Mary Grace’s parents were silent, mysterious types who were very involved in their Baptist church. Jane and her husband tried to guess why the parents never spoke to them and why they never invited the son to their house. Perhaps Mary Grace’s father was having an affair. Or the mother was having an affair. Perhaps they never had sex or had bad sex. Perhaps they did not make each other laugh. Perhaps the mother was sad because she wished she had become a ballet dancer, a doctor, a rock star. Perhaps one drank too much. Perhaps he wanted to live in Australia. Perhaps she hated his taste in clothes. Perhaps one of them had cancer. Perhaps they did not want their floors to get dirty. Would they break up or marinate in their sourness for years? Mary Grace’s parents did not set up any sort of social life for her. Jane noticed the wife spending most of her free time snipping their front hedges with gardening implements that were large and vicious. Jane saw the husband on his dutiful evening walks around the block, his eyes cast down, his feet lifting in a peculiar way so he seemed to be tiptoeing across ice. Mary Grace scuttled over to Jane’s at least once a day, neatly dressed and clean, but always with the demeanor of someone who was starving.
That day, she was grateful for the girl’s knock. Jane had returned from the clinic, opened the door to her home slowly, as though she were an intruder. The children noticed nothing; their absorption in their own crises was complete. They saw only that she was their mother and fell toward her. She was aching and exhausted, but the babysitter couldn’t stay. Jane needed a stranger in the kitchen, someone to speak because she could not.
“Let’s make a magic potion,” Mary Grace announced. She believed touchingly that she could realize her great dreams in their home. The girl rushed into the kitchen. Her hands rummaged through drawers, plucked juice boxes from cupboards. “We need to make a magic potion,” she said. “We need olive oil. Lemonade. Baking soda. Seltzer.”
“Yes,” her son said, gazing at Mary Grace.
Jane brought the items over, and Mary Grace poured them carefully into a glass. Her son was now whispering to her, his face intent, and the girl said, rolling her eyes, “No. It will not make you into a cheetah.” Jane looked at Mary Grace.
“He can become a cheetah if he wants,” Jane broke in.
“Then I want to become a princess,” said Mary Grace.
She brought them some vinegar and mayonnaise and seltzer and watched them stir their concoction. Mary Grace looked up and said, “My mother’s doing her fitness video. She wants to get to her high school weight.”
“Oh,” said Jane.
“She was going to become a fitness instructor, but then she was dating my dad and they knew each other three weeks, and then she dropped everything to have me.” She giggled frantically, as though she was not sure what sound to make. Then Mary Grace grasped Jane’s forearm. The girl’s nails were long and sharp. “Can we add perfume to make princesses?” she asked.
Jane allowed the girl to hold her arm for a moment. “No,” she said. She patted Mary Grace’s hand carefully. “I’m sure she’s very glad she has you,” she said, and she reached up to a cabinet for some baking soda. Mary Grace released her hand.
“Then she had my brother like that, boom, and then my sister, and she says if she gets back to her high school weight, she’ll look seventeen again.” Mary Grace took the baking soda, poured it in, and the mixture began to fizz and rise. The children shrieked at the possibilities implied in this, and when the potion puttered out they looked toward Jane. “More!” called her son.
“I want a snack now,” Mary Grace said.
Jane opened the refrigerator. She felt more blood slip out of her, sharply took a breath. “Do you want some carrots?” she asked.
“I want ice cream with hot fudge syrup,” said the girl. “Please.”
IN BOSTON, WHERE JANE USED TO LIVE, HER HUSBAND HAD A SUCCESSFUL business constructing corporate websites, but he most enjoyed helping people create elaborate personal shrines that floated in no place on earth. People wanted all sorts of things on them: personal philosophy, photos both personal and professional, diary fragments, links to other people whom they admired but to whom they had no other connection. Her husband understood their desire to communicate their best selves with an unknown, invisible public; a shy person, he had forced himself to become sociable and liked convincing people of all the intimate facts they needed to tell strangers about themselves. When they met, he was exuberant, and she was disdainful of websites; she was the only person he had ever met who did not want one for herself. “Don’t you want people to click and find out all about you?” he asked. “Your achievements and innermost thoughts?” He was leaning, one arm against a wall, clutching cheap wine in a plastic glass.
“No,” she said.
He sensed she was holding back, and that made her appear to conceal something deeply valuable. She admired his shamelessness, the way he could go up to people at a party and convince them to create monuments to themselves. They had both stumbled out from families in which they felt they did not belong: she, second of four, he, oldest of three. He had a beautiful, careless mother who had left the family for two years when he was seven; this created in him a sharp and fierce practicality, a need to ingratiate himself and to hoard money. She had been belittled by her father and for years had cultivated the aloofness of the shy.
The economy quickly broke apart their life. People and companies were running out of money to create themselves in an invisible space. She had been working as an editor for a small publisher, and that was the first job she lost simply because the company was folding. Their rent was shooting up, they were in their late thirties with a three-year-old, another on the way, and they had nothing saved for retirement. It was time to move on.
HER HUSBAND CAME HOME THAT EVENING IN A CHEERFUL, DETERMINED mood, armed with a new digital camera. He wanted to take pictures of them in the garden and arrange them on a website that would record the children’s growth as well as that of the various vegetables and flowers they had recently planted. The routine quality of his new job sometimes filled him with a manic, expansive energy. So many parts of him were unused. The camera had cost $345. “We can do this every few days,” he said. “We can tell people about it. They can click from everywhere and see our garden. We can start a trend!” He tried, with difficulty, to arrange the children beside the plot of dirt.
She did not want him to take a picture of her. She did not want to see a picture of her face on this day.
“We need more good pictures of you,” he said, irritation flickering across his face.
“I look tired,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” he said. “You need a picture with pearls. Holding a rose. Jackie Kennedy. A socialite surrounded by her darling cherubs.” He laughed.
“Oh, right,” she said. It was a sweet but clichéd worldview that he reverted to when he felt uprooted, and it comforted him. He had nurtured it when he was alone and neglected as a child and had formed his ideas of happiness, what his family and love should be.
She had been the daughter of nervous parents who cut up apples in her lunch so she would not choke and drove only on the right side of the road, and she had been drawn to his point of view when they were dating. She remembered the first time she saw his childhood house, in a suburban tract in Los Angeles — it was a small house that attempted to resemble a Southern mansion, with columns on the porch and a trim rose-bed in the front. There was something in the stalwart embrace of other people’s tastes that made Jane envious — not of the house so much as the purity of longing.