The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [15]
While Emily lay curled inside me, occasionally kicking, he made the initial steps for the painting—sketching on the walls with charcoal. We had yet to get married and refused to admit that we both secretly worried to do so might be a mistake.
“They say that large, colorful shapes are best,” I instructed Jake. “They stimulate the infant brain but don’t overtax it.”
Jake had dragged our mattress to the middle of the floor so I could lie there and expound such theories while he drew. He had become obsessed with the size of my belly—how Emily announced her presence, inch by inch.
“Total power,” he said when he put his hand against me. “And it isn’t even here yet. Sometimes I think it’s mocking us.”
“It is,” I said matter-of-factly. “Rounded edges are soothing to baby,” I read aloud from a book Mr. Forrest had sent.
“Why are we suddenly following rules?” Jake asked.
“Okay,” I said, throwing the book on the floor, where it slid a few feet and then stopped. “Jagged edges make baby happy.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Knives and guns and depictions of brutality lead baby into the land of nod.”
Jake came over to the mattress and joined me.
“Lizzie Borden is a favorite cartoon character for baby. Why not make baby happy and draw her covered in blood?”
“Keep going,” he said.
“Pad baby’s walls, if needed. Chintz is always nice. And nails. Lots of them.”
“I want to fuck you,” Jake said.
“Draw.”
After we married, in that brief time when I pretended I liked to cook, I would cut the white fat off a slippery chicken breast and spread the flesh out flat on the broiler pan, only to imagine holding my mother’s heart. Then I would stare out the window of the house we rented in Madison and see the cars lined up at the traffic light, leading away from campus like humming corpuscles lined up in an artery. It was all I could do to get my mind back and slide the broiler into the oven, knowing that one of the cars on its way to temporary faculty housing contained my husband and that he was coming home.
I was always careful to wash the knife and the cutting board and to hold my hands underwater until they ached red from the heat, so fearful was I of poisoning Jake or of accidentally touching the rim of Emily’s baby bottle or blue applesauce bowl.
After I was sure I had washed every utensil and dried it, and the smells of whatever spices I’d culled from the full professor’s wife who took pity on us had begun to fill the kitchen, I would have my reward and go into Emily’s room. There, I would sit and wait for my new family to come alive when Jake walked in. Emily would be in her crib, facedown in the dead man’s pose she most preferred, her diaper peeking up in back like a badly made paper hat. It was in that silence that I relaxed the most, in the short interval between baby sleeping and husband arriving, when I had finished, to the best of my ability, the wifely tasks. School itself seemed far away by then, the diploma I hadn’t earned something I would never care about.
I dialed the phone with my back to my mother’s body. For some reason I felt disloyal to her. I worried, if I were to turn, that her corpse would be sitting up and raging at me while pulling her skirt back down.
I had read in the paper that Avery Banks, one of the last of Jake’s graduate assistants at U–Mad, was now an associate professor of sculpture at Tyler in Philadelphia. I racked my brain for the town the article had said he and his wife bought a house in. He had two children—daughters, I remembered—but in order to find him, I was going to have to engage in random-patterned directory-assistance hell. I called information three times. Finally, in Germantown, there was a listing.
“Is this Avery Banks?” I said when a voice greeted me.
“Who may I say is calling?”
“Helen Knightly,” I said. I took my finger and lightly touched the numbers on the phone’s base, counting inside my head to calm myself.