She shivered, though it wasn’t cold. There was violence everywhere. Dogs barked, disrupting the quiet. Insects buzzed, voices carried, cars flew through streets, ignoring signs telling them not to. Lately, she braced herself when Lance touched her. Or perhaps she’d been bracing herself for years.
After half an hour of walking, slick with sweat, she’d wound back to her street, to her daughter’s street, and climbed the steps to Victoria’s sprawling ranch. She wasn’t winded.
Victoria opened the door before Lisa knocked. Handed her a glass of wine. Smiled.
Lisa entered her daughter’s house. Remembered to smile back.
Sometimes it felt as if she were moving underwater. She went to the bookstore near Rice and bought books with covers featuring faceless women: their heads turned or severed at the eyes. Those were the kind of books she liked: preferably set in the past, about women and their troubles. Dropped into societies and marriages and families that didn’t understand their desires.
She went to the grocery store and bought two loaves of the ciabatta Lance liked. Stood in the deli line and sent the turkey back, apologetically, when it wasn’t sliced thinly enough. Went to the salon and luxuriated in what would be her last appointment for a long time. When her hairdresser massaged her scalp with a drop of oil, Lisa nearly wept with pleasure.
Other times — like now, at home, in her white-tiled bathroom, staring at her new bob — she felt thrilled. Titillated. An electric current running from her brain to the tips of her fingers. She now had brown hair, for the first time since she was a child.
Her plan was simple. She’d heard somewhere that simple plans were the best plans. She hoped it was true.
Her makeup had been disturbed at the hair salon, by the hair washing and the heat of the dryer. She took a pad soaked with astringent and drew it across her face, starting at her chin, moving upward in quick, deft strokes.
It had always been her nature to be gentle. When Victoria was a little girl, Lisa was good at untangling knots in her daughter’s hair. Her instinct was to move slowly, to solve with patience instead of force.
A less patient woman would’ve left Lance. He wasn’t flagrant with his affairs, but still there’d been a nurse who’d driven by their house too many times to ignore. And then, abruptly, stopped. A smear of lipstick on the back of one of his collars, hidden from his sight. Late nights at the hospital, even when he wasn’t on call.
Lisa hated to think about the fight Lance and the nurse — she wore sunglasses, drove a Honda with an empty car seat in the back — must have had. Lance challenging her, invoking... Who knew what he invoked? Did he threaten her career? Her marriage? Did he say he loved his wife?
Lisa dabbed at the delicate skin beneath her eyes. Imagining the sex didn’t bother her. It was the fighting that disturbed her — the intimacy that accompanied conflict.
Lisa lived in a beautiful home. Liked her life. Loved her daughter, who she was lucky to have living close by. She hadn’t ever thought seriously of leaving Lance. Or demanding that he stop. She knew he wouldn’t.
But the bruise. And then the photographs. One day, Lisa let herself into her daughter’s house — a ranch, yes, but totally gutted and restored — with the key hidden beneath the stone turtle out back. Found the Polaroids. It undid something in Lisa, holding them in her hand, stacked in a neat square. She guessed that David checked Victoria’s phone. That something physical, in this digital age, felt safer.
The photographs were lurid. The bruises against the pale skin — Victoria had always had such beautiful skin — reminded Lisa of tie-dye. Multiple variations of the same hue. An irregular pattern that somehow made sense.
She had put the photographs back into Victoria’s trunk. The same trunk in which she’d hidden her secrets since she was a little girclass="underline" notes passed by friends, treasures dug up in the creek that ran through the backyard of their first home. A letter from her father, who was barely in Victoria’s life.
Lisa startled back into the present: her white-tiled bathroom, with the dormer windows to let in the light. The light was not flattering, but it was useful for applying makeup.
It was Lance, opening the door in his firm way. He never hesitated. Lisa caught his surprise in the mirror’s reflection; he rarely saw his wife without makeup.
She felt naked.
“You’re home early,” she said, resisting the urge to drop her head. Let him look at her. Let him see.
He shrugged. “Thought I might go hit some balls.”
“We have the thing at Deb’s tonight.”
“I know.” He made to go, raising his hand in a sort of half wave, but then he paused. “You look nice like that. You look nice without all of the—” He ran a hand over his face, as if removing a mask, before he left.
She was moved. But she shouldn’t have been. It was Lance’s instinct, always, to make women feel good about themselves.
It was only later that she realized he hadn’t noticed her hair, brown for the first time in years.
Victoria met David three years ago, while walking through the neighborhood with her mother. She was twenty-seven. He was a partner in a law firm, recently divorced, Victoria’s senior by a decade. Lisa didn’t like the decade part, but she liked David. He was quiet and seemed kind. The rumor was his wife had left him for her high school boyfriend, breaking David’s heart. Now, of course, Lisa wondered why the woman had left. They had no children. And he adored Victoria.
When they’d been dating for a few months, Victoria had fainted, and David had taken her to the emergency room, calling Lisa on the way. When Lisa arrived, David was in a quiet fury, demanding that his wife be seen that instant. And she was.
David was quiet, but he was forceful. Taller and larger and less handsome than Victoria, with a weak chin and sandy-colored hair. Victoria had worked at a marketing firm when she met him. Not her passion, perhaps, but a good enough job. A way to get out of the house, at least. She’d gone to part-time after they married, then quit altogether. You don’t work, she’d said to Lisa, and you’re happy.
That was true, or true enough. But sometimes Lisa felt the world had passed her by. Especially once Victoria left for college. She had no purpose, had never had a purpose, except for her daughter.
But then Victoria moved to Tanglewood, and her presence brightened Lisa’s life. They were each other’s purpose.
The first surge of sickness, when Lisa was sixteen years old — she’d known what it was. Who it was. And everything after that, all her moves — up, up, up — had been for her daughter. She knew people — Gary’s mother, for one — thought she’d gotten pregnant so she could escape Midland. But it’d been the other way around, entirely. She doubted she would have left if not for her child, her child who had made her life possible.
Lisa would’ve lived a lifetime with Lance. He would’ve retired, eventually. He was reluctant to leave work, said he didn’t know what he’d do with his time, but Lisa and he both knew that the office and the hospital provided good cover for his extracurricular activities.
They still had sex. A few times a month. It was nice enough. She’d told him once, after the nurse had driven by, that if she ever got an STD, she’d kill him. They had been eating dinner on the porch. She didn’t look at him when she said it.