One of the only times Lucy noticed the stars these days was when she went out to close the door to the chicken coop. Which was one reason they’d lost so many chickens—a chicken door should be shut tight long before it’s dark enough to see the stars; the predators prowled around at dusk, and a chicken coop with a dozen chickens nestled side by side up on their roost was like a drive-through fast-food joint to them. One time, Owen went in to lock up the chickens and a possum was up on the roost with its teeth buried in the neck of a buff Polish chicken named Cacciatore. Owen battled the possum with a metal snow shovel for about ten minutes until it finally sauntered out of the chicken coop and slunk back into the woods. Lucy drove Cacciatore to the friendly local veterinarian’s house, and, two hundred and fifty dollars later, she was fine.
The inside of the chicken coop smelled much better than you’d think. It was a nice earthy smell, and not at all like chicken poop, believe it or not. Lucy went inside and counted the chickens. Eleven, still. She stroked each chicken along the back as she counted it. Kiev, Nugget, Curry, Marsala, Fat White, Fat Black, Ugly Chicken, Crazy Chicken, Cacciatore, Tikka, and Gluten-Free Patty. She had raised them all inside the basement from the time they were two days old and she had violated the most basic rule of chicken-raising. Don’t name them, everyone said. Don’t do it. You’ll regret it if you do.
Lucy had named them. And she didn’t regret it.
Eight
If you’re content not having sex with your partner, that’s fine. But you might want to consider the following fact. Most people are having sex with somebody.
—Constance Waverly
The Waverly Report
Four years earlier, when the twins finally made the jump from half-day preschool to full-day kindergarten, just after baby Charlotte turned one, Susan Howard realized she and her husband, Rowan, were no longer having sex.
It was their anniversary. They went out to sushi for dinner, stopped by the country club for dessert and more drinks, and yet they still made it back home by eleven. They usually got home late from nights out, around one or even two, but those were nights out with other couples, dinner parties and party-parties, Beekman parties where the good red wine never stopped flowing. But Rowan, when forced to pay the restaurant’s markup for a bottle of wine and twelve dollars for each drink, drank less than usual. And the two of them, without the distraction of the twins or baby Charlotte or the buzz of a party whirling around them, didn’t have that much to say to each other. It was difficult for Susan to sit across the table from Rowan and keep herself from reminding him of things he needed to do—get the minivan inspected, pour the fifty-pound bag of salt crystals into the water purifier, stick the tall orange reflector sticks into the driveway before the ground froze. But she didn’t. She kept her mouth shut. She smiled and tried to be interesting and engaging and entertaining and fun. She scrounged around inside her brain to come up with things to talk about that weren’t about the twins, that weren’t about baby Charlotte, that weren’t mommy nonsense.
When they got into bed, Susan realized her heart was pounding. She could feel it in her fingertips, the blood pulsing. She wasn’t drunk enough to pretend it wasn’t happening, she wasn’t sleepy enough to fall asleep. It’s our anniversary, she thought. You have to have sex on your anniversary, right? Something is really, really wrong if you don’t.
We’ve stopped having sex. When did we stop having sex?
For a long time, Susan had welcomed the reprieve from any sexual demands. She was exhausted. She was overwhelmed. She had other things to worry about. Sex was like the can of baking powder she kept on a high shelf in her pantry, something she didn’t need right now but that she knew she could get her hands on without too much trouble. “Marriage isn’t about sex,” Susan’s mother had told her when she was growing up. “Passion fades,” her mother had said. That, and “Men don’t like to have fat wives.”
So Susan did not let herself get fat, and she didn’t worry about fading passion, and she channeled her energy into her volunteer work and into breastfeeding her kids longer than most women considered either necessary or normal. But once the sex thing became an issue in her head, it was just about all she could think about. After trying to initiate sex a bunch of times—bona fide humiliations, every last one of them—she more or less forced Rowan to go see a therapist, Dr. Weinberg, who specialized, according to his website, in sex.
“Do you remember that commercial for Dunkin’ Donuts? With that old guy who woke up early every morning and said, ‘Time to make the doughnuts’? He was dragging himself around, saying, ‘Time to make the doughnuts, time to make the doughnuts’?” Susan asked Dr. Weinberg at their first joint therapy session. “Seriously, do you remember?”
“I do remember that commercial,” the doctor said finally.
“Okay, well, that’s how Rowan makes me feel about wanting to have sex. Any time the idea of sex comes up, it’s like there’s a thought bubble over his head that says, ‘Time to make the doughnuts.’”
“Because you’re putting a lot of pressure on me,” said Rowan. “You don’t see it, Susan, but you are.”
“What pressure?”
“All of it! The new lingerie. Every time I get into bed I feel like I’m disappointing you.”
“You are disappointing me! This is a really messed-up situation, Rowan. I don’t see why you don’t see it!”
“I do see it. I’m here, right? I’m willing to work on it. I want to fix it.”
“Are you gay, Rowan? If you’re gay, just tell me.”
“I’m not gay.”
“Do you think he’s gay, Dr. Weinberg?”
“No, I don’t.”
It seemed rather unusual for a shrink to say something that definitively, but Susan liked it. He must be pretty sure, she thought, to put it that plainly. Dr. Weinberg had had three sessions with Rowan on his own. Who knows what he might have teased out in those hundred and fifty minutes? Perhaps Rowan had revealed a very deep, very symbolic, profoundly heterosexual dream.
“Okay,” Susan said. She scooched a bit on the couch, turned her body toward her husband, and looked him directly in the eyes. “Are you having an affair?”
“No! Jesus, Susan. No.”
“Just tell me if you are,” she said. “It’s okay to tell me. Honestly, at this point I’d rather know.”
“I’m not! I swear,” said Rowan. “Are you having an affair?”
“Of course not.”
“I love you. I love our family. I want us to work.”
“I do too,” said Susan.