“I’m going to the ladies’ room,” she says, standing up.
“The ladies’ room? Why don’t you just call it a bathroom?” says Margaret.
“I call it a ladies’ room because I am a lady, unlike some of the other residents of this house, who would prefer to be slobs or pigs,” snaps Janice, and tries to walk, not run to the downstairs bathroom, snatching her purse from the counter en route. With the door closed, she sits on the toilet and rifles through the handbag, hands shaking. She finds the Ziploc bag, fumbles with the seal, and fishes out the little packet of It.
She taps the white crystalline powder onto the marble counter and carves out a thin line with the edge of her Neiman Marcus credit card. Eyeing this, she tips just a bit more out, and then, with a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill, snorts It up her nose.
It makes her eyes water, and she sits on the toilet, dabbing at the corner of her eyes with a square of quilted bath tissue, so that her mascara won’t melt. She can taste something bitter and viscous dripping down the back of her throat, but she doesn’t mind it anymore, because she knows that what follows it is relief.
She is getting better at this, she thinks. The first time she did It, she was riveted by this gritty rail of fire in her nose and throat. She thought she must have broken something or done something wrong. She’d followed James’s instructions to the letter—the credit card, the dollar bill, the pinned nostril—but she hadn’t expected the raw power of It. The only drugs she’d ever taken were marijuana—once or twice in college—and painkillers, but this felt so much
dirtier.
She had stared at herself in the mirror, thinking that her face surely must look different after this violation. A flicker of a memory—a scene from some movie about gangsters, a pile of cocaine and a man with his nose dipped in it like a contestant in a pie-eating competition—had flashed through her brain and she’d panicked: Had she made a terrible mistake? He had called this crystal meth, not cocaine; he had
said
it was medicinal, but what if he had lied?
And then her anxiety winked away as the drug did its work. She closed her eyes and felt a brightening wash through her. It was that same feeling that she feels today, right
now:
a spreading warmth that immediately erases the tension in her head and then melts slowly over her body, like ice cream softening in its tub. In a minute, she feels totally remade. She can face anything now.
She is careful to flush the toilet before she leaves the bathroom, just in case Margaret is listening.
there is a legitimate reason for It, of course. she strained her elbow in the April tournament at the club, chasing after a sliced volley that Beverly could have easily returned but didn’t (Beverly always was a little lazy on the upper court), leaving it up to Janice to save the match. They had lost anyway—the first time in three years—and the pain in Janice’s elbow sent her to Dr. Brunschild, who prescribed her two weeks of total arm rest and a week’s worth of Vicodin.
She was amazed by how pleasant the Vicodin was—delightful, even, not only eliminating the pain in her elbow but also bequeathing her a quiet sort of elation. When she walked, it was as if she were sliding slowly through silk. Still, she felt guilty about the pills; the pain in her arm wasn’t terrible, and taking medication she didn’t
really
need seemed dangerous. She stopped, but tucked the rest of the bottle away in her medicine cabinet, just in case the pain came back.
That particular pain hadn’t come back, though another one had descended in its place. Janice discovered the bottle in her bathroom cabinet the Monday Paul left her for Beverly. She stood there, the half-empty bottle of champagne in one hand, slowly rolling the Vicodin bottle in the palm of the other. The pills rattled provocatively: eight left. And she thought,
Why not?
After all, this was a pain far worse than a strained muscle or broken wrist. This was a pain worse than childbirth, even, because with childbirth you are being given a gift; worse, too, than the death of her mother from cancer last year, because that slow demise at least had a sense of eventuality to it, of an ending due to come. No, this kind of loss was a living loss, one packed with anger and remorse and self-doubt.
As she stood there in front of the medicine cabinet, she thought of what Paul had said. “Claustrophobia”?
He
felt claustrophobic? She was the one who should feel claustrophobic—her life was the one that took place within the confines of this house, the yard, the local supermarket and the shopping center and the country club. She was the one who had to be present and available whenever her children and husband needed her. Meanwhile, Paul was off on a business trip every week; he visited a half dozen countries a month. He apparently even had the leisure time to go off and screw her best friend. Who was he to complain? She thought about picking up the phone again and screaming until her lungs gave out, but she couldn’t muster the will to do it.
She took a pill instead. And then, twenty-two minutes later, mercy. The combination of Vicodin and champagne erased everything, leaving only the most ghostly pencil shavings of fury and shame. She spent the rest of that afternoon wandering around the house in a euphoric calm. She stood in the garden for a long, long time, overwhelmed by the sugared scent of the summer roses. She spent hours enthralled by cooking shows on TV. Just as
soon
as she felt better, she was going to run out and buy an immersion circulator so that she too could make lamb
sous vide
with balsamic sorbet! Paul and Beverly barely crossed her mind; when they drifted in, like feather down, she found it amazingly easy to blow them away.
“He’ll come home,” she reassured herself. “He will come to his senses. Everything will be fine.” She set the table for supper—and, despite everything, set a place for him anyway, wondering whether positive thinking might somehow lure Paul home. In this mild stupor, she told Lizzie only that her father was taking some time off and would be gone for a little while, and when she saw that Lizzie thought Janice was referring to a business trip, she didn’t bother to explain.
Janice told herself that it was an extraordinary situation and she wouldn’t take the Vicodin again. But when she woke up the next day in the empty bed and thought she would tear her hair out and break the china into a million pieces or burn the house down, it was obvious what she needed to do. She didn’t have room for anger in her life, and if people with, say, insomnia occasionally took Ambien to help them sleep, why couldn’t she prescribe herself some Vicodin temporarily to relieve this rage?
She floated through the next two days on a cloud, unperturbed and full of energy, popping a Vicodin every time she felt the fuzzy edges beginning to sharpen again. It
was
as if Paul was on just another of his business trips—hadn’t he spent the better part of the year gone, anyway?—and she thought:
Yes, I can live like this, in this limbo state.
Thoughts of divorce and infidelity barely crossed her mind.
And then she ran out of pills.
She called Dr. Brunschild for a refill on Thursday morning. “My elbow hurts,” she said.
“Again?” he said. “Or still?”
“Still,” she said, unsure if this was a plausible answer and hoping he hadn’t already seen her playing out on the club courts.
“Have you been playing on it?”
“Not really,” she lied. “It’s too painful. Maybe I need more Vicodin?”
“No, if it’s still hurting you, you may have torn something. You could need surgery. I think you should come in and see me.”
She couldn’t lie to him in person, of course. So she demurred, then stood there, in her empty bedroom, as hopelessness fell over her. Looking forward, she could see only pain, like a monster waiting to devour her. And suddenly she understood the impulse to murder—this was
Paul’s
fault, all of this, and he should suffer as she was suffering.
She flung open the doors to the closet and considered the line of Paul’s suits. They marched along the back of the closet, in a palette that ranged from gray to black, summer weight to heavy woolens, the coordinating shirts hanging just below. Ties hung crisply from a rotating rack. Shoes were in position below, again matched by color, each shoe polished to a shine and stuffed with a cedar shoe tree to keep its shape. Janice thought of the endless hours she had spent at Thomas Pink and Neiman Marcus, selecting those 44R suits, those matching ties and dress shoes and shirts with meticulous care. The hours she spent designing an organizational system for the closet that would guarantee that Paul would never leave for a predawn meeting accidentally wearing a black suit with a brown shoe. The shirts she had taken to be dry-cleaned and pressed until they snapped on their hangers. She could have been a translator at the U.N., or a fashion designer in Paris, or gone to culinary school, and instead, she’d spent the last thirty years doing
this,
for a man who seemed to believe that it had turned her into some kind of ogre.
With one arm, Janice swept the shirts off the rack and into a pile on the floor. They lay in a satisfying heap, wrinkling, wasting hours of her exertions. Then she attacked the suits, which, being heavier, required more effort. The pile grew. Woolens and gabardines and worsteds lay in heaps. She began to perspire. The contents of the bureau came next: socks, underwear, handkerchiefs, T-shirts, pajamas, golf clothes, each drawer turned upside down and emptied onto the floor. The personal effects: They would go too. She dumped the contents of his jewelry box into the pile.
The mountain of Paul’s possessions on the floor of the closet looked disappointingly small. She wanted it to be enormous, a massive purge. She stepped into the bedroom and looked around: pictures. Paul was all around her, smiling out from a dozen photographs, from the bedside table, the top of the bureau. Janice swept these away. Yes, she was throwing away images of Margaret and Lizzie and herself in the process, but they would take more photos, this time
without
Paul.
She continued her rampage down the stairs, removing, as she went, the annual Christmas family portraits. Paul’s stiff, false smile—no, she never wanted to see it again. At the bottom of the stairs, she stacked all twenty-eight of the photographs in a precarious tower; then she made her way to the kitchen, where, after tucking back a glass of wine, she unearthed a box of super-strength Hefty bags from under the sink.
All told, Paul’s presence in the house filled up seven Hefty bags. This was a good start, Janice thought as she stuffed the stiff fabrics into the black plastic, hangers and all. The sharp edges of the photographs poked holes through the bags. The shoes left polish marks on the pristine white golf shorts. But Janice didn’t care, not at all. Soon, her velour tracksuit was soaked through with sweat and streaked black from the dust at the back of Paul’s closet.
Janice dragged the first Hefty bag down the staircase, letting it land with a thunk against each step, and then on out the front door toward the curb, where the garbage and recycling bins were already awaiting their weekly pickup. From inside the bag came the crunch of broken glass. She tried to lift it over her shoulder, but the bag, loaded with suits, was too heavy. She dropped it to the driveway and tried to drag it behind her with both hands, but the plastic didn’t glide along in gravel the way it had on the hardwood floors. The bag resisted her and snagged in the sharp stones. She gave it one more heave and heard the sound of ripping plastic as the bottom of the bag split open and Paul’s clothes spilled out onto the gravel.
“Piece-of-crap bag,” Janice exploded. “Super-strength, my ass.” She kicked at a camel-colored overcoat with her foot and watched it tumble through the chalky white dust, and then she broke into hysterical, furious sobs. Sat right down in the gravel and screamed.
When she came back to herself, after what must have been five minutes, it felt like she was emerging from a red haze. Her jagged breaths came slower and more smoothly, and she gazed out onto the street, at the Ferns’ new house on the other side of the road, at the drapes pulled shut in the Upadhyays’ living room. She realized that the neighbors, if they were looking out the window, had just been graced with quite a spectacle.
Thank God,
she thought,
there’s no sign of life across the street.
Madness; this was madness. She was completely out of control. What was she going to do, tear the whole house down in order to destroy everything Paul had ever touched? Make a fool of herself in front of the entire neighborhood? And what would Lizzie think when she arrived home from camp to see her mother behaving like an escapee from a lunatic asylum? This was not rational, not at all. She was
better
than this. She thought again of the gentle embrace of the Vicodin: If drugs were what was required to regain control of the situation, then she would simply have to find more, despite Dr. Brunschild. For normalcy’s sake. For Lizzie’s sake.
She gathered Paul’s possessions into her arms and, cradling them, carried everything back upstairs. It took three trips, as she darted from driveway to doorway to avoid being seen by any passersby. The suits were marred with dust and grit, which Janice scrubbed away with a damp cloth and a lint brush before hanging them back on the rack. She emptied the six other sacks, returning each item to its place. She rehung the photographs in the stairwell. The two broken photographs she put in the back seat of her SUV, to be taken to the frame shop for repair. When she was done, she drank an entire bottle of wine and crawled into bed. When Lizzie found her there, later that afternoon, Janice couldn’t even sit upright, and the alarmed expression on Lizzie’s face only firmed up Janice’s resolve. That, and the news that Margaret was going to be coming home. There was no way Margaret was going to see her like this. She needed to get more Vicodin, in order to pull herself together. But how?
the day after her breakdown, janice woke up hung-over and irritated. It was hot in the house, despite the air-conditioning, and Janice found herself gravitating toward the cool, clean water of the pool.