“I thought it was me, I thought I dialed wrong. Why didn’t he identify himself? Why didn’t he say, Green residence? Why didn’t he just say—I’m the one who’s out of place?”
“I don’t know,” her mother says.
“Did Daddy go with you to the concert?”
“Of course—he drove.”
“What was this Ray doing at the house when you weren’t home?”
“Haven’t I mentioned him?”
“No.”
“Really? You would think I would have—he’s staying with us.”
There is a long pause.
“Mother—could you just check with your doctor, could you just say, my daughter is concerned. She thinks I don’t remember. She thinks I forget. Could you do me the favor and ask the doctor if everything is all right?”
“The truth is when I’m in there, I don’t think of it.”
“You forget.”
“I’m in that paper gown. Who can think of anything when you feel like at any second it might come undone?”
“How long has this Ray been around?
“A couple of weeks. He’s a lovely guy. You’d like him. He’s very tidy.”
“Is he paying rent?”
“No,” her mother says, horrified. “He’s a friend of your father’s.” She changes the subject. “Where’s Steve?”
“At the game.” As she says it, she hears Steve at the door. She hurries to get off the phone. “I’ll call you tomorrow, we’ll figure out the weekend.” She snaps the bedroom light off.
She hears Steve in the living room, opening the mail. She hears him in the kitchen, opening the fridge. She sees his shadow pass down the hall. He is in the bathroom, peeing, then brushing his teeth. He comes into the bedroom, half undressed. “It’s only me,” Steve says. “Don’t get excited.”
She doesn’t respond.
“Are you in here?” He turns on the light.
“I just spoke to my mother.”
“Yeah? It’s Wednesday—don’t you normally talk to them on Sunday?”
“There is a strange man living at the house. He’s been there for two weeks—she forgot to tell me. A friend of my father’s.”
“Your father doesn’t have any friends.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe if you’d waited and called on Sunday, he wouldn’t have been there.” Steve pulls his T-shirt off and drops it onto the floor.
“Not funny.” She gestures toward the hamper. “I was thinking I should go and see my parents this weekend—that’s why I was calling. I haven’t been in a long time. But I can’t exactly go home if this guy is there.”
“Stay in a hotel.”
She sits up to set the alarm. “I’m not staying in a hotel. Am I going to have to do some sort of intervention, kidnap my parents and reprogram them?”
“It’s deprogram.”
“How’s Bill?”
“Good.”
“Did you ask him what you should do?”
“About what?” Steve punches at his pillow.
“Us.”
Steve doesn’t answer. She thinks of her parents, her parents’ marriage. She thinks of her parents, of Steve, of having children, of when they stopped talking about it. She wishes they had children. He thinks it’s good they didn’t. She still wants to have one. “It’s not going to fix it,” he says. She doesn’t want the child to fix it. She wants the child because she wants a child and she knows that without Steve she will not have children. She rolls away from him. There is an absence of feeling, a deadness, an opaque zone where there used to be more.
“Breathe,” Steve says to her.
“What?”
“You weren’t breathing. You were doing that holding-your-breath thing.”
She takes a deep breath. Sighs.
“Do you want me to come with you to your parents?”
“No.”
In the night, in the subtlety of sleep, they are drawn together, but when they wake it is as though they remember—they pull apart, they wake up en garde.
“I know it’s been hard,” he says in the morning as they’re getting ready to go.
“What should we do?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says.
They don’t say anything more. She is afraid to talk, afraid of what is happening, afraid of what she is feeling, afraid of what will happen next, afraid of just about everything.
The morning meeting is adult undergarments—Peer Pampers. There are boxes of the product on the conference room table. The client opens a box and starts passing them around—a cross between maxi-pads and diapers, there’s something about them that’s obscene.