The Husband's Secret(51)

            Marla raised her eyebrows. She always had particularly eloquent eyebrows.

            Marla had the right to raise her eyebrows. Ed had been in Adelaide for work (Ed was always away for work) when the two policemen turned up at Rachel’s door. Marla went with Rachel to the morgue and was standing right next to her when they lifted that ordinary white bedsheet to reveal Janie’s face. Marla was ready the moment Rachel’s legs gave way and caught her instantly, expertly, one hand cupping her elbow, the other grabbing her upper arm. She was a midwife. She had a lot of practice catching burly husbands just before they hit the floor.

            “Sorry,” said Rachel.

            “Janie would have come to my party,” said Marla. Her eyes filled. “Janie loved me.”

            It was true. Janie had adored Marla. She was always telling Rachel to dress more like Marla. And then, of course, on the one occasion Rachel wore a dress that Marla had helped her buy, look what happened.

            “I wonder if Janie would have liked Tupperware parties,” said Rachel as she watched a middle-aged woman arguing with her primary-schooler at the table next to them. She tried, and failed, as she always did, to imagine Janie as a forty-five-year-old woman. She sometimes ran into Janie’s old friends in the shops, and it was always such a shock to see their seventeen-year-old selves emerge from those puffy, generic middle-aged faces. Rachel had to stop herself from exclaiming, “Good Lord, darling, look how old you’ve become!” in the same way that you said, “Look how tall you’ve grown!” to children.

            “I remember Janie was very tidy,” said Marla. “She liked to be organized. I bet she would have been right into Tupperware.”

            The wonderful thing about Marla was that she understood Rachel’s desire to talk endlessly about the sort of adult that Janie might have become, to wonder how many children she would have had and the sort of man she would have married. It kept her alive, for just those few moments. Ed had hated those hypothetical conversations so much, he’d leave the room. He couldn’t understand Rachel’s need to wonder what could have been, rather than just accepting that it never would be. “Excuse me, I was talking!” Rachel would yell after him.

            “Please come to my Tupperware party,” said Marla.

            “All right,” said Rachel. “But just so you know, I’m not buying anything.”

            And so here she was sitting in Marla’s living room, crowded and noisy with women drinking cocktails. Rachel was sandwiched on a couch in between Marla’s two daughters-in-law, Eve and Arianna, who had no plans to move to New York and were both pregnant with Marla’s first grandchildren.

            “I’m just not into pain,” Eve was telling Arianna. “I told my obstetrician, I said, ‘Look, I have zero tolerance for pain. Zero. Don’t even talk to me about it.’”

            “Well, I guess nobody really likes pain?” said Arianna, who seemed to doubt every word that came out of her mouth. “Except masochists?”

            “It’s unacceptable,” said Eve. “In this day and age. I refuse it. I say no thank you to pain.”

            Ah, so that was my mistake, thought Rachel. I should have said no thank you to pain.

            “Look who’s here, ladies!” Marla appeared with a tray of sausage rolls in hand and Cecilia Fitzpatrick by her side. Cecilia looked polished and shiny and was wheeling a neat black suitcase behind her.

            Apparently it was something of a coup to get Cecilia to do a party for you, because she was so booked up. She had six Tupperware consultants working beneath her, according to her mother-in-law, and was sent on all sorts of overseas jaunts and the like. “I’ll tell you this in confidence, of course,” Cecilia’s mother-in-law, Virginia Fitzpatrick, had said to Rachel once, “but I think Cecilia actually makes more money than John-Paul, and he’s an engineer.”