Say When (10 page)

“Why?”

Zoe picked up the cage, put it carefully beside her Tinkerbell perfume and lotion set, never opened since she’d gotten it on her last birthday, but she liked the bottles.
“Sit,”
she said, and prodded the ant. Then, to Griffin, “What did you say?”

“I asked why homework was stupid.”

“Because kids need to play after school. Teachers always forget what it feels like to be a kid. They don’t remember
anything.
Don’t
ev
en get me
go
ing.”

Griffin smiled. In the old days, he would have shared this with Ellen.

Ellen was subdued at dinner, but friendly. “I hear you’re going out for some clothes with Dad tonight,” she told Zoe.

Zoe looked at Griffin.
“Clothes!”

“And a game, too,” Griffin added hastily.

“I don’t need clothes!”

“A coat you need, Zoe. And maybe some pants.”

“Okay, but don’t make me try anything on.”

“We’ll see.” The marinara was delicious. “This is good,” he told Ellen. “Better than what you usually make.”

“Yes, it’s a new recipe.” She wouldn’t look at him, saying this. Ah. It had come from him. Lube Chef.

“I’ll be going out tonight, too,” Ellen told Zoe. “And I won’t be here until after you go to bed. But you get to sleep on time, okay?”

Zoe popped a forkful of spaghetti into her mouth, talked around it. “Where are you going?”

“Don’t talk with food in your mouth, Zoe.”

She swallowed. “To your quilting class?”

Ellen nodded. “Yes.”

He thought, for a moment, about saying, “Bullshit. Pass the cheese,” but didn’t. Instead, he sat still, staring at his plate.

“I’m done; can we go?” Zoe asked.

Before he could answer, she was halfway down the hall. “I’ll get our coats.”

“Did you get a ride?” Griffin asked Ellen quietly.

“Yes.”

“When is he coming?”

“After you leave.”

He stood, pushed his chair in. “This is very weird, Ellen.”

“DAD!” Zoe called.

“Coming!”

He started for the hall, then turned back. “Don’t you let him in here.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“I said I
wouldn’t!”

“‘BYE, MOMMY!”

“Goodbye, sweetheart!”
Smooth as silk.

The game was fifty-five dollars. In the car on the way home, Griffin said, “You know, I don’t think I ever had a toy that cost more than ten dollars.”

Zoe groaned. “Oh, no. Don’t start telling me that.”

“What?”

“About how hard it was when you were a kid and you got spanked with a belt and all that stuff.” She yawned mightily.

“Are you sleepy?” He’d kept her out past her bedtime.

“No. Can I play one game before bed?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

Silence.

That was it? But then Zoe said, “Dad, that yawn was not because I’m tired. I’m not tired at all.”

“No, Zoe.”

There. Three usually did it.

After they got home and Zoe was tucked in, Griffin brought her a glass of water, then sat beside her. “Guess where I’m going tomorrow?” he said.

“Where?”

“To a class to learn how to be a Santa.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Nope.”

“What for?”

Griffin shrugged. “For fun!”

“Do you get any free toys?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, good night.” She turned over.

Griffin sat still for a while, then said, “Zoe?”

“Yeah?”

“I thought you’d think it was pretty cool. Me being a Santa.”

She turned over. “Actually, Dad, it’s kind of embarrassing.”

“Well, if any of your classmates come, I won’t reveal myself as being your father.”

“Huh. As if.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nobody in my class still believes! Except for Sarah Kimball, who brings a
doll
to school every day!”

“Well. Maybe it will turn out to be fun for both of us. Somehow. But right now, you’d better start snoring. It’s late.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “Dad? When Mommy comes home, tell her to tuck me in, too.”

“She will. She always does.”

“I know. But tell her, too.”

“Okay. I’ll remind her.”

He’d forgotten. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d been thinking that he’d go downstairs and Ellen would be there in the living room, curled up in an armchair, reading, her glasses perched on the end of her nose. Now, remembering, reoriented, he felt a dull ache in his stomach.

He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk, got two more cookies. He’d spent too much on that game. But he’d wanted to buy it for Zoe. Why? Was he trying to get her on his side? Well, so was Ellen. Chocolate chip cookies, indeed. Although she did do this often, bake things from scratch. Cakes, pies, apple strudel. She was a good mother, he didn’t deny that. Whatever demons she suffered within herself, she put them aside to care for her daughter properly. They’d agreed before Zoe was born that a parent needed to be there for a child, and Ellen volunteered, having no real career plans, anyway, having worked listlessly at a bookstore before they were married. There were times staying home had been difficult for her—once, when Zoe was two, Ellen had sat on their bed weeping, saying she never read anything but the back of cereal boxes anymore. But she was committed to honoring her pledge. “I’ll take the bad with the good,” she’d said, later that night. “It’s worth it.”

Griffin went to the message pad by the telephone, and wrote,

He reread the note, thought for a moment about throwing it away, but left it there. Then he turned out all of the lights but a small one on the hall table, and went to bed.

H
e dreamed he was walking alongside the ocean. Ellen was with him. They were holding hands; she was smiling. He picked up a luminescent purple shell and gave it to her. She admired it, turning it over and over to look at it from this angle and that. But then she dropped it, and it disappeared into the sand. She fell to her knees and dug for it, but couldn’t find it. “Well, it can’t just be
gone,”
she said. But it was. She looked for a long time, then put her hands to her face and burst into tears. “Hey, this is no big deal,” Griffin said. “There’s lots more—I’ll find you another one.” But she was shaking her head, saying, no, that was the only one. He knelt down to put his arms around her, to comfort her, to show her the shells that lay on the beach ahead of them. As he held her, he felt her grow smaller. He pulled away from her and, astonished, watched as she became the size of his thumb. “Don’t drop
me,”
she said. She was looking up at him, her sweater clutched tightly around her, her voice barely audible. Her face was full of fear.

He startled awake, opened his eyes to the empty space in the bed beside him—no matter how determinedly he started out in the middle, he always gravitated back to his old outside half. His mouth was dry; he was perspiring slightly.

In the old days, he’d have awakened Ellen to tell her about the dream. She was good at analyzing them, at making sense of things that seemed not to. She liked to be told dreams as soon as they happened; it didn’t matter what time it was. She would always tell Griffin to say what he thought his dreams meant, first; she said that the dreamer knew best what his own dreams meant. But Griffin didn’t think so. He thought Ellen knew best what his dreams meant, and he assigned that part of himself to her.

He closed his eyes to try to go to sleep again, but it was pointless: He was wide awake. He checked the clock: 2:14. He wondered if Ellen had come home yet. Well, what if she hadn’t? It wasn’t his business any longer.

Still.

He got up, put on his robe and slippers, and went downstairs. He would say that he’d forgotten to turn the heat down, which was true. No wonder he’d awakened perspiring.

She was asleep on the sofa, her purse gaping open on the floor beside her. Why? What had she been doing? Looking to see if there was enough in the checking account to pay for first and last month’s rent for some apartment she and the Oil Pan King had looked at?

He went into the kitchen, turned on the night-light on the microwave. Milk might help him sleep. He poured a glassful, then stood at the sink, looking out the kitchen window as he drank it. He saw his reflection and, beyond that, the leafless branches of the maple tree. Maybe this weekend, he and Zoe would fix that floorboard—it was supposed to be unseasonably mild. And in the spring, he’d paint the tree house, maybe add the rope swing Zoe kept asking for, though he worried about doing that. Zoe was too daring, even for a tomboy. He worried that one of these days, she was going to hurt herself badly. It would be so much safer for her to be more…well,
girl
-like is what he’d say, though it was probably politically incorrect to do so. But why couldn’t she play with girls once in a while, sit quietly in someone’s pink bedroom playing Barbies instead of having demolition derby day with the “race car” she’d built with her roughneck friends from a discarded red wagon? The only Barbie Zoe owned lay ignored at the bottom of her closet. Once, he and Ellen had talked about whether or not Zoe was gay, and had decided not—
not that it mattered,
as they Seinfeld-ly agreed. Zoe seemed to have crushes on boys every now and then—Ben Picchiotti was someone she talked about lately. Ben was an older man, a sixth-grader and a superb baseball player—legendary in Little League circles—whom Zoe seemed to admire for reasons beyond his athletic abilities. So why couldn’t she giggle about Ben in the safety of some other girl’s house rather than racing around outside all the time? Grace Woodward, one of the girls in her class, had called her to come over a couple of times, but Zoe always found a reason not to go. Maybe it was Griffin’s fault. Maybe rather than asking her if she’d like to help hammer, he’d ask her to pick out curtains for the tree house. Wallpaper. If Ellen wasn’t going to be around, he’d have to make more of an effort that way. Not that any of Ellen’s love of the domestic and the feminine had rubbed off on Zoe yet.

He rinsed out his glass, put it in the sink, and started out of the kitchen. Near the phone, he saw a note, then remembered that he’d left one for Ellen. She hadn’t even bothered to read it. He started to throw it away, then saw that it was not his note, but one from Ellen to him:

He read it three times, looking to see if there was something else he could find, something in the slant of her writing, the dotting of the
i
’s. But he couldn’t find anything. Not what he wanted.

He went into the living room and stood over Ellen, watching her sleep. In her open purse, he saw his note, and the sight of it made for a small leap of happiness inside him.

He went back into the kitchen, got out a pencil, and on the notepad wrote:

He put Ellen’s note in his robe pocket, then headed back upstairs. He would put it in the dresser drawer where they kept a huge pile of things from Zoe: notes to Santa and the Easter bunny, drawings from the time she could barely hold a pencil. Strange: At the same time Griffin was feeling a conciliatory warmth toward Ellen, he was also feeling that if she tried to take even one of those papers with her when she left, he’d kill her.

He lay back in bed, sighed. Of course he wouldn’t kill her. But he would never give her a single one of Zoe’s papers. They belonged here. In the family Griffin.

*  *  *

In the morning, Ellen awakened him, saying, “Do you know what time it is? Are you sick?”

He looked at the clock, bolted upright. It was 8:30, an hour and a half past the time he usually got up. Ellen was wearing the multicolored silk robe he and Zoe had picked out for her a few Mother’s Days ago. She had thought about returning it at first, saying that it must have cost a fortune—which it had. But then, at Zoe’s insistence, she’d decided to keep it. She didn’t wear it except on special occasions—Christmas mornings, times when they had guests staying over—fearing that she’d stain it or damage it in some other way. Besides, she’d always liked wearing Griffin’s flannel shirts as robes. He supposed she no longer wanted to do that.

“I didn’t know whether to wake you or not,” she said, her hands clasped tightly before her. He realized with some surprise that she was nervous.

“It’s good you did. I just overslept. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Is Zoe up?”

Ellen frowned. “She’s gone to
school.”
There was something in her tone Griffin didn’t like. Some accusation, some disapproval: Did he not
know
this, he who insisted he’d be able to take care of their daughter just as well as she could?

“Look,” he said. “I didn’t set the alarm, okay? I was tired. I could have gotten Zoe up, but I didn’t think you’d mind doing it.”

“What are you talking about? Why would I mind? I do it all the time!”

“Not
all
the time. I do it sometimes, too. And if you hadn’t been here, I would have gotten her up on time, believe me.
And
made her breakfast.
And
made sure she had what she needed for school, which
you
don’t always do.”

“Griffin. Jesus.” She turned and left.

He sat at the edge of the bed for a while, trying to decide if he should be ashamed of himself or not. Then he got into the shower and stood with the hot water running full in his face, his eyes closed tightly, until it ran out. When he was dressed, he went downstairs and into the kitchen. Maybe he would apologize to Ellen—he’d been out of line.

She was sitting at the table with an empty coffee cup before her, reading the paper. He refilled her cup, set it down before her again. She did not thank him. She did not acknowledge him in any way.

He sat across her with his own cup of coffee, took a sip, then took another.

“Ellen.”

Nothing.

“Ellen.”

“What.” She did not look up.

“I’m sorry.”

A moment, and then, still glued to the paper, she said, “All right.”

He leaned back in his chair, sighed. This…tightness. When was the last time it had been easy between them? He stared at Ellen, then substituted Donna for her. Donna in some blue robe, smiling, asking him about what he was going to do that day. Kissing him at the door when he left. When had it been that way with Ellen? Ever?

“I have to leave at six-thirty tonight,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow, kept reading.

“Did you hear me?”

She looked up. “Yes, I heard you. Dinner will be at six. You can leave whenever you want to.”

He noticed a smudge of mascara beneath her left eye. “What did you do last night, Ellen?”

She got up from the table, stood at the sink with her back to him. “I don’t think we need to talk about that.”

“You are still my wife.”

“We are separated, insofar as we can be.”

“You are still my wife.”

She turned around. “I
really
don’t think you would want to hear about it, Griffin.”

He nodded. “I see.” He picked up his briefcase and headed for the door.

“Are you really going to be a Santa Claus?”

He turned around. “Who told you that?”

“Zoe. Or is that your ‘quilting class’?”

“I wouldn’t do that, Ellen. I would never lie to her.”

“Yeah. That’s what I always thought, too. Well, I’ll see you tonight.”

Her voice was soft, nearly itself again. He remembered, suddenly, the notes they’d left for each other.
Had
they done that? Yes. Yes, they had. “Thanks for your note,” he told her.

She looked away from him.

“Did you get my other one?”

“Yes.” She moved past him, headed upstairs.