Part 3

Happiness Sold Separately
by Lolly Winston

(Page 3 of 5)

Gina gets to work chopping vegetables. As she tosses them into a wok, a huge cloud of steam billows toward the ceiling. She speaks as she cooks, nodding her head with determination, then shaking it with uncertainty, then wiping her cheeks and nose with the sleeves of her robe. An argument? Ted looks glum. Elinor can tell by his posture. Shoulders curling toward his chest. He doesn't love you, Gina! Elinor tells the poplars. Surely they are about to break up.

But then Ted gets up from the table and ambles up behind Gina. He pulls her away from the stove, his arms circling her waist, his hands sliding up under the V of her robe and across her breasts. Gina closes her eyes and tips her head back against his chest. Ted kisses her neck, kisses her shoulders, and the robe falls away. Then they fall away, onto the kitchen floor, where Elinor can't see them anymore. Making love on the kitchen floor while the wok blows steam at the ceiling. The special effects affairs are made of.

Elinor covers her face with her hands and falls to her knees. The mud beneath the grass seeps through her jeans with a disturbing sucking noise. She wants to go back, to erase the past two years. It seems that the spam filter for their life has broken, and all kinds of junk is pouring through: painful medical procedures, negative test results, sleepless nights, and now this bimbo in leotards.

The next day, Elinor finds a book tucked under layers of undershirts in Ted's drawer while putting away the laundry. Live Healthy in the Zone. Inside the paperback, there's a date and an inscription: Dear Ted, Congratulations on reaching your goal! I knew you could do it. Here's a reminder of some of your favorite dishes. Love, Gina.

Elinor flips through the pages, which are smudged with ingredients. Corners are turned over and hearts are drawn beside some recipes. The hearts seem to be a grading system, like stars for rating movies. "Soybean Croquettes" gets only one heart, while "Rainbow Vegetable Saut?" is worthy of three. "Creamed Tomato Soup with Cognac" gets four and a half.

The night she finds the cookbook, Elinor fixes Lean Cuisines for dinner. Rushed and tired, she and Ted often resort to frozen foods, grilled cheese, or scrambled eggs.

"These things are mostly carbs," Ted says, poking his fork at the too-bright green beans. He pushes away the dinner. "I'm trying to cut carbs. Stick to complex carbs, anyway."

"Oh? Since when?" Elinor asks. Why don't you cook us a Zone dinner! she wants to holler. "Since when?" she repeats. The anger hisses and clanks, like the radiators in an old house when you turn on the heat on the first cool day in the fall. A slight burning smell. The house trembling and creaking all over.

Ted shrugs at his little black tray of pasta and beans. "Dunno." "I think you know." The inscription in the cookbook was dated June 1. He and Gina have been having their low-carb trysts for at least two months.

Ted cocks his head and frowns.

"I know..." She wants to say I know about Gina. I know about the affair, but suddenly she has the uncontrollable urge to flip the table over on Ted. She presses her palms against her thighs to stop her legs from shaking; she pictures herself becoming less and less attractive in Ted's eyes as she rants and raves and threatens and forbids. She cannot find the means to confront her husband with the firmness, grace, and composure she had hoped for.

Finally, she gets up from the table, carries her unfinished dinner to the sink, and stuffs it down the disposal. "Sometimes," she says, unable to look at her husband, "I find complex carbohydrates a little too complex."

Elinor awakens the next morning to the shrill whine of a table saw. It's Saturday, but Ted is up already, out in the garage working on the cherry hutch he's building from a kit. Save for the hours he's fled to the gym, he's been holed up in the garage working on this project for weeks. They do not need a cherry hutch. But the buzz of the power tools and the pages of detailed directions seem to soothe his nerves. "Perhaps this makes Ted feel as though he's able to fix something," Dr. Brewster gently suggested during their last session. Elinor kvetched about Ted only caring about the hutch. She knew this was an odd complaint, since all she seemed to care about was the laundry. But when Ted quit trying to make Elinor feel better and retreated to the hutch and the gym, she began to miss him-to realize that she'd been taking him for granted. She wondered what kind of madness would make her irritated by her husband when he was attentive, and then resentful when he stepped back to give her room.

Now she lies in bed, clammy from a restless night's sleep. Her reading glasses and her heavy copy of The Iliad are tangled in the covers. She fell asleep reading again. While she found The Iliad impenetrably boring in college, now she likes escaping into the bloody tragic mess. She's rooting for handsome Hector, who's stuck in a war simply because his cocky brother fell for a beautiful girl who wasn't his.

Elinor composes a Saturday-morning to-do list in her head. Get rid of husband's lover. She will deal with Gina herself. Forget the counselor, forget confronting Ted. She'll go straight to the source of the problem. This is what she does at work. Call in the perpetrator and lay the cards on the table. She doesn't want this Gina problem to be overly complicated, to be dramatic. She's had enough drama in the past two years. She rehearses what she might say to the girl: I know you're sleeping with my husband. Please stop. He and I have had our troubles but we're going be fine... No-Elinor certainly doesn't owe Gina any explanation of her marriage.

She gets up, brushes her teeth, then sits on the edge of the bed, squeezing the cordless phone. Finally, she dials information and is connected to the gym. A woman's voice breaks into the Muzak on the line. Elinor asks to make an appointment for a fitness consultation with Gina. The woman cheerfully announces that Gina has a cancellation in an hour, which is really lucky, because Gina's very popular.

"Oh, I know." Elinor has the urge to smoke, something she hasn't done since college. "Sign me up!" She tries to sound cheerful. She looks anxiously into her closet. What should she wear for this encounter? She's never mastered the breezy casualness of gym attire. Most women in her suburban town dash from their workouts to the grocery store in stylish velour sweats with matching hooded tops, somehow looking trim without ever seeming to perspire. But Elinor always feels dumpy.

She showers and chooses jeans, a white V-neck sweater that shows off her tan from working in the yard, and red high-tops, which she hopes convey that she has the self-confidence not to care about trends. She wore Converse high-tops all through high school. Petite and funny, Elinor was voted "cutest" in her yearbook, a title she secretly loathed. She didn't want to be cute. She wanted to be beautiful. But her blond hair, upturned nose, little Chiclet teeth, and apple cheeks would never be deemed movie-star sexy. In the 1980s, she tried to shed any hint of cuteness by spiking her hair and donning rubber bracelets and torn sweatshirts. Now when she sees photos of herself during this era, she has to laugh. It looks like she's wearing a Halloween costume. By the time she entered the corporate world, she succumbed to slacks and flats and a tidy French braid.

Hurrying through the kitchen, Elinor spies Ted's bag of flaxseeds on the counter. He's been spooning out two level tablespoons every morning and sprinkling them on his fruit and plain yogurt. She slides the bag off the counter into her purse. Maybe she'll return it to Gina. You left your damn flax in my husband's car.

Elinor glances at her day planner as she picks up her keys. Twelve noon is circled with pink highlighter. In an hour she's due to have lunch with Phil, the CEO at her company, to discuss the details of a merger. Phil wants to outsource the employee relations part of the merger to an outside law firm, a blow to Elinor's impeccable track record of keeping everything in house, thereby saving the company money. But Phil has grown wary of Elinor's absences and missteps, which got worse as her infertility appointments wore on. Elinor's afraid she's about to be demoted or let go or God knows what. This luncheon is Step 1 of her Corporate Comeback. The venue for the I'm-your-man speech.

For what? Who cares? She's tired of always working nights and weekends because she doesn't have children. She grabs the phone and dials the CEO's admin, who's always strapped to her desk on weekends.

"Food poisoning," Elinor says. "He canceled his golf game to meet you," the admin admonishes. Being sick is never an excuse for missing meetings at Elinor's company. You're supposed to show up in a medicated haze and breathe germs on your colleagues.

"I'm vomiting." She wishes this were the case, rather than my husband's having an affair.

"Dry toast," the admin replies coolly. "Right." Elinor clutches her car keys, snaps her bag shut. The heft of it tugs at her shoulder as she heads out the door.

Copyright © 2006 by Lolly Winston

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