Other People's Houses, page 4
“Are you going to tell Michael?”
“Of course. He is my husband.”
“Do you think he’ll tell Charlie?”
“I have no idea. Anne, you’ve been on the planet for over four decades. You read books. You watch the news. You should have anticipated getting found out, because it always happens. It always happens, Anne, and you knew that going in. You just didn’t care.”
Anne opened the door and stood there for a moment. “It’s not that I didn’t care, it’s that I’ve lost my mind. I really think I’ve gone insane. I don’t feel anything anymore, it’s just a blank white sheet. And the worst part is I don’t even care that I don’t care. I don’t miss feelings at all.” She turned and looked at Frances with cool, tearless eyes. “Horny is the only emotion I’ve felt for the last six months.”
Frances was cutting. “Horny isn’t an emotion, Anne. It’s a glandular condition of the young, which you are not. Depression isn’t an emotion, either, but many people find therapy and medication a lot more effective than having sex with a college student.”
“He’s not a college student. He’s a teacher at the art college.”
“I don’t give a shit what he is, Anne, it’s not like I’m ever going to be his friend.”
A neighbor walked by with her small dog, looking over at the raised voices. Anne and Frances both nodded and waved, and the neighbor nodded back, then paused for an awkward moment while her dog peed on the lawn. She made the classic eye roll that said, Sorry, my dog’s peeing on your grass, what can you do, I can hardly drag him off trailing piss across the sidewalk, and the two women at the door smiled and waited.
As the lady moved off Anne suddenly sighed and walked away, and Frances turned and shut the door. Back to work, everyone, nothing to see here.
* * *
• • •
Across the street, Bill Horton looked up at the sound of a door slamming. Anne Porter was walking away from Frances Bloom’s house, carrying a bag of something. He watched her, noting the cool way she moved, the slenderness of her figure accented by the simple jeans and loose sweater she wore. She was one of those women you couldn’t help noticing, whatever the context. They came in all shapes and sizes these women, the women he mentally labeled “alluring.” It was an old word, a word his father would have used, but it worked. All women could be attractive, many women were sexy, lots and lots of them were appealing and intelligent and funny and loving, but only a select few were like Anne, unreachable and, he mentally shrugged, alluring.
Now she was getting into her car, her hand on the top of the door the last thing he saw; her slender wrist torquing as she lowered herself suddenly filled his mind with the thought of seeing that wrist against a pillow as he pushed himself into her. Her car pulled away, carrying the image with it. He sat back from his desk and laughed at himself. In his forties, currently separated from a woman less timeless than Anne, but much warmer, he hadn’t had sex for nearly a year and sometimes the teenage boy who lived in his dick appeared. He didn’t even like Anne very much; there was something mocking that went along with her elegance, but you didn’t need to like a woman to imagine fucking her. He wondered how different human history would have been had evolution selected for that.
The phone rang, and he knew immediately it was his wife, Julie. Right now they were apart, but for Bill the separation was only physical.
“Hello, you.” Her voice was lovely, as ever; it might have been the thing he missed most about her. He’d always loved listening to her talk: to him, to the guy at the grocery store, to their son, even to their lawyer. Deep and melodious, with a laugh always buried somewhere inside it, it was what he’d been attracted to first. He’d heard her talking to someone else behind the library shelves, and managed to wander around in time to see her. He’d found himself staring at books about accountancy, hoping she would notice him. She had.
“Hello, yourself,” he replied now, a dozen years later, still in love.
“How’s today?”
Bill frowned, trying to remember. “Fine. Frances took him off to school. I’m working on twenty-four seconds of music to go behind a dancing . . . hang on . . .” He looked on his desk for a piece of paper. “. . . a dancing Danish.”
“Danish what?”
“No, just Danish. The pastry.”
His wife laughed, then coughed. “What is it dancing about? Is it happily dancing because it’s thrilled by its frosting, or is it drunkenly dancing alone in the liquor aisle?”
“Is your cough worse?”
“No. Tell me about the Danish.”
Bill sighed. If she didn’t want to talk about something, she wouldn’t. That was the way with her. She was like a cat, his wife, in many ways. Mysterious. Beautiful. Happy to be alone. And totally disinterested in pleasing anyone else unless she wanted to. Not in a mean way, at all, but in a way that didn’t expect anyone to do anything for her, either. He felt a mild frisson of anger, but ignored it. They’d fought hard for a long time, and now they were trying to keep the peace. He certainly wasn’t going to be the one to throw the first stone.
“The people at the agency didn’t give the Danish a backstory. The brief is simply this: ‘The music cue is twenty-four seconds long, should have a polka rhythm, and suggest energy and happiness.’”
Julie snorted. “Well, that’s plenty of background. The Danish enjoys polka music. The Danish is happy. The Danish feels energetic.”
“Which is sad, seeing as, presumably, it’s going to get eaten shortly.”
“Not that one. That one got plucked from obscurity to star in a commercial.”
There was a pause. He could hear her drinking water. “Is the cough really better?”
“I didn’t say it was better, I just said it wasn’t worse. It’s fine, don’t worry about the cough. Tell me about Lucas, what did he say this morning?”
“He repeated his request for a cat.”
“That was all he said?”
“No, he said he doesn’t like Cheerios anymore, then he said he wanted to wear different shoes than the ones I could find, and then, when he had me on the ropes about the shoes, he suddenly zigged and mentioned the cat.”
He could hear her smile. “Are we going to get him one?”
“Maybe. Maybe when you come home.”
A pause. “Or maybe if I don’t.”
“You will.”
“OK.” Bill heard voices in the background. “Hey, Adelaide just showed up. I gotta go.”
“Busy day?”
She sighed. “Same old same old.”
“Will you be able to Skype tonight? Lucas loved you reading to him last night.”
“I don’t know. I’ll text you, OK?”
“I love you.”
“I love you more.”
“I love you most.”
He heard her smile again, and then she hung up.
* * *
• • •
Lally and Lucas had apparently been hooked up to a sugar IV during the last hour of preschool, which seemed unlikely, but was empirically indicated. Both of them were in that state of little kid laughter where at any moment one of them might throw up. Frances watched them in the rearview mirror, torn between letting them laugh because, you know, children, and trying to calm them down so they didn’t implode. It was unclear why they were laughing, but apparently that shit was comedy gold. They were also amused by the enormous amounts of toilet paper and paper towels on the floor of the minivan. Momma went to Costco.
Of course, by the time they pulled up in front of Frances’s house, they were pale and angry with each other, and only the immediate application of an episode of Blue’s Clues (classic Steve, on Netflix) and some goldfish crackers settled the waters. As she made them lunch, Frances answered in her head for Blue, and wished she had a handy-dandy notebook. This world, the world of the preschooler, was where she felt most comfortable these days. After going through this phase twice before she knew resistance was futile, and mommy-ninja’d her way through most of the challenges Lally threw at her.
With a fourteen-year-old, a ten-year-old, and a four-year-old, Frances finally felt she had some kind of paradigm for understanding her experience of parenthood: Raising kids was like warfare. Not in the “dramatic death of millions” kind of way, obviously, but in the “struggle for peace” kind of way. Babies and little kids were like trench warfare. It was physically exhausting, psychologically draining, and there was a lot of flying mud and screaming. Shit went everywhere. Your clothes were ruined. You ate when you could, slept when you could, and got interrupted at the whim of the enemy.
Elementary-age kids were like campaign warfare. You knew there would be times of stress—like forcing a child to get a shot at the doctor, or to do their homework, or to give up on the concept of becoming a Pokémon trainer in the real world—but in between those intense sessions there was a lot of boring routine. One minute it would seem as though you were making progress, with promising overtures on both sides, but then two minutes later someone chucked a grenade and everything caught fire.
The big change, however, was what happened when the hormones kicked in. Then it was a guerilla war against an unseen counterinsurgency. Everything seemed much calmer on the surface, but any minute an improvised explosive device could cut you off at the knees or a sniper could get you in the back of the neck. You could never fully relax, and there was a lot of tiptoeing about and quizzing other kids for intel.
Sighing, Frances filled three little bowls with mac and cheese and joined Lally and Lucas on the sofa. She watched Steve do his thing, and continued her inner debate about how Salt and Pepper could have managed to conceive and produce both Paprika and Cinnamon. Salt was a crystal, pepper was a seed pod from a plant, paprika was also a seed pod. OK, so yes, she could see that, but cinnamon was the inner bark of a tree. She had wondered this before, which is why she had Wikipedia’d all that stuff and had, in fact, a fairly high level of knowledge about the international pepper trade as a result. It still bothered her, and she worried that Mrs. Pepper was a little tough on Paprika, especially once the baby came.
* * *
• • •
Ava was angry, and Frances had no idea why. She had no way of knowing if her daughter was angry with her, or with someone else, or just furious at the world in general. Not that it mattered. Ava often came boiling out of school ready to fight, as if she’d been simmering ever since drop-off, and had planned everything she needed to say for a convincing victory and the ultimate vanquishing of the adult world. But then she just sat there, letting her silence shout at her mother instead. Could anyone emanate silence as forcefully as a fourteen-year-old? No wonder people associate poltergeist activity with adolescence; they can beat you around the head without raising a finger. Frances felt a headache starting and took a deep, cleansing breath and slowly let it out.
“Why are you sighing at me?”
Frances shot her daughter a look. “I wasn’t. I was just breathing.”
“Well, quit it.”
“Completely?”
There was a pause.
“No,” replied Ava. “Not completely. I’m not tall enough to reach the pedals from over here, and if we crash on the way home I’m sure I’ll get blamed.” She picked at her nail polish.
“Not to mention that you’d have to explain to Anne, Iris, Charlie, and Bill why their kids were all in the hospital.”
Ava relaxed a little. “Charlie and Bill would be fine, but Anne would be pissed. She’s a little bit scary.”
“Anne?” Frances raised her eyebrows.
Ava was looking out of the window. “Yeah. Sometimes she looks at me as if she wants to snap my neck and throw my body on the ground.”
Frances pulled to a stop at a red light and turned to Ava. “Really?”
Ava nodded but didn’t elaborate, her mind already somewhere else. Frances looked in the rearview. Theo, Kate, Wyatt, and Milo were chattering away about God only knew what, and Lally and Lucas both had the thousand-yard stare of mid-afternoon preschoolers who were only a year or so out of taking a nap. None of them were paying any attention to her conversation at all.
She tried to reel Ava back in. “How was school?”
Ava shrugged. “Same same.”
“Same same good or same same bad?”
“Same same repetitive, which I think is what the phrase same same implies.” Her edge was back, like the slightly raised shoulder fur of a dog. I don’t have to fight you, it said, but I can and will if you keep irritating the shit out of me by merely existing.
“Who wants to stop at the park?” Frances raised her voice, startling the littlest kids and interrupting the older ones. They all looked interested, so she started to detour toward the playground.
“I have homework,” said Ava, firmly. “You need to drop me at home first.”
“We’ll only stop for half an hour, it will be good for you to be outside for a little while.”
“No,” replied her daughter. “It won’t. Don’t tell me what I need, you have no idea what I need.” She’d shifted herself away from her mother, each incremental inch making her distaste for proximity crystal clear.
“I didn’t. It will only be half an hour, and I’ll buy you ice cream.”
There was a pause as the Ava who loved ice cream fought with the Ava who hated to let her mother win.
Milo suddenly spoke from behind them. “If she has homework, maybe we should just go home. I don’t really care about the park.”
“Who are you, my agent?” Ava’s tone was scornful. Frances looked at her son’s eyes in the rearview. This was a new dynamic she’d noticed. He hated when she and Ava argued, so he was starting to take Ava’s side; but Ava rebuffed him every time, not needing anyone’s backup, thank you very much. Least of all that of a little boy. The little boy in question turned quickly to look out of the window, the scythe of his sister’s tone surprising him to tears.
Frances felt the quick, sharp pain of empathy, which was always so complicated when the slight was between siblings. But she kept her tone mild. “Ava, he was just trying to help, there’s no need to be mean.”
“I don’t need his help. I need to go home and be left alone to get on with my homework and, preferably, my entire life.” She knew she’d just hurt her brother’s feelings, and felt bad about it, but in the battle between her and her mother he was collateral damage. Unfriendly friendly fire.
Frances felt a tightness at the base of her throat that meant she was getting annoyed. She pushed it down, turned into the playground parking lot, and pulled into a space, punching the open- door button as soon as she turned off the engine. The younger kids started unbuckling, and she turned to her oldest child and smiled. “Look, Ava, I know you’re a mass of hormones and conflicting chemicals and I understand you have homework, but half an hour in the park will mean a better evening for all of us, and that’s what we’re doing. If you want to sit in the car and sulk, feel free.”
Ava started to speak, but Frances was already out of the car and helping the little ones jump down. As Milo climbed out she gave him a quick hug and followed him to the playground, not looking back at Ava at all.
* * *
• • •
Frances sat on the side of the playground where a low wall ran around the equipment. In theory, this playground was well designed, with a large central play structure and the aforementioned wall going all the way around. It probably looked awesome in blue pencil on thin paper, printed out in a New York design practice. But in real life it meant you could easily lose sight of your kids. All along the wall parents would look up from their phones, scan the structure, then stand and crab walk along until they spotted their charge, sitting down again where they could see them, dropping their eyes back to their phones, and then repeating the whole dance several times. If you time lapsed it from a drone it would look like the shadows on a sundial, circumnavigating.
Frances’s kids were old enough that she’d stopped crab walking. But occasionally she would scan, pausing as she waited for one or the other of them to appear, or bend to look under the structure, hunting for their shoes. When she had other people’s kids, too, as now, she was more watchful. Losing her own child would be bad enough, losing someone else’s would be a disaster.
Ava appeared next to her, ostentatiously carrying a textbook. She sat down, opened the book to a section on homeostasis, and did a little mime of running her finger down the page to the appropriate sentence.
“So,” said Frances, “homeostasis, eh?”
“Yup,” replied her daughter.
“Maintaining balance, right?”
“Yup.”
“A pendulum swinging will eventually come to rest in the middle?”
Ava sighed. “That’s not a perfect metaphor because homeostasis is about balance between oppositional forces, which keep pushing. A pendulum rests because it’s run out of energy to swing.”
Frances nodded. “Just checking.”
“You wondered if you’d forgotten the meaning of homeostasis?”
“No, just wondered if we were still talking.”
Ava smiled a very small smile. “Oh, we’ll always be talking, Mom. I’ll push from one side, you’ll push from the other. You know.”
Frances put her arm around her daughter and gave her a squeeze. “I know you have homework, baby. But the littler kids need to run about a bit, OK?”
Ava nodded. “I don’t know why I get so cranky with you. I’m just so tired after school, and so wound up from being nice all day.” She laughed at herself. “Not that I’m all that nice at school, I must admit.” Just then Lally appeared and tugged at her sister. “Will you chase me?” Ava started to frown, then suddenly nodded and got to her feet, turning to Frances. “Balance, right?”
