Janice reclines in the salon chair, finding it difficult to lose a tension that’s settled in between her shoulder blades (excitement? anxiety? she can’t tell), while Peggy—who seems out of sorts this morning, her eyes puffy and her responses terse—slaps the stinging peroxide on Janice’s scalp. By the time her hair is blown out and coaxed into submission around her shoulders, Janice can tell that the color is a little too brassy this time, a shade too yellow—the color, she thinks, of a woman trying to cling to youth, rather than of one aging with grace. Peggy watches her staring at herself in the mirror, and Janice forces a smile. “Thank you,” she says. “It’s lovely.” She will
not
let this ruin her day, she decides, and when it comes time to pay the bill, she impulsively adds a $100 tip—a little something to improve Peggy’s spirits. Besides, if today isn’t the day for frivolous generosity, when is?
As she leaves the salon, she checks her cell phone and is frustrated that there is still no message from Paul. The stock market won’t close for another hour, though, and it’s probably too much to expect him to call before then. Janice tucks the phone in her bag and shoulders on to the grocery store, where they have no Cornish game hens at all, the ahi looks mangy, and the cantaloupe that she needs for her melon puffs is completely unripe. As she stands in the produce aisle, morosely contemplating the rock-hard melons, Cecile Bellstrom clips by in her jogging suit, a quart of orange juice in her hands. “Janice!” Cecile exclaims. She pauses, and then bursts out: “Okay, I just can’t stand here and pretend that I don’t know, but of course I do, I saw the news just like everyone else, so I just wanted to say congratulations! Couldn’t happen to a nicer family!”
This lifts Janice back up, out of her strange slump, and she bounds off toward the florist, where she picks up an armful of stargazer lilies for the dinner table. On the way back to her car she spies Noreen Gossett, who just last weekend had been in a golf foursome with her and Beverly—their daughters are in the same class, although Noreen’s rather self-entitled daughter, Susan, has never shown the slightest bit of interest in Lizzie—and she perks up in anticipation of yet another flattering conversation. But instead of coming over to say hello, Noreen twitches and then jerks sideways as if someone had seized her shoulders, veering off without even a wave.
Janice comes to a halt, seized by confusion. She can feel the heat radiating off the parked cars around her as they bake in the midday sun. What could she have done to offend Noreen? Is something wrong? She has a sudden flash of understanding that the news of the Miller family’s new fortune will not be taken well by everyone and that she is not the only person in town who’s ever suffered a twist of jealousy at her neighbor’s successes. But maybe it’s just that Noreen didn’t see her after all, Janice tries to reassure herself. She restlessly pulls out her cell phone and checks it again—ten to one, the stock market closing any minute—before continuing on toward the tailor.
The tailor is two blocks up Centerview Avenue, and Janice glimpses herself in every window she walks past: the organic Italian deli (yes, the hair is definitely too yellow), a real estate agency whose plate glass is hidden underneath photographs of Beaux Arts estates (her tennis skirt is exposing far too much cellulite), and the shop that sells four hundred kinds of artisanal soap (has her chin always had that wobble in it?). A throng of teenagers slump over the wrought-iron sidewalk tables outside the Fountain, eating French fries; the expressions of ennui on their faces suggest that summer, only a week in, has already become a chore. Janice smiles at them as she passes, trying to recall if she knows any of their parents, but they gaze at her without interest. The traffic on the street has picked up—it’s the lunchtime rush—and someone is honking persistently, slamming down on their horn over and over.
At the tailor shop, the owner, an efficient elderly Chinese lady named Mrs. Chen—her fingers, Janice often tells her friends, move as quickly as hummingbirds—sits hunched over a suit, framed by plastic garment bags hanging on the rack behind her. Janice’s own dress, a dark blue Calvin Klein sheath that she had to purchase slightly too large in the chest in order to fit over her hips, is already waiting for her by the cash register, and she tries it on behind the faded curtain that serves as a dressing room. The minute Janice pulls the dress over her head, she knows something is wrong: It wedges at her armpits, with her arms trapped helplessly in the fabric, and refuses to go farther.
“I think you took it in too much,” she calls.
Mrs. Chen peeks around the curtain, seemingly unperturbed by the sight of Janice in tennis panties and a jog bra. She tugs firmly down on the dress, and there’s a sound of popping thread. “You too big,” Mrs. Chen observes mildly, yanking the garment back over Janice’s head.
Janice picks up her tennis shirt to shield her nakedness. “You measured me,” she complains. “I certainly haven’t changed sizes in the last week.”
Mrs. Chen examines the seams of the dress and picks at the zipper. “No worry, I can fix,” she says. “You come back next week.” Janice looks down at the dress—feels the image of herself as the stylish and still-attractive wife effortlessly serving her family a gourmet meal fading away—and is taken aback when tears well up in her eyes. She blinks them back before Mrs. Chen can see them. It’s just a dress, she reminds herself; just a bad haircut, a missed game, an unripe melon.
“Fine,” she says. “It’s not a problem.”
As she returns through the sheltering oaks toward her house—the car radio, tuned to the news, announces that the Nasdaq has closed up thirteen points but mentions nothing about Paul’s company—Janice goes back over her day. She senses that things have shifted out of alignment, like a house that’s slipped off its foundation; trying to identify the origin of this feeling, she fixes on Beverly once more. Something was definitely wrong this morning—it’s not like Beverly not to call—and she is suddenly overwhelmed with a rush of concern for her friend.
Maybe,
she thinks,
if I just sort that out, everything else will fall back into line.
When she reaches the edge of town, instead of turning toward her house, she impulsively turns right, toward Beverly’s.
The Weatherloves live in a two-story Tudor with a shake roof and green shutters. The Fourth of July is still a week away, but Beverly has already hung up bunting and a flag and planted red and white impatiens in the flower beds by the front door. Beverly’s BMW is not in the driveway. Janice rings the doorbell, peering through the front window into the dim living room, but sees no sign of life. She can hear footsteps echoing through the hallway, though, bare feet thudding along the wood floors toward the door.
When the door swings open, Beverly’s teenage son, Mark, stands there, sullen and silent, his hooded sweatshirt yanked over his head despite the heat, his eyes bloodshot, his mottled skin angrily mapping every red pimple.
“Hello, Mark. Is your mother here?” Janice asks.
“No,” he says. His voice is nasal and stuffy—has he been crying?
“Where is she?”
“She’s gone,” he says, which elucidates nothing at all. Janice stands looking at him dumbly, pondering that word:
Gone? Gone where? Gone to the grocery store? Gone away?
She looks at the boy—he’s definitely been crying, and despite her general alarm she feels a stab of tenderness for the dour child.
“Mark, is everything okay?” She steps toward him, her hand half-lifted, tugged by a desire to pull him into her bosom. But Mark shrugs and punches the door slightly toward her, as if to block her way.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Thanks. I’ll let her know you were here.” And then he closes the door, leaving Janice baffled on his front steps. There is nothing for her to do but go back home and hope that she’s making something out of nothing. A forgotten date, a crying kid—it could be anything and nothing at all. But she remembers a confession Beverly made a few months back, after a couple of Bloody Marys in the club lounge, about how her relationship with Louis had been strained for some time, and she can’t help but wonder now if Louis has left her. If she doesn’t hear back from Beverly by the morning, Janice decides, she’ll come marching back and sit on her friend’s doorstep until Beverly tells her what’s wrong.
She pulls into her own driveway just after two and sits in her car for a moment, gazing up at her house. They painted it a pale yellow several years back, the color of a cashmere sweater, and the house seems to glow in the afternoon sun. It’s a graceful, regal building, in a classic Georgian Colonial architectural style, with manicured hedges and pilasters framing the front entrance and ivy creeping up the siding, a house that makes her feel like she’s a part of some great American tradition. Looking at it, she experiences relief, as if she’s ridden out a small squall and has arrived back in a safe port.
But inside, the house is too quiet. The answering machine is silent: no messages. Janice’s breath is loud in the empty kitchen as she puts away the groceries and the champagne, echoing off the stainless steel appliances, the Calphalon pans hanging above the kitchen island on their custom-designed iron rack, the yellow-veined granite counters. In the back garden, James, her new pool boy, has arrived for his biweekly visit. He pushes his net slowly against the current of the water, lifts a single leaf, swings the pole to the side of the pool, and taps the net to deposit the leaf on an accumulating pile of soggy greenery. Janice watches him from the kitchen window. When he looks up, she waves at him, and he lifts a hand and smiles. A worm of sweat rolls down his brow as he upends a jug of chlorine into the deep end.
Janice sets the oven to preheat and quickly begins arranging the stargazer lilies into a centerpiece, with one eye on the clock: She is already behind on her cooking, and she needs to clean, too (her housekeeper, fired earlier in the month when Janice discovered that the liquor cabinet was suspiciously empty, has yet to be replaced). As she sets the table with the good silver, she snaps the television back on and, standing in the middle of the living room with her arms crossed against the chill of the air-conditioning, learns that the Applied Pharmaceuticals stock has closed out the day at 141¼. She absorbs this news neutrally, unable to conjure the breathless excitement she had only six hours earlier. Instead, she just feels weary: weary of taking all of this in on her own, weary of waiting for her husband to call her. Despite his schedule, he should have
wanted
to share the excitement, the second it happened. In this moment of weakness, what creeps in is the sneaking suspicion that her enthusiasm for reviving their marriage is not matched by her husband, that she is going to have to do all the work.
But she perseveres with her table settings, folding three napkins into swan shapes, the way she always has for special occasions, just like Paul’s mother showed her so many years ago. The first time Paul took her back to his parents’ house in Connecticut for Christmas, her senior year of college, it felt like she had stepped into one of those homes her mother had once cleaned. There was the tree, decorated with matching gilt ornaments made of real glass; the homemade stuffing, not from a box; the napkins folded like origami; the sharp-scented pine boughs over the front portico. A portico! Cunning crystal salt and pepper shakers shaped like Christmas trees! The scene winked at her with such familiarity that she almost wept. When Paul’s mother asked her whether her own mother would miss her at the holiday, Janice thought of her, working an extra shift for the overtime pay and then eating a microwaved turkey dinner alone, and lied. “No,” she said. “She’s eating with friends. She’s baking a ham.”
Despite the cordial napkin-folding lessons, Paul’s mother had been less than thrilled to hear, months later, about their shotgun wedding. Janice always suspected that Elaine had more ambitious aspirations for her only son’s wife, a suspicion that was finally confirmed a few years back, during their last visit to Connecticut, where an Alzheimer’s-addled Elaine was decaying in a senior citizens’ home. Elaine had grabbed Janice’s arm with her ropy hands. “I know you,” she had croaked, her breath sour in Janice’s face. “You’re the tramp that trapped my son.”
It wasn’t quite that simple. If fifteen-year-old Janice had imagined college as a place where one went to meet a rich husband, twenty-year-old Janice had grown beyond that. This Janice—Jan to her friends—was a French major known, within her sorority, for her bohemian streak. During her first year at the university, an art history professor had written on one of her essays that she had a “sharp mind and an artistic spirit,” and she had taken him at his word. She read Balzac in the original French, took classes in ceramics (producing a series of very respectable teapots), sewed her own skirts, learned to cook pot-au-feu. She even took up smoking Gauloises at parties and liked the way they conferred upon her an appearance of continental nonchalance. By her junior year she was planning a postgraduation year in Paris, where her thesis adviser said he might be able to arrange a job at a student travel agency. Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she was thrilled by herself.
Paul came as a surprise, a quiet and intense MBA student who materialized by her elbow at a sorority mixer at the beginning of her senior year and doggedly pursued her throughout the fall. When he looked at her, sometimes, she felt like a valedictory prize he had claimed as his own, and she would blush at how much this pleased her. By his side, she experienced a new stillness: He could calmly command a room like that, tilt it toward him until he seemed to be at its vortex. And yet he was vulnerable to her too. One night, they drank too much Chianti, and he told her about his banker father’s expectations for him and his mother’s patrician coldness and cried real tears, and she knew she was in love.
Of course, she hadn’t
intentionally
forgotten to take the pill; not at all. The pill just passed through her mind, like water through a sieve. Graduation was looming, just a few months away, and the question of her future was growing less clear by the day. She had the job lined up in Paris and a room in the home of a young couple who were friends of friends of friends, but Paul no longer smiled benignly when she talked about leaving, as if her year abroad were some charming quirk; instead he glowered like she was betraying him. But if he was so angry with her, why didn’t he ask her to stay? Even though she wasn’t quite sure what her answer should be if he did beg her not to go, she grew increasingly concerned when he didn’t. Would he just
allow
this casual amputation? The thought made her ill. She spent most nights motionless and frozen under the old cotton sheets, unable to sleep. Lying there, in a black fugue, she would remember the smooth pink oval, wrapped in tinfoil and buried in her makeup bag in the bathroom, and think:
I should get up and take the pill. I can’t forget the pill.
And then the next thing she knew it would be morning and she’d be on her way to class and she would have forgotten entirely that she’d never taken it. And she wouldn’t remember again until three days later, when she guiltily gulped down four pills in a row with a glass of milk. She should have said no when Paul crawled in her bed, the way she usually would when this happened, should have told him of her mistake and insisted on a condom, but she didn’t have the willpower to turn him down, not now when he was so distant anyway. And so she lay in bed afterward as he slept beside her in a warm placid sleep and tried to forget that she had forgotten.