Ruth______________
My husband is watching our neighbor walk to the curb for his newspaper in his boxers. I stand on the stairs watching him watch our neighbor. Only in California could someone walk out for their newspaper in their boxers during the winter. Any other time I might force myself to talk to my husband about what he is doing, but Owen is not my concern right now. Our fourteen-year-old daughter is pregnant.
The baby can’t be wished away, action has to be taken. It has to be taken right away. Time is everything in this type of situation. A shadow seems to fall over me. But it is too late for an abortion. Something else has to be done with this baby. I will not have my daughter turn out like Amber Sullivan did. Our neighbor, when we were young girls, had a baby at fourteen. Amber Sullivan, I think. That is not going to be my daughter’s life! There has to be another solution.
Before I realized Sage was pregnant I thought she was eating too much. I was ashamed of her for being overweight. Before I realized she was pregnant I dreaded attending my sister’s surprise anniversary party in May because I did not want to hear my mother’s comments about Sage’s weight. Now I wish my daughter was just overweight.
If I had been home more I might have realized what was going on with our daughter. I might have been able to stop her from getting pregnant. She might have come to me before I discovered it too late when she is so far along. This is my fault. I have not been a good mother. How could I be? Our mother is insane.
When we were kids our father left us. From the moment he was gone our mother lost her mind. She was strange enough before that, but at least she was stable. We would come home to find her fixing snack in the kitchen or gardening in front of the house on East Avenue in Oak Park, outside Chicago. After our father left we nearly lost the house our mother still lives in. People talked about us. Finally, our mother put us in a van and drove across the country to Cape Cod because she wanted to meet Jackie Kennedy at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port.
We lived like that for years, staying in cheap rentals traveling days in that van. She enrolled us in schools all over the Cape, in time getting us into school in Hyannis Port. We imposed on anyone crazy enough to allow us to darken their doorstep. Our mother taught us to lie about our ages and steal things we could not afford. I married Owen young to get away from that women, even though I suspected he enjoyed watching men in their underwear.
Unable to see my husband watch our neighbor bend over the newspaper a minute longer I am about to leave the house when a thought comes to me. Cape Cod flashes through my mind. For the first time in my life I think I realize why our mother loaded us into the van after our father left us. I know the reason she went to Cape Cod.
My baby sister has a house on Cape Cod. Even though she is no longer a baby, in her forties, she remains a baby to the rest of us–the youngest. Her husband’s family has the place in Hyannis Port, but Tanner bought another home down Cape in Truro. Moving across the room now I start to dial my baby sister’s phone number to ask if I can take my pregnant daughter to her house in Truro. Running away to Cape Cod for the summer while we wait for our daughter to have the baby seems to be the answer suddenly. It makes me feel like I am mothering. The only way I was ever taught to mother.
Emily_______________
My purpose is unclear to most people, ever since the youngest of my three boys became old enough to attend school. Prior to that it was obvious that I was home with my children. I was a Stay-At-Home Mother. Neighbors saw me pushing a stroller or unloading children from safety seats in the rear of her mini-van for more than ten years. I have not been that person for a long while.
Our neighbors do not remember anymore that I cared for my three children over a period of fifteen years, spacing each pregnancy so that I would be home with each of my boys until they were old enough for school. They do not recall me parading the cute toddlers through the neighborhood or organizing neighborhood block parties each summer. My purpose in life, Emily Newman’s entire identity, rode away with my youngest child on a school bus the year that he was old enough to attend school all day.
For a short while I went through the motions. I woke with my family, sending my husband off to the Oak Park Avenue El Station. He took the train into Downtown, Chicago. Edward is an investment banker. When the boys were young I would walk with them to the El Station each evening, waiting for my husband’s train to arrive.
I began to drive my older boys to school the year I put my youngest on a school bus. That year I waited in the driveway with my youngest son, singing songs to him until the bright yellow vehicle he loved arrived. While my family was gone all day I cooked and cleaned, shopping for things to surprise them with each evening. As the boys grew I cut articles out of the newspaper to read with them over dinner,sparking lively conversation at family meals.
The third year that my youngest child attended school all day I stopped waiting for the school bus with him. He no longer liked to see the bright yellow vehicle he once loved. There were no songs between us. When he played with the neighbors my youngest son, the baby of the family, swore at the other boys. One of my older sons threatened to kill a teacher at the high school. My husband began to drive to work, staying late into the night.
By the time my youngest child had been attending school all day for five years I stopped getting out of bed in the mornings. My husband, Edward, left without waking me. The boys ate candy bars on their way out the door. Our house did not get cleaned. In the evening I drove to fast food restaurants where meals in bags of grease were handed out the window to me. There were no longer lively dinner conversations. Life had changed. I had changed with it.
During the summers I had purpose again for a few weeks of the year. My children were home from school all day. I arranged swim lessons and trips into the city. Each year I planned an elaborate family vacation. By the time my youngest son had been attending school for five years that changed too. The boys began to attend sleep-away camps. My oldest son held a job as a camp counselor. I did not see my sons most of the summer. Letters home each week stopped coming. I was lost. People no longer knew what my purpose was.
The summer before my youngest child was to begin his eleventh year of school I went to the pool the way I had each year before, because it was my habit. I had been attending the pool with my boys for nearly two decades. It would not be summer if I did not go to the pool. Instead of watching over my boys in the toddler pool or raving about their antics on the diving boards I read novels on the adult sun deck. All around me mothers rushed home for afternoon naps, pushing their strollers with urgency I once knew. Reading my novels on the adult sundeck I fell asleep. The afternoons passed.
One afternoon as I woke after drifting off to sleep in a lounge chair on the adult sundeck I saw something I had not before. It was a lifeguard. I had not noticed him until then. Joel Lowell, a boy who had grown up across the street from me, caught my attention.
Joel Lowell had been guarding at the pool for several years, almost finished with college, by the time I took notice of him. During the school year Joel studied to be a teacher at the University of Illinois, downstate. Summers he was a life guard. Joel enjoyed teaching swim lessons.
The afternoon I noticed Joel my neighbor was at the pool with her children. I watched my neighbor for a few long moments before I began to drowse, reminded of raising my own sons when life was different. My neighbor was gone when I woke up. I believed she had probably returned home with the kids. Turning my head absently I saw her talking with Joel Lowell.
On the day I saw my neighbor talking to Joel Lowell I noticed the lifeguard’s athletic build. He wore a golden tan and a pair of blue trunks. As I watched the twenty-one year old guard who once played in the street during the block parties I organized something was stirred. I was different.
While my neighbor spoke to Joel Lowell I left my chair on the adult sundeck. I approached them, speaking to the woman about her children.
“How much they have grown!” I grinned.
My neighbor nodded, probably hating the words the way that I always did when people said the same thing to me years before because it was stupid. Children grew, it was what they did. Their growth, I supposed, was a sign of our own mortality. That’s why people said it. My neighbor nodded–polite, talking about swim lessons. I recalled my own years of taking my sons to swim lessons. Joel Lowell grinned when my neighbor introduced us. He shook my hand, putting his dark glasses over
his eyes. As my neighbor spoke I watched the guard named Joel leave us. He climbed up onto a guard chair. My eyes stayed on him.
My life began to take purpose again. I started attending swim lessons with my neighbor to help out, hoping to catch sight of Joel Lowell. 
It was something my mother might do I thought, making an opportunity for herself like this. She did things like this our entire childhood. In time I took the kids to lessons alone, giving the harried mother time to herself. Each weekday morning I woke with the excitement of knowing that I would see Joel Lowell. Weekends, I lived for Monday.
By the middle of the summer I took to attending night swim, something I had not done since the early years of my marriage when the boys and I would meet my husband at the train with his trunks. Joel Lowell was always on duty at night. As Head Guard he closed the pool most nights. I arranged to be the last person to leave the pool each night. Once I offered Joel a ride home–a brave evening. He refused because he had his own car. Of course he had his own car. For two more weeks I attended the pool day and night. Finally I did something drastic. I rented the pool for an end-of-summer party just to have an excuse to speak to Joel.
With the same energy I once used to arrange neighborhood parties I planned the pool party. I invited neighbors who did not know me. The women I had raised my sons with had moved on. They were in careers or divorced with condos now. Younger families filled the houses on my block.
The party was a failure. Two families, one of them strangers to Oak Park who did not realize that a private party was being held, attended. When the party ended I began to cry, out in the parking lot alongside my mini-van. Joel Lowell was moving toward his own car. I held my face in my hands. Joel spoke to me in a low tone as I cried because the party had been a disaster. My house was empty all the time now. I did not want to go home. Joel Lowell went for a drink with me that night.
We had drinks at Poor Phil’s, outside the Carleton Hotel. When it was time to leave I told Joel that he should not drive because he had had too much to drink. I offered to get a cab back to my mini-van in the pool parking lot, insisting that I wanted to drive him home. He agreed. Was the flirtation I felt mutual? How could he be attracted to a woman more than half his age with spreading hips and frosted blown out hair? As we waited for the cab I could not help myself.
“Your smile lights up the night,” I told him, drunk with tears in my eyes.
“You make me smile,” Joel Lowell responded.
He leaned close, kissing me in a way that woke something inside me down deep the way that spring does in March when the first snow melts away finally after a long grueling winter that has known no relief. Longing rushed like a stream through me. Using my charge card I paid for a room in the hotel. We went up to the room together, kissing in the ancient elevator.
We met in hotel rooms at first. As the hot days of summer began to fade we made love in Joel’s car, then in my mini-van where my children once sat in safety seats eating Cheerios. Near the end of August we met at the pool late at night. By the time the season was over we were having sex in the same water children took swim lessons in each weekday morning.
Hidden in a book near my bedside I kept a photo of Joel Lowell. At night when my husband was asleep I would look at it. During the long empty daytime hours as leaves were torn from trees by autumn winds then snow drifted past the windows of my house I studied the photo. Climbing into bed each night I would reach for my women’s magazine first, listening to the sound of my husband’s snoring. It rose from him like the smell of old age did lately, the price of marriage to a man nine years older than me. In my hand with the magazine I would hold the photo of Joel Lowell.
Running my fingers over the glossy pages of my magazine I remembered the feel of Joel’s bare chest against the same hands. Inhaling I smelled his young skin. It weakened me at the knees to recall the gasp running my hands over the brawn of the lifeguard’s body caused in me. A small anxiety ran through me as I did this each night.
On the Saturday before Memorial day last summer I went to purchase my swim pass for the season. I wanted to learn if Joel Lowell would be returning for another season of life guarding. My hands shook as I thought about the pool,remembering making love to Joel In the water beneath the summer night sky. I could feel my heart quicken as I thought that I heard a familiar voice. A male guard stood with his back to her. I thought that his hair looked too dark but it was early in the season. He did not have the golden bronze tan I recalled. This was how he looked before the summer I convinced myself. It was Joel! He was back! I could feel myself aglow again suddenly. It was not Joel.
Joel Lowell surprised me the Tuesday after the Memorial Day Weekend. While I moved through the monotony of my daily chores, displaying patriotic plates I always use for the summer, 
he appeared at my door. Joel was tanned and blond the way that I remembered him in aT-shirt and shorts. His feet were in a loose-fitting pair of sandals, not the expensive uptight status screaming ones that my husband wore.
I sent him away, before anyone could see him on my porch. In a frenzy I drove to the rooming house in South Oak Park, where Joel was renting a room since he’d come back from college. After he had left I pondered what to wear, finally deciding on a red halter that I had never worn because I realized it was too young for me after I purchased it with a billowy white skirt. As I drove to South Oak Park I wished I had whiter sandals. Climbing out of the car I put on my straw hat and sun glasses, a scarf tied around my neck despite the heat. 
He was waiting for me. Inside the rooming house we climbed the winding staircase together, Joel’s fingers were on my bare back where the halter scooped almost too low. I could tell that Joel wanted me as much as I wanted him when he came to my house. He wanted to pick up where we had left off the summer before.
In his room Joel stammered. His voice was low. I waited for him to kiss me. He did not, turning away from me to look out at an El train headed west from the city across the street on the elevated train tracks. 
“I’m engaged,” he told me finally.
The words fell hard over me. Why should I care? What was he saying?
“I’m married!” I said to him.
Joel’s handsome features screwed up then.
“I don’t want…to be married like that,” he said. “It isn’t going to be like that for us. I love her!”
“Take off your shirt!” I told him.
“No…I mean it!” he tried to be stern.
My hands reached for his shorts. He did not stop me. For the first time I could see that he was a child. Joel Lowell was a twenty-three year old child in a man’s beautiful body. The shorts dropped down to his knees. I twisted his boxers around his trim waist, lowering them too. My hands moved up beneath his T-shirt to the chest that I had imagined for too many lonely months. He allowed me to push the shirt up over his head, without a word.
Naked we lay together for a few short minutes after it was over. The entire rooming house shook with a passing train. I rose at last from the rumpled bed, naked with a blanket concealing the parts of my body I did not want Joel to see. From the window I saw a school bus on the street below beneath the umbrella-like green branches of trees. It reminded me of my sons.
We barely dressed, listening at the door for sound in the hallway of the rooming house. When it was quiet I followed Joel out into the hallway. We hurried down the stairs still dressing. Outside the rooming house Joel lingered. I hurried down the block to where I was parked. Sliding into the passenger seat I realized that Joel wanted us to get caught. I could tell. He wanted it over.
The summer before last Joel Lowell had started to go soft. There was the hint of the man he would be in his forties, love handles starting to spill over the elastic waistband of his trunks. His blond hair was thin enough that it would be gone by the time he was fifty. When he returned from college he was lean. His head was shaved. Joel’s jaw was drawn tight when I saw him at the rooming house after Memorial Day. His body appeared sculptured. He was happy–healthy. Joel Lowell was about to be married.
Last year was different. I caught him unhappy and vulnerable, unhealthy. That was why he was with me, I told myself sitting in the car outside my house. It was the only reason. Seated in the car with the truth that day I knew it was over. The pool was ruined for me. We were done, spent. Without Joel now my life had no purpose. I was finished.
These thoughts accompany me now as I stand outside Poor Phil’s and The Carleton Hotel on Marion Street in Oak Park. I stand in the cold air. Joel and I were together for the first time in these places. I walk now in
the late winter snow through Oak Park, shivering in my full-length fur as winter gives into spring–reluctant lovers always. The truth is that I am not just out walking. I walked past the apartment where Joel Lowell and his new wife live. As I passed the building, looking up toward their windows the way that I always do, hope swelled in me. I prayed that I might see him. 
The phone call from my sister has caught me doing the thing I always do–thinking about Joel Lowell. She wants to go to Cape Cod together for the summer, the place we spent so much time after our father left us when we were young girls. A place my mother always tried to force us to fit in, to belong. I am thinking about Joel as I listen to my sister tell me how nice it will be to be on Cape Cod this summer with the baby that I am due with next month.
My baby is due any day now. I will explain that it came early, in February instead of March. I discovered I was expecting Joel’s child last Fourth of July, when I staged awkward sex with my husband to convince him the baby was his. This is what I am thinking about while I agree to go to Cape Cod with my sisters this summer for some type of reunion Ruth is desperate to arrange for all of us.
Tanner’s Wife_____________
The necktie–I can’t find the black necktie I bought Tanner to wear with his new black pin-striped suit to symphony last night. I found the suit on the floor this morning where he dropped when we came into bed late. Was he wearing the tie when we came in? I can’t remember. It bothered me to find the suit on the floor as I moved around the bedroom this morning. My husband is careless with his clothes. I know great pleasure dressing my husband.
My husband does not even realize that the suit he wore to symphony last night was a Kilton. The majority of his suits are now. Most of his suits cost seven thousand dollars off the rack from SAKS. Kilton Suits are handmade in Italy expressly for SAKS FIFTH AVENUE. The label sewn into every suit says it but Tanner never pays attention to it. He does not realize that the suits I put him in cost a little over twenty-one thousand dollars made to order for him. It takes twenty-five hours to make a Kilton Suit Jacket. Kilton only produces a few thousand pieces a year. Each garment is soft, like a second skin.
If Tanner realized how expensive the suits he wears are he would complain that he should not be dressed so expensively. But he should be dressed well. Tanner makes An obscene amount of money. A person has to be at a certain income to purchase a Kilton Suit. Tom has a closet full of them. In this lingering poor economy when so many people have lost their jobs and their homes we are lucky. Tanner would say that it was insulting to wear such expensive clothes during these times if he knew the prices of the things I buy for him. I think men need to wear nice suits and ties during economic downfalls. The clothes I buy for my husband give him an image of being in control.
It is challenging to be doing well right now because of the economy. My friends and I do ‘shame shopping’ now, asking the stores to put things in plain unmarked bags. Part of the
fun of shopping is toting around those designer shopping bags. One of my friends brings her own plain bags to shop. Last week I had to pass up buying two cashmere throws priced unbelievably low at twenty-one hundred dollars each because one of the women shopping with us is going through a ‘difficult’ period. I called the store from home and had them delivered to the house because the throws are perfect for the leather club chairs in the den the fur throws from Italy were on all winter.
I was going to ask Tanner where the tie was this morning, but instead I watch him sleeping. One of the few enjoyments I have in life is watching my husband and our five children sleep. Tanner is wearing one of those sleeveless undershirts that I hate because they show through his dress shirts. Luckily he did not take his suit jacket off at Symphony last night. He said he just grabbed it when he was dressing because Helen did not have a crewneck undershirt out for him. I know he just did not look hard enough. The comforter is half off of him, the black silk boxers I matched to his tie are a splash of color against the white hotel bedding I ordered from New York. I do not wake him to tell him to remove the socks or ask about the tie. Instead I watch him sleeping, enjoying the moment.
Tanner wanted sex when we came in from Symphony last night. He always wants sex. Sometimes I think that my husband is a sex addict. I’m just glad I am still his fix. My mother told me once never to send him away, early in our marriage when Tanner’s appetite for sex surprised me. She said a woman who sends her husband away invites a mistress into the marriage.
Nobody remembers my name. They never call me by it. I have become known as someone’s mother in our neighborhood and at the school our children attend. From the moment the first child was born I have been disappearing. It has been like that since. To most people we know I am Tanner’s Wife.
My husband would disagree with this. He would remind me that I was a photographer, asking me to remember that I tutored students early in our marriage. What happened to that person? How have I become who I am?
During a visit to my doctor a few years ago something happened I could not forget. The doctor seemed puzzled as she examined my back. Alarm ran through me,toddlers running around the cramped office. What had she found?
“It looks like a bruise,” she said.
I heard a small gasp of relief come from her.
“It’s nothing,” she said in a meek tone. “An area you missed showering.”
Dirt, I realized. My doctor had found dirt on my back! She found dirt on the small of my back because I did not have five minutes to myself to even shower properly. Tom found me help after that, Helen our housekeeper and the other staff.
I am pregnant again. I know I am pregnant. I can feel it in my body, new life forming. That life is taking away the hope I had for finding a part of myself that I gave away so many years ago during my first pregnancy. My hope for a long bath during which nobody needs anything from me. We are in our forties, too old for another baby. My older sister, Emily, and her husband are having another baby too old. I don’t want to be like them.
My husband has an animal sexuality about him. Other women notice it too. They flirt with him. There’s a heat that rises from him for me. When I see him in a suit and tie I want to take his clothing off. On weekends when he is in jeans or shorts and a T-shirt I am weak for him. Exhausted and humiliated by the state of my own body I only have sex in the dark. Bi-weekly hair appointments for Highlights and hours at the gym work to preserve me but I am losing the battle against age and childbirth. The shame I feel for myself is erased for me in the dark when Tanner slides his naked body against mine. I open myself up to him, finding myself pregnant again time after time.
Helen listens now as I tell her about my husband’s tie. She nods as I explain that it must be somewhere in the house. I am not sure where he took it off when we came in last night. He may have taken it off in his SAAB. A look of understanding crosses the woman’s creased face. Helen is in charge of the household staff–two maids working with her, the nanny, the cook and the yard man who spends his time hiring landscapers and caring for parts of the house I know very little about like the basement. I could not live without Helen. She tends to the details I came to hate early in marriage, before children. The running of the house; everything from making sure the dinner table is properly set and the menu varied enough to having Tanner’s dress shirts to and from the cleaners and our four vehicles detailed. Helen is my savior.
Before Tanner hired staff to help with the children and the house I did everything. Sometimes when I think back on those days I wonder where I found the energy. It seems impossible to me now that I did all I did. Every single waking moment was about caring for the kids first and my husband, then the house. I was lost in it. Drowning I think these days.
Early on I would see a mother with one child and feel hostility toward her. She thought she was doing something so special caring for one. I had two, then three. My arms were always busy. People would tell me that. They would stop and say to me you have your hands full. Older people would smile at the stroller and call it precious cargo, two or three small children in it. I took pride in it.
I spent most of my time walking to and from the park or the playground. In the summer we would go to the pool where I would line my stroller up with the others in the wading section. At one o’clock all the mothers would make a grand exodus from the wading pool in our frantic rush to get home before Nap Time. In the car I’d pray the kids would not fall asleep, keeping them awake with songs and stories or games we would play. All that effort just to have a few moments to myself while they slept.
While they were in the stroller I would tell my children stories and sing songs. We would talk. I would talk most of the time. There were questions with long explanations. What was a mailbox the first time we passed one. Why did people take newspapers out of those metal boxes? Eventually there were letters being recognized. Street signs became familiar–STOP and YIELD.
These days I get angry when I see mothers with small children. They seem to push their strollers without emotion while they speak into cell phones or listen to IPODS I assume play their favorite music. The same hostility I knew toward women with only one child overcomes me. Lately I have tried to soften a bit. Perhaps they are listening to children’s music on the IPOD, singing with their small child as they walk. Maybe it is their version of Nap Time, the only moment of a day when they have anything for themselves. I tell myself these things as I move through my life without children because they are at school or with the nanny.
The anger is always there though. I can’t shake it. Thinking about it once I realized I was so angry about women with one child and women who spoke on phones and listened to music because I couldn’t do it when my oldest kids were young. I am jealous for some reason. That’s where that kind of anger comes from.
When we rebuilt our house a few years ago people were angry. It was unheard of to move out of our home and level it to ground, living in a rental while a four-story monster rose from the ground where our old home once was. Neighbors did not like it. They complained about the size. It was too big I had to admit.
Devastated by the comments I complained to my mother. She did not ever seem to be too bothered by the things I told her irritated me.
“Ignore them, keep up appearances but ignore them” she told me. “Some people might be jealous. That‘s all it probably is.”
Appearances are everything. My mother taught me that. When we were young one of our neighbors commented on how dingy our laundry was hanging out to dry on the line behind our house. 
Appearances were everything she told me. It was true I realized. Jealousy caused anger in people. That was true also, I knew. My mother was an angry person. I think this as I speak into the phone about to agree to spend the summer down Cape with my sisters. Tanner can take the ferry down from Boston weekends.
Joyce_______________
I do not answer the phone past nine at night. As a rule I am in bed before nine. The life I live is governed by such rules.
At the onset of each school year, in September when the heat hangs heavy in the classroom, I announce to parents and my students that I will not answer the phone after nine p.m. at night. Then I tell them I get to school by six-thirty each morning, that I am available every morning from that time until school begins at eight. These are some of my rules. I cling to rules, probably because our mother had few of them for us after our father was gone. We practically lived out of a van. Rules are important in life. I do not answer the phone after nine at night. But tonight was the last concert of the school year. I am not in bed yet when the phone rings.
Lilac is a good color for me. The lilac suit I wore for tonight’s concert was perfect I thought as I put it on the hanger. A pencil skirt with a long slit up the back to expose my legs. I have my mother’s pear-shaped body. Once someone asked my mother when she was due when she was not even pregnant. That upset her. I wear my mother’s short dark brown hair–never bleached the way her forced curls were when we were younger– and have her body, complete with tummy bulge, but my legs are great. People must have noticed my legs as they watched the concert. They probably admired how much control I had over the class, their children. Other teachers had to nearly shout to get their groups in line or to quiet down. Parents must have admired my control and the lilac suit.
The phone rings as I stand admiring the lilac suit on the hanger. It hangs on the front of the closet door in the small condo facing Lake Monona with a wonderful view of Madison, Wisconsin’s Capitol I have owned for the past six years. I never leave anything hanging on the outside of the closet but the lilac suit is special. I want to be able to see it from my bed. The phone rings when I am already breaking rules so I move across the room to see who it might be on the Caller I.D. before I climb into bed. It is Tanner’s Wife–my younger sister.
We all call our youngest sister Tom’s Wife. That is who she is. After she married Tanner our baby sister disappeared. Our mother called her The Baby way too long. For a time after that we must have used her name but as long as I can remember she has been known to us as Tanner’s Wife. It is who she is.
Standing near the phone I debate answering it. A rule is a rule. She knows better to call me after nine I tell myself. But it might be something about our mother, a problem I need to be aware of. Emily or Ruth might have told our baby sister to call me because they were afraid to phone after nine. Perhaps it is something about my mother, I reason. What if it is Tanner. His name is what appears on my phone. My heart seems to skip a beat at the thought that it might be my brother-in-law on the other end of the line.
At my sister Ruth’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party in River Forest I attended alone earlier this month, the way I attend most things, I listened to Tanner’s Wife talking. As Tanner stood drinking with the men I listened to his wife talk about another pregnancy.
“Six kids!” Connie Sullivan, plump and simple, stated in an exhausted tone. “I was lucky Mike didn’t want a big family! I don’t know how you young people do it! Mike and I could barely handle two!”
Connie Sullivan was our childhood neighbor, a mother to the four of us when our own could not be. She was the only stability we knew. Our baby sister has kept Connie in her life as a best friend, including her in every gathering we ever manage to have. I imagined our mother would not be happy to have Connie at the anniversary party for Ruth and Owen but she did not plan it. Our sister ,Emily, planned the entire thing An elaborate affair that our mother never could have even imagined. 
“I was thinking about it the other night, wondering why,” Tanner’s wife stated. “I realized that it must be because Tanner is the only man I’ve known who can find my clitoris.”
Connie Sullivan stood silent, perhaps a bit uncomfortable I imagined as I stood listening, shoving potato chips into her mouth.
“That’s how it happens,” Tanner’s wife said. “He kind of moves his hand up and down slowly if he is lost the way most men I’ve ever known do. Then he finds it.”
“I don’t think about things like that,” Connie said. “Since Mike’s diabetes…it isn’t like that for us. He gets a prescription so he can perform but it’s always him rolling on top of me quick before the pill can wear off.”
“There are plenty of times like that,” Tanner’s wife nodded. “Tanner loves sex. I never turn him down. My mother said a woman who turns her husband away is opening the door for a mistress. To keep my sanity I tell myself those aren’t the times we get pregnant. It’s the times he finds my clitoris, when he takes his time with me.”
“I can’t imagine six kids!” Connie Sullivan laughed.
“The only sanity I know is nap,” Tanner’s wife said. “For a few minutes a day the younger ones all go down at the same time while the older ones are at school or camp now that it’s going to be summer. It isn’t much time. Usually just long enough for me to go out into the yard and watch a beach ball floating in the pool. In the winter I sit listening to snow fall. My mother always said she had sand in her shoes, between the toes. That‘s why she kept going back to Cape Cod. I have so many fun memories of that time. The beach ball and listening to the snow are my sand in my shoes, I guess. ”
She was quiet a moment. I had no fun memories of childhood with our mother.
“I LOVE those moments!” she said finally. “Watching that damned beach ball and listening to snow fall it all seems worth it somehow. Those moments are mine. They wrap around me the way life does when Tanner manages to find my clitoris.”
I did not say a word, breathless as I stood a distance from the two women listening to what they were saying. I looked over to where my brother-in-law stood in his suit and tie. 
While the men drank and talked the women were fussing over food even though the anniversary party was catered. I was letting them all compare notes. The entire gathering was whispering about me, I was sure. Why I am not married, how they might find someone for me. The usual things. They have their ideas about what I should do, the way the teachers at the school where I teach music do. People always seem to know what I should do. They talk about me constantly, the new life I should get for myself. Joyce needs a man is what they all say. Not far from me my brother-in-law Tanner stood in shirtsleeves now that he had removed his tan suit jacket, the knot of his black and white striped tie loose. A wide grin spread across his tanned face. He was surrounded by a group of rowdy boys he had worked up with a game of chase and now water guns.
“Where are you taking me?” Tanner demanded, his charismatic tone rising above their heads as he lifted his hands into the air as if he was their hostage now that they had caught him.
The boys pushed and shoved him. He was their prisoner of war being ushered into the jungle, the woods lining the perfect River Forest lawn.
“How much is it going to cost me to stay dry?” Tanner asked, his tie sliding back and forth across his crisp white dress shirt.
“Fifty dollars!” one of the boys laughed.
“Fifty dollars!” Tanner balked. “How about ten?”
“Seventy!” another boys said.
“Twenty!” Tanner told them.
He looked as if he was going to reach for his wallet. Instead he took hold of the long stem of one of the soakers aimed at him. Tanner managed to wrestle it free from the boy holding it. Their voices cried out. Tanner held his arms up to fend off the sprays of water suddenly. I watched him running backwards as he emptied the gigantic water gun on them. His tie bounced up and down on his heaving chest like some sort of crazily dancing black and white striped snake of expensive silk. The boys yelled loud as they ran across the lawn after him, toward the woods lining the River Forest Estate. The Chicago Suburb neighboring Oak Park where we are from was alive with all of the flowers of May. The boys rushed into the woods after Tanner. I caught a glimpse of Tanner without his tie, captured again.
Despite his protests my brother-in-law was forced away from the adults by the older boys in the group he had incited with the game of water play. I watched him being taken away fromw here I stood. Tanner called to us for help. Nobody even bothered to try to assist him, a few loud laughs running amongst the grown-ups now. I pretended to be listening to a boring conversation over a new kitchen someone was putting it. Straining my eyes I could see through the branches and leaves of the trees that Tanner was being forced deeper into the woods. Alone in the coolness of the woods I was looking for Tanner. The boys who chased him into the trees returned wet and exhausted, claiming that they could not find him. I left the group of men who sat drinking to prowl the woods to find Tanner. Holding my shoes I walked barefoot, anticipating the feel of the wet long blades of grass against my bare ankles. It would be the most sensual thing I had known in too long a while.
Moving through the woods I searched for my brother-in-law. The voices startled me, not the sound of them but because they were so near. There were two voices. I had anticipated only hearing one, Tanner’s. I saw that his wife was with him. She had found him first.
“When they said that they couldn’t find you I thought I’d better come look!” Tanner’s wife said to him. “Why did you let them catch you anyway?”
“Let them?” he asked, damp strands of his short blondish brown hair against his tanned forehead. “They had a posse! I underestimated them!”
“They overpowered you, huh?”
“Not exactly over powered, but they managed to get the best of me,” he admitted.
“It’s official–you’re married to an Old Guy, Babe!”
Our baby sister laughed.
“Old and helpless,” she said.
“Who’s helpless?” he asked, grinning as he grabbed her.
“Stop–Tom!”
He pulled her toward him, their bodies pressed. As they kissed I knew that I should turn away–leave. I didn’t, afraid to. If I left they would hear me, I told myself. That’s why I stayed where I was, watching. At least it’s the reason I told myself that I did not leave. Tanner leaned into my younger sister, running his hands over her breasts.
“I want you!” he muttered against the side of her face between kisses.
“You always want me!” she sighed. “You’re impossible!”
He kissed her again. I did not leave, watching them. Fear of being heard did not keep me where I was I realized as something inside me weakened. I wanted to watch them. My brother-in-law removed my sister’s dress. Tom unfastened her bra then pushed her underwear down toward her knees. She did not resist, leaning against the thick trunk of a tree in a position I thought must not be very comfortable. Tanner did not remove his suit pants, opening his fly instead as he ran his mouth over her naked body. A heavy sigh released itself from me as I watched them. Tanner’s wife looked uncomfortable against the tree in the final moments. He did not notice. I stood watching without a breath.
Tonight I am breaking rules. The lilac suit hangs outside the closet door. I am not in bed by my usual time. A window has been left open to allow in the last scent of fading spring. The phone is ringing past nine at p.m. and I am about to answer it rather than allowing it to go to voice mail. Not because of the night I realize but rather for the smallest of hope somewhere deep within me that it is my brother-in-law on the other end. I imagine Tanner seated in their home in Marblehead or possibly the Boston condo overlooking Beacon Hill, where he took us to breakfast at a place I loved called the Paramount the last time I visited my youngest sister and her family. Tanner is calling me I think. Answering it I am disappointed to hear my baby sister speak. Tanner’s Wife is excited on the other end for the line. She is talking about all of us spending the summer on Cape Cod. Ruth’s idea she tells me.
Listening to her voice I hear myself wilt the way a lilac does when the season has past. My suit hanging on the closet door looks old me suddenly I realize–ancient. How foolish I must have looked in it at the concert tonight. I am not convinced until she says the thing I have been waiting to hear. Tanner will come down Cape every weekend.
Tanner_______________
The doorman at the Seaport Hotel greets me with the usual smile, as does the familiar man who ushered me up to the large double doors I know too well. There are nods and hushed, whispered, conversation with me from these men. A heavy silence surrounds me as these men who do not call me Tanner, but by my last name as they lead me. These men who know me because I come to the hotel often for the woman who is on the other side of the double doors. A woman my wife does not know I pay to keep in a long-term room at the hotel.
She is naked, twisted in the sheets and covers, on the large bed beyond a second set of double doors. Heavy floral draperies close out the view of the Boston Harbor on this late spring afternoon in June when Boston is still damp and cold as if it is March or April, about to give way to the heat of summer. A light rain falls beyond the windows. The woman in the bed moans and groans. She is hung over. The hotel called me because she had to be taken out of the lobby drunk and naked, again. I am no stranger to this type of scene.
Too often my sister, Zelda, calls me from motels or hotels after a night of drinking, crying. She tells me the same thing each time; that she met a guy who got her drunk and stole her purse after they had sex. I always find her stranded in bad neighborhoods. Each time I tell her that it is the last time I am going to pick her up. She always calls again because she know I will come for her. It’s what I do.
Zelda can barely open her eyes as I stand telling her how angry I am, finally managing to rouse her from her drunken slumber.
“I’m not coming for you again when you call,” I tell her, removing my suit jacket and loosening the tight knot of the pale blue tie that my wife matched to one of the half dozen navy blue pin-striped suits that I own this morning. “I can’t leave my life up in the air to come for you all the time like this, Zelda!”
“You look nice, all dressed up,” she says about my suit and tie.
When I do not respond she begins to apologize.
“Sorry,” she says, groggy.
I know that she isn’t sorry. A Drunk is never sorry. I put her in the hotel to stop her from being in dangerous motels. For a time it worked, but lately she‘s been calling me from bad locations again.
“Christ!” she says, looking into the mirror as she climbs from the bed. “I look like Hell!”
I throw some clothes at her. She stumbles around the room looking to smoke Her hair is all over, her face creased from sleep and still heavy with drink.
“I’m finished paying what could be a down payment on a home for you to stay in this hotel!” I tell her.
The hotel offers rooms considered to be apartments for a long-term stay.
“Money, money, money!” she says, yelling. “Keep your damned money! It’s always money with you, Tanner! Keep your money!”
She starts to smoke, looking away from me out the window. I am furious with her, but can’t blame her completely. It isn’t all her fault. I think about our parents. 
The holidays were never a good time in our house. For many years our father was gone. He had left the family. Before he left our father drank too much. Every year he would work half-a-day on the day before Christmas. We spent the entire afternoon waiting for him to come home. Instead of coming home to us on Christmas Eve. our father would seek comfort in the darkness of a bar where he’d spend an entire paycheck buying drinks for strangers. It gave him courage he told me once to come home to us. To her, our mother.
Our mother would pace the house worried that we might be late for the yearly gathering her side of the family invited us to. She favored her side of the family, the Italian side. Our father’s family was Irish. We’d listen often to our mother tell us that the Irish were all drunks. They were no good, she would yell. When she was angry she said we were just like the Irish side of the family, no good. In particular she made a point of telling me that I was just like my father. I never wanted to be like my father, often wondering if I was.
Waiting all day for our father the only real sense of the holiday Zelda and I ever had were the special episodes the television shows would broadcast that day. We would watch those families together, the two of us were afraid of our mother. I wished that I had one of those families.
When our father did finally come home he would always be drunk ,staggering– his words slurred. Our mother would yell and scream at him while we hid in our bedrooms. She’d convince him to take a bath, something he rarely did because he said it made him itchy. We would always leave the house in a hurry, fueled by our mother’s anxious words–her worry that we might be late.
On the way to the holiday gathering our father would turn on the radio. For a minute or two Christmas Music would pour into the car.
“Turn that racket off!” our mother would yell at him. “I have a headache!”
He would turn the music off and sing the same song each year. We listened to it in the dark backseat.
“Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go…”
“Shut up!” our mother would yell at him. “You sound like a big goof!”
Our father would stop singing. We would ride the rest of the way to the holiday gathering in silence. Thanksgiving or Christmas, every single holiday.
Every year we were the first guests to arrive at the holiday gathering. Aunts and uncles ran around as if they had not been expecting us, doing last minute things including showering. We were always too early. Our mother was silent and shy with her relatives, the way a high school girl might be in view of a popular crowd. My sister and I sat awkward for the first few hours with cousins we only saw once or twice a year until the moment came during conversation around the table when we were family again it seemed. It only lasted a short while, gone once we left the warmth of their home.
The ride home would be worse than the ride there had been. Our father always drank too much at the gathering. In the backseat of the car we’d sit half-asleep listening to our mother’s worries that he was too drunk to drive. They would fight all the way home, the three of us holding our father up as he staggered into the house and passed out on the bed.
“Not on the spread!” our mother would whine. “Get off of the spread! I have to pull the spread down!”
Our father would not budge. Frustrated, our mother would sleep on the sofa in the living room after she sat in the kitchen for a long while alone, drinking. In the morning we’d always wake expecting presents. Our parents were passed out. We waited hours for them to wake to open cards we made at school for them. I can’t remember the year my sister began drinking, but I know it was Christmas Day.
As I tell my sister that I am not going to continue to pay for the suite at the hotel I do not reveal to her that I have another plan. One that will make my wife unhappy. She does not know I keep Zelda in the hotel because my wife has little patience for my sister. Zelda is unstable, my wife has insisted over the years. She reminds my wife of her own mother who I have heard was not stable when she was raising the girls, after their father left them. Gwen was rather crazy back int hose days, I recall. Zelda never liked her. I know about unstable childhoods.
When I was nine I was asking relatives for money to pay the rent because my father was a drinker and my mother had taken to her bed the way she always did whenever her life became too much for her to bear. That was when I developed my relationship with money. I befriended it. Money was good, I realized. It was solid. Money, if handled right I learned at an early age, would never let me down.
Our parents inherited money. That changed everything. Our father came back. We left the city, living in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod. In some ways it was as if we had two childhoods, before Hyannis Port and after Hyannis Port. My sister is stuck in the life we had before Hyannis Port. I know I will continue to take care of my sister, trying to keep her safe. It is what I do. This is who I am–the moneyman.
I will move Zelda from the hotel I decide in this moment. Somehow I will convince my wife to take her down Cape with her and her sisters and their mother this summer. My wife will be unhappy. I have to take care of my sister I realize as I twist around to see her vomit. It’s what I do. I always do the things that need to be done.
Gwen______________
Standing in my garden yanking at weeds I try not to think about the day I killed my husband. When I do allow myself to ponder it I realize it was inevitable. I should have known it was going to happen. Ron was asking for me to kill him.
In college I only dated wealthy families. Their sons beckoned me. The parents approved of me. My parents had money. I belonged to money, even if it was new money as my aunt insisted when she would criticize my mother and father for their newfound wealth. Marriage to a man with money was expected for me. Ron did not fit the picture. He was…a mistake.
I knew early on that Ron was a mistake. We belonged to the same group of friends, from the drama department at Oak Park and River Forest High School. One summer we worked on the play ANNIE GET YOUR GUN together. The group coupled us really. Marriage to Ron was never my intention. When I found out I was pregnant the spring of my senior year of high school a panic overcame me. We married too quickly. I lost the baby during my fourth month of pregnancy. Brad Olson’s baby, not Ron’s. We were stuck, trapped in a marriage we’d rushed into because Brad told me to get an abortion. I wanted out of the marriage to Ron but stayed married to keep up appearances. Marriage to Ron was, a mistake.
We worked hard, saving money while we went to school at the University of Illinois Circle Campus instead of going away to college. After graduation we rode the train together to our jobs as computer engineers in the city, saving for a house. When we purchased a house it was the most practical one we could find. The one I live in now on East Avenue in North Oak Park.
It was an empty house. I wanted a baby but we could not get pregnant again. For three years we tried while I was tormented by the irony. In time I began to think about adoption. Then I was pregnant with Joyce. Before she was a year old I wanted another baby, convinced I would be happy with a house full of kids. Life was perfect, for a little while. Until Ron lost his job.
For a year we sat in the house on East Avenue without an income after Ron lost his job. I pretended everything was alright. Ron looked for work, leaving the house each day. He was changing careers. Men did that. I had a second baby, Ruth. Ron worked for my father’s company as we lived off of my trust fund. Life was still good I told myself. But Ron left the job my father provided him. He left job after job after that as my trust fund ran out.
In time everyone realized the thing I could not bear to think. My husband was not employable. I knew that I could find a job standing on my head. The first ad I answered I knew would be mine. I would be hired in a week. Ron and I studied computers in college so that we would always be employed. It was my plan. My husband strayed from the plan. I hated Ron for that.
My third pregnancy came then. Ruth had been an easy baby. She and Joyce were like little dolls I carted around. Emily was a torment from the moment I conceived her. She never sat well inside me. The birth was difficult. I did not sleep for a moment the whole time Emily was an infant. It was decided that I should not have anymore children because Emily nearly left me undone. Only my mother, who passed away later that year not more than six months after my father had, knew that I tried to drown Emily in the bathtub. I should not have more children she said to me before she died. After my mother was gone I became pregnant with The Baby of the family.
For a long while I kept it to myself. When I finally told Ron I insisted he not tell anyone. Our neighbors thought that I was getting fat when they saw me at the pool in my bathing suit. I knew a certain happiness over my secret. Nobody suspected I was pregnant. The pregnancy surprised them when I finally announced it, the way it had me.
During my pregnancy I discovered Ron’s lies. He lied that he was going to school for computer classes for an entire year. I believed him when he told me that he was
taking a program that would get him a job. The money I gave him for tuition he used on prostitutes he finally confessed. I would have divorced him then if ourchildren were old enough. The pregnancy stopped me from seriously thinking about divorcing Ron. My first pregnancy made me marry Ron Coleman. The fifth kept me married to him years later.
After the baby was born Ron lied to me again. He said he had a job out of state. I believed him when he left six weeks after our daughter was born. He called home with fantastic stories about he work he was doing as I wrote checks for his rent and expenses off of the inheritance I had from my mother and father after they died. By April of that year I realized the truth. Ron was not working. He was camping with college kids, living as if he was a student off of my dime. Furious I made him come home. That was my mistake.
It was only a matter of time before I killed my husband. I can see that now as Istand in my garden pulling weeds, thinking of Ron buried beneath my feet all these years. Connie Sullivan never told anyone my husband was the father of her daughter’s baby. Amber did not mention it to anyone I am sure. She went off to a good college, married now with a family practicing law. Nobody ever knew my husband had gotten a fourteen-year-old girl pregnant.
People in our neighborhood are jealous of me. That’s why my daughter Ruth did not get the lead in the play when she was young. She deserved it. Everyone knew that she deserved it. Ruth comes from talent. I always had the lead in the play. My mother shined in community theatre. Her mother won dance competitions on the radio station at the Oak Park Arms when it was a hotel, before it became senior citizen living. We are talented women. Annie deserved the lead in the play. She was denied it because people are jealous of me.
Neighbors in the neighborhood would not speak to me if they did know that Ron got Amber Sullivan pregnant. They would be ruder than they already are because they do not approve of how I raised my children after Ron was gone. I was given a grace because Connie and Amber Sullivan never spoke the truth to anyone. Across the street from me this morning as my daughter Emily talks about spending the summer together, Cape Cod that I love, a neighbor waves to me. I wave back. Even from where I stand in my garden I can detect the pity the man feels for me because he has been told the story I told. The lie I made up the day after I killed Ron. I told everyone that my husband abandoned me, and our four young children. Today I think about all of this as I make my way to my favorite wooden bench in my garden, stepping on the soft spring dirt Ron is buried in beneath my feet.
Sand Between The Toes 
