She had fantasies. Just not her mother’s year-round Christmas-carol idea of imagination.
The girl above her seemed to find a good position. Cheerily she had said she was from that prison colony. Sara had looked at her blankly. She had an Australian accent and a wide sandy face with crow’s feet.
The perfect form of escape, abduction.
Sara put her hand out to make sure of her flashlight. Her wallet was smooth in her pocket.
She spread her mind over the breast of it. It could happen here, in Paris. It could happen any day now, tomorrow. She wouldn’t even know it was happening. She would be chloroformed, hypnotized, charmed, captured. There was an island where she would be sustained on wine coolers. The ultimate privacy: no one would speak English.
There would be nothing to do on the island except drink the wine coolers. She could wander off into the hospitable jungle—there were no animals, there had never been any land bridges or evolutionary swimming rodents—but there were guards on all the beaches. They never talked and she never talked to any of them.
The girl in the top bunk turned over.
Sara waited a moment.
There would be, in fact, a group of girls who were prisoners on the island, who would someday be able to vouch for each other. And there was the occasional rumor—screw language, thought Sara—that one of them would be chosen as the High Priest’s new sexual favorite.
It didn’t embarrass her.
Everything she had ever said out loud or written for school embarrassed her. Her mother had been an English major. Her mother taught British literature at the community college, her mother got a glad-eyed voice when she recommended a book to someone, when she loaned out one of her books she presented it with two hands as if it were a fruitcake.
Not literally a priest, not literally an island. Sara despised fairy tales. European history. British literature. Her mother’s affectations.
Something she wanted to tell someone, at some point, was that a model had lived next door to her. Their neighbors were families finishing their basements, families heaving lacrosse balls up and down alleys, families contagious with Halloween and Fourth of July parties. And then there was the model, Debra Nederlander. Her affiliation with a family—she was, unbelievably, the wife and mother—was redeemed by her beauty.
It was as if she knew exactly what she was doing with her teeth and her gums, cue her heart, when she smiled. She was slender without being starving or athletic like the other skinny mothers. She was taller than most of the dads, taller than her own husband. Her hair and her shoes. For years, when Sara was upset she would calm herself by thinking of Debra Nederlander’s hair and shoes.
The Nederlanders moved in and suddenly the neighborhood mothers lingered in their front yards, chatted louder and longer on the sidewalk. Sara caught her mother reading a novel on the front steps as if she were a teenager, and she saw how it was the unbeautiful, actually, who wanted to be beheld by the beauty.
There was her mother wiping down counters, fanning out cookies. “Oh, but do you eat—?” said her mother, and Debra hung back, obviously she didn’t, but Sara’s mother swam up and around her as Sara watched in horror. Finally Debra shrugged sort of helplessly and made a small secretive wave toward Sara.
That was the story. That was the whole true story of her childhood, thought Sara.
Two months in Paris and she was running out of money.
She cut out the laundromat, the cardboard orange juice with her meals, and she wondered if she could sleep in the day in a park and walk around at night to save on the youth hostel. Sooner or later she would have to face the open roundtrip ticket her parents had generously funded. She would have to take the metro to Charles de Gaulle and find a more-or-less English-speaking window and make a reservation. She could stay at the airport until her flight. Even if it were a day or two or a week, she imagined washing, as she had seen other women travelers do, in the long and mirrored airport bathrooms.
What if she called her parents? Send money. The sound of her voice in her head was what stopped her. She couldn’t imagine breaking her silence.
She took her pack out of the day locker and left the hostel. She owed three nights. That was a flaw in their French system. She had just enough left for a metro token.
She had a sense, now, with no money, of needing to conserve her energy and emotion. It would cost her to worry, cost her to stand as the train lurched into motion. She found a seat and she sat her pack beside her. She listened to the sound of the stops, place names, the mild burbling of a conversation on the opposite benches. Her underpants and bra were hand-washed but her jeans and sweater were silky-dirty. She did not feel like she had nothing left to lose; she felt like she must be even quieter, with no money.
At the next stop the conversers got off and a young man in a hood took their spot opposite Sara. She unzipped the top of her pack. What she had left were two fruit-filled biscuits.
The train was a sewing machine making a long seam out of the station. Her mother used to love to sew. She’d get quiet and hummy, and Sara would also. Her mother liked quaint cotton prints, and Sara suddenly remembered the “rhubarb dress” with the red zipper that squeezed her up the side and into her left armpit. If she ever saw her mother again she’d have to remind her.
She raised her eyes to the advertisements above the windows. If she ever saw her mother? Taking her whole life into account, that’s right. She could hear herself saying she’d already seen a lot of her mother. She thought of the playfields that seemed to have cropped up nearly every day of her childhood. She’d been gone ten months. Not a year. Ten years would have annihilated her. Ten years would have been full of admiration.
She let her eyes fall to the sweatshirt hood beneath the strip of advertisements. A handsome boy with shadowy eyes and aquiline features. Carrying nothing. Middle Eastern? How was it boys could get away with carrying nothing? Did they know themselves that well? He was her age or older. Good-looking boys were always older. Meegan had got very serious when Sara told her she wasn’t into sleeping with people.
“Did something happen?” Meegan had asked her.
No, not that she knew of. And then they’d both laughed because didn’t things happen to them all the time with no idea what those things would mean in the future? Meegan, pro-present.
After a while Meegan had offered that she’d never had sex with a girl before and Sara knew she was meant to say if she had or hadn’t. Meegan shrugged and said she thought it must be all fingers.
Then she had backed off kindly. Sara knew that she hated sex because she hated—well, she did. That’s what Portugal was for, she realized. It wasn’t just her mother but humankind she hated. She’d said it. Her stupid heart was racing. And there wasn’t any easy out for her, she wasn’t adopted or abused or mentally ill that she knew of, she had absolutely no corner on misery, but she was now and forever—she was smiling—Sara Who Hated People.
The hood looked up and across the aisle.
Dark and delicate. Painfully handsome.
Painful because she wasn’t him. She would have traded places in a second.
The train slowed in the dark between stations. He wasn’t afraid to stare right past her out the blank window.
Just then, the train blew out its air and stopped completely.
The mid-tunnel stop was longer than it should have been, long enough to claim a part of the day, and the mood, and a few of the riders began to get restless. A bony fair-haired man with white rabbit eyelashes kept a lookout up and down the aisle. He turned to the dark mirror window and before he could help himself he rapped on the glass—it wasn’t glass, it must have been plastic. He saw that Sara had seen and he tried to smile at his let-me-out antics, but Sara fidgeted instead of returning the smile.
A black woman with enormous marble eyes sighed and shifted her shopping bag from one side of her body to the other.
The boy in the hood leaned over his long legs with his hand extended. Sara watch
ed, mesmerized, as his eyes opened on her at the last possible moment.
What was going on here?
Without any warning at all Sara felt she was in the land of the living. Here, underground, the land of the living.
His arm was still extended. He was waiting. She thought he was going to pull her, up and out of a body of water she was only just aware of. How long had she been drowning? She saw herself in the window behind him, the reflection was colorless, her chin and jaw like loose bones in a sock. Her hair was pulled back too severely.
He had her hand now. “It’s pleased to meet you.”
“What?” said Sara.
He withdrew his hand, smiling but disappointed. He said, “My name is Christophe.”
Take it or leave it, he seemed to be saying.
She said her name. She had to speak louder than she was comfortable speaking. She said, “How did you know I spoke English?”
He pointed to the tag on her backpack. Return address, like Paddington, one of the many bear stories she had endured as a child.
“Do you think?” he said, as he rose and crossed and sat beside her. The hood fell backward and bareheaded he was older. Do you mind, he must have meant. His English. Sara was glad she was so thin, as if it signified strength of character. She thought he was one of those effortlessly controlled people whose body was a temple, who, being a boy, burned such a hot, clean fire inside he could turn anything into a few airborne ashes. Could turn an encounter with a stranger—
“Where are you?”
“Going?” said Sara.
“Of course,” he said, brushing off the English.
“The airport.” It sounded wrong. Deadening.
“I thinked—the airport.”
“You?”
“The same, of course,” said Christophe with a French style of mild exasperation.
What could she possibly say to him?
“So we have time.” He showed her time between his hands. “But not forever.” With a sad half smile.
“Last year, when I was in high school”—had she really said that? It had been so long since she’d spoken.
“I understand you,” he said simply.
“I know the French system is different. High school goes to thirteenth grade?” said Sara.
Christophe shrugged.
She was mortified, unbearable, sitting still stumbling wildly.
He took her hand again. She felt as if she were the victim of truth. Not an equal partner. But maybe that was the truth, that truth was always greater.
The train rolled backward, and then it shook resolutely into forward motion. Slowly at first, quietly, then picking up speed, as if to make up for lost time, almost whirring through the dark batting. The man with those eyelashes, they were not made of the usual eyelash material, sat back tersely. Another man down the row tucked his paperback in his leather jacket with a very precise arrogance.
Christophe held up their hands, the interlocking hub of fingers. Necky wrists. Onion dome of fingers. Here is the church, here is the steeple—moist, creased interior, drenched lint in the divots.
2
When the phone rings I hear myself playing it back already, the phone rang, as if I’m playing house, or writing a novel.
I hear myself saying, she ran to get it, and I find I really am running.
Ten thirty. The day is still cool and tender.
Here I go again, phone cords weren’t made like umbilical cords by accident.
Although when was the last time anyone used a phone that was attached to anything? Just air, evidently. Crowded with feelings.
I know it’s her. She calls at the same time every morning.
I can hear the baby banging in the background.
“How’s the baby?”
No answer.
Still no answer.
“Sara?”
“I didn’t even mean to call you,” she snarls.
She’s taken to blaming me for every grievance.
I’m a sorrow sponge, she squeezes me out then holds me up for the overcharge on her phone bill.
She blames me for the cars that splash mud puddles into the stroller. For the walks I take with friends when I could be volunteering in a soup kitchen. When I could be drinking her thin soup of sadness. She calls me when she’s bored with the baby. She calls me later, when she’s drinking.
Motherhood is how it looks on other people. It doesn’t become us, me and my Sara.
She hangs up on me, and I imagine the baby with the only pot they have, the pot I brought over, it’s not even a kitchen but a sticky little closet. I brought over a toaster oven that had been in the garage since the last time an elementary school had a tag sale, and a mini fridge she unplugs when she’s out of milk, to save on electric.
Of course I bought a crib for Christopher. I would have bought a thousand.
The phone rings again and I throw myself upon it. “Sara!” Silence.
“It’s Carolyn.” Beads slide together. Like an abacus, counting against me. One of the old moms. The moms from the old days, when we were moms all day every day, like actors in a living history museum.
“It’s been too long again, sweetie!”
Carolyn’s voice is all tosses.
I go upstairs to change. Carolyn always dresses for walks, and I’m as susceptible as any woman over fifty to exercise outfits. The one time we get to wear the same clothing as our daughters.
There’s a window seat in my bedroom with cushions I made on my sewing machine, years and years ago, when I used to glow late into the night in the nook I set up for myself in the basement. I still like the fabric, even though I don’t know what it means anymore. Cabbage roses. You never know what’s on the other side of the lovely cabbage rose garden.
You never know if that sound you hear in the middle of the night is the onset of an ax murder or just the old radiator popping. You don’t believe in destiny or hocus-pocus but you still have to admit you don’t know much of anything about your children.
It comforts me to say it.
Sara went to Europe because she thought no one else had ever. She never read a single book; she thought her feelings against me meant she had invented psychology.
I always wondered, did she want to be different because she was different?
What I mean is, was she trying to be herself, or was she trying to be different? It would help me to know. I could never ask her.
She’d been home two weeks when my husband said reasonably, conversationally, that he felt we should separate. I felt it was either an enormous thing of him to say, or a very, very small thing. He rented a condo with housekeeping and room service. Linguine with manila clams, their shells like the rhythm instruments found in every preschool classroom. When I used his bathroom I found my hand hovering over the eternally extra box of soap, smaller than any lay soap, I thought, which made it seem precious.
Sara was shocked, affronted. “I’m never speaking to him again!” and so on.
Poor green soul. She looked more like a pear than ever, pregnant. And her face so fat in spite of her bare-bones anguish.
There were all the different categories and subcategories of government assistance she could get, she and her tiny lamb, bleating and peeing through the night beside her.
I can live without Carolyn coming inside. A few calf stretches on the porch steps. I suppose I’m acting like Sara, who makes it a habit to keep me at bay in the parking lot of the apartment complex. Section 8 Housing, she corrects me. Carolyn’s still talking on her phone as she approaches, but she sees me and makes an enthusiastic show of hurrying the call to closure. She still has a son at home. He still troops down from his bedroom and the three of them sit down for dinner. The thought catches me off guard and my throat tightens.
I let her head us off in the direction she chooses. Her steps are short and feisty. Her philosophy is that everything is a weight loss opportunity. She says it again: “I miss you, sweetie!”
“I know,” I say
, and I do know I miss her too.
I ask after her two older sons.
Jason has a salvage store in an undiscovered neighborhood of an undiscovered city. Would Carolyn please stop calling it an antiques store? says Jason.
“He’s growing one of these,” Carolyn says, scrubbing her big chin to show me.
“And Noah,” she sighs. “Is buried.” She pauses. “His girlfriend Dimitra is buried with him.”
She laughs, taking those tiny punchy steps, and I remember her telling everybody on the sidelines of a drizzling soccer game that she could not, repeat couldn’t, get Noah to stop drawing. We all wanted our children to do one thing so prodigiously that we’d never have to try another new sport or lesson. We all wanted our children to raise themselves on their genius so we could just sit down and yabber—rest, finally—and Noah, she’d allowed him to wait out the game in the car with the window cracked so he could continue his intricate lace of aircraft carriers. It felt all right to hate someone for it, although it wasn’t quite Carolyn.
As if to trick me into talking, she keeps her pace steady: “Tell me about Sara.”
We turn into the little park-side dog-leg where all the houses look like they have enchanted gardens. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for thirty years and I’ve never met a single one of the inhabitants. Maybe I wouldn’t want to know they were just another set of bottled-water-drinking walking partners.
Still, the fig trees.
I used to push the stroller through this arbor. I used to think I could set a whole novel among these bungalows. All I needed was a day. A day to myself, a day was a novel.
I wanted to write—something. It hardly distinguishes me from anyone else who hoped to elevate her inchoate sadness.
My husband said, “Sadness?”
I must have looked wary.
“Not boredom?” he persisted.
I’d put my own mother in my novel, that disturbed creature. I’d write a chapter for the ex-model, Debra Nederlander, who lived down the street, our street, and drove us all crazy.
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