“Don’t say that. You’ve helped me so much. I can take care of the children and make the meals. I used to do it all the time. Gene is becoming more and more independent, and with each passing day, he seems to be getting stronger. And now the kids can play outside.” She looks down. She’s wrapped a dish towel around her hand and wrist the way Amy might bandage an injury.
“You’re making this too easy on me.”
“I can’t make it easy enough.”
Marjorie embraces Grace. She catches her mother’s scent in her clothes, a natural perfume that has always comforted her. “When are you going?” Grace asks as they pull away.
“This afternoon.”
Grace is both surprised and dismayed but refuses to show it. “This is a terrible situation, Mother, but it’s one that involves Gene and me. No one wants to live in the midst of so much unhappiness.”
“I kept the children happy.”
“And so will I,” Grace promises.
With the children napping, Grace steps into her mother’s room. It’s been weeks since she’s been in here. She notes her mother’s sewing basket, a short stack of books on the bedside table, a glass ashtray filled with licorice drops.
Grace sits on the patchwork quilt. “I want to leave him,” she tells her absent mother.
“How can you?”
“I can’t bear it. It’s not his disability—it’s his hatred. Of me, of his situation. It’s become intolerable.”
“You have to stay,” her mother says calmly.
“Why?”
“You’re married.”
Grace remembers a woman in pin curls and glasses who watched a boisterous sea and told her to hold on to her husband.
“You made your bed,” her mother adds.
“I didn’t make this bed,” Grace says.
It feels like years since Grace experienced the mild weather of June sunshine, the miraculous array of flowers, a wonderment of birds nestled inside the hedge and making a racket. She picks a bouquet of peonies and lilacs and brings them inside to arrange in a vase to put on the kitchen table. On an impulse, she carries the vase into Gene’s room and sets it on the desk.
“What’s that?” he asks from the bed.
“Spring flowers. I thought they might brighten up the room.”
“Get them out of here.”
Grace is taken aback. Who doesn’t want flowers?
“I get hay fever, remember?”
No, Grace does not remember. She removes the vase and carries it back to the kitchen.
The flowers are glorious.
One desultory afternoon in the kitchen when Claire and Tom fight over a toy fireman and Gene shouts from his room to keep it down, Grace puts her head in her hands. Tom, for the first time that Grace can remember, looks afraid, his lip quivering. She wants to go to her children, to soothe them, but she can’t. She climbs to the third floor alone and falls onto her cot. She turns onto her side and puts herself into a fetal position and cries and remembers that the only other time she did this was when she lost the baby. She’s amazed that she can weep, that the well isn’t dry. Most of the time she’s numb, refusing to think about her future. But now she sees the reality she’s kept at bay: she and the children will be prisoners here for years.
She sits up. She’s left the children alone downstairs. When she reaches the kitchen, Claire and Tom lie facedown on the linoleum, holding hands, still awake but not speaking. Grace asks questions, but neither will answer her. They are angry—of course they are—what mother abandons her children? Tom turns his head as if he would smile at Grace, but Claire, lovely little dictator that she is, whispers, “Shush!” and Tom puts his forehead to the floor. Grace tries to remember when she last washed it.
That night, in the children’s bedroom, now her own, Grace opens all the stuck windows and inserts the screens she found in the closet. As she lies on her cot in her summer nightgown, she refrains from pulling up the sheet and instead allows the soft air to cover her. She feels it move over her face and arms and legs, and it’s as if she’s floating above the earth, aloft in the night, gently buffeted by sweet summer breezes. Her children are near her, asleep in their pj’s. She refuses all thoughts, simply savors the sensation. This is peaceful. I can feel this. I can enjoy this. She drifts, and then she drifts. This is wonderful, she thinks as she begins to dream.
A man stands over her. She wakes as if seized but instinctively doesn’t yell out because her children are in the room. She covers herself with the sheet and searches for Claire and Tom. Undisturbed, they are sleeping shapes in the dark. The man whispers to her. “Come out into the hall. I need to talk to you.”
“Gene?”
“Just come.”
Grace yanks the sheet from the cot and wraps herself in it. She makes her way to the door and follows her husband into the corridor. Why isn’t it lit?
“How did you get up here?” she asks, breathless.
“It wasn’t easy.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I just wanted us to talk.”
“Now? In the middle of the night?”
The kiss is wet, his breath rank. She turns her face, but not in time. His tongue reaches deep inside her mouth. His right arm props him up, his hand next to her ear. She wrenches her head to one side.
“Come on, Grace, give your hubby a kiss.” He swoops again and catches her eye this time. He doesn’t have another hand with which to overpower her. Does he really imagine that she will somehow help him to have sex with her?
“Just a little kiss,” he persists. He grabs the back of her hair to hold her head to the wall. “We can start over again,” he coos, “wipe away the past.”
“Gene, stop. You’ll fall.”
“But you’ll catch me, won’t you, Dove?”
The old nickname, the one she hasn’t heard in over a year, fails to move her. She slides out of his grasp and away from him. “Gene, you have to go downstairs. The children are right through this wall.”
“You should be good to me. I’m your husband.”
“Let me take you downstairs. We can lie in your bed. The children won’t hear,” she explains. “You don’t want the children to hear us, do you?”
“You’ll help me?”
“Of course I’ll help you.”
“You love me, don’t you?” he asks, sounding oddly like a child.
She switches the light on. “Let’s just concentrate on getting you down the stairs. You shouldn’t have come this far.”
“I had to rest on my mother’s bed,” he says, squinting in the electric light.
What time is it? she wonders. How long did it take him to get to the third floor? They make the turn on the landing and descend. Trying not to hurry him, she walks with him to his bedroom.
“Here,” she says, “let’s get you settled, and then I’ll come around and slide in with you.”
“And you’ll let me kiss you then?” he asks, catching her hand.
“I will,” she answers, slipping her fingers through his.
A man has sexual needs. She is his wife. She uncovers the bed and lies next to Gene. He has lowered his pajamas to expose his rigid penis. “Just touch it,” he says.
There will be no discussion, no loving words. She takes hold of him, makes an open fist and slides it back and forth. He moans. In less than a minute, he jerks and his sperm spills out over her palm and wrist and sheet. He makes the same involuntary motions she sometimes feels inside her when he has finished. She wipes her palm and arm on her side of the bed and stares at her husband.
He is spent, nearly unconscious. Any woman’s hand would have done. She hates that she had to touch him, that the sexual urge turned a frightful and nasty man into a wheedling beggar. She hates that he can ask her for this.
No, she was wrong. It wasn’t that any woman’s hand would have done—it has to be her hand. His demand and her hand.
He doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t call her Dove. He gives no indication that she is even in the same room with him.
She slides out of bed and walks to the stairs. Once there, she takes them two at a time to the third floor. Inside the room, she reaches high on the door for the bolt. She slams it home and leans against the wall. She presses her hand against her breast and can feel her heart hammering. She slides down the wall and sits with her back against it until morning.
Grace is careful to deliver Gene’s breakfast before he can get up and come into the kitchen. He wakes in a fog. She doesn’t give him a chance to mention the night before.