He wondered if she wanted him to explain the quote to her, to speak to the relationship between self and the writer, but saw fury in her brow line. She thought he did not sit in judgment of his self; she thought he sat in judgment of hers.
It was a simplistic way of looking at his writing, but he could see where Marion was coming from. He couldn’t seem to explain, however, that the poems he wrote about her felt more alive than his other work. He liked them more. He thought they were more honest.
Marion was the most honest. The way she had moved in that café had been honest, even when she was lying.
He has been making himself up for years; how can he sit in judgment over something fundamentally unreal?
He sits in the closet, her underwear in his hand, and he thinks of his poems and his house and his being a father. When Marion does come back, she will be an entirely different sort of person. She will be the sort of person who abandons children at a drugstore, and therefore he cannot also be that sort of person. Unless drugs are involved, he thinks, only one person in a marriage with children is allowed to be that sort of person.
Denise is still in the house when Jane comes home from school, but Nathan doesn’t need to make excuses for the strange woman in the basement. Jane has an odd look on her face and responds to his questions about school with one-word answers thrown over her shoulder. She indicates that she wants to be alone by dropping her lunchbox on the foyer rug, slipping her backpack off her shoulders, and climbing the stairs. Nathan is inclined to ask her if she has homework to do, but who cares? He watches his daughter’s small hand slide up the banister. Jane’s backpack stays in the foyer, and the lunchbox will remain unopened. Nathan will forget to refill it with a sandwich, juice box, fruit, and a cookie. Jane’s teacher will need to take her to the cafeteria the next day.
An hour and a half later, Ginny comes home. Nathan is sitting in the living room, not reading articles on his iPad, just scrolling down. When he hears Ginny let herself in, he crosses to the front door. He looks with deliberation at his eldest daughter, but Ginny seems unperturbed by his anxiety. When asked where she’s been, she replies that she was walking. Nathan knows his daughter is lying, he can feel it. But Denise left an hour ago, and Nathan was careful to close the front door quietly after her in order to conceal her presence from Jane.
The taco dinner he planned falls apart in front of Nathan and his daughters, who are waiting to be fed. The lettuce is brown. The chicken smells off. The taco shells snap and crack into a cornmeal dust. Nathan throws the entire mess into the garbage and finds old takeout menus in the den. He wants Chinese, greasy, old-school Chinese, the kind Marion won’t eat. He asks Jane what she wants from the menu and she tells him the orange kind. Orange chicken? he asks. No, she says, the other orange kind.
Nathan says okay, and what does Ginny want?
Ginny rolls her eyes. “It all tastes the same.”
Perhaps it’s now time to discuss Marion, Nathan considers, and where she might be, but he can’t make himself do it. Last time she came back. Last time the girls were simply happy to see their mother again. Nathan decides to wait a little longer. Maybe this will sort itself out.
Ginger Tea
Having slept most of the day, Marion finds herself awake at midnight. The sex hotel is alive with the sound of television sets. She doesn’t mind, but she doesn’t want to be inside either. She throws the papery sheets off her body and dresses herself in the clothes she left in, a pair of black work pants and a blue blouse. The armpits of the blouse are still damp with sweat from her day of homelessness. The pants have lost their shape and bag in the butt and the knees. Marion must buy new clothes at the next opportunity. But now she’s in the hallway, slipping the electronic key card into her pocket. She’s left the knapsack behind, trusting the motel’s promise of peace and privacy to its occupants, but still puts a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob. To be outside without the knapsack will be liberating. It may also be a mistake. Still, it would be more dangerous to take the knapsack with her at this time of night, and so Marion takes the risk. Down the elevator, through the seedy lobby and the glass doors, unnoticed by the night desk clerk, Marion is on her own in the dark.
Fourth Avenue is refreshingly ugly. She’s been too long within the radius of charming Brooklyn, where it’s easy to avoid unpleasant sights and smells. Fourth Avenue is separated by a median, and trucks rumble in both directions. The garbage piles up here, and there are no stoops, but there are houses. In the summer Fourth Avenue smells like garbage and shit, but now, in the autumn, it smells like exhaust fumes. On the corner of each block, a bodega or Laundromat. In the middle of the blocks, a Burger King, an urgent-care medical center, a takeout place with illuminated pictures of the food served, a car service where the men sit on folding chairs inside, smoking, watching a game, their tan and black Lincolns parked up and down the street.
Marion walks to a corner store. She wants a Coke, a real Coke, and a bag of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips. The bell chimes when she walks in, and the man behind the counter acknowledges her with a loud hello but doesn’t look her in the eye. She’s not the only customer; a couple, young and drunk, giggle over the food they should buy to sober themselves. There is a smell to the store, though, different from that of other bodegas, and Marion asks about it.
“Ginger tea,” the man behind the counter tells her, pointing a knobby finger at the corner of the store, where there is a hot plate set up with two coffeepots. One is filled with coffee, the other with a light brown liquid in which large chunks of shaved ginger float.
“Can I buy some?”
“Sure,” the man says. “It’s very spicy, but good for digestion.”
Marion makes a noise that means “Oh, wow. I didn’t know that.”
So she buys a Coke, her chips, and a cup of this spicy tea. She spends her change on lotto tickets. Instead of walking back to the motel with her black plastic bag of goods and her Styrofoam cup of tea, she walks up the hill to the park. She can’t remember the name of the park she’s looking for but knows it’s here somewhere. She thinks there is a view. The houses she passes are small and have aluminum siding, but they have stoops. She can hear the couple down the block, laughing, dropping keys. When they manage to unlock the front door of their building, the street sounds too quiet without them. Marion looks up and down the hill for a new compatriot. No one. In her past life she would have turned around, but now she walks up. It’s important that she push at her boundaries. What more can happen to her?