Marie runs up behind me, grunts, and a good-sized rock sails past Larkin’s head, barely missing Dr. Lamm. Larkin gags and tries to get his fingers under the belt. “I am responsible!” calls out the doctor. “I… take… full…” Marie’s next rock hits Larkin smack in the middle of the forehead and a spurt of black blood appears.
When I look back I see our patio lights still on and the open gate and flashlight beams crisscrossing in the darkness toward us. Then voices: Dad’s and Mom’s, higher-pitched than usual, voices calling out for Marie and me, voices full of fear and hope. Dr. Lamm has gotten the belt into a branched “V” of a tree trunk and he’s pulling hard. Larkin stands levered against the tree, arms in a reverse hug of it, his head raised in order to draw breath. His face is smeared with blood and tears, and his gray eyes are calm as always, and, as always, unblinking. Marie throws her small light body against me and I lift her and trudge back toward the light.
THE EVERYDAY HOUSEWIFE
BY LAURA LIPPMAN
The summer that she was a newlywed, Judith Monaghan watched The Newlywed Game almost every day, except when it was preempted by the hearings. She watched those, too, marveling at Senator Ervin’s eyebrows and Maureen “Mo” Dean’s outfits, but she preferred The Newlywed Game, despite the fact that she had once been vitally interested in politics. Actually, maybe that was why she preferred the game show to the hearings; it seemed more real to her.
The Newlywed Game came on at 2 p.m. on Channel 13, and Judith set aside the next two hours to accomplish whatever could be done while seated in the living room—darning socks, shelling peas, whipping in hems, teaching herself to knit. She was sure that she and Patrick could answer every question correctly, as they had known each other for six years before they married. But how would they get to California from Baltimore? Would her mother be upset about the inevitable “Making Whoopee” questions? And was it possible to angle to be on the show when the top prize was a washer-dryer? Judith didn’t like the look of the furniture sets given away as prizes—too shiny new for her tastes—and the Monaghans already had a perfectly good television, a wedding gift from her second-oldest brother, who owned two electronics stores.
The Newlywed Game was followed by a show called The Girl in My Life, about women who had made a difference to others. Judith didn’t care for it as much. She usually switched to The Edge of Night, which led right into The Price Is Right, where she won almost everything. Or would have, if she had been in the studio audience. Judith was a very focused shopper, paying attention to prices, calculating the per unit cost among different brands.
Judith did have a washer, but no dryer, a problem during that clammy, damp summer, when the sun rose every day only to disappear until 4 p.m.—the time that Judith tied an immaculate apron over one of her pretty, hand-tailored dresses and began to prepare dinner for her husband, who arrived home at 5:30 p.m. and expected his food at 6. (He spent the intervening half hour with a beer and the evening paper, the Orioles pregame show on WBAL.) She liked making Patrick dinner. She liked doing things in general. Judith was as restless as a hummingbird, and the small brick duplex required so little of her. She cleaned the woodwork with a Q-tip, vacuumed the Venetian blinds, scrubbed the long-discolored grout with a toothbrush, and still she ended up with time on her hands. She even started ironing the sheets when she changed the linens on Fridays and she might have washed them more often, but they took so long to dry on these strangely overcast summer days. She tried to bake her own bread, once. The loaves were flat and dense; Patrick said he preferred store bread, anyway. He liked Wonder Bread, and Judith liked Maranto’s, the fresh, paper-wrapped Italian loaves.
“Those only taste good the day you buy them,” Patrick said. “Wonder Bread tastes good all week long.”
They had only one car, and of course Patrick took that every day; the bus stop was four blocks away and he would have been required to change buses on Route 40. Besides, he needed the car for his job, which involved driving from bar to bar, doing inspections. Judith didn’t mind. She did a big grocery shop on weekends and could do any daily marketing on foot—vegetables, last-minute items—at the High’s Dairy Store on Ingleside, or even the grocery stores on Route 40 if it came to that. She knew if she shopped efficiently, she wouldn’t have to do these daily runs to High’s, but the walk down Newfield Road was another way to fill the long days.
Married life was lonely, which seemed strange to her. Shouldn’t marriage be the end of loneliness? She tried to find a neutral way to express this thought to her mother, who called every day at 9 a.m., despite the fact that Judith told her repeatedly that was when she cleaned the kitchen.
“The days seem so long that I find myself cleaning even more than you did.”
“I,” her mother said, “had four sons. No one could clean more than I did.”
“I cook a lot, too. I’m getting pretty good.” Judith was proud of her cooking, the meals she put together for Patrick. She would never be like the woman in the Alka-Seltzer commercial, the one who made heart-shaped meatloaf. “Sometimes I wonder if I should have kept my job until I got pregnant.”
A quick laugh at her own expense, as if what she was saying was silly. But she did miss work, the intrigues of an office, being around others. She had lived at home until she married. She had wanted to take an apartment with another girl after she finished college, but her parents wouldn’t hear of it.
“Marry in haste, repent in leisure.”
Judith adjusted the phone, which she had cradled between her ear and shoulder, thinking she must have misheard. For one thing, no one could call Patrick Monaghan’s courtship hasty.
“I didn’t catch that,” she said. “I’m washing the breakfast dishes.” Patrick liked to start the day with eggs, bacon, toast, and juice. She had made the juice fresh until he told her he preferred Minute Maid concentrate. That was okay, she used the empty cartons to set her hair after he left in the mornings, the best way to get the smooth look that he liked.
“Mrs. Levitan died that way. She was washing the dishes and the phone slipped in the sink and she was electrocuted.”
“I don’t think that’s what happened,” Judith ventured.
“You’re right. Mrs. Levitan is the one who died while talking on the phone in a thunderstorm. It was Irene Sandowski who dropped the phone. Although I think it was in the bathtub.”
“Oh, Mother, how could someone drop the phone in the bathtub? The Sandowskis aren’t the type of people to have a phone in the bathroom.”
“She thought she was so clever, that one. And grand. She had her husband find an extra-long cord—I think he had to call Bell Atlantic special—and she hooked it up to a princess phone, pink, a birthday gift, and she would take it into the bathroom and prop it up on the toilet and take bubble baths like she was Doris Day or somebody, talking the whole while. Well, one day, the whole thing fell in.” A pause. “I just realized—I never did understand why she got a pink phone, when her bedroom was all gold and white, but the bathroom was pink.”
“Irene Sandowski is alive,” Judith said.
“Are you sure?”
“She was alive as of last week when I got the invitation to Betty’s wedding. Irving and Irene Sandowski request your pleasure, et cetera, et cetera.”