She wasn’t twisting her hands anymore. She wasn’t looking at him, either. She was just sitting on the bed, looking at the floor, doing nothing and saying nothing and showing no emotion.
Walter felt a wave of dislike hit him, a huge tsunami of rage that went all the way down to the soles of his feet. Why had he married this woman? What had possessed him, all those years ago, to first propose to her and then to walk her down the aisle? Maybe it had been nothing more than the need to appear mature and responsible, the way you’d had to do in the days before all the nonsense started. Maybe it had been nothing at all. He really couldn’t remember. There were just times when he wanted to put the heel of his shoe onto this woman’s face and grind it and grind it and grind it until the blood spurted out or she started to say something.
He turned away and went back into the hall. They’d voted him off the governing board this last set of elections, and now they were reaping what they sowed. It served every last one of them right.
7
Fanny Bullman had a problem. It was not the kind of problem she would have talked to her friends about, or to her husband about. It was not the kind of problem most other people would think of as a “problem” at all. Problems were hard and material and intractable. They were not having enough money to pay the bills, or having an incurable disease, or losing your job. Sometimes they were smaller things, like having the car in the shop on a day you had to use it to go to your daughter’s dance rehearsal, or having to find a way to make three hundred cupcakes for the Brownie Christmas party when you only had two cupcake pans that cooked six cupcakes each. Problems were like puzzles. You took all the elements of them and stretched them out in front of you. Then you put the elements together in different ways until you came up with either a solution, or a course of action. This problem was nothing like that, and Fanny didn’t know what a solution would look like if she found it.
It didn’t help, of course, that the house felt more than empty. It felt hollowed out. It felt as if nobody was in it, not even herself. And Charlie hadn’t even been gone that long, this time.
The children were all wrapped up in their barn jackets now. Their backpacks were packed and zipped up and ready to go. Now it was only necessary to walk them out to the bus stop and wait until the school bus came along. Fanny did this every day, because she didn’t trust the Marsh girl from across the golf course. Whoever had decided to give that girl an automobile must have been crazy. She zipped around as if she were on a racetrack, and then came to screeching halts for no reason Fanny could see.
Sometimes Fanny tried to think her way back to what it had been like in high school, but she couldn’t really remember it. She couldn’t really remember college, either. It was all out in back there in the mist. It was not about things that had happened, but about the way she had been. And that, of course, was the problem.
Mindy’s backpack was pink and had Strawberry Shortcake on it. Josh’s backpack was black and had Darth Vader on it. Some of their friends were surprised that she allowed Josh to have Darth Vader on his backpack when he was only seven. She just couldn’t see the point in fighting the inevitable. Kids got the backpacks they wanted in the end. They got the video games they wanted, too. You could talk all you wanted about how it was a parent’s responsibility to choose what her children ate and watched and read, but the real world didn’t work that way.
She opened each of the backpacks in turn and carefully checked the contents of the brown paper bags she’d wrapped their lunches in. There were all kinds of rules for lunches these days, even though Josh and Mindy went to a public school. They were not allowed to have anything with peanuts, because one of the other children might be allergic. They were not allowed to have “junk food,” like bags of chips or candy. They were not allowed to have soda. Fanny was fairly sure that wasn’t the way it had been in her time, but all she could remember of her school lunches were the few times her mother had sent her in with sandwiches of cream cheese and jelly. She had really loved cream cheese and jelly. She had really hated peanut butter.
The lunch bags had bottles of Frutopia in them, and oranges, and bologna sandwiches with mustard on whole wheat bread. The school didn’t like bologna sandwiches, but there was a point where you had to make compromises. Josh and Mindy wouldn’t eat sandwiches made out of nothing but vegetables, and they wouldn’t eat the multigrain everybody was supposed to prefer these days to keep them from getting fat.
Fanny zipped the backpacks up again and went into the family room. Josh and Mindy had turned the television on and were watching some kind of cartoon. The cartoon looked depressing and dull, but the children seemed riveted.