by Marian Thurm
“A Furby!” the twins cried.
None of the women except Clare had any idea what they were looking at, and Marshall had to explain that this Furby thing was an interactive electronic robot capable of learning English—though because Nathaniel’s was brand new, at the moment it could only speak its own language.
“Let’s hear him talk!” Savannah said. She and her sister were out of their seats, rushing at Nathaniel with such enthusiasm, they nearly knocked the kid over onto the floor.
Narrowing his eyes at the twins, Nathaniel pressed the Furby close to his chest. “He doesn’t want to talk to you,” he said. “Maybe later.”
“Come on, Nat,” Roger said. “They’re just little girls; can’t you give them a break?”
Apparently he could, even if he didn’t want to: with a sigh, Nathaniel rubbed the robot’s belly; instantly it responded, in a childish, cartoony voice, “You-nye-boh-doo.”
The twins shrieked with pleasure.
“It means ‘how are you?’ in Furbish,” Nathaniel interpreted for them.
He patted the creature’s belly again, and this time it said, “Wee-tah-kah-wee-loo.”
“ ‘Tell me a story,’ ” Nathaniel translated proudly.
The twins had fallen in love with him and his interactive robot; anyone could see that. When Nathaniel left the room with his Furby, it was no surprise that the girls ran after him, begging for a chance to rub the magic belly.
The annoying sound of the Mister Softee jingle suddenly flowed from the cell phone in the back pocket of Marshall’s jeans. “How are ya?” he said, answering it immediately. “Yeah, yeah, I already told her—and also your, uh, ex-husband—that the bite plate should stay in her mouth twenty-four/seven, except when she brushes . . . I know it’s uncomfortable, but she’ll get used to it, trust me. And between now and then, she can try some Advil or Tylenol . . . Not to worry, no problem at all.” Snapping the phone shut, Marshall said, “Sorry, everyone. Had to do a little hand-holding there.”
Stacy liked the soothing way he’d spoken to the patient’s mother, the way he hadn’t allowed himself to sound even a trifle bored or patronizing. She felt affection for Marshall, and even more of it for Clare. Soon she would officially be a part of the family; they would introduce her as their sister-in-law, and she already liked the sound of it. She and Chuck had never had much to say to one another, but it was different with Clare and Marshall; they were more her kind of people, she felt, more likely, perhaps, to understand the value of the work she did, and to appreciate the opportunities she’d given up, the opportunities her Harvard diploma would inevitably have afforded her had she chosen another route instead of the nonprofit one. (Not that she had a single regret—she didn’t.)
Her mother and father were gone, but, thanks to Roger, she could attach herself to this family of his and render it her own; thanks to Roger, she thought, she had found her way in the world.
She filled up a plate of food for him now, and standing together in the midst of his family, they both ate from it, Roger expertly lifting the chopsticks first to her mouth, then to his, back and forth, again and again, until the plate was empty.
S
After a long, hot afternoon at Puttin’ Around—a miniature golf course Stacy found for the kids—everyone except Roger votes for a late swim. While Stacy plays with their kids in the water, he falls asleep poolside and dreams of a run-in with Dr. Avalon, who claims he’s seen Roger at the shooting range and can’t believe what he’s planning.
“I mean, are you out of your fucking mind?” Dr. Avalon barks at him. The two of them are in line at a 7-Eleven, and people are turning to stare.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” Roger says. “And what the hell are you so angry about?”
Dr. Avalon is staring at him with such contempt, Roger just can’t believe it.
“What is wrong with YOU, you lunatic?” Avalon says, sipping on his Slurpee now and looking very undignified. “I’d hate to think that all the time we put in together over the years didn’t do you an ounce of good, you fucking head case.”
“Daddy?” Roger hears someone say; squinting into the sun, he sees that it’s Will standing at the foot of the chaise longue. “IHOP or Applebee’s, Daddy?”
“What?”
“We’re hungry.”
Will’s bathing trunks are patterned with palm trees and laughing starfish, and reach all the way down to his knees. His belly button protrudes from his stomach; it is, in fact, an umbilical hernia, and the pediatrician has already told them Will’s going to need corrective surgery in a year or so.
“C’mere and talk to me, baby boy,” Roger says, trying so hard to dismiss Dr. Avalon’s anger, even as he reminds himself it was only something he’d dreamt. He’s disappointed with Avalon all the same, and bewildered by the guy’s failure to understand. Come to think of it, Avalon hasn’t been particularly helpful these past few months, tossing off questions that have only led to darker and darker places.
Will has declined Roger’s invitation to sit down and talk; he’s still standing there in his soggy bathing trunks and damp little feet, waiting for Roger to make up his mind about dinner. Finally he positions his pocket-sized hand on his hip and says, “Applebee’s or IHOP, Daddy, you hafta choose.”
Why does everything seem so impossibly difficult, even a question as simple as this one?
“Can you help me, please?” Roger asks his three-year-old. “Help me decide.”
His baby boy nods solemnly; Roger’s never seen a child look so worried before.
~ 11 ~
When Stacy moved into Roger’s apartment not long after their engagement, she brought with her three suitcases of clothing, hundreds of books, and two dark-gray Persian cats: a subdued, none-too-bright male named Keats, and a neurotic female named Shelley. Roger didn’t have the heart to tell Stacy that cats were not his favorite creatures; though there’d been no dogs in his life since he left home for college years ago, he’d grown up with Shetland sheepdogs and a trinity of funny-faced Brussels griffons. He wasn’t happy ceding one of his two bathrooms to Keats and Shelley and installing the big plastic litter box that sat squarely in it; was annoyed by the swirls of cat hair that attached themselves to the black-and-white comforter on his bed; and hated the bits of litter that were sometimes kicked out into the hallway and then crunched under his bare feet. But he loved Stacy, and tried his best to warm to her pets, who generally ignored him but from time to time sat on his head just as he felt himself falling asleep. Love always entailed some sort of sacrifice, he figured, and if surrendering a bathroom to a couple of cats was the worst he had to endure, well, he could handle it.
He and Stacy discussed possible wedding venues every night at dinnertime, studied endless wedding-related websites together, and kept up the conversation as they watched TV before they went to sleep, but they didn’t seem to be making much headway, Roger thought. Several times Stacy and her sister had plans to go shopping for a wedding dress, but at the last minute something always seemed to go wrong on Lauren’s end—one of the twins developed conjunctivitis, or a strep throat, or a twenty-four-hour stomach virus, courtesy of a classmate at the Kiddie Kollege—and Stacy was left to go it alone. She and her grandmother met in the bridal departments of Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, and Saks, but Juliette’s bad knee—the one that her orthopedist was still trying to convince her needed to be replaced—slowed them down so much that Stacy was relieved when her grandmother decided to call it quits after a single shopping excursion. (“I’ll be there with you in spirit,” Juliette told her over the phone, then mailed her a check for $4,000. Which Stacy immediately threatened to mail right back to her, because how could they take money from an old lady when the happy truth was, they clearly didn’t need it, thanks to Roger’s booming business. You send that check back to me, I’ll cut you out of my will, sweetheart, Juliette warned her.)
“I’m thirty-three years old and I miss my mother,” Stacy said one night when they w
ere at Roger’s desk perusing caterers’ websites on his computer in the den. She sank her face into her palms, and Roger was surprised to see that her eyes were actually shiny with tears. “I know I sound like a big baby,” she said, “but there you have it.”
Roger had friends who didn’t get along with their parents, who stopped talking to them because of furious arguments over money or what sounded like imagined slights, friends who insisted that if they didn’t speak to their mother or father ever again, well, guess what, they just didn’t give a shit. Stacy couldn’t stand to hear this; once, when she and Roger were out with one of his fraternity brothers from college, a guy named Phil who was enraged by his parents because they refused to lend him and his girlfriend money for a down payment on a house, Stacy got up from her seat in the Thai restaurant, and fled to the ladies’ room, where she remained until Phil’s girlfriend finally came looking for her. Stop talking trash about your parents, Stacy told Phil when she got back to the table. It was none of her business, but there wasn’t even a hint of apology in her voice; apparently she just couldn’t keep quiet when it came to this particular subject. So Roger apologized for her, which only made her even more upset. And they hadn’t seen Phil again since that night last summer.
“And who’s going to walk me down the aisle in place of my parents?” Stacy asked now. “Lauren and Chuck? How pathetic would that be?” she said crossly. “I mean, come on.”
Keats and Shelley, who had an annoying habit of following Stacy everywhere, were on the floor next to the desk; their arms were folded around each other and each was licking the other’s face industriously. Roger studied the cats for a moment, trying to summon up some tender feelings for them. “I bet Marshall would be honored to walk you down the aisle,” he said, “and why don’t you ask Clare to help you find a wedding dress?”
“Hey, sounds good,” Stacy said, and it was gratifying to see how swiftly he’d been able to get to her, to shift her mood, just like that, from dark to light. She was, he knew, an optimist, who occasionally had to work at getting him to see things her way, but this time, he was the one who had turned things around.
Mimicking the cats, they embraced, and, as Roger would overhear Stacy say laughingly to her friend Jefrie Miller a few days later about something entirely unrelated, one thing led to another, as it often did. Afterward Roger found himself thinking of Allyson, his ex-wife, and how, never, not in a million years, would she have allowed him to undress her on the floor of the den, or made love to him without a comfy pillow under her head. She wasn’t a spontaneous person; if anything, she was someone—like Roger—who had to have everything just so, just the way she liked it. And rolling around on the floor like two animals in heat wasn’t the way she liked it. Roger thought then of how lucky he was that Allyson had fallen for that loser Warren Whitcomb, the geometry teacher, freeing Roger himself to go after the one true love of his life, which, he recognized, Stacy surely was. Oh, he knew the score, knew that she was the one he simply couldn’t live without.
S
Roger is perched on the closed lid of the toilet seat reading aloud to the kids as Stacy gives Olivia and Will a bath together. They never share a bath anymore, mostly because Olivia has recently grown shy about her body, but tonight, following an endless day at the Museum of Discovery and Science, Stacy is so beat, she just wants to get both kids in and out of the tub as quickly and painlessly as possible. But what’s wrong with Roger? He’s reading Doctor De Soto (Stacy’s all-time favorite children’s book— about a rodent dentist and a fox with an extremely bad toothache) and doing a shockingly poor job of it. His voice is scarily without affect and his eyes are half-closed; it’s as if finding the vigor to move from one word to the next is just too strenuous an effort for him. Normally he’s a terrifically expressive reader, skillful at doing every sort of voice, from meek to arrogant, squeaky to roaring, and the kids are always an appreciative audience.
Today, however, is another story.
“Hey, wake up!” Stacy says, snapping her fingers briskly in front of Roger’s face before turning back to her naked kiddies.
“Daddy’s a terrible reader tonight,” Olivia offers matter-of-factly, and no one disagrees with her, not even Roger.
“Is he sick?” Will asks. He fills a plastic cup with bathwater and raises it to his mouth. “Yum yum yum,” he says, smacking his juicy, rosebud lips.
“No, he’s not sick, but you might be after drinking that dirty, soapy water, mister. As I believe you’ve been told a thousand times.”
“Will might get sick enough to go to the hospital?” Olivia asks, and there’s no mistaking her enthusiasm. “What kind of bacterium is in the water?”
“What?” Stacy and Roger say in unison; Roger, she is glad to see, suddenly seems to have been lifted from his lethargy and indifference.
“ ‘Bacterium’ is one, ‘bacteria’ is more than one,” Olivia instructs them. “Didn’t you guys know that?”
Stacy finds it amusing that “you guys” has become part of Olivia’s lexicon. “We did,” she tells her daughter, “though we didn’t know it in kindergarten, did we, Roger?”
Roger sighs. “That’s because unlike Olivia, we didn’t grow up in the big city.”
“Just one little sip,” Will says, then deliberately spills the rest of the cup over his sister’s head.
After Olivia stops shrieking, Roger announces that he’s going to sleep.
“For the night?” Stacy says, shocked. After all, it’s not even eight o’clock. “The kids are still up,” she points out. “And I could use some help getting them to bed,” she adds uselessly.
Help? Not gonna happen; not today, not tomorrow, either.
She contemplates calling Dr. Avalon again, even though she knows, from the last time she called him, just a few weeks ago, that he will immediately cite patient confidentiality and refuse to speak to her—about Roger, anyway. But even if she could convince him to listen to her litany of worries, what would she say? That Roger, a grown man, is too depressed to stay up past eight p.m.? That her fears about him are escalating by the day? That he barely speaks to her, that she’s not a mind reader and can’t figure out what he’s thinking? All she knows is that he carries himself like a profoundly unhappy guy, someone who’s so bummed out, he’s no longer able to recall the simple meaning of the word “hope.”
There’s a burning in her chest as she considers these things, and it worsens now as she bends over to lift Will, and then Olivia, out of the tub. If it’s only acid backing up into her esophagus, why do they insist on calling it heartburn—something that actually sounds pretty terrifying when you think about it.
~ 12 ~
Stacy’s client, Kim Sutherland, was a diminutive twenty-something in filthy, child-sized saddle shoes, and a black sweatshirt that said, “EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW, I LEARNED FROM SATAN!” Stacy wasn’t at all surprised to hear that Kim had found it in a Dumpster. Kim had the wildest, frizziest hair Stacy had ever seen, and it was held in check by a clean white ribbon tied in a bow at the top of her head. Her face was ruddy, and there was a smear of neon-pink lipstick across her mouth. Formerly of Holly Hill Lane, Greenwich, Connecticut, Kim was a onetime heroin addict who suffered from schizoaffective disorder, and she was, at this moment, coming down from a busy weekend of crack smoking and seated in the rear of a 1996 Chevy Lumina, the agency vehicle Stacy was driving. Up front was one of Stacy’s coworkers, a kind-hearted, middle-aged psychologist named Barbara Armstrong, whom she was very fond of. The three of them were en route to a Goodwill thrift shop, where they were going to stock up on a few essentials for Kim before ferrying her to the shelter on the Lower East Side where she’d promised to stay for the night. When they’d found her a couple of days ago, she was slumped on the sidewalk on a large sheet of cardboard in front of a children’s store called Goody Two-Shoes. Next to her, suspended from the side of a supermarket shopping cart she’d co-opted, was an opened, empty pizza delivery box she’d scrawled her message acro
ss. She’d made it known, in blue Magic Marker along the red-and-white box, that she was “broke, homeless, and shit out of luck.” And, Stacy had noted, surprisingly clean, except for those begrimed black-and-white saddle shoes. Kim was a veteran Dumpster diver, and she enthusiastically recommended it as a way of life.
“Yeah, you wouldn’t believe all the cool shit I’ve gotten from those Dumpsters,” she was saying as they pulled up to the Goodwill. “Great food, obviously, but once I even found a computer monitor in perfect condition. I tried to give it to my fiancé for his birthday, but he wouldn’t take it.”
The fiancé seemed highly unlikely, but Stacy had learned that when it came to her clients, often the unlikeliest things proved to be true. “Oh, really?” she said nonchalantly to Kim. “So when was this? You never mentioned that you were engaged.” She glanced down at her own engagement ring, which, during the workday, she wore turned around so that you couldn’t see the diamond.
“Oh, yeah yeah, Brent and I were going to get married at the New York Botanical Garden, the one in the Bronx, not Brooklyn. We had an event manager and everything, and we booked the Garden Terrace Room. There was a beautiful patio where you could see the Bronx River, and that’s where we were going to have the actual wedding ceremony if the weather cooperated. And the menu, let me tell you, was unfucking-believable.” Closing her eyes, as if in a trance, Kim recited, “Angel hair with lobster, pumpkin pie soup, endive salad . . .” This last she pronounced “ahn-deev”; hearing that, Stacy no longer needed convincing—she somehow knew for certain that there’d been a fiancé in the picture.
“My parents loved Brent,” Kim said, her eyes open now. “They fucking adored him. He was an i-banker, made tons of money straight out of Wharton, but so what, you go to Wharton, that’s what’s waiting for you out there, right? But then he got his old girlfriend pregnant, and guess who suddenly gets all sentimental and shit about this baby of his, and decides, guess what, that he’s going to ‘do the right thing’ and marry the bitch?”