The Violet Hour: A Novel (16 page)

He managed to get all the way up the stairs and into their room before he set her down again, on her back on the bed, her arms and legs stretched comically wide as though she herself were ready for dissection.

“Scalpel!” she’d whisper-cried, as she often did when they were young. Doctor wasn’t a game they played much anymore now that they were older and had Elizabeth, and Abe was a doctor everywhere he went.

But for whatever reason, he’d complied, drawing an incision line with his finger from her throat all the way down to her clit.

Ferdinand tugged sharply on the leash, yanking her into a run. The frothy tail of a squirrel was flying up a tree. “No, Ferdinand,” she barked, planting her feet and pulling his head back. “Heel! You hear me? I want you to heel!” The dog just glanced at her, not even ashamed, then surged forward against the leash once more. She gave up. She let go. Ferdinand took off down the street, feeling the air in his coat, the mounting seconds of motion. She didn’t even panic. She knew this dog. He only wanted a taste of freedom, the thrill of chasing a squirrel. As soon as the squirrel was out of reach, and he found himself alone, he’d come padding back, the loops of his collar jangling against themselves, as though he’d never been anywhere else.

“This is your one strike,” Abe had said when she screwed up the
first time, his face so expressionless she thought she might die. She still saw that face in her mind. She’d do anything she could to avoid seeing it again in real life. “You can never, ever do this again.” He spoke like it wasn’t his choice, just the way things had to be.

He hadn’t seen. Couldn’t possibly. But how close she’d come. How
close
.

She sat down on the curb and folded her arms across her knees. The concrete was hard but the grass behind it was blanketed in morning wetness. She rocked back and let the edge of her butt get pleasantly dewy while she awaited Ferdinand’s return.

J
EFF DROPPED OFF
Jessica while they were still eating breakfast. Elizabeth leapt from her seat to get the door, leaving behind a dogleg of bagel slathered with cream cheese and a plate full of sesame seeds.

“We’ll be back at one,” Jeff called from the car, holding his arm out the window in a sheepish attempt at solidarity.

“Makeup!” Elizabeth shouted in a grand-dame accent, as Jessica chased her up the stairs.

By the time Jeff and Sheryl arrived for good, dressed as though they might actually be going to the theater, the girls had arranged four chairs in the sitting room and tied an afghan blanket to the wooden balusters on the little balcony overhead. They were hiding upstairs, leaving Cassandra to answer the door.

Nobody harbored illusions that this visit was about anything other than the kids, but Cassandra played hostess nonetheless, ushering Jessica’s parents into the kitchen for nuts and crackers and cheese.

“Thanks, no, I’m still stuffed from last night,” Sheryl declared. She’d said thanks, though somehow it felt as though she hadn’t. “That’s the trouble with tapas and sushi. It’s all so small, you think you can just go on forever. But you can’t, can you? The body has limits!”

“Or how about something to drink?” Abe was there, suddenly, shaking Jeff’s hand. “Iced tea? Perrier? Something stiffer?”

“Whatever you’re having,” Jeff said to Abe.

“I’m just having water, if anything.”

“Oh, well, then do you have an orange soda?” Jeff asked.

“
Orange
soda?” Cassandra repeated. “Let me think.”

“It’s fine if you don’t.”

What was it about these people that made her so determined to please them? Who had orange soda just lying around? She recalled standing uncomfortably with them in their front hall one afternoon when she’d come to pick up Elizabeth. It was an overcast weekday, and they were both home, their stacks of papers and academic journals standing in dreary pedestals around the living room.

“I’ve got some root beers in here,” Abe said from the fridge. “That do?”

“No, really, I’m fine with water,” Sheryl said before turning to Cassandra breathlessly. “It’s so nice to see you again! That was fun last night, wasn’t it?”

“It was fun.”

“We won a case of wine, did Jeff tell you?”

Cassandra glanced back at Jeff, who was accepting a root beer from Abe, and looking rather unhappy about it. “No, that’s great.”

“And we wanted to bid on your bowls, but we didn’t. You were so nice to donate them. I don’t have anything anyone would want.”

Cassandra gave a curious smile. Why would you tell someone you wanted to bid on their bowls if you didn’t? Really, why mention it at all?

“Aren’t you glad you came, though?” Cassandra asked, passing Sheryl a glass of water. “I always leave feeling so good about the school.”

Sheryl looked into her glass, as though hoping to find something interesting at the bottom of it. “Who was that couple you introduced us to? I know I must’ve met them before.” She seemed to be combing her enormous brain, pushing past species and salinity levels, to remember this basic detail.

“Who—Gail and Steve?”

“I think so. Maybe.” As though Gail and Steve were side charac
ters and not some of her closest friends! Didn’t Sheryl understand that
she
was the side character, the one who never came to school events?

“They’re dear friends of ours,” Cassandra said, hearing herself. She sounded prissy and loud. Filling her own water glass, she made an effort to modulate her tone. “We had you both for dinner a few years back. We made fish on the grill?” It had been a quiet night, despite Gail’s constant storytelling, despite Abe’s magnificent tumble down the porch steps with six short-stemmed aperitif glasses in his hands. Remarkably, not one of them broke; he landed on his knee with his arms in the air, like a Christian athlete in the end zone. Cassandra, Gail, and Steve had laughed hysterically, and Jeff, to his credit, had cracked a smile, but Sheryl just sat there.

“Oh, yes, of course,” Sheryl said, uncertainly. “Steve seemed fun! I saw you dancing at one point. He actually seemed to know what he was doing!”

Cassandra’s neck grew warm. “Last night? I don’t think I danced with Steve.”

“No?” Sheryl fingered her pearls—such an odd choice, pearls. On a Sunday afternoon. In Berkeley. “I’m pretty sure you did.”

Cassandra suddenly felt passionate about the facts. “Really, I didn’t. We talked, of course, but no dancing.”

Sheryl frowned. “Is there another woman who looks like you?”

“I don’t know.” Her tone was measured.

“Well, I hope so. Otherwise I’m going to have to start worrying about my memory, and God knows, I’m too young for that!”

Cassandra looked at Abe, who mistakenly took this as a signal. He loped over in his easygoing way and placed a hand on her shoulder. She hoped he couldn’t feel the flush of her skin underneath.

“We were just talking about memory loss,” Sheryl said to Abe.

“
Ladies
and gentleman.” Here, at last, they were interrupted. Elizabeth stood in the kitchen doorway cloaked in one of her father’s white coats. “The performance is about to begin.” She spoke in her theater voice, projecting: half British Isles, half deaf.

Relieved, the parents took their root beers and waters to their seats.

Then came silence. Then the sound of bare preadolescent feet. Then, all at once, music: synthesizers and a clap beat from a boom box upstairs, a song by Paula Abdul. The afghan curtain rushed up and there was Jessica; above her, on the second floor, Elizabeth popped out from behind a wall. Their arms flew out and clasped their elbows above their heads. They rolled their hips, not unseductively, but also a bit like electric mixers grinding dough. They were wearing their togas, of course, and they seemed to have assembled them well. Each girl had a flap of fabric over one shoulder that she’d pinned to her bra strap, while the other shoulder stood bare and free, the bra strap somehow tucked under. When Cassandra squinted, her daughter was almost a woman.

The choreographed dance complete, the parents applauded, but their daughters were only just getting started. Now it was on to the featured presentation.

Jessica returned to center stage, this time dressed as a boy. She was wearing a plastic breastplate over her toga, and carrying a plastic sword. “Let Rome in Tiber melt,” she proclaimed, “and the wide arch of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space.”

“So you say.” Elizabeth appeared behind her, her arms folded crankily across her chest. “But you, Antony, are married to another. Tell me you love me and not Octavia!”

As a family, they’d seen a production of
Antony and Cleopatra
a few years prior. Cleopatra had had long, thick dreadlocks and Antony was often shirtless and heaving. At the time Cassandra had worried it was all too erotic for Elizabeth, but Elizabeth was more disturbed by the deaths. She sat quietly through much of the performance, and as it neared its conclusion, and the lovers were defeated at Actium, she began to grip her armrests like a nervous passenger on a plane. When the climax finally arrived, she stared, mouth agape as the berobed Cleopatra put a lifelike snake to her breast.

“But
why
?” she asked on the car ride home, her dress bunched between her legs.

“They’d lost the war,” Cassandra explained. “And Cleopatra would rather die than become Caesar’s slave.”

“Why couldn’t they have run away? Maybe Caesar would’ve let her go.”

“But that’s the nature of tragedy, sweetheart,” Abe said. “An opportunity is missed, and a great life ends. You are supposed to feel sadness and regret. You are supposed to wish it hadn’t happened.”

Elizabeth considered this. In the rearview mirror, Cassandra watched her look out at the light-filled hills of the city as they headed back across the bay.

“But, but,” she said, finally. “The snake! She did it to herself.”

The play had stuck with her. It had to have been her idea.

“You care about Rome more than you care about me!” she cried now in her toga. “You don’t love me. You never have!”

Where had she learned to shout like this?

She swung at Jessica, who clapped her hands as she spun offstage. A trick Elizabeth had learned in theater camp and practiced on her dad. There was no mistaking it for an actual slap, but Sheryl gasped anyway.

“O, never was there queen so mightily betray’d!” Elizabeth wailed. She lay down and put her hand to her forehead. She panted and writhed on the floor. “What I wouldn’t give for my salad days, when I ate nothing but vegetables, and they tasted so good.”

Here again was Jessica, sans breastplate, sans sword. “Madame? You called?” She seemed to be trying to sound like a twit.

“Yes, Charmian, come hither!”

Jessica minced over and arranged herself elegantly by Cleopatra’s side.

“Tell me,” Elizabeth went on, “why do I need Antony?”

“Honestly, Madame, you don’t. You’re the most famous woman in the world!”

“Exactly!” She got to her feet, gesticulating. “I’m Queen of Egypt. My word is law. My way or the highway. I think, therefore I am. And you know what I think, Charmian?” Here she crouched
and stage-whispered to Jessica, cupping her mouth with her upstage hand. “I think a girl’s gotta have her fun. Let’s hit the town. Meet some boys.”

“Ooh,” Jessica squealed. “Boys!”

The performance went on from there, but Cassandra could not follow it as closely as she had before. Watching Elizabeth play a man-eater in their living room was like watching herself cry out to be caught. She was aware of Abe in the chair beside her, and the regular rhythm of his breath keeping pace. Calmly, she tried to synch her breath with his, tried not to fall behind. But it was only a matter of time, wasn’t it? Before they fell out of step once again. And what then? Would she fall straight into someone else? She didn’t think so; it had been so long. But Steve had been her warning. That stirring on the back of her neck. The way he’d spoken to her out of the blue. Even if he hadn’t really meant it—and for Gail’s sake she hoped he did not. Regardless, it was possible. And then what would Abe do? Throw her out, as he had threatened? Blame himself, try to win her back?

She didn’t know which was better.

For now at least, she was safe. She continued to breathe with Abe, and every time she glanced his way, she felt a little less agitated. He leaned back with his arms folded confidently across his chest, taking in the performance.

The play concluded with Antony prostrating himself before Cleopatra and Cleopatra taking him back. Perhaps in some other universe, they continued to rule the world, dancing an encore, as the girls did, to the inevitable “Walk Like an Egyptian.”

After Jessica and her parents had gone, Cassandra and Abe gave Elizabeth the mouse dissection. Cassandra had wrapped it in a drape of satin she’d found in her bag of remnants. “This is so gross!” Elizabeth said excitedly, poking the thread of its exed-out eyes. “I cannot
wait
for high school.”

She was going to be a doctor, Cassandra could already tell. Despite the play, despite her mom.

“They were awful, weren’t they?” she said to Abe once they were under the covers that night. “I hope we don’t have to see them again for a while.”

“Who, Jeff and Sheryl?” As though she might’ve meant someone else.

“Yes.”

He looked up from his book. “I don’t know, they’re not so bad. Jeff had some pretty interesting things to say about laboratory protocols.”

He’d been known to do this. Often, when she needed to be catty, he’d undermine her, casually refusing to be on her side. As though he wasn’t aware that there were sides to begin with. Still, she was surprised. He’d flayed her on this very bed the night before, consumed her. Why the indifference now?

She supposed it was partly her fault. One of her biggest problems was that she was constantly surprised by people. How different they could be from her, how inconsistent. She was nearly forty. She might’ve grown used to inconsistency by now. But she’d known Abe for more than fifteen years and every month or so it seemed she needed to be reintroduced.

She watched his chest rise and fall against his book. She made her chest do the same, kept pace. She concentrated on the feeling of it, the movement deep inside her, the stirring of cells where the air warmed the surface of her skin.