He was at the sink now, scraping and rinsing. She heard a huge plop into the garbage disposal. Someone had hardly touched the food. She wondered if it was her. Or Peter. Where had Peter gone? She couldn’t even remember him sitting at the table. She collected what remained on the table and brought it to Tom. He dropped the forks he was rinsing and wheeled around to her.
“Where does all that anger of yours come from?” He grabbed the bottle from the pantry closet. “From inside here?” He shook it at her. She was surprised by how little was left. “Or is it in here”—he poked her in the bone between her breasts—“all the time, crouching, waiting?”
Vida was stunned. The scene was like the nightmare in which one of her best-behaved students hurls obscenities at her. The poke on her chest stung and spread.
“The boy is simply trying to cope.”
“But he’s filling himself with illusions.”
“We’re all filled with illusions.”
“No we’re not.”
“Taoism is one hell of a lot less harmful than practically all the other ways of dealing with grief he could have latched onto.”
“I’m not so sure. Actionless action. Blankety blank. He’s negating himself from his own life. He’s disappearing.”
“Why does it upset you so much? It’s just a way of looking at the world.”
“It’s a way of not looking at the world. You heard him. He wants to detach. You might as well give him a shotgun so he can blow his head off.”
“Jesus Christ, Vida.”
There it was finally, the glare, the tone of voice he’d been denying himself. He saw her now for what she truly was; he saw the waste within. She needed to get out of the house. She threw on a coat and whistled for Walt.
“I don’t know why you’re trying to push us away. All of us. Ever since you agreed to marry me, you’ve been—”
“Pinched and thin?”
“I don’t understand what happened. I thought you were—”
“Someone else?”
“Stop it. Stop finishing my sentences. Stop looking at me with that smirk like you can see all around me, like I’m a character for you to analyze. You don’t have to be a goddamn English teacher all the time. Just be yourself.”
“And who do you think that is?”
He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “I don’t know. I think it’s the woman I first saw at a podium, in tears, clutching a little silver cup. It’s the woman, the first woman, who let me talk about Mary without feeling threatened in some way. God, what’s happened to her? You’ve gotten so hard and closed and—”
“Let’s leave our sex life out of it.” She couldn’t resist a little humor. And these memories of his — where did they come from? She certainly wasn’t in tears at the podium.
“I’m not joking, Vida. I don’t give a flying fuck about the sex. It’s our marriage I care about. You have to work at marriage. It doesn’t come easy to anyone. But it’s like you’ve already given up on it. Before you even gave it a chance. You’re like that student of yours who decides he hates the book before he’s opened it.”
“I’m going to take the dog for a walk.”
“I’ll come,” Tom said.
He actually believed they could talk their way through it. “Screw you,” she said, and slammed the door, nearly catching Walt’s tail.
She wished she’d glanced at Tom’s face. He’d probably never been spoken to like that in his life. “Little goody-two-shoes,” she muttered, then laughed at her childishness.
It was freezing out. Walt looked up at her as if asking her to reconsider, then he bowed his head into the wind and they set off. The cold felt good; escape felt good. She was trapped, trapped like Dorothea with Casaubon, like the new wife at Manderlay.
“Ma!” Peter called from the front steps, yanking a sweatshirt over his head. “Can I come?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s cold,” he said, his breath hanging white between them. The sweatshirt added bulk to his frame. His shoulders never seemed so wide to her before.
They followed Walt as he trailed a smell down the strip of grass inserted between the sidewalk and curb, carefully shifting his nose for oncoming trees and poles, then shifting back again. Her arm began to ache and she let go of the leash. They had to move swiftly to keep up with him.
“You’ve got some beans in you tonight, old man.” Her voice was distant and unnatural. Nothing seemed recognizable out here tonight. She wasn’t sure which street Walt had led them onto. Had they turned right back there, or left?
But Walt knew where they were going. He swerved into the same driveway they’d stood in that morning. The house was just a house being fixed up. The smell had retracted in the cold.
Peter stood beside her, too close. He had something to say.
“He asked you to come with me, didn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is that?”
“He was worried, I guess.”
“Worried that what, I’d hang myself on a tree with Walt’s leash?” She hadn’t meant to be so specific.
“Worried you wouldn’t come back.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake where am I going to go?”
“Ma—”
“I don’t want to be called Ma. Stop calling me that.”
She could smell the wood now, the new doors and floors. But it was mild, unmenacing. Now she could follow Walt up the steps, stand here and look at the sawhorses, breathe in the dust from all the new floors. None of it provoked any reaction. It almost felt like she was remembering someone else.
Walt disappeared through a doorless opening. Peter called to him, but not with the urgency Walt responded to. They waited for him on the porch. The street was quiet, with only the thin hum of a streetlight and a faraway squeak of a car frame going over a speed bump. She had a mind to tell Peter right here, tell him everything. Tell him about the porcelain sink and the fresh boards on the floor and the sound of the football game across the street rising and falling and rising again and how all the other teachers and even the workmen had left their work to see the last half of a close game, left their tools scattered in the hallway, the only witnesses to her steps from the classroom to the bathroom, her last fearless steps in life, one two three four five and her thoughts on the toilet as simple as hoping that her mother would be making chicken for dinner and the water running warm now from the sink — before the renovations there was only cold — and she kept her hands under it too long. At first she thought the lights had gone out, the way in the mirror the room darkened behind her. He brought her down quickly, smashing her chin to the sink, her lower teeth cutting clean through her tongue in two places. She heard a grunt as he turned her over, the clang of his belt buckle, the rip of fabric, then skin, her own gagging on the blood in her mouth, and a horrible boarlike snorting — but she never heard the sound of his voice. In some memories she is clawing, hitting, writhing, but in others she is perfectly still, save the blood pouring out of her mouth. Her dress was badly stained. I bit my tongue, she told her mother, who had in fact made chicken, when she got home.
“Walt!” she called, and he came immediately, head lowered by the sharpness in her voice.
Peter knocked the railing with his sneaker. “Tom loves you, you know. If you could just lighten up a bit.”
So this is what he had to say to her. That she should lighten up.
Walt pushed the side of his face against her thigh, then, finding her hand, nudged his way in against her palm. The shape of his head beneath her hand was the most familiar object in her life.