Bark: Stories (7 page)

“Very nice,” Robin said to me. “You never sing enough,” she added, ambiguously. Her smile to me was effortful and pinched. “Now I have to go,” she said, and she stood, leaving Pat’s painting behind on the chair, and walked into the lit hallway, after which we heard the light switch flick off. The whole house was plunged into darkness again.

“Well, I’m glad we did that,” I said on the way back home. I was sitting alone in the back, sneaking some of the gin—why bother ever again with rickey mix?—and I’d been staring out the window. Now I looked forward and noticed that Pat was driving. Pat hadn’t driven in years. A pickup truck with the bumper sticker
NO HILLARY NO WAY
roared past us, and we stared at its message as if we were staring at a swastika. Where were we living?

“Redneck,” Isabel muttered at the driver.

“It’s a trap, isn’t it?” I said.

“What is?” asked Pat.

“This place!” exclaimed Isabel. “Our work! Our houses! The college!”

“It’s all a trap!” I repeated.

But we did not entirely believe it. Somewhere inside us we were joyful orphans: our lives were right, we were zooming along doing what we wanted, we were sometimes doing what we loved. But we were inadequate as a pit crew, for ourselves or for anyone else. “It was good to see Robin,” I continued from the back. “It was really good to see her.”

“That’s true,” said Isabel. Pat said nothing. She was coming off her manic high and driving took all she had.

“All in all it was a good night,” I said.

“A good night,” agreed Isabel.

“Good night,” Robin had said the last time I’d seen her well, standing in her own doorway. She had invited me over and we
had hung out, eating her summery stir-fry, things both lonely and warm between us, when she asked about the man I was seeing, the one she had dated briefly.

“Well, I don’t know,” I said, a little sad. At that point I was still sitting at her table and I found myself rubbing the grain of it with one finger. “He seems now also to be seeing this other person—Daphne Kern? Do you know her? She’s one of those beautician-slash-art dealers?” All the restaurants, coffee shops, and hair salons in town seemed to have suddenly gotten into hanging, showing, and selling art. This dignified, or artified, the business of serving. Did I feel I was better, more interesting, with my piano and my violin and my singing?

“I know Daphne. I took a yoga class once from her, when she was doing that.”

“You did?” I could not control myself. “So what’s so compelling about her?” My voice was not successfully shy of a whine. “Is she nice?”

“She’s pretty, she’s nice, she’s intuitive,” Robin said, casually ticking off the qualities. “She’s actually a talented yoga instructor. She’s very physical. Even when she speaks she uses her body a lot. You know, frankly? She’s probably just really good in bed.”

At this my heart sickened and plummeted down my left side and into my shoe. My appetite, too, shrank to a small pebble and sat in stony reserve in the place my heart had been and to which my heart would at some point return, but not in time for dessert.

“I’ve made a lemon meringue pie,” said Robin, getting up and clearing the dishes. She was always making pies. She would have written more plays if she had made fewer pies. “More meringue than lemon, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, thank you. I’m just full,” I said, looking down at my unfinished food.

“I’m sorry,” Robin said, a hint of worry in her voice. “Should I not have said that thing about Daphne?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “That’s fine. It’s nothing.” But soon I felt it was time for me to go, and after a single cup of tea, I stood, clearing only a few of the dishes with her. I found my purse and headed for the door.

She stood in the doorway, holding the uneaten meringue pie. “That skirt, by the way, is great,” she said in the June night. “Orange is a good color on you. Orange and gold.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Then, without warning, she suddenly lifted up the pie and pushed it into her own face. When she pulled off the tin, meringue clung to her skin like blown snow. The foam of it covered her lashes and brows, and with her red hair for a minute she looked like a demented Queen Elizabeth.

“What the
fuck
?” I said, shaking my head. I needed new friends. I would go to more conferences and meet more people.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” said Robin. The mask of meringue on her face looked eerie, not clownish at all, and her mouth speaking through the white foam seemed to be a separate creature entirely, a puppet or a fish. “I’ve always wanted to do that, and now I have.”

“Hey,” I said. “There’s no business like show business.” I was digging in my purse for my car keys.

Long hair flying over her head, bits of meringue dropping on the porch, she took a deep dramatic bow. “Everything,” she added, from behind her mask, “everything, everything, well, almost everything about it”—she gulped a little pie that had fallen in from one corner of her mouth—“is appealing.”

“Brava,” I said, smiling. I had found my keys. “Now I’m out of here.”

“Of course,” she said, gesturing with her one pie-free hand. “Onward.”

for Nietzchka Keene (1952–2004)

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. Married for two decades of precious, precious life, she and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old lusty love mutated to rage. It was both the shame and the demise of them that hate like love could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic. They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling. They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a system, as a dance team of bad feeling, they had shoved their hate center stage and shown a spotlight down for it to seize.
Do your stuff, baby! Who’s the best? Who’s the man?

“Pro-nuke? You are? Really?” Kit was asked by friends, to whom she continued indiscreetly to complain.

“Well, no.” Kit sighed. “But in a way.”

“You seem like you need someone to talk to.”

Which hurt Kit’s feelings, since she’d felt she was talking to
them
. “I’m just concerned about the kids,” Kit said.

Rafe had changed. His smile was just a careless yawn, or was his smile just stuck carelessly on? Which was the correct lyric? She did not know. But, for sure, he had changed. In Beersboro they put things neutrally, like that. Such changes were couched.
No one ever said a man was now completely screwed up. They said,
The guy has changed
. Rafe had started to make model rockets in the basement. He’d become
a little different
. He was something of
a character
. The brazen might suggest,
He’s gotten into some weird shit
. The rockets were tall, plastic, penile-shaped things to which Rafe carefully shellacked authenticating military decals. What had happened to the handsome hippie she had married? He was prickly and remote, empty with fury. A blankness had entered his blue-green eyes. They stayed wide and bright but nonfunctional—like dime-store jewelry. She wondered if this was a nervous breakdown, the genuine article. But it persisted for months and she began to suspect, instead, a brain tumor. Occasionally he catcalled and wolf-whistled across his mute alienation, his pantomime of hate momentarily collapsed. “Hey, cutie,” he would call to her from the stairs, after not having looked her in the eye for two months. It was like being snowbound with someone’s demented uncle: Should marriage be like that? She wasn’t sure.

She seldom saw him anymore when he got up in the morning and left for his office. And when he came home from work, he would disappear down the basement stairs. Nightly, in the anxious conjugal dusk that was now their only life together, after the kids went to bed, the house would fill up with fumes. When she called down to him about this he never answered. He seemed to have turned into some sort of space alien. Of course later she would understand that all this meant he was involved with another woman, but at the time, protecting her own vanity and sanity, she was working with two hypotheses only: brain tumor or space alien.

“All husbands are space aliens,” said her friend Jan.

“God help me, I had no idea,” said Kit. She began spreading peanut butter on a pretzel and eating quickly.

“In fact,” said Jan, “my sister and I call them UFOs.”

It stood for something. Kit hated to ask.

“Ungrateful fuckers,” Jan said.

Kit thought for a moment. “But what about the
o
?” she asked. “You said
UFO
.”

There was a short silence. “Ungrateful fuckeroos,” Jan added quickly. “I know that doesn’t make perfect sense.”

“He’s in such disconnect. His judgment is so bad.”

“Not on the planet he lives on. On
his
planet he’s a veritable Solomon. ‘Bring the stinkin’ baby to me now!’ ”

“Do you think people can be rehabilitated and forgiven?”

“Sure! Look at Ollie North.”

“Well, he lost that Senate race. He was not sufficiently forgiven.”

“But he got some votes,” Jan insisted.

“Yeah, and now what is he doing?”

“Now he’s back promoting a line of fire-retardant pajamas. It’s a life!” Jan paused. “Do you fight about it?”

“About what?” asked Kit.

“The rockets back to his homeland.”

Kit sighed. “Yes, the toxic military crafts business poisoning our living space. Do I fight? I don’t fight I just, well, OK: I ask a few questions from time to time. I ask, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I ask, ‘Are you trying to asphyxiate your entire family?’ I ask, ‘Did you hear me?’ Then I ask, ‘Did you hear me?’ again. Then I ask, ‘Are you deaf?’ I also ask, ‘What do you think a marriage is? I’m really just curious to know,’ and also, ‘Is this your idea of a well-ventilated place?’ A simple interview, really.
I don’t believe in fighting. I believe in giving peace a chance. I also believe in internal bleeding.” She paused to shift the phone more comfortably against her face. “I’m also interested,” Kit said, “in those forensically undetectable dissolving plastic bullets. Have you heard of those?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe I’m wrong about those. I’m probably wrong. That’s where the Mysterious Car Crash may have to come in.” In the chrome of the refrigerator she caught the reflection of her own face, part brunette Shelley Winters, part potato, the finely etched sharps and accidentals beneath her eyes a musical interlude amidst the bloat. In every movie she had seen with Shelley Winters in it, Shelley Winters was the one who died. Peanut butter was stuck high and dry on Kit’s gums. On the counter a large old watermelon had begun to sag and pull apart in the middle along the curve of seeds, like a shark’s grin, and she lopped off a wedge, rubbed its cool point around the inside of her mouth. It had been a year since Rafe had kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn’t.
A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.

The summons took her by surprise. It came in the mail, addressed to her, and there it was, stapled to divorce papers. She’d been properly served. The bitch had been papered. Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even buried in an excellent suit. Atop the papers themselves was a letter from Rafe suggesting their spring wedding anniversary as the final divorce date.
Why not complete the symmetry?
he wrote, which didn’t even sound like him, though its heartless efficiency was suited to this, his new life as a space alien, and in
keeping generally with the principles of space alien culture. The papers referred to Kit and Rafe by their legal names, Katherine and Raphael, as if it were the more formal versions of themselves who were divorcing—their birth certificates were divorcing!—and not they themselves. Rafe was still living in the house and had not told her yet he’d bought a new one. “Honey,” she said trembling, “something very interesting came in the mail today.”

Rage had its medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away, loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center in a cold blue heat. At two different funerals of elderly people she hardly knew she went in and wept in the back row of the church like a secret lover of the deceased. She felt woozy and ill and never wanted to see Rafe—or rather, Raphael—again, but they had promised the kids this Caribbean vacation, so what could they do. This at last was what all those high school drama classes had been for: acting. She once had played the queen in
The Winter’s Tale
and once a changeling child in a play called
Love Me Right Now
, written by one of the more disturbing English teachers in her high school. In both of these she learned that time was essentially a comic thing—only constraints upon it forced it to tragedy, or at least to misery. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde—if only they’d had more time! Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disrupted, and so the funniness of which was never-ending.

Still, Rafe mustered up thirty seconds of utterance in order to persuade her not to join them on this vacation. “I don’t think you should go,” he announced.

“I’m going,” she said.

“We’ll be giving the children false hope.”

“Hope is never false. Or it’s always false. Whatever. It’s just hope,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“I just don’t think you should go.” Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab, as in who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog?

What bimbo did he want to give her ticket to? (Only later would she find out. “As a feminist you mustn’t blame the other woman,” a neighbor told her. “As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me,” Kit replied.)

And months later, in the courtroom, where she would discover that the county owned her marriage and that the county was now taking it back like a chicken franchise she had made a muck of, forbidding her to own another franchise for six more months, with the implication that she might want to stay clear of all poultry cuisine for a much longer time than that, when she had finally to pronounce in front of the robed, robotic judge and a winking stenographer whose winking seemed designed to keep the wives from crying, she would have to declare the marriage “irretrievably broken.” What second-rate poet had gotten hold of the divorce laws? She would find the words sticking in her throat, untrue in their conviction. Was not everything fixable? This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives? Why “irretrievably broken” like a songbird’s wing? Why not “Do you find this person you were married to, and who is now sitting next to you in the courtroom, a total asshole?” That would suffice, and be more accurate. The term “irretrievably broken” sent one off into an eternity of wondering. Whereas the other did not.