“You need to ask your mother for some help.”
Lisa stared out the window.
“No. I can’t do that, Mark.”
He pulled his hand off her knee and turned the steering wheel leftward, moving the truck into a parking space.
“Don’t be this way. We don’t have enough money. We are falling way behind.”
“Look, I’m not asking her for money. We already owe her money. I’ll pick up more cleaning hours. We’ll manage.”
“No, Lisa, you already can’t even manage to keep our apartment clean. There are piles of laundry and there is never any food in the fridge. I’m sick of it. Just ask her for five hundred. It means nothing to her.” But it was no use. She was being a stubborn bitch. She was in a foul mood. When she was trying to get him up this morning, he grabbed her arm and told her to give him a break. He just pulled her a tiny bit too hard. He honestly hadn’t meant to, and now she would be quiet and angry all day. The kids were quiet in the back, somehow taking Lisa’s mood and multiplying it.
Alex gripped his mother’s hand as they walked across the parking lot following Mark and Alisa. Alisa did not want to hold her father’s hand. She kept pulling back to her mother. He moved too fast across the parking lot. Alisa went limp, a passive resister, her little body made dead weight. When he pulled at her she became a rag doll on the ground. He cursed, shot Lisa a look, then picked Alisa up. She continued to play dead, her head lolling around and her arms limp. She would do this to him. In the living room at bedtime, he’d grab her fast and she’d fall backward, like she’d been dealt a blow. It was kind of disturbing, her dead falls, even from the tiny height of a five-year-old body. She was fearless in her resistance of him. He wouldcontinue to pull her, and she would drag on the ground, her legs catching on table legs and doorjambs, until he gave up and picked her up. Then she became suddenly animated, her whole body a writhing, squirming thing, wriggling against his grip. He would nearly drop her, she became so difficult to hold, and he gave up, the five-year-old body outsmarting his huge person.
In the parking lot she did not squirm but continued to play dead. He thought people walking by would think she’d passed out, but at least she wasn’t squirming.
Lisa watched the back of Mark and her tiny daughter’s head bobbing. Her little face was blank. She wished Alisa wouldn’t behave like this toward Mark, but kids were not diplomatic in that way. They were Richter scales of disturbances, tiny, finely calibrated indicators of subarticulated resentments. At the entrance to the Safeway, Mark turned to Lisa and handed her the body of Alisa. Alisa immediately revived and hugged her mother with arms and legs, an exaggerated affection. Alex clung tighter to not just Lisa’s hand but her whole forearm. Mark regarded them for a moment, the three of them like refugees in some news footage, huddled under the shellfire of the enemy. He, of course, was the enemy, or the whole world was. Things had become stuck this way. He wanted to appeal to Alex, at least, but instead he turned away from them and strode through the automatic doors, the AC feeling good and momentarily relieving his frustration. He waited by a shopping cart as Lisa walked in, child-upholstered, staggering a bit. She peeled Alisa from her neck and pushed her into the kiddie seat of the shopping cart. Alisa still tried to cling to her from her seat, but Lisa firmly placed her daughter’s hands on the cart handle. Mark had his arms folded, watching. Lisa lifted thetight-gripped Alex and placed him standing in the cart next to where his sister sat.
“Are we ready or what?” Mark said, scowling at his watch. Lisa pushed the cart after him, pulling her list out. He led them, although he had nothing specific in mind. She had the list. She stopped behind him, filling the cart with paper towels and jars of peanut butter and tubes of toothpaste. She read labels intently. She studied them. She examined produce. Smelled it. Looked at expiration dates and asked the produce clerk the origins of things. She picked expensive organic chicken. Mark didn’t say anything. Time and money were no object to Lisa.
Alex reached for a package of cookies, and Mark grabbed it out of his hands.
“No extras today. We can’t afford it.” Alex looked at his mother.
“Don’t look at her. I’m the walking wallet. Daddy pays, not Mommy.”
Lisa pushed the cart forward. Mark shook his head. How did he get to be the one who always said no? She was the one who had too much pride to ask for help.
After the checkout girl took Mark’s money, he let Lisa push the cart of packages to the truck. He leaned against the car smoking as she unloaded the bags into the back.
“That’s nearly my whole check, Lisa. I have to have some money for gas. And I need some money to go out and blow off some steam tonight. My one night of the week. I have to drink cheap beer and stay home watching TV, is that it? I have to work at five in the morning and I can’t even buy a damn hamburger?”
Lisa put the kids in the backseat. They were quiet andpliant, thankfully. He watched her. They were a whole thing, united against him. He stood apart, unregarded. She moved heavily in the front seat and waited for him. He stood in the parking lot; the hot asphalt and the relentless summer California sun made him squint and sweat. He finally got in. She looked at his thick fingers on the steering wheel. It wasn’t going anyplace. Things were stuck. They were stuck.
“I’ll take care of the rent. I told you,” she said.
Mark shook his head.
“But I’m not asking her.”
Lisa felt a tiny soft hand on her cheek from the backseat. Her son, Alex, stroked the side of her face that was turned to the car window. A gentle little-boy touch. She reached behind her for his hand.
Spirit Gyms and Miracle Miles
Mina was trying to walk fast from her meeting with Lorene, which naturally she had been late for. First Lorene, then Max, then Scott. She had made Lorene late for an afternoon session at her spirit gym, again, Mina’s fault, again. But Mina couldn’t help it. She had, in a mere matter of weeks, hopelessly complicated her life. Now it seemed out of her control, a momentum of disaster. And on a Sunday. She remembered, with odd nostalgia, the way Sundays used to be. David and Mina’s unassailable day at home. It had all started on a Sunday, though, hadn’t it? She had sat on the porch with them, David and Max. Anordinary Sunday afternoon. They sat, drinking beer and eating potato chips, sucking on the occasional hot-weather cigarette. She kept lighting one and then putting it out — it never tasted as good as she imagined, but she kept trying, thinking some subtle chemical change had occurred since the last attempted drag that would make the cigarette as satisfying as she hoped.
If a person — Mina herself, for example — if she were a stranger, passing this porch and taking in this tableaux, here is what she would think: she would envy the handsome group of friends, leisure-wilted, good-looking, laughing and slightly drunk in the afternoon. And the average-looking girl, in the casual company of men and their jokes and their ease. The luck of the girl, with the attention of the two men, and their laughter. What must her life be like? And Mina would see her as if she were in a print ad or a TV commercial, laughing open-mouthed, throwing her head back, shooting pool in a sequined dress, leaning into a sail on a perfect blue sea, throwing an arm up in the swing of a convertible, waving — open-mouthed and impossibly carefree — at unseen friends, but always outnumbered and accompanied by men. Always backlit by their charmed and undivided attentions. What a lucky girl, what a life she has, she would imagine, watching herself. And she’s not even beautiful.
David’s best friend, Max, sat on their porch steps, unshaven and sweaty, smoking and drinking at twice the pace of the other two. He kept holding the sweating beer bottle to his forehead and rolling it horizontally, occasionally pressing the wet glass to one of his cheeks. David’s cheeks looked cool and dry. He wore an Australian army cap with a brim that suited his face, made him cinematic and casually glamorous. Where Max had an apparent early-thirties thin-guy gut that pressedagainst his T-shirt when he sat hunched, David was sleek, and inoffensively so, no hard-earned ripples in his stomach, just a natural slim elegance that made Mina think, He really isn’t like me, is he? It was in a silent pause in the afternoon sun, as she compared Max and David, that it happened. Max looked at her, looked when David wasn’t looking, looked when she was looking. He stared at her, and she felt it. It was like that, nearly conscious, although it wasn’t, she just made it so when she recalled it, finding reasons and ironies and logic and psychologies. But there, with the heat and the sweating beer bottles and the porch, within exhale reach of David’s obscene elegance, Mina nearly fainted with desire for his best friend, Max, his sweat and his soft, decadent body, his chain-smoking, his sideways cynicism, and his dead-on gaze.