​THREE

Elena

Sometimes, I wake up, and it’s just a little headache. Like if someone was pressing down too hard on my temple with their pointer finger. And then other days, there is no headache, but my stomach is sick, and I snap at Sela: “Get your bag, hurry it up. We’re late for school!”

Mitch leaves early during the week, still dark most days so it’s easier to act like a normal human being when he’s not in the room looking at me. But on the weekends, when he’s home, I work it like the Christmas play I did every year at St. Ann’s back in Helena. Remember your lines, remember your cues. Don’t fail because people are watching.

“You are a sight for sore eyes!” Ronnie says when she opens one of the front doors. They’re wooden, six feet tall. Their handles are brass and curved into two ferocious lion’s heads, and every time I walk through the threshold, I imagine them roaring.

“Is that what the Florida sun does? Work the eyes a bit too hard?” I say in my stage voice. I kiss her cheeks like I’m supposed to. I gulp her expensive perfume like I’m supposed to. I pretend this has nothing to do with charity.

“That and then some,” she says, which really doesn’t make sense, but that’s something I’ve come to gather after knowing Ronnie for the past two years. You don’t have to make sense when you have more money than you know what do with.

Her feet are bare, and they’re stationed in first position on one of the foyer’s black and white tiles. The tops are kissed with sun, evidence of their return from Destin where the Gibsons keep a second home. “A 900-square-foot condo,” Mitch always corrects me like he has an issue with the concept of people living in more than one place. 

“So how was it?” I ask. Sela slides around me and meets Trudy at the bottom of the curved staircase. They rush upstairs giggling and their noise pings off a mix of surfaces: marble in the dining room, the silver candlesticks on the entryway table. “Only you would notice stuff like that,” Mitch says somewhere behind the finger in my temple.

“Sun, sand, the usual. Although Luke lost his trunks out in the surf. That was new.” Ronnie laughs, and I join in, stacking my worn sandals one on top of the other near the door.

“Shoes, Sela,” I call up the stairs.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Ronnie says, although I know she’s exactly the type to worry about it and complain to her Junior Leaguers later. But maybe not. I’m paranoid, always have been really. And the feeling’s been multiplied since meeting someone like Ronnie who lives in Avon Estates, has a maid who stops by weekly and enough money to make fun of the huge homes being built out near the golf course, saying things like, “I bet they give off a new money stench.” She’s the kind of person I see when I close my eyes and look at the mirror in my mind. The person I’m supposed to be.

But I’m not.

“Coffee’s a-brewing,” she says. Her kitchen is all white except for the floors—a dark bamboo like the coffee's spilled and has soaked through the planks. There are pigs that line the counter, but they’re not garish because they’re white porcelain, and Ronnie told me how she had them special ordered from France.

“How’s the bed wetting?” Ronnie says. There it is, what sums it all up: Ronnie has a second home, and I have bedwetting.

“She’s getting better. Dr. Mailer found us someone to talk to.” Not “us.” Sela. The worst part was when it happened at school, and I had to change her in the bathroom. It reminded me of the time she messed in her panties at the mall when we were potty training, and I was at the nut stand, warm salted almonds in one hand, a child leaking from her diaper in the other, and I started crying until an older lady came by and led me gently by the elbow. She held the almonds while I cleaned up Sela in the bathroom. And at St. Bonaventure, in the tiny stall where I removed Sela’s clothing to change her into a fresh uniform, she was small-boned in my arms, her breath warm like when she was younger. But she was the one crying this time.

“Good. If anyone’s going to help you out, Mailer’s the guy. His wife used to have a huge crush on Luke back in the day. Total sorostitute,” Ronnie says. I realize for the first time as she lightly tugs on her short ponytail at the nape of her neck, that Ronnie’s not a real kind of pretty, only the type of pretty that comes with a hefty paycheck. Her dress is expensive, I'm sure, but it's Barny purple, and light violet flowers march down the front. Her throat is choked with blue baubles the size of my thumbs.

“Sorostitute?”

“Oh right, a college thing,” she says, like I can't even fathom what college must be like in my little acorn of a brain. That's not fair. I'm only in a rotten mood because my husband put me in a rotten mood. Which I guess really isn't fair either. The same fight we always have played last night on repeat, and whiskey was the offending record player, as usual.

There was this girl, one of those types of girls who used to live in our town. Virginia. She was always up on Mitch, touching his shoulders, winking at him, and pursing her lips. There was a rumor that she was molested by an uncle growing up, which didn’t help matters, and once upon a time I used to feel sorry for her. But then she developed, and just as the story usually goes, she developed a taste for men, too, specifically mine.

“A sorority girl who acts like a prostitute,” Ronnie says. She ducks down and roots into one of the white cabinets. She's lifting a lid off an All-Clad pot, and I know this because it's what's done every Saturday morning. Our little ritual.

It's strange, rituals. Like how a lot of mine are fixed around the ankles of the two people I love. It's like I'm being dragged behind a truck, my belly receiving the worst of it: pebbles, rocks, the occasional broken bottle. All I want is to be fully in my life, like I'm really in it. No scripts. No cues. I want another baby. I want the past to stop chasing me. I want to stop drinking and wear pretty clothes and save up our money for a 900-square-foot condo in Florida. I want to start over.

“Let's stop pretending,” Ronnie says, placing the peppermint schnapps and a package of Virginia Slims on the marble island.

Fine by me.