Someone cried out in the house and she was alarmed for a moment until she realized it was Hank and that he was shouting in reaction to something that had just happened in his game, a score no doubt. She spread her arms and spun around on the patio and then held the pose. She was a middle-sized woman, middle-sized everything: middle-sized height, five six, middle-sized weight, 135, middle-sized breasts, 34C, middle-sized looks, not beautiful but certainly nice-looking, certainly attractive; middle-sized ass . . . well, that she had to work at. She had to diet and exercise to keep her ass under control, otherwise it would mushroom into a monster ass, like her mom’s when Ronnie was twelve and used to sing in Lindsey’s ear, Mom’s-got-a-monster-butt, whenever he wanted to make her laugh. But for now it was a middle-sized ass, and all that middle-sizedness made her perfect for spinning, which was something else she used to do with Ronnie when she was a girl, the spin-until-you-fall-down-and-then-try-to-walk-a-straight-line game. She grinned at the memory of the game and then spun like she did when she used to play ballerina, an all-alone girl game. She spun around and let the momentum of her spinning carry her out to the grass and the yard, all the way across the lawn to the line of trees and wild grass and scrub, where she stood a while with her eyes closed as if blindly offering her middle-sized dizzy undressed self to the huge untended firefly night, and when the night refused to ravish her and the dizziness subsided, she went back into the house and down to the basement.
Hank at first didn’t notice that she was naked. His eyes were fixed on the TV and as she passed in front of him he ducked his head, not wanting to miss a second of the action. “It’s fourth and goal,” he said. “We’re on the two-yard line,” and then, as if her nakedness had indeed registered with him on some deeper level, he turned his head slowly toward her, seemingly wary about confirming that he’d just seen what he thought he’d seen. He looked at her worriedly for a moment before the play went off and his head snapped back to the TV.
Lindsey looked down at her pale body against the black leather couch. The air conditioning had raised goose bumps on her arms and legs. Her nipples had popped up. She grabbed the lightweight red throw from behind Hank, where he had placed it to support his bad back when he wasn’t leaning, as he was now, so far forward that it looked like he might leap into the action. She draped it over her and propped her legs up on the coffee table. She always felt a little like an intruder in this room, which seemed to belong in some deeply gendered way to the boys. She and Hank had fought for a week after a delivery truck showed up on a Saturday morning and two workers hauled out a monstrous sixty-inch rear-projection TV. It took Lindsey the longest time to understand that the tank-sized package was a television set. They had to take the back door off its hinges to get the damned thing into the rec room, where it loomed over the furniture like a billboard. Once the TV was installed, with its array of speakers and amplifiers, Hank camped out in the room for a month. Keith, following his daddy, brought his favorite toys down, so now the carpeting was strewn with so many Lincoln Log cabin pieces and Lego parts and Tinker Toy crap and Erector Set contraptions he and Hank built together, she thought of the room as a cave where the boys played, with a huge electronic portal into every hockey arena, football stadium, and basketball court in the universe.
Hank cursed and turned off the television, which said good-bye with a four-note melody of electronic beeps. “They can’t get two damn yards,” he said and then leaned back into the couch. Lindsey felt as though she could actually see the various molecules and particles of his essential self recomposing as they transitioned back into the real world, where they suddenly found themselves sitting on a black leather couch in a dimly lit basement alongside a naked woman draped in a red throw. How strange that must be. Gone, the screaming crowd. Gone, the intense game. Here, dark, quiet room with a woman draped in red.
“Why,” Hank said, the annoyance in his voice obvious if restrained, “are you naked?”
“You’re upset?” she said. “I come to you naked late at night with Keith asleep—and that’s a problem?”
Hank locked his fingers behind his neck and looked at the opposite wall. “Lindsey,” he said, as if he had something significant to say and was prefacing it with her name to signal its importance.
“Yes?”
He sighed and closed his eyes. To Lindsey he looked, for a moment, almost beatific. His blond hair, bleached by the sun, was curly and thick as a boy’s, though he was coming up on his forty-first birthday. His face, big and squarish, was largely uninteresting except for those striking pale blue eyes, which every woman who ever saw him noticed first thing.
Lindsey moved closer to Hank and laid her head on his shoulder. His gut may have grown out over his belt buckle, but his arms and shoulders were still thickly muscled. She put her hand on his thigh and stroked gently upward.
Hank shoved her hand aside.
“What?” She pulled away from him. “What the hell is that?”
“You’ve been drinking,” he said. “I smelled it as soon as you came in the room.”
“So? I can’t drink now?” She kicked his calf with her ankle. “Could you look at me?” she said. He was staring straight ahead. “If you’re going to criticize me, could you at least look at me?”
“At what point—” he said, and he pulled his feet up under him as he shifted his position, turning his body toward Lindsey, “at what point does your drinking become a problem?”
“Beats me.” She clutched the throw at her neck. “Why would my drinking be a problem? Do I sound drunk to you?”
“No,” he said. He folded his arms over his chest, as he always did when he was getting ready to settle into an argument. “You never sound drunk, not at all. But you are. You are drunk. We both know, regardless of how you sound, that you’re drunk right now. Aren’t you, Lindsey?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She shrugged and offered Hank a little smile. “Define drunk.”
Hank was a smart guy whose job was mostly about lifting heavy things and arranging them. His father had started a landscaping and construction business half a century ago, and now everyone in their huge family, including Hank, was part of it. Lindsey watched with intense interest as his eyes narrowed and his lips opened. She was often impressed at the sheer bulk of him, the six foot—plus frame, the thick chest and broad shoulders and wide, muscular thighs. There was something purely animal and thoughtless in her attraction to all that mass of body, and when he screwed himself up and concentrated it was almost as if he were doing something against nature, like the beast speaks or something. Though they had met in college, at VCU. Though she had always known he was smart. “When you’re drunk,” he said finally, “it’s like you’re not really here. I’ll talk to you and you’ll talk back to me, but on some level—which I can always sense—you’re gone. It’s like having a conversation with someone who’s not here. Not really.”
“I’m here,” she said. “What could that possibly mean, like I’m not really here? You ask me a question, I respond. I’m engaged. Perhaps,” she said, “this is more about you than me. Have you considered that possibility? Maybe you just don’t think it’s appropriate for women to drink because the women in your family are all churchgoing teetotalers. Maybe you just want me to be more like your mother,” she said. “Could that be it?”
The color in Hank’s broad face, tanned almost to a shade of brown, deepened. His breathing turned shallower and more labored. “You’re not here,” he repeated, “and the person who turns up in your place is sarcastic and dismissive, and sometimes, like now, she’s mean.”
“What was mean about that? Just because I suggested you might sometimes act like you want me to be your mother as much as your wife?”
Hank looked away from her to the opposite side of the room. His eyes fell on a half-finished Erector Set cement truck. He turned back toward Lindsey and stood up in the same motion.