“Sorry I kept it for so long,” Andrew said.
Carla took a step back to let him in. “Your chair is in the kitchen,” she said.
104:PM
Terrence and Leonard grew up in Dallas and moved to different cities at the same time. They were bored with Dallas. All the women in Dallas were preternaturally interested in the fact that they were twins, though they were grown by then and had exhausted all avenues for conversation regarding their twinship.
Of course, luck would have it that the woman Terrence was starting to feel comfortable around would squeal and hold her palms together when she learned he was a twin.
“Who’s older?” June asked, resting her chin on her upturned palms. It was the most excited she’d been all evening, even after he told his humorous stories from his job at the collections agency.
“He is, by thirteen minutes.” Terrence couldn’t stop fussing with a dollop of glitter glue on the Formica table between them. He was trying to edge his fingernail under it.
“What did your mother do in that thirteen minutes?” June asked. “Have a cigarette? Wonder, ‘is this second one really worth it’?”
Terrence laughed politely. “Right,” he said, answering none of the questions. June had no way of knowing that his mother was long dead, and she seemed nice enough that she would have been embarrassed if he mentioned it.
“Anyway,” June said. Saying “anyway” was a conversational tic of hers, it seemed, as she had resorted to it three times over the course of an hour.
AM:105
Missy shrugged. “What I want to know is,” she said, dropping her fork into a puddle of maple syrup, “why does everyone keep talking about how fat Frances is?”
“Who’s Frances?” Chet asked. Missy and Chet had been married for six months.
“Oh my God,” said Chastity, at that moment breastfeeding her three-year-old son. “Frances is so plump.”
“She’s plump!” Missy said. “Exactly! She’s pleasantly plump. I mean, there but for the grace of God go the rest of us.” She pinched the thin layer of fat on her own belly.
Chastity made a face. “I’ll never be that plump,” she said, shifting her weight. The boy toothed her nipple and she winced.
“Not as long as you keep up that tit lipo,” Missy said, mostly for the benefit of Chet, who hadn’t stopped staring since Chastity unbuttoned her blouse and hauled it out.
Missy plunged her fork into the last square of her french toast, swirling it around and thinking of all the opportunities for pain she had missed in her life. “Frances is so fat,” she said, satisfied.
106:PM
They found Tess in the center of her living room with her legs folded neatly under her. The pose suggested that she had received sudden and shocking news, and had to sit down immediately to allow her body to catch up with the emotional significance.
The rope hung loose from the rafters, still on her neck, its frayed ends spun out behind her like a child’s toy. The shoe on the table, five feet from the girl, suggested that she swung about eight horizontal feet before the rope broke. You could imagine the look on her face.
AM:107
One day, everyone stopped over-thinking. We started thinking just as much as we should, and not any more than necessary. There were no more misunderstandings whatsoever. Minor disagreements were forgotten, not turned into proof of larger things. Trivial errors of speech or judgment were just as important as items on the breakfast menu: you chose waffles and I chose eggs and it was a god damn miracle.
108:PM
Carla stepped out of the dressing room and took a modest turn. “How do I look?” she asked.
Hazel looked at her mother with a critical eye. The knot halter cut of the gown revealed her slender shoulders. The vibrant pink, which had looked a little young on the rack, added color to the woman’s face. Carla looked in the mirror, put one bare foot forward, wiggled her hips a little.
“Mom,” Hazel said, “you look like a brand new bitch.”
“Well that’s fine,” her mother said. “I somewhat feel like a brand new bitch.”
AM:109
Charles was painting the ceiling red after the landlord specifically told him not to paint anything at all.
From the door, Doreen looked up at him. “It must take a special kind of stubborn,” she said, “to live your life.”
“It will look incredible,” he said, stretching his arms overhead. He winced in the stretch.
“You should get off that ladder.”
“It all has to be done at once, or it won’t appear even.”
“You’ll pull a muscle in your back and we’ll starve.”
“You want to do it?” he asked, waving the roller at her. Red paint dripped to the drop cloth below. At least he had the foresight to put down the drop cloth, she thought.
“I don’t want you to do it,” she said. “The landlord doesn’t want you to do it. Nobody wants you to do what you’re doing right now.”
“It will look incredible. The baby will love it.”
“What baby?”
He looked at her, exasperated. “For God’s sake, woman. I’m simply thinking ahead.”
110:PM
Olivia couldn’t bear to watch them take the rest of the tree. The men propped ladders up against the trunks and climbed up to stand at eye-level with her office. She shut the blinds and shuddered as branches fell against the walls and windows. When she opened the blinds again, she saw that the tree central to her viewing area had been compromised, swarms of gnats attending to sap glistening on the cut trunk. The tree bent back unnaturally from the window, as if shamed. She realized the hatred she felt for the people and things over which she had no control.
AM:111
They sniped at each other quietly outside the changing room at the department store. “Everything makes sense if you think about it long enough,” Missy said. “That’s your problem.”
“Now, that makes sense,” said Chet. “I bet you thought about that for a long time.”
“Does this make me look fat?”
Chet looked appraisingly at his wife. “You gained half a pound this week.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“Maybe a quarter pound,” he lied.
“You make all that stuff up anyway. I can’t understand why those scientists call you amazing.”
She flounced back into the changing room. Chet took a seat by the doorway.
112:PM
“Terrence,” Charles said. “Friend.”
“Charles?”
Charles mumbled something, but Terrence could barely hear Charles’s voice from the other side of the box.
Terrence leaned forward. “What’s that?”
“Infants are smarter than we think,” Charles said, faintly.
“Infants?”
“Infants,” Charles said, “are smarter than we think.”
“You’re all right, Charles?”
“They’re smarter,” Charles said.
AM:113
Wallace’s concept of honor ensured he would never go to sleep satisfied. His concept of God was that a being that creates bread from bread is to be feared. Love is intensity with less spectrum, sadness is spectrum with less intensity. Wallace believed in the horizontal nature of pain and the verticality of love.