A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [49]
I went to bed at 7:40 his time, 7:30 my time, listening to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” on the clarinet in the next room. Emma and Claire were floating down the hall in their summer nighties. Howard was proving his mettle as a father, make no mistake. He was so much better at handling their spats, and wrestling, and telling stories. It probably made sense for me to plow and cultivate and plant and repair, and for him to manage the children. I closed my eyes until it was the next day, and he was shaking me again, putting my own clothes in my hands, guiding me with unending patience, telling me what arm to put in which hole.
“I know you, Alice,” he said, setting my tennis shoes next to the bed. “Someday you’ll turn this into a story. You’ll tell a group of dinner guests about the time you were so depressed I had to talk you through dressing. You’ll say something about how I had to dust your feet off to put your socks on.”
I squinted at him, trying to think what he was saying about this time turning into a joke at a later date. If I’d felt slightly better I might have punched him in the mouth. The only dinner guests we ever had were Dan and Theresa. There was yellow lint stuck between every single one of my toes. I lay down again and closed my eyes.
“Alice—Alice.” He hunched down, and I imagined that he was going to beg and plead, use Russian diminutives to lure me out of bed, sing to me, offer money, a vacation, a diamond. “Alice,” he said, “we can’t change what happened.” He was leaning over me, brushing the hair out of my face.
I was just about to rise up a little, hold him around the waist, press my cheek against his stomach, tell him that everyone seemed monstrous to me, ready to devour me in one bite. Howard, I’m trembling—can’t you feel it?
“I don’t know exactly how people get through this kind of thing,” he was saying, “but I know we have to carry on. It might be a good idea to see someone, a professional. I don’t know much about what’s available for help. You can’t get out of bed, you haven’t talked to anyone. Aren’t you supposed to go to the school board meeting tonight? Weren’t they going to discuss your contract? If you could see yourself you’d realize how frustrating it—” He turned and called into the hall. “What, Emma?”
“They’ll lynch me in the inner sanctum,” I murmured.
“What?” Howard said.
“Could you please come here for one short minute?” Emma shouted.
“What did you say, Alice?”
“No,” I said, “nothing.” When he was out of the room I eased back down on the bed.
That night I put on a light blue skirt and one of Howard’s new white T-shirts that had yet to go yellow in the wash, and a small straw hat that was unraveling. I drove with great caution along the back roads to the grade-school cafeteria in Blackwell. I didn’t want to exceed twenty miles per hour because my feet seemed to be unattached to the rest of my body. The principal had sent me a letter a few weeks before explaining that there were parents who wanted to volunteer in various capacities in the following school year. The administration and the PTA had noted that there were seasons when my office was a bottleneck and that it might be helpful to have a parent dispensing over the counter medication. Blackwell Elementary was a titanic K-through-Eight school, the last in the state, with nearly seven hundred students. It was true that my office was sometimes chaotic. They had told me that it was important to be present at the meeting so that the board could discuss those prospects and also go through my contract.
The five board members were all men