“I don’t know. How do you get lobster to go?”
“You just tell them that’s how you want it.”
“They’ll say no,” Ruth says.
“Hold on a minute,” Sarah says into the phone. Then, to Ruth, “No, they won’t. I’ll explain that this is an exceptional situation.” Then, into the phone, she says, “I wonder if you could help me with a kind of unusual request.”
Ruth smiles. “I always dreamed of being exceptional,” she says. “Only not like this.” She turns to me. “I want some french fries from McDonald’s, too.”
“Okay,” bay. “I’ll go get them.”
I put on my boots and my coat, and Ruth watches me. She is, I know, remembering this: the intentional pull of the coat over the shoulder, the confidence in saying you’ll go somewhere and then just going. Nothing is easy for her anymore. Everything has taken on an unwelcome weight.
Sarah is off the phone; the lobsters will be ready to be picked up in twenty minutes. “I’ll go get the fries,” I tell her.
“Get lots of catsup,” Sarah says.
“Make sure they were just done,” Ruth adds.
“Jesus,” I say. “Anything else?”
“Get lots of those little salts,” Ruth says. “They’re good.”
I climb down the steps, thinking how good it will taste, lobster and french fries, thinking about how I would never ordinarily get take-out lobster. I am a reluctant beneficiary. I am the one standing at the base of the high thing, shielding my eyes from the sun, shivering with the challenge of the task I am watching someone else do.
I pull into the McDonald’s lot, tell the eager clerk inside that I want three large orders of french fries. “Now, they need to be perfect,” I say.
She smiles, hesitates.
“I mean, were they just done?”
She looks over at the fryer. “They’re about ten minutes old, I guess. Ten, fifteen.”
“I’ll wait for a new batch,” I say. “Just call me when they’re out.”
“Okay,” she says, and looks around me for the relief of the next customer.
I sit at a booth, unbutton my coat, pick up a newspaper that someone has left behind. Today is Thursday. Tomorrow is Friday. It scares me, the way tomorrow keeps coming. I look in the paper for a good comic strip to bring Ruth. All of them today would only hurt her feelings. Try this sometime: read the comics as though time were awfully short. You will be hard-pressed to find anything funny. You will understand irony. You will put down the paper and look at way the sun happens to be lighting the sky, and you will be thinking one word: please.
We’d been eating pizza before another movie when I asked Ruth why she didn’t leave her marriage.
She shrugged. “You know. Michael. You met him. You saw the size of his rib cage.”
I had. I’d listened to his twelve-year-old lungs, a courtesy medical call for Ruth, who was worried that Michael’s cold had progressed to pneumonia. He’d taken off his wrinkled blue pajama top, smiled sweetly, inhaled to the best of his ability. His lung sounds were perfectly clear. He was fine—it was only a cold. I told Ruth—who’d been leaning against the doorjamb with clenched fists—that he was fine. She nodded, and her face became free of the force that pulls down on mothers’ eyes and mouths when their children are ill. “Thank you,” she said, embarrassed by the tears in her eyes. But it was those tears that let me know we’d be friends, really.
“I know a guy who’s a sociologist,” I told her that night, “who says that kids by and large fare fine after divorce.”
Ruth smiled. “Right. Where? Where is that?”
“He swears it’s true. And he says a good divorce is better than a bad marriage.”
“For who?” Ruth asked.
“I guess for everyone.”
“Bullshit.” She put down her fork, sighed. “Over and over, I’ve tried to say I want out. I’ve felt the words in my throat as if they’re going to boil over. But I can’t say them. I can’t. I just stay. I stay and stay, and all of a sudden it’s fifteen years later.”
“I know,” I said, and realized suddenly that I really did know. I too had had my moments of sitting on the side of the bed in the morning, looking at my husband getting dressed and wanting to take his arm and say, “Let’s just stop this.” One doesn’t. One makes coffee.
“I came close, once,” Ruth said. “We were out to dinner, Eric and I. We’d left Michael with a sitter, so we could be alone. But I don’t know why—Eric might as well have been by himself. We were silent all the way there. Then, after we ordered, I kept trying to make conversation, but he wouldn’t respond. I mean, he didn’t even nod, he just sort of looked at me, picked at his teeth with a toothpick. And I thought, this is nuts. I’m sitting here feeling desperate, and he won’t say one fucking word. I felt this kind of … I don’t know, panic, I guess. I saw that things were never going to change. And I just got up and walked out, left him there.”
“Really?” I asked, a little thrilled.
She nodded. “And, you know, it felt so fine. That moment of simple truth. Seeing the situation as intolerable and for once really doing something about it.”
“So what happened?”
“I just … started walking home. And I remember I felt so much lighter. I saw every leaf on every tree. The sun was setting, and I stood still and watched it, and it was beautiful. I felt air coming into me and air going out of me, and it was such a relief, as if someone had taken off a belt I’d forgotten about that was cinched way too tight. I was making a million plans, you know, how I’d sit on Michael’s bed with him and tell him I was leaving his father, answer all his questions as honestly as I could—God! It felt so good to think about being completely honest! I thought about how I’d open my own checking account, how I’d give Eric all the electronics, everything, all I wanted was out. I walked for a few miles—I got blisters on my feet, but I didn’t care—and then I saw a car pulling up, and it was Eric and I just … I got in.”
“And?”
She sighed, looked away, then back at me. “He said he thought I’d gone to the bathroom, and the appetizers came and I didn’t come back so he paid the bill and then drove around looking for me. He told me how embarrassed he was to be left like that. He asked if I was crazy.”
“Well, did you tell him why you left?”
“Yeah, I told him why. And he told me it was an extreme and selfish reaction. That I was a hopeless romantic if I expected candles and hand-holding after all these years of being married. That if I wanted him to talk I should have said something.”
“Jesus.”
“And so,” she smiled, held both hands up, surrender-style, “I apologized.”
“But why?”
“Oh, God, I don’t know. You don’t know Eric. I can’t describe how he does what he does. He’s a lawyer, you know, he’s good at manipulation. I mean, he’ll actually say our relationship is fine, what the hell do I expect, and I’ll end up agreeing. But I have made some progress. A few months ago I moved into my own bedroom. I said it was because Eric snored too loudly, but we both knew what it was. We eat together; we coparent; we share the bills. We’re slightly hostile roommates.”
“But that’s horrible!” I said.
She shrugged. “Well, I look at Michael, and he’s fine—he’s doing well in school; he has friends; he sings in the shower. Just because I made a bad choice doesn’t mean he has to suffer, too. He loves his father. And Eric says we’re the same as most marriages except that we’re more honest with each other. Look around, can you disagree?”
I swallowed, said nothing. If I wanted to argue against her position, what could I say? At the table next to us was an obviously married couple out to dinner. They stared vacantly past each other, engaged in conversation only when they needed to pass things to each other. All their lights were out. And what could I say about myself? That just last night, while my husband lay on top of me, I’d had tears of a terrible and too-familiar loneliness come to my eyes?
That my husband—as usual—hadn’t even known? That afterward he’d gone downstairs to read the newspaper while I lay in bed holding my pillow with a resigned loneliness like a child put to bed too soon? I was going through my own bad time lately.
But this is normal, isn’t it? C’est le mariage, all that stuff. I mean, I have had this experience a thousand times: I am talking to a woman who is complaining bitterly about her husband. She is close to tears; her hands flutter, mothlike, around her face, ready to wipe away the evidence of her grief. Then I meet her husband, and he acts perfectly fine and friendly; and so does she. He puts his arm around her waist. She looks up at him, asks him about the plans they’ve made for the weekend. Wait, I always want to say. Where is it, what you were talking about before? The truth is, we usually only show our unhappiness to another woman. I suppose this is one of our problems. And yet it is also one of our strengths.
I told Ruth, “Listen, I know marriage has its ups and downs. But yours can’t always be as terrible as you describe.”
“Yes, it can,” she said.
“But then you must be constantly … I mean, this has to take a terrific toll on you!”
“For a while,” Ruth said, “I thought we could be saved. I would try therapy tricks, you know—active listening. Fair fighting, for God’s sake. Really trying to see things from his point of view. I would try to share things with him, tell him about what I was excited about, interested in. But it was the restaurant scene all over again. He would listen politely and walk away without saying a word and I would feel humiliation like a shower, you know? I would ask him to go places with me, and every time, he would refuse. And then I would ask him again! Nothing worked. There’s no tenderness in me for him. And none in him for me.” She smiled, looked up at me. “He hates me.”
“He can’t hate you,” I said.
“Why not?”
I remembered the first time I met her husband. He was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter. He was blond, magazine-handsome, admirably muscular from the weightlifting he did every lunch hour. He wore a pair of khaki pants and a navy-blue sweater, loafers with no socks. The friendly look. But his brown eyes were a shut door. He kept his arms crossed tightly over his chest. Ruth told him my name, and when he said, “Nice to meet you,” I heard a thousand other things. I felt as though I’d come too early, or dressed wrong, or said an unforgivable thing.
“He did make me feel as if I was in trouble for something when I met him,” I tell her now.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I mean. That’s how he is. You feel you’ve done something terribly offensive that only he can see. He won’t tell you what it is. Because then he might have to forgive you.” She sighed deeply.
“But there must have been something, once,” I persisted. “There was a reason you married him.”
“Of course,” Ruth said. “I was pregnant.”
“Oh, God.”
“I know,” she said. “But, listen. I don’t care anymore. We have our little arrangement. I love my bedroom. It’s gorgeous. French blues, a white wicker chair to read in by the window. I always have a box of Godiva chocolates under the bed. And it’s such a relief not to have him all over me at night. He was a terrible lover, always. I don’t know how he found the right place to get me pregnant.”
We laughed, and then I said, “But … don’t you miss sex?”
“I get plenty of that.” She pulled a slice of pizza onto her plate, looked over at me. “Come on, you can figure it out.”
I watched her take a bite of the pizza, then delicately wipe the corner of her mouth, and an image came to me. I saw Ruth and a man in bed together, naked. Ruth lay beneath him, her eyes closed, her hands knotted into fists of pleasure. A wide swatch of warm afternoon sun lay across the two of them and the rumpled sheets. Their sounds were quiet, earnest, intensely exclusionary. Orange peels lay in beautiful, two-tone disarray at the side of the bed. There was a romantic blurriness to the scene; and a wrenching kind of sweetness, too. My appetite disappeared.
“Does your son know?” I asked.
“About the others? No.” She shook her head. “No, I’m incredibly discreet.” She looked at her watch. “You know, I’m not that anxious to go to a movie. Let’s go look at stuff that’s too expensive for us to buy.”
“Okay,” I said. “We should try on evening gowns.”
“Of course,” she said.
“Who do you sleep with?” I asked.
She leaned back in her chair, smiled. “Why, Ann. I hardly know you.”
I spill the french fries into a bowl when I get back to Ruth’s, and we begin to eat them, slowly at first, then rapidly, even though Sarah has not yet returned with the lobsters. “These were better when they fried them in beef fat,” Ruth says. “Everything’s getting too goddamn good for you.”
“I know.”
“And even the things that are made the same taste different to me now. Do you think things taste different as you get older?”
“Of course,” I say. “Potato sticks, Snoballs, they’re nothing like they used to be.”
“Peanut butter and jelly,” Ruth sighs.
“But now we can appreciate martinis,” I say.
“And semen.”
I stop a french fry midair. “You don’t like semen!”
She nods. “Yes, I do.”
“Oh, God!”
“Don’t you?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s … you know, like raw egg but even worse. It’s too salty. And it’s that terrible lukewarm!”
“Well, what can I tell you? I always liked it.” She takes another handful of fries. There aren’t many left.
“Do you think we should cover these, save some for Sarah?” I ask, looking into the bowl.
“Nope. I don’t wait anymore. They’re here, right? We’re here, right? Seize the moment.”
I nod, think about all she is saying—and not. But what is “not waiting, anymore,” really? What kind of hyperawareness does she live with? When she looks in the mirror, what does she see? What stands, see-through, behind her? When she puts down a fork, when she steps into her shoes, when she opens an envelope addressed to her—what is happening? Surely she must feel as though she is in another dimension. And surely she must be wiser, and capable of teaching us all something essential. It’s as though she’s wearing a robe that’s hiding her real outfit.
“What’s this all like, really?” I ask her now.
She stops chewing, looks at me. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I think about what it must be like to wake up at night, knowing all you know. And how everything … I don’t know. I guess I wish you’d tell me more … inside stuff.”
She stands up, pushes her chair in. “What do you want, Ann? A closer seat?”
“I didn’t … I’m not asking—”
“Just be my friend, okay?” She starts toward her bedroom. “Just call me when the fucking lobster gets here.” She turns around, her face flushed. “What’s it like for you, Ann? What’s it like? What do you think about when you wake up? You’re going to lose me, and I’m really important to you. The truth is I’m your only goddamn friend and I’m leaving. One-way ticket, Ann. And you have to stay here. Sometimes it’s you I feel sorry for, not me.” She is running out of breath. She looks around the room, then suddenly holds her hands out to me, palms up, as though she is giving me the whole world in the form of light and space. Then her arms collapse at her side, her head hangs down. “I think I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying,” she says. She begins to laugh, then to cry, jagged spasms of sound. “Jesus.” She covers her face with her hands.
I cross the room and hold her, crying myself. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry. Oh, I wish I could take a day for you. I wish we could trade for just one day.”
She steps back from me, smiles bitterly. “No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I do!”
?
??It might be the day I check out.”
“I’d take the chance.”
“The hell you would.”
Nothing. Nothing except for the gigantic fact that she is right.
“We’ll just eat, okay?” I say. “We’ll just … eat.”
“Okay. Okay.” She embraces me again, her fingers press into my back, and I relish this small demonstration of strength. “I know what we should do,” she says, pulling away from me and wiping the tears from her face. “Let’s call L.D.”
“Good idea,” I say. Most times, L.D. is too much. But now she will be perfect.
“And bring those fries in here,” Ruth says, heading again toward her bedroom. “Let’s finish them. We’ll call the restaurant and tell Sarah to go get more. Of course, whatever she brings, if L.D. is here, it won’t be enough. We’ll need to go get more again. It’ll be like that Disney movie, where the buckets keep throwing water. What is that movie?”
“Fantasia.”
“Right,” she says, crawling into her bed. “Fantasia. Do you know what I mean?”
I pull her quilt up over her, put the bowl of french fries in her lap, push my sneakers off my feet, climb up on the bed beside her. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Mickey couldn’t keep up with the water, and we won’t be able to keep up with the demand for french fries. It will just keep going on and on. Like frustration dreams—you know, you fall, you can’t get up, and the truck keeps coming and coming.”
“Yeah.” She closes her eyes, then opens them. “Hey, Ann?”
“What?”
“That’s what this is like.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know.”
“Okay.”
“Call L.D.”
“After Sarah.”
Sarah wants to know why we need more fries. “Because Ruth and I ate the ones I got,” I said. “And because we’re calling L.D. to come over.”
“Jesus,” Sarah says. “Then we need about ninety more lobsters.”
Ruth has friends like other people have wardrobes. I mean that there’s someone for every occasion. Sarah is fine-boned, delicately beautiful, the kind of woman who can wear a perfectly tailored silk dress to take out the garbage and not spill a single thing on it. You know she’s wearing makeup, but you can’t find it. Her voice is low and smooth, conciliatory. She is management material through and through, clear-eyed and decisive. It was Sarah who organized all of us, made sure that there was a neatly typed roster of our names and phone numbers so we could reach one another, so we could make sure someone was always with Ruth.