“Sounds pretty sophisticated,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “The thing is, they tailor assignments to each student’s interests — and you know how, like, if you’re really interested in something, you can really go far? I mean, this is, like, eighth-grade level.”
Near the end of the conversation she says, “Okay, so there’s a letter that’s going to come in the mail; just so you have the real story, I better tell you a couple of things.” She pauses. “It wasn’t a tattoo ‘club,’ there were three of us, and we gave each other homemade tattoos — not a big deal — but then another group of girls went into town on the weekend and got real tattoos. So Georgia, from my group, decided that ours were supposed to be ugly on purpose and all about scarification. She looked up ancient scarification traditions, and the three of us had a ritual and all rubbed dirt from the compost onto the wounds, which is how I got the infection. It was so not my idea. Anyway, the parents who found out about the ‘clubs’ got all freaked out, and so this letter is being sent out saying, like, no new tattoos for both students and staff and blah, blah, blah.”
“What was your tattoo of?” I ask.
“A unicorn,” she says, like it’s a given.
I spend the evening glued to the television set. Amanda’s story about Heather Ryan’s murderer checks out. Her parents have identified the guy who bought her bed, and her diary was found in the guy’s car, along with chunks of Heather’s hair.
Pretending to be a librarian following up on a book she’s put on hold, I call Amanda. Her mother answers. “Good evening, I’m calling from the circulation desk for Amanda. Is she in?”
“One moment, please.”
“Who is it?” I hear Amanda ask in the background.
“Your husband,” her mother says, handing her the phone.
“Hello?” she asks, baffled.
“What was for dinner tonight?”
“I deviated,” she says. “I served Wednesday on Tuesday, just to see if they would notice. Chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese. Not a peep except that when they sat down my father said, ‘We want to confirm that there are snickerdoodles with this meal.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, even though I’d planned to serve them angel-food cake. I’m flexible.”
“I have an idea: let’s put up a tent in your parents’ backyard and have a sleepover.”
“For my parents?”
“For ourselves — we could sleep together, in the tent.”
“I’ve never slept outside,” she says.
“Me either.”
“I was always afraid to,” she says.
“Even in the backyard?”
“My sister and I would start off brave with flashlights and mayonnaise jars filled with lightning bugs, but as soon as it was really dark, as soon as the lights in the houses all around us started to go out, I’d panic and we’d run inside.”
“If we set up a tent, would they spot us outside?”
“Oh no,” she says. “They never look out.”
“Friday?” I suggest.
“I’ll think about it,” she says.
“It’s a plan,” I say. I hang up, excited.
I dig out the tent, the AeroBed and battery pump, some sleeping bags, new batteries for the flashlights. I fill a giant canvas tote bag with bug spray, pillows, an old black-and-white video baby monitor, so we can keep an eye on her parents.
We have dinner with her parents. I slip upstairs and set up the old baby monitor and then bid them good night and leave. I think I’m so clever and crafty, going out the front door and then slipping around back.
I wave to Amanda as she’s in the kitchen; I have a melancholy split-second flash — her yellow gloves reminding me of Jane, of that Thanksgiving.
Amanda does the dishes and gets her parents settled for the night while I’m around back, decorating with a string of Christmas lights I found in George’s basement. It’s like being a kid again. I’m decorating and thinking about Amanda: Will I ever really know her? It’s like she’s one person inside the house and entirely another outside — an indoor/ outdoor personality.
She comes out at about nine-thirty, offering herself to me. She stands before me in the lantern light, taking her clothes off, and then, in a panic, thinking she hears something that we can’t see on the monitor, she puts them all back on and goes in to check on her parents.
In a reversal of the children being checked on by the parents, Amanda keeps thinking something is wrong, something is happening, and goes back inside every ten or fifteen minutes, worried they will fall and break their hips, there will be carbon-monoxide buildup, a gas leak that will cause the house to explode, they will wake up frightened of the dark, they will want a glass of water, a sip of Scotch, a little nightcap.
Despite my idea that it would be exciting, it’s a lot less erotic than I’d hoped. The AeroBed is squishy, the ground beneath it cold and hard. At around eleven-thirty, when we’ve been going at it on and off with limited success on both sides, we see her father on the grainy black-and-white monitor, leaving his room. Seconds later, we watch him enter the mother’s room, pull down the sleeping woman’s blanket, push up her nightie, and mount her.
“It looks like he’s hurting her,” Amanda says, shocked.
“Hard to tell,” I say.
On the small monitor, it looks like her mother is trying to fight him off in her sleep. She swats at him as though he is an oversized nuisance, an enormous fly, and he is holding her down, forcing himself on her.
Amanda stares at the small screen; you can see his equipment jutting out of his pajama bottom. “Is my father raping my mother?”
“Maybe,” I say. “Let’s see how they are in the morning.”
“I can’t believe how blasé you’re being,” she says
“I don’t feel blasé, I just don’t know what we should do about it. Go into the house and create a distraction? Do you want to confront them in the act? Maybe this is how they do it, the way they’ve always done it. Remember, you’re spying on them; they may be senior citizens, but they have rights, and at least one of them still has feelings of a certain sort.”
She is mad at me.
“If you feel so constantly worried and overburdened, why don’t you put them in a retirement home?” I ask.
“Why don’t you go to hell,” she says sharply, turning off the monitor, then rolls away from me and feigns sleep.
I am in the office three days a week. I have my own ID card to get in and out of the building, the office, and the men’s room. I have been given a small office with a narrow window — Ching Lan sits in a cubicle outside. Often I ask her to come into my office and read the stories out loud; she is practicing her English. It’s interesting to hear Nixon’s words with a strong Chinese accent.
Nine of the stories are in close to finished form. I review them, tease out the narrative thread, trim the digressive dross. For a man who didn’t like a lot of small talk, Nixon was almost verbose in his fiction.
“What’s the best way for me to contact Mrs. Eisenhower?” I ask Wanda. “There’s a story I’d like her to consider sending to some magazines.”
“I’ll let her know,” Wanda says. “Which magazines?”
“The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vanity Fair. What the hell, we could even try The Paris Review.”
“What about McSweeney’s? or One Story?” Wanda asks. “They take risks.”
“All right, let’s go wide, send it everywhere,” I say, not wanting her to know that I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“I minored in creative writing,” Wanda says, exiting deftly. “Mrs. E. is on the line,” she says an hour later, when she rings the phone in my office, which never rang before. “Press the blinking light to take your call.”