12. Zelda
ZELDA
The cake has three candles because Hedy insisted an anniversary ought to have candles.
Jeremiah blew out the ones on our first cake with me, then kissed a smear of frosting from my thumb.
Tonight the cake waits on a side table beside a bowl of Christmas ornaments for the guests to choose from later.
Candace keeps touching the corner of her bag.
I have eaten some dinner. Hedy made sure of that by putting potatoes on my plate without asking whether I was hungry.
She sits two chairs away, near enough that I can catch her eye.
Suri has told me twice that the tart is perfect.
The ordinary kindness of both women makes it difficult to give up on the evening.
Jeremiah stands for a toast. His glass catches the candlelight. I put down my fork.
There will be something about us now. How we met, perhaps, or the first Christmas when I sewed the stocking wrong. He knows those stories too. I look up at him, ready to laugh at whichever one he chooses.
“Three years,” he begins. “I’m grateful you’re all here to celebrate with us.”
Candace rises before he can say more. “And Zelda has something she’d like to say so we can all begin Christmas as friends.”
She takes the folded card from her bag and slides it beside my plate.
I look at the gold tree. A moment ago I was getting ready to laugh.
Across the table, one of Jeremiah’s friends looks down. He was at Suri’s party. I push my plate away so there is room to move the card, then hate myself for making room.
“No,” I tell Candace. “I said I wouldn’t read that.”
Jeremiah stays on his feet. “Let’s get this over with. Everybody wants to enjoy Christmas.”
I touch the corner of the card, then move my hand away. “Then stop asking me to repeat a lie.”
“You already apologized,” he says.
“You made that the price of going home with you.”
Suri sets down her fork. Candace puts a hand on the back of Jeremiah’s chair as if she’s steadying herself.
I turn to Candace. “Which hand?” It comes out louder than the table needs.
“I’m sorry?”
“Which hand did I hit you with? I was against the desk. One hand on my mug, the other on my stomach. You walked past me.”
“Zelda—”
“Show me.” I hold up my hands. “You said I slapped you. Which one?”
Candace’s fingers lift toward her cheek and stop. Nobody asked her that at Suri’s party. Her mouth opens, and what comes out is for Jeremiah.
“Tell her we’ve dealt with this,” she says. “I told you what happened.”
My pulse is loud in my ears. “You told him what?”
“What happened in the study.”
“You told him I didn’t touch you.”
She looks toward Jeremiah.
He doesn’t look surprised.
I wait for it. A frown, a question. Something that means he has heard what I just heard.
“Jeremiah,” I say. “Did you know I never hit her?”
“This isn’t how I intended to discuss it.”
“Before tonight. Did you know?”
“Yes.”
Hedy’s chair scrapes the floor. Someone says, “What?”
I keep looking at his mouth.
Yes.
My hand is resting beside the card. I can see the pale space where my plate was, the fork I put down to hear our anniversary toast. Nothing on the table has moved.
“Before tonight?” I say again.
“Zelda, I said?—”
“I heard you.”
I did. I cannot seem to get farther than hearing it.
Saturday morning I asked if he still wanted this, with me.
He kissed my head before he left. Did he know then? I had held so still for that kiss. If he’d only stayed another minute, I thought, I might have found a better way to ask.
I pull my hand away from the card.
“You let me keep asking.”
“I was trying to get us through Christmas,” he says.
“By making me lie twice?”
Candace lifts both hands. “It was never only about the slap. You said horrible things to me.”
“I asked you to stop trying to take my husband.” I hear how tired I sound. I wanted that question to be a private one between friends. Candace brought the answer to my table.
Jeremiah turns toward me. “You’re doing it again.”
“Did she tell you she wants you?”
He doesn’t answer at once.
“Jeremiah.” I need him to say no to this one. “Did she?”
“She told me she had feelings,” he says. “I told her I was trying to save my marriage.”
Candace looks down. She doesn’t seem like a woman whose feelings have been turned away.
“You could have told me that,” I say. “You could have told her to leave us alone.”
“We can talk about what I should have done when we’re alone. Right now I’m asking you to help us get through this evening.”
Suri says, “Jeremiah, put the card away.”
“This is between my wife and me.”
“Then why is Candace here waiting for my apology?” I ask.
Hedy stands. I shake my head at her, barely a movement, and she stays beside her chair.
He knows now. Everybody knows. Surely he can be angry for me now. I can almost feel the relief of him coming around the table, standing beside me.
“I planned tonight,” I tell him. “I wanted to celebrate marrying you. I put your family’s ornaments on the tree this morning. I thought next Christmas we’d have the baby here with us.”
“We still can.”
The baby. Next Christmas. I want them enough to hear that as an offer.
“Then tell her I’m not giving that speech.”
He looks at the guests. His fingers tighten on the back of his chair.
I wait. I am still making it easy for him, staying seated, keeping my voice down.
“Please,” I say. “You heard her. Tell them.”
Candace is beside him. The card is beside my plate. I want him to look at me instead of either of them.
“I’m trying to keep our family together,” he says.
I put a hand over the small rise of my belly. “You want me to teach him to say he did something he didn’t do?”
“A marriage is about give and take,” Jeremiah says. “Its thirty seconds. Just read the card and let us get on with the evening. I’m asking you to do this for me.”
I hear the sentence from the stairs again. I thought he could only say it because he believed her.
He is looking straight at me.
There isn’t anything left to explain. I reach for the edge of the table and push myself up.
Hedy has our coats in her arms; I don’t know when she went to get them. She lays mine over the chair while I reach for my bag.
“I won’t say it again.”
“Then you’re choosing to leave,” Jeremiah says.
I look at the man I married. He can still give me an alternative. The room will have to hear it if he does. He looks furious and frightened, and he stays where he is.
“Yes.”
My wedding ring has been snug since October. It sticks at the knuckle and I have to twist it, and the whole table watches me twist. I set it on the cream card, on top of the little gold tree.
Jeremiah looks at the ring. He doesn’t reach for it.
Candace says, “Please don’t ruin the night for everyone.”
Suri pushes back her chair. “Zelda, I’ll tell them what happened at my party.”
“You weren’t in the study,” I say. I won’t make her claim a sight she never had.
“No. I saw you ask for privacy. I saw you say you didn’t touch her. I saw him refuse to listen.”
“Suri,” Jeremiah says.
She turns toward him. “You said you knew. Did you tell any of us before tonight?”
“No.”
One of the guests who watched the first apology sets down his napkin. He looks at Candace, then at me. “I told my wife you’d lost your temper,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
His wife wasn’t at Suri’s. I have only met her once.
I open my mouth to answer him, but I don’t know which answer he wants. It’s all right? Thank you? My ring is on the table. Jeremiah still has his hand on the chair.
I turn away.
I leave the card on the table. The cake is still waiting on the side table.
Hedy opens the door. Jeremiah tells me to sit down.
I’ve heard him use that tone to halt a conference room full of people. My hand is on the cold brass handle before I realize I can keep moving.
Outside, I’ve put my coat on badly. One lapel has folded under the other.
Hedy fixes it without a word and gets me into her car.
She has to tell me twice to put on the seat belt.
At the first traffic light I remember the cake on the table and begin to cry because I still want to know how it tastes.
I made sure there was enough for the people who loved us.
Hedy takes the longer road where there are fewer lights. I know the route because we used to drive it to our mother’s apartment when we were young and wanted a few extra minutes before getting there. The familiarity undoes me.
I say, “I thought if he heard her admit it, he’d be angry for me.”
“I heard him say he knew.”
“He knew before tonight.” I don’t know the exact day, only that he’s had time to decide what to do. “I kept asking him to believe me.”
Hedy’s hands tighten on the wheel. She doesn’t fill the car with judgments about him. “I heard you ask him again tonight.”
“I almost stayed.”
“You left.”
I watch the Christmas lights on an apartment balcony blur past. I try to picture the table without me. Jeremiah at one end, my chair pushed back at the other. I cannot stop putting myself in it.
“Do you want me to go back for anything?” she asks.
“No.” Then, “My vitamins are by the bed.”
“We can buy more tonight. We’ll get your things later.”
I watch the houses pass. I’ve spent the last two weeks imagining a way to make Jeremiah understand that I told the truth. I have no plan for what to do with the knowledge that he knew the truth and wanted the apology anyway.
I wonder whether Suri is telling people what she saw. I wonder whether anyone is still eating. I wonder if Jeremiah will call me before we reach Hedy’s apartment.
He doesn’t. At Hedy’s, I sit on the edge of the guest bed in the borrowed T-shirt she gives me.
Her spare room smells faintly of laundry soap.
There’s a folded blanket at the foot of the bed and a strip of streetlight across the rug.
I can hear her moving around in the kitchen, making up the couch so she can stay nearby if I need her.
I take out my phone to tell Candace what happened. For eleven years that was how I endured a terrible evening: I told her every ugly detail, and she stayed awake until I could laugh at some part of it. Her name is still near the top of my messages.
Hedy asks if I want her to take a day off work.
I tell her to keep her shift. She says we can move the small table in her kitchen if I want space for my laptop and that I can stay as long as I need.
She doesn’t offer to solve a marriage over a glass of water.
She makes room for the morning I’ll have to wake up in.
“I can still go to work,” I say, mostly to find out whether I believe it.
“Of course you can. I’ll drive you for the first couple of days if you don’t want to think about the route.”
At the library I can put books back where they belong. I don’t yet know where I belong. The offer of a ride is so ordinary that it makes me cry again.
I put the phone down. I want my husband so badly that I think I might answer if he called and said only, Come home.
I want him to know that he was wrong. I don’t know how to want both things without tearing myself in two.
Hedy’s phone rings in the kitchen. I hear her say she is home and that I’m with her, and then she tells the caller she won’t discuss me tonight. I don’t know who called. I’m grateful she hasn’t made me part of another conversation I can’t control.
When she returns, I ask if it was Jeremiah.
“Suri,” she says. “She wanted to know you got here safely.”
“Did she say what happened after we left?”
“I didn’t ask. If you want to hear it, call her tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” I say.
I put the phone facedown. Then I turn it over again, in case he calls.
There’s a knock. Hedy comes in with a glass of water and the vitamins she bought at the late pharmacy. She puts them beside the bed, sees me looking at my phone, and sits with me until I can take one.