make an honest stab at passing this exam. This is when I think of Freddie.
She’s never spent a night alone, not even on a sleepover with friends. I hated to keep her from childhood rituals, but I worried. I worried Freddie would have a meltdown. I worried she would wake up in the dark hours unable to orient herself, wondering why the books on another shelf didn’t match her own. I worried she might cry out, and one of the other girls would taunt her about it in school the next day.
Would I have chosen differently ten years ago?
I nearly did. In the end, though, I faked Freddie’s test results, choosing a number high enough to make Malcolm happy and low enough to hedge my bets.
It may have even been a true number. Freddie’s problems, to the extent she has any, are exactly what Dr. Nguyen diagnosed. Nervousness, stress, anxiety. All manageable. Of course I made the right choice.
I’m not sure I made the right choices in the years after that, coddling Freddie and keeping her sheltered, prepping her for each test until I was satisfied she wouldn’t end up too far below the false quotient I created before she was born. Now I worry I screwed it all up, laid patchy groundwork for a situation no one could see coming. My protectiveness backfired, leaving my girl unprotected.
I scribble more nonsense on a blank page of my blue book, put my pen down, and raise my hand.
I’m done being Malcolm Fairchild’s brilliant wife.
THIRTY
THEN:
I was getting funky with Malcolm after giving Anne her night bottle and tucking her into the bassinet on my side of the room, just in case she got the midnight munchies. The same old song played in my head. If he pushed one way, I’d sing along with his rhythm; if he ran his mouth over my body, I’d match the music to the lapping waves of his tongue. Mostly, I’d stay there with him, but a part of me often slid from underneath his body, stepped onto the carpet next to our bed, and danced a little jig.
Do you love me? I sang inside myself. You know, now that I can dance, and all that other shit?
I wasn’t a very good dancer, which didn’t matter at all, because Malcolm was only ever interested in one thing. Not my tits or my ass or how well I went down on him, either.
I used to try fluffy little baby doll negligees, satin merry widows, even webbed body stockings that gave me that rather interestingly sadistic Spider-Woman look. Malcolm shook his head at all of them.
“Take that off, El,” he’d said the time I came to bed in a red teddy so sheer you could see my organs through it. “It demeans you.” What he meant when he said this was that he wasn’t interested in my body, and I thought that was hilarious and not hilarious at the same time.
So there we were, back when sex still happened, pumping and bumping in the night under ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets he said were the Absolute Best, which was key, because Malcolm was all about the Absolute Best. Well, one of us was there. I was somewhere far, far away. In a nicer place, thinking about a man who once kissed me and said I was beautiful. I was thinking about messy sex, rock-and-roll sex, crazy crazy I can’t get enough of you sex in the back of a Ford Mustang.
I always stopped at that point because I wanted to hang out there in the car, not in my subway-tiled bathroom in Connecticut, not in the library where I finally wrote Joe my last letter, and definitely not in the sterile clinic where I took care of things so I could have a better life. If I didn’t stop, the nicer place I traveled to turned gloomy.
Malcolm’s body hovered over mine, shuddered, and went still, the weight of him pressing down on me and trapping me.
“God, I love you, El,” he said, and I asked him the question, asked him what he loved about me. It came out as a joke, a spur-of-the-moment pop question: “Do you love me