She had planned to just turn on a light or two and sit back in the wing chair, but her legs kept moving, into the kitchen, into the pantry closet. She brought out the bourbon, the glass, the ice, then shoved them all away. She sat down at the green table, not in the seat at the far end where she did her grading, and not to the left of Tom’s place where she usually sat at dinner, but to the right of him, Mary’s old seat. It was an odd choice, pressed in close to the wall. Vida felt a little suffocated in it even without the kids on all sides. Mary, she imagined, was part Mrs. Ramsay and part Marmee March, intoxicated by her role as Mother.
The red hands above the stove were clutched at six-thirty. Where the hell was everyone? She imagined the station wagon skidding into the headlights of a monstrous truck. I’m sorry, ma’am, the cop at the door would say. Her heart raced at the thought of a man at the door with a gun.
She pulled out a saucepan, remembering As if her soul had shrunk and died, / And left a waste within and Tom’s fake-earnest question “Which one?” As if he knew the title to even one of Hardy’s poems. Opening a can of tomato paste she had that feeling again that this was not the real moment, that she hadn’t married him, that she and Peter didn’t actually live here. It startled her, how easily reality could slip off her shoulders. She put down the opener and poured herself the damn drink.
After a few sips it was easy to make the paste into a sauce, put the water on to boil. She sat back down at the table, in her seat this time. She stirred the ice with her fingers, thinking of Davis Clay and that awful trick his wife played on him a few summers ago. She’d called people all over the country, childhood friends, aunts and uncles, even his ninety-two-year-old granny, everyone the poor guy loved, and they’d all snuck into his house while he was out playing golf and when he got back they surprised him not with a party but with accusations that he was ruining his life and his children’s lives. They pushed him into a car and drove him to this place in Connecticut for a month, the remaining month of his summer vacation, to dry out. Vida never forgot the way the guy looked in September. Old Clay went to Auschwitz for the summer, Vida said to someone in the lunch line, and the joke traveled around school. He’d never recovered from it, as far as Vida could tell. He still had these gray hollows under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept since, and he’d completely lost his sense of humor.
These babies are going to be writing better books … She felt sorry for Mark Stratton, really. His wife had left him several years ago, taking their six-year-old son with her to Minnesota. He was a pitiful character, someone, despite the irritation he provoked, you had to feel sympathy for, a Robert Cohn. Perhaps she should have been kinder to him after his wife had gone. They’d only had one conversation about it, in the lunch line. He didn’t even mention her or the kid, just that he missed his cat. Vida had earnestly commiserated with him, imagining if something ever happened to Walt, but she’d deliberately separated from him when they’d gotten their food, feigning interest in the salad bar. Now she wished she’d handled it differently, for clearly he’d wanted to talk that day. Carol had been one of his confidantes at the time, and though she and Vida used to gossip nearly every afternoon, Carol would never divulge the details of Mark’s situation. Vida respected her for that, among other things. She acknowledged the familiar shame about Carol and the unfinished letter as it rose, but she didn’t feel it, didn’t let it overwhelm her as it often did. That was the beauty of a good drink at the end of the day.
On his rug in the corner Walt twitched and whimpered. Did he picture her in his dreams? How would she appear to him — in fragments? A pair of legs, a long hand, a soothing voice? Did he have nightmares about her, in which she transformed into a hollering, dog-kicking old crone? The thought of nightmares did not scare her right now. She could even think of her own without panic. The checked shirt, the mustard breath, and her chasing him down the hallway with only a book for a weapon. Every time she lunged for him he got smaller until, when she reached the room he’d veered into, Peter’s room, he was gone. Only Peter was there, in his crib — he was always only a few months old in the dream — but when she drew close to check on him he leapt to his feet, agile, angry, no longer a baby at all despite the body, and grabbed her. She raised her book and smacked him off. She beat him and beat him until he was finally still.
Vida felt pain in her hands and looked down to see her fingernails cutting into her palms.
She made the next drink stronger, then stirred the sauce with a fork. She wondered if the clock had stopped; it wasn’t even quarter of seven yet. She thought of Fran on her sleepover in some bedroom right now with her girlfriends talking about their hair. She had had enough experience with teenage girls like Fran to know what little went on in their heads. She didn’t understand it. The girl wasn’t stupid by any means, but she’d never read more than a few pages of any of the books she’d loaned her. When she was Fran’s age she devoured books. There had been no better feeling on earth than being under her pink blanket on a Saturday afternoon with a new book in her hands. No reality competed with the reality of those books. If her mother’s hounding grew too persistent she took the book and the blanket to the car and locked herself in. She would spend days — a whole weekend and then Monday and Tuesday if she could convince her mother of a stomach bug — prone, engulfed, gone. She didn’t understand a girl like Fran who found this thin life enough, especially after losing her mother. Why wouldn’t she want to enter a better world every now and then, a world with a little more sense to it, where even tragedy had luster and resonance to it?
Her sister Gena had been like Fran, probably still was. California attracted that kind of person, social, unreflective. Gena had never spent a minute more in the house than necessary, always off with some pack of girls, or, later, boys. Their mother had despaired. She’d wanted good girls who would marry early and well, like Jane and Elizabeth Bennett. Instead she got one who never came home at night and another who never left the house. One of us finally got married, Mother, Vida said to the ceiling. Was it possible she hadn’t even thought of her mother since before her engagement? Her mother knew everything, now that she was dead. It probably didn’t feel so good to know everything.
She heard the thuds of car doors. She put the bourbon back in the closet. She didn’t remember making a third drink but there it was and she polished it off. She put her glass in the dishwasher, and the spaghetti in the water. Half of the water had boiled off, but she pressed the stiff noodles into it with a spoon, cracking most of them. After they sank, the water became a white fizz. Vida leaned her face into the steam. It felt old and dry. Tom’s voice rang through the house, calling her. There was no apology in it.
He and Peter came into the kitchen carrying big brown bags.
“Chinese takeout!” Peter said, as if he and Vida didn’t used to pick up a meal from the Lucky Star on occasion, as if Tom himself had invented Chinese food.