The Housewife(24)

“What about you? What do you do?”

I don’t know Erin well enough to tell her the truth, even though I find I’m dying to. I am on a quest to prove my husband killed my sister. Also, I hate him so much, some days all I want is to stab him in the throat.

But I don’t. Instead, I tell her that I do precisely nothing and it’s fine with me. “I’m very busy with the house,” I say. “And looking after my husband. It’s what I love doing, and he doesn’t mind that I don’t work.”

She laughs, but I think I detect a tiny edge to the laughter. Perhaps because she recently broke up with her fiancé.

“I’m sure he doesn’t mind,” she says. There it is. That edge again.

“What do you mean?”

She smiles. It’s tight. “If you spend all your time looking after him, he’s hardly going to complain.” She puts her coffee cup down. “Lucky him. You two must be very happy.”

I shrug. “It’s my life’s work, making my husband happy.”

“How wonderful for him. I’m sure he loves every minute of it.”

“Thank you. That’s sweet of you to say. And I certainly hope so.”

“After only a month, you two must be very much in the honeymoon phase.”

Is he still in the honeymoon phase? I wonder. When we were first dating, Roy couldn’t get enough of me. He’d pull me to his lap, touch my hair, kiss my face. “My beautiful porcelain doll.” We’d make love at every opportunity, in every room of his house. Now? Some days I feel him pull away, and I can’t help but wonder if I’m losing him.

So I bake more, and I cook more, and I put on extra-thick eyelashes and powder my face with Dior Luminous Light Deflecting Powder and spray La Verderie Orange Blossom Room Mist around the place and sit on his lap and play with his tie. I love you, I whisper in his ear. I love you more than the moon and the stars. He still smiles, but distractedly. I ask Amy and Nora and Abigail inside my head. Do you think he’s tiring of me? And they’ll say, Don’t be silly! All you need to do is try a little harder, that’s all. And if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! And they’ll laugh, and then Abigail will chime in, And if you still don’t succeed, then all options are on the table.

Erin is waiting for an answer.

“How did you know we’ve been married a month?”

A beat. “You told me yesterday.”

“Oh! Right. Yes. Honeymoon phase.”

She tilts her head. “So?”

I nod. “We’re very happy. We can’t keep our hands off each other, put it that way.” I laugh, flicking my hair over my shoulder. And then I grow serious. “Although…”

“What?” she asks eagerly.

I lean forward. “What would you think if your husband rambled on about his ex-wife?”

She recoils. “His ex-wife?”

“She killed herself. Or so he says. He talks about her all the time. I don’t think that’s fair, do you? It’s not like she’s the one folding his underwear. He kept her wedding dress, can you believe it? It’s in his closet.” I lean even closer. “Sometimes—” I was going to say Roy, and while I feel comfortable with Erin, partly because she’s a lovely person, and partly because she lives miles away from me, it occurs to me that Roy being a famous psychologist with best-selling books and the occasional appearance on the Sophia Sanchez show, Erin might know who I’m talking about. So I opt for pronouns only .

“Sometimes, when I’m not there, he takes out her dress and looks at it.” I’ve never told anyone this. I study her face. She looks shocked.

“How do you know?”

“I know this because he never puts it back exactly the same way. The first time I noticed the sheath was facing in the other direction. So I made a tiny mark on it, and sure enough, a few days later, it was positioned differently.”

She fingers the chain on her neck. Thin gold, with a moon-and-sun-shaped pendant. “So what does he do with it?”

“That’s an excellent question, and I don’t have the answer. Dance with it, maybe? Lie with it on the bed, the top of her dress in the crook of his arm?” I pick up my cup. “Anyway, apart from that, we are deliriously happy. What about you, Erin? Would you like to get married someday?”

A shadow crosses her face. “Maybe. We’ll see. When I meet the right man.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” I say. “To wait until you meet the right man.”

“What about your family?” she says, changing the subject. “Are you close?”

“God no!” I laugh. “They’re dead. Thank God.”

“I’m sorry?”

“My whole family is dead.”

“Oh my God. How awful, I’m so sorry.”

I wave her apology away. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. And trust me when I say they are not missed. My mother was the most horrible person ever to walk this earth. ”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

She waits, eyebrows raised, eager to hear the rest. It occurs to me that maybe I won’t need Amy and Nora and Abigail so much. Maybe I can have a real friend. A real, flesh-made one.

I lean forward. This time our foreheads are almost touching. “When I was six years old, I found a woman’s magazine in the kitchen trash can. I have no idea why my mother would possess such a thing since she hated anything remotely to do with caring for her home or her family. Maybe someone had given it to her. Anyway, I took it out and pored over it. Interestingly, it was the beginning of what would become my obsession with home interiors and homemaking. I cut out pictures of blue and white shutters and potted rosebushes and flower arrangements, and I hid them in my box under my bed so I could look at them whenever I wanted.”