Dying for Chocolate

Naked! Dying! Pummeled by hail and then hit by lightning!

I groaned. The air had turned cold. I felt each thud of hail directly on my heart. You’d think that after being married to an abusive husband you would learn to take abuse. But until you find a way to pull yourself away from the abuser’s opinion of you, it still hurts. I was going to find a way to pull myself away. And I was going to find out who had it in for me.

Adele was saying to the headmaster, “I don’t understand why nothing goes right in this town. . .”

Tell me about it.

I slipped into the living room for a couple of Lindt Lindors. When I came back out to the porch I picked up the periwinkle-and-white crocheted afghan, moved to a cold but dry wicker chair, and wrapped myself up. I opened a chocolate and popped it in my mouth, then allowed the sinfully dark, soft creaminess to melt on my taste buds and make me feel much better. After a moment I took a deep breath of cool air and opened my eyes to see the hail falling in massive vertical sheets to the meadow. Here and there splashes of white speckled the lush green.

In addition to feeling things will go right in a move to the mountains, people often mistakenly believe that in the midst of such natural beauty, there will be an absence of honking traffic, backstabbing gossip, and cruelty in general. I ate the other chocolate and allowed my eyes to travel around the deck, to Adele shaking her head at the headmaster’s distress, to the table with the hateful newspaper review, to the panel of security buttons on the wall. Security, it seemed, from physical intrusions only.

Arch came out to the deck and beckoned. The hail was so loud I had not heard Julian drive up or the two boys come inside. In the kitchen I automatically began to prepare hot chocolate, Arch’s favorite drink on snowy days.

“Mom,” he said as he looked into the pan of milk, “it’s not snowing. Hey!” He pulled back and stared at me. “What happened to you?”

I gazed at him: freckles, eyes full of concern behind glasses, hair damp from being hatless in the hail. I assured him I was okay, just had a little slip in the café and ended up falling. I shrugged it off. With my assurance that things were fine, he pressed his lips together in a grin, opened his eyes wide, and raised his eyebrows.

Something was wrong with the way he looked. I had to keep staring at him for a minute to figure out what it was. This morning he had left without my checking his sweat suit. Now he was wearing baggy black pants and a white oxford cloth shirt, both about four sizes too big for him. While I was contemplating this bizarre turn in personal style, the milk boiled over.

“What are you wearing?” I asked as I reached for a sponge.

He said, “Clothes.”

“Whose clothes?”

He glanced down at the pants, then gave me an innocent look. “Julian gave these to me. They were too small for him.”

I dumped out the scalded milk and scrubbed the stove. I thought, Let go of it.

“Listen,” he said. “Julian and I want to go swimming in the hail. We think it would be really cool.”

“Do you want to get pneumonia?”

“No,” he said, “I want to show him that I can get out of the handcuffs under water.”

“Forget about it. No to all of the above.”

“Jeez, Mom!” His voice was furious. “You never let me do anything! No money for magic stuff! No swimming, even though the pool is heated, in case you hadn’t noticed! You always think I’m going to get hurt! But who’s wearing a bandage, huh? Is there anything I can do?”

And before I could answer he turned, narrowly avoiding Adele, and stomped out of the kitchen.

Adele was rubbing her forehead with the hand not holding the cane. She said, “The headmaster says we should show another film, since the print with Rumslinger is unavailable. We’ve already sold the tickets. Of course, he has no film in mind.”

I scrubbed scalded milk off the bottom of the pan and made guttural sympathetic noises.

She sighed. “I’m going into the study where I can hear myself think, and call Paramount.”

If you have money, I guess you can do anything. I was the last person to try to talk her out of doing battle with Hollywood. I couldn’t even make hot chocolate.

She said, “What’s wrong with Arch?”

“He wants to swim. Says the pool is heated, so why not? Now he’s angry because I said no.” I rinsed the pan and dried it. “I hate to have him mad at me. He’s all I’ve got.”

“Well,” she said in a sympathetic tone, “you know what the psychiatrists say. No matter what you do for your children, they don’t appreciate you.”

In my many readings on parenting, this was not something I had ever heard.

I said, “What psychiatrist said that?”

“One who had to raise children.”

I put down the dish towel and thought for a minute. “Well, actually,” I said with my best sarcastic laugh, “I never knew a psychiatrist who had to stay home and raise children.”

“That’s what I mean, Goldy,” she said before she tapped off.