“Oooh.” Elizabeth’s enormous gray eyes widened in delight. She grabbed a pen off the side table and a junk envelope from the huge stack of her unopened mail. “Let’s draw it.”
She sketched a car with the top down and a driver wearing Ray-Bans, motoring happily down the highway. Then she drew a bunch of arrows and a sharp exit turn with guardrails on both sides. Next, she sketched the bottom of the car, upturned against the left guardrail so the driver was obscured. In the sky she drew a soaring head wearing Ray-Bans with a seagull flapping by.
She was so brilliant. If Tupper tried to sell the sketch on eBay, it would probably fetch a fortune.
“Have they located the head?”
“I believe they have,” Tupper said, loving how much she enjoyed the story.
She put down her pen. “Maybe we should collaborate.”
Tupper shot a nervous glance at the television. Man and wife were hugging and grinning happily on their new terrace, gazing out over the parking lot with its cracked blacktop and lone palm tree. Elizabeth had never involved him in her work. He put his sticky plate down on the coffee table and wiped his mouth with a blue-and-white checked napkin.
“But you never collaborate.” He stopped himself, careful not to dictate or predict too much.
Elizabeth picked a blueberry out from between her front teeth. “Why not?” she said. “Let’s try it.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Yes. Well.” Elizabeth had never been able to exchange compliments or pleasantries. Had she suggested they collaborate out of some nauseating marital urge to make her partner feel included? She certainly hoped not.
“Thank you,” Tupper said. “I think.”
Elizabeth laughed. “Come here.”
He got up and sat beside her on the narrow love seat. She took his wrists in her hands and squeezed them. She’d always liked his wrists. They were bony and long, almost canine. He reached up and smoothed down one of her thick, dark eyebrows. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against his. When they were kids, learning to drive in Maine, he used to chase down rabbits just to please her, but he never ran over them.
“Your breath smells sweet,” she said.
He kissed her downturned lips and smoothed her other eyebrow. Why was he so anxious? Being together didn’t have to be difficult. The couple on TV wept happy tears and embraced. Maybe the miserable view from that ugly apartment was their frisson, their severed head. The phone rang again and Elizabeth jumped up to get it.
* * *
A set of second-grade twin girls with blotchy red rashes on their faces waited blearily on the bed in her office. Peaches paid no attention to them.
What had she done?
All week long she rehashed it. She’d kissed Stuart Little of the Blind Mice, something she’d wanted to do since she was nineteen years old. It was a great kiss, too, but now it was over. Now she could go back to being nurse, mom, wife.
But what if she was in love with him? What if he was in love with her? Maybe this wasn’t just a little crush. Maybe they were meant to be. Of course, she hadn’t seen or heard from him all week, so it was really fucking difficult to know.
“I have to pee,” one of the twins whined.
“Mommy will be here soon,” the other twin said.
The mother arrived, all in a fluster because she thought she’d have a twin-free day. “I hope it’s not contagious.”
“It’s very contagious,” Peaches assured her, and ushered them away.
Her phone vibrated as a text arrived. Finally, the text she’d been waiting for. She resisted the urge to read it in its entirety until she was up and out of her swivel chair, out of her office, down the passageway outside the cafeteria, and out the back door that led to the schoolyard.
The sun was bright and a crisp fall breeze blew. The melted and burned playground equipment was cordoned off with yellow police tape. She hugged her sweater coat around her and read Stuart Little’s text.
I don’t want things to be weird. Want to have dinner?
Anyone not crazy in Peaches’ situation would have responded with something like, Probably not a good idea Don’t text me anymore. Peaches texted back right away.
Sure
Stuart Little replied immediately.
Good. I know it’s late notice but does tonight work? 6:30? 10 Cheever Place, #2.
Peaches’ heart slowed.
Oh fuck. He meant come over to his house for dinner. He meant hang with him and his wife and kid. Unless he meant fuck in his bed while his wife and kid were out? Her heart sped up again.
Ok.
* * *
Liam sat up in bed and pulled back the window blind. He watched his dad head out to teach, sheet music flapping out of his black canvas CBGB tote bag. His mom would have already left. It was Thursday. Liam had double free first two periods and then lunch, which meant he didn’t have to be at school until 11:43. He didn’t know how he’d scored this scheduling gold mine. It was awesome, and usually he slept straight through until eleven, but not today.
Last Thursday night, his dad had been waiting on their stoop when he finally got home from grabbing tacos with Ryan on Smith Street after the Sublime drop/photo shoot/fake-protest craziness. Their big old dog lay on the sidewalk, panting.
“Hey, Dad,” Liam had said. He was tired. He wanted to take a shower and wash the bullseye off his chest and see if Shy was done babysitting so he could tell her what happened.
“Your mother is still out,” his dad had said, removing his headphones. He looked pretty worn out too, like he’d been walking for miles in his Birkenstocks.
“Where is she again?” Liam’s mom never did much of anything besides put Band-Aids on little kids and walk their old dog and go grocery shopping and make dinner and drink wine and ask him how school was and get mad at him about burning the schoolyard or leaving his shoes directly in the way of the front door or not hearing what she said because he had earbuds in or getting water all over the bathroom floor when he took a shower. Oh, and hoard jam jars full of weed.
“I’m not sure. There was a party at a bar. She seemed to know everyone there. I went in and then I left because there was karaoke.”
“Seriously? That’s so lame.”
“Seriously. It was like a karaoke nightmare, and with my tinnitus, I had to escape.”
Greg had developed tinnitus playing the piccolo in his New Jersey high school marching band. It worsened at Oberlin, where he’d fronted two experimental rock bands, a Dixieland jazz ensemble, and a Philip Glass synth symphony. Ever since, he’d had to wear noise-canceling headphones when out and about. Teaching music to small children who sang in breathy voices and barely made a sound when they blew into their recorders didn’t bother it much, but he couldn’t go to a live concert or anyplace where the music was loud without tremendous suffering.
“Your mom was singing and dancing and having a wonderful time. She didn’t even notice me. I left without speaking to her, but then I went back because I was hoping to talk to Stuart Little from the Blind Mice. He wasn’t there. Neither was she. They… they’d already left.”
There was a sadness in his voice that Liam hadn’t heard before. His parents were nerdy and annoying, but they were usually nice to each other. They held hands at the movies and got each other weird gifts at thrift stores.
“Were you wearing that?” Liam gestured at his dad’s rolled-up Dickies overalls, black Doc Martens, and khaki fishing hat. His dad had explained to him that his style of dress was a tribute to some early-eighties band called Dexys Midnight Runners, but it didn’t really work for him. “No wonder she didn’t want to talk to you.” He was trying to lighten the mood. His dad didn’t respond.
“Want me to call her?” Liam offered. He pulled out his phone. The battery was almost dead. “Let me go inside and plug it in.”
“No, don’t,” his dad said.
“You sure?”
His dad nodded, staring dejectedly at the dog. He looked up at Lia
m again. “Would you be at all interested in transferring to a public school?”
Liam frowned. It wasn’t like his parents had to pay any tuition. “Not really. I mean, I’m a junior. It’s probably not easy to change schools this far into high school. Why?”
His dad shook his head. “No real reason. I was just thinking that maybe if I got a better-paying job your mom wouldn’t have to work so much and we could do more things together as a family. But if I change jobs you can’t go to private school anymore. Which could be a good thing. It might be good for you to go to a school with more economic diversity.”
“Yeah.” Liam shrugged his shoulders. “I mean, I like my school. And it’s a pretty good deal we have. Plus, I’ll be leaving for college after next year.”
His dad nodded. He looked like he was going to cry. “Wow. That’s soon.”
“Uh-huh,” Liam said.
His dad leaned down to scratch the dog between the shoulder blades. “Never mind. It’s not important.” The dog didn’t move.
Liam went inside to take a shower. His dad stayed outside. After his shower he’d texted Shy, but she couldn’t talk because she could hear the parents of the kid she was babysitting coming home. Liam passed out pretty soon after that.
Now his parents were avoiding each other without admitting they were avoiding each other. It was like sharing an apartment with roommates who never spoke.
His dad was a morning person. He usually woke up first and put on music and fixed breakfast and danced around nerdily while Liam’s mom stared at him and drank her coffee before stumbling off to work. This morning and every other morning that week, his dad left late, after his mom, without making breakfast or any noise at all except the front door slamming behind him.
Liam stared at the sunspots on the wall and enjoyed the silence. Then he picked up his phone and texted Shy.
Hi.
She texted back right away.
wtf mr streko hates me now—went to his office to get chocolate b4 2nd period like always and he said I’m not a vending machine and shut the door in my face. wat a cunt.
We don’t use that word here, like ever
not sure i even want to be on his cunty table tennis team
Hey are you free later or are you babysitting again?
those people are weird. i got a surprise for us—meet me after school?
They walked from school to the playground on Congress Street. Shy sat on a bench and pulled off her gray fleece jacket. She wore a black jumpsuit with the name MARK sewn in green script on the chest pocket. Her long, thin legs looked less gawky beneath the loose, thick material.
“Nice to meet you, Mark.” Liam held out his hand.
Shy gave him the finger. “Hey, look at the sun.”
The days were getting shorter. Already the sun was sinking and the sky had begun to pinken.
“Pretty,” Liam said.
Shy handed him a chocolate-chip cookie. “Eat that. I’m already almost finished with mine.”
Liam shoved the whole thing in his mouth. “Did you make them?” he asked as he chewed.
Shy laughed. Her blond hair was pinkening too. “No, I took them out of the fridge at the people’s house where I babysat. The kid told me not to touch them. I’ve been hiding them in our freezer ever since. They’re pot cookies. Smell.”
She held out the last bite of hers and Liam took a whiff. The cookie smelled like chocolate with an underlayer of skunk.
“What’s it going to do to us?” That time they’d tried his mom’s pot, Liam could barely walk.
“I don’t know. Eating it is probably different from smoking it, and this is different pot. Come on.” Shy jumped to her feet, popped the rest of the cookie into her mouth, and led him over to the swings.
“I have a calculus test tomorrow,” Liam complained.
“I’ll help you study,” she joked. Shy was so behind in math she’d probably never take calculus. She pumped her legs and swung back and forth, looking cute and spidery in her black jumpsuit and Gucci sneakers.
Liam tried to relax. Why was he thinking about calculus?
He sat down on the swing next to hers and kicked it back and forth. “Fifteen minutes and then I better head home to study.”
Shy twirled her swing around and around so the two chains it hung from twisted. Then she let it unwind, spinning fast and violently, her pinkish-blond hair flying out around her head. “In fifteen minutes you won’t want to go anywhere.”
Liam kicked at the ground some more. “Have you done this before?”
“No,” she said simply. “But the dad is famous. I don’t think his stuff is weak.”
* * *
Peaches had gone home to shower and change the minute school got out. She’d emailed Greg and Liam to tell them she wouldn’t be home for dinner. Texting was too immediate. Whenever she didn’t want her family members to hear about something right away but wanted them to know she’d made the effort to keep them informed, she sent an email. Greg wouldn’t be home until seven. By then she’d be naked in bed with Stuart Little or eating canapés with Mandy and Stuart and Ted. What did one wear to sleep with a man she’d just kissed, or alternatively, eat dinner with his wife and child? Were her V-neck maroon sweater dress and knee-high boots too un-nurse-like? Fuck it. She left the house again before she could change her mind. What should she bring? Flowers? No, flowers were in poor taste if Mandy was sick and wasn’t ever getting better. Wine seemed like a worse idea. Peaches kissed people who were not her husband when she drank alcohol. She’d bring dessert, a key lime pie.
Never before had she felt this nervous. Her hands shook as she passed a twenty to the checkout guy at Union Market.
“Do you need a bag, ma’am?”
“Mmm?” Her mind kept wandering. What was the purpose of this dinner exactly? To normalize their relationship, she assured herself. Whatever that meant. Should she have gotten a healthier dessert? Clementines? Raspberry sorbet? Did Mandy know? She hadn’t exactly been friendly at the karaoke party. Her beautiful smile was reserved for the select few: Stuart; Roy Clarke; Roy Clarke’s wife, Wendy—she seemed to like her a lot. Peaches had gotten the brush-off—the vague smile, the cursory nod. Well, she was only the school nurse, after all.
“Will you be needing a bag today?”
“No, no bag,” Peaches said, and carried the pie out of the store. A green taxi raced up Court Street. She could have sworn she saw Liam’s friend Ryan with a tiger painted on his bare chest in a poster in the advertising box atop the taxi’s roof. The word SUBLIME was stamped in purple above his head.
She was half an hour early. Stuart Little’s place was only three blocks away. If she wandered the streets nearby, she’d risk bumping into him. She decided to walk down to Congress, over toward the water, and then circle back up Kane.
The sun was low and the sky was streaked with violets and pinks. Peaches carried her pie down the hill and across Hicks Street. Van Voorhees Park was just ahead, more a large playground with slides, monkey bars, and swings than an actual park. The younger grades at Liam’s school had their end-of-the-year picnic here because there were sprinklers and enough benches for the parents and teachers to sit down. Last year, Peaches had had an awkward conversation with the mother of a third grader. She wanted advice on how to make her daughter “cool.” She worried her kid would suffer in middle school because she liked hats and refused to wear denim.
“My husband likes hats,” Peaches told her. “And he doesn’t own a single pair of jeans.”
There were two teenagers on the big-kid swings, a boy and a girl, kissing. Peaches looked away and then looked back again. She’d washed those gray pants over the weekend, that blue NASA T-shirt. It was Liam with Roy Clarke’s daughter, Shy. They weren’t kissing normally, either. They were really going at it and sort of licking each other. Peaches ducked behind a tree. The pie trembled in her hands. She didn’t like to spy, but she’d never seen Liam with a girl before.
“Grrr,” she heard
Liam growl. Then he licked the girl’s neck.
“You are so high!” the girl squealed. She was wearing the type of jumpsuit gas station attendants wear. It was pretty cool.
“Grrrr,” Liam growled again. The girl pushed him away and he fell on the ground.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “Get down here and look up at the sky!”
Peaches watched them for a moment, lying on their backs, side by side. She didn’t want to interrupt. They were teenagers, having fun. And Liam seemed cooler to her now. He was high and with a girl and not worrying about preparing for his AP Calculus test or picking his pimples. Was she a bad mother for feeling this way? At least he wasn’t home, wondering where his mother was, resenting her for not being there to fix him dinner. She slipped away and back up the hill, unnoticed.
* * *
Stuart had only just convinced Ted to take an early bath and put on his red plaid pajamas when the doorbell rang. Mandy was on the bed, painting her nails. A ham and mushroom quiche was in the oven. She’d already made garlic bread and kale Caesar salad. Tonight’s box was from Grandma’s House—stolen from the power-walking, knit-their-own-sweaters, two-woman couple across the street—and she was pretty sure it was going to be her favorite so far.
“Who’s that?” Mandy asked without looking up from her nails.
“I’ll go down and check,” Stuart said, and dashed out into the hallway.
Bitches got me jumpin’, I’m in distress
Balls are shrinking, got to clean up this mess!
The lyrics shouted themselves in Stuart’s head as he opened the wood-framed glass doors at the top of the stoop. A Blind Mice pin featuring a picture of Stuart’s mouse-tattooed fist was stuck to the collar of Peaches’ leather jacket and she was holding a pie.
She handed him the pie and pointed to the pin. “The mystery is gone. I decided to completely geek out on you. I’ve had this pin since sophomore year in college.”
Stuart knew he was supposed to feel flattered. Instead, he was simply bummed out. Why had she chosen to reveal her great, longtime fandom at this particular moment in time? To render herself harmless? To show him that she’d always loved him? To somehow align herself with him and Mandy? Her intentions weren’t clear. But then again, neither were his.
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