Vanessa made another face; she was blushing deep crimson. Sherry went on.
“What happens when there’s real problems in your lives, and there will be. How are you going to feel if he fools around on you? You’re so prepared to do it to him, how will that be — having the shoe on the other foot?”
“I hadn’t really thought that far ahead, Mom,” she said.
“Vanessa, I love you. But your problem is that you never think that far ahead. Marriage is big, serious stuff, honey — not something you rush into hoping it will all work out.” Her eyes met Neal’s, briefly, as she said it, and he felt his throat swelling. “You have to mean it, you have to make it work. This thing with you and Brad won’t work. A family is one thing, that’s trouble enough. A family with a guy you don’t love is quite another. That’s just making things worse.”
“Right,” said his daughter, wiping tears away. “I know that.”
“You know your father and I both love you. We love both of you. We’ll help you all we can, we’ll work things out. But Brad has to be told. It’s not fair to him, to the baby or to you if you let it go on.”
“Okay.” It was barely a whisper.
Sherry rose and crossed to them, falling on her knees before them, hugging them. She kissed their foreheads and rocked with them, as if they were three years old.
Neal sat amazed, dumbfounded, mute. There were no kisses for him, no hugs. No signs of reconciliation to reassure him, save one.
You know your father and I love you, she had said. Your father and I . . .
“Okay,” said Sherry, resuming her seat and drying her own eyes. “That was the easy part.”
***
Hours later, when there was no more talk, she and Neal gathered in the kitchen to recover. The kids had fallen asleep, Josh in Neal’s recliner, Vanessa on the couch.
Actually, there had been “no more talk” rather quickly. As Sherry came to realize, and as Neal seemed already to surmise, there was almost no way to talk adequately about What Had Happened. In fact, the phrase had acquired capital letters for her during their attempt to talk, simply because no one was sure what to call it, how to refer to it. Some things Neal had said seemed to indicate he thought of it as a rape, but Sherry was prepared to argue with that definition. She did not feel like a “victim” in any sense.
It would have been far less complicated to talk about if she could fix on some definite response. She certainly could not condone what her husband and children had done to/with her — Hey, let’s all fuck each other on a regular basis! — nor could she, with her hand on her heart, honestly condemn it — That was vile and disgusting and I hate you all. Neither attitude fit her feelings. She would never be able to bring their sex (it was after all “their” sex — she had participated) into their normal, everyday lives together; she wasn’t sure any civilized human being could do that. But she also could not genuinely feel the revulsion, the dismay and disgust she thought she should feel. The sex had just felt too damned good.
What she needed — she wasn’t sure about the others — was a way to think about it that kept them safe, that kept them together. Admittedly, her remarkable burst of clarity in the past few hours had a lot to do with all the puking she’d done upstairs, the natural response of a body after days of physical abuse. But it also had to do with the fact that she now knew the worst, and had an objective: keeping her family. It seemed to Sherry that she must acknowledge the fact that they had all had sex together, not merely in the same room, but actively participating, and that she had enjoyed it. Yes, the fact that she had been on a week-long drug and booze buzz had made it possible for her to enjoy it, had softened the hard lines of reality enough to get lost in it. If they had all shown up at her door and said “Can we all come in and make love to you?” she would certainly have refused them. Hell, six hours ago she would have refused Neal this request, and he was her husband.
Sherry finished her glass of wine, her second glass, and looked across the table to Neal. His eyes were smoky, and still, not a little afraid. A while ago, when the kids had begun to doze and they lowered the lights and made for the kitchen, she had kissed him — their first kiss in almost a week. It had to be a tender kiss, what with his busted lip: that blow she’d landed with the candlestick. But their first in a week, and the first they had really meant in much, much longer. Despite all the craziness, the elements that made their sex so hard to understand, the fact remained that Neal had made love to her again. Slowly and carefully, with all his attention upon her, he had brought her his hard, throbbing, naked desire and had buried it, had lost it, in her. In her pussy, her womb. It was not rape, nor was it just complacent, dutiful sex, which might have been worse than rape. It was an almost unthinkable set of circumstances for reconciliation, but it had happened. Somehow, she felt like she possessed him again.
“What’s going on?” he asked her, peering anxiously into her face.
“What do you mean?”
He tapped her forehead gently. “In there. You’ve been so quiet.”
“Oh. Well . . .”
“I know,” he said. “I understand. Well, I . . . at least, I think . . . I’d like to think I do. But no, I guess I don’t.”
She smiled at him. It was just Neal, bumbling through a conversation. Certainly no great help. But it was sincere.
“Sure you don’t want some coffee?”
“Oh no. Have a little more wine though. No, I’m not going on a binge or anything.”
“I wasn’t saying anything. Hang on, I’ll get it.”
He got up, cheerfully enough. No accusing looks. The fact was, coffee was a reality drink, something that woke you up. She didn’t feel like being wakeful was what she needed at the moment. Better to sort things out in a relaxed frame of mind.
While she watched her husband uncork the bottle and pour the dark red liquid, she pondered for the hundredth time two remarks made by her kids during the long, frustrating discussion.
One: Josh, who had often seemed too dazed to contribute anything useful to the conversation, had brought said conversation to a burnt-rubber halt when he asked, “How come family members can fart around each other but they can’t fuck?”
The question, which produced its share of giggles, seemed at first to be totally incongruous, if not deranged. And to be sure, the poor boy was a bit distracted from the shock of what had happened. But the more Sherry thought about it, the more she extrapolated from the specifics of the question, the greater validity it seemed to have.
Family members — that is, people in an immediate family, living under the same roof — acknowledged certain basic aspects of being human more or less without question. They showered and left hairs in the tub. They got sick sometimes and threw up, right in front of each other. They took pisses and got the toilet seat wet — well, men did. And yes, they cut the cheese in each other’s presence (mostly men again). Everybody got to smell everybody else’s dirty feet. All these things, all perfectly natural and understandable, are tolerated daily, by virtually every family. They all had to do with typical human drives and functions.
Now sex is a typical human drive and function, too, but it is not shared in a family. It is not acknowledged. In other words, what her dear son was asking (in his own shallow way) was why this had to be the case. Why was it okay to wipe your son’s piss off the toilet seat but not okay to let him pleasure you, sexually? Why was it normal to wash his cum-stained bedsheets but not to let him cum in your mouth?
Of course, it was a ridiculous comparison. But that did not mean the question was invalid.
Two: Vanessa had interrupted at one point to say, perhaps a little petulantly, “You know, Mom, you’re wrong when you say I never think far ahead. I think far ahead about you and Dad. I want you two to stay together.”
That remark really got Sherry thinking. What the hell did that mean? Was Vanessa saying she’d intended all this, that she’d engineered it somehow? Surely that was impossible. She could never have stage directed such a catastrophe, nor could she have known everything would come out (reasonably) okay.
Well, no, but there was plenty of evidence to suggest that she was mindful of the sexuality in the house, or lack thereof. Her remarks about overhearing Sherry and Neal through the wall, and her gift of the dildo (a dildo! for Christmas! for her mother!) made that obvious. It seemed to Sherry that her daughter, for all her nuttiness and lack of restraint, for all her impulsiveness, had been trying to heal them. She recognized a need and tried to provide it. It was strange, it was extreme — it was insane, her solution. But to some degree, it seemed, it had worked. Sherry was calmer than she had been, less afraid, less desperate. She had just taken part in the craziest sex scene of her life — and without becoming a swinger, without risking disease, without betraying Neal. Saying that she “kept it in the family” sounded a bit lurid, but in effect, she had. All that release and none of the consequences — well, none of the conventional consequences, anyway. Just some guilt and bewilderment. Now if Sherry could find a way to contain that guilt, to clear up that bewilderment, why couldn’t they all get on with their lives, intact?
“Hey,” Neal said.
“Hmm — what?”
“I love you.”
Sherry looked at him. He was across the table but leaning towards her, as though hanging onto her every expression, her every sigh. She hadn’t seen him so . . . so into her, since they were newlyweds. She smiled and touched his hand.
“That sounded like you meant it.”
“I did. You’re beautiful.”
“I love you too.”