The high school auditorium, muggy and tinseled.
“All of the other reindeer. Used to laugh and call him names.”
“Santa?” asks John.
“Soon.”
“Santa doesn’t come to holiday assembly,” corrects Bex, hell-bent on accuracy.
Didier, on the other side of John: “Pipe down, chouchous.”
The wife glances around for Bryan. Pauses at the silver-sequined breasts of Dolores Fivey, which seem smaller, like the rest of her, shrunk down in those long weeks at the hospital. Not so sixy anymore. Penny, yawning. Pete, checking his phone. Ro, sagged down in her seat, looking enraged.
“As they shouted out with glee, ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, you’ll go down in history!’”
Applause, bowing, then Bryan strides onstage in a Grinch-green sports jacket. She can’t see his dimple from here.
“Thank you, choir!” he booms. More applause. “And thanks to all of you for joining us at our, ah, seasonal celebration.”
Didier leans over John to whisper: “That man is dumb as a melon in a sock.”
“May everyone’s holidays be merry and bright,” says Bryan. Where will he be having Christmas dinner? He must eat like a shire horse, big as he is.
Outside the auditorium she stands with Didier and Pete, postponing the moment when she must snap the kids into their seats, drive back up the hill, unbuckle them, rinse apples, spread almond butter onto whole-grain bread, pour cups of milk from cows who eat wild grasses only.
Pete: “That record didn’t come out until 1981.”
Didier: “Excuse me, but it was 1980, exactly two months after he hanged himself.”
Yet he can’t remember to give the kids their fluoride supplement.
“And exactly a hundred years,” adds the wife, “after our house was built.”
“I bet Chinese laborers hammered every nail in it,” says Pete, “for criminally low wages. My people got fucked in Oregon. Railroad workers especially, but also the miners. Ever heard of the Hells Canyon Massacre?”
“No,” says the wife.
“Well, you should look it up.”
Pete’s scorn for her is always just barely concealed. Pampered white lady who doesn’t have a job, lives on family property—what does she do all day? Whereas Didier regales him with stories of his trasherjack childhood in Montreal public housing and is revered.
Her phone vibrates: an unknown number. She prepares her telemarketer line: Remove me from your call list immediately.
“Susan MacInnes?” The name she had for thirty years. “It’s Edward Tilghman. From law school?”
“Of course, Edward—I remember.”
“Well, I should hope so.” He hasn’t lost his primness, or his nasal congestion. Book-smart and life-dumb Edward.
“How are you?”
“Tolerable,” says Edward. “But here’s the thing: I’m in your village.”
She looks around, as though he might be watching from the auditorium steps.
“I’m representing a client in the area, and I wanted you to know I’m in town. It would be somewhat awkward if we just bumped into each other.”
“Do you have a place to stay?” she says.
Edward would be a clean houseguest but a finicky one; he’d want extra blankets and would remark on the drafts, the dripping taps.
“The Narwhal,” he says.
“Well, you’re more than welcome to—”
“Thank you. I’m already ensconced.”
She has followed his career, a little. He was an excellent student, could have gotten hired in a minute at a white-shoe firm. But he works at the public defender’s office in Salem. Must earn practically nothing.
“You should come for dinner one of these nights.”
When he sees her he’ll think She’s blown up a bit. Used to be a slender thing, and now—although it happens, he’ll think, after they reproduce. Fat hardens.
“Mmh. That’s a thought.” That was one of his trademarks, she recalls: soft grunting.
There have been reports of bedbugs at the Narwhal.
“So …?” but she realizes he has hung up.
Didier bumps his shoulder against hers. “Who that?”
“Guy from law school.”
“Not Chad the Impaler, I hope.”
“Just a nerd I worked on the law review with.”
True to form, her husband asks nothing further.
John whimpers, yanking on her hand. She didn’t remember to bring the porcupine book or the bag of grapes. And there are streaks of her own feces in the upstairs toilet. She’s grown afraid of the toilet brush, damp and rusted in its cup.
Bryan is surrounded by eager, jostling boys; they must be his players. Isn’t the season over?—but of course they wouldn’t stop adoring him when the season ends.
Ro, too, is thronged by students. She has wiped the rage off her face and is gesturing theatrically, making them laugh. They love her—and why not? She’s a good person. The wife would like to be a good person, a person who’ll be happy if Ro gets pregnant or adopts a baby, who will not hope that she doesn’t.
When Ro sees the wife’s children, is she jealous? What if she never conceives? Can’t adopt? What will be her life’s pull light then? When the wife goes down a street, John in the stroller and Bex holding her hand, purpose is written all over them. These little animals were hatched by the wife, are being fed and cleaned and sheltered and loved by the wife, on their way to becoming persons in their own right. The wife made persons. No need to otherwise justify what she is doing on the planet.
Huge brown eyes, sunlit hair, perfect little chins. All small children are cute. You know that, right?—D.’s reliable smashing of her happiness. Okay, yes, kids are built adorable so they won’t be abandoned to die before they can survive on their own; but it is also true that some kids are more adorable than others. Jambon sur les yeux, Didier likes to say. You’ve got ham over your eyes.
Lifting, settling, buckling.
Specks of rain on the windshield.
Soon, the sea.
“Starving!” calls Bex.
“Almost home,” says the wife.
Almost to the sharpest bend, whose guardrail is measly. Hands off the wheel. They would plow through the branches, fly past the rocks, tear open the water.
The newspapers tomorrow: MOTHER AND CHILDREN PERISH IN CLIFF TRAGEDY.
“Momplee,” says Bex, “do reindeer sleep?”
As they approach the bend, she eases her foot off the accelerator.
Didier was once jealous of Chad, the third-year student she’d gone out with a few times before meeting her husband.
If she were ever to tell him I slept with Bryan, would he spring into action, agree to counseling, fight to get her back? Or would he say, without looking up from the screen, Congratulations?
She is too chickenshit to leave her marriage.
She wants Didier to leave it first.