Lauren Grodstein - The Explanation for Everything

Andy looked at Sheila, curious. Her conversation was usually cheerful and practical; she wanted to know if she could pick up the girls, if he needed anything at the Pathmark. If he could replace the lightbulb she couldn’t quite reach.

“I feel like that all the time,” he said.

“You do?”

“I felt like that even before Lou died—but then it was mostly my biology background getting in the way of basic human happiness.”

She smiled at him through closed eyes. He could tell that she liked it when he talked about biology. “Because you’d had your kids.”

“Right,” he said. “We’d had our kids, and I knew it would be my job to help feed and look out for them for a while, but the truth is, genetically, once I had my girls there wasn’t much use for me anymore. I’d done my part. And also my back started hurting around my thirty-third birthday, and I remember thinking, well, this is it. The beginning of the end.”

“Because your back hurt?” Sheila laughed. “Honestly, Andy, you’re worse than I am.”

The smoke plumed around them. His clothes would stink and Rachel would give him grief about it unless he did the laundry tonight. What time was it? The moon glowed overhead, enormous.

“I was never depressed until John,” she said. “Never. Not a day.” John was Sheila’s ex-husband, who’d had an affair with her best friend when Jeremy was a toddler. John and the best friend now lived on the other side of town, which was only a few blocks away, really. Sheila was civil to them whenever she saw them, which was another thing Andy admired about her. Sheila was civil, and when she spoke about what happened, she was generally neither vindictive nor pathetic. “But of course when John left, that was when it became clear I had to keep living. Just when I didn’t want to anymore.”

“Same with me and Lou.”

“I know,” she said.

After John left, Sheila started drinking, which she did with increasing fervor and recklessness until her mother threatened to call social services to take Jeremy away. Sheila, chastened, went to rehab, while Jeremy went to Disney World with his grandmother, and now most mornings, after she dropped him off at school but before she went to her job as a dental hygienist, Sheila attended the AA meeting in the rec room at Our Lady of Lourdes. She had invited Andy to attend the meetings for his research a few times, but he had never gone. He didn’t do that kind of sociological work, for one thing, and for another he couldn’t abide setting foot in a room full of drunks. Or in a church.

“Look at that,” she said, gesturing to his lawn. Tiptoeing close to them, suddenly visible under the porch lights, a pale yellow kitten. “That thing’s hardly older than a few weeks.”

Behind it, another kitten, then another, and then a larger cat, a feral tabby.

“You think they want food?”

“They were probably planning to attack my garbage.”

“Poor babies,” she said. She stood, and he did too, stubbing out the cigar in the ashtray he kept on the small side table. Sheila was standing closer to him than she usually did, and he could smell the smoke in her hair, and the faint remains of the tarragon and parsley she’d used in the stew.

A rustle behind them, and a fast, surprising breeze.

“What the—”

When they looked again, the cats had disappeared. That old shiver went through Andy. There were predators all around. Without meaning to, exactly—or without thinking too hard about it—he touched Sheila’s face. Her skin was soft and slightly slick, a comfort. She leaned upward. As he kissed her, a mosquito buzzed near his ear. She smacked it for him, and they laughed, which made it easier to kiss again.

In ten minutes, they were in his bedroom. “Is this okay?” he whispered. He was taking off her clothes as he asked. Her underwear was exactly what he would have expected: sturdy and beige. Silvery stretch marks glinted in the dim light. He kissed her neck. The meal, the tobacco buzz, the heat, the moonlight, Sheila’s peppery skin—he kissed her neck harder, then down to her collarbone. He licked the space between her clavicles. Should he be doing this? With anyone? With Sheila? She was one of his few real friends, even though he wasn’t such a good friend to her, or as good as he should have been. He buried his mouth in the side of her neck.

“It’s so okay,” she said, leaning her head back.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course,” she said. “Are you?”

He murmured nothing specific. He worried that he didn’t have any condoms, but she didn’t ask about them. Funny, he thought, that he had never before had sex with a woman in her forties.

Once they got started, moving quietly, easily, Andy kept thinking that all this was inevitable, and that he should have known it was inevitable: this house, this heat, Lou’s death, Sheila above him, her body larger than he would have guessed, and pale like the moon. Her breasts were small and loose; he put one in his mouth and she moaned. It felt rehearsed, but pleasant. A song whose words they’d forgotten but whose tune they could still hum.

“Well,” he said when they were done. She had allowed herself a few minutes in his arms on the sweaty blue sheets.

“Well,” she said. Now she was tugging on her jeans, and suddenly he felt overwhelmed with panic—what if, having done this, they would no longer be friends? Andy didn’t want close friends but he didn’t want to be friendless, either.

“Was that okay?” he asked.

“It was better than okay,” she said. “It was really great. It had been a while.” She leaned over and kissed him. He was sitting up on the bed, the sheets arranged around him for modesty. He was still wearing the T-shirt he’d worn all day. “I better get home, though,” she said.

“Okay.”

She fastened her bra. “Were you wondering when we would finally get around to that?” she asked.

“I guess so,” he said.

“I was,” she said. Through the darkness, she looked at herself in his mirror, clipped her bangs back up off her forehead. Why did she bother? “It was really nice,” she said, then sat down on the bed next to him. “Do you think we…”

He waited for her to finish, but she didn’t. “Do you think we what?”

“Do you think we’ll see more of each other now?” she asked, after another second in the dark.

“Well,” Andy said, “the semester’s starting…”

Sheila paused. “Right, but—”

“But of course we’ll see each other. Don’t we always?”

“I guess so,” she said. She touched his knee, then stood. “We always do.” She walked to the door.

“Wait,” he said, then kissed her briefly on the cheek, one last time. “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she said. That felt like the right place to leave it, as though she was the one who had done him a favor.

She let herself out, and he waited to hear the door close. On the floor, he saw her walkie-talkie. It must have slipped out of her jeans when he pulled them off. He could chase after her, return it, or wait until the morning, or—or if he never gave it back, maybe that would mean she’d never come over at nighttime again. He could cut the line right there. Return things to their uncomplicated past.

Andy stood, pulled on his pants, collected his laundry. On his way out the door, he looked at his denuded bed, and smelled the repellent fumes of cigars and sweat. How had this happened? Why tonight of all nights had he let down his guard? The full moon, he supposed. The lobsters. The fact that he couldn’t think of a good reason not to anymore.

Andy turned on the hall light. Lou’s ghost stood in the doorway of the kitchen, where she usually stood. Passing through the kitchen toward the basement laundry room, not acknowledging Lou or her silence, he placed Sheila’s walkie-talkie gently in the trash, then went down the stairs to start the spin cycle. The stairs, wooden planks as old as the house, creaked as he walked. The whole cement basement was lit like a haunted house by a single lightbulb. Over the ancient Whirlpool a small spider moved across a filigreed web. He poured the detergent, started the water. That old pain in his back. The spider stopped moving, then plunged, by a single thread, behind the washing machine and out of sight.