Talking in Bed (10 page)

"Ev didn't tell me what you do?" Rachel asked them.

Didi leaped to answer this. "Paddy here owns his own business, roofing. Right now he's working over in Naperville, you know that new subdivision around the Amestra plant?"

"No," Rachel said, finally able to work her head in a direction other than up and down.

"Oh, where the geese are? All those geese they had to spend so much money to root out of there? They were on the front page of the
Tribune
last Sunday?"

"Had to spend an arm and a leg," Paddy said. "Called it a wetlands instead of a darned swamp and charged the company to get those birds moved."

"Wetlands habitat," Didi scoffed.

"What'd they do with the geese?" Rachel asked.

Paddy smiled at her once more. "I worried about that myself. But they transported them right down the road to the fountain at the Plytel plant. Geese are ornery," he added.

"Ornery," Rachel repeated.

"They've got the ugliest tongues," he said, "like a man's fingers." He wiggled his thick pointer to illustrate.

"And I stay home with Melanie," Didi continued. "I might work at a day care this fall, when she starts kindergarten. Do you work?"

"I used to be a public defender," Rachel said. "But not anymore. I consult on occasion, some semesters I teach over at Circle, and I'm trying to decide whether to set up a private practice."

"As what?"

Rachel blinked. "Well, as a lawyer."

Didi nodded. "Oh, a
lawyer.
"

"Guess we won't tell any lawyer jokes," Paddy said, chuckling. Rachel hated chuckling; it reminded her of people who thought they had a sense of humor, the ones who had to practice how to find things funny.

"Go ahead," she said. "I love jokes." She did, in fact, love jokes. She would tolerate an evening with anyone who could make her laugh.

"I don't know any lawyer jokes," Paddy admitted.

"How about some other kind of joke?" Rachel asked, enjoying his discomfort. "Do you know any shrink jokes?"

"All I know are knock-knock jokes." Didi laughed, then added, "Knock knock." When Rachel was slow to supply the next line, she did it herself, "Who's there? Mindy."

"Mindy who?" Melanie said from the floor.

"Mindy oven—lemme out!"

Evan and Melanie toppled all the animals over, as if they'd laughed themselves supine.

"Knock knock," Melanie said.

"Who's there?" Rachel said quickly.

"Not you," the child whined, pointing at Ev. "Him."

"Who's there?" Ev said. Rachel abruptly stood.

"May I help you with supper?" Didi said, rising from her perch on the couch.

"Sure," Rachel said.

"Who's there?" Ev repeated.

"Oh, a little old lady."

"You can come, too," Rachel told Paddy, since he was poised on the couch as if trying to decide where he belonged. He followed gratefully.

In the kitchen, the Limbachs stood awkwardly together while Rachel pulled food from the refrigerator.

"I smell bread!" Didi exclaimed happily. "Do you have one of those machines?"

"Machines?"
Oh, a little old lady who
? Rachel thought. A yodeling joke.

Didi said, "A breadmaker?"

"No," Rachel said, working at keeping the disdain from her voice.

"Those machines are great. My mother has one. She makes bread every day, just throws in the mix, comes back in four and a half hours, bread's done. She's gained ten pounds since Christmas, which is when she got it, on sale."

"You could slice mushrooms for me," Rachel said, handing Didi the cardboard carton and a small knife. To Paddy she gave two red onions. He looked surprised to see them in his beefy hands.

Didi said, "I don't remember the last time Paddy helped out in the kitchen. His method of cooking goes like this: apply heat."

Ignoring her, Rachel said, of the onions, "You need to remove the skin." She enjoyed listening to him snuffle as he chopped.

He said, "You hear about the farmer who's so dumb he thought you spelled farm E-I-E-I-O?"

Her sons arrived home just in time. They'd met up on the bus, Zach thoroughly mud-smeared and Marcus carrying his chessboard, which folded and fastened like a briefcase. He was a perfect replica of his father, down to the frameless glasses that reflected surfaces and hid his eyes. It had apparently bothered him to sit next to Zach on the bus. They came through the back door arguing about humiliation, Zach's single line being "But I'm your
brother.
" He was ten; his feelings showed on his soft face.

Marcus said, "You didn't have to take up a whole other seat with your bag. That old man could have sat there."

"Say hi," Rachel directed.

Zach dropped everything—soccer ball, dirty backpack, worn textbooks—in the middle of the floor and said hello to Didi and Paddy, who introduced themselves as Mrs. and Mr. Limbach. "Why are you crying?" he asked Paddy.

"Onions," Rachel explained. "Move this stuff, and clean up. You're late. Marcus, say hello."

"Hello," Marcus said sullenly, sliding through the crowded room with his black case, heading for his bedroom. It would not occur to him to come to dinner without clean hands; he worried too much about germs. Perhaps he would be a surgeon, Rachel always thought. Or perhaps just uselessly obsessive, like most everyone else on the planet.

"That was Marcus," she told their guests.

"Mom," Zach said, reaching around her to grab a cherry tomato. "Mom, Marcus called me illiterate."

"And?"

He shrugged. "Just thought you'd like to know." He popped the tomato, spilling seeds down his chin.

"You stink, son. Go clean up."

Zach left his things where they'd fallen and thumped down the hall to his room.

Rachel decided not to apologize for her boys. Instead, she took the mushrooms and onions from her guests to drop them into their places and then declared the meal finished. She asked Didi to help her move it to the table. She directed Paddy to retrieve Ev and the little girl.

The three children sat on a long bench on one side of the table, facing Didi and Paddy. Ev and Rachel took head and foot. Bowls circulated. The Limbach child refused everything.

"Try a little," her mother wheedled.

"I don't like chicken," she complained. "I don't like these green things, either, or these toadstools."

"Mushrooms," Paddy corrected her. "Try one. Mommy cut them. And this isn't chicken, it's Cornish gamehens. From Cornland."

Rachel watched Marcus roll his eyes.

"How about some bread?" Rachel said, handing down a slice, thinking that Paddy seemed hatched from Cornland.

"It's brown bread," said Melanie. "It has raisins."

"Seeds," Marcus corrected her, leaning around his younger brother to address the girl. "Caraway seeds, not raisins. Bite one—it tastes like licorice."

"Black licorice," Zach added.

Melanie pouted as if she would cry.

Didi said, "It's very good bread. Mrs. Cole worked hard to make it for us."

Rachel, embarrassed by this, stood, asking Melanie what she
would
like.

"Macaroni and cheese," the child said, in a tone of voice daring Rachel to satisfy her.

"Sniveling thing," Rachel muttered in the kitchen. Fortunately, she found a frozen box of macaroni and cheese in the back of the freezer, its expiration date unreadable for all the hoarfrost. While it was microwaving, she poured herself another glass of wine, happy to be alone.

When she got back to the table, Melanie stared at the bowl. "It's the wrong kind," she whispered to her mother.

"Try it," Paddy repeated. Maybe this was his parenting technique, to be always the chorus.

Rachel's boys were eating in their usual way, Zach with a full plate he would slowly proceed through, Marcus with tiny servings he would rush to finish, his arms near the plate as if fending off someone else's fork. Zach frequently stayed at the table eating from the serving bowls, grazing, after everyone else had moved on.

Paddy and Didi seemed as confused by the little hens and mushrooms and piñons as Melanie did.

"Good gravy," Paddy commented of the sauce.

"Thank you," Rachel said.

"He sounds like a superhero," Marcus said. "'Good gravy.' Like Superman, isn't it?"

Ev gave him a glance, in response to which Marcus ducked, as if struck. There wasn't anything in the world Marcus would rather avoid than displeasing his father. He behaved in his father's presence like a whipped dog. Rachel hated this about their relationship, perhaps because Marcus did not grant her anywhere near the same power over him.

Rachel had had enough wine by now to feel less upset with the evening. She liked her own cooking, even if her guests didn't, even if Ev wouldn't eat meat, and she knew her working part of the entertaining was done. The bread, a rye with caraway, was particularly good.

Melanie, under duress, had taken a large bite of macaroni and cheese. She said something with it in her mouth, and her mother asked her to wait until her mouth was empty. Instead of swallowing, Melanie removed the food and held it cupped in her hand. "I said, 'It's yucky,'" she said.

Zach, beside her, laughed long and loud. Like Rachel, he enjoyed being amused.

Ev stood, dropping his napkin on the table, and hurried to the kitchen. Rachel waited with everyone else, uncomfortable with his unpredictable impatience. But he returned in a moment with a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter. "Here, Mel," he told her kindly, kneeling beside her to open the jar.

"I don't want to sit by her," Melanie told Ev, meaning Rachel. "I want to sit by you."

The Limbachs cried out as a team, "Melanie!"

Dinner proceeded in this way, with little or nothing besides Melanie's comfort and preferences being addressed. Rachel had never in her life felt so hostile toward a child. Even Ev, who generally did not coddle, seemed set on making the girl comfortable.

During dessert (whole wheat and carob brownies that Melanie optimistically bit into, then spit out, crying over the nuts), Rachel discovered that Didi was a Mormon. "A little bit Jack Mormon," she admitted, meaning the wine coolers earlier. "But no thanks to the coffee."

"A Jill Mormon," Zach said, grinning at his cleverness. He wasn't generally very quick about such things. "Because she's a girl," he explained.

"We know," said his brother. "We just didn't find it humorous."

"A Mormon?" Rachel said. "I don't think I've ever met a Mormon."

"Well, I'm not really of the church any longer."

"Huh."

"I'm not Mormon," Paddy said. He pulled at his shirt collar. "No long johns, and only one woman." He laughed.

Ev joined the conversation by mentioning that Rachel wasn't Catholic anymore and he wasn't Jewish anymore. "None of us are who we used to be," he said, a line that Rachel decided to remember for later, for review.

"Oh, you're a Jew," Didi said, attaching herself to a topic. "Well, I guess I'd guessed that, the hair and the nose and being a shrink and all."

Rachel watched Ev. His reaction was only a mild pained smile, and Rachel's interest in the disastrous dinner now focused exclusively on her husband. What was it about Paddy Limbach that Ev found compelling? When she looked at Paddy to study him, she discovered him already looking at her, which was oddly disarming. He smiled yet again; perhaps someone had once told him that his teeth were his finest asset, that he should show them as often as possible.

"I've heard that Mormon women only have two career opportunities outside the home," Marcus said, for the first time interested in the conversation. "Nurse or teacher, the helping jobs. Is that right?"

Didi said, "I'm going to teach in a day care. My sisters don't work at all, they take care of their kids."

"How many sisters?" Marcus persisted. "How many kids?"

"Eight, and, let me see..." She rolled her gaze upward to count all her nephews and nieces. "Thirty-two kids—thirty-three counting Mel here."

"Oh my god!" Marcus said. "Can you believe that, Dad? And that guy, that Brigham Young, he got to the Great Salt Lake and said, 'This is the place,' right? He thought it was the ocean?"

"The ocean?" Zach said. "He thought a lake was the ocean? Kind of lame, huh?"

Rachel laughed. "I always thought Mormon men must have got together and said, 'Hm, maybe if we tell the women God wants them to stay home and breed, they'll believe us. We'll just have us some harems, and go hang out together in the temple.'"

Didi had laid down her silverware. Her face was red. Rachel realized that she'd gone too far and felt humiliated by her rudeness. Didi said, "Well, polygamy has been frowned on for some time now," then stared at her plate, at her untouched hen and mushrooms. The stems of sage seemed to be giving her problems. Ev hadn't cleared her place when he had the others, and now there was hardly room for her dessert plate.

"Frowned on?" Rachel said.

Paddy pretended to be chewing his brownie, overmasticating to avoid filling the gap.
A pall fell,
Rachel thought, dreamily imagining the conversation she might have later with her ironic friend Zoë.

Finally Ev said to Marcus, "Give us some imitations, son."

Marcus shook his head, tucking a slim brownie into his mouth.

"Marcus does impressions," Ev explained. "He's very talented. Show them George Bush, son."

"Do Arnie," Zach encouraged with his mouth full.

Marcus did not really require much prodding, especially from his father.

"O.K., here's George Bush," he said, swallowing, then tilting his head sideways and pulling his lower teeth in, flattening the air before him with his slender hands. "Now, folks, let's be reasonable here about this economy thing," he whined, shaking his head, smiling hollowly, letting the light from the overhead chandelier catch the surface of his eyeglasses. Ev applauded. Rachel smiled. Paddy and Didi sat, bewildered. Marcus launched into others without pause, moving from Sylvester Stallone to Barbara Walters to Larry King to William F. Buckley. He did a savage British accent that Rachel was quite proud of. Their guests, watching him and frowning as if he might be insulting them in another language, did not appear to appreciate Marcus's talents. Didi didn't seem to recognize any of the impressions; her openmouthed, quizzical expression remained unchanged through them all. She was revealed as not having a clue as to who the secretary of state was or why Marcus's imitation of Jim Lehrer's phony ingenuous lower lip was so perfect.