Salada says that happiness is a way station between too little and too much, and this thought can bring us to the fateful night of the orgy. But still we need details before we get right into it. Maggie always laughs when I say the truth is in the details, but I got that one from Salada, too, and they haven’t been wrong yet. So, some details.

How did we set it up? Simple. Jack was away, of course, and Chuck didn’t care—he wanted to believe Maggie when she told him she was going to spend the night at my house because she had to get away from the kids for a while, and he even baby-sat all four kids for us. See how simple? And then Maggie knew a few people from Juilliard and they didn’t care about the missing husbands—a party is a party, and we promised to feed them. And that’s how the Michelob got into my refrigerator. It wasn’t any big deal, really, just a few guys she studied with, one girl who played bass and one who wrote music, and the heat of that Indian-summer evening, which really helped us to pretend that we were some place else.

We drove over to the A&P as soon as we left the kids with Chuck. The sun was setting right into the windshield, a tearjerking blaze of white light—the kind of flaming light that must have given Adam and Eve pause when they turned for one last look at the fire-barred gates of Eden. We were still euphemistically calling it a party, not an orgy, and although we really needed only wine and beer and a few things to eat that would make you thirsty, we had planned to stay at the market until the sun burned down past the giant picture windows at the checkout counter and quietly sank before we came home, so we could unload the groceries in the dark.

At the liquor store, the clerk stared at Maggie shining in a puddle of Chablis light in the glass doorway, bit off a fingernail, and insisted I buy the wine because she wasn’t, couldn’t be old enough. While they talked about whether 1968 was a good year for anything, I went over to the market, got a shopping cart, came back, and loaded it up with the wine. I was packing the bottles carefully in the back of the station wagon when Maggie backed through the glass doors of the liquor store waving with her free arm.

“Here’s another bottle—compliments. He’s gonna stop by later—we can always use an extra wangawanga, right? Let’s see—we still have an hour and a half to kill—let’s hit the market for a while.”

“Are you going to invite all the ladies at the checkout when we go in?” I asked, slamming the tailgate.

“Hey, calm down. Calm down! Don’t be so nervous—things are gonna go fine …”

“He could be an ax murderer, for all you know.” I opened a bottle of malt liquor and drank it down, right there in the golden parking lot. “Or he could know Jack, for all you know …”

“No problem, really! I used to go out with him. I knew I knew him from somewhere—we went to junior high school together. He’s still trying to get it together as an actor, so he’ll fit right in, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

I burped a warm bubble of beer. I love to burp. “Let’s do the market and get this show on the road,” I said, following her through the automatic rubber-hinged doors, over to the fruit.

“I hate fruit debris,” she said, and while I was picking among the tangerines, she wheeled smoothly past the cornucopia counters, spinning wire wheels around the corner, and I heard a crash, the tinkle of silvery laughter, and then the voice of Sherry, the prettiest neighbor. I wheeled over behind the pickles and relishes to listen.

“Why, hello, Mary Margaret!” I heard Sherry say. “And what brings you to our humble market? I thought you only shopped the health-food stores.”

“I’m slumming, forgive me,” Maggie said.

“And how’s your mom? Is she still as beautiful as ever?” Sherry asked.

“Last I looked, she was doing fine—excuse me, Sherry, but I’m in a bit of a hurry … see you around?”

“Oh, I’m sorry—but wait a sec, Mary Margaret … we miss you at the club—why don’t you stop by again one of these days. Frankly, nobody can cheat the way you do and never get caught. We’ve lost the championship now for three years running—have you heard?”

“Well, it all depends on what I’m doing this fall with my music. Listen, I’ll see you around, okay?”

When I caught up to Maggie, she was filling her cart with nuts. “Which do you like better: pistachios or cashews? What the hell, it’s an orgy,” she said, and threw both in. Then some peanuts.

“Shhhhh—Mary Margaret! I didn’t know you knew Sherry! I’ve only heard of her. I’ve never met her. And please don’t shout the word ‘orgy.’ “

“Are you kidding? Our mothers made their debuts together. I’ve always lived here, except in the last few years. We moved away when Daddy got promoted and Mother didn’t. But my little intrigue with Sherry goes back years—we went to the same schools, all the way through. How about popcorn? You can’t lose with all that hot air, right?”

And then, suddenly we were at the oils. “Crisco, Mazola—for the classy party of oil repute. Should we? Well, why not,” she said, and reached for a tall bottle of safflower oil. “We might as well be healthy about it, although if we’re really going to get down to it, honey is a hell of a lot tastier.”

Then she leaned over my shopping cart. “What have you got here so far? Ha! Well … well. Have you ever got a feelthy mind! This is incredible! Butter—of course. Grapes—cute. And look at this, will you—this is absolutely gynecological!” And she held up the Reddi Wip with the dispenser tip that they say is for shooting into the bottom parts of parfaits. The cheeses that I had picked out had no significance other than I liked the laughing cow face and I thought maybe I could do something with the little cardboard container afterward. I’d also bought two dozen candles, so my stretch marks would be less obvious in the darker atmosphere, and by the time the stuff was rolling on the conveyor belt past the watchful eyes of the computer read-out and a dark-haired clerk named Lolly, I was sure we’d be arrested for lewdness. After checking out most of the items without raising her head, the woman suddenly rang the bell on her cash register and held up the Reddi Wip, and I was sure that one went too far—I thought we were done for. But instead of Joyce Brothers, another clerk came running over, took the can for a price check, and then yelled out $1.35 from somewhere within the store. Then we were finished, and I quickly bagged our guilty groceries while Maggie paid, and we walked out with our equipment in two brown paper wrappers.

I put the candles everywhere and we set up the Passout game with cheese and beer on Aunt Ruth’s crazy quilt, which I had spread over the living-room carpet. I thought to kill two ghostly birds of guilt with one stone that way, and I was also afraid that any stains would be hard to get out of the gold rug, whereas they could never be seen at all in the dark colors of the quilt. And I was going to create my own crazy quilt, a live one out of real people, because she hadn’t cornered the market on crazy—there was still time for me.

Guilty? Of course, I felt guilty. There can be no sin without guilt. I knew I wanted to sin, to make myself feel so bad that I would then have something to fix up, rather than just let things get worse and worse and let Jack and Maggie and Chuck keep drifting in and out of my life whenever they wanted to. At least Jack might think about me a little more when he was on the road, once he found out about this. If he found out about this.

I had also learned how to drink away most of the debilitating guilt that can stop you before you start, and I could do it in a half hour or so, give or take a few minutes. And I suspected Maggie, who wouldn’t say if I asked, of fooling around with Jack, who would certainly never say. I didn’t want to risk sounding paranoid or, worse, give anybody the idea if they hadn’t thought of it before, but I can remember from high school that you can never trust a girlfriend if she happens to want your boyfriend. She’ll feel bad, maybe, but she’ll go ahead and take him anyway—it’s biology. And a part of me thought that Maggie might stay a little longer in the neighborhood if the orgy was interesting enough, and I was sick of teasing Chuck, or had it turned around and now he was teasing me? And the tension of preserving my saintly marriage virginity was getting to me, especially since I thought that this marriage was the reason I was frigid in the first place.

Reasons enough? Or you could just say I went and did it, without so much as a glance at the street mail, which was coming at me with Special Delivery intensity. When you’re suddenly going faster than you ever have before, you need every sign you can get, and you ignore them at your own risk. I noticed for the first time that afternoon that the Salada messages were shaped like little red stop signs. I ignored them. On my way home from the market, I noticed that every single light was red when I got to it, and I almost hit a squirrel. But sometimes you have to do something just to be bad, so you have new material to work with.

As it got nearer to eight o’clock, my resolve was softening as fast as the cheeses I was trying to unwrap and arrange on lettuce leaves.

“Let us begin. Brethren, we are gathered here together to join this man and this woman …”

“Why don’t we just cancel the whole thing and go and see a dirty movie, instead—then there won’t be any mess to clean up,” I said to Maggie, who was winding herself into a peach-colored sari in front of the quiet little fire I had carefully laid that afternoon.

“We can’t,” she said, around the pins in her mouth. “I don’t have any of their numbers—they live off campus and in lofts, on the edges of things, probably, and I’m sure they’ve already left, anyway. It’s nearly an hour’s drive from the city …

Here—can you help me with this?”

“This is really stupid!” I said, wiping the cheese off on the back of the sari.

“I thought it was right clever. You know: peachy-keen, loose, love means never having to say you’re sari; sari, Charlie …”

“The phone numbers—not getting the phone numbers! What if Jack called and said he would be home early? How could we keep them from coming, then?”

“Well, remember, they’re all musicians, first of all, and nothing canstop musicians from coming, heh, heh … and secondly, we’d simply sitaround and pretend to play chamber music until old Jack Frost fellasleep on us, and then we could still get down to the business at hand.”

“Jack Frost? Why Jack Frost? He’s more like Jack-be-nimble, Jack-be-quick, if you ask me. Which reminds me—what else can I stick candles in so they won’t drip all over the furniture?”

“Are you serious? He’s enough to make anybody frigid, believe me. Just stick them in little glasses. Do you have any brandy snifters? No? Really? Egg cups? How about if you put them into fruit halves—just slice an apple or an orange in half and put it in a saucer, then dig out a space in the top for the candle, and it’s soggy enough so there won’t be a fire if it gets knocked over in the heat of passion; then you’ve got a disposable in spite of yourself. You can throw the whole thing out with tomorrow’s mail. But you do it—I can’t stand pieces of fruit lying around. I’ll tell you one thing, though. Should this thing be pinned under my armpit or under my breast? Who cares? Right? Are you there?”

“I hate to dig out the pulp of stuff—it’s such a waste. Go on, go on …”

“I’ll tell you one thing, he sure ain’t Jack the Pumpkin Eater, is he?”

I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation, or even if we were both talking about the same thing. I looked very carefully for my next question, as if we were playing pick-up sticks. “Are you speaking from personal experience—about Jack, I mean?” I began, carefully clattering the extra ashtrays when she collapsed to her knees on the quilt in front of the fire.

“Shhhh—let’s be quiet now and cleanse our minds—we’re getting too silly. Let’s let this experience come and enter unobstructed …”

But unfortunately, the toilet was still obstructed with Toby’s last diaper before I hurried him down to Maggie’s, so I was in the bathroom with my hands and mind in the toilet when the party actually began. I heard Maggie laugh with the first group that blew in when she opened the door. “Pizza!” she said. “That’s really clever—do we eat it, or do we all get down and wallow in it?”

My partner in the Passout game was a shy pianist from Michigan who seemed amazed at my breasts, which he could get a glimpse of each time I reached for the dice. I had wanted to be more subtle, but since I’ve had very little practice at dressing like a loose woman, the halter I made didn’t fit properly and my whole breast, rather than just the cleavage, showed. So I found myself being whisked along by the racing subliminal messages I was sending out like a person behind a runaway St. Bernard. When the card said Drink, he gulped down several swallows from the Mateus bottle, and when the card said Kiss, he grabbed me by the arm and cut his tongue through my lips so that I swallowed more of his wine. The object of Passout is to see who can drink the most liquor the fastest and still stand up. The winner gets to clean up the messes made by the losers.

The first person to get sick was the girl who wrote music, probably because she was the most sensitive. Her partner, a tall blond, who was either also sick or just anemic, leaned sympathetically against the bathroom door waiting for her, helped her into her jacket, and then quietly closed the back door behind them both after steering her through it. They were dull, anyway. The bass player was the first person to take off her clothes, because she wanted her partner to stand behind her and pretend she was a bass fiddle herself and play on her while he sang. Her partner was the clerk from the liquor store, and because he had no musical talent, it was painful to watch him pretend.

So, the next time I went into the kitchen for more beer, I pulled Amanda’s kaleidoscope out from behind the tea canister and brought it into the living room just as the bass player was leaving. The clerk was now trying to play with Maggie’s toes, but she kept pushing him away with her knee while she and her partner tangled in the sari. I aimed the kaleidoscope at the four people left on the floor and spun them up into a compote of peach, silk, fuzz, and pepperoni, with candles spinning like flaming batons on the Fourth of July in Anytown. When I heard bells ringing, I saw the peach pieces crawl out of the mosaic, and while someone was unbuttoning my jeans, I heard Maggie say, “I’ll get that.” Then I heard her yell, “Nothing’s going on, Chucky baby! You’ve got a small, dirty little mind—you think I’m going to become a homo just so I can wait around for you—well, forget it, sucker!” She hung the phone up with a sharp twist of her wrist, and the pages in the angel’s hand fluttered.

Then I was kissing someone again and I was only able to watch Maggie out of one eye while she came back in, pulling at the pins under her arms, and the silk threaded off in a long trail on the floor while four arms and four legs reached up, swaying, to pull her down, and began to wrap around her. The kaleidoscope was somewhere under somebody now, lost in the maze, and I squinted and everything was gone but the center of the scene, and there I saw an opening like the brown rubber lid on the Lepage’s Mucilage, winking, oozing, winking. The person from Michigan held up a card from the game that said Kiss your partner like you really mean it, and I was aware only that he held his lips on mine past the delicate point when it’s no longer a kiss but something else—a rest, maybe. We had rolled so close to the fire that my clothes smelled as if someone were ironing, and I kept my eyes closed in case, against all odds, Aunt Ruth had brought her ironing board in and was actually trying to work during this party.

The person from Michigan and I made it through the game until past two o’clock, and I remember excusing myself while Maggie and one of her partners continued to throw the dice and kiss, throw the dice and drink, throw the dice and I went back to the bathroom—it’s a game of stamina, of testing your mettle—you’re on your honor not to give up and I could hear them endlessly throwing the dice and laughing, and throwing the dice, and I dropped onto Debbie’s bed; they threw the dice and he was in the bed on top of me and I could smell that he had thrown up, too, and I heard the dice rattle and I tried to pass out but couldn’t.

And then we were silent in the darkened, room, while the music from the party moved in intricate patterns all around the edges of the bed. I closed my eyes hard and I could see a purple design in the dark, feel a cold silken smoothness sliding between my legs, cold, smooth, and I could taste the dark wine he breathed into the air. That was all.

When he was gone I opened my eyes to see the damage, and I saw I was covered with moonlight on the bed. It was streaming in through Debbie’s window, through her eyelet canopy, a shower of light coming down on me in tiny droplets. I pulled my arm up from the shadows and it was webbed with luminescent lace, and my stretch marks made a silver hammock of my soft belly. When the wind blew the tree branches outside, the patterns in the room shifted so that gray pearls of light were flung against the ceiling. They embroidered the walls, the bureau, and fizzed like champagne bubbles across the mirror and through the windows until they hardened into pointed stars outside in the night sky. I thought they must be coming from me when I took a breath because I felt as if I were floating under water … the whole bed was floating. Drop by drop by drop the little bubbles rose when I breathed, freezing like crystal beads on the dark web of intrigue I had hung from the corners of the room. Drop by drop by drop, and I fell deeper until the weeping-willow branches were floating above me in the cool watery darkness outside like thick seaweed. I was alone, a dark creature floating in the center of lights like a black widow on a web of dew.

I woke. Over at the lace curtains on the window I clearly saw my pearl necklace flashing there, miraculously all back together again, and then I felt Aunt Ruth putting it on my neck again, and suddenly she ripped them apart and threw them at me again and I was sleeping in my bed in her house again with my bureau pushed against the door to keep her out. But she came in through the window, her dark eyes flashing like burning coals, and she played with the broken beads as if they were marbles, or dice. She rattled them in her fist and threw them against the wall, and they were snake eyes, and she wasn’t afraid of them. She arranged them in a pretty design on the floor and grew a tree of life that dripped spangles and sequins. She put some in her pocket for the quilt and tied a piece of the broken string around my finger so I would never forget. She was writhing, dying in an orgy of pain, and I would never forget, never, never, when her fingernail tore through my palm as I held her hand.

I looked down at my hand. I wouldn’t forget. But there was only my wedding ring and the grinning gargoyle scar on it. There was no string. Was I dreaming? To try and remember? The beads were still flashing in the lace at the window, and I was afraid to get out of the bed, afraid they were all over the floor … the beads glowing like snake eyes, a mummy’s eyeball in the dark, and I knew that if I lifted my head from the pillow, one would shine at me from the corner like a cat’s eye in a car’s headlight. I fell asleep again, I think, seeing the beads in my old tiger trash can, in my saddle shoes, under the bed, and still flashing, flashing, at the dark window, glittering lights in my dark tea, in her black coffee.

Suddenly a sword of light slashed the room in two, and then a white frame appeared on the wall as someone slowly opened the door. She pushed her head into the room and the brittle voices of the strangers from the party blew in, scattering the dreamy white pearls and gray bubbles.

“Are you all right in there, Linda?” she whispered into my black void.

My voice moved thickly through the dark air to answer the light at the door. But it was too weak to break through the surface tension that surrounded the brightness, separating the dark from the light.

“Can you come out? I’ve got a big problem,” she whispered. It was Maggie. It was always Maggie.

She closed the door, pulling the swirling darkness after her like water down a drain, and the room was full of black dreams again. I waited in the darkness, gathering strength, and then I moved from the bed.

I turned the clown’s nose on the light switch, and Debbie’s room appeared again, the room of my pastel gingham daytime dreams. There was a Winnie the Pooh bag holding her sneakers, and Holly Hobbie on the sheets, Barbie and Ken in their A-frame ski lodge, and my pile of clothes on the floor. As I bent to find my underwear, I felt a slivery wetness slither down my leg and I realized that yes, it had all really happened. Under water. There were lots of dead fireflies on the floor beside my halter top, under Debbie’s eyelet curtain. I sat at her dressing table and looked in the Snow White mirror at the dark circles under my eyes and at the whiteness of my cheeks, and I couldn’t decide if I looked like the Wicked Witch yet, although I certainly wasn’t Snow White any more. I brushed my hair with her brush, which was shaped like Cinderella’s slipper, and some peanut shells fell out, crinkling onto her jewelry box, and I wondered if she believed in all these fairy tales as much as I still do. On the wall, Gretel followed Hansel into a little chalet, where the time, 4:35, was surrounded by painted bluebirds. Before I left the room I smoothed out the quilt I had made for her before I really knew what I wanted her to know about me, and now there was a pale-yellow stain from the person from Michigan across two of the plaid babushka squares. I turned out the light and went to find Maggie.

The living room looked like a war zone—empty of people now, but full of their debris. It was a Pompeiian scene of petrified despair crawling toward the doorway at me. It seemed that a stone had been thrown into the calm surface of my life, and now everything yellow I used to think about when I stood in this room was swirling around the stone and disappearing.

I went outside to look for Maggie. But first I sat down on my front lawn to try to let my head clear. The tree branches were flung like black threads against the gray sky, all knotted together. Maybe nothing was making any sense any more, because I was looking at the whole thing from the wrong side—maybe the knotted branches are really fine embroidered net, seen from the clouds, beautiful if you look down at it, scrambled if you look up. Or maybe the pattern in things is in the spaces between, not the branches themselves. In what is not said in the night, rather than what is said. Or maybe the pattern only shows up when the wind blows, and the real pattern is the movement, the dance … or maybe there is no pattern at all. I was completely on my own—nothing could help. I got up to go find Maggie.

She was standing out back in my driveway, next to her car, which must have just fallen out of the tree it stood under, it was so smashed up. The fender was crumpled back on itself, as painful-looking as a bent-back fingernail, and a long savage splinter zigzagged through the wooden frame from the fender. Maggie was leaning against it crying, while the moonlight glittered off the silver maze that a rock had made of the windshield.

Now the retribution from the sin starts, I thought, but Maggie was crying with anger, not remorse. “Goddamn sonofabitchin creep … bastard! He can’t let me have anything … he has to ruin everything … he fucks his brains out with the nurses, but not me, never me, and I go out for one night and have a few laughs, get a little high, and he wrecks the one thing that’s really mine in the world … I can’t have anything around him … he hates me! He hates me!” She was shaking the little car with her hard sobs and I don’t think she was talking to me, but she kept on talking, crying, “He says I emasculate him … he’s forcing me to leave …” when suddenly she stopped. “Oh, my God,” she screamed, and then she was running down the street even before I could try to stop her, which I wouldn’t have necessarily done, because I was hoping her crying would lead her away from Chuck and Open Marriage, and in her hysteria maybe she’d tell if she’d slept with Jack, and then I’d be off the hook—I wouldn’t have to feel so bad about tonight. But she was gone, running, screaming, “If he hurts it, I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him!” And I thought for a moment that she might be worried about Amanda, but then I remembered the piano and realized that I would have to go down there myself now and gather up Debbie and Toby before all hell broke loose.

That’s the one big problem with being a mother. Even with semen from a man who is not your husband dripping down your leg and a raging headache that makes you feel as if you could tear up the lawn in fistfuls with your bare hands, you still have to go and get the kids. And they will still be so sweet-smelling and innocent, totally protected from you and your messy life, as they sleep on your shoulder.

It was now starting to get light, bringing the day that would bring Jack back, as I walked past the darkened houses that separated my house from Maggie’s.

I listened for raised voices. This much commotion surely couldn’t go unnoticed, but there was nothing. Maybe this really is a Potemkin village and the reason nothing makes sense to me is that I’m on the wrong side of the flats. The houses slept on as I walked past, all was safe behind the little beady Automatic Failproof Burglar Alarm Protection buzzers and dots of light. Maggie’s house was still completely dark and I got in through the back porch, past the giant sleeping mattress pad with Maggie’s gray cat sleeping on top, and found the kids in their Superhero bags in the game room, safe and unaware of the night. Toby was cold, curled up tightly, like a bug when you touch it. His cheek under his sucker blanket was as warm as a fresh miniature waffle, all woven with the thermal pattern, and his pajama tops were unsnapped, showing a pink ribbon of skin. Little boys in spacesuits were rocketing across his chest to a little yellow moon, and over his diaper a cowboy with fringes flying was roping a calf. I picked him up and tapped Debbie to wake her. She was frowning and curling in on herself on the couch, her nightgown wrapped tightly around her long legs. Roses were strewn all over her delicate back. I leaned over and shook her, and I could smell her breath. She was in foreign countries again. I woke her and quietly left the house, with Chuck and Maggie somewhere deep inside, their voices picking at each other like twigs crackling in an unseen fire. Only Harvey Wallbanger’s yellow almond eyes watched us as we went out, and down the dark and silent neighborhood street. 🏠

☜* previous Chapter Ten 🏠

next *☞ Chapter Twelve 🏠