“How long had you been going out with that boy?” she asked Savannah. “The one who—” She touched her own eyebrow where Savannah’s injury had been.
“About a year.” Savannah’s face was impassive. She scraped a spoonful of froth from her cappuccino.
“Had he ever hurt you before?”
She wasn’t checking up on her story. Absolutely not. She was just asking questions, trying to understand her.
Savannah put down her spoon and said, “Can I ask you a question? About your … marriage?”
Joy had that odd feeling again that here was the real Savannah, relaxing for a moment, being her true self, taking off her mask.
“Go right ahead,” she said expansively.
“Was there ever any … infidelity?”
“Oh!” said Joy. She wiped her mouth with her napkin and sat back.
“It’s a very personal question, I know,” said Savannah.
It was a personal question, but Joy had just been asking Savannah personal questions about her relationship, so why shouldn’t she ask them back?
“No,” she said, and it was no problem at all to bat away that blurry, shameful image of another man’s lips bending toward hers.
“As far as you know,” said Savannah.
Joy blinked.
“I didn’t mean to imply anything by that,” said Savannah.
“Of course you didn’t,” said Joy. “You’re right: as far as I know.”
“You were lucky,” said Savannah thoughtfully, “to meet your soulmate when you were so young.”
“Soulmate,” repeated Joy. “I don’t know about that. He was just a boy. He’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. When you’re young you get so worked up about things you think you could never forgive, like, I don’t know…”
“Birthdays?” Savannah lifted a crumb of the apple crumble topping and rubbed it between her fingertips. “Like forgetting a birthday?”
“That sort of thing, yes,” said Joy, although she’d never cared that much about birthdays or anniversaries. She wanted to say, Oh, darling, you’ve no idea.
She remembered that day they were all driving to the Northumberland Open on the Central Coast and the boys wouldn’t stop fighting in the back seat, and she could feel Stan becoming unnaturally still in the driver’s seat and her stomach was churning in anticipation, and she turned and hissed at the children, violently, silently contorting her face to try to make them stop. It was during the height of the battles between Logan and Troy, when it seemed like each argument between them was a matter of life and death.
And then Stan put on his turn signal. His flicker. That’s what they used to call the turn signal back then. Funny how words disappeared, became quaint and ridiculous, like fashions and opinions you once held dear. He put on his flicker, stopped the car, undid his seatbelt, got out, closed the door, and Joy thought, You must be joking, Stan. We’re on a highway. But he wasn’t joking. He missed that day’s matches. The kids all lost their matches. Bizarre behavior.
Husbands could do worse! That’s what she’d always told herself. She knew of husbands who hit or shoved or shouted terrible abuse. If Janet Higbee lost a game on a double fault, her husband tweaked her nose and said, “Stupid goose!” Janet always laughed merrily, but it wasn’t funny, anyone could see that it hurt and humiliated her, and poor Janet was annoying but she didn’t deserve her nose tweaked just because her ball toss was too low.
Joy remembered another club member from years ago, a pretty girl called Polly Perkins who was an absolute demon on the court, not scared of coming to the net, as aggressive as any man, but had to record every cent she spent in a little notebook for her husband, a hotshot university professor. Once, Polly told Joy about a terrible argument she and her husband had the previous night because he wouldn’t “give her permission” to buy a new iron. Polly said the old iron kept spitting rust stains onto her clothes. She showed Joy the brown dots on her white tennis skirt. Six months later Polly walked out on her husband and moved back home to New Zealand, and Joy often thought of her when she did the ironing and hoped that she’d found happiness and a new iron that didn’t spit rust.
A husband could leave, like Stan, but a husband could also never return, like Joy’s father. Stan always came back.
The truth was that most of the time Stan was more patient and less prone to anger than Joy. When the kids were little her mood remained set at a permanent low level of simmering irritability.
Did he not think that she too dreamed of walking straight out of her life when she got angry? She regularly fantasized about doing what her father had done all those years ago: walk out the door to “see a friend” and never come back. Sometimes she abrogated responsibility by fantasizing about kidnappers bursting into the house, bundling her into the back of their van, and taking her away for a long rest in a nice, cool, quiet dungeon.
But walking out the door was never a real option. She was too necessary. Only she knew the children’s schedules, where everything was, the vet’s name, the doctor’s name, the teacher’s name.
But Stan could walk out without a moment’s thought. Sometimes he simply left the room and that was fine. Normal people did that. Sometimes he walked around the block and perhaps normal people did that too. Sometimes he went for a drive and came back an hour later. Two hours later. Three. Four. The longer he went, the less normal it became. The longest time was five days.
“Here’s what you do,” Joy’s mother said when Joy finally confided in her about her husband’s strange, shameful habit. “Make sure you’re wearing lipstick and your nicest dress when he walks back in the door. Don’t cry. Don’t shout. Don’t ask a single question about where he’s been. Hold your head up high, and act as if you didn’t even notice he was gone.”