“Keep it,” he said.
Francie lit a cigarette, smoothing the cellophane on the red pack.
“You don’t get over killing people,” Stan was saying.
“Shhh,” Francie said. She didn’t want to hear any war stories.
“You don’t get over—”
She leaned over and kissed him full on the mouth to shut him up. Stan didn’t act surprised. Francie realized this was why he was here. She wondered if Mike had told him about the other night. She supposed this should make her angry, but instead she had that powerful feeling again. All of these husbands wanted her. They did not want their placid, bland wives with their flat chests, their pregnant bellies, their coiffed hair. They wanted someone who had suffered, like they had. They wanted someone exotic. They wanted her.
Francie pulled off her sweater and her bra. She pulled off her panties and unzipped his pants. He was thick and pink there too and she smiled knowing this. She straddled him, facing him, grasping at him to fit inside her.
Dottie Podaski’s husband moaned, loud. This time, Francie was the wild one. She was wild with what she could have, with what she could do. She was wild for these husbands, every one of them. She tried to remember her husband, doing this with him.
Husbands. By fall Francie had had almost every one of them. They came to her unable to sleep, drunk, crying over what they had seen and done. Paul Lefleur would not have sex with her but very politely asked if she would blow him. She did, kneeling at his feet on her shiny hardwood floors, his one arm moving her head, the sleeve of the other flapping against her face. Matt MacGuire said he loved her. He came on Sunday mornings before church and then Francie made sure to be outside when the family drove past on their way to St. Joseph’s nine o’clock Mass, all of his little daughters dressed in matching dresses, bows in their hair, his wife, Helen, smiling smugly out the window at Francie. The funny thing was, after each one, the wife showed up to invite her to this or that. She went to parties all the time now, as if by inviting her the wives would never suspect. If something was going on, surely the husbands would not insist she be invited. A new rule, Francie thought.
Late at night. Francie on Stan Podaski’s lap. The neighborhood asleep. Tears on Stan’s cheeks because he was a killer, a murderer. She tried to remember her husband. His weight on her, yes. And once, in his car by a lake, he had brought her onto his lap just like this. She remembered the steering wheel digging into her back, the shift against her hip. His face, blurry still, had once been close like this.
“Yes,” she said, clutching Stan’s thick shoulders.
And she saw it for an instant, her husband’s beautiful face.
Crooning with Dino
AIDA CARUSO LOVES TWO THINGS.
First and above all else, she loves Dean Martin. Every Thursday night she sits smack in front of the Zenith in the living room and waits for Dino to jump onto the piano, swirling a cocktail and waving a cigarette as he sings, looking straight at her.
Second, she loves the boy in the white VW Bug. The boy has pale blond hair that hangs straight to his collarbone, a Barney Rubble nose, sometimes a scraggly patch of hair on his chin. She guesses he is a lot older than her, maybe even eighteen or twenty. Certainly too old to notice a fourteen-year-old.
He drives down the hill in front of her house and around the corner every afternoon at five. Aida watches from the small window at the top of the steps that lead to the three bedrooms in her house. Her weekly chore is to dust the glass dishes and vases and the wooden figurines that line the stairs on a shelf. They are ugly things, the vases and dishes all orange or gold, useless and fragile. Her father had bought the figurines in Haiti when he was in the Navy. They are of women with pointy breasts and men in loincloths. They collect dust in the elbows and knees, along the shoulders and fingers and feet.
She hates them, hates dusting them. But this afternoon, the Thursday before her sister’s wedding, Aida likes sitting alone at the top of the stairs, a half-naked man in her lap, a dishrag in her hand, the noise of her loud aunts and uncles and parents and grandmother and great-grandmother all drifting up from below her as she waits for the boy in the white VW to come down the hill.
“Aida!” her mother yells. Her mother only yells. She cannot speak in a normal voice; none of her family can. When one of her aunts telephones her mother, Aida can hear everything she says from across the room. “Aida!” her mother yells again. Then: “That girl gives me agita. Her head is in the clouds all day.”
“She’s a dreamer,” her aunt Gloria says. “Like my Cammie.”