The tour concluded with a visit to the kitchen, where the white tour guide took a plate of gingersnaps from a silent black woman who never raised her head. The tour guide passed them out, giving Byrdie four cookies while everyone else got one.
When the plate was empty the black woman, whose nappy hair was greased back awkwardly and who seemed somehow a cripple or a hunchback although she was neither and had a pretty, tender face, rose again from her stool in the corner and carried the empty plate into another room.
Byrdie stared. He had never seen anyone like her. She was not an adult. Or was she? She wore a uniform or costume—a calico dress. “Is the colored lady a slave?” he asked Lee.
Everybody turned to laugh at Byrdie. The memory branded itself on his brain: the gales of laughter, everyone offering him their cookies, the slave woman with her eyes on the floor.
The second time Lee rubbed Peggy’s nose in an infidelity, she drove the same route she had years before, inexorably drawn to the college where her life had first jumped the tracks. It was about four years after the visit to Stratford.
By that time Byrdie had a little sister: Mireille. Lee didn’t seek sex often enough for Peggy to think she needed birth control. Sex only happened when Lee was in a certain strange, dramatic mood, acting out something Peggy could not grasp.
Then there she was. Born into ambiguity and ambivalence, an incontrovertible baby. Mireille at three was a sallow blonde with downy hair so white it was almost invisible. She clung to Peggy like a baby monkey most of the time. When she said “Daddy,” it didn’t sound like a request for love. She said “Daddy!” as though unpleasantly surprised. Two clipped syllables that seemed to encapsulate all her mother’s resentment, as if it had been passed along in utero. He would fill her bowl with applesauce and she’d say “Daddy!” and he had to add applesauce until she had more than Byrdie. Then she’d eat just the extra piled on at the end and push the rest away. Lee disliked her, but he expected her to grow on him sooner or later. She would get old enough to be more than just a reproachful bundle of petty envy that had grown on Peggy like a tumor. She might turn out to be a pretty, playful tumor that moved about under its own power. There’s something appealing about a narrow-minded, scheming blonde who plays with boys like a cat, Lee thought.
One day Peggy came home from the Safeway and walked in on a wasteland. Arms full of groceries, she scanned a little forest of pottery figurines at her feet as she walked through the living room to the kitchen. There was more pottery next to the trash can. She had made these statues at the college art center and considered them emblematic of her frustration as a housewife. They were pinched pyramidal figures with tiny round heads, done in dull shades of blue. Their necks were very thin and easy to break. Most of the heads were gathered in a pie tin on the floor.
“Lee!” she yelled. There was no answer. She set the groceries down and walked out the back door. And there he was, in a net muscle shirt, getting in the canoe with a boy. Making his getaway as soon as he heard the car, right in the middle of letting some teenager help him turn her sewing room into a weight room because she didn’t have time to do any sewing.
It was a betrayal of just about everything—her privacy, her pottery that was a cry for help intended to be heard by no one, her struggle to be a good mother and sew little dresses for Mireille. The intimacy she and Lee still shared. The vestiges of heterosexuality she occasionally saw in him and cosseted like rare orchids. All of it gone. The more sacrifices she made for her family, the more he took his power for granted. He got all the love in the world, and she got none at all.
She drove to the college. She had a vague notion of storming into his office and breaking something.
As she rounded the main building, she spied the grassy slope under the tulip poplars going down to Stillwater Lake, and she followed a mad impulse.
She stopped the car and said, “Byrdie, could you take Mickey and stand over there by that tree?”
He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and toted his little sister and her blanket over to the tree, warning her with a gesture to stay put, came back to close the car door, and rejoined her in the shade.
The lake made Peggy angry. It ought to be bringing Lee to her, on his knees in the canoe, to offer her an explanation and an apology. But the lake was empty, because Lee was not alone and would never come to the college dressed as his true self. He was back at the house by now, sweeping up her art with no pants on.
“Don’t move, Byrdie,” Peggy said. “This’ll just take a second.” She put the car—more precisely, Lee’s irreplaceable VW Thing—in second gear and drove slowly and deliberately into the water. She watched the water pour in around her feet and kept going. She revved the Thing until the wheels were in mud up past the axles, even up past the lower edge of the doors.
As the engine died she heard a sucking sound. The car was still moving forward and tilting.
Peggy felt an anxiety she had not anticipated. She had expected it to be like driving down a boat ramp. She floundered to shore, up to her knees in mud that ripped her shoes right off her feet, and turned to watch the car settle into place nose down, rear bumper in the air. Around it, a maelstrom was forming. It didn’t look like it would be easy to get back out.
A security guard ran up behind her to ask if she was all right.
“Where’s my kids? Byrdie, Mickey, c’mere. Come on, honey. It’s all right. I love you, baby. I just didn’t like that car.”
“You’re crazy, Mom. I’m going to tell Dad.”
“Now, sweetie, ain’t nobody crazier than your dad. We’re all crazy!”
The campus security officer asked, “Mrs. Fleming, are you saying that was not an accident?”
“Nope. That was theater of cruelty.”
The officer sighed and said, “Mrs. Fleming, you’re a card,” and they went together into the administrative building to call Lee. That was one advantage of being a wife. It was Lee’s job to discipline her, not that campus security would have involved the police in anything short of murder.
A week later, they got the car out with a farm tractor and some oak planks. It was doable only because the water in the lake had fallen to the level of the car’s submerged front axle, leaving a wide and hideous beach of glutinous brown slime. Mrs. Fleming was firmly established as a legend on campus, and Lee was …
… livid? Was he livid? Are there words to describe how Lee was? Less privileged men sometimes fancy themselves egotistical sociopaths, but they don’t know the half of it. They don’t even know how it’s done. In most cases they’ve even apologized for something at some point in their lives.
Lee had never been hot-tempered. A lesser man might strike his wife. A man who trusts in the rule of law files a formal complaint. For example, “My wife is a danger to herself and others.” A hearing is conducted. Fees are paid. A judge issues an order. The order’s execution makes the wife kick and scream, undermining her credibility. Seeing the force necessary to crush an annoyance he merely wanted rid of, the complainant heaves a sigh of regret.
That was Lee’s reaction when faced with the desirability of having Peggy locked up for a while. As a wife and mother, she was impossible. The theatrics! Who attempts suicide in a convertible in a lake ten feet deep? She was in hell. He was in hell. Yet she refused to leave him. She couldn’t leave him. She hated both their families, and she knew no one else well enough to get invited to their house. Thinking about it made him melancholic. Lee found depressive feelings unpleasant. He saw that something needed to be done. He conveyed the reality to her many times, repeating it like he thought she was slow: “I’m going to call a doctor. You’re not well.”
With every repetition he could see her edging toward the door. That was where she belonged: the door. The closer she got to it, the more his heart brightened with clarity. He threatened her in a low, friendly