Authors: Suzanne Jenkins
He turned to look at her.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” she said angrily.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”
“No. Not until we get home.”
The usual ten-mile journey felt like it was twice that distance. Ed pulled the car into the garage, and Lisa got Megan out of the backseat without wasting a step. “Get her diaper bag.” Ed did as she asked. She waited for him to unlock the door, and it wasn’t until she was watching his shaking hands trying to get the key into the lock that she noticed he had black ink all over his fingers.
“What’s going on? Why do you have ink all over your hands?” Did he have an accident with a pen? Then the words “finger-printed” drifted through her head. A flush of heat spread through her body. She didn’t say a word yet, wanting to get the baby into her crib before she attacked him.
He looked down at his hands and then back to her, but she pushed by him to get to the nursery. She went up the stairs as quickly as she could and put the baby down without waking her. Going into the hall bathroom to wash her hands, she looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the face staring back at her. Although she hadn’t confronted it yet, she knew in her heart they were in trouble. She had a moment of clarity. She could deal with it as her mother had dealt with problems all of her life: by ignoring it, or facing it head on. Grabbing the towel, she dried off her hands and shut the light off. Their bedroom was dark; he must be down in the kitchen waiting for her. She held on to the handrail, her mind empty for just a moment, but her heart still hammered out a staccato beat.
“Okay, what the heck happened? You were gone for six hours, and now I see that you have fingerprint ink all over your hands.”
He’d tried to wash it off when she was upstairs, but it still showed, the ink having worked into the crevices of his skin.
“Did your mom tell you anything? About my call to the house?”
Lisa shook her head. “No, not a word. When did you call her? Why didn’t you call me?”
“I was arrested, Lisa. I needed Dan to get to the police station. It’s true they’ll only give you one call. No more than one. Dan must have decided not to tell you. I don’t know because we barely spoke on the way home.”
“Well? What did you get arrested for?” She felt sick. She went through several scenarios in about sixty seconds. In the first one, Ed was caught stealing from the 7-Eleven
. He goes in and demands money from the clerk. No, he wouldn’t do that. He goes into the store and takes a bag of potato chips and flees, but the owner catches him. Ed runs like a girl, so it would be easy to catch him.
“I was arrested for indecent exposure.”
He’d gone to the sink and was filling a glass from the tap even though she kept after him to drink only filtered water. Now wasn’t the time to correct him. She watched him put the glass under the faucet, not allowing it to run at all, so it would be warm and taste like pipe. The faucet was new, as was the farm sink. Ed didn’t like either one, but Lisa had to have it. Pam gave her the money, and she made sure all the renovations that they did were high end, out of reach with Ed’s salary, but just on target with her allowance. Why she thought of the sink and the money thing just as he’d confessed those ugly words,
indecent exposure
, was a mystery, although she’d begin to grasp her responsibility in a second or two.
“Who’d you expose yourself to?” she asked softly. The next scenario was of
Ed pulling into the front of a 7-Eleven, approaching a bevy of adolescent girls at the Slurpee machine, and unzipping.
Why the 7-Eleven motifs kept popping up wasn’t explainable; none of this was explainable.
“A cop,” he said. He was nervous, and she could tell there was a big part of the story to get to yet, and she needed to stay calm, not to yell at him for being slow. Ed could be
really
slow.
“And how did that come about?” she asked, completely confused now. There was simply no scenario to explain him exposing himself to a cop unless he wanted to be jailed, so she didn’t say anything else. She watched him drink from the glass and put it back in the sink, rinsing it out first although it only had water in it to begin with. She’d trained him well.
He took a deep breath. “Could we sit down first?” he asked, nodding toward the table. She hated the thought of an unpleasant association in her kitchen. It was such a great kitchen. She had grey quartz counters and subway tiles, hardwood floors and big windows. They’d left the windows uncovered, but tonight she wished there was something over them in case a neighbor was watching this unfold. She didn’t know how much longer she would be able to keep it together.
“Let’s go in the den, okay? I feel exposed in here tonight.” She hoped this wasn’t going to ruin her house for her.
He followed her into the den. It had cooled now, a late spring evening, and she pointed the remote at the fireplace and pushed the on button. A blue flame spread across the fake ceramic log. Was it really just that morning that they’d laid on the beach together, that she’d tried to fondle him under a towel?
“Please leave the lights off,” she said. She didn’t want to watch his face grow any paler; he was already pasty, a gloss of sweat on his forehead. She wanted him to go take a shower but needed this horror show to be over with first.
“You were going to tell me how you happened to show yourself to a cop,” she said, reminding him, avoiding the word “exposed.”
They sat on the couch together, she facing him with her arms wrapped around her knees, and him facing the fire. He looked over at her.
“How much detail do you need?” he asked.
“Well, why not tell me everything? Where were you?”
“I was in the car,” he explained. He told her about pulling behind the Taco Bell and eating and then thinking about his life, and how he was failing her sexually. He didn’t know why, he explained, but he suddenly wanted to know what it was like to masturbate. He looked at his wife.
“I’d never done it before,” he lied. “I was thinking about you, too.”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault,” she said, disgusted. “Get on with the story, please. You were jacking off in my mother’s car, is that correct?”
He nodded. “Yes. But I didn’t come. I was ready to, and when I reached over for a Taco Bell napkin, the cop was standing there, knocking on the window.”
Lisa couldn’t help it. She was either going to beat the crap out of him, he was just asking for it, cowering there on the designer couch, or burst out laughing. She chose the laugh, although the humiliation it would cause her husband would propel him further on his downward spiral.
“Oh my God! I can see it now. Your dick in your hand and looking up to see a cop. You can’t imagine the picture I have in my head.”
Ed looked at her. “No, actually, I can. That was a great description. Very fitting for my wife to think it was funny. Our relationship is so fucked up.”
It was as if he’d thrown a bucket of ice at her. He’d never complained before, and now when she really needed him to get on his knees and beg her for forgiveness, he was being a jerk. She decided to get more information out of him before he clammed up.
“So, did Dan come to the rescue? He never showed up for dinner either, and now I know why.”
“Yes, he did,” Ed replied.
“Did he drive you home from the station?”
Ed nodded his head, knowing what was coming next. “And where, if I may ask, is my mother’s car?”
“It was impounded. But Dan said he’d take care of it on Tuesday. They don’t release cars on a holiday weekend.”
Lisa got up and started to pace, thinking about what had taken place. The local police caught her husband with his dick in his hand. He didn’t really expose himself to anyone. The cop should’ve known there was a possibility that he might see something if he peeked in parked cars. Ed was a good guy, not a sex addict who had to do it every moment like her father did. He was just unlucky. Or was there something else she was failing to recognize? She stopped pacing and looked down at him, pathetic guy, skinny and hunched over. When had he lost so much weight? It was clear that there was more here needing investigation. She went to sit down beside him, putting an arm around his shoulders.
“I’m sorry I laughed about it, Ed. You’re right; our marriage is fucked up right now. Do you forgive me for laughing?”
He looked into her eyes and nodded. “Can
you
forgive
me
for embarrassing your family? When this gets out, I might lose my job. No, I
will
lose my job. You can’t flash your penis around a town like Babylon and not suffer some repercussions.”
Lisa burst out laughing when he said it, although she knew he was probably right.
“Ed, stop. Let’s just deal with one thing at a time. Your parents are at my mother’s house. We can’t abandon Pam and sit here in hiding all weekend. It’s a good thing it’s a holiday. No reporters are going to bother spending much time looking at police records.” She hoped she was right. Standing up, she pulled on his hand until he was on his feet.
“Let’s go to bed, okay? I guess we don’t have to worry about having sex for a while,” she said, chuckling. Yep, that was the last thing on her mind and would be the last thing on his for a long time.
Chapter 4
The children’s wing was far enough from the rest of the house that just about anything could transpire there and no one would hear. On the first night away from the Eagle’s Nest Retirement Center, Bernice Smith was having a meltdown. Nelda was used to caring for her when sundowner’s syndrome turned a normally lucid Bernice into a confused, whining woman.
Pam was in the kitchen, making tea at midnight, when she heard murmuring coming from Marie’s old room. She turned the gas off under the kettle and tiptoed into the hallway leading to the rooms.
“Bernie, just sit here for a minute and let me get my nightgown on. You’re all ready for bed, now it’s my turn.”
“Why are we here? I want to go back to the mansion.”
“This is Jack and Pam’s house. You remember, don’t you? We’re here for their picnic. You love the beach.”
“Where’s Jack? I don’t care for Pam, you realize that, correct?”
Pam snickered; age-old dislike was difficult for even the most compassionate daughter-in-law to deal with. She was ready to burst in and send the old witch back to the nursing home, but wanted to hear what else she had to say first.
“Jack died,” Nelda said. “He died before the picnic, so we didn’t have one that year. Last year was the first picnic Pam had without him. We had such a great time! You laughed and flirted with all the men here; don’t you remember?”
Pam waited for Bernice’s reply.
“Maybe I remember, maybe I don’t. So much has changed. My sons, my beautiful home, all gone. I might remember a picnic here. When Albert was alive, we used to go to picnics in Central Park every Sunday.”
“Who’s Albert?” Nelda asked. Pam’s heart started pounding. She knew who Bertram Albert was. “I thought your husband’s name was Harold.”
“Bertram Albert was Jack’s father,” Bernice said softly, lucid.
Pam leaned up against the wall, hopeful Bernice would go on with the story.
“You never mentioned him before,” Nelda replied. “I didn’t know you’d been married twice.”
“I wasn’t. We were going to get married, and then he died,” Bernice said, and Pam could hear the sadness in her voice. “Albert knew I was pregnant with Jack before he died. Of course, back in those days you didn’t know what you were going to have. I remember telling him I thought I was going to have a baby. It was devastating. My parents were working class. Back in those days,” Bernice used that phrase over again, “working class Jews lived off Delancy. It’s not like it is today, with all the same stores you find on Madison Avenue. The people you passed on the street were the same ones whose parents and grandparents had lived there, too. Back in those days, you could get the best knishes I’d ever tasted right on the street from a cart. My father was a cobbler, and his shoes were sought after by nurses and teachers, anyone who had to stand on their feet all day. My mother was a housewife, but she baked amazing cakes and pies. During the Christian holidays, the bakeshop on 2
nd
Avenue bought everything she baked. It was a Jewish bakery, but a lot of Italians had moved into the neighborhood during the war. My parents were simple people, but they weren’t stupid, and they were strict. I could not go to them pregnant and unmarried. They’d have disowned me.”
Pam was trembling, listening to her mother-in-law’s heartbreaking story.
“So what did you do?” Nelda had stopped undressing and was sitting on the edge of the bed next to Bernice, holding her hand.
“I left home. My excuse was job related. And then when Albert died, I was sunk. It wasn’t unusual back in those days for a young woman to go away to work and not see her parents often. I tried hiding the pregnancy so I could continue working, and succeeded. No one could tell.
“Harold had been hounding me a long time. I was a secretary in his father’s construction office. After I had the baby, after I had Jack, and told him the truth, he was shocked, but he didn’t judge me. He asked me to marry him. I knew it wasn’t ideal, but he was kind to me and wealthy, and he said he’d raise Jack as his own son.
“I knew Harold had ways about him that I might find disagreeable, but I was desperate. After we were married, we moved into the mansion with the Smiths. Mrs. Smith was wonderful to Jack and me. She would have continued to play an important role in my children’s lives if she’d lived. When she was around, everyone was on their best behavior, especially the sons. But after her death, everything sort of fell apart.
“The old man died a year later, and then the brothers tried to keep the business going. There was a construction boom after the Korean conflict; all the soldiers coming home from the war started families and needed housing. Harold jumped on it. All of those awful high rises along the FDR? Harold. Yes, he could smell out a deal on land. When the housing market dried up, he started the demographics end of the business.