Sand in My Eyes (4 page)

With the early sun poking me in the eyes, I rolled to my side and reached for a damp cloth to put over my face, but then I heard the footsteps of a wolf entering my room. I pulled the sheet back up to my chin-ny-chin chin, hiding a bit longer from morning and from him. He was there with us all night, picking up the fallen, damp cloths, refolding and laying them across Marjorie’s forehead, and I had felt his eyes watching me as I climbed into the lukewarm water with my nightgown on so I might better comfort and hold our slippery, screaming, and feverish little girl. I had ignored him, refusing his help, but he hovered close through it all, kneeling on the floor beside the tub as our girl and I cried together, knowing we had lost the battle and that something worse was about to happen.

Timothy, my husband, was across my room now, and I could hear him breathing, but there was nothing more I had to say to the man. I had said it all that bitterly cold morning when I confronted him, told him I knew, had seen the signs and put it all together. “You wicked animal!” I had snarled at him then. But now I held my breath, pretending to be asleep. I didn’t want him leaning over me in bed like he had then, with those big red eyes, and my, what a big mouth he had, drooling out the details of how
he did me wrong, drinking on a business trip, finding himself in bed with his younger co-worker, and how he swore to never stray again.

I should have divorced him right then. But I didn’t. A mother does things for her children, things that don’t always make sense. “A mother’s love is illogical,” I said when he asked whether I was leaving him. “A natural instinct kind of love—one I don’t expect you to understand.”

I stayed with him for the sake of our children and encouraged him to take the branch office promotion he had sitting on the table, the re-location offer that brought us to Florida, three hours away from where his parents were living and far, far away from his mistress, so far that he might never cross paths with her again. I would quit my job in New York City and become a stay-at-home mother in a tiny house on a barrier island in order to be farther away from her, and there we would live happily ever after, pretending, trying to believe that life was good.

When he left the bedroom and I could hear the shower, I wanted to sleep longer, but “ready or not, here I come,” I heard the voice of morning—my three-year-old twins cantering down the hardwood floors toward my bedroom like ponies set loose from a stable. I would have to check outside their window for a woodpecker waking them consistently at the crack of dawn, I thought as I opened my eyes and looked around. The walls in our bedroom were yellow, and in the little yellow room there were a writing desk, red syrup on a spoon, dirty socks, an unpacked box, crumbs on my rug, and an army of bugs. It all made me close my eyes, then mutter, “Good-bye, morning!” and “Good riddance!” to writing and the sticky spoon, “Adios!” to the dirty socks and ugly box, and “Bon appétit!” to the bugs eating crumbs on my rug.

“Juice, juice, juice,” Thomas chanted as he jumped over the black wrought-iron post of my bed, and Will was asking for something, too, but he was grumpy, and his words were more like the sounds of a dying blueshell crab.

“Use your words, Will. Your words are powerful. Mama can’t understand you when you grunt and groan,” I told him.

“Will wants juice,” his brother said for him.

“Mama will get you juice. But first she wants to cuddle,” I told them,
but then Marjorie awoke, and I could see from her eyes that she was wondering whether the paramedics really came to see her at one o’clock this morning, or had it only been a dream. Was I really screaming over her as she vomited and jerked rhythmically in my arms?

I reached for the fever-reducing syrup I had hidden under my pillow and poured a teaspoon into her mouth, waiting for her to say something, a single word, “mama.” They promised me simple febrile seizures are harmless and cause no brain damage, but until a mother sees her little one talking and playing, she remains in a worried state, for this is the way we
tend to think, tend to think, tend to think
. This is the way we tend to think on an early sleep-deprived morning.

There was nothing I craved more than to nest in my blankets forever, cuddling as we were, and not fly around like a frantic bird, but mornings couldn’t care less whether a mother is rested or not, and my boys, playful as river otters, hopped down and took off out of my room—headed, I knew, for the refrigerator. And Marjorie slid down too, usually following her brothers in single file wherever they went, but this time she pushed open the bathroom door, and I could still hear the shower, her father leisurely lavishing himself with hot water. I didn’t feel like stepping foot in the same small room as Timothy, but then I heard the toilet lid open and knew that my daughter, like a mourning dove in a birdbath, was dipping her hands in to play.

I didn’t enjoy waking in the little house on stilts any more than I had in the house back north: touching my feet to the cold floor, shivering like a feeble goose, taking my first throbbing steps morning after morning, laughing at the foot doctor for having told me the only way my so-called “plantar fascitis” would go away was to stretch, ice and massage my feet several times a day (Yeah, right! Like who has time for that?) so, all this time after giving birth last, my feet were still aching first thing in the morning and any time I stood up, and I was a mother dancing in circles, responding to the called demands of three children, hoping the activity might warm me. It didn’t matter where I lived. Mornings then and living there and now living here, on this barrier island down south, are all the same, no longer my own. They belong to my children and household chores.

“Yuck, Marjorie,” I scolded as I grabbed her by the tummy and soaped her hands in the sink. “Again, your father forgot to shut the bathroom door, you poor thing, disgusting. How many times do I have to tell him?”

“Good morning, princess,” Timothy said, poking his head out from the shower, and I knew he wasn’t talking to me. “Daddy is late for his trip,” he continued. “I wish I didn’t have to go, especially after what happened to you last night, but at least your fever broke.”

We both knew well how to play the silent game. Tell the children what you want your spouse to hear. That way you don’t have to talk to each other. Since I found out what he did with that other woman, the two of us had become ghosts, occupying the same house but living on different planes of existence, aware when the other was present, yet making no contact. The boys had witnessed us sauntering past one another in the hallways, and their eyes begged for us to communicate. But even now, as we stood with nothing but a shower curtain separating us, I hardly knew what to say to the man. I had cursed and said all there was to say in the days following his confession.

I wiped the steam off the mirror with my sleeve and took a good hard look at myself. My once brilliant eyes now looked coated in layers of grime—a build-up of pain and disappointment—and my face was covered in the markings of scorn that I feared might never go away. I didn’t know how one removes the resentment from her face, or renews the brilliancy in her eyes and the radiance in her skin.

Resentment does bad things to a person. It was turning me into an ugly woman.

“Who are you?” I shouted at the face in the mirror. “I’m looking for Anna Hott. What happened to her?”

“Did you say something?” Timothy asked from behind the curtain.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” I told him and, when the younger, happier, more beautiful me would not appear, I stared back at the exhausted, overwhelmed, joyless thirty-six-year-old telling me what I didn’t want to hear, that I was no longer the fairest of them all.

Then I reached for my toothbrush but could hear the boys bickering toward me, and Marjorie was opening the drawer with the razors, pulling
them out. I redirected her to the drawer with the cotton balls, and because there wasn’t time for brushing my teeth, I quickly pulled my dark, shoulder-length hair into a ponytail at the nape of my neck, noticing three gray hairs growing from my head. I tugged on one until there were two gray hairs growing from my head. I pulled on another, and then there was one gray hair growing from my head. That one I left exactly where it was, hoping that Timothy would spot it and know what the last several months had done to his poor wife.

By now the boys had come in, and Thomas was angry and hounding, and Will was pathetic and whining, “Where’s our juice?”

“Who do I look like, a superhero?” I asked. “Because I’m not. I’m one mommy, two hands, that’s all I am. Now go into the kitchen and wait for me. I’ll be right there.”

I looked at my primly petite lips in the mirror, wanting to use them as weapons, wishing they had the power to tell my husband how nice it must be to be him, to be taking a ridiculously long, hot shower, and then to be going off like he was on a flight, another business trip, one more lavish hotel, and a cocktail reception, followed by a dinner, feasting on more than cereal and corn dogs like us. But he was numb to my words and would only shut me up, scold me for complaining, remind me that we live on a tropical island in Florida, and that my life isn’t so bad.

“Would you hand me a towel, dear?” he asked, turning off the shower, and I rolled my eyes at the way in which he attached the word “dear” to whatever he said to me. Guilt does that. It brings out the superficial best in husbands. But he no longer held my hands, looked me in the eyes, bought me flowers, or desired date nights, so being called “dear” meant nothing.

I reached down and pulled a damp, smelly towel off the top of the pile of dirty clothes lying on the floor, then opened the curtain a crack and, turning my head away, tossed it in.

“A clean one would be nice,” he said.

“There are no clean towels,” I said, letting out a wretched groan. “No clean anything. Maybe if I had someone to help me, if we hired someone to help with the laundry …” I stopped there, sounding more like a wicked
witch than I intended.

“Well, by the time we pay the rent, car payments, insurance, and buy groceries, we’ve got nothing left, which reminds me. Don’t spend a single penny for the next four days, or things will bounce.”

“You always say that.”

“I’m sorry your life is miserable, dear,” he said, but there were no harps playing, no trumpets blowing, and I know he didn’t mean it, didn’t feel an eensy-weensy bit sorry for my woes.

“You’re the one who has to grow old with me, with the woman I’m becoming.” I pulled a bar of soap out of Marjorie’s mouth, wanting to go further, tell him I was at a crucial age, where I could either age gracefully and with an elegant look to my face—given a little help around the house—or begin to deteriorate and grow into an ugly old woman thanks to overexertion, stress, and resentment.

But he wouldn’t get it and, because I didn’t want to stick around longer and see what the other woman saw—his naked body, thick around the middle from all those hotel happy hours—I picked Marjorie up and stormed out.

CHAPTER FIVE

IT WAS A STRESSFUL
stop-and-go commute toward the kitchen, with traffic, toys, and my disturbing thoughts dangerously in my way, causing me to trip and swerve.

“I don’t know how the house is always a mess,” I told Marjorie, who was riding on my hip down the hall. “It’s not like I dilly-dally. Mama doesn’t stop, doesn’t sit. She runs from one disaster to the next all day long.”

My home was gruesome enough for a wildlife documentary, and if there were a narrator, she’d have said, “This is a habitat in distress, in which a bird has been trying to create a nest out of chaos.” But I was no bird in distress. I was an overwhelmed mother, wondering whether one too many crazy mornings mixed with lack of sleep might have a tragic cumulative effect, like one too many huffs and puffs and the house falls down.

The refrigerator was open when I got to the kitchen, and I could see from the puddle on the floor that the boys had pulled out the gallon of juice and drunk what was left.

“I swear I’m on the verge,” I muttered as I saw from the corner of my eye that Marjorie had taken her diaper off and was peeing on the couch. “On the verge of what, I don’t know, but the verge.”

“I’m hungry,” cried Thomas, and like Old Mother Hubbard I went to my cupboard to fetch that poor boy a bone, but it was bare, except for a can
of beans, and I hated being that mother, always out of food, feeding her children boiled beans and butter.

“Aha! An egg,” I announced, opening the carton and discovering one left. “I’ll make us all an egg!” But then I noticed the sink, full with yesterday’s dirty dishes, and there I spotted the frying pan sticking out from the heap. It needed a good scrubbing, but I had no soap, nor clean sponges, nor rags, and because I had nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, I let my eyes wander to the window above my sink, and there I peeked out.

The world outside my kitchen was lighting up, and I caught a glimpse of the lady who lives next door moving around like a shadow in her yard, filling her birdbath with water. This was the elderly woman I saw out there all those mornings when Timothy was out of town. I watched her then through the windows, digging holes in the soil, and later in the day taking bundles of roses from buckets and putting them into the holes. And when I was pacing the halls with whining children in my arms, she was out there spraying, pruning, or tying cans in arched positions to stakes. And as I sped away in my car to the pediatrician’s or the store, I pretended I didn’t see her watering flowers on the side of her house. What is wrong with my life, I’ve wondered, when I can’t find it in me to wave to the cute old lady living next door?