Eventually it leads to a dry island in the middle of the marsh, where wrens flitter and herons squawk from the highest limbs of the scraggly alders. Oddly enough, you smell the remnant of a fire and realize that you’ve stumbled into a clearing, a clearing full of frosted stones the color of jewels. Maybe they are hunks of marble. Maybe the trees here were petrified and turned to minerals a million years ago. Then one of the stones shifts and changes shape, and you hear a rustling as if from a lady’s ballroom gown. And more of the stones shift, change shape. . by now you’re backing toward the boardwalk again.
It’s too late to run: suddenly you’re struck by a flashlight beam, and you know now that the moving stones are children wrapped in sleeping bags, a dozen who have spent the night here. One girl calls out, “It’s Jason’s mother!” and a low singsong wafts your way: Whoa-oh, Ja-suh-uhn’s busted. . Jay-suh-uhn’s busted. The woods ring with the song while you try to think of an appropriate thing to say, but by the time you can dredge up the words your son has already said them: What are you doing here?
CHERRY TONGUE is the giveaway, that fuzzy, red, iridescent tongue whose scent you camouflage by chewing Life Savers. In any case your husband can tell the scent doesn’t come from gin. So when he asks, “Have you been drinking?” you can answer him indignantly. He is wrong and he knows it, you have not had a real drink for months. And there is a difference: Gin sent you down like a rock kicked off a cliff. Gin was the tall man standing up there while you fell too fast too far for there to be any use in crying out.
But Doctor Vicks you could speak to and he would talk back; your head might grow yards from your feet but even then the squat red man was there to look you in the face. Or rather your feet might grow yards from your head, for the feeling was not as if you floated but rather as if you waded through the real, the real having thickened into jelly around your legs. Doctor Vicks engulfed you in a warm swirl like the sweat underneath a man’s armpit, which you could curl yourself into. With your husband, this had stopped happening long ago. And sure, you used to love him, but how can you love anyone to whom you are an embarrassment? Next question: are you an embarrassment to your son Jason? Hard to tell. For now, you are two dogs circling each other, using your paws to travel sideways. Knowing that you are not really going anywhere, knowing that you are only headed back to where you were.
THE SUNDOG LADY shows up at the wrong time of year for vacuum sales. Now the rain falls steadily and instead of leaf crumbs what you have is mud against which the Denby is powerless so long as the mud stays in liquid form. So this is what occupies your day: waiting for the mud to dry so that it can be sucked. You haven’t the heart to tell the Sundog lady that not two months ago you bought a Denby. Instead you are thinking about all those years with just the carpet sweeper, and now this glut of vacuum salesmen — salespeople. How strange life’s feast or famine.
Still, the Sundog lady importunes on you to let her give you a demonstration—“then you’ll know what I’m talking about.” Brown-skinned and wearing great padded silver boots, the Sundog lady responds to your invitation across the threshold: “Honey, if you don’t mind, I think I better get these moonboots off my feet.”
Underneath, she’s wearing pantyhose, and you walk her quickly to the carpet. You’ve noticed that she has no vehicle, and she explains that she walked from the crossroads where her husband dropped her off, with the intention of demonstrating — she calls it “demo-ing”—the Sundog along the way. She has the vacuum strapped to a rolling luggage cart with a complicated web of bungee cords that she untangles. Then she shows you how the Sundog has a water reservoir through which the dirt gets sucked, even the mud will be sucked, believe you me. And though you just this morning ran the Denby over the shag carpet, still there’s a brown film wobbling on the surface of the water reservoir after she makes one swipe.
It sort of sickens you: how hard you fight the world, how the world keeps coming in.
The Sundog lady sees you frown and understands — and is grateful — that you are genuinely interested and not just letting her go through the motions. She also knows she’s got a live one on her hook, and so do you: you could buy a vacuum and spare this woman any further trudging along the shoulder while the cars spray rooster-plumes of mud into her face. You have that power. You are that well off, really: if you were a more reliable sort of wife you’d be sure to have a car. And you could build a fire and let the Sundog woman spend the afternoon in her stockinged feet with a mug of tea. No doubt she would find your husband’s furniture odd and sterile: not much there to cushion her meaty bones. Instead the two of you will have to lie on the shag, underneath the old quilts that smell like your dead mother, eating Oreos on salad plates until the light grows dim and she calls her husband to come fetch her.
As she navigates the vacuum around your living room, the woman speaks in the reassuring tones of farther south, those sunny places that you talk to on the phone from Castle Ethel. She’s admitting that you are the first person today to let her in. But she does not seem disheartened: “Ain’t had the chance to get out in the country much,” she says. Because you ask, she offers that it’s pretty, but that she would be afraid to be alone out here at night. “Too much space with nothing here,” she says, “and I’d always be feeling like it was up to me to fill it up.”
REPORT FROM THE TRENCHES
Having never smashed any plates before, I was surprised by their substance, how they made the copper skillets sway on their hooks over the range, jeweling the kitchen with those shards of orange light. Then I wadded the curtains in my fists and threw my weight back against them.
Okay, I’m leaving, Jimmy says. You can take your tit out of the wringer.
Then there’s the telltale snarl of his car in retreat, a mufflerlessness out of place in this neighborhood, where the rest of our vehicles were manufactured by the timid Japanese. And then it’s quiet, the kind of quiet that’s hard work to remember, as I lie in the kitchen, still gripping the curtain rod like a ceremonial sword.
Soon Jill comes in the door that he left open — she’s been outside walking her sheltie with all the other neighbors dragging their dogs around until their bowels empty for the night.
You should have shut the blinds, she says. Unless you really did want everyone to show up here tomorrow with a casserole, she adds.
So what was the fight about this time?
You mean what’s the name this time.
Okay, what?
La-riss-a.
She humphs: Now you need to get some holy water and sprinkle it around the house.
Her next bit of advice is that I shouldn’t clean up right away: instead I have to spend time basking in the wreckage I’ve wrought, since in it will appear the phoenix rising from the shards of my old life. But suddenly the phoenix just looks like broken plates, the good set of Spode that belonged to my mother, and when I whack myself with the curtain rod, the dusty curtains are reluctant to part company with the mucus on my chin.
Oh, come on, she says. Name one way that you’re not better off without him.
Money, I say finally.
Then Jill digs through the junk mail on the counter and pulls out the credit card applications. Here, she says. Here’s plenty of money, and you didn’t even have to leave the house.