She glanced over her shoulder. “I have to go. Never saw you, never had this conversation.” She turned to walk away, but then she looked back at me. “I like to shop at this Draeger’s two or three times a week.”
With that, she walked away, leaving me stunned and confused and, I’ll admit, scared. Punishments? Severe? What the hell? Was JoAnne going insane? Surely, she must be. Or worse, was she a perfectly sane person trapped in a sadistic club? A club in which Alice and I were now members?
I milled about in the cookie aisle, still shaky, wasting time, not wanting to run into JoAnne and Neil at checkout. After a few minutes, I made my way toward the registers. I could see them heading toward the sliding glass doors—Neil in front, JoAnne walking behind. As the doors opened and Neil walked through, I saw JoAnne hesitate for a split second, then glance back into the store. Looking for me, I thought. What the fuck?
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Up 101, across 380, north on 280, all the way home I tried to recall JoAnne’s specific words. When I pulled into the driveway, I looked down to see that the entire pack of Stella D’oro cookies I’d just bought were gone, crumbs everywhere, though I couldn’t recall eating even one.
Alice wasn’t home yet, so I set about making dinner. Chicken over romaine lettuce, with bottled dressing. I didn’t have the concentration to make anything more complex.
Alice showed up after seven, looking tired in her vintage Chanel suit. I gathered her in my arms and kissed her, held her tight. The bracelet felt smooth and warm as she laced her hands behind my neck. But now, after the conversation with JoAnne, it sent shivers up my spine.
“I’m glad you’re home early,” I said, maybe more for the bracelet than either of us.
She massaged the back of my neck with her fingers. “I’m glad to be home early.”
I pulled her wrist toward my mouth and spoke into the bracelet, “Thank you for bringing home my absolute favorite ice cream, that was so thoughtful of you!”
Of course, I was the one who brought home the ice cream, but there was no way for them to know that, right?
She smiled. “Well,” she said, speaking into the bracelet, “I did it because I love you. And because I’m happy I married you.”
I wanted to tell her about the meeting with JoAnne. I considered picking up the pad of paper on the kitchen table and writing it all down, handing it over to Alice so we could silently discuss this thing together, figure out how to proceed. But JoAnne’s warning raced through my mind: not a word to anyone, not even Alice. The more reasonable part of my brain told me that JoAnne was going through something, losing her grip. I’d seen it happen before—perfectly normal people, mentally stable, late onset cases of schizophrenia and paranoia. Unexpected reactions to certain drugs. Triggers that brought up some trauma from childhood and seemed to change someone’s personality overnight. Middle-aged professionals who’d done too much acid in college and suddenly found that a weird, buried portal to insanity had opened up inside their brains. I wanted to believe that JoAnne’s panic, her bizarre story of punishments, was caused by some personal demon she couldn’t get out from under. I wished I had spent more time talking with her husband at the party, so I could get a sense of the kind of person he was. But the threat of action against Alice, the idea that Neil and others were discussing her supposed crimes and the appropriate punishments, gave me the creeps. How could I know what was real and what was a product of JoAnne’s feverish imaginings?
As we were setting the table, Alice told me that she was meeting Vivian for lunch the next day. “It’s been fourteen days,” she reminded me. “Tomorrow the bracelet comes off.”
Alice skipped her half hour of reading that night. A long dinner, no TV, a walk through the neighborhood, loving conversation, a slow, uncharacteristically loud encounter in the bedroom. Our performance of the happy couple was so complete that it would make other happy couples, like Mike and Carol Brady or Samantha and Darrin Stephens, seem like they were on the edge of a nasty divorce. The strange part was that we never acknowledged that our performance was for the bracelet or that it even was a performance, so that for me it became something else, something more genuine, as the night wore on. Yet when I woke up the next morning, my perfect wife of the night before was gone. There were her heels in the hallway, strewn haphazardly so I almost tripped over them, her mess of lotions and mascara and lipstick scattered on the bathroom counter, her empty yogurt container and coffee mug, smeared with lipstick, on the table. I half-expected a note—Thanks for the amazing night, I love you more than words can express—but there was nothing. When the clock struck five A.M., my devoted wife Alice had turned back into the laser-focused attorney she was. For her, I feared, last night’s performance really had been for the bracelet.
As I was getting ready for work, I had a memory of the first time we spent the night together. It was in her apartment in the Haight. We’d stayed up late the night before, making dinner and watching a movie, and we fell into bed together at the end of the night but didn’t make love. Alice wanted to take things slow, and that was fine with me. I loved lying next to her, holding her, listening to the sounds of the street down below. The next morning, Alice and I sat in bed, reading the paper. There was some music on—a great piano piece by Lesley Spencer. The sun was shining through the windows, and the apartment had a beautiful yellow glow. For some reason, the moment just felt right. And I knew the picture would remain with me for a long time.
I’ve always been surprised by the fact that our most indelible memories are often seemingly mundane things. I couldn’t tell you my mother’s age, or how many years she kept her nursing job after she had us kids, or what she did for my tenth birthday party. But I can tell you that one time on a hot Friday evening in summer in the 1970s, she took me to the Lucky grocery store in Millbrae, and as we walked through the door, she said that I could buy any food I wanted.
I can’t remember the details of many of the significant markers of my life, the events that are supposed to carry so much meaning: First Communion, confirmation, college graduation, the first day of my first job. I can’t even remember my first date. But I can, with incredible clarity, describe for you my mother on that summer night in Millbrae: the yellow dress she wore, the cork wedges with the flowered straps, the smell of Jergens lotion on her hands mingling with the clean, metallic smell of the freezer, the big silver shopping cart, the bright lights of the grocery store, the Flaky Flix and Chocodiles stacked in the seat at the front of the cart, the teenage clerk who told me I was a lucky kid, and the warm, happy feeling I had, my intense love for my mother at that moment. Memories, like joy, always seem to sneak up on me when I’m not seeking them out.
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