need a break. You’re tired. I can see that.” He puts his hand tentatively
on her shoulders, applies pressure. She doesn’t know why he keeps
doing this lately, palming her shoulders like they’re basketballs and
pushing down as if he might push her right into the ground. “Do
something for yourself, Vero. What do you need? Tell me—we can
do it.”
“Right.” She smacks his hands away. “Shane will fix it. It’s always
about Shane. About what you did to me, what you did for me, about
what you can change. Always back to you.” She can hear her hysteria
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as if it comes from someone else, her head a balloon floating high
above, watching the performance.
“Geez, Vero. It’s like you want to fight. I said, ‘whatever you want.’
Just tell me.”
Vero wants be alone. She turns her back to him, shoulders heaving.
Tears will get rid of him. “You’re prettier when you smile,” he always
says. He likes her happy.
“C’mon, boys. Mama needs a little rest.” Shane packs up Eliot and
Jamal, hurries suits and towels into a grocery bag, and heads for the
swimming pool, leaving her sprawled at the kitchen counter.
When he leaves, Vero can’t just be sobbing into the granite
countertops. But with him gone, she doesn’t know what else to do.
Neurotic energy buzzes through her body, and she paces small, fast
circles around the kitchen. She could call Joss, but the idea of this
spectacle of herself reflected in those calm eyes shames her. She could
go for a bike ride like Shane always does, or she could run deep into
the woods like she usually does, but she doesn’t have the energy for
either. Not that kind of energy.
Vero opens the cutlery drawer and pulls out a steak knife. She holds
the blade against her wrist, pushes until it hurts. A trace of blood rises
from her skin in a thin flat line, a number 1. Or a small “l” for love.
She laughs aloud.
She doesn’t want to kill herself. And if she did, she certainly
wouldn’t do it with a steak knife. She imagines the fun Drunkle Vince
would have with that in his stand-up show.
My dead sister-in-law is soooo stupid…
How stupid is she?
Vero drops the steak knife to the floor and grabs a bottle of white
wine from Shane’s beer fridge, its long neck cool in her grip. She
fumbles through the medicine cabinet above the stove, safe out of the
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reach of the boys: children’s Advil (four bottles, all coated in sticky
blue); Metamucil (supersized); generic anti-inflammatories (three
bottles); antibiotic eye cream; Robaxacet; Tylenol 3 (nearly empty).
Someone has taken all the fucking Percocets.
What, she wonders, is the point of being married to a pharmacist? She
laments, not for the first time, her failure to marry a massage therapist
or a chef, or at least a bartender, and grabs the mostly harmless pills,
spills them onto the counter, as if setting a stage. She wants Shane to
be alarmed when he returns home.
She grabs eight of the geriatric back meds and rolls them around
her palm before dropping four back onto the counter and popping
the remaining four in her mouth, bitter against her dry tongue. She
screws off the wine top. A Pinot Grigio. She prefers reds, but gave
them up because of the terrible headaches. Good thing, she thinks, I
wouldn’t want my allergies acting up during my staged suicide attempt.
She swallows three long hauls of the wine and then crawls into the
pantry with the rest of the bottle.
With the door shut, Vero feels better. A closet of one’s own. That’s
all she needed. She takes another long swig from the bottle, puts her
legs up against the shelves of canned food. She likes Pinot Grigio, she
decides; it’s refreshing and fruity but not too sweet. She takes another
couple glugs. Her trapezoid muscles fall open, flowers blooming from
her relaxed shoulders. It’s quite lovely in here. She wonders why she
hasn’t thought of it before.
As she nears the halfway mark of the bottle, she feels her anger
problem. A slideshow of Shane runs through her mind: him posing
like Jesus with arms outstretched to her from the back porch; his
spandex-clad ass sneaking off to one of his bikes strategically stashed
in the driveway; his Mexican-flagged crotch following Vince around
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the beaches of Puerto Vallarta. As the Schoeman family would say:
Shane is Shane. He’s awakened into middle age to find himself with
two kids, a full-time job, an aging body that requires full-time main-
tenance, and now, a wife who looks less like herself every day, his life
distorted and warped as if he’s looking at it in a fun house mirror. He’s
doing his best. Vero wets her lips with wine and wonders, from the
comfortable distance that alcohol provides, if the same is true of her.
◊◊◊
Crouched on the floor, head resting on a dustpan, Vero wonders
whom she should call first. She wants to talk to someone. If she could,
she’d call the BlackBerry Lady, Ms Say-a-command. She’d been espe-
cially rude to her. But how can Vero call her if she doesn’t know her
name? She laughs, swirling the last bits of wine in the bottle, grateful
there are more bottles in Shane’s beer fridge just outside the pantry.
She fingers the dirty broom bristles at her cheek. The room has grown
so dark that it feels good to touch something so familiar, to ground
herself.
Her neck has developed a sharp kink where it meets her shoulders,
so she pulls down a bulk bag of rice to use as a pillow. Finishes the
bottle.
She pinches her cheeks. Numb. She imagines Jamal and Eliot
splashing at the pool, Eliot ramming things with his head and telling
everyone what to do, Jamal quacking like a duck. If she was a good
mom, she’d be there with them. She moves to stand, tries to remem-
ber where her car keys might be, imagines the boys’ delighted surprise
when she joins them. But the floor tilts, first this way and then that.
She holds the walls to steady herself.
Instead, she will call Joss. Joss can come for wine! It will be a party!
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That’s what she needs, what they all need—a party! She leaves the
pantry long enough to grab her phone and a new bottle of wine.
After just two rings, Joss and Ian’s voicemail clicks on. God,
doesn’t anyone answer their phones anymore? On the recording, Ian
sings, strumming his guitar loudly in the background. “We’re not
going to… strum…answer our telephone… strum…so leave a mes-
sage… strum…at the…(pregnant pause) beep! ” Ian’s voice radiates
optimism, so bright and hopeful on that last word that Vero feels
; a moment of embarrassment for them, pictures Joss holding up the
iPhone while Ian sings enthusiastically in her direction, their pre-
teen boys rolling their eyes in the background.
“Hi. Joss. It’s me. You’re right. I’m run ragged, just like you said. I
guess I just wanted to say, hey, thanks for seeing that.” This isn’t at all
what Vero meant to say—she wanted a party—but she lies back on
the floor and listens to the unexpected words flow from her mouth.
“Not everyone takes time to look, really look, at each other in this
crazy-ass world.” Vero’s words run together, each indistinguishable
from the next. She makes a concentrated effort to pause after each.
She thinks of saying, I’m drunk on the pantry floor. “Parenting’s
hard,” she says instead, her tongue slow and heavy. “Whatever made
us do it? I mean, really, imagine trying to sell this experience to some-
one, if we hadn’t all bought it already. Here’s the pitch: You’ll get preg-
nant. Your body will warp in ways you hadn’t thought possible. It’ll
never be the same again. You’ll pee your pants for months afterward,
maybe forever. Delivering a baby will hurt until you think you’ll die.
You’ll wish for death. You won’t recognize your own screams. What’s
that awful noise? you’ll ask the doctor. As a reward, you’ll have years
of shit and barf and endless sleepless nights of screams and whines.
You don’t even know what that noise will do to your nervous system.”
Vero stretches her legs, resting her feet on a shelf, and kicks a can.
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It falls down and dings her square on the shin. She lets out a curse,
grabs her leg and holds it before continuing. “But then, the baby will
grow up into a teenager…who hates you. I don’t have to listen to you,
he’ll scream. You don’t know anything! He’ll disrespect you and spend
all your money and tell you he hates you. That’s it: the pitch for kids.
Who would buy that? How could you sell it?” She rubs her shin and
lets her leg fall to the floor, drinks some more wine. It feels good to let
all these words out. From now on, she decides, she will be this honest
all the time. “Oh, there are good moments,” she adds, to be fair. “Sure.
Build that into your marketing plan—there are good moments.”
God, Ian and Joss have a long voicemail recording. Vero can’t beat
it. Maybe they never answer their phone, just leaving people like her
to conduct these one-sided conversations that they’ll get around to
when they they’re in the mood. Maybe, with their shared reverence
for silence, they’ll never get around to it.
Vero thinks about what else she wanted to say, rubbing her shin
where the mushroom soup has dented it. “Oh, yeah. It’s Vero. Call me.”
◊◊◊
By the time Shane and the boys get home from the pool, Vero is loose
and warm on the pantry floor. She feels like that pile of clothes fresh
from the dryer. Ding! Brand-new Vero! She giggles and cradles the
second empty wine bottle to her chest. She listens as Shane prepares
the boys for bed: teeth, jammies, stories. The standard protests at each
stage: But we’re not tired!
Vero wonders how long it will take Shane to look for her, to notice
the pills on the counter, the steak knife on the floor, the open-mouthed
beer fridge, the missing bottles of wine.
Her eyes are nearly closed, her cheek heavy against the floor when
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Shane finally does come into the kitchen and stops abruptly in the
middle of the room, stone still. She imagines him adding up the
pieces: the pills, the knife, the booze, the quiet. I’m good at math, he
often tells Vero. He won’t like this equation.
When his body starts moving again, she hears it kick into overdrive.
His feet pound up the stairs into each bathroom, his gait clumsy and
panicked. She listens, unmoving, as he races to the garage, imagines
his face pressed against windows as he checks the car, while she hugs
her wine bottle. He’s talking aloud to himself by the time he comes
back into the house, a one-word prayer: no, no, no, no, no. He throws
himself down the stairs to the basement, banging against the wall the
whole way down. She imagines him panting like the pursued protag-
onist in a horror flick, his heart beating so forcefully it shows through
his heavy sweatshirt. She know he’s thinking the worst, praying please,
please, please to a God he doesn’t have time to believe in.
Please, please, please, no, no, no, no—in room after room, looking
under furniture, looking up to rafters— please, please, no, no, racing
through the house in a rush of air that smells like chlorine and kid-
dy-pool pee.
Let him worry.
When he finally slides the pantry door open and finds her curled
into a small ball on the floor, resting her head on a bag of rice and
clutching a wad of papers at her chest, she smiles up at him as if
they’ve been playing an innocent game of hide-and-seek.
She watches as he takes in the empty bottle rolling at her feet,
the other one cradled in her arms. She doesn’t budge when he opens
the door, and when he pries the paper from her hands, she lets him
have it. She watches as he reads. Across the top, she’s scribbled: A is
for Asylum: A Mommy’s Alphabet. Most of the verses are illegible or
incomplete, but the ones he can make out, he reads aloud:
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A is for asylum,
The place mommy would go to stay
If she didn’t have her happy juice
To keep insanity at bay.
C is for the condoms
Your mommy shoulda thought to use,
They woulda saved her lotsa money
On her monthly bill for booze.
M is for martinis
Mixed while running at full throttle,
But smart mommies know it’s easier
To drink straight from the bottle.
B is for the breakdowns
Mommies sometimes have to fake.
Sadly, it’s the only way
They’ll ever get a break.
“Not bad, hey, Shince?” she slurs, closing her eyes like a sick child
on a wild rollercoaster. “Maybe I’ll write that book one day after all.
Just needed a closet of my own.” She hugs her bag of rice. “When you
left, I didn’t hold such high expectations for this night. Poetry. Wine.
Laughs. It’s been a while since life has exceeded my expectations.”
Vero speaks into the bag of rice, the words so muffled that even she
can barely make them out.
“Vee. C’mon. Pull it together. You’re a mom.” Mom: as if that one
word were a suit of armour she could step right into.
Shane’s words are steady and sure, but his eyes don’t land on her.
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They dart from one side of the pantry to the other, two panicked
minnows in a clear plastic bag.
“I like it in here,” she slurs, semiconscious, taking the crumpled
papers dangling from his hand. “Smells like cinnamon.” She clutches
her poems to her chest and curls her knees until she’s one tight period.
“Close the door, please. Vero Baby! is tired.”
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CHAPTER SIX
Ligaya is moving out of her closet. She’s endured her twelve
months of servitude to Madam Poon and now has the one year of
experience she needs to apply to the North American nanny agency.
Of course, the agency fee is dear, well out of Ligaya’s reach. But the
same was true of the Hong Kong agency’s fee. Or, even before the fee,
the compulsory three-week schooling in the Philippines. To earn the
privilege of paying to apply to Hong Kong to care for Chinese babies,
the agency told her, she would have to learn the history of China,
the language of China, the culture of China. Her Chinese employers,
of course, have learned nothing about her language, her history, her
culture.
Fine by her. Madam Poon did not deserve to know. When the blan-
ket is short, we must learn to bend. Ligaya feels the skin of her mother’s
forehead against her own, her mother’s fingers in her hair.
There are costs piled on costs piled on costs. And then there are
the hidden costs. But Ligaya will get the money, again and however,
because she must. It’s a “necessary investment in her family’s future.”
She’s said this phrase so often in the last year that the individual
words no longer hold meaning: the phrase is just one lump of energy
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pushing her ceaselessly forward into an increasingly unknown future.
It’s her Sunday afternoon off, and she stands against the damp
wall of ate’s Kabayan, sheltered from the heavy rain by a narrow eaves
trough. She phones her Uncle Andres, named after the patron saint
of fishermen, though he’s never been to sea.
Uncle Andres most closely resembles Ligaya’s mother, his full lips
out of proportion on a skeletally thin face, with a neck so short that
his head seems to sit right on his shoulders. But his thickly lashed
eyes, the rich brown of coffee beans, detract attention from his less
attractive features. Ligaya’s mother is blessed with the same arresting