She doesn’t let that face slow her down, he thought, not for a second. It was a sound calculation on her part too. There was nothing to be done for it, after all, with her nose so large and her mouth all slack, those beady little eyes set close.
Bobby admired bravery of every stripe. It was one of the things he liked best about Emma.
He went fumbling back to his keys.
“It’s a bitch of a lock,” she said, “isn’t it?”—her southern accent gone with the wind. She crossed the hall and stood right beside him, in front of his metal door. “The guy before you used to leave it unlocked,” she told him.
Bobby felt the chill of the outdoors on her tight red coat. He smelled it on her mousy brown hair. “Well, I thought I had it figured out,” he said, looking down at his useless arms, all encased in navy cashmere. “But I’m having a terrible time with it today,” he said, pulling the key back out of the lock and letting his arms fall down to his sides.
The girl plucked the key right out of his hands.
Bobby was less startled than he would have thought.
“Trick is,” she said, “you’ve got to push it as hard as you can.”
“The key?” he asked.
“No,” she replied, rolling her eyes, as if she were bowled over by his massive stupidity. “The door,” she sang, pushing her shoulder hard against it. He watched the fluttering musculature of her thighs as she pressed her weight against the door. He heard his key turning in the lock.
“See?” she said.
“Well done,” he told her.
Bobby didn’t remember anything about pushing. In fact, he was fairly certain that his pulling-and-lifting method worked here too. He wasn’t quite willing to abandon it yet, but it was hard to disagree with success.
He thanked her.
“De rien,” she said, lifting her voice up high at the end and batting her beady eyes—the southern belle gone straight to France. She went to such lengths, he thought, to make herself larger than life, which put him in mind of Emma all over again. She dropped the keys into the palm of his hand—from a height—so they gathered velocity as they fell, landing hard against his soft skin.
“There you go,” she said, with a lilt in her voice.
Bobby wondered if it was some other apartment door that he was meant to lift and pull. There’d been any number of doors like these over the years. He placed the keys, deliberately, in a small compartment of his briefcase. He was careful to zip it shut. He was adamant about avoiding mix-ups, especially now that he’d moved in with Emma. He didn’t want these keys turning up in a trouser pocket, in a jumble of American Express receipts, landing on the foyer table along with the mail.
And they won’t, he thought, not as long as I’m careful about it.
“Going out?” the girl asked.
“Yes,” he said, “I’ve got some errands to run.”
He was heading back to Emma’s place. He’d been gone for a couple of hours already. He didn’t want to push his luck.
“It’s freezing out there,” she said, lifting her shoulders up around her ears, as if an arctic gust had just blown through, making her red coat even shorter at her thighs.
Bobby wondered if the girl thought he lived there. He only came around a couple of times a week, but she wouldn’t know that.
He wondered if she had any notion of a “secret apartment.”
As a young man, practically a newlywed still, Bobby had rented a small apartment—not so different from this one, he thought—in an ordinary building on the Upper West Side: Sixty-sixth Street, he remembered, just off Broadway. He kept it a secret from Emma, of course. He needed to have a place apart, safe from all her meddling, where he wasn’t under glass.
Bobby could see that young man still, with a slimmer waist and a jowl-free jaw, not so different from the man who stood in that hallway then: kindly and good-natured, a little weak. He was no match for Emma at all. So he rented a small apartment, which he set up like a newlywed of one—his bride gone missing. He remembered pondering the arrangement of the living room so carefully. Maybe he should try the couch over there?
Emma wouldn’t dream of consulting him on such questions.
It hardly matters now, he thought, which was true enough, of course, but he still felt a pang, wondering what life might have been like with a woman who actually listened to his opinion every once in a while.
Eventually, the apartment on Sixty-sixth Street gave way to another, somewhere nearby—the next in a long line of secret apartments. He’d rarely been without one for as long as he’d been married to Emma. He lived in one of them even, after the two of them separated, all those years before. They were always in this neighborhood, and always fairly nondescript, but Bobby took tremendous care in arranging them. They were a comfort to him.
More like home, he thought, than any of the places he’d lived with Emma.
He’d taken this last one just a week or two after moving back in with her. He’d forgotten the level of scrutiny she put him under, after all those years of living out from under her watchful eye.
He’d come over that afternoon for just an hour or two, to stretch out on the sofa and read the Sunday paper. He was leaving in fine fettle—nicely restored, as from a long winter’s nap—with a crisp glass of wine under his belt and a roast turkey sandwich from the deli on the corner.
“I haven’t seen you around lately,” the girl said.
He’d told Emma he was going to the office.
“I’ve been traveling,” he replied. Bobby wondered whether he’d ever known the girl’s name. He suspected not.
“For pleasure?” she asked, smiling at him.
He watched her place the toe of her boot a little farther out in front of her. She began to wriggle it as if she were crushing out a cigarette.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “all for work.”
Bobby hadn’t been out of town since Christmas.
“Well, I’ve missed seeing you,” she told him, a little kittenish.
He recognized, finally, that the girl was flirting with him. He smiled to himself, having assumed—in all his guilt—that she was trying to pin down some inconsistency in his story, or trick an admission out of him, the way that Emma might have. He felt relieved, but not interested at all. He couldn’t imagine why such a young girl would be flirting with him in the first place.
She was barely Cassy’s age, practically half his own.
The girl kept smiling at him, her eyes locked onto his.
Then again, he thought—a little emboldened by her interest—why shouldn’t she flirt? He was a good-looking man, nearly six feet two and solidly built, with the smooth, clear skin of a much younger man, and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. I’m not so bad, he thought—and he had some money too, which might compensate for a few extra years.
But the girl didn’t seem like that to him, not at all. She was just high-spirited.
Bobby had never had much trouble finding women. He found them too easily, in fact, and his spate of secret apartments had come in handy for trysts as well. But at sixty-four, he was old enough to be this girl’s father, and he’d never gone in for that sort of thing. What’s more, he’d curtailed his romantic high jinks lately. He was after a more mature companionship nowadays—some mutual pampering, not too much heat.
He was hopeful of his reconciliation with Emma.
Bobby looked down at his expensive shoes, willfully breaking contact with the girl’s insistent gaze. He transferred his briefcase heavily from one hand to the other.
“Well, don’t be a stranger,” she said, the arc of flirtation on its downward trajectory.
He was glad to watch her turn away, back to her own door then. Bobby walked down the long hallway, all covered in wall-to-wall carpeting—a mauve ground with a small, insistent pattern printed on it, like a swarm of busy ants. He passed a succession of metal doors, all painted beige, just like his own. Ten of them, he’d bet, every five paces or so, and every one
of them exactly the same.
That’s twenty apartments a floor, he thought.
They had the landing to themselves at home.
Bobby called for the elevator, its doors opening the very second he pushed the shiny gold button. It must have been waiting since the girl decamped. He stood inside the elevator cab, waiting for the doors to close again. He heard the fluorescence of the tiny lights that were set into the hallway ceiling, ticking away like impotent time bombs. He’d heard them from the first moment he’d walked into the place—just ticking and ticking—but no explosion yet.
“DAMN BLACKMAN,” TINA MUTTERED, ANNOYED with Benjamin and mildly attracted to him both. Even as recently as their meeting on Friday—the two of them gazing at each other through veils of mistrust—Tina had felt strangely drawn to him. She’d gone to special pains to dress that morning, for a meeting with Benjamin at the very end of the day. She might be crazy, but she suspected, from time to time, that he returned her interest. They were like lame tulip bulbs in April—fighting not to push their heads above ground.
But why, she wondered? Tina supposed she’d never work it out.
And she couldn’t blame Benjamin for her current problem. It was her fault—not his—that Gracie thought they were going to a party that night. Benjamin may have recommended the Diet Club to her, and he was definitely the one who told her that the group that met at the Baptist church on Sunday nights specialized in families and children, but Tina was the one who’d upgraded a support group for fat kids into some kind of party.
Much as she’d like to, she couldn’t blame him.
It wouldn’t hurt, she thought, if she met a decent guy every once in a while.
Tina steeled herself as she walked down the hall to Gracie’s room. Better to get it over with, she decided—moving slower with every step, as if she were crossing the Mojave Desert. The corridor was only ten feet long.
“Sweetie?” she said, from outside the door.
There was no reply. Tina didn’t hear the girl inside either.
“Gracie?” she called, opening the door.
The first thing she saw was a yellow dress laid out on the bed, its lacy neckline beneath the pillow. It looked like a body in a coffin.
That’s my doing, she thought, wanting to crucify herself on a cross of cheap yellow taffeta.
“What the hell?” she mumbled, taking in the balance of the scene.
She saw Gracie on the floor, leaning up against her bed, half a dozen stuffed animals arranged all around her—a cookie in front of every one of them, and the orange box in Gracie’s hands.
Tina walked into the room.
She saw a trail of crumbs running down the front of Gracie’s shirt.
“What’s going on in here?” she asked, failing to keep her voice as neutral as she’d intended. “Sweetie,” she added—in recognition. She watched her daughter stash the box of cookies behind her back, her head hanging down as she salted the evidence away.
“Sweetie?” she said, but much kinder this time. She hated to see her feeling ashamed.
“I’m supposed to say, ‘Come in,’” Gracie told her, “before you open the door, Mommy.”
“That’s true,” Tina replied.
No defense like a good offense either, she thought, admiring the girl’s pluck. “Next time I will,” she told her. She decided not to say anything about the cookies for the moment.
Where the hell did she get them? Tina wondered.
She’d never bought a box of gingersnaps in her life. Every once in a while, Tina caught Gracie with a small stash of secret food—cookies, usually, or those awful little snack cakes. She suspected her father of breaking down, giving in to the girl—when he picked her up from school maybe, or when she visited him at his apartment. He swore he didn’t give her junk though, or not much of it anyway, and Tina believed him. What’s more, she knew it would take a lot more than an occasional gingersnap or Hostess Twinkie to have gotten the girl to the state she was in—twenty pounds overweight at the age of nine.
Tina gazed back at Gracie’s bed, as if to change the subject.
It wasn’t just the dress. She saw a pair of bobby socks, all snowy white with lacy yellow edging, and a pair of patent leather shoes, their shiny toes peeking out from under the bed.
You’d think she was going to a wedding, Tina thought.
She began to have misgivings about the Diet Club. She knew that Benjamin wanted them to go. It might be useful for a concerned mother, but Gracie was only a child. What could they possibly do there, she wondered, that would be worth a damn to her? Talk about calories and exercise?
She pictured cautionary filmstrips about the lives of fat children.
Tina saw a long yellow ribbon dangling over the edge of the bed, not quite touching the floor. Gracie liked to wear it in her hair.
Her heart sank deeper.
She wasn’t taking her daughter to the Baptist church that night; she knew it in a flash. She wasn’t going to sit her in a room brimming with fat kids. Tina might not have a solution to Gracie’s problem yet; she might not have a diagnosis even, but that was her problem, not Gracie’s. She was going to shield her daughter from places like the Diet Club, and Benjamin Blackman could go straight to hell if he didn’t like it.
Gracie didn’t need to be told she was fat.
It’s not exactly breaking news, Tina thought.
The little girl was already powerfully aware of her body, she was sure of that much—ashamed of the rolls of fat that showed when she sat in the bathtub, the way she towered over her classmates on the playground at school.
How could she not be? Tina wondered.
She wasn’t going to rub her nose in it, not any more than she already had.
“Mommy?” the girl asked softly.
Tina looked down at her.
“Can you turn that frown upside down?” she asked, repeating a line from one of her favorite television shows.
Tina was instantly sorry she’d let her concern show.
She looked back at Gracie, as if weighing the request—tapping an index finger against her chin. “You know,” Tina said, dragging it out, as if she could go either way, “I think I can turn my frown upside down”—all the words coming out in a rush. She made a funny face too: a big, toothy smile, and her eyes as wide as she could manage.
Gracie giggled.
Tina sat down on the floor beside her and wrapped an arm around her daughter’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry about the cookies, Mommy.”
“That’s okay,” she said. Tina meant it too: the cookies were perfectly okay. She watched confusion bloom on her daughter’s face. She must have thought she’d be in trouble.
“Are they good?” she asked.
Gracie nodded with enthusiasm, a cheerful smile peeking out.
“That good?” Tina asked, sounding impressed. “Well, pass them over then,” she said, taking the box of cookies from Gracie’s outstretched hand. She plucked one out and ate it thoughtfully. “Mmm,” she hummed—not bad at all.
She was going to have to talk to her father again about giving the girl sweets.
Gracie burrowed a little deeper into her mother’s body.
Tina felt proud of her close escape, grateful that she’d let the awkward moment pass. Why should she be angry? Because the little girl was hungry? Because she wanted a cookie?
Tina decided something else then too, which had been a long time in coming: there had to be something wrong with the girl, physically wrong. Gracie wasn’t fat because she sneaked the occasional gingersnap, or a dozen of them—and Blackman and that bitch school nurse should stop blaming and start helping. They’d be hearing from her, she thought, a burst of confidence shining through.
She offered the girl a cookie.
Gracie shook her head warily.
She probably wants it too, Tina thought, relieved that the girl hadn’t taken her up on her offer. She closed the box up tight.
“I’ve got some good news a
nd some bad news,” Tina said. “Which would you like first?”
“Bad, please,” Gracie announced, without the slightest hesitation, her face composed, ready for the worst.
“I’m afraid the party’s canceled,” she said. It was the easiest out she could imagine.
Gracie looked unmoved. “Why?” she asked, her voice flat.
“You know,” Tina replied, “I’m not exactly sure. I’m sorry though. I know you were looking forward to it.”
“Not really,” Gracie said.
“Is that true?” Tina asked.
Gracie nodded. “I was looking forward to dressing up,” she said.
“I can see that,” Tina told her, motioning toward the finery on the bed.
Gracie looked at the dress with a little sigh.
“What’s the good news?” she asked.
“Well, I thought we could go down to the Rec Center and have ourselves some fun,” Tina said—inventing her good news on the fly, the same way she’d devised the bad. “We could go swimming if you want?”
“Swimming in winter?” Gracie cried, giggling at the very idea.
Tina nodded, smiling, squeezing her daughter’s arm with pleasure. “So what do you think of that idea?” she asked.
“I think that’s very, very, very good news,” Gracie said.
Tina stood up and walked toward the bed. She picked up the yellow dress on its sweetly scented hanger and danced it back to the closet, her daughter watching her every step. She twirled the taffeta, flicking it out in front of her—like a bullfighter’s cape in canary yellow.
Gracie was transfixed.
Tina prayed that the pool would be open.
EMMA SLID THE ROASTING PAN BACK INTO THE oven, switching off the interior light with a flourish that looked a little like victory. She walked to the dining room to check on the table she’d set earlier that day.
Emma's Table Page 8