The Society of Shame

ISBN-13: 9780593468784

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Vintage

Publication Date: 03-12-2024

Pages: 368

Product Dimensions: 8.00h x 5.19w x 0.75d

JANE ROPER is the author of two previous books: a memoir, Double Time, and a novel, Eden Lake. Her short fiction, essays, and humor have appeared in publications including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, The Rumpus, Salon, and Poets & Writers and on NPR. Jane is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in the Boston area with her husband and two children.

Read an Excerpt

Day One

At seven p.m., Kathleen Held was in a taxi heading home from JFK to Greenchester, a full three hours earlier than originally scheduled.

It had worked out so perfectly, she felt almost giddy. She’d been able to switch to a nonstop flight from LA, which meant: (A) not having to change planes in Chicago—so, a 50 percent lower chance of dying in a fiery crash, or so she reasoned; and (B) that she’d get to enjoy a whole quiet evening at home, alone. After five days with her sister’s family, listening to Margo drone on about the value of alternate nostril breathing and being forced by Nick to sniff and describe the various strains of genetically engineered cannabis his company grew (Pot! They all smelled like pot!), she was starving for solitude.

Her daughter, Aggie, was staying in LA for a few more days before school started—yet another forced attempt at cousin-to-cousin bonding. Margo’s kids might as well have been a different species from Aggie, all long limbed, sun bronzed, and aggressively outdoorsy. But Aggie, sweet soul that she was, always went gamely along with whatever vigorous outings were planned.

Bill, meanwhile, would have just left for the large and extremely important campaign fundraiser he was attending that night at a country club in Scarsdale. Had Kathleen switched to an even earlier flight—which, in fact, she could have—he would have tried to convince her to go to said extremely important fundraiser with him. And it would inevitably have led to another one of the silent, simmering nonarguments they’d had so many of since he’d begun his US Senate campaign eight months before.

Tonight, thank god, there would be none of that. No simmering, no guilt. No having to stuff her soft middle-aged midsection into shapewear and make small talk with smug limousine liberals. Instead, just an easy, sleepy reunion when Bill came home—the kind where the light would be off and she might even be asleep but would wake up at the sound of the bedroom door opening. She wouldn’t mind. She liked listening in the dark as he undressed: the clink of belt buckle, the whoosh of cloth, a muttered curse if he stubbed his toe. When he crawled into bed, she would whisper a “Hi,” and he would whisper a “Hi” back. Then he would roll toward her, kiss her cheek, and slide his arm over her belly, where it would stay all night, heavy and warm and familiar.

She just wished their bedtime reunions weren’t the only times things felt right between them anymore—when she didn’t feel like she was being squashed into a corner by Bill’s glorious career.

Maybe, she told herself, as she watched streetlights whip past along the Van Wyck Expressway, she needed to make sure that Bill knew, even if the rest of the world didn’t, that she was more than just a supporting character in his story. She would start as soon as he got home tonight. Maybe she’d even wait up for him. Yes, she would. With that small gesture of engagement, she could begin the work of nudging the balance between them back into a better, healthier place.

In the meantime, though, the evening was hers.

By the time the taxi turned onto her street, she had started picturing where she’d be in a matter of minutes: sitting on the three-season porch in a fresh change of clothes (she imagined some loose, breezy linen ensemble that she didn’t actually own), having a glass of white wine, catching up on her New Yorkers, ignoring the dog.

Instead, she came home to smoke billowing out of the garage.

“That doesn’t look so good,” the taxi driver said.

Kathleen bolted out of the car. The driver was close behind her.

“Is anybody in the house?” he asked.

“No—I mean yes! Nugget. Shit.”

“Nugget shit?”

“Nugget, our dog,” said Kathleen. “He’s in there.”

She started toward the house, but the driver flung his arm in front of her chest. “Don’t you go in there, ma’am. You call 911. I’ll go get your dog. My twin brother’s a firefighter.”

“What’s that got to do with—”

“You want your dog to die of smoke inhalation? What does he look like?”

“He looks like a dog,” said Kathleen. “He’s the only one in there. But the house doesn’t look like it’s on fire. I can really just—”

“Big dog? Small dog?”

“A Yorkshire terrier. Small. With a missing eye. But—”

“Small one-eyed dog. Got it. Give me your keys.”

She handed him the keys, just to get rid of him, and called 911. When she got off the phone with the dispatcher, she moved a few paces over the lawn toward the garage. The smoke was thicker than it had been seconds before, and there were now tendrils of flame creeping out from under the roof. The left-hand garage door was open, and Kathleen saw that the source of the blaze was Bill’s 1969 Dodge Charger, which he’d bought on a whim the year before. It was completely engulfed in flames. In spite of herself, Kathleen felt a flare of triumph. She’d told him repeatedly it was a deathtrap. She’d been referring to its lack of three-point seat belts and airbags, but the fact that it was now on fire was not altogether surprising to her.

Still, poor Bill was going to be heartbroken. She dialed his number and was waiting for him to pick up when suddenly there he was, emerging from the garage, stumbling and coughing, a spent fire extinguisher in his hands, wearing nothing but a half-unbuttoned white dress shirt and boxer shorts.

“Bill, Jesus!” She ran toward him. “What’s happening? Are you okay?”

He staggered forward a few more steps, then tossed the fire extinguisher aside, fell to his hands and knees, hacking and coughing, and vomited onto the grass. Kathleen knelt beside him and rubbed his back. After a few final mucus-drenched coughs, he looked at her. “I’m sorry, Kath,” he croaked.

“Sorry for what? What happened?”

In the distance, there was the wail of sirens.

“Shit,” Bill said, and commenced coughing again.

“I got him! All good!” The taxi driver was coming down the front walk, Nugget a small hairy lump in his arms. “Hey!” He pointed to Bill. “You’re that guy running for president. I saw you on the news.”

“Senate,” Bill managed to gasp.

The driver grinned. “Sure, that’s where it starts.” He handed Nugget to Kathleen, nearly knocking her to the ground, then pulled his phone out of his pocket and crouched next to Bill to snap a selfie.

“Delete that!” Bill yelled, his voice suddenly strong and clear.

“Don’t worry,” said the driver, standing back up. “I won’t show it to anyone. Just my wife.”

“Please, delete,” Bill said before he was wracked by another coughing fit.

An ambulance and a fire engine were pulling into the driveway now.

“All right, all right.” The driver tapped at his phone in a not entirely convincing way. “I guess you being in your underwear and everything.”

For the first time, it occurred to Kathleen to wonder: Why was Bill in his underwear? The Nantucket Reds, she saw now—an inside joke going back to when they were first dating and had gone to Nantucket for his sister’s wedding, at his parents’ enormous summer home. The day before the wedding, they’d gone into a shop that was entirely devoted to clothing in that simpering, stupid, milky tomato soup color. Kathleen, relatively new to the East Coast at the time, had told Bill she couldn’t believe men actually wore it. He bought a pair of boxer shorts on the spot to prove that they did. She had bought him a pair every Christmas since, to the point where it wasn’t quite a joke anymore.

“Bill,” she said now, “why are you— Were you in the middle of getting dressed? In the car?”

He turned his head toward her, and the look in his eyes was one of utter defeat. “I’m so sorry, Kath,” he rasped. “She’s not . . . ​She just . . .”

Kathleen felt the blood drain from her limbs. Please let him be referring to the car, she thought. But Bill was not the kind of man who referred to cars or boats or any other mode of transportation as she. She wouldn’t have married him if he were.

He started coughing again, and this time it sounded decidedly fake.

Kathleen stood and turned slowly around. Atop the low wall on the other side of the driveway was a woman in a disheveled blue cocktail dress, barefoot, slumped over on her side, her face partially obscured by the low-hanging branches of a rhododendron. A pair of hot-pink panties dangled from her left ankle.

“Uh-oh,” said the driver.

“Who . . . ​is”—Kathleen could barely force the words from her throat—“that?”

Bill did not reply.

“Is she dead?” the driver eventually said.

“She drank too much,” said Bill.

“I don’t know,” said the driver. “She looks pretty dead.”

“Excuse me,” Kathleen said, a scrap of breath having returned to her lungs, “could you give us some space, please?” She turned and thrust Nugget into the driver’s arms. “Keep him if you want.”

“Nah, I’m not really a dog person. And the missing-eye thing . . .”

“You can’t keep him,” said Bill. “Just go away.”

The driver shrugged and ambled down the lawn.

“Who is that?” Kathleen asked Bill again. She couldn’t bring herself to say she. It would confirm the fact that there was, indeed, a she in their yard. A she in their life.

But before Bill could answer, or take his fake coughing up a notch, two EMTs appeared, one man and one woman, and clapped an oxygen mask to his face.

Kathleen turned away. Across the driveway, the that in the dress was also being attended to by an EMT. Kathleen recognized her now: one of a bevy of twentysomething women who worked on Bill’s campaign. The one with an impossibly small waist; an incongruously bulbous, perfect ass; and huge teardrop-shaped eyes fringed with antennae-like eyelashes. She looked not unlike a cartoon ant—something Kathleen herself had pointed out to Bill. In their bed, no less. Had his laughter been strained or forced? Not that she recalled. All she remembered was that it was one of those intimate moments of connection they’d had far too few of since his campaign had begun.

And no wonder: he was fucking the ant woman. A woman half his age who was technically his employee. If he was going to do this, did he have to be such a goddamned cliché about it? Kathleen had never felt so small. So foolish. So raw and exposed—as if her very skin had been stripped away.

She felt an intense need to hold on to something. Even Nugget, maybe. But the taxi driver was down at the edge of the street now, still holding the dog, talking with the small crowd of neighbors that had assembled.

The firefighters were deluging the garage with water, and the EMT in the driveway had wrapped a blanket around the woman in the blue dress and was leading her away. She was crying hysterically. Bill, meanwhile, was arguing with his own EMTs, who were trying to convince him he should come to the hospital for monitoring.

“A man your age . . .” the woman EMT said.

“A man my age?” Bill practically whimpered. “I’m only forty-nine.”

The EMTs exchanged a look.

“You should go to the hospital,” Kathleen said. The last thing she wanted was to be alone with him in their house. Although the thought of him being in the ambulance with the ant woman wasn’t much better. The thought of anything hurt—sent her heart smashing into a brick wall. How could this be happening?

Bill shook his head. “I’m fine. It’s just a little smoke.” He swallowed back a cough and then, absurdly, looked at Kathleen and mouthed I love you.

Kathleen felt the sudden violent urge to be as far from him as possible. “I’m going to get Nugget.”

She started down the lawn to where the taxi driver was holding up Nugget’s paw, making him wave at a neighbor’s cellphone camera. She hadn’t gotten more than a few steps when the female EMT caught up to her.

“Hey, ma’am?” the EMT said softly. She touched her palm to Kathleen’s shoulder, and for a second Kathleen thought perhaps she was going to try to comfort her.

“It’s okay, I’m fine,” Kathleen said, though in fact, she was suddenly on the edge of tears, just from that gentle touch. (Would it be strange if she hugged the EMT? Yes, it would.)

“You just had a little, um . . . ​leak,” the EMT said. She shrugged off her jacket and tied it around Kathleen’s waist.

“A leak?”

“The fire chief will want to give the all clear before he lets you into the house, but I think you could sneak around the back door and change if you wanted. I’ll cover for you.”

“What do you—?”

“You’re clear.” She turned Kathleen toward the house and gave her a little shove. “Go!”

It wasn’t until she was rounding the back corner of the house that Kathleen realized, with a growing sense of dread, what had probably happened: In her haste to get home after her flight landed, she hadn’t stopped to use the bathroom at JFK. And therefore, she hadn’t changed the tampon she’d been wearing since she’d left LA—the weird, flimsy, organic hemp, made-by-women-in-Malawi tampon she’d had to borrow from her sister when her period showed up four days early with a vengeance, the way it so often did of late. Except, of course, when it didn’t show up at all. (What a joy it was to be forty-seven.)

Inside the house, she flung off the EMT’s jacket and raced to the bathroom off the kitchen, where she climbed up onto the toilet and peered over her shoulder to see herself in the mirror. And there it was: on the very bottom of the seat of her pale green capris was a circle of dark, ugly blood the size of a saucer.

She sat down on the toilet and sobbed.

Day Two

Kathleen woke up the next morning with her pajama top soaked in sweat, smelling like a foot. As with her periods, there was no predicting when her body would decide to release the valves on whatever hormones controlled her sweat glands, drenching her in her sleep.

Sitting up, seeing Bill’s side of the bed empty, the linens flat, she was slapped with the memory of what had happened: Fire. Boxers. Floozy. Blood. Her life as she’d known it gone, never to return. Her husband was a cheater. She was a perimenopausal, middle-aged fool. Their daughter’s tender heart would be shattered. Everything would change.

She closed her eyes and laid her forearm across her face to block out the light.

She couldn’t believe this was happening.