Little Children

by Tom Perrotta

  “Right. I can tell her why I don’t have a job and why my face is plastered all over town.”

  “Just keep it light, honey. Chat about the weather, the foods you like to eat, your favorite TV shows. If you hit it off and start going steady, then maybe you can get into…you know, the other stuff.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Ronnie clapped his hands and rubbed them together like he was eager to get down to business. “I’ll work the old McGorvey charm on her. It hasn’t let me down yet.”

  May let that one pass. She couldn’t blame him for being nervous; she was nervous herself. As far as she knew, this was the first time Ronnie had ever gone on an actual date. It reminded her of the excitement that used to brighten up the house back when Carol started having boyfriends, the burst of activity when one of them came over for dinner, the heart-in-your-mouth feeling of prom night, when your little girl suddenly transformed herself into a princess. Ronnie had never had any of that. He was always hiding in his room with the door locked, doing God-knew-what.

  “She’s late,” he said, squinting at the digital clock on the VCR. “Maybe she chickened out.”

  “Be patient,” May told him. “She probably just hit some traffic.”

  Ronnie’s personal ad had worked like a charm, drawing twenty-seven responses the first week alone. Bertha tried to take credit for the success, insisting that her addition of the word handsome had made all the difference, but May knew better. Ronnie had read the letters out loud, and almost all of them referred directly to the line, I’m not perfect and don’t expect you to be, either. There must have been a lot of men out there demanding perfection, judging from the relief the women felt at the absence of this requirement.

  I’m overweight, the very first letter began, but I have a lot of love to give. I do hope you’ll give me a chance. One correspondent spoke of her double mastectomy scars; another detailed her long struggle with unwanted facial hair. I tried electrolysis, but it hurt like anything! I am currently making an effort to accept myself for who I am, and your ad made me think you might treat me with the compassion and respect I deserve.

  “Jesus Christ.” Ronnie tore the letter into shreds with the thoroughness that characterized all his actions. “Just what I need. A date with the bearded lady.”

  Jenny had SEVERE acne. Patricia’s cellulite was so bad she’d rather die than wear a bathing suit. Diana was suffering from female pattern baldness. Chronic foot pain made it hard for Angela to get around. Sharon had headaches that felt like dull spikes being pounded into her skull. The world was riddled with imperfections.

  “It’s a freak show,” Ronnie muttered. “They should all run away and join the circus.”

  May hated when he talked like that. She wanted to believe that her son was good at heart, that his own suffering had at least made him sympathetic to the suffering of others. But there was a coldness in him that scared her sometimes. One woman had included a photo of herself taken at an amusement park. She was standing beneath a Ferris wheel, holding a cloud of cotton candy on a paper cone. She would have been pretty enough, May thought, if not for the buckteeth. Ronnie held up the picture and burned the woman’s face away with the tip of his cigarette.

  “There,” he said. “A little cosmetic surgery.”

  In short order, he had whittled the stack of letters down to three finalists: Arlene, a divorcee with three kids, two of whom had life-threatening allergies to peanut products; Gina, “a teenager in her late thirties” with “a passion for miniature golf” and Sheila, who had been “out of circulation for too long,” and was making “a sincere effort to come out of my shell and reconnect with other people.”

  Arlene was his first choice, but May talked him out of it. Life was complicated enough without having to deal with someone else’s kids. So he’d written to Gina and Sheila, identifying himself only as “R.J.,” and inviting them to give him a call, if they didn’t mind the fact that he didn’t have a car. Only Sheila took him up on the offer. She hadn’t included a photo with the letter, and hadn’t provided much in the way of physical description (Slender SWF, 29), so there was an added layer of suspense when the doorbell finally rang.

  “She better not be a dog,” Ronnie said, stubbing his cigarette into the ashtray and rising without haste from the couch. “I’m not gonna be seen in public with some dog.”

  “Ma,” said Ronnie, “this is Sheila.”

  May was pleasantly surprised. The girl was no beauty, but she was attractive enough, a slightly mousy brunette of medium height wearing a sleeveless pink dress. She wasn’t heavy, exactly, just a little wide in the hips and thick in the ankles, but May didn’t hold that against her. She was “slender” the same way that Ronnie was “handsome.” But they made a nice-looking couple.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said May.

  “Hello,” said Sheila.

  All it took was that one word for May to realize that something wasn’t quite right with her. Part of it was her voice, flat and dreamy, as if she were talking to herself, and part of it was her eyes, which were staring vacantly, but insistently, at the wall above May’s head. Also the way she hugged her purse so tightly to her stomach with both hands, as if she were walking through a bad neighborhood late at night.

  “Are you cold?” asked May.

  “Why?” said Sheila. “Are you?”

  “No,” said May. “I thought maybe you were.”

  “It’s the middle of summer.” Sheila laughed nervously, her eyes darting around the room. “Why would I be cold?”

  The poor girl’s terrified, May thought. Maybe she recognizes him from the poster. But when he sat down on the couch, she sat down right next to him, as if they were old friends.

  “Can I get you something?” May asked. “A wine cooler, maybe?”

  “Just water,” said Sheila. “This medication I’m taking gives me the dry mouth. I can hear the spit crackle when I talk.”

  Ronnie winced, making a face of exaggerated disgust. May gave him a sharp look.

  Sheila smiled sweetly. “When I wake up in the morning, I feel like I’ve eaten a jar of paste.”

  “I’ll get you a nice tall glass of ice water,” said May.

  She took her time in the kitchen, giving them a few minutes to get acquainted, but she didn’t hear any voices. When she returned to the living room they were both staring straight ahead, like strangers waiting for a bus.

  This is a date, May wanted to tell them. You’re supposed to talk to each other.

  She handed one glass to Sheila, the other to Ronnie. Sheila drained hers in a single thirsty gulp.

  “How was traffic, dear?” May inquired. She glanced pointedly at Ronnie, as if to say, See? It’s really not that hard.

  Sheila seemed perplexed. “Excuse me?”

  “The traffic? On your way over here.”

  “Oh.” She nodded, but her expression remained vague. “I didn’t really notice.”

  Ronnie twirled his index finger by his ear, indicating that Sheila was a little batty. He seemed pleased by the idea.

  He knew, May thought suddenly. He must have known it from her letter. Ronnie had a radar for that sort of thing. A feeling of unease spread through May’s body.

  “Come on.” Ronnie patted Sheila on the knee. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  May followed them to the front door. She pinched Ronnie’s arm.

  “You be nice to her,” she whispered.

  Ronnie crossed his arms on his chest and drew back as if she’d offended him.

  “When am I not nice?” he asked her.

  Sheila didn’t see it coming.

  As far as she could tell, the date had been a dud, and the ride home was worse. R.J. hadn’t said a word the whole time, just sat brooding in the passenger seat, encased in a bubble of his weird nervous energy, plucking repeatedly at the dark hair on his wrist. But then, when they were only a couple of blocks from his house, he spoke up suddenly, his voice clipped and urgent, striking an unexpected note o
f command.

  “Take the next left.”

  She obeyed without thinking, pulling into a small parking lot built alongside what appeared to be an elementary school, judging from the playground lit up by the beam of her headlights. It had those bucket swings, the ones that kept the little kids from falling out. The slides were made of molded plastic in bright, primary colors, and the ground around the structure was covered by some kind of spongy rubber material. It was a far cry from the playgrounds of her own childhood, rusty monkey bars embedded in cracked asphalt, metal slides baking in the sun, sharp edges and exposed screws.

  “Everybody’s so careful now,” she said. R.J. stared at her like she was kind of alien life-form. She wondered if her words weren’t coming out right, if they were slurred or mechanical-sounding, or maybe she was talking too fast or something.

  “Cut the headlights,” he told her.

  At one time in her life Sheila had been a good conversationalist. She’d had friends. She remembered sitting with them in the high school cafeteria, laughing about silly things. She and her college roommates used to stay up till all hours, trading secrets, giggling about sex, trying to figure out the meaning of life.

  But not anymore. The damn medication had fogged her brain, made it seem like everything was happening twenty feet away, on the other side of a gauze curtain. If she stopped taking it, though, everything was too close, way too bright, pressing in on her until she forgot how to breathe. That was how she’d ended up in the hospital again this past fall. She just wished there was some middle ground, something that didn’t muffle everything and make her feel like English had become a foreign language.

  She and R.J. had spent the first half of dinner floundering around, trying to make conversation. But what was there to talk about? Neither one of them had a job. He wasn’t interested in sports or music, and showed no interest in travel.

  “I’m broke,” he said. “Where am I gonna go?”

  The sad part was, she kind of liked him. He wasn’t like the other guys she’d met through the personals, big forty-year-old babies. Joel, who asked her to squeeze his bicep and then seemed hurt when she wasn’t as impressed as he thought she should be. Gary, who went on and on about the boat he would have built if he’d had access to an unlimited amount of money. And that awful one with the beard, who kept calling her for weeks after their date, trying to convince her to upgrade her cell phone, apparently unaware of the fact that she didn’t have one.

  “I’m offering five hundred anytime minutes a month. Can your current plan compete?”

  R.J. didn’t have much to say, but at least he seemed smart, like there was something going on beneath the surface. He watched her with those shrewd eyes—the glasses made them seem too big, too observant—smiling in a way that seemed encouraging, but then suddenly did not. He laughed a lot, too, usually when she wasn’t trying to be funny. There were moments when she could have sworn he was emitting radio signals from the center of his forehead, beaming them right across the table.

  We have a connection, she thought.

  But when the food arrived, he lost interest, stopped even trying to talk to her. She kept waiting for him to look up from his gigantic bloody steak, to say something, if only to acknowledge the fact that she was still sitting right in front of him.

  Of course she’d panicked and started blathering about her illness, the way she always did, just to fill the silence. That she could talk about for hours. She told him about her first so-called breakdown, the one that came out of nowhere during her senior year in college. One day she’s normal, a sociology major on the dean’s list, and the next she’s standing naked on the quad, trying to set a pile of her clothes on fire.

  “They were itchy,” she explained. “I thought they were full of bugs.”

  That got his attention. Chewing slowly, he pondered her with the neutral expression of a psychiatrist.

  “Maybe you just wanted to get naked,” he suggested. “Maybe the breakdown was just an excuse.”

  “I wanted to kill the bugs,” she insisted. “I didn’t even realize I was naked until the police came and made an issue of it.”

  R.J. flagged down the waiter and ordered dessert, apple pie and ice cream, which he shoveled into his mouth while she continued the saga of her hospitalization and treatment, the five years of relative lucidity followed by a second so-called breakdown, which was actually a very positive experience. She was about to tell him why—it was something she enjoyed talking about—when he looked up and yawned right in her face, not even bothering to cover his mouth. Then, when the check arrived, he said he’d forgotten his wallet.

  “Wouldn’t you know it?” he chuckled.

  She didn’t mind paying. It was her father’s money anyway. A thank-you would have been nice, though, a simple word of gratitude. But R.J. just acted like it was his due, the least he deserved for sitting through dinner with a crazy woman.

  But maybe she’d misread his signals, she thought, as they sat quietly in the car, staring at the shadowy playground. Maybe he liked her. Maybe he was as shy and awkward as she was, and simply didn’t know how to behave around women. He didn’t seem like a guy who’d had a lot of girlfriends.

  She smiled, to let him know that it would be all right to kiss her or just hold her hand. It wasn’t that she wanted to kiss R.J., exactly. She just wanted to kiss someone, to remember what it felt like, to know that she’d taken one more step in the direction of a normal life.

  R.J. smiled back. She must have been a little more encouraging than she’d meant to be, because instead of kissing her, he started undoing his belt, and then his zipper.

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You must have misunderstood.”

  “Don’t be scared,” he told her. “It’s not gonna bite.”

  If R.J. had been a little more interested back at the restaurant, Sheila would have told him about the vision that had triggered her second so-called breakdown, the most beautiful and important thing that had ever happened to her.

  She was driving on the highway during the evening rush hour, coming home from a temp job, a mind-numbing eight-hour shift of data processing for a payroll company. It had rained all day, but now it was clearing, a strong breeze erasing the bad weather from the sky so quickly that it looked like time-lapse photography.

  The sun was sinking, ducking in and out of the scudding silver-gray clouds. At one point, she happened to be looking straight at it as it emerged from hiding, inexplicably transformed into something glorious. A moment before it had been a pale yellow orb, but now it was an enormous red fireball, its rays separating into four rosy beams, one of which—the second from the left—was directed right at Sheila’s windshield. The touch of that crimson sunlight through the glass, the sudden reassuring warmth, landed on her skin like a blessing.

  She knew it was a bad idea to look directly at the sun, but she couldn’t avert her gaze. A face had emerged from the clouds, and it was trying to speak to her. She rolled down her window to hear the words, but it was no use; the road noise was just too loud.

  She slammed on her brakes, right there in the center lane, setting off a chain reaction of violent swerves, squealing tires, and furious horn-blowing, capped off by the sound of one crash, then another, behind her and off to the right. She gave the collision no more than a passing glance—a three-car pileup, nothing too serious—as she climbed onto the warm hood of her car and from there onto the roof, so she could get a better look at the face in the clouds.

  It was a boy, seven or eight years old. Brown hair. Freckles and a cowlick. An innocent but mischievous expression. A face she’d seen before, or imagined she had.

  “Hello!” she called. “I can see you!”

  “I can see you, too,” he replied.

  By then he wasn’t just a face anymore, but an entire body, his blue jeans and black-and-orange-striped shirt standing out vividly against the flat gray background. And suddenly it wa
s obvious: He was her child, the one she’d aborted during sophomore year. But he was more than just her unborn son.

  “You’re God, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” he told her. “And you’re my special mommy.”

  “Will you forgive me?” she asked.

  “You’re already forgiven.”

  She felt so much better knowing that, relieved of the burden she’d been lugging around for so long, the terrible guilt of not having given him a chance. But he was God, so of course he was okay.

  “I’d like to know you better,” she told him.

  “You will,” he promised her.

  She sat with her hands resting in her lap, and comforted herself with the thought of God’s sweet face while R.J. finished his ugly business in the passenger seat. At least he wasn’t touching her. He wasn’t even looking at her, just staring straight ahead at the playground as he yanked on himself, once in a while muttering something disgusting in a threatening voice.

  “You bitch…you whore…little crybaby…piece of shit…”

  After a while the words dissolved into whimpers and R.J. exploded with an angry bark of relief, lurching forward as if he’d been shot, bracing himself with his free hand against the glove compartment. He rested his head on the dashboard, breathing in hiccupy spasms that sounded like sobs. After a while he straightened up, wiping his dirty hand on her seat. He studied Sheila with cold eyes as he zipped up and fixed his belt.

  “You’re not gonna tell on me, are you?” His voice was soft and taunting, but worried nonetheless.

  Sheila shook her head. He pressed his index finger against the base of her chin, forcing her head back until she was staring up at the padded ceiling of the car.

  “I hope not,” he whispered. “Because I don’t like tattletales.”

  He removed the pressure. She lowered her head cautiously and looked at him. He put his hands over his face like a child playing peekaboo and started moaning into his palms, making a sound she interpreted as a kind of apology.