The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (13 page)

C
onstance wore her pink housecoat. In one pocket: three bobby pins. In the other: a pencil stub she considered good luck, for it was what Joe had used, those many years ago, to write down his marriage proposal. This pink housecoat was an important thing—homey, earnest, it brought to mind the kind of satisfied, efficient woman she hoped to be, content to cook and putter and smack a kiss on her husband's cheek at the workday's end. In this way it was a talisman. In this way it was a plea. Now, her hands in its deep pockets (a finger on the pencil stub), she stood in her bedroom and looked down at her bed.

A nap was a crime on a day like this. It was a glorious day, a perfect spring day, but she didn't want to be outside. Outside was hairy caterpillars and hippies, mud on your shoes, boys and girls shooting each other significant glances they were so stupid as to think no one saw. She saw. A nun could see. Heat. Halter tops. The way a jaw worked chewing gum. Outside was, to put it mildly, a mess; total rudeness. Soon Hank and Grace would show up to collect their daughter and produce dirty dishes. She had been right all along. Hadn't she? She had! It was not, she told herself, in her nature to gloat. But it was true: she'd been right. Whenever they visited that sleepy place, Hank's ramshackle house on its weedy hill, Constance was struck by its dirtiness, by the dreadful manners of their girl. She'd feel a little pull of scorn inside her, a self-satisfied
tsk,
but then she'd tell herself—
So they're happy. So what? Don't begrudge them their happiness. Who are you to begrudge anyone anything? So there's a cigarette floating in the toilet; so the cat did its business on the welcome mat. So what?
And, diligently, she would turn the scorn inward. The
tsk
revolved. Then it was:
You're a scold, Constance. You're just jealous of their happy mess, aren't you? You wish you smoked cigarettes. You wish you burned incense in the butter dish and were free enough to leave a pair of underpants on the front porch.

But she had been right all along. Her scorn was justified. She could not have been jealous, for what was there to be jealous of? Their daughter had run away, had wound up in some hotel with who knows whom, proving that clean countertops mattered. Her disdain for Hank was a secret she kept even from her husband. Tonight she was expected to serve them beer and cook them a hot dinner. She was expected to be sympathetic. She was expected to act as confidante to Grace, to share with her a knowing and maternal empathy, as if it could just as easily have been Sam who'd run away. She would pretend, since it was her job to pretend, but it wasn't true—Sam, her good boy, would not have run, would not have taken up with riffraff. Even so, Constance would pat Grace's hands, she would say something like “Kids today” in a low, commiserating murmur, as if the era were at fault and not the ill-trained girl or her faulty trainers. And all the while Grace would look at her with those steady grayish eyes that reminded Constance of the eyes of child geniuses in movies—they looked at you too directly, or too intently, either way it was unnerving. Constance was a little scared of Grace. She had to admit it. She was also scared, maybe the smallest bit, of Judith, whose thin mouth pulled her face into meanness; whose hair she wore in a loose, glossy braid; whose eyebrows were so dark and straight they appeared slashed into her face—who resembled, all in all, thought Constance, an irritable Indian. Yes, she was scared of the girl—see? she could be honest with herself—but she wouldn't let it show.

Is this why she got back into bed? She never got back into bed. When she was up she was up, busy and bustling, until the end of the day. Yet here she was, sun shining, trying not to disturb the hospital corners, her housecoat folded on the floor next to the bed.

She would nap. She would allow herself that rare indulgence. She closed her eyes, but felt only a deeper, more heightened wakefulness. Her limbs were hot. She thought:
Grace is the kind of person who naps, not me, not me.
She wanted to hurt herself. Did she? Really? She rammed her fingernails into her palms. The need surprised her in its force and clarity. To put a safety pin into her skin, or hold her hand over a flame—some small, centralized hurt. Why? What on earth compelled this desire? No. She realized it wasn't pain that she wanted—she wanted the opposite, except the effort would be the same. Except with pain there would be no guilt, so it was the easier thing to crave.

She rolled onto her side and found her dead sister-in-law sitting on the floor by the bedside table.

Louise said, “You want to get in bed with him, don't you?” She wore black patent-leather shoes, dancing shoes, with laces of pink satin ribbon.

“What?” And: “Who?”

“Both,” Louise said. “Any. All.”

“That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard.”

One of Louise's shoulders rose and fell.

“Stupid,” Constance said. “Vile.” She searched for the word that would expel this phantom and pull Constance upright, restore her to herself. From down the block she heard the squeals of children. It was wrong to nap, to
want
to nap, on this kind of day. “Outrageous. Asinine. Ludicrous.” She had done well on vocabulary. “Odious,” she tried.

“Maybe you want to hold him to your breast. That's what I think. You want him to—what's that word again? It's a strange word, isn't it. Suckle.”

Fatigue washed over Constance's body. “Please just let me sleep.” What a fool she was, what a weak woman, saying
please
to Louise—not even a ghost but a fantasy, poor man's ghost, wearing shoes Louise did not wear in life. The shoes were Constance's, from her childhood—tap shoes handed down by an older cousin. She had adored these shoes, wore them even in her bed at night, but she was a terrible dancer; finally her mother refused to pay for lessons and gave the shoes to Goodwill for a needy, less awkward girl.

Constance rolled onto her stomach. “I'm going to sleep now.”

“On a day like today?”

“It's allowed.”

It was true, a baby had never suckled at her breast. There were so many things she had never done. Never danced in a recital, worn a tutu, purchased a bra that contained anything but the essential materials. Never been bought a drink by a man in an impractical hat. Never read that book of erotic short stories that had been passed around town. Never kissed someone and said, afterward, “Let's just pretend that never happened.”

The room was too bright for sleep, her mind too addled. She roused herself from bed.

She had allowed herself to submit once before to pleasure, or to the promise of pleasure. Nineteen, not yet married (but engaged!), they dropped the cloak of their timidity long enough to conceive, and look at the mess that followed.

She felt better when she put on the housecoat again.

She found herself in Sam's room. His bed was neatly made. A pair of corduroy slippers waited on the floor, their toes to the wall. On his dresser sat a plastic comb, a nail clipper, and a glass of water. It was like a room, she realized, in an orphanage. She understood he was going to leave soon—he was going to leave and then it would be her and Joe, alone. She would continue to cook the same meals. She would continue to buy his soap, iron his pants, spray his shoes with deodorant. Spaghetti night, taco night, oatmeal every other morning, lovemaking once a week followed by his humming sighs and a few minutes of his hand twirling her ponytail as he drifted asleep, and always the same thing for his birthday, Christmas, always his face lighting up, always “Aw! Wow!” as if she'd bought him tickets to Paris and not another three-pack of tube socks with yellow bands at the calves.

“I raised your boy,” Constance said finally. “For you I did this.”

“Did what?”

She gestured:
Everything
, floor to ceiling. Her hand swept the room and then returned, fisted, to her chest. She meant: the water glass, the slippers, the food in the refrigerator, the plentiful cold cuts, the marriage to a man for whom she felt sisterly warmth, the notebook documenting her boy's growth and grades and vaccination schedule. The notebook was always meant for Louise, as if someday Louise would retrieve it and find proof of Constance's diligence, goodness: yes, he got his polio shot, yes, he ate his broccoli, and passed math, and grew two inches in six months, and lost his front tooth on such and such day. But Louise said, “Look, no one ever called for a sacrifice.”

“You did!”

“Me?” She shook her head. “I never did anything but die.”

“Go away,” Constance pleaded. “Please go away.”

She was gone.

Constance blinked. She needed some air. Louise had ruined the peace of the house. As always, Louise took whatever you cared about and laughed in its face—how had Constance ever seen this for anything but what it was? How had she ever admired this woman's juvenile vanity? Now she dressed, put on a high-necked white blouse, pressed navy slacks, so in the mirror she saw her fourth-grade self, a scrubbed openness, a tidy, sexless, faultless being, and she felt a little better.

It was warmer than she expected. Whirring spring air; sun like a burner. She sat in her car, unsure where to go. The lawn was as neat as a lawn can be, edged, mulched, flowers in discrete rows. But her tulips! She looked at her tulips, her breath growing faster, torso dampening. They were obscene, weren't they, the tulips? Too big! Too glossy! Tumid, bloated, veined, labial, she had an urge to snap their necks. Oh what was wrong with her! She felt hot, stupid, overdressed.

She went where she felt she had to go. When she pulled into the parking lot, Louise was back. There was Louise again, buckled into the passenger seat, one tap-shoed foot up on the dash, the other folded under her. Louise said, “Fuck church. You might as well pray to a rooster. You might as well pray to the pebble in your shoe. Take a left.”

Constance did as she was told. She drove away from church, toward the center of town, past the library, the post office. The streets were mostly empty. On the green in front of town hall she saw a few mothers and babies, old people on benches, and tulips, daffodils, in rows, in circles, everywhere neat, civic arrangements of flowers.

“Right at the light.” Louise was gazing out the window, thumb hooked under her chin, on her face an expression of sleepy, mild curiosity, like a train passenger moving through any small town they'll never see again. Suddenly she turned to Constance, said, “Poor thing. I see how hard you're fighting.”

“Where am I going? I have things to do.”

“How much you want to like yourself.”

It was unseemly. You weren't supposed to like yourself. You were supposed to respect yourself; you were supposed to regard yourself with disinterest, to notice yourself only enough to make sure you were doing right.

“Go away,” Constance said.

But she hadn't really meant it.

Louise said, “I think you need a break.”

“I have to buy some groceries.”

“Turn here. Slow down. Good. Stop.”

“A break from what?” Constance said.

The sky cloudless, vibrant blue, taut as the skin over a skull. She stopped the car.

A break.

“You want a higher power?” Louise said. “You want a church? Open that door. Say hello to the man at the counter. The most honest god you're gonna find.”

And what did Constance do? She could have done anything in the world, and what did she do? She got out of the car, inhaled a spring breeze, did not pause or think or smooth her hair. Chimes on the door. Behind the counter, a grinning old man, cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. He wore an Army-green T-shirt. Dirty fingernails, moon-round belly. Asphalt eyes, orangey teeth. The vein in his neck—greener, thicker, somehow, than it was meant to be—suggested something amphibious.

“I don't believe I've ever seen you here.” A calm drag on his cigarette, then: “What a fine surprise.”

She said nothing.

“Marco,” he offered. “You got a name?”

She just stood there, purse to her stomach like a girl clutching her babydoll. The store was empty. Dust on the shelves. Junk. A display of farting pillows. Comic books and kazoos, party hats, a pair of sandals made of twine, toilet paper with the president's face on it.

“A name?” Louder: “Your name?”

She said it.

“She speaks. Right on. You looked so blank I thought for a second you might be deaf. I know a little sign language.” He jabbed his hand in a few directions. “That means:
Welcome to my store
.” Another, grander gesture, with a wink. “That means something not polite to say in front of a lady.”

“I think I'm lost.”

“Take a look around. We're having a sale today. Lucky for you—half off everything in the back room.”

“I only have a moment. I'm on my way somewhere.”

“You and me both. You have all the time you need, Connie. They call you Connie? Check out the back room.” He tapped his cigarette into an ashtray in the shape of a person's behind. “No harm in looking, especially during a sale. Person like you must appreciate saving money. I can tell. I see it in your eyes.”

She was a money-saver, it was in her eyes. A dented-can-buyer, a coupon-clipper, a penny-hoarder. She had nearly two hundred dollars in loose change stored in a cardboard box in the basement. On the side of this box she had written, in optimistic pink marker: Rainy Day Fund.

Now, when she wanted her, Louise was nowhere.

She didn't like the way Marco's eyes fixed on her, didn't like his expression, which was discomfiting not because it was smirking but because it was somehow too kind, too—what was it? It was too patient. His face had all the time in the world. She turned away, made for the back of the store, but only to escape his stare, only to escape that incongruously sympathetic, perversely steady gaze. Not because she was curious. She was not curious. There was not a door but a curtain, dusty red velvet, its raw edge touching the floor. No, she was not curious until she was, and then she was curious to her toes. She pulled aside the curtain.