The Mere Wife

  He goes over it twice with his crayon, tracing the outline, placing it in the center of the new world he’s created.

  11

  What? Willa wakes up, heart pounding. It’s five in the morning, and no one’s awake but her. Did she hear something? Scratching, or soft feet padding away?

  No. New locks are installed all over the house. There’s been no sign of anything coming in. No bear. No intruder. There was no sign on the mountain either. No den, no nest, no lair.

  Willa doesn’t believe it. She doesn’t believe anyone. Not the officer who swore it to her, not her husband, who seems to think the claw belonged to a creature that came through and then went.

  “Maybe a mountain lion,” said Roger, as though that was fine. “Or a panther. There are panthers no one ever sees out in daylight, but they found one in Florida, didn’t you read that article? They thought they were extinct.”

  As though Willa should let giant cats sharpen their claws in the halls of Herot. As though there should be no feeling of betrayal. She’s supposed to be safe. She’s supposed to be protected. Isn’t that why she married this man?

  Previously, there’s been only one moment in their entire marriage when Roger seemed likely to betray her. He began to pour himself scotch and sob at the dining table, using words like existential and guitar. Willa suffered for thirteen and one-half days, and then told her mother, who passed the omens to Roger’s mother.

  The next day, it was fixed. No one said anything about it ever again, and no one ever, ever will, certainly not Willa, who loves her husband, obviously.

  Now, though …

  Roger denies monsters exist, but Willa knows better.

  “What about Dylan?” she asked him. “What if he’d been here?”

  “He’s fine,” said Roger, and shrugged. “Nothing came near him. He didn’t see it. If it was here, it’s gone now.”

  She journals her dream in the book she’s bought for this purpose. There are stickers for bad dreams and good ones too. It’s like a scrapbook of nightmares.

  Hundreds of people are at a party and I’m pouring red wine into plastic cups. I have a pitcher, but it has a leak, and so I’m spilling, drop by drop onto my dress until the whole front is red.

  I bring wine to that police officer, but he’s holding a goblet already, and it’s big and ugly, the kind of thing you might get on a wedding registry from a relative, or maybe from a fraternity. If he was part of a fraternity. He probably was.

  Just as I pour the wine into his goblet, something throws itself against the door—

  There’s a sound in the hall. She picks up the baseball bat she’s started keeping beside the bed, but it’s just Dylan.

  “Dilly,” she says, calming her heartbeat. “Did you have a nightmare?”

  “You did,” he says. “You screamed.”

  When Willa was little, and she came out of bed scared and crying, her mother told her that if she didn’t stop waking up, she’d tie her into the bed every night, and how would Willa like that?

  She stopped dreaming entirely. Only recently has she dreamed again, and these are dreams in which the world crushes down upon her. Dreams in which there is no place any longer for anyone like Willa, and everything she’s earned has been taken away from her. In one dream, she clung to the knobs of her kitchen cabinets. In another, she was shrouded in cashmere and rolled into the sea.

  She sits up, blurry, looks at the bedside table and sees red in the bottom of a glass. The whole thing suddenly looks like a hospital and the glass a transfusion.

  “Back to bed,” she says to Dylan, and looks to the other side of the mattress for Roger, who is apparently out for a run. She can see his clothes laid out on the chair, but his running shoes are gone. Who runs in snow?

  She gets up. There’s no point trying to sleep. She weighs herself for comfort. A hundred and fourteen pounds, but she feels like a dinosaur. Somewhere in one of Dylan’s allegedly cute children’s books there’s a thing about dinosaurs, where it says humans couldn’t grow that big because their brains would never catch up. There’s a picture drawn with pastels, a human woman with tiny tyrannosaurus arms and a lobotomized expression. The book goes on to say that if humans were the size of dinosaurs, they’d just walk around with pea-sized minds, unable to talk, marry, or bury their dead.

  She’d like to be a dinosaur sometimes, and thunder across Herot Hall all teeth, claws, and irresponsibility.

  But no.

  The neighbors will be coming later for champagne, caviar, toothpicked morsels, and “Auld Lang Syne.” Willa thinks an evil thought: maybe she’ll order pizza instead, the stress of the past few days. She could serve gluten, dairy, and fat on New Year’s Eve. How would that be for monstrous?

  Instead, when the sun’s risen, she drives to the market and picks up the caviar in its little cooler. As she walks to the car, she imagines she’s carrying two hearts on ice, each one suspended, but about to beat again. It’s disappointing when she unloads the cooler at home and finds only implausibly expensive fish eggs.

  By noon the house is full of workers, hanging garlands and fluffing pillows, and Willa follows them around, dictating their decoration. There are already luminarias lining the walk, each one a colored paper sack full of a battery candle.

  Roger’s home and showered by now, not particularly helpful. He’s at the computer, diagramming a nose job. She’s put his tuxedo out on the bed, with cuff links depicting Magic 8-Balls. Where’d he get those?

  “Who’s that?” she asks, leaning over his shoulder.

  He’s startled.

  “You know,” he says. “Louisa? From down the street? Mark’s wife?”

  Willa looks at the photo of Louisa, with lines all over her skin, a dot-to-dot of a new face appearing out of thin air, and feels ever-so-faintly something.

  She goes back to the kitchen and makes blini the size of thumbnails, whips sour cream, slices baguettes. She hard-boils eggs and tries not to choke on the smell of sulfur. There is cake to bake and there are carrots to chop, and when she next looks up it’s later than she thought, and the evening is twitching its way across the sky. She should be showered and dressed.

  She turns on the faucet to wash her hands, and the coldness feels like fingers grasping hers. It’s water from beneath the mountain, and it’s full of the taste of bones and rocks. She’s bought five cases of bottled to keep from having to serve this, even in ice-cube format. There’s something awful about it. It feels full of ghosts.

  She looks down into the sink and watches the water spin into the drain.

  Willa thinks about when she was the wife of an about-to-be rock star, who wrote a song about how she left him in bed the morning after she married him. He ended up with a gold record. She ended up the hostess of Herot Hall. She looks down at her thigh, where the once-upon-a-time tattoo of Richie’s name is a white wriggle of invisible ink, raised up when she’s cold, like a readable goose bump.

  There’s a long hair growing there, somehow missed by the waxer. She plucks it with her fingernails and throws it into the trash, then turns on the mixer to puree chickpea water into a vegan cocktail foam she read about on the Internet.

  She thinks about the party, about how there might be flirting or fondling or fucking against the wall in the back hallway, where last year she glimpsed some hanky-pankying between a husband and wife, not to each other, and not to be named.

  She swore secrecy, and told Roger.

  While the mixer spins, she walks to the kitchen door to look at the view. There are tracks in the snow. But why shouldn’t there be? Isn’t the point of the mountain to climb it? That police officer went up there, of course, and who knows who else? The slope’s been hammered down with sleds and discs, and it makes her feel strange, as though all of that is somehow against the mountain’s will. Stay off it, she thinks, but she shakes that away. There are no voices up there. The mountain is only a mountain.

  She can’t help it, though. The snow makes the slope look like the p
ale crook of an elbow with blue and red marks in it. A man on a train in the city, years ago, nodding off, then sitting up, eyes wide, hands outstretched. He looked at Willa and said, out of nowhere, “Listen to me. What if we were the last two people on Earth? Would you listen to me then?”

  Willa put on her headphones and raised the collar of her coat.

  “WOULD YOU LOVE ME THEN?” he shouted. Willa felt scarred. What if? she thought. What if this was as good as it would ever get? A man shouting with passion on a train, telling her she was the one he wanted. Should she have surrendered? Sunk into it? Of course not. He was disgusting. But still, there’s a part of Willa that wonders about every other life she might’ve had.

  She starts to close the door, and sees the rabbit.

  Dead on the doorstep, and dead for days. Frozen, eyeballs pecked out.

  “Roger!” she calls. “Roger!”

  Her husband comes into the kitchen, entirely too slowly for Willa’s taste, half into his tux.

  “How are you not dressed?” he says. “People will be here any minute.”

  She points and runs for the sink. There’s no smell. It’s the actuality of the death that makes her stomach churn.

  “Shit,” says Roger, who never says shit. He beckons Willa over. It’s only when she bends closer that she notices what’s tied around the rabbit’s neck.

  A bow from a package, shining foil, and a tag: To: Dylan, From: Santa, in Willa’s own handwriting.

  “Dylan!” Roger yells. “Down here, now!”

  “Don’t show him!” Willa says. “Why would you show him? Someone killed it and left it—”

  “I’m not showing him something he hasn’t already seen. He did this,” says Roger. “The BB gun. I told Mother not to get it, but you left it on his list.”

  Willa remembers, belatedly. The entirety of the scenario that just played in her head—some disgusting stranger, bringing a rabbit, tying the tag gently on—was only a boy with a baby’s bullet.

  “The officer thought Dylan did the claw too,” Roger says. “It seemed unlike him. Now I wonder.”

  “Therapist?” says Willa, queasy.

  “We’ll get a recommend,” says Roger, and then looks at Willa with blame on his face. “I’ve said it before. You’ve been feminizing him.”

  Feminizing? How does feminizing make a boy kill rabbits?

  “He needs sports.”

  “That’s not my fault,” Willa protests. “He just sits down in the middle of the field.”

  “Softball, rugby, tennis. He’s trying to prove himself. He doesn’t want to be treated like a child. This is a rebellion against you and those Santa tags. He knows there’s no Santa.”

  Willa begs to differ. Dylan doesn’t know that, even a little bit. He’s a true believer in everything. Santa, tooth fairy, Easter bunny, which makes it all the more wrongful that he did this.

  Roger’s outside with a garbage bag, angling the stiff rabbit into it.

  “We can’t have your mother seeing this,” he says. “She’ll go ballistic. We’ll deal when the holiday is over.”

  “Your mother’s the one who gave him the gun,” protests Willa, to deaf ears.

  Dylan runs into the kitchen, and she thinks about how he never leaves prints on anything, at how he’s perfect. A sudden horrible thought about the many cats that’ve disappeared from Herot Hall over the years. Just recently, the Moore’s Siamese. What if? No. She decides not to allow that thought into her mind ever again.

  Roger has the rabbit in the sack, but the gift tag is still on the step. Dylan beelines at it, grabs it, stares.

  “Who brought this?” he asks. “Who left it?”

  “We’ll discuss it later,” Roger says.

  “What’s in the bag?” Dylan howls, staring at the garbage bag on the ground, and his face begins to redden. “Gren!” he screams.

  Then he’s tantruming in earnest, red, white, and blue, a flag whipping in the wind, flung from his father’s arms and raging in the snow.

  Willa tries to get between them, but he’s kicking, thrashing, screaming loss and rage. From the look Roger gives her, it might as well be Willa on her back, limbs akimbo, her mouth open so wide that her tonsils are visible. It might as well be Willa screaming all the curses she knows, in every language she can find.

  She drops to her knees, and slaps Dylan across the face, feeling the size of his head (tiny), the sharpness of his teeth (shards of broken glass), the wetness of his face (slippery), and the sin she’s committing, all at once, even as he stares at her in shock, his eyes enormous and liquid.

  He lurches forward and opens the garbage bag, and then he’s crying, not in anger, but in relief. What did he think? What imaginary friend lives in a rabbit skin?

  The New Year walks heavily down the highway on its way to Herot Hall, and there’s a sound from the mountain.

  Snow shuffles itself from branches and caves crackle, but it’s nothing awful, just a shiver in the century, and the three of them crouched outside the kitchen door around a garbage bag full of a dead thing.

  Willa shuts her eyes and looks into the darkness inside herself, a room with doors that open onto nothing, a theater, and in it red velvet seats and harnesses for flying, trapdoors that lead to the secret chambers beneath the stage. She feels something in there, something that can’t be trusted. Her fingers sting with the slap, and she feels the creature rising, horns and claws, a tail lashing, making its way through spotlight and shadow.

  It feels good to be angry. It feels good to let go.

  The doorbell rings.

  “Oh, my god,” says Willa, returning from going, going, gone.

  “Your mother,” says Roger. “Never not early.”

  “All the mothers,” she says, inching aside a curtain. They’re standing on the front steps, stamping their feet.

  Willa and Roger are briefly on the same side, as they scoop Dylan out of the snow and mop his nose, as Roger, cursing, sprints up the stairs carrying him, as Willa, also cursing, wraps herself in a coat to get the door.

  In the kitchen, something is on fire and she ushers the mothers through the house as the smoke alarm goes off, lets them begin the party with the pouring of a bottle of champagne to douse a tray of devils on horseback, each date charred, and each piece of bacon sizzling and black.

  “Happy New Year,” says Willa, knowing she’ll pay for this for at least twelve months, but who bought the baby a BB gun? Who caused him to kill a rabbit and tag it as a present?

  And god, how quickly time is passing, whipping around her like a hurricane, Willa buffeted by flotsam. Old, older, drowning and withering at once. She’ll be her mother in a moment.

  Why isn’t she sitting on a fire escape in the city? Why did she waste her youth? The peak of pretty, no wrinkles, no fat, no stretch marks anywhere. Why is she here at Herot Hall, where at any second something bad could come down the mountain, or tunnel up from below? Monsters. There’s a whole world filled with monsters. They’re everywhere.

  Stop it, Willa. That’s the nightmare, not the reality.

  She shakes herself, then hides for a moment in the powder room and throws back a shot of vodka, not looking at her reflection. Why itemize the speckles on the bridge of her nose, the spiny cartilage of her ears, the tiny broken vessels in her cheeks? Why acknowledge the monster in the mirror?

  Still swallowing, feeling the vodka burn its way through the frozen animal that’s invaded her throat, she darts upstairs to the shower, blow-dryer, foundation, lipstick.

  She’ll conceal everything, and when she’s done, no one will know what’s there, just under the surface.

  12

  What kind of mess have we marched into? The matriarchs of Herot Hall arrive fifteen minutes early, as agreed, wearing silver and bearing bottles.

  Kitchen full of smoke, grandson sobbing, Willa half dressed, Roger’s tie not even tied. Well! We tie it.

  Roger’s clean-shaven, at least, his shirt pressed and starched. He’s not much, but he’
s been made into a man with his daddy’s money.

  Oh, please, we knew his daddy. Died in a car wreck off the mountain road, yes, and could he hold his alcohol, no, but he could hold two women in each of his hands. Not one of us wasn’t pinched by that man. Tina was his fourth choice. She was his secretary. This is the way it goes. Now Tina’s having an affair with her personal trainer, Stu.

  Diane’s daughter stands before us, looking tipsy.

  “Willa!” says Diane. “Upstairs! What’s gotten into you?”

  What’s gotten into her is that she’s a time bomb in yoga pants. We exchange a glance.

  “Rough day,” Willa says, as though that’s an excuse.

  Once, we had to have an emergency hysterectomy and we said nothing.

  We tap our feet outside the shower, and then zip Willa into the tightest sequined dress in her closet. Long sleeves and a high neckline, a dress that outlines her figure, semi-couture armor.

  Diane stands back to consider her daughter. One can think one’s own child is weak. One usually does. We turn away, polite, as Diane tugs Willa into Spanx.

  We’re commuter wives. These are our commuter lives. We’re capable of carrying alcoholic husbands from the kitchen to the bedroom in a fireman’s grip. Between trains, we train to fight with enemies we haven’t met yet, battling against punching bags, leaping like the world is made of stone walls and we’re storming them.

  There’s another version of commuting, of course, as in to commute a sentence.

  This is our sentence, these suburbs, the train that does not stretch to meet them. We have not been commuted. We haven’t slept in years. This is an advantage of menopause. Some nights, we meet for coffee at 4:00 a.m. We stand on the balcony of one of our homes, looking out over the river, itemizing betrayals, watching the fools of this place waking from their dull dreams. We see plenty of things at that hour of the morning.

  We whip Dilly the Second into shape, washcloth and suit, and his fury is ignored. His face is red and his eyes are so dilated they’ve gone black. He’s clutching a rock he refuses to surrender. When Tina tries to take it from him, he threatens to swallow it unless he can play with someone, some muttering about rabbits and bows, and then a truly inappropriate kick at a shin.