I cast my gaze quickly to the ceiling.
Frankenstein’s monster. That is what I feel like. I close my eyes as Mary begins to apply the ointment. I twitch at her touch, and she says, “Oh, stop being such a baby. Look how it’s already begun to heal!”
No, thank you. I’m all finished with the looking part of this assignment. Instead, I keep my gaze trained on the kitchen window, which, from where I’m sitting, offers a portal into a clean square of blue sky.
My foot jerks uncontrollably again.
“Stop moving!”
I find the little microphone in my pocket and hold it tightly in my grip.
Hello, America.
Are you watching me, right now?
Are you entertained?
18
There comes a pointin every marriage when a woman realizes that the man she married is a freak. This is inevitable. It cannot be avoided. The only real question in the matter is what type of freak your husband will be—meaning:if you are lucky,you will find out your husband is preternaturally into vintage children’s train sets, and you willnotfind out that your husband pays high school cheerleaders for sex. That is the best we homemakers can hope for in this life: a man whose freakishness is not unspeakably violent or technically illegal, and therefore is something we are able to bear.
This is what my mother told me on our daily phone calls in those first few weeks of my time at the Mills estate, whenever I mentioned my husband’s particularbehaviors:his refusal to get a job, his adolescent mewlings at his parents when they were simply trying to be nice. I would tell my mother about these moments while pushing Clementine in a stroller down the long, tree-lined driveway, and she would listen patiently before reminding me that it was a woman’s job to encourage her husband to be normal.
“The problem, Mother,” I would say at this point, “is that he isn’ttrying.”
“Well,” she would reply. “I’m sure he will soon.”
And then the phone conversation would drift off in a quiet deflation of mutual uncertainty.
I had hoped Caleb’s parents would whip him into shape upon arrival—that Doug might offer some sort of ho-hum rallying cry for the tenets of traditional masculinity, or that Amelia might grab her son’s wrist and squeeze tightly, telling him in as few words as possible not toembarrass the family.But so far they’d done nothing of the sort. They’d barely said anything to him at all, had only reprimanded him mildly whenever he slouched through the kitchen in sweatpants in the early afternoon.
We’d been here for weeks—weeks!—and nothing had improved. If anything, it had gotten worse. Caleb now spent all his time in our bedroom, the glow of his computer screen turning his face an unworldly blue while he played video games, or read niche culture blogs, or watched porn.
Yes. Porn.
This, I hadn’t told my mother: One afternoon, I walked into our bedroom to find Caleb’s laptop open at his desk. I glanced over to our bathroom door and saw it firmly shut tight, a band of yellow light by the floor. I walked over to his desk, hoping to find the browser open to a job listing. Instead, I found a grotesque still of a couple, naked and frozen mid-thrust. Before my brain short-circuited, I noted the long line of tabs open at the top of the browser—Husband + wife (REAL COUPLE) fuck passionately for one whole hour; Intense kissing leads to squirting orgasm!!!!; Amateur couple have hot intimate fuck session (lots of pussy licking)—then I stepped forward and slammed the laptop screen shut.
My wagon was hitched to a sex pervert.
Then one night, the moment I was waiting and hoping and praying for finally arrived.
It was evening. Late October. We’d been at the Mills estate for a month. I was on my way to the laundry room when I came across Amelia and Doug sitting beneath the dim light of the island pendants, a bottle of white wine sweating on the counter between them. Doug was about to leave for a week inDC. A black rolling suitcase lay by his feet like a family dog. His tie, lipstick red, wasloose around his neck. It was a casual scene, somewhat nostalgic. Like a Norman Rockwell painting: a nightcap between a traveling salesman and his homemaker wife. But something about their expectant faces unnerved me—I hadn’t expected to catch either of their gazes so quickly, nor had I expected those gazes to hold such quiet urgency—and suddenly I felt destabilized, like I was floating through the half second when dream tips over into nightmare. The moment when you realize an intervention is taking place, and the person it’s meant for is you.
“Natalie,” Amelia said. “Could we chat for a moment?”
“Of course,” I said, though my heart sank. Clementine was just starting to sleep through the night, which meant thatIwas just starting to sleep through the night. But nothing threatened my nine o’clock bedtime more than Amelia with a bottle of Pinot Grigio.
“You know how much we love having you here … ,” Amelia said, a bit breathily. It was clearly abeginning,a first half to a sentence she’d already rehearsed in full, and yet she paused unnaturally here, like a teleprompter was frozen. She looked helplessly at Doug.
“Natalie,” Doug said. “Can we have an honest conversation?” He gave me a congenial, we’re-all-friends-here kind of look. Sitting there in his starched white shirt, with an American flag pin fastened neatly on the breast pocket, I could suddenly see him perfectly at a campaign stop in West Virginia, sitting down in a booth filled with coal miners, ordering a round of pints for the table, giving some hearty speech comprised entirely of one- and two-syllable words, closing with some rowdy punch line aboutGod, family, and beer.
“It’s about Caleb,” he said.
“Oh?”
“When he told us he was engaged,” Amelia added, “we weresothrilled. We thought it was just the thing to …helphim, but it wasn’t, or it didn’t, I suppose …”
“We thought a wife and a baby might make him grow up,” Doug said. “Help him become a man. But we were wrong.” He swirled his glass around, aerating it, his eyes on me.
