Say When by Elizabeth Berg
But Mr. Crankshaft. He’d use them all. Lover. Honey. He’d say, “Does he know where you are, babe? Did you tell him where you were going?”
She would shake her head, smiling.
“Good,” he would say, and kiss her again.
He would make dinner, and Ellen would help. She’d take over making the salad, of course, save him from all that fussiness. She’d be all womanly and careful and cute—a strand of hair falling across one eye as she sliced the tomatoes. He would gently tuck it behind her ear, kiss her again. My, didn’t making dinner take a long time when you were so in love! When you had found what you always wanted and never knew you could have! You might have to fuck each other between courses, you were so blissful! Between bites!
Mr. Smooth would say—obliquely, of course—how nice it was to have a woman around the house. Wouldn’t want to push too hard, too fast. So to speak. He would seat her at his dining room table, and, with a flourish, put before her a plateful of linguini in clam sauce. “Oh, this is so nice,” Ellen would say. “We only use our dining room for folding laundry, you know? For paying bills. Griffin’s just not comfortable eating in the dining room.” Mr. Crankshaft would pointedly refrain from commenting. What a good guy, to let pass such an obvious opener to Griffin’s myriad faults!
There’d be plenty of good wine to go along with the meal so as to loosen Ellen up, she always needed to be loosened up. Although maybe with him she didn’t.
Griffin threw his empty beer bottle in the recycling bin, then put his bowl and spoon in the dishwasher. Yes, first they’d eat, each finding at least one opportunity to feed the other, to slide their fingers in and out of the other’s mouth, slowly. Then they’d retire to the bedroom and screw one another’s brains out, and then Ellen would get up and get dressed and come home and get in bed with good old Griffin.
Oh, no, she wouldn’t.
“DAD!” Zoe called.
“COMING!” He wiped off the counter, threw the sponge in the sink. He turned out the light in the kitchen, then all of the lights downstairs and on the porch. He put the chain locks in place on both the front and back doors, then went upstairs to his daughter.
At eight o’clock, he ran bathwater for Zoe, then sat on the toilet seat to talk to her as she washed. Zoe draped the wet washrag carefully across her head, then asked her father, “Who am I?”
Griffin shrugged. “Beats me.”
“I am the grrrrrreat…I am the Great Buffalo hoho!”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“YES!”
“To what do I owe the honor of this meeting?”
Zoe stared at him. “Huh?”
“What brings you here, Ms. Buffalohoho?”
“Oh. A meeting.”
“I see. With whom?”
“With all my tribe in the worrrrlllddd!” She pointed at Griffin. “You are under my supreme command!”
“All right.”
“And I command you…I command you to get me two Oreo cookies.”
“Later.”
Zoe gasped. “You dare to defy the great—”
“Later, I promise.”
He didn’t want to go back to the kitchen and turn any lights on. Just in case.
Zoe stretched herself out full length in the tub. “Hey, Dad.”
“Yes?”
“Could I sleep in the bathtub some night?”
“I think you’d get pretty cold. Plus you might fall asleep and get water up your nose.” Or drown. In a distressing but utterly reflexive parental way, Griffin pictured dragging a blue-faced and lifeless Zoe out of the water.
“I don’t mean sleep in water. Just in the tub.”
“Don’t you think you’d be pretty uncomfortable?”
Zoe made one of her goofy, elastic faces, rested her chin on her raised knees. “Noooooo.”
“Why not?”
She jerked upright. “Because! I’d bring pillows! And blankets!”
“Why do you want to sleep in the bathtub?”
“I don’t know. It’s cozy.”
She knows, Griffin thought. Even if it’s unconscious, she knows. And she’s scared, and she’s seeking comfort in the goddamn bathtub. He imagined Zoe dreaming her young girl dreams behind the shower curtain, soothed by the white walls that rose up straight and smooth and dependable, walls that did not ever change, and that kept her from falling out of something meant to hold her securely. Goddamn Ellen.
Griffin stood and undressed to his boxers. “Coming in!” he yelled, and then, while Zoe giggled excitedly, Griffin stomped around in the bathtub, splashing mightily, until fully half the water had spilled over the side.
Zoe covered her mouth. “You’re going to get in so much trouble, Dad!”
“Oh, yeah? With whom?”
“With Mom!”
“Oh, you think so, huh?”
“Yeah!”
“I don’t think so.” He sat down and leaned against the back of the tub, his arms behind his head. “Ahhhhhhhhh!”
“Your underwear’s all wet, Dad.”
Griffin feigned great surprise. “It’s not!”
Zoe giggled. “Is too. It’s soaking!”
“Ah, well. It’ll dry.” Suddenly, Griffin’s heart was breaking. “It will dry.”
“What’s wrong, Dad?”
Griffin looked over at Zoe, at her washcloth sliding off the top of her head. He reached out to straighten it, then said, “Well, I’m very sad. Because I am missing something at this moment—at this otherwise perfect moment with you, Ms. Buffalohoho—I am missing the one thing that would make my happiness complete. And do you know what that one thing is?”
“Oreos?” Zoe asked hopefully.
“NO! NO! Not Oreos! Cigars! Do you have any?”
Zoe smiled, shook her head.
“Smoked ‘em all up, huh?”
“Dad.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow I’ll get a big box of real stinky ones, and you can sit in the bathtub with me while I smoke one.”
Zoe grimaced happily. “Mommy hates the smell.”
“Yes, I know she does.”
“And also she says if you splash water on the floor, it wrecks the ceiling in the living room.”
“Uh huh.”
“Does it?”
Griffin shrugged. “Not if you know how to fix it. And I know how to fix it.” He looked at Zoe, at her small, wet chest, her overly long eyelashes bejeweled by water droplets, her stick-out ears that their pediatrician had once gently suggested needed correcting. But neither Ellen nor Griffin nor—most important—Zoe saw them as a problem. Her ears were just her. She was a beautiful child. Griffin swallowed. “You know I can fix anything, right?”
“Yes.”
“You believe that?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then.”
Zoe stood. “I want to get out, now.” She shivered. “I’m freezing.”
They lay in Zoe’s bed and read two chapters from her book, taking turns, as usual. Then Griffin reached over to turn out the light and kissed the top of Zoe’s head. “Good night, Zops.”
Zoe yawned. “Good night. When’s Mommy coming home?”
Griffin stood. “Don’t know. Pretty soon.”
“Will it be eleven o’clock?”
“I said I didn’t know, Zoe! Now go to sleep!”
“O kay!” She leaned over, reached under her bed, and pulled out her ancient panda bear. Then she lay back down, her eyes shut tightly in angry compliance.
Griffin sat on the bed beside her. “Hey, Zoe?”
“I’m sleeping. You said go to sleep.”
“I think you’re right. I think it will be eleven o’clock.”
Zoe opened her eyes, studied Griffin seriously. “Okay.”
“All right?”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes, turned onto her side away from Griffin.
Griffin closed Zoe’s door halfway, as she liked it, and started down the hall for his own bedroom. Maybe it would
Chapter 4
He dreamed that Ellen died. She died and then she came back and was sitting on the stone bench they kept near the bird feeder in the backyard. She was see-through: Griffin saw the outline of the branches of the bare rhododendron behind her. He stood before her in his overcoat and galoshes, weeping, and she, dressed in a filmy white gown, waved her hand as if to shoo away his grief. “Stop it,” she said. “Look what I’ve brought you.” She held a glowing blue bowl, filled with multicolored stones.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Just look.”
He stared into the bowl.
“Well?” she asked, smiling.
“Aren’t you cold, Ellen?”
She stopped smiling, looked away.
He stepped closer, full of an awful longing that stole his breath, that made his fingers ache. “Ellen,” he said softly. “Tell me what it’s like.”
She looked up at him, her face full of bitterness. “It’s nothing like what you think,” she said. “Not at all.” She stood up, started walking away.
“Will you call me?” Griffin asked.
She turned around. “You know I can’t do that.”
“You can. I won’t tell anyone.”
She smiled sadly at him, then disappeared. He stared at the space where she’d been until he became aware of a knocking sound. It was Zoe, standing at her bedroom window, knocking at the pane and gesturing at something moving up into the sky. She knocked and pointed, knocked and pointed at something Griffin couldn’t see. She was smiling.
Of course the knocking in his dream was Ellen at the door. He jumped up quickly, then remembered, and looked at the clock. One-thirty. All right. He tried to muster up some righteous anger, but the dream was still alive in him, so that after he came down the stairs and undid the chain lock he said simply, “Sorry. Forgot.”
She didn’t look at him. She squeezed past him, hung up her coat, threw her purse onto the chair in the living room, and went upstairs. Griffin stood by the door, thinking. What had he intended to do? Confront her with the lateness of the hour. Tell her that she could not sleep in the same bed with him. Insist that they had to speak to Zoe, together. He had thought of telling her she had to move out, too, but now he was barefoot and in his pajamas, feeling the biting draft that leaked under the front door and wanting only for Ellen to say she’d made a terrible mistake, she was so sorry, she was back.
He went upstairs and heard the murmur of voices coming from Zoe’s room. “Someone from the PTO called,” Zoe was saying. “Daddy took the message.”
“Okay, sweetie,” Ellen said. “I’ll get it tomorrow. Thank you. You finish your water and go back to sleep, all right?”
Griffin moved quietly to stand outside his daughter’s door. Ellen was kneeling next to the bed, for a good-night hug. He saw the smallness of Zoe’s arms around her mother’s neck and remembered when Ellen was first handed her—streaked with blood, beaten ugly by birth, fists clenched tightly and trembling with newborn outrage. Griffin, his hands in his pockets, had leaned over to peer into Zoe’s face. “Looks like a boxer,” he’d said.
Ellen—impervious, bedazzled, had stared into Zoe’s eyes saying, “Oh, it’s you. It’s you!” She’d wept happily, rocked her baby in an instinctive and entirely unself-conscious way. She’d kissed Zoe’s tiny forehead, stroked her hair. Griffin had watched all this, fascinated by the spontaneous emergence of a person he didn’t know. He’d felt a momentary pull of intense jealousy—to be admired by her so! When the nurses told Ellen it was time to give Zoe to them, she’d laughed and said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” She’d kept the baby beside her every moment except when she showered—and then it was only Griffin she’d let hold her. The nurses, eyebrows raised, talked about her—yes, most mothers fell in love with their babies, but this! Ellen paid no attention to them.
Zoe had gotten a cold when she was only three weeks old. Ellen slept on the floor beside her crib at night, called the pediatrician so many times during the day that the beleaguered doctor finally called Griffin at work, begging assistance. “I think it’s that she’s afraid the baby might die,” Griffin tried to explain, but the doctor said no, he didn’t think it was that. He’d seen that before, he understood and was sympathetic to that; this was something else altogether. It seemed that Ellen didn’t want Zoe to experience any discomfort whatsoever. It wasn’t that she thought she was in grave danger: Her nose must not be stuffed. She must not cough. Apparently she wanted the world to be remade for her daughter. Really, if Mr. Griffin could not have a talk with his wife, he’d be forced to tell them to find another doctor.
So Griffin had told Ellen she had to stop calling the pediatrician, and Ellen had burst into tears. “Well, what are doctors for?” she’d asked, and Griffin had understood that she really meant it. “They are for really sick children, Ellen,” he’d said gently, and she’d said, “Oh. All right.” Then she’d looked up at Griffin with a face full of pain and said, “She’s too important. I don’t know how to manage a love like this.”
But she had learned. She’d gotten better. And now she was simply unequivocally there for Zoe. Zoe knew it, too, and Griffin was convinced that it was one of the reasons she was such a good kid—everybody liked Zoe, everybody said so.
“I love you, too,” he heard Ellen say, and then she came out of Zoe’s room. She started when she saw Griffin, and then the surprise left her face and was replaced by something close to hatred. She went downstairs, and Griffin followed her. He sat at the kitchen table opposite her. “It wasn’t the PTO that called.”
“I know. It was Peter.”
“Mr. Points and Plugs.”
“Peter.”
“Ellen, we have to talk about some things.”
She laughed. “As I’ve been saying.”
“Where were you tonight?”
She got up and went to the refrigerator, then closed the door without taking anything out. “Actually, mostly driving around, by myself,” she said. “I was trying to figure out what to do, what to say to you to make you understand, how to get you to sit down and just listen.”
“Well, here I am.”
She sat down, leaned in toward him. “Are you?”
“Yes. I am. We need to decide what to tell Zoe. She knows something’s up.”
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“Come on, Ellen. She just knows something—nothing definite. She can sense it. Kids always can.”
Ellen sat quietly for a moment, then said, “Oh, I’m so sorry about this, Griffin. If I could make myself feel differently, I would. But I can’t help it. I feel…like another person with Peter. Alive, you know?”
“Meaning you felt dead with me.” He laughed. “Is that it?”
She said nothing.
“Is that it, Ellen?”
“No. No, that’s not…” She reached across the table, touched his hand. “I didn’t feel dead with you, I just…” She leaned back in her chair. “Griffin. I’m going to turn forty years old and I have never…Look, I never believed in romantic love. Not for me, anyway. I never felt it. I wanted it, though. I’d watch all those sappy movies and feel this incredible yearning.…I didn’t think I’d ever get to feel those things inside myself. But when I met Peter, there was this instant—”
“Zoe wanted to sleep in the bathtub.”
“What are you talking about? Why won’t you just let me try to explain—”
“Frankly, I am not interested, Ellen. I could not care less about you and your greasy paramour. I told you, just do what you have to do. I don’t want to hear about it. What matters to me is Zoe. We have to tell her why things around here are going to change. And they are, Ellen. For one thing, I’m going to be going out, too.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m going out, too. We’ll alternate nights. If you think I’m going to baby-sit every night while you live out your soap o
“Griffin, sit down. I want to talk to you.”
“I’ll tell you something, Ellen. I’m getting a little bored hearing about what you want. And I’m tired. I’m going to bed. You don’t tell me what to do anymore: That’s the first thing. You don’t ask me for anything. And we will both talk to Zoe in the morning.” He turned to leave the room.
“Wait a minute!” She stood up, grabbed his arm. “You can’t just leave like this, goddamnit! We have to have some plan.”
Griffin frowned. “I just told you the plan. If you don’t like it…” He didn’t bother to finish. He went upstairs, flung back the covers angrily, and got into bed. He heard Ellen come upstairs, rummage around in the linen closet, then go back downstairs. “Fine,” he said aloud. “Good.” And then quietly, experimentally, “Bitch.” The word echoed inside him, a mournful reverberation that emanated from behind his breastbone and would not stop.
Hours later, he was still awake. He’d felt, standing over Ellen at the kitchen table, that he finally had things under control. That, now that the shock of first hearing the news had passed, he was actually relieved at the prospect of getting rid of her—even at moments of extreme adoration, he’d realized she was a royal pain in the ass. Oh, yes, he’d realized that. Ellen took the concept of “high-maintenance woman” to another level entirely. He wanted a low-maintenance woman, one who would sit and watch a Bears game with him and drink real beer and realize that sex was about giving as well as taking. Ellen made him nervous, she always had. She was ungrateful and mean-spirited.