The Birthdays (8 page)

“I did. Yesterday.”

“I like it,” he said. “I can see more of your eyes now.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“It’s definitely a good thing. One of the big goods.” He kept his gaze on his plate. She wanted to ask him to keep going—did he mean her eyes specifically, or eyes in general, a woman’s eyes, what? Was
she
one of life’s big goods for him? But she grew nervous about where such a question might lead. What if he laughed at her and said of course he’d been talking about eyes in general, what had she been thinking? Now that she thought of it, maybe she should have just come out and set the cards on the table, asked him if he too noticed that the air between them had changed.

Joe slid his hands around the steering wheel. She looked out at the houses along the street, at two young kids playing soccer in their yard. “Do you think that poor boy back at the gas station had a home?” she asked.

“He had his grandpa with him. I’m sure they live somewhere.”

“Where
are
we?”

“I’ve got it, Ell. Don’t worry.”

And only a few moments later she recognized everything: the town hall, the colossal flag in front, the neon
ICE CREAM
sign missing the R, the small parking lot and the ferry slip. She was amazed they’d made it, and in even less time than they’d planned.

Joe pulled their car under the shade of a thick oak. He opened his door, hurried to pull the bags from the back of the car and rushed away as if completely forgetting he had a wife. He shoved past a small group of people stepping out of the
next car and plowed his way out of Ellen’s field of vision. She decided to stay where she was and let him realize she was not beside him.

She turned to Babe in the back seat, now asleep in his shell. Did Joe assume she’d follow him, carrying Babe’s enormous cage and the remaining bag as well as her purse and jacket? The turtle’s clay-colored head and arms and legs pulled beneath him, he resembled a rock. The animal was oblivious to her or anything else, for that matter. But perhaps he wasn’t. What if Babe in fact understood everything? He’d been in the room when she spoke on the phone with MacNeil. Babe had watched her with his unblinking eyes, the black pits unmoving beneath thick, hooded lids. He was an ugly creature, really, an animal of no color or fur, no purring or singing. Joe liked to point out the ringed pattern on his shell—
Like a face, see? The eyes, the nose, the mouth
—and the calmness, the gentleness of a creature that moved so slowly.
What’s the rush?
Joe would say when Babe inched his way across their kitchen floor.
What, when it comes down to it, is really the rush?
Babe had seen everything. He was aware of her feelings for MacNeil. The turtle was not going anywhere. He was sitting there, unmoving, unblinking, communicating that she could drift anywhere she wanted. She could fall in love at this late age, she could leave her life as she’d known it, go anywhere, but
I, Babe, am not leaving Joe. I am not running off anywhere.
Like a rock.

“Ell,” Joe was saying. “Ellen.” He was standing just outside her door. “We’re all set. Come on now.” She hoisted herself from her seat, followed him around the back and said, “Take it slowly. One thing at a time.” He gently lifted Babe’s cage into the air.

They had twenty minutes until the boat would leave, and they found an empty bench in the corner of the parking lot. Joe stopped for a moment, clearly considering whether to place Babe’s cage on the bench or offer it to her. He paused and then carefully lowered the cage onto the ground. At once grateful and annoyed, she dropped the suitcase she was carrying. “I’m shot,” she said again,
who cared if he knew what she meant
, and he nodded absently. They sat and watched a line begin to form at the ticket counter. Joe set his hand on her leg. It felt solid and sturdy, almost separate from him, as if right then it was the only thing holding her against the earth.

Liz had napped while Jake unpacked the groceries, made the beds, opened the windows and set up the plywood ramp over the front step. Now he looked down at her on the couch, her head against her chest, her lips slightly parted, and he draped a thin blanket over her legs, careful not to wake her. He decided to go for a walk on the beach behind the house. He grabbed his sunglasses off the coffee table and headed out.

By the water, he found a yellow pacifier and turned it over in his hands. It was encased in wet sand, and he brushed it off. Jake kept a wooden box of odd things he’d found, things that for some reason seemed wrong to throw away: an old copy of the Bible he’d found in a parking lot, a dog collar outside his office, a tiny mitten, a photograph of an elderly couple. He tried to remember to bring the box wherever he went, as he was constantly finding items that belonged in it. He imagined each had a story, a rightful owner and maybe even a reason for being left behind, and collecting them made him feel good, like the one savior of all these forgotten things. Liz
didn’t know about his collection—she’d have thought it sentimental. She hated unnecessary clutter, things kept only because a person felt guilty getting rid of them. Such things, she’d say, kept one needlessly bound to the past. But Jake shoved the pacifier in his pocket, glad he’d remembered to bring the box this weekend. He often forgot it, and tended to find the most heartbreaking things when he was without it.

He crouched before the tide, dipped his fingers in the icy water and recoiled. Maine water was invariably frigid, but it never failed to surprise him. He turned to walk back to the house, noting the faint smell of fir trees. He could hardly wait for his family’s arrival and to hear what they thought of his house, which none of them had seen. He looked forward to handing them each a drink and guiding them to the back porch, watching them gaze out at his little patch of ocean under the sunset. What a change this was from the house where he’d grown up. That small, crowded Cape with the stained carpets, the practically antique appliances, the rotting roof. Last year he’d offered his father some money to fix the roof or buy some new appliances or, better yet, both, but Joe had adamantly refused. Jake remembered back in high school joining forces with his mother as she tried to convince Joe to tear up the carpet in the living room and put in hardwood floors. Joe’d received an unexpectedly large bonus at the car lot, but he’d wanted to replace a cracked toilet with the money. Daniel and Hilary didn’t much care about the matter, but Ellen and Jake pleaded for the new floor. Jake’s classmate Henry lived in a large house that had only hardwoods and Jake thought it made the place seem even bigger and somehow cleaner and more elegant. In the end, though, the new toilet won out and that matted beige carpet stayed. Jake
stopped for a second just before the path that led to his back porch. Now he had two houses of his own filled with hardwood floors. He gazed ahead at the newly patched roof, the freshly stained clapboards, and reminded himself that he’d tried to help his parents. He’d done what he could.

Liz was up now and slicing mushrooms. She’d turned on the radio and he could hear the low buzz of someone talking when he stepped into the kitchen. A shred of something—a carrot, he soon saw—hung from her hair by her ear, and for some reason it saddened him. Jake reached over to remove it, and she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

“They’re saying rain.”

“No,” he said. “It looks all right out there. Just a little overcast.”

“A storm moving in later, I guess, and then rain all weekend.”

“Tell me you’re kidding,” he said. A few days ago the forecast had been for only sun. He’d planned to take his family out in a fishing boat he’d chartered on Saturday and to go to the beach on Sunday. “I didn’t hear anything about a storm.”

“I’m kidding,” she said flatly, and popped a slice of mushroom in his mouth. “It’s okay. We’ll play games or cards. Maybe it won’t rain the whole weekend.” She turned and set the knife on the counter.

“Mom hates games. She says they’re just a substitute for conversation.”

“We could watch movies. We’ll figure something out.” Liz was only this flexible when he was not. If he’d been the one shrugging off the weather right now, she’d be the one pacing the kitchen, trying to come up with alternate plans.

The Adirondack chairs sat stacked in the corner of the
porch, and he went to set them out beneath the overhang so no one would get wet if it rained. He placed each about a foot apart, and noted there weren’t enough for the seven of them, so he went to the basement to look for the folding chairs they’d bought last year. Down here were remnants of past summers—a beach umbrella leaning against the wall, rusty cans of bug spray, a basketball he’d had since he was a kid. He used to play one-on-one with his brother, who always beat him handily and would then proceed to taunt him. Once Daniel fired the basketball at Jake’s head and gave him a swollen, painful bruise that lasted weeks. (What made Daniel do such things? Jake vaguely remembered having said something desperate like, “So you’re good at basketball? I get much better grades than you.”) They would likely never play basketball again. Jake would never lose to him again.
Thank God
, Jake said aloud, and then blanched at his words. It was a strange concept still, Daniel in a wheelchair, and as much as the thought saddened Jake, and it did, profoundly some days, it also remained plainly incomprehensible. Jake could still remember his brother wrestling him to the ground whenever they fought over whatever it was that used to rile them. Just after the accident, Jake tried to communicate his mixed feelings about everything (“After all, you used to beat the life out of me, which isn’t to say I’m glad that you’re in this state, but it’s just so strange to see you this way, you, of all people. You’ve always been such a physical person, you know? This must be devastating for you”), and Daniel, not surprisingly, told him that he wasn’t exactly helping. Jake tried to clarify and expand upon what he meant—that he’d always been a little scared of his big brother, that throughout his childhood Jake had only wanted his approval and friendship, really, but
Daniel just sat there, nearly expressionless, and soon Jake gave up. This clearly wasn’t the time. After all, Daniel had his own aftershock to handle—he didn’t need to deal with his brother’s issues too.

Jake set the basketball inside a box and looked around the basement. On top of a stack of books, he found a copy of the
Kama Sutra
. He’d bought it a few years ago as a sort of joke, when sex had become tedium, nothing more than the means to an elusive end. He’d stocked up on porn magazines, but he kept these to himself—Liz had never been particularly adventuresome or curious in the bedroom. Even before they’d begun trying to get pregnant, their sex life had been fairly sparse. He now remembered he’d hidden a few magazines here—in his underwear drawer, was it? At any rate, buying the
Kama Sutra
was his first try at expressing his desire for better, or at least more varied, sex to Liz. He’d found an old copy of the book at a used bookstore, something that made it even more perfectly ridiculous and thus somehow less overtly demanding. He’d wrapped it in leopard-skin-patterned paper and had planned to give it to her that night after work. He’d gotten home in a good mood, having devised a way to save far more than expected on the firm’s quarterly taxes and then later been interviewed by
The Wall Street Journal
. Liz was sitting on their bed drinking a glass of wine and doodling furiously on a sketch pad, wrecked by the news that another of her friends had just conceived. Not once since then had the opportunity arisen for him to give Liz the book. Eventually he set it aside to be taken to the island, thinking the moment might arise here. Now he brought it upstairs and found her sitting on the porch. He sneaked up behind her. “Close your eyes,” he said.

“What?” She looked back at him, her face upside down.

“Close them,” he said, and she did. He placed the book in her hands, and when she glanced down, she smiled at the wrapping paper and tore it off. When she saw the title, she scowled. “The
Kama Sutra?
”

“I bought it for you a while back as a joke. When sex was becoming, you know, kind of redundant.”

“Good Lord,” she snorted as she peeled off the wrapping paper. “Some joke.”

He looked over her shoulder at something about decorating one’s lover’s body with flowers. He thought of the small clinic, its hallways lined with maps of the uterus and fallopian tubes. He thought of the bottles of pills she’d kept beside the sink in their bathroom—the countless bottles, the shots he’d had to give her in her thighs with each cycle of treatment, the ovulation-predictor kits, the different types of thermometers, how she’d cut caffeine and alcohol from her diet, stopped exercise, restarted exercise. All the doctors, the five failed IUIs, two failed IVFs, the bad moods, her sore abdomen, her cramps, the endless complaints. Nothing at all joyous had gotten her pregnant, nothing remotely sexy or loving, merely a speculum, an embryo-transfer catheter and a doctor.

Jake was suddenly embarrassed that he’d given her this book. Who read this stuff anyway? Who kept porn stashed away in their underwear drawer? People who thought sex was only a form of play, nothing more, nothing less. Hormonal teenagers, maybe. People who didn’t need to think about procreation and biology, that was who. He tried to remember when he’d been such a person, and it seemed like a hundred years ago.

He placed his hands on Liz’s shoulders and massaged them. She leaned back and said, “That feels good.”

He leaned over and kissed her forehead, then her nose, her mouth. He reached his hand over her stomach, pulled up her shirt and drew his fingers across her belly button. Like her face, her stomach was spotted with hundreds of freckles. Back in college, Jake used to look for constellations on her stomach and breasts. Even then she was squeamish and faintly reluctant about sex, but he found it old-fashioned and endearing. Most of the girls there were anything but squeamish. They wore snug jeans and cropped shirts. They covered their eyes in black paint and blue powder and slunk around the boys like predators. Liz seemed to come from a different species, this healthy, tall girl dressed in baggy drawstring pants and loose, hand-knit sweaters. The two dated and drifted apart after graduation, never guessing that they’d reunite eight years later.