chapter 4

 Just before Marilyn had given Lydia that first diary, the university had held its
annual Christmas party. Marilyn had not wanted to go. All fall she’d been
wrestling a vague discontentment. Nath had just started the first grade, Lydia had
just started nursery school, Hannah had not yet even been imagined. For the first
time since she’d been married, Marilyn found herself unoccupied. She was
twenty-nine years old, still young, still slender. Still smart, she thought. She
could go back to school now, at last, and finish her degree. Do everything she’d
planned before the children came along. Only now she couldn’t remember how
to write a paper, how to take notes; it seemed as vague and hazy as something
she had done in a dream. How could she study when dinner needed cooking,
when Nath needed to be tucked in, when Lydia wanted to play? She leafed
through the Help Wanted ads in the paper, but they were all for waitresses,
accountants, copywriters. Nothing she knew how to do. She thought of her
mother, the life her mother had wanted for her, the life her mother had hoped to
lead herself: husband, children, house, her sole job to keep it all in order.
Without meaning to, she’d acquired it. There was nothing more her mother could
have wished her. The thought did not put her in a festive mood.
James, however, had insisted that they put in an appearance at the Christmas
party; he was up for tenure in the spring, and appearances mattered. So they had
asked Vivian Allen from across the street to babysit Nath and Lydia, and
Marilyn put on a peach cocktail dress and her pearls and they headed to the
crepe-papered gymnasium, where a Christmas tree had been erected on the
midcourt line. Then, after the obligatory round of hellos and how-are-yous, she
retreated to the corner, nursing a cup of rum punch. That was where she ran into
Tom Lawson.
Tom brought her a slice of fruitcake and introduced himself—he was a
professor in the chemistry department; he and James had worked together on the
thesis committee of a double-majoring student who’d written about chemical warfare in World War I. Marilyn tensed against the inevitable questions—And
what do you do, Marilyn?—but instead they exchanged the usual benign
civilities: how old the children were, how nice this year’s Christmas tree looked.
And when he began to tell her about the research he was doing—something to
do with the pancreas and artificial insulin—she interrupted to ask if he needed a
research assistant, and he stared at her over his plate of pigs in blankets. Marilyn,
afraid of seeming unqualified, offered a flood of explanations: she had been a
chemistry major at Radcliffe and she’d been planning on medical school and she
hadn’t quite finished her degree—yet—but now that the children were a bit older
—
In fact, Tom Lawson had been surprised at the tone of her request: it had the
murmured, breathless quality of a proposition. Marilyn looked up at him and
smiled, and her deep dimples gave her the earnestness of a little girl.
“Please,” she said, putting her hand on his elbow. “I’d really enjoy doing
some more academic work again.”
Tom Lawson grinned. “I guess I could use some help,” he said. “If your
husband doesn’t mind, that is. Maybe we could meet and talk about it after New
Year’s, when term starts.” And Marilyn said yes, yes, that would be wonderful.
James was less enthusiastic. He knew what people would say: He couldn’t
make enough—his wife had to hire herself out. Years had passed, but he still
remembered his mother rising early each morning and donning her uniform, how
one winter, when she’d been home from work with the flu for two weeks, they’d
had to turn off the heat and bundle in double blankets. He remembered how at
night, his mother would massage oil into her calloused hands, trying to soften
them, and his father would leave the room, ashamed. “No,” he told Marilyn.
“When I get tenure, we’ll have all the money we need.” He took her hand,
uncurled her fingers, kissed her soft palm. “Tell me you won’t worry about
working anymore,” he said, and at last she had agreed. But she kept Tom
Lawson’s phone number.
Then, in the spring, while James—newly tenured—was at work and the
children were at school and Marilyn, at home, folded her second load of laundry,
the phone rang. A nurse from St. Catherine’s Hospital, in Virginia, telling her
that her mother had died. A stroke. It was April 1, 1966, and the first thing
Marilyn thought was: what a terrible, tasteless joke.
By then she had not spoken to her mother in almost eight years, since her
wedding day. In all that time, her mother had not written once. When Nath had
been born, then Lydia, Marilyn had not informed her mother, had not even sent a
photograph. What was there to say? She and James had never discussed what her mother had said about their marriage that last day: it’s not right. She had not
ever wanted to think of it again. So when James came home that night, she said
simply, “My mother died.” Then she turned back to the stove and added, “And
the lawn needs mowing,” and he understood: they would not talk about it. At
dinner, when she told the children that their grandmother had died, Lydia cocked
her head and asked, “Are you sad?”
Marilyn glanced at her husband. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.”
There were things to be taken care of: papers to be signed, burial
arrangements to be made. So Marilyn left the children with James and drove to
Virginia—she’d long since stopped thinking of it as home—to sort out her
mother’s things. As mile after mile of Ohio, then West Virginia, streamed past,
her daughter’s question echoed in her mind. She could not answer for sure.
Was she sad? She was more surprised than anything: surprised at how
familiar her mother’s house still felt. Even after eight years, she still remembered
exactly how to wiggle the key—down and to the left—to get the lock to open;
she still remembered the screen door that slowly closed itself with a hiss. The
light in the foyer had burned out and the heavy curtains in the living room were
closed, but her feet moved by instinct despite the dark: years of rehearsal had
taught her the dance step around the armchair and the ottoman to the table beside
the sofa. Her fingers caught the ribbed switch of the lamp on the first try. It
could have been her house.
When the light came on, she saw the same shabby furniture she’d grown up
with, the same pale lilac wallpaper with a grain, like silk. The same china
cabinet full of her mother’s dolls, whose unblinking eyes gave her the same cold
tingle on the back of her neck. On the mantel, the same photographs of her as a
child. All the things that she needed to clear away. Was she sad? No, after the
daylong drive, only tired. “Many people find this job overwhelming,” the
undertaker told her the next morning. He gave her the number of a cleaning
company that specialized in making houses ready to sell. Ghouls, Marilyn
thought. What a job, clearing the homes of the dead, piling whole lives into
garbage bins and lugging them to the curb.
“Thank you,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’d rather take care of it myself.”
But when she tried to sort her mother’s things, she could find nothing she
wanted to keep. Her mother’s gold ring, her twelve settings of china, the pearl
bracelet from Marilyn’s father: mementos of an ill-fated wedding day. Her
demure sweater sets and pencil skirts, the gloves and hat-boxed hats: relics of a
corseted existence that Marilyn had always pitied. Her mother had loved her doll
collection, but their faces were blank as chalk, white china masks under
horsehair wigs. Little strangers with cold stares. Marilyn leafed through photo albums for a picture of herself with her mother and couldn’t find one. Only
Marilyn in kindergarten pigtails; Marilyn in third grade with a missing front
tooth; Marilyn at a school party, a paper crown on her head. Marilyn in high
school in front of the Christmas tree in a precious Kodachrome. Three photo
albums of Marilyn and not a single shot of her mother. As if her mother had
never been there.
Was she sad? How could she miss her mother when her mother was nowhere
to be found?
And then, in the kitchen, she discovered her mother’s Betty Crocker
cookbook, the spine cracking and mended, twice, with Scotch tape. On the first
page of the cookie section, a deliberate line in the margin of the introduction, the
kind she herself had made in college to mark an important passage. It was no
recipe. Always cookies in the cookie jar! the paragraph read. Is there a happier
symbol of a friendly house? That was all. Her mother had felt the need to
highlight this. Marilyn glanced at the cow-shaped cookie jar on the counter and
tried to picture the bottom. The more she thought about it, the less sure she was
that she had ever seen it.
She flipped through the other chapters, looking for more pencil lines. In
“Pies,” she found another: If you care about pleasing a man—bake a pie. But
make sure it’s a perfect pie. Pity the man who has never come home to a
pumpkin or custard pie. Under “Basic Eggs”: The man you marry will know the
way he likes his eggs. And chances are he’ll be fussy about them. So it behooves
a good wife to know how to make an egg behave in six basic ways. She imagined
her mother touching the pencil tip to her tongue, then drawing a careful dark
mark down the margin so that she would remember.
You’ll find your skill with a salad makes its own contribution to the quality of
life in your house.
Does anything make you feel so pleased with yourself as baking bread?
Betty’s pickles! Aunt Alice’s peach conserve! Mary’s mint relish! Is there
anything that gives you a deeper sense of satisfaction than a row of shining jars
and glasses standing on your shelf?
Marilyn looked at Betty Crocker’s portrait on the back cover of the
cookbook, the faint streaks of gray at her temples, the hair that curled back from
her forehead, as if pushed back by the arch of her eyebrow. For a second, it
resembled her mother. Is there anything that gives you a deeper sense of
satisfaction? Certainly her mother would have said no, no, no. She thought with
sharp and painful pity of her mother, who had planned on a golden, vanilla-
scented life but ended up alone, trapped like a fly in this small and sad and empty house, this small and sad and empty life, her daughter gone, no trace of
herself left except these pencil-marked dreams. Was she sad? She was angry.
Furious at the smallness of her mother’s life. This, she thought fiercely, touching
the cookbook’s cover. This is all I need to remember about her. This is all I want
to keep.
The next morning, she called the housecleaning company the undertaker had
recommended. The two men who arrived at her door wore blue uniforms, like
janitors. They were clean-shaven and courteous; they looked at her with
sympathy but said nothing about “your loss.” With the efficiency of movers they
packed dolls and dishes and clothes into cartons. They swaddled furniture in
quilted pads and trundled it to the truck. Where did it go, Marilyn wondered,
cradling the cookbook—the mattresses, the photographs, the emptied-out
bookshelves? The same place people went when they died, where everything
went: on, away, out of your life.
By dinnertime, the men had emptied the entire house. One of them tipped his
hat to Marilyn; the other gave her a polite little nod. Then they stepped out onto
the stoop, and the truck’s engine started outside. She moved from room to room,
the cookbook tucked under her arm, checking that nothing had been left behind,
but the men had been thorough. Her old room was hardly recognizable with the
pictures peeled from its walls. The only signs of her time there were the
thumbtack holes in the wallpaper, invisible unless you knew where to look. It
could have been a stranger’s house. Through the open curtains she could see
nothing, only panes of dusk and her face faintly reflected back to her in the glow
of the ceiling light. On her way out, she paused in the living room, where the
carpet was pockmarked with the ghosts of chair feet, and studied the mantel,
now a clean line under a stretch of bare wall.
As she pulled onto the highway, heading toward Ohio and home, those
empty rooms kept rising in her mind. She swallowed uneasily, pushing the
thought aside, and pressed the gas pedal harder.
Outside Charlottesville, flecks of rain appeared on the windows. Halfway
across West Virginia the rain grew heavy, sheeting the windshield. Marilyn
pulled to the roadside and turned off the car, and the wipers stopped midsweep,
two slashes across the glass. It was past one o’clock in the morning and no one
else was on the road: no taillights on the horizon, no headlights in the rearview,
only farmland stretching out on either side. She snapped off her own lights and
leaned back against the headrest. How good the rain would feel, like crying all
over her body.
She thought again of the empty house, a lifetime of possessions now bound
for the thrift shop, or the garbage dump. Her mother’s clothes on some stranger’sbody, her ring circling some stranger’s finger. Only the cookbook, beside her at
the other end of the front seat, had survived. That was the only thing worth
keeping, Marilyn reminded herself, the only place in the house there was any
trace of her.
It struck her then, as if someone had said it aloud: her mother was dead, and
the only thing worth remembering about her, in the end, was that she had
cooked. Marilyn thought uneasily of her own life, of hours spent making
breakfasts, serving dinners, packing lunches into neat paper bags. How was it
possible to spend so many hours spreading peanut butter across bread? How was
it possible to spend so many hours cooking eggs? Sunny-side up for James.
Hard-boiled for Nath. Scrambled for Lydia. It behooves a good wife to know
how to make an egg behave in six basic ways. Was she sad? Yes. She was sad.
About the eggs. About everything.
She unlocked the door and stepped out onto the asphalt.
The noise outside the car was deafening: a million marbles hitting a million
tin roofs, a million radios all crackling on the same non-station. By the time she
shut the door she was drenched. She lifted her hair and bowed her head and let
the rain soak the curls beneath. The drops smarted against her bare skin. She
leaned back on the cooling hood of the car and spread her arms wide, letting the
rain needle her all over.
Never, she promised herself. I will never end up like that.
Under her head she could hear water thrumming on the steel. Now it sounded
like tiny patters of applause, a million hands clapping. She opened her mouth
and let rain drip into it, opened her eyes and tried to look straight up into the
falling rain.
Back in the car, she peeled off her blouse and skirt and stockings and shoes.
At the far end of the passenger seat they made a sad little heap beside the
cookbook, like a melting scoop of ice cream. The rain slowed, and the gas pedal
was stiff under her bare foot as she coaxed the car into motion. In the rearview
mirror she caught a glimpse of her reflection, and instead of being embarrassed
to see herself stripped so naked and vulnerable, she admired the pale gleam of
her own skin against the white of her bra.
Never, she thought again. I will never end up like that.
She drove on into the night, homeward, her hair weeping tiny slow streams
down her back. At home, James did not know how to make eggs behave in any way. Each morning, he served the children cereal for breakfast and sent them to
school with thirty cents apiece for the lunch line. “When is Mom coming
home?” Nath asked every night, crimping the foil tray of his TV dinner.
His mother had been gone for nearly a week, and he longed for hard-boiled
eggs again. “Soon,” James answered. Marilyn had not left the number at her
mother’s, and anyway, that line would soon be disconnected. “Any day now.
What shall we do this weekend, hmm?”
What they did was head to the Y to learn the breaststroke. Lydia hadn’t yet
learned to swim, so James left her across the street with Mrs. Allen for the
afternoon. All week he had looked forward to some father-son time. He had even
planned out how he would begin: Keep your arms underwater. Whip your legs
out. Like this. Although James himself had been a swimmer in high school, he
had never won a trophy; he had gone home alone while the others piled into
someone’s car for celebratory hamburgers and milkshakes. Now he suspected
that Nath had the makings of a swimmer, too: he was short, but he was wiry and
strong. In last summer’s swim class, he had learned the front crawl and the dead-
man’s float; already he could swim underwater all the way across the pool. In
high school, James imagined, Nath would be the star of the team, the collector of
trophies, the anchorman in the relay. He would be the one driving everyone to
the diner—or wherever kids would go in the far-off 1970s—after meets.
That Saturday, when they got to the pool, the shallow end was full of
children playing Marco Polo; in the deep end, a pair of elderly men glided in
laps. No space for breaststroke lessons yet. James nudged his son. “Go in and
play with the others until the pool empties out.”
“Do I have to?” Nath asked, pleating the edge of his towel. The only other
kid he recognized was Jack, who by then had been living on their street for a
month. Although Nath had not yet come to hate him, he already sensed that they
would not be friends. At seven Jack was tall and lanky, freckled and bold, afraid
of nothing. James, not attuned to the sensitivities of the playground, was
suddenly annoyed at his son’s shyness, his reluctance. The confident young man
in his imagination dwindled to a nervous little boy: skinny, small, hunched so
deeply that his chest was concave. And though he would not admit it, Nath—
legs twisted, stacking the toes of one foot atop the other—reminded him of
himself at that age.
“We came here to swim,” James said. “Mrs. Allen is watching your sister
just so you could learn the breaststroke, Nathan. Don’t waste everyone’s time.”
He tugged the towel from his son’s grasp and steered him firmly toward the
water, hovering over him until he slid in. Then he sat down on the vacant
poolside bench, nudging aside discarded flippers and goggles. It’s good for him James thought. He needs to learn how to make friends.
Nath circled the girl who was It with the other children, bouncing on his toes
to keep his head above water. It took James a few minutes to recognize Jack, and
when he did, it was with a twinge of admiration. Jack was a good swimmer,
cocky and confident in the water, weaving around the others, shining and
breathless. He must have walked over by himself, James decided; all spring,
Vivian Allen had been whispering about Janet Wolff, how she left Jack alone
while she worked at the hospital. Maybe we can give him a ride home, he
thought. He could stay to play at our house until his mother finishes her shift. He
would be a nice friend for Nath, a good role model. He imagined Nath and Jack
inseparable, rigging a tire swing in the backyard, biking through the
neighborhood. In his own schooldays, he’d been embarrassed to ask classmates
to his house, afraid that they’d recognize his mother from the lunch line, or his
father from mopping the hallway. They hadn’t had a yard, anyway. Maybe they
would play pirates, Jack as the captain and Nath as the first mate. Sheriff and
deputy. Batman and Robin.
By the time James focused his attention back on the pool, Nath was It. But
something was wrong. The other children glided away. Silently, stifling giggles,
they hoisted themselves out of the water and onto the tile surround. Eyes closed,
Nath drifted all alone in the middle of the pool, wading in small circles, feeling
his way through the water with his hands. James could hear him: Marco. Marco.
Polo, the others called back. They circled the shallow end, splashing the
water with their hands, and Nath moved from one side to the other, following the
sounds of motion. Marco. Marco. A plaintive note in his voice now.
It wasn’t personal, James told himself. They’d been playing for who knows
how long; they were just tired of the game. They were just messing around.
Nothing to do with Nath.
Then an older girl—maybe ten or eleven—shouted, “Chink can’t find
China!” and the other children laughed. A rock formed and sank in James’s
belly. In the pool, Nath paused, arms outstretched on the surface of the water,
uncertain how to proceed. One hand opened and closed in silence.
On the sidelines, his father, too, was uncertain. Could he make the children
get back in the pool? Saying anything would draw attention to the trick. He
could call his son. It’s time to go home, he might say. Then Nath would open his
eyes and see nothing but water all around him. The smell of chlorine began to
bite at James’s nostrils. Then, on the far side of the pool, he saw the blur of a
body sliding silently into the water. A figure glided toward Nath, a sandy head
broke the surface: Jack Polo,” Jack shouted. The sound echoed off the tiled walls: Polo. Polo. Polo.
Giddy with relief, Nath lunged, and Jack held still, treading water, waiting, until
Nath caught his shoulder. For a moment, James saw sheer joy on his son’s face,
the dark furrow of frustration wiped away.
Then Nath opened his eyes, and the glow vanished. He saw the other kids
squatting around the pool, laughing now, the pool empty except for Jack in front
of him. Jack himself turned to Nath and grinned. To Nath, it was a taunt: Joke’s
on you. He shoved Jack aside and ducked underwater, and when he reemerged at
the edge, he climbed straight out without shaking himself. He didn’t even wipe
the water from his eyes, just let it stream over his face as he stalked toward the
door, and because of this James could not tell if he was crying.
In the locker room, Nath refused to say a word. He refused to put his clothes
or even his shoes on, and when James held out his slacks for the third time, Nath
kicked the locker so hard he left a dent in the door. James glanced back over his
shoulder and saw Jack peeking through the door from the pool area. He
wondered if Jack was about to speak, maybe apologize, but instead he stood
silent and staring. Nath, who hadn’t spotted Jack at all, marched out into the
lobby, and James bundled up their things and let the door swing shut behind
them.
Part of him wanted to gather his son into his arms, to tell him that he
understood. Even after almost thirty years, he still remembered P.E. class at
Lloyd, how once he’d gotten tangled up in his shirt and emerged to find his pants
missing from the bench. Everyone else had already dressed and was stuffing
gym uniforms into lockers and lacing shoes. He had tiptoed back into the gym,
hiding his bare thighs and calves behind his knapsack, looking for Mr. Childs,
the P.E. teacher. By then the bell had rung and the locker room had emptied.
After ten minutes of searching, mortified at being in his undershorts in front of
Mr. Childs, his pants were revealed under a sink, legs tied around the U-bend,
dust bunnies caught in the cuffs. “Probably just got mixed up in someone else’s
things,” Mr. Childs had said. “Hurry along to class now, Lee. You’re tardy.”
James had known it was no accident. After that, he had developed a system:
pants first, then shirt. He had never told anyone about it, but the memory clung.
So part of him wanted to tell Nath that he knew: what it was like to be
teased, what it was like to never fit in. The other part of him wanted to shake his
son, to slap him. To shape him into something different. Later, when Nath was
too slight for the football team, too short for the basketball team, too clumsy for
the baseball team, when he seemed to prefer reading and poring over his atlas
and peering through his telescope to making friends, James would think back to
this day in the swimming pool, this first disappointment in his son, this first and  most painful puncture in his fatherly dreams.
That afternoon, though, he let Nath run up to his room and slam the door. At
dinnertime, when he knocked to offer a Salisbury steak, Nath did not respond,
and downstairs, James allowed Lydia to nestle against him on the couch and
watch The Jackie Gleason Show. What could he say to comfort his son? It will
get better? He could not bring himself to lie. Better just to forget the whole
thing. When Marilyn arrived home early Sunday morning, Nath sat sullen and
silent at the breakfast table, and James said merely, with a wave of the hand,
“Some kids teased him at the pool yesterday. He needs to learn to take a joke.”
Nath bristled and glared at his father, but James, cringing at the memory of
all he had left out—Chink can’t find China—didn’t notice, and neither did his
mother, who, preoccupied, set bowls and the box of cornflakes in front of them.
At this last outrage, finally, Nath broke his silence. “I want a hard-boiled egg,”
he insisted. Marilyn, to everyone’s surprise, burst into tears, and in the end,
subdued and unprotesting, they all ate cereal anyway.
It was clear to the entire family, however, that something had changed in
their mother. For the rest of the day, her mood was sulky and stormy. At dinner,
though they all anticipated a roast chicken, or a meat loaf, or a pot roast—a real
meal at last, after so many Swanson’s dinners warmed in the oven—Marilyn
opened a can of chicken noodle soup, a can of SpaghettiOs.
The next morning, after the children went to school, Marilyn pulled a scrap
of paper from her dresser drawer. Tom Lawson’s phone number still stood out,
sharp black against the pale blue college rule.
“Tom?” she said when he answered. “Dr. Lawson. It’s Marilyn Lee.” When
he didn’t reply, she added, “James Lee’s wife. We met at the Christmas party.
We talked about me maybe working in your lab.”
A pause. Then, to Marilyn’s surprise: laughter. “I hired an undergrad months
ago,” Tom Lawson said. “I had no idea you were actually serious about that.
With your children and your husband and all.”
Marilyn hung up without bothering to reply. For a long time, she stood in the
kitchen by the phone, staring through the window. Outside, it no longer felt like
spring. The wind had turned biting and dry; the daffodils, tricked by the warm
weather, bent their faces to the ground. All across the garden, they lay prostrate,
stems broken, yellow trumpets withered. Marilyn wiped the table and pulled the
crossword puzzle toward her, trying to forget the amusement in Tom Lawson’s
voice. The newsprint clung to the damp wood, and as she wrote in her first
answer, the pen tore through the paper, leaving a blue “A” on the tabletop.
She took her car keys down from their hook and lifted her handbag from the entry table. At first she told herself she was just going out to clear her head.
Despite the chill, she rolled the window down, and as she circled the lake once,
twice, the breeze snaked its way beneath her hair to the nape of her neck. With
your children and husband and all. She drove without thinking, all the way
through Middlewood, past the campus and the grocery store and the roller rink,
and only when she found herself turning into the hospital parking lot did she
realize this was where she’d intended to come all along.
Inside, Marilyn settled in the corner of the waiting room. Someone had
painted the room—walls, ceiling, doors—a pale, calming blue. White-hatted,
white-skirted nurses glided in and out like clouds, bearing syringes of insulin,
bottles of pills, rolls of gauze. Candy stripers buzzed by with carts of lunch trays.
And the doctors: they strode unhurried through the bustle like jets cutting their
steady way through the sky. Whenever they appeared, heads turned toward
them; anxious husbands and hysterical mothers and tentative daughters stood up
at their approach. They were all men, Marilyn noticed: Dr. Kenger, Dr. Gordon,
Dr. McLenahan, Dr. Stone. What had made her think she could be one of them?
It seemed as impossible as turning into a tiger.
Then, through the double doors from the emergency room: a slender dark-
haired figure, hair pulled back in a neat bun. For a moment, Marilyn could not
place her. “Dr. Wolff,” one of the nurses called, lifting a clipboard from the
counter, and Dr. Wolff crossed the room to take it, her heels clack-clacking on
the linoleum. Marilyn had seen Janet Wolff only once or twice since she’d
moved in a month before, but she would not have recognized her anyway. She
had heard that Janet Wolff worked at the hospital—Vivian Allen, leaning over
the garden fence, had whispered about late shifts, the Wolff boy left to run wild
—but she had pictured a secretary, a nurse. Not this graceful woman, no older
than she, tall in black slacks, a white doctor’s coat loose around her slim frame.
This Dr. Wolff, a stethoscope looped around her neck like a shining silver
necklace, who with expert hands touched and turned the bruised wrist of a
workman, who called clear and confident across the room, “Dr. Gordon, may I
have a word with you about your patient, please?” And Dr. Gordon put down his
clipboard, and came.
It was not her imagination. Everyone repeated it, like a mantra. Dr. Wolff.
Dr. Wolff. Dr. Wolff. The nurses, bottles of penicillin in hand: “Dr. Wolff, a
quick question.” The candy stripers, as they passed by: “Good morning, Dr.
Wolff.” Most miraculous of all, the other doctors: “Dr. Wolff, could I ask your
opinion, please?” “Dr. Wolff, you’re needed in patient room two.” Only then did
Marilyn finally believe.
How was it possible? How had she managed it? She thought of her mother’s cookbook: Make somebody happy today—bake a cake! Bake a cake—have a
party. Bake a cake to take to a party. Bake a cake just because you feel good
today. She pictured her mother creaming shortening and sugar, sifting flour,
greasing a pan. Is there anything that gives you a deeper sense of satisfaction?
There was Janet Wolff striding across the hospital waiting room, her coat so
white it glowed.
Of course it was possible for her: she had no husband. She let her son run
wild. Without a husband, without children, perhaps it would have been possible.
I could have done that, Marilyn thought, and the words clicked into place like
puzzle pieces, shocking her with their rightness. The hypothetical past perfect,
the tense of missed chances. Tears dripped down her chin. No, she thought
suddenly. I could do that.
And then, to her embarrassment and horror, there was Janet Wolff before
her, bending solicitously in front of her chair.
“Marilyn?” she said. “It’s Marilyn, right? Mrs. Lee?”
To which Marilyn replied the only words in her mind: “Dr. Wolff.”
“What’s wrong?” Dr. Wolff asked. “Are you ill?” Up close, her face was
surprisingly young. Beneath her powder, a faint constellation of freckles still
dotted her nose. Her hand, gentle on Marilyn’s shoulder, was steady and assured,
and so was her smile. Everything will be fine, it seemed to say.
Marilyn shook her head. “No, no. Everything’s fine.” She looked up at Janet
Wolff. “Thank you.” And she meant it.
The next evening, after a dinner of canned ravioli and canned vegetable
soup, she planned it out in her mind. She had all of her mother’s savings, enough
for a few months; when her mother’s house was sold, she would have more,
enough for a few years, at least. In a year, she could finish her degree. It would
prove that she still could. That it was not too late. After that, at last, she would
apply to medical school. Only eight years later than planned.
While the children were at school, she drove an hour to the community
college outside Toledo and enrolled in organic chemistry, advanced statistics,
anatomy: everything she’d planned for her last semesters. The next day, she
made the drive again and found a furnished efficiency near the campus, signing a
lease for the first of May. Two weeks away. Every night, when she was alone,
she read the cookbook again, steeling herself with her mother’s small and lonely
life. You don’t want this, she reminded herself. There will be more to your life
than this. Lydia and Nath would be fine, she told herself again and again. She
would not let herself think otherwise. James would be there. Look how they had
managed while she was in Virginia. It was still possible In the quiet dark, she packed her old college textbooks into cartons and
tucked them in the attic, ready to go. As May approached, she cooked lavish
meal after lavish meal: Swedish meatballs, beef Stroganoff, chicken à la king—
everything James and the children liked best, everything from scratch, just as her
mother had taught her. She baked a pink birthday cake for Lydia and let her eat
as much as she wanted. On the first of May, after Sunday dinner, she sealed
leftovers in Tupperware and put them in the freezer; she baked batch after batch
of cookies. “It’s like you’re preparing for a famine,” James said, laughing, and
Marilyn smiled back, a fake smile, the same one she had given to her mother all
those years. You lifted the corners of your mouth toward your ears. You kept
your lips closed. It was amazing how no one could tell.
That night, in bed, she wrapped her arms around James, kissed the side of his
neck, undressed him slowly, as she had when they were younger. She tried to
memorize the curve of his back and the hollow at the base of his spine, as if he
were a landscape she would never see again, beginning to cry—silently at first
and then, as their bodies collided again and again, more fiercely.
“What is it?” James whispered, stroking her cheek. “What’s wrong?”
Marilyn shook her head, and he pulled her close, their bodies sticky and damp.
“It’s okay,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Everything will be better tomorrow.”
In the morning, Marilyn burrowed beneath the covers, listening to James
dress. The zip as he fastened his trousers. The clink as he buckled his belt. Even
with her eyes closed, she could see him straightening his collar, smoothing the
cowlick in his hair, which still, after all these years, made him look a bit like a
schoolboy. She kept them closed when he came to kiss her good-bye, because if
she saw him, she knew the tears would come again.
At the bus stop, later that morning, she knelt on the sidewalk and kissed Nath
and Lydia each on the cheek, not daring to look into their eyes. “Be good,” she
told them. “Behave. I love you.”
After the bus had disappeared around the curve of the lake, she visited her
daughter’s room, then her son’s. From Lydia’s dresser she took a single barrette,
cherry-colored Bakelite with a white flower, one of a pair she seldom wore.
From the cigar box beneath Nath’s bed she took a marble, not his favorite—the
cobalt with white specks like stars—but one of the little dark ones, the ones he
called oilies. From the inside of James’s overcoat, the old one he’d worn in her
college days, she snipped the spare button from the underside of the lapel. A tiny
token from each, tucked into the pocket of her dress—a gesture that would
resurface in her youngest child years later, though Marilyn would never mention
this small theft to Hannah, or to anyone. Not something treasured and loved;
something they might miss but would not grieve. No need to tear another hole,
even a pinprick, in their lives. Then Marilyn took her boxes from their hiding

even a pinprick, in their lives. Then Marilyn took her boxes from their hiding
place in the attic and sat down to write James a note. But how did you write
something like this? It seemed wrong to write to him on her stationery, as if he
were a stranger; more wrong still to write it on the scratch pad in the kitchen, as
if it were no more important than a grocery list. At last she pulled a blank sheet
from the typewriter and sat down at her vanity with a pen.
I realize that I am not happy with the life I lead. I always had one kind of life
in mind and things have turned out very differently. Marilyn took a deep, ragged
breath. I have kept all these feelings inside me for a long time, but now, after
being in my mother’s house again, I think of her and realize I cannot put them
aside any longer. I know you’ll be fine without me. She paused, trying to
convince herself this was true.
I hope you can understand why I have to leave. I hope you can forgive me.
For a long time Marilyn sat, ballpoint in hand, unsure how to finish. In the
end she tore up the note and tossed the shreds into the wastepaper basket. Better,
she decided, just to go. To disappear from their lives as if she had never been
there.
To Nath and Lydia, who that afternoon found themselves unmet at the bus
stop, who let themselves into an unlocked and empty house, that was exactly
how it seemed. Their father, when he came home two hours later to find his
children huddled on the front steps, as if they were afraid to be in the house
alone, kept asking questions. “What do you mean, gone?” he asked Nath, who
could only repeat: gone, the only word he could find.
Lydia, meanwhile, said nothing at all during the confused rest of the evening,
in which their father called the police and then all the neighbors but forgot about
dinner, and bedtime, as the policemen took note after note until she and Nath fell
asleep on the living room floor. She awoke in the middle of the night in her own
bed—where her father had deposited her, shoes still on—and felt for the diary
her mother had given her at Christmas. At last something important had
occurred, something that she ought to write down. But she did not know how to
explain what had happened, how everything had changed in just one day, how
someone she loved so dearly could be there one minute, and the next minute:
gone.