“Perry?” she called. “Becky?”
Climbing the stairs, she called their names again. Maybe the boys had gone out sledding? Their bedroom was dark, the door ajar. She turned on a light in her and Russ’s room. On the foot of the bed was a note in Perry’s artistic hand.
Dear Mom,
Dad is stuck in the city, so I’m taking Jay to the Haefles. Becky waited for you. I told her to go to the concert.
Perry
Now came, without warning, the tears she hadn’t shed in her confession. Whatever Russ might mean or not mean to her, however poorly he and Perry got along, he would always be the person Perry called Dad—would forever be his father. And how unjust she’d been to Becky, imagining that she wouldn’t come to the open house. How poignant Perry’s striving to behave like an adult, how generous his mentioning that his sister had waited; how dear and real her children were, how lucky she was to have them; what a difference there was between proclaiming her badness to the dumpling, the abstract fact of it, and experiencing it in relation to her children. She’d let them down. Becky had obediently waited for her, and Perry had made the best decision he could.
Clumsy, her eyesight teary, she tore off her exercise clothes and rubbed her hair with a towel. She truly was a bad person, because along with love and remorse, no less strongly, she was feeling self-pity for having been wrenched from the vividness of memory and fantasy; resentment for the interruption of her disturbance. Also hatred of the sack of a dress in which she was now obliged to encase the sausage of her body. In the bathroom, after brushing her hair, she forced herself to step onto the corroded old scale by the toilet, to establish a new baseline. Counting clothes, she weighed one hundred and forty-four pounds. It was almost enough to make a person cry again. When she went back to the kitchen for her cigarettes, wearing her good winter coat and her good fur-trimmed boots, the sugar cookies had regained their allure.
Eating cookies is an interesting response to feeling overweight.
“Really?” she said aloud, to the dumpling in her head. “Is that really so goddamned fucking hard to understand? Have you never in your life felt sorry for yourself?”
After a fortifying smoke on the front porch, she set out for the Haefles’。 The snow was still coming down heavily, but the air’s flavor had turned Canadian as the cold front gained the upper hand. Her only consolation for having let her children down was that Russ was letting them down even worse. Whom she felt more like murdering, him or the slender widow with whom he was stuck in the city, was a toss-up.
Leaving the Haefles’ house as she approached it were two priests in identical sable-collared overcoats. Her fear of priests outside a church, which dated from her Catholic years, was related to an atavistic fear of all things monstrous, even the ostensibly laudable monstrosity of being half human and half divinely anointed: of being celibate. She lurked on the sidewalk until the priests had climbed into a Country Squire station wagon. That it looked brand-new was itself vaguely monstrous.
She knew the Haefles well enough to let herself inside without knocking. Smelling meatballs, blessedly also cigarette smoke, she took her Luckies from her coat before she hung it in the closet by the basement stairs. From the basement came the sound of Hollywood violins and then a familiar little voice, Judson’s.
Downstairs, in the rec room, she found him on a sofa between two girls in whose faces the unfortunate lineaments of Doris Haefle were discernible. They were watching Miracle on 34th Street on a portable Zenith. On the screen, Kris Kringle was seated on the bed of a little-girl character whose mother, as Marion recalled, saw nothing wrong with leaving her alone with strange men and their penises. As the camera framed Santa’s face, her chest tightened. Not her favorite movie. She went behind the TV to avoid it.
“Hi, Mom,” Judson said.
“Hello, dear. I’m sorry I’m so late. Did you have some dinner?”
“Yes, but now we’re watching this movie.”
“I’m Judson’s mother,” Marion explained to the girls.
They mumbled hellos. Judson was slouched low on the sofa, the girls inclining toward each other, their bodies touching his. Although he was a happy child in general, Marion was struck by the heavy-lidded dreaminess of his expression. He seemed to be enjoying more than just the movie. He looked like a cat transported by petting. She had the uneasy sense that she was interrupting something.
“Well, I’ll leave you to your movie,” she said. “Perry is upstairs?”
Judson’s gaze stayed on the screen. “Presumably,” he said.