ll go straight to the source of the problem. This is what she does at work. Call in the perpetrator and lay the cards on the table. She doesn’t want this Gina problem to be overly complicated, to be dramatic. She’s had enough drama in the past two years. She rehearses what she might say to the girl: I know you’re sleeping with my husband. Please stop. He and I have had our troubles but we’re going be fine . . . No—Elinor certainly doesn’t owe Gina any explanation of her marriage.
She gets up, brushes her teeth, then sits on the edge of the bed, squeezing the cordless phone. Finally, she dials information and is connected to the gym. A woman’s voice breaks into the Muzak on the line. Elinor asks to make an appointment for a fitness consultation with Gina. The woman cheerfully announces that Gina has a cancellation in an hour, which is really lucky, because Gina’s very popular.
“Oh, I know.” Elinor has the urge to smoke, something she hasn’t done since college. “Sign me up!” She tries to sound cheerful. She looks anxiously into her closet. What should she wear for this encounter? She’s never mastered the breezy casualness of gym attire. Most women in her suburban town dash from their workouts to the grocery store in stylish velour sweats with matching hooded tops, somehow looking trim without ever seeming to perspire. But Elinor always feels dumpy.
She showers and chooses jeans, a white V-neck sweater that shows off her tan from working in the yard, and red high-tops, which she hopes convey that she has the self-confidence not to care about trends. She wore Converse high-tops all through high school. Petite and funny, Elinor was voted “cutest” in her yearbook, a title she secretly loathed. She didn’t want to be cute. She wanted to be beautiful. But her blond hair, upturned nose, little Chiclet teeth, and apple cheeks would never be deemed movie-star sexy. In the 1980s, she tried to shed any hint of cuteness by spiking her hair and donning rubber bracelets and torn sweatshirts. Now when she sees photos of herself during this era, she has to laugh. It looks like she’s wearing a Halloween costume. By the time she entered the corporate world, she succumbed to slacks and flats and a tidy French braid.
Hurrying through the kitchen, Elinor spies Ted’s bag of flaxseeds on the counter. He’s been spooning out two level tablespoons every morning and sprinkling them on his fruit and plain yogurt. She slides the bag off the counter into her purse. Maybe she’ll return it to Gina. You left your damn flax in my husband’s car.
Elinor glances at her day planner as she picks up her keys. Twelve noon is circled with pink highlighter. In an hour she’s due to have lunch with Phil, the CEO at her company, to discuss the details of a merger. Phil wants to outsource the employee relations part of the merger to an outside law firm, a blow to Elinor’s impeccable track record of keeping everything in house, thereby saving the company money. But Phil has grown wary of Elinor’s absences and missteps, which got worse as her infertility appointments wore on. Elinor’s afraid she’s about to be demoted or let go or God knows what. This luncheon is Step 1 of her Corporate Comeback. The venue for the I’m-your-man speech.
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For what? Who cares? She’s tired of always working nights and weekends because she doesn’t have children. She grabs the phone and dials the CEO’s admin, who’s always strapped to her desk on weekends.
“Food poisoning,” Elinor says.
“He canceled his golf game to meet you,” the admin admonishes. Being sick is never an excuse for missing meetings at Elinor’s company. You’re supposed to show up in a medicated haze and breathe germs on your colleagues.
“I’m vomiting.” She wishes this were the case, rather than my husband’s having an affair.
“Dry toast,” the admin replies coolly.
“Right.” Elinor clutches her car keys, snaps her bag shut. The heft of it tugs at her shoulder as she heads out the door.
She waves to Ted as she backs out of the driveway. He looks up from his table saw and waves back, smiles—a flash of white teeth and faint dimples. Elinor closes her eyes for a moment and imagines his smell—sawdust and Mountain Spring deodorant—and wishes they could lie side by side on their comforter for the rest of the day. Stripped of passion. Down to just love.
More than anything, Elinor loves her husband’s face. A big, handsome Irish face. Boyish, yet slightly jowly with age. Pools of brown chocolate for eyes. Thick lustrous hair she’d clutch and hang on to when they made love. She hates her husband and loves his face and hates herself and . . . thump, thump, she backs over the curb at the end of the driveway. Ted looks up, waves his hand for her to steer to the left, smiles. She waves back, pausing under the shade of the big oak tree in their front yard.
After the second in vitro, Elinor would lie under the tree, trying to calm herself. It was hot that spring. In the evenings after work she’d drag an old sleeping bag outside and take refuge on the cool grass, reading and dozing. Ted would join her, grabbing a beach chair from the garage. “Can I get you anything?” he kept asking Elinor. He’d nervously tap his palm against the arm of the aluminum chair, his wedding ring making a little clinking noise that made Elinor want to scream. She felt bad for being so irritated. What was wrong with her?
Now, as she heads for the gym, Elinor flips down the visor to look in the mirror. She runs her fingers through her shoulder-length hair, which she’s decided to wear down for once. As soon as she gets rid of her husband’s girlfriend she’s going to get a new haircut. Maybe whiten her teeth. She snaps the visor back into place. Today Gina’s going to evaluate Elinor’s health and fitness needs and develop a workout plan for her, the receptionist who scheduled the appointment explained. Gina and Elinor will work together to accomplish these goals. Except that Gina’s goal is to sleep with Ted, and Elinor’s goal is to make Gina go away.
Gina meets Elinor in the lobby at the club. She doesn’t seem to know who Elinor is. A blank-yet-pleased expression passes over Gina’s face as they shake hands. Is Elinor as unrecognizable as all of the other drooping, middle-aged women at the gym? Gina’s fingers are long and thin. She’s wearing black warm-up pants and a collared shirt. Her long, light brown hair is pulled into a high ponytail, with bangs that fall into her eyes. She’s lithe, buff, but not exactly beautiful. Her face is a bit flat and her eyes set far apart, reminding Elinor of a flounder. These cheekbones certainly wouldn’t break a man’s heart.
They sit at a table in the snack bar. Gina asks a list of questions, filling in the answers in small, square handwriting. She is all energy and spunk. Nimble fingers, spry ovaries. Beautiful eggs. A group of retired men share a pitcher of beer at a table next to theirs, even though it’s not even noon. This is the quirky thing Elinor loves about their gym: The snack bar serves brownies and beer alongside the smoothies and salads. Elinor would like to join the gentlemen. Give in to gravity and Father Time.
“Age?” Gina asks. Her lips shimmer with rosy gloss.
“Thirty-nine,” Elinor lies. While she had no problem turning forty, she does have a problem saying forty, especially in the company of Gen-X fitness Nazis who are romancing her husband. “The real problem may be your age,” the doctor had gently explained when Elinor first couldn’t conceive. While she hadn’t looked forward to turning forty, she never thought her birthday would constitute a medical emergency.
“Really? You look great,” Gina says without looking up.
I lost my ass, Elinor wants to say, as though it might actually be here at the gym’s lost-and-found. She wishes for a moment she were consulting a fitness expert for real. It’s a shallow, vain thing to fret about, but what she hates most about aging is the southern migration of her buttocks after two decades of sitting on her duff for corporate America. Somewhere along the way she lost her figure—the small-framed size 4 build she’d had all her life. Then the infertility treatments made her belly bloat, like an overripe melon. Elinor doesn’t mind the two coppery age spots forming on her hands, or the crow’s-feet crinkling at the corners of her eyes, but she wants her body back.
Gina says she’s going to weigh Elinor and give her a stress test and body fat analysis after they finish the paperwork. Then she’ll recommend classes, such as spinning and yoga!
The flax in Elinor’s purse on her lap is heavy in a comforting way, like a cat curled up there. She’d been all riled up driving here, but now she can’t think of a single thing to say to Gina. She’s too tired. She figures she hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in about two years. While she can barely keep her eyes open during office meetings and conference calls, she lies awake at two AM cataloging a dizzying inventory of worries: donor eggs, adoption (foreign or domestic?), mounting medical bills and insurance forms.
“What would you say your overall fitness goal is?” Gina asks.
Once, while walking on the beach in Hawaii, Elinor saw a woman fishing. At first she thought the woman was a man. But when she reached the fisherman, she realized he was a woman, with beautiful white hair cropped short and blown back in the wind. The woman wore khaki shorts and a black T-shirt, and her legs were muscular and tan. She was solid and as beautiful as the scenery. Yet she was sort of genderless—not really feminine or masculine, just a person, smiling up into the sun, the ocean a sparkling carpet before her. Just fishing. She looked at peace. Not worrying anymore about crow’s-feet or how her rump would look in a tankini. Elinor wants to tell Gina that this is her fitness goal.
Gina leans across the table and looks at Elinor intently. Her wide-set eyes are green and almond-shaped and her skin is flawless. The bangs-falling-into-the-eyelashes look is definitely sexy.
“To lose fifteen pounds,” Elinor says. “And firm up my . . .” everything, Elinor wants to say. But she doesn’t want to admit this to her husband’s lover. She clears her throat. “To firm up my butt. I don’t get to the gym much. I’m too busy.” I am successful, she wants to tell Gina. Okay, maybe not at the things that matter now. But at the things that mattered before. Did you know, if you live in Holland and your pipes freeze, you legally get the day off with pay? Elinor is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to international employee relations law.
“First thing?” Gina says. “If you’ll let me? I’m going to come to your house and clean out your cupboards.”
Elinor laughs. “And mop the floors?”
“I’m going to purge your carbs,” she says firmly. “Your pastas, breads, and cereals?”
“Cereal?” Elinor asks.
“Cereal is the worst!”
“Uh . . .” You’re taking my husband and my Frosted Mini-Wheats? Elinor considers this unlikely scenario: Gina, at Elinor and Ted’s house, cleaning out the cupboards. Gina and Ted sweating under the bright lights in the kitchen. The whole thing out in the open. Remorse. An apology. More important: an agreement. Gina will never come near them again. “Okay,” Elinor finally tells Gina. “But it’ll have to be in the evening. I work during the day.”
“Sure,” Gina says.
“My husband will be there. Is that okay? He wants to cut carbs, too. Well, he already is. He started without me.” Elinor hates the bitterness in her voice. Maybe after t
hey give Gina the boot, Elinor and Ted can take a trip to a tropical resort. Eat steamed fish and brown rice and soak in a tub for two. Run on the beach and have sex on the marble bathroom floor of a luxury hotel room. Elinor will catch up with Ted. Lust and exercise. They don’t sound bad at all.
“Great,” Gina says. “I can fuck both of you.” But Elinor is sure she said help. I can help both of you.
As Elinor sprinkles tarragon over three chicken breasts, she feels the need to prove to her husband and his lover that she can cook. Gina is due to arrive at their house in forty-five minutes. Elinor’s fixing a low-fat, low-carb dinner—broiled seasoned chicken breasts, zucchini split and stuffed with ricotta cheese and chopped mushrooms and onions, butter lettuce salad sprinkled with the ubiquitous flaxseeds, and fresh berries for dessert with just a dollop of whipping cream. She begins setting the kitchen table for three.
Ted turns the channel on the little TV in the kitchen to a Nova show about coal. “Too fine to use in the steel-smelting process, the coke is sold for heating and cooking on small stoves,” the narrator says.
“What do you know?” Ted says. He’s mostly interested in factual things. Details that don’t require you to form an opinion.
“How come three?” he asks, looking at the place mats.
“A gal who might join my book club is coming over.” Elinor sets out the napkins and silverware. Soon this will be a part of the past. They’ll get their lives back.
Ted regards the TV.
Elinor sprinkles more thyme and tarragon on the chicken breasts, worrying that they’re going to taste bland—as bland as sex became with Ted before they quit making love altogether. She wonders if Jerry Hall’s mother ever really uttered those infamous words: “In order to keep a man you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom.” Gina’s a whore in the kitchen. Innovative, Elinor will give her that. Meanwhile, Elinor’s become a lump in every room: in the bedroom, in the kitchen. Maybe because she had to become a numb lump on the doctor’s examining table to ward off the pain of all those procedures. “Just a little pressure,” the doctor would say. Why couldn’t they use the real P-word? Pain. This might hurt. Instead there were euphemisms: pressure, a pinch. Once, when Elinor had an outpatient procedure to remove cysts on her ovaries from the drugs, they let Ted accompany her. “Squeeze my hand,” he whispered sweetly. Elinor grimaced, a flame of pain shooting toward her hip. Ted’s hand was solid and warm, the only comforting thing on the planet.