Little Children

by Tom Perrotta

  “Welcome,” she said, her voice animated by a sudden infusion of friendliness. “It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

  Sarah trudged forward with awkward tenacity, dragging her human ball and chain. Her hair was frizzy from the humidity, and her lipstick was the wrong shade of red, clashing both with her skin tone and her shirt, as though she were a teenager who still hadn’t quite mastered the grown-up art of color coordination. Kathy almost felt sorry for her, she had so completely failed to live up to the paranoid image she had concocted of the Other Woman, the Stay-at-Home Mom/Sex Goddess at the Town Pool.

  “This is for you,” Sarah said, holding out a bottle of chilled white wine.

  “Thanks.” Kathy glanced at the label, an Australian chardonnay, more expensive than what she and Todd were used to drinking. “That’s sweet of you.”

  The husband thrust out his hand and introduced himself as Richard Pierce. He was a skinny, potbellied man with close-cropped gray hair and a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, wearing pleated navy shorts, a pink Ralph Lauren oxford with the sleeves rolled up, and Topsiders with no socks. Kathy didn’t approve of any of these choices in isolation, but taken together they gave him a confident, surprisingly distinguished air.

  “Nice place,” he remarked, with obvious insincerity.

  “We just rent,” Kathy explained. “We’d love to buy something, but we’re not quite ready yet.”

  “It’s a tough market,” Richard observed. “Even the little starter homes are way overpriced.”

  “Tell me about it. It’s hard to keep up with our monthly expenses, let alone save for a down payment.”

  She glanced away from Richard just in time to see Lucy peeking out from behind Sarah’s right leg, a delicate elfin thing with rosy cheeks and silky blond hair, so different from her dark, curly-haired mother, who, despite her small size, gave off a strong impression of squat peasant solidity. Being the willowy child of plump parents, Kathy was familiar with the fluky nature of genetic transmission, and knew better than to comment on the apparent lack of resemblance. She got down on one knee to address Lucy on her own level.

  “And who is this pretty girl?”

  In lieu of responding, Lucy pressed her face into the back of her mother’s thighs.

  “She’s a little shy,” Sarah explained.

  “Well, I know someone who’s very excited about your visit.”

  Kathy beckoned to Aaron, who was watching from the hallway, his face a horror movie mask of dread and despair.

  “Come on, honey. Come say hello.”

  He held up both hands and shook his head no, as if Lucy were a goon who’d come to collect a large sum of money he was in no position to repay.

  “Aaron, you’ve been waiting for this all day.”

  Richard knelt down and placed his hand on Lucy’s shoulder. In this position, his face was only a few inches from Kathy’s, and she saw that he’d grown his beard to artfully compensate for a weak chin.

  “Is that your little boyfriend?” he asked, directing a sly wink at Kathy.

  Kathy forced herself to smile, even as she hurried to stand up. She didn’t like being winked at, especially by older, bearded men. It was a constant thing at the VA Hospital, an epidemic of not-so-subtle innuendo. She got it from everyone—these battered, geriatric vets, toothless and shell-shocked, their limbs missing or palsied, some drooling and incontinent, all of them winking at her like sleazy British game show hosts. And now this guy, right in her own house.

  “Not boyfriend,” Lucy said with bitter vehemence, as if she’d been accused of a crime she hadn’t committed.

  Kathy smiled at Sarah.

  “They just nap together,” she quipped. “It’s not like it means anything.”

  Sarah smiled back, but only a little, and only after an uncomfortable hesitation. It was odd, Kathy thought. She didn’t look like a prude.

  “Todd’s getting some beer,” she reported. “He should be back any minute.”

  Kathy had never been one of those women with a thing for older men. She’d always been a little grossed out when one of her girlfriends confessed to a crush on a gray-haired professor, or an affair with a “senior colleague.” It seemed perverse to her, depriving yourself of the best years of your lover’s life, fast-forwarding to the inevitable period of decay and decline, the saggy pecs and expanding waistline, the cholesterol and blood pressure medicines, the god-awful snoring they all did, the ear wax and nose hair, the need to be compassionate and understanding if the plumbing didn’t work the way it used to.

  The thing that really gave her the willies, though, was the idea of the guy having a massive heart attack in the middle of sex, Nelson Rockefeller-style, dying while he was still inside you. Everybody thought about it from the man’s perspective, like it was some kind of triumphant exit (What a way to go, they’d sigh. At least he died happy). Did anybody consider the poor woman? Could there be anything more horrible? It would probably take a few minutes for you to even realize what had happened—you might just think he’d had an especially intense orgasm or something—and the whole time you’d be lying there, hugging an old man’s corpse, talking dirty into its waxy ear. Just the thought of it was enough to make you start sleeping with teenagers again.

  “Forget the old geezers,” she’d said, after her friend Anna had described a fantasy in which her sixty-eight-year-old father-in-law seduced her at the family vacation house. “Stick with the young studs.”

  “But he’s so vital for his age,” Anna replied. “And he’s done so much with his life. You really feel like he appreciates things. Good food, good books, a vigorous morning walk. I’m sure he’d be like that with a younger woman. Polite and appreciative, and maybe even passionate, but in a dignified way.”

  Oddly enough, Kathy found herself flashing back to this conversation while listening to Richard talk about his experiences as a restaurant consultant. Despite his yucky clothes and weak chin and annoying tendency to wink, there was a kind of expansive ease about him, a wealth of experience and opinions that reminded her of something else Anna had said about her father-in-law.

  “He’s a man of the world in the old-fashioned sense. Guys our age don’t have the same sort of gravitas.”

  Todd didn’t, that was for sure. He was a thirty-one-year-old man who’d accomplished nothing with his life except to father a child and avoid paying work for longer than she’d imagined possible. It wasn’t so much that Richard had achieved anything particularly significant, or even that he’d reached some especially impressive level of financial success, it was simply that he had some experiences to share, some stories to tell about his interactions with the world. All Todd could do was sit there and ask the occasional question.

  “Are these guys Chinese?”

  “Of course not,” said Richard. “That’s the beauty of it. They’re a bunch of fat cats from Tennessee. But they think they can create a chain of Chinese restaurants authentic enough to fool the average American boob. After all, people just like them have already gotten rich doing the same thing with Mexican and Italian food. Why not Chinese, right?”

  “It just doesn’t seem right,” Todd reflected. “Chinese people should run Chinese restaurants.”

  “That’s why they want to call it Charlie Chopsticks. They figure they can have a cartoon logo of this bucktoothed Chinaman, maybe even use him as a spokesman in commercials, and that would somehow convince the dining public that Chinese people are actually involved in running the restaurant. I keep telling them that it’s a racist image that’s going to cause them no end of trouble, but they just don’t get it. They say, what’s racist about buckteeth? And Charlie, what’s the problem with that? It’s just a name, it has nothing to do with Vietnam. I say, what if a bunch of northerners started a chain of Southern restaurants called Redneck Roy’s House of Grits? How would you feel about that? And they all nod their heads like, Hey, great idea! Let’s do that next year!”

  “Have you suggested alternatives?”
Kathy asked.

  “That’s my job. I’ve given them at least a hundred. My favorite is Chow Down Here. It kinda sounds Chinese while actually communicating in idiomatic English. To me, it’s a home run, but the clients hate it.”

  “I liked Chairman Mouth,” said Sarah. “That was clever.”

  Richard shook his head sadly.

  “You can imagine how that went over. No one’s going to get it, they said, and anyway, we’re not naming our restaurants after a communist dictator. So I said, you want something American, how about Wok ’n Roll?”

  Todd laughed. “You could do Rock Around the Wok, or Wok Around the Clock. Or Wok Star.”

  “Wok Steady,” added Richard. “Wok On By. I have two solid pages of wok puns.”

  Sarah smiled fondly at her husband. “You’ve been wokkin’ overtime.”

  It was such a lame joke, Kathy couldn’t help laughing. She sipped the excellent wine her guests had brought and thought about how long it had been since they’d spent an evening like this, meeting new people, enjoying some interesting adult conversation while the kids played quietly at their feet. It wasn’t what she’d expected—it was, in fact, quite the opposite of what she’d expected—but she was more happy than to admit that she’d been wrong, that she’d gotten herself all worked up over nothing.

  The only thing that still bothered her was this: If Sarah was what Todd said she was—i.e., a casual acquaintance, the mother of one of Aaron’s playmates, a parent he occasionally bumped into at the pool; in short, no one she needed to worry about—then why all the secrecy? Why the denial? (Those were the first two entries on her six-item list, entitled Reasons It Might Be True.) Why had she had to hear about Sarah from her three-year-old son, instead of her husband? And why, when she first mentioned Sarah’s name, had Todd pretended not to know who she was talking about?

  “Sarah?” he said. “I don’t know any Sarah.”

  “Sarah from the pool? She has a little girl named Lucy?”

  They were lying in bed in the dark, so she couldn’t see his face. But there was a hesitation before he answered, a slight pause that smacked of calculation.

  “Oh, Lucy’s mom. That’s right. I forgot her name was Sarah.”

  “Aaron says he plays with her every day.”

  “Not every day.”

  “He says he takes naps at her house.”

  “One time,” said Todd. “We got caught in a rainstorm. The kids fell asleep in the stroller.”

  “He made it sound like an everyday thing.”

  “That’s an exaggeration. Maybe two or three times, but not every day.”

  Now it was Kathy’s turn to pause.

  “So what do you and this Sarah do while the kids are napping?”

  “What do you think we do? We hang out. We talk.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Jesus, Kathy. If you’re accusing me of something, just come out and say so.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to figure out why you never told me.”

  “It didn’t seem like earth-shattering news. Am I not allowed to make friends with the other parents?”

  “You go to her house, Todd.”

  “Just a couple of times. Mostly we just see each other at the pool.”

  “What kind of bathing suit does she wear?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t noticed? Because in my experience men are pretty much aware of what a woman’s wearing at the pool.”

  “I’ll take notes tomorrow and bring you back a full report.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Not really,” said Todd, with surprising quickness. “Not like you.”

  “Right.”

  “Come to the pool tomorrow. See for yourself.”

  “I can’t just come to the pool tomorrow, Todd. I have a job, remember? I’m the only person in this family who has one.”

  “You think it’s not work, caring full-time for a little kid? You should try it sometime.”

  I’d like to, she wanted to tell him. I’m happy to switch places whenever you say the word. But she didn’t want to change the subject to the bar exam, and their less-than-perfect domestic arrangements. She just wanted to know what the hell was going on between him and Sarah while she was stuck inside the hospital all day, interviewing broken old men about Midway and Guadalcanal.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “Why don’t we invite Sarah and her husband over for dinner next week?”

  “I don’t think so,” Todd mumbled.

  “Why not? Doesn’t she have a husband?”

  “She has one. I just don’t think he’s the nicest guy in the world.”

  “Oh, so she complains to you about her marriage, does she?”

  “Not exactly. I’m just reading between the lines.”

  Kathy’s stomach hurt, and she wasn’t breathing right. She hadn’t felt this sort of sexual panic since high school, when she found out that Mark Rovane had cheated on with her with slutty Ashley Peterson a week before the junior prom, making out with her at a crowded party while Kathy was home with the flu. She should have told him to fuck off, but she was weak, and didn’t want to miss the prom. So she went with Mark and hated herself the whole time. When she got home that night, she made a vow never to be put in that position again.

  “Invite them to dinner, Todd. I’d like to get to know my son’s friends. And my husband’s, too.”

  Todd dragged his feet for a couple of days.

  “I’ll do it,” Kathy said. “Just tell me her last name so I can look it up in the phone book.”

  “I don’t know her last name.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll take tomorrow afternoon off. I’ll meet you at the pool.”

  “Calm down,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. Now would you just chill out already?”

  The kids ate first—hot dogs and Tater Tots and baby carrots—then migrated into the living room to watch Thomas and the Magic Railroad, a movie Kathy found disturbing on any number of levels. It was a cinematic catastrophe, shifting clumsily between the inane antics of the talking trains and a bewildering psychodrama starring Peter Fonda, of all people. As a filmmaker, Kathy felt insulted and even polluted by the sheer awfulness of the storytelling; as a parent, she was mystified that her normally rambunctious three-year-old could tolerate, let alone enjoy, its art house pacing and dark Freudian overtones. But Aaron would have watched it every day if she let him, and Lucy seemed willing to trust his recommendation.

  In the past couple of years, as if in apology for his failure to pass the bar exam, Todd had become a surprisingly talented cook. Tonight he’d grilled salmon, and it was done to perfection, a vivid tic-tac-toe board of grill marks seared into the flesh of each moist, flaky fillet. He beamed as the compliments poured in.

  “This is delicious,” said Sarah.

  “You could start a restaurant,” said Richard. “House of Todd.”

  “Your wine is terrific,” Todd replied.

  “Speaking of wine…” Richard raised his glass. “Here’s to the chef, and to his lovely wife. Salud.”

  There was a slightly awkward pause after the toast, a moment of collective floundering they masked with tentative, encouraging smiles. Kathy was about to fill the space by asking Richard if it might be possible for her to film some of his meetings with the Charlie Chopsticks executives. For too long, she’d put off planning a new project, on the assumption that Todd would pass the bar and find a good job, freeing her to take a break for a couple of years, spend a little more time with Aaron, maybe have another baby. But recently she’d come to accept the possibility that it might not happen, and it had occurred to her that it might be fun to do some kind of comic documentary, something lighthearted but socially engaged, a little hipper and edgier than her current project. The creation of a nationwide chain of Chinese restaurants by a bunch of clueless white guys seemed like just the sort of vehicle she was looking for, a way to shine an amusing
light on what was actually a troubling phenomenon: the voracious march of American business, its insatiable need to devour everything in its path—other people’s history, their cuisine, their ethnic identities and cultural traditions—and then spit it back out as bland commodities for sale to middle America. But she needed to be diplomatic, to figure out a way not to tip her satirical hand, and while she was pondering her strategy, Richard shifted the conversation in an entirely different direction.

  “Lots of sturm and drang in our quiet little town, eh?”

  Nobody had to ask what he was referring to. In the past couple of days, the papers and TV news had been full of Larry Moon and Ronald James McGorvey, the sensational tabloid drama of the pervert expelled from church by “the killer cop,” the assault and battery charge filed against a man some people considered a hero and others a dangerous vigilante.

  “It’s crazy,” said Sarah. “He’s lucky he didn’t kill the guy.”

  “And in church of all places,” agreed Kathy. “I’m not religious myself, but I was like, is nothing sacred?”

  “What I want to know,” said Richard, “is what a creep like that was even doing in church.”

  “Which creep?” asked Sarah.

  “Larry’s not a creep,” said Todd. “McGorvey was sitting near his family. Larry didn’t like the way he was looking at his kids.”