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Authors: Lauren Grodstein
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painted on, their cheeks so rosy in their sleep, their chests moving up and down in unison. Nothing was sweeter.
Andy gave her a five from his walletâneither one of them ever carried much cashâand went to check on the girls, one of his greatest pleasures. He imagined, in the next few years, heâd find a job somewhereâhe was hoping Ohio, to be close to his mother, or maybe California. Lou looked like she belonged in California. They would buy a small house. They would have at least one more kid, probably a girl (he had a sneaking suspicion he could only make girls) but maybe, fingers crossed, heâd have a son.
Heâd get tenure, theyâd buy a bigger house, in Ohio, in Wisconsin, in California. There were jobs that year at Kenyon, Claremont McKenna, the University of Cincinnati. Heâd also applied to schools in New Jersey, Maine, and Connecticut, because the job market was so tough and he wanted to hedge his bets.
Lou had left her cell phone on the kitchen counter. In the bedroom, Belle slept like an angel.
When she didnât come home after a half hour he started to worry and when she didnât come home in an hour he called the police but nobody could give him any real information although yes, there had been an accident on Eighty-seventh, yes, a Mazda, and thatâs when he banged on the door next door, that nice old Jewish couple who sometimes invited Rachel over to light Shabbat candles, and Rona Katz told him to calm down, not to worry, but it was too late, she was in his living room and he was out the door speeding speeding toward the intersection of Eighty-seventh and Manor by the entrance to Route 1.
There were orange cones, flare lights, traffic. He pulled the car into the parking lot at Blockbuster, got out, ran ran ran ran ran out of breath kept running to the accident, the McDonaldâs across from the Steak ân Shake, yes, he knew what he was going to see, and there it was: the ambulance, Oliver McGee, the drunk kid from the complex, on a stretcher, their Mazda crushed like a can, his wife still in that crushed Mazda since the doors were accordioned shut and there was no way sheâd have been able to get out. There was no way anyone could get her out. He raced to the door. Her head slammed against the windshield. The cops pulled him away. On the seat, blood and brain.
B UT IN HIS dreams, both erotic and scientific, she was perfect. She was whole. It was Louâs body that came to him even more than her voice, which was surprising: in life, although her appearance had been the first draw, soon enough it was her conversation that kept him interested, generous and mordantly funny. She liked dirty jokes. Before the girls were born sheâd read long-winded fantasy novels featuring magic dwarves and big-breasted sorceresses. She was impatient with everybody, especially in Florida, where people talked too slow, and usually in check-out lines. When he was pressed into servitude as a teaching assistant in Human Anatomy, she came with him to the cadaver lab, looked at the splayed-open bodies with an appraising eye, remembered fondly her own days in nursing school, and said, âCatch!â pretending to throw him a human eyeball. She wasnât even wearing gloves.
Sheâd had such a beautiful body. It worked so beautifully, the choreography of her limbs, the delicate threading of her arteries and veins, the miracle of her vision, iris through lens through retina through optic nerve to the visual cortex in her pulsing splattered brain. And deep inside her smooth freckled bellyâif he peered there, put his head against her soft warmthâhe could almost see the uterus, the fallopian tubes, the ova, their children.
The night of the accident, an ambulance took Louâs body away to the morgue, and Andy returned home to his children. Rona Katz was sitting in his kitchen, playing Go Fish with Rachel, who was still awake.
âDaddy? What took you so
Andy gave her a five from his walletâneither one of them ever carried much cashâand went to check on the girls, one of his greatest pleasures. He imagined, in the next few years, heâd find a job somewhereâhe was hoping Ohio, to be close to his mother, or maybe California. Lou looked like she belonged in California. They would buy a small house. They would have at least one more kid, probably a girl (he had a sneaking suspicion he could only make girls) but maybe, fingers crossed, heâd have a son.
Heâd get tenure, theyâd buy a bigger house, in Ohio, in Wisconsin, in California. There were jobs that year at Kenyon, Claremont McKenna, the University of Cincinnati. Heâd also applied to schools in New Jersey, Maine, and Connecticut, because the job market was so tough and he wanted to hedge his bets.
Lou had left her cell phone on the kitchen counter. In the bedroom, Belle slept like an angel.
When she didnât come home after a half hour he started to worry and when she didnât come home in an hour he called the police but nobody could give him any real information although yes, there had been an accident on Eighty-seventh, yes, a Mazda, and thatâs when he banged on the door next door, that nice old Jewish couple who sometimes invited Rachel over to light Shabbat candles, and Rona Katz told him to calm down, not to worry, but it was too late, she was in his living room and he was out the door speeding speeding toward the intersection of Eighty-seventh and Manor by the entrance to Route 1.
There were orange cones, flare lights, traffic. He pulled the car into the parking lot at Blockbuster, got out, ran ran ran ran ran out of breath kept running to the accident, the McDonaldâs across from the Steak ân Shake, yes, he knew what he was going to see, and there it was: the ambulance, Oliver McGee, the drunk kid from the complex, on a stretcher, their Mazda crushed like a can, his wife still in that crushed Mazda since the doors were accordioned shut and there was no way sheâd have been able to get out. There was no way anyone could get her out. He raced to the door. Her head slammed against the windshield. The cops pulled him away. On the seat, blood and brain.
B UT IN HIS dreams, both erotic and scientific, she was perfect. She was whole. It was Louâs body that came to him even more than her voice, which was surprising: in life, although her appearance had been the first draw, soon enough it was her conversation that kept him interested, generous and mordantly funny. She liked dirty jokes. Before the girls were born sheâd read long-winded fantasy novels featuring magic dwarves and big-breasted sorceresses. She was impatient with everybody, especially in Florida, where people talked too slow, and usually in check-out lines. When he was pressed into servitude as a teaching assistant in Human Anatomy, she came with him to the cadaver lab, looked at the splayed-open bodies with an appraising eye, remembered fondly her own days in nursing school, and said, âCatch!â pretending to throw him a human eyeball. She wasnât even wearing gloves.
Sheâd had such a beautiful body. It worked so beautifully, the choreography of her limbs, the delicate threading of her arteries and veins, the miracle of her vision, iris through lens through retina through optic nerve to the visual cortex in her pulsing splattered brain. And deep inside her smooth freckled bellyâif he peered there, put his head against her soft warmthâhe could almost see the uterus, the fallopian tubes, the ova, their children.
The night of the accident, an ambulance took Louâs body away to the morgue, and Andy returned home to his children. Rona Katz was sitting in his kitchen, playing Go Fish with Rachel, who was still awake.
âDaddy? What took you so
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