They got out of the car, and for the first time, I felt scared. It was a weekday and no one was home anywhere on our street. My dad was at work. Mom and Valencia were visiting my aunt and wouldn’t be back until after dinner. Van was supposed to be watching me, but he had gone to the pool.
I picked up my notebook and ran inside, locking the door behind me. Then I ran to the patio doors and the garage door and locked those too. I hid in the pantry in the kitchen, my arms wrapped around my knees. All the windows in our house were open, and I could hear the boys yelling her name. I waited for them to break in but finally it got quiet. I stayed hiding in the pantry though, and that’s where I was when Van opened the door.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Hiding,” I said.
“Why is the house all locked up?”
I just shrugged. I don’t know why I didn’t just tell the truth. It’s as if my mouth could not form any words.
Later that night I heard him telling our parents what happened. He made me sound ridiculous, and added fake details, like how I was eating uncooked macaroni by the handful. He made me sound like a gremlin or a monster. I understood why he did it; it was the way to talk to my parents and have them listen and talk back. They loved to gang up on someone. It was what kept them close and the best way to buddy up with them. But usually he was too good to stoop so low. He probably figured if he didn’t throw me under the bus first, I would do so to him for leaving me home alone.
Teachers used to tell us that children preferred even negative attention to being ignored, but this is not always true. I never liked conversations about how stupid I was; I doubt any child would.
My clever parents never noticed the beer cans in our front yard or trampled hedges associated with that day.
“Well, it’s obvious she’s not old enough to stay home by herself,” said my mother, definitively, using the newfangled remote control to turn on Dallas when they were finally done rehashing the pantry episode.
Then there was Dougie the Lawn Boy. He mowed our lawn for free, loving every shrub and rosebush for allowing him take his sweet time while he gazed at my window, thinking it was her window. (When I was seven Valencia gave me a big sign with her name on it that had turned up unexplained on her locker, and I, as another one of her loyal fans, had stuck it to my window where it stayed for years, hence the confusion.) Now and then, my dad would come outside and tell Dougie that he didn’t need to mow our lawn, that we mowed our own lawn, that we had a perfectly good lawn mower, and would he please leave. But a week later he would be back, as if the conversation had never happened. Pulling up on his Cub Cadet, a wagon of clippers and trimmers behind it, tank top with the big number five on it… Dougie the Lawn Boy was relentless.
We won the Hudson Lawn of the Year award in 1984, 1985, and 1986. No joke.
Chapter 6
A little over two months ago a letter came for Adrian. There was no return address but I instantly recognized it as trouble. First of all, the address was typed, apparently on an actual typewriter, considering that there was an extra letter n added to his name and then struck out with slash mark. Postmarked from Minneapolis. It seemed like the kind of letter that Anthrax would arrive in. Now that Adrian was becoming famous, things were getting trickier. Women he dated once fifteen years ago found excuses to run into him at the Circle K.
He was in Atlanta for the day, meeting with someone about something (trust me, I have since learned to pay better attention), and as I sorted through the mail I separated this piece out and laid it aside in its own pile. This initial step looked innocent enough: bills, magazines, junk mail, letters to ponder over. That old instinct I associated with Valencia’s dressing table took over. What is it about stalking that is as primal and intuitive as the desire to eat, or sleep, or come?
I held the letter up to the window, but of course that didn’t work.
Adrian and I operated our relationship on a level of trust and maturity I had never expected from any union I would be a part of. I could have just asked him what it was when he got home. Instead, I went into the laundry room and found a clothes steamer beneath a pile of linen napkins from a dinner party we had hosted several months back. I still don’t know what made me do this. I especially should know about turning points and the way one day, one moment, can completely change the direction something is going. A steamer can open an envelope and unravel all the trust that two people have spent years building. But if I sealed it back up, and set it back with the unopened mail, only I would ever know. Didn’t I make decisions like this all the time? Paying a little extra on our mortgage when I did the bills, for the good of both of us. Replacing dishtowels once they became stained. Shaving my legs as an expression of goodwill. I reasoned it was all part of being a woman and keeping our life running smoothly. A little practice for motherhood maybe.
Opening an envelope with a steamer doesn’t work. The steamer spit water all over the envelope, drenching it and maki
ng the address bleed like a watercolor painting. I was defeated going into it. Screw it, I decided, and tore the envelope open. We’ll just say whatever this is got lost in the mail. That has to happen sometimes, right?
Inside was a piece of notebook paper, fringed edges and pale blue lines. The sheet of paper was blank and was folded loosely around some photographs. I saw the back of them first. Food for thought was scrawled in black ink tilted nearly sideways to the right. Scary man handwriting, I decided.
From within the sheet slid a picture of my husband, wearing the shirt I had bought him just two weeks before for Christmas. He was uncomfortably close to a woman I did not recognize. The next photo was nearly the same. In neither were they kissing, or actually even touching. It could have been anyone, any situation. I tried to decipher where they were but could not recognize any of the buildings in the background.
The pictures were grainy and blurry, as if they had been taken with a crappy phone or some really old digital camera. The strange thing is that this is what stood out to me, this is what I dwelled upon in those first moments after seeing the photos: “Some poor person with out of date technology is trying to blackmail Adrian.”
Another thought instantly followed: Was the food for thought meant to imply that an affair had not started, but that Adrian should consider it? Were these photos sent by the woman, and she was trying to offer herself to him? Why would anyone send pictures to his house? Wasn’t it too risky? Perhaps the photos were sent by someone knowing I would intercept them. Some troublemaker.
My head was swimming in confusion. I needed someone to talk to. Adrian was who I turned to for everything, and without him as an option I was alone. I needed a friend, but I could think of no one. So many of my friendships depended upon me being Adrian’s wife, or upon me being the kind of person who would be Adrian’s wife. They were the kind of friendships that looked like pages torn from an Elle Décor magazine. Elegant gatherings at barnwood tables beneath small twinkling white lights. If children were invited it was only to picturesquely capture fireflies in mason jars. These were not friendships with room for weighty problems. They were friendships of class and casual sophistication, honoring the unspoken code of We Shall Not Be Flawed. I considered seeking out a priest or some other religious person.
Instead I put the photos back in the envelope and slid them into a big decorating book on a shelf in the hallway. I thought I would come up with a plan.
That was January.
I thought if I slept on it, I would work it all out. But for the weeks following this I could barely sleep at all. My mind raced as I lay still beside Adrian. So many times I almost asked him, almost showed them to him. He did not seem to notice that I had not slept in weeks, which I appreciated. He is good at taking me at face value. He doesn’t usually ask if anything is wrong, and if I tell him I am fine, he simply believes me. It’s such a masculine trait.
Of course, I did not stop thinking of the pictures, even when the sleep came back in early February, hitting me in heavy twelve hour waves which he also did not find peculiar. I slept and slept, dreaming bad dreams of him cheating on me with everyone I had ever known.
What I have finally taken the pictures to mean is not necessarily that my husband was having an affair, but that someone wants to upset him. Threaten him. Scare him, blackmail him. Or maybe it was nothing: Just some lonely person trying to bring drama into an empty life by creating a façade of connection to someone important.
I continued to wish I had someone I could talk to about it, but there was no one, and the days rolled by as they always have. I waited for something else to happen. Something terrible. And then, of course, more did happen. But for quite some time Adrian was just Adrian, proving to me again and again in his ordinary actions that nothing was wrong, proving to me that if something truly was wrong, he was not the catalyst. When he got excited over some fancy cheese spread from the grocery store, for instance, it made me feel safe and reassured me that he was not the enemy. No one to blame could care so strongly about cheese spread, I reasoned.