Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

She said, “What was it, when you were with her, and I was taking Tasha to the British Museum — we were wearing our matching goddamned tan tourist raincoats, Bob, for heaven’s sakes! And you and Deborah were laughing and doing everything together that you did. What did you think was coming to you that you deserved so much?”

Kevin stepped into the doorway behind us, a muscular man who wore a towel over grown-up cock and balls, and also a damp, happy child just out of his bath.

Jillie looked from me to Kevin and then again at me. She stood between men gone wrong, or boys who hadn’t turned out right. You looked at us, I thought, and we seemed okay. You looked again and we were ruined just a little. We were your dreams come true.

AS THEY CHEWED AT Cheerios in milk and drank unnaturally orange orange juice in the breakfast room off the kitchen of their house, Stephen’s daughters studied him through eyes distorted by corrective lenses. Sasha seemed patiently curious, Brigitte apprehensive; neither spoke, and neither looked away. When Rosalie in their bedroom started to sing, not in words, just heavy syllables pounded atop a tune about joy—

Dee duh duh doe

Dee da-da!

Dee duh deed da

Dum da-da!

— Stephen saw his daughters watch him hurry to the kitchen, cocking his head to listen hard. Inside his face, on top of his tongue that rose as if he sang, and underneath a brain he thought of as boiling in his blood like an egg in water in a pot on a stove, Stephen supplied the words as Rosalie sang while she packed before leaving him:

Jesus loves me

This I know!

For the Bible

Tells me so!

And we’re not even Christians, he thought. We aren’t anything.

He had stayed home from work this morning after making sandwiches for the children’s lunches. Sasha liked hard-cooked eggs in slices on mayonnaise smeared over soft white bread. Brigitte ate only smooth peanut butter with grape jelly on the same pulpy bread that Sasha liked. Both girls, nine and eleven, stared at him through dark-framed glasses that reminded him of Rosalie’s (as did their eyes), and Stephen bellowed bad jokes, all but screamed “Sure!” when Brigitte reminded him about money for milk and an after-school snack. Rosalie, meanwhile, prowled their bedroom, blowing her nose and slamming things.

When the bus came, the children, he knew, were happy to be released. Brigitte had called from the front door, “Bye, Daddy. Bye, Mommy.” But Sasha had said nothing. He’d called to them, as if deputized, “We love you!” As they fled the tension that ached in the house like flu in muscles, Stephen felt that he, too, had been set free. The feeling didn’t last. He heard their bedroom door open as Rosalie marched in her fuzzy, dragging slippers to the bathroom and back. She must have left the door ajar: he heard the brass pulls on their bureau jangle, then the thrap , four times, of suitcase clasps, and he was certain that Rosalie was packing to leave.

He fetched a mug of coffee from the kitchen to the breakfast room and sat with it as Rosalie hummed, and as the words she didn’t say echoed in his inner ear, though not in her voice but in his. She sounded, now, reassured by the song. She sounded young.

When he looked at the tile-topped breakfast table, he understood why his coffee had tasted awful. He had poured not milk but orange juice into his acid third cup. He still held the juice tumbler, which rattled on the tabletop to something like the rhythm— dee da-da — of Rosalie’s song. Stephen kept time.

The tumbler was Sasha’s. She had worn too much dark red lipstick, as usual, to counteract what she saw as the scarring effect of her braces. Of course the frame of crimson broadcast her braces, and she looked like the grille of a ’49 Buick. Today she’d worn even more than he was used to, and Stephen wondered if, hearing their fight, she had laid the impasto of lipstick on as a rebuke to them. He had locked her out, though, with his porcelain grin, his morning commotion, his all-but-yodeled good cheer. He lifted her juice tumbler, and he kissed the one-lipped print that Sasha’s mouth had left on the rim of the glass. It tasted like Crayola.

He left the breakfast room and walked through the kitchen, where the cat was on the counter next to the stove, eating hard-boiled eggs. He went down the small parquet corridor that connected the back of the house to the front, and he stood outside their bedroom door. It had two thin cracks that looked as though someone had tried to draw: they were stick-people, hand-in-hand, made by his kicking at the door when Rosalie had locked him out, years before. He watched her now, and he listened. She was wearing her heavy green plaid bathrobe, with a dark gray bathroom towel around her neck, tucked into the robe, like a scarf. She hummed about Jesus’ love.

She looked up from her underwear drawer and her face was sullen, swollen, sliced by her glasses’ dark frames. But when she took his stare and countered it with her own, she nearly smiled. He felt his eyebrows rise. “You’ve got lipstick on your mouth,” she said.

He nodded. Leaning against the doorframe, he wiped at his lips, then licked them, then wiped once more. “Sash,” he said. “I drank from her glass. She wore lipstick for two today.”

Rosalie waited, then looked back into her drawer.

“You shouldn’t do this,” he said.

“Nope.”

“Then don’t.”

“I shouldn’t want to do this,” Rosalie said. “I shouldn’t feel so bad. Nobody should.”

“Then don’t feel bad.”

“Stephen, we don’t need to be as old as we are to talk like this. We could hire a couple of kids. We could get the girls to do it. God knows they hear it enough.” After studying her underthings, she plunged both hands into the bureau drawer and drew out what looked like random handsful, then wheeled and went to the suitcases, and tossed some into each. She stood at the suitcases which lay on their bed and, with her back still toward him, she asked, “Why aren’t you at work?”

“You really want to know?”

She went back to the bureau and began to examine pantyhose. She didn’t answer him.

He said, “Because I’m scared to be. At first I stayed here to fight. But then I heard you singing that goddamned hymn. I thought: she’s leaving.”

“You’re right.”

“And I was too frightened.”

He watched her shoulders slump. She pulled at the towel, settling it into the robe, around her neck.

“I’d have expected ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’” he said.

“What was I singing?”

“You didn’t know?”

She shook her head, she held up hosiery and shook her head again.

He said, “‘Jesus Loves Me.’”

“I was? Really. I haven’t sung that since I was a little girl. It’s the song that good little girls like. They’re so good, Jesus has to love them.”

“Is this for real, Rosie? With taking the kids, everything? The girls go away, and you go away, and I’m supposed to live here alone?”

“No,” she said. “After a while, the girls and I come back, and you’ve moved out. You’re living in an apartment someplace. The girls and I live here. I don’t know. Life goes on.”

“This is really for real, then.”

She slowly nodded.

“No,” he said. “Rosie, we love each other. That’s why we get so mad.”

“So? You think love makes you feel better? Who said love makes you feel better? With you and me — and this is thirteen years into the mission, now, long enough for us to be out on the edge of the solar system if we’re a rocket ship—”