This is a lie, and one she’s grown accustomed to telling: Henrique is still very much alive. But the temptation to fantasize, to imagine the thousands of bloody and gruesome ways that her ex-husband could have met his end—well, that’s simply too seductive to ignore. She wonders how Kim is conceiving of it: if she’s settled on something pedestrian like a heart attack, or if she’s let her mind wander into darker territories. Donna won’t give her an explanation—she never does. She prefers instead that the strangers she lies to imagine and reimagine Henrique’s death on their lunch breaks, their drives home. She comforts herself knowing that, at least for the next few hours, Kim will be killing Henrique in her mind. A thousand tiny deaths.
It’s easier, just claiming he died. It saves her from the torture of having to explain what Biarritz, and seafood paella, and the Simons’ Spanish au pair (Maria-Elena was the bitch’s name) have to do with her failed marriage. (The answer, Kim, is everything.) The lie, like most lies, is a defense. It saves her from the horror of admitting she’s a cliché.
*
Kim knocks on the dressing room door.
“How’s everything going in there?”
Donna’s just slipped on the purple tunic and she stares at herself in the mirror. She turns left, right, examines her uneven profiles.
“Going well!” she shouts.
The thin fabric scrapes at the extra skin just below her armpits.
“Can I get any other sizes for you?”
What is Kim implying?
“No, not just yet, dear.” Donna does her best to mask her annoyance. “Still working through the ones I have.”
Kim says something in return, but Donna can’t hear it. She’s too busy wiggling her way out of the purple disaster, letting the brittle cloth gather on the floor around her ankles. She faces the mirror and grabs a handful of pale flesh on either side of her waist. She squeezes. Fat globs together in her fists, and blue veins threaten to burst. Errant hairs sprout from freckles. She prods at one of her breasts, lifting it up, letting it fall and slap against her upper ribs.
She could blame her second husband. She could say that things turned south when she married Bill, two years after she and Eloise packed up their lives in Paris and moved back to Chicago. (Henrique had given Donna no indication that Maria-Elena was going anywhere, and she wasn’t about to accept the … er … modern arrangement that he had proposed to her. France had opened her eyes, but she was still from Indiana, a Hoosier at heart.) Before too long Alice was born, and then, two years later, Paul. Soon, Donna forgot what it was like to eat a meal sitting down. She tried to hold on to vestiges of her old life—despite Bill’s grumbling, she declared Tuesdays to be coq au vin night; she spoke to Alice and Paul in a mash-up of English and French. At night, she read French novels, and watched French movies, and listened to the news on Radio France. But constantly reminding herself of the person she used to be was exhausting. Besides, the reality of her new life was too flagrant to ignore. Instead of being chauffeured around in black cars driven by quiet, angular men in wool hats, she drove the car that Bill bought her, a used Ford station wagon—the only thing he could afford on his accountant’s salary. If Henrique, with his prominent law career and his opinionated aristocratic friends, had offered her a chance to transcend her suburban American upbringing, then Bill had yanked her back to her roots. He had reminded her that she was, and always would be, middle class. There were no more galas, no more Augusts in Provence, no more last-minute dinners at Le Meurice. Now there was Sunday football, and big-box retailers, and celebratory dinners at the Cheesecake Factory in Oak Brook.
“He’s a good man. Salt of the earth,” her own mother had told her when she called with the news of Bill’s proposal. “Don’t turn your nose up at him.”
“I didn’t say that I was going to.”
“Because from where I’m sitting, these sorts of offers aren’t going to come along every day. Not when you’re pushing thirty-two and you’ve already got a kid hanging off you.” She didn’t hesitate to add: “Most men are scared of kids.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Well, what’s the other option, honey? Go back to Paris, find another job teaching English, and marry some other rich frog who’s got a thing for Spanish floozies?”
“I think you’ve made your point.”
“Just say yes, Donna. For Christ’s sake, say yes.”
She did.
Donna cocks her head to the left. She pokes her other breast.
She could blame Bill.
She shakes her head: No. She couldn’t. After all, she’d loved him. Maybe not with the same na?ve passion with which she’d fallen for Henrique, but she had loved him, in her way. He hadn’t been perfect. He’d made his mistakes, and unforgiveable ones, at that. But turning Donna into … God, into this thing that she’s staring at in the mirror hadn’t been one of them. And anyway, hadn’t she learned to treasure the life he gave her? While the initial shock of returning to the world she’d fled was disappointing, disorienting, the truth was that there was a homey comfort in falling back into old routines. While the tedium of life in St. Charles certainly dragged on her, she also felt strangely cleansed by rediscovering the pureness of the suburbs and the simplicity of life with Bill.
Besides, Bill’s dead. And not fake dead, but actual dead, which makes the whole business of blaming him for turning her into a Midwestern housewife feel a little tacky.
*
She sneaks out of the store before Kim comes to check on her again. She considers leaving the dresses (all of them tried on; all of them discarded) on the floor in their little humiliated heaps—it would make for a faster getaway—but her guilt gets the better of her, and she hangs each of them up, flattening out wrinkles, picking away bits of lint. She’s hurrying past the food court when her phone begins to buzz. Her heart skips a beat, and she quickly rehearses what she’s planned on saying when Paul calls: excitement, without being saccharine; joy, without being scripted. But when she finds the phone, its screen is dark. No missed calls. No long-lost sons. And yet: more buzzing. She reaches farther into her purse, past half a packet of Kleenex and a box of Altoids, and finds her other phone, her real, guilt-free phone. A text blinks on the screen. Her neighbor Janice, from across the street. House Hunters International and wine 2nite?
Donna squints as she hunt-and-pecks y-e-s and presses send.
In the mall’s garage, she finds her car and digs through the center console for her parking ticket and the joint she rolled earlier this morning. She lights it and reclines in her seat. Three rows to her left, a car door slams and footsteps echo. Donna inhales and lets the pot swirl in her lungs. She’s new to smoking—it’s a habit that she’s made a very conscious effort to cultivate over the past three years, ever since Bill died and, in her grief, she reached the conclusion that she needed to start having a little more fun. She coughs. She’s still getting the hang of it, the shock of hot air and smoke searing her throat. She likes the repetitive action, though—joint-to-mouth, joint-to-mouth, joint-to-mouth—and how the weed makes her feel, slowing things down until each blink seems as long as an afternoon nap.
She fishes beneath the passenger seat for her copy of Carole King’s Tapestry and slides the disc into the car’s stereo. She flips forward three songs, to “It’s Too Late,” slides deeper into her seat, and laughs.
*