“I also teach,” she said.
“And the kids get that? They can make sense of all of that?” He had a fleshy face, and a burst blood vessel had left a splotch of red below his eye.
“Some of it,” she said. “They’re very bright, the kids I get. They’re wonderful.” She believed this as she said it, smiled thinking of them. “I teach intro classes also. It’s a pretty universal concern, though, right?”
He nodded. “It’s not really practical, though, huh? It certainly won’t help them get jobs.”
Maya sat up straighter and pulled her shawl more tightly to her chest. “Practical,” she said. “It’s literature.”
She’d meant this as corrective. But he stared at her smugly, as if she’d just proven him right.
“This is the problem with liberal education,” he said. “These kids are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to leave school without a single marketable skill.”
“Do you consider knowing how to think impractical?” she asked him. Her voice had risen. She was somehow, inexplicably, standing up. The shoes and then the gin: she was unsteady on her feet.
“I happen to think quite well,” he said.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” Maya’d said.
She might have raised her voice.
People were watching. She could feel Stephen’s eyes.
He pulled her away.
“You were about three seconds from throwing your drink.”
“He was an ass, Stephen.”
“Did you think you might convert him if you yelled more?”
“I wasn’t yelling.” Maya placed her now-bare feet back on the floor. Stephen glared at her. They’d just come through the tunnel. She looked ahead to avoid facing him. She watched the light turn to yellow and then red.
“Stephen!” she said. But they were halfway through the intersection by the time the brakes caught. Horns honked. Maya fell forward and her head hit hard on the dash.
Summer 2011
“I did in vitro,” says Annie. She talks freely, ambling from topic to topic, not seeming to mind when or if Ellie or Jeffrey joins.
They’ve been swimming — after fifteen minutes in the car, Ellie staring down at her hands, nervous, Annie chatting, Jeffrey smiling, trekking over the boardwalk, Ellie barefoot on tiptoes forgetting how very hot the sand could get, finally then forgetting Jack and Jeff and Annie all behind her, diving in and thinking, perfect—those few minutes she was underwater like there might be no one in the world but her.
“It took us two years before it worked,” Annie says.
All three of them have showered. Ellie put her clothes away while Jeffrey and Annie fed Jack and put him to bed. She tried on a dress and two pairs of shorts, before she chose a loose-fitting pair of jeans and one of Ben’s old soccer shirts. They usually all eat together, Annie told her, but all the hours in the water have worn Jack’s tiny body out.
“I never thought I wanted a family, you know?” She moves from the pantry to the stove and pours a cup of rice into boiling water; she grabs the cutting board from Ellie and scrapes the garlic and the onions into a pan. “I always felt so independent,” she says. “But then, I was almost forty and desperate for someone to love like that.” Ellie’s still a minute, trying to figure out what “like that” means, but Annie doesn’t explain and Ellie doesn’t ask her. Annie takes the strips of peppers Ellie’s cut and drops them in the pan. “Jeffrey.” She nods toward him. He wears shorts and a short-sleeved white button-up. He holds his hair behind one ear and smiles at his wife. “I thought he would be ambivalent. We’d talked about it, you know? But it seemed like we’d decided by virtue of waiting as long as we did. He has his kids, you know, his patients. He gives so much to his work. But once we started trying, he was more attached to the idea than me.”
She stops then and looks at Ellie. She puts the top on the pot with the rice and pulls a chair out so Ellie can sit. The kitchen’s large, with bright yellow cabinets above burnt-red counters covering two full walls. They have an island in the middle with a stovetop and lines of spices. The kitchen opens straight onto the living room, where two long couches sit catty-corner to one another and look out lines of windows onto the overly lush yard and then the river beyond that. “You think you’re not that caught up in your idea of yourself as woman, you know? But it turned out I wasn’t above that sort of empty ache.” For a minute she’s quiet, turning down the rice, looking at Jeff. “It was the third time we tried that it finally stuck.” Jeffrey sits at the table close to Ellie. He has a magazine in front of him, an old New Yorker. He flips pages as Annie talks.
“I guess I’ll always be most grateful for that push,” Annie continues, and Ellie watches as she smiles at her husband, his eyes still angled toward the pages of the magazine. “And I have him now.” There’s a way that the “him” sounds that makes clear to all of them that she means Jack. “It’s hard to imagine there was a time when I might not have. I never thought I’d be living here either or running that restaurant.” She says the last word like it tastes sour, raises an eyebrow, firms her lips. “But it suits me. And I like the water.”
“Me too,” says Jeffrey. He stands up now and grabs a green pepper from the pan where Annie’s mixing them together with the garlic and large strips of onion. He kisses Annie once, brusquely, on the cheek. “All of it.” He winks at Ellie. “Me too.”
Annie goes to check on Jack as they sit down to dinner. Jeffrey offers Ellie wine as she settles in her chair. She almost says no, but he’s already reaching up into the cupboard for another wine glass as he asks. Ellie doesn’t want to be the sort of girl who can’t handle a glass of wine when it’s offered her. She likes the face that Jeffrey makes when she says sure and smiles. He’s tall and tan and only looks his age when his skin crinkles on his forehead and around his eyes as he smiles, which he does, his head tilted toward Ellie, as he fills her glass. When Annie comes back she looks at Ellie’s glass, then over at Jeffrey, but whatever thought she has she keeps to herself.
She must not know, Ellie thinks. Or what she does know isn’t all there is.
Ellie loves the feel of the glass’s stem between her fingers, the way the weight of the wine shifts subtly as she tips it to her lips. She drinks slowly so as not to have to pour herself another glass.
Annie tells her a bit about the restaurant. Things are slow now because it’s summer. Like so much else in Florida, Jeffrey says, the tourist seasons are backward too. The whole place empties out from May to September. It gets too hot and the snowbirds head up north. So she’ll have time to get to know Jack gradually. Jeffrey’s schedule is also slower, since he works with kids and many of them have also gone for the too-hot months.
They eat quickly and move to the couches in the living room. The couches are a dark blue and the cushions are hard when Ellie sits. She pulls her legs underneath her in the corner. She wonders briefly if she should have asked first, if she should put her feet back on the floor. But, quickly, Annie does the same as Ellie; she rests her feet up underneath her, then stretches them out on Jeffrey’s lap; Ellie settles in as Annie talks.
“You know, he was the prom king.”
Jeffrey has one arm around the back of the couch and the fingers of his other hand move slowly up and down Annie’s bare shin.