Other People's Houses, page 21
“Maybe this time it’s true.”
Another sigh. Ah, the innocence of youth. “No. It never is. Maybe you can go and live with her instead? That happens a lot, right?” She looked around for support. One of the other girls, Jemma, piped up.
“My mom lives in a much nicer house than she did when we were all in the same place. She said now that she doesn’t need to pay for my dad she can afford a better place. I have a cat at her house. And a bike.”
Kate considered this. Jemma had more details. “But when I stay with my dad he lets me stay up late and watch TV with him on the sofa, and then I get to sleep in his bed.”
“Where does he sleep?”
“On the sofa. I guess he likes it.”
“Why can’t you both sleep in the bed?”
Jemma shrugged. “It’s not big enough. It’s just a regular bed, like I have at home. Not a big parents bed.”
“Where is your mom living?”
A ball came flying toward them, but Becky deftly returned it, displaying the superior reflexes of a seven-year-old. A clump of boys scattered as the ball plowed through them, like pigeons evading a toddler. One of them hurled insults at the girls for no reason, and Becky flipped him the bird.
“I don’t know where she is,” Kate realized suddenly, a feeling of panic starting in her tummy.
The bell rang for the end of recess, and the girls turned to go inside. Suddenly Becky put her arm around Kate and hugged her. “Don’t worry, Kate, everything will be fine. Hardly any of the kids in school have both parents at the same time. It’s not that big a deal.”
It felt like a big deal to Kate, but she smiled anyway.
* * *
• • •
That night at dinner, Lally was incredibly bent out of shape. She wanted a different plate. A different spoon. A different pasta shape. Frances tried to convince her they all tasted the same, but Lally considered that a ludicrous argument and Michael unhelpfully agreed with her.
“I think the thicker shapes, the penne, the rigatoni, the farfalle . . . they definitely taste different from the thinner ones.”
“Like what?”
Ava chimed in. “Spaghetti and angel hair.”
“No.” Frances felt pretty strongly about this. “They taste different because of the way in which the sauce interacts with them.”
“Is interact the right verb? I think of pasta as pretty passive, I’ll be honest.”
“Yes, Michael. It takes both pasta and sauce to make a taste, otherwise we would just eat them on their own.”
“But I do want to eat them on their own.” Lally felt this conversation was getting away from her. “I just want spaghetti with butter and cheese.”
“But you like meat sauce.”
“No. I’ve never liked it.”
This was a lie, but suddenly Frances didn’t care anymore. She put a fresh pan of water on to boil, and gave Lally a bowl of strawberries in the meantime.
Milo had been steadily eating during this whole exchange, and now pushed his plate away. “I’m done, is there dessert?”
Frances nodded. “There’s ice cream in the freezer, like always. But you can’t have it until everyone is done eating, like always.”
Milo sighed. “May I be excused?”
Frances sighed back. “You can’t just stay here with your family for more than the time it takes to eat? Maybe we have exciting news.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“OK then. I have homework to do.”
Frances nodded and her son got up and headed out, putting his plate down for the dogs as he did so. There was only the faintest smear of sauce left on it, but the dogs took their pre-rinse responsibilities seriously, and became worried if you didn’t put your plate down. Apparently, they lived in fear of being replaced by, what, a running faucet?
“I have news,” said Lally, around a strawberry.
“Oh yeah?” asked Ava, who was in a relatively good mood for once.
“Yeah. Treasure is getting a puppy.” She turned to her mom. “We should get a puppy.”
“No puppy,” Michael said, automatically.
But Lally was insistent. “Jack and Diane are old now, we should get them a puppy.”
“That’s not how it works,” explained her father. “They won’t look after the puppy, your mom would look after the puppy, and she’s got enough to do right now.”
“No, I would help . . .”
“Lally, I really have my hands full enough, OK?” Frances said, maybe a little more sharply than she’d intended.
Lally looked at her mom, and suddenly subsided. “OK.”
There was a short silence.
“That’s it?” Ava couldn’t keep it in. “You’re just giving up?” She reached over to her sister and felt her forehead. “She’s not hot.”
“I don’t want a puppy, it’s OK.”
Frances frowned. It was most unlike Lally to stop bugging them this quickly. There had to be something deeper at work.
“I don’t want to make Mommy mad.”
Michael looked over at the stove. “I think her water is boiling.”
Frances got up to put the pasta on.
“It’s fine, Mom, I can eat the penne.” The four-year-old started eating her pasta, which was now sitting cold in front of her.
“It’s not a problem, Lal, honestly.” Michael reached across the table and touched her arm. “Mom’s already making spaghetti.”
But Lally was upset about something, and her chin was wobbling, even as it was getting covered in spaghetti sauce. Suddenly Ava spoke, her connection with her baby sister helping her put the pieces together faster than the rest of the family.
“She won’t leave, Lally. It’s not that big a deal. Mom’s not going anywhere.”
Michael looked at Frances, who had just dropped a handful of spaghetti into the water and was about to stir it to stop it from clumping. The spoon was in the air.
Lally started crying, putting down her fork and wiping her face.
“But she might.”
“She won’t.” Ava was firm. “Good luck getting her to leave just by asking for a puppy or a different dinner. I’ve been driving her mad for my entire life, and she’s still sticking around.”
Lally sniffed and looked at her big sister. “Really?”
“Really. Honestly, I’ve been terrible. You’re a rank amateur compared to me.”
Milo had wandered in during this, having heard the commotion from the other room. “Plus,” he added, “what about that time I set fire to the curtains in the front room?”
Lally’s eyes grew round. She hadn’t been alive for that one, but it was part of family lore. It was alternately referred to as The Curtain Incident or That Time the Dog Saved Our Lives. Jack had been a lone dog at that point, and a heroic one at that.
“If she didn’t leave over an actual fire, then she isn’t going to leave over pasta.”
Lally looked trustingly at Milo and nodded. But then her face clouded. “But Kate and Theo didn’t do anything at all and their mom left.”
Michael cleared his throat. His turn. “Well, Anne left for reasons to do with her, not because of Kate and Theo. Mommies and daddies never leave because of something their kids did, or at least, only very, very, very rarely.” He got up and came around to Lally’s side of the table. He knelt down next to her, and turned her little face to look at him. “Listen to me, Alexandra. There is nothing, NOTHING, you could do that would make your mom or me leave you, do you understand? We have been a family for a long, long time and we’re going to be following you around the grocery store when you’re at college, got it?”
“That’s creepy,” said Ava. “You’d better not do that to me.”
“I’m not promising anything.”
Finally, Lally got up the nerve to look at Frances. “Are you going away?”
Frances was stirring the pasta, letting Michael and the kids sort this one out in their inimitable way. Her heart was breaking for her baby, but she kept her outside calm and measured, nothing to panic about. She smiled at Lally and shook her head. “No, baby. Your dad is right, there is nothing you can do to get rid of me. You’re stuck with me forever, I’m afraid.”
“Seriously,” said Ava. “She’s like a genetic disorder.”
“Or a birthmark,” added Milo, turning to head back to his homework, this crisis having been averted.
“Or termites,” concluded Michael. “You might not always be able to see them, but they’re nearly always there.”
Frances threw a piece of spaghetti at the ceiling, where it stuck next to the one that had been there since before Lally was born. She waited, but it stayed.
Twenty-nine.
It was Saturday again. There was a kids book Frances liked, where the alphabet decided to wing it for once and go in a different order from usual. A started it off, but then one of the other letters got pissy and they all ran about and picked their own places. It got completely out of hand, but Frances often wished things could be more like that in real life. Let’s throw Tuesday out completely one week, and have two Thursdays instead. Tuesday is a pointless, soul-destroying day, the day when you’re brokenhearted that the week still has so much to go, and none of this work is going to do itself. Tuesday is the day you stare at the wall and wonder if you should have chosen a different major. A different husband. A different haircut. Wednesday you get your shit together emotionally because, let’s face it, you’ve been doing days in this order your whole life, and what’s the point of fighting the system? At work, however, it’s touch and go all day. But Thursday? Thursday you can see the weekend ahead and you get a second burst of steam and plow through everything so you can leave early on Friday. Frances gave this kind of thing a lot of thought, and if there were a “Random and Totally Useless Thoughts” category on Jeopardy!, she would crush it.
Frances was back at AYSO again, having thrown scissors against Michael’s rock. They used rock, paper, scissors to settle everything, and it had reached the point where they would throw the same thing for about six turns, then one of them would throw scissors and the other would throw rock. She wondered if when they were eighty it would take them thirty identical throws to get to a decision, which was another question for that Jeopardy! category, if Alex Trebek ever called. Occasionally she would play “crazy” rock, paper, scissors with Lally or Milo, where they would throw nutball things like shark (one hand making biting movements), spider (obvious), flames (upside-down spider), or rabbit (again, if you need a diagram this isn’t the game for you). She’d tried this against Michael one time and he’d vetoed it instantly.
“How can you say for certain that shark would beat scissors?” he had asked, incredulously.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Frances said. “Could it be that sharks are one of the world’s most efficient killing machines, with super tough skin and teeth that constantly replace themselves, and scissors—even if they’re incredibly, surgically sharp—are still just scissors? PLUS you would need to be very close to the shark to deploy them, and then it would just eat you. Particularly if you had just stabbed it with a pair of scissors, which it would probably consider unfriendly.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” he’d said. “But if we start going outside the norms of rock, paper, scissors I think we’d be playing a dangerous game.”
“Rather than a childhood game?”
“Yes. Who knows where it could lead. You could throw karate chop and I could throw finger guns and all of a sudden it’s a Tarantino movie.”
Suddenly Frances got hit in the head with a soccer ball, which jolted her out of her pleasant replaying of Idiotic Conversations with My Husband, a channel she watched a lot in her head.
“Sorry!” A small boy ran up to her and retrieved the ball. “Sorry, Frances!”
She looked down. It was Lucas. She smiled. “No problem, sweetheart, I wasn’t using my head for anything right then anyway.” He ran off. Frances waved at Bill, who was standing on the goal line of Lucas’s game, and then looked over to see if either of her own kids was injured. She wasn’t asking for a broken leg or anything, a badly skinned knee would cut this shit short.
“Hey, Frances, anyone injured yet?” It was Lilian, clutching an enormous cup of coffee.
“Hey there, no, sadly, all hale and hearty and running around this morning.” Frances looked around. “Did you bring Mr. Edam?”
Lilian nodded, pointing one finger from her coffee-gripping hand. “He’s over there, watching Clare. Her team are the Pink Dolphins. He’s holding a Pink Dolphin. That’s how you’ll pick him out.”
Frances spotted him. “He’s very tall.”
Lilian nodded. “Yup.”
“And quite broad in the shoulders.”
Lilian sighed. “Yup.”
“And handsome and all that stuff. I can see why you’re ambivalent.”
Lilian clicked her tongue. “But look at him waving a stuffed dolphin! Isn’t that questionable behavior in a grown man?”
Frances shrugged. “I think it’s cute. I think he’s cute. I think Clare likes him, judging by the way she’s clutching him around the knees.”
Lilian smiled. “Yes, the kids like him a lot. Annabel wasn’t sure at first, but now it’s like he was her idea all along. I don’t know why I’m reluctant about him, he’s really nice.”
Frances shrugged again. “Because you’re as nuts as the rest of us? Because why let yourself be happy when you can get in your own way and question it? Because you feel guilty for being happy when there is so much misery and suffering in the world?”
“Sure,” said Lilian, after taking a thoughtful swig of coffee. “All of the above. Plus, he’s amazing in bed, and who needs that?”
“Never mind,” consoled Frances. “That will fade. I promise.”
Lilian looked at her. “Sex life not what it used to be?”
Frances shook her head. “Actually, much as it used to be, if you only go back a decade or so. My mother once memorably told me if you put a coin in a jar every time you had sex the first couple of years of a relationship, and then, once you’d been married a year started taking one out every time you had sex, you’d never empty the jar.”
Lilian frowned. “I’m not good enough at math to understand that.”
“Me neither, when she told me. I thought she was wrong, and told her so. She laughed, and I think now I understand why. You don’t have very much sex after you’ve been married twenty years. Or at least, we don’t.” She coughed. “How on earth did we get onto this?”
“My hunky Dutch guy.”
“Oh yeah. Well, anyway, get it while you can. Enjoy.”
“I have two little kids. There’s not all that much time for chandelier swinging.”
“Get a room.”
Lilian suddenly looked animated. “Oooh, like Anne Porter? Is that all true?”
Clare came running over, with the dolphin in her hand. “Mom, can you hold this for me?”
“Wasn’t Edward holding it?”
“I was.” The tall Dutch guy had shown up behind Clare. Frances looked him over surreptitiously. Jeez Louise. He noticed her and smiled, holding out his hand. “Hello, I am Edward.”
“Hi there.” Frances shook his hand, enjoying Lilian’s obvious discomfort. She was dying to say, “Hey, Lilian says you’re great in bed,” but decided to save it for when there wasn’t a child present. She looked at Lilian, who clearly saw the internal debate she was having. “Are you having dolphin problems?”
He cleared his throat. “The game is over, and Clare wanted to go to the playground. Is that OK?”
Lilian nodded. “Sure, knock yourselves out. Annabel’s game will be over in another fifteen minutes or so. I’ll hold Pinky and meet you down there.”
“It’s not Pinky,” said Clare.
Lilian looked at the dolphin. “It’s not? Who’s this then?”
“That’s Dolphy.” Edward kept a straight face. “Pinky used to be her name, but she changed it.”
“Why?”
He opened his mouth to answer her, but Clare was tugging on him. “Mom,” she said, “can we just go? We can talk about names later.”
Lilian raised her palms and nodded.
“See, Edward?” Clare took his hand and dragged him away. “You just need to be firm, then she can understand anything!” Edward looked apologetically over his shoulder at Lilian and Frances, then turned back to the child at hand.
“Yeah,” said Frances. “He’s awful.”
“So, is it true, about Anne?”
“The cheating part or the getting divorced part or both?”
“All of it. Tell me all of it.”
Suddenly Frances was tired. “Do I have to? I’m bummed out about it and I just can’t get excited about it as a piece of gossipy news. I’m sorry, but you’re an actual friend, so I’m being honest. I realize I’ve talked about other families like this many, many times, but for some reason now it’s my life, so to speak, or at least this close to my life, and it feels wrong to talk about it. It may ruin gossip for me permanently. You know Anne, you can ask her directly.”
Lilian looked at her. “Are you OK? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize how upsetting it would be. You’re right, when it’s someone else it’s all fun and games, but when it’s your own life it’s not the slightest bit funny.” She sighed. “After my husband died people I didn’t know very well suddenly became very interested in me. They wanted to chat, wanted to know stuff, wanted to make inquiries, do you know what I mean? Most of them meant well, wanted to help. But after a few months you start to hate the smell of dropped-off rotisserie chicken and the obligation to make coffee and rehash your pain for someone else’s vicarious experience.” There was a silence. “Everyone brings a fucking rotisserie chicken.” Another silence. “I call them The Birds of Grief.”
