“You weren’t lonely.”
Audra put one hand in the air, as though swearing an oath in court, but on an ice cream sundae. “Not once,” she said. “Betty, I knew I could tell you. You understand.”
Cracker was glad that she was the sort of person her friends could tell terrible secrets to—she imagined she presented herself as a kind of card catalogue, where all the entries sat next to each other, each precisely the same size as the next, arranged for ease of location and not importance. She also wished she were not that person. Her friends thought she forgot their confidences. She didn’t judge—mostly she didn’t judge—but she remembered. You understand, Audra had said, but Cracker didn’t. She didn’t understand Janis drunkenly sleeping with the young mortician the day of her mother’s funeral; she didn’t understand Gladys’s confession that she loved her littlest child, a son, better than all his lovely older sisters, and that the girls sensed this, and had become desperate to win her love, which turned her stomach. She didn’t understand not missing Audra’s nice Dennis, who fixed cars on the weekend and didn’t drink and had once played bass in a jazz quartet. Of course not all families were happy! But Cracker didn’t want to know the specifics. The visible world, that was fine, snappishness, ennui, misdirected flirtation. She would not turn away, but she wished to remain innocent of the causes.
She was known for her dislike of gossip and so everyone brought their gossip to her: they figured her for a lagoon. The affairs and the revenge affairs, the drunken incontinence, the lack of sex and the excess of it, the husband who cried for a month when his formerly secret mistress died, the woman who could not stand the smell of her child dying of cancer. “Like rotten cabbage,” the mother said, then, seeing the look on Cracker’s face, “I love her so.”
By then her own marriage was falling apart. The wonder was that it had lasted so long. She thought she’d be embarrassed but she wasn’t. All those things that she knew about other marriages, through confession and gossip, people likewise knew about hers, or made good guesses. Then one Saturday noontime she was watching Arch on Candlepins for Dollars, live television, and he absentmindedly reached out and palmed the round underside of the rump of the ladies’ champion, Anna Rzepka. Rzepka didn’t even flinch. The camera cut away, cut back. In the intervening moment Arch had understood what he had done. It showed on his face. You’d have thought he’d lost the tournament, and just afterward he did that, too. No instant replay, thank God. Still, in living rooms all over greater Boston, Arch Truitt had idly fondled Anna Rzepka. By dinnertime people remembered it happening in close-up and slow motion.
Cracker, in her own living room, had seen it clearly, the stroking upturned hand, one finger above the rest intimately tickling. She looked at her mother-in-law, who was crocheting some ghastly circular object: a turtleneck for disadvantaged serpents. Then Cracker turned to the telephone and waited for it to ring. Isn’t that what happened? No: in other houses, the phones were ringing, the chatter had begun. Did you see that? Poor Cracker, poor thing. Well, it’s no surprise.
Nobody would be calling her. She turned her head back to the television. She’d forgiven him before, invisibly, at all the other signs: the hotel bills for tournaments an hour’s drive away, the ringing phone with nobody on the other end, a sudden drop-off in their sex life, a new and startling expertise in bed. She’d known plenty and ignored plenty but they had never said anything. This was different.
“He’s like his father.” Margaret was still crocheting, jerking her fingers, circling the air with yarn in a genuflective way. “He wears his arm on his sleeve.”
“Arm?” said Cracker.
“Heart,” Margaret corrected. “He wears his heart on his sleeve.”
“Yeah, well, look closer. That isn’t his heart.”
“Forgiveness is a blessing,” said Margaret, to her moving fingers. “Don’t forget that, darling.”
He came home that night with one of his twilight hangovers, his hair combed back, his clothes hanging from his shoulders, a paper doll of a man. He had his bag over one shoulder, the balls stamped with his initials, ACT. He saw the look on her face. Probably he didn’t want to be forgiven: you fuck up, you should feel like a fuckup.
“Sweetheart,” he said. Alone of the Truitts he had that flat Salford accent. Sweet-hot. He winced at something, toothache, headache, conscience. Already he was guilty, repentant, on his way, he believed, to absolution. “I’ll sleep at the alley.”
“You will not,” said Cracker. “That’s my place now. You have a mother, remember?” The mother was dozing on the davenport; the mother (thought Cracker later) was why they did not fight, or fuck, or do anything that might jolt their marriage’s fundaments, and save it.
She had children but she was not running off to Dennis, only down the street. She would come every morning and cook them breakfast, she would pack lunches and send them off to school. Like Audra she would not miss her family. She would not think anything until she thought the grand thoughts of her youth: she would imagine how she might be loved, how she might (through charity and hard work) be redeemed. That had been her plan, when she was a girl of fourteen. She was not the smartest girl in her class; she was only ordinarily pretty; she did not play an instrument; she could not sing. But she liked the idea of being good. Arch was guilty, there was no doubt about it, but maybe she was guilty, too. She planned to examine herself.
When she opened the door to the apartment she saw it hadn’t stood empty in all that time. Arch had brought people here. Women? Yes: there was a drift in the corner of womanly things, underpants and single stockings, cotton balls peachy with pancake, emery boards. But other people, too—beer cans and scotch bottles, the fat ashes of cigars, racing forms. It wasn’t utter ruin, just bad behavior, medium fresh. He was a careless man but not a disaster. Once a month he cleaned the place. He hadn’t slept with every woman who’d left a crescent lip print on a scotch glass. Really, only three or four over time. How many secret lives does one man need?
All of them, Cracker, all of them.
It felt like the sort of camp teenagers with a little money might pitch in the woods. She tried to clear things up. She got the old push broom from the alley and plowed the floor. This is my penance, she thought, still hoping she might attain goodness, but for what? Amid the garbage, the inevitable husks of insects and one twitching live one. The last drunk at the party. What kind of bug? She stepped on it. The crunchy kind. The worst of it: she’d been gone an hour and a half, and already she was lonely, she missed everyone. Amy, who was twelve, tall and pimpled and music-obsessed: her friends loved rock and roll but she was a folkie, perverse in the family way. Brenda, littler, little enough that she still let her mother pinch her bottom and sniff her neck. Who could Cracker confess to? One day I ran away from home and you know what? I had to run back immediately.
She missed Arch, too, but he had to go.
Every Man a Portmanteau
The four months Arch lived above the bowling alley, his women treated him like a visiting dignitary from an impoverished country. They wanted him to be comfortable and also grateful, dazzled by the richness of ordinary things. They got rid of all the old beds in the apartment and moved in the wooden mission bed from Arch and Cracker’s bedroom: she wanted a new one. She sewed him a quilt made of all the sheets and blankets of their married life. Cracker did not wish to sleep upon them or beneath them ever again.
“You could have just given them to me,” said Arch. “They would have done fine. Now they’re like—” He waved at the quilt, spread out on the bed. “It’s like a mausoleum of blankets.”
“Yes.”