Labiaplasty surgeons earn up to $250,000 per month.
A little animal—possum? porcupine?—tries to cross the cliff road.
Sooty, burnt, charred to rubber.
Shivering, trying to cross.
Already so dead.
After federal and state taxes, social security, retirement, and health insurance, Didier brings home $2,573 per month. They don’t have rent or mortgage payments, but it’s still not enough.
Clap, clap, say the labia.
If the wife were a better budgeter, it would be enough. If she were more organized.
The wife has been letting the house “go.”
And letting herself “go.”
We’ll go if you let us.
Wife and house run away together, hand in door. Hand in dormer window.
I’d take lonely over beaten to a paste.
She pictures Bryan’s cousin, whoever she is, in a shack in the woods, hurled against a moldy particleboard wall. The husband is long bearded, wild haired. He rarely comes out of the woods or lets his wife come out. They drive to town once a month for supplies. On these trips Bryan’s cousin wears sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat.
Why does Bryan stand by and let it happen? Shouldn’t he run into those woods and find the shack and put a stop to the beatings? Shouldn’t he and the mother he visits in La Jolla, if they care so much, call the police?
Can’t think of Bryan without broiling with shame.
“Mommy.”
“Yes, sprite?”
“Cold,” he says, her dear boy who isn’t interested in saying much, who is so different from his chattery sister.
“Let’s go put on a sweater,” hoisting him onto her hip.
After they separate, will Didier buy pot gumdrops and leave them out on the coffee table for the children to find?
You need to tell him.
Upstairs, she finds a blue wool pullover.
Can pot be overdosed on?
“No!” shouts John.
“I forgot, you hate this one—sorry.” She pulls off the blue wool and picks a red cotton, less itchy, from the drawer.
Will he remember to give them their vitamin D?
Tell him.
Downstairs the wife sits at the dining room table with her eyes closed.
“Momplee!”
“Don’t yell, Bex.”
“Then pay attention.”
“What?”
“I said, what will you get Daddy for Valentine’s Day?”
“That’s over a month away.”
“I know but I already know which cards I’m giving to people. The turtle ones, remember, that we saw?”
“Well, I’m not going to get Daddy anything.”
“Why?”
“It’s not a holiday we celebrate.”
“But it’s the day of love.”
“Not for us,” says the wife.
“Do you love Daddy?”
“Of course I do, Bex.”
“Then why don’t you celebrate it?”
“Because it’s silly.”
“Oh.” The girl looks at her interlaced fingers and is thinking of the turtle cards, signed and sealed in small white envelopes, one for each classmate.
“I meant for grown-ups,” adds the wife. “Not for kids—it’s great for kids.”
“Okay,” says Bex, wandering off.
Two days and nights of solitude every week. The house to herself.
But first you need to tell him.
She’ll feel so much better from the solitude that she will teach John to like foods other than buttered spaghetti and chicken nuggets. She’ll bake those barley walnut muffins Bex eats at the Perfects’. She will start cleaning again, keep the rooms scrubbed and dusted, wipe the toilet rims weekly, buy a dehumidifier for the attic, make an appointment to test the kids’ bloodstreams for lead.
Or she won’t be living in this house at all: she will rent an apartment that requires virtually no cleaning.
Maybe the apartment will be in Salem.
After you tell him.
“Daddy’s here!” shrieks Bex, galloping onto the porch.
“Daddy,” sniffles John.
“Fee fi fo fon,” calls Didier.
Children need two parents at home. Every child needs two.
So say the legislators and the commercials and Bryan, the child-free boy whose aim in life is to win money at competitive mini golf.
Jessica Perfect will have a field day. Oh my God, did you hear? The Korsmos are separating. I feel so bad for the kids—they’re the ones who really pay.
The wife’s mother, never a Didier fan, is going to say: I saw this coming a mile away.
She rummages in the kitchen drawer to see how many chocolate bars she has left.
“Momplee?”
Two.
“Yeah?”
“I lost my homework sheet.”
“Look in your room.”
“Incinerate! All homework sheets!” sings Didier.
Last summer at the teachers’ picnic Ro asked her why she’d taken Korsmo, and the wife said, “Because I wanted us all to have the same last name.”
“But why?”
“Because.”
“It’s the twenty-first century.”
“I’m not going to sit here and justify my choices to you,” said the wife.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t need to.”
Ro kept her teeth on the bone. “How come nobody’s allowed to criticize a woman’s decision to give up her name for a man’s name? Just because it’s her choice? I can think of some other bad choices that—”
“Shut up, please,” said the wife, and that was the beginning of the end of her friendship with Ro.
On the kitchen calendar, in Saturday’s square, she writes a T.
Tell him.
She can’t cheat her way out.
She can’t wait her way out, head in the sand.
She has to say it herself.
“Momplee?”
“Jesus, Bex—it must be in your room. Have you checked under the bed?”
“Not about that,” says the girl.
“Then what?” The wife stands holding the ballpoint pen with which she has just written herself a reminder to inform her husband she is leaving him. She wants to ram the pen into her own neck.
“Am I fat?”
“No!”
Voice wobbly: “I weigh eight pounds more than Shell.”
“Oh, sweetpea.” She kneels down on the kitchen floor, gathering Bex into her lap. “You’re exactly the right size for you. Who cares how much Shell weighs? You’re beautiful and perfect just the way you are.”
The wife fails, as a parent, on so many fronts.
“You’re my perfect darling gorgeous girl.”
But she will do this one thing right.