Paul Crumb brought us our pancakes. I smiled perfunctorily, Bitty generously. Paul didn’t smile back. I smothered the pancakes with syrup and took a bite. They were not entirely unappealing, tasting one moment like a breath of spring air, the next like a sofa cushion.
We couldn’t speak while eating, so I listened to the other people around us. To my right, two women were having what sounded like a business lunch. After a few minutes, it became clear that one was giving the other a color analysis, the kind that helped you get dressed in the morning. Are you a Winter? A Summer? I stole a few glances at the women. They were regular, thirtyish people, sort of attractive. Both were utterly rapt. The customer turned out to be an Autumn. “No offense,” said the analyst — whose clothes, I thought, were ill-fitting and strangely colored—“but that outfit is all wrong for you.” The customer nodded, looking down at her clothes as if she had just spilled something gluey and slightly toxic on herself.
For a minute I wanted to get up and stop them. I wanted to tell the customer woman that she looked fine and that there was no reason to pay for the other woman’s advice. Shame on you, I wanted to tell the analyst. But it became clear that they were both perfectly happy and having a good time, and it was none of my business. My mouth clogged up with pancake and I swallowed hard, suddenly lonely. I thought about my frequent breakfasts out with Amanda, and the great time we invariably had at them. I wondered what she was having for lunch: probably nothing. She didn’t eat when she was under stress.
Bitty paid our bill. It felt strange, accepting this from her; I used to buy her ice cream with the money I made raking yards, in exchange for her doing the household chores I was responsible for. But I had no money of my own, not until the strip was officially mine. I felt like the ne‘er-do-well prince of a deposed royal family.
We went to the multiplex outside town to see Benny II, the movie Bitty had been looking forward to. It was a strange movie, apparently the sequel to a popular film about a dolphin, which I hadn’t seen. The main character, a marine biologist named James, had been a boy in the first movie, and had been saved by the dolphin, Benny, in some kind of sea disaster; now he was involved in a righteous plot to sabotage a Japanese tuna boat known for its inhumane treatment of dolphins. Benny was recruited for the cause, and led other dolphins in a salvo of head-butting against the ship, saving James and his new girlfriend, who had been captured by the greedy fishermen. Benny was a friendly and clever animal. His motives seemed far purer than humans’. As the credits rolled, Bitty’s body shook with sobs. At first I thought she had broken down, and would soon reveal to me some awful personal problem, or talk to me about our father, but as we got up to leave I realized she had been moved by Benny II.
Out in the parking lot, we couldn’t find the car. People were everywhere. For the life of me I couldn’t recall any landmark we’d parked near, and neither could Bitty. We decided to go into the mall the theater was part of, in the hope that the crowd would thin out. We found a slatted bench next to a huge fake ficus tree and sat down.
“Nice ficus,” Bitty said. “Are you bored?”
“Oh, no,” I lied.
“I am.”
I watched a child drag his mother into a video game arcade. “You can’t play the beat-ups,” the mother said.
“What was your wedding like?” I asked Bitty.
She shrugged. “We went down to Atlantic City. Mike wanted to be married by a sea captain.”
“In Atlantic City?”
“Well, we didn’t find one. We got married by a justice of the peace. He took us out onto a pier.” She sighed. “I love the shore.”
“I haven’t been for ages,” I said.
“Well, it was a little cold, the water. But we went in.” She dug into her purse and pulled out a cigarette. I didn’t know she smoked. Then she said, “Do you think Rose hates me?”
“I doubt it. I mean, I don’t know. How would I know that?”
“She treated me funny at the funeral.”
“Maybe she hates us all.”
“Maybe,” Bitty said. “We go up to Newark Sundays to eat dinner with Mike’s family. They laugh and joke and have a good time.” She looked at me, holding the cigarette in the air like a question. “We never did that. Even when we weren’t eating. I mean, I’m not stupid, I know that other families are different, but you know, I just sit there getting more and more pissed off at them. I want to tell them, ‘Shut up! All of you shut up!’ They’re smug, is what they are.”
“And Rose?”
She smoked. “We invited them over for dinner. Andrew, specifically. And this look came over him, like, Oh, Jesus, I want to say yes but Rose is going to be pissed. And sure enough: he comes back to us later saying, I don’t think we’ll be able to make it.”
“Poor guy,” I said.
She shook her head. “No, he loves her. They have each other, I mean. He’s a nice person and all, Tim, but he doesn’t care if they get chummy with us or not.”
“It’s that important to you?”
“Actually, yes, it is. Mike has his brothers and uncles. I want a sister. It’s not a hell of a lot to ask.”
“It’s a lot to ask of Rose.”
“No kidding.” She seemed disappointed by the cigarette and, finding no ashtrays, put it out in the giant ficus pot. “The last of my college friends has left Jersey. There’s nobody to hang around with.”
“What about Mike?”
“Mike’s Mike. He’s a smart guy, but he acts dumb around his dumb friends and their dumb wives. I get lonelier around them than I do alone.”
“Have more lunches with me,” I said.
She smiled. “Yeah, okay. How lonely are you?”
“Lonely.”
“We all are, aren’t we? Pierce, duh, no kidding. But Rose and all that hate, hate, forget, forget, and Bobby, with his rules. I bet fucking Bobby’s like taking a driving lesson.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
She stood up and kicked my shin. “Like I would,” she said.
* * *
We found the car about forty feet from the front door of the theater. While the AC cooled down we split the rest of Bitty’s candy bar. It was extremely soft and got on our hands, and we sat licking them off and listening to the radio. I felt like we had made a breakthrough: or, more precisely, we discovered that there had been nothing to break through besides our own apathy and/or laziness. When she dropped me off we kissed each other’s cheeks.
I wanted to call someone, to tell them what I’d done, though I understood that to most people, having lunch with a sibling was a negligible accomplishment. Even so, my appetite for conversation had been whetted. I picked up the phone and listened to the dial tone, hoping someone might occur to me. No one did, though.
fourteen
My cleaning jag had left me feeling jittery and unfulfilled, so I spent the rest of the afternoon purging the studio: though I’d had the windows cracked open for days, it still had the same musty ripeness my father had left in it. I took the car-washing supplies from the garage — rags, sponges, a stiff brush misshapen by years spent jammed into the corner of a box — and filled a bucket with warm soapy water.
The first few items were hard to throw away, but after that it was easy. I filled a garbage bag and a half with old newspapers, food containers and xeroxed pages from books. I crawled around on the floor and pulled the dusty corpses of pencils and pens from under the baseboard heaters. I threw the empty bottles into a box for the recycling center.