Sally was sitting at the kitchen counter when Chris got home. It was Thanksgiving, and he had told his wife he was the only one who could work that day. Sally had whispered two weeks before that she wished they could ‘skip it’ this year. She couldn’t handle it, she said, her eyes begging please don’t make me go, so Chris had dutifully lied. “That works out great!” he said, feigning enthusiasm. “My boss will love it if I work on Thanksgiving, since no one else is around,” and Sally had smiled in relief. In fact, he wasn’t needed at the office, which was closed, so he drove around most of the day, sat in three different coffee shops over three, very long drawn out lattes, and came home when he approximated it might seem legitimate. The street outside was already dark; the sun extinguished itself early this time of the year. “The darkest day is over,” Sally would breathe like it was a prayer, after the winter equinox had passed. “From now on, every day until June is a little bit brighter than the last.” As if it were a mantra, words that propelled her onward when solar power ceased to provide warmth and energy. Tonight, she was slumped on her stool, a back that Chris remembered being stick-straight in the seminar classes of college where he had first met her reduced now to an arc, like the curve of a wishbone. Her lips were clamped together until they were white and her eyes were tight with concentration as she counted out almonds from the clear package at her side.
“Three, four, five…” he heard her hissing under her breath like a radiator leaking out gas. The almonds landed with precise clinks into the small glass bowl on the counter in front of her, and Chris froze in the doorway, watching the wrinkles deepen at the corners of his wife’s eyes with each successive almond, the whites growing larger all around like a spooked horse, as though she was afraid of the end she knew was coming.
“…Twelve, thirteen, fourteen,” she finished in a rush. She dipped her slender fingers – no; he remembered them as slender, now they were more properly bone with just a trace of flesh on top to add humanity to it – watched as those bony fingers descend greedily into the bowl and she lifted almond to mouth quickly, as though afraid someone might take it from her otherwise. He watched until this horror show was over, all fourteen almonds gulped down, her eyes closed, her mouth macerating the food, her lips working like she was praying. He knew better than to interrupt Sally when she ate. Such interruptions most often resulted in having things thrown at him, or Sally crying hysterically, or, more rightly, both.
“Hi,” he said when the last almond was swallowed with obvious pain down her throat, the esophagus bulging against the sinews of her neck. Her eyes snapped open and she glared at him accusingly.
“How long have you been standing there?” she demanded.
“Since I got home from work.” Only a small lie. Her eyes weighed his answer.
“You were watching me eat,” she accused.
“No,” he lied. She jumped off the stool faster than it seemed her frail body should have been capable, lunged at him and pushed – tried to push – him backwards against the garage door. “You were watching me eat! No one watches me eat. No one!” Small fists pummeled against his chest, a flurry of angry white snowflakes that melted on his lapels.
He grabbed a wrist in each hand; his fingers could easily have circled around the bone twice. “Sally. My love,” he said as gently as he could. “I wasn’t watching. I just now walked in the door.” She glared at him defiantly a moment more before her arms went limp in his grasp and she sank back from where she had been poised on tiptoe. He released her and she walked back to the counter, laying her forearms atop it and hunching over them. He remembered when his wife’s ass had been round and firm when she stood like that, sticking out and inviting him to caress the curve, but now there was no seat to her pants.
“God, Sally,” he said then without thinking. “What happened to you?”
He instantly wished he could take the words back when his wife’s head swung towards him and he found himself frozen under the dead, vacant look in her eyes. He remembered in that moment every hope she had had as a young revolutionary in their college days. The desire to enter politics, to go to law school, to become an investigative journalist – the ‘goal’ had a tendency to change daily, but it wasn’t what it was that mattered so much as that there was always something to be achieved, done, conquered. Then the years of their early marriage, watching her bang her head against disappointment after disappointment, stumble up against turned-down job offers, watching her uterus reject the idea of childbirth. (“Is your wife getting her period?” more than a few fertility specialists had asked, and Chris hadn’t known enough back then to ask about amenorrhea.) The next few years only brought more career disappointments, book manuscripts that never sold to agents, classes in graduate school that she dropped out of after a semester, wanderings around the house with a zombie’s gait and eyes that stared vacantly ahead at all hours of the day. Going to bed at night only to wake and realize his wife had never occupied the sheets next to him, her side still tucked up and unwrinkled, and finding the empty wine bottles in the recycling can (buried under plastic Evian bottles and soup tins so he wouldn’t find them, but he learned to dig). He couldn’t remember how long ago she had stopped cooking dinner or going out to restaurants with him, only that he would come home and see these strange rituals, this pagan worship of the fourteen almonds or the half a cup of oatmeal (unflavored) or the sucking on water crackers until they were pap in her mouth. The way she said, “I like eating them better that way. It gives me something to do,” and then instantly clapped a hand over her mouth, betrayed by her own words. And now, this crazed look in her eye, this wild rolling of the iris. Her hair was thinner, he realized. He had ignored the clumps that would collect by the drain in the shower, but there was no denying it anymore.
He couldn’t help it. “What happened to you,” he repeated.
A touch of the feral look drained from her eyes, and Sally slumped further forward onto her forearms, as if the little weight left on her bones couldn’t stand upright anymore. “I got lost somewhere along the way,” she said slowly, shaking her head, and began reciting, “I got lost somewhere along the way. I got lost. I got lost. I got. I got…”
* * * * *
Jackie opened the front door and found her daughter and her new boyfriend laughing hysterically, holding one another up on the doorstep as if their convulsions of mirth would knock them over otherwise. “What on earth is going on out here?” she demanded, wiping her hands on her apron.
Sally wiped her eyes. “Mom!” she crowed, throwing her arms forcefully around Jackie’s neck so the older woman took a step or two backwards. “We’re so glad we’re here.”
“So glad you’re here? So glad you’re here?” She looked from one to the other. “That’s nice and all, but I’m not sure I can ever remember you so enthusiastic for a Thanksgiving.” She ushered them inside. The scent of roasting turkey and candied yams, of cranberry relish and Brussels sprouts, of corn muffins made from a pre-packaged mix – all of it was thick in the air. The kitchen was at least ten degrees warmer than the rest of the house. Sally frisked her hands along her upper arms as they came inside, and her boyfriend – this one’s name was Chris, if Jackie remembered correctly – was smiling awkwardly and wrinkling his nose; Jackie wasn’t sure if that meant he enjoyed the smells coming from her holiday kitchen or not.
“Now, what’s all the mirth about?” she asked, planting her hands on her hips. Sally and the boy – Chris? Chris, she decided – Sally and Chris looked at one another and broke into fresh gales of giggling.
“Oh, Mom!” Sally said, hoisting herself onto one stool and sitting, her back straight. She began thumbing some of the cheese spread onto a cracker without even bothering to use the decorative knife provided. “We took a wrong turn!” she said around a giant mouthful. “We had just gotten off the highway but we must have missed a fork in the road and we got lost along the way! We were circling forever!” ‘Ever’ said as though it was a wonderful place to be. She and Chris howled with laughter as if this was the funniest thing. Jackie dug her fists into her hips until her flesh ached. She hated being lost. What joke, exactly, was she missing here?
“And?” she prodded.
Sally screwed her eyes up towards the ceiling and Chris took over. “We had the best time exploring the new roads that we discovered. You wouldn’t believe it, the excitement of only vaguely knowing where we were, but not really. The adventure involved…” He shrugged as if it all made sense. “Getting lost is the fun part. We knew we’d get here eventually.” And he popped one of Jackie’s bacon tarts into his mouth.
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