Today I’m grateful that Viktor will be home late. He will not see the casserole that I’ve burned because I was out back smoking and lost track of time. No one knows I smoke, not even my friends. Everyone’s so anti-smoking and judgey these days. You can’t light up anywhere without some stranger getting in your face to ask you to please, please blow the lung cancer elsewhere. I can just see Sarah’s judgmental glare if she knew. Actually, smoking is one of the few things that I have in common with Viktor’s mother. She and all of her European friends smoke, although she doesn’t make any attempt to hide it from her son, like I do. Whenever we visit her, Viktor complains, grabbing her cigarettes and throwing them out. Dramatic gestures that she likes because they make her feel loved. I wish I could be like her and just smoke in the open.
It would probably be comical to watch me sneak out of the kitchen door and along the flagstone patio to the corner of the house, where I stand on tiptoe to reach a little crevice between the stone and the graying white fascia for the pack and lighter I’ve hidden there. I favor Marlboros, which is ironic given their hypermasculine ad campaigns, but my lighter is girly, a purple Bic from a Sheetz gas station. One a day, that is all I allow myself now. It’s not like the days when I modeled and we all lived on cigarettes and booze in between cadging free dinners paid for by older, reptilian men. Yes, I gave up all that glamour for the provincial life of the suburbs.
“Mommy, something smells funny!” It’s Daniel at the back door, and I stub out the cigarette as fast as a wink and squirrel my pack away. At first I think he’s referring to the cigarette smoke, but then I smell it, too—dinner burning. I race into the kitchen, which is more than twice the size of my mother’s, and open the convection oven to find the top layer of cheese on my casserole dark brown and smoking.
Sometimes I feel as if I’m playing the role of traditional housewife—I’m cooking casseroles, for heaven’s sake. If I just added crushed potato chips to this dish I could be my own mother back in the late seventies, bustling about her avocado kitchen with her shag haircut and polyester dress, consulting Redbook for recipes to appease the insatiable appetite of my mutton-chopped and leisure-suited father. Certainly Viktor reminds me of him sometimes, coming home every night with the same sense of expectation and entitlement.
“What’s for dinner?” he asks, no matter what hour he comes home. Once I actually said, “I don’t know, I’ll ask the elves.” I had a brief moment to enjoy the confused look on his face before he got upset.
“He has a very stressful job.” These are the excuses and justifications I hear from his mother and mine. “Viktor will always work long hours and his schedule will always be changing; being a doctor’s wife means having to understand that.”
That’s what I am, you see. I’m no longer a person in my own right, I’m a doctor’s wife. A surgeon’s wife, to be precise. I serve on a hospital’s charitable board, along with a host of other people, many of whom seem to spend a lot of time struggling desperately to avoid getting older. Everyone is on a diet all the time and they discuss the latest antiaging creams and regimens with a seriousness that might suggest they were cures for cancer.
All the other wives on the board are torn between envy of the plastic surgeons’ spouses and gratitude that they’re not one of us. On the one hand, they imagine that we can get the “work” everyone has had done or wants to have done at a big discount. On the other hand, they wonder if we ever make love without imagining our husbands mentally re-sculpting us. As one Texas transplant put it, “D’yall scream any time your husbands pick up a Sharpie?”
“Not that you have to worry,” one of the older women says to me. “Not with your height and skin.” She gives my upper arm a tiny squeeze like I’m a peach at the market. “Did anyone ever tell you that you could be a model?”
“No, never.”
Of course I’m aware of my looks. What can I say? I won the gene lottery. But people assume that looking good comes with other luck, and that’s not true at all. I’ve never been lucky in love, for instance, though I’ve been hopeful each and every time.
Viktor and I met at a party in Miami. He was attending a conference and I was down from New York doing the winter circuit, and we happened to meet at the hotel bar. He was in a crowd of doctors loudly and animatedly discussing a complete facial transplant—a horror story, when you think about it—but I felt his eyes on me as I excused my way past them to order a drink at the long teak bar. I wore a sky-blue sheath dress that was a gift from a designer whose show I’d walked that spring, and Viktor said that he thought the dress matched my eyes perfectly. Such a sweet, sweet thing to say—I remember being impressed that he noticed the color of my eyes. That was before I knew how detail-oriented he was and how much appearances mattered to him.
“We need to set up an appointment with an orthodontist,” he said the other morning after Daniel gave him his best five-year-old gap-toothed smile. By “we” Viktor means “you.” He does this all the time; I’m not sure he’s aware of it. “We need to get more groceries,” or “We need to tell the cleaners to do a better job with the vacuuming—there are lines in the carpet.”
Well, “we” don’t want to talk to the cleaners, who are resentful that one of us is just a more expensively dressed version of them, an American success story, who married her way out of an Appalachian backwater into a better social class. And “we” don’t think that five-year-olds need to worry about their teeth, not yet—not for some time. I’d ignore these demands, but he’s meticulous and will be sure to remember and ask about them. It’s an unspoken agreement: He will work his obscenely long hours and barely see his wife and child, and I will make his life as smooth as possible and tolerate his moods.
“You should be happy,” my mother says to me when I talk to her. I can picture her in that kitchen that has been “freshened” so it’s no longer avocado, all the appliances swapped for “biscuit” or “almond.” She is always in her kitchen, standing with the cordless phone as if she can’t move anywhere else in the house, a holdover from the days when the cord limited her reach. “What I wouldn’t give for what you have—that security.” My mother is whispering because my father will hear her from the next room. He’s been made redundant again, and this time there will be no other job for him. “You’ve got to take the bad with the good,” my mother says. “That’s what it means—for better and for worse. You promised.”
Another thing I’m grateful for: sleeping pills. With any luck, by the time Viktor gets home tonight I’ll already be fast asleep.
chapter five
ALISON
I choked on my coffee when Julie called what we’d seen a “potential domestic problem.”
“Are you referring to Heather being abused by her husband?” I said once I’d stopped coughing.
“Don’t use that word,” Julie hissed, glancing around the coffee shop to see if anyone else had heard. “I just saw Terry Holloway come in—that woman lives for gossip.”
“Who?” I asked, turning in my seat.
“Don’t look,” Sarah warned, and I turned back, catching only a brief glimpse of a skinny woman with a snotty expression who seemed to be arguing with a barista.
“We don’t know that’s what it is,” Julie said in a low voice. “For all we know Heather was telling the truth and it was an accident.”
We were sitting in our corner of Crazy Mocha on a rainy Saturday afternoon, a day that we knew Heather had a long-standing spa appointment and wouldn’t see us. We were child-free, our kids in the care of their fathers or, in the case of our oldest three, at a birthday party for one of their classmates.
“That was no accident,” I said, looking to Sarah for support, but she appeared to be waffling. “C’mon, you both saw that welt. Are you actually going to tell me that you’re not worried about her?”
“I know, but they’ve always seemed like such a happy couple,” Julie said, a slight whine in her voice. I think part of her was annoyed with me for spoiling the image she had of the gorgeous couple leading a fairy-tale life in their mansion on the hill. Understanding that humans are flawed and often disappointing was something of a birthright for me.
“They might be happy some of the time, but he still beats her,” I said, trying to be gentle, although I know my tone couldn’t hide my impatience.