Tommy
T
ommy had his bag packed. A year or so ago, he would have felt pained to leave Crowheart behind, but today his heart leapt. A break would do him good. This rustic lifestyle just wasn’t working out. It had been fun at first, but subjecting himself to being Earth Man for years to come, chopping wood all winter, was the last thing he wanted. He’d done everything he could to please his wife, but it wasn’t working. He’d tried, yearned to make her happy, but he couldn’t do it anymore; be her “happy barometer,” the one responsible for her equilibrium. He needed to make new plans for his family, for himself—he needed to get them out of this rut.
As he stood in the kitchen drinking a Guinness, he watched Sylvia as she half-leaned against the table, chopping vegetables. Her tall frame was slightly stooped. She’d changed. The only thing he’d ever noticed about her height before was her grace, her elegance. She had always carried her shoulders erect, her golden head held high like a dancer. He’d always been struck by her beauty—she was still beautiful, but different. These days, she had a sad look to her so much of the time. Never with Grace—she was an amazing mother.
But with him.
He wondered if she even loved him. Certainly not the way she used to in the beginning, when she laughed at his jokes and marveled at things he’d say. She used to think he was clever, dynamic. Now she was bored by him. Unimpressed. Obviously. He sensed that she was judging him, dissecting him all the time. Grace coming into their lives was incredible—he loved that little minx—but Sylvia had become distant toward him, as if she already had all the love she needed by way of her child.
Sylvia dressed badly now. Slobby jeans and ugg boots. In New York, she looked like a movie star every day of the week, even Sundays. She had her hair done, wore heels, short skirts, make-up. He remembered he used to think of her like a sparkler—fizzy, blindingly bright. Sexy. But now it was as if she just didn’t give a damn. He’d heard Grace refer to that nonchalant look she wore as her “Ground Dog” face, and Grace was right. It was as if a switch was turned on (or off). Sylvia would be playing with Grace, all smiles and joy, and then he’d walk into the room and she’d don a deep, hurt expression as if he’d wounded her in some way.
There she was now. Chop, chop, chop. She was always in the kitchen, doing chores. He didn’t want her to be that woman—sweeping, chopping, scrubbing bloody pans. She was better than that. He wished he could afford to get help. He felt emasculated. He wasn’t earning enough money to support them. Sylvia’s father had been helping them out the year before and the more he did so, the more distant she became. They hardly had sex anymore. If they did, it was as if she was doing him a favor. She’d say, “I know we haven’t done it for a while so feel free to come whenever you want.” e.g.,
get it over with as
soon as you can
.
So no wonder he’d got tempted. Because Sylvia didn’t even seem to notice. All she appeared to care about was being a mother. He felt expendable like some piece of dirty laundry tossed aside at the end of each day. Had he fixed this? Had he fixed that? Could he do dinner tonight?—she was feeling tired. She was always tired, lackluster. She never laughed at his jokes anymore; she tuned out when he talked about his passions. Photography, for instance, nodding her head in agreement with a glazed look in her eyes. Distant. Absent. Even disdainful, in a passive, supposedly benign way.
He needed time for himself. He needed to get his identity back. He used to be a player earning a hefty income. And he’d jacked it all in for “creation,” for a peaceful family life. But the price he was paying was high, when what he was getting on his return was proving to be cheap, shoddy. Like a new piece of equipment you long for but once you’ve tried, you want to take straight back to the store because the ads for it were better than the product.
Rural life was not for him. Evidently not for Sylvia either. It was hard to be creative when you were broke. But he was trapped in a catch-22. Skint. Out of a real job. Neither creating nor earning—lost in a sort of purgatory.
And he wanted out.
Sometimes he thought of taking his family to England. But what a mess his country was turning out to be. Unemployment, crime, schools either insanely expensive or too dangerous to attend. No, he was over the UK. His home was here, in America. Still the land of opportunities, if you worked hard and luck was on your side. Maybe, just maybe, this job in LA would pan out.
Right now, he felt creatively homeless.
All this “Bel Ange” and Facebook guilt crap Sylvia was throwing at him was just making it worse. He hadn’t
done anything
except take the girl out to lunch that time, but his wife was acting as if he’d sold his soul to the Devil. He might as well have fucked Marie for all the fuss it caused.
And on some days, he wished he had.
Sylvia
S
ylvia and Grace were at the airport, waiting for Ruth to arrive. They’d already seen Tommy off, and for some reason it was Sylvia who cried, not Grace, when she saw him turn the corner and disappear through Security.
However, the prospect of having a friend to stay for a couple of weeks was exhilarating. Sylvia had nobody to chat with apart from her husband. There were some friendly women about, it was true—they’d been welcoming, and she liked them, but they had nothing particularly in common with each other. Not really. Unless you called living in the middle of America’s wilderness something in common.
Sometimes she’d hook up with a neighbor and they’d go horseback riding when Grace was at school. They’d chat about this or that, but Sylvia had gotten used to her sophisticated, New York friends who traveled the world, and who could talk about art or literature with her. Ruth was like that. During their Skype calls, they’d discussed the structure of novels and scripts. Points of view, character, what made someone tick, and why. She knew Ruth valued her judgment as an armchair critic and editor. Sylvia could spot faults quickly. Easier done, of course, with somebody else’s work. With her own screenplay she’d got completely stuck and was half tempted to chuck the whole thing out. Figuratively speaking. She, like everybody else, wrote on her laptop, addicted to spell-check, just like any writer. Writing a movie script had been a dream but it was far harder than she’d imagined it would be to complete. How could a hundred and twenty pages be so tough? But it was. If it was that easy, she guessed, everybody would be at it.
She missed her job, though. She thought it would be a relief to no longer play nanny cum psychotherapist to her actor clients who were so needy and self-centered. But they were also fun, often a bit eccentric and creative, and she missed them. She’d go to first nights at the theatre, movie premieres; they’d review scripts and sit in dark bars talking about the Method or the craze for hand-held cameras, and they’d show her brilliant short films shot on iPhones. She pined for all that now. Although, having Grace did make up for it. Her daughter was just as entertaining as any of them, and smarter, too. Grace’s little mind never stopped clicking away, asking questions, dissecting possibilities. She made Sylvia alert. Grace wouldn’t let her get away with bland explanations. Thank God for that, she thought,
or my mind would be
marshmallow by now.
“Mommy, why doesn’t Ruth have a home?”
Sylvia swallowed the last of her lunch at one of the airport cafés. Grace was sitting on a chair too big for her, swinging her legs excitedly, and slurping freshly squeezed orange juice through a straw. She’d begged for a soda but to deaf ears.
“Because she split with her boyfriend, honey.”
“But why did she live in her boyfriend’s house? You told Daddy that she had
pots
of money. She could have her own house.”
Never misses a trick that little girl.
Grace had a point, though. Why hadn’t Ruth bought her own home yet? Why wasn’t she house-hunting this summer instead of visiting friends?
“Maybe because she’s a free spirit, sweetie, she didn’t want to tie herself down.”
“With rope?”
Sylvia laughed. “It’s just an expression, Gracie, a way of saying something. It means not getting bored with the same thing. I remember when I was a little girl though, your age, and a friend of mine got dirt all over her skirt and she said that her mother was going to ‘kill’ her. And I said, ‘
What with, a knife or a gun
?’ She just meant that her mom would get very cross with her because she’d got dirty.” Sylvia realized she’d said too much, forgetting her daughter was merely five years old. “Have you had enough to eat, honey? Would you like a brownie now?”
“No thank you, Mommy, I’m full.”
Sylvia took in a deep, satisfied breath. She had raised a polite little angel, she gushed to herself. An adorable, perfect child. “Come on, Gracie, let’s go and find Ruth.”
Ruth was more glamorous than Sylvia remembered. She was wearing a straw cowboy hat, her skin tanned golden, her dark hair long and unruly. A smile stretched across her friendly, open face. Her eyes lit up when she spotted Grace, and Sylvia felt a wave of relief, knowing that she was having a friend to stay for a while. A real friend, with whom she had so much in common.
“DO YOU STILL think Ruth’s eyes are the color of poop?” Sylvia asked as she tucked Grace up in bed, later that evening.
“No, she’s pretty. And very nice. I like her.
A lot
. I do remember her now.”
Sylvia walked over to the bedroom window and looked out. The stars fell thick in the blue-black sky and the first crickets of the season chirped in the high grass, even though it was still only May. She drew the curtains.
Grace pouted. “But you took so
long
to come up and read me the Two Bad Mice!”
“That’s because we have a guest. Guests need to be treated with respect and made to feel welcome.”
“Well Pidgey O Dollars thinks Story-Time is more important.”
“Where
is
Pidgey O Dollars, by the way?”
“He’s hiding under the blanket.”
“Let me give him a kiss. And you, too. A big hug and a kiss.” Sylvia felt the soft, combed cotton of Grace’s rosebud pajamas and breathed in the sweet scent of soap and little girl. If only she could bottle it forever. “Sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what little girls are made of,” she whispered. “Sleep tight, sweetheart.”
Grace’s eyelids fluttered. “Sing me a lullaby.”
Sylvia sat on the edge of the bed and tucked the blankets tight around Grace’s smooth, honey-brown neck. She pressed the war-torn veteran teddy into the pillow next to her, and began to sing:
“Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream . . .
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.”
She crooned the same song four or five times over, then switched on the nightlight, a little Swiss chalet with snow on its roof, and tiny windows glowing golden—a comfort to ward off the gremlins. Her daughter had already fallen into a profound sleep.
Sylvia tiptoed out of the room and went downstairs.
Ruth was sitting at the kitchen table, pouring herself another glass of white wine. “Honey,” she said, “little Gracie is just
divine
. I could eat her!”
“Isn’t she? She changed my life.”
“I heard her chatting with her dad on Skype earlier this evening. So
cute
! She sounded English when she was talking to him.”
“I know. It’s funny. I catch her all the time. English with him, American with me, but with the local kids at school she blends in perfectly. She’s quite a chameleon. Last summer, we had a Mexican au pair girl staying with us. Grace was actually speaking Spanish by the end of the summer. Incredible how fast they pick up stuff at that age.”
“I was trilingual from the beginning,” Ruth told her. “I think you make little compartments for each language when you start young. They’ve done psychological tests and say it doesn’t confuse a child at all to know several languages.”
“Always useful, that’s for sure,” Sylvia said. “She has a musical ear.”
“Usually people who are good with languages and impersonations are great with music. Not me, though. I can’t hold a tune. Unless I’m singing ‘Happy Birthday Mr. President,’ aka Marilyn Monroe. And I can do a mean Katharine Hepburn imitation.”
Sylvia nudged her arm. “Go on then, show me.”
Ruth proceeded to run a gamut of impersonations of Humphrey Bogart, Christopher Walken, Margaret Thatcher, Jack Nicholson, and Katharine Hepburn—all without hardly pausing for breath. Sylvia held her stomach she was laughing so hard.
“Stop,” Sylvia said, her breath caught in her giggle, “be serious now; I don’t want to wake Grace with all the noise I’m making.”
Ruth went back to being Ruth and asked seriously, “So how are things going with hubby? When we Skyped the other day you sounded really down. Sweetie,” Ruth said, putting her hand on Sylvia’s shoulder and tilting her head to one side, “I’m so sorry he’s not fulfilling your needs.”
Sylvia looked at her friend. She had never thought of it that way before. She felt betrayed by Tommy and she’d been hurt by him, but having her needs “fulfilled,” per se, sounded like some sort of therapist babble and was something that she had never even considered. Were people put on this earth to fulfill each other’s needs, she wondered? She wasn’t even aware of what her needs were. “He’s a great dad,” she replied in his defense.
Ruth took a sip of wine. “Yes, but what he did to you was so
wounding
, so belittling.”
Sylvia had felt furious with her husband but for some reason her hackles rose like a defensive dog, “It’s water under the bridge now. He’s being really sweet. We’ve been having a rough time financially. I think it was his way of—”
“Of what?”
Sylvia shook her head. “Never mind.”
“No, what do you think he was trying to prove?”