The Lonely Polygamist (3 page)

“Just one more thing. Do they look mad?”

Clifton sighed. “I think they’re probably mad at you. I think that’s why you’re hiding in this closet.”

Golden handed Clifton the bucket. “When you’re done, put it behind the rag pile. And don’t let Cooter out or Aunt Beverly will have your hide.”

THE BARGE

Out in the bright lights and noise, Golden was overcome by a wave of dizziness, and suddenly felt vulnerable again. He wished he’d taken more time in the closet to gather himself, to prepare a defense. As he climbed the stairs, a gang of children pulsing around him like a school of fish, he decided he wanted it over with. No more faking it. He would offer no apologies or excuses. He would place himself at their mercy.

The wives were gathered in the upstairs kitchen, all three of them, just as Clifton had said. Golden had installed the upstairs kitchen so Nola and Rose-of-Sharon would have the option of cooking for and feeding their families separately. Not much more than a galley kitchen, it turned out to be too small for even one of their families, and was used only when the kitchen downstairs couldn’t accommodate the cooking and cleaning for several dozen people. Slowly, Rose-of-Sharon was converting it into what Golden thought of as Estrogen Ground Zero: its drawers were filled with the tools of womanly crafts, of knitting and needlepoint and tole painting. On every available section of wall space were hung portraits of kittens and poodles and elaborate framed embroideries that declared
BLESS THIS HOUSE
and
LOVE IS SPOKEN HERE
.
Macramé and beadwork dangled from the ceiling, and the countertops and windowsills were decorated with doilies and little pincushions in the shapes of smiling tomatoes and plump snowmen. The air was thick with rose-petal potpourri and lilac-scented candles, and Rose-of-Sharon had recently plastered the walls with daisy wallpaper so bright it made Golden feel like he was in a room full of popping flashbulbs.

Golden tried to make sense of their conversation, but the constant hiss of water in the sink made the voices blur into one another. His back pressed to the wall, he performed a maneuver that involved craning his neck and holding his head at an extreme angle so he could eyeball the situation without being spotted. Rose-of-Sharon was at the table, sucking on her shirt collar, carefully mapping out a new quilt on a sheet of graph paper. Nola and Trish were out of sight, probably standing at the sink.

Golden took a moment to deliver two generous squirts of Afrin nasal spray into each of his nostrils. All his life he’d had the bad habit of sneezing when he was nervous—anxiety and dread would build like a physical pressure inside his head, and the slightest itch or irritation of the nasal cavity would trigger a great, ripping sneeze, the sound of which could make children cry and adults recoil as if a grenade had gone off. The spray was the only thing he’d found that kept the sneezing in check, and now that he’d made it this far into the heart of enemy territory, he wanted to make sure he didn’t give his position away until he was absolutely ready.

He gave himself a quick once-over and found his bootlaces untied, his shirt untucked, and the back of his left hand covered with a residue of barbecue sauce and dog slobber. Doomed, he tied his laces, patted at his hair, and tried to wrestle his shirttail into the tops of his jeans until he gave up, nearly yanking his shirt clean off in a spasm of frustration. The heck with it. No more stalling, he was going in. He started forward, paused, stepped back to check his zipper.

One more toot of nasal spray, one more breath mint for good luck, and he was ready. In what he considered to be an act of reckless bravery, he strode into the kitchen, put his hand on Rose-of-Sharon’s shoulder, and, with all the confidence he could muster, croaked, “Hello, girls.”

Nola and Trish, who were indeed standing together at the sink in a rising curtain of steam, did not turn around. Rose-of-Sharon’s shoulder, soft and pliant when he first touched it, now felt like something made of wood. Trish cast a quick, nervous glance back at him and Nola fished a basting pan out of the dishwater, went to town on it with a ball of steel wool.

“Sorry I’m so late,” Golden said. “Had to wait two hours for the darn electrician—”

Rose-of-Sharon slipped from under his hand, ducking, and went to the drawer next to the stove, where she began sorting a collection of embroidered hot pads and oven mitts. Such an act of hostility, even one so mild, was so unlike her that for a few moments Golden’s hand hovered in midair as if he really couldn’t believe there wasn’t a woman’s shoulder positioned firmly beneath it.

Now all three women had their backs to him and in the sudden silence of that room he knew that minty breath and tied bootlaces weren’t going to make a bit of difference. The wives waited for him to say something but his tongue hung in his mouth like a hunk of old bread. He sat down at the table. Unaccountably, he needed to pee again.

“I’ve been looking for you downstairs,” he said. “The kids didn’t know where you were.”

There was a drawn-out silence, broken by the clank of dishes, the
whang
of a cookie sheet. Finally, Nola sighed. In a tone that sounded, if you didn’t know any better, quite jolly, she said, “Hey, girls, we’ve been discovered! Ha ha! Wives ahoy!”

Nola could always be counted on to break the silence; she simply didn’t have the capacity to keep quiet for long. She was a bosomy, wide-bodied woman with a barroom laugh and the small, pouting mouth of a child. Rose-of-Sharon had her younger sister’s freckled skin and pale green eyes, but that was where the similarities ended. She was long-boned and big-jointed, and her face was handsome, sometimes pretty if the shadows fell across it the right way, but her face almost always took a back seat to her hair, which was done in a new style nearly every week. She and Nola ran the Virgin County Academy of Hair Design in town. Nola, the head stylist, used Rose-of-Sharon as a sort of hairstyle guinea pig, and, if the style came out well, a walking advertisement for the academy. Tonight Rose-of-Sharon’s hair was done up in a way that made Golden think of the word
milkmaid
. The sisters had shared Big House for the entire eleven years of its existence and Golden had never once seen them argue or disagree.

“You’re mad at me,” Golden said. “Why don’t you yell and get it over with? Throw a plate at me? Something?”

“We’re not going to yell at you,” Trish said.

“Oh, we’ll see about that,” Nola said. “And if we hadn’t just taken the trouble to wash all these dishes you might have gotten that plate you were asking about.” She stepped back from the sink and whapped Golden across the shoulder with a dish towel. Nola was always whacking him with something or other, usually as demonstration of her affection for him, but this dish towel had more of a sting to it than he was used to. He rubbed his shoulder and wondered if everybody in the house was going to take a shot at him before the night was out. “
Nola
,” Rose-of-Sharon said. By the tremor in her voice, he could tell she was about to cry. Golden hoped it was because she felt bad about turning her back on him; he needed any scrap of sympathy he could get.

“I’m sorry,” Golden said. “I’m real, real…sorry. Terribly. About everything.”

“Sorry’s nice,” Nola said. “Real, real sorry, oh that’s pretty good too. But what are you going to do about it? Are you going to leave it where it is or are you gonna make us haul it out back and break it up into kindling?”

Golden looked up. “Kindling?”

“Or maybe we could put it out in the Spooners’ pasture,” Trish said. “That way their mangy cows could have a seat when they get tired of standing around looking stupid.”

All three women laughed, each in her particular way: Nola, loud and hooting; Rose-of-Sharon with her hand clapped over her mouth; Trish, like an evil witch in an old black-and-white movie:
eee-eee-eeeeeeeeee
. Golden had nothing to do but sit at the table with his mouth half open.

They were happening more and more lately, these moments of dislocation when it seemed everyone was speaking in a kind of pig latin that he could not quite make sense of. He’d come home and the children would start asking him questions that stumped him, the wives would mention places and names that meant nothing to him, would refer to the children by nicknames he’d never heard, and once in a while everybody’d start laughing, just like now, and Golden lost, the only one not in on the joke.

He said, “I’m, I guess I don’t, I didn’t—”

This made them laugh harder, and though Golden wasn’t happy about being the grinning jackass at the table, it made him hopeful: if they could laugh like this, things couldn’t be
that
bad.

Trish wiped her eyes. “I think we could find more than one good use for that junky old couch.”

“Ha ha,” Golden said, still deeply confused. And then from his slump he straightened up so quickly that he banged his knees on the underside of the table. “
Couch
,” he said. He’d meant to say
ouch
, but
couch
, like a stone dislodged from a hillside, was what had tumbled out of his mouth. And then he knew why: the anger, the noise, the cold looks, the plate covered with tinfoil, all of these things had nothing to do with the whopping lies he’d been telling for months now, the deception that had overtaken his life. It was about a stinky, broken-down, truly wonderful old wreck of a couch.

“Couch!” Golden said again, as if he were delivering the clinching answer on a game show. “Where is it?”

“You’re telling me you didn’t see it downstairs?” Nola said. “She had her boys bring it in before dinner, acting like she was doing us a great favor, like we’d never had a couch before and were lucky just to be getting a look at one.”

Without another word Golden shot out of the kitchen and hobbled as fast as he could down the stairs, eventually taking two steps at a time. He remembered now. Remembered how Beverly had called him at the construction site a few days ago, saying she’d found a once-in-a-lifetime deal on a new Churchill hide-a-bed from Steltzmeyer Furniture in St. George, which was going out of business. She’d been complaining about the old couch for at least two years. Because of its fishy smell and enormous size, the children referred to it as the Barge, and regularly took it on jungle river expeditions, slaughtered bands of pirates and man-eating sharks from its decks, and had contests to see how many of them could crowd onto it at once (the record was eighteen). It slumped in the middle, its ruined springs poking through the burnt-orange plaid fabric, and had been haunted by the smell of fish ever since one of the Three Stooges threw up his tuna casserole dinner all over the cushions.

Golden, in a flustered effort to get off the phone as quickly as possible, told Beverly to get the couch, no problem, go right on ahead. Beverly wondered what she should do with the old one and here was where Golden made his mistake. Just before he hung up he’d mentioned something about the sisters finding a place for it in Big House.

Under their present financial circumstances, allowing Beverly to buy a new couch was bad enough, but telling her to give the old one to the sisters—he really needed to have his head examined. The other wives had become so sensitive over the years at getting Beverly’s hand-me-downs and castoffs that even bringing up the subject could result in instant accusation and tears. So it was no wonder how things had turned out: the three sister-wives had gone upstairs to fix their portion of the dinner away from Beverly and the offending couch, and Beverly, for her part, had stayed downstairs, feeling unjustly accused. She was, after all, simply carrying out Golden’s wishes.

When Golden couldn’t see the couch from the stair landing, he hit the living room at a fast walk, and, before he knew it, was trotting along, only the slightest hitch in his gait; all these years, and he’d never once given the racetrack a try. He took the first bend, following the ratty, worn-down groove, and it was like he was being whipped along by a spontaneous gravitational force. He felt strong and weightless, loping past the dinner table like a lead-off hitter rounding second, children in every room turning to watch him go. He leapt over a tub of wooden blocks—carpentry pencils and his toothbrush bouncing out of his shirt pocket—and felt only the slightest twinge of pain in his knee. He was feeling so fine he missed the couch entirely on the first go-round. Only when he’d nearly completed another lap did he see it—how could he have missed it?—pushed into a corner in the family room, given a wide berth, looking sunken and exhausted, as if it had spent the night sobbing in despair.

Golden went into the kitchen and rang the dinner bell, an eight-inch length of old rail hanging from the ceiling by a chain. “Boys! I need boys!” he called, and they came running. They were sweaty and red-faced and ready for action. “Every available boy—let’s see—ages nine through fourteen, I guess. We’ve got furniture to move. Deeanne, you go upstairs and tell the mothers in the kitchen that we’re going to get them another couch. Boys, let’s get this one outside.”

Before he could start giving orders they already had it up off the floor, weaving and banging into the doorjamb like a crew of drunken pallbearers. Suddenly Beverly was behind him. “What’s this?” she said.

“Well, we decided what we’re going to do here is get a different couch, it doesn’t really go all that good with the carpet and the, you know, furnishings.”

“Right now? We need to be getting these kids to bed. We can discuss the couch tomorrow.”

“Won’t take but a minute. The boys will help me. Back in two ticks.”

Golden felt Beverly’s hard glare on his back, but he avoided it as best he could, ducked and sidestepped, told himself not to turn around or he’d never make it out alive. He helped the boys squeeze the couch through the front door and shouted encouragement when their arms started to give out. The sky was clouded with stars and it was cold out, so Golden decided that instead of the pickup he’d better take the old Cadillac, a 1963 hearse he bought from Teddy Hornbeck when Teddy sold his funeral business and moved to Florida, where people were known to be dying on a more steady and dependable basis. The hearse had only four thousand miles on it and was one of the most beautiful machines Golden had ever laid eyes on: ultra-long and sleek, with just a hint of fins at the back and velvet drapes at the windows that concealed an interior so large you could host a bridge tournament inside. Behind the single back seat Golden installed three removable benches he’d made out of welded steel tubing and oak planks, and there you had it: the family man’s dream machine, a car that could haul five adults and thirteen children with a certain kind of style. Of course, some people thought it was morbid, even disrespectful to God and the departed, but Golden didn’t mind; he loved the profound, vibrating hum of its eight-cylinder and the way it drifted effortlessly down the road like a baby grand launched into a river.