“Jesus,” Nancy said.
“You don’t have to go all superior on me,” Emma said. “He really could have killed her. Or Betsy could have. It’s more likely to be one of them than one of us.”
“It’s more likely to be one of them than one of us because they read Kafka? You’re delusional.”
Emma drained the last of her coffee. It was stone-cold by now, and almost entirely milk. “It’s more likely to be one of them than one of us,” she repeated stubbornly. “There’s nothing wrong with any of us. We’re all normal as the day is long. They’re the ones who are odd.”
She got her wallet out of her pocketbook and three quarters out of her change purse. She put the money down under the bill and got off her stool. Her ass hurt.
“You ought to make more sense than you do,” she told Nancy. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be the principal.”
She went back down the length of JayMar’s to the front door and out again onto Grandview Avenue. This was all she ever did: went in and out of buildings, went up and down Grandview. For a split second, the vision was appalling. In the end, it was comforting. It was normal. Nothing could be more normal than Grandview at breakfast time with the lights glowing in the deep long recesses of Mullaney’s, and the little red signal light blinking at the end of the platform at the train station, and the dresses on mannequins in the window at Elsa-Edna’s. This was what people did with their lives. They graduated from high school and got jobs and had families and lived in towns where they knew most everybody and everybody knew them. They gained weight as they got older and took snapshots of their grandchildren to show their women friends when they met them once a month or so for lunch. That was normalnormalnormal, and normal people did not take knives to their childhood friends and spew their intestines all over somebody else’s backyard.
2
For at least an hour after the news had come on television the night before, things had been all right. They hadn’t been great—things were never great when Stu was drinking—but they had been all right, and Peggy had sat by herself on one of the small red chairs at the kitchen table and wondered if he just hadn’t heard the news at all. It was one of those nights when everything was very clear to her, not only her marriage, but her house, too, and her face, and her life, as if she were looking at all of them through a magnifying mirror. The west wall in the kitchen was cracked. It had been cracked for at least a year or two. The vinyl on the floor in the entryway was peeling. When she came in after teaching, she tried to come in the back way so that she wouldn’t have to see it. In the early days of their marriage, Stu had been good at fixing things. He had a whole wall full of tools in the garage to prove it. Of course, in those days he had also held a job for more than a couple of weeks at a time. He’d come home on Friday nights with two big steaks he’d bought at the Grill Center and a bottle of champagne, and she’d think he was wonderful, so optimistic, so exuberant, so happy with life. Sometimes now she thought about those steaks and wondered what they had cost. The Grill Center was the place where the people who lived out by the golf course went. Peggy had been in there once and seen swordfish selling for fourteen dollars a pound. It was probably a sign of manic depression that Stu bought the steaks there, or a sign of alcoholism, and she knew now that she should have worried once it became clear that he would hit the Grill Center every single Friday night. The problem was that she had wanted steaks from the Grill Center, too, and good china bought in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, and a house with three bedrooms and a family room with a fireplace where children could hang stockings. That was the kind of thing you aspired to when you grew up in Hollman. Peggy remembered sitting for hours with Emma and Belinda and Maris and Chris, pouring over her mother’s old House Beautiful magazines and talking about what they would do, what they would have, how they would live once they were married. It was frightening to think of Chris there with them, her legs folded up underneath her, her hair pulled back from her face with clips. Was there some connection between the fact that Chris was the only one of them who had managed to achieve a House Beautiful life, and the fact that she was dead? Peggy kept feeling that there had to be some connections somewhere. There had to be reasons for why things happened. She just couldn’t think of what they were. It was nearly midnight. The news about Chris had been on at eleven o’clock. Peggy wanted to fall asleep right where she was, sitting up.
It was the crying that started the trouble. Back in the kitchen now, with her dress torn and her eye so painful she knew it had to be black, she had to admit it to herself. It was the crying that started the trouble, and she was to blame for the crying, because it really made no sense for her to cry. Stu was always so rational about everything. Even when he was drunk and crazy, he was rational. He saw situations plain. She was the one who got things confused and made everything wrong and then did the worst possible thing. She was the one who somehow made it impossible for him to function. She was a ball-busting bitch—she was—she was—what? One of those feminists, Stu said when he really got going. Maybe she was. Maybe she was one of those feminists, like Betsy, and she was dangerous to people, she was dangerous to Stu, if she ever had had a child she would have ruined it. Christine Inglerod Barr was found dead at the home of … Nobody ever called Chris Inglerod “Christine.”