Little Children

by Tom Perrotta

  Unless he leaves her, she thought, her chest swelling with a strange feeling of lightness, as if hope were helium. Unless he leaves her to be with me.

  It wasn’t the first time she let herself consider this scenario, of course, but it was the first time she’d let herself believe it was a real possibility. He could divorce Kathy. He could marry me. I could divorce Richard. Todd could marry me. She kept extending the sequence, playing out the permutations, imagining the logistics involved to the best of her ability—the lawyers, the custody battles, the financial arrangements, the emotional trauma—until Todd startled her by stepping out the front door, hugging a picnic cooler to his chest, his brow furrowed with worry. He can divorce her. He carried the plastic box down the steps and placed it in the trunk of the Toyota. I can divorce him. It took all of the self-restraint she possessed to stay inside the car, to keep herself from running over to him and shouting out the wonderful news.

  We can divorce them and marry each other!

  He made three trips in all—beach umbrella, toy pail and shovel, two canvas totes, a football—and had just shut the trunk when Aaron emerged from the front door, looking serious and oddly unfamiliar without his jester’s cap, and joined his father by the car. Kathy stepped out into the sunlight a moment later. She was barefoot, wearing tight blue jean shorts, a black bikini top, and Italian movie star sunglasses, looking taller, thinner, and more glamorous than Sarah had let herself imagine in her worst self-loathing insomniac nightmare. She was one of those girls, the ones from high school who made you stick your finger down your throat after lunch, the ones who made you look in the mirror and cry.

  Kathy stood on the porch for a long time, giving Sarah a fair chance to contemplate her folly. She interlaced her fingers overhead and tilted her lithe torso from side to side. Then she spread her arms wide and yawned, the way people do when they’re sleepy but happy, and ready to embrace the day.

  “Okay, boys,” she called out. “Let’s get moving.”

  Sarah felt herself deflating, a Thanksgiving Day float pierced by an arrow. Oh God. Her dream of happiness suddenly seemed cruel, a joke she’d played on herself. He’ll never leave her. She barely managed to hold herself together until Todd and his family had backed out of the driveway and headed off down the street. Not for me. She covered her mouth politely with one hand, as if she were coughing instead of sobbing. Not for anybody like me.

  Long after she’d stopped crying, Sarah sat in the parked car on Angelina Way, wondering how she was going to get through the next two days. Weekends were brutal under the best of circumstances, forty-eight-hour prison stretches separating one happy blur of weekdays from the next. But this one was going to be unbearable, now that she’d be able to torment herself with the thought of Todd spending every second of it in the company of his gorgeous wife—at the beach no less—while she was stuck at home with the panty sniffer.

  Richard was sitting on the front lawn with Lucy when she pulled into the driveway, and just the sight of him filled her with disgust—his pleated shorts and Italian sandals, the polo shirt with the collar turned up as if it were 1988 on Nantucket, his little potbelly. They were having a tea party around a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, along with one of those hideous American Girl dolls and a stuffed frog named Melvin (both the doll and the miniature ceramic tea set were gifts from Richard’s mother, a woman who still believed that “dainty” and “ladylike” were the conditions to which all little girls should aspire). He looked up from the game as she approached, a demitasse of nothing raised halfway between a saucer and his mouth, his pinky sticking out with a primness that didn’t seem satirical.

  “Where were you?” he asked, his face artfully blank, no hint of accusation in his voice. Ever since the incident in his office, he’d been a lot less imperious around the house, a little more considerate of his wife and child.

  “I had some things to do.”

  “You could have left a note. I didn’t know if you were coming back in fifteen minutes or two hours.”

  You’re lucky I’m back at all, she thought. She looked from Richard to Lucy, smiling as if touched by the sight of them.

  “Well, I’m glad to see the two of you having so much fun. I think you needed a little father-daughter bonding time.”

  He nodded, as if to concede her the round.

  “It’s been wonderful,” he said. “But I was hoping you could take over in a few minutes. I have some work to do for that Chinese restaurant. The presentation’s next week.”

  “Could you do it later?” she said. “I need a little time to myself.”

  “Sarah.” She could hear the irritation creeping into his voice. “This is a big account.”

  “Spend the day with your daughter,” she snapped. “It won’t kill you.”

  “I don’t think this is fair,” he spluttered. He seemed genuinely baffled, as if Sarah had no business in life beyond taking care of Lucy and making things convenient for him. “Is there something particular you need to do?”

  She only had to hesitate a second or two.

  “I joined a book group,” she told him. “We’re reading Flaubert.”

  Based on the name alone, Sarah had developed a completely erroneous impression of the Ladies’ Belletristic Society. She’d expected it to be stuffy and pretentious, fatally suburban, a garden club nightmare of watercress sandwiches and polite snobbery, well-preserved matrons in golf visors and pearls who used the word darling as an adjective.

  Instead, the atmosphere inside Bridget’s condo was warm and welcoming, full of laughter and intellectual curiosity. Over here an informed conversation about the films of Mike Leigh. Over there an impassioned discussion of third-world debt relief. Despite the age of the members—the “ladies” were in their sixties and seventies—Sarah sensed a collective vibrancy in the air that seemed vaguely reminiscent of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  As the only little sister present—everyone kept assuring her that another was on the way—Sarah found herself in great demand. Jean ushered her around the room like a visiting celebrity, introducing her to each new arrival: Regina, a tall bony woman with a hearing aid and an owlish smile; Alice, whose iron gray hair only emphasized the uncanny youthfulness of her face; and now Josephine, plump and frumpy, with a tight helmet of curly hair and mismatched orthopedic splints on her forearms.

  “Oh no,” said Jean. “Don’t tell me you got carpal tunnel.”

  “Repetitive stress,” Josephine replied with a sigh. “Too much typing.”

  “She’s writing a novel,” Jean explained to Sarah. “She always said she would.”

  Josephine gave a rueful nod. “Only forty years behind schedule.”

  “This is Sarah, my neighbor,” said Jean. “She’s a literary critic.”

  “In my dreams,” said Sarah. “In real life I’m the mother of a three-year-old girl.”

  “An adorable three-year-old girl,” added Jean.

  Josephine stared at Sarah for a long moment. There was something probing in her gaze, but tender too, as if she were attempting to move beyond conversation into some more intimate realm.

  “She won’t be three forever, honey. When she goes to school, you can get back to your work.”

  “My work,” said Sarah. The words felt good in her mouth. She just wished she knew what they referred to.

  “Don’t be like me.” Josephine reached for Sarah’s hand and gave a feeble, but still somehow encouraging squeeze. “Don’t let your whole life go by.”

  Before Sarah could reply Josephine was besieged by concerned friends peppering her with questions and medical advice. Regina recommended acupuncture. Alice said she should try dictating her novel into a tape recorder. Bridget said she hoped Josephine’s grip was strong enough to support a wineglass. Jean said she knew lots of people with similar injuries who had complete recoveries, no disability whatsoever.

  “You just have to be patient,” she said.

  And all at once, it came t
o Sarah: It was like being back at the Women’s Center. For the first time since she graduated from college, she’d managed to find her way into a community of smart, independent, supportive women who enjoyed each other’s company and didn’t need to compete with one another or define themselves in relation to the men in their lives. It was precisely what she’d been missing, the oasis she’d been unable to find in graduate school, at work, or even at the playground. She’d searched for it for so long that she’d even come to suspect that it hadn’t actually existed in the first place, at least not the way she remembered it, that it was more a product of her romantic undergraduate imagination than anything real in the world. But it had been real. It felt like this, and it was a huge relief to be back inside the circle again.

  The feeling didn’t last long. The doorbell rang, and Bridget escorted two more women into the room, both of them in expensive floral dresses. The older one had a pretty, but somewhat leathery face and the toned legs of a tennis player.

  “See,” said Bridget, presenting the younger woman to Sarah with an air of triumph. “I told you you’d have a comrade.”

  Sarah tried to look pleased, but her face wouldn’t cooperate. She just hoped her smile wasn’t as stiff and phony as the one plastered on her comrade’s face.

  “Nice to see you again,” said Sarah.

  “What a surprise,” said Mary Ann. “We miss you at the playground.”

  The two little sisters eyed each other warily across the coffee table. Sarah still hadn’t recovered from the shock of Mary Ann’s arrival and how completely it had spoiled what had been shaping up as a very nice evening. This couldn’t be the Women’s Center, not with her here. She felt like she’d been given a beautiful birthday present, only to have it ripped away a moment later and handed to someone else. Her only consolation was the look of raw discomfort on Mary Ann’s face. She must have realized that she’d strayed onto alien turf, that for once she was the one who was outnumbered.

  “Which one of you would like to start?” asked Bridget.

  “She’s the bookworm,” said Mary Ann. “Let her go first.”

  “No, you go ahead,” said Sarah. “I can wait.”

  Mary Ann took the measure of her audience before speaking. The ladies of the Belletristic Society were smiling at her like kindergarten teachers overseeing the year’s first installment of show-and-tell, fully prepared to be fascinated by a broken clam shell or a worn shoelace.

  “Did anybody like this book?” Mary Ann screwed her face up into the look of offended disapproval Sarah knew so well. “Because I really just hated it.”

  She hesitated, waiting for someone to take the baton and run with it, but the ladies seemed startled by this unexpected salvo of negativity. They didn’t look upset, exactly, but their smiles were in retreat.

  “I mean, isn’t it kind of depressing?” Mary Ann continued, her voice growing in confidence, as if she were sitting at the picnic table on the playground, lecturing Cheryl and Theresa. “She cheats on her husband with two different guys, wastes all his money, then kills herself with rat poison. Do I really need to read this?”

  This question was met with an uncomfortable silence. It was Laurel, Mary Ann’s sponsor, who finally ventured a response.

  “There’s a lot of good descriptive writing,” she said hopefully.

  The ladies nodded in vigorous agreement.

  “It’s supposed to be depressing,” Josephine pointed out. “It’s a tragedy. Emma’s undone by a tragic flaw.”

  “What’s her flaw?” Bridget inquired.

  “Blindness,” Josephine replied. “She can’t see that the men are just using her.”

  “She just wants a little romance in her life,” Jean ventured. “You can’t really blame her for that.”

  “It’s about women’s choices,” Regina added. “Back then, a woman didn’t have a lot of choices. You could be a nun or you could be a wife. That’s all there was.”

  “Or a prostitute,” added Bridget.

  “She had a choice not to cheat on her husband,” said Mary Ann, staring rudely at Sarah.

  “Mary Ann’s got a point,” admitted Laurel.

  “Usually it’s the man who cheats,” said Alice. “I found it refreshing to read about a woman reclaiming her sexuality.”

  “Reclaiming her sexuality?” Mary Ann repeated with disdain. “Is that a nice way of saying she’s a slut?”

  “Madame Bovary is not a slut,” said Regina. “She’s one of the great characters in Western literature.”

  “Hello?” said Mary Ann. “She’s sneaking off to the city every week to screw her husband’s friend.”

  “I found some of the sex stuff a little cryptic.” Josephine paged through her paperback. “Like ‘Rodolphe discovered that the affair offered still further possibilities of sensual gratification. He abandoned every last shred of restraint and consideration. He made her into something compliant, something corrupt.’”

  “See?” said Mary Ann. “She’s a slut.”

  “Does anybody know what that means?” Josephine asked. “Do you think he’s tying her up or something like that?”

  Alice leaned forward and mouthed the words, “Anal sex.”

  Josephine looked horrified.

  “Really?” she asked, glancing around the room in embarrassment. “Did everyone get that but me?”

  “Why don’t we hold off on that for the moment,” suggested Bridget. “Let’s see what our other little sister has to say.”

  Back when she was teaching, the prospect of public speaking had filled Sarah with dread. She always felt like she was faking it, unsuccessfully impersonating an authority figure. But tonight, for some reason, she felt calm and well prepared, an adult among her peers. Maybe she’d grown up in the past five or six years without realizing it. Or maybe she was just happier now than she’d been back then. She looked at Mary Ann with what she hoped was a kind of empathy.

  “I think I understand your feelings about this book. I used to feel the same way myself.” She shifted her gaze around the circle, making eye contact with each of the older women. It was okay being the center of attention; it was even kind of fun. “When I read this book back in college, Madame Bovary just seemed like a fool. She marries the wrong man, makes one stupid mistake after another, and pretty much gets what she deserves. But when I read it this time, I just fell in love with her.”

  Mary Ann scoffed, but the ladies seemed intrigued. Jean smiled proudly, as if to remind everyone who was responsible for Sarah’s presence at the meeting.

  “My professors would kill me,” she continued, “but I’m tempted to go as far as to say that, in her own strange way, Emma Bovary is a feminist.”

  “Really?” Bridget sounded skeptical, but open to persuasion.

  “She’s trapped. She can either accept a life of misery or struggle against it. She chooses to struggle.”

  “Some struggle,” said Mary Ann. “Jump in bed with every guy who says hello.”

  “She fails in the end,” Sarah conceded. “But there’s something beautiful and heroic in her rebellion.”

  “How convenient,” observed Mary Ann. “So now cheating on your husband makes you a feminist.”

  “It’s not the cheating. It’s the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.”

  “I guess I just didn’t understand the book,” Mary Ann said, adopting a tone of mock humility. “I just thought she just looked so pathetic, degrading herself for nothing. I mean, did she really think a man like that was going to run away with her?”

  Sarah couldn’t help smiling. Just yesterday, for the first time, she and Todd had discussed the possibility of divorcing their respective spouses. Sarah had floated the subject cautiously, after he’d told her about his miserable Saturday at the beach, how he and Kathy had argued the whole time, how fragile and unhappy their marriage had become. She’s losing patience with me, he confessed. I’m going to leave Richard, she replied. And then they had made love tenderly, alm
ost fearfully, as if trying to absorb the meaning of what they’d just told each other.

  “Madame Bovary’s problem wasn’t that she committed adultery,” Sarah declared, in a voice full of calm certainty. “It was that she committed adultery with losers. She never found a partner worthy of her heroic passion.”

  Mary Ann shook her head sadly, as if she pitied Sarah, but the other ladies were beaming, nodding in fervent agreement with this unexpected and thought-provoking assessment of the novel. Sarah sipped her wine, basking in the glow of their approval. Maybe I should go back to graduate school, she thought. Josephine raised her hand.

  “Could we get back to the sex now?” she asked.

  Dream Date

  RONNIE WAS BEING A LOT MORE COOPERATIVE THAN MAY EXPECTED. He was ready at six-thirty, shaved and showered, looking quite presentable in the beige Dockers and jungle-print polo shirt she and Bertha had picked out for him at Marshall’s. His hair was combed, and his shoes were polished. If not for his eyeglasses, which were thick and ugly and sat crookedly on his nose—May had been bugging him for years to get contacts—he would have seemed completely normal.

  “You look handsome,” she told him. “She won’t be disappointed.”

  “Wait’ll she hears about my criminal record,” said Ronnie, mimicking May’s bubbly tone. “That’ll really seal the deal.”

  “I don’t think you need to get into that just yet. Why don’t you stick to the small talk?”