Acts of Love (4 page)

Sandy frowned. “Think how much better off you'd be if you had forgotten just one of Ted's notes and the plane had crashed. Did Ted have life insurance?”

“Stop it, Sandy. I wish you'd lay off him.”

“Okay, okay. So what did you do all weekend?”

“Do you promise not to tell anyone?”

“Tell anyone what?”

“I went out on a date.”

“Stop the presses, woman on the loose. I don't get it. Why is it a secret? You're separated, remember?”

The other night, on the couch like teenagers, furious and sweet and tasting faintly of sin. “I just don't want Ted to know, that's all. He's so possessive,” she added.

“That's one word for it. So who did you go on this sexual rampage with?”

“Good Lord, Sandy. We didn't have sex.'”

“Of course not. God forbid. We all know that's my department. Who did you sit on the porch swing with?”

“Neal Frederickson. He's head of neurosurgery up at the hospital. He brought me those roses.”

They both turned to look. The pale yellow petals had fallen open, plush, promising.

“Not bad,” Sandy remarked, turning back and reaching into the red box of animal crackers on the table. “How was it?”

“Kind of awful.”

“I'm not sure you're approaching this with quite the right attitude, Ann.”

“I don't mean he was awful. I mean dating. Dating is awful. I don't know how you've done it for so long.”

“Thanks.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Unfortunately, I think I do. Next thing, you'll be lecturing me about my biological clock. I know you're new to this, but certain things are off-limits on Sunday afternoons.”

“All I meant was, I got married so young, I've been wondering what I missed.”

“That sounds suspiciously like regret.”

“Regret? No. I wasn't like you. I didn't think there was another way out. Maybe there wasn't for me, I don't know. Anyway, your life has just seemed so much more romantic than mine.”

“Yeah, you just can't beat those scintillating blind dates with used-car salesmen, those steamy nights getting intimate with a pint of Haagen-Dazs.”

“C'mon. You have a great job at the
Chronicle.
And you have a great guy. You should be nicer to John.”

“What makes you think I'm not nice to him?”

“I don't know why you don't just marry him. You're been with him almost a year. Isn't that some kind of record for you? And he's already asked you twice.”

“Because then I'd have a lifetime of him bringing me home sneakers from that godforsaken sporting-goods store of his and trying to get me to exercise. Yech.”

“I'm serious.”

“So am I. You know how I feel about exercise.” She paused. “Sometimes I think that his insistence on getting married is just so he can check it off his list.” She made writing motions in the air. “College, check. Career, check. Marriage, check. You know what I mean?”

Ann stared at her blankly.

“Look,” Sandy said, changing course. “I'm just not all that sure I believe in marriage. Something happens to men after they get married, something hormonal.”

“Yeah, they become husbands.”

“Exactly.”

“Women change, too.”

“They become wives. I think that scares me even more.”

“Mom and Dad had a good marriage.”

Sandy frowned. It had been so good, so close, that there had been little room for anything else, not even Ann and Sandy, who would spend hours in the small bedroom they shared in the house just twenty miles from here trying endlessly to make sense of them, these parents they were a part of and yet not a part of at all. On rainy nights, the air was so crowded, so thick, that the room grew fogged with a particular odor all its own, a marshy blend of the worn green corduroy bedspreads of their bunk beds, of Magic Markers and cheap nail polish and menstrual blood, the thick, inescapable smell of their own breath in that tight room neither parent ever entered, as if they knew that it was in those dark, marshy confines that the girls rolled about their clues and their theories like cherished marbles.

“What they had wasn't a good marriage,” Sandy said. “It was psychosis.”

“Maybe you're right,” Ann said quietly. “Maybe they cursed us after all.”

Sandy put down her wineglass and looked curiously at Ann, her words new to the scale of their disparate memories. “What do you mean?”

“They made us believe, made me believe, that two people could be truly joined, could be almost indistinguishable from each other, and that anything less is failure.”

“But would you really have wanted that? I start gasping for air just thinking about it.”

“I don't know anymore.” She took a sip of wine. “I'm just glad they didn't live to see what a mess Ted and I made of things.”

 

A
LI SAT IN THE ROOMY FRONT SEAT
of the car between Julia and her father as they drove down Route 87, headed toward home. The trees on either side of the road were almost completely barren, save for the ragged green curtain of pines between the granite crags.

“Okay, so maybe we're not the world's greatest hunters. But this was only our first time up there. We'll be back,” Ted promised. “We'll get one next time.”

“We'll be back,” Ali agreed.

“Julia? Would you like to go again?”

“I don't know.”

Ted took his right hand off the steering wheel and reached over to feather the wedge of her hair. “Maybe we'll even get Mom to come with us, huh Julia? I'll tell you what. In the meantime, why don't you hold on to your grandfather's gun?”

Ted swerved the car into the parking lot of Burl's Lounge, a low, black, windowless structure five miles outside of town, just across from the new mall. “You guys wait here,” he told them as he pulled up the parking brake and opened the door. “I'm just going to run in and use the john.”

Inside, he squinted in the darkness, banging his shin on a chair. The small stage where they had topless dancers in the afternoons, young girls, fifteen, sixteen, with hesitant curves not yet fully formed, girls who'd do anything for twenty bucks, was empty. Two men sat on barstools hunched over their bellies, silently watching a college football game on the TV overhead. The only other customer was a slatternly woman in a polka-dot wraparound dress, her bleached hair falling to her shoulders in dried-out husks. Ted hurried into the space between them, leaning across the dented wooden bar and rapping his fingers impatiently. “Jack Daniel's,” he called out to the bartender, who continued to take an inventory of the name brand liquor. “Make it a double.”

His fingers continued working away as he watched his drink being poured, hardly noticing that the woman had risen from her stool to wait by his side.

“Buy you another?” she asked after he had gulped the liquor down in one swallow and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Another day, sugar. Right now, I have a wife and two kids waiting for me.”

“Don't they all.”

The two men pitched back, laughing, and Ted pivoted to them, his face inverted, incalculable. They stopped short and glanced back to the football game. Ted stared at them a moment longer and then hurried back into the day.

“That's better,” he exclaimed as he climbed into the car and started the ignition. He turned on the radio and they drove off, while Willie Nelson sang one of his slow, mournful songs, just his rickety voice and his guitar.

 

“S
O, ARE YOU GOING
to see him again?” Sandy asked.

“Who?”

“What, you have others? Doctor what's-his-name?”

“Neal. Neal Frederickson. I don't know. He wants me to go to Albany with him next weekend, but…”

“But what?”

“Sandy, Ted wants us to get back together.”

“Give me a fucking break. You're not actually considering it, are you?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“You just managed to get rid of him.”

“I've known Ted for as long as I can remember. Everything in my life, good and bad, has something to do with him. I know we were on some damned roller coaster the last few years, but…”

“I can't believe I'm hearing this. A roller coaster is an amusement, Ann. I fail to see what's amusing about this. What about all that stuff you told me just a few months ago, about how tired you were of the battling? Or how he never listens to you? Hell, what about all the nights you didn't even know where he was? How can you just forget about all that?”

“I'm not forgetting about it. But you always see things in such absolutes, Sandy, black and white, good and bad, and marriage is a muddy business.”

“So who told you to play in the mud?”

“We've been talking. I think he's changed. We both have. Maybe we've learned not to expect so much from each other.”

“Are you sure that's the lesson you want to learn from all this?”

Ann looked at Sandy, inviolate, staunch. She would never understand the home Ann had found, the home she had lost, would never understand how the edges of love can get so ragged and hazy that you can no longer distinguish where it begins and ends. “It's not like he fooled around. He loves the kids. And they still need him. They've been having a hard time with this, particularly Julia. He says he loves me.”

“You're too trusting.”

“You're too cynical.”

Old words, so old they hardly bothered to listen to them.

“You just don't understand what it's like to have that much history with someone,” Ann added. She smiled. “Look, all I said was that I was thinking about it. There's still the grapefruit problem, after all.”

“The grapefruit problem?”

Ann laughed. “Every night Ted used to eat a whole grapefruit. Just cut it up like an orange and, well, I don't know what he did, but it involved a whole lot of lip-smacking and slurping.” She paused to slobber loudly. “It turned my stomach. It got to the point where I'd be thinking about that grapefruit all evening, just dreading it, and then when I saw it come out, I'd have to leave the room. Ted and his goddamned grapefruits. I used to fantasize about him choking to death on one of them. Or beating him senseless with a bag of them. I still don't know if I could face it. So until I have the grapefruit problem solved, my marital status is on hold.”

They were laughing when they heard the car drive up, the doors open and shut, and Ted, Julia, and Ali enter the house. Ann bolted from the kitchen to greet them, taking Julia and Ali in her arms, swallowing the outside that clung to them, the smoke that stained their hair, the traces of pine and dirt, while Sandy and Ted, leaning against the rifle he had planted butt-down on the floor, eyed each other suspiciously.

“I know you'd all love for me to stay and take part in this tearful reunion,” Sandy said, “but it's time for me to go save my hardworking boyfriend from the rigors of counting the jockstraps in his store. Ann, do you want to have lunch tomorrow?”

She was still fingering their hair, their faces. “Sure,” she answered distractedly. “I'll call you at work.”

“Okay. Bye, girls.”

Julia and Ali straightened up. “Bye,” Ali said, smiling.

Sandy left without having exchanged one word with Ted.

 

“W
HAT WAS SHE DOING HERE
?” Ted asked.

“She's my sister. So how was your weekend, girls?”

“We saw a doe,” Ali said, rushing out, “but we didn't shoot it. I ate two hot dogs last night.”

“Two? That
is
impressive. Julia? Did you have a good time?”

“Grumpy over here had a better time than she'd care to admit.”

Ann turned to Ted, probing, prodding his eyes, his voice, testing, sniffing. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. Ted shifted his weight, picking up the gun by the barrel and moving it forward an inch for better balance. “As a matter of fact,” he went on, annoyed at her sniffing, her constant sniffing, “I'm going to leave the gun here for safekeeping.”

“Damn it, Ted, you know I don't want that thing in the house.”

“Lighten up.”

She frowned and, seeing this, seeing the ball that was them off in the mid-distance, he backtracked, eased up. “I told you, you worry too much.”

“You came back in great shape.”

He ignored this. “We missed you, didn't we, girls?”

She turned to Julia and Ali. “Well, I'm glad you had a good time.”

“Maybe next time you'll come along.” Ted looked at Ann and decided not to pursue this. “How was your weekend?”