A Scarcity of Virgins by JoAnn Catania

Author:JoAnn Catania [Last, First name]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77180-511-7
Publisher: Iguana Books
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

The house, when I get home, holds a veil of irreality — familiar, yet with the foreignness one might feel returning after a long trip abroad. I dismiss the babysitter with an apology and a promise to pay her tomorrow. In a semi-suspended state of consciousness, I respond to my children’s demands: a glass of juice, an empty bottle for bugs, help tying up running shoes, and in between, I prepare supper. Even though I’ve changed my clothes, when the air stirs around me as I move, I smell Valentin; my body smells of him. I rub my chin against my shoulder and inhale a lingering muskiness. We have never been as intimate with each other as today.

Despite my lapses of attention at the dinner table, Victor doesn’t notice any change in me. He hasn’t noticed any changes whatsoever in the last few months, or at least has not mentioned noticing any. Yet my life has done a complete turnabout, so that even I am not sure anymore who I am.

When dinner is over, the rest of the family goes outside. Victor is going to cut the grass, and I have not bothered to ask Alison for help with the dishes as I sometimes do. I much prefer to be left alone in the kitchen with my thoughts uninterrupted. There aren’t many dishes, and only one roasting pan, and I’m soon done stacking them in the dishwasher. I move into the family room to pick up cushions and toys and comics the kids have left on the floor. Through the sliding doors that look out into the backyard, I can see Alison up in the tree house Victor built years ago in the Norwegian maple; she is reading a book that has my approval. It is just after Labour Day, but the leaves of the trees are already tipped with yellow. At the foot of the maple, Micah is raking together grass clippings and gathering them into a green garbage bag. I can hear the droning of the lawn mower but cannot see Victor, who is mowing at the far side of the yard. The droning becomes louder as he comes closer to the family room door. Victor’s reflection appears in the double panes of the sliding doors as he works. His gray, pallid image moves slowly and deliberately, scanning the surrounding lawn in search of obstructing objects that the children have left lying around. His reflection seems immaterial, a ghost locked between two panes of glass. One of Dickinson’s ghosts, there to haunt and reproach me. He had told me once, in the first few months of our marriage, when we were getting to know each other better, that his parents had never been very demonstrative towards him as a child, never hugged him; he never once recalled either of them kissing him. Was that possible? Perhaps that was the reason for the hardness that often enveloped him, the vitriol that sometimes erupted unexpectedly. Knowing that, I had tried to show him more tenderness, tried somehow to compensate.

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