Forbidden Silence

The zipper on my dress was stuck at the small of my back, right where my fingers couldn't reach, and I was already ten minutes late.

"Let me."

Mara's voice came from the doorway, low and unhurried. I didn't turn around. I knew the sound of her footsteps on the hardwood, the particular weight of them, heavier on the left foot because of the old soccer injury she never talked about. She crossed the room. The air shifted. Her hands found the zipper tab before I could decide whether to let her.

She pulled it up slow. One tooth at a time. The fabric drew tight across my ribs and I forgot to breathe for a second.

"There," she said, and stepped back.

I turned. She was in the gray suit she wore for parent conferences, hair pulled back, no makeup. She looked like she'd been up since five. She probably had been. She had a stack of essays in her bag that she'd been grading all weekend, and I'd watched her do it, curled on the other end of the couch with a red pen and a cup of tea going cold beside her, and every few minutes she'd look up at me like she wanted to say something and then look back down.

"The dinner's at seven," I said. "Jeff's already there."

"I know."

"You're not coming."

"I'm not coming."

I picked up my purse from the bed. My hands were steady. That surprised me. Three months ago my hands would have shaken. Now I could stand in a bedroom with her, zipped into a dress she'd bought me for my birthday, and feel almost nothing. Almost.

"Mrs. Calloway asked about you at the faculty meeting," I said. "She wanted to know why you stopped coming to the Thursday socials."

Mara leaned against the doorframe. She crossed her arms. "What did you tell her?"

"That you were busy."

"Good."

"She didn't believe me."

"She never does."

I walked past her into the hallway. The house was small, a two-bedroom rental with beige walls and a kitchen that got too much afternoon sun, and it smelled like the coffee Mara had made at six that morning. I could hear the dryer running in the laundry room, the thump of it, the same off-balance rhythm it had had since we moved in. Everything in this house was temporary. The lease was six months. We'd signed it in August and it was already March and neither of us had mentioned what happened in June.

At the front door, I stopped. My keys were in my hand. I could feel her behind me, not close, but there.

"Are you going to be here when I get back?" I asked.

"I don't know."

I turned. She was standing in the middle of the living room, and the light from the window caught the side of her face, the line of her jaw, the small scar above her eyebrow from when she was twelve and fell off a bike. I knew that scar better than I knew my own reflection. I knew the way she slept, on her stomach with one arm under the pillow. I knew she couldn't eat eggs before ten in the morning. I knew she cried at commercials about dogs.

What I didn't know was whether she loved me. Not in the way that mattered. Not in the way that made people leave their husbands and move into rentals with beige walls and off-balance dryers. She'd never said it. I'd never asked.

"Jeff's going to ask where you are," I said.

"Tell him I'm sick."

"You've been sick a lot lately."

"I know."

I opened the door. The evening air was cool and smelled like someone's grill, charcoal and lighter fluid. I stepped out onto the porch. Behind me, she didn't move. I could feel her watching me, and I wanted her to call me back, to say something, to give me one reason to stay. She didn't.

I got in my car and drove to the restaurant.

Jeff was at the bar when I walked in, talking to a man in a blue blazer. He saw me and waved. I waved back. I made my way through the tables, past the hostess stand, past the couple celebrating their anniversary with a bottle of wine and two plates they weren't touching. I sat down next to Jeff and ordered a gin and tonic.

"You're late," he said.

"Traffic."

"On a Tuesday?"

"Accident on the bridge."

He nodded. He believed me. He always believed me. That was the thing about Jeff. He was kind and he was trusting and he had no idea that his wife had spent the last six months sleeping with the woman who taught eleventh-grade English at the school where he was the assistant principal. He had no idea that I'd stopped wearing the perfume he liked because Mara said it gave her a headache. He had no idea that I'd told him I was going to yoga three nights a week when I was actually sitting on a couch in a rental house, watching Mara grade papers, waiting for her to look up.

"How was your day?" he asked.

"Fine."

"You seem distracted."

"I'm tired."

He put his hand on my knee. It was warm and heavy and familiar. I didn't move it. I never did. That was part of the deal I'd made with myself. I could have Mara in the dark, in the hours that belonged to no one, but I had to keep the rest. The house. The marriage. The life that looked right from the outside. I had to keep all of it, because I didn't know what I'd have if I let it go.

The bartender brought my drink. I took a long sip. The gin burned going down.

"I invited the Harpers for dinner on Saturday," Jeff said. "I hope that's okay."

"Sure."

"And my mother's coming Sunday."

"Okay."

He squeezed my knee. "You're the best, you know that?"

I smiled. I was good at smiling. I'd been doing it for thirty-four years, and I'd gotten very good at it, good enough that no one ever asked what was behind it. Not Jeff. Not my mother. Not the women in my book club who thought I was quiet because I was shy.

Mara knew. Mara had always known. She'd known the first time we talked, at a faculty happy hour two years ago, when she'd looked at me across the table and said, "You don't like it here, do you?" and I'd said, "What makes you think that?" and she'd said, "Because you're smiling."

I finished my drink and ordered another. Jeff was talking about the Harpers now, about their new boat, about the trip they'd taken to the Bahamas. I nodded at the right moments. I laughed when he laughed. I was a good wife. I was a good wife and a bad person and I didn't know which one was true.

My phone buzzed in my purse. I didn't check it. I didn't need to. I knew it was her.

Are you coming back?

I let it sit there. I let it sit there for the rest of dinner, through the appetizers and the entrees and the dessert Jeff insisted on sharing, through the drive home and the walk up the steps and the turn of the key in the lock. The house was dark when I walked in. The dryer had stopped. The coffee cup was still on the counter, cold and half-full.

She wasn't there.

I stood in the kitchen for a long time, in my dress, in the dark, and I thought about the way she'd zipped me up, slow, one tooth at a time, like she was trying to make it last.