Crossroads Read online

  She saw what she had to do next. She had to confess to Perry, too. Confiding in Sophie had only been practice, a warm-up. Someone in her family needed to know what she’d done, and it sure as fucking hell wasn’t Russ. Perry was the person most like her, the person in danger of disturbance like her own, the person she had to warn. Wherever her disturbance might lead her, whether back into Bradley’s arms or merely to a divorcée’s career in local theater, she would have to bring Perry along with her. Her responsibility for him would keep her from flying too dangerously high. This would be the deal she made with God.

  Insulated by her fatness, she went around the side of the library, pushed through a weak spot in its hedge, and made tracks across its front lawn, which she’d never seen one person set foot on. New Prospect was lovely in the snow but not as beautiful as Arizona, because it was already shadowed by a tomorrow of gray slush-puddles, of salt-corroded snowbanks blackened by the exhaust pipes of cars gunning their engines, spinning their wheels. In Arizona, the white purity had persisted for weeks.

  Fighting uphill against the wind on Maple Avenue made her aware of nicotine’s poisoning of the heart. At the corner of Highland, she stopped to catch her breath and check her watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. With all the snow, Russ might only now be getting home himself. She could always say to him, “Fuck the reception—I’m not going.” But a sweeter way to punish him would be to let him wonder why she hadn’t come home. She was pretty sure he’d lied to her at breakfast, pretty sure he was with his widow friend. And there was, she realized, an easy way to be certain. Kitty Reynolds, his putative companion for the outing in the city, lived in one of the little houses farther up on Maple, near the high school.

  Decisions being simple for a person unafraid of consequences, Marion crossed Highland and proceeded up Maple, into the wind. Her feet were frozen, her fingers getting there. She couldn’t quite picture Kitty’s house, but she recognized it when she came to it. There was light in every downstairs window, a sports car with a Michigan license in the driveway, no wreath on the door, no lights on the bushes. Marion marched up the front walk, noting that it had been shoveled perhaps an hour earlier, and rang the doorbell. For a heart-clutching moment, she confused what she was doing with the thing she’d done to Bradley’s wife, as if she were reenacting it. Then clarity returned. Her situation now was exactly the reverse.

  An elderly man in a thick cardigan opened the door. She was afraid she had the wrong house, but he identified himself as Kitty’s brother. “She’s just draining the spaghetti,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to bother you at dinnertime.”

  “Who can I tell her is here?”

  “I—it’s not important. I should have stopped by earlier. Was she here in the afternoon?”

  “Yep. Trouncing me at Scrabble. It was the perfect day for sitting by the fire. Would you like to come in?”

  “No, I, no,” Marion said, turning away. “Thank you. I’ll see her in church on Sunday.”

  “And you are…?”

  She raised a hand and waved it as she walked away. As soon as she heard the door close, she took out her Luckies. One of her match packs was sodden, the other still usable. Suspicious though she’d been that Russ had lied to her, it had taken conclusive proof to make her furious about it. His lie had been stupid, easily found out, the lie of a little boy, and this made her even angrier. Did he think she was stupid? Probably not even. She’d barely registered as a person at all. She’d been little more than an inconvenient object at the breakfast table, an annoying vase in the way of his sugar bowl, not even worth telling a decent lie to. Soon enough, when she’d lost her fat, she would have more ways to make him pay. For now, the sweetest punishment would be to say nothing, let him think she knew nothing, let him damn himself by telling further lies.

  It was nearly seven thirty when she got back to the parsonage. There was no sign of the car, no car tracks in the driveway. Inside the back door, she took off her shoes and coat and ran her fingers through her slushy hair. On the kitchen counter were sugar cookies whose allure she could no longer fathom. Everything in the kitchen seemed lusterless and alien. She might have been entering the house of someone recently deceased.

  “Perry?” she called. “Becky?”

  Climbing the stairs, she called their names again. Maybe the boys had gone out sledding? Their bedroom was dark, the door ajar. She turned on a light in her and Russ’s room. On the foot of the bed was a note in Perry’s artistic hand.

  Dear Mom,

  Dad is stuck in the city, so I’m taking Jay to the Haefles. Becky waited for you. I told her to go to the concert.

  Perry

  Now came, without warning, the tears she hadn’t shed in her confession. Whatever Russ might mean or not mean to her, however poorly he and Perry got along, he would always be the person Perry called Dad—would forever be his father. And how unjust she’d been to Becky, imagining that she wouldn’t come to the open house. How poignant Perry’s striving to behave like an adult, how generous his mentioning that his sister had waited; how dear and real her children were, how lucky she was to have them; what a difference there was between proclaiming her badness to the dumpling, the abstract fact of it, and experiencing it in relation to her children. She’d let them down. Becky had obediently waited for her, and Perry had made the best decision he could.

  Clumsy, her eyesight teary, she tore off her exercise clothes and rubbed her hair with a towel. She truly was a bad person, because along with love and remorse, no less strongly, she was feeling self-pity for having been wrenched from the vividness of memory and fantasy; resentment for the interruption of her disturbance. Also hatred of the sack of a dress in which she was now obliged to encase the sausage of her body. In the bathroom, after brushing her hair, she forced herself to step onto the corroded old scale by the toilet, to establish a new baseline. Counting clothes, she weighed one hundred and forty-four pounds. It was almost enough to make a person cry again. When she went back to the kitchen for her cigarettes, wearing her good winter coat and her good fur-trimmed boots, the sugar cookies had regained their allure.

  Eating cookies is an interesting response to feeling overweight.

  “Really?” she said aloud, to the dumpling in her head. “Is that really so goddamned fucking hard to understand? Have you never in your life felt sorry for yourself?”

  After a fortifying smoke on the front porch, she set out for the Haefles’. The snow was still coming down heavily, but the air’s flavor had turned Canadian as the cold front gained the upper hand. Her only consolation for having let her children down was that Russ was letting them down even worse. Whom she felt more like murdering, him or the slender widow with whom he was stuck in the city, was a toss-up.

  Leaving the Haefles’ house as she approached it were two priests in identical sable-collared overcoats. Her fear of priests outside a church, which dated from her Catholic years, was related to an atavistic fear of all things monstrous, even the ostensibly laudable monstrosity of being half human and half divinely anointed: of being celibate. She lurked on the sidewalk until the priests had climbed into a Country Squire station wagon. That it looked brand-new was itself vaguely monstrous.

  She knew the Haefles well enough to let herself inside without knocking. Smelling meatballs, blessedly also cigarette smoke, she took her Luckies from her coat before she hung it in the closet by the basement stairs. From the basement came the sound of Hollywood violins and then a familiar little voice, Judson’s.

  Downstairs, in the rec room, she found him on a sofa between two girls in whose faces the unfortunate lineaments of Doris Haefle were discernible. They were watching Miracle on 34th Street on a portable Zenith. On the screen, Kris Kringle was seated on the bed of a little-girl character whose mother, as Marion recalled, saw nothing wrong with leaving her alone with strange men and their penises. As the camera framed Santa’s face, her chest tightened. Not her favorite movie. She went behind the TV to avoid it.
/>   “Hi, Mom,” Judson said.

  “Hello, dear. I’m sorry I’m so late. Did you have some dinner?”

  “Yes, but now we’re watching this movie.”

  “I’m Judson’s mother,” Marion explained to the girls.

  They mumbled hellos. Judson was slouched low on the sofa, the girls inclining toward each other, their bodies touching his. Although he was a happy child in general, Marion was struck by the heavy-lidded dreaminess of his expression. He seemed to be enjoying more than just the movie. He looked like a cat transported by petting. She had the uneasy sense that she was interrupting something.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to your movie,” she said. “Perry is upstairs?”

  Judson’s gaze stayed on the screen. “Presumably,” he said.

  There was an edge of sarcasm in his voice, as if he were performing for the girls. Marion went upstairs feeling like no better a mother than the one in the movie. Judson was nine years old. She knew it was time for Becky to have a boyfriend, past time for Clem to have a girl in his life, but she was not remotely ready for Judson to lose his innocence.

  In the hallway, standing with her back to the party and popping a whole cookie into her mouth, was the Lutheran pastor’s wife—Jane. Definitely Jane Walsh, not Janet. On her dessert plate were four more cookies, and she was even heavier than Marion.

  “Hello, Jane. Marion Hildebrandt—Russ’s wife.”

  One greeting down, a million to go.

  “This party is a lovely tradition,” Jane said, “but Doris’s cookies are not what I need at this time of year. I always seem to overdo.”

  Marion herself preferred the meatballs. The cookies here, though impeccably Swedish, were dry and flavorless. She was on the verge of expressing this judgment, on the theory that she was done with censoring herself, when the sociable din in the living room died down suddenly. She wondered if Dwight Haefle might be making a little speech. Instead, she heard another familiar voice rising. It was Perry, shouting something about … being damned?

  She hurried past Jane Walsh and pushed through the party’s margins. Perry was standing by the fireplace, his face extremely red, a Haefle to either side of him. Everyone else in the room was watching them.

  “What’s going on?” Marion said.

  Perry swallowed a sob. “Mom, I’m sorry.”

  “What is it? What’s happening?”

  “Son,” Dwight Haefle said, putting an arm around Perry. “Let’s, ah. Let’s take a little walk.”

  Perry bowed his head and let himself be led away. Marion tried to follow, but Doris Haefle arrested her. Her expression blazed with triumph. “Your son is intoxicated.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear it.”

  “Hm, yes, this is what happens when children aren’t supervised. Did you only get here now?”

  “A few minutes ago.”

  “It’s quite unusual that your children came without you.”

  “I know. The weather is just … Perry was trying to do a good thing.”

  “You didn’t tell him to come?”

  “God, no.”

  “That’s good, then, dear.” Doris patted Marion on the shoulder. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You just need to take him home now.”

  Doris Haefle had a grossly inflated sense of the importance of a pastor’s wife, was sensitive to every slight to it, and therefore, because the world didn’t share her regard for the role, existed in a state of perpetual grievance. Among the crosses she bore was being married to a pastor who ironically deprecated his own role. For Marion, the miserable thing was that she, too, was a pastor’s wife and thus, in Doris’s view, worthy of the highest respect. She had to endure not only Doris’s unsolicited suggestions on how to comport herself, in her exalted role, but the unfailingly tender manner in which she offered them. It was awkward to be called dear by a person you felt like calling insufferable bitch.

  Perry was slumped forward on a chair in the dining room, his hair draping his face. Dwight came over to Marion and spoke in a low voice. “He does seem to have been drinking gløgg.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said. “I apologize for this.”

  “Should we be worried about Russ?”

  “No, he’s on a date with Frances Cottrell.”

  The widening of Dwight’s eyes amused her.

  “They’re delivering toys and canned goods in the city.”

  “Ah.”

  “But listen,” she said. “Judson’s in the basement watching Miracle on 34th Street. Would you mind if I left him here and came back later?”

  “Not at all,” Dwight said. “If you don’t want to come back, I can run him home.”

  How often a marriage consisted of nasty paired with nice. If her own marriage didn’t strike people this way, it was only because they’d never met the real her. She needed to go down and tell Judson that she was taking Perry home, but the scene in the basement had left an unsettling aftertaste, and so she asked nice Dwight to do it. When he was gone, she went to Perry and crouched at his feet.

  “Sweetie,” she said. “How drunk are you? A lot, or not very?”

  “Relatively not very,” he said, his face still hidden. “Mrs. Haefle overreacted.”

  The word relatively didn’t surprise Marion. She herself had done her first drinking when she was his age. Then again, look how she’d turned out.

  “What were you thinking?” she said. “You brought Judson here. You were responsible for him—did you not think of that?”

  “Mother. Please. I am very sorry, all right?”

  “Sweetie, look at me. Will you look at me? I’m not angry with you. I’m just surprised—you’re always so considerate of Judson.”

  “I’m sorry!”

  The poor boy. She took his hands and kissed his head.

  “Jay was fine,” he said. “He was playing Yahtzee, and I wasn’t that buzzed. Everything was fine until…”

  “You picked the wrong woman’s house to get drunk in.”

  He gave a little snort. Her opinion of Doris Haefle was known to him. She’d told him all sorts of things she didn’t tell the other kids. And now she had new things to tell him. The hotness of his hands, the reality of the boy she so especially loved, was burning a hole in the tissue of her fantasies of Bradley. “Let’s get you home,” she said.

  When she returned from the closet with their coats, Perry was eating from a plate of meatballs. They were tempting, but so were cigarettes. The old cycles of nicotine, of hunger and its suppression, of anxiety and relief, were coming back to her. Leaving Perry to get some food in him, she stepped out onto the front stoop.

  She was only halfway through the Lucky when he opened the door. She had a red-handed impulse to drop the cigarette, but it was important that he see her as she really was.

  He goggled in cartoonish astonishment. “What, may I ask, are you doing?”

  “I have my own contraband tonight.”

  “You smoke?”

  “I used to, a long time ago. But it’s a terrible habit and you must never try it.”

  “Do as I say, not as I do.”

  “Exactly.”

  He shut the door and stepped into his rubbers. “Can I try one anyway?”

  Too late, she realized her mistake. At some point, she was sure of it, he’d take her smoking as permission to smoke himself, and it would be yet another thing to feel guilty about having done to him. To quell this new anxiety, she sucked hard on the cigarette.

  “Perry, listen to me. There’s one thing you can do that I will not forgive. I will never forgive you if you become a smoker. Do you understand?”

  “Honestly, no,” he said, buckling his rubbers. “I don’t think of you as being a hypocrite.”

  “I started smoking before anyone knew how dangerous it is. You’re too intelligent to make the same mistake.”

  “And yet here you are, smoking.”

  “Well, there’s a reason for that. Would you like me to tell you what it is?”
/>   “I want you not to die.”

  “I don’t intend to die, sweetie. But there are some things you need to know about me. How are you feeling now?”

  “The buzz no longer buzzeth. Buzzeth buzzeth buzzeth—see?”

  In the story she began to tell him, as they made their way home, there was nothing of Bradley Grant, nothing of any man except her father. The snow, deep on the ground and still falling, gave her voice a curious distinctness while dampening its carry, as if the world were an enlargement of her skull. Perry listened in silence, wordlessly offering her a hand where the snow had formed drifts. Until now, she’d kept the suicide a secret from her kids. Even to Russ she hadn’t spoken of it in many years; she had the sense that it frightened him, or embarrassed him; as did, for that matter, everything else related to her innermost self. Perry’s face was hidden by the hood of his parka, and as she proceeded to describe her own mental disturbance, following the suicide—the dissociation, the episodes of slippage, the months of insomnia, the weeks of catatonic lowness—she had no idea what he was making of it.

  They reached the parsonage before she’d finished. In the driveway were two sets of recent footprints, one coming, one going. Guessing that they were Clem’s, she called his name as soon as she and Perry were in the kitchen, but the house was obviously empty.

  “I wonder if he went to the concert,” she said. “You probably want to get down there, too. We can talk more in the morning.”

  Perry was eating a cookie. “If you have more to say, let’s hear it.”

  She retrieved the Luckies from her coat and opened the back door for ventilation.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. This is hard for me to do without smoking.”

  Her hands were too shaky to get a match lit. Perry took the matches and flared one for her. She was feeling somehow younger than he was; more daughter than mother. She gratefully inhaled the smoke and tried to blow it out the door, but the wind pushed it in.