Authors: Callie Wright
If Anne’s mother had ever dreamed of confronting her father’s mistresses, she’d made a great secret of it. In a town of only two thousand people, Joanie must have known some of them personally, or at least well enough to say hello. Had she ever been tempted to tip her hand, a little
I know that you know that I know
? Not from what Anne could tell, but in this way Anne was nothing like her mother. She was paid a six-figure salary for her pugilistic spirit and had no qualms about stepping into the ring.
Anne merged onto Route 166 and wound toward the village of Cherry Valley, past the hair salon where she brought Julia every couple of months, easing to a stop at the traffic light. It was after eleven o’clock; hers was the only car at the intersection. Across the street, a gas station beckoned with its dual-access points, an excellent place to make a U-turn, but Anne wasn’t tempted. When the light turned green, she drove on, reading mailbox numbers and finally stopping at the long driveway of a white house, where the downstairs lights were still on.
It was the very vantage point Teddy would’ve had, a clear shot—no curves in the driveway, no obstructing telephone poles or trees. Even in the dark, Anne could see straight to the house. She collapsed her headlights and turned into the driveway, missing the grooved tire tracks by six inches. The car jostled over the muddy earth, rocking left and right until she braked and killed the ignition, just behind a green Subaru.
* * *
The last time Anne had gone over to a woman’s house in the middle of the night to threaten her, she was thirteen years old. Halloween, 1962, while Anne’s parents were downstairs masked in face paint and fake blood, Anne had been curled up in her bedroom with a plate of popcorn balls and her mother’s copy of
The Sex Cure
. It certainly wasn’t Anne’s first read-through (she’d memorized a handful of lascivious scenes), but her father—who had taken her to see
The Blob
at the old movie theater on Main Street and therefore could not be said to be categorically protective—had all but hit her mother when Anne confessed to having read it. In the weeks after that incident, Anne had eavesdropped and spied and snooped on her parents, trying to get to the bottom of their tension over the book, but it had always remained just out of her reach.
Alone in her bedroom, she’d examined the front cover. Elaine Dorian must have written the novel right here in town, at her house on Lake Street, only a few blocks from the Coles’. Anne pictured a desk in a dark study, a ream of paper turned upside down next to a typewriter, the veiled typeface still faintly visible through the onionskin. According to an advertisement on the last page, Mrs. Dorian was also the author of
Love Now—Pay Later
,
Suburbia: Jungle of Sex
, and
Second-Time Woman
. On the back cover:
You will be shocked. You may be angry. But you’ll hang on every word
.
Anne, an eighth-grader, had easily picked out many of the town’s characters by their fictional names, which meant that she couldn’t have been the only kid in town coping with the frightening possibility that the affairs and divorces happening in the book were also happening in her own home.
There had been times when, as a young girl, Anne was ushered into the front seat of her father’s Buick for a ride downtown—to breakfast at the Cooperstown Diner or to a picnic at Lakefront Park. Usually they were met by a new friend of her father’s. Usually these new friends were women. And, yes, they’d paid attention to Anne only as long as her father was watching, but her dad’s fast-paced, convivial domain was so enchantingly different from the quiet, contented life Anne led with her mother that she had been willing to play her part. So what if her father asked her not to mention a Miss Janson or a Miss Pride to her mother? They had all just been sitting on a quilt in the middle of Lakefront Park, and it couldn’t be a real secret if everyone already knew.
Downstairs, Anne’s father said, “And who do we have here?” Anne pictured an outlaw, a robot, a cowboy holding a cap gun and a pillowcase, a lunch pail, a plastic jack-o’-lantern for whatever treat her parents offered, this happy couple playing along as though all of life were a game. In the last two months, between Nikita Khrushchev and
The Sex Cure
, near nuclear war had played out at Anne’s kitchen table, and now that Anne had her parents back—loving, considerate, communicative—she would do anything to keep them. Anne didn’t think her family could survive another round from Elaine Dorian. Hadn’t her mother said that the author was working on a sequel?
Hopped up on sugar and adrenaline, Anne began to fantasize: on Halloween night, any number of devils and demons would be out tricking up the town with shaving cream and eggs, children on the prowl. Every year, the school janitors had to come in early to wash off soap from the first-story windows and rub out words written with pieces of brick on the cement stoop. How easy it would be to blend in with this madness, to slip into the night and reappear ghostlike with a can of spray paint.
Anne waited until her parents were asleep, then crept to the utility room to get a flashlight and the key to her father’s shed. A little rooting around and she found his new supply of automobile paint and slipped one can into the front pocket of her navy sweatshirt, thinking he’d never miss it.
The Halloween antics had already died down by the time Anne set off east on Walnut Street, then north on Delaware, zigzagging her way across town. She saw the village patrol car cruising south on Pioneer, heading away from the lake, which meant she had at least fifteen minutes before the police made another lap.
As she approached the house, Anne was neither nervous nor apprehensive. With her black hair and blue eyes, she looked like a fairy-tale character and was trying to channel one. Her parents needed her help, and Anne could protect them. Superheroes were never caught. They delivered their charges from evil, then woke in their own beds in sole possession of the secret knowledge of their valorous feats.
Anne found the two-story house at the corner of Lake Street and Hoffman Lane completely dark—either the author was out of town or she had already gone to sleep for the night. Anne crouched beside a shrub near the side door and got out her paint; she shook the can, then removed the top, securing it in her sweatshirt pocket, and began duckwalking the circumference of the house.
Once she’d decided, Anne never looked back, printing the neat foot-high letters of whatever phrases came to her mind—
GET OUT, GO HOME, LEAVE US ALONE
—working quickly, efficiently, and peppering her commands with words she’d never even thought to say aloud:
BITCH, SLUT, SEX URGE.
Just as she was finishing the last word on the most visible wall, directly on Hoffman Lane, a car turned off Main Street and into the alley, its headlights arcing straight for her, and she tossed the paint and ran, down Lake Street to River and up to Christ Church, where she ducked into the cemetery and slid down between a tombstone and the ivy-covered fence at the edge of the lawn.
Anne decided her parents were lucky to have her—she was back in bed before midnight, with her homework finished and her clarinet already packed for school.
Then came the newsmen and the television cameras, giving voice to Elaine Dorian’s every passing thought. Anne’s attack, meant to silence the author, had instead turned
The Sex Cure
into a national sensation and single-handedly sent it into a second print run. Out came her mother’s scrapbook, out went her father into the world of late nights at the office, and out ran Anne’s patience with her parents—she couldn’t fix them, she was no superhero after all, so she concentrated instead on her schoolwork and her life after here. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, then she was gone—Vassar—driven away with no thought of ever coming back.
And yet here she was again, in every sense of the word. But if Anne had learned one lesson from her first foray into intimidation tactics, it was that there could be no new scandal, no newspaper articles, no lawsuits, and when the front-porch light switched on at Caroline Murphy’s house, Anne did not even flinch. She sat up, ready. This time she was here to kill the story.
* * *
A slight woman with long brown hair stepped outside and stood barefoot on the doormat, her gray corduroy pants sitting low on her narrow hips, a cardigan hugging her tight. She shielded her eyes against the overhead bulb and peered out at Anne.
Anne removed her key from the ignition, which had the unwelcome effect of illuminating the car’s interior. She hadn’t yet applied lipstick, hadn’t checked her hair. Worse, the taste of wine had worked its way back into her mouth, and Anne quickly hunted in her purse for a tin of mints, then popped in two and chewed.
“Hello?” Caroline called.
Anne opened her car door and stepped onto the front lawn, introducing herself using her real name.
“We need to talk,” said Anne.
Caroline laced her fingers across her waist and said, “My son’s asleep,” but Anne was already mounting the porch steps; she waited for Caroline to open the door for her, then filed through.
Noting the collection of footwear in the front hall, Anne asked if she should remove her shoes.
“You don’t have to,” said Caroline, but Anne slipped out of her heels, watching Caroline from the corner of her eye. She was petite, with pale skin and full lips, her face scrubbed clean and her eyebrows uneven, as though she’d given up plucking midway through. Anne had expected her to be younger—with a five-year-old, she might easily have been in her twenties—but crow’s-feet and a smattering of grays at her hairline put her closer to Anne’s age.
Anne lined up her heels alongside a pair of duck boots and two tiny Spider-Man slippers, while Caroline dipped into a wicker basket of woolens and retrieved a blue-and-white-striped scarf, wrapping it over her shoulders and around her neck, then pulling her hair free. Her jaws worked a piece of gum, the smell of spearmint filling the air.
Anne indicated that Caroline should lead the way, then tiptoed behind her in case the child was a light sleeper. The house smelled faintly of mildew, that summer-camp scent of rain-weathered canvas and damp wool. It was sharp but not unpleasant; it heightened Anne’s sense of being on a trip.
Caroline led her into the den, which was a cozy mess, all pillows and newspapers and tattered quilts. She invited Anne to sit anywhere, but a cache of knitting supplies had booby-trapped the couch. The only open seat was a child’s Adirondack chair pushed right up to the screen of a thirteen-inch television set.
“Shit,” said Caroline, registering Anne’s hesitation. She started to clear the couch, placing one item at a time in an oversize canvas carryall, but Anne abruptly picked up a jumbo-size papier-mâché frog from the seat of a cane rocking chair and set it on the floor.
“This will be fine,” she said.
“Can I get you something to drink?” asked Caroline carefully. “Juice? Tea?”
Anne had had it with the tea; what she really wanted was a cocktail but instead asked for water, no ice.
While Caroline was in the kitchen, Anne swiveled to detail the room: two bookshelves dotted with glazed ceramic vases and lined with titles like
Encounters with the Archdruid
and
Desert Solitaire
, along with a sizable collection of art books; a rattan area rug overlapped with patchy Oriental carpets, one frayed, one with a hole in the middle, one that seemed to be torn in half; a stack of Barney videos on top of a VCR; a Hockneyesque photo collage of a snow-covered fir tree; and an alcove with a large wooden easel pitched over a paint-splattered floor, the back of a stretched canvas barely visible.
Caroline returned from the kitchen with two handmade ceramic mugs and handed one to Anne, then perched at the edge of the couch.
“Are you painting?” asked Anne, pointing to the alcove.
“It’s just something I’ve been playing around with,” said Caroline.
“A nude of my husband?” asked Anne, and Caroline didn’t speak, did not even move.
“Look,” said Anne, “I don’t know if Hugh told you, but I’m the lawyer for the Seedlings School in addition to being the principal’s wife. As I understand it, your ex-husband is planning to file a negligence claim.”
“I—” Caroline’s voice quavered, her mug in a death grip. “He said he was looking into the fall but I’ve already told him I don’t want any part in it,” she said. “Even if we’d been there, Graham could’ve fallen.”
There went proximate cause. Anne wished to God this were admissible.
“Just to be clear,” said Anne, “if he does file a claim, and this does go to trial, you can’t testify. It will come out that you had sex with my husband in your son’s hospital room.”
“We didn’t … I mean—”
“You mean you
would
have had sex, but then your son woke up. Hugh already told me.”
Caroline stared into her mug, and Anne wondered if she were wishing it were wine as much as Anne was.
“Look at me,” said Anne.
Caroline looked up.
There were so many ways Anne could go with this—guilt (do you make a habit of sleeping with other women’s husbands?), shame (this is my family; we have children at home), threat (if you come near my husband again, you’ll find yourself back in family court)—but they all felt scripted. Frankly, Anne didn’t care what this woman did with her life; her only concern was her family.
So, a question for Caroline: Had it really been only that one time? If so, maybe their marriage was salvageable.
“This afternoon,” said Anne. “My son saw Hugh kiss you in your driveway.”
“Oh, God,” said Caroline. She set her mug on the carpet and pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, as though testing for a fever.
But it was Anne who felt feverish, in the grip of a life-threatening disorder, the end of her marriage.
“You did sleep with him, then,” said Anne.
The look on Caroline’s face told her all she needed to know.
Anne stopped rocking and put the mug on the floor. She liked water in water glasses and couches you could sit on and television screens you could actually see. She favored books with plots—novels, mysteries—over end-of-times histories more alarming even than her own. Caroline was not a younger, fresher version of Anne; she was a different person, and if this was what Hugh wanted, Anne couldn’t give it to him.