“That’s my girl,” I say like a dad in a movie. I shoot a look at Sarah. Sarah smiles back at me. So nice. A family on a lawn, or near a lawn, at the Botanical Gardens on this fine day, half a decade into the life of Lulu, into the life of Sarah and Danny as parents.
“Well,” I say, “maybe you can’t play on it, but you can walk on it. Go ahead, Lu. Walk on the grass. Walk on it. It’ll feel nice.” I push her gently forward.
Lulu pauses at the boundary between the paved path and the grass. She dips her foot in its jelly sandal onto the grass as though the grass is a body of water with a dangerous current.
“It tickles,” she whispers.
“It’s nice, right?” I encourage. “It’s nice. Go ahead. Walk on it.”
I place my own foot on the lawn, the prickles of grass poking up between the holes in my sandals. In a sudden fit of exuberance, I throw myself down. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized that Lulu is old enough to find me embarrassing. I can see the love and the embarrassment fighting on her face as she watches me. But there’s no one nearby, and I decide to go all the way. I fling my legs out and lie star-shaped on the grass.
“Yodeleheho!” I say.
“Danny,” Sarah says. She too is half-ashamed, half-admiring the way I am. The joy I can contain. She points at a second wooden sign: NO WALKING, SITTING, OR LYING ON THE GRASS.
“There’s a guy coming,” Lulu says.
“Hello, guy,” I say unconcernedly. But I stand up, hoping I’ve gotten at least a couple of grass stains on my khaki shorts.
The Botanical Gardens employee changes course.
“Does this remind you of anything?” I ask Lulu, gesturing wide to encompass the rolling lawn, the trees and trellises, the prettiest place I have to offer her. I’m thinking of a print book we like to read together, an old textbook called Flora.
Lulu follows the sweep of my arm as it directs her gaze toward more green than she ever gets to see in one place.
She grabs my other arm and looks up at me soberly, hopefully, aiming to please.
“It reminds me of money,” she says.
* * *
I don’t know if Lulu meant money because money is green, is the sort of green she sees more often than the other sort of green, or if she already understands that rich people have lawns whereas people like us don’t whereas some people don’t have produce or computers or homes. I didn’t want to probe, back there at the Botanical Gardens, but my mood did a nosedive, that’s for sure, a nosedive that’s landed me in the concrete enclosure behind our apartment building at ten o’clock at night, but I’m not out here to dump trash or recycling, I’m just checking on the moon, orange through layers of smog. The moon never looked this awesome when I was a kid. I stand there looking at it, challenging myself to ignore the smell of over-warm trash, until the moon scoots a couple inches and gets obscured by the wall.
On the other side of the wall, where the moon is still visible, the Stanhopes are splashing in their pool. I can hear it, alongside the noise of their generator, humming as it always hums, purifying the air on their lawn, incinerating the mosquitoes.
How do I know all this about the Stanhopes’ lawn? Well, there’s a hole, believe it or not, a tiny peephole at the place where the Stanhopes’ amalgamated quartz and rubber wall meets the side of our concrete enclosure, a fact that came to my attention some months ago, a fact that I haven’t shared with Lulu or Sarah because what good would it do them to see this. It is a wrong thing, one of the wrong things, how near to each other the rich and the not-rich live. Steve Stanhope is an inventor, or not an inventor, an investor in inventors — he finds the scientists who are doing the cool things and figures out how to get them to the people. I think you have to admire that.
“Daddy! Daddy!” the sons (twins) cry out as Steve Stanhope throws them again and again into the pool. I scoff at the irresponsible parenting — who lets their kids stay up this late? Sure, Lulu’s bedroom might be a cubbyhole carved out of our bedroom with a temporary wall, and sure, maybe I was a little wounded when Lulu proudly led a new friend into her room and the girl said, “Why is your room so dark and small?” but at least we put her to bed at a healthy hour, and read her print books beforehand, and give her a little bit of the special organic kids’ toothpaste, arm and a leg but worth it, god, well worth it, for her. And now I’m remembering the time a few weeks back when I happened to peek through the wall during the twins’ birthday party, and who should I see there but Marshmallow — looking maybe a little bit cleaner, sure, but skinny old Marshmallow nonetheless, marching wearily up and down that lawn just as he’d marched up and down the sidewalk for Lulu.
Right as I’m trying to get myself onto my high horse about what great parents Sarah and I are, Mara Stanhope steps out onto the patio in these soft gray harem pants, and I realize with a start that she’s pregnant, pregnant as a pumpkin but still somehow so lean, standing in the light of her double glass doors.
Three children. Imagine that. It was already a luxury to have two. Even if we could somehow get the money together again for the fertility treatments (which no way could we), no way could we afford a second. It had taken Sarah two years to conceive. “Plastics,” the doctors explained. So you go home and it’s like, the yogurt’s in plastic, the shampoo’s in plastic, the toothbrushes are plastic.
Mara Stanhope bore the twins surrounded by a pod of dolphins at sunset in the ocean off a black volcanic sand beach in Hawaii. The pics were gorgeous, and public, on the Internet, with her privates blocked out. DOLPHIN-ASSISTED CHILDBIRTH SUCCESS! DOLPHIN MIDWIFERY LEADS TO DREAM BIRTH! “It’s about coexistence,” Mara Stanhope was quoted as saying. “It’s about total relaxation.”
“Boys!” she says now, resting a hand on her pert belly. “Aiden! Landon! Bedtime!”
* * *
When Sarah was pregnant she would always say, “I’m starving for something but I have no idea what it is.” One night I spy Mara Stanhope lounging on the torch-lit lawn with a tray of small bowls, eating a bit from this or that with a tiny fork, but I can tell she’s just like Sarah was, starving for something that hasn’t yet been tasted by anyone on this planet. She reaches into the stainless-steel cooler, then settles back into her lounge chair with plain old Coca-Cola in a can.
“Hey witness,” Sarah says, coming up behind me.
I startle. It’s nearly midnight — Lulu has been in bed for hours, and so has Sarah. She’s wearing her great little blue robe.
“There’s a peephole here,” I say stupidly.
“I know.” Sarah smiles in the slight light. “Pretty fun, huh?”
I love my wife.
“She’s had some wild cravings,” she says. “All those capers.”
Above us a spot of light moves across the purple clouds.
“Another fucking searchlight,” she whispers. “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?”
* * *
Sarah and I, we get sad about different things.
Like that night, later on, I think about how Lulu doesn’t recognize stars except as a shape in coloring books and on stickers and stuff. I say that to Sarah. “Isn’t that sad?” I say.
“No.”
“It doesn’t make you sad?”
“Everyone has lots to learn about everything.”
* * *
When I get home from work that Friday, Lulu is sitting on Sarah’s lap, helping her order the groceries. Lulu has outgrown this activity a bit, her legs splaying awkwardly over Sarah. I remember going to the grocery store with my mom, helping her choose the honeydew based on how hollow they sounded when you knocked on them.
“No, Mom!” she says to Sarah, both of them staring at the screen. “Rutabaga only gets two and a half stars this week.”