“What?” he asked, sensing a disturbance.
“I yelled at the girl,” she said. “She was mean to our boy, and I couldn’t stand it. I shouldn’t have. She turned around and left.”
“They already hate us,” he said, calmly. Then he returned to his book.
She was now revved up for an argument.
“I’m wasting my life picking up towels,” she said. “For every ten towels I pick up, you pick up one. I’m sick of it, and they smell like goats.”
Now he looked up. “I pick up towels,” he said. “Plenty of them.”
“Not as many as me,” she said.
He jumped out of bed, standing on the balls of his feet, like a boxer who had been secretly preparing for this barrage, and then grabbed a robe and tossed it over himself. “What do I give up for this family! Look at this leg.” He held it out. “If I had any time at all to exercise, then I would be able to get in great shape. I could run a marathon! I could make love ten times a day.” The edge in his voice, the raw and bottomless yearning, was so sharply reminiscent of her own father’s during her childhood that she felt time as a funneclass="underline" she’d been emptied into her old home, the same person but just a different size. He sank down into his chair and began to tap his foot nervously, looking anywhere but at her.
“We would have had a third child,” she said. “I stopped it.”
He looked at her.
“This week,” she said.
She remembered the night that she and her husband had brought their son home from the hospital. They had cupped him in their hands, a person just two days old. When he began to cry, his first human wails rising into their apartment, she and her husband realized that they were supposed to comfort him. It was them. They gazed with longing into his hopeful eyes.
He stared at her. Carefully, he clasped his hands. His eyes were bright; she realized there were tears in them.
“Did you forget about me?” he asked.
His voice was soft, and it sounded as though it came directly out of the black night outside. “We couldn’t have done it,” she said.
“You didn’t want to,” he replied, sharply.
“You didn’t either,” she said. “I know you.”
“Do you?” he asked. “Look at me. What am I thinking right now?”
She looked into his dark eyes. When they got married, she wanted to know, to own everything about him.
She leaned toward him and looked closer. She and her husband were sitting beside each other, half-dressed, their windows open. Outside, the leaves on the trees gleamed in the orange street-lights. Jane touched his hand. She thought she heard weak laughter in the neighbors’ house, carried through the streets on a warm and fragrant wind.
MARY GRACE WAS BACK THE NEXT AFTERNOON, WASHING UP AT their door as inevitably as the tide. There was something ancient about her, the way she smiled warily at Jane, scratching her leg and pretending that yesterday had not happened. She loved them simply because they opened the door.
“Could we make a lemonade stand?” Mary Grace asked. “We could sell lemonade for twenty-five cents.”
Jane moved outside. It was a cool day, with drizzly rain. “I don’t know,” said Jane, looking at the sky. But her son ran out the door, bubbling with joy that the girl was back. “Yes!” he yelled. He and Mary Grace arranged themselves around a card table in the front yard, a pitcher of lemonade and some cups between them. Mary Grace clutched an umbrella. Jane watched their small, dignified backs as they regarded the neighborhood, set in their belief that others would want what they offered.
She did not have many plastic cups. She thought she could ask Mary Grace’s mother if she had any cups; she looked up the woman’s number in the phone book.
“Hello,” said Mary Grace’s mother. Her voice sounded high-pitched and young.
“It’s Jane Goldman, next door,” she said. “Mary Grace’s over right now. I just wanted to say hi.” There was a silence. “Well, the kids are having a lemonade stand, and well, I wondered if you have any plastic cups—”
She heard a deep intake of breath. “Stop,” said Mary Grace’s mother.
“Excuse me?” said Jane.
“She knows that she can get sweets from you. She needs to lose ten pounds. I don’t want her to look ugly. Do you?”
“No!” said Jane. “Maybe she’d stay at your house if you actually talked to her—”
“I’m a good mother,” said Mary Grace’s mother. “I keep her clean. She minds her manners.” There was the sound of growling. At first Jane thought it was the mother but then realized it was the family dog. “Stay away from her,” said Mary Grace’s mother, her voice rising, “Stop feeding her—”
Jane banged down the phone. “Dammit!” she yelled. She heard Mary Grace and her son laughing outside, and she knew that it would be the last time the girl would visit their house. It would be his first grief, the loss of a friend; it would tip like a domino against the losses to come. Mary Grace would have her own disappointments with her sour and careless parents, and the families would live side by side until this particular race was over.
Everyone — the children, the parents — were visitors on earth; they were here briefly, and then they would vanish. The children sat, stalwart, behind a plastic pitcher. The clouds broke apart, and sunlight fell upon them. She went and bought a cup for a dollar because she had no change. Others bought lemonade, too, with dollars, and the children still had no change, and within an hour they had ten dollars. The children were gleeful at their unexpected riches. “I will buy billions and billions of toys!” her son screamed. The baby, sitting on a blanket, crowed as she regarded them. The children stood around the table, counting their riches, over and over, counting their riches, over and over.
The Loan Officer’s Visit
For the first sixteen years of my life, my father was a vigorous man. Once upon a time, he was almost a blur. But when he became ill, he spent half of the morning lying in bed with the curtains drawn. Then he put on a gray suit, walked gingerly to his Chevy, and sat at his desk at Great Mutual in Beverly Hills listening to people — some wealthy, some not — ask for loans to acquire boats, houses in Hawaii, expensive cars. He listened to the customers’ excited and rambling descriptions of the trips they were going to take, the second homes they were going to decorate; he set up meetings with imaginary people at 3:00 PM so he could instead shut the door to his office, lay his cheek on his maroon couch, and close his eyes, trying to conserve the energy he needed to get to the end of the day.
He was never quite sure if he could make it to 6:00 PM; his superiors tried to be flexible, as he was a good closer, but he knew they had their limits, and he did not want to lose his job. He was a stubborn man, and he did manage to sit at his desk until the doors of the bank were locked, even if he was sometimes damp with sweat by the end, as though he had run a marathon.
Once, when I was seventeen, I stopped by his office and waited for a ride home. I sat on the couch in his office, the fabric the peculiar spongy consistency of an alien landscape. I always enjoyed watching the oddities who wanted money from the bank, or more personally, my father. That day, a couple thanked my father for helping them arrange a loan to furnish their necessary chalet in Switzerland. The woman wore spike heels that looked like they could puncture a rubber tire. The man, in a peculiar shiny blazer, nodded too often and gripped his gold pen as though it warmed his hand. My father smiled, asked innocuous questions about their vacation plans, indicated the x’s where they were supposed to sign.