Somebody Else's Daughter

  “Let’s get out of here,” Rudy said.

  They were quiet in the truck. “That was fucked up,” Rudy said. “There’s something wrong with that man.”

  They smoked a joint to calm down. Rudy asked him if he wanted to meet his sister, a nurse in Troy. They waited for her down in the hospital lobby, watching people coming in and out of the sliding glass doors. Her shift ended and they went to this Polish bar, below street level, and they had good sweet pickles and wheels of cheddar cheese and Ritz crackers. Teddy didn’t say much, but he watched the other people, men mostly, hunkered over the bar in tweed coats, with pointy red chins and bulky, swarming hands. Rudy’s sister had long red hair down to her hips and wore fake eyelashes and she smiled a lot. She had a baby too, at home, a boy. They went back to her apartment and he was a little drunk and they peered into the crib and watched him sleep.

  They smoked some more pot with his sister then said good night. It was late, and he knew his mother was going to be pissed. She would probably try to ground him or something futile like that, as if she could. On the way back to the Berkshires, they drove through Spencertown and Rudy asked him point blank if he wanted to get laid. Teddy figured why not—he didn’t want to seem lame—and he didn’t want Rudy to know he’d never done it. You couldn’t lie to a man like Rudy. They went up a road called Angel Hill, and took a turn down a dirt road. They drove along that way for a while and he cracked the window and he could smell manure again and he could hear the crickets. Then this house appeared. It was a farmhouse with the shades pulled down over the windows, dim lights behind them. There were some cars parked in the grass. Rudy pulled a comb through his hair and handed it to Teddy and Teddy used it and licked his palm and pressed his hair down in back. Then they got out and started up through the wet grass. Somebody came out. It was a man who looked familiar, something about the way he walked, the subtle hunch of his shoulders, but Teddy couldn’t see his face. The man walked around back out of sight and a moment later a car started up. While Rudy was looking for his key, Teddy turned to watch the car pull out. It looked like a Volvo, he thought, a station wagon, but it was dark, he couldn’t be sure. Rudy pulled a skeleton key from his pocket and unlocked the door with it. As they stepped into the foyer, Rudy put the key away. You could hear people up in the rooms. Then a girl came out in one of those Japanese robes and you could see her tits sliding around underneath. Teddy started to sweat. His hands felt clammy. Rudy whispered in her ear and she looked at Teddy. Her smile was a wicked flash. He shrugged, he felt weird, but she took his hand and they went up the dark, narrow staircase. At the end of the hall, she knocked on a door. There was a girl in there. The woman in the robe nodded for him to go in.

  The room was dark save for a candle. The girl was sitting on the bed. He thought she might be crying. But then the door closed and she got up and put out the cat.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, but he didn’t think she was. “What’s your name?” She had an accent. He told her his name and she said, “I’m Pearl.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Poland.” She was lighting a joint. “You smoke?”

  “Not now.”

  She went to the window and opened the shade. “You like the moon?”

  He could see it full in the sky. “Yes, I like it.”

  “You’re romantic, yes?”

  “I guess.”

  He felt a little sick and his mouth went dry. She came and stood by the bed and took his hand and swept it up her belly to her breasts. She let him touch her all over. She took his hand and put it on her and he moved it around. Then she made him lay down.

  It was almost light when Rudy came and got him. He had fallen asleep and the windows had gone to white. They went down the stairs, holding their shoes, and even Rudy was trying to be quiet. Down the hall, Teddy could see some of the girls in the kitchen, drinking coffee. They went out to the car, his bare feet getting wet in the grass, saying nothing to each other, and eight geese crossed over the sky.

  25

  It is only a matter of time before a man betrays his wife. This is what Maggie Heath’s mother had told her when she was just a girl. Her mother had told her a lot of things, and most of them had come true—don’t swim after eating or you will get a cramp; don’t go out in the winter with a wet head, you will catch cold; don’t believe for a minute that your husband will be faithful to you—he won’t.

  On an ordinary Thursday afternoon after school, Maggie discovered an envelope on the seat of her car. She never locked her car, nobody did. It was probably an invitation to something, she assumed, and opened the envelope with anticipation, but instead of a card she found a tidy pile of letters that had been cut with meticulous precision out of a magazine—a clever invitation, perhaps, which did not surprise her, the parents at Pioneer were a very clever bunch. She would have to look at it more carefully at home, she thought, pulling out of the lot. Turning out of the driveway, she caught sight of her husband on the soccer field, coaching the boys’ game against Waverly. The sun was bright and his features were blurred, but his posture gave him away, the slightly stooped shoulders, the forlorn keel of his spine. On the adjacent field, the girls’ field hockey team was practicing scrimmages, Ada among them; Maggie was grateful to have a few hours to herself. It was only a short drive home to their little cottage. The Head’s house was like a beautifully wrapped present— the box was nicer than its contents—and had been home to many families before them. Maggie pulled into the driveway and gathered up her things, stacks of papers to correct and the envelope that had been left on the seat, and went into the kitchen to make tea. She had eaten very little that day and now she felt weary and her belly rumbled with hunger—a not unpleasant feeling that she’d grown accustomed to and rather liked.

  Inside, she put on the teakettle and sat down and poured out the contents of the envelope: To her surprise, there were only seven letters, and now the idea of an invitation seemed less likely. She had a knack for word puzzles—she could do the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in less than an hour. Her father had nicknamed her Wordsmith, when she was still in elementary school. She had always loved words, and loved to write—she’d won a poetry prize at Amherst—the Emily Dickinson Poetry Prize—and she’d written her senior paper on Sylvia Plath. It had been Nate Gallagher’s father, in fact, who’d encouraged her to write—but it was Nate who’d become the writer. When she’d received his application in the mail, she’d been so happily surprised that she couldn’t resist calling him in for an interview. His parents had lived on the outskirts of campus in a little white cape. On some evenings the house would be all lit up like a storefront, people coming and going, smoking and drinking out in the yard—she’d always longed to go inside, but had never been invited—none of the students were. Through the open windows, you would hear someone bellowing the words of Chaucer or Shakespeare in the voice of a practiced actor. Get thee to a nunnery! As a teenager, Nate had been shy and aloof. She could still picture him walking the black paths on campus, his loping, long-legged stride, long arms hanging down, hands shoved in his pockets. People had said he’d gotten hooked on drugs. A few years later, after he’d dropped out and disappeared, Maggie’s roommate had gone out west on vacation and visited San Francisco. Walking on Fisherman’s Wharf, she’d seen Nate Gallagher with a girl, strung out, a tiny baby in his arms.

  Maggie wondered whatever happened to the girl and the baby. She didn’t have the courage to ask.

  After Nate had left home, the Gallaghers’ house became a quiet, dull place, the curtains drawn, the windows dark. And his father was never the same.

  The teapot whistled, interrupting her reverie, and she made herself a cup of tea and returned to the table and brought her attention to the letters, pushing them around on the surface like pieces on a board game. There was an E and an A and another E. There was a T and a C and an H and an R. Immediately, she made the word teacher. Well, that made sense, but what was the meaning of
it? It seemed a silly thing for someone to do. She studied the word. Perhaps there was another possibility. Moving the letters around on the table, another word took shape. C-h-e-a-t-e-r. There. Cheater.

  Cheater?

  She sat there studying the word. Had Ada cheated on a test, she wondered, last week’s Latin test perhaps? Had someone seen her cheating? Almost immediately, she refuted the idea. First of all, her daughter didn’t cheat—she didn’t need to cheat. She was one of the best students at Pioneer. Furthermore, cheating wasn’t something that Pioneer students did. It wasn’t part of the school’s culture. In fact, trust was instilled in the students from their first day on campus, allowing them the freedom to leave their backpacks outside in the halls during classes without fear of anyone taking them. People respected one another’s belongings. There was no thievery of any kind at Pioneer.

  She dumped her tea in the sink and poured herself a glass of gin. She left the letters where they were and walked into the living room and looked out at the lake, something gnawing at her mind. Something highly unpleasant—Maine, the incident at Remington Pond, the awful scream she’d heard in the night. She’d been dreaming about loons. Cheater! The word taunted her. Again she looked out at the lake. She could be anywhere, she thought. The lake, the endless rows of trees. She felt stranded, abandoned—the way she’d felt up there. Cheater!

  They’d found the girl in the lake. When they’d pulled her out, her skin was the color of violets.

  Things didn’t really go away. You just learned to push them deeper.

  There was the dream of happiness and then there was what was real. Happiness all lined up in a row, like the houses in Hilltop Acres, lined up like tissue boxes at the supermarket, their pale colors as predictable as the lives inside. Well—who was she to talk? Anyway, those weren’t their customers—those children went to public school.

  She sipped her drink and lay on the couch as the gray sky grew dark. The girl had been depressed, she reminded herself. She’d had issues. It was a school for kids with problems. They used behavior modification. The girl suffered from aquaphobia, a fear of water, since early childhood. Her parents had never been able to teach her to swim, which of course, for safety reasons, was essential. But she was not a normal girl. Maggie could picture her, touching her toe on the surface of the lake. They’d tie a rope around her waist and lead her to the shore. She was a scrawny girl, knobby-kneed. Don’t splash me, the water’s cold!

  She and Jack had put Remington Pond behind them and moved on.

  Jack was late getting home. Wanting to avoid him, she’d gone to bed early. He came heavily into the room. In the darkness she watched him unbutton his shirt. A fragrance wafted off him, the smell of lilacs, but perhaps that was the new laundry detergent. He went into the bathroom to get washed. He coughed, urinated. Then the bathroom door opened, spreading light across the bed. He stood there a moment looking at her as she feigned sleep, her heart beating loudly in her ears. If she didn’t move perhaps he’d leave her alone. But that wasn’t the case. He pushed up her nightgown and fumbled his way between her legs and thrust inside of her. His mouth smelled of gin. It did not take long. Then he turned away and began to snore.

  But sleep would not come so easily to Maggie. She lay awake all night, the word cheater jingling in her brain.

  In the morning, Ada stormed into her room. “I’m out of uniforms,” she complained. “How do you expect me to go to school without any clothes!”

  “That’s impossible,” Maggie defended herself. “I just did the laundry. ” She went to the girl’s bedroom and opened the closet, expecting to find the plaid skirt where she had hung it the day before, but it was gone. “That’s odd,” she said. “I could have sworn . . .”

  “You’re really losing it, Mom,” Ada said cruelly, grabbing the skirt she’d worn yesterday from the hamper.

  “What’s all the commotion?” Jack asked when they came into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table drinking coffee and grading his students’ history papers.

  “No commotion,” Maggie said. “Ada needs to order some more uniforms, that’s all.”

  “So order them,” he said, uncharacteristically generous. “And hire a cleaning lady while you’re at it, this place is a mess.”

  “I’m trying my best,” she said to him.

  “Your best doesn’t cut it.” He looked at her hard. “You’re obviously overwhelmed.”

  The insult chilled her. She went into the bathroom and shut the door. For several minutes she sat there on the edge of the tub, trying to catch her breath.

  When she came out, it was obvious to her that no one had noticed she’d been gone. Ada was looking over his shoulder, trying to see into his grade book. “What did I get, Dad?”

  “You’ll get your paper back like everyone else.”

  Ada rolled her eyes and finished her juice and put her toast in her mouth and pulled on her coat. “I’m going to walk,” she announced, grabbing her lunch bag before Maggie had even finished filling it. A moment later she was out the door.

  Maggie pulled on her green crewneck sweater and brushed her hair in the mirror. Her skin was pale and dull. She had dark circles under her eyes. Behind her, in the reflection, she caught Jack staring. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Is there something wrong with my outfit?”

  She stood there before him. He shook his head. “You look fine.”

  But she didn’t believe him. “I’ve put on some weight,” she admitted, although it wasn’t really true and they both knew it.

  He looked at her blankly. You can lose all the weight you want, I still won’t love you. He got up from the table and dumped his coffee into the sink then stepped into the side hall to put on his coat. He stood there looking out at the day. “I don’t know why she couldn’t wait,” he said. “She’s always in such a goddamned rush.”

  “She wanted to walk.”

  “Her paper was weak.”

  “Really?”

  “Let me put it this way: I’ve seen better.”

  The way he said it made it her fault. Everything was always her fault: the missing uniform, the untidy house, the bitter coffee. She turned on the tap and rinsed the dishes, stacking them in the dishwasher. The door slammed. To her surprise, Jack had walked out, leaving behind his grade book. “Jack,” she called. She went to the door, but he was already in the car, backing out. There had been a frost, and the windshield was clouded. His face was obscured behind the glass. She ran outside, across the cold grass, waving his ledger in her hand, but the back windshield was cloudy too. He hadn’t even said good-bye. It occurred to her that she was barefoot. She stood there, as though it were her punishment, almost relishing it. Maybe she’d catch cold, she thought. Maybe she’d get so sick she could no longer work and would have to go to a hospital where she could get the proper kind of care. The proper kind of care. The words lingered a moment in her mind.

  The book felt heavy in her hand. She brought it back inside to the table and flipped through it, curious to see what he’d given Ada on her paper. Maggie ran her finger down the row of names. There were only fourteen in Honors History—the brightest of the group of juniors. Ada had gotten an 80 on the paper, which was respectable enough considering the challenging subject matter—her overall average was a 90, which was, in fact, highly respectable. Meticulous about handwriting, Jack listed all the averages in a trim row, yet still something didn’t look quite right. It took her a moment to pinpoint it, but then she observed that Willa Golding’s row of grades was smudged with erasure marks—apparently Jack had changed her numbers. Willa had gotten a 97 on her paper, which was inordinately high for her— she was, at best, a mediocre student and wouldn’t even have been placed in Honors History if it weren’t for her meddling father. The only reason she was in Honors anything was because her father would complain if she wasn’t, and Jack didn’t want Golding complaining. Jack always did what Golding wanted, no matter what, including losing
at golf, and Golding always showed his gratitude with a substantial check to the annual fund. It was what Jack called a symbiotic relationship.

  She supposed it was possible that Willa was improving. But to this degree? Possible, but doubtful. An ugly feeling stretched up her spine.

  Time for breakfast, she thought. Time to eat. She poured herself a bowl of Shredded Wheat and sat down. On her second spoonful, something hard and strange rolled across her tongue and instinctively she spit it out. There on the table, in a puddle of milk and chewed-up wheat, was a Scrabble piece, the letter E to be exact. What in the hell? Wielding her spoon like a weapon, she poked around in the bowl and discovered three more little wooden squares, then dug into the box and found three more, seven in all. A quick glance at the letters told her what they spelled, but she moved them into place anyway, as though seeing the word again would somehow secure in her mind its intended meaning. Cheater!

  The idea that someone had come into their home and done this— one of Ada’s friends perhaps—but who? Someone knew something, but what? It was all too familiar. There was a pattern here, she could see that now, a perverse sort of logic, and in her most rational mind, in that cold little place where even the worst sort of news could be assimilated and processed, she understood that there was the very likely possibility that her husband was sleeping with someone else. That Jack, in fact, was the cheater. And worse, that someone in the community knew about it.