Arcadia Falls by Carol Goodman Read Free Book Online Page B

present from my mother, chipped on the lid from when I dropped it during a fight? It was in the apartment on Avenue B, two weeks after I had told Jude I was pregnant. He came home and announced that he’d dropped out of the MFA program at Pratt and taken a trading job with Morgan Stanley.
    “Good thing I’m good at math as well as art,” he said just as I lifted the lid off the casserole. I looked down at the coq au vin I’d spent half the day making from a recipe in Julia Child and felt suddenly queasy.
Morning sickness
, I thought, even though it was night. When I picked up the pot to bring it to the table my arms went limp. It fell to the stained linoleum, splattering wine sauce and chicken bones everywhere.
    “Shit, Meg,” Jude said, surveying the carnage, “if this is how you react to my first real job I’d better not bring home a Christmas bonus.”
    As I pour Dymphna’s stew into the pot I touch the place where the iron shows through the blue glaze. Whenever I look at it I wonder what I might have said to change things. Should I have offered to get an abortion? Should I have told him we’d scrimp by on an art teacher’s salary? Orthat surely with his talent he’d be a famous artist someday? Should I have suggested we borrow from his parents? Or move to the country and raise goats for a living? Should I have recognized the look in his eyes as defeat and not pretended that giving up his dreams to support me and our unborn child was a good idea?
    I turn on the gas under the chipped pot, but it hisses without catching. It takes me a long moment of smelling gas to realize that the stove is so old it needs a match to start. There’s a box of Diamond Tips in a rusted tin box screwed into the cabinet right above the range. I light one and step back as the flame lashes out like a cornered cat.
    My hands are still shaking as I start unpacking the everyday china: the blue-and-white Marimekko Jude bought at the Scandinavian Design store our first married Christmas together. What a kind man, I had thought. The average guy his age would have spent his Christmas bonus on stereo equipment or a bigger TV set, not plates and bowls and saucers for his hugely pregnant wife who had burst into tears the week before because the paper plates she ate on made her think she wasn’t grown up enough to be a mother. I still remember how bright and cheerful it all looked laid out for Christmas breakfast. And even though the white glaze is scratched and the blue rims have faded it’s all still here—service for eight. “For our growing family,” Jude had said. Now it seems like a lot of crockery for just me and Sally.
    I lay plates and bowls on the table and fish out spoons and knives from the jumble of flatware (the good silver went in February to pay the heating bill), and then sink down onto a spindly kitchen chair that creaks under my weight. A wave of exhaustion settles over me like the lead apron the dentists make you wear when you get your teeth X-rayed. How am I going to unpack all these boxes when every single cup and saucer carries the weight of all the mistakes I’ve made? Checking first to see that Sally hasn’t come downstairs, I lay my head down on the table.
    It’s surprisingly cool. I’d thought the top—white with a trim of green leaves and brown pinecones—was painted wood, but with my cheek on its smooth surface I realize it’s actually enameled steel. My grandmother had a table like it in her Brooklyn kitchen. It had two folding leaves likethis one that could be let down and then, when you sat underneath it, you felt like you were in a little house. The scalloped edges of the leaves looked like the trim on the cottages of fairy tales. A word was stamped on the underside of the table: Porceliron. I had thought it sounded like a fantasy kingdom, but my grandmother told me it was the brand name of the table because the top was iron coated with an enameled layer of porcelain. That was why I loved those Le