The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [79]
She goes to her closet. What to wear? Father Andrew has seen her mainly in skirts and blouses. Wouldn’t it seem odd if she dresses up for his visit? But there is a wraparound skirt, green with white piping, which pairs nicely with a green-and-white-checked shirt. That works, although it’s a little summery for November.
The timer pings. She brings the loaves out to cool, making a mental note to hide them later. Tim and the boys would go through these like locusts. She feels a twinge of guilt: What kind of woman bakes a delicious dessert and then hides it from her loved ones? But in her mind’s eye, there must be two perfect, uncut loaves on the serving plate. She wants her table to look like a picture out of Better Homes and Gardens. She needs a tablecloth and fresh napkins. She rummages through the dining room’s built-in breakfront and finds a white tablecloth. Stained, of course. She tosses it into the wash with some bleach, hoping for the best.
When she was a newlywed, she didn’t even have a washer-dryer. Also no dishwasher, no venetian blinds, only hand-me-down lace curtains at the windows. All their things were hand-me-downs, with the exception of their bedroom suite, which was a wedding gift from her father. They lived in a simple brick rowhouse off Ingleside, and she kept it spotless. Tim returned from work to home-cooked meals. She washed the dishes by hand while he sat on the back steps, listening to the Orioles game. She was happy. The women’s libbers said she shouldn’t have been, but she was. What happened?
Children. No one wants to say that out loud, but between the children she gave birth to and the ones she didn’t, Doris was done in. They moved up to a bigger house, not that this place was that big, but it’s that much more to clean. If she had to wash her dishes by hand now, it would take all nine innings to get through them, and that’s despite trying to simplify meals, serving things like Hamburger Helper and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, which the boys prefer to homemade anyway. Look at how many bowls and utensils went into creating a pound cake. Come to think of it, she better wash and dry those now, hide the evidence. She laughs at herself, thinking of a pound cake as a crime. But she is contemplating a crime, isn’t she? Well, not a crime, but a sin, one of the biggest. To be sure, she’s only thinking about it, but even the fantasy is wrong.
Four years ago, everyone laughed when the current president confessed to committing adultery in his heart. Tim Senior certainly had. For some reason, people thought that the president’s admission made him even more of a—what did the boys call it—a wimp. But Doris dug out Tim Senior’s Playboy—she had known the location of his secret cache for years—determined to read the article for herself. She flipped to the interview, trying not to see the naked women along the way—not because she was a prude, but because they made her feel so bumpy. It was natural for them to be young, with big bosoms and tiny waists, but the honeyed, creamy look of their skin taunted Doris. She never looked like that, even when she was the second prettiest girl in the parish. She found her way to the interview, and as she had suspected, there was more to it than people were saying. The president not only said that God forgave his lust, but he said that he, the president, also could not judge men who gave in to it, that he should not think he was better than a man who left his wife.
Well, Protestants, Doris had thought at the time. What do you expect? Yet those words lodged into her, granting her permission to