Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies

Author:Isabel Gillies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

21

My heart felt worried. I felt I had done something wrong, but I also had this gut instinct that something was going on between Josiah and Sylvia. I saw it after all. Josiah was powerful to me, though. If he made a statement, I believed it. And he said I was wrong.

When I was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the first year that we were together, he would drive down from Cambridge on Friday evening and I would have a big dinner ready for him in my little kitchen with a bathtub in it. He would bring big bunches of my favorite Casablanca lilies, we would make love, and then eat dinner by candlelight in the kitchen. One night I roasted an entire Arctic char fish with fennel. It was superb. The next day we had lunch with my parents and I bragged to my mother about my accomplishment.

“How did you figure out how to do that?” my mother said.

Without missing a beat, I recounted for her exactly how one roasts a whole fish. It’s not hard at all to roast a fish, but there are certain things that she just doesn’t do. Roasting a fish, or a chicken, almost, falls into the category of more trouble than it’s worth. It’s just how she is.

“Why does your mother not think you are capable of doing something as easy as roasting a fish?” Josiah said later.

“Oh, I think she just thinks it’s hard.”

“But she said, ‘How did you do something like that.’ She knows you can cook. I thought it was really undermining.”

Yeah, I thought. Does my mother think I am such a loser I can’t open a cookbook and follow directions? I had never thought about it before, but now that Josiah had highlighted it, it made all the sense in the world. He was my advocate, my defender against my mother, who thinks I am too lame to roast a fish. He said it and it was law to me.

I rarely questioned anything Josiah said. He felt smarter to me than most people I knew. When he said I was wrong about what I saw in the office, I believed him. Almost.

I felt like I was in the doghouse that Friday night. We got home and Josiah paid the babysitter and took the dog out for a walk. I checked on the boys and started getting ready for bed. I was in bed when Josiah came upstairs.

“That was a terrible night,” I said.

“Yes, it was.”

“Can’t we make up? I’m sorry about today, but you have to admit it wouldn’t be a fun thing to walk into if you were me. Can’t you at least see how it would look suspicious?” (I could feel myself about to cry, but did everything not to. I cry a lot for good reason, but I also cry easily. So does my mother. Hymns in church, kids trying hard, I even cried watching Tommy Boy with Chris Farley.)

“Oh, Isabel,” he said (he never called me Isabel), sounding weary and frustrated.

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