Model Home (7 page)

At least that's the story Warren told himself. In truth, even before the dump issue, he'd had a chance to pull out. When Larry started to get cold feet after the feasibility study came in—when the estimate was far more than they'd expected—Warren had insisted they go through with it. He could have gone back to Wisconsin, could have eaten the cost of the study and saved his family from impending doom, but he'd convinced the folks at Sakamoto Investment that it was worth the risk. It had been Warren's idea, too, to build twenty houses before they'd sold the lots. “Create the supply,” David Stockman had told the country, “and the demand will follow.” It was a formula too seductive to resist. He could blame Larry for the mess he was in—he gave in to the
temptation more and more—but in truth Warren had brought it on himself.

Now the dump had become the nail in the coffin. You could see the construction crew breaking ground from the Auburn Fields gate: less than a mile away, a cloud of ominous dust blooming from the earth.

“Look,” Larry said, “if you really want to stop this sludge from being dumped, we should get as many families as possible in there. Nobody gives a flying fuck about two developers. But twenty families: they could form a coalition, go to the papers with it. Raise a real stink. See what I mean? It's in everyone's best interest to sell these houses.”

“Are you forgetting our man jumped ship? It's against his ‘professional ethics.'”

“Fuck the broker. We'll do it ourselves.”

Warren closed his eyes. It had not occurred to him to lie to people. It was morally indefensible, so why did the heaviness in his legs seem to lift? Even the room itself seemed slightly bigger, as if someone had pushed back the furniture.

“Ourselves?”

“We'll hit the phones. The streets. Whatever it takes. For Pete's sake, enlist your fucking family.”

Warren pretended he hadn't heard this. “You're forgetting about the view.”

“People like construction. It's a sign of growth. If they ask, we'll tell them it's a shopping mall. Honestly, it could be just what we need to sell them on the desert.”

Warren stared at the papers on his desk. “Even if we could sell the things,” he said after a minute, “how are these ‘twenty families' going to band together if they don't know about the dump?”

“Word will spread. Believe me. These things have a way of getting around.” Larry cocked his head toward the phone. He was no longer smiling. “This isn't Wisconsin, Warren—it's the desert, kill or be killed. Survival of the fittest.”

Warren stood up and walked to the bulletin board on the wall. Larry was right: it wasn't their fault the county had decided to dump sludge near their property. Why should Warren and his family suffer? It was wrong to lie to people, in a fair and righteous world—but this was not a fair and righteous world. It was a world where you could work for twenty years to give your children
something, a life you never had, and then see it whisked away by some fucking bureaucrats living off your tax dollars.

Warren stared at the twinkling Latino family pictured in the brochure. Desperate straits required desperate measures. He would do whatever he could—lie, swindle, bust his ass—to save his family. He pulled the Yellow Pages from his desk and picked up the phone.

“I need your credit card,” he said.

“What are you doing?” Larry asked.

“Ordering some business cards.” Warren untacked the brochure from the bulletin board and flipped it over so the faces weren't visible.

Camille stood in the bathroom in her underwear, waiting for her endometrium to shed. By now, the corpus luteum should have stopped producing estrogen, which in turn should have caused the tiny veins and arteries in her uterus to pinch themselves off. Bad news, of course, for the endometrium. Good-bye, nothing there,
degeneration.
A week ago, it should have begun its clotty, bright red trickle from her body. She remembered the animated sequence from
Look, Ma, I'm Only Bleeding,
one of her best productions, in which the endometrium melts into little rainy droplets.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She'd heard about women with IUDs getting pregnant. It was definitely possible.
Actual failure rate: 4 percent
. Once, at a party, someone had told her about a baby being born with a Copper T in one hand: he'd come out of the womb that way, clutching it like a rattle.

Camille squatted until she was nearly sitting on the tiles and slipped a finger inside herself, reaching through the warm folds to the dimpled hardness of her cervix. The strings were still there, small and whiskery. She glanced at herself in the door of the shower. She couldn't remember the last time she'd checked: the squatting, the single finger, felt crudely automotive.

She washed her hand carefully and went into the bedroom, surprised to find Warren sitting on the bed. He was wearing running clothes, a dickey of sweat darkening his T-shirt. All summer he'd been keeping unusual hours at work; she never knew if he was going to be lurking around the house or hanging out in the Chrysler for no reason, listening to some god-awful tape of
Dustin's. Well, the car had been stolen—he wouldn't be doing that anymore, at least.

“What are you doing home?” he asked, tugging at his shoelaces. Maddeningly, he always tied them in double knots he couldn't undo.

“I've got my presentation today,” she said. “I wanted to change clothes.”

“Presentation?”

A sizzle of anger ran through her. “For
Earth to My Body: What's Happening?
Remember, I told you yesterday. I've got to present the script to the advisory committee.”

Camille went into her closet and surveyed the piles of carefully stacked sweaters, all pink or green or periwinkle. The kids made fun of her sometimes, calling her “the Stepford Mom.” Was it her fault if she looked good in pastels? “Did that thing with the broker go okay?” she asked.

“What?”

“The broker. You said you were meeting with him this morning.”

“Oh. Right.” He paused. “Yeah, everything's great. There's a lot of interest.”

She came out of the closet, but he was sitting on the far side of the bed so she couldn't see his face.
Everything's great:
it was the extent of their conversation these days. Camille wanted to believe that this was true. Sometimes, in fact, she did believe it: when you looked at all the starving people in Angola, or the four-year-olds tied to rug looms in Pakistan, sold into bonded slavery by their own families, things were comparatively very good indeed. Other times—when she examined their marriage, how little they seemed to confide in each other—she wanted to drop what she was doing and grab Warren by the shirt, to scream into his face like one of those hysterical victims in a disaster movie:
We're lost! Danger! Our lives are in peril!
She wanted to save them before the engine room filled with water. Instead, she couldn't even tell him about her period. She was too nervous—frightened—of what it might reveal.

Warren disappeared into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Camille put on her favorite outfit—the blue skirt suit with a teal bow-collared blouse—and immediately felt frumpy and self-conscious. Perhaps it was only Herradura Estates, but
something about the way women looked at her here, their eyes drifting magnetically to her shoes, made her feel like an Amish person. It had not been this way in Nashotah, where people wore sweatpants out to dinner and couples walked around the lake in matching windbreakers, beaming dowdiness and goodwill. She could have fetched the mail in her pajamas and no one would have cared. Camille had not wanted to leave the lake but had done so for Warren, so he could pursue his dream project in California. In fairness, she'd been surprised at first by its virtues. She liked her job, there was tennis all year round, she had to admit the weather was glorious—but after three years in Herradura Estates she could not say she'd made any true friends. Not that people weren't nice to her. In fact, they were perfectly kind. But that was the problem: their kindness was
perfect.
It had none of the goofy, shambling warmth her friends in Wisconsin had given off. She could spend hours on the phone with her best friend, Nora Lundy, chatting about the silliest things. It pained Camille to think about how many of her other friendships had dried up or dwindled to Christmas mailings, simply because she'd moved halfway across the country. Lately Warren had been bugging her about the phone bill, hinting she should limit her calls to Nora, as if she hadn't sacrificed enough for him already.

Camille tripped over his running shoes on her way to get some earrings from the dresser. She blamed her clumsiness on Warren—or rather, blamed it on the annoying hunch that he was having an affair. The idea had occurred to her last week. Not that she believed it really—it was just a hunch—but why else would he be acting so strangely? He was distracted all the time, lost in a daze at the dinner table or else staring at the kids without speaking, as though regretting something he'd done. The other day, after Dustin's green-eyed girlfriend had come over for dinner, she'd overheard him tell Dustin that he'd always had a thing for them. Green eyes. Warren, her husband of nearly twenty years. Who used to tell Camille that her own eyes were his favorite color, “blue as Lake Michigan.”

Other times he seemed about to speak, staring at her shyly before looking away, as if he was on the verge of telling her something but had decided not to at the last minute. It had happened last Monday in the bathroom. He'd actually begun to tell her something; she was sure it was a confession.

Camille looked at herself in the mirror above the dresser, studying the soft, motherly bulges at her waist. She wondered if Warren no longer desired her. “Erotic fatigue,” they called it on TV. Men were particularly prone to it, supposedly—something about the survival of their genes. Certainly she and Warren made love much less than they used to. Camille had confessed this to Nora Lundy, who'd admitted to having similar problems with her husband; to get in the mood, they'd started watching pornographic movies before bed. Camille had thought Nora was joking until she'd offered to send her a tape. She'd said no but an envelope had arrived in the mail anyway, empty except for a videotape with the label scratched out. Camille had slipped it in the VHS player when the kids weren't home and was so dismayed by the threesome taking place in a dentist's office that she'd ejected it after five minutes. What had shocked her more than anything was the woman's nipples: one was much larger than the other, smearing her breast like a glob of food.
Harder,
the deformed woman had moaned,
fuck me till I die.
Camille tried to use the line that night with Warren, to see if it would excite him as much as the tattooed men in the movie, but she couldn't bring herself to use any bad words. What had come out—confusingly, no doubt—was “I want to die.”

It must have been that night when her Saf-T-Coil failed to destroy his sperm. If that was in fact what had happened.

Camille went into the kitchen, which smelled sweet and unwholesome. Her children were eating Pop-Tarts with snowdrifts of icing on top. She tried to get them to eat three square meals, to make their daily way up the food pyramid, but it was a hopeless cause now that Lyle and Dustin could buy their own food. “Remember,” she told them, “you're only supposed to have one serving of sugar a day.”

“How many Pop-Tarts in a serving?” Jonas asked.

“Pop-Tarts are fruit,” Dustin said. “You can have four servings.”

“They are
not
fruit.”

Dustin checked the box. “Says here ‘real strawberry flavoring.'”

“That's not fruit,” Camille explained. “Wouldn't you rather have a nice bowl of real strawberries?”

They looked at her in disbelief.

“Is that a joke?”

“Could we put strawberry flavoring on them?”

Camille sighed, looking at the unnaturally pink filling inside Jonas's Pop-Tart. It
did
look delicious. To her chagrin, she found that her mouth was watering. “You may not care now, but later in life you'll regret polluting your body.”

“How would you know, Mom?” Lyle said. “You've never done anything wrong in your life.”

“That's not true, honey.”

Lyle and Dustin looked at each other. “Name one bad thing you've done,” he said.

“Well, let's see. Let me think.”

“You forgot to recycle the bottles,” Dustin said.

“You drove over fifty?” Lyle suggested.

“Once, when we lived in Milwaukee, I got a two-hundred-dollar parking ticket for blocking a wheelchair ramp. Downtown. I protested the ticket and lied about it. I went back the next day and parked legally . . . then I, um, took pictures of the bumper so that it looked like it wasn't in the red part.”

Lyle and Dustin seemed stunned, clutching their Pop-Tarts in midbite. Then they burst into hysterical laughter, their mouths pink as flowers. Jonas laughed too.

“You're a regular menace to society, Mom,” Lyle said.

Camille turned to get some yogurt from the fridge, her face stinging. She knew they were just trying to be funny; still, it bothered her, their ganging up on her like this. She could have told them about Bobby Wurzweiler and the things they did to each other in his boathouse, all when he was supposedly engaged, his hands cold and strange and skittery on her breasts. She'd been seventeen to his twenty-one. To this day she remembered it perfectly: the calluses on his hands, rough from waterskiing; the stale, smoky, rotten-dessert taste of his mouth. He'd given Camille her first cigarette ever, rolling it from a crumpled-up bag in his pocket. They'd spent the whole summer down there in the Wurzweilers' boathouse, making love on the mildewy floor and smoking Bobby's homemade cigarettes and talking about running off together without telling their parents, picking leaves from their tongues as they smoked. He vowed to leave his fiancée, a girl from Madison, and Camille believed him. He was doting and persuasive, the heir to a beer fortune. He didn't leave the girl, of course, but deserted
Camille as soon as the summer ended; when she called his house finally, reckless with despair, he hung up at the sound of her voice. It was only through the newspaper that she'd found out about his plane crash, a week before the wedding, his body dragged from Lake Michigan with his father's.