The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [71]
By now, I had taken off my pants and was lying on the bed, which was covered with a sheet of paper. Vera was preparing the wax as she talked.
“How do you mean?”
“It could be anything. The touch of a hand as he was passing by.” She was stirring the wax, thinking. “But maybe I idealize him.” She swiped hot wax on my legs. “My daughter says I do. Something happened once. There was a hairdresser’s on the ground floor of the apartment building where we lived. One time my husband told me he was going out to see a movie. This was strange. He never did this. But I was completely absorbed in the children, so I didn’t care. Then a few weeks later my mother-in-law called me. We were good friends. She told me my husband was seeing a woman who worked at the hairdresser’s. ‘He’s there now,’ my mother-in-law said. ‘Go find him.’ I went. He was just leaving. But he lied and said that a woman there was the girlfriend of a friend of his. He’d had to give her a message. I believed him. But the next week I went to the hairdresser’s myself to get a haircut. There was a pretty girl there working. I said, ‘My mother-in-law says you’re seeing my husband.’ She pointed to the other girl beside her, who was ugly. “That’s Tanya, not me.’ I began talking to Tanya. She told me that my husband had lied to her, saying he was single. She had a lot of problems. She was single and had a daughter. They needed things. My husband had bought them for her. Then they’d gone out for coffee, started dating.
“After I was finished with my haircut, I invited her to come back to my house with me, so we’d both be there when Dima came home. Together, we packed up his things in a suitcase and waited there in the kitchen for him.”
I laughed. “That’s funny. Revenge.”
“Of course.” Vera looked at me quite seriously. “It’s very important to take revenge. In the right way, of course. It doesn’t mean you have to hurt anyone. But you act in a way that lets you keep your self-respect.”
Yet another thing I’d never considered doing in my life, taking revenge.
“When Dima got home, we told him that his suitcase was all ready and he had to go. He went crazy. He lied about everything. Then Tanya left and he went after her. I found out later that he’d told her that he loved her, he wanted to be with her and didn’t want to be with me. She said, ‘No, forget it.’ He came back and told me that he loved me and he didn’t love her and all he wanted was to stay with me. The next day, I went to the hairdresser’s again to talk to Tanya. She told me what he’d said, that he didn’t want to be with me.
“That night, Dima came home. He said he wanted to do something very special, to have a special night together. He took me to the movies. Then he bathed me and made love to me, like never before, but I knew it was a lie. Later that night, when he was asleep, I went to the kitchen and took some pills, a lot of them. I didn’t know how else to get out of the situation. He found me, passed out, and called an ambulance. I spent three days in the hospital, but they saved me. The doctor was furious, my daughter was still nursing. ‘You were going to abandon your children for some man,’ the doctor said. A psychiatrist came and told me to say I didn’t want to kill myself, I just did it to scare my husband. Otherwise I would lose my job.
“That whole year, I was not myself. I didn’t smile or laugh for a long time. My husband was really worried. He wouldn’t even pass by the hairdresser’s anymore. He’d take a bus on the other side of the building, wave as he was coming and going. I used to always be eating nuts. He would call me his squirrel. Now he would plead with me, saying, ‘I want you to be like you were before, my little squirrel.’ But I couldn’t. To have been lied to like that was something I couldn’t understand. Finally, I came out of it.”
“You