In Twenty Years: A Novel (15 page)

“You can do it!” Annie cheers, not to any of them in particular, because she could never take sides.

Catherine hasn’t churned butter since . . . well . . . she did it once in the early days of the blog, when she was testing out a branding idea of “Homemade with Heart,” and literally all her ingredients had to be homemade. Butter was tough, but she threw in the towel when she tried to tackle olive oil (and one particularly horrible stab at almond milk), and when she realized that very few potential readers had as much time on their hands as she did. Thus, fresh butter is not Catherine’s forte.

She doesn’t remember it being this exhausting, though. Up and down and up and down and up and down. She’s frantically pulsing her plunger, the wooden barrel rattling around, the four other barrels rattling around her. After five minutes, her biceps start to flame out. After ten, her triceps are shaking.

She inhales, trying to catch her breath, the plunger slowing to a pathetically unthreatening pace. Beside her, Owen is looking slightly gray, like a dead fish, with alarming streaks of sweat cascading down his cheeks and neck. But he’s still keeping a somewhat steady pace, those spinning classes paying off. Beside him, Leon is looking like he could do this all day. He senses Catherine’s gaze, so glances over and winks. Again.

He actually winks at her again!

Well, this is all Catherine needs. She forgets her flimsy biceps and her wimpy triceps and plunges, plunges, plunges—all the while resolving to make more time for the gym—but when is she supposed to find time for the gym? She sometimes locks her office door and does those twenty-minute videos that come with stretchy bands, but always figures that twenty minutes really doesn’t do anything, so why bother in the first place?
She should have bothered in the first place!

Her arms are numb but still moving when the cramp kicks in on her right side. She is wincing, half-doubled over, her once immaculately crisp button-down now drenched in perspiration, when Leon raises his arms above his head, triumphantly announcing, “I have butter! I HAVE BUTTER!”

The crowd that has gathered in a horseshoe around them starts hooting and hollering, like this is actually exciting. Like they literally didn’t just stand here for half an hour watching them
churn butter
.

Soldier #1 marches over to confirm that Leon does, in fact, “have butter,” and when he does, he bows in front of him (more
Star Wars
) and bestows Leon with fifty tickets to the prize booth, which he notes is five tents down.

“Goddamn it,” Catherine mutters, tossing her plunger to the bricks, then massaging her abs like she used to in high school PE after being forced to run a mile.

“That was a bad call,” Owen says, looking more gray than ever. “Definitely should
not
have done that.”

“Maybe
I
should get invited to
Good Morning America
!” Leon crows, winking again at Catherine.

“Just because you can make butter does
not
mean you’re capable of much else!” Catherine says.

“Uh, who wants to hit the prize booth?” Leon turns toward Lindy, who claps her hands together in mock euphoria and mouths, “Yippee!” but trails him down the walk anyway.

“Who
is
that guy?” Catherine says to no one in particular.

“Well, that was exciting!” Annie exclaims. “I posted it to Facebook. I’ll tag you.”

“I wouldn’t call it exciting,” Catherine says.

“Oh, it was, though! It was.”

Catherine sighs. It was just some dumb contest, and it’s not like she’s some dog who needs to piss on her figurative territory.
Maybe just a little piss.
A little pee would have been nice. Why did it matter if Leon bested her? It’s not like some butter-churning event at her old stomping grounds defined who she’d become or somehow invalidated her.

Annie hands her the Wawa coffee she’s been holding. Catherine sips it, but it’s gone cold. She spits it back out, then tosses it a little too brusquely into the trash. Just a split second before she notices the recycling bin sitting beside it.

H
ELP
P
ENN
G
O
G
REEN!

She once built an entire house made of biodegradable elements for
InStyle
. She also shot a PSA on how to make coffee without paper filters, and another on how to create a home composting bin on your windowsill for city dwellers. It’s not like she doesn’t know about environmentally friendly causes.

And yet she pretends she didn’t notice the sign and strides onward.

“Cathy!” Owen’s pallor has returned, and his shirt clings to him now, the armpits damp, two concentric circles sagging beneath them. He scrambles to catch up to her. “Recycling!”

“It’s not the end of the world.” She turns around to see him fishing her cup from the garbage.

What is he trying to prove?

He holds it aloft, triumphant.

“That wasn’t so hard,” he says, dropping it into the proper bin.

Catherine thinks of a lot of ways to respond:
Should I give you a medal? What are you, my errand boy?

Or, the most honest:
I’m still really pissed off at you from last night!

She puts on that fake smile that he hates and says, “Thanks. It’s not often you clean up my mess.”

She doesn’t mean it the way it comes out—meanly, cruelly—like a wife who finds her husband subservient. She regrets it immediately—how brittle she sounds, how unkindly she’s behaving. But she’s angry and tired and completely off-kilter here, with visions of her old dependent, sweeter self colliding with her new autonomous but not particularly gracious self, and no idea what to do with either of them. Besides, once it’s been said, she can’t unsay it. And the subtext is there anyway, all circling back to his assurances of stepped-up domesticity, of their agreement when he left his job, and all the ways he’s let her down since. It’s the same fight they always have now, just with different words and out in public rather than in their insulated suburban bedroom.

Owen’s lips curl into a corkscrew. “I don’t often ‘clean up your mess’? All I do at home is clean up your mess. And Penelope’s. And Mason’s!”

Catherine is surprised that he challenges her, and this lights her short fuse. “We have a housekeeper! How much mess can there possibly be? Surely you do
not
spend your days cleaning up
our
mess!” She uses air quotes for “our.”

“True,” he says, his puffy eyes narrowing to slits. “Not ‘ours,’ because you’re never home.”

“I’m never home because I’m working!” Catherine cannot believe he’s bringing this up again, like they haven’t discussed this to death, like he hasn’t gotten the same answer he’s always going to get. She works; she’s the breadwinner; what else does he expect?

“Well, then, that’s why I’m at home always cleaning up the mess!”

“But you’re
not
cleaning up the mess! You’re not!” Catherine wants to calm herself, she does. She despises losing her cool, her grip, her stoic sense of order. But even as she tells herself to stop, to bite her tongue, she also feels her anger roiling through her, like a tsunami cresting from the deepest pit of the ocean, and once it’s begun, there’s no way to clamp it down. They’ve been building to this for months, maybe even a year. And now here, surely haunted by their fractured happiness, they can no longer simply contain things. “Last week, every single night, the dishes were disgusting in the sink. What? Do you think that they’ll magically move themselves to the dishwasher? Or do you think that
I’ll
just do it when I get home? Because of course that’s what you think!”

“I don’t think anything,” he says. “I think that’s what the housekeeper is there for! Who gives a shit if they get moved in at night or she does it in the morning?”

“I give a shit!”

“Then you should be around to do it!”

“Well, that would be absolutely miraculous! If, you know, someone invented a machine in which human beings could be in two places at once, and thus, I could be all things to all people, including your personal maid service, even though I have plenty of other crap on my plate, and I’m pretty sure you
agreed
to handle said household crap five years ago!” Catherine is sweating down both the front and back of her shirt now; her eyebrows are darting, her cheeks are spasming into likely all sorts of unflattering angles.

“A time-space machine, perfect! I’m surprised you haven’t invented it yourself! Put it out in six different pastel hues with a yellow bow on top! The only question is: where else would you be . . . because it wouldn’t be at home!”

“Well . . . my
God!
” Catherine shouts, unable to properly compose the retort she wants to articulate. “Let’s take out an award, a plaque for the world’s biggest martyr! Screw you, Owen.”

Owen shoves his hands into the enormous pockets on his cargo shorts and marches ahead, baseball cap lowered, but head held high, like nothing could have delighted him more than airing this awful, intimate laundry out in the open.

Annie stares at the crimson bricks of the walk, then fiddles with her phone, then suggests, “Maybe we should skip the Quad for now?”

And Colin answers, “I really have to pee anyway.”

So Catherine just strides forward, far enough behind her husband so he can’t mistake her as trying to catch up.

There’s a box waiting on the front stoop of Bruiser when they wind their way down the narrow street to the door. They hunch over it in a huddle—Catherine on the periphery so she doesn’t have to engage (or seemingly share air) with Owen. The return label reads:
D
AVID
M
ONROE,
E
SQ.
But it’s a holiday, so it must have come via special delivery.

“What the hell?” Lindy says.

“Very weird,” Colin mutters.

“A Pandora’s box,” Leon exclaims. “Supercool.”

“There is nothing cool about a Pandora’s box,” Catherine chides. “Who would want a Pandora’s box? All they bring are problems.”
Why are you here?
is what she really wants to add. But she has enough issues right now; this guy can’t be one of them.

“Jesus,” Lindy groans.

“What?” Catherine snips.

“You are
seriously
in a terrible mood,” Lindy replies.

“Takes one to know one,” Catherine says, though it’s not quite on the nose, so Lindy and the rest of them look puzzled until they realize Catherine is actually calling Lindy a bitch.

“Oof, I’m not crazy about surprises,” Annie says. “Well, I did once throw Baxter a surprise birthday party for his thirty-sixth, so maybe I am! I don’t know.” She chews on a cuticle, worry spreading across her face, which she attempts to disguise with an off-kilter smile.

Colin hoists it inside while Leon, carrying in a four-foot-tall foam Liberty Bell from the prize booth, gropes beneath the mat with his free hand for the key and clicks the lock open.

Catherine waits for someone to stop him, to say, “Hey! Who gave you all-access?” but no one does, and it occurs to her that maybe they’re so used to a six-some, they’ll accept anyone who comes along now. She thinks of Bea, closes her eyes for a fraction of a moment, really thinks of her, and tells Bea, if she’s watching, that she’s irreplaceable.

Before anyone can pull back the tape that seals the box closed, Catherine’s phone begins to bleat, and she punches it on before it can ring a second time.

She’s silent as she listens to the voice on the other end, her forehead wrinkling, then wrinkling deeper, while Owen breaks their standoff, frantically whispering, “Mason? Penelope? The kids? What is it?!”

Catherine raises her pointer finger toward him, then turns to ignore him.

“Well, crap,” she says five times, then four times more once she’s hung up.

“Is it the kids? Is everything OK?”

“It was Sasha.” She won’t meet his eyes, barely even turns back to acknowledge him.

“Sasha?” Annie asks.

“Her assistant,” Owen replies, because Catherine is typing into her phone.

She finds what she’s looking for, her free hand floating to her mouth.

“Well, crap,” she says again.

They hear it before they see it, an echo of what they were all witness to thirty minutes prior.

“Cathy! Recycling.”

They gather around her phone at that.

There’s video. Some stupid undergrad recognized Catherine from The Crafty Lady and thought it would be so totally awesome to film her! In the background she says to a friend, “Should we go get her autograph?”

“Thanks. It’s not often you clean up my mess.”

The friend says, “Oh my God, what a bitch!”

“We have a housekeeper. How much mess can there possibly be?”

And then they’ve spliced it with that goddamn dumb I’m-gonna-slit-your-throat gesture. Which was a joke! Obviously! Then, a freeze frame of her in perhaps the worst snippet of a frame she has ever viewed: her blazing, moist cheeks, swollen like a chipmunk’s, her eyes bulging like a zombie, her hair smattered against her neck, sweaty and oily and frankly, all-around horrifying.