Days of Awe

by Lauren Fox

  “We’re fine, Andi,” I said, giving her fingers a little squeeze and then letting go. “You look gorgeous.” She did; she looked gorgeous. She wore a charcoal-gray dress that hugged her perfect little thirty-one-year-old body, cinched with a slim black belt around her tiny waist. How is that fair? Hannah was always saying to me, raging against the injustices of her life. How is that fair? When Andi moved, her shawl seemed to shimmer in little rippling waves, like water. Her dark hair was newly short—just to her chin, accentuating her lovely stem of a neck.

  I was wearing the black pants and blue sweater I’d worn to school that day. I considered it a victory that they matched.

  Hannah gazed at her as if Andi were a travel brochure for an exotic vacation. She tucked a hank of her own long, thick, unruly hair behind her ear and looked at her feet. I put my arm around her, protectively. She shrugged it away.

  “I love your jeans,” Andi said to Hannah. “I have a pair just like those.” And Hannah lifted her eyes to Andi, besotted.

  “Let’s mosey on in!” I said, and my daughter snorted quietly with disgust.

  Chris handed Andi a bottle of merlot and we walked into the apartment. He took it in, surveying the room quickly, like Rain Man, mastering the details. “A photograph of Josie on the mantel,” he whispered to me. “Her watercolor on the wall by the hallway. And a little sculpture on the table underneath the window. And no tree. Obviously.” I grabbed his hand, laced my fingers through his. We had started seeing a couple’s therapist three weeks earlier. “Try to remember that you’re on the same team,” she had said.

  Mark spotted us and moved in our direction, weaving his way around the other guests. Other guests: that was something new. Before, it had always been just the five of us. Now there were some old neighbors, a few of Mark’s fellow adjunct English lecturers from the technical college, a couple of teachers from Rhodes Avenue—Debbie Huddleston, the music teacher; Sanjay Shah, P.E. The Andes were conspicuously absent, and for that I felt a wave of gratitude that bore a confusing resemblance to pleasure.

  “Oh, Hannah,” Mark said. “I haven’t seen you in so long. You look so pretty and grown up!” He grabbed her in a rough hug, more of an awkward wrestling move. “Sorry for sounding like such a dorky adult.”

  “It’s okay, dork,” Hannah said, from underneath his elbow. “Hey, it smells like latkes in here.”

  “Andi has been cooking all day.” He looked at me, gauging my reaction; I smiled without showing my teeth, gave away nothing. Let him figure it out. “She really knows how to fry a potato.” There was something familiar and unsettling about the way he was talking, a new rhythm to his speech, an overemphasis on certain words. Josie was disappearing from his speech patterns. Andi was moving in. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said to us, still looking at me. “So glad.”

  Chris had admonished me in the car on the way over, quietly, privately, underneath Hannah’s music: “This is really important,” he said. “Be happy. Or at least act happy. Fake it if you have to.” I knew he was right.

  “Okay, okay,” I said now, trying for a light tone. I punched Mark in the arm. “Calm down, buddy. We’re glad to be here, too.” Hannah, eyeing me carefully, smiled.

  “Are you hungry? There is so much food, it’s ridiculous. I don’t know how that happened.” Mark shook his head and shrugged in mock incredulousness. He was wearing a dark purple shirt and a geometrically patterned tie. He looked less like he had gotten dressed and more like someone had dressed him. His face was clean shaven, his hair neat. He looked fresh. Happy. There were certain women who cared what their men looked like, who viewed their partner’s appearance as a reflection on their own. Josie had never been one of those women. Andi, it seemed, was.

  “We’re hungry!” Chris said, and Mark escorted him and Hannah over to the table that was loaded with drinks and snacks.

  I drifted away and wandered around the large, open living room, tried to get my bearings. I examined everything, the curious integration of furniture and knickknacks from Mark and Josie’s old house with things I’d never seen before—their dusky-blue pillows on a new gray couch; their crystal candlesticks sitting on a pretty Arts and Crafts coffee table I didn’t recognize. Under the coffee table was an indigo and deep green rug I could not place—was it one they’d had up in their old bedroom? Or was it brand-new, acquired specifically for this apartment, this new life? I pictured Mark choosing it carefully at Namdar Carpets in the Third Ward, near Solitano’s, the Italian bakery we liked. Maybe he’d stopped in for biscotti after he picked it out—alone? With Andi? And where were Josie’s rugs? Life was a tender accumulation of possessions, quickly discarded.

  Hannah sidled up to me. “Mama,” she whispered. “This is no good. Can we go home?”

  Her hip bumped against me lightly, her arm bounced against mine. Oh, I wanted to leave, too. I wanted to carry her out of there like a koala bear. I wanted, wanted, wanted to go home. “I don’t think so, Banana. Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’ve only been here a few minutes. We should stay for a bit. Did you get a snack? Something to drink?”

  Hannah took a ragged breath. “I don’t want anything. And it stinks in here. It stinks like latkes. My hair is going to smell. My stupid hair is going to smell, and I just washed it this morning, and I hate it here!” Her voice was getting louder. Deb Huddleston, midconversation, looked over at us, concerned.

  “Shhh,” I whispered to Hannah. “Please. Shhh.”

  “I hate it here!” she said again. “You made me come. Don’t you understand? This is all wrong! I want to leave!”

  “Hannah, we can’t. It’s not…we can’t…” I was paralyzed in the face of my daughter’s keening need, a Pompeian trapped underneath the flowing lava. “We just can’t yet, it’s not…”

  Chris was walking over to us, smiling, holding a plate stacked high with food. When he noticed Hannah’s stricken face, my rising helplessness, his smile shriveled into a tight scowl. “Iz,” he hissed. “You promised you’d try.”

  “Hannah wants to leave, actually,” I said. “Not me. Hannah.” She looked up at me, confused, her eyes teary. In the marital trenches, once in a while even your own child was cannon fodder.

  Chris softened immediately. “Oh, Hanners,” he said. “Come on.” He handed me his plate and put his arm around Hannah’s shoulders, led her away.

  And so I was alone in the middle of the room, balancing a ridiculously heavy plate of latkes and sour cream and grapes and chocolate-dipped pretzels. The plate was beginning to leak oil; I could feel it seeping onto my hand. I thought briefly about setting it down in the middle of the blue-and-green rug. I looked around at the little clusters of people, the festive murmur and sparkle of it all. A love song by Charm School that I hadn’t heard in years, “I’ll Pull Out,” banged from hidden speakers with their signature, jangly cowbell rhythm. (We don’t need protection/from our sweet affection/Don’t want nothing to come betweeeeen us.) One of Mark’s colleagues from the English Department, a tall woman wearing a velvet jacket and a porkpie hat, was laughing loudly at something Sanjay Shah was saying. A pale, dark-haired woman who looked like Andi—she had a younger sister—was holding court with three men I didn’t recognize; probably, based on scruffy haircuts alone, they were Mark’s colleagues. I stood there for five or ten minutes, maybe longer. The room was too bright, too loud. I wondered where Chris and Hannah had disappeared to.

  And then two things happened at almost the same time. The doorbell rang, and, without waiting for anyone to answer, Kelly Anderson-Jensen and Andrea Brauer breezed into the apartment, laughing at something, their high, good-natured giggles like tinkling bells. But I barely had the chance to register their arrival, because Mark and Andi were heading toward me, quickly, together. I noticed how subtly his tie matched her dress, like a subliminal message flashing between the frames in an old-fashioned movie. He had his arm draped around her. She wore a look of practiced calm on her face. I’d seen her with
that expression at school, expertly soothing an agitated child.

  My heart started to pound in my chest, a frightened baboon thumping. I thought I might do or say something I would regret. I felt the regret already, like blood boiling in my veins.

  “Hey, Izzy,” Mark said. “Chris said to tell you he took Hannah out for a quick walk.” He stepped closer to me and brought Andi with him. “She was upset.”

  Andi nodded and raised a hand to smooth her silk shawl across her shoulders, her fingers lingering on the delicate fabric. “She seemed really upset.”

  My own fingertips were slick from the latkes, my palms shiny with oil. I wanted nothing more than to get rid of this heavy, absurdly laden plate of food, and then go wash my hands. These paper plates were flimsy, not up to the job. Josie would have known better. Or maybe not. Hell, maybe Josie bought these plates, and they, unlike her rugs, survived the move. I shifted it from my left hand to my right, my fingers greasier with each adjustment.

  “I know that Hannah is upset,” I said. “I’m her mother.” Andi had been avoiding me at school ever since September, staring at me when she thought I wasn’t looking with her big kangaroo eyes, frightened, curious, ready to hop away at a moment’s notice. This was how I knew she and Mark were still together. “Of course she’s upset. This is hard for her.” My words came out chopped and angry. I looked at Mark, then at Andi. “She thinks we should be mourning, not celebrating.” Strictly speaking, I didn’t know if that was exactly what Hannah thought. But it was close enough.

  At that moment I sensed the Andes. They hung back, huddled a few feet away from us, their laughter clicked down one notch to a sort of high murmur. I turned, just in time to see Kelly catching Andi’s eye, a silent exchange between close friends: What’s going on? What’s wrong with her? and Andi, telegraphing back with a little shake of her head, Stay away.

  I can’t explain what happened next, what primal nerve exploded inside me. “How the hell can this be happening?” I said to Mark, and I wasn’t sure if I meant the party or the life we were living, the life that should have included Josie, happily married to Mark, or at least happily enough, and growing older and making tragically bad art and seeing everything the way I did, sideways and hilarious, knowing me better than anyone, but instead looked like this, bright and shiny and wrong, Andi instead of Josie, the world tilted on its axis and me, barely standing.

  I turned again and Kelly and Andrea were whispering to each other. I handed Mark my plate. “Take this, please.” The sour cream was beginning to melt, the watery extract seeping toward the pretzels. My hands were coated with oil. I needed to wash them. I needed to find Chris and Hannah and get out of here.

  “Iz!” Mark snapped, and I stopped short, surprised, maybe because I’d never seen him angry before. “Tell me,” he whispered, “how is this supposed to work?” He glared and took another step toward me. He was very near me now, too close. There was a little dab of spit in the corner of his mouth. I fought the urge to back away. I smelled his minty shampoo mingled with something sharp and salty underneath it. He still held Chris’s seeping plate of food. “Do you want me to be sad forever?”

  It was a reasonable question. I had never thought of it that way before. “Yes,” I said. Andi looked like she was going to cry again. Off to the side, Kelly and Andrea were moving in, closer, like lions.

  “Don’t you love how she’s decorated the place?” I heard one of them say, and Andi shook her head again, and then I knew that she and Mark were living together in this apartment.

  “Yes,” I said again to Mark, my voice high and tight and about to crack. “I want you to be sad forever. That’s what I want.” I turned to Andi, and I could see that she was good, that she loved Mark; in her drawn, concerned face I saw a flicker of how she would grow old, with Mark, with children, how she would be one of the good people who got to be happy.

  Mark shook his head and walked away, just like that: Enough of this.

  I stood up very straight. “Thank you for having us over,” I said to Andi, “but we really must leave now,” as if we were at some Edwardian garden party. And with my oil-slick hands, I gently lifted her shawl from around her shoulders and ran my slimy fingers along the fine, shimmery blue silk. “This is very beautiful,” I said, touching it everywhere, fondling the ends, caressing it, leaving little fingertip-sized grease stains over every inch of it.

  “Um, thanks,” she said. She would find out later what I’d done—in a minute, when one of the Andes noticed, or later tonight, when she took it off before slipping into bed with Mark.

  I turned around. Chris stood there with Hannah, their cheeks pink from outside. He was looking at me, watching me. I met his eyes and knew that he had seen. Well, he had seen me. Probably they both had. I shrugged. You saw. So what? I tilted my head at him, defiant.

  He sighed, and because I knew him so well, I heard everything that curdled in that sigh, the disappointment, the resignation, the dimming concern, the fading love. And I opened myself up to the cold thing that had been clawing at my heart since Josie died: Underneath the sadness there is more sadness.

  ···

  When I try—and I do, in spite of myself—to stitch Josie’s unraveling back together in my mind, the first thing I come up with is the incident with Lily Barrett and her cell phone. Horrible little Lily Barrett—we called her that long before the cell phone debacle.

  Any teacher who’d had her in a class could attest to the girl’s cruelty, her Machiavellian social jockeying, how she was on her way to becoming a dangerously unrepentant grown-up bully if someone didn’t intervene. She was the girl who would organize her friends to get up and switch tables in the cafeteria if one of the unpopular girls sat too close. She would send a photo of herself and five friends from a slumber party to the two girls who hadn’t been invited.

  I once overheard a conversation between Lily and another girl, Amelia Ricci. I was on playground duty; they were sitting together under a tree.

  “I’m so fat!” Lily complained, pinching a bit of skin on her thigh.

  “No, you’re not! I am,” Amelia said, poking her tiny tummy.

  Lily nodded sadly. “I know.”

  We always knew where Lily Barrett had been by the trail of tears in her wake. She worked the periphery, so her friends didn’t know from one day to the next if they were in or out. She was sly. Merciless.

  Josie had been pacing the classroom when the incident occurred, explaining the Irish potato famine to her students. She was a kinetic teacher, always on the move. She stopped, midsentence, behind Lily, clued by the telltale hunched shoulders, the intense downward focus. Lily was texting Grace Lister, about to hit SEND. Maddie could use a potato famine, she had written. Her butt looks huuuuge in those jeans!!!! They think they’re so clever, especially the clever ones. Josie peered over Lily’s shoulders and snatched that phone from her slim fingers before the girl could inflict any more psychic damage.

  It gets a little dicey here. The school has a strict no-electronic-devices-during-school-hours policy. So Josie was—and this is very important—well within her rights to confiscate the phone. But according to Lily Barrett, Josie yanked it from her hard, leaned down so close Lily could see the downy fuzz on Josie’s cheeks, could smell her vanilla perfume (“She was so close to me, Mommy! I was actually scared!” she wailed later, in front of Principal Coffey and her parents) and whispered, “You little bitch.”

  Nobody heard, not even the kids who were sitting inches away. In the end, it was Lily’s word against Josie’s. And anyone who’s worked in a school knows that kids lie. They do. Some of them are brilliant at it. It’s the only recourse of the powerless.

  Later, in Principal Coffey’s office, Josie sat up straight in her chair and clutched her hands in her lap, looked around the room in indignation. The Barretts were nice people. Craig Barrett was the director of a local food bank. Beth Barrett was a public health nurse. They had the cowed, defeated air of kind people who had birthed a monster, gen
tle robins who had somehow hatched a vulture. They held hands. Craig Barrett sighed. Principal Coffey sat behind his desk in a rumpled, light green poly-blend shirt and rubbed his tired eyes.

  “I know I shouldn’t have been texting, but she called me a name!” Lily growled, glaring at Josie. “A really bad name. The b-word!”

  Craig Barrett sighed again. “Lily,” he said.

  “I certainly did not,” Josie said firmly. “I did not, Lily, and you know it.”

  ···

  “I did,” Josie admitted to me a few days later. “I absolutely put my lips right up to that little she-beast’s ear and whispered it. You little bitch.”

  It was a Sunday morning. We were sitting at my kitchen table, sharing a cinnamon roll. Hannah and Chris were in the living room, watching SpongeBob. The Lily Barrett issue had been put to bed; Josie had been cleared. Now she set her fork down on her plate and poked at a crumb on the table with her index finger. “I don’t know what got into me.” She laughed without smiling. “I’ve never…I have never. You know that. I mean, she deserved it, but she’s a ten-year-old child.” She stared at her fork as if it might explain her actions, or absolve her.

  But the fork wasn’t up to the task. I chewed slowly, thinking. “I mean…they get to us,” I said. “It’s no secret we all want to say something like that once in a while.”

  “But we don’t. You don’t. Do you know anyone who has? The thing is, Iz…” She half smiled at the sound of that. “The thing is, Iz, why couldn’t I control myself?”

  This was a year or so after Lake Kass and well before Alex Cortez came into her life. In the living room, SpongeBob played a trick on Mr. Krabs. Hannah’s giggles and Chris’s laughter sounded like music.