The Uncoupling

  Henry kissed her hard. “Mm-hmm!” he said for emphasis, and then he said, “Let’s have a date tonight, okay?” which was code. He wanted a date probably five times a week, and because of their lack of privacy and time, the date in bed was usually straightforward and brief. He smelled of apple juice now, as if he’d been swigging it warm from a juice box.

  “I have to pee,” she said. “Wait, wait.” Ruth handed the baby back to him, then walked swiftly to the front hall bathroom, and though Henry respectfully stayed where he was, the twins followed her inside.

  As she sat on the toilet, both boys observed her from a critical distance of a few inches. Brant turned to Ryan and said, “Mama sits down when she wees. She sits down.”

  “Why?” Ryan asked. “Why you sit down, Mama?” He stepped closer and placed an open hand on her bare thigh, peering into the shadowed slice of toilet bowl between her legs.

  “Oh,” she said, “well, because it’s easier for me. You know.”

  But he didn’t know. He knew nothing yet about distinctions in anatomy, or the ways of the world. Its chaos, its sadness. He peered between her legs as though the secrets of the universe were stored in the shallow water. Ruth released an involuntary puff of gas then, and Brant casually said, “Oh, that was gas. Was there beans today, Mama?”

  She thought back to lunch, and the salad bar in the school cafeteria: the chickpeas unjacketing in their metal tub of water. She said, “Yes, Brant, there were beans at lunch. You’re psychic.”

  The boys solemnly stood and listened and appraised her wiping style, and looked between her legs like grim nineteenth-century consulting gynecologists. They took her full measure when she stood with her blond pubic hair exposed for a half second. No part of her was more unusual to them than any other part; all were compelling. They owned her, and in the tiny room they flanked her, asserting their ownership. When she left the bathroom they followed hard behind; they gave chase.

  Most nights, when the twins were meant to be in their small beds in the room down the hall from the master bedroom, they would inevitably end up in their parents’ bed, appearing like apparitions shortly after they had been tucked in. Sometimes Ruth and Henry were stern with them, but it was much easier not to be. A child, or two children, usually slept between the parents or down at the foot of the bed. Once, Ruth had accidentally kicked one of the twins in her sleep and sent him flying to the hard floor. The baby sometimes spent the night in the bed too, though Ruth had read stories of suffocation, a big parent rolling over and crushing a tiny baby. The entire bed felt crowded and unmanageable.

  Still, it was easy to let her husband and sons love her, and to love them back, and not feel stiff or embarrassed. How did fussy women manage? How did those society women in their pencil skirts and with their fist-sized handbags and those sticks up their asses manage having little boys who watched them urinate, and listened to them stutter-fart on the toilet, and touched their tended, scented bodies in casual ownership? Maybe those women actually didn’t manage, Ruth thought; maybe there was a kind of woman who couldn’t manage at all, and who closed the door of the bathroom and double-locked it with deadbolts, keeping those children waiting outside, desperate to come in. But Ruth Winik would always let them come in; how could she keep them out? Why would she?

  The boys inspired fierceness in her; their need to be with her and watch her do ordinary but private actions seemed like a literal representation of love. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be the mother of one of those simpering little girls she sometimes saw around town—pale-skinned, pale-haired, utterly-silent-when-spoken-to creatures who liked having their faces glitter-painted at carnivals, and who often stayed pressed against their mothers, and, like chameleons, eventually disappeared against their mothers’ glittering legs. She suspected that she would have been an impatient mother to a femmy girl, and she was grateful that Henry’s sperm seemed to contain only Y chromosomes.

  Ruth Winik, who taught girls’ field sports and indoor sports and sometimes a folk dance elective at Elro, was the mother of twin boys, aged three, and now yet another boy, an infant. She was also the wife of a husband who sprouted facial hair five minutes after shaving. The irony of the manliness of the household wasn’t lost on her—she who had been a lesbian during the opening years of her twenties. She’d been in graduate school in physical education at Ohio State, and during that time, while taking classes in softball team management and first aid and even a seminar on steroid use, she’d gotten involved with a few other women getting their degrees in this area. There had been a corn-fed, clean quality to those women. They wore Lacoste shirts with the collars up; their skin was a ruddy tan from the hours they clocked outdoors. They had good, blunt haircuts, and more than one of them was named Chris. They were a hoot in bed, a pleasure.

  Ruth Winik laughed her way through Ohio State, and got her degree and her teaching certificate, and when she moved to suburban New Jersey to take the job at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, she was shocked one weekend afternoon to fall immediately in love, at the farmer’s market set up in the parking lot behind Chapter and Verse, with a local sculptor named Henry Spangold, who was there searching for parts to use in a new sculpture that was still in the planning stages.

  Henry Spangold had nothing female about him, nothing that made him a variation on the theme of lesbianism. He was a sculptor of enormous environmental pieces, who used a blowtorch and often smelled of burned and twisted metal, an aroma that reminded Ruth of “evil s’mores,” she told him. He dressed for work in jumpsuits like the kind janitors or gas station attendants wore. He was big, sexy, bearlike, curly-haired, quite loud. He would have done anything for Ruth. He wasn’t threatened that she’d been involved with women so extensively and so recently. He felt proud of her for having done exactly what she liked, and then for taking a sharp turn and doing something else, which meant: loving him.

  Henry tried to do his artwork in their converted garage a few hours a day, but mostly he did childcare now. The art market had dried up; even corporations weren’t buying sculptures for the big open plazas in front of their buildings, or at any rate, they weren’t buying his. It was all slowing down, and he was on his way toward being a full-time father, though neither he nor Ruth ever admitted this. As a parent, Henry was more patient than she was, but he had patches of negligence that troubled her. Just yesterday she had come home from school to find Brant contentedly sucking on a kitchen sponge that had once been light blue but was so old and filthy that it was now the color of a bad bruise; all the ancient flavors of soap and chicken and apple juice flowed into his small, supple mouth.

  Tonight, at their five-thirty dinner, which was when they always ate these days, Ruth sat at the small, grimy table nursing the baby, and the twins sat in their booster seats, and Henry tended to the microwave, which was lit up like a stage set as a frozen fried chicken Kidz Meal turned slowly and bubbled toward edibility. A second one waited on the counter for its moment in the sun. The whole kitchen of the small starter house smelled fried, and Henry popped opened a beer, which also bubbled and foamed. He leaned against the fridge, sending a few alphabet magnets and preschool-related notices cascading downward.

  “Tell me something from the outside world,” he said.

  “That overrated place,” said Ruth. “Okay. The drama teacher asked me to choreograph a dance for the big finale in the school play.”

  “That’s great, Ruth.”

  “I’m not crazy about her, personally, but I’m glad to be part of it. It’s a Greek play. Lysistrata. I think it’s a comedy. They had actual laugh-out-loud comedies back then, which is so amazing. Do you know what it’s about?”

  “I know what it’s about,” said Ryan.

  Henry and Ruth smiled over their son’s head. “It’s the one with the sex strike, right?” Henry said. “To end a war?”

  “Right,” said Ruth.

  “So show us the dance. We all want to see it.”

  “The dance?”

/>   “Have you started choreographing it yet?”

  “I’ve just started thinking about it a little. It’s supposed to be Greek, as I said, but the only Greek music I really know is the song from Zorba the Greek, with that instrument, the bouzouki. Remember that song, from a million years ago? My dad used to play the record all the time,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Henry. “I do.”

  She had gotten an old cassette of the music that day from the school library, which still carried a small and arbitrary assortment located in a drawer in the back marked CASSETTES—which at this point in time might have been marked SCRIMSHAW. Ruth brought an old boom box into the kitchen, then unplugged one of the many appliances that grew from the wall, and turned it on.

  Henry held the baby and Ruth stood in the middle of the yellow kitchen, waiting until the music started. She was mostly a standard gym teacher, but she’d always liked teaching the folk-dance elective. She knew what people thought of gym teachers; she knew the jokes they made. Ruth was a tall blond woman with broad shoulders and straight hair and excellent, square teeth. Now she let her arms go up over her head and did a couple of finger-snaps as she moved sidelong across the floor, the least Greek-looking person she knew, and the least dancerly. She wasn’t overly graceful, just forceful, but she was never embarrassed in front of these people, her men.

  “It’ll probably go like this,” she explained, and her husband and sons were fascinated. “The dance will come at the very end of the play, and it’ll involve the whole cast coming onstage. Some happy thing takes place, and everything is resolved. I suppose the war ends, whatever war it is. I know the play was supposed to be a little risqué, and Fran Heller had to tone it down. But it’s definitely upbeat at the end, with celebrating. I’m going to have the actors all join hands and do the Zorba dance around the stage, and then everybody’s going to go into the aisles, I think. Fran said that audiences love it when you go into the aisles.”

  “I love it,” said Henry. “It sounds great. Do you like this music, guys?” he asked the twins, and they both said yes, yes, they did.

  As Ruth did her Greek dance around the small kitchen, she became aware that her bare feet were cold. The stick-on honeycomb tiles of the floor actually seemed freezing to her, and her first thought was that she needed socks. But socks wouldn’t have helped, for the spell was circling the room, closing in on her in time to the bouzouki music. Its cold air went up her legs and then down along her arms. She hugged herself, chattering, but this seemed to Henry just to be part of the dance, and he smiled at her in enjoyment of her physical freedom and openness. No one else in the kitchen seemed cold, but she became colder and colder, and she moved at an accelerated clip, and as she did, one of the twins began to smack the surface of the table, keeping time with a flat and splayed hand.

  Ruth thought: How did I get here, among all these males? I am overrun by them. Freezing under the force of the spell, she thought of how, later that night, she would get into bed beside her husband, and he would say, “The date begins!” Then he too would touch her breasts and her face and the rest of her. There would be a few minutes of this, and they always tried to hurry, so that at the very least Henry could have an orgasm. Ruth took longer, and she disliked being rushed, so sometimes she pretended she was done when she wasn’t. She didn’t even mind pretending, though it wasn’t something she wanted to advertise, because Henry would have been so hurt. They were both aware of the narrow slip of time they had before a child would begin to scream, and before another child—or more than one—would appear beside them. A child would observe Henry and Ruth’s entanglement, see their mother’s head turned at such an odd angle, as though she’d fallen and broken her neck. “Guernica,” her artist husband had once called the look. Or, if the blanket was pulled up above her feet, the boys might see her toes curled under. They had certainly seen a lot in their short time on earth.

  But she couldn’t bear the idea of getting into bed with Henry tonight, and of being touched by him, or anyone else. She realized now that she had been overtouched; she was like a computer with a thousand fingerprints on the screen. How did anyone tolerate being touched? she wondered. How did her friends stand it? It was terrible, all that touching.

  The spell took hold of Ruth Winik, a girls’ gym teacher at Elro, and as the frantic music reached its climax, she fell to the floor, no, was thrown to the floor, like just another one of her sons’ toys, or a ceramic bowl that she’d dared not buy, because this is what would have happened to it. The spell had shattered her, made her indifferent. She knew she could no longer take part in those continual dates with Henry, and she felt dreadful about this. The boys seemed to represent the collateral damage of sex. Look at them, she thought. I cannot take them anymore either.

  They all stared down at her in terror. “Oh Mama,” moaned one of them. “Mama.”

  “My God, Ruth,” said Henry, kneeling down and taking her cold hand. “Are you okay?”

  The music had finished, and the old boom box clicked off.

  “I can’t,” was what she said, looking up at him. Then she added, miserably, “Please don’t ever ask me again.”

  12.

  But the spell, though it had been so proficient, was nowhere near being finished. Under the arch of her canopy bed, in a house eight blocks away from Ruth Winik’s house, Marissa Clayborn was overcome by it, too. Had she known this was happening to her, she would have been shocked, for she was not the kind of person to be frequently overcome by anything. Common colds had rarely felled Marissa Clayborn; sad movies tended to leave her tearless. Yet when the spell came for her, she was as susceptible as the rest of them.

  Marissa had been working all year at Froze, the dessert place in the mall, which she sometimes referred to as “Cottage Cheese for Suckers.” The product did have a curdlike, highly textured quality as it slowly emerged from a nozzle. It wasn’t cottage cheese, but it wasn’t officially yogurt either, or ice cream. No one really knew what it was, but three evenings a week Marissa sold it to customers, almost all women. Customers who admitted that the one thing they looked forward to in the evening was a cup of Froze that they could put a lid on and take home to their house, or else just eat right in the store, blunting the pointed peak with a grateful tongue. So many women who came to the store in the mall said they craved Froze; that was the word they used. Just the other evening, Ms. Cutler had been in, and she’d ordered a large cup with jimmies and coconut shreds and cookie crumbs, saying, “Now you know my guilty pleasure.” Marissa watched as the guidance counselor went and sat on a stool, hunching over her little dish protectively, as if she were from some primitive culture and thought someone might take away her kill.

  Marissa Clayborn was one of those girls who was not interested in sweet desserts, or in food of any kind, really. She’d never had an eating disorder, but had been thin and rangy as long as she could recall. She had been given the female lead in the school play virtually every year; one year, though, when she was thirteen, she’d contracted mono and couldn’t even audition. That year, Paige Straub had been cast instead, but everyone quickly realized that it was a mistake, for Paige was like a robot in front of an audience. Marissa was known throughout the school for her talent, her speaking voice, her composure, and the way she looked. If her face wasn’t completely beautiful, it was angular in a way that made it appear faceted, and her skin was closer to black than brown. There were twenty black kids in the grade at Elro, and she was friends with a few, though almost none of them had been in middle school with Marissa, when her most intense friendships had begun. She was good friends with a girl named Jade Stills, who was a drummer. (“African drumming?” Carrie’s mother had asked with interest when Marissa and Jade went over to the Petitos’. “No, just regular, Mom,” Carrie had hurried to say, mortified.) Marissa’s friends from middle school had remained her real crowd; they were the ones she truly knew, even if, she sometimes thought, they did not know her that well anymore.

  During ninth
grade, Marissa had sex with one boy, and then, over the summer before tenth grade, with another. She did not feel strongly about either of them at the time, but when they had showed an interest in her she had been curious to see what would happen. Quite a few other girls at Elro were sexually experienced too. There was Chloe Vincent, obviously, who had been sleeping with Max Holleran since last year, the two of them in love, though since their breakup he now loathed her. And there was sad-sack Becca Nilsson, who drank insanely and slept with anything. And there was talented Eva Scarpin, who’d had apparently enjoyable hookups with a couple of different senior boys and a man in his twenties. Eva wanted to be a designer, and she drew detailed pictures of models in gowns across the covers of her notebooks and even her textbooks. All of the women in the drawings had the same half-smile on their lips that Eva had. It was as if they all knew something. Jen Heplauer had had sex too, of course, but certainly no one wanted to follow her example. Laura Lonergan, another non-virgin, was an interesting emo girl who submitted short stories to the literary magazine The New Deal about a moody young girl involved with an older guy.

  In a high school like Elro, people knew things about you; and by now a certain number of people had heard that Marissa Clayborn had slept with two boys. It had become common and acceptable in recent years to go far with a guy, or with different ones. If someone called you a slut it was probably one of your friends saying it as a joke, and you could justifiably reply, “Thank you.” But as the first girl in her immediate group of friends to have hooked up in any capacity—and then as the first one to actually lose her virginity—Marissa had been expected to report back to the others in detail.