see her only because she would be a mirror to reflect back to him his own glory as a father and a lawyer both. Any old or new acquaintance would have served.
And the other half?
Micajah didn’t care either. Which can have different meanings. One of which could be that, like her, he didn’t want to bring a husband into the space between them.
She tries to trace it back, to the first moment when she felt the beam of Micajah’s focus locking onto her. Before he brushed against her foot; before the talk of roses. When she caught him eying her dirty knees? No: out on the sidewalk when Robert whirled her round. It was she who sought his eyes, to stabilize herself. By the time she was standing on firm ground again, the connection was made.
Then, later, that shockingly intimate gaze. Could such a look have existed across the distance of a restaurant table? It was, she imagines now, how he would look at her if they were making love. It said, We are so joined, so complete, that the rest of the world does not exist. Meeting it was like riding a rodeo horse. When Micajah turned to his father and said something teasing, that was the eight-second buzzer. Whatever he said, whatever Robert replied, was white noise in her ears. That’s when she reached for her handbag, made an excuse about a just-remembered appointment, and left.
She has never seen that look in Larry’s eyes. He looked at her with love in their early years, a sparkle of pleasure at a quirk of speech or an idiosyncratic movement. But sex had always been basically a roll-on, roll-off deal. She’d thought that was how he wanted it. He’d glance at her quickly and look away, as if he was embarrassed or didn’t want to force her to look at him. Now she wonders if he didn’t dare to pause and pour his heart into hers, for fear she would close hers against him.
I might have, Eve realizes with a lurch. I was scared too.
It was the same fear that Larry felt: fear of being fully seen. She and Larry both wanted to be what the other wanted them to be; they hid their frailties, were ashamed of their faults. Maybe, she thinks, he thought that I loved an idea of him—a partial person, not the whole. He dreaded being seen—and so did I.
Now, after being held in the beam of Micajah’s steady gaze, she yearns for it. The very unlikeliness of his interest in her made pretense absurd.
Did she ever really, truly love Larry? Even yesterday, she would have answered yes, she did. Now, lying in bed, thinking about Micajah, the truth is that she doesn’t know.
I am being ridiculous, she tells herself, panicking. He touched my foot by accident. He probably looks at everyone that way. There’s no reason he would be interested in me.
Maybe he has a mother complex, she thinks. But that comes as a comfort, not a diagnosis—a possibility, not a problem. It wouldn’t be enough to make her say no.
And there she is, back again, like a compass needle dragged inescapably to the north.
The next day, Eve wakes with the spider on her face. It’s been there most mornings, for months now—a heavy darkness pressing on her brow, reaching sharp points into her eyes, her sinuses, cracking the corners of her mouth, making her head ache from the bones out.
Her breathing is shallow, though she’s so used to it that she hardly notices. Her stomach feels sour, as it usually does until she brushes her teeth. Her thighs are lead weights, and her feet are hot and uncomfortable. She sleeps with them outside the covers and often they’re cold, but there’s no way to warm them without the raging heat. Sometimes she fantasizes about chopping them off.
Many mornings, she rolls over and buries her face in the pillow, longing to drop back into unconsciousness. When that fails, she lies prone, one arm across her eyes, summoning the strength of will to greet the new day with optimism—what her mother used to call a good disposition. Eve dislikes people who feel sorry for themselves. She deals with her own burden of darkness by leaving it in her bed and, once upright, pretending firmly that it isn’t there.
Her heart thuds, too hard and too fast, as if it is trying to rev up the momentum to run away. It will calm down soon, as it always does; the thought of coffee helps. A latte, warm and bittersweet, soothes the jagged edges of her nerves. She will walk to the coffee shop and have somebody make one for her. She allows herself this luxury a couple of times a week, on days when she needs to feel cared for.
She resolves that today she will put all thoughts of Micajah from her mind. The name draws her back to that Shakertown and its naive, decorous purity. Since sex was forbidden, the sect grew only by conversion. No wonder it died out.
She hears Larry in the hallway, his door opening then shutting. They too sleep separately, but in resentful, repressed inequality rather than in equable, asexual peace. The bathroom Larry uses is not en suite; it also serves the room that Eve still thinks of as Allan’s. Though he keeps his bedroom door closed unless he’s actually walking through it, he leaves the bathroom door open. It’s a territorial power play that Eve accepts as a quid pro quo for his acceptance of the lower-status bedroom. She won’t go into the hallway until she hears his footsteps on the stairs.
The rasp of the blender drifts up from the kitchen. Larry is making his morning smoothie. Its ingredients are kept in a special drawer in the fridge into which nothing else is allowed, and which he has requested her not to open. Maybe he’s putting raw meat in it, she thinks, but the joke—if it is a joke—isn’t funny.
She’s hungry. Her stomach is clenching. Feeling treasonous for not wanting to see him or talk to him, she waits for the businesslike bang of the door. Then she will get up and revel in the empty house. He’s going to Arizona for work this week, and she’s looking forward to a few days of solitude.
Things are easier now that he has his own room. In the last years when they shared a bed, they would wake and turn away from each other if they weren’t turned away already. They would exchange cursory good mornings and she would ask, “What do you want for breakfast?” and dutifully she would have cereal, or eggs, or French toast, waiting for him when he came downstairs. The secret smoothies are a blessing too. Until she stopped doing it, she had no idea how much she resented starting her day by serving him.
She asked her son the same question, every day until he left home. She mulls it over as she lies in bed: how she has perpetuated the servitude by training the next generation to expect it. But isn’t that what a good mother does? When her mother said it to her, it was different: training by example, the flip side. She got breakfast for her father and her brother on the days when her mother lingered in bed.
Until the moment he left her, Eve’s mother served Eve’s father. She brought him a drink when he came home from work, she asked solicitously about his day, she never questioned that he did nothing to help with the cooking or the cleaning up, when she had had a far more stressful day with five children to care for than he could have had, in his well-appointed office with a well-appointed secretary. The details have changed, not the dynamics. The serving has become subtler: buying Christmas presents for Larry’s mother, praising him for taking any small share of the housework, making “Daddy time” the family priority. As the years tick by, Eve is starting to understand why in more brutal days old women were reviled, exiled, burned as witches: they’d stopped worshipping at the shrine. They could see that it was all just smoke and mirrors.
As Eve sits at the kitchen table, eating a slice of the apricot tart she made for dessert last night but didn’t serve, her phone pings. She gets few texts now that Allan is out of the country. Mostly they’re from Deborah. But this is too early for Deborah. She doesn’t open her store until noon so she can lie in bed late.
“Mornings are the best,” she said lasciviously once, enjoying Eve’s discomfort. “I get to spend time with my little friend. Actually, a really nice big friend! Poor Ted, he never measured up, but then what man does? No man around here, anyway. Once you go wired, you never get tired. You should try it, Eve. Stop being such a born-again virgin!” Deborah knows about