Why They Run the Way They Do (4 page)

They'd made it through all
the Michaels, Carrie and Dan believed, made it through Michael Jordan and Michael Douglas and Michael Moore and Michael J. Fox, made it through the terrible summer when Michael Phelps won all those gold medals in swimming, and then the next terrible summer when Michael Jackson died on every channel for days and days, dodged a bullet when Michaels, the crafts store, canceled plans to open in their town (that would have been hell—Dan drove by that strip mall every day on his way to work). Once at a library program when Chloe was two they'd been forced to sing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” but Dan was in the bathroom and missed the whole sordid tune, and by the time he returned everyone was mechanically rolling their fists around to “Wheels on the Bus.” They had survived the Michaels, hadn't bumped into a big, noisy one for over a year, seemed to have found their most solid footing, and when the occasional Michael was mentioned on television, or when their waiter at Chili's wore the vulgar name on his name tag, their world did not lurch to an awkward halt and the piece of them that had already perished a thousand times did not perish again. They, Carrie and Dan both, had pulled through. It had taken six years and one baby girl but they'd made it, together, they'd weathered the storm of Michael, and they were going to be okay.

And then out of the blue one day late in February—no birthday or holiday in sight, no earthly reason—Dan's mother sent Chloe a package with a stuffed armadillo puppet inside and Chloe snatched the animal from the box and hugged it and exclaimed: “Michael! Michael!”

It was early evening, the best time of the day, the sudden, painless shedding of work and preschool complete, the familiar comfort of worn couch cushions and the temperamental garbage disposal. They were in the kitchen, Chloe and Dan at the table (Chloe kneeling on the chair) and Carrie standing at the stove, stirring something in a pot—she couldn't have said what it was in that moment, not if someone had had a knife to her throat.

“How do you know that's his name?” Dan asked, in the most nonchalant tone he could muster.

“Michael! It's Michael!” Chloe said, joyfully, bouncing on her knees. She stuffed her hand into the hole in the armadillo's belly, wiggled her fingers into its head, then thrust it toward her father's face. “I'm Michael,” she said, in her armadillo voice, which was her voice for every animal, a low monotone with a hint of a speech impediment.

“Is he on TV?” asked Carrie from the stove, a panicky, hopeful lilt to her voice, as if she were calling up the stairs in an empty house. Dan looked briefly in her direction, but his eyes were not able to land on his wife. His glance began darting uncontrollably around the room, fly-like. It had been years since this had happened and he was furious and humiliated to find it happening to him now, in front of his daughter, as if she'd notice, as if anyone but him had any idea.

Dan looked at his shoes. This was the only thing that helped.

“What d'ya mean, TV?” Chloe asked. She tried to spin the armadillo around on her finger and it flew off her hand and skittered across the floor to Carrie's feet. Chloe leapt up to retrieve it.

“Does he have a TV show?” Dan asked, looking up, his eyes back under his own power. “Have you seen him on some—”

“No,” Chloe said, smacking a kiss on her mother's knee with the fuzzy, twisted mouth of the puppet. “He's just here, in our house. He's mine. He's—”

—goddamn Michael the goddamn armadillo,
Carrie thought, standing in the backyard, smoking her cigarette. An armadillo! Really? What a stupid animal! Who sent a child an armadillo? Who would even
make
a stuffed armadillo, ugly and scuttling, awkwardly prehistoric? She took a deep drag and let it out as slowly as she could. She allowed herself one cigarette in the backyard every night, after Chloe was asleep and Dan was watching TV or doing the dishes. She also allowed herself to eat a small Baggie of gummie bears before lunch, at her desk. She allowed herself to sleep late on Sundays. She allowed herself to be ten minutes late for work, as long as she was thinking about work (and thus, more or less, working) during the ten-minute drive to her office. She allowed herself to buy the expensive toilet paper. She allowed herself to take showers that were environmentally irresponsible. She allowed herself to think about Michael, but only when she was stopped at a train crossing and alone (completely alone—not even Chloe) in the car, and then the
ca-clack ca-clack ca-clack
was her permission to disengage from her current situation—her family, her home, her
life
—and when the train had passed and her car was bumping over the tracks she stopped thinking about him and allowed herself to go on with her day.

She'd been with Michael six years before, very briefly—one week at a professional workshop in Boston. It had been a whirlwind: three days of friendship, two days of courting, then two frantic, ecstatic days in her room when she felt so unlike herself, so shameless and reckless, so joyfully unguarded, that in moments she wondered if she were dreaming or dead. She told herself on the Sunday morning before they parted, as they lay tangled in bed,
You will tell yourself that you did not feel like this. You will tell yourself that it wasn't extraordinary, but you will be lying in order to not torture yourself. You will tell yourself this didn't mean anything, but that will not be true.
It was a terrible thing, what she did to herself that day. In that tangled moment she pretended it was a gift she was giving to her future self, but really it was pure cruelty—cold-blooded, premeditated murder—because she knew her own weaknesses, and she chose to exploit them, and she knew she would cripple her future self with doubt and misery, possibly for the rest of her life. And yet she—this present Carrie—had thwarted that cruel self, that old murderer. It had taken some time, but ultimately she had triumphed, limiting that self, that curse, to the
ca-clack ca-clack ca-clack
of the swiftly passing train, and she really did not think about Michael, or that vicious trick she'd played on herself, at any other time, not anymore. It was another life, six years that seemed like sixty, a life before Chloe, before she'd figured out what was important, what she really wanted. It was a stupid mistake, a moment of recklessness. It was not who she was.

And yet she had written to him for seven months after that weekend in Boston. Dan knew this. Dan knew
everything
. He had made it his business to find out everything, after she had admitted to it. She'd told him one morning in their bedroom, while they were getting dressed for work. He never knew what it was that finally compelled her to spill it, but when she spilled it she
spilled
it, nearly vomiting out the truth, standing there in her underwear beside the closet, trembling, weeping the ugliest tears he'd ever seen. She'd never kept a secret in their seven years of marriage, maybe not ever in her life, and watching it wrest out of her was like witnessing an exorcism. She said, she blubbered: “I know you'll want to leave me. I'll understand.” And then, the filthy cat out of the foul bag, she had gone to work, with no makeup and wet hair, and wearing two different shoes (he noticed this when he looked out the bedroom window and watched her get into the car), and then he went through the house like a goddamn DEA agent, ripping clothes off hangers, digging into every coat pocket, emptying entire desk drawers onto the floor. He would have slit open the couch cushions if he hadn't suddenly looked at the computer sitting there impassively on the desk in the living room and sat down and typed what—in a moment of desperate inspiration—he absolutely
knew
was her email password (though he'd never asked), the name of her childhood cat, and there was
everything
, in a tiny little mailbox icon marked ETC—ETC!—not only the other man's emails to her but, more damning and far more excruciating, hers to him.

But Dan, broken as he was, did not leave. By going to work Carrie had given him a window, a bay window, of several hours to gather his thoughts. The house was ransacked by 9:30, the emails read by 10:15, reread by 10:35, re-reread by 10:50. He'd called in sick (because you couldn't call in
shit on
) to work and there was a whole day ahead of him, brimming with endless possibility. He could pack his bags and leave, yes. He could be three states away—in any direction! he could go wherever he wanted!—by the time she pulled into the driveway. This was the first day of the rest of his life. He was not so old—only twenty-nine. He could begin again, reinvent himself. “I'll understand,” she had said. But she had conspicuously not said “I'm leaving,” not said “the marriage is over.” She had left the choice to him. She had probably thought he would leave her, probably wanted him to leave her, probably was sitting at her desk pricing flights to Phoenix (this is where the man lived, he'd learned from the emails), preparing for the big, romantic reunion with Michael the tax accountant who had rocked her world in Boston. In the letters there had been phrases like “When we're finally together” and “I can't wait until we
 . . .
” as if it were only a matter of time. But Carrie had not left him this morning, had not said she was leaving him, had instead, importantly, crucially, said, “I know you'll want to leave me.” And now she was at work, fully expecting him to be here packing his things, using this bay window of time to get his affairs in order, to box up the marriage in her absence so she could be free (she used this word in one of the letters: “free”) to go to Phoenix and join Michael the tax accountant who had rocked her world in Boston. She was leaving the ball in his court, lobbing up a big fat fattie across the net, like she used to do when they'd played in college, so he could have his overhead slam and feel like a big man, but guess what?
Fuck her!
He said this aloud, at 11:13, standing among their lives dumped out on the floor.
Fuck her!
He'd show her, all right. No way was he going to leave her! He hated her, so he wasn't going to leave her. And he loved her, so he wasn't going to leave her. She wanted him to do the dirty work, make it easy for her, open the door to her new life? Ha!

He cleaned the house. He didn't only clean
up
the house, he
cleaned
the house, first tidying his own frenzied mess and then vacuuming and dusting and scrubbing until his fingers ached so much that he couldn't make his hands into fists. He defrosted the freezer, tightened the rickety porch railing, changed the lightbulb in the garage that had been dark for two years. He showered and shaved and went to the grocery store and bought two slabs of tenderloin and baked potatoes and fresh corn on the cob. He made dinner and set the table and lit the candles and when she walked in the front door he put his arms around her and said, “We're going to be okay.”

“We are?” she asked.

Now, six years later, Dan stood in his daughter's room, watching her sleep. She had saved them, softened his rage, centered Carrie's world. And it wasn't just that they loved her—of course they loved her, madly—but rather that their love for each other was altered, irrevocably, by her squirming body, lifted from Carrie's belly (he'd seen
inside
his wife, seen the startled eyes of his daughter looking up from her mother's womb) and set stickily and miraculously into his trembling hands.

Chloe was clutching the armadillo, but she slept soundly so it was easy to slide it from her arms and insert, in its place, a red rabbit with a star for a nose. He knew that Chloe had little attachment to individual animals. She had never had the best-loved-bear, no tattered dog she mourned if it were left behind—he'd heard such stories from other dads. They were mostly interchangeable to her, these animals, and she had, it seemed, hundreds of them, all of which she loved for a day or two until another in the room caught her eye. So he put the armadillo on a crowded shelf with another twenty once-loved animals and she rolled over onto the star-nosed rabbit and he went down the hall to his bedroom and his sleeping wife.