Sparks
Story by Leah
Browning • Photo by Sunny
Williams

It was childish, she knew, but
Lela took the boy and left purely out of spite. She wanted Jim to
suffer the way she was suffering, and she didn’t have the heart to take
a pair of scissors to his suits or set the house on fire.
Besides, she was a practical woman. Things were simple enough
now, but at some point, their son would need piano lessons and braces
and other things she couldn’t even fathom. Alienating Jim
wouldn’t help anything.
Mikey was four, their only child, and Lela felt weak at the thought
that someday he, too, would leave her. The first night that they
slept side by side in the bed at the motel, she gathered him in her
arms and squeezed him too tightly. He squirmed away from her,
whining, “Where’s Daddy?” and she had to catch her breath before she
answered.
Everyone in her life, it seemed, was cutting her down, layer by layer,
until she would open her eyes one morning and find that there was
nothing left of her but a vague sense of injustice. Her parents’
divorce had been bitter, and she had vowed to herself not to speak ill
of her husband. “He’s at home,” she told Mikey. Then she
tickled the boy until he stopped laughing and begged her to stop.
She couldn’t bear to answer any more questions.
Jim didn’t mind that they had moved out. This occurred to her
after three days. He was calling every night, speaking mostly to
Mikey, but first asking her how she was getting along, and did she need
anything. Lela had left the phone number of the motel on a slip
of paper taped to the wall next to the kitchen phone. Her
handwriting was a terse, jerky scrawl, but neat enough to be read.
She had pointedly chosen a run-down motel on the edge of town, wanting
him to see what he had done to their family, what he had reduced them
to, but he never referred to it. She had also used duct tape to
attach the note to the kitchen wallpaper, but he had not mentioned
that, either. He did not feel their absence as she had hoped that
he
would.
The second night, Lela was unable to sleep, and she called the
house—once, then several times, obsessively—but the phone rang again
and again with no answer. Jim wasn’t there.
She wanted to drive over to the house and see for herself, but Mikey
was sleeping and it didn’t seem right to wake him. She could see
it now: she would drive over, her stomach roiling, and throw a rock at
the house (missing, of course, because she had always been
uncoordinated), and a neighbor would call 911, and the police would
find her staggering around the lawn in her bathrobe in the middle of
the night while Mikey sat buckled in the car, still half-asleep.
Then Child Protective Services would take him away and she would lose
her precious boy, her baby. The only thing that made sense
anymore.
So instead of driving to the house, Lela took a pill and fell into a
stupor on the bed, and when Mikey woke her in the morning, wanting
breakfast, she had a sour taste in her mouth and dark smudges under her
eyes. But she was coping! She could already accept the idea
that soon she would have to go back home and begin a new life.
Look at her; she was acting so grown-up.
When she and Jim had met, almost twenty years earlier, she had been
eighteen, a headstrong, impatient girl prone to violent tantrums.
Jim had been six years her senior, a stately, ancient twenty-four, and
she had fallen head over heels in love with him. He was taken by
her youth and beauty: enchanted, as she thought of it. She had
spent years envisioning this fairy-tale meeting and whirlwind romance,
the dashing suitor and his beautiful blue-eyed bride.
This was ridiculous, of course. Jim had already finished college
and had a job in finance, and he was tired of cooking for
himself. He had begun looking at the women around him with
different eyes, examining each one for her potential as a mate.
Lela had been hired as a temp by a CPA in his building. She had
striking looks; a set of wide, child-bearing hips; and genuine talent
in the kitchen. Jim was a boring man—she could see that now—and
despite her age and temperament, marrying her had been both convenient
and practical. Perhaps this was why the affair stung her so,
because it was so completely out of character. He had never
strayed in all their years together—or had he? she was plagued now by
little stabs of doubt—though he must have had opportunities.
The point, though, was that Lela had changed. She had been young
and beautiful and vicious, in the way that beautiful people can afford
to be, with a biting tongue and a bad habit of throwing things when she
lost her temper, as she often did. Gradually she had been tamed,
by Jim’s quiet reproaches and by life, by growing older and more
thoughtful and losing her looks, just a little, so that she saw an
unwelcome stranger in the mirror every morning. She asked Jim
anxiously, “Do I look the same to you?” and he said, “Yes, of course,”
and kissed her.
This was meant to be reassuring, and yet he closed his eyes when they
kissed. He never looked at her with the deep, lingering, longing
gaze he had turned on her when they were courting, and when they were
first married.
At the time, she was not quite twenty-seven years old. The days
when she found a stray silver hair were coming closer together.
At thirty-three, Jim’s temples were already almost completely gray, but
he seemed not to notice. When he got out of the shower, the skin
hung loosely on his stomach and buttocks. She could only vaguely
remember ever being aroused by the thought of his naked
flesh.
They were living in a new house, on a cul-de-sac, and she befriended
the women on her street, asked questions when she went out to lunch
with the other secretaries from work. “That’s just the way it
is,” the married women agreed. “The sparks go away after a
while.”
“Then why stay married?” Lela asked.
They laughed at the question, but she was serious. She and Jim
were young. They had no children. Couldn’t they just move
on?
But it seemed that they couldn’t. The idea of divorce shamed her
after all she had been through with her parents—their acrimonious
fighting, the tug-of-war they had played with her—and even ten years
later, she wanted to prove them wrong, to show them that she had not
been too young when she met Jim, that she had not made a mistake by
marrying him. She swallowed her embarrassment and bought a copy
of The Kama Sutra. For
a while things were better, but then they
became stale and predictable again. She eventually gave up.
When she was twenty-nine, Lela had an affair with a TV repairman who
parked his truck two doors down and made love to her in the guest room,
slowly, with the window open. She had a sprained wrist and had
had to take time off from work. When the sprain healed and she
could type again, they broke it off. Just in time, too, as it
turned out. One of Jim and Lela’s neighbors, an older woman who
walked her schnauzer every morning at eleven, had noticed the truck and
decided that someone was scoping out the neighborhood, planning a
robbery. When she ran into Lela at the grocery store, she
mentioned that she had been planning to call the police.
Every summer after that, Lela’s boss took her to a conference in New
York, and they had sex in his hotel room after a bottle of expensive
champagne. The first time it happened, she had thought that it
meant something—that he was in love with her, that they would run away
together—but he never mentioned the encounters aloud, and she didn’t
know how to bring them up herself. Though he never so much as
looked at her suggestively in the office, and their late nights were
purely work-related, this annual mating became an unspoken ritual.
In fact, when she unexpectedly became pregnant, she was terrified that
the baby was his. After the birth, when Jim went downstairs to
the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, Lela pulled off Mikey’s knit cap and
unwrapped his white cotton hospital blankets, making him cry from the
cold and from the loose, unfamiliar feeling of his arms and legs.
She kissed him and wrapped him back up, holding him close and crying
with relief because he had Jim’s ears and the peculiar quirk of Jim’s
pinky finger—not solid evidence, by any means, but enough. She
had already quit her job in the sixth month of pregnancy, and her boss
had been transferred to Cleveland soon after, so she no longer had to
worry about running into him on the street or at the grocery store with
his wife.
Lela had never again been unfaithful. She had thought of it,
certainly, but things had changed. She was older, a mother.
The thought of Mikey someday discovering that she had strayed from her
marriage sickened her.
After her parents’ divorce, Lela’s mother had gone to a party one night
and drunk too much and come home two hours late. She sent the
babysitter home. Then she woke Lela and cried, kneeling next to
Lela’s bed and clutching her at the waist, whispering drunkenly into
Lela’s stomach.
She spoke of being with another man while she was still married, about
guilt. Lela had stared down at the top of her mother’s head,
still half-asleep, bewildered, not old enough to understand the
significance of the confession but old enough to remember it later,
when it became mortifyingly comprehensible. For a period of
weeks, Lela found it difficult to look at her mother without
blushing. She had never thought of her the same way again.
Did Lela want that to happen to her son? Of course not, she told
herself.
And besides, she was no longer sure of herself. When she looked
in the mirror, there were marks across her abdomen, stripes that had
faded to a purplish silver, stretch marks from being pregnant with
Mikey. There was a roll of fat below her navel that she could
disguise with clothing, but there was no way to withhold it from a
lover. Jim didn’t seem to care what she looked like. Her
body held no secrets for him. But the thought of another man
looking at her, seeing the ravages of childbirth and age—her flabby
arms and thighs, the bulge of her stomach—made her cringe. No one
would ever see her young, beautiful body stretched out on a bed under
him again.
On the days when she felt emotional, after the baby was born and for
years afterward, this thought could bring her to tears. Jim would
come home and find her standing at the island in the kitchen weeping
over a pile of uncooked chicken. When the baby was young, she
might still be in her bathrobe, as he had left her that morning, her
hair uncombed and her eyes puffy.
She couldn’t deny that she had been unfaithful in the past, but at
least she had been discreet, she had been thoughtful. Jim
flaunted his affair. He couldn’t help himself, really. He
was giddy. If he hadn’t told Lela himself, she would have
realized quickly what was going on. He ironed his shirts more
carefully; he sang in the shower.
And that, Lela realized, was what made this so painful. She had
only been fooling around with other men because she craved flattery and
attention and stimulating sex. Jim was serious. He was in
love. He had told her this! The thought of it made her feel
sick.
He had come home unexpectedly early from work, kissed Mikey and turned
on a video for him, and pushed Lela toward the dining room. For
some inexplicable reason, it occurred to her that he was going to
surprise her, that he had gotten a raise or set aside some money, and
he was going to take her on a cruise, or on a trip to Europe, and as
they sat down at the mahogany table, she had grabbed his hand—her
cheeks burned at the memory—and said, “Oh, Jim,” because she could
scarcely contain her excitement at the thought of it, of doing that
kind of traveling when she had only dreamt of it for so
long.
His smile had dulled a little, then, and she realized too late that she
had been mistaken. She pulled her hand away, feeling confused all
over again, and he gave her a gentle one-two punch, told her that he
was in love with another woman and that he wanted a divorce.
He was so apologetic, in fact, that it only made her feel more
stunned. There was supposed to be screaming, or storming out, or
something, anything, she knew that much. Not this sad, quiet
conversation followed by a quiet dinner and bed, where they lay without
touching, which was not unusual but now felt purposeful.
Why are you here? Lela wanted to ask him. You love her, you’ve
told me about it already, so why are you still in bed here with me?
She would have asked, but she was afraid to hear the answer, was afraid
he was there simply because he had not thought of that, and if she
brought it to his attention, he would rise and dress and leave her
right then. And though she was bored with him—with their
marriage, their sex life, their inane conversations about dentist
appointments or what to have for dinner—the thought of his leaving was
like a knife in her heart, she couldn’t bear it, and she had to bite
her knuckles to keep from crying aloud.
He turned over in bed and put his arms around her, murmuring something
soothing that she couldn’t make out. That only made it worse,
made her begin to sob, because he was leaving her, and she found that
she had expected their parting all along, but she had never known that
it would affect her so.
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