Outtakes from a Marriage (18 page)

“Hi, guys!” I said. Sammy ran across the room and leaped onto Ruby’s lap.

“Sammy, watch it!” said Ruby.

“Hi, Julia!” said Catalina. I smiled but Ruby looked straight ahead at the TV, her knitting needles clacking angrily against each other.

“How was school, Ruby?” I asked.

Silence.

“Ruby?” said Catalina.

“Ella abusa niños,”
Ruby said to Catalina.

“Ella no abusa niños,”
Catalina scolded.
“Hablas con su madre.”

Because my spoken Spanish is so bad, Ruby and Catalina think I can’t understand what they’re saying. I understand enough.

“¡Abusa niños!”
Catalina said again, rising now and laughing. “Americans! In my country, if a child hit his mother and she no hit him back…
that
is child abuse! Because he might grow up and think nobody ever care enough about me to teach me anything about what is right and wrong.”

Then she said, “I’ll finish the dinner,” and she kissed Ruby on the top of her head.

“Thanks, Catalina,” I said, and she looked like she was going to give me a little hug, but I must have given her some kind of nonverbal indication that her touching me would cause me to dissolve into a sodden pile of tears, because she just touched my arm and went into the kitchen.

“I guess she knows where her bread is buttered,” Ruby muttered.

“RUBY!” I shouted. “THAT’S ENOUGH!”

The decibel of my shouting caught Ruby and me both by surprise and Ruby looked at me, startled. Then she started to cry. I wanted to keep shouting. I wanted to tell her to give me a fucking break. That I was obviously in over my head when it came to parenting. That what little I knew about being a mother I had learned from Catalina—a woman who went to Mass every morning and mysteriously crossed herself whenever she heard a siren. That Ruby’s whole life, the best I could do was act as if I knew what I was doing. But I didn’t keep shouting. Instead, I sat next to Ruby and put my arms around her, and she didn’t pull away. She hugged me back and sobbed. Sammy patted her and said, “No crying, Ruby! No crying!”

“Everybody at school is asking me if Daddy’s gay!” Ruby sobbed.

“What?”

“It’s what all the kids at my school are talking about. Daddy picks up guys at nightclubs and is secretly gay.”

“Ruby, you know that’s not true,” I said.

“How am I supposed to know it’s not true?”

“You’d know if your father was gay!”

“There are gay men whose
wives
don’t even know they’re gay.”

“Okay, I’ve told Catalina again and again, I don’t like you kids watching
Oprah.
”

“Why all the gay rumors, then, if Daddy’s not gay?” Ruby sniffed.

“People are sometimes jealous and resentful of celebrities and they make up things out of spite. A miserable, miserable, pathetic person made up those stories about Daddy. Everybody’ll forget them soon, don’t worry.”

“Also…I want a chin implant. I know that’s adding to my insecurity about Daddy….”

Ruby was playing on my sympathy here. She is a beautiful girl, but she had decided almost a year earlier that she had a weak chin. “I have
no
chin,” is what she said, and she’d been angling for a chin implant ever since.

“How does a thirteen-year-old even know about chin implants?” Joe had asked after she first broached the subject. I guess Joe doesn’t get to see a lot of daytime television in that trailer of his. I had told Ruby again and again that she was too young for cosmetic surgery, but now I felt my resolve weakening. I felt like one of the world’s worst mothers. It would be so easy to ingratiate myself with Ruby again by giving in on this issue. I couldn’t take back the ridiculous rumors I’d started about Joe, or the fact that I had slapped Sammy, but I
could
make her an appointment with a surgeon and buy her a new chin!

Then I came to my senses.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?! You obviously spent a fortune on your hair extensions, and everybody can tell you’ve had your lips injected—I don’t know who you’re trying to fool! You can do anything you want to try to improve your looks, but I’m not allowed to fix my facial deformity?”

“That’s right,” I said coolly.

“It’s my face!”

“It’ll be your face when you’re eighteen. Legally, it’s my face now and it’s not finished growing. And you’re right about my lips and hair. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have done all this—”

Ruby stood up and started to leave the room.

“—
but
I’m a grown-up, and when you’re grown-up, you can do anything you want to your face!”

“Uggggh!” Ruby shouted from the back hall before she slammed her door.

I went into the kitchen, where Catalina was tending to a roast pork tenderloin. A pot of potatoes was simmering on the stove. Joe was due home any minute and I suddenly wanted the kitchen to myself. I felt full of wifely goodness. Goodwife Ferraro, I was. In a few short hours, I had advocated for one child at his school and set limits with another. This was the best mothering I had done in weeks. Now I wanted my kitchen back.

“You don’t have to stay, Catalina,” I said with a smile.

“Oh…” she replied, confused.

“Just show me what to do and I’ll finish making dinner. You can have the rest of the night off.”

“Okay. Is almost ready. The roast needs to stay in the oven for another twenty minutes. Then it’ll be finished. The potatoes are almost ready to be mashed. You’re sure you no want me to stay and do that?”

“No, I remember how to mash potatoes.”

“There is salad in the fridge, and a tofu stir-fry for Ruby. Just put it in the microwave for about a minute.”

“That sounds good.”

“And those green beans with garlic that Joe likes. They’re on the stove. They’re all done.”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks.”

I said good-bye to Catalina and dumped the boiled potatoes into a bowl. I poured cream over the potatoes and dropped some butter in as well. “Plenty of salt,” my mother used to tell me when I helped her make potatoes. Mashing potatoes was one of only a handful of things I clearly remembered doing with my mother. I’ll have to show Ruby how to make mashed potatoes, I thought, and I’ll say, “My mom always told me that the secret to her mashed potatoes was plenty of salt.”

Ruby has a bit of a biased perspective on my mother. She thinks she was careless—even more careless than me. “Things were different then—we had more freedom,” I had told her the day, two summers ago, when we visited my old neighborhood. Joe was shooting a film in D.C., so Ruby and I had taken a day trip to Annapolis, and after we went on a tour of the Naval Academy, we went to my old block. We gazed at the house—it had been a two-family home when we lived there but now it was a grander single-family home. I led her down to the old railroad tracks—now overgrown with weeds—and I told her about how Neil and I used to play down at the tracks in the late-summer afternoons, looking for snakes and bottles and treasure. I told her about the Confederate money that local kids believed had been buried in the woods behind the tracks. And about the house on the corner that was supposed to be haunted by a wife-murderer. It was hard to explain to literal-minded Ruby how the ghosts of murderers and witches and Confederate soldiers swam in our little minds. We didn’t go to preschool, and we didn’t need the constant supervision of our parents, the way kids do today. We were never expected to sit quietly in groups or develop sequencing skills. Our teachers were the six-and seven-year-olds in the neighborhood who told us that in elevators in skyscrapers there is no gravity, that dogs’ mouths are cleaner than people’s, and that cats can fall safely from a five-story building by landing on their feet.

“You were only five when you lived here, but you could run around the neighborhood without any grown-ups?” Ruby had asked.

“We weren’t allowed past the railroad bridge,” I told her, pointing to the stone structure ahead of us. It had seemed like the end of the world to us back then. “I can’t believe it’s really such a short distance from our house!”

The bridge looms large in my memories of that neighborhood because we were forbidden to cross it, but we had done so late one night, according to my father. He and my mother had left us alone in the house, Neil and me, because we were sound asleep. “You kids never woke up once you were asleep. Never!” my father said. “Sometimes, not often, we’d sneak out after you puppies were asleep, just to run up the road to the neighbors for a beer,” and the term
sneak
used here always amused me. The idea that my father—young, handsome, and strong—and my free-spirited mom had to “sneak” behind our backs to do anything was astonishing. Anyway, one night they returned from their drinks at the neighbors’ and found Neil and me, frantic and hysterical, running across the railroad bridge in our pajamas in the dark. “Where were you two pups running off to?” my father used to laugh when he recounted the story, but I have no idea, because I think my only recollection of that night left for me is of his telling it.

I never share this story with Ruby—she wouldn’t get it, just like she doesn’t get the fun of “rounds.” I had tried to get her and Joe, and later Sammy, to sing rounds in the car with me, but they all thought it was too tedious and kept muddling their parts. “You sing it yourself,” Ruby said the last time we tried, and I had sung one verse, but it’s no fun singing “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream” when nobody’s following you. When it ends, when you’re alone—it’s all at once. It’s like hitting a wall.

When Joe arrived home half an hour later, the table was set. Ruby was in her room instant-messaging her friends, Sammy was watching Nick Jr. in our room, and I was in the kitchen opening a bottle of Chardonnay.

“Dinner smells good,” said Joe. He walked up behind me and kissed the back of my neck. “And you do, too!”

I turned and kissed him on the lips.

“I know about Jenna,” I whispered. I thought I’d take back my husband, while I was at it.

Joe stiffened, then pulled back a little. “Who?”

I grabbed the front of his shirt and remembered fighting with my brother as a child and the mistake of the shirt grab. Neil used to wriggle out of his shirt while I tugged on it, cursing and crying, trying to smack him on the head. He would squirm free of the shirt in the blink of an eye and then start shoving me, or worse.

I released Joe’s shirt and he backed up a few steps.

“Jenna who?”

“Jenna! Your girlfriend. I’ve heard all her messages on your voice mail over the past two weeks. And, by the way, change your code. I can’t get anything done because I’m wasting all my time listening to your simpering whore moaning about how horny she is…. Kids! Time to eat!”

The call to the children was issued in a singsong voice, but the preceding words had been said in the same quiet, controlled, but somehow ultra-menacing tone that my father used when he was really, really angry. His extensive military training always kicked in when he was emotional about something, and we knew that he was raging, fighting mad when his voice lowered to almost a whisper and he had to get real close to our faces so we could hear.

I lifted the platter of roast tenderloin from the counter and carried it into the dining room.

“What the fuck are you talking about? Wait a minute,” Joe said, following me, but Sammy was running into the room and Joe picked him up for his hug.

“Wait,” said Joe, “I think I know what this is about….”

“We’ll have to talk about it after dinner, won’t we, honey?” I said, smiling and motioning toward Sammy.

Needless to say, Joe didn’t eat a lot during dinner, but I finally had my appetite back.

“I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Catalina can really cook. This is delicious,” I said, beaming. I took a small sip of my wine. I had to watch myself and not drink too much, but I wanted to drain the glass down my gullet and pour another. (I thought of my dad, in his current home at the VA hospital, cursing at nurses, his hands shaking and his mind sodden, and I left the rest of the wine in my glass.)

Ruby stared sullenly at her plate. Joe was in full spaniel mode, looking up at me imploringly and then looking away.

I don’t know why I felt so good. Like I was in full charge, for the first time in weeks. Ruby brought up the chin surgery again and I thought Joe was going to break down and weep as he told her that she was perfect the way she was.

“You look like your mother. Like your beautiful mother, when we first met,” he said, and I smiled as I cut into my meat.

After dinner, Ruby helped me with the dishes while Joe put Sammy to bed.

“I’m sorry about what happened last night. With Sammy,” I said. “I’ve already told Sammy I’m sorry, but now I’m telling you.”

Ruby moved about the kitchen quietly. She covered up the vegetables and placed them in the fridge, steering a wide path around the platter of meat.

“You’re so…psycho lately.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m a little stressed.”

“What do you have to be stressed about?” Ruby asked with a little laugh. “I’m the one who’s taking too many honors classes. Daddy’s the one who has to support us. You don’t really have to do anything.”

“I know. You have no idea how stressful that is,” I said.

Eventually, Ruby went to bed and Joe and I were alone in our room. I was in bed, pretending to read, when he came in and shut the door quietly behind him.

“Jenna doesn’t exist,” he said.

I put my book down.

“It’s Susanna.”

“What?”

“Susanna has been cast in a film where she has to play an American. She’s trying out this Southern accent—you know how British and Australian actors who can’t really do American accents always do Southern accents?”

It’s true about the Southern accent,
I thought.
For some reason it’s easy for foreigners.

“She was just being silly and playful. You know she has no interest in me…and vice versa! I told her she could try out the accent on me, so she calls me sometimes after her sessions with her voice coach and she can never think of anything to say, so she just leaves those dirty messages.”