Three Women, page 9
Lina
A women’s discussion group meets at Lina’s doctor’s office. Behind the examination rooms, there’s a large, attractive chamber with a long oval mahogany table, and on this late November evening eight women drink chardonnay out of plastic cups and eat cashews and Wheat Thins with roasted red pepper hummus. They range in age from their early thirties to their early sixties. Among them: April, a very pretty schoolteacher with a five-year-old named Tristan; and Cathy, who has been married a few times and has a Dolly Parton effervescence, like nothing can keep her down.
The women come to this country doctor for hormones and for weight loss and lately they all feel different inside their bodies. They say it’s something about the way pants fit, the way fabric hangs from pelvic bones. The weight loss creates space between themselves and the world and the hormones fill up that space with new needs or old ones that have been repurposed.
April has a very good-looking boyfriend. She shows a picture of him to the group, and they all agree that he is handsome. They look at her differently afterward. They look her up and down. She says she and her boyfriend have been together several years, all of them happy.
I have a past, she says, smiling, and my boyfriend’s mother knows it and she never lets me forget that she does. It’s a small town.
There were occasional sexual lulls in the past, but since April has moved in, it’s been oddly, inversely, hotter. Her boyfriend has cuckolding fantasies, she tells the group, shyly at first and then, with the confidence that comes from nods of acceptance, more boldly. While they are making love, he asks her to tell him about big penises she’s ridden.
April says there’s a line she knows not to cross. She can’t make it sound as though any of the penises were bigger than his. She knows not to say names out loud, so that he can’t look on Facebook to see if she remains in touch with any of them. She does not talk about the Italian man named Massi with whom she spent a few glorious weeks in San Sebastián. She doesn’t talk about how it felt staring out a gray stone window while he was entering her from behind. She doesn’t talk about that, because of how much she misses it, still.
Lina, at thirty-two, is the youngest, and the only Catholic. Some of the things these other women are saying make her uncomfortable at first. But then she has another glass of wine.
How about you, honey? asks Cathy, the mother hen. What’s going on with you? I can tell you’ve got somethin’ to say, darlin.
Well, says Lina. It’s interesting. I am in fact right at this moment in the middle of a big change.
What’s that, sweetie?
Slowly but decidedly Lina tells the room about her husband, Ed, how for three months she waited in their bed for him to touch her body. Any touch at all. In general, when Lina feels the full weight of her desperation, she speaks very confidently and unswervingly.
How can you call yourself a husband, she says, and not give your wife the one thing that is supposed to unite you above all else?
Cathy clucks and shakes her head.
April says, And you’ve told him how important it is to you?
Almost every day, for a while, Lina says. I’ve told him—and here she starts to cry—I’ve told him that all I want is to be kissed. I want it more than anything!
The women look down at their plastic tumblers. They sip nervously. The wine tastes like cool sneezes. They begin to offer wan recommendations. How to reignite the fire. Lina says she has tried every thing. She has worn sexy panties. She has taken the kids to stay with her parents. She has been sweet to him for days, making deposits in his emotional bank. She’s held her tongue. She’s played hard to get. She’s licked the top of her lip with the tip of her tongue after sipping from an ice-cold glass of water.
She gets frustrated because it’s hard to tell other people that it is all your husband’s fault. Everyone tries to find a way you can change something, a Redbook tip. One woman who is recently divorced says that on some days she doesn’t know whether it’s better to have a man who doesn’t love you enough or no man at all. She says it’s easier if you have money. You can leave or you can take care of your children on your own and you have the confidence to say, To hell with this bullshit.
Lina cries louder. I have no money of my own, she wails.
Now, now, says Cathy. Half of his is yours, you know that. And further, you know that in the state of Indiana—
Lina looks up from a triangle of tissue. Yeah, she says, that’s true. But.
But what, honey? Cathy has moved to seat herself beside Lina and is holding her hand and tucking tissues into her palm.
Well, I’ve gone and asked for a separation.
Well heck! You’re halfway there, honey!
Yes, but. So it’s a separation and not a divorce so he will still pay my health insurance—
He owes you that! Cathy says. Heck you can divorce that man tomorrow and have health insurance! And half the house and all of it!
But I’ve got my two kids—
They’re his kids, too!
Yes, but. Lina looks around the room trying to gauge who she can trust but it’s too late, she has already gone this far. There is a right and a wrong way to do everything. There is especially a wrong way to leave your husband in Indiana. She gathers her moist tissues into one fist. She looks at Cathy.
I’m having an affair.
There is a holy silence like the silence before a golf shot and in the silence one might see the thought bubbles above the heads of all the women.
What a little whore.
I can’t believe I felt sorry for her.
I’m jealous of her.
I wonder who it is.
Who does she think she is.
She’s not that pretty.
What does he look like.
I thought she was Catholic.
I hope it’s not my husband.
I had an affair, too.
My husband is having an affair.
I’m in love with my physical therapist.
Cathy is the first to break the silence. Like the preamble to a country song, she says, Okay, honey. Tell us. Tell us all about it.
Lina blinks. Her desire to talk about the man she loves is stronger than her understanding that talking about it can hurt the relationship. She realizes in some part of herself that talking about it will make her more receptive to its potency. She takes a sip of wine.
And then she says his name out loud.
Aidan, she says. His name is Aidan and he has always been the love of my life.
They dated in high school, she tells the group. Well. It was more than dating. They were lovers in high school. They were in true love in high school. He wrote her a note once, it was a note to end all notes, she kept it for years until one day her mother found it and threw it away. Their love was fathomless. But also, they were star-crossed. It’s a Romeo and Juliet story. It’s awful and beautiful because of the way they came to their end. And she has thought of him ever since.
The women pass around the bottle of chardonnay. They sip their wine and don’t worry about the dinners they’re late to making. They lean forward into the guilty attraction of Lina’s story.
Let me tell y’all, she says, about this man.
Aidan is tall with a square jaw and cobalt-blue eyes. He has the black-and-white face of someone who has gone to war. Lina tells the room that when he’s not with her he is thinking of her. When he’s not with Lina he’s hacksawing and building onto his place so he can raise the value of his home, so he can sell it, so he can leave behind his mistaken life. The woman he married doesn’t love him. She semicheats on him. She makes out with guys, she texts with her ex. But she holds Aidan tethered, because the hours he spends working on the construction site pay for her Downtown Brown manicures, her Forever 21 terry dresses, and she jokes with her friends that the store is called Forever 34 when they’re out at local bars wearing the dresses and sidling up against strangers and having blue island drinks in the middle of maroon Indiana winters.
Sometimes he will be in the double-wide on the job site and the music from the nearest modern country station will be sort of crackly but he will hear it and it’s funny when you’re in love or about to fall back in love, it’s funny how every single song is about that person. It’s funny how that works.
He is a good man, Lina says. He has made mistakes but all good men do. Good men are flawed but even. There is a shortage of real men in America and Lina is not talking about Marlboro Men with mustaches who pound raw burger meat. She is talking about actual men, who stand up straight and hold doors open and go down for hours and make money and whether it’s honest or dishonest they are honest about how it’s made. And they’re interesting, doesn’t matter what they do or where they live, they’re just interesting, they have some stories you’ll hear after you’ve known them for a few months and some stories you’ll never hear even if you’re their brother. When men like Aidan tell a story, it isn’t so you’ll think they’re cool, it’s because this is a story that wants to get heard, and usually you need to coax it out of them, or maybe there’s a woman at the table and she begs a little for it, because one thing that really separates good men from everybody else is this: real men, guys from backwoods Maine and the tough zones of Philly and the rusty thickets of southern Indiana, they love women, and sex, and as strong as they are, they can be swayed a centimeter or two by pussy, and Lina doesn’t like using that word because it’s more than that, but the word also stands for so much more than it sounds like. Anyway, the other kind of men, the men who make up most of the world, they’ll be dirtier once they get a woman in a bedroom, they’ll ask for things they shouldn’t ask for and they’ll leave in the morning without class, but they won’t be swayed in a bar, or at dinner, they won’t do something they don’t want to do for a woman, because they don’t have the intrinsic manly love for a woman that exists in abundance in a man like Aidan Hart.
Aidan.
The women are pitched forward, like soup tureens in an earthquake. Their chins are on the heels of their hands, and they are eating mixed nuts nervously.
Oh my, says Cathy. That sounds like quite a man, and a real love affair.
How did it end? someone asks, because women are often better at handling the endings than the beginnings. Lina understands that some women, like her mother and her sisters, truly care for another woman only when that woman is in pain, especially in a kind of pain that they have already felt, and then overcome.
How did it end, Lina repeats softly. It ended badly.
Some of the women gasp. Cathy places her hand over Lina’s.
Well, Lina says, Aidan heard rumors. The rumors were that I’d slept with three guys in one night and the truth of it is these guys put something in my drink and raped me, one after the other. And I didn’t even really try telling him the truth. To be honest, I didn’t know that was the truth until years later. So we were both stubborn is what happened. It was almost too powerful a thing that we had, that any little untoward thing that happened would have been too much to bear, even though it was a lie. It was too much. We were young. We were both stubborn.
April says, That’s the kind of thing—leaves a real mark.
No shit, Lina says.
The women all curdle a bit at the obscenity.
Plus, she says, I never got asked out again. I never got asked to a prom. I never got asked on a date, not to the movies or bowling or anything. Forget Aidan. Nobody wanted anything to do with me.
She says she understands they were kids and they have probably changed now. She says, It doesn’t really bother me, anymore. I never had an STD from it, or got pregnant. We all grow up, anyhow. We all become different people.
She’s quiet for a bit.
If I’m being honest, she says, then I’d say that situation is the situation that created my emotional loneliness, it just put a stamp of approval on my being known as a whore. And I didn’t even do anything. I didn’t even understand it. And something I didn’t understand, barely remembered, had the power to change my whole damn life.
Oh my God. Oh, honey, Cathy says. She is wringing her hands.
It’s okay, Lina says. It’s okay. Now that I’ve seen him again, I feel that it doesn’t matter. That there’s a chance now.
Hmm, says the one who asked how it ended. So how did you find him again?
He actually found me. On Facebook.
April yelps. Facebook! If it weren’t for Facebook, I wouldn’t have a son!
April reconnected with a high school boyfriend on Facebook and they conceived Tristan one night and that was about it for the reconnection.
That a fact? Lina asks, in a way that means, I’m still telling my story.
And what’s he up to, darlin’? says Cathy.
Aidan is married, with a daughter and a stepdaughter. They live in Cloverland, which is on the outskirts of Terre Haute. They live in a brick ranch that Lina has never been in, down the street from a gas station called Duncan’s Market. Their house is off a long flat main road. It’s one-fifth the size of Lina’s house. There are several shovels leaning against the garage long after the most recent snowstorm.
But he’s married, one of the women says. And you are, too.
I am getting separated, Lina says, evenly. She looks around at all the women, one by one. She makes eye contact and sets her jaw.
And I know, she says, that he is married.
If it gets to three months—she says this in her head—I’m leaving.
It’s been eleven years of being unhappy. Of not being French-kissed, or really kissed at all. Some women want careers as much as or more than they want love but all Lina has ever wanted is to be fully in love and forever partnered, like a penguin.
Lina still seems like her high school self, even after having two children. She has childlike energy and laughs easily. She’s been married for over a decade to Ed, a mail carrier who looks like a scientist. He’s slight of frame but handy around their big house. The house is in a new development in a farmy southern Indiana town without any big farms. There are broken-down tractors on front lawns and the occasional eczematous patch of dry white corn or witch hair grapevines.
While Ed carries mail to the next town over, Lina takes care of Della, who is seven, and Danny, who is two. She wakes up early in a dark house. In Indiana, in the winter, the sun is as pale as a supermarket egg yolk. She goes through the house, clicking the washing machine, emptying the dishwasher. She gets Della ready for school and then she sets Danny up in the playroom while she cleans around the house. She takes Danny on her errands, loading him into the car seat in the middle row of the maroon Suburban and driving for twenty-five minutes into the first big town over, Bloomington. The university is there, and so is the Kinsey Institute where they study sex but where, Lina says, they would have no reason to look at her. She buys groceries from the world’s biggest Kroger’s supermarket. She picks up lightbulbs at Walmart. She sees a chiropractor for her joint pain. Danny is quiet and blond in front of other people but in private he’s fussy.
Back at home she fixes lunch for him; oftentimes it’s dinosaur chicken nuggets that she puts in the big clean oven that looks like a new marriage and Danny presses his face up against the door of the oven and watches them turn from yellow to brown. She kneels behind his small body and puts her hands on his cotton shoulders and says, Look at those nuggets cook!
As the nuggets brown, she spoons little mounds of macaroni salad from a square plastic container onto a plate for herself and for Danny and she’s at the counter while he sits in the high chair and she stands like a teenager, her elbows on the counter and her rear back and high in the air. She looks more like his babysitter but she looks at him like a mother.
Since Della’s been born this has been her routine, and since even before Della was born this big house has been her station. When they were first married, Ed, who is seven years older, bought the house with help from his parents and with USPS money and Lina got to pick out everything. The Craftsman doors and the prairie windows and the stained-glass ceiling fan from Lowe’s. They’ve never had a housekeeper so Lina walks around with rags and Windex and erases streaks and cleans up dribbles of bright yellow urine from the rims of toilet seats.
Taking care of the house feels endless, and often purposeless. The kitchen floor is clean on Tuesday but by Thursday it’s dirty. She used to have set days when she cleaned the floor but lately she just seems to clean it every day, sometimes twice a day. There is nothing to show for those hours.
The children, of course, add purpose, but the house feels like a set of posts without a goal. Sometimes when Lina is in the big empty house she imagines a chasm inside her, a black space between one set of organs and the next. She feels she exists in that space, mindless, flavorless, unseen.
The main reason she feels this way is the lack of romantic love. It’s as though Lina is living with a roommate. For most of their marriage but especially the past few years Ed hasn’t initiated sex. And when he used to initiate it, he wouldn’t do so with any charm. He would drum his fingertips on her arm and say, Feel like doin’ it?
She met Ed in the last week of her sophomore year at Indiana University at a barbecue at her sister’s place. She’d just come back from a jog and had spilled pink smoothie all over her shirt and she walked into the living room and Ed and his friend Dex were inside talking to her sister and her sister’s boyfriend. She liked Dex better, he was cuter and more engaging, but he didn’t pay her that much attention, and Ed was sort of hanging around.
Later that night, after the cookout, Lina and Ed were lying on the living room floor, talking. Everyone else was asleep around the house or in tents outside. After a bit, she pretended to be asleep because she didn’t want to do anything with him. He bent over and said, Good night, and kissed her forehead. He didn’t know anything about her. When she got up to leave the next morning there was a Post-it on the windshield of her car. On it was Ed’s phone number and a note saying to call him if she wanted.
She’d been asked out only twice in college. Not by anyone she liked. Nobody at Indiana University knew about what had happened to her in high school, but it must have been that the stink was on her. Certainly, she could smell it on herself. That day was sunny and bright, school was letting out, and she was moving out of her house and into her friend’s place for the summer, so she felt free and the promise of a date was inviting. She tucked the note into her pocket and drove home.
