She was nervous, a light night sleeper who treated sleep as if it were an expensive dress that required many preparations to wear: glass of water on her nightstand, a room both warm and cool, a light on somewhere, but not on her—though, as I’ve said, all those afternoons right before she disappeared, there she’d be when I got home from school, folded up on her side, lost in the kind of sleep that swoops down on the sleeper in one big storm of wings and a funnel of feathers, hauling her off in its beak.
I knew what their sleeping beside one another for twenty years was like, but when I tried to imagine the two of them doing what Phil and I did, I saw naked statues in an art museum instead, a guard in an olive uniform standing in an archway warning you not to touch.
Their bedroom was as plain and orderly as a hotel room. A white spread, white curtains, oak chest of drawers. They had two closets, his and hers. Hers smelled like lavender soap. His smelled like leather.
I got down on my hands and knees on their gray carpet and looked under the bed. Nothing there. I opened the top drawer of the chest. Socks, a shallow dish of cuff links, a handkerchief with BC, my father’s initials, on it.
What had I wanted to find?
Some sign of their secret life.
A condom wrapper? A dirty magazine?
I knew where my father kept those—the dirty magazines, I mean: in a file cabinet in the unfinished part of our basement beside the horizontal freezer full of yellow chicken limbs and slabs of steak gone pale with cold—a chest full of frozen hearts—and his tool bench, with his bright and expensive tools, which had the dustless look of things not used.
He kept that file cabinet locked, but I knew how to open it. Right next to the cabinet, tacked to a piece of corkboard over his tool bench, was a file card with the combination: 36–24–35.
It was like a joke—both the combination and where he kept it, precisely where anyone wanting to open the cabinet would look to find the combination for the lock—and I’d spin those ideal measurements and look at his spread-eagled Bunnies and Pets whenever I wanted.
Sometimes, my friends Mickey and Beth and I looked at them together, slipping an issue out of my father’s file cabinet there in the basement, the place we retreated to whenever Mickey and Beth came over.
Down there, my parents wouldn’t bother us—only, occasionally, come to the top of the stairs to shout something about dinner, or to announce that Beth’s mother had called for her to come home. We could do whatever we wanted in those two rooms—the finished one, which had a gray carpet remnant covering the floor, an orange vinyl couch, a pool table no one ever used, and the unfinished one with its cement floor and white appliances humming in the emptiness. We could smoke. We could drink rum in our diet Cokes. We could look at those magazines, my father’s secret Pets.
“Gross,” we’d say, or, “Oh my God.” But we would hold the glossy pages open for a long time, looking down at whoever she was that month—all those limbs, those wet lips. She’d look like something a wolf would eat, spread out like that, all that edible flesh, or something a hunter had shot out of the sky. When she landed at his feet, he’d jumped back in surprise with no idea what to do next.
But those magazines had nothing to do with my parents’ secret life. That was my father’s hobby, and I didn’t want to think about it. Obviously, he thought no one knew what he had down there, hidden, locked up naked in the basement, waiting for him to sneak down in the middle of the night and take a peek. But in its secretness, it made him even duller, even safer, even less sexual than he already seemed.
Still, if I’d found one, found Variations, or Big Boobs, in their dresser, a place they shared, that would have been something else. That would have meant that she knew, and approved, or that they looked at them together.
Of course, there was nothing there.
I fished through the second drawer. Women’s underwear. Nothing black. Nothing dirty. I looked in the third drawer, which was full of blouses she never wore. Too frilly, or too sheer, or too plain, but too expensive to throw away, and in the back, a shoe box, which I opened, and inside it a paperback book with a pink cover and raised white letters, Achieving Orgasm: A Woman’s Guide.
I thought, Jesus Christ.
I pictured her scrubbing the toilet, disinfecting.
I pictured her in the kitchen, baking angry batches of cookies.
I saw her in the basement, wringing the necks of my father’s white shirts while a choir of nasty children sang “Ring around the collar! Ring around the collar!” in her head.
I saw her in the living room running the vacuum cleaner over and over a four-inch area of carpet, seeing something in there that the huge rattling suction of her machine could not suck up, and pictured her in a bookstore in the mall on a Friday afternoon, circling a rack of books for a long time before she got up the nerve to buy that one and take it to the register.
She would have carried herself with a kind of stubborn dignity, buying that book. As the young clerk slipped it into a paper bag and handed her some change, she’d have looked him straight in the eyes and seen herself in there, wearing a camel’s-hair coat, a black skirt, a silk blouse with bone buttons.
To that young clerk she must have looked like a woman with enough money to be happy (clearly, she paid another woman to manicure her nails, set her hair in smooth curls) staring at her own reflection in his eyes as he slipped this bit of bitter information about her into a paper bag—as if she’d just bought and paid for a rotten part of her own body, a limb that had been frostbitten and was putrid now, a limb the clerk was selling to her in public, in the weak light of the mall.
Pathetic, and absurd, he must have thought as he handed the book to her.
“Have a nice day,” he said.
I put the lid back on the shoe box and closed the drawer.
Their marriage, I knew then, as I must have always known—their marriage was like a long drink of water so icy it turns the teeth to diamonds in your mouth.
A drink of water from a frozen fountain, twenty years long.
My MOTHER MOVED TO THE SUBURBS WITH A HUSBAND, AND she vanished in Garden Heights. Her name was Eve, and although my father’s name was Brock, not Adam, they were one of Garden Heights’s first couples.
Garden Heights was an Eden without a past, like the first one—but also without temptation, or snakes, or trees. Our house was built in the middle of a cornfield in a subdivision a few miles from Toledo, and no one had ever lived in it before us, as if God had decided to re-create the world without variety this time.
Newness was the whole idea behind Garden Heights. Newness and sameness. Every house in the cornfield had been built with the same blueprint, and there was even a bylaw that prohibited the building of fences and additions. The point to the place was fitting in, and my father did.
This was a life he liked. Every night, he came home happy. “Evie!” he might say to my mother, “Guess what? I bought a raffle ticket for the board of education benefit, and won a crockpot. Look.”
It was brown with a long, winding cord. For years my mother kept it above the refrigerator. Only once, she let a piece of pot roast shrivel up to shoe leather in it, and after that, she threw it out.