Chapter 28 1994
Her sister’s house, a Thursday afternoon, the radio, kids rolling around on her lawn. Viola, in a blue dress, curls sprouting out of her head. Sebastian in green hand-me-down overalls from a friend of Sadie’s, a little stain on the back of the pants.
In the kitchen, Sadie is pouring a glass of red. “You joining?”
“Just a splash,” Susan says, because she’s driving, but Sadie knows she wants it desperately.
The travel is hurting her. Being away from her children is hurting her.
Being with them—in such short, smothering bursts—needing to let Al have his own time, trying to undo everything his mother has done during the week, it hurts her.
Three years of their faces rising and falling as she passes back and forth through the door.
They have stopped running to greet her. Viola, a creature of ritual, wants only Daddy at bedtime.
Has she left it too late?
She rifles through Sadie’s refrigerator, tops up sippy cups with watered-down orange juice.
Sadie has agreed to film Susan today, an audition for a major feature that her agent put her up for.
They’d be stupid not to want you, Orson said.
The director was a big Academy type and the way everyone talked about him intimidated her.
Like there were right and wrong methods.
But she liked the role: a young mother in a psychological horror film whose baby is kidnapped by her deranged neighbor.
If she got it, it would be intense. It would mean she couldn’t come back for some time.
They sit on the back patio as Sebastian explains to his sister why his blocks have to stack on top of hers, frustrated that his logic is unconvincing.
You’re not listening, he says, with an exhausted emphasis that sounds like his father.
They’ve tried to shield the children from their arguments, but maybe their hearing is improving. Or maybe they’ve gotten louder.
“Shall we just get this out of the way?” Susan asks, collecting the camcorder from her bag. “Maybe we could run it a bit first.”
Sadie rolls her eyes. “Don’t people get paid to do this for you now?”
“Not really. Please, it will be fun!”
Sadie relents and reads back the lines in the gravelly voice of a man.
It keeps making Susan laugh. Susan’s character is harsh, a woman on the verge of a breakdown, and her raised voice is agitating the children.
Sebastian is pulling Viola’s hair and she is screaming, which ruins at least two takes.
Again, now with a different kind of frustration in her voice, the character growing dimensions, mastering her drunkenness.
Harness the anger, the sense of loss, all the conflict she feels when she looks at her husband’s face.
Don’t tell anyone, the most difficult line, difficult not to look down at Viola, who keeps returning (so intent now!) pulling at her fingertips, picking up the ashtray on the table and asking what it is.
“Don’t even need this out,” Sadie says, placing it out of reach. “Gave up smoking for Lent.”
“Shit,” Susan says. “Lent!”
“It only started today. You could give up… coffee.”
“Or like, everything in my life.”
Sadie raises her eyebrows. She adjusts the pair of cheap black sunglasses over her nose, waits her out.
“I’m missing their birthday,” Susan admits. Her voice wobbles, and it’s strangely embarrassing, asking for strength from her sister. Laying all of her optimistic bullshit at the altar of a woman who has always been a realist.
“What? How come?”
On Saturday, Susan will be filming a scene in the rain.
A climactic scene on a beach. No studio tricks will do.
She thought she had more time, but this low-pressure zone has come up from the South Pacific more quickly than anyone expected.
And now she has been required to book a flight for first thing tomorrow. “It’s not really a choice.”
“Are you going to cancel the party?”
“I don’t know. It’s just insane, isn’t it? The whole situation?”
“What did Al say?”
“Haven’t told him.”
Sadie’s mouth is a thin line. The worst part is that, with Sadie, she doesn’t need to explain why. Sadie, unlike Al, gets why it’s important. Why it has to come first.
Often now she wonders how they ended up together.
Why they believed, with all the divergence of their desires, a life between them could make sense.
What naive chemical possessed them, what impossible blindness?
This morning, watching him step in to reexplain to the children how to tie their shoelaces, it occurred to her that all the things she loves about him are the things that frustrate her most deeply.
His closeness to the children, his desire to simplify the world, his instincts to protect them all.
The way they look at him fills her with jealousy as much as adoration.
“You’re going to collapse if you keep this up, Susie. You’re going to make yourself sick.”
Between them hover the shades of so many events she has missed over the last four years: first words and first steps and first beach days. The shades of future empty seats at plays and sports matches and birthday dinners and road trips if she doesn’t just do it, just make her move.
“Susie, he needs to understand.”
Her daughter has gone into the bushes and sat in poison ivy and Sebastian is pointing at the rash and screaming.
Susan reaches, scoops her up, while Sadie runs upstairs—“I’m sure I have calamine…
” Trust her sister to have hung on to this bottle for fifteen years.
But the pink liquid retains some effect as Susan rubs it into the backs of Viola’s pudgy legs.
“Is that a magic potion?” Viola asks.
“Yes.”
“Does it taste good?”
“No.”
“Are you a witch?”
Her daughter looks up at her with her own eyes. Has he told her this? That her mother is a witch?
“No.” Susan is firm.
Viola looks perplexed, blinks, tries again: “Are you a witch?”
Susan’s resistance is melting. What is so wrong, if it is only a game? “No,” she says weakly, wiping off her hands on the bathroom towel. I am innocent of a witch.
Viola traces fat fingers through the unrubbed lotion on her legs.
“Please, Mom.”
“You got me,” Susan says, cracking, cackling, losing herself in the sweet giggly folds of her daughter’s neck.