The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [83]
For the rest of that week and the next, she tried to hire babysitters every day. It was not easy, this late in the summer, to get caretakers for three active boys. Once when no one would come, she was so haunted by the memory of that imagined self lifting the paring knife (now inaccessible, relegated to the bottom of the trash) that she locked herself in the bathroom for a full twenty minutes before the horror of her vision yielded to her fear of letting the boys run wild in the yard.
All the other days, she fled as soon as the sitter arrived, devoted to less-than-lethal forms of personal destruction. She had her belly button pierced and adorned her flesh with a small silver hoop. Better to pierce her own midsection than a son’s. She had a butterfly tattooed onto her butt. Every piercing, every mutilation she could devise for herself was one she would not imagine inflicting on her child. One day she considered piercing her eyebrow but decided against it because it would set a bad example for her sons. She did not really want to harm them. She loved them; she wanted them to live and thrive.
She had two more holes pierced above the existing ones in each ear. The cartilage must be thicker there, harder to penetrate, and the procedure hurt. Later, she removed the first set of earrings from the tender new piercings and never replaced them. She allowed the holes to close up.
In Home Depot, months before, Bill had introduced Julianne as his wife and the boys as “my children.” My children, not “our children”—as if she were there merely to help with them, to be his servant.
For the past year she’d been jogging in the mornings after the boys left for school on the bus, hoping the exertion would suck up her restlessness. It hadn’t worked, though it had helped her lose weight. Certainly it was better than nothing. In summer, when the children were home, she couldn’t count on getting out. During the school year she’d lifted weights at the gym, another routine that fell before the shapeless morass of school vacations. It seemed to her that all she had left of her efforts to regain her balance was the hair she’d been growing for a year, at Paisley’s suggestion.
“Haven’t you ever worn it long?” Paisley had asked back then. “Not many women are natural blondes. If you ask me, the more blond hair the better. It would become you.”
It didn’t become her. Chin length or longer, it was too wavy to look anything but unkempt. When it finally reached her shoulders, Paisley was too polite to say anything, but Bill suggested that she might want it shorter so it would dry faster, what with all the trips to the pool. Julianne, rebellious, told him she thought the wild and messy look suited her. She tossed her head whenever she sensed that anyone was looking. Sometimes she flirted. She was thirty-four years old, the mother of three. She was not a flirt.
For a year she had contemplated going back to school for a degree so substantial that it would trump her BA in nursing and demand she start a career, no matter that, for tax purposes, Bill didn’t welcome more income. For a year she had feigned interest in kinky sex when all she really wanted was to avoid having another baby—although she might have reconsidered if she could have ordered a girl.
Before the advent of children, she had been a good nurse. Intuitive. Caring. A healer.
What had happened to her?
Then came Paisley’s Hot Moms in the Hood party at the end of that fearsome two-week stretch. For a few hours, Paisley’s powerful Painkillers muted Julianne’s pain. In her drunken stupor in the hot tub, she pushed away the nightmarish evening