She dug in with spaghetti dinners, school plays (the year she found out the spring production would be Oklahoma!), and trips to the beach. She folded Levi’s, clipped Chef Boyardee coupons from the Sunday paper, and filled the freezer with 92% lean ground beef. She trained to run a marathon, took her car for oil changes according to the date on the windshield sticker, and helped with the carpools to soccer matches on Saturdays. She moved into a newer, larger home in a cookie-cutter neighborhood with sidewalks, a community pool, and cul-de-sacs filled with carefree neighbors. Neighbors as light as feathers.
Before the boxes had been unpacked, neighbors dropped by with introductions, banana bread, and the latest news from the HOA. No parked cars allowed on the street. No dogs doing their business in the common areas. New loungers for the pool.
Oh, and an ice cream social on Saturday.
Things got cozy quickly. And before she had time to become uncomfortable with it all, she’d been invited to craft night. This happened every Thursday at Pat’s house and sometimes on Fridays at Jane’s. Pat was an unhappy transplant from Oregon—things here weren’t environmentally friendly enough—she was moving back soon to a place where she could recycle glass. Jane met her husband at a Mensa social, played bells at her church, and never wore a bra—Jane was chesty, not perky.
At the craft night get-togethers, they stamped handmade cards, practiced bead-weaving in Japanese tradition, and made scrapbooks filled with photos of kids eating melty popsicles, first haircuts, and academic night at school. And they bad-mouthed Beth when she didn’t come. Beth was a backstabber, they said. In between bites of roasted Brussels sprouts and bruschetta and sipping chardonnay from a box, they exchanged gossip in juicy whispers.
“John’s blue pills weren’t working. Then on date night he took two…or too many. Not sure which. Then they went to the ER.” Some giggled, others just pursed their lips. She shifted in her chair, her shoulders hunched, head down. Why’d it always have to be about sex? She hoped they’d move on to something other than the bedroom.
“Have you seen Janet’s black eyes? She said she fell but I’m pretty sure she had them done.” More giggles. She wondered how they knew. What proof did they have other than their own suspicions?
“Harvey Kennedy is having an affair with his neighbor, the eye doctor with the incredible ass and fake tits.” The table fell silent; everyone sipped their wine in silence.
She’d had tits when she was breastfeeding, but all that was left now was her ass. Stretch jeans. Tunics. Swim skirts. He said he didn’t care.
“That’s not all,” Jane said. “Their son’s been hosting porn-watch parties for all the neighborhood tweens. They’re not sending him to therapy, though. Harvey just beat his ass and supposedly that fixed him. No more Deepthroat.” Lots of laughter.
She knew he watched porn. He’d left it up on the computer they shared, and when she’d logged on to get her favorite cookie recipe, she wondered if Kelly Lingus liked oatmeal cookies with raisins or without.
When they’d finished off the snacks and their chardonnays had reached room temp, they relocated to the oak table to felt. Felting was new and even though they were beginners, Jane had ordered imported wool roving—far too expensive for starting out, but Jane insisted everyone would be pros at this in no time. Several times a month they gathered around kitchen tables and spent several hours stabbing at clumps of wool. She felted a giraffe—her first attempt at an animal and a poor choice—the neck snapped. The truth was she hadn’t properly supported the neck. After the giraffe she tried a bear—bears were easy—and as the weeks went by, she developed a technique and worked her way up to more sophisticated animals. The table mostly looked like a scene from Bambi. Woodland animals artfully arranged in circles—squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, foxes, raccoons, bears, and Jane’s prize barn owl atop a small twig she’d plucked from the yard. Her aesthetic was different from the others. She had a toad, a Komodo dragon, a tarantula—which everyone agreed looked a lot like a raccoon in the beginning—and when she’d started the third leg, their hopeful faces faded to acceptance. There was something sad about cold-blooded creatures, the kind that have to crawl from safety to feel the warmth of the sun, the kind you don’t bother saving from the middle of the road. The curious glances and whispers into wine goblets weren’t lost on her, but she didn’t care. She was pleased with her miniature pride of misfits.
She listened to Emily talk about Ron’s bedroom role play and Sally drone on about Clay’s kidney stones, all while she stabbed at the beginnings of a tortoise shell. Around the table everyone was jabbing and poking at clumps that looked like something pulled from the dryer vent…until they looked like animals. Sometimes she would get lost in the assault, the catharsis of watching a large bunch of roving wool get smaller and smaller until it resembled something real, such that time came and went with barely a thought. The week after she finished the tortoise, she put the finishing touches on a pair of geckos while she listened to Sarah whine about her son’s picky eating habits.
“He’ll eat hot dog buns but not hamburger buns, and his father goes right along with it. It’s bullshit. They’re the same fucking thing! Last week at Sonic I lost my shit, and I threw the hot dog out the window of Jeff’s new Tahoe. I wanted to send a message. But the hot dog didn’t make it. It landed in the driver’s side door cubby. Yellow mustard’s a bitch to clean up, and the Tahoe smells like greasy food now. Jeff said we’ll have another date night just as soon as that smell is gone.” Everyone guffawed.
She thought about these kinds of messages and wondered if that sort of thing ever really worked. Why not just say it? Whatever happened to transparency? Throwing a hot dog seemed more like a message a toddler might send to a parent. I don’t want to eat this. She’d always preferred people who were direct and honest—in a “that-dress-makes-your-ass-look-fat” kinda way.
“And what about your son? Is he still refusing to eat hamburger buns?” Emily asked. Everyone stopped stabbing and looked up from their work, seven pairs of expectant eyes. She set aside her Gila monster to listen.
“Funny you should ask. Last week I took a knife and trimmed a hamburger bun to look like a goddamn hot dog bun and guess what? He ate it!” The table imploded with laughter. “And when I showed him what I’d done, he ran from the table, crying like I’d poisoned him. I felt like a bad mom. For about a minute.” Sarah winked.
“You’re gonna go to hell for that one.” Jane slapped the table so hard our wine goblets bobbled.
“Tough love ain’t killed nobody yet,” Pat said. Everyone nodded in agreement and returned to their pricking and stabbing.
The Gila monster was a nice addition to her collection, she thought as she glanced around the table. Tonight there were birds, a fox, some mice, and a narwhal. She was beginning to work on an alligator and had used all of the dark-green roving, but no one seemed to care much.
It was the first Thursday of the month, and the girls met and felted their hearts out while drinking cabernet from a box. They all agreed the wine from the box wasn’t half-bad while they poked clusters of roving into kangaroos and koalas. She stared at her large bundle of lime-green roving. It wasn’t the right color for an alligator, but she didn’t mind. She loved jabbing something big and inconsequential into something much smaller and meaningful. She began with the torso and tail and saved the teeth for last. In the end, the teeth were larger than she’d wanted—more wolf-like than alligator. She leaned back in her chair, mostly pleased, and took a large gulp of wine. She didn’t much care for Kate’s panda or Sarah’s hedgehog—albeit the hedgehog had been a real challenge—or Jane’s herd of sheep, one black. She much preferred the scaly exteriors and protective shells of her reptiles.
Then, one day, the truth came like a bullet in slow motion. She was Swiffering the baseboards while a fresh pot of greens and onions simmered on the stove.
“You know I love you, right?”
That was how he’d started. She caught her reflection in the window. She was wearing her new pink lipstick—Finale—it looked good on her, she thought.
“I think we make a great team.” He spoke in a low, sympathetic tone.
She kept to her Swiffering while the Beatles whispered words of wisdom, let it be. Over the years, she’d cataloged little things here and there but had always dismissed them as paranoia. She’d asked, but the answer was always a definitive no, and after a while, she’d stopped asking. And after seven years, her concern had grown stale. The truth was that he’d fed her a line for so long, she’d acquired a taste for the lie.
“You mean everything, everything to me.” He moved closer.
Saying it more than once did nothing for her. In point of fact, she found it unpleasant—like when the nurse had to fish for her vein during a blood draw.
Her eyes focused on a scratch in the wood floor. Then he said it. She paused her dusting as she listened to the truth.
“Remember when you asked if I cheated?”
What exactly was she supposed to answer to that? She’d asked a hundred times.
“Well, I did.”
“With who?”
“Who do you think?”
Was she supposed to know?
“Michelle?”
“No.”
“Jennifer?”
“No.”
“Carmen?”
“God, no.”
“Who? Who then?”
“Chelsea.”
“Oh,” was all she said. She’d never have guessed Chelsea.
“I needed to get it off my chest. I want us to have a fresh start. I want us to start over.”
Her limbs turned to concrete one by one, and the truth filled her ears until she went deaf with it. She wanted desperately to unhear it. She wanted her plausible deniability back. She wanted the air she’d been sucking for years, no matter how thick with lies, back. She wanted to go back to the tidiness of her former life, everything smooth and neatly tucked, like hospital corners when she made the bed.
She had a routine! She was carefree! She was light as a fucking feather!
That night, she felted her first snake. The diamondback design was easier than she’d thought it would be. It was the forked tongue that gave her the biggest headache. She called up her light-as-a-feather neighbor, whose llama was coming along nicely.
“Even the eyelashes look great,” Emily said. “Did you know llamas hum? That’s how they communicate.”
She didn’t know that. She wondered if llamas ever hummed lies to each other. She carried her felted snake, with its perfectly coiled body and triangular head, next door, remnants of the red tongue dragging the ground; it wasn’t to scale.
The truth never is.