The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood
ONE
First of all, the ones in sorrow should be urged if possible to sit in a sunny room and where there is an open fire. If they feel unequal to going to the table, a very little food should be taken to them on a tray. A cup of tea or coffee or bouillon, a little thin toast, a poached egg, milk if they like it hot, or milk toast.
—FROM Etiquette, BY EMILY POST, 1922
1
The Missing Boy
CLAIRE, 1960
If Claire had to look back and decide why she had the affair in the first place, she would point to the missing boy. This was in mid-June, during those first humid days when the air in Virginia hangs thick. School was coming to an end, and from her kitchen window Claire could see the bus stop at the corner and the neighborhood children, sweaty in skirts and blouses, khaki trousers and damp cotton shirts, pile out of it like a lazy litter of puppies. Their school bags dragged along the sidewalk; their catcher’s mitts drooped. Jump ropes trailed behind a small group of girls, as if even they were too hot.
Watching this scene, Claire smiled. Her hands in the yellow rubber gloves dipped into the soapy dishwater as if on automatic. Wash. Rinse. Set in the drainer to dry. Repeat. The kitchen smelled of the chocolate cake cooling on the sill in front of her. And faintly of her cigarette smoke, and the onions she’d fried and added to the meatloaf. Upstairs, Kathy napped, clutching her favorite stuffed animal, Mimi, a worn and frayed rabbit.
A stream of sweat trickled down Claire’s armpits. Was it too hot to eat outside? she wondered absently, still watching the children. It was hard for her to imagine that in a few years Kathy would be among them, clamoring onto the bus at eight-fifteen every morning, her braids neat, her socks perfectly rolled down, and then, like these kids, appearing again at three-thirty, sweaty and tired and hot.
That June was when Peter had said he was ready for another child, and Claire had stopped inserting her diaphragm before they made love. She wanted more children. The families around them in Honeysuckle Hills all had at least two, more likely three or four. Like divorce, only children were rare and raised eyebrows. Everyone suspected that the mother in a family with an only child had female trouble of some kind.
After all, it was 1960. The country had put war behind it. New houses were springing up around the city, in Arlington and Alexandria, clustered together in neighborhoods like Honeysuckle Hills, neighborhoods with bucolic names like Quail Ridge and Turtledove Estates. They had wide curving streets, manicured lawns, patios with special matching furniture. Men wore suits and fedoras and overcoats to work in D.C.; the women vacuumed the wall-to-wall carpeting that covered the floors. They polished furniture tops with lemon Pledge and baked casseroles with Campbell’s soup and canned vegetables. They went to the hairdresser every week and got their hair sprayed and flipped.
On long summer evenings, the families sat outside watching their children bike up and down the streets, or balance on scooters or roller skates. The girls chanted songs as the sound of their jump ropes slapping the pavement filled the air, beside the whir of lawn mowers and the distant noise of someone’s radio. On Saturday afternoons, adolescents gathered, clutching bath towels and shaking their still soft bodies trying to learn the Twist. They walked on a mat with plastic footprints, doing a clumsy cha-cha.
Even now, Claire could hear Brenda Lee crooning “I’m Sorry” from someone’s transistor radio. The dishes done, the children from the school bus dispersed, Claire removed the rubber gloves and touched the top of the cake to see if it was cooled enough to frost. Not quite. Soon enough, Kathy would wake from her nap, a little cranky, and insist on sitting on Claire’s lap, keeping Claire immobile and unable to get anything done. She glanced at the clock. If she was lucky, twenty minutes stretched before her with nothing to do. She thought briefly of the basket of laundry waiting to be folded, the summer linens that needed to be aired before she put them on the beds.
But instead of doing any of these things, Claire poured herself a tall glass of ice tea, adding ice cubes and saccharin and a sprig of mint she kept in a glass by the window. She grabbed the new issue of Time with its stark cover of an illustration of a woman and the headline: THE SUBURBAN WIFE. A yellow banner across the corner reported that one third of the nation lived in the suburbs. Settling onto the chaise lounge in the backyard, Claire glanced at the lead story.